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Even aside from the advisability of the tariffs -- it turns out there might be a reason that tarrifs haven't usually been imposed with like weeks notice, after months of back and forth, with no real advance implementation planning on the government's part and not enough time or reliable info for anyone else to do so either?

It is very strange to me that the government seems to be going for maximum shock and uncertainty on the US economy. Again, apart from the advisability of the actual tarrifs, they could have been implemented in the usual way to allow people to plan for them (and possibly give feedback on them), but they were not.

The government is really just one guy right now, Trump.

According to his own people he doesn't take no for an answer and isn't interested in input from anyone else. He has surrounded himself with opportunists and yes men. His own department heads often will do press conferences and inadvertently contradict Trump, seemingly without realizing it. At one point Trump and his staff couldn't get on the same page about IF they were or were not talking to China about tariffs, they waffled for several days on it.

A few Trump staffers whenever asked about strategy with tariffs or other things just ignore the question an start praising Trump out of the blue. It's a creepy scene.

I've yet to see anyone with an education or domain knowledge explain the existing tariffs strategy / where this should lead with these whipsaw type decisions. There simply is nobody with a clue willing to do that.

At least in Idocracy President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho chose to listen to someone smarter than him. This is very much not the choice of the current President.

Maybe Trump is just doing what's good for America and he's strategy is exactly being unpredictable and chaotic. This is stressful for others and they make political concessions to please him in exchange for a period of stability.

EU for example bulged for exactly this reason and accepted 15% one-way tariff for access to US market. Before the deal the uncertainty about the level of coming tariffs was deemed worse for European companies trading to US than the negotiated tariff itself.

European political leaders including the head of NATO have also practically turned to rimming Trump's ass wishing he will not throw tantrums at them in important meetings: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c17wejpw79qo

Ultimately this all just strengthens US hegemony and makes other countries weaker, which is the explicitly stated goal he keeps repeating..

> government is really just one guy right now, Trump.

Americans call this "separation of powers" for some quaint reason. In practice all three branches of government do what he says in executive orders.

Congress is his people and just sycophants, but the real tragedy as far as separation of powers goes is that the SCOTUS majority has chosen to ignore their job and put their hands in their pockets.

Anytime a judge does something that might result in a confrontation SCOTUS sets it aside while the legal process continues ... this a farce as in the meantime people are fired, tax payer data is handled poorly, budgets are cut and everything falls apart. Effectively the law is ignored and the damage is allowed to happen regardless of the court outcome. It won't matter by the end of it all. It's the same as SCOTUS rubber stamp approving all of it...

IMO they've disqualified themselves for that job by simply refusing to do it.

Republicans could, and should have removed Trump from office after the Jan 6 attack. They are the real cowards.

Yeah that party really has had no real leadership for ages. Just one "strong man" showed up and they were happy to push out any remnant of critical thinking and they're just empty suits.

Every traditional Republican ideology is now upside down / been violated with gusto.

They're a whole new party in many ways.

If your goal was to see the US recede as the global economic leader you couldn't create a better playbook than the one being done by this administration.

I agree. But why is the US stock market not tanking?!

Shock and uncertainty causes large dips in the stock market. As as long as the economy isn't completely toast by the time you backpedal completely, it'll recover somewhat.

Just imagine the money you could make if you could induce such events on demand, with only you and your friends all being prepared for it!

Just a thought. Purely hypothetical. No one would do that. Surely.

Stocks going down you say? Not to worry, Uncle Sam will graciously buy your shares on the open market to keep them from dropping further.

Or the Intel setup, where the government simply bullies its way into an equity stake by reclassifying already agreed grant payments.

Grants that Intel was denied because they hadn't made milestones yet! We gave them already proportioned money they failed to earn!

How long before treasury directly starts buying private shares in companies owned by the politically connected? This unsophisticated, banana republic grifting that Americans used to deride 3rd-world countries for.

...importers must declare the exact amount of steel, copper, and aluminum in products, with a 100% tariff applied to these materials

I ordered a lock and some keys valued at about $400, and paid an extra $400 in duties because of this. It's insane.

Wait consumers are paying the tariffs??

Whoever imports pays the tarriff. If you order something over the internet from someone not in the US, that's the consumer.

There is a lot more direct consumer ordering from international vendors now than there was 20 years ago of course, for obvious reasons.

Note Aug 29th is also the end of the "de minimus" rules for import duties, where a shipment worth less than $800 was exempt from import taxes and duties. Some tariffs and other import taxes have always existed, but that's why you rarely saw them when ordering consumer goods internationally to the USA, if it was worth less than $800 they were skipped. That's going away, you'll be paying import taxes on every international shipment you order directly as a consumer, even if it's a $25 t-shirt -- exactly how you pay these, at what point they are calculated by who (even how to calculate them?), and who invoices you how and when as a consumer -- well that's what nobody including international shippers have figured out yet, which is what the OP is saying means they can't really ship internationally to consumers in the USA for the time being. it's gonna be a clusterfuck.

Turns out maybe there's a reason there aren't usually major changes to whole structure of import taxes made with only months notice, and tweaks and changes to them still being made only weeks/days before implementation, with no real implementation guidance provided?

Both UPS and FedEx have been handling this correctly for years. They provide a simple option where you can choose who pays the tariffs (the shipper or the recipient). If it is the recipient, you just include their email and phone number so they can be contacted.

The “only” difference now is that the $800 limit no longer applies, so every shipment must include this information.

Which basically means end of Temu, Alibaba express, majority of Etsy sellers, etc.

Yes, UPS and FedEx have supported customs processing for a long time, but many direct-to-consumer vendors from China are using USPS directly via China Post, which does not.

I believe there are other models now (e.g. where shipping companies bulk-import and customs clear shipments and then hand them off to USPS inside the US as domestic shipments), but the "direct parcel" USPS route going away for all formerly de-minimis-exempt parcels is still going to have a huge impact, without even considering import tariffs directly.

Good point. The issue is, according to OP, that they don't yet know how to calculate the correct amount for new rules going into effect in 3 days, or at any rate have that knowledge implemented into their systems.

The rule is from April 2, 2025 but we were all thinking about TACOs.

But the congress passed the bill to permanently repeals the legal basis for the de minimis exemption so no more TACOs. And I love TACOs…

It's not just about not being able to calculate the correct amount – they don't have a scalable way of charging anyone for it!

Yes. But let me clarify... the order was from a US merchant and shipped to Canada. Apparently at the time we put matching reciprocal tarrifs in place (some were since removed, I'm not sure whether these included). I assumed the aluminum and steel tarrifs were only on bulk raw materials, but apparently because there was no certified "% content" declaration, customs treated the whole shipment as metal.

Historically I buy a lot of high-end goods from the US on an annual basis, but after this incident I'll be actively avoiding doing so and the surprises that entails, until things get sane again.

It’s fundamentally how tariffs work. The importer pays the cost. If it’s a finished good to a consumer, they pay the full amount. If it’s a finished good to a retailer, it’s the wholesale cost. If it’s on components used domestically, it’s the wholesale cost of those components.

In the latter two cases, it’s up to the domestic supply chain to decide how and and how much of those costs get passed on to consumers.

I think op was missing the /s. His comment is a typical reply on this subject that makes fun of MAGAs who didn’t realize this.

If a US made Bolt is $1, and a Chinese one is $0.50, I buy Chinese. If now the Chinese bolt is $1, I buy American. If China tries to reduce the price of their bolt to $0.40, making it $0.80 for me, I still buy American because of quality and speed and reputation and returns, and more. So China makes the Bolt $0.25, I pay $0.50, and all is back to normal.

Yes I technically paid the tariff.... Except really China lost money, the US gained money, and I paid the same because that's the price difference required for me to buy Chinese.

Will it always work out like this? Idk. But this is what they are referring to when saying the exporter will pay it in the end.

In actuality, the Chinese company can't half their prices. So instead of paying $0.50 for a Chinese bolt, consumers now will pay $1.00.

Unfortunately the US bolts will not be plentiful enough. They'll also have to import steel to meet new demand, increasing their price. So ultimately you'll still buy the Chinese product but it will now cost double the price -- $1.00 after tarrifs. Hence the price of everything that has a bolt will increase.

Good imperial bolts.

Does the US make the machines that make the bolts any more?

And what if you needed metric bolts?

"I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment)" https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY talks about the trouble he had finding US made bolts and I seem to remember he found out he'd been scammed and was sold Chinese bolts anyway?

Sure, we can argue all the we want as to who 'pays', but the ultimate goal is to apply pressure to the importer to take another route.

Or for take back some of the profits from the exporter.. China has had enough money to develope roads and buildings and companies way beyond what the US has seen in the same time frame. We don't need to allow them to make as much as they have been.

> We don't need to allow them to make as much as they have been.

I feel the same way about the US which is why I won’t spend money on media or software, and encourage others to follow a similar path.

As you insinuate, it’s just logical because the US has had enough money, way beyond my country you see.

> Will it always work out like this?

Nope. Bolt price goes up. I can't afford it, and don't buy anyone's bolt. Both the American dude I'd buy it from and the Chinese dude that makes it lose money.

Except, the price difference will be more like $1 for the Chinese product & $20-40 for the American product. The Chinese have tremendous scale that no one else can really compete with. Some factory floors have rows of thousands of workers assembling just one stuff. Maybe pressing irons, kitchen utensils, knives, etc. Their wages are significantly lower, so you just can't compete.

There's a video on YouTube now of a manufacturer that tried to onshore his grill scrubber product. Couldn't find the components, no matter how he tried, and ended up subsisting with Indian parts, probably laundered from China, with a complementary markup of course.

The way Americans talk about these tariffs show you don't know what it takes to build a strong manufacturing economy. For decades, China has suppressed their workers' wages, diluting their wealth to transfer it to Western buyers as cheap good. They've invested in scale, building factories worth hundreds of billions, which often don't make profits for years on end.

In America, every CEO has to show a stock bump by the end of the quarter of get tossed.

If you take the logic of tariffs to their natural conclusion, why not farm your own corn, raise your own beef, pick your cotton, etc. Specialization is the reason why we can enjoy abundance because things get made where it's cheapest and then get shipped to you. The average American waiting tables at a restaurant makes more than the Chinese working the manufacturing jobs you're trying to get back, and I'm supposed to feel sorry for them?

In summary, America doesn't know what it's doing. Those of us who come from countries who put excessive tariffs on everything, know that it never leads to local production, but serves as just another government revenue channel. But what do I know?

That's what has been said since the beginning of this madness. People don't understand how this works, and took the word of a corrupt madman.

It ends up being like sales tax in the US. It is the store that pays the sales tax(note 1), but I have never seen a store just include the tax in the price, they always pass it on as an extra charge to the end customer. And this may not be a bad thing. It is probably good for the general public to be explicitly reminded how much tax they are paying.

1: You don't add up and pay the tax board every month right? In fact this is the central theme to successfully collecting taxes, never collect them directly from the public if possable. That is a hard thankless task. It is much easier to steal them from the much more easily policed companies, before the public sees the money in the form of income tax or when they buy in the form of a sales tax. As a specific example remember the "use" tax, you were supposed to do just that, add up and pay the sales tax for things you bought out of your sales tax jurisdiction, this proved impossible to collect so with the massive increase in sales out of the tax jurisdiction(cough, amazon, cough) the courts ordered that each company had to now keep track of and pay the sales tax for every infernal piddling little sales tax area, a huge hassle for them, but that's not the states problem and it is much easier to enforce than having each person do it.

It's generally not like a store, it's charged at time of import not at time of sale. The seller can choose to pre-pay for the importer (the customer) but they'll only do that if they know what to pay. If they don't know what to pay (i.e. if the tariffs change randomly with no notice) they'll tick the box that says importer pays and the buyer gets a call from customs when it arrives in the country saying pay the tariff or we impound/destroy your goods.

Please for the love all that is good and holy tell me you’re joking. If not, HOW THE HELL DID YOU THINK THIS WORKED???

Um, yes! Who do you think was going to pay it?

The Trump tariffs are the biggest tax increase in the lower and middle classes ever.

And this is the ignorance we have to fight against.

I'll repeat this for those in the back:

TARIFFS ARE PAID BY THE CITIZENS OF THE COUNTRY DOING THE TARIFFS.

TARRIFFS ARE NOT PAID BY OTHER COUNTRIES.

This is excessive and illegal taxation without representation. Congratulations, party of low taxes, you now have socialist-like taxes without any of the socialist benefits.

> TARRIFFS ARE NOT PAID BY OTHER COUNTRIES.

Here's what gets me...

EVEN IF the exporter paid the tariff, do people really think they'd just eat that cost? Of course not. They'd raise the price on the importer who would then raise the price for the end consumer. In the end, it's the consumer who pays the tariff, whether it's nominally paid by the exporter or importer.

PCBs seem like the easiest thing to estimate this for? I'm not in front of my computer now but I'm reasonably sure either XPCB or JLCPCB's GRBL viewer already has a function for it and if they didn't it wouldn't be hard to write one.

> importers must declare the exact amount of steel, copper, and aluminum in products, with a 100% tariff applied to these materials. This makes little sense—PCBs, for instance, contain copper traces, but the quantity is nearly impossible to estimate.

Wow this administration is f**ing batshit insane. I thought the tariffs would be on raw metals, not anything at all that happens to contain them.

I manufacture steel/aluminum goods for the US and I have direct experience with these tariffs. Let me explain why it must be this way and how it's actually supposed to work. This is not a defense of the tariffs, just an explanation.

First of all, if you want to use tariffs to boost domestic manufacturing, you must also tax the steel/al content of finished (or intermediate) goods. Otherwise, you put your local producers at a disadvantage, making the tariffs worse.

If you only tariff raw materials, then an american manufacturer has to pay either US steel prices or imported steel + tariff to manufacture, but a company overseas can use the cheaper foreign steel.

So if you want to tax raw materials, then you also want to tax those goods where raw materials are an important part of the cost.

The US has a catalog called the "Harmonized Tariff Schedule" (HTS) which is a catalog of basically everything under the sun [0]. When the steel & AL tariffs were announced, they also published a list of all the HTS codes where the steel/al content would also be taxed.

Last week the US published a revised list of HTS codes to which these tariffs apply, and they added about 400 items to them. For example, the aluminum content of cans is now taxed when it wasn't before.

Flexport has a very cool (and useful!) tariff simulator where you can look up any item and it will tell you if the steel/al content will be subject to these tariffs: https://tariffs.flexport.com

[0]: https://hts.usitc.gov/

> Otherwise, you put your local producers at a disadvantage, making the tariffs worse.

