This is going to utterly fuck so many R&D projects at my company. We actually do large-scale manufacturing of industrial valves in the USA. But a lot of our prototyping involves working with Chinese suppliers and getting small batches of samples / prototypes / revisions sent in packages on airplanes.
I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages from China. It's going to halt all our R&D for at least 6 months while we onboard domestic contractor alternatives --- which will also just generally be shit. Not to mention the American contractors WONT BE ABLE TO SHIP IN THE FUCKING ELECTRICAL COMPONENTS FROM CHINA THEY NEED FOR THE PROTOTYPES.
Every single R&D department in the USA just got fuuuuuuuuucked by this.
catherd 6 hours ago [-]
Only if "utterly fucked" somehow means you can still pay a bit more to DHL and get packages even faster than USPS.
Your fast prototypes coming by air freight likely aren't routed through USPS at all unless it's the last leg of a consolidated shipment that's broken apart once it reaches the US. Those would be using some other carrier to get them from China to the US and then USPS only inside the US. USPS all the way from China is slow.
Paying ~$30 for express shipping through DHL (plus whatever the new tariffs end up being) will still get you those parts in 3-5 days to most major shipping hubs in the US, your suppliers will just need to start filing the export paperwork correctly.
These changes will likely have bigger impacts on cheap off the shelf parts from e-commerce places like Temu or AliExpress, who were previously taking advantage of both the de minimis rule and inequal international rates through USPS.
Your Chinese suppliers can still ship by any of the normal commercial express shipping carriers as long as they understand how to file export paperwork or have an agent who can do it for them. Previously this usually added 1-2 days to the transit time over shipping undeclared "samples". Last year DHL moved to a paperless system and that extra 1-2 days delay is probably going away anyway. They may have even done it because they saw this coming. People have been grumbling about the de-minimis stuff for a while now.
nottorp 4 hours ago [-]
> Paying ~$30 for express shipping through DHL (plus whatever the new tariffs end up being) will still get you those parts in 3-5 days to most major shipping hubs in the US, your suppliers will just need to start filing the export paperwork correctly.
In my european experience, DHL is anything but fast when customs are involved. And I doubt they have the manpower to handle it for the new US rules.
> These changes will likely have bigger impacts on cheap off the shelf parts from e-commerce places like Temu or AliExpress, who were previously taking advantage of both the de minimis rule and inequal international rates through USPS.
Again in my european experience, the likes of Temu have solved the problem. You just order and a courier shows up with the taxes already handled. You paid Temu for them when you ordered and they paid the taxes for you at the point of entry to the EU.
Unfortunately they probably don't have a similar setup in the US, but they're likely to solve it much faster than DHL.
And of course prices will increase. Will that make them less competitive? Time will tell.
catherd 3 hours ago [-]
DHL B2C shipments to the EU are generally held in customs until the duty is paid, which makes it slow but ensures DHL isn't left holding the bag when people decide they don't want to pay unexpected import duties.
That's (historically) not the case for US B2B shipments. For those, DHL pays the duty as the shipment goes through customs and then sends an invoice after the parcel is delivered.
Understandable, they have to reevaluate the effort and probably adjust pricing. Upwards.
> DHL B2C shipments to the EU are generally held in customs until the duty is paid, which makes it slow but ensures DHL isn't left holding the bag when people decide they don't want to pay unexpected import duties.
Nothing is unexpected with DHL considering the amount of paperwork they want you to fill each time :) Even if you check "retain my data for next time and don't send me this form again".
They indeed send me a payment link and i pay for customs online before the package starts moving.
I don't do Asia->EU shipments but I get prototypes maybe 2-3 times per year from the US. We gave up on DHL and are using UPS now... they want 800% less forms, cost much less and take about the same time to deliver.
2 hours ago [-]
m4rtink 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, DHL has been usually a pain with customs paperwork - needed far too much hand-holding compared to other options (eq. a regular local European carrier doing the same thing).
Unfortunately, with DHL this can even end up costing a lot of extra as they might even start to accumulate a storage fee as they hold the package while they make sense of the documents you sent them. :P
_heimdall 1 hours ago [-]
I had the same experience with DHL while I was in the Netherlands. Here in the US its been fine, my best guess is that it has to do with how customs and duties are handled.
jagermo 1 hours ago [-]
> In my european experience, DHL is anything but fast when customs are involved. And I doubt they have the manpower to handle it for the new US rules.
yeah, but like with t-mobile, I think the US branch might be working better than what we are used from them in europe/germany.
dwaite 4 hours ago [-]
This USPS announcement is most likely a reaction to just how far backlogged US customs is about to get. DHL won't save you.
not sure about other carriers but that doesn’t sound good
relistan 5 hours ago [-]
I’d deem it extremely unlikely that US customs processing or the express carriers will be able to handle that overflow in anything like a reasonable timeframe.
catherd 5 hours ago [-]
Could be.
The carriers do already have practice ramping up and down for Christmas and Chinese New Year so it seems plausible they could absorb significant extra volume in whatever time it would take to negotiate the leases on the extra flights they use during those times.
For that matter customs processing also has experience managing the same surges.
I'd believe we might have some sort of own-goal planned for customs that could hang things up.
relistan 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, they do. But my understanding is that we’re talking about almost the entire US-bound volume from China of all of Aliexpress, Temu, eBay, Amazon, and all the other retailers shipping from China. USPS carries a massive amount of load there. And almost none of that was dutied in customs because of the high de minimis value in the US.
boxed 5 hours ago [-]
> Only if "utterly fucked" somehow means you can still pay a bit more to DHL and get packages even faster than USPS.
That probably will work for like a week, considering how fast and reckless the administration moves.
amarcheschi 2 hours ago [-]
DHL hk announced they stopped shipping to us, except for letters
dtquad 10 hours ago [-]
>I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages from China
As a software engineer who works closely with electrical and firmware engineers I know what you are saying is completely true.
The question is how did we let it go this far? Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.? Has anyone asked themselves how these Chinese firms are so cheap? How can JLCCNC take ~$120 worth of raw material, CNC machine it into our specified part, anodize the part, and send it to Denmark for ~$120? Like what is going on?
Veliladon 9 hours ago [-]
Because there's nowhere in the US like Shenzhen, Guangdong or Hong Kong.
Remember how Apple couldn't just pick up and move the production of iPhones to India or Vietnam? You need all the ancillary industries around the production to be there, along with being competitive and commoditized as well.
When a supplier has something go wrong a line of manufacturing doesn't go down. You go down the street to the same guy selling the same thing and have them pick up the slack. If you want a 1uF ceramic cap come hell or high water there's going to be a dozen people selling them all quoting a price a little above cost. When Apple moved production to India and Vietnam? When you hear Apple talking about a few billion in investment in Indonesia? This is what they're helping set up and what takes a decade to do.
Anyone can buy automation equipment but there's nowhere in the US you can do what JLCPCB/PCBWay do with PCB and electronics assembling because we literally don't manufacture all the ancillary stuff required in the US, little alone manufacture it all in the same place. If the SMT components are manufactured domestically say for military purposes it's going to be spread out all over the US because politicians pork barrel contracts for their districts and states.
You could setup next to a Mouser distribution hub but Mouser is a middleman and they have you over a barrel. What do middlemen do in that situation? They raise prices just enough to the point where it's uneconomical to leave.
You metaphorically need to invent the universe to make it work in the US.
throw_m239339 32 minutes ago [-]
> You metaphorically need to invent the universe to make it work in the US.
You didnt answer the obvious question of the why things are the way they are now? US used to have their entire electronic supply chain, save from raw materials, in USA in the 70s... So why cant US build its own Shenzhen or Hong Kong? taxes? corporate taxes are relatively low in some US states, infrastructure? US has all the infrastructure needed. Engineers? US claims to have the best universities in the world...
willvarfar 16 minutes ago [-]
In the 1800s the UK led the industrial revolution. Most things were manufactured there. Raw materials were shipped in from all over the Empire but the manufacturing was usually happening in the mills of the UK.
In the 1900s the USA took that crown. Most things became manufactured there. A lot thanks to Britain bankrupting itself to defeat Germany in WW1.
In the 2000s China has taken that crown. Now most things are manufactured there. But the owners and customers are in the US. The US corporations have outsourced their manufacturing to China and get rich from it.
And now the USA workers wonder if it was all actually a good idea?
The financiers are still getting rich and looking not to move their manufacturing back to the US but rather to a less developed and so cheaper country further abroad...
myrmidon 14 minutes ago [-]
That is extremely simple, because there is less money to be made compared to just going into pure software/finance/etc, which is why all the US talent shifted there in the past.
Economically speaking it was a big advantage because you could get all the gadgets manufactured at chinese wages for the last decades-- electronics made in the US will be more expensive even after all the necessary investments are paid for (duh).
A possible model sector for how this could look like is agriculture:
Most nations subsidize the shit out of it to keep a good chunk of it local (~$20 billion/year for the US). You could treat heavy industry/electronics manufacturing the same way, it would just cost taxpayers a bunch and also increase prices in general (because you then poach manpower and capital from other unsubsidized industries).
bdcravens 12 minutes ago [-]
It barely explains the full situation, but I feel like in the US we have lifestyle expectations (which is more than just money) that go with our education and career choices. This puts a virtual boundary on where you'll be able to get talent to go. (Relating it to our common experience, there's a reason why San Francisco or Austin is a much more attractive city for developers than Houston)
likeabatterycar 7 hours ago [-]
> Remember how Apple couldn't just pick up and move the production of iPhones to India or Vietnam?
You left out the part about dormitories full of modern-day slaves, complete with nets so they don't leap to their deaths. Generally this is frowned upon in the West. India and Vietnam wouldn't tolerate it either, despite being developing countries. Wasn't there a riot at Apple's India factory over work conditions or am I thinking of something else?
Bury this post all you want; I know a guy at Apple that saw the nets in person. It's quite a sight to behold and humbling experience.
throw37373 7 hours ago [-]
Except they have dormitories with safety nets in India and Vietnam too.
The riot in India was because they weren't getting paid, not because of the work conditions.
onemoresoop 41 seconds ago [-]
Gosh, they were not getting paid despite those conditions? That’s batshit crazy.
weird-eye-issue 6 hours ago [-]
There are nets on bridges and other places in the US, too.
Also I don't think the suicide rate of those workers you are referring to is higher than the general population. There are simply lots of workers. For example, Foxconn has more than 1 million employees so it is normal that there would be some level of suicide within such a large population.
consp 6 hours ago [-]
We have millions of people here, suicide rates are not that high, and no nets. So what is your argument exactly?
ben_w 5 hours ago [-]
The US? Your suicide rates are higher, and you do have nets[0].
In their worst year, Foxconn had 15 suicides from 930,000 people for a rate of 1.6 per 100k[1].
The US region with the current lowest rate is the District of Columbia, at 6.1 per 100k; the US national average in Foxconn's worst year was about 13 per 100k[2].
Today, the USA national average ranks them #31 highest in the world with a rate of 14.5 per 100k, while China's national average of 6.7 per 100 is close to your best region (DC) and ranks them #122 (higher rank number means lower rate)[3].
Foxconn, in that year, had a workforce about the same size as the total population of South Dakota. South Dakota in that year had a suicide count of 139 [4].
Did you actually compare suicide rates to China in general? Something tells me you didn't.
throawayonthe 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
moshun 7 hours ago [-]
While I agree with the sentiment, the new administration clearly doesn’t care about that and has no intention of fixing it. This political theater so they can fix it later.
ben_w 5 hours ago [-]
> You left out the part about dormitories full of modern-day slaves, complete with nets so they don't leap to their deaths. Generally this is frowned upon in the West.
That's funny because I've thought it is the same for years and I'm happy to see someone else post a comment about it instead.
Perhaps you'd like to elaborate on why you think it's not the same.
antonyt 3 hours ago [-]
These are the extremely obviously different. A company that has to take specific measures to prevent the suicide of their workers should raise a much different level of scrutiny that the fact that a massive bridge available to millions of people is used to commit suicide.
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
The company had just shy of a million people in it at the time, making the comparison "about the entire population of South Dakota" (which had 139 suicides that year) or "121% of the population of San Francisco" (32 jumped from specifically the Golden Gate bridge in 2010, which was Foxconn's worst year[0], and that doesn't count any of the other suicides in SF that year, just jumping specifically off that specific bridge), and it's nowhere near the only example of this in the USA.
This university had three students jump to their deaths in 2010, out of about 26k students, compared to 15 in Foxconn's worst year out of 980,000 employees:
"""In late 2003, the library was the site of two suicides. In separate incidents, students jumped from the open-air crosswalks inside the library and fell to the stereogram-patterned marble floor below.
After the second suicide, the university installed Plexiglas barricades on each level and along the stairways to prevent further jumping. In 2009, a third student jumped to his death from the tenth floor, apparently scaling the plexiglas barricade.[7]
The library has since added floor-to-ceiling metal barriers to prevent any future suicide attempts. The barrier is made of randomly perforated aluminum screens that evoke the zeros and ones of a digital waterfall.[8]"""
2 out of 59,144 students would be equivalent to 33 out of the 980k Foxconn employees, double the number who actually jumped.
Why should a company require more strict scrutiny than, say, a public bridge? Well of course there are many reasons, but specifically: in the case of addressing suicide? If a bridge is being used to commit suicide then... perhaps the problems causing suicide should be addressed instead of (or... in addition to) the symptom of suicide being prevented.
HPsquared 2 hours ago [-]
I don't get all the hubbub about the nets. Classic example of trying to do something good (save lives) and getting attacked for it.
Compare to barriers around train/subway platforms, nets or high barriers on bridges. All sorts of things. It's pretty much a "large number of people living around tall structures" thing.
ben_w 2 hours ago [-]
When I'm feeling positive about humanity, I think it's a failure of comprehension of the scale of Foxconn. The company is about the size (both population and economic output) of a small country all by itself, and people are bad at imagining things on that scale.
> Generally this is frowned upon in the West. India and Vietnam wouldn't tolerate it either
Yes, "frowned upon" is the perfectly realistic way to describe it.
Dior was just caught using slave labor including illegal immigrants in Italy (so they can say "Made in Italy" on the label), all working round the clock shifts and sleeping locked in the makeshift factory, operating machines with safeties disabled so they're more productive, making 2700E handbags for 53E [0]. The court just called it "Unethical Supply Chain" but no criminal charges. Luxury brands are "put on notice".
> thousands of small foreign-owned manufacturers supply luxury brands with goods that can claim the prized “Made in Italy” label but are produced at “Made in China” prices.
If you thought now you can sleep well but still buy cheap (or even a 2700E handbag) because your product isn't made in China, think again. And this isn't just Italy, it's everywhere. And it isn't just iPhones or Dior handbags, it's almost every cheap thing you buy and some expensive ones too. Business owners are greedy and chase profits, and customers are cheap and don't care beyond their own needs and wants.
Sorry, but comparing the living/working standards of [developing country] to the wealthiest nation on earth is a silly 1990s emotional appeal ignoring the reality that, every society has to climb the ladder. And actively harms this process.
You do realize the default state of humanity is living in the dirt and fighting off starvation daily right? It takes decades/hundreds of years to develop an advanced economy and fight for the institutions that enable this not to be the case. Undesirable manufacturing jobs lead to desirable manufacturing jobs (as is happening rapidly there!)
Foxconn not being a rung on the ladder in China doesn’t mean locals suddenly get American living standards, it means they never climb the ladder and get stuck with even worse alternatives —- I don’t think you realize the history of China is basically constant mass starvation:
> complete with nets so they don't leap to their deaths.
These nets are everywhere here. In the our other building's (which is an R&D facility where nobody is a modern day slave by your definition) stair well, construction sites, bridges, etc.
I saw it all over Europe in buildings, bridges, etc.
openplatypus 4 hours ago [-]
Which Europe? I live in Germany and travel frequently around most of the Western, Central and Northern Europe. No nets.
I think I saw one in Freiburg, in University. I vaguely remember seeing some nets in The Netherlands. Probably inside Science Park buildings.
youngtaff 4 hours ago [-]
US prison population is essentially modern day slaves… yes some of them are there for truely horrific things but a lot are their on minor issues
6 hours ago [-]
meigwilym 3 hours ago [-]
> If the SMT components are manufactured domestically say for military purposes it's going to be spread out all over the US because politicians pork barrel contracts for their districts and states.
Or possibly politicians attracting investment to their districts for the benefit their voters. What's the alternative here, a centrally planned economy?
reaperman 3 hours ago [-]
I don't understand your comment. None of it makes any sense.
> because politicians pork barrel contracts for their districts and states.
> Or possibly politicians attracting investment to their districts for the benefit their voters
That's literally the same thing - you just gave the definition of pork barrel spending. It isn't purely bad, it's just excessive or unnecessary to benefit one politician's constituents.
And pork barrel spending is also literally a centrally-planned economy. It's the federal government saying "put this industry here" despite the fact that capitalism would not have put it there.
2 hours ago [-]
somenameforme 7 hours ago [-]
Prices in the West are maximized with the goal of reaching the peak point on the supply vs demand curve. Prices in the East, and China in particular, are minimized [presumably?] with the goal of maximizing longterm marketshare. One of the easiest examples of this is water [1] because it's a relatively low-labor, low-processing industry. Yet a bottle of water in the West tends to cost about 700% more than a bottle of water in Asia. As a result of this I can buy a bottle of water in the middle of the desert in the Mideast for a tiny fraction of what I'd pay in Michigan which, alone, has ~20% of the entire world's fresh water supply.
This is also why GDP is extremely misleading. PPP is supposed to account for these differences but often is often wrong by a rather wide margin for many critical industries.
Good point. Capitalism's fundamental is RoI, and in China the time scale is "forever" while in the venture capital market it's 5 years max.
vaccineai 6 hours ago [-]
Chinese government only thinks in terms of months, not forever. Why do you think they overbuilt housing and crashed the economy? It's because the government officials want to quickly cash out and escape to other countries.
Maken 4 hours ago [-]
Wasn't the housing crisis mostly the Chinese middle class trying to secure their savings from inflation by investing in real state?
Daishiman 6 hours ago [-]
Building out more high-speed rail interconnections than any other part in the world is a well-known sign of a country that thinks short-term.
bobthepanda 5 hours ago [-]
It’s short-termism but not the kind you first think of in the West.
Chinese local officials are expected to meet and exceed targets for GDP growth. Investment is GDP growth, so officials are incentivized to build lots of flashy projects to boost growth even if there isn’t a clear need for them.
It's amazing how different accounting systems can affect decision-making.
vaccineai 5 hours ago [-]
Building out mostly unused high-speed rail interconnections and being in debt is a well-known sign of a country that thinks short-term. the local government gets paid for building these useless rails out.
Building nothing and being in even more in debt is the high IQ play.
frikskit 4 hours ago [-]
First time I genuinely LOL’d on HN
3 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
Aurornis 9 hours ago [-]
> The question is how did we let it go this far? Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.? Has anyone asked themselves how these Chinese firms are so cheap?
It’s not really a secret. They have cheap labor. Very lax environmental standards (big deal for PCB manufacturing). They have a high density of manufacturing and production. One factory can get their materials and machines from other factories nearby. Their government manipulates exchange rates.
