Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong
Comments
reaperman
catherd
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
> 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
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.
account42
> DHL B2C shipments to the EU are generally held in customs until the duty is paid
That used to be the case here in Germany until recently when they started paying the duty for you and then demand it at pickup along with a "small" markup (up to 1000% when the duty was low) for a service you never asked for.
yladiz
I agree, if the information is available electronically they should just automatically process it with no fee (I assume this is how it’s handled most of the time anyway). At least you can opt out of the process, but then you’re responsible for filling out all the forms, which suck since ATLAS is not a nice system to work with. Maybe in the future they’ll get rid of this admin fee.
throwaway290
DHL doesn't accept packages anymore (or temporarily, hopefully) either https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/22675...
nottorp
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.
m4rtink
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
rjsw
It isn't just the EU that does this, AliExpress collects the taxes for shipments to the UK as well.
_heimdall
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
> 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
This USPS announcement is most likely a reaction to just how far backlogged US customs is about to get. DHL won't save you.
hnfong
apparently DHL is not accepting parcels from Hong Kong to US: https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/22675...
not sure about other carriers but that doesn’t sound good
boxed
> 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.
relistan
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
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
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.
mrbigbob
you do know how they "ramp up" right? All the big ones hire thousands of temp holiday workers then let them go shortly after. do you think they are going to hire thousands of full time workers for these roles. most of them since the pandemic have enjoyed record profit from already increasing shipping rates. this would be a perfect excuse for them to do it more
Nothing more American than the government attempting to kill competition so multi billion dollar corporations can get richer
amarcheschi
DHL hk announced they stopped shipping to us, except for letters
486sx33
I was just going to say … uhh DHL ? Prototyping through the regular mail or even air mail is a little crazy it’s worked at all for you.
1oooqooq
tipical liberal thinking. why on earth do you assume your favourite corporation will get in legal trouble to get you your package? if anything they will be slower because they will be fined and jailed for any mistakes. while the usps only gets a slap on the wrist.
dtquad
>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
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
> 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...
myrmidon
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).
abirch
What I would love to see is a public payer heath plan paid with a VAT. Then every startup gets subsidized as do large corporations. It sucks when you have to think about health care costs when doing a startup or rolling the dice.
palmfacehn
Shenzhen is a Special Economic Zone and Hong Kong is/was a major hub for finance. People used to say, "China didn't take Hong Kong, Hong Kong took Shenzhen". It would be hard to replicate the opportunity of Deng's liberalizations being new and adjacent to a major center for finance. It would be like having Manhattan across the bay from an untapped backwater like rural Mississippi and have Mississippi declare, "anything goes, we're open for biz".
Look at the existing issues with the Rust Belt as an example. The higher cost of labor could be offset by higher worker productivity. The issues are in regulatory compliance, demands from politicians and unions. As soon as a major project is announced, the demands start flowing in. Look at what happened with Amazon's attempted fulfillment center in NYC. Look at the amazing strategic location and port infrastructure of a city like Baltimore, and ask why it cannot attract more development. There are major political obstacles which need to be tackled in every case. Even California's failed highspeed rail project should tell us something.
ta20240528
> The higher cost of [US] labor could be offset by higher [US] worker productivity.
I suggest you watch American Factory (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9351980/) to completely disabuse yourself of this notion.
HeyLaughingBoy
American engineer: "I wish we could tape their mouths shut."
Chinese engineer (in amazement) "You are allowed to do that?"
Yah, I need to watch that again.
palmfacehn
https://www.conference-board.org/publications/Productivity-A...
>Among major economies and regions, the United States has the highest rate of production of goods and services per hour worked, with only a few small European economies outperforming it. Productivity rates in most parts of the world are well below the US’. Indeed, according to research conducted by The Conference Board, nearly 75% of the global population lives in economies where productivity rates are below the global average of US$21.6 per hour worked.
Of course, it may be reasonable to suspect that at least some of these productivity gaps are a result of different sectors which are served, ie manufacturing vs. services.
https://jacobin.com/2020/02/american-factory-julia-reichert-...
>A day before she quoted Marx at the Oscars, Jacobin briefly chatted with American Factory co-director Julia Reichert about her democratic socialism and long history on the Left.
>At Saturday’s Film Independent Spirit Awards ceremony Julia Reichert mentioned “income inequality” during her best documentary acceptance speech for American Factory. The first film released by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, American Factory is about a Chinese capitalist who reopens a closed plant in Ohio, employing thousands of American workers.
https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5946906/
>The only effective means of worker power is through unionizing, and both Chinese and American executives resist it mightily, using pages from the exact same playbook, like targeting leaders and paying for propaganda campaigns. In a sense, the American executives going overseas was like finding a pool of scabs to cross the picket line. As one of the state congressmen observes in speaking to the workers, corporate profitability and treating workers respectfully via a living wage are not incompatible things, and it's shameful that they're treated that way out of unfettered greed in extreme capitalism. (Hmm, if only there was an international labor organization, lol)
>>The issues are in regulatory compliance, demands from politicians and unions. As soon as a major project is announced, the demands start flowing in.
Without getting into the weeds of the documentary's agenda or methods of argumentation - it isn't hard to see that the same methods employed on the mainland with low productivity per worker, will not magically produce different results in the US. Higher productivity, along with higher wages may require automating much of the production process. This may be more capital intensive up-front.
ta20240528
Serious comment: how does comparing productivity (or anything) by dividing into GDP work - let alone to three significant figures - when all countries measure GDP differently?
The USA for example includes about $7t of hedonic and imputed values that a) never happened in the real world, but b) exceed Japan's entire GDP.
palmfacehn
US: Large public sector of debatable value (please no flames)
Japan: Paves entirety of Yokohama
China: Tofu real estate and more...
I agree that it is silly. If the state or the public sector digs holes and refills them, it adds to GDP. Typically economists say, "Yes, GDP is a flawed metric, but it is better than no metric"
That said, we can evaluate the added benefits of automation and the productivity gains thereof, purely from first principles, without resorting to empiricism.
willvarfar
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...
brickfaced
>And now the USA workers wonder if it was all actually a good idea?
We were never asked.
ta1243
> 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.
Throw in the massive loss of manpower both from the war and from Spanish flu, then the damage from years of bombing in WW2.
ta1243
Best engineers are working at shoveling more adverts down our throats, tracking our every thought to maximise the value they can extract for us.
The goal isn't to have 50 people selling a batch of capacitors for $10, it's to sell them to Alfie for $6, Barbara for $12, and because it's absolutely critical for Colin he gets to pay $623
The western world is about maximising the value middlemen can extract.
bdcravens
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)
harimau777
I'd almost say that the lifestyle expectations come first. I care about getting paid a lot primarily because high pay is necessary to live somewhere like San Francisco/Austin/NYC.
floatrock
The boston-95-ring-vs-silicon-valley/noncompete-enforcement story gets close to this. Or the detroit-automotive-supply-chain story.
It's largely about can you set up an effective ecosystem of suppliers.
The story of the Traitorous 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight is basically the tale of how free-market competition spawns the economic prosperity of an entire region. In those times, Boston's 95 ring was the favored home of semiconductor tech, but the popular story goes that Massachusetts enforced non-compete clauses while California didn't, and the result was the ascension of Silicon Valley as people out west intermingled between semiconductor and computer companies, traded ideas, started new firms from those ideas, etc.