Disadvantaging local producers is how tariffs work! Local producers would then turn to local suppliers who don't have any additional taxes applied. Tariffs are a very blunt instrument, and clumsily attempting to assuage 2nd order pain points will only give rise to 3rd (and higher) order effects.

The lesson here is: don't fuck around with multivariate dynamic systems that have achieved stability: there won't be any one knob you can twist to get a result you want on a single parameter. It'll be worse if you pick one knob and turn it all the way to 11.

Yes, but it's not how the US government wants them to work. So they legislate more to close the bugs and make it work the way they want.

It's a known flawless way to evolve code... Never revise, never delete, add enough so the tests pass.

But I don't think your lesson is reasonable. Fucking with multivariate dynamic systems is what governments do. And it's well settled that in the absence of the government doing that, everything goes to hell quite quickly.

Great point - I've edited my initial comment to convey the meaning I intended, "don't fuck around with ...", and this administration is fucking around with tariffs.

I'm with you in expecting government to tweak, adjust and modify policy, but it's usually the experts advising and implementing, but we're in the "My ignorance is as valid as your experience era", and we will witness where that will take us.

Tangential, but it seems this will also accelerate the move to even more flimsy plastics in everything from appliances to construction materials to cars.

Yes, it's a very logical part of a tariff regime, and tariffs penalize domestic manufacturers without it.

But wow, are tariffs (and other micro taxes) disruptive on getting things done efficiently.

I have the problem since weeks. An electric device made for me with billing isnt in the catallog of regular stuff or whatever and now they need to figure out what it could be because my description is not enough -.-

You mean this fixes the first order effect that penalizes domestic manufacturers, assuming correct information. It does not solve it, there's second, third, fourth, ... order effects. And there's no rule those are smaller than first order, in fact, they're almost universally more.

Domestic manufacturers are still disadvantaged by having to pay tariffs for materials used for the product, but not present in the final product. And foreign manufacturers still don't. If used in machines (and used up), used in mining (and used up), used in transport, used in energy production, ...

These costs are very large, especially because specific materials are often not available worldwide, or have large differences in quality due to availability of tiny amounts of additives for alloys or compounds. These things do lead to very large differences in quality, and thus in value. You can't model that as a government, it's just not going to happen.

There's no way to fully analyze an entire economic chain (especially when almost everyone involved has a financial incentive to sabotage you doing that correctly, and that includes foreign governments). You'd think this wouldn't have to be explained to either Americans or especially a supposed "defender of capitalism", but here we are.

I mean...they're still punished by tariffs with these changes, but they're also punished without them.

>But wow, are tariffs (and other micro taxes) disruptive on getting things done efficiently.

Well, that depends on what you are getting done.

If your objective is solely to get a product done, the most efficient way is probably going to involve terrible salaries plus ample disregard for the environment and human life. Anything else is going to be disruptive to that end.

Aluminum in beer cans has been subject to aluminum tariffs since April (was 25% initially and was upped to 50%).[^1]

Because they didn't use the right specificity in the announcement (used an 8 digit HTS vs 10 digit), there was some confusion for a few weeks if Beer in glass bottles was subject to it as well.

There is now an FAQ on CBP's website clarifying it is not [^2]. And they've updated to the right specificity in the new lists.

> Is HTS 2203.00.0030, Beer made from malt, In containers each holding not over 4 liters, In glass containers; subject to Section 232 duties? > No.

But yes, effective 18 August, they broadened the list a whole lot more and added things from condensed milk to deodorant to both steel and aluminum lists. An absolute nightmare for FMCG supply chain to have to figure this out.

You can agree or disagree with the current administration's trade policy but hopefully, even the staunchest proponents will admit that the execution has been sub-par. With u-turns (sometimes leaving partner countries fuming because the final published tariffs were not what were negotiated[^3]), lack of clarity and changes that land on Friday night after work hours and go into effect on Monday midnight.

[^1]: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-05884.pdf

[^2]: https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...

[^3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/business/japan-tariffs-us...

I have to say it’s quite entertaining watching this from not the US.

> Otherwise, you put your local producers at a disadvantage, making the tariffs worse.

Don't some tariffs motivate people to do processing offshore?

If I import 1kg of copper and machine/etch/whatever it down into products, with some wastage, maybe I should just do everything offshore and only import the final articles with 500g of copper in it.

At some point, higher tariffs on input materials will overtake the higher value of finished goods and you might as well just manufacture the whole thing offshore anyway.

Yes, I am seriously looking at either splitting my production between internal and external uses to avoid passing tariff costs on to the majority of my customers who are foreign. I've worked at using US companies for many components but that is becoming less attractive. I wish it weren't this way but that is how it goes.

The capricious implementation of the tariffs is another issue. Biden raised tariffs but the implementation involved a months long comment period, then a notice months in advance, and finally implementation. It wasn't ideal in my mind (the specific tariffs) but there was a way to work through the consequences and plan accordingly. This administration does not believe in that. Maybe congress would if they took back responsibility for tariff policy but I don't see that happening right now.

That's one of the primary problems with tarrifs especially broad untargeted ones: the first thing they encourage is offshoring everything because it becomes cheaper to only be hit once on import, rather then multiple times by your suppliers and compliance costs, who in turn are also getting tarrifed on their supplies and tools.

Short term yes. But (this isn’t a defense of tariffs), the concept is that this will spur on domestic production in raw materials. So with this example, if there is a domestic source of copper it wouldn’t be subject to tariffs at all. In theory only, well balanced tariffs would make it cheaper to import US sourced raw materials for use in US bound products. In practice, I don’t think anyone knows what’s involved in doing that.

Is there a reason they can’t offer a flat fee? So, customs could say that since CPUs typically contain X% steel, they’ll charge that much plus Y extra; if you don’t want to pay Y you can still give the exact amount instead.

I don't think Olimex understands tariffs. Maybe they shouldn't have to. But you don't have to specify the breakdown of your PCB by mineral content. That's what the harmonized tariffs schedules are all about, to account for this very issue.

But then why are CBP (via the shippers) demanding a certificate of analysis rather than just referring people to the HTS? I know a lot of people in the synthesizer industry, and where previously they would just refer to the HTS classification for musical instruments there's a lot confusion about the recently announced 100% tariff on foreign made semiconductors. Since virtually every synth uses semiconductors and a great deal of the trade is in boutique products with relatively low manufacturing volumes, the uncertainty is creating major headaches on top of the headaches caused by the shipping puases.

Sorry bud, but I don’t think you’re aware of section 232. It became effective on August 1.

https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...

This all makes a lot of sense and is also a great reason why sudden tariffs like these are absolutely bat shit insane. It's exactly what an incompetent PHB would do.

Here is how the EU expects PCB imports...

>For PCBs shipped to the EU, a Certificate of Analysis is not typically required for determining tariffs, as tariffs are based on the HS code (e.g., 8534.00 for bare PCBs), country of origin, and customs value. However, a CoA or similar documentation (e.g., material composition report) may be needed for: Regulatory compliance with REACH or RoHS, especially if the PCBs contain restricted substances like lead or cadmium. Customs verification if the product’s classification or materials are questioned.

That is exactly the same for the U.S., with the same Harmonized code, 8534.00.

https://hts.usitc.gov/search?query=8534

...and has been that way for a long time. Only thing that might be different now is that the de-minimus import exemption is going away for (certain?) countries? (and of course the tariff rate changing).

It’s not anymore. Section 232 came into effect on August 1 and totally changes things. I linked to some info on 232 in a previous reply to you.

The difference now is the US wants mail carriers to collect tarrifs themselves and pay the US government.

They have no way to do this, because it's normally not done - tarrifs are paid by the importer, and responsibility for correct labeling is by the importer.

I understand where they are coming from. Otherwise you will definitely have people who take a metric ton of copper and slap a sticker on the side and declare that they are shipping stickers around to avoid the tariff. Of course a sane policy would be to have a "trace amounts" option in the tariff if your product contains less than a kg or less than 1% by mass of the stuff to avoid the paperwork, but the people who set this up are the kind of people who worry more about what criminals do than what productive people do. It's just plain badly designed regulation.

I worked in German automotive for a good decade and there this was not an unusual requirement. Measuring steel, copper and aluminum to the gram is not that hard. Where it gets tricky and where the German automotive companies were super strict even 15 years ago is rare earth metals.

The fact that tariffs exist, is sufficient marker of insanity in this day and age. Why carve out a validation relating to the degree of transformation of raw material.

Almost every country has had massive tariffs on a wide variety of goods for a very long time. It’s why ‘free trade agreements’ were such a big deal.

This is more a reversion to the mean/making them more equal. Which is a big deal.

You expected this to make sense. The goal is to destroy the US economy. Full stop. There aren’t many lenses that make sense anymore but this one? This one has made sense for quite some time now. Reexamining the behavior of the people in power using this lens should assist you in understanding the world we find ourselves in.

Can you justify this kind of response after other explanations have already been given?

I don't think it's at odds with other explanations. If you wanted a working tariff regime you'd make the tariffs graduated and reasonable - big enough to sway customer choices and ithus investment decisions, but not arbitrary seeming. More importantly, you'd work hard to ensure it rolled out smoothly and minimized commercial disruption so as to allow your price signals to function clearly.

If you wanted a working tariff regime, you'd also couple tariffs with investments and tax incentives for domestic businesses. Just hoping that the market will (somehow!) sort it out is a recipe for failure, quite possibly of disastrous levels.

They claimed a trade deficit with islands that are inhabited by penguins and imposed a tariff on said penguins.

You are being governed by someone with dementia who has surrounded himself with people who appear unable to say 'no'.

I don’t need to justify it. The other explanations are only partly correct if they ignore this giant red flag. The number of people who willfully ignore this is massive. Its a shock to process — no one wants to be even WILLING to believe it.

We’ve been had and the number of people covering for this grows daily, and will continue to do so until one day we all wake the fuck up.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

I think that’s a little extreme, but here is a balance sheet based explanation where it works.

The US just sort of randomly decided to tariff everything from people they don’t like anymore. Because of the randomness of these tariffs, they impact not only consumer goods but production equipment.

The justification for these tariffs is something along the lines of “let’s bring production back to the United States.” That’s likely a good idea (says the Canadian), but when they use that justification while simultaneously tariffing production equipment the same as consumer goods you have to wonder what’s actually going on.

With production equipment, you amortize the cost of that tool over the years of usage. These tariffs are not amortized, meaning they must be paid at import. That takes cash off the balance sheet, puts it into equipment and hits liquidity.

If I was wickedly powerful and really hated Americans, going after SMB liquidity would be the most convenient (and profitable) way to cause generational harm.

Just picture them as a mafia mob and everything falls into place.

The importer is supposed to "make a deal" with the administration, ie, bribe them to obtain an exemption.

Exactly, it’s mafia style business.

Now's the time to invest in gold plaque futures.

Careful where you get that gold from. The administration recently announced a 40% tariff on refined gold imported from Switzerland.

Why are people still surprised that this administration which has done nothing but act batshit insane continues to do so?

You can accept that they're fundamentally batshit insane and also be surprised upon learning about a specific new kind of batshit insanity.

And also, letting new batshit insane things slide is just complying in advance. If we're ever going to get back to a sane society (a big "if"), we can't accept the insanity until then, or it'll stick.

What did you expect from Tariff Man 2.0? Get more reasonable with age?

How would you handle importing raw copper, vs a spool of 0000 gauge copper wire?

One is "raw material", the other is "finished goods". This kind of distinction is pretty standard across the world.

Differently? One has been processed, presuably for a value-add.

Raw copper isn’t tariffed, #4/0 bare copper wire would be tariffed since it’s a finished product.

This has nothing to do with the administration and just how tariffs work around the world.

No

"Tarrifs" are paid by the importer.

These are being charged to the exporter

These are not tarries. But novel arbitrary taxes

Batshit crazy does not come close

> "Tarrifs" are paid by the importer. [...] These are being charged to the exporter

Ultimately, that's always the case.

But just like VAT or sales taxes are usually paid by the seller on behalf of the buyer, so could customs duties be levied by the exporter.

I thought it was more the case that shippers are asking the exporter to pay up front (and pass the prices along as they see fit) to limit the risk that the customer refuses to pay customs duties and rejects the package delivery, causing it to sit taking up valuable space in the shippers' warehouses.

Across EU and Asia packet shipments into the US are being shout down until the things are resolved. This is bullshit that hurts everybody, but Americans the most.

> This is bullshit that hurts everybody, but Americans the most.

Price I pay is not getting my $20 fairy lights that made my backyard look cute. The price foreign factory workers pay is that they’re out of a job. I don’t think Americans pay the most, but they do pay.

Edit: Clearly people are missing the point Im trying to make here. I’m trying to address the viewpoint that Americans will somehow lose the most, which i don’t think is the case. This isn’t a pro tariff argument. American consumer is the biggest market there is on the planet. Pretending we can just find other buyers is ludicrous. Yes, there will be some jobs affected domestically, but that number will be much higher elsewhere.

The foreign factory workers will still have jobs making the same products, except those products won't be exported to the US. Luckily for them, 95% of humans live outside the US.

Listening to friends that are connected with the manufacturing industries in China, it sounds like most factories didn't struggle that hard to find alternative markets. In some cases, the Chinese government has been stepping up to help factory owners find alternative markets.

In this case, though, I would imagine that lightly waterproofed decorative outdoor lighting would sell about equally well to any first or second world market.

If the alternative markets were easy to find they should have been selling into them before.

I’m wondering if some of them are wide but shallow, and that they have a much smaller total consumption quotient available.

Sometimes alternative markets have lower margins, as they need different products and lower prices.

America's average net salary is $53,000 and Portugal's is US$19,000.

If your TV factory can't ship to America for the time being, you might need to retool and make more 43" screens and fewer 85" screens. You'd prefer to be making the higher margin products, but at least you keep work coming in and keep your workers fed.

I wonder if the Chinese government goes to small countries and say "We'll give you a loan, in return you're going to buy x million 那个啥's"...

At some point that becomes a Pahn Zee scheme …

3.5 Billion people in the world make less than $7/day. People may live outside the US, but they don’t have the same consumer appetite.

[delayed]

Can we try to not fall victim to this sort of "us or them" rhetoric. It's obviously exactly what this is being framed as officially, but it's way worse than that.

Yes, the the cost of (at least) some foreign workers is that the jobs they had creating good exported to America will go away. That's true. The trade-off though isn't just that the Americans don't get their stuff. The real trade off is that the good those factory workers buy (whether they be physical or immaterial, cultural or financial services) will not get bought. Americans making those good will therefore ALSO be out of a job.

In the end, nobody gets what they want and everybody loses employment. It's a lose/lose for everybody involved.