People are also quick to forget US companies that serve these same markets. OSH Park was doing cheap PCB panel share before JLCPCB was a common name. Boards manufactured right in the United States. They don’t have the volume of JLCPCB but they’ve been doing cheap boards for hobbyists for a long time: https://docs.oshpark.com/services/
pclmulqdq 9 hours ago [-]
Most US-based PCB manufacturers can do low-volume PCBs rather cheaply for you, but not quite at China prices. AdvancedPCB in the US has their "$33 each" which gets you a very quick turnaround on a pretty-good-tech 2-layer board for $100 total (minimum 3 boards). They do 4-layer PCBs for $66/board and they apparently also do RF materials for $100/board. Sierra Circuits, for example, also has similar prices. This is a market that exists.
This is not the price you get from China, but this is still a pretty damn good deal. When I was in college, $33 each was great (this was before JLC and PCBWay), and I would say the same for most hobby projects.
jdietrich 3 hours ago [-]
"Not quite at China prices" is something of an understatement. JLCPCB offer five 100mm*100mm 4-layer boards for $7. Not $7 each, $7 total for five boards. Shipping to Europe is $1.50.
Aurornis 8 hours ago [-]
OSH Park has been doing 4 layer boards for at $10 per square inch for a set of 3 for years. Shipping included. 2 layer for $5/sq in. Much cheaper for anything but the largest boards.
It was actually only recently that China low volume manufacturing beat out OSH Park for very small boards once you factored in shipping.
pclmulqdq 8 hours ago [-]
At one point recently, I used OSH Park to make a PCB that was exactly 1 square inch, and I felt like I was stealing money from someone with how cheap it was.
For the record, college was more than 3 years ago for me, and $33/board (last I checked) does not beat any of the other prototyping services except at very large sizes - they go up to 60 sq in for that price.
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
That's not bad. Sierra and Protologix are much more expensive.
eru 8 hours ago [-]
Chinese labour isn't that cheap anymore.
Chinese wages are higher than those in Mexico for example.
grumpy-de-sre 3 hours ago [-]
My impression, having visited the place, is that the Chinese laborers just work ridiculously hard. Part of this is due to culture and very heavy handed management, part of this due to the working class seeing huge returns on their labor (wealth has grown exponentially in their own lifetimes).
numpad0 2 hours ago [-]
Don't know about China specifically, but "working ridiculously hard" is just "working" if everyone around is doing the same and you had no points of comparison.
If you've seen enough people graduating into non-working class, or you have had yourself, that changes your perspective.
grumpy-de-sre 2 hours ago [-]
I guess that would add credence to the culture element. All of east Asian shares in this practice really. Given a structure/framework in which to work productively, they tend to really crush it economically. However it seems this often comes at the expense of other aspects of society (underemployment, low fertility rates, elder poverty, deflation etc).
eru 2 hours ago [-]
Going a bit on a tangent:
I grew up in Europe, but am now living in Singapore. It's interesting: despite all the PRC's advances and progress in the last few decades, they are still the poorest Chinese-majority country. You can go even wider, and look at countries with sizeable Chinese minorities, like Malaysia or Thailand, and I think you will find that the average ethnic Chinese person there also makes more than the average ethnic Chinese person does in the PRC.
I haven't checked the numbers for all of the relevant countries, but I think it's fair to say that by and large, PR China has the poorest ethnically Chinese people.
HPsquared 2 hours ago [-]
Similarly the UK is pretty much the poorest Anglo country. It seems to be a pattern where the most ambitious/productive types "boil off" to where there is more opportunity. I suspect this pattern is reflected with most diaspora groups.
stingrae 9 hours ago [-]
In China, they compete with each other to get be the cheapest. Here (Bay Area) it feels like the PCB fab and assembly houses have decided to be higher priced because the defense contracts (and FAANG Quick turns) are willing to pay it.
adgjlsfhk1 9 hours ago [-]
I think your cause and effect is backwards. They target defense and FAANG R&D because there's no way you can compete on price when you have to pay your employees $20-30 an hour and you have to do small batches because you can't compete on price.
stingrae 8 hours ago [-]
In China they are pushing automation. When you are charging $500+ a pcbs, you don't care as much.
pclmulqdq 9 hours ago [-]
The assembly houses have done this, but the American PCB fabrication companies often have a "slow and cheap" service. They definitely optimize for the defense market, though.
jaredklewis 8 hours ago [-]
> The question is how did we let it go this far?
Because allowing countries to maximize their comparative advantages is great for economic growth. It doesn’t make sense for every nation on earth to have their own copy of every industrial sector. We don’t need all nations to manufacture their own jet engines, oil tankers, t-shirts, and Tylenol. Trade is good.
The idea that China is a major security threat is basically brand new. Half of century of economic policy can’t be reversed in 5 years.
roamerz 7 hours ago [-]
>>The idea that China is a major security threat is basically brand new
You're kidding right?
jaredklewis 6 hours ago [-]
No. I guess it’s a matter of degree but my memory of the 90s, 00s and even early 2010s the middle east and North Korea both received far more attention from the press and politicians than China. China seemed to be on a trajectory towards a free market and less repressive government. I don’t feel like the current “cold war” esque situation set in until the late 2010s but maybe I’m wrong? What’s your take?
mitthrowaway2 5 hours ago [-]
It's been a gradual shift with rising and falling tensions and various flare-ups, but if I had to pick a date I would pin it to around 2012, when Xi Jinping became the leader of China and began taking a more hardline stance.
I'm responding to "China seemed to be on a trajectory towards a free market and less repressive government"
newswasboring 5 hours ago [-]
I thought the point being made was that this trajectory has been reversed recently.
suraci 6 hours ago [-]
timing is important
China is always a 'security threat' to the US since 1946, but it never get a high priority untill now
- 1946-1991 Cold War with Soviet
- 2001-2017 Global War on Terror in MiddleEast
- 2018-now Trade War and Chip War with China
I highly doubt the memory capacity of americans, it seems like americans can only remember things that are "present"
it's just like the meme
1. Remove the chip
2. Overwrite Iraq -> China
3. Insert the chip click
4. "China is our destined enemy"
ta20240528 4 hours ago [-]
> China is always a 'security threat' to the US
Only because its been recently revealed that everyone is a security threat to the US.
brabel 7 hours ago [-]
> The idea that China is a major security threat is basically brand new.
And as far as I can see, that idea comes from China simply having grown its economy to a size comparable to that of the USA, nothing else?
But everyone during the Chinese miracle growth (from 1980's to today) expected China would've become the largest economy in the world by the 2020's. I guess people just didn't really take that seriously until it actually became true?
maxwindiff 6 hours ago [-]
We hoped China would grow into a Korea or Japan, instead we got ourselves a Russia.
Ekaros 3 hours ago [-]
So in essence a colony or puppet state? Thankfully China avoided that. And is not controlled by others like Soviet satellites were.
geenkeuse 3 hours ago [-]
Lol. you are speaking like a parent. Only China was never your child, like Korea and Japan was. You never overpowered or controlled them and forced them into whatever mold you wanted. You were never in control of China.
While you were basking in your arrogance, they overtook you. And now you have to deal with that. People are literally saying how they cannot do their jobs now that their stuff is not coming in from China. Why is that? You thought you were exploiting cheap labour, but meanwhile you were making them smarter with every bit of "menial" work you gave them. Now they can do anything that you can do, and a lot of it they can do better and cheaper. You are more dependent on them then they are on you. But your ego refuses to let you see it.
Here is some comparison from an uneducated nonprofessional...America is a company masquerading as a country. China is a country run like a business. Once you know the difference it will inform you of the way forward...Dankie
jazz9k 36 minutes ago [-]
It's funny because Trump saw this years ago and the entire point of the tariff is to gain Chinese manufacturing independance.
elfbargpt 6 hours ago [-]
They expected China to grow in a way that would lead to the "west" exerting much more control over China than they ended up with today. Basically they wanted more western-style capitalism, reduction of state control, etc...
Now China is very strong, and the west exerts very little influence
vaccineai 6 hours ago [-]
China is weak, its current economic engines of real estate and internal consumption has failed. It is currently heavily dependent on export, of which, sanctions and tariffs on China would wreck their economy.
elfbargpt 5 hours ago [-]
They account for 30% of global manufacturing, have the second largest GDP (largest GDP PPP), and are rapidly developing in the tech sector. Not weak by any means
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago [-]
China would have a hard time economically without being able to sell to the US. But it's been developing markets and economies in Rest of World, especially Africa. And its internal market is huge.
Meanwhile this is a thread about the US tech and retail sectors being unable to survive at all without imports from China.
Turns out offshoring was one of the most self-harmingly stupid decisions in US economic history.
Still - at least it prevented worker unionisation. So that was such a win for corporate America.
throw310822 7 hours ago [-]
Exactly. We knew perfectly well it was coming, for decades, and we knew perfectly well the US would have put up a fight to prevent it. Not a competition, a fight: real and fake accusations, FUD, tariffs, or even actual war.
Now the time has come and we're in the middle of it. At least, I hope this is not just the beginning.
eastbound 8 hours ago [-]
> The idea that China is a major security threat is basically brand new
That’s what I was taught when I grew up in the 1989ies.
forgetfreeman 6 hours ago [-]
Great for who's economic growth? As in, when staring at the graph of GDP vs wages plotted over the last 50 years, that big-ass pie slice that everyone's excited about? That appears to have ended up in roughly 800 people's pockets. Meanwhile even mention domestic manufacturing in the country that basically invented consumer electronics and kazoo music starts playing in the background. grits teeth We knew NAFTA was bullshit, we knew it was going to break basically everything, and yet folks just couldn't quite get mad enough to scare the political elite badly enough to back off. I love my country, we have always been at war with Eurasia, I am going the fuck to bed.
anavat 2 hours ago [-]
For humanity? It is the same reason most of us don't grow our food or make our shoes. Specialization makes a lot of sense. Western tech wouldn't have been able to grow as fast if electronics manufacturing were not concentrated in China. It is (was?) a win-win.
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago [-]
One of those "wins" was based entirely on toxic wealth hoarding by financial elites, which is why we are we are, with the flailing remains of a US government taking a hatchet to science and education while infrastructure crumbles around it, and climate change alternately floods and burns prime real estate.
So in reality, not so much.
MSFT_Edging 1 hours ago [-]
> The question is how did we let it go this far?
I've tried to get PCBs fab'd stateside and I think its multidimensional. I didn't NEED to get them made stateside, but I wanted to try. The price for a board for a run of ~150 fairly simple PCBs was 2-3x what the chinese fabs offered. On top of that, American fabs are typically for ITAR/defense contract work. They'll snub their nose at small orders, give you the runaround, etc.
When working with Chinese fabs, the main downside is the time difference. JLC and PCBWay have both been great to work with, offer a good price, especially for a hobbyist(which is important if you want more hardware R&D).
logifail 7 hours ago [-]
> Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc? Has anyone asked themselves how these Chinese firms are so cheap?
Of course we've asked ourselves that, we know the answers too! Manufacturing costs are so low, and the cost of shipping is so low.
I recently made contact with a manufacturer at a trade fair in Europe.
I was wanting a sample of their product, they had one at their stand - I had it in my hands - but due to time constraints we didn't have time to seal the deal on the day and I had to leave town.
So they ended up taking the item all the way back to Asia, and then a week or so later air-freighted it all the way back to Europe. Shipping cost was approx USD55, they shipped it out on a Friday, it was delivered on the Monday.
suraci 7 hours ago [-]
I post this elsewhere, i'll just put it here again:
Due to underdeveloped economies, developing countries cannot avoid economic dependence on developed countries, especially in areas such as high technology, equipment, and precision instruments. However, this dependence varies depending on the development stage of each country. For example, African nations primarily require food to sustain basic living conditions.
Regardless of their specific needs, this situation has resulted in a unique exchange mechanism: developing countries must offer their best products in exchange for goods from developed countries. As a result, people in developing countries are unable to enjoy the finest products produced in their own countries, and sometimes not even second-tier products, as these are reserved for foreign consumers.
The U.S. market features products from various countries and regions, including China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Jamaica, and Mexico. The world's finest products flow into the U.S. market in exchange for U.S. dollars. As everyone competes to obtain dollars, competition intensifies, leading to high product quality and low prices. This has created unprecedented prosperity in the U.S. market. This outcome is a result of market mechanisms and the benefits that the U.S. has gained from the global status of the dollar, established by the Bretton Woods Conference after World War II.
However, the massive influx of foreign products into the U.S. has also impacted its domestic industries, causing factory closures and rising unemployment. This issue cannot be ignored, which is why the forces of free trade and protectionism in the U.S. have been in constant conflict.
— Wang Huning, America Against America
as long as the US still export USD to exchange products, this situation will not change
> how these Chinese firms are so cheap?
believe me, we don't want this, we have no choice, just like all other 3rd countries, cheap products, cheap minerals, cheap men and women, all running to the US to be exchanged for dollars
bigbacaloa 7 hours ago [-]
For those that don't know, Wang hunting wrote that in 1991! Now he is one of the top dogs in the Chinese government ....
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
There are US PCB makers who do prototypes. Sierra Circuits [1] is in Sunnyvale, CA. Pentalogix is near Portland, OR.[2] But 5 small boards will cost about US$75 each.
Check AislerHQ on Twitter, based in Germany and should not be affected from the block.
No affiliation except that I like to look at naked PCBs.
mschuster91 2 hours ago [-]
> Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.?
We have our own PCB shops but they are like double or quadruple the price of Chinese shops because of labor costs and a lack of investment capital to introduce automation.
> Has anyone asked themselves how these Chinese firms are so cheap?
As said, extremely low labor costs plus ecosystem efficiencies. When the shop making capacitors by the container load is one block away there's barely any handling effort or stockpiling required, whereas domestic Western shops have to keep much more stockpiles.
6 hours ago [-]
likeabatterycar 8 hours ago [-]
> Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.?
Because the West has to actually follow environmental and safety regulations. As opposed to write them down on paper and wipe your ass with it when the West isn't looking.
Evidence: I watched a tour video from one of these Chinese PCB houses and some of the workers were wearing surgical masks.
Not for COVID mind you, for presiding over open vats of boiling poison that would need a chemical respirator in any responsible country.
PeterStuer 7 hours ago [-]
"Because the West has to actually follow environmental and safety regulations"
... that can only exist because they can circumvent them by offshoring all their production to the East and South. If they actually wanted to comply rather than bypass said regulations they would have to curb consumption for which there would not be support.
likeabatterycar 6 hours ago [-]
Next you're going to tell me that the cobalt used to make batteries for the electric vehicles literally saving the environment right now in the West is being mined by enslaved children in the Congo with archaic hand tools and no PPE under inconceivable conditions.
LinXitoW 3 hours ago [-]
No, I'd tell you that the cobalt for electric cars is only a tiny fraction of the total cobalt used, and that combustion engines also need a lot, AND that there's less un-ethical sources of cobalt that many manufacturers use.
But that's the nitpicker in me. The general point that our over-consumption drives like 80% of the bad things in the world still stands. The only real solution is to consume less.
jdietrich 3 hours ago [-]
BYD and CATL are using cobalt-free chemistry in most of their batteries. I suppose that makes the Chinese evil for stealing the bread from Congolese children's mouths.
Given how much the US wants to deregulate everything, perhaps it can become the Shenzhen of the West. And not in the good way.
ab5tract 6 hours ago [-]
*A handful of oligarchs and their useful idiots in the US.
Fixed that for you.
altairprime 6 hours ago [-]
The opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn the necessary prereqs to launch such startups are no longer present. US political leaders and businesses responsible for fiscal policy and (anti-)taxation lobbying do not consider “investment in education of industrial workers” to be a relevant enough factor in domestic manufacturing security to be worth taxing, spending, or lobbying for. The fiscal climate for launching new businesses of this sort is also now extremely hostile; entrepreneurs are expected to self-fund their businesses, which is now due to wage deflation wholly incompatible with high-capex industries like electronics; or to persuade a VC investor to bet on them, which is how we get Juicero; or to pursue subscription-based revenues, which is how we get the Cricut revolt of a couple years back; or to persuade a bank to take a risk on a large capex loan with uncertain outcomes, when banks can make more reliable money gambling on financial derivatives and government bailouts and monetary policy does not compel them to loan out excess reserves.
This is the long con of Reagan in the 80s: extracting value and diverting profits from households to shareholders will only get you a few decades before the last well-trained, well-funded workforce ages out and no one’s left to prop up the scam. In SimCity terms, the US is collapsing from High-Density Industrial to Medium-Density Industrial because all the schools had their funding cut for 50 years while the city budget has Commercial taxes set to 0%. The solutions are similarly apparent to any SimCity player, but deeply unpalatable for the real-world beneficiaries — the 0.1% — that are now accustomed to their diverted income. Ironically, one of the best ways to learn more about the grifter’s mindset is to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; not because she proposed a workable solution or because it’s a good or bad novel, but because her portrayal of the grifter sociopathy is dead-on accurate for what we now see happening. Or, watch the TV show Leverage; the villains are often a stellar model of the same.
leric 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
anigbrowl 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
antigeox 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ygouzerh 7 hours ago [-]
In a world based on mutual respects instead of trading wars, there should be no point to redo everything again in every country. If one country is very good at doing something, why try to re-implement it again?
anonzzzies 6 hours ago [-]
That doesn't exist though; politician use globalism to paint all negative stuff (immigration, inflation, wars, climate change, whatever), people (including them) start to believe in it and there we are. Every rich country/country group will need to implement everything (energy, military, tech, food, health, etc) themselves to sustain themselves and 'normally' drive trade to cut prices but at any moment be able to fold into itself again.
13 minutes ago [-]
ta20240528 4 hours ago [-]
> I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now
Move. Like the rest of us had to when all the tech was in the USA.
JohnBooty 9 hours ago [-]
Can you ship via non-USPS couriers? FedEx, etc?
BikiniPrince 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, private shipping is perfectly fine. This is not a shipping embargo. USPS is just not taking packages. Letters and flat rate will continue to be processed.
7 hours ago [-]
9 hours ago [-]
onion2k 7 hours ago [-]
If the basis of this move is that the USPS haven't figured out how to collect the tariffs on imports from China you would expect other couriers to be implementing the same measures very soon.
j16sdiz 7 hours ago [-]
No.
USPS forwards packages from HongKong Post and China Post -- they don't have direct relationship with the shipper.
FedEX/DHL, otoh, have their local office in HongKong and China, they help the customer do declaration and inspect them before seal.
When FexEX/DHL package got the declaration wrong, they got fined.
When USPS package got the declaration wrong, they are hand-tied.
anonylizard 9 hours ago [-]
Indeed you can. This only affects the heavily subsidized usps shipping process. If your r&d cannot afford fedex you shouldn’t be doing r&d.
For all the supposed panic and importance of this process, the poster didn’t do even a google search of this issue
So on the surface, this looks more like corporate welfare to FedEx/DHL.
j16sdiz 7 hours ago [-]
(declaimer: I am from Hong Kong, and have worked on some import tax/declaration system)
Import tax and tariff relies on clear and accurate import declaration.
For DHL/FexEx imported package, you can fine them when the declaration isn't right.
For USPS imported package, you can't fine USPS -- they didn't know what's in package when it arrive. You can't fine Hong Kong Post or China Post, because they are not US entities. Rejecting parcel in bulk is one of the reasonable option if they can't get the shipper fill in the correct declaration form.
callmeal 5 hours ago [-]
>For USPS imported package, you can't fine USPS
Or you could do what pretty much every other country in the world does, and fine the recipient.
bunnie 3 hours ago [-]
"let them eat cake"
throwfgtpwd234 5 hours ago [-]
For $$$$$
bgro 1 hours ago [-]
It’ll be circumvented with proxy shipments from other locations, or third party shipping companies. Just like Russian sanctions and anything else people prepanic about or think will have any effect good or bad.