Shenzhen is amazing because it's an entire village of micro-manufacturies... one bodega specializes in one type of capacitor, a neighborhood specializes in rapid prototype boards, there's institutional social connections between all these folks so you can just run to the other side of town if you need something for this week's production run or if your assembly line controller board failed.
As for why we can't reproduce that in the US, my best guess is we've had the "get big or get out" mentality since Nixon. VC's won't fund a bodega specializing in some obscure electronics niche -- we favor rapid injection of capital into something that can quickly grow and dominate an entire industry. "Lifestyle business" is a pejorative here. The Shenzhen model on the other hand is an interconnected cottage industry village of generalists that focus on small runs of whatever Temu gadget is trending today and can rapidly change and adapt week to week. No individual bodega dominates, but as an ecosystem it does. Something something anti-fragile.
Yes, there are also the megafactories that make our iphones and galaxies and have dormitories for the basically-slave-level workforce, so the models do mix. But it's largely a different business mindset -- ecosystem vs. winner-takes-all.
_DeadFred_
You are forgetting insurance/healthcare. Public healthcare would make it way easier for individuals to setup small boutique bodega manufacturing shops.
macleginn
"VC's won't fund a bodega specializing in some obscure electronics niche" --- is it generally known who funds Shenzhen bodegas?
AnotherGoodName
Walking through there and nearby HongKong it’s literally well educated individuals in garages each doing a ‘thing’ that all comes together to make something bigger. No investment needed here.
As in I witnessed a bespoke electric motor manufacturer that was in the ground floor garage space with a couple of guys neatly winding insulated copper around an iron bar cut to the size needed (very large).
You might see a massive train motor and say ‘where’d they get the funding to start this bespoke train motor company’. But it’s literally a couple of guys in an area where they have another couple of guys make the custom brushes, someone else doing the housing, they wind on the coils and boom you have a bespoke motor manufacturer. No investment needed.
floatrock
My armchair understanding is they're closer to "lifestyle businesses", and if there's larger funding sources at play it's in supporting the ecosystem at large.
But I'm just an armchair commentator here. I hangout here cause I'd love to hear some better firsthand experiences if my story is off.
troyvit
> So why cant US build its own Shenzhen or Hong Kong? taxes?
I would guess labor costs and practices are a big aspect. We send all our kids to stupid school instead of paying them pennies to get their tiny little fingers to work building micro-controllers for us and stuff.
klipt
Surely these days much of that is done by robots?
And will only be increasingly robotic with advances in AI.
myrmidon
The degree of automation affects this very little, for 2 reasons:
- Anything you can easily automate (like pick & place machines for electronics, industrial robots for welding/assembly) will be automated anyway (no advantage for the US as location there)
- Even if you have 100% automation, you still need to pay (mainly) local workforce to set the whole thing up, and a lot of those jobs are even less competitive in the US wage-wise (construction crews, etc.)
Neither of those calculations is probably going to change much in the next decades. If you want to keep low-wage industry (like PCB assembly, heavy industry etc.) in a country like the US, then you will need to subsidise this with taxpayer money one way or the other (tariffs are essentially just that).
Agriculture is an example where this is already done (for obvious reasons related to people not starving in a trade crisis). But this is somewhat expensive (US agriculture subsidies are ~$20billion/year).
I think this will happen, and that some degree of it is a good idea (for strategic reasons), but framing this as a benefit for the average american is pretty much a lie-- because in the end, the taxpayer is on the hook for those subsidies, all those industries products are gonne get more expensive and other sectors are gonna get dragged down, too, because they have to compete for talent and might suffer from foreign trade retaliation.
klipt
So China subsidizes a lot of their factories and now they have all the factories and they also have rising standards of living so ... seems to be working for them?
myrmidon
The factories are not in China because they were subsidized, they are there because wages are lower. Yes, some caveats apply, there is some network effect, and you need sufficient infrastructure, suitable workforce and administrative stability to get the process rolling, but the notion that China "bribed" those industries into their country is nonsensical.
Also note that this development (low-skill manufacturing migrates to growing, lower-wage country, then the migration propagates up the tech level) is something that occured basically exactly the same way in the past (with Japan in the 1990s).
> now they have all the factories and they also have rising standards of living so ... seems to be working for them?
This is basically the point of international trade.
Things also worked out for the US, because they reaped the fruits of that cheap Chinese labor-- all-American electronics would have been significantly more expensive.
I'd also like to point out that those living standards are WAY below US levels-- there is absolutely no way that US-americans with comparable education levels would be willing to work in comparable conditions.
Note also that artificially messing with this process has consequences: If the US had forced electronics and heavy industry to stay fully domestic starting in the 80s or so (with tariffs, regulations and subsidies), then their products would have stayed much less affordable for decades, and a lot of bright STEM graduates that made software/CPU development/Hi-tech happen might have taken cushy, tax-payer funded jobs instead...
saturn8601
China has a demographic collapse coming so there is probably baked in inflation coming in the 2030s. The era of cheap chinese junk might go away. It doesn't just mean Aliexpress/Temu junk. It means a lot of fun things we take for granted may not make sense in a more inflationary environment so they dont get made.
If you watch manufacturing videos, its crazy how many people actually come together to make the cheap mundane things we take for granted: For example, count the number of people who touch this random RGB bluetooth speaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
Maybe you could automate that, but it really would be more effort than its worth to set up robots to make what I assume is a fairly cheap product.
fpoling
It is much more profitable to invest into financial industry in US than into manufacturing. So the latter attracts top talent.
likeabatterycar
> 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.
close04
> 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.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/06/24/italian-...
themaninthedark
It's not just >Business owners are greedy and chase profits, and customers are cheap and don't care beyond their own needs and wants.
You have the judicial system of Italy that is complicit in this behavior in this instance and others in different cases.
Although, it seems to be Dior's subcontractors: >found two of its Chinese-owned subcontractors based outside Milan had exploited their workers.
And Dior was not doing audits.
No comment in the article on the fate of the subcontractors who violated the law.... very encouraging.
throw37373
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
Gosh, they were not getting paid despite those conditions? That’s batshit crazy.
weird-eye-issue
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
We have millions of people here, suicide rates are not that high, and no nets. So what is your argument exactly?
ben_w
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].
[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...
weird-eye-issue
Did you actually compare suicide rates to China in general? Something tells me you didn't.
throawayonthe
[dead]
moshun
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
> 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.
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
Evil_Saint
That's not the same at all.
inetknght
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
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
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:
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.
inetknght
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.
Evil_Saint
The Golden Gate Bridge is a public bridge and a destination for suicidal people.
Foxconn is a place where people live and work. Not accessible to the public.
Where is the overlap?
ben_w
Foxconn is the same size of the combination of all of San Francisco on one side of the bridge with quite a lot of the small settlements on the north side.
Treating Foxconn as "a company" is fine for legal purposes, but it's on a scale of "one of the larger incorporated cities, close to the top 10" by US standards — or indeed "South Dakota". (Similar population, but Foxconn's revenue is about 3.7x South Dakota's GDP or 81% of San Francisco's GDP).
HPsquared
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
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.