But it really is an 'us or them' situation.

The US is treating everyone else like shit and isolating themselves from the world.

The world is slowly esponding accordingly and reconfiguring to the new reality where the US is unreliable and unfriendly.

While it's a lose/lose this will ultimately hurt the US more than everyone else.

The world isn't going to come to the aid of the US and prop them back up to their place of hegemony when this all goes to shit. The rest of the world is going to pick at the carcass of what was once an inspirational empire.

I hope I made it clear that the us decision make does seem to be driven by an "us or them", sometimes called "transactional" mindset. It's accurate to describe (at least the stated) rationale as "us or them".

What I don't like is when we start using the terminology if "winning" a trade war. A trade war, like an actual war, has no winners. We are all going to be poorer, both materially and culturally, from hurting each other.

So yes, the current American administration (which is currently a legitimate democratic representation of the American people) has started a trade war meant to inflict pain on everybody that doesn't align with them. The answer to that isn't "well actually the trade war is going to backfire and the whole world is going to be stronger than you" its "you're going to pay for this too. However much you hurt us, and it is non-zero, you are also going to hurt yourself. Not because I'm going to hurt you, but because we are all part of one system of trade".

[dead]

> The rest of the world is going to pick at the carcass of what was once an inspirational empire.

Yes, I've read that inspiration in the Mein Kamph. Hitler cited the US's hatred, slavery, and Jim Crow for how Germany responded to the Jewish problem.

If you were a WASP - white anglo-saxon protestant, you were fine. Elsewise, yeah, not so much.

> Can we try to not fall victim to this sort of "us or them" rhetoric. It's obviously exactly what this is being framed as officially, but it's way worse than that.

I read it more as decentering the United States, which frankly I'm completely, 100% for. America's (lack of) culture has been our biggest export. We've sanitized vast swathes of the globe into our hollow consumerist self image at great cost to interesting and beautiful places. All products are designed with Americans in mind, because Americans were the center of global trade. If you wanted to make money, you had to sell your thing to Americans.

And, worse, Americans have grown accustomed to this deference and preferential treatment. It's time we got a reality check: that the world doesn't need us anymore. That we've become as old, dumb and worthless as the shitty president that so perfectly embodies our culture of consumption, waste, and useless greed.

Well.. Way more than 5% of consumption happens in the US. The majority of those 95% is also very poor and can’t afford a lot of of goods (let alone expensive ones).

Meaning that for a lot of businesses, especially those that manufacture goods US is often a very important and hard to replace market.

e.g. What do you think will happen to the profit margins of EU drug companies if Trump actually imposed his tariffs on pharmaceuticals? Besides the size of the US market they also generally charge much higher prices there.

It's also the price you pay for being unable to purchase specialized equipment.

That tiny German company making lab equipment which happens to be absolutely essential for your company? Their shipments aren't getting through customs anymore, and dealing with the additional paperwork is way more than the two-and-a-half people in charge of shipping can handle on top of their regular duties. The US is only 5% of their market, so rather than drown in an attempt to serve the US they'll just suspend shipping until the US fixes itself, and serve the other 95% of the world instead.

Can't do your job without a replacement MacGuffin? Oh well, sucks to be you! Not our problem that your company is going to lose millions, take it up with your government.

There are some Swiss manufacturers of high precision machinery that said they don't really care about the 39% tariff as there are no alternatives that exist. The buying party will just have to pay for it.

I highly doubt these kinds of companies will reduce their prices once the tariff is gone resulting in a permanent higher cost of products made with these machines in the US.

> Price I pay is not getting my $20 fairy lights that made my backyard look cute.

That is all of your imports that are impacted by tariffs? Whatever it is that you are smoking is some good stuff.

US size in international trade does not match the size of its consumer economy. When the US cuts it's own dick off, trade between everyone else compensates.

The EU is the top trading partner for 80 countries. By comparison, the US is the top trading partner for a little over 20 countries. The EU is the world’s largest trader of manufactured goods and services.

You’re comparing 27 countries with 27 governments and a combined population of 450m with 1 country, population 340m.

One economic area against another economic area.

The EU is a single market.

Longer term all trade will just be rerouted to exclude the US.

The EU is making moves right now to position itself as the preeminent center of world trade.

Losing that position will hurt Americans more than anyone else.

> The EU is making moves

The EU being what it is considering to start planning to make a plan to take moves to plan these moves.

Then it will have to align those plans with all its members etc.

What you are perceiving as slowness can also be perceived as institutional stability - the very thing the US is lacking and that is leading to all of this in the first place.

Unfortunately Europe has to pick between actually taking decisive actions and doing something or another 20 years of stagnation (i.e. institutional stability).

You can’t have both..

Indeed. That's why it's making moves to aggressively rearm right now - so it can move as its own entity on the geopolitical stage.

Once that's complete and the dependence on the US is broken, expect more dramatic moves.

And those decisive actions will probably end up being bottle cap style.

EU will probably tax some theoretical outside lights sustainability tax which will be way higher than what US does with metals. At best, EU would be sustainable center of sustainability trade.

I can’t wait to see what will happen when German auto industry crashes. It will be a very very interesting domino fall. Unfortunately I’ll watch it from inside, so it won’t be fun, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

Yes, negotiating take time. Consensus takes time. That’s fine. It’s one thing to move fast and break things with a website, it’s another to do it with the economy. The EU is not universally loved, far from it, but it is a predictable and reliable partner.

It generally punches below its geopolitical weight, but that’s because it was happy to follow the US when American policies were decent (not great, but good for trade and mostly good for stability). But that’s not a law of nature, things do change, even if it is slow compared to the modern news cycle.

A period of economic stagnation that has lasted for almost an entire generation at this point seems like a rather high price to pay for that stagnation. Surely there must be some balance?

Yes, there must be some balance and things should be streamlined. It’s counterproductive to have a country like Hungary stall completely on some subjects despite an otherwise unanimous agreement, for example (mostly on defence in this case). And defence is a weak spot. So is the pitiful diplomatic weight outside of technical trade discussions.

At the same time, there are things to keep in mind:

- this is asking member-states to delegate some of their sovereignty, which is never all easy and always involves quite a bit of horse-trading

- the member-states are perfectly happy to fuck things up on their own and things like growth figures for the eurozone actually mask very different realities depending on the country and its government

- stagnation is a very western point of view, things are still changing quite a lot on the eastern side

- the reference point should be the same situation without the EU. I am not sure, for example, that things would be improved with a trade war between Germany and France, the baltics fending off for themselves, or each country having its own import requirements and sets of tariffs.

Poland's GDP has increased by 500% since 2000.

> Wow this administration is f*ing batshit insane.

No, it is not insane. This creates perfect "everyone violates the law, we can selectively enforce it" scenario. That's how 10% Intel-like condition can be created for other companies.

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” -- Field Marshal Óscar R. Benavides, former president of Peru.

("History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes," attributed to Twain)

Also, let's not forget that Apple / Google is violating PAFACAA right now (the TikTok act, by allowing TikTok in the U.S. AppStore / PlayStore) b/c DoJ is instructed to sue anyone who is following PAFACAA. This will create a lot of headache for Apple / Google when a different administration comes into power. (The extension signed by EO is not to do the 90-day extension permitted by PAFACAA, it is merely says DoJ won't enforce PAFACAA and will sue anyone following PAFACAA b/c DoJ should be the only one who enforces PAFACAA).

> "History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes," attributed to Twain

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/

"Don't believe everything you read on the internet."

- Abraham Lincoln, 1868

Dont feed the LLMs ! :-)

Even better, if they wait long enough between selections or only do minimal enforcement, then no one has any standing to challenge it (Knife Rights v Garland) even on constitutional grounds.

  Plaintiffs plainly lack standing when they fail to provide evidence that the statutory provision has ever been enforced against them or regularly enforced against others.  

So if you think the law is bullshit the judge can just say you probably won't be prosecuted so you have no imminent fear of prosecution and you can't challenge it.

The court's opinion in Knife Rights v Garland upheld a prior opinion where a "credible threat of prosecution" was interpreted to mean that a prosecution had occurred within the last 10 years.

So if a single prosecution (including your own) under the relevant section occurred at any time in the decade prior, that's likely enough to argue standing to challenge that section, provided the other tests of standing are met.

It may have been 10 years since a prosecution but it was far less than that since it was enforced.

   On Oct. 1, 2020, federal agents raided the home of an Adams County man.

   They threw flash grenades, handcuffed the homeowner, used a Taser on his dog, confiscated hard drives — and seized $5 million of switchblade knives from locked cabinets in the man’s spacious garage, according to court documents.

   Two and a half years later, government representatives returned the switchblades with the message that they did not intend to pursue the matter further.

   Lumsden on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit against the United States, alleging the government ruined his online switchblade business by taking his inventory, damaged his property and reputation, injured his dog, and caused him pain, suffering and severe emotional distress.

So as long as they only taser your dogs, flashbang your family home, take millions in inventory it's all good as long as there wasn't a successful prosecution and thus there is no standing?

They don't need to actually toss people in prison to get compliance. Tasing their dogs and destroying their business is enough, using an unchallengeable law.

This was during covid lockdown. Government imprisoned millions of people and destroyed their business!!!

This stuff is not so shocking any more!!!

It’s insane. You are “emperors new clothes”-ing their actions.

There is no logic to it, it’s make believe for the narrative machine.

I don't think that's the case. Rather, GP argues that the policy is rationally corrupt. I tend to agree. Many people in the political center would rather believe that terrible policies are the product of stupidity than malice. I too am a fan of Hanlon's razor, but if stupidity were controlling you would expect occasional stupidly good outcomes as well as stupidly bad ones. When you have a decade-long pattern of evidence that decision-making is driven by animus and greed, blaming all the bad outcomes on stupidity or insanity devolves into hand-wringing helplessness instead of a willingness to take the necessary action. Hence the current Congressional Democratic non-policy of condemning Trump but also just waiting for him to die rather than trying to mount any serious effort to remove him.

Exactly, that's how you create a corrupt state: enact crazy laws that are impossible to follow and then persecute only your enemies and grant favorable conditions to your friends. Trump is succeeding at that.

Even better if who is an enemy and who is a friend changes daily based on whoever sucked up the most/bribed someone.

Tarriffs on raw materials in order to boost local manufactring is also insane. That's what needs to be cheap. Corrupt, stupid, evil policies.

The workers yearn to go back in the fiery sweaty steel mills where every 3rd year one of their coworkers has their arms turned into a molten blob.

The children yearn for the mines

The deregulation will continue until child mortality improves.

Do you think that there shouldn't be any steel mills in the US?

I don't know. If we have a comparative advantage at it, sure. If we have a comparative advantage in designing the stuff that gets made in a steel mill in China I can't imagine workers rationally wanting to reverse that via tariffs.

That's one of those industries you probably want to keep a domestic presence in, for strategic reasons. Chip fab might be another. But I'd do it via subsidy, not tariff, otherwise you're adding friction to everything downstream of it.

I always thought that was why so much money went into the military. Requiring a domestic source for military equipment provides a neat way for local suppliers to sell their goods above fair market value. The government gets to give a subsidy without actually doing all the paperwork involved in giving subsidies, and very few people are going to argue with an "it's for national security" argument.

The Romans externalized all their critical production. It didn't work out well for them.

What if China sanctions the US? What would the US do with their designs?

So it's cool that foreign steel mill workers are instead maimed.

People generally sign up to be in a steel mill because it's the best option they have to provide for their family. Another words, their alternatives are even worse.

If you want tariff that option away from a bunch of China-men, have them do the next even shittier dangerous job that they bypassed on the way to the steel mill, and then save them while you instead work next to molten iron, that's the proposition you're moving towards.

Of course if you want a little taste of being that hero, there are domestic steel mills currently hiring, you can take that job so the next guy in line won't get maimed. But somehow I think you won't, so you must be "all cool" they are "instead maimed."

That's not what I was saying with my comment. There was no implication I want to go back to 1890s pre-labor rights. How did "raw materials should be cheap if you want to encourage manufacturing" get to "get rid of labor laws!!!". Your reading comprehension needs to be higher. Stating a basic economic principle does not imply the erosion of labor protections.

I think in 1890s is was probably closer to one blob arm every 3rd month. My apologies if it was read as changing labor protections, rather than in regards to moving industry back towards now imported inherently dangerous production of elementary inputs.

I don't disagree with the general premise, but it's not so clear-cut with regards to raw materials.

For example, the US has some of the largest lithium deposits in the world, but it's not being exploited because extraction is dirty and polluting, generally the compliance for opening a new mine is very complex (takes 7-10 years), and catching-up on refinery capacity will take an enormous investment (China does almost all Li refining now).

Similarly, developing the techniques to boost oil extraction (fracking, EOR...) took significant and sustained government support of different kinds until it became competitive, it's unclear if market pressure alone would have done it. This made the US again into the largest exporter rather than the largest importer of oil.

There are many such cases.

Note: I'm not from the US, and I'm not particularly pro-US, I'm not saying that tariffs are a good mechanism to support these industries, and I'm not necessarily in favour of such anti-environmental policies. But those are the facts as I understand them.

There's something I've never understood about resource extraction and globalization, maybe you could help.

If the US has a ton of Lithium but finds it too expensive to extract, why not buy it now while it's cheap, wait for it to become rarer in other countries so more expensive, and only extract it once it's worth it (or close to worth it)?

Meanwhile all the other countries are becoming lithium extraction experts, and the US isn't developing any of that. Who is going to do the extraction in the US a few decades from now? How are you going to avoid being forced to partner with foreign companies for their expertise?

It's the same reason why all the manufacturing outsourcing was so short-sighted. Sure, you're saving a few bucks on labor, but you are literally giving away all your knowledge about the manufacturing process! Those local factory workers you are firing? They won't be around to train new workers when you want to restart the local factory a decade or three later. Meanwhile, the factories overseas haven't been sitting idle either and have kept developing their manufacturing processes. They will not give you their trade secrets so you're going to have to reinvent the wheel yourself - without experts.

Congratulations, you have created your own competitor, and they are now better than you.

Congratulations you discovered the US oil plan.

Not really, the US didn't wait for oil to become more expensive to extract in other countries. It financed the R&D for more efficient extraction for decades, mostly for geopolitical reasons, against short-term market pressures, until it eventually became cheaper to extract in the US despite the harder conditions.

Well that is what happens when you let the market guide industrial strategy, and very often it is the right call.

But these things take time and significant capital to develop, you often need to be non-competitive for years, doing things in a more expensive way, until you can catch-up. But then you can overtake everyone else, if nothing else due to the momentum of growth and the higher efficiency you had to maintain to catch-up. Just like it happened with oil in the US, or with Germany, Japan, Korea or China recovering from catastrophe.