Any raise in cost will disappear and be absorbed as profit in supply chain shrouds of smoke and mirrors, permanently. Unless it legitimately costs slightly more money or causes any inconvenience to companies and we hear about it on the news.
qwertox 4 hours ago [-]
> Every single R&D department in the USA just got fuuuuuuuuucked by this.
The problem is that your important R&D purchases are competing against the lipstick order of the neighbors wife (or his own) or that cute little cat toy.
IDK who's to blame for if R&D then starts having problems, but it might be R&D department itself if they are happy to compete with lipsticks, in terms of shipping.
khelavastr 8 hours ago [-]
Surely they can use DHL/UPS, right?
thaumasiotes 6 hours ago [-]
Should be minimal disruption; when someone in China wanted to send me a package, they used DHL anyway.
throwfgtpwd234 3 hours ago [-]
This is $$$$ compared to China Post Epackets.
boopdewoop 10 hours ago [-]
ill buy em for ya mate, get them posted from Australia, It will just cost you $500 in postage fees.
dzhiurgis 9 hours ago [-]
Let's do it via New Zealand, it's $600 plus you wait about 6 months.
VagabundoP 7 hours ago [-]
It would be cheaper to temp relocate a bunch of teams to the EU at this point, than completely stop all R&D.
stonogo 7 hours ago [-]
The only team you need in the EU is someone to peel shipping labels off inbound parcels and ship them on to the US.
ZaoLahma 4 hours ago [-]
That's a fantastic way to get the attention of and end up getting the stick from the US, so I think (hope) the EU would have mechanisms in place to quickly shut down tariff evasion strategies that would involve just relabeling goods.
mschuster91 2 hours ago [-]
We don't even have that in place for illegal Russian oil exports or imports of stuff they use to make rockets to shoot at Ukraine with.
ashoeafoot 6 hours ago [-]
My guess is that a shitton of R&D labs will move out of the us now?
JKCalhoun 9 hours ago [-]
Ha ha, whoops, just placed an order with AliExpress earlier today.
paxys 1 hours ago [-]
AliExpress uses private couriers, not usps.
eru 8 hours ago [-]
Could you ship to eg Singapore first, and then ship from there to the US?
6 hours ago [-]
instagib 7 hours ago [-]
Well add a mid ship point in Mexico, Canada, or Japan.
King-Aaron 9 hours ago [-]
Can you get things forwarded via Singapore or Australia etc?
8 hours ago [-]
bboygravity 5 hours ago [-]
Just get them through Europe? Outsource to European contractors?
You could literally just outsource your prototyping to me (I'm in Europe, EE with embedded programming skills and good connections to local 8--day turn-around PCBA production) and I'll ship them from Europe to US (using 1 day shipping if needed).
Ok, sorry for spamming, but my point is: there are ways?
briandear 7 hours ago [-]
Then ship UPS/DHL/Fedex.
Those aren’t affected.
sandworm101 9 hours ago [-]
Are there not other delivery services? Is FedEx also not allowed to deliver packages?
7 hours ago [-]
thesaintlives 7 hours ago [-]
Time to step up?
anigbrowl 10 hours ago [-]
Well if you're not busy you'll have time join in a general strike. Shutting the economy down is rapidly becoming the only nonviolent option.
pessimizer 7 hours ago [-]
The only nonviolent option to support Chinese imports? Imagine black Americans being like "that's the last straw! I thought life in the US had become intolerable when cheeto hitler threatened USAID, but now he's going after Chinese shipping loopholes?"
anigbrowl 7 hours ago [-]
No, the only nonviolent option for people who want to protest the administration's scattershot behavior, of which this is but one example. I think you understand this just fine, don't you?
smileson2 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah probably makes sense to just offshore r&d more to countries that don’t get in the way so much
khana 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
likeabatterycar 8 hours ago [-]
Your company is grossly mismanaged or your work isn't very important if you are shipping hardware China Post. Which would take weeks on a good day.
Had you read the article you would realize this only affects parcels sent through the mail.
999900000999 10 hours ago [-]
The obvious solution to this is to BUILD IT ALL IN AMERICA.
And while waiting 15 years for that to become possible, just move that US based R&D to countries not ran by idiots.
I blame myself for not immigrating earlier. I had a chance to move overseas for a least a year and I didn't.
JohnBooty 9 hours ago [-]
I know it's absolutely not the point of your post and you don't mean 15 years as a literal prediction but I thought about it anyway and damn, 15 years is pretty optimistic. Think about how long it took China to become a manufacturing giant. It would take the US even longer to get back to that. The US would have to do what China did, with additional challenges such as:
- overcoming environmental regulations
- a more disjointed government that changes hands every 4 or 8 years
- competition from, well, China
- US dollar making exports very challenging because of strength relative to yuan
etc
it would take, honestly, more like 30-50 years and/or a true forcing function like a world war (heaven forbid)
transcriptase 8 hours ago [-]
I think you’ve, intentionally or not, hit on a critical point that most like to ignore while passively accepting that “China is simply where things are manufactured”. As if that wasn’t the case until about the time the median HN reader was born.
Some will attribute it to the proximity of factories to one another, collaboration between those in adjacent industries, culture, government intentionality, a general lack of enforcement on IP as long as it favors China… but the truth is if China along with every alternative adopted Western environmental and labor laws tomorrow, by mid-2026 there would be factories open in every town and city in the USA and Canada.
The West loves to play holier than thou while paying others to put their negatives on their books. Canada implementing carbon pricing and phasing out coal domestically while simply shipping it to Asia instead is the perfect example. Or banning single use plastic because we were shipping it to countries that claimed they were recycling it and instead dumping it into rivers.
There is no reason why we can’t produce things, aside from the fact that it’s unpalatable and often illegal to have to deal with the realities of manufacturing like toxic effluents and aerosols.
It’s why we tend to stick to manufacturing things that only involve assembling, processing, and welding materials after the bulk of the nastiness has been done overseas.
rfoo 7 hours ago [-]
At this point, adopting Western labor laws actually helps China. China is facing increasingly severe challenges caused by the distribution of wealth. Changing labor laws does not fix them all, but it likely helps.
eru 8 hours ago [-]
Well, the other 'obvious solution' is to minimise your reliance on that volatile banana republic that is the US.
If none of your R&D is in the US, you don't have to worry so much about them throwing a fit.
I sincerely hope US and Canada can regrow some manufacturing capacity. I think the only way to do it is by a one-two punch, and middle class like me are going to seriously get hurt, but I still want it done, for the sake of later generations and for a better, safer, more competitive humanity. Safer because a successful reform removes the need of a world war.
The one-two punch is:
1) A massive devaluation of housing, stocks and other similar items. The reason for this is we need to introduce local, more affordable merchandises, which can only be brought by cheaper lands, cheaper labor -- but no one is going to work $6 an hour (about 45 Yuan per hour, more or less on par with the better paid Chinese manufacturers I think) unless, unless housing and renting costs a fraction, like, 20%. That's why I said we are going to get seriously hurt. This is basically a wealth transfer from the richer to the poorer.
2) Educate a whole generation that labor is honorable, so that engineers, scientists, technicians and such get more respect (I mean real respect, not the superficial one nowadays) than lawyers and bankers. It's a social change that takes at least one generation, perhaps two. Maybe I didn't put it right, but by saying getting more respect I'm basically saying getting an equal pay and equal say.
But I'm seeing is that US is taking another darker road.
gruez 1 hours ago [-]
>1) A massive devaluation of housing, stocks and other similar items.
I get how cheap housing can contribute to domestic manufacturing, but cheaper stocks? How does lower NVDA prices help domestic manufacturing? Is it just there to hose the rich?
markus_zhang 60 minutes ago [-]
I think they just drop at the same time. Maybe I'm wrong.
47 minutes ago [-]
s1artibartfast 53 minutes ago [-]
I was expecting a how-to, not preconditions.
It is very hard to devalue assets and jobs that are valuable in fact.
markus_zhang 49 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I think it's very hard. Wealth redistribution is essentially a revolution, and successful revolutions rarely occur before a war with external states.
huijzer 45 minutes ago [-]
> Educate a whole generation that labor is honorable, so that engineers, scientists, technicians and such get more respect (I mean real respect, not the superficial one nowadays) than lawyers and bankers.
And people who do real work with their hands around physical objects? What task can a scientist do if you need to build a factory and get lines humming? Scientists are great at optimizing complex processes, but what if there is no process yet?
markus_zhang 39 minutes ago [-]
They are in the same group ("and such").
ndom91 59 minutes ago [-]
Looks like they've flip flopped already:
> Effective February 5, 2025, the Postal Service will continue accepting all international inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts. The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.
sidewndr46 4 minutes ago [-]
This appears to be the end of my hobbies as there are just so many small parts I can't possibly get in the US but are available for $6 on AliExpress
ggm 9 hours ago [-]
Anyone got a non-intuited, horses-mouth reason why? I suspect (ie, intuit) that its actually an attack on the USPS, not on China. The party of government doesn't like the post office, and this is to teach us not to like the post office either.
I guess if they stopped using electric cars, they might like the post office again.
seo-speedwagon 8 hours ago [-]
Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.
ggm 8 hours ago [-]
And forgo the revenue? Or, do the other carriers do a better job of meeting the imposts?
mastodon_acc 7 hours ago [-]
It’s a govt service, they are not trying to meet wall street quarterly shareholder expectations
nozzlegear 6 hours ago [-]
It's worth noting that Congress has been trying to force the USPS to run itself like a self-sustaining business for decades at this point. It started in 1970 with the Postal Reorganization Act, which transformed it from a government department to an independent government entity that was expected to fund its operations entirely through its own revenue. Then in 2006, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the PAEA which required the USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits seventy-five years into the future¹. Congress even restricted the USPS's ability to set its own rates, expand its services or close unprofitable locations without political interference.
¹ The retiree funding requirement was only changed recently when Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 into law.
potato3732842 3 hours ago [-]
USPS does more or less teeter on the edge of solvent and sustainable depending on how you measure and when you measure. All things considered, I think that's pretty damn good. Pretty much no other government service can claim that. I think the retiree funding requirement is/was dumb and an unnecessary handicap but the way USPS runs itself should be a model for other government services. The only reason we don't look at USPS as a massive success is because the idiot left brains want it to be run like a charity and the idiot right brains want it gone entirely.
taurknaut 6 hours ago [-]
> It's worth noting that Congress has been trying to force the USPS to run itself like a self-sustaining business for decades at this point.
That's the narrative, but this was always a blatant bid to destroy the USPS. There's simply no other explanation.
troupo 7 hours ago [-]
> And forgo the revenue?
There's no revenue. The postage fees you pay (if you pay them) on Chinese goods are paid to China Post (or whatever Chinese shipping company), and USPS doesn't see a cent of it. And still has to deal with a frankly insane amount of packages from China.
It's not just a US problem. PostNord (Scandinavia) imposed a mandatory fee on all packages arriving from China until they reached an agreement with China Post (?) to get some of the money people pay for shipping
ggm 7 hours ago [-]
Sorry I responded to a comment which mentioned duty assessment. If this UPU/international postal union settlement rate stuff, that's not duty, it's a global model for cost reconciliation.
> Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.
j16sdiz 6 hours ago [-]
DHL/FedEx do lots of declaration/tax work for imported packages. More often than not, they inspects the package before sealing.
USPS don't -- they simply forward from HongKongPost or ChinaPost. If the local post office in HK or CN does not cooperation, they can't do anything.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4 hours ago [-]
So, they don't check for fentanyl? Might explain the move. I remember ordering some prescription drugs from India, which is, I think, illegal. It arrived to local post office, so I guess, USPS.
magicalhippo 3 hours ago [-]
Here in Norway, customs works tightly with the courier companies and postal service. They even have their own booth at the major postal hub, which processes all postal shipments from abroad.
cma 1 hours ago [-]
I am doubtful that would explain it, though it may be offered as an explanation: don't you remember Trump just pardoned the founder of the drugs by mail organization silk road to pump his crypto?
hnburnsy 7 hours ago [-]
From Reuters...
>"In our view, the USPS would require some time to sort out how to execute the new taxes before allowing Chinese packages to arrive in the U.S. again," said Chelsey Tam, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar.
> The Trump administration this week imposed a 10% tariff on all goods from China and banned all low-value, e-commerce parcels from receiving duty-free benefits under the de minimis entry program. The administration said the emergency order is part of its strategy to stop the illegal shipment of fentanyl and precursor chemicals into the United States."
cma 7 hours ago [-]
> The administration said the emergency order is part of its strategy to stop the illegal shipment of fentanyl and precursor chemicals into the United States."
Lol said out of their mouth while he was pardoning the head of the Silk Road underground/darkweb drug distribution organization to pump his crypto.
spiderfarmer 6 hours ago [-]
Never accuse this regime of hypocrisy, you'll run into apologists real quick on this platform.
nipponese 6 hours ago [-]
The illegal Fentanyl precursor industry didn't donate enough to his PAC. /s
vaccineai 7 hours ago [-]
This Trump's continuation of US's disengagement and disentanglement from China. And full on economic attack on China. Between this and
- Marco Rubio's first day trip ao Australia to address AUKUS, which is containment for China
- Marco Rubio's trip to Panama, and subsequent Panama's quitting of China's one belt and road and investigation into Chinese ownership inside Panama Canal
- Trump's 10% tariff on China, and 25% tariff on Mexico (basically targeting Chinese manufacturers in Mexico)
- Trump's threat of sanctions and tariffs on Russia, which China is allied with on invading Europe
- Israel/Hamas ceasefire, allowing US to focus more on China
China is fucked. That's why Xi Jing Ping is so quiet these days, having to deal with lack of cooperations from Chinese military, deflation, mounting debt, and now full court economic attack from US. Wait until congress removes China's most preferred nation status and instant 60% tariff increase.
ks2048 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know if China is fucked, but this reminded me of a map going around showing who in Latin America is trading more with: US or China [1]. In 2000, for everyone, it was the US. By 2023, for most it was China.
And one of the only hold-outs in South America is Colombia - a country Trump has already had a fight with. And with Trump's erratic tariff policies, I would imagine this trend would continue or accelerate.
all of latin America added up is only around 10% of US's consumer market size
seanmcdirmid 7 hours ago [-]
China has a lot going for it. The right investments in green energy and EVs is maturing now, allowing them dominate basically 75% of the world market for energy production and vehicles (without local competitors). They are also making investments right now in AI and robotics that are already beginning to pay off. The US as a market doesn’t mean much to China anymore, and Trump’s aggressive treatment of enemies and allies alike are bound to push more countries into China’s corner.
Trump is basically dismantling the world-leading US’s influence and handing it over to China on a silver platter.
Foobar8568 4 hours ago [-]
From a French point of view, I feel that Trump is going for self-reliance of the "USA", Panama, Greenland, Canada would lower greatly in external reliance and control better several trading routes.
And the US might still be the biggest consumer market in the world right now, but margins are thin and a lot of companies have spent the last few months preparing for Trump's whims.
Also, you're completely ignoring his most important point, which is that even allies now think of the US as unreliable. As an ally, as a trading parter and as a market. Trump is 100% destroying very important international relations and China is the country that will profit the most.
seanmcdirmid 6 hours ago [-]
I’m pro-common sense. The anti-Chinese crowd on HN is just as annoying and uninformed as the pro-Chinese crowd. China has access to the rest of the world, and Trump is helping out with pushing the rest of the world toward China. So what if the USA is the largest consumer market in the world? China can replace them with internal consumption and developing world markets that are rapidly growing. Have you visited Australia recently? They don’t give a rats ass about protecting their auto market (they don’t produce any anymore), so Chinese cars are taking over. And in Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, not to mention Africa. and definitely China is more interested in selling an EV to an African country than selling rubber dog poop to America. Moving up the value chain is a long sought goal for them anyways.
That vehicles make up 4% of their exports in 2024 is already telling because it was 0% only a few years ago. None of the clean tech was there a few years ago, they had no leadership in AI a few years ago, they weren’t producing fully mobile robots a few years ago. If you think they are stuck just because I’d a moribund real estate market and a demographic decline, well, I don’t see how that is even possible at this point.
Trump sh*tting on allies and enemies alike is more in china’s favor than the consumption they lose from the states. Even Mexico and Canada could get tired of the USA and just go full in with China if Trump pushes them too hard.
j16sdiz 6 hours ago [-]
> .... and Trump is helping out with pushing the rest of the world toward China.
I am not sure about this one.
Trump is pushing the rest of world to take side.
Panama, as displeased as it can be, choose to end the belt-and-road thing.
> China can replace them with internal consumption and developing world markets that are rapidly growing.
internal consumption: They tried. and kind of failed.
developing world markets: They are winning on this one, agreed.
kilroy123 5 hours ago [-]
I don't buy this. They badly want into the US market for their EVs.
As well as their solar panels.
teractiveodular 4 hours ago [-]
They wouldn't mind it, but Chinese EV & solar panel production volumes are already completely mind-boggling, they'll keep doing just fine without the US.
KaiserPro 31 minutes ago [-]
> China is fucked.
China will encounter economic headwinds, yes.
However china has a functioning and fairly flexible executive that is capable of making long term plans and executing them (see belt and road, debt trapping most of africa's ports and mines).
The US has a completely non-functioning legislature and an executive that is not in control of the president. The Executive does not have a plan past personal power grabs. When the president realises that he's been locked out of the mechanisms that control the executive, then all bets are off.
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
You can still ship stuff from China to the US via FedEx, UPS, or DHL. You just have to do all the standard customs clearance data entry and pay.[1]
> DHL Hong Kong has announced that it will no longer accept individual shipments directed to the United States.
...
> As for UPS Hong Kong, FedEx Hong Kong and SF Express, the companies stated that their headquarters have not informed them to stop accepting parcels from Hong Kong for delivery to the United States.
> However, FedEx Hong Kong's customer service reminded senders that they might need to pay additional duties for the deliveries while the shipping costs remain unchanged.
> UPS mentioned that the company is currently discussing the duties arrangement, but no updates have been announced yet.
bb88 11 hours ago [-]
So if you're worried about packages coming from AliExpress, you probably shouldn't be. The last several packages I ordered were shipped USPS with an origin of the US. Los Angeles was the origin of the last one I received with AliExpress Choice(tm).
It may affect ebay purchases of electronic parts from Shenzhen though. Particulary if the vendors use the Chinese post office.
I also ordered a Keychron keyboard last weekend and it's being shipped from Shenzhen via DHL.
reaperman 11 hours ago [-]
I'm worried more about the prototypes my R&D department is designing in partnership with Chinese contractors and fabrication facilities. We manufacture the final products here in the USA, but a LOT of components we air-mail from China.
A huge percentage of the nation's R&D efforts (for DOMESTIC MANUFACTURING) is going to be completely and utterly fucked if they can't rush-deliver niche items from China. This is a disaster.
And it's not just R&D! If you have a big factory here in the USA but you need a rare part/tool/electrical component to fix the factory - often the OEM you buy it from will ship it from their China warehouse and it'll arrive in 1-4 days.