When I'm feeling negative, a Tom Gauld cartoon comes to mind: https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/2xljaz/us_vs_them/
bayindirh
> 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
Which Europe? I live in Germany and travel frequently around most of the Western, Central and Northern Europe. No nets.
ben_w
This is in central Berlin, the net is just about visible: https://maps.app.goo.gl/vDSL4HeQrLLfYU2m7
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
bayindirh
I think I saw one in Freiburg, in University. I vaguely remember seeing some nets in The Netherlands. Probably inside Science Park buildings.
pembrook
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:
oldpersonintx
[dead]
youngtaff
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
bogantech
You can't even get a bare PCB manufactured anywhere else for a price even remotely close to that of JLC, PCBWay etc.
Component availability has nothing to do with that, JLC have always been way cheaper than US/EU board houses even before they started doing assembly services
Veliladon
Their cheap as chips PCBs are garbage for anything but hobbyist use. They use crappy substrates and have poor tolerances. If you want decent quality substrates and decent quality finishes for fine pitched work the price quickly shoots up.
meigwilym
> 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
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.
somenameforme
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.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
Peteragain
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
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
Wasn't the housing crisis mostly the Chinese middle class trying to secure their savings from inflation by investing in real state?
Sabinus
Not from my understanding.
Land sales/leases are one of the few ways the local governments can make money, so they overdid approvals and subsidies.
The Communist party also imposed strict capital controls so the middle class couldn't invest worldwide. Combine that with a cultural desire for housing, and you have a huge over investment in Chinese housing.
Daishiman
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
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.
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...
HPsquared
It's amazing how different accounting systems can affect decision-making.
Daishiman
That's... worse than the US not building any infrastructure?
bobthepanda
Is built infrastructure any good if it has to close or never operates? https://english.pardafas.com/china-sees-more-stations-shut-d...
The local government debt burden that has resulted has also started resulting in other services getting cut, like local bus services ceasing to operate. What good is a high speed rail line you can't get to? https://www.asianews.it/news-en/Chinese-bus-crisis,-a-new-bu...
suraci
it's really weired because you seem know very much abt china but still are very misleaded
i'm really curious about how you get those information about china, because those information are mostly target to domestic chinese, rarely go abroad, the ultimate purpose of these information is to privatize state-owned enterprises(or opposite, it's complex, even for most Chinese live in China)
like,
> It calls on them to ensure that funding for public transport is included in their budgets, so that they can provide bus service operators with financial subsidies in a timely manner
if you know more abt it, you'll know the bogged bus service is a very classic example to show what'll happened if you handle your public service to a private enterprise, yes, not like China Railway, that bus operator is not a state-owned company, which was threating local gov for subsidies, would be better if they managed to force the local gov acquisite their shit
i sincerely you to dig more by yourself, be cautious with your sources
and if you want to know more abt the debt crisis in China, welcome to ask, a little tip, the keyword is 'bridge', not 'bus' or 'railway'
vaccineai
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.
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
blitzar
Building nothing and being in even more in debt is the high IQ play.
frikskit
First time I genuinely LOL’d on HN
Aurornis
> 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
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.
Aurornis
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
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.
jdietrich
"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.
p_j_w
For a company doing R&D, this difference is so small it hardly matters. It's less than an hour of an engineer's time.
saturn8601
If the whole Twitter -> X transition and DOGE has taught us anything, those costs don't magically disappear, they add up over time and get passed down as inflation. Are you really measuring an engineer's time properly? There is an implicit assumption that an engineers time is at 100% utilization which is never true. This mentality you described allows people to get sloppy with costs. At some point you need to do a form of Zero Based Budgeting.
Animats
That's not bad. Sierra and Protologix are much more expensive.
eru
Chinese labour isn't that cheap anymore.
Chinese wages are higher than those in Mexico for example.
grumpy-de-sre
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).
eru
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
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.
neom
It also begets the other, a place that has that opportunity attracts people who want to work, people who want to work build opportunity, attract more people, etc. Once you're in a death spiral of people who don't want to work and you're not specifically building socialism, you end up in this half functional dead state like my country (Canada). I always say, I honestly don't care if we do communism or capitalism just pick one and do it well.
eru
The best run and most successful socialist country ever was East Germany.
Even by global standards (compared against all countries) it did fairly well. By socialist standards it did really well. By German standards, it did so much worse than Austria, Switzerland or West Germany.
I don't think you want that for Canada. And that's pretty much a best case outcome.
lazylizard
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese
how to quantify "by and large"? there's not many chinese people outside china and most of them left china in the last 100 years in search of better lives.
and usa and singapore are rich?
eru
USA and Singapore are stinking rich, yes.
> [...] there's not many chinese people outside china and most of them left china in the last 100 years in search of better lives.
Wikipedia says:
> Overseas Chinese people are people of Chinese origin who reside outside Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan).[20] As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese.[8]
40.3 million is quite a few. And they form significant minorities in many South East Asian countries.
But you are right that eg Germany or South Sudon don't really have enough Chinese people to really say much about them there.
numpad0
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
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
Looking broader at South East Asia, the Chinese minorities in countries around the region are know for working hard and being successful, often more so than other locals.
grumpy-de-sre
I'm inclined to think about it in terms of east Asians than strictly ethnically Chinese. You see the exact same attitudes to work in Korea and Japan. Confucianism is a powerful force in the region.
Suffice to say don't underestimate the work ethic and skill of Chinese laborers.
stingrae
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
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
In China they are pushing automation. When you are charging $500+ a pcbs, you don't care as much.
pclmulqdq
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
> 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.
forgetfreeman
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
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
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.
roamerz
>>The idea that China is a major security threat is basically brand new
You're kidding right?
jaredklewis
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
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.
roamerz
You're right it's definitely a matter of degree. And I would have to say early 2000 when Clinton signed the trade agreement with them. That is when our manufacturing capacity started moving to China and with that our security. It's of course way more complex than that but..
vaccineai
You are so very wrong.
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...
newswasboring
2021 is not recent for you?
vaccineai
I'm responding to "China seemed to be on a trajectory towards a free market and less repressive government"
newswasboring
I thought the point being made was that this trajectory has been reversed recently.
suraci
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
> China is always a 'security threat' to the US
Only because its been recently revealed that everyone is a security threat to the US.
eastbound
> 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.
KerrAvon
China is a nuclear power and has been recognized as a major security threat since they acquired nuclear weapons (in the sixties?).
But your last sentence is true. Politicians and corporate executives failing to accurately extrapolate long-term consequences have not done us any favors over the past 50 years, and now we’re super fucked. It’d be hard even if we still had a competent government instead of the smoking ruin in progress.
(Thomas Friedman and his globalization-is-brilliant shtick making people think this was all OK wasn’t great either.)
brabel
> 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
We hoped China would grow into a Korea or Japan, instead we got ourselves a Russia.
Ekaros
So in essence a colony or puppet state? Thankfully China avoided that. And is not controlled by others like Soviet satellites were.
geenkeuse
[flagged]
suraci
> America is a company masquerading as a country
wow, didn't expect to see such insight here
jazz9k
It's funny because Trump saw this years ago and the entire point of the tariff is to gain Chinese manufacturing independance.
elfbargpt
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
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
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
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.
zxilly
"tariffs"
My memory is not very good, but it seems that something similar has happened 4 years ago, do you remember?
throw310822
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.
logifail
> 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.
likeabatterycar
> 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.
Freedom2
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
*A handful of oligarchs and their useful idiots in the US.
Fixed that for you.