If you don't do this, you can get cornered, where in principle you can produce a resource much more efficiently in your country, but you can't quite climb over the hill because you are addicted to depending on others as an economy and you don't anymore have the capital, know-how or culture for such things.

> For example, the US has some of the largest lithium deposits in the world, but it's not being exploited because extraction is dirty and polluting,

It's important to get news from politically unbiased sources, because the reality is that US lithium sources are being stood up! Especially in that politically incorrect state of California which is supposedly a hellhole that would never approve something of the sort.

As for tariffs being a good way to support these industries citation needed! It's exactly the opposite type of policy for driving the investment that's needed. It's actually drastically collapsing all of the massive investment that was happening under Biden, in a complete disaster for the US. So I totally agree that you are not pro-US, but let's be honest about the disaster of tariffs.

> Wow this administration is f*ing batshit insane

It's reasons why this that I refuse to associate with Republicans in my daily life anymore. They are undeserving of respect or decency for how they continue to make our lives worse.

I think it depends on what kind of Republican someone is. I was raised in a conservative Christian community and later came out as a transgender woman. I've been surprised at how many people have been supportive of me since they got over the initial shock. I think knowing someone who's personally affected by this administration has an effect on people's opinions. There are plenty of people who are reactionary assholes that aren't worth talking to but there are people who still have an open heart. It's tiring, and I couldn't do it if I didn't have a supportive community to retreat to, but I have been able to sway some people. I don't judge anyone that doesn't want to put in the effort though.

I guess that is my core problem: no empathy default. Opinion can be changed only by anecdotal example person (“you are one of the good ones”).

Yeah, I've made friends with a bunch of (mostly ex- at this point) Republicans because we can agree (1) that other people matter and (2) structural inequalities exist and should not.

If we have that in common, then I find the difference in politics is mostly implementation and method. I'm happy to debate civic policy on the merits all day at that point.

The people who are drawn to the performatively cruel side are not rational actors and can't be reasoned with. I've tried.

You have my admiration for trying, especially in this political climate. I've had younger folk straight up not believe me when I say this is exactly the same playbook they ran against gay men in the 90s.

I live in Switzerland and Swiss post, which is the state owned postal service, does not ship to the US anymore.

Here is the official link:

https://www.post.ch/en/about-us/media/press-releases/2025/us...

Pretty crazy if you ask me

> I live in Switzerland and Swiss post, which is the state owned postal service, does not ship to the US anymore.

That is not what the link says. It says that goods consignments are not accepted -- which is not at all the same thing as "does not ship to the US anymore". The link explicitly says that they're continuing to ship letters, will continue to ship goods via another service, and (I can only presume) will continue to accept personal packages, since those aren't affected at all by these tariff changes.

The discussion on this topic on HN is far more heat than light.

Wait, ARE “personal packages” exempt? Doesn’t say that in the press release.

If I buy a Swiss watch (<$800) I’ll have to use DHL or UPS (though AFAIK, they also use national post in places) so I’m SOL.

But if my Swiss friend mails me a watch they can use Swiss Post still? Unclear.

Nothing has changed wrt the personal exemption. Imports under $800 are exempt (i.e. you always had to pay tariffs on an expensive watch). I don't know how many commenters here actually realize it, but the de minimis exemption changes only apply to commercial import, which is how Temu and others could send a $10 piece of crap from China to your doorstep.

I don't know if the Swiss post office has realized this, but it's true.

Edit: one bit of nuance (see my comment downthread with some of the actual laws and the EO) is that if you buy a watch from Chrono24 or something then it's more like the Temu use-case, and I think the personal exemption probably doesn't apply? But if you go to Switzerland and pick up a $799 watch and post it back or carry it on a plane, then there's no problem.

> the de minimis exemption changes only apply to commercial import

What exactly distinguishes a commercial import from a personal gift? How on Earth would the USPS adjudicate the difference?

Well, I'm not a customs agent, but I'd imagine they do it in the same way they adjudicate anything else: inspection. Some things get through by chance, of course, but not at a rate you'd want to rely on if you're a business.

In particular, if I walk into a random post office and send a one-off shipment internationally, the paperwork, origin, packaging, manifest, etc. is vastly different than what, say, Temu was doing to ship a $10 widget to US consumers at scale.

The rule you're talking about is not new, so presumably they've figured it out.

The $100 rule might not be new, but given that it was by far exceeded by the $800 de minimis exemption until now, it just didn’t matter.

> how Temu and others could send a $10 piece of crap from China to your doorstep.

The postal union treaty also externalized shipping costs.

Postal services (including the one I'm in) are going with the $100 gift limit, not the previous $800 de minimus.

If so, they're wrong.

None of them wants to have a whole bunch of consumer/small business shipments stuck in US customs for who knows how long it will take for the US to figure out exactly what tariffs it wishes to charge and how exactly it plans to collect them, so are leaving it to the higher-priced experts like DHL (who will only do it if you’re willing to pay for their Express service, not their Standard parcel service from Germany), UPS, or FedEx.

I doubt they’re conspiring to leave money on the table just to make Trump look bad.

If you're saying post offices around the world are wrong, it might be time to reevaluate your own statement for truthiness.

There's multiple countries that are now suspending shipments over $100 to the US. So either there is a huge fuckup in communications from the US to every other country or there's a fuckup in the process itself.

> If you're saying post offices around the world are wrong, it might be time to reevaluate your own statement for truthiness.

...or you could read the actual changes? Accusing people of lying is not cool when you clearly haven't even read the source material.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/susp...

Here's a summary by a law firm:

https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/united-states-suspen...

Specifically:

> The executive order declares that “[t]he duty-free de minimis exemption provided under 19 U.S.C. § 1321(a)(2)(C) shall no longer apply to any shipment of articles not covered by 50 U.S.C. § 1702(b) [enumerating narrow exceptions, such as for donations, informational materials and transactions ordinarily incident to travel] regardless of value, country of origin, mode of transportation, or method of entry.”

50 USC 1702(b)(4) lays it out explicitly:

> (4) any transactions ordinarily incident to travel to or from any country, including importation of accompanied baggage for personal use, maintenance within any country including payment of living expenses and acquisition of goods or services for personal use, and arrangement or facilitation of such travel including nonscheduled air, sea, or land voyages.

You don't need to go into this much detail, of course -- you could just Google it or ask an LLM -- Google's AI summary currently returns the correct answer.

https://www.google.com/search?q=does+trump+de+minimis+tariff...

How about another White House source explicitly listing a $100 personal gift exemption, from the same day as the one you quoted, one bullet point below one outlining how shipments under $800 would be subject to duties?

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-pr...

Here's the thing, nobody trusts what the administration or statutes say any more so entities like postal services in other countries are interpreting everything as a worst case scenario, instead of relying on good faith and mutual cooperation as they would previously.

Here's a summary by a law firm:

Normally that would be sufficient, but now we have an executive branch that tries strategies like personally suing all the federal judges in a district because it dislikes some of their rulings on one of the president's signature issues. CEOs of major corporations are literally giving the president lumps of gold to decorate the oval office. So you'll have to forgive me for discounting the value of legal opinions in general nowadays.

https://www.postnord.dk/nye-toldregler-i-usa/

> Som privatperson kan du fortsat toldfrit sende gaver med en maksimal værdi á $100

You can see the number and read the obvious words, it's not even necessary to translate it

OK. So what?

I'm not saying that post offices around the world don't make mistakes, or even make decisions that have nothing to do with the actual rules. I'm telling you what the rules are, right now.

You claimed Swiss post will continue to accept gift packages over $100, contrary to their press release.

Several people have explained that you are incorrect — Swiss and others are not accepting gift parcels over $100.

You then changed tack and said Swiss Post etc have the law wrong.

So what to you? It doesn't matter what details and uncertainties are in the law, it's resulted in most European countries setting a $100 limit, and at least Finland has suspended delivery entirely (even letters).

> You claimed Swiss post will continue to accept gift packages over $100, contrary to their press release.

I literally just quoted the statement, which was explicit that the change involved “goods consignments”. They are continuing to accept mail, in general, and are continuing to accept goods consignments via another service.

In other posts I showed you that there’s no change to US policy for personal exemption.

Neither fact is in tension with the other.

So again, to be clear: You're saying multiple post offices around the world are wrong? Are they acting in unison? Is this a conspiracy against Trump? Explain to me your process here. The EO doesn't mean shit as much as how things are enforced.

> So again, to be clear: You're saying multiple post offices around the world are wrong? Are they acting in unison?

Well, I don't keep track of what post offices around the world are doing, but if they're not following the rules that I just showed you, then yeah, they're wrong.

It wouldn't be the first time that bureaucratic organizations get things wrong.

> The EO doesn't mean shit as much as how things are enforced.

You really need to step back from the keyboard.

You were writing about Japan's $100 limit yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017265

> I'd suggest something like: "Japan Post stops accepting US shipments over $100."

I'm not sure what your point is? What Japan does or does not do has no bearing on the laws, which I just showed you.

I doubt you can interpret the rules better than the combined postal services of Europe and their legal departments, and so should you.

There's a tariff code and ways of labeling for US customs that should get you through customs with that. Customs is more about regulating commerce and secondarily about preventing contraband from getting through. Sending someone a gift Swiss Watch is probably still possible as long as you don't just YOLO it straight into the mail like it's going to a domestic address.

Same in Australia now, I believe.

Same here in Belgium, and many other European countries.

Same in the Netherlands too.

The vast majority of republicans caused this. You still need to talk to them and live with them. There will need to be a reckoning and they will need to own their mistakes, but you will need to move on. That’s the point of democracy.

They will never own their mistakes. That's the point of lack of democracy.

I'll associate but sorta make fun of them in conversation.

It's not the most productive but for all the pain their "opinions" create, the least I can do is make them feel the group believes their opinions to be ridiculous as the group all laughs.

I don't think they should get civility outside of the voters booth if they're uncivil within the booth.

> I refuse to associate with Republicans i

I understand

I urge you to reconsider

The purpose of the policies are to create division that can then be exploited.

So fight them by building bridges and maintaining relationships

It is hard work, but it is the most effective way to fight these people who would sacrifice general peace and prosperity for the sake of their personal greed

"When they go low, we go high" hasn't worked for a long time. They always find new ways to go lower and drag everyone with them.

'Fight them by collaborating as best you can' is an absolute losing strategy. The GOP isn't a normal political party any more, where you can appeal to long term interests, the back and forth of the political pendulum, national values and so on.

And polarization and alienating voters has worked out so well as a strategy for the Democrats for the past 12 years, has it?

Obama pointed straight at call-out culture as a losing strategy 5 years ago; NYT article: https://archive.is/Di4uG . The Democrats need to start divorcing themselves from "allies" like the parent poster immediately and loudly if they want to build a voter coalition strong enough to win the midterms.

Ah, bullshit. The Republicans have been playing that game for >30 years and just escalating steadily. Democratic efforts at bipartisanship are never reciprocated, whereas every time Democrats try to act unilaterally they are demonized.

Obama was wrong. Look at your own article, which quotes Tulsi Gabbard gushing about the need for a little more of that 'aloha spirit', and compare it with her actual behavior now that she's Director of National Intelligence in the current administration.

https://users.wfu.edu/zulick/454/gopac.html <- a 1995 strategy document from former GOP speaker Newt Gingrich's GOPAC.

> polarization and alienating voters has worked out so well as a strategy for the Democrats for the past 12 years, has it?

It's worked really well for the Republicans for decades. The Democrats just need to try harder.

And how well has pandering to the Republican-light voter base been going the last few elections?

Zohran Mamdani is doing so well for a reason: a decent part of the voter base is getting increasingly fed up by the center-right politics the Democrats have been selling. Young left-wing voters really don't like the fossils currently leading the Democratic party. If the Democrats don't start selling something better than "we aren't the Republicans", they are at risk of losing yet another generation to the next right-wing populist who claims he's going to "drain the swamp".

So no, call-out culture isn't the problem: the complete lack of left-wing values is.

> pandering to the Republican-light voter base

Its not that you have to appeal to them. Feel free to have policy positions and to stand on those. You might even get some people on the other side to agree with you on policy.

Instead, the losing strategy is doing what the OP is apparently doing, which is preemptively dismissing half the population, wholesale. Defining yourself as nothing, exempt as a hating half of the country is neither a real policy position, nor does it gain much.

> Zohran Mamdani is doing so well

He is doing well because he is standing on values. Not because he spends his time saying that he hates half of America. I'm sure he would be happy to get republican voters who move over to his side and agree with his policy positions.

have policy positions and to stand on those

As if activist conservatives won't simply lie about them. Yes, in an ideal world everything would be evaluated on the basis of policy by rational actors using objective criteria. In the world we live in bad faith abounds, and voters aren't very attracted to candidates who are long on integrity but allow themselves to used as a punching bag in some sort performative political martyrdom.

Obama spent most of his time in office trying to compromise with Republicans. The result was that they stubbornly resisted almost everything, and then elected Donald Trump in a fit of pique.

Polarization and alienationg and being offensive worked great for conservatives.

Democrats were nice and polite, always letting themselves be guilted into treating Republicans nicely. It was loosing strategy.

Conflating the people in charge with Republicans as a whole, and writing them collectively off, is a disservice to society and by extension, yourself.

The tl;dr of the current conundrum is that we have two corrupt political parties, and a system that's so rigged that it's nearly impossible to elect someone outside of them. Modern society's problems are complex to reason about and nearly intractable to solve. The people in power are not capable of even trying to reason about, let alone solve them.

I grew up in Nevada. Most of the people I grew up with are lowercase-L libertatian: they believe the government exists to arbitrate between the conflicting rights of individuals; that it should be as small as possible and let them do what they like unless they're harming someone else. Because of the aforementioned duopoly, these people tend to count as Republicans (in the style of Reagan). (This is true generally - the more geographically isolated a place is, the more it skews libertarian. The more urban, the more it skews liberal.)

The national Republican party was weak after Bush and got taken over by the Trump personality cult. The people I grew up with don't believe in instituting tariffs and arresting immigrants; yet if you force them to choose an R or D label, most of them are still going to count as R.

The world is a nuanced place. If you ignore that nuance and force everyone you're willing to converse with to pass your litmus test, you end up with two tribes ostriching themselves into bubbles of partisan-approved groupthink. That begets more yelling, less mutual understanding, and makes it even harder to solve problems. All of this empowers the extremists who control the major parties to continue making the world a worse place in service of their own power.

Yes, everything about politics sucks, and the people in charge are unfathomably awful. But if you refuse to share ideas with people you might disagree with, you're contributing to making that even more true.