As a person who works in domestic manufacturing, this seems really, really bad for domestic manufacturing.
seanmcdirmid 10 hours ago [-]
I doubt you were using USPS before for those, so your company shouldn’t be affected unless this affects private shipping companies as well.
soganess 9 hours ago [-]
Honest question, why? USPS is cheap. Is there something special about a stack of blank PCBs (or ICs, or caps, or whatever) that precludes USPS from shipping them? I know they are weird about batteries, but everything else, right?
bb88 8 hours ago [-]
This is kinda funny. I ordered a bunch of blank PCB's and it was inspected (opened) by ICE. It had their green tape trying to close it up (badly) after they opened it.
I think they're looking for things that can't be X-rayed or scanned.
seanmcdirmid 9 hours ago [-]
USPS is cheap! Much cheaper to send from China to the USA than the other way around d for some weird reason. But I’m guessing a business who was interested in air mailing parts and prototypes..isn’t interested in value.
BikiniPrince 9 hours ago [-]
It’s cheaper because USPS has been subsidizing the costs. That’s why a lot of small packages were shipped with usps.
transcriptase 8 hours ago [-]
Also cheap because the entire world subsidizes China-to-elsewhere shipping via the UPU continuing to classify them a “developing country”.
umanwizard 7 hours ago [-]
Why would China not count as a developing country?
transcriptase 6 hours ago [-]
When you’re the worlds 2nd largest economy, technologically advanced, and exerting geopolitical influence like a superpower, it’s somewhat comical to declare yourself a developing nation incapable of participating in global commerce without your shipping costs being subsidized by everyone else.
> “Their economy size is second only to that of the United States. [The] United States is treated as a developed country, so should PRC,” Kim said. “And is also treated as a high-income country in treaties and international organizations, so China should also be treated as a developed country.”
And CCP also usually paints PRC superior to US in everything so it's kind of their choice too...
umanwizard 5 hours ago [-]
Which country is poorer: Luxembourg or Kenya? Luxembourg has a lower GDP, after all.
throwaway290 3 hours ago [-]
> PPP-adjusted GDPs per capita
ftfy.
on which btw China scores higher than Mexico and World Bank classifies Mexico as an upper-middle-income economy
And the answer is Luxembourg by a mile.
thaumasiotes 3 hours ago [-]
The US is treated as a high-income country because incomes are high. Incomes in China are low. There's nobody disputing either of those claims.
USA NGDP per capita 2024: US$86,600, just below Norway.
China NGDP per capita 2024: US$13,000, just below Malaysia.
Their economy is large because there are more of them. That doesn't do anything for their income.
throwaway290 3 hours ago [-]
High income != developed. There are different metrics.
Overall GDP very high, GDP PPP per capita middling, incomes highly disparate, etc. Developing status becomes kinda subjective and this particular move is not insane. Sadly it's unlike many many other moves.
bb88 8 hours ago [-]
Not so much anymore. Aliexpress shipping has become quite a bit more expensive lately (unless it's "Choice"). Somewhere in this thread you can see my theory about their "Choice" shipping service.
throwfgtpwd234 3 hours ago [-]
The point is Jeff Bezos wanted AliExpress shutdown because $$$$.
throwfgtpwd234 3 hours ago [-]
That's not the point. The point is the USPS is abusively discriminating against trade for political purposes.
bb88 10 hours ago [-]
I would say so, but there are options right? FedEx? DHL?
sidewndr46 10 hours ago [-]
That brings up a good point. Does this only pertain to USPS? So you can still get a package from China via DHL? If so, private couriers are about to go way up in their business
bb88 10 hours ago [-]
Well if my DHL shipment from shenzhen gets blocked, I'll let you know.
I'm guessing Aliexpress choice fills up entire shipping containers shipping them to contractors on the ports. Once inside the US it's simply a matter of relabeling packages with a USPS sticker.
If Wal-Mart, e.g., can no longer import containers from China, well, Wal-mart would be fucked long faster than Aliexpress.
seanmcdirmid 10 hours ago [-]
Didn’t a lot of Chinese drop shippers concentrate product in the US in anticipation of tariffs? If so, we might hit supply shortages as the stockpile winds down.
userbinator 8 hours ago [-]
I don't remember seeing Ali ship directly from China either, and they were doing that long before this, I suspect due to cost reasons.
I can confirm that Aliexpress doesn't allow me to checkout with a USA address and states that items can't be shipped to my region. -edit: Since this post it seems that I can order items again? Very odd.
dwaite 3 hours ago [-]
Depends quite a bit on the item. Some items are actually shipped domestically, for instance, and can be sold out within the country.
hnburnsy 7 hours ago [-]
They can ship via UPS, FedEx, DHL, or shipping container. From the news...
>The majority of inbound shipments originating in China come by ocean or air freight, not the mail system.
throwfgtpwd234 5 hours ago [-]
It depends on the seller and shipment method. I just made a panic order of some stuff Choice and not-Choice and it went through.
Account says: 63 Shipped, 42 To Ship
thih9 7 hours ago [-]
> it seems that I can order items again? Very odd.
Perhaps it’s now being sent not via USPS?
throwfgtpwd234 3 hours ago [-]
Cainiao (AliExpress's shipment arm) and others will probably end up chartering planes to get customs' cleared packages to the US and then cross-ship them from somewhere in the US like Kentucky or Long Beach. Shipping costs will rise but hopefully not by much.
xnx 12 hours ago [-]
Bad for consumers, but seems like a very good thing for AMZN?
Amazon won't have to compete against the much cheaper Temu, Aliexpress, Shein(?) etc.
999900000999 12 hours ago [-]
Cheaper and better.
This country is so painfully stupid. Now I have to pay 2x as much for inferior products, if not the same exact stuff imported by an American company.
This alone is probably going to cost me about 1000$ to 2000$ per year. We literally don't make much most of this stuff in the US. For example I just ordered a guitar bag, 15$ direct from China. The same exact bag, made in the same exact factory is going to be 40$ on Amazon.
That's assuming this resolves before resellers run out of stock.
If I had any idea this stupid policy change was happening so soon I probably would of brought more stuff.
The next 4 years are going to be very expensive, the price of everything is going to skyrocket.
addicted 11 hours ago [-]
> We literally don't make much most of this stuff in the US
Not said often enough is that we DONT WANT to make much of this stuff in the US.
People seriously don’t get how remarkable it is that the U.S. is able to get other countries to send them actual usable stuff in return for pieces of paper that the U.S. prints. And how much richer this makes Americans.
I don’t believe the U.S. should be fully free market. Clearly it went too far away from industrialization to the point that the U.S. was reliant on China for critical stuff and has lost the capacity to scale if it needs to. The CHIPS act was the first tiny step towards changing this.
But these actions and the industries targeted needed to be strategic and not random.
queuebert 11 hours ago [-]
The new problem is the factories making a lot of this stuff are heavily polluting, and we have little to no control over that because they are abroad. Part of a good climate strategy must involve regulating them somehow.
conception 11 hours ago [-]
At least for China they have an environmental plan far and away better than the US’s “what do the rich want to do?”.
stikit 10 hours ago [-]
Can you give details of China’s environment plan?. All I hear about are the dozens of coal plants China builds each year. Are they no longer building those plants?
defrost 10 hours ago [-]
It's all true ..
they have a large population, largest in the world, India second (or not, I don't recall) and with a growing middle class (it alone now larger than the entire population of the US) with western consumption patterns and expectations they have insane power demands and projections.
So, more renewables than anywhere else, more nuclear than anywhere else, and more coal than anywhere else.
That said, they build new coal plants that are state of the art and "less bad" than the many older coal plants they are ripping apart. They also use coal power to supply energy to transition off of coal and create solar farms, etc.
compare and contrast with other countries (according to the IEA) and then look at other non IEA big picture summaries.
SeanAnderson 10 hours ago [-]
Renewable energies account for 29% of China's energy production and 21% of US's.
In 2010, this was 19% and 10% respectively.
So, they have a bit of a head start, but are transitioning to renewables just as quickly as the US. Their much larger population does make the overall impact they're having on the environment larger, though, and yes they are still building new coal plants to keep up with rapidly increasing energy needs.
As of August 2024, China has 55 nuclear reactors in operation, 25 under construction, and plans for an additional 36 reactors. In August 2024, China’s State Council approved five nuclear power projects comprising 11 new reactors. Overall, China aims to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035.
adgjlsfhk1 8 hours ago [-]
Yes and. China is still rapidly expanding their electricity production (because their energy use per capita is still way below US/Europe), and they don't have huge amounts of natural gas like the US does. As such, they are building coal plants that in the near term boost energy production, and in the medium term will be used as peaker plants for when the massive amount of renewables that they're also installing don't meet demand.
vkou 9 hours ago [-]
They are building more renewable capacity than the rest of the world combined, and have an 86% renewable target for 2050.
What's the US target for 2050?
tpm 6 hours ago [-]
> All I hear about are the dozens of coal plants China builds each year.
I suspect this is partly true and gets repeated a lot, but then nobody follows up with the actual numbers of plants that get built and are producing. I have found these where a lot of the coal plants gets approved but then not actually built, cancelled etc:
Also China's coal use seems to not grow too much anymore.
throweep 10 hours ago [-]
Please stop trusting whatever CCP says
9 hours ago [-]
blitzar 4 hours ago [-]
Ignore the investment, the land, the input costs, the pollution etc. - the jobs pay 50c an hour (+ and the jobs making the input materials and parts pay 50c an hour) and the rich owner of the factory might rake in a cool $25,000 a year.
Either all the things cost way more or everyone from employees to owners lives like peasants.
nyjah 11 hours ago [-]
The other issue is American quality has gone down the tank. 10-15 years ago I’d look for American quality over Chinese, but nowadays I prefer the Chinese manufacturer almost 100% of the time. Not always the case but anecdotally chinas quality has gotten better while American stuff has gotten worse.
wenc 10 hours ago [-]
Yes. People associate Chinese manufacturing with low quality products, but I feel those people misunderstand systems. It's not Chinese manufacturing that is low quality. It's really the sites like Temu and Shein that create low quality products -- because of their aggressive pricing, they create a cascade of systemic cost pressures on manufacturers, who have to cut corners.
AMZN on the other hand probably provides more headroom and reduces cost pressure on manufacturers. If you know how to shop on Amazon (avoiding 3P sellers, and only getting 4 star and above products), you generally get high quality products.
I've only rarely gotten anything bad from Amazon (from Chinese manufacturers).
I've bought Chinese products like Anker batteries, Thermopro thermocouples/sensors, Jigoo (weird name I know) dust mite vacuum, Tapo camera, Levoit humidifier, Cosori air fryer, and little clever tools like toothpaste tube squeezers and the like.
They've all exceeded expectations.
(I recently bought a Insta360 Flow Pro 2 gimbal, also a Chinese product, and it's amazing).
tssva 7 hours ago [-]
> Levoit humidifier
Be careful with that. I liked mine too until it burst into flames one evening.
wenc 6 hours ago [-]
I’ve had it for years running 24/7 and nothing happened. You might have gotten a dud.
HPsquared 2 hours ago [-]
Bursting into flames shouldn't be possible, that's a LOT worse than a "dud". (Assuming parent isn't exaggerating)
tssva 40 minutes ago [-]
Not exaggerating. I had it for a little over a year. I used it in my bedroom. As usual I started it going and then went into my bathroom to brush my teeth before bed. Partly through brushing my teeth I smelled something burning. I came out and saw the humidifier in flames.
HPsquared 20 minutes ago [-]
It does raise the question of certification and product safety in general, there are so many electrical devices that probably don't meet Western safety standards. A humidifier is basically a heating element in a plastic housing, it should be engineered with safety features (overheating protection etc) so it shouldn't be able to just catch fire, someone clearly didn't do their job properly at some stage. I wonder how product recalls work with that sort of thing.
fragmede 9 hours ago [-]
China makes quality things, they just keep it for themselves, and ship their crap to us.
vaccineai 6 hours ago [-]
That's hilarious. The most popular grocery stores in Shanghai right now are Costco and Sams, with lines everyday out the door, not Chinese grocery stores. Chinese citizens don't want to buy cancerous food products for example.
HPsquared 2 hours ago [-]
Comparative advantage in action!
eru 8 hours ago [-]
If you are willing to pay (and know where to look), you can get good quality from China just fine.
Most iPhones come from China after all.
queuebert 11 hours ago [-]
We must buy different things.
TylerE 11 hours ago [-]
I will absolutely concur with American products getting far worse. Everything is cost cut to the bone.
doubled112 11 hours ago [-]
With few exceptions.
In general, if I’m going to buy something that’s going to last 2 uses, I might as well just buy the cheapest one.
throweep 10 hours ago [-]
as a non American i would prefer American/Japanese/German/Taiwan stuff over Chinese ones.
Chinese products are just crap
bloomingeek 9 hours ago [-]
"This country is so painfully stupid."
Not all of the country is stupid, a lot of us didn't vote for the idiot who is causing all this lunacy. Unfortunately, not enough of us.
taurknaut 3 hours ago [-]
hah, I would say that blaming voters is the best example of american stupidity I can think of. What do you expect when you have two parties that agree on virtually everything but abortion? Blaming the voters just enables this dynamic. At some point people need to get pissed off that we haven't had policy worth voting FOR since well before I was born, just an endless cycle of people explaining why nothing will ever improve and all our problems are intractable.
Trump is easy to laugh at, but he genuinely understands this country and how democracy functions on a level most people in DC and in newsrooms across the country completely fail to grasp. Why people aren't more pissed with the democrats for pushing unpopular losers is baffling.
bloomingeek 19 minutes ago [-]
I miss wrote, I should have written, "Unfortunately, there weren't enough rational voters to stop the idiot."
liamwire 11 hours ago [-]
Admittedly I’ve not looked past the linked page, but does this stop direct importing via other means? If not, and it holds, I’d expect to quickly see a bunch of US-based importers pop up very quickly just to resell onto the usual channels.
Aurornis 9 hours ago [-]
> This alone is probably going to cost me about 1000$ to 2000$ per year.
This is a temporary hold while they figure out what’s going on.
They’re not announcing that shipments from China are over for the year.
viraptor 1 hours ago [-]
They're not going to stop. But they'll need more people / time. And everyone will have to pay extra for that.
froh 8 hours ago [-]
> by an American company
...
> cost me about 1000$ to 2000$ per year.
they sponsored 2025, they collect the benefits, and peons pay.
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
Bezos donations to Trump are taking money right out of our pockets and putting it in his.
999900000999 11 hours ago [-]
People started realizing Temu/AliExpress/Shen are literally selling the same exact stuff.
Now Amazon is going to get their 50% markup. I'm literally going to just stop buying a lot of stuff if this policy isn't reversed.
It's not like you can buy an Xbox built in Texas, this has the potential to make almost every product more expensive.
frangfarang 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dzhiurgis 9 hours ago [-]
Or it's going to save you a ton because you are not spending money on frivolous shit.
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
Probably 80% of the listings on Amazon I see come from Chinese resellers drop shipping off AliExpress.
Reverse image search usually finds the original.
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't even mind paying extra for the Amazon return policy, but I hate the dozens of listings for the same product.
harha 10 hours ago [-]
Isn’t half of Amazon just resellers of aliexpress with a markup?
Neil44 7 hours ago [-]
For about a week until their stock from China runs out... However this won't last that long.
ulfw 11 hours ago [-]
The same amazon that happily ships from the US TO Hong Kong free of charge (above USD49) with SF Express (a Chinese company). Funny how that goes.
Scoundreller 10 hours ago [-]
All those cargo planes gotta go back, worth filling them up with stuff.
refulgentis 12 hours ago [-]
I got the distinct impression Amazon shifted mix significantly in that direction, via the resellers and the resellers themselves shifting
Which reminds me of a rule: price up, demand down
Scoundreller 12 hours ago [-]
How’s it work in the US these days with AliExpress (and I guess Temu) last-mile delivery?
In Toronto, most of those items are coming to me by private courier (and this pre-dates the Canada Post strike).
karlshea 12 hours ago [-]
That’s an interesting point, I just got some keycaps on Taobao and they were shipped all the way to Chicago with CAINIAO and then handed off directly to UPS.
grepfru_it 11 hours ago [-]
Ordered a bunch of server ram and parts. Most are sold by a Chinese company but the point of origin is either Ontario or California
sidewndr46 10 hours ago [-]
are you sure it isn't Ontario, California?
tanduv 10 hours ago [-]
Temu has been using Ontrac
nico 10 hours ago [-]
The speed at which all of this is happening is astounding
Is this all improvised or was there a big list of stuff to do ahead of time?
If the latter, does anyone have a copy of that list?
Alternatively, is anyone keeping track of what's already been done so far?
EDIT: you downvoted me for giving the other poster a primary source document from the original publisher, with no commentary? What are you mad about?
reaperman 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah this definitely deserves more upvotes than just mine.
reaperman 7 hours ago [-]
This is (probably?) related to the de minimis exemption, so here is the section of Project 2025 which provides bullet points for dealing with that:
- Stop Communist China’s abuse of the so-called de minimis exemption, which allows it to evade the tariffs for products valued at less than $800.
- Reinvigorate and expand the DHS crackdown on the CCP’s use of e-sellers (including third-party sellers) and the shippers and operators of major warehouses such as Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba to flood U.S. markets with counterfeit and pirated goods.
- Strategically expand tariffs to all Chinese products and increase tariff rates to levels that will block out “Made in China” products, and execute this strategy in a manner and at a pace that will not expose the U.S. to lack of access to essential products like key pharmaceuticals.
- Systematically reduce and eventually eliminate any U.S. dependence on Communist Chinese supply chains that may be used to threaten national security such as medicines, silicon chips, rare earth minerals, computer motherboards, flatscreen displays, and military components.
- Significantly reduce or eliminate the issuance of visas to Chinese students or researchers to prevent espionage and information harvesting.
- Prohibit the use of Communist Chinese–made drones in American airspace.
- Provide significant financial and tax incentives to American companies that are seeking to onshore production from Communist China to U.S. soil.
- Prohibit Communist Chinese state-owned enterprises from bidding on U.S. government procurement contracts (for example, contracts for subway and other transportation systems).
- Ban all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.
- Prohibit all Communist Chinese investment in high-technology industries.
- Prohibit U.S. pension funds from investing in Communist Chinese stocks.
- Delist any Communist Chinese stocks that do not meet Public Company Accounting Oversight Board standards or, alternatively, close off the Chinese “A shares” stock market to U.S. investment and deregister U.S.-sanctioned Communist Chinese companies.
- Prohibit the use of Hong Kong clearinghouses as transit points for American capital investing in the Chinese mainland.
- Prohibit the inclusion of Chinese sovereign bonds in U.S. investors’ portfolios.
- Sanction any companies, including American companies like Apple, that facilitate Communist China’s use of its Great Firewall surveillance and censorship capabilities.
- Order the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice to contract with U.S.-owned and U.S.-operated artificial intelligence companies that are capable of detecting, identifying, and disrupting both the domestic groups’ and CCP influencers’ social media operations and funding streams using public information as a rapidly available offensive measure.
- Compel the closure of all Confucius Institutes in the U.S., which serve as propaganda arms of the CCP.