PeterStuer
"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.
themaninthedark
Why would there be no support for products if they were made in compliance with environmental and safety regulations? Or why would people not be able to consume them?
likeabatterycar
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
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
suraci
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
For those that don't know, Wang hunting wrote that in 1991! Now he is one of the top dogs in the Chinese government ....
MSFT_Edging
> 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).
mschuster91
> 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.
corimaith
The other posters are describing the state of China right now, so I'll describe things on a more macroeconomic perspective.
The lack of manufacturing in the US can be linked to the lack of investment from the low savings rate as the flipside of high consumption, and a strong dollar (relative to surplus countries like China) that both boosts imports, driving consumption even higher than lowering savings rate, and weak export competiveness.
That lack of savings manifests as the Current Account Deficit, and normally the dollar should weaken due to it, strengthening exports and naturally rebalancing the trade. Unfortunately, because the rest of the world does the opposite in having an abnormally high level of savings, they push all their capital into the USA. This overall appreciates the dollar, and is good for the finance industry, but persistently doing this for 40 years has basically destroyed US manufacturing.
Animats
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.
thesaintlives
Because it is not $120 of raw material...
altairprime
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.
ygouzerh
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
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.
OvidNaso
Well we're finding out right now aren't we. Funny enough the guy who had such the beautiful vision that humanity was meant for the stars is at the center of disproving his life's work and cementing that were doomed for domestic squabbles until the end.
beej71
> The question is how did we let it go this far?
It's an optimized market, isn't it? Didn't it naturally go this far?
bsdice
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.
486sx33
Apple uses fedex straight from Shanghai I’m sure that’s an option too
ruskyhacker
I believe the answer is "economies of scale"
ge96
OSHPark but more expensive
leric
[dead]
anigbrowl
[flagged]
antigeox
[flagged]
ta20240528
> 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
Can you ship via non-USPS couriers? FedEx, etc?
BikiniPrince
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.
anonylizard
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
reaperman
upvoted by poster. BUT - USPS stopped subsidizing Chinese packages back in 2018? https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/418081-usps-is-done-subs...
So on the surface, this looks more like corporate welfare to FedEx/DHL.
j16sdiz
(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
>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
"let them eat cake"
onion2k
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
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.
throwfgtpwd234
For $$$$$
insane_dreamer
Big US corps moved manufacturing to China to save money and destroyed the supply chains that used to exist in the US.
Oops. But at least big shareholders made a lot of money, and GDP is up!!
(I don't think most people realize how easy it is for China to f*k with the US for this very reason. Yeah, they'd also be shooting themselves in the foot, but they're a country that might be willing to do that if they had to, because they don't have elections to worry about.)
Workaccount2
Shareholders made tons of money and consumers saved tons of money.
People demand cheap shit, and riot over expensive stuff. Hell Trump is arguably in power because people couldn't handle prices increasing since 2020 (despite wages increasing too).
insane_dreamer
Consumers didn't save tons of money. They just bought more stuff with the money they had.
> People demand cheap shit and riot over expensive stuff
Sure, agree. But moving manufacturing to China wasn't done under pressure of Americans protesting that prices were high.
Workaccount2
No, but it was done under pressure of Americans buying Walmart over local mom and pop.
I cannot take anyone seriously who thinks people care about "Made in USA" more than $10 sweatshirts and $50 dinnerware sets.
insane_dreamer
I didn't say Americans cared about Made in USA - any more than they care that WalMart destroyed small down America.
And by the time they wonder where the jobs all went and start griping about it, it's too late.
But it was a deliberate decision to offshore manufacturing that started the process (you can't sell cheaper goods until you start making cheaper goods abroad). Americans didn't switch from Kraft or Whirlpool or whatever to some Chinese brand. US companies offshored production.
seanmcdirmid
I remember the 90s before China joined the WTO and things did feel “more expensive”, the rise of Chinese production definitely led to lower prices and basically tamed inflation for a couple of decades.
khelavastr
Surely they can use DHL/UPS, right?
thaumasiotes
Should be minimal disruption; when someone in China wanted to send me a package, they used DHL anyway.
throwfgtpwd234
This is $$$$ compared to China Post Epackets.
boopdewoop
ill buy em for ya mate, get them posted from Australia, It will just cost you $500 in postage fees.
dzhiurgis
Let's do it via New Zealand, it's $600 plus you wait about 6 months.
VagabundoP
It would be cheaper to temp relocate a bunch of teams to the EU at this point, than completely stop all R&D.
stonogo
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
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
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.
stonogo
It is already an established business model.
bgro
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
> 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.
ashoeafoot
My guess is that a shitton of R&D labs will move out of the us now?
meaningjoj
Not just R&D. This is how manufacturing works in general. Nobody is like "here's the CAD, go ahead and send me 50,000 units! I'm sure it will be fine."
JKCalhoun
Ha ha, whoops, just placed an order with AliExpress earlier today.
paxys
AliExpress uses private couriers, not usps.
K0balt
We do R&D in the Dominican Republic. Like most nations in the USA orbit, we receive our eastern imports via the USA via transshipping.
This is also disrupting the nascent technology industries in the Caribbean and the Latin-American diaspora. For us specifically, it will increase our logistics costs by multiples and lead times by weeks.
I expect this will result in substantial schedule misses and cost overruns.
Symbiote
Perhaps new transshippers in Canada or maybe Mexico could take the place of the Americans.
K0balt
Perhaps. For now, it looks like we get a reprieve.
sandworm101
Are there not other delivery services? Is FedEx also not allowed to deliver packages?
MisterTea
> But a lot of our prototyping involves working with Chinese suppliers and getting small batches of samples / prototypes / revisions sent in packages on airplanes.
There are shops in the USA that can do that work.
DaveExeter
It will create jobs, for customs inspectors. Good, high-paying jobs with the best health insurance and lifetime pensions.
And it's a small price to pay for the freedom of Ross Ulbricht and the January 6th patriots.
eru
Could you ship to eg Singapore first, and then ship from there to the US?
instagib
Well add a mid ship point in Mexico, Canada, or Japan.
briandear
Then ship UPS/DHL/Fedex.
Those aren’t affected.
likeabatterycar
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.
King-Aaron
Can you get things forwarded via Singapore or Australia etc?
davidmurdoch
Hopefully the company started setting up those relationships when Trump was elected. I personally bought a bunch of hard to get domestically "Made in China" stuff I knew I'd need in the next year back in December to hedge against Trump's anti-China policies, so I imagine most American companies that rely heavily on China aren't completely unprepared right now.
Edit: if you don't agree with something I've said, please comment and explain why. I really don't see how this is controversial.
bboygravity
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?
thesaintlives
Time to step up?
anigbrowl
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
[flagged]
anigbrowl
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
Yeah probably makes sense to just offshore r&d more to countries that don’t get in the way so much
khana
[dead]
999900000999
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
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
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
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.
8note
> Canada implementing carbon pricing and phasing out coal domestically while simply shipping it to Asia instead
Canada's carbon pricing is to incentivize buying stuff that has less carbon emissions. there's nothing particularly holier-than-thou about it, its just there to get the infrastructure to swap.
transcriptase
Yes I’ve heard that speech from Freeland a dozen times too. And yet she just announced if she’s elected leader of the LPC she’s going to do away with it.
eru
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.
dmd
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international...