> yet if you force them to choose an R or D label, most of them are still going to count as R.

this is to say they have a glowing endorsement of the trump agenda of authoritarian intervention in both social and economic issues. they could have stayed home, or voted for democrats who were pushing a more traditional conservative policy.

they also could have voted for local politicians who are against trump policies, but the local republicans are lockstep with trump too.

you need to reevaluate what the people in your community believe in. they mught say theyre libertarians, but their actions say theyre very favourable to criminal dictators. if they werent, they would have acted dofferently in elections, and the votes speak louder than words

> Conflating the people in charge with Republicans as a whole, and writing them collectively off

Maybe not "as a whole" but the majority of Republicans voted for this so at least those need to be written off. The rest have an opportunity to claim that they oppose the takeover by the personality cult. A great way to do it is to change their voter registration to anything else.

At this point, ever Republican has absolutely opted in to the current leader and platform.

> voted for this so at least those need to be written off.

Are you willing to write off so many people? That is what the "fascists" want. Division is a core technique of erasing liberty

> Are you willing to write off so many people? That is what the "fascists" want. Division is a core technique of erasing liberty

He told them what he wanted to do, over and over and over again. Now that he's doing what he told them he was going to do (again over and over and over again) they want some respect for their objections? They voted for him knowing what he was going to do. Exactly what is there about these fucking morons that I shouldn't write off?

I'm not sure what to tell you, I can't envision myself having a productive conversation with someone who, with sound mind, supports the person responsible for the Mar a Lago documents, January 6, and the Epstein cover up.

> Division is a core technique of erasing liberty

Seems like embracing a self-coup is also a core technique of erasing liberty? Maybe both of these statements are so broad that they are meaningless.

What about the people who just voted against a party infrastructure that 1) insisted that a vegetable was sharp as a tack, 2) that you can't have a primary no matter how much you want it, 3) that the guy who won in 2016 is definitely working for Russia, and 4) is probably just as involved in the Epstein situation as the red team?

You chose your lesser of 2 evils, and others chose theirs. There is no acceptable choice in American presidential politics.

I mean, exactly. If they live in a reality where Jan 6 is less evil than an incumbent president getting the automatic nomination, it's going to be hard to have a productive conversation.

If, in their minds, Harris and Trump are somehow equally implicated in the Epstein scandal, all I can say is "lol, have a good one".

You're trying to "both sides" here, but the problem is your talking points are fabricated and were never real. They're propaganda.

1. Biden was old and everyone knew it. He still got shit done. The idea that everyone thought he was great and fine is not true. That's what Republicans claimed people thought.

2. Primaries are not an official part of the election process. They are a party matter. The whole weird Republican meltdown over it is not based in fact or history.

3. Russia did interfere with the 2016 elections. There's a whole congressional report on it, by a majority Republican committee. [0]

4. I don't even know what this means. If someone did crimes, they should be held responsible. The idea that we don't want that is, frankly propaganda.

[0] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/...

Trying to call the democrats corrupt on the same level of the trump administration is fucking rich.

It's like saying that both antarctica and oregon are 'cold'. Fucking stop already.

The Republican leaders could have removed Trump from office after Jan 6.

All those traditional conservatives and "lowercase-L libertatians" could speak up now, and do something about the ongoing fascist takeover, but they are not. American democracy is probably doomed, we will find out in 2026 whether we can have fair mid-term elections.

The whole party is corrupt. Lindsey Graham was loudly anti-Trump until Trump won, and now he's just as loudly a Trump sycophant. The establishment cares about its own power more than it cares about doing what's right. (That indictment is true of both parties, but I'm specifically talking about Republicans here.)

I'm not defending people who voted for Trump. I'm saying if your response is "then I'm going to pretend you don't exist," this is only going to get worse.

Normal people need to be able to work together to find common ground for us to have anything resembling a healthy society.

It makes me sad that Hacker News, the place that emphasizes thoughtful curiosity in its post/comment guidelines, has lately often devolved into an echochamber indistinguishable from Reddit when anything remotely political comes up. Anything more nuanced then "Trump is evil and Republicans are stupid" gets downvoted, which is a microcosm of the whole problem that put them in power.

speak up, we can barely hear you in the top rows of the grandstands

voters have essentially zero influence over policy and overwhelmingly vote on "vibes". also most people don't care about policy at any level of detail until it directly affects them. is this good? no. true nonetheless. much of why i'm not much of a fan of democracy and i think it's a sham.

i don't think contributing to increased polarization, especially at the level of your neighbors, is something to be proud of.

The Republican media-political machine is by far the most competitive, and they have been punishing bipartisan behavior since the 60s. Such actions are imitation, and therefore the best flattery.

The Repub model is being replicated globally too. It just works.

Maybe you could have hid behind the "vibes" line the first time around, but not anymore. We're way past where we could realistically give people the benefit of the doubt.

> voters have essentially zero influence over policy and overwhelmingly vote on "vibes"

The "vibes" that attract conservative voters are fucking disgusting.

yeah it's what publicans had to deal with for years when they were seeing their jobs vaporize and we just said ' well globalization ' but they didn't stop associating with crats.

c'mon. IT outsourcing was done 100% to drive shareholder value, not to improve globalization. Don't drink your own kool aid. The party and its members engage in an incredible mutual hypocrisy with each other. It's all facile BS.

How many more cycles do you think you will need to realize it is both sides, in fact it is above both sides?

Do you think it will finally click after 2 more cycles, that's 8 years or so?

You will be your current age + 8, maybe you can then start saying "yeah man both sides suck, it is as if there is something above it that controls them both and we are made to support them as if we're supporting our favorite soccer team"?

I'm no apologist for bad policy or lack of rigor on the side of the democrats, but the "Both sides" argument is tired and not particularly persuasive. What the Trump administration is doing is objectively unprecedented, and the republican complicity in a degradation of the separation of powers is not something that has been attempted by "Both sides". Trump certainly has raised the bar on presidential power, but in context, republicans under Bush and through Obama's term have set a standard of the erosion of important balances to power.

In regards to my ability to "realize" I suppose I'll keep myself to the facts. At present, I don't see a set of functional equivalency in each party's extravagances.

??? Republicans were also a huge driver of offshoring manufacturing, not just the neoliberal Democrats. What are you talking about?

Indeed. Neocons were all about helping large corporations make a quick buck, which included free trade (except for a few critical industries) and offshoring. It shifted with the tea party, whey the GOP became a nationalist populist party.

Americans now hate capitalism. If you predicted this 40 years ago people would have called you crazy.

That's silly. What's actually happening is far more nuanced and interesting: the parties have flipped.

For years, Democrats were generally aligned with labor, and broadly opposed to trade agreements -- remember that Hillary Clinton campaigned on rejecting the TPP [1], and it was unusual that Trump agreed with her, taking the issue away. Now, suddenly, the left is on the other side of the issue, because the current executive wants to restrict trade. It's nothing but realpolitik.

Also, not that long ago, it was the left that was advocating tariffs. For example, Obama in 2009 [2]. Admittedly nothing as sweeping or rushed as what is going on now, but still far from the party of free trade.

[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/hillary-clinton-trade...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna32808731

This simply isn't true.

Democrats still broadly align themselves with labor (the many people getting the stuff done)

Republicans still broadly align themselves with rich CEOs (the few people profiting off the backs of the labor).

It has been this way for at least 40 years.

Labor vs. Trade ≠ Tariffs vs. Free Trade — Democrats’ historic opposition to trade deals like NAFTA and the TPP was about protecting workers from job outsourcing and race-to-the-bottom standards. That’s not the same thing as imposing blanket tariffs as a blunt weapon in foreign policy. Conflating the two is lazy at best, dishonest at worst.

Obama’s 2009 tire tariffs were a narrow safeguard against China dumping, consistent with WTO rules, and widely viewed as a targeted response to an actual violation. That’s worlds apart from sweeping, across-the-board tariffs used as political theater.

And if it’s all “realpolitik” like you say, then your whole point collapses: by your logic, both parties shift based on circumstance — so stop pretending there’s some tidy ideological flip when the reality is far messier.

> Labor vs. Trade ≠ Tariffs vs. Free Trade — Democrats’ historic opposition to trade deals like NAFTA and the TPP was about protecting workers from job outsourcing and race-to-the-bottom standards.

OK, so we agree on the facts -- historically, the Democrats were aligned with labor, and opposed to trade. They had absolutely no qualms about opposing trade when they felt it was in their political interests to do so.

> Obama’s 2009 tire tariffs were a narrow safeguard against China dumping

I mean...you can attempt to diminish it in scale if you like, but the fact is that the left has historically been pro-labor and anti-trade, and the right has been pro-trade and anti-labor. Now the right controls the government, and they're clearly anti-trade.

They've flipped.

Your 1st source [https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/hillary-clinton-trade...] points out that many (myself included) contend Clinton was lying her face off to draw support away from those had felt burned by Democratic treatment of Bernie Sanders and his campaign.

Clinton was VOCIFEROUSLY pro-TPP for quite a while, and "changed" her stance as the race with Trump tightened. I believe she was a bald-faced liar.

The Clintons were ur-Third Way democrats. Financialization of the economy and globalization were the stock-in-trade (puns intended) of 1990s-2010s Democrats (at the Federal level) until Bernie came along.

Current administration is not aligned with labor and poor people are the one who will pay the most.

It makes complete sense for the left to oppose this. And it is completely consistent with position of "i want these smart selective predictable tariffs". It would not be consistent with what is happening now

> Current administration is not aligned with labor and poor people are the one who will pay the most.

You might want to tell labor. I just listened to an hour-long podcast with the Teamsters leader, where he revealed that over half of their members supported Trump in the most recent election:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-unions-went-for-tr...

Ask them what they think now.

No, the parties haven't flipped. Republicans and lobbyists just keep dragging the Overton window to the right and mainstream dems just follow along for most of the ride.

Biden, who actually walked a picket line, is probably among the most proworker presidents in American history (certainly in my lifetime) and that's sad because the bar is so low. Trump, and his litany of judges, are all very much anti-worker and pro big business. He is trying to dismantle the NLRB at their behest!

Yes, they have. I just gave you two documented examples, and I didn't try that hard to find them.

As far as Biden goes, you do realize that he didn't roll back the tariffs that Trump 1 put on China, right?

> Biden, who actually walked a picket line, is probably among the most proworker presidents in American history (certainly in my lifetime) and that's sad because the bar is so low.

I said, at the very top, that the Democrats were historically aligned with labor. They had no qualms about enacting trade barriers or opposing trade agreements in order to appease that constituency. It is only since -- well, this year, basically -- that they have become free trade evangelists.

It's realpolitik. Democrats see a wedge issue, and they're riling up the base to exploit it, regardless of the party's own historical actions.

These examples don't prove your point though, so they were easily countered. You even conceded this yourself when you admitted that Obama's tariffs were "nothing as sweeping or rushed as what is going on now".

I'm not sure who is arguing against ever using tariffs in general. Obama's, like Trump's tariffs against China, they were at least planned and somewhat targeted for a specific purpose. The argument against Trump's tariffs this time around has always been they are capricious.

> These examples don't prove your point though, so they were easily countered.

I guess I missed the part where you "countered" them. Saying "that's not true" is not an argument.

> You even gave up the point when admit Obama's tariffs were "nothing as sweeping or rushed as what is going on now".

I didn't "give up the point" -- I can admit when something is different in scale while still nothing the fundamental shift in historical stance.

Some more examples for you:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/politics/china-tariffs-biden-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/business/energy-environme...

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-steel-dumping-2014071...

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2017/0...

Didn‘t know Nixon and Reagan were Democrats.

Maybe you realize that neither do something for the working class but the big corporations and billionaires.

The ones who try are labeled socialists.

Haven't people been saying this for a decade now? The democrats purity tests make this test for copper look like child's play.

So your claim (based on your link downthread) is that

- new regulation changing trade in a way that companies are struggling to follow

is child's play compared to

- a memo from a think-tank suggesting a particular choice of words

?

I’m genuinely interested in which “purity tests” you are referring to. I’m all for bi-partisan ridicule if it’s warranted.

https://nypost.com/2025/08/25/opinion/dems-nix-45-woke-words...

Thank you for sharing.

Would you agree that Third Way’s positions and suggestions should be weighted differently than official federal government stances and actions?

An opinion article from the NY Post. Neat.

Isn't it better to argue the content than ad hominem the source?

The content is also garbage (I read this a few days ago). They collected examples of the wackiest, most tortured language that they could (phrases like 'birthing person') and ascribed them to Democrats in general as if the party had some sort of crisis of cognition. The truth is that ivory-tower euphemisms like this are not common political currency, but ham-fisted attempts at communication by individuals or tiny groups with little or no political capital.

Tabloid trash publications like the NY Post are not honest messengers, but rather seek to amplify things like this using synecdoche to suggest that they're representative of the median Democrat. If the poster above wanted to showcase the underlying ideas, they could have just linked to the Third way website and paraphrased their argument directly, but instead they decided to share the gutter press version. I discount tabloid newspapers the same way I discount left-leaning outlets like Democracy Now! or Truthout - they might be right some of the time but the general level of bias outweighs their utility as providers of factual information, which is readily available from less biased sources.

Hold on I will have an LLM write a 40-page rebuttal and when you don't read it I'll accuse you of ad homineming the AI.

That source lost its right to the benefit of the doubt long ago.

Donald Trump did get elected about a decade ago, so sure?

Indeed. The worst purity test to fail is being an ex-Democrat.

2-layer or 4-layer board? It makes a difference, you know.

... you're surprised?

It's been ten years.

>"Wow this administration is f*ing batshit insane. "

I would not limit it to "this administration". Bureacracy tends to fuck thing up royally regardless of which imbecile they're currently serving.

I thought the criticism was that it was slow moving and thereby resistant to abrupt fuck ups.

Sounds like a non issue in this case, we are talking about grams of metal? You are engineers, provide an estimation, pay the tariffs on 2 grams of metals and move on.

Is certificate of analysis anything more than a pdf made with word with your signature on it?

The amount of copper on a PCB is only impossible to estimate if you don't try. Otherwise, you take the PCB copper thickness that you paid for, multiply it by the surface area, and multiply it by a guess of how much remains after etching.

It's not that easy according to the post:

> U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product. This is a prime example of unnecessary complexity in international trade.

Also why would they go through all that trouble? Easier to not sell there anymore.

Also why would they go through all that trouble? Easier to not sell there anymore.

I don't agree with it, but isn't that ostensibly the end goal? That is, to force/encourage the manufacturing of goods in the US, rather than importing them. Of course, the metal itself still needs to enter the US either way.