- Hold the CCP accountable for the COVID-19 virus, which almost certainly originated as a genetically engineered virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and do so through the establishment of a presidential commission or select congressional committee that would investigate the origins of the virus; its various costs, both economically and in human life; and the possible means of collecting damages from the CCP, which are likely to rise to the trillions of dollars.
tristor 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly, most of this doesn't sound like a bad idea from a strategic perspective, although there will be a lot of pain along the way. Once we get down towards the bottom of the list, there are some items which are almost guaranteed to be unconstitutional, or are a bit ridiculous, but in general the US and the West in general is very over-reliant on Chinese manufactured goods and this puts at a strategic disadvantage as China becomes a more serious geopolitical adversary, reducing or eliminating that reliance is just good sense.
By the way, can anybody explain what's the significance about this submission?
Hatrix 12 hours ago [-]
Watch things in the US grind to a halt when you can't maintain them with cheap parts from China.
reaperman 11 hours ago [-]
Yep. We ship in little bits and bobs from China constantly to keep our enormous manufacturing center running here in the USA. This is going to be horrible for us.
Kye 6 hours ago [-]
There are a few channels on YouTube where someone's tasked with fixing a laptop or some small electronic thing. They pull it open, find some tiny little circuit that won't go, dissolve the solder, and put a new tiny little circuit in to save a perfectly good device from the landfill.
I hope they can still afford their tiny little circuits and tiny little solder dissolving things with more expensive shipping.
USPS is the preferred carrier for illicit drug distribution.
hansvm 8 hours ago [-]
Wait, we're opposed to illegal drugs and letting _who_ exactly inject his own code into the treasury?
almaight 5 hours ago [-]
This is like when Mexico imports synthetic ammonia from China, but synthesizes TNT in Mexico and smuggles it to the United States, but American politicians say that China exports TNT. The funny thing is that TNT is a seriously illegal product in China.
dev1ycan 30 minutes ago [-]
Chinese know very well what they are doing when exporting certain chemicals, and to whom. They just don't care.
mindslight 8 hours ago [-]
Really? I would think these orders are due to some combination of cocaine, Viagra, and Ambien.
jrflowers 8 hours ago [-]
I don’t think cocaine comes from China
mindslight 7 hours ago [-]
I assume by this point they're getting it direct from that one factory that supplies Coca-Cola.
hpone91 9 hours ago [-]
Looks like everything will be hit by the MPF
What is a Merchandise Processing Fee? The Merchandise Processing Fee (MPF) is a user fee that the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) charges. It is charged in addition to US Customs duty as an ad valorem tax at a rate of .03464%. It is calculated as a percentage of the value of the shipments shown on the invoice, also known as the Customs appraisement. This user fee carries a minimum and maximum amount depending on the entered value of the shipment.
MPF is required on informal (goods valued $2,500.00 USD or less) and formal (goods valued over $2,500.00 USD) entries into the US.
Informal MPF Rates Rate: $2.53 USD
Formal MPF Rates Minimum: $32.71 USD Maximum: $634.62 USD
(And under Trump's decree, all mail from China must be labeled as formal goods now, so minimum $32.71 fee applies)
Just to be clear - if I order $5 of LED's from China, I now have to pay at minimum $37.71 instead of $5?
hpone91 7 hours ago [-]
Yes
anigbrowl 7 hours ago [-]
Wow, that's fucking bullshit. I buy electronics components every year from Shenzen, talking with my supplier now about shipping from Singapore or Japan.
What a dumpster fire. Hard to believe ~half the electorate thought electing Trump, Musk, and army brocoll-topped tech-bros was a good idea.
bbarnett 5 hours ago [-]
Unless I've missed a thread, no one seems to be saying what counts.
Changing duties, taxes, and rules is fine. It's how a society adjusts. Changing them instantly is literally the most anti-consumer, anti-business concept ever.
No 30 days? 90 days? Nope, block it all now! That's sheer stupid on a caliber almost unheard of. It sends a signal "Don't do business with the US, the rules change on a whim". Don't do business IN the US, the same!
Set up a company anywhere else, any other nation, else you'll wake up tomorrow and your entire business model is invalidated, without even a day to adjust.
This is how children behave. How over emotional, non-rational people behave.
Unfortunate.
I personally support this, but not immediately. Nutty.
jeroenhd 1 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth, the Project 2025 documents with all of these measures written down as bullet points has been up for a while. Getting rid of China's de minimis exemption is listed on page 789.
Americans, American businesses, and businesses with American clients would be wise to read through the document to see what they can expect the coming year(s). The current executive branch sure won't give you a heads up, but the plans are out in the open.
steveBK123 2 hours ago [-]
I am paying less attention to minor day to day news drama during the orange mans second reign, but even then it feels more chaotic this time.
anigbrowl 10 hours ago [-]
Guess my little stash of ESP32 devices just doubled in value.
Scoundreller 8 hours ago [-]
Good time to list all that Chinese junk I never use on ebay
casenmgreen 7 hours ago [-]
1. Current administration are wholly unfit for purpose; they have no clue about running a Government.
2. A dictator is now in place, with a subverted democratic system underneath (by subverted I mean deceived - enough people have bought into the lies that elections are now democratic in appearance only).
3. The judicial system is now in the way.
4. The judicial system is now going to be attacked.
qwertox 4 hours ago [-]
EU should do the same. They're essentially performing a Bureaucratic Denial-of-Service attack on customs and tax authorities.
jeroenhd 1 hours ago [-]
The EU has enforced a new system that ensures VAT is being paid over imported goods.
For some Chinese stores, that essentially blocked off all of the EU because they don't want to raise prices to pay tax for EU customers. The lack of taxes or import fees together with enough stickers and stamps that say "GIFT" are the whole reason many shops have western customers in the first place.
Customs takes forever to clear a Chinese packages now, they're not letting themselves get rushed beyond doing their job. Not every package gets checked, but a lot more do, and drop shippers are not very happy.
sureIy 3 hours ago [-]
How so? Just hire more people and be better at logistics. Duties will pay for the extra people.
guerrilla 3 hours ago [-]
We already have in Sweden, years ago. I thought that was all of the EU. Really fucked up my electronics hobby.
anomie31 9 hours ago [-]
Could an expert mention if this violates the Universal Postal Convention?
boredatoms 9 hours ago [-]
Regardless of violation, is there an enforcement body?
jeroenhd 58 minutes ago [-]
It's a UN body, so there's no strict enforcement. If the USA decides to ignore the UPU's fees and regulations, there's not much reason for other countries to accept American postage stamps and post in general under UPU rules, though.
Without the UPU, the USA would need to negotiate rules and fees with every other country on the planet individually, causing an explosion in complexity, administrative overhead, and cost. If the negotiated rates are good enough there can be a net benefit for the American government, but I doubt they'll be able to make it work.
I don't think the USA will leave the UPU, though, they're probably working up a small fine to try to force renegotiations. A dangerous game, given how sick the world is getting of America already.
During Trump's last presidency, the UPU was already involved during the trade war started against China, and the USA paid off the UPU for 7 million dollars.
frangfarang 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
9 hours ago [-]
persedes 11 hours ago [-]
I'm unclear on this, but to my understanding if I order of Temu, Aliexpress etc I forfeit any consumer rights that I might have in the country I reside in?
E.g. if the cheap stuff burns down my house / takes out my eye [1], there's no one to blame about gross defects / QC oversight?
You’re getting items more or less as described for a few dollars at the most. Heck, when I got my ebike motor they even asked what power wattage sticker they should put on it. More reliable than Amazon, that’s for sure.
jeroenhd 48 minutes ago [-]
If you buy from an American store, you can file your claims with the store under American law and everything is easy.
If you import from China, American laws apply to you and Chinese laws apply to the seller. If you get scammed or hurt yourself with a dangerous product, you can try two things: sue the Chinese seller in your home country (they won't turn up if the court even cares enough not to dismiss your case) or sue the Chinese seller in China under Chinese law (good luck with that as a foreigner).
You have rights, but your cheap products come at the cost of having to jump through many hoops to enforce them. I don't think many people will follow through on the paperwork required for a Chinese visa just so they can spend months or longer trying to sue a dropshipper in Shenzen, but you could!
As for gross defects and QC: keep in mind that QC on Chinese websites is done to comply with Chinese standards. What's considered carcinogenic or dangerous in one country may be completely fine to sell in another (see: importing American soda to Europe, if it contains any banned food coloring).
Do note that platforms like Craigslist, eBay, and Amazon are often not considered as the business you're doing business with. The same Chinese seller can be active on Aliexpress and Amazon, and you'll still have to go after the Chinese entity if you want your medical bills paid.
Don't buy foreign if you want to be able to enforce your local laws. Buying locally is more expensive, but at least you have an address to sue.
Aurornis 9 hours ago [-]
You’re not forfeiting any rights by buying something on Aliexpress.
US law doesn’t apply in China. Nobody is going to take your case because some Aliexpress seller has no reason to even respond to your threats to take them to court.
swores 7 hours ago [-]
You're not legally forfeiting rights as in the laws saying "you lose these rights", but in common parlance of course you are as you explain in your second paragraph.
If the default situation is that when you buy faulty goods you have legal recourse against the seller, but when you buy direct from a foreign country you do so knowing that should there be a problem you won't have that option, you are de facto forgoing, or forfeiting, those rights by choosing to make that purchase.
It's nothing specifically to do with China, but it's how things work (except/until between countries who agree to mutual protection of consumers rights, which I think is the case between EU member states but I'm not sure about any other examples).
hedora 6 hours ago [-]
It’s the same for Amazon, at least in the US. By law, if a retailer sells you a thing, liability first goes to the manufacturer, and, failing that, the retailer.
Amazon isn’t a retailer, they’re a “marketplace” or some other BS the courts buy, so they’re not liable if they sell you stuff that’s negligently dangerous. Good luck tracking down SGVEEESQRTS or whoever built the thing.
tempeler 6 hours ago [-]
I know this movie very well from somewhere, but the ending is both unhappy and bad. But you are lucky, it does not last longer than 4 years.
thesaintlives 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe he is going to take a hard look at why this service is subsidised bu the US tax payer...
abrookewood 12 hours ago [-]
Any idea why?? Presumably the tariff/trade debate?
somat 11 hours ago [-]
Probably attempting to correct the shipping imbalance. Shipping china to US is much cheaper than shipping US to china. My understanding is that a large part of that is due to china not needing to pay full local delivery(USPS) fees. Something with how international mail is governed.
The orders against China, Canada and Mexico all halt a trade exemption, known as “de minimis,” which allows exporters to ship packages worth less than $800 into the U.S. duty free, arguing it has helped Chinese e-commerce companies undercut competitors with lower prices.
anigbrowl 10 hours ago [-]
I don't mind paying an extra 10% on small electronics imports (mostly ESP32 CPUs and related modules for hobby projects). I mean, I do a bit but I rarely order more than $100 of goods at a time, it's just an annoyance rather than a real problem.
I DO mind not getting my orders delivered.
jeroenhd 44 minutes ago [-]
The language of the order getting rid of the exemption seems to reclassify all Chinese post as formal post to get around the exemption.
That means the amount of dues is still calculated as a (fraction of a) percentage, but there is a minimum of about 30 dollars. That means a $10 order of components or LEDs can end up costing you $42 to actually get it through the mail.
When you go beyond those thirty dollars, the rate isn't too steep, though, so you can still order in large quantities.
Taniwha 9 hours ago [-]
My guess is that because of Trump's "de-minimus" change the USPS will now have to collect import duty on each and every parcel - they've probably stopped so that they can tool up for doing this. The annoying part of buying something is going to be physically going down to the Post Office and paying them, (or possibly having to poll them to pay online).
I live in NZ, manufacture open source hardware in China and ship from there. I ship all over the world, some countries charge import duty, some don't, but as an exporter I NEVER have to pay anyone's tariffs - Americans are going to learn who pays tariffs because now you personally will get the bill and have to deal with the annoyance of having to pay it.
Note: NZ charges import duty (which here is essentially our sales tax), they have deals with places like AliExpress/Digikey/etc to pay it at source (ie it shows up in your cart as you check out)
maxglute 12 hours ago [-]
PRC hit back with tariffs vs Mexico/Canada buying time by conceding on border / drugs.
addicted 11 hours ago [-]
Mexico/Canada conceding by restating actions they had already agreed to months ago?
maxglute 11 hours ago [-]
Conceded _more_, i.e. CAN adding fentanyl czar, whatever that entails, MX adding another 10k troops. Western reporting alleged PRC would offer restoring phase1 trade, but PRC did the opposite and counter tariffed, on energy and agriculture goods, so relative to CAN/MX it's escalating/rejecting or no sign of conceding.
davorak 10 hours ago [-]
Is there a primary source for sending "additional troops" by Mexico? All I found was the twitter post from Mexico's president:
Neither confirm additional troops rather than just having 10k at the border.
maxglute 8 hours ago [-]
A lot of the English reporting I'm reading said "reinforce" which implies addition. I don't speak spanish but the tweet from Sheinbaum also translates to "reinforce" if translation valid:
>1. Mexico will immediately reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, particularly fentanyl.
freeone3000 8 hours ago [-]
I love the “fentanyl czar” position because that’s how american special ministers are named. Give a minister the portfolio, but dumb it down for the orange guy.
vkou 8 hours ago [-]
Canada 'conceded' to increase border security to 10,000 border officers (It currently has 16,000), to spend 200 million on border security (Which it planned to since November), and to hire a 'fentanyl czar'[1].
Trump got paid with his own coin.
----
[1] To match the power players of the Trump administration's all-star television celebrity cabinet, I nominate Robb Wells, who did an exceptional job playing Ricky on Trailer Park Boys.
freeone3000 8 hours ago [-]
I nominate Ya’ara Saks
marcus_holmes 11 hours ago [-]
maybe this is the payoff that Bezos gets for toeing the line
keltex 12 hours ago [-]
They are trying to close the de minimis exception which is a, "100-year-old tariff loophole that Trump wants to close."
Why stop the packages though? Just make the shipper declare a value and let the receiver pay the tariff if they want their package.
graeme 12 hours ago [-]
My guess is customs isn't prepared to inspect that volume of packages and would need to up their infrastructure to handle it.
reaperman 11 hours ago [-]
The USA doesn't inspect every package -- almost all current tariffs are on the honor system. They could start by checking every 1 in 10,000 packages and then build up the system until they're spot-checking x in 100.
Customs doesn't even know what half the shit is. If I order a quarter-pound of palladium for $4,000 from China, but pay tariffs on 4 ounces of lead (say, $5), do you really think customs can tell the difference? They open the package, see a chunk of metal, and go "okie dokey". Yes, sometimes they'll whip out an XRP gun and double-check the alloy, but not for a completely random & arbitrary 4-ounce package.
This will happen for every. single. product.
graeme 10 hours ago [-]
They got rid of the de minimis exemption. Now every package needs to pay duty.
They may not inspect the package but they still have to collect duty on it.
I live in Canada where our de minimis exemption is like $20. Generally when a package comes to in it is help at the border where a broker certifies it for customs. Below $20 there's no broker.
Now you need brokers etc for every single package. Def more paperwork even if they keep the same inspection ratio.
Scoundreller 8 hours ago [-]
Sure when you courier stuff into Canada but when it’s through the postal service, duty & sales tax collection is at the discretion of customs.
Customs used to check everything and tax/duty any parcel over $20 until ~2011 or so.
Not sure if it was because of cutbacks, rationalization (it’s a lot of paperwork to collect a couple bucks even with their, at the time, $6.95 fee), or a part of their reinvention as gun carrying “law enforcement” and consistent tax collection being beneath them.
Stealthisbook 10 hours ago [-]
The sticking point isn't the value of the tax, it's having to individually generate the paperwork for each shipment.
Scoundreller 8 hours ago [-]
Customs could just… not.
It’s at their discretion, just like someone bringing in more than their exemption of beer and deciding not not to charge duty.
9283409232 12 hours ago [-]
Trump and Elon apparently don't know how to do anything without first blowing it up.
anigbrowl 10 hours ago [-]
It's divide and conquer tactics. They are not interested in continuity or a smoothly functioning economy. They want chaos and panic because they can exploit it.
Terr_ 12 hours ago [-]
Alternate framing: "A 100-year-old thing you could do that Trump is trying to tax, also without getting permission from Congress."
blackeyeblitzar 6 hours ago [-]
The most likely reason is because shipments below a certain value were not being inspected and this was a loophole that allowed China to undermine the US by shipping fentanyl ingredients. My guess is that the postal service needs time to resolve this issue, and are choosing to stop processing these packages for now.
The other possible reasons are to impose tariffs on shipments below the low value threshold, to disrupt the Chinese economy which is currently weak, to discourage consumption of Chinese products, or to use as a negotiation tool in the current push to reset foreign policies.
almaight 5 hours ago [-]
This is like when Mexico imports synthetic ammonia from China, but synthesizes TNT in Mexico and smuggles it to the United States, but American politicians say that China exports TNT. The funny thing is that TNT is a seriously illegal product in China.
ajross 12 hours ago [-]
Surely the tariff/trade debate. The question is which side pulled this particular trigger? Yes, it could be Trump. But it could also be Xi, seeing that Trump just got cold feet vs. Mexico and thinking he could get ahead of things and force a concession.
Folks, this is why you don't engage in brinksmanship at this scale. It gets out of hand really quickly. I await the coming economic crisis (I mean, the stock market was already primed for a correction) with resigned exasperation.
reaperman 12 hours ago [-]
If it was China pulling the trigger, USPS wouldn't say "we are suspending acceptance of inbound parcels". It's pretty clear this is a US action.
ethagnawl 12 hours ago [-]
Don't underestimate the pettiness of this administration.
reaperman 12 hours ago [-]
What the fuck does this even mean? Is it agreeing with me, arguing I am wrong, or simply stating something related/orthogonal?
defrost 12 hours ago [-]
Mind the F-bomb's, this ain't a TISM concert mate.
It is simply stating that
if China was stopping parcels bound for the US
then the current US admin might be petty enough to pretend that they are the ones stopping incoming parcels from China to appear in control.
This doesn't seem likely, but the sentiment is reasonable .. the current crowd do seem exceptionally petty.
swores 7 hours ago [-]
I agree that their aggression wasn't needed, but while this isn't a concert it is a grown up discussion space where we can see the word "fuck", spelled more than the first letter, without fainting!
Are you complaining that I failed to "avoid general tangents" or something? Because I don't believe swearing is against the guidelines... (and I agreed with your criticism of the swearing used by the person you initially replied to)
ajross 12 hours ago [-]
Or China pulled the plug and this is just PR? Meh. I don't think anything's going to be "clear" here. Brinksmanship is literally a policy based on uncertainty and fear.
warmlander99 11 hours ago [-]
Might it be to cut down on fentinal shipments? China is where most of it comes from, not that you would know that if you listen to Trump go on about Canada.
edit: there's why and there's why. Drugs is the answer you sell
dahdum 12 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t this be due to the Lunar New Year, a massive holiday that shuts down wide swaths of the country? UPS has a bunch of Asia delays right now too.
It says until further notice. So unlikely to be Lunar New Year since it just ended today.
seanmcdirmid 10 hours ago [-]
CNY goes for two weeks and just started last Tuesday night. The golden week holiday however just ended. Most people take extra time off so things are usually slow until the whole holiday is over.
Foobar8568 4 hours ago [-]
In HK it's just a few days...
winrid 12 hours ago [-]
My Chinese wife says it goes on another week despite what Google calendar says (also it's not called Lunar New Year evidently)
dahdum 10 hours ago [-]
UPs refers to it as “Lunar New Year holidays” on the website I linked, probably because it’s more than just China. You’re right though, I should have been more clear.