Restored already. It's all about chaos.
floatrock
Or it's about not knowing how any of this works and quickly backing down when you're told how much your race-baiting is actually gumming up the wheels of the economy.
But yes, it's a "throw a bunch of shit against the wall and see what sticks" chaos strategy.
jerlam
It also helps sway low-information voters, who either:
- never hear about the rollback, and thus think the problem has been fixed
- believe that the rollback is caused by "enemies" instead of incompetence, thus focusing on perceived attacks
Eextra953
Chaos is exhausting. This also shows the risks of moving fast, the USA is so big that any small change is going to have huge unforeseen consequences. We've seen several examples of this in the last few weeks already.
therealpygon
Create the chaos, then be the solution.
pentel-0_5
How to be the "hero" on the Karman Drama Triangle while actually being the "villain".
cma
Could also be valuable for Trump allies to trade on these quick reversals and there are basically no rules around it.
adultSwim
Seems like negotiating.
daveguy
Trump couldn't negotiate his way out of a paper bag. All a despot has to do is compliment him and he will repeat whatever they want. It's pathetic.
adultSwim
[flagged]
ggm
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.
pieix
A huge portion of USPS international package volume is “ePackets” from China. These are a special service provided by USPS since 2011 for Chinese/HK goods that are cheaper and faster than normal USPS international shipping.
These ePackets are then bundled up into big sacks that are basically not inspected at all at US international mail facilities due to the de minimis exemption, which was just rolled back. The special status granted to ePackets meant that the volume shipped grew far beyond the processing capacity for normal packages at US IMFs. This pause (and subsequent unpause) from USPS on packages from China is because they don’t know how they’re going to handle that volume if it isn’t given special status.
Source: I worked on a project adjacent to this a couple of years ago. Close enough to pick up the basics but this isn’t quite what I was working on, so take my comment with a grain of salt.
seo-speedwagon
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
And forgo the revenue? Or, do the other carriers do a better job of meeting the imposts?
mastodon_acc
It’s a govt service, they are not trying to meet wall street quarterly shareholder expectations
nozzlegear
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
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.
evilduck
> Pretty much no other government service can claim that.
Sure there are, they just don't get the air time and political attention. Examples I'm familiar with: The minerals, oil, and gas regulatory agencies bring in billions of dollars. A single lease sale in the gulf would make BOEM as an agency incredibly profitable but instead the money just goes up to the federal government and is redistributed. National Parks already collect entry fees and the NPS could easily raise those prices to meet or exceed agency expenses, public demand would almost certainly pay it, and they could also teeter like the USPS. Social Security, if it were never fucked with, would have more money from just interest than most country's GDPs but we've robbed that piggy bank numerous times already.
taurknaut
> 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
> 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
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.
Symmetry
Doing an inspection is going to take a moderately well paid government employee a little bit of their time. I'd be very, very surprised if the cost of their labor is less, in expectation, than the tariff collected on the average de minimus shipment from China.
j16sdiz
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
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
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
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
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.
nipponese
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/u-s-postal-service-places-...
> 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
> 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
Never accuse this regime of hypocrisy, you'll run into apologists real quick on this platform.
nipponese
The illegal Fentanyl precursor industry didn't donate enough to his PAC. /s
vaccineai
[flagged]
ks2048
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.
[1] There's a few versions. here's one: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1ibunc1/latin_amer...
vaccineai
all of latin America added up is only around 10% of US's consumer market size
seanmcdirmid
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
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.
Add that https://www.businessinsider.com/who-was-elon-musk-grandfathe... and you see who is actually leading today USA.
vaccineai
[flagged]
spiderfarmer
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN.
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
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
> .... 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
I don't buy this. They badly want into the US market for their EVs.
As well as their solar panels.
teractiveodular
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.
seanmcdirmid
I don’t see our protectionism as a problem given their own, but there are plenty of countries who don’t want to import lots of oil and won’t mind buying Chinese EVs along with solar panels and wind turbines to achieve that. American simply isn’t the only consumer market anymore.
KaiserPro
> 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.
bbarnett
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
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.
chiengineer
I just use chatgpt to summarize it months ago. It legit said it will cause a recession
markus_zhang
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) 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
I think they just drop at the same time. Maybe I'm wrong.
s1artibartfast
I was expecting a how-to, not preconditions.
It is very hard to devalue assets and jobs that are valuable in fact.
markus_zhang
Yeah I think it's very hard. Wealth redistribution is essentially a revolution, and successful revolutions rarely occur before a war with external states.
s1artibartfast
I would argue that war increases the factual value of workers. It isn't a moralistic redistribution.
It is hard to fight against economic reality, like low market value of highly replaceable labor. However, situations can change that increase demand or make labor more scarce. War is one of those situations.
Now I think that binding social contracts are garbage and used to crush peoples lives for vapid soundbyte.
The only way to ensure social collaboration is positive sum is by keeping it keeping it voluntary. When people have no opt out, they are mercilessly exploited, if not by corrupt politicians, then by a majority whenever they can.
huijzer
> 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
They are in the same group ("and such").
Workaccount2
I'd love to see it too, but as someone who does hardware for a living and software sometimes for fun, I just don't see how this is going to happen.
Hardware is a money pit endeavor with low margins and high overhead. Software is a money printer with high margins and low overhead.
markus_zhang
TBH, I don't see it either. It's a hell lot of changes that can only be achieved by some dramatic political movements.
soared
How do low pay manufacturing jobs create a better, safer, more competitive humanity? What does that phrase mean?
Why not educate the masses to have successfull careers like most of HN, maybe working remote for a foreign company, and taking the salary back home to the US?
anothercoup
> I sincerely hope US and Canada can regrow some manufacturing capacity.
What does canada have anything to do with anything. When was canada a manufacturing power? Why do canadians love to interject themselves into topics that don't involve them?
> 1) A massive devaluation of housing, stocks and other similar items.
You want wealth destruction? Most of americans' wealth is tied to home equity and 401k.
> That's why I said we are going to get seriously hurt.
Who is we? Are you even american?
> 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.
What are you talking about? You think lawyers and bankers get more respect than engineers and scientists?
> But I'm seeing is that US is taking another darker road.
What road is that?
Animats
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]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/business/china-us-usps-de...
nosianu
Maybe not any more? The situation still seems to be developing.
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.
ndom91
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.
ranger_danger
[flagged]
cguess
oooooh 2004 burn! Relevant!
bb88
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
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
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
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
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
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
It’s cheaper because USPS has been subsidizing the costs. That’s why a lot of small packages were shipped with usps.
transcriptase
Also cheap because the entire world subsidizes China-to-elsewhere shipping via the UPU continuing to classify them a “developing country”.
umanwizard
Why would China not count as a developing country?
transcriptase
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.
throwaway290
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3921082-house-unanimously...
> “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
Which country is poorer: Luxembourg or Kenya? Luxembourg has a lower GDP, after all.
throwaway290
> 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
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
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.
thaumasiotes
> High income != developed. There are different metrics.
You might want to replace the quote you were citing.
throwaway290
Why?
thaumasiotes
OK, I guess first you might want to read it.
throwaway290
I did! Did you?
bb88
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
The point is Jeff Bezos wanted AliExpress shutdown because $$$$.
throwfgtpwd234
That's not the point. The point is the USPS is abusively discriminating against trade for political purposes.
bb88
I would say so, but there are options right? FedEx? DHL?
sidewndr46
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
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
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.
baby_souffle
> 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).