Sure, that could be the eventual goal. But for that to happen, we need to ramp up manufacturing in thousands of sectors: not just the device, and not just everything it contains, but also the machines that make each of the components, the machines that make the parts for those machines, the raw materials for each...

If this was a serious economic policy, it would have started small—perhaps a 5% tariff, to take effect in six months. Then, promise to ramp it up (say an additional 5% every year).

Also, it's a weird way to do "hidden" tariffs, in addition to the official ones that are bad enough.

E.g. if he wanted to tariff electronic devices, why not tariff them directly, instead of those weird mental gymnastics?

> to force/encourage the manufacturing of goods in the US, rather than importing them.

There are two mutually exclusive stated goals. One is, as you said, onshoring tech manufacturing to the USA [1]. The other stated goal is to eliminate income tax and replace it with income from tariffs [2][3]. To play these out on their own terms: if the first goal succeeds, then import volume would drop, and total tariff income would be too low to replace income taxes. If the first goal fails, then tariff income would be high enough to replace income taxes. IDK I haven't done the napkin math and I suspect neither have they.

[1]: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trump-says-his-tariffs-...

[2]: https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/trump-proposes-abolishment...

[3]: https://www.foxbusiness.com/video/6371514396112

Going with Fox Business links to avoid accusations of bias.

Yeah, I could also cut off my hand in order to resolve an itch on it. End goal met!

> otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product.

This seems like it could also lead to absurd situations. If a device contained both, would customs pretend it was simultaneously 100% made out of copper and 100% made out of steel and apply both tariffs?

> This seems like it could also lead to absurd situations. If a device contained both, would customs pretend it was simultaneously 100% made out of copper and 100% made out of steel and apply both tariffs?

Yes, because it benefits the “here’s how much extra revenue our copper tariffs generate in 2025” sound bites for the Administration to tout (even if they are fabricated numbers based on nonsensical assumptions.)

Even before these changes, there were absurdities where items cross a border with one step of the manufacturing process missing because in one direction it's an unfinished good that has no tariff, and in the other direction it's a finished good coming from a preferred country with a lower or no tariff.

Yes they would 200% of product won't be a problem for them.

Furthermore as I know customs, the moment you will start making stuff up in a too brazen way, they will just use Google, search some average price of products and use that instead what you are declaring.

Sometimes it looks like they are getting a cut from amount of tariff they successfully scalp from you.

The situation is already absurd, what's a little more absurdity.

It’s easiest to not make any money in general. Per capita Americans consumer more stuff than almost everyone else. It’s a huge and highly lucrative market and will remain such for at least some time still.

Losing a significant proportion of their revenue can easily bring down plenty of businesses.

The two statements in the OP seem opposed to each other. Why would one need to estimate if an estimate isn't sufficient?

Why do you assume the person selling the PCB is the one who designed and ordered its manufacture?

Olimex sells kits, kits made by others.

They don't know how much copper is in the MPS430F5438 because Texas Instruments made the MPS430F5438.

I think that's fair.

It's also fair for a company to say 'f- that, even just doing that eats away at our bottom line, we'll concentrate on more profitable markets' (which is the intention I guess. Go and build it in USA,USA,USA).

Even if you build in USA, you'll likely still need to import materials or pay a premium for domestic.

even at a 100% import on the mats, the actual end product would only go up 25 cents - the labor will get us- but that's the point. merican jobs

Great! Now prove it.

The problem isn't creating a reasonable estimate, anyone can do that. Most cheap consumer PCBs are going to be 2-layer FR4 with 1oz/sq. ft. of copper, minus some etched away, with negligible copper in parts like chips. That indeed should get you fairly close.

But there are also 32-layer PCBs, and even PCBs with a solid copper core. And your PCB could be filled with copper inductors! Similarly, it could also be a solid aluminum-core PCB. If I were a malicious customs officer, I would insist that the only valid upper bound is a 100% copper PCB, which is also 100% aluminum, and 100% whatever else. Don't want to pay that? No problem, just provide a certified lab analysis report!

Simple things rapidly get complicated when the goal is to frustrate the process as much as possible. You don't live in a modern economy focused on global trade anymore, you are now living in a Kafka book.

multiply it by a guess

There's your problem. It enables selective enforcement, because the authorities can decide at any time "if you're off by 0.1% we'll consider you in violation".

The Swiss Post has also stopped shipments to the US. [1]

Your only option now is to use FedEx or UPS which cost a significant amount more.

[1] https://www.post.ch/en/about-us/media/press-releases/2025/us...

Japan Post has stopped shipments as well https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/information/2025/0825_01_e...

Serious question: Do you ever actually ship things to the US using La Poste? I've NEVER shipped things to the US using La Poste, although the fact that I work in finance might have something to do with it.

I have many times.

The Norwegian postal service as well [1].

[1] https://www.nrk.no/urix/posten-stopper-sendinger-til-usa-1.1...

My mother-in-law shipped us homemade jam from Slovakia. It's been stuck in customs for 3 weeks. The agents must be working diligently to assay the canning jar lids.

Dang, there goes my plan to smuggle RTX 3090s into the country in jelly jars!

(For government agents: The above is a "joke", you surely have been introduced to this concept before they gave you the government brain chip, if not, here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke)

Jokes are only for L80 and above citizens.

“What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

protectionists tariffs are an interesting gun with which to shoot one’s own foot off. Good for China though. They get to take over as the central trading entity, and they didn’t have to do anything! We shot our own foot off.

Both stable and genius

All scandinavic countries have stopped shipment to USA due to this (except gifts valued < $100)

> otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product.

Do I understand this correctly that if I have a 1kg product that costs $1000... the US is trying to charge me a $1000 tariff on at most $10 [1] worth of metal?

[1] Copper is the most expensive of those metals at roughly $10/kg

If you don't go through the work of detailing your materials, then yes, they have to assume worse case as they are not going to go through each package individually and compute an accurate number for you.

That seems exceedingly reasonable.

I wonder who will flinch first. I highly doubt domestic manufacturing can scale up fast enough to meet demand but It'd be fun to be proven wrong.

You're assuming domestic manufacturing will scale up... tariffing the raw inputs to manufacturing seems unlikely to do this.

also, the tariffs have changed very rapidly for a bit now, so you can't really make multi year investments based on them

I have yet to see any compelling argument for the expected source of labor for the scale-up in manufacturing. We're going the other way and reducing our labor force.

In a country where people were ready to riot when service was slow at Chili's in the summer of '20, policy aimed at reducing restaurant employment seems risky.

I wonder if you could weigh the FR4 material, weigh the final result, and subtract them to get the weight of everything else? It would be better than being taxed on the entire weight.

This whole tariff circus boils down to regulatory capture by manufacturers at the 10+-figure market cap scale. Olimex (and other small and medium businesses) can't reasonably be expected to calculate the exact material composition of their products (much less their suppliers' products); the only people who can are on the scale of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Google whose volumes can amortize the cost of doing so on a per-product basis (and who have probably already done that analysis as part of their process control).

We’re living through a political revolution centralizing state and economic power. It’s almost like the pendulum swung away from the Soviet system and now we’re swinging back.

Yeah, seize the means of production, indeed.

Funny that this time this started from the right side of the political spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

Horseshoe theory is real, but there's also the fact that politics has more than one axis.

Authoritarianism is the common denominator; only the details vary.

Makes sense.

If you think you have the best idea, the natural next move is to force everyone to follow that best idea, no room for disagreement or alternatives.

This pops up everywhere, everywhere ideology is involved in decisions.

A recent guest (historian) made that point on the Triggernomitry podcast.

Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hitler- they were all 'idealists.'

They were in it to improve the human (or some subset thereof) condition. And they weren't going to let anyone get in their way of making things better!

Idealists in the sense of a simplistic worldview.

It is worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf-bSAnW_E0 but it itself is a somewhat simplistic take.

That guest is Dominic Sandbrook, one half of the excellent "Rest is History" podcast.

You can't make an omellete without breaking a few eggs, after all. That was Lenin, supposedly.

edit: spelling of "one"

It's probably more accurate to say they were reductionists -- it's easy to imagine an ideal system if you ignore the complexities of reality.

Which is why they all failed.

I bet it's related to the tendency for narcissism where you believe that you alone have all the right answers.

This is what's scary about Elon Musk talking about 'sustainable abundance'.

> politics has more than one axis.

The "political compass" has two dimensions: left/right horizontally and authoritarian/libertarian vertically.

Unfortunately "political compass" is also for the quadrant memes: https://en.meming.world/wiki/Political_Compass (which has some good commentary on the compass and great examples).

And there's the Nolan Chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart which is even more confusing. The word "liberal" is not used in New Zealand much, although perhaps the US meaning is taking hold. Also centrist here is unclear so the Nolan Chart makes no sense to me.

there is not one intelligent credible person on planet earth who endorses horseshoe theory. It’s utter nonsense designed to try and discredit anyone outside of a narrow neoliberal window.

Had exactly the effect that I’d expect. Hollowed out every aspect of society and helped lead to exactly the sort of extreme government you don’t want.

Okay, click on the wikipedia link and you can find a reasonable number of credible sources the article cites.

You can follow citations from these citations to find primary search that shows quite a bit of support for it in academic political science.

I believe when you look at Germany, the Far Right party is much more popular in former Soviet strongholds (East Germany outside Berlin)

If you overload right to mean authoritarian, for sure.

Good to remember that pretty much all leftist governments had to pivot toward authoritarianism 'for the greater good'.

I don’t understand what you’re even trying to say here.

AfD is objectively far more popular in the former east Germany. Look at a map of votes, it’s clear as day. The borders are exact. They are not a left wing party, not at all. They are a far right party.

It makes sense that the the economically struggling former communist areas would be both more drawn to extreme parties and have a distaste for the left.

> It makes sense that the the economically struggling former communist areas would be both more drawn to extreme parties and have a distaste for the left.

That: "have a distaste for the left" is extremely wrong, because before the AfD, the far-left parties which traced their history back to the SED (the socialist party of the GDR (East Germany)) were very popular there, much more so than in West Germany.

> They are not a left wing party, not at all. They are a far right party.

They are a populist semi big tent party as well. They are not particularly coherent but there is some overlap between some of their policies and what some in the far-left might support (Euroscepticism, the Euro and such)

Oh wow, what some of the far left might support.

Totally erases their literal nazi ideologies.

> erases

No, hence horseshoe theory.

You are the one arguing for 'erases' here. Given the horseshoe theory is valid, it seems completely on point for these assholes to have some far left ideas. Doesn't make them not nazis.

AfD is literally a shitty copy-paste of UDC/SVP (Switzerland). Shitty because they lack the one big advantage SVP had in the 90s: Big money backing it. If AfD had at least ONE German billionaire seriously backing it they would already be in power.

> erases their literal nazi ideologies

If you say so. Seems like a rather incoherent view though…

Fact is that there is a lot of overlap between far and far right voters in ex-socialist parts of Eastern Europe. Just compare the supporters of BSW and AFD in Germany..

If you want the most absurd example this was a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevik_Party

Yes, far right parties are very often more popular in areas that have seen more economic hardship.

East Germany was economically crippled for the latter half of the 20th century under Soviet rule. It's started to recover, a bit, but it's slow going. That makes the people there more willing to listen to anyone who will lie to them about a) who's responsible, and b) how easy it is to solve their problems.

Don't forget about Wagenknecht though. Very conservative socially, very left wing economically.

Read the "Academic studies and criticism" section of the very page you linked. Horseshoe theory is nothing but a bunch of baloney, that is actually harmful to understanding the current situation.

No, fascist consolidation of state and businesses has little to do with communism and "seizing the means of production".

> fascist consolidation of state and businesses has little to do with communism and "seizing the means of production".

Yeah sure they are very different except for the consolidation of state and business that every fascist and every communist state has attempted :)

What's your point? Why do you refuse to learn about the actual reasons we are in this mess? Do you not want to expand on your very surface level understanding of politics and ideology?

The mechanisms behind both ideologies are different, and the outcomes are different too.

It wasn't called National Socialism for nothing.

Just like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is well-known to be a bastion of democracy.

Right: Socialism only for those who were worthy. Those considered to be "true" parts of the German Nation.

Everyone else gets to be exploited, deported, or just plain murdered.

First thing Hitler did was arrest the socialists and communists, then make unions illegal.

Not that I agree with the comment above but that means nothing at all on itself.

One of the first things the Socialist government did was violently put down a communist coup. The communists would have abolished democracy ASAP and purged the socialists if they ever took power.

Fact is that extremist movements will crack down on anyone that tries competing with them for power. Ideological affinity hardly matters.

Please name, say, three elements of NAZI policies that were socialist. To my knowledge, the only thing that's even a tiny bit socialist was Hitler's plan for some sort of central bank, because of course he saw banking and loans as part of some Jewish conspiracy.

Hitler was an O.G. troll, taking over the Workers' Party and renaming it with the word Socialism purely to aggravate his political opponents. He hated socialists, communists, and anarchists.

> three elements of NAZI policies that were socialist

Government control over transportation, newspapers, and other industries that should ideally not choose profits over quality of service. Communalized non-profit grocery stores. Sounds familiar?

Strict measures to ban or nationalize war profiteering, high interest rates, capital heavy business models allowing rent seeking. Explicit profit sharing required by large companies.

Welfare state with free healthcare and expanded pension funds.

Sometimes 'bad' people have the same 'good' ideas you have. Now sure why this is so difficult to grasp.

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This is a great podcast on philosophy in general, but this episode on Technofeudalism https://open.spotify.com/episode/5SjdkYzdSp6tHTdD2o1OAe?si=8... talks directly about the state of Big Tech taking over the capitalist free market. The same as is happening with large scale industries like you mention.

I knew without clicking this would be Philosophize This.

I friggin love that podcast, and keep recommending it to friends. The only problem I have with it is that I like to listen to it while driving, but I can't stop to take notes every five minutes.

(Small anecdote: A while back I was listening to the series on anarchy, as a philosophical view questioning the power of the state, and in the middle of the episode I got stopped by the police. Which, especially when driving in Bavaria, can happen randomly without any reason, for those confused.)

This podcast is one of my favorites to listen to while out riding my bike. Something about the cardio + his way of breaking down the core meaning behind philosophers' works is just a very edifying and enjoyable experience.

I had no idea who Byung-Chul_Han was before listening to this podcast- he has a lot of interesting things to say about the current state of our capitalist society. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byung-Chul_Han )

It makes me so happy that he's still going. I remember listening to him when I was like 15, and now I'm way older...

It's a fascist coup, and they're tidying up the loose ends.