Oh, look! We've cut off shipments from China! Now you'll have to buy American.
News flash: we can't afford to buy American. Why do you think we were shopping there. It's too late to fix it now - we no longer have the money or the ability to make the money to buy American and even if you gave more money to Americans, prices would just increase accordingly.
Also, some of those products were paid for already. Someone owes the purchasers reimbursement for their loss.
mcphage 11 hours ago [-]
> News flash: we can't afford to buy American.
Oh come on now, how much more does an iPhone made in the US cost?
Oh. Hmm.
fineman1618 11 hours ago [-]
Probably 3x - 10x cost
If
You have the infrastructure to manufacture it.
And they years it take to build infrastructure in china its months, in us?
Years.
Just look into how long it takes to put a bus station or a factory
mcphage 11 hours ago [-]
And we’ve got none of that. Right now, a US made iPhone doesn’t exist, and is years away from existing. It can’t be bought with any amount of dollars.
charlieyu1 4 hours ago [-]
But many iPhones are made in India and Vietnam.
aqueueaqueue 9 hours ago [-]
Right now. $10bn?
Sperfunctor 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mysecretaccount 11 hours ago [-]
The upper class vacuuming up all profit, greatly exacerbating inequality, is a far bigger deal than the inflationary impact of immigration. Your analysis is poor.
Sperfunctor 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
gigel82 12 hours ago [-]
There goes AliExpress...
3 hours ago [-]
12 hours ago [-]
throwfgtpwd234 5 hours ago [-]
This is complete crap. There was no warning given. And isn't this illegal?
We've merged that thread hither, since this one has the more specific link.
chitw00d 8 hours ago [-]
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lyzml_AF 2 hours ago [-]
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sareada52 6 hours ago [-]
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aaron695 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nico 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
suraci 9 hours ago [-]
i'm very focus to observe which certian topics were missing in HN
that's one of my habit since I live in a country with highly censorship
And base what I observed
some topics i cares were not popped up - i.e trump's meeting with Nethanyahu
some topics i interested were flagged - i.e 'Trade War Heats Up After Trump Orders Tariffs and ...'
i feel it's kind of creepy since i don't think there's a censorship supervisor in HN like where i came from, or is there any?
Volundr 9 hours ago [-]
Usually it's user flags. There's more than enough Trump supporters that between them and the folks who will flag anything political that it takes a HUGE number of upvotes to overcome that.
Technically @dang does have mod control to remove things as well as prevent user flags from suppressing something. As far as I know the second power is used much more commonly, to prevent something controversial but clearly on-topic from being supressed, but clearly I'm not @dang so take that with a grain of salt.
If anyone has a question that isn't answered at those links, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
nico 8 hours ago [-]
Thank you @dang for the in-depth and thoughtful information communicated in those links. You put a lot of effort and dedication into taking care of HN. Really appreciate that
Given how much has happened and come out in the last 48hrs alone. I would say there is a big unprecedented Major Ongoing Topic (MOT)
The MOT is the coup going on. You might call it something else, but you can definitely group a lot of the political news under unprecedented and illegal
Also, given the seriousness and impact of what’s happening, and considering how close the tech community is to some of the events and the people involved, HN is not just any bystander, it’s a pretty influential actor
Whatever HN does about this MOT, will impact not just the behavior of its users in the short term, but will likely also have repercussions in the future of the United States as a country
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
another question I had was what are your thoughts on spinning off a politics.news.ycombinator.com or some other official link from here, and letting the people that want to do politics have a space separate from the main site?
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
I have a question. How can users here help you, Dan? Judging by the activity over the past 15 days have gone, the next four years are going to involve multiple MOTs on most days, and moderating that all seems like a lot of work for one person.
aqueueaqueue 9 hours ago [-]
Par for the course. It is political. HN isn't Reddit.
nico 7 hours ago [-]
These are unprecedented times
Given HN’s community’s pretty close ties to the current events, HN should allow and even promote discussion
Even if sometimes threads can get derailed. There are a lot of very thoughtful conversations that allow for greater nuance and understanding than almost anything you can find on social media or sites like Reddit
ppollaki 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
suraci 10 hours ago [-]
Why do you blame this on Trump supporters? from what I saw, opponents are also rationalizing it.
HideousKojima 12 hours ago [-]
The stated purpose of the tariffs is to stop the flow of fentanyl into the US (which kills over 70k Americans a year). If the economic hurt this causes to China is enough to drastically reduce the flow of fentanyl into the US then I suppose it will have accomplished its mission
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11 hours ago [-]
I don't believe the stated purpose of the tariffs because the stated purpose (or lack thereof) from all the other new policies are nonsense
Saris 11 hours ago [-]
This is a genuine question because I don't know, how do tariffs stop illegal drugs from coming in?
icegreentea2 11 hours ago [-]
a) You could try to use tariff's to apply pressure to the other country to get them to apply more enforcement.
b) For the specific case of removal de minimis exceptions, this could reduce shipping volume (in terms of number of individual shipments), making inspection easier/more tractable.
sky_rw 11 hours ago [-]
Ok I'll bite. The de minimus rule allows any import valued under $800 to enter the USA duty free. Chinese drop shipping companies and others leverage this rule to ship millions of packages direct to consumer. Many Chinese companies split a large freight shipments into dozens of smaller shipments to avoid paying duty fees.
My understanding is, trade war stuff aside, the effect this has on customs is to overwhelm their intake facilities with small packages, thus allowing shipments of narcotics and illicit goods to make it through without much chance of getting caught. The idea is that removing this rule will force shippers to bulk ship freight and allow customs to better inspect smaller shipments.
reaperman 8 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't the bulk freight still be largely un-inspected?
Seems like a lot of logistics companies will just offer a lot of LTL where packages will go inside shipping containers and then get reshipped via USPS after getting sorted at the private logistics warehouse near the port.
The containers will take longer to get here via ship, and everything will have to be marked with an invoice for some kind of tariff, but I don't know what else will really change.
HideousKojima 11 hours ago [-]
By conditioning the lifting of the tariffs on China stopping the fentanyl, it's really not that complicated
Saris 11 hours ago [-]
Gotcha, that makes sense.
mcphage 11 hours ago [-]
> If the economic hurt this causes to China is enough to drastically reduce the flow of fentanyl into the US
What if the economic hurt this causes to China drastically increases the flow of fentanyl in the US?
HideousKojima 11 hours ago [-]
Then block all trade outright with China if they show themselves willing to be so openly belligerent.
reaperman 11 hours ago [-]
Ahahahahahahahahahahaha. As someone who works in manufacturing in the USA - we can't keep our domestic factories running, or build new ones, without trade with China. We also can't keep our hospitals running, manufacture vehicles, or a million other things without Chinese components/tools/materials.
seanmcdirmid 9 hours ago [-]
Illegal fentanyl is already legally blocked, but somehow still gets in. This is like making drug smuggling illegal, yes, we can do that, we do that, but for some reason the drugs are still smuggled in.
maxerickson 11 hours ago [-]
Pointing the gun, telling the others to drink the kool-aid.
jncfhnb 11 hours ago [-]
That seems unlikely
mcphage 11 hours ago [-]
> if they show themselves willing to be so openly belligerent
Why would they need to be open about it? But also: the time to do that was 30 years ago.
tzs 11 hours ago [-]
Actually a White House spokesman said it has killed "tens of millions of Americans" [1]. They didn't say over what timeframe, but it has only been around 65 years so would have to have killed on average over 150k per year just to reach 10 million.
OD deaths have also been plummeting since mid 2023, after rising greatly during the last half of Trump's first term, and to a lesser extent during the first half of Biden's.
This is a terrible time to be working for a hardware startup
JFC
blackeyeblitzar 7 hours ago [-]
Good. I'm glad to see moves that reduce market access for China, given there is little reciprocity. It's also worth hurting the Chinese economy for numerous other geopolitical reasons, including that the American economy can absorb disruptions like this a lot more easily at this time.
jmclnx 12 hours ago [-]
Well the page is gone
neuroelectron 12 hours ago [-]
It's working fine for me :
Suspension of Inbound Parcels from China and Hong Kong
INTERNATIONAL SERVICE SUSPENSION NOTICE – effective Feb. 4, 2025
Effective Feb. 4, the Postal Service will temporarily suspend only international package acceptance of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong Posts until further notice. Note the flow of letters and flats from China and Hong Kong will not be impacted.
antigeox 9 hours ago [-]
Fully support this move. America needs to build.
Havoc 6 hours ago [-]
> America needs to build.
Without the needed parts apparently
Rendered at 13:51:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I literally do not know how the electrical and firmware engineers will do their jobs now if we cannot receive packages from China. It's going to halt all our R&D for at least 6 months while we onboard domestic contractor alternatives --- which will also just generally be shit. Not to mention the American contractors WONT BE ABLE TO SHIP IN THE FUCKING ELECTRICAL COMPONENTS FROM CHINA THEY NEED FOR THE PROTOTYPES.
Every single R&D department in the USA just got fuuuuuuuuucked by this.
Your fast prototypes coming by air freight likely aren't routed through USPS at all unless it's the last leg of a consolidated shipment that's broken apart once it reaches the US. Those would be using some other carrier to get them from China to the US and then USPS only inside the US. USPS all the way from China is slow.
Paying ~$30 for express shipping through DHL (plus whatever the new tariffs end up being) will still get you those parts in 3-5 days to most major shipping hubs in the US, your suppliers will just need to start filing the export paperwork correctly.
These changes will likely have bigger impacts on cheap off the shelf parts from e-commerce places like Temu or AliExpress, who were previously taking advantage of both the de minimis rule and inequal international rates through USPS.
Your Chinese suppliers can still ship by any of the normal commercial express shipping carriers as long as they understand how to file export paperwork or have an agent who can do it for them. Previously this usually added 1-2 days to the transit time over shipping undeclared "samples". Last year DHL moved to a paperless system and that extra 1-2 days delay is probably going away anyway. They may have even done it because they saw this coming. People have been grumbling about the de-minimis stuff for a while now.
In my european experience, DHL is anything but fast when customs are involved. And I doubt they have the manpower to handle it for the new US rules.
> These changes will likely have bigger impacts on cheap off the shelf parts from e-commerce places like Temu or AliExpress, who were previously taking advantage of both the de minimis rule and inequal international rates through USPS.
Again in my european experience, the likes of Temu have solved the problem. You just order and a courier shows up with the taxes already handled. You paid Temu for them when you ordered and they paid the taxes for you at the point of entry to the EU.
Unfortunately they probably don't have a similar setup in the US, but they're likely to solve it much faster than DHL.
And of course prices will increase. Will that make them less competitive? Time will tell.
That's (historically) not the case for US B2B shipments. For those, DHL pays the duty as the shipment goes through customs and then sends an invoice after the parcel is delivered.
> DHL B2C shipments to the EU are generally held in customs until the duty is paid, which makes it slow but ensures DHL isn't left holding the bag when people decide they don't want to pay unexpected import duties.
Nothing is unexpected with DHL considering the amount of paperwork they want you to fill each time :) Even if you check "retain my data for next time and don't send me this form again".
They indeed send me a payment link and i pay for customs online before the package starts moving.
I don't do Asia->EU shipments but I get prototypes maybe 2-3 times per year from the US. We gave up on DHL and are using UPS now... they want 800% less forms, cost much less and take about the same time to deliver.
Unfortunately, with DHL this can even end up costing a lot of extra as they might even start to accumulate a storage fee as they hold the package while they make sense of the documents you sent them. :P
yeah, but like with t-mobile, I think the US branch might be working better than what we are used from them in europe/germany.
not sure about other carriers but that doesn’t sound good
The carriers do already have practice ramping up and down for Christmas and Chinese New Year so it seems plausible they could absorb significant extra volume in whatever time it would take to negotiate the leases on the extra flights they use during those times.
For that matter customs processing also has experience managing the same surges.
I'd believe we might have some sort of own-goal planned for customs that could hang things up.
That probably will work for like a week, considering how fast and reckless the administration moves.
As a software engineer who works closely with electrical and firmware engineers I know what you are saying is completely true.
The question is how did we let it go this far? Why has there never been serious Western alternatives to JLCPCB, PCBWay, JLCCNC etc.? Has anyone asked themselves how these Chinese firms are so cheap? How can JLCCNC take ~$120 worth of raw material, CNC machine it into our specified part, anodize the part, and send it to Denmark for ~$120? Like what is going on?
Remember how Apple couldn't just pick up and move the production of iPhones to India or Vietnam? You need all the ancillary industries around the production to be there, along with being competitive and commoditized as well.
When a supplier has something go wrong a line of manufacturing doesn't go down. You go down the street to the same guy selling the same thing and have them pick up the slack. If you want a 1uF ceramic cap come hell or high water there's going to be a dozen people selling them all quoting a price a little above cost. When Apple moved production to India and Vietnam? When you hear Apple talking about a few billion in investment in Indonesia? This is what they're helping set up and what takes a decade to do.
Anyone can buy automation equipment but there's nowhere in the US you can do what JLCPCB/PCBWay do with PCB and electronics assembling because we literally don't manufacture all the ancillary stuff required in the US, little alone manufacture it all in the same place. If the SMT components are manufactured domestically say for military purposes it's going to be spread out all over the US because politicians pork barrel contracts for their districts and states.
You could setup next to a Mouser distribution hub but Mouser is a middleman and they have you over a barrel. What do middlemen do in that situation? They raise prices just enough to the point where it's uneconomical to leave.
You metaphorically need to invent the universe to make it work in the US.
You didnt answer the obvious question of the why things are the way they are now? US used to have their entire electronic supply chain, save from raw materials, in USA in the 70s... So why cant US build its own Shenzhen or Hong Kong? taxes? corporate taxes are relatively low in some US states, infrastructure? US has all the infrastructure needed. Engineers? US claims to have the best universities in the world...
In the 1900s the USA took that crown. Most things became manufactured there. A lot thanks to Britain bankrupting itself to defeat Germany in WW1.
In the 2000s China has taken that crown. Now most things are manufactured there. But the owners and customers are in the US. The US corporations have outsourced their manufacturing to China and get rich from it.
And now the USA workers wonder if it was all actually a good idea?
The financiers are still getting rich and looking not to move their manufacturing back to the US but rather to a less developed and so cheaper country further abroad...
Economically speaking it was a big advantage because you could get all the gadgets manufactured at chinese wages for the last decades-- electronics made in the US will be more expensive even after all the necessary investments are paid for (duh).
A possible model sector for how this could look like is agriculture: Most nations subsidize the shit out of it to keep a good chunk of it local (~$20 billion/year for the US). You could treat heavy industry/electronics manufacturing the same way, it would just cost taxpayers a bunch and also increase prices in general (because you then poach manpower and capital from other unsubsidized industries).
You left out the part about dormitories full of modern-day slaves, complete with nets so they don't leap to their deaths. Generally this is frowned upon in the West. India and Vietnam wouldn't tolerate it either, despite being developing countries. Wasn't there a riot at Apple's India factory over work conditions or am I thinking of something else?
Bury this post all you want; I know a guy at Apple that saw the nets in person. It's quite a sight to behold and humbling experience.
The riot in India was because they weren't getting paid, not because of the work conditions.
Also I don't think the suicide rate of those workers you are referring to is higher than the general population. There are simply lots of workers. For example, Foxconn has more than 1 million employees so it is normal that there would be some level of suicide within such a large population.
In their worst year, Foxconn had 15 suicides from 930,000 people for a rate of 1.6 per 100k[1].
The US region with the current lowest rate is the District of Columbia, at 6.1 per 100k; the US national average in Foxconn's worst year was about 13 per 100k[2].
Today, the USA national average ranks them #31 highest in the world with a rate of 14.5 per 100k, while China's national average of 6.7 per 100 is close to your best region (DC) and ranks them #122 (higher rank number means lower rate)[3].
Foxconn, in that year, had a workforce about the same size as the total population of South Dakota. South Dakota in that year had a suicide count of 139 [4].
[0] https://www.goldengate.org/district/district-projects/suicid...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
[4] Page 5: https://sprc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/South-Dakota-Sui...
Frowned upon, but you (the US) do have them: https://www.goldengate.org/district/district-projects/suicid...
Seen them here in Germany, too: https://maps.app.goo.gl/vDSL4HeQrLLfYU2m7
Perhaps you'd like to elaborate on why you think it's not the same.
This university had three students jump to their deaths in 2010, out of about 26k students, compared to 15 in Foxconn's worst year out of 980,000 employees:
https://news.sky.com/story/suicide-nets-college-attempts-to-...
Population adjusted, what happened at Cornell University was as if 112 people rather than 15 had jumped in Foxconn.
Or this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Holmes_Bobst_Library
"""In late 2003, the library was the site of two suicides. In separate incidents, students jumped from the open-air crosswalks inside the library and fell to the stereogram-patterned marble floor below.
After the second suicide, the university installed Plexiglas barricades on each level and along the stairways to prevent further jumping. In 2009, a third student jumped to his death from the tenth floor, apparently scaling the plexiglas barricade.[7]
The library has since added floor-to-ceiling metal barriers to prevent any future suicide attempts. The barrier is made of randomly perforated aluminum screens that evoke the zeros and ones of a digital waterfall.[8]"""
2 out of 59,144 students would be equivalent to 33 out of the 980k Foxconn employees, double the number who actually jumped.
[0] https://abc7news.com/archive/7878562/
Compare to barriers around train/subway platforms, nets or high barriers on bridges. All sorts of things. It's pretty much a "large number of people living around tall structures" thing.
When I'm feeling negative, a Tom Gauld cartoon comes to mind: https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/2xljaz/us_vs_them/
Yes, "frowned upon" is the perfectly realistic way to describe it.
Dior was just caught using slave labor including illegal immigrants in Italy (so they can say "Made in Italy" on the label), all working round the clock shifts and sleeping locked in the makeshift factory, operating machines with safeties disabled so they're more productive, making 2700E handbags for 53E [0]. The court just called it "Unethical Supply Chain" but no criminal charges. Luxury brands are "put on notice".
> thousands of small foreign-owned manufacturers supply luxury brands with goods that can claim the prized “Made in Italy” label but are produced at “Made in China” prices.
If you thought now you can sleep well but still buy cheap (or even a 2700E handbag) because your product isn't made in China, think again. And this isn't just Italy, it's everywhere. And it isn't just iPhones or Dior handbags, it's almost every cheap thing you buy and some expensive ones too. Business owners are greedy and chase profits, and customers are cheap and don't care beyond their own needs and wants.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/06/24/italian-...
You do realize the default state of humanity is living in the dirt and fighting off starvation daily right? It takes decades/hundreds of years to develop an advanced economy and fight for the institutions that enable this not to be the case. Undesirable manufacturing jobs lead to desirable manufacturing jobs (as is happening rapidly there!)
Foxconn not being a rung on the ladder in China doesn’t mean locals suddenly get American living standards, it means they never climb the ladder and get stuck with even worse alternatives —- I don’t think you realize the history of China is basically constant mass starvation:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
These nets are everywhere here. In the our other building's (which is an R&D facility where nobody is a modern day slave by your definition) stair well, construction sites, bridges, etc.
I saw it all over Europe in buildings, bridges, etc.