Look closer at that shipping label, you'll probably see another one underneath it that is the original one. Just after clearing customs, packages are moved to this consolidation warehouse which is where your "LA Origin" label comes from. If you initiate a return, it's likely that you'll also ship your item back to another LA location.
It's the package/logistics equivalent of a reverse proxy or mux/de-mux step.
userbinator
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.
throwfgtpwd234
It's effectively the same price as on Amazon but good luck ever returning that to China. https://amzn.com/dp/B0CSYB8RNC
tkems
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.
hnburnsy
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
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
dwaite
Depends quite a bit on the item. Some items are actually shipped domestically, for instance, and can be sold out within the country.
thih9
> it seems that I can order items again? Very odd.
Perhaps it’s now being sent not via USPS?
throwfgtpwd234
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
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
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
> 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
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
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
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
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.
"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.
SeanAnderson
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
stephenitis
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.
Workaccount2
China doesn't actually care to much about green energy production, it's more that green energy production just happens to be one of the best ways for China to achieve energy independence.
China doesn't have huge reserves of fossil fuels, and they don't have a truly reliable way of importing them (and any import will always be vulnerable anyway).
So they are left with coal, nuclear, wind, and sun to build energy independence with. This is the primary driver of massive "green" investment (and coal investment too). They want all their energy made in house with what they have, which turns out to be a lot of cheaply accessible sun and wind.
tpm
> 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:
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.
adgjlsfhk1
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
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?
throweep
Please stop trusting whatever CCP says
blitzar
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
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
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
> Levoit humidifier
Be careful with that. I liked mine too until it burst into flames one evening.
wenc
I’ve had it for years running 24/7 and nothing happened. You might have gotten a dud.
HPsquared
Bursting into flames shouldn't be possible, that's a LOT worse than a "dud". (Assuming parent isn't exaggerating)
tssva
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
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.
wenc
I don’t think I would make that leap about falling short of Western safety standards.
All electrical products sold in the US are legally required to be NRTL certified (according to US standards). Levoit is ETL certified.
Non certified products are seized by customs or recalled from the market.
wenc
It’s very unlikely and I agree, not acceptable, but any household appliance with a heating element has a nonzero fire risk. I read that for UL certified humidifiers the incidence rate is 1 in 100k, similar to fans. The seems worryingly high.
fragmede
China makes quality things, they just keep it for themselves, and ship their crap to us.
eru
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.
vaccineai
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.
DrillShopper
Then why is lead in everything from China?
HPsquared
Comparative advantage in action!
queuebert
We must buy different things.
TylerE
I will absolutely concur with American products getting far worse. Everything is cost cut to the bone.
Workaccount2
It's not so much that it is cost cut to the bone, but that the expertise is being lost.
I can tell you with a straight face that american manufacturing is being held up right now by grey beards pushing back retirement because young people have zero interest in manufacturing boiler conduit fittings. You can crash course an IT cert and come out making more money than you would ever make pressing steel couplers.
TylerE
No, a lot of it really is just obvious cost cutting. Things like replacing metal fasteners with plastic ones that break or strip easily.
doubled112
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
[flagged]
bloomingeek
"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
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
I miss wrote, I should have written, "Unfortunately, there weren't enough rational voters to stop the idiot."
liamwire
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.
pentel-0_5
Yep. Inflation across the board through many inflationary policies is the goal because it's good for the rich who can keep their liquid and illiquid assets hedged and bad for ordinary people because it's a "tax" without a pay increase.
treis
>15$ direct from China. The same exact bag, made in the same exact factory is going to be 40$ on Amazon.
Do you have examples of this? It hasn't been the case for me. Usually the prices are similar and I tend to find that Amazon is slightly cheaper.
999900000999
Amazon , 40$ https://a.co/d/6HSc2A6
AliExpress , 17$( see coupons below). https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806198514308.html
Plus AliExpress tends to offer coupons.
So let's say you buy 300$ of stuff from Amazon, and 300$ of stuff from AliExpress.
Even if the products are the same price, AliExpress will offer a 30$ off coupon.
Amazon has to build in a higher margin though, they practically have a no questions asked return policy for anything less than say 100$. AliExpress is a bit more difficult here.
I even remember getting on chat support with Amazon, and telling them I was basically too dumb to put a table together right. No return, they just refunded me $200. You don't get that with AliExpress.
treis
$17 is temporarily half off with list $37.19. So normally it's pretty similar.
999900000999
Everything on AliExpress is always half off.
Lenovo does this too.
It's just marketing.What matters is at the end of the day what you paid for it.
Aurornis
> This alone is probably going to cost me about 1000$ 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
They're not going to stop. But they'll need more people / time. And everyone will have to pay extra for that.
froh
> by an American company ... > cost me about 1000$ to 2000$ per year.
they sponsored 2025, they collect the benefits, and peons pay.
xnx
Bezos donations to Trump are taking money right out of our pockets and putting it in his.
999900000999
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
[dead]
dzhiurgis
Or it's going to save you a ton because you are not spending money on frivolous shit.
ceejayoz
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
I wouldn't even mind paying extra for the Amazon return policy, but I hate the dozens of listings for the same product.
ulfw
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
All those cargo planes gotta go back, worth filling them up with stuff.
harha
Isn’t half of Amazon just resellers of aliexpress with a markup?
tofof
No, no definitely nowhere near half, don't be so pessimistic. It's at least 90%. ;)
refulgentis
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
2OEH8eoCRo0
Why does any regulation that affects China follow this recipe?
"Good for <US tech company>. Guess they won't have to compete."
Neil44
For about a week until their stock from China runs out... However this won't last that long.
nico
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?
SeanAnderson
Broadly speaking it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025, but it's been tough for me to find bullet point summaries that don't come across as biased.
anigbrowl
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL...
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
Yeah this definitely deserves more upvotes than just mine.
soared
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_47
Trumps’s actual agenda, though slightly old generally aligns with his actions
reaperman
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.
Symbiote
Some of this was already done by the EU and UK in the last few years. The de-minimis exemption equivalent was removed [1], but with over a year's notice which allowed time for logistics companies and their clients to develop software to pay the required taxes. (If I browse Ali Express from Denmark, I see prices including 25% Danish VAT.)
The next step seems to be starting this week [2].
[1] https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs-4/customs-proc...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/feb/05/eu-to-tight...
tristor
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.
Scoundreller
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
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
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
are you sure it isn't Ontario, California?
tanduv
Temu has been using Ontrac
The_suffocated
The linked page is about a different notice. The correct webpage (that the linked page has linked to) is https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international...
By the way, can anybody explain what's the significance about this submission?
Hatrix
Watch things in the US grind to a halt when you can't maintain them with cheap parts from China.
reaperman
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
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.
dang
(This was originally posted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42942236, which has a different top level URL, but we merged that thread hither)
casenmgreen
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.
hpone91
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)
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-02293.pdf
reaperman
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?
Symbiote
Ordering from Denmark, a medium or larger retailer in China would collect the Danish VAT (25%) and send that to the Danish tax authority. They'd mark the package with a transaction id for this, and it would go through EU customs without any further charges. (Presumably they still scan it for guns etc, and make random checks that these packages are labelled correctly.)
Goods ordered without using this system would be charged the 25% plus a handling fee, which is about $20 here.