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Fascism is the world's most evil people lying to the world's most stupid people about what fascism is.

Huh? Can you expand on that? Is fascism completely devoid of meaning then?

What he was doing is called a joke a la The Devil's Dictionary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil's_Dictionary

We're not supposed to get political here, but my comment was more observation rather than accusation.

As for communism -- if you think the Dems are communists I recommend you research what communism really means.

Disclaimer: I'm non-partisan and abhor partisan politics, but I do think the Constitution is a worthy document to try to adhere to as best possible.

No, it’s a reaction to capitalism failing. It’s capitalism eating itself.

> It’s capitalism eating itself.

I thought that was kind of a definition, or at least broad explanation, of fascism.

It's beyond that. There's a strong element of White Nationalism and Christo-Fascism at play as well. The proponents make their intentions very clear, albeit without the self-labeling as such.

"Both" were true "classically" in early 20th century Europe in the sense that capitalism being in crisis drove the rise of the communist movement. And then the fascist movement (and other strongly reactionary movements) rose in reaction / fear of that.

Today's pseudo-fascism in the form of Trumpism is something else. More of a reaction to a) climate crisis and the potential/growing crisis in the energy sector and b) and identity politics/culture-wars stuff.

Slightly different location.

> This whole tariff circus boils down to regulatory capture by manufacturers at the 10+-figure market cap scale.

Not just manufacturers but retailers/distributors too.

Want to be a small time importer/retailer and do international sales online? Good luck!

This is nothing new. The number of hoops a former employer had to jump through to export, from the US into the EU, what amounted to a steel bar with some brackets on it was almost worth more in salary hours than the entire value of the sale.

> The number of hoops a former employer had to jump through to export, from the US into the EU

Makes perfect sense to make ordinary Americans pay tariff/taxes on imports in return. Sucks to be them.

Not so. There exist BOM analysis tools which are free for manufacturers of products to use - you just upload your parts list and your suppliers, and it works down the list either requesting info from the supplier or using pre-supplied info. The suppliers in turn contact their suppliers, etc. - it’s the suppliers who ultimately pay a few hundred bucks a year for access. At the end of the process you know exactly what’s in your doodad, get a materials compliance declaration, don’t poison any kids, etc.

This is something this manufacturer should already be doing, otherwise it’s unclear how they’re complying with RoHS or REACH.

If only people had access to spreadsheet software and affordable desktop computers, they could easily do these calculations.

You know that you can't do it on your own, but you need to have certification for that?

> U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product.

You can self certify unless it's a highly regulated import like pharma, food, or medical equipment.

Self-certification generally doesn't mean simply saying "trust us, we won't lie to you". They still expect you to be able to hand over a bunch of laboratory reports proving that you have actually tested your stuff.

The main difference is that with self-certification they will accept reports from your own in-house laboratory, rather than demanding reports from an independent pre-vetted testing lab.

Same with paperwork: you can make your own rather than having it made by an independent auditor - but you better still be able to back it up!

This seems… quite reasonable.

That is not how this works. No one can say - we used spreadsheet software and investigated ourselves and we estimate we use x mg of copper. Governments ask for something like a metal spectrometer analysis of components. They might even say each batch needs to be analysed and we trust analysis from spectrometers manufactured and/or operated in US. Each condition raising the price for certificate/analysis even more.

The details are here: https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...

And

https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCBP/bulletins/...

And you use the ACE system to set everything up and report origins of melting, etc and it computes the fees for you:

https://www.cbp.gov/trade/automated

From your first link:

> Does CBP require an aluminum certificate of analysis to be filed at the time of entry? > > At this time, CBP does not require an aluminum certificate of analysis to be filed at the time of entry. CBP, however, >>> can <<< request the importer to provide an aluminum certificate of analysis if CBP needs one to ensure compliance with the entry requirements pertinent to the item being imported.

In other words: they usually trust people to file their paperwork correctly, but reserve the right to demand lab reports when they suspected foul play. Filing lab paperwork in advance is not needed, however.

As mentioned in Olimex's blog post: US customs is now starting to ask everyone for a Certificate of Analysis. Paperwork isn't enough anymore, even when it is an obviously harmless product which has been imported many times in the past without any issues. If you can't hand over a lab report, it's not getting in.

And you can still self certify. Just follow the instructions on ACE.

FYI, poste italiane - Italian mail service - stopped shipping to USA too today or yesterday, if I had to guess other eu mail services have already followed or will follow soon

The goal is to encourage people to make things in the US and they are plugging the large hole first.

It will be interesting to see if they also apply more customs scrutiny to checked luggage for air travel when returning to the United States. Right now they are not. But, if you go to places like Costa Rica, which has had high tariffs on many imports for years, they make you scan all of your luggage when you enter the country and will stop and scrutinize what you are bringing in. CR will also periodically have raids on retailers who obtained goods that circumvented customers via things like clandestine border crossings.

There will be some secondary challenges with enforcement of this as some decide to roll the dice, import illegally and hope to not get caught. If there is enough of a price difference between buying something with a high tariff in the US vs locally I can also see some people travelling to Mexico or Canada to buy some higher dollar smaller items if the cost savings offsets the trip.

Organized crime also thrives arbitraging the tariffs by smuggling imports. The Sinaloa cartel may discover there's more money to be made smuggling copper compared to Colombia's finest.

that's one way of bringing Mexican jobs to America.

and as the experience of every democratic developing country has shown, all this will do is create a new layer of corruption where smuggled goods will be let in for a bribe, while the infant industry strategy largely falls flat due to the above black market workarounds and lax enforcement standards.

Let's do the math for a raspberry pi sized board:

Dimensions: 85 mm x 56 mm

Area: 4760 mm^2 or 7.38 in^2

Copper: 4 x 1oz layers

Copper Weight: 0.205 oz = 0.013lb

Copper price: 0.013 * $4.50/lb = $0.0585

And that doesn't include the copper removed by etching. So if they paid a 6c tariff on each raspberry pi board, they'd be overpaying.

Can they generate a certificate claiming each board contains no more than this amount of copper, overpay the tariff by a few pennies, and carry on?

Repeating my comment. That is not how this works.

Governments ask for something like a metal spectrometer analysis of components. They might even say each batch needs to be analyzed and we trust analysis from spectrometers manufactured and/or operated in US. Each condition raising the price for certificate/analysis even more.

Or directly from the post

> U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product.

Do they have to do this each time they change the composition of the board? What about if they just move/change the layout of the copper traces?

Yes, that's how the math usually works with properly-functioning global trade.

Now prove that your math is correct. Can you hand over paperwork proving that it is indeed a 4-layer PCB and not a 32-layer one? Can you prove the 1oz copper isn't secretly 2oz? Can you prove it isn't a copper-core PCB? For all we know that PCB is a 1.6mm-thick solid chunk of copper!

And what about all the parts on it? Do the manufacturers of all the components on top of that PCB provide an exact per-element writeup? How many grams of copper are in that power inductor, or the ethernet jack's magnetics?

We're still not entirely convinced your paperwork checks out. Could you please have a testing lab run it through a mass spectrometer, just to remove any doubt?

Yes, we know it's a $1.50 board. No, we don't care. Yes, you really have to do it again for the next one-off shipment - you didn't go through the proper year-long type approval process, after all.

only if they pay a few thousand dollars to certify that for every single board they sell.

It was easiest to do some napkin math than throwing their hands in the air and writing a blog post.

I suspect this is more about politics than it is about international trade. If you've ever done imports you know that there's a substantial amount of paperwork and compliance, demanding that products state their composition doesn't seem extraordinary at all. Maybe OP should try consulting what regulations food exporters must follow.

Congress should be setting tariff rules. Regardless of your political philosophy, these tariffs will crash the economy and move innovation out of the US.

Congress does set tariff rules. Tell Congress to start enforcing its authority and end the fake “emergency” that supposedly justifies this executive override, otherwise it doesn’t really matter who’s nominally in charge.

I mean, someone will get rich off that, which may be all that person cares about.

Deutsche Post/DHL Standard shipping to the US from Germany is off for all commercial goods as well as gifts worth more than $100 (85 EUR); DHL Express is still accepting shipments, but is far more expensive - going from 27 EUR for a 2kg parcel to 82 EUR.

I know this is besides the point but this is probably one of the ugliest website I've seen in a long while. Why would someone choose a dirty-yellow background :sob:

Economy is the realm of unseen connections and unexpected consequences. If USA's tariffs look obviously troublesome, I'm probably just seeing the tip of the shark fin of this black swan as it swims under the water. I have this feeling in my bones that this is gonna bring the mother of all recessions, and not only to USA.

Good. I have removed the USA from my mental map, with its petty little money hungry king. In the meantime China delivers on promises, in time, high quality gadgets, toys and metalworks, with excellent customer service and care.

Thanks for sharing.

How can anyone actually defend these silly, self-defeating tariff maneuvers?

It has been pretty challenging to ship to the US already for a few weeks. Unless it’s a gift with a value under 100 USD most EU postal services will no longer let you mail to the US due to the customs chaos.

It’s really frustrating if you need to ship stuff around as an individual.

Why are many shippers still getting everything through? Are they using tech like Flexport to handle the complexity?

Is this a situation where if you abide by the letter of the law without tech it doesn’t work, where if you use software and/or route through nations that already have no tariff deals with US you get your items through?

I just bought (last week) an EEG kit from Europe to US for personal sleep studies. It has similar metals that you indicate. There was no issue in my shipper getting it through. There was no tariff added. There was no certificate of analysis.

There's a comment asking about this on the blog that they replied to:

> Mouser and Digikey have the same issues, but have professional import customs brokers and do these import procedures and handle all these charges by themselves. The average small US customer have no clue how to do import, they wait someone to deliver their parcel to their door. Which now do not happens, and after several weeks of this parcel hanging at US customs they ask the seller “where is my parcel? I ordered this way many times and every time the parcel arrived to my door” meantime they have to pay import taxes, storage fees etc etc and they simple refuse the parcel and return it back. This is why DHL and UPS refuse to take parcels to USA now until they figure out how to calculate these import tariffs correctly so they can be pre-paid in advance i.e. the US customer knows what he have to pay $$$ tariffs in advance and all these returns stop.

Digikey is nuts anyway. I ordered less than 100 euros worth of stuff (but still free shipping?!) for a ham radio DATV receiver kit from them and the package showed up like 30 hours later. From the US to Germany. And given just how freaking many components it was, handling of all these single-piece mini packages is insane.

I seriously wonder if Digikey lost money on that order, shipping alone must have cost 20-30€, and on top come all the antistatic bags, handling costs, payment costs.

Digikey pricing is designed around it. They give some really serious volume discounts: they'll happily charge $0.10 / unit when you're buying 1 while charging $0.002 / unit when you're buying a whole reel of 10.000. Similarly, they charge a $7 reeling fee if you don't want cut tape.

Combine that with a stupidly efficient order picking process, and I wouldn't be surprised if they basically break even on small orders.

You've got to remember that those small one-off orders are almost always for industrial prototyping. You don't need to make a lot of money selling 5 units for a hand-assembled prototype when you know you will be selling them 500 units for the initial automated run, or even 50.000 units for the final production run.

Additionally, there's a lot of value in being a one-stop-shop: they might not make a lot of money on small-quantity low-volume items, but if an engineer can purchase their entire BOM from you at once, she is unlikely to go looking for a competitor to save a few bucks on the higher-margin items.

The Digi-key situation is funny. Going forward, ordering from Digi-key will be cheaper for europeans than for folks in the US. Digi-key operates a bonded warehouse where they don't pay tariffs until it gets shipped to a customer. ICs that are sent from China to Digi-key and then to europeans will pay no US tariffs and often with free shipping deals as you mentioned.

Digi-key never offerred free shipping for US customers and now we will have to pay these high tariffs too.

the package showed up like 30 hours later

Or...they have a warehouse in Germany?

all these single-piece mini packages

Automated pick-and-package.

DigiKey itself only ships from Thief River Falls. But they also have direct shipping from European suppliers to European customers (Marketplace). So I'm just gonna guess that those parts had to have been shipped from a European supplier.

My one experience with this recently is that UPS will charge you anyway for the duty and if you don't pay they will threaten to turn you over to debt collectors even if they don't deliver the package. So I'm not sure why they in particular would care.

I had the same with FedEx. I reported it as a lost padkage at X value and they decided to write off the customs charge

It’s still an administrative cost for them, and the non-delivered packages are filling up their warehouses.

They have teams that are dedicated to handling tariffs and imports. Smaller companies that used traditional shipping now having to jump through insane loops are just calling it quits.

Having bumped into this world via family...even small manufacturers that do substantial portion of their business overseas often have dedicated import/export people, or contract to firms that handle it. It's just smart business. I think it's the scale and the level of uncertainty that the current round of economic chicken has the SMBs hedging.

> Why are larger shippers still getting everything through?

Boats. They're still dealing with tariffs, but it's a lot easier to declare an entire container than individual airmail packets.

But having a US presence that can then receive the containers and ship domestically, is kindof reserved for the big boys.

Look at the rates FedEx etc. will charge you for DDP service, and there's your answer.

Love this for the US. I hope many more companies follow the example

Recent and related. Others?

Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45016517 - Aug 2025 (351 comments)

Australia Post halts transit shipping to US as 'chaotic' tariff deadline looms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44970269 - Aug 2025 (173 comments)

Flexport’s tariff simulator accounts for the 232 requirements:

Tariffs.flexport.com

It’s free even for non Flexport customers.

I'm sure this will be painful for a lot of people and that sucks.

But drop-shipping into the U.S. has been absurdly one-sided for years. Americans have been subsidizing it through taxes and mailing rates our own government negotiated, and that basically fucked over American small businesses for decades.

It’s been dramatically cheaper to ship items from Shenzhen to Anytown, USA than to mail something across town. That killed domestic mail-order growth and flooded us with mountains of plastic Temu junk instead.

It's obvious that it should be more expensive to ship from China to the US than from the US to the US. It no longer makes sense to subsidize these rates and the entire system needs to be rethought.

DHL and UPS are generally not subsidized. Usually it's when USPS is involved.

No matter what the pretext, it should be completely clear that the only real goal of this is to damage the US economy.

Just as the real effect of a vaccine ban will be to damage US health, and the real effect of dismantling government funded R&D will be to damage US education and competitiveness.

I have no doubt some people believe patriotism is involved, and some large companies will get exemptions.

But I also have no doubt these decisions aren't being made for the long-term benefit of the US as a whole. Or even most of it. Or even those parts of it which are currently exempt.

This is Brexit++, sponsored by the same people, with similar - but much worse - lasting effects.