Clifton Suspension Bridge in the UK is infamous for it, which is why it's now got a barrier up on the pedestrian section: https://maps.app.goo.gl/U1xYZHqhhxNoKMDV7
Or possibly politicians attracting investment to their districts for the benefit their voters. What's the alternative here, a centrally planned economy?
> because politicians pork barrel contracts for their districts and states.
> Or possibly politicians attracting investment to their districts for the benefit their voters
That's literally the same thing - you just gave the definition of pork barrel spending. It isn't purely bad, it's just excessive or unnecessary to benefit one politician's constituents.
And pork barrel spending is also literally a centrally-planned economy. It's the federal government saying "put this industry here" despite the fact that capitalism would not have put it there.
This is also why GDP is extremely misleading. PPP is supposed to account for these differences but often is often wrong by a rather wide margin for many critical industries.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
Chinese local officials are expected to meet and exceed targets for GDP growth. Investment is GDP growth, so officials are incentivized to build lots of flashy projects to boost growth even if there isn’t a clear need for them.
The central government is so concerned with local government spending that has resulted that it has ordered 12 provinces to halt new projects: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-orders-indebted-lo...
China Sees More Stations Shut Down as High-Speed Rail Debt Crisis Deepens https://english.pardafas.com/china-sees-more-stations-shut-d...
China’s High-Speed Rail Is Dead: Over 4,000 Ghostly Stations, Billions Spent, No Passengers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhclmurNUuw
It’s not really a secret. They have cheap labor. Very lax environmental standards (big deal for PCB manufacturing). They have a high density of manufacturing and production. One factory can get their materials and machines from other factories nearby. Their government manipulates exchange rates.
People are also quick to forget US companies that serve these same markets. OSH Park was doing cheap PCB panel share before JLCPCB was a common name. Boards manufactured right in the United States. They don’t have the volume of JLCPCB but they’ve been doing cheap boards for hobbyists for a long time: https://docs.oshpark.com/services/
This is not the price you get from China, but this is still a pretty damn good deal. When I was in college, $33 each was great (this was before JLC and PCBWay), and I would say the same for most hobby projects.
It was actually only recently that China low volume manufacturing beat out OSH Park for very small boards once you factored in shipping.
For the record, college was more than 3 years ago for me, and $33/board (last I checked) does not beat any of the other prototyping services except at very large sizes - they go up to 60 sq in for that price.
Chinese wages are higher than those in Mexico for example.
If you've seen enough people graduating into non-working class, or you have had yourself, that changes your perspective.
I grew up in Europe, but am now living in Singapore. It's interesting: despite all the PRC's advances and progress in the last few decades, they are still the poorest Chinese-majority country. You can go even wider, and look at countries with sizeable Chinese minorities, like Malaysia or Thailand, and I think you will find that the average ethnic Chinese person there also makes more than the average ethnic Chinese person does in the PRC.
I haven't checked the numbers for all of the relevant countries, but I think it's fair to say that by and large, PR China has the poorest ethnically Chinese people.
Because allowing countries to maximize their comparative advantages is great for economic growth. It doesn’t make sense for every nation on earth to have their own copy of every industrial sector. We don’t need all nations to manufacture their own jet engines, oil tankers, t-shirts, and Tylenol. Trade is good.
The idea that China is a major security threat is basically brand new. Half of century of economic policy can’t be reversed in 5 years.
You're kidding right?
Just one example around free market: China's private sector has lost ground as state sector has gained share among top corporations since 2021 https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-privat...
China is always a 'security threat' to the US since 1946, but it never get a high priority untill now
- 1946-1991 Cold War with Soviet - 2001-2017 Global War on Terror in MiddleEast - 2018-now Trade War and Chip War with China
I highly doubt the memory capacity of americans, it seems like americans can only remember things that are "present"
it's just like the meme
1. Remove the chip 2. Overwrite Iraq -> China 3. Insert the chip click 4. "China is our destined enemy"
Only because its been recently revealed that everyone is a security threat to the US.
And as far as I can see, that idea comes from China simply having grown its economy to a size comparable to that of the USA, nothing else?
But everyone during the Chinese miracle growth (from 1980's to today) expected China would've become the largest economy in the world by the 2020's. I guess people just didn't really take that seriously until it actually became true?
While you were basking in your arrogance, they overtook you. And now you have to deal with that. People are literally saying how they cannot do their jobs now that their stuff is not coming in from China. Why is that? You thought you were exploiting cheap labour, but meanwhile you were making them smarter with every bit of "menial" work you gave them. Now they can do anything that you can do, and a lot of it they can do better and cheaper. You are more dependent on them then they are on you. But your ego refuses to let you see it.
Here is some comparison from an uneducated nonprofessional...America is a company masquerading as a country. China is a country run like a business. Once you know the difference it will inform you of the way forward...Dankie
Now China is very strong, and the west exerts very little influence
Meanwhile this is a thread about the US tech and retail sectors being unable to survive at all without imports from China.
Turns out offshoring was one of the most self-harmingly stupid decisions in US economic history.
Still - at least it prevented worker unionisation. So that was such a win for corporate America.
Now the time has come and we're in the middle of it. At least, I hope this is not just the beginning.
That’s what I was taught when I grew up in the 1989ies.
So in reality, not so much.
I've tried to get PCBs fab'd stateside and I think its multidimensional. I didn't NEED to get them made stateside, but I wanted to try. The price for a board for a run of ~150 fairly simple PCBs was 2-3x what the chinese fabs offered. On top of that, American fabs are typically for ITAR/defense contract work. They'll snub their nose at small orders, give you the runaround, etc.
When working with Chinese fabs, the main downside is the time difference. JLC and PCBWay have both been great to work with, offer a good price, especially for a hobbyist(which is important if you want more hardware R&D).
Of course we've asked ourselves that, we know the answers too! Manufacturing costs are so low, and the cost of shipping is so low.
I recently made contact with a manufacturer at a trade fair in Europe.
I was wanting a sample of their product, they had one at their stand - I had it in my hands - but due to time constraints we didn't have time to seal the deal on the day and I had to leave town.
So they ended up taking the item all the way back to Asia, and then a week or so later air-freighted it all the way back to Europe. Shipping cost was approx USD55, they shipped it out on a Friday, it was delivered on the Monday.
Due to underdeveloped economies, developing countries cannot avoid economic dependence on developed countries, especially in areas such as high technology, equipment, and precision instruments. However, this dependence varies depending on the development stage of each country. For example, African nations primarily require food to sustain basic living conditions.
Regardless of their specific needs, this situation has resulted in a unique exchange mechanism: developing countries must offer their best products in exchange for goods from developed countries. As a result, people in developing countries are unable to enjoy the finest products produced in their own countries, and sometimes not even second-tier products, as these are reserved for foreign consumers.
The U.S. market features products from various countries and regions, including China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Jamaica, and Mexico. The world's finest products flow into the U.S. market in exchange for U.S. dollars. As everyone competes to obtain dollars, competition intensifies, leading to high product quality and low prices. This has created unprecedented prosperity in the U.S. market. This outcome is a result of market mechanisms and the benefits that the U.S. has gained from the global status of the dollar, established by the Bretton Woods Conference after World War II.
However, the massive influx of foreign products into the U.S. has also impacted its domestic industries, causing factory closures and rising unemployment. This issue cannot be ignored, which is why the forces of free trade and protectionism in the U.S. have been in constant conflict.
— Wang Huning, America Against America
as long as the US still export USD to exchange products, this situation will not change
> how these Chinese firms are so cheap?
believe me, we don't want this, we have no choice, just like all other 3rd countries, cheap products, cheap minerals, cheap men and women, all running to the US to be exchanged for dollars
[1] https://www.protoexpress.com
[2] https://www.pentalogix.com/
No affiliation except that I like to look at naked PCBs.
We have our own PCB shops but they are like double or quadruple the price of Chinese shops because of labor costs and a lack of investment capital to introduce automation.
> Has anyone asked themselves how these Chinese firms are so cheap?
As said, extremely low labor costs plus ecosystem efficiencies. When the shop making capacitors by the container load is one block away there's barely any handling effort or stockpiling required, whereas domestic Western shops have to keep much more stockpiles.
Because the West has to actually follow environmental and safety regulations. As opposed to write them down on paper and wipe your ass with it when the West isn't looking.
Evidence: I watched a tour video from one of these Chinese PCB houses and some of the workers were wearing surgical masks.
Not for COVID mind you, for presiding over open vats of boiling poison that would need a chemical respirator in any responsible country.
... that can only exist because they can circumvent them by offshoring all their production to the East and South. If they actually wanted to comply rather than bypass said regulations they would have to curb consumption for which there would not be support.
But that's the nitpicker in me. The general point that our over-consumption drives like 80% of the bad things in the world still stands. The only real solution is to consume less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
Fixed that for you.
This is the long con of Reagan in the 80s: extracting value and diverting profits from households to shareholders will only get you a few decades before the last well-trained, well-funded workforce ages out and no one’s left to prop up the scam. In SimCity terms, the US is collapsing from High-Density Industrial to Medium-Density Industrial because all the schools had their funding cut for 50 years while the city budget has Commercial taxes set to 0%. The solutions are similarly apparent to any SimCity player, but deeply unpalatable for the real-world beneficiaries — the 0.1% — that are now accustomed to their diverted income. Ironically, one of the best ways to learn more about the grifter’s mindset is to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; not because she proposed a workable solution or because it’s a good or bad novel, but because her portrayal of the grifter sociopathy is dead-on accurate for what we now see happening. Or, watch the TV show Leverage; the villains are often a stellar model of the same.
Move. Like the rest of us had to when all the tech was in the USA.
USPS forwards packages from HongKong Post and China Post -- they don't have direct relationship with the shipper.
FedEX/DHL, otoh, have their local office in HongKong and China, they help the customer do declaration and inspect them before seal.
When FexEX/DHL package got the declaration wrong, they got fined. When USPS package got the declaration wrong, they are hand-tied.
For all the supposed panic and importance of this process, the poster didn’t do even a google search of this issue
So on the surface, this looks more like corporate welfare to FedEx/DHL.
Import tax and tariff relies on clear and accurate import declaration.
For DHL/FexEx imported package, you can fine them when the declaration isn't right.
For USPS imported package, you can't fine USPS -- they didn't know what's in package when it arrive. You can't fine Hong Kong Post or China Post, because they are not US entities. Rejecting parcel in bulk is one of the reasonable option if they can't get the shipper fill in the correct declaration form.
Or you could do what pretty much every other country in the world does, and fine the recipient.
Any raise in cost will disappear and be absorbed as profit in supply chain shrouds of smoke and mirrors, permanently. Unless it legitimately costs slightly more money or causes any inconvenience to companies and we hear about it on the news.
The problem is that your important R&D purchases are competing against the lipstick order of the neighbors wife (or his own) or that cute little cat toy.
IDK who's to blame for if R&D then starts having problems, but it might be R&D department itself if they are happy to compete with lipsticks, in terms of shipping.
You could literally just outsource your prototyping to me (I'm in Europe, EE with embedded programming skills and good connections to local 8--day turn-around PCBA production) and I'll ship them from Europe to US (using 1 day shipping if needed).
Ok, sorry for spamming, but my point is: there are ways?
Those aren’t affected.
Had you read the article you would realize this only affects parcels sent through the mail.
And while waiting 15 years for that to become possible, just move that US based R&D to countries not ran by idiots.
I blame myself for not immigrating earlier. I had a chance to move overseas for a least a year and I didn't.
- overcoming environmental regulations
- a more disjointed government that changes hands every 4 or 8 years
- competition from, well, China
- US dollar making exports very challenging because of strength relative to yuan
etc
it would take, honestly, more like 30-50 years and/or a true forcing function like a world war (heaven forbid)
Some will attribute it to the proximity of factories to one another, collaboration between those in adjacent industries, culture, government intentionality, a general lack of enforcement on IP as long as it favors China… but the truth is if China along with every alternative adopted Western environmental and labor laws tomorrow, by mid-2026 there would be factories open in every town and city in the USA and Canada.
The West loves to play holier than thou while paying others to put their negatives on their books. Canada implementing carbon pricing and phasing out coal domestically while simply shipping it to Asia instead is the perfect example. Or banning single use plastic because we were shipping it to countries that claimed they were recycling it and instead dumping it into rivers.
There is no reason why we can’t produce things, aside from the fact that it’s unpalatable and often illegal to have to deal with the realities of manufacturing like toxic effluents and aerosols.
It’s why we tend to stick to manufacturing things that only involve assembling, processing, and welding materials after the bulk of the nastiness has been done overseas.
If none of your R&D is in the US, you don't have to worry so much about them throwing a fit.
Restored already. It's all about chaos.
The one-two punch is:
1) A massive devaluation of housing, stocks and other similar items. The reason for this is we need to introduce local, more affordable merchandises, which can only be brought by cheaper lands, cheaper labor -- but no one is going to work $6 an hour (about 45 Yuan per hour, more or less on par with the better paid Chinese manufacturers I think) unless, unless housing and renting costs a fraction, like, 20%. That's why I said we are going to get seriously hurt. This is basically a wealth transfer from the richer to the poorer.
2) Educate a whole generation that labor is honorable, so that engineers, scientists, technicians and such get more respect (I mean real respect, not the superficial one nowadays) than lawyers and bankers. It's a social change that takes at least one generation, perhaps two. Maybe I didn't put it right, but by saying getting more respect I'm basically saying getting an equal pay and equal say.
But I'm seeing is that US is taking another darker road.
I get how cheap housing can contribute to domestic manufacturing, but cheaper stocks? How does lower NVDA prices help domestic manufacturing? Is it just there to hose the rich?
It is very hard to devalue assets and jobs that are valuable in fact.
And people who do real work with their hands around physical objects? What task can a scientist do if you need to build a factory and get lines humming? Scientists are great at optimizing complex processes, but what if there is no process yet?
> Effective February 5, 2025, the Postal Service will continue accepting all international inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts. The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.
I guess if they stopped using electric cars, they might like the post office again.
¹ The retiree funding requirement was only changed recently when Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 into law.
That's the narrative, but this was always a blatant bid to destroy the USPS. There's simply no other explanation.
There's no revenue. The postage fees you pay (if you pay them) on Chinese goods are paid to China Post (or whatever Chinese shipping company), and USPS doesn't see a cent of it. And still has to deal with a frankly insane amount of packages from China.
It's not just a US problem. PostNord (Scandinavia) imposed a mandatory fee on all packages arriving from China until they reached an agreement with China Post (?) to get some of the money people pay for shipping
> Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.
USPS don't -- they simply forward from HongKongPost or ChinaPost. If the local post office in HK or CN does not cooperation, they can't do anything.
>"In our view, the USPS would require some time to sort out how to execute the new taxes before allowing Chinese packages to arrive in the U.S. again," said Chelsey Tam, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar.
> The Trump administration this week imposed a 10% tariff on all goods from China and banned all low-value, e-commerce parcels from receiving duty-free benefits under the de minimis entry program. The administration said the emergency order is part of its strategy to stop the illegal shipment of fentanyl and precursor chemicals into the United States."
Lol said out of their mouth while he was pardoning the head of the Silk Road underground/darkweb drug distribution organization to pump his crypto.
- Marco Rubio's first day trip ao Australia to address AUKUS, which is containment for China
- Marco Rubio's trip to Panama, and subsequent Panama's quitting of China's one belt and road and investigation into Chinese ownership inside Panama Canal
- Trump's 10% tariff on China, and 25% tariff on Mexico (basically targeting Chinese manufacturers in Mexico)
- Trump's threat of sanctions and tariffs on Russia, which China is allied with on invading Europe
- Israel/Hamas ceasefire, allowing US to focus more on China
China is fucked. That's why Xi Jing Ping is so quiet these days, having to deal with lack of cooperations from Chinese military, deflation, mounting debt, and now full court economic attack from US. Wait until congress removes China's most preferred nation status and instant 60% tariff increase.
And one of the only hold-outs in South America is Colombia - a country Trump has already had a fight with. And with Trump's erratic tariff policies, I would imagine this trend would continue or accelerate.
[1] There's a few versions. here's one: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1ibunc1/latin_amer...
Trump is basically dismantling the world-leading US’s influence and handing it over to China on a silver platter.
Add that https://www.businessinsider.com/who-was-elon-musk-grandfathe... and you see who is actually leading today USA.
And the US might still be the biggest consumer market in the world right now, but margins are thin and a lot of companies have spent the last few months preparing for Trump's whims.
Also, you're completely ignoring his most important point, which is that even allies now think of the US as unreliable. As an ally, as a trading parter and as a market. Trump is 100% destroying very important international relations and China is the country that will profit the most.
That vehicles make up 4% of their exports in 2024 is already telling because it was 0% only a few years ago. None of the clean tech was there a few years ago, they had no leadership in AI a few years ago, they weren’t producing fully mobile robots a few years ago. If you think they are stuck just because I’d a moribund real estate market and a demographic decline, well, I don’t see how that is even possible at this point.
Trump sh*tting on allies and enemies alike is more in china’s favor than the consumption they lose from the states. Even Mexico and Canada could get tired of the USA and just go full in with China if Trump pushes them too hard.
I am not sure about this one. Trump is pushing the rest of world to take side.
Panama, as displeased as it can be, choose to end the belt-and-road thing.
> China can replace them with internal consumption and developing world markets that are rapidly growing.
internal consumption: They tried. and kind of failed.
developing world markets: They are winning on this one, agreed.
As well as their solar panels.
China will encounter economic headwinds, yes.
However china has a functioning and fairly flexible executive that is capable of making long term plans and executing them (see belt and road, debt trapping most of africa's ports and mines).
The US has a completely non-functioning legislature and an executive that is not in control of the president. The Executive does not have a plan past personal power grabs. When the president realises that he's been locked out of the mechanisms that control the executive, then all bets are off.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/business/china-us-usps-de...
5 Feb 2025: https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/22675...
> DHL Hong Kong has announced that it will no longer accept individual shipments directed to the United States.
...
> As for UPS Hong Kong, FedEx Hong Kong and SF Express, the companies stated that their headquarters have not informed them to stop accepting parcels from Hong Kong for delivery to the United States.
> However, FedEx Hong Kong's customer service reminded senders that they might need to pay additional duties for the deliveries while the shipping costs remain unchanged.
> UPS mentioned that the company is currently discussing the duties arrangement, but no updates have been announced yet.
It may affect ebay purchases of electronic parts from Shenzhen though. Particulary if the vendors use the Chinese post office.
I also ordered a Keychron keyboard last weekend and it's being shipped from Shenzhen via DHL.
A huge percentage of the nation's R&D efforts (for DOMESTIC MANUFACTURING) is going to be completely and utterly fucked if they can't rush-deliver niche items from China. This is a disaster.
And it's not just R&D! If you have a big factory here in the USA but you need a rare part/tool/electrical component to fix the factory - often the OEM you buy it from will ship it from their China warehouse and it'll arrive in 1-4 days.
As a person who works in domestic manufacturing, this seems really, really bad for domestic manufacturing.
I think they're looking for things that can't be X-rayed or scanned.
> “Their economy size is second only to that of the United States. [The] United States is treated as a developed country, so should PRC,” Kim said. “And is also treated as a high-income country in treaties and international organizations, so China should also be treated as a developed country.”
And CCP also usually paints PRC superior to US in everything so it's kind of their choice too...
ftfy.
on which btw China scores higher than Mexico and World Bank classifies Mexico as an upper-middle-income economy
And the answer is Luxembourg by a mile.