However, the EU gave the logistics companies and retailers over a year to get these systems in place. The USA is taking a different approach.
hpone91
Yes
anigbrowl
Wow, that's fucking bullshit. I buy electronics components every year from Shenzen, talking with my supplier now about shipping from Singapore or Japan.
nkurz
The suspension has already been suspended. Packages are again being accepted for delivery:
"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."
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international...
anomie31
Could an expert mention if this violates the Universal Postal Convention?
boredatoms
Regardless of violation, is there an enforcement body?
jeroenhd
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
[dead]
anigbrowl
Guess my little stash of ESP32 devices just doubled in value.
Scoundreller
Good time to list all that Chinese junk I never use on ebay
drivingmenuts
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
> 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
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
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
But many iPhones are made in India and Vietnam.
aqueueaqueue
Right now. $10bn?
Sperfunctor
[flagged]
mysecretaccount
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
[flagged]
jschveibinz
Fentanyl is the likely reason behind this order:
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO24/20230517/115956/HHRG...
USPS is the preferred carrier for illicit drug distribution.
hansvm
Wait, we're opposed to illegal drugs and letting _who_ exactly inject his own code into the treasury?
almaight
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
Chinese know very well what they are doing when exporting certain chemicals, and to whom. They just don't care.
mindslight
Really? I would think these orders are due to some combination of cocaine, Viagra, and Ambien.
jrflowers
I don’t think cocaine comes from China
mindslight
I assume by this point they're getting it direct from that one factory that supplies Coca-Cola.
persedes
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?
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/lawsuit-ruling-dog-leash-purch...
freeone3000
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.
Aurornis
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
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
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.
persedes
in the case linked above amazons defense that they're just a "marketplace" did not work though.
jeroenhd
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.
persedes
Yes, that's of how I see it too. The upcharge has to come from somewhere and I guess it's up to regulators on how much they would allow the public to take on that risk. My guess is that most people are completely ignorant about that gotcha and (understandably) only care about the price.
ChrisArchitect
Updated Feb 5, 2025:
> Effective February 5, 2025, the Postal Service will continue accepting all international inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts.
sidewndr46
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
neom
Climate change is out of control and you're buying $6 plastic from China. Thank god it's the end of your hobbies.
dbetteridge
> 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.
Looks like its changed since posting
sam345
That didn't last long they did say it was temporary. https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/u-s-postal-service-su...
qwertox
EU should do the same. They're essentially performing a Bureaucratic Denial-of-Service attack on customs and tax authorities.
jeroenhd
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.
guerrilla
We already have in Sweden, years ago. I thought that was all of the EU. Really fucked up my electronics hobby.
Symbiote
It was indeed the EU, it was the end of the low-value goods exemption if you want to search for it.
I avoid shopping from China on principle, but if ordering from Ali Express or similar you shouldn't have any problems. Of course, you pay 25% VAT on your purchases.
guerrilla
It was a big problem for a while before most vendors added VAT because in Sweden they hold the package for ransom against lenalty fees and the VAT, which often means you have to go get the package at a service point instead of having it dropped in your mailbox. Things are better now but that was a disaster for a while.
sureIy
How so? Just hire more people and be better at logistics. Duties will pay for the extra people.
keuoa_
I had several small packages in transit from china, now that the CBP considers ALL packages from China "formal" I have to pay $32.71 PER PACKAGE. I'm freaking screwed, I can't really afford to drop several hundred dollars just on bullshit fees
steveBK123
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.
abrookewood
Any idea why?? Presumably the tariff/trade debate?
somat
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.
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...
neuroelectron
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
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
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
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
PRC hit back with tariffs vs Mexico/Canada buying time by conceding on border / drugs.
addicted
Mexico/Canada conceding by restating actions they had already agreed to months ago?
maxglute
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
Is there a primary source for sending "additional troops" by Mexico? All I found was the twitter post from Mexico's president:
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.
maxglute
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.
davorak
> A lot of the English reporting I'm reading said "reinforce" which implies addition.
Agree it implies addition, but if you promise to send 10k, then make another promise to send 10k, then send 10k you kept both promises to send 10k.
An article saying home many troops are going to be on the border ie 10k vs 20k. Or clarity on if 10k had already been sent to the border before the pledge to Trump for 10k reinforcements. Or something that goes in to detail about the timing and number of troop deployments would clear up the issue.
freeone3000
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
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
I nominate Ya’ara Saks
keltex
They are trying to close the de minimis exception which is a, "100-year-old tariff loophole that Trump wants to close."
https://www.theverge.com/news/605483/shein-temu-amazon-trump...
reaperman
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
My guess is customs isn't prepared to inspect that volume of packages and would need to up their infrastructure to handle it.
reaperman
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
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
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.
graeme
There's still more paperwork though. Canada Post cites a $9.95 handling fee on international packages over $20.
I'm not saying US customs will inspect everything. My point is on $800 packages they're moving from a very low level of scrutiny to some scrutiny and at scale that matters. They'll need to add staff to handle the new process and make the new process.
https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/articl...
Stealthisbook
The sticking point isn't the value of the tax, it's having to individually generate the paperwork for each shipment.
Scoundreller
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
Trump and Elon apparently don't know how to do anything without first blowing it up.
anigbrowl
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.
ozmodiar
The problem is they've already threatened most of their allies. In divide and conquer the goal is supposed to be to divide your enemies, not divide yourself from your allies. As it is their enemies and allies now have good reason to work together.
9283409232
If you assume they are both compromised by Russia and China(which they are), then all of their actions make much more sense by treating our allies as enemies because they are enemies of Russia and China.
anigbrowl
I wasn't thinking IR terms. I think they're perfectly willing to crash the US economy in order to consolidate domestic power, even if it causes an overall loss for the US.
Terr_
Alternate framing: "A 100-year-old thing you could do that Trump is trying to tax, also without getting permission from Congress."
marcus_holmes
maybe this is the payoff that Bezos gets for toeing the line
blackeyeblitzar
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
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
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
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
Don't underestimate the pettiness of this administration.
reaperman
What the fuck does this even mean? Is it agreeing with me, arguing I am wrong, or simply stating something related/orthogonal?
defrost
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
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!
defrost
Thanks for chipping in, good to hear your input.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://rb.gy/vekpsm
swores
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
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
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.
lazyasciiart
No. The ingredients ship from China and India to Mexico, then the finished product comes over the border. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg93nn1e6go
csours
and drugs
---
edit: there's why and there's why. Drugs is the answer you sell
tempeler
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.
fsagx
I have a jclpcb job that finished today :o
2025-02-06 01:52:00 Shipment information received,ZHUJIANG DELTA AREA - CHINA, PEOPLES REPUBLIC
fsagx
DHL shipments seems to still be moving OK
2025-02-08 23:00:00Processed at FRANKLIN PARK - USA,FRANKLIN PARK - Illinois - USA 2025-02-08 22:51:00Clearance processing complete at FRANKLIN PARK - USA,FRANKLIN PARK - Illinois - USA
stronglikedan
It's good that people are making dumb decisions like this, presumably out of spite. Makes it easy to know who to fire.
thesaintlives
Maybe he is going to take a hard look at why this service is subsidised bu the US tax payer...
dahdum
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.
hpone91
It says until further notice. So unlikely to be Lunar New Year since it just ended today.
seanmcdirmid
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
In HK it's just a few days...
seanmcdirmid
It is still two weeks, just the official days you get off from work are only a week or a few days.
