661–670 of 721 posts
I wonder if we can look forward to the end of the letter soup brands on Amazon, it's ridiculously difficult finding real brands in between them. That would be one silver lining in all this mess, at least.
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I'm a lefty lib and, like lots of us, I've wanted restricted trade with China since we granted them MFN status in the '90s. I think that was a bad idea in the first place. Neoliberalism is not popular and never was. Donors like it. Workers don't. The only reason either party could stick to it and still win elections, is because both stuck to it. Neither "defected". Tariffing Canada and Mexico? The EU? Yeah, not so mu…
If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as well, in order to prevent evasion by trans-shipping (until and unless they restrict Chinese imports as well). Canada has been laundering Chinese aluminum and steel, Malaysia has been laundering Chinese ‘honey’, etc.
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You did a great job explaining it, what more do you need to unpack?
Am I, in fact, going to be hit with a $100 tariff on a $2 item ($2+$100=$102) or a $2.40 tariff ($2*1.2=$4.40) ? I am looking for language like "Whichever is greater" in the announcement and I'm not seeing it. Do importers choose which to go with? Do customs? It looks like before, shipments below $800 were exempt of all tariffs under the "De Minimis exemption", and that exemption is going away, but I'm still not clea…
Then there's [avalara.com](https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2025/02/how-to...) saying on 4/10 that it's 120% OR $100, but not clear if filer gets to choose.
The latest I can find is from today (4/15/25) from [metro.global](https://metro.global/news/new-tariffs-and-the-end-of-de-mini...) that says 120% AND $100 per package (rising to $200 June 1st).
Your question is so simply put it seems like there should be an easy answer but it seems like there's a lot of interpretations on what's going to happen. It's possible that all of these sources were true on the day they were posted but the rules are continuously changing.
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You haven't been following the FTC's enforcement? e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/owner-conservative-appa...
> The company is based in Salt Lake City. Chinese drop shippers aren't dumb enough to pull the scam from within the FTC's juridsiction .
Or to openly advertise it.
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> I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years. > I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering. I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
I've been short on work, which means I've been poor. I use my off time to work on side projects that I simply could not afford to complete if I paid what US companies charge for tools, components, and custom PCBs. My ability to innovate is seriously impacted by these tarrifs and there is no alternative that I can afford. I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered…
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I don’t think anyone is claiming there’s secret industry on the islands. But a “data error” is probably understating it, that is what did actually appear on the bills of lading. Whether it was a bizarre innocent mistake or sort of some kind of financial scheme is unclear.
My strong suspicion is someone misclicked a select box in a form somewhere.
Do you know if tariffs are assessed based on the country of origin in the bill of lading? The Guardian article doesn’t answer that question. I’d suspect so since that’s how everyone is counting imports and exports, but the Guardian article isn’t clear.
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My favorite is all these letter-soup Firewire-to-USB convertors which are just glue and random wires inside and are either completely inert or disastrously damaging to your peripherals: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=firewire+to+usb+adapter It's fascinating to me that every letter-soup brand is competing on a product that is literally fraud.
I literally got a Firewire to USB converter yesterday to try and pull video off a DV Camcorder. A video capture card in the same price range had worked great for letting me stream VHS tapes through OBS Studio. There are various YouTube videos showing a daisy chain of Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 adapters connected to various Firewire cables and adapters. I was hoping to avoid all of that but the camera doesn't sh…
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I enjoy the cheap shipping (from Aliexpress China warehouses to Germany), but I really wish this would be improved. It just seems nonsensical. There should be a closer relation to actual cost, but paying 4-5€ for a national shipment, versus essentially nothing for Chinese shipments, is mad.
It gets even weirder when you consider the prices of shipping even within the EU. Within Germany? €3,50 if the seller has a good deal with DHL, within the Netherlands? €4,50 with PostNL. As a normal consumer shipping something the price goes up, and when you want to ship from the Netherlands to Germany or vice versa? €9,50 at least. Vinted seems to be the exception because of their deal with Mondial Relay, so I can o…
Ridiculous! And they don't even discount you for bringing the package to their dropbox or to a store, it's the same price for home pickup. There's just no way to economically ship things as an individual.
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> create so much pollution and waste in the process Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country. Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost. The only exception is something where the only purpose is to be environmentally good (maybe planting some trees, maybe something that reduces energy usage). Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
>Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country. No, it depends on what you do with that income. >Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost. Plainly false. E.g. more expensive things made of natural materials and lasting for a long time create much less landfill than products which are cheap but last only a short time. I own expensive shelfs which my parent bought…
But maybe bought from a salesman with a Humvee and a artisan that spends every last cent on overseas travel
The issue is that trying to analyse the breakdown of $ by environmental outcomes is hard.
There is a lot of propoganda about how to be environmentally sound. We tend to pick one dimension like trash output. We lack the information to be able to make better balanced decisions, for example sometimes the throwaway thing is better for the environment.
> expensive shelfs
I think that example is selection bias. I'm sure you can think of plenty of expensively wasteful examples too (it's easiest to look at other people to find that).
Counter-factual: I made some shelves from waste-stream offcuts, and other shelves were going to be thrown out. Plus costs to paint them (much much less than even the cheapest of new shelves).
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You did a great job explaining it, what more do you need to unpack?
Am I, in fact, going to be hit with a $100 tariff on a $2 item ($2+$100=$102) or a $2.40 tariff ($2*1.2=$4.40) ? I am looking for language like "Whichever is greater" in the announcement and I'm not seeing it. Do importers choose which to go with? Do customs? It looks like before, shipments below $800 were exempt of all tariffs under the "De Minimis exemption", and that exemption is going away, but I'm still not clea…
> Transportation carriers delivering shipments to the United States from the PRC or Hong Kong sent through the international postal network must collect and remit duties to CBP under the approach outlined in either subsection (c)(i) or subsection (c)(ii) of this section. Transportation carriers must apply the same duty collection methodology to all shipments; however, transportation carriers may change their collection methodology once a month or on such other periodic timeframe as CBP determines appropriate, upon providing 24-hour notice to CBP.
(c)(i) is Ad Valorem Duty and (c)(ii) is Specific Duty