USA NGDP per capita 2024: US$86,600, just below Norway.
China NGDP per capita 2024: US$13,000, just below Malaysia.
Their economy is large because there are more of them. That doesn't do anything for their income.
Overall GDP very high, GDP PPP per capita middling, incomes highly disparate, etc. Developing status becomes kinda subjective and this particular move is not insane. Sadly it's unlike many many other moves.
I'm guessing Aliexpress choice fills up entire shipping containers shipping them to contractors on the ports. Once inside the US it's simply a matter of relabeling packages with a USPS sticker.
If Wal-Mart, e.g., can no longer import containers from China, well, Wal-mart would be fucked long faster than Aliexpress.
>The majority of inbound shipments originating in China come by ocean or air freight, not the mail system.
Account says: 63 Shipped, 42 To Ship
Perhaps it’s now being sent not via USPS?
Amazon won't have to compete against the much cheaper Temu, Aliexpress, Shein(?) etc.
This country is so painfully stupid. Now I have to pay 2x as much for inferior products, if not the same exact stuff imported by an American company.
This alone is probably going to cost me about 1000$ to 2000$ per year. We literally don't make much most of this stuff in the US. For example I just ordered a guitar bag, 15$ direct from China. The same exact bag, made in the same exact factory is going to be 40$ on Amazon.
That's assuming this resolves before resellers run out of stock.
If I had any idea this stupid policy change was happening so soon I probably would of brought more stuff.
The next 4 years are going to be very expensive, the price of everything is going to skyrocket.
Not said often enough is that we DONT WANT to make much of this stuff in the US.
People seriously don’t get how remarkable it is that the U.S. is able to get other countries to send them actual usable stuff in return for pieces of paper that the U.S. prints. And how much richer this makes Americans.
I don’t believe the U.S. should be fully free market. Clearly it went too far away from industrialization to the point that the U.S. was reliant on China for critical stuff and has lost the capacity to scale if it needs to. The CHIPS act was the first tiny step towards changing this.
But these actions and the industries targeted needed to be strategic and not random.
they have a large population, largest in the world, India second (or not, I don't recall) and with a growing middle class (it alone now larger than the entire population of the US) with western consumption patterns and expectations they have insane power demands and projections.
So, more renewables than anywhere else, more nuclear than anywhere else, and more coal than anywhere else.
That said, they build new coal plants that are state of the art and "less bad" than the many older coal plants they are ripping apart. They also use coal power to supply energy to transition off of coal and create solar farms, etc.
"It's complicated"
See:
https://www.iea.org/countries/china (and drill down)
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2024/chi...
https://www.iea.org/reports/meeting-power-system-flexibility...
compare and contrast with other countries (according to the IEA) and then look at other non IEA big picture summaries.
In 2010, this was 19% and 10% respectively.
So, they have a bit of a head start, but are transitioning to renewables just as quickly as the US. Their much larger population does make the overall impact they're having on the environment larger, though, and yes they are still building new coal plants to keep up with rapidly increasing energy needs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
What's the US target for 2050?
I suspect this is partly true and gets repeated a lot, but then nobody follows up with the actual numbers of plants that get built and are producing. I have found these where a lot of the coal plants gets approved but then not actually built, cancelled etc:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sHBsK_Ez7C9XA4HKRQSv...
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-puts-coal-on...
Also China's coal use seems to not grow too much anymore.
Either all the things cost way more or everyone from employees to owners lives like peasants.
AMZN on the other hand probably provides more headroom and reduces cost pressure on manufacturers. If you know how to shop on Amazon (avoiding 3P sellers, and only getting 4 star and above products), you generally get high quality products.
I've only rarely gotten anything bad from Amazon (from Chinese manufacturers).
I've bought Chinese products like Anker batteries, Thermopro thermocouples/sensors, Jigoo (weird name I know) dust mite vacuum, Tapo camera, Levoit humidifier, Cosori air fryer, and little clever tools like toothpaste tube squeezers and the like.
They've all exceeded expectations.
(I recently bought a Insta360 Flow Pro 2 gimbal, also a Chinese product, and it's amazing).
Be careful with that. I liked mine too until it burst into flames one evening.
Most iPhones come from China after all.
In general, if I’m going to buy something that’s going to last 2 uses, I might as well just buy the cheapest one.
Chinese products are just crap
Not all of the country is stupid, a lot of us didn't vote for the idiot who is causing all this lunacy. Unfortunately, not enough of us.
Trump is easy to laugh at, but he genuinely understands this country and how democracy functions on a level most people in DC and in newsrooms across the country completely fail to grasp. Why people aren't more pissed with the democrats for pushing unpopular losers is baffling.
This is a temporary hold while they figure out what’s going on.
They’re not announcing that shipments from China are over for the year.
they sponsored 2025, they collect the benefits, and peons pay.
Now Amazon is going to get their 50% markup. I'm literally going to just stop buying a lot of stuff if this policy isn't reversed.
It's not like you can buy an Xbox built in Texas, this has the potential to make almost every product more expensive.
Reverse image search usually finds the original.
Which reminds me of a rule: price up, demand down
In Toronto, most of those items are coming to me by private courier (and this pre-dates the Canada Post strike).
Is this all improvised or was there a big list of stuff to do ahead of time?
If the latter, does anyone have a copy of that list?
Alternatively, is anyone keeping track of what's already been done so far?
EDIT: you downvoted me for giving the other poster a primary source document from the original publisher, with no commentary? What are you mad about?
- Stop Communist China’s abuse of the so-called de minimis exemption, which allows it to evade the tariffs for products valued at less than $800.
- Reinvigorate and expand the DHS crackdown on the CCP’s use of e-sellers (including third-party sellers) and the shippers and operators of major warehouses such as Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba to flood U.S. markets with counterfeit and pirated goods.
- Strategically expand tariffs to all Chinese products and increase tariff rates to levels that will block out “Made in China” products, and execute this strategy in a manner and at a pace that will not expose the U.S. to lack of access to essential products like key pharmaceuticals.
- Systematically reduce and eventually eliminate any U.S. dependence on Communist Chinese supply chains that may be used to threaten national security such as medicines, silicon chips, rare earth minerals, computer motherboards, flatscreen displays, and military components.
- Significantly reduce or eliminate the issuance of visas to Chinese students or researchers to prevent espionage and information harvesting.
- Prohibit the use of Communist Chinese–made drones in American airspace.
- Provide significant financial and tax incentives to American companies that are seeking to onshore production from Communist China to U.S. soil.
- Prohibit Communist Chinese state-owned enterprises from bidding on U.S. government procurement contracts (for example, contracts for subway and other transportation systems).
- Ban all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.
- Prohibit all Communist Chinese investment in high-technology industries.
- Prohibit U.S. pension funds from investing in Communist Chinese stocks.
- Delist any Communist Chinese stocks that do not meet Public Company Accounting Oversight Board standards or, alternatively, close off the Chinese “A shares” stock market to U.S. investment and deregister U.S.-sanctioned Communist Chinese companies.
- Prohibit the use of Hong Kong clearinghouses as transit points for American capital investing in the Chinese mainland.
- Prohibit the inclusion of Chinese sovereign bonds in U.S. investors’ portfolios.
- Sanction any companies, including American companies like Apple, that facilitate Communist China’s use of its Great Firewall surveillance and censorship capabilities.
- Order the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Justice to contract with U.S.-owned and U.S.-operated artificial intelligence companies that are capable of detecting, identifying, and disrupting both the domestic groups’ and CCP influencers’ social media operations and funding streams using public information as a rapidly available offensive measure.
- Compel the closure of all Confucius Institutes in the U.S., which serve as propaganda arms of the CCP.
- Hold the CCP accountable for the COVID-19 virus, which almost certainly originated as a genetically engineered virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and do so through the establishment of a presidential commission or select congressional committee that would investigate the origins of the virus; its various costs, both economically and in human life; and the possible means of collecting damages from the CCP, which are likely to rise to the trillions of dollars.
By the way, can anybody explain what's the significance about this submission?
I hope they can still afford their tiny little circuits and tiny little solder dissolving things with more expensive shipping.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO24/20230517/115956/HHRG...
USPS is the preferred carrier for illicit drug distribution.
What is a Merchandise Processing Fee? The Merchandise Processing Fee (MPF) is a user fee that the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) charges. It is charged in addition to US Customs duty as an ad valorem tax at a rate of .03464%. It is calculated as a percentage of the value of the shipments shown on the invoice, also known as the Customs appraisement. This user fee carries a minimum and maximum amount depending on the entered value of the shipment. MPF is required on informal (goods valued $2,500.00 USD or less) and formal (goods valued over $2,500.00 USD) entries into the US.
Informal MPF Rates Rate: $2.53 USD
Formal MPF Rates Minimum: $32.71 USD Maximum: $634.62 USD (And under Trump's decree, all mail from China must be labeled as formal goods now, so minimum $32.71 fee applies)
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-02293.pdf
What a dumpster fire. Hard to believe ~half the electorate thought electing Trump, Musk, and army brocoll-topped tech-bros was a good idea.
Changing duties, taxes, and rules is fine. It's how a society adjusts. Changing them instantly is literally the most anti-consumer, anti-business concept ever.
No 30 days? 90 days? Nope, block it all now! That's sheer stupid on a caliber almost unheard of. It sends a signal "Don't do business with the US, the rules change on a whim". Don't do business IN the US, the same!
Set up a company anywhere else, any other nation, else you'll wake up tomorrow and your entire business model is invalidated, without even a day to adjust.
This is how children behave. How over emotional, non-rational people behave.
Unfortunate.
I personally support this, but not immediately. Nutty.
Americans, American businesses, and businesses with American clients would be wise to read through the document to see what they can expect the coming year(s). The current executive branch sure won't give you a heads up, but the plans are out in the open.
2. A dictator is now in place, with a subverted democratic system underneath (by subverted I mean deceived - enough people have bought into the lies that elections are now democratic in appearance only).
3. The judicial system is now in the way.
4. The judicial system is now going to be attacked.
For some Chinese stores, that essentially blocked off all of the EU because they don't want to raise prices to pay tax for EU customers. The lack of taxes or import fees together with enough stickers and stamps that say "GIFT" are the whole reason many shops have western customers in the first place.
Customs takes forever to clear a Chinese packages now, they're not letting themselves get rushed beyond doing their job. Not every package gets checked, but a lot more do, and drop shippers are not very happy.
Without the UPU, the USA would need to negotiate rules and fees with every other country on the planet individually, causing an explosion in complexity, administrative overhead, and cost. If the negotiated rates are good enough there can be a net benefit for the American government, but I doubt they'll be able to make it work.
I don't think the USA will leave the UPU, though, they're probably working up a small fine to try to force renegotiations. A dangerous game, given how sick the world is getting of America already.
During Trump's last presidency, the UPU was already involved during the trade war started against China, and the USA paid off the UPU for 7 million dollars.
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lawsuit-ruling-dog-leash-purch...
If you import from China, American laws apply to you and Chinese laws apply to the seller. If you get scammed or hurt yourself with a dangerous product, you can try two things: sue the Chinese seller in your home country (they won't turn up if the court even cares enough not to dismiss your case) or sue the Chinese seller in China under Chinese law (good luck with that as a foreigner).
You have rights, but your cheap products come at the cost of having to jump through many hoops to enforce them. I don't think many people will follow through on the paperwork required for a Chinese visa just so they can spend months or longer trying to sue a dropshipper in Shenzen, but you could!
As for gross defects and QC: keep in mind that QC on Chinese websites is done to comply with Chinese standards. What's considered carcinogenic or dangerous in one country may be completely fine to sell in another (see: importing American soda to Europe, if it contains any banned food coloring).
Do note that platforms like Craigslist, eBay, and Amazon are often not considered as the business you're doing business with. The same Chinese seller can be active on Aliexpress and Amazon, and you'll still have to go after the Chinese entity if you want your medical bills paid.
Don't buy foreign if you want to be able to enforce your local laws. Buying locally is more expensive, but at least you have an address to sue.
US law doesn’t apply in China. Nobody is going to take your case because some Aliexpress seller has no reason to even respond to your threats to take them to court.
If the default situation is that when you buy faulty goods you have legal recourse against the seller, but when you buy direct from a foreign country you do so knowing that should there be a problem you won't have that option, you are de facto forgoing, or forfeiting, those rights by choosing to make that purchase.
It's nothing specifically to do with China, but it's how things work (except/until between countries who agree to mutual protection of consumers rights, which I think is the case between EU member states but I'm not sure about any other examples).
Amazon isn’t a retailer, they’re a “marketplace” or some other BS the courts buy, so they’re not liable if they sell you stuff that’s negligently dangerous. Good luck tracking down SGVEEESQRTS or whoever built the thing.
I think it is this but I don't have access. https://www.upu.int/en/Postal-Solutions/Programmes-Services/...
And I found this article which is probably relevant(2019). https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/upu-postal-rate-change/...
update with an actual current article: https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/trump-tariff-de-minimis...
I DO mind not getting my orders delivered.
That means the amount of dues is still calculated as a (fraction of a) percentage, but there is a minimum of about 30 dollars. That means a $10 order of components or LEDs can end up costing you $42 to actually get it through the mail.
When you go beyond those thirty dollars, the rate isn't too steep, though, so you can still order in large quantities.
I live in NZ, manufacture open source hardware in China and ship from there. I ship all over the world, some countries charge import duty, some don't, but as an exporter I NEVER have to pay anyone's tariffs - Americans are going to learn who pays tariffs because now you personally will get the bill and have to deal with the annoyance of having to pay it.
Note: NZ charges import duty (which here is essentially our sales tax), they have deals with places like AliExpress/Digikey/etc to pay it at source (ie it shows up in your cart as you check out)
https://x.com/Claudiashein/status/1886434747238514776
And the summary of the speech on on instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/firstpost/reel/DFntTIlvOpe/
Neither confirm additional troops rather than just having 10k at the border.
>1. Mexico will immediately reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard to prevent drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, particularly fentanyl.
Trump got paid with his own coin.
----
[1] To match the power players of the Trump administration's all-star television celebrity cabinet, I nominate Robb Wells, who did an exceptional job playing Ricky on Trailer Park Boys.
https://www.theverge.com/news/605483/shein-temu-amazon-trump...
Customs doesn't even know what half the shit is. If I order a quarter-pound of palladium for $4,000 from China, but pay tariffs on 4 ounces of lead (say, $5), do you really think customs can tell the difference? They open the package, see a chunk of metal, and go "okie dokey". Yes, sometimes they'll whip out an XRP gun and double-check the alloy, but not for a completely random & arbitrary 4-ounce package.
This will happen for every. single. product.
They may not inspect the package but they still have to collect duty on it.
I live in Canada where our de minimis exemption is like $20. Generally when a package comes to in it is help at the border where a broker certifies it for customs. Below $20 there's no broker.
Now you need brokers etc for every single package. Def more paperwork even if they keep the same inspection ratio.
Customs used to check everything and tax/duty any parcel over $20 until ~2011 or so.
Not sure if it was because of cutbacks, rationalization (it’s a lot of paperwork to collect a couple bucks even with their, at the time, $6.95 fee), or a part of their reinvention as gun carrying “law enforcement” and consistent tax collection being beneath them.
It’s at their discretion, just like someone bringing in more than their exemption of beer and deciding not not to charge duty.
The other possible reasons are to impose tariffs on shipments below the low value threshold, to disrupt the Chinese economy which is currently weak, to discourage consumption of Chinese products, or to use as a negotiation tool in the current push to reset foreign policies.
Folks, this is why you don't engage in brinksmanship at this scale. It gets out of hand really quickly. I await the coming economic crisis (I mean, the stock market was already primed for a correction) with resigned exasperation.
It is simply stating that
if China was stopping parcels bound for the US
then the current US admin might be petty enough to pretend that they are the ones stopping incoming parcels from China to appear in control.
This doesn't seem likely, but the sentiment is reasonable .. the current crowd do seem exceptionally petty.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://rb.gy/vekpsm
---
edit: there's why and there's why. Drugs is the answer you sell
https://www.ups.com/cn/en/service-alerts.page
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5283957/fentanyl-trump-...
It was already written in project 2025 to do this, they're just going down the line.
People have short memory.
Feasible.
News flash: we can't afford to buy American. Why do you think we were shopping there. It's too late to fix it now - we no longer have the money or the ability to make the money to buy American and even if you gave more money to Americans, prices would just increase accordingly.
Also, some of those products were paid for already. Someone owes the purchasers reimbursement for their loss.
Oh come on now, how much more does an iPhone made in the US cost?
Oh. Hmm.
that's one of my habit since I live in a country with highly censorship
And base what I observed
some topics i cares were not popped up - i.e trump's meeting with Nethanyahu
some topics i interested were flagged - i.e 'Trade War Heats Up After Trump Orders Tariffs and ...'
i feel it's kind of creepy since i don't think there's a censorship supervisor in HN like where i came from, or is there any?
Technically @dang does have mod control to remove things as well as prevent user flags from suppressing something. As far as I know the second power is used much more commonly, to prevent something controversial but clearly on-topic from being supressed, but clearly I'm not @dang so take that with a grain of salt.
If anyone has a question that isn't answered at those links, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Given how much has happened and come out in the last 48hrs alone. I would say there is a big unprecedented Major Ongoing Topic (MOT)
The MOT is the coup going on. You might call it something else, but you can definitely group a lot of the political news under unprecedented and illegal
Also, given the seriousness and impact of what’s happening, and considering how close the tech community is to some of the events and the people involved, HN is not just any bystander, it’s a pretty influential actor
Whatever HN does about this MOT, will impact not just the behavior of its users in the short term, but will likely also have repercussions in the future of the United States as a country
Given HN’s community’s pretty close ties to the current events, HN should allow and even promote discussion
Even if sometimes threads can get derailed. There are a lot of very thoughtful conversations that allow for greater nuance and understanding than almost anything you can find on social media or sites like Reddit
b) For the specific case of removal de minimis exceptions, this could reduce shipping volume (in terms of number of individual shipments), making inspection easier/more tractable.
My understanding is, trade war stuff aside, the effect this has on customs is to overwhelm their intake facilities with small packages, thus allowing shipments of narcotics and illicit goods to make it through without much chance of getting caught. The idea is that removing this rule will force shippers to bulk ship freight and allow customs to better inspect smaller shipments.
Seems like a lot of logistics companies will just offer a lot of LTL where packages will go inside shipping containers and then get reshipped via USPS after getting sorted at the private logistics warehouse near the port.
The containers will take longer to get here via ship, and everything will have to be marked with an invoice for some kind of tariff, but I don't know what else will really change.
What if the economic hurt this causes to China drastically increases the flow of fentanyl in the US?
Why would they need to be open about it? But also: the time to do that was 30 years ago.
OD deaths have also been plummeting since mid 2023, after rising greatly during the last half of Trump's first term, and to a lesser extent during the first half of Biden's.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5283957/fentanyl-trump-...
JFC
Suspension of Inbound Parcels from China and Hong Kong INTERNATIONAL SERVICE SUSPENSION NOTICE – effective Feb. 4, 2025
Effective Feb. 4, the Postal Service will temporarily suspend only international package acceptance of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong Posts until further notice. Note the flow of letters and flats from China and Hong Kong will not be impacted.
Without the needed parts apparently