In 2008 when they burned down the CCTV cultural center with fireworks on the last day of CNY, we were already pretty much back to work in Beijing.
winrid
My Chinese wife says it goes on another week despite what Google calendar says (also it's not called Lunar New Year evidently)
dahdum
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.
ranger_danger
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/business/china-us-usps-de...
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.
gorbachev
And now they reversed it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/business/usps-china-de-mi...
What a flustercuck.
gigel82
There goes AliExpress...
davesque
Does anyone know why this is happening? A result of some initiative by the Trump administration probably?
gnabgib
It's because of an executive order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42942619
alistairSH
And they've already walked that back... https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international...
What a dumpster fire. Hard to believe ~half the electorate thought electing Trump, Musk, and army brocoll-topped tech-bros was a good idea.
ozmodiar
It's so ridiculous. From an outside perspective the US starts cackling wildly and making threats (and they do seem to delight particularly in trying to humiliate their targets), then when people think they won't actually do it they start implementing them to remove any doubt. Then the final step is to say "oops, give us a second, like maybe a month."
Like, they've played their hand already, do you think everyone's just going to assume everything is fine? Any competent world leader, include "The West" which the US seems to think it owns completely, should now be scrambling to cut the US out as much as possible and they've got good company to go to with all the other countries being bullied. It's practically a matter of pride at this point to cut the US off as much as possible.
caspper69
The parade of stupid continues unabated.
throwfgtpwd234
This is complete crap. There was no warning given. And isn't this illegal?
dang
We've merged that thread hither, since this one has the more specific link.
chitw00d
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aaron695
[dead]
sareada52
[dead]
lyzml_AF
[dead]
nico
[flagged]
suraci
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
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.
dang
Here's a subthread from yesterday where I went into this in depth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011. Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
If anyone has a question that isn't answered at those links, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
nico
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
dang
I hear you, but I don't feel that HN is that influential, and I feel like what influence it does have would evaporate if we tried to use it. HN works best as a place to meander, with unspecified side effects.
Since some people perceive discussion quality to be (relatively) high on HN, they often want to redirect its focus to things that are more important to them (such as urgent public issues or, less loftily, promoting their own stuff). But if those things did grab the focus, quality would go down, making the forum less desirable.
It's one of the feedback loops of this system: things that make HN better attract things that make it worse, so there's a cap on how good the site can ever get (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
I know that the quota we put on political discussion here—allowed to some extent, but never so much that it dominates—can be frustrating. Why not relax the constraint, especially in urgent times, and apply this valuable resource to things that really matter?
The answer is that the constraint is not arbitrary—it's not a dial we could just turn up if we wanted to. There's a limit on how much political load HN could bear before its character changed. To know how it would change, just look at the political threads we do host: they are by far the worst and nastiest that appear here, and moderation has limited ability to do much about it.
If we moved in the direction that that vector points toward, HN wouldn't just get a little more like that—it would get a ton more like that, because these effects compound. In other words, if we tried to turn that dial very much, we wouldn't get "HN, but with more politics". Rather, HN would cease to exist.
It works the other way as well: we can't turn the dial down much either. Trying to exclude politics would be neither possible nor desirable for reasons I've explained elsewhere (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219906 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and the links from there).
Thus the problem space is more constrained, and the solution more overdetermined, than one would guess at first. We can't move too much in any direction, and this leaves a lot of users unsatisfied.
Btw I found some past threads where this same point came up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25786150 (Jan 2021)
nico
Thank you for the detailed answer
Now I understand better where you are coming from and what you are trying to protect
I wish we had something like HN where we could address more tech-adjacent topics, especially when it’s a huge MOT like what’s going on now
dredmorbius
FWIW, I've noticed that HN features heavily in FastGTP's responses (by Kagi), it occasionally throws my own (recent) comments back at me, which is a bit unnerving to be honest.
YC itself is finding itself in the midst (or outskirts) of several current political discussions including associated ventures and personnel.
HN is also sufficiently of general interest that the New Yorker ran a profile on its moderators a few years back, as you may recall ;-)
ViktorRay
Why do you say there is a coup going on? There was a peaceful transfer of power.
A plurality of the electorate voted for Trump to be the leader of the executive branch of the United States [1] and a majority of the electorate voted for the Republican Party to be in charge of the House of Representatives [2] as well.
It only seems like a coup because the policies of the current administration and current Republican Party are drastically different from preceding administrations but sometimes in a democracy these types of radical changes occur. It doesn't make it a coup.
I'm being quite serious here. I see much alarm over the things going on in the US right now but the stuff going on seems to be a result of democracy rather than a threat to it...
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_House_of_Re...
fragmede
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?
dang
I don't know who would both want to and be good at moderating that.
Also, I'm not sure it would make sense for YC to fund it. HN is in a sweet spot that way [1] but the sweet spot is a fairly constrained corner of the internet, different but analogous to how I described the political constraints in my reply above [2]. I doubt it's possible to modify one variable very much while keeping the others fixed.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
tptacek
One big problem with that is there'd be constant tension about what political thingies were important enough to be on the "main" site; we'd just instantly recapitulate all the problems we have now, while also supporting a site full of inevitably awful threads as a sort of attractive nuisance.
fragmede
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.
dang
I'm not the only mod (thankfully!), just the only one who posts publicly.
How to help? Thanks for asking! Here are the first three things that occur to me:
1. Sticking scrupulously to the site guidelines when commenting, even when it feels like nobody else is
2. Flagging comments that break the site guidelines
3. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com when there are particularly bad things going without moderation or particularly good things not getting discussed
aqueueaqueue
Par for the course. It is political. HN isn't Reddit.
nico
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
[flagged]
suraci
Why do you blame this on Trump supporters? from what I saw, opponents are also rationalizing it.
HideousKojima
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
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
This is a genuine question because I don't know, how do tariffs stop illegal drugs from coming in?
sky_rw
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
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.
icegreentea2
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.
HideousKojima
By conditioning the lifting of the tariffs on China stopping the fentanyl, it's really not that complicated
Saris
Gotcha, that makes sense.
mcphage
> 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
Then block all trade outright with China if they show themselves willing to be so openly belligerent.
reaperman
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
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.
mcphage
> 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.
maxerickson
Pointing the gun, telling the others to drink the kool-aid.
jncfhnb
That seems unlikely
tzs
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.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5283957/fentanyl-trump-...
evbogue
[flagged]
evbogue
Landed it didn't I?!
antigeox
Fully support this move. America needs to build.
Havoc
> America needs to build.
Without the needed parts apparently
NetOpWibby
This is a terrible time to be working for a hardware startup
JFC
jmclnx
Well the page is gone
neuroelectron
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.
0xbadcafebee
It's like the right is doing everything they can to make the country be pissed off at them. Do they understand we still have the power to vote?
lazyasciiart
They’re hoping to fix that before it comes up again.
plorkyeran
The usual pattern is they blame the democrats for all the things they did which were unpopular.
anigbrowl
Do you?
catlikesshrimp
In four years.
People have short memory.
Feasible.
fragmede
Details matter. Vote in two years to choose your representatives in Congress.
0xbadcafebee
I hope you're voting more frequently than every four years bro
blackeyeblitzar
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.
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.