Damaging economy - and slowly, but surely, closing America from the external world. It does feel very much this way. :|

American own Cultural Revolution.

> But I also have no doubt these decisions aren't being made for the long-term benefit of the US as a whole

Then why are they being made? That is the real question that in my opinion is not being discussed enough. A lot of reacting to what's happening in the US, but not enough pondering about what the real goals are here.

I have my own views about this, which I used to think were somewhat conspiratorial and hyperbolic, but no more.

The goal of Republican policy is to make the wealthy & powerful, more wealthy & powerful. As we see here, small companies can't deal with the tariff complexity, and so they turn away American customers. Large companies can handle the complexity, both by having compliance employees and lawyers who can cover over mistakes. So, Americans must do their business with the only remaining suppliers, which are the large companies who can now charge higher prices due to less competition.

The mega-wealthy individuals will not suffer from any economic downturn, so it doesn't matter if their policies harm the economy.

Maybe, except that doesn't explain the deliberate kneecapping of R&D, health, and academia.

I'm pretty sure that if the curtains are pulled to the side, the people who are behind these policies are not seeking wealth and power. They are instead religious zealots seeking transformation.

> that doesn't explain the deliberate kneecapping of R&D, health, and academia

I think it does, those are all efforts to destroy trust in qualified experts. It's impossible for everyone to understand everything, so we have to trust experts. But the experts correctly point out that Republican policies are actually harmful to their own voters. So, Republican media bought into a ton of conspiracy theories, which are centered around exploiting difficult-to-understand systems and promoting "do your own research" type conspiratorial thinking. Once your voters no longer trust the experts, you can sell them anything you want, namely policies that move wealth from the poor to the wealthy.

The goal is to enrich Donald Trump, his family, and associates. Given the amount of open bribes and shady crypto dealings that we already know about it is doubtful that we will ever know the true extent of corruption in this administration.

If it all happens out in the open and by the "letter of the law", and everyone involved in steering it that way appears to be complicit in some manner, is it a conspiracy or even hyperbolic any longer? Previous reality seems to have been thrown completely out the window imo.

I just want to explain how I understand this, and please correct me if I am wrong.

In theory, importers have been required to provide a Certificate of Analysis (COA) since around 2003. This comes from federal TSCA regulations as well as California’s RoHS requirements (bill SB 20).

But in practice, nobody really followed those rules because they could claim the “de minimis” import exemption.

The problem now is that Trump issued Executive Order 14324, “Suspending Duty-Free De Minimis Treatment for All Countries.” This means that shipments valued at $800 or less from any country are no longer eligible for de minimis treatment. So in order to properly calculate taxes you need CoA.

And no one is going to update their systems because TACO.

Many Canadians (90% of us live within 100km of US border) have the concept of an “Amerifriend”. A US relative/friend they utilize to get cheaper US goods shipped to and pick up on visits.

Most border towns have shops that will receive and hold orders for pickup for a small fee.

I wonder if this will reverse where Americans send to their Canadian friend to pickup.

Canadian retail has been pretty dumb/expensive. Much Cheaper to buy from US for auto parts than buy local, even though virtually none is made in USA. I wonder if tariffs will eliminate that price advantage.

how do situations like this typically progress in high tariff countries? I know for instance Brazil has a high tariff rate on certain imports. Does a black market typically spring up to fill the gap? It's hard to imagine that can happen here, no matter how bad the tariffs got.

The European Union has been a high tariff zone for a long time, so you can study their situation.

Are you referring to VAT?

poorly

Well shit. I pre-ordered a risc-v motherboard from DeepComputing (Hong Kong) for my framework laptop that is supposed to ship next month. They'll likely run into these exact same issues.

I had my finger over the 'buy' button for an Omlex board when I saw this, thinking "If I want it I better order before things get weird". I was too slow avoiding the weird......

I knew shenanigans was going to go down so I conveyed to DeepComputing that I wanted to wait until the product was available to place my order. 1 month after that I got an email from them stating "Our product, [...] has been available for some time now" so I believed them. Turns out they meant the pre-orders were open. So even though I knew this was coming, I still managed to fall into an international pre-order situation.

(FWIW I assume this was a language barrier issue leading to a misunderstanding, perhaps with a customer service rep that didn't review my past messages. I don't think DeepComputing intended to trick me.)

>U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product)

https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...

>At this time, CBP does not require an aluminum certificate of analysis to be filed at the time of entry.

This does not read as a demand.

See also: https://blog.ploopy.co/tariffs-and-us-shipping-suspension-32...

I got bit by this one - ordered a few days ago, thinking there might not be much time left - guess I was more right than I realized. (they're offering refunds but I'll probably let them keep the money - not like it's their fault)

All part of this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/26/postal-servi...

"Suspensions including from Australia and Europe come after Donald Trump removed a rule exempting parcels worth less than US$800 from his tariffs."

(For some reason this isn't showing the full article to me in Firefox with uBlock Origin. There's more info here that works with that setup - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/25/postal-serv...).

No, that is the de minimis exemption repeal. This is due to a series of new tariffs on copper and other metals which is unusual (and nonsensical) in that it applies to the metal content of finished and semi-finished products. The de minimus rule exempted low value individual products sent directly to consumers, but this metal tariff affects all importers, unless they deal in one of the carved-out product categories.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out - I thought it was all part of the same deal.

To be fair, China has been widely abusing the <$800 rule for a number of years. And it really wasn't not helping either economy. Temu routinely employs forced labor and worse to give those super low prices that US companies can't compete with. https://youtu.be/quGoGgbP-aE?si=FL8pgTssEwn5qEvS&t=387

Yes, but it's the receiver that is supposed to handle the tariff not the sender.

Since when forced labor was a problem for Americans? We know for decades that Diamonds are extracted with forced labor, many imported agricultural products like coffee, clothing, etc. use forced labor/minors/slave-like conditions. The US never stoped buying these products because of such issues.

Not to mention the domestic prison-industrial complex:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_comp...

US companies also have access to locally-sourced forced labor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries

There must be some other reason Temu is able to sell goods at lower prices, especially now that China is not a particularly low-wage country.

We're gradually becoming a pariah state. Foreigners are afraid to visit, citizens are afraid to move freely, and more and more companies are going to stop doing business with us because of these erratic, incompetently implemented tariffs. Not to mention the daily threats of martial law.

Being a US citizen used to be a perk, not a liability.

US citizenship is a big liability for citizens living abroad. Our banks have to report how much money we have to an American criminal monitor. The fines of doing it improperly are so draconian that some financial institutions have refused to work with Americans for many years already. We have to file and sometimes even pay taxes on money earned abroad. We are practically forbidden from investing in many products that someone living abroad would typically do.

“otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product. This is a prime example of unnecessary complexity in international trade.”

Pay me 20$ i will tell you the upper limit and then bobs your uncle, you can change your customers the added cost.

I buy a veterinary grade vaccine for my dog from Great Britain. I'm sure it contains a few micrograms of aluminum salts (those RFK Jr. doesn't like) as a stabilizer. And now I need to pay a 100% tariff on the aluminum?

Probably has an aluminum ring to cap it (with a rubber-like seal that can be punctured with a needle.

What about the aluminized foil-sealed bottles for pills, powders, etc.?

For national security.

The steel/al content is taxed only for some products. Veterinary vaccines have tariff code `3002.42.00` which is not subject to these Section 232 tariffs :)

What are you vaccinating your dog against that you need to purchase multiple doses from overseas?

Is there even a dog?

Sammy the poodle (http://matrixmark.kesug.com/Sammy.jpg) is prone to severe ear infections. Every time he gets one of those and I take him to the veterinarian, they give him an antibiotic injection, an anti-inflammatory injection and drops to put in his ear. That's $402.85 out of my wallet. Or I can give him the same injections myself. However, in the United States I can shoot my dog with impunity (see Noem, Kristy) but I need a prescription from a veterinarian to give him an antibiotic - that will be $402.85 please. Heck, I need a prescription to give him flea pills too. Or I can order the same medications from Great Britain, without a prescription.

There's a lot of stuff for animals that is rx only in the US, but not controlled medication, so people end up buying it overseas as it's not really enforced and even if it were the penalties would be weak.

Stuff like flea medication and rabies vaccine comes to mind.

100% tariff on a few micrograms of aluminum shouldn't break the bank ;)

> U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product.

It’s on the whole product not just micrograms of aluminum, which could break the bank based on how much you order.

The paperwork will though.

This is insane, wtf have you Trump voters done.

Plenty of them here before the election. Wish they’d speak up more now and explain how any of these policies are objectively good for the US economy and US citizens.

If they cared about measurable outcomes we wouldn't be in this situation.

For them, "success" involves feeling that a particular social arrangement has been solidified. It involves an exploitative hierarchy (which they believe is both inevitable and required) where they aren't obviously on the bottom and where "the right people" are on top.

They simply do not care how much it costs to raid people's attics looking for Anne Franco, or even the odds of finding her family, as long as The Authority is taking Firm Steps and people like Anne Franco are afraid.

Quite simply: de minimis import rules make no sense, they are inevitably abused by China in particular to import billions in untaxed goods. No foreign country has a right to sell things in America. China and EU and others impose their own arbitrary redtrictions and taxes on imports but for some reason if America does it, it gets worldwide press because for the longest time, it was just open season as we drained out manufacturing and gutted the base that built America in the first place.

We have laws on the books and they have to be enforced equally, whether you're shipping in entire containers or thousands of small direct mail packages.

Of course de minimis import rules make sense. Processing every $20 or $50 parcel through full customs would cost more in bureaucracy than it would raise in revenue. This is why many countries around the world have de minimis rules including Canada, the EU, and even China.

De minimis had nothing to do with draining out manufacturing; that's been happening for decades. Before 1993 the rate was $10.

And who cares about the "base that built America"? US unemployment was low! The US doesn't need these terrible jobs or look to the past for opportunity. There is plenty of opportunity available by looking forward.

> No foreign country has a right to sell things in America

Flipping this around: this is a limit on the rights of American citizens to purchase things from around the world. My argument is it's best for policy to center the rights of American citizens vs trying to curtail the rights of people who do not even live here.

Seems like the correct solution would be to just eliminate tariffs entirely then.. why shoot yourself in the foot by reducing trade when you can.. just not do that?

The irony is this comes from the conservative movement, who are purportedly neoliberal economists.. but then completely disregard a central plank of neoliberal theory.

consistency is low on the MAGA priority list

They don't have the mental capacity to understand the consequences of their vote.

Oh the blue collar and union workers that voted for this are getting exactly what they wanted and know better than you about the consequences. When they get a pay raise because their job and whole town aren't being gutted to globalization they are clearly playing 4D chess.

Blue collar jobs are going to evaporate as the supply chain gets wedged. This like trying to lose weight by burning down the farms with napalm.

They're already losing their jobs so this unjustified fantasy has already been destroyed by reality. There are no good economic indicators for the US right now.

it's got nothing to do with policies, it's tribal

I am not a Trump voter, but here's my understanding of what they're hoping for, economically speaking. By devaluing the US dollar, American manufacturing becomes more appealing to other nations. I think it's generally believed that tariffs are a pretty lousy way to boost domestic manufacturing, but I think it might be an effective means of accomplishing the goal of devaluing the dollar. This devaluing shouldn't have any direct, negative effect on Americans when buying domestic (e.g. home prices, locally produced food), but will significantly reduce your ability to travel or buy imported goods.

Again, I'm not a Trump voter and I think this is the clumsiest, most dangerous way to bring manufacturing back to the US, but that's my understanding of what their goal is. I'm not even going to touch the Christian nationalist side of the plan.

Sorry, but this does not place enough blame on those that didn't vote (about 90 million people). I will hold responsible anyone with a heartbeat who did not vote at all in 2024.

Lately I've noticed a social trend, where whomever you critique for The Current Mess, someone else is afraid that indirectly lifts justified blame from another group. Maybe that just reflects how we humans have limited capacity for attention and outrage, and there's too much to fix at once.

For example, the split between:

1. The willfully-culpable Republican party.

2. The inept/uninspiring Democratic party.

3. The lazy/clueless non-voters.

I'm not sure how to solve that problem... maybe arguing over prioritization is necessary.

________

P.S.: For something more-actionable, how about this: Many problems exist, individual humans aren't built to consider them all simultaneously and coequally, be kind to well-meaning allies that are focusing on a particular piece.

But Kamala Harris was not perfect in every respect. In fact, she had several policy preferences that don't align perfectly with my own. In a lot of ways, she was just like Trump. Also, she was not a very good public speaker. /s

When she tried to run in the primary in 2020, she was last place and considered a joke candidate. If even the Democrats don't like her, do you expect republicans to be charmed by her and switch sides?

We hoped that the party of law and order, of Christian morality would not re-elect a convicted rapist, convicted financial fraudster, serial adulterer, pathelogical liar and instigator of America's first coup attempt.

Even Liz Cheney was supporting Harris. This wasn't about "charm", it was about saving democracy. And now we are fucked...

Related:

Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States (Japan Post)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45016517

We're going to get loads of these on Hacker News if we're going to get it twice per country's postal system and also individually for each supplier affected in specific ways. (-:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45020661

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44970269

There's an announcement today on the PiHut WWW site, for example.

* https://thepihut.com/pages/delivery

Just a random Bing search turns up loads of these from the past week.

* https://crooked-dice.co.uk/blogs/news/temporary-suspension-o...

* https://www.elgrecominiatures.co.uk/pages/temp-suspension-us...

* https://coscraft.co.uk/blogs/three-nerds-in-a-shed/tariffs-o...

and so on. I suspect that dang and tomhow might have to apply the "It's in the mainstream news and we have umpteen dupes." rule soon. (-:

the point was more that there's a giant discussion about this similar topic over there already. These other country/carrier stories are all the same discussion.. tariffs, de minimis, etc.

Didn’t you guys on Silicon Valley vote for this? If I remember correctly, this whole thing was managed by the libertarians of the tech industry. Own it.

Why would these supoosed libertarians vote to restrict free trade?

Disgusting, these morons have already destroyed the job market and made groceries near unaffordable. They’re on track to crash the stock market and now will destroy our global trade.

[flagged]

> fake pandemic

Well over a million people died from a communicable disease. Whatever issues you have with policy surrounding the pandemic, the nomenclature isn't controversial.

No, that's not what they meant. They presumably meant what they said (see above).

I'm sorry, but 7MM reported deaths worldwide is hardly a "fake pandemic". The actual number of deaths is estimated to be 2-5x the reported amount.

What are you talking about?

> The bureaucracy

I seem to recall Trump doing the press conferences about covid response. Is he the deep state now?

Completely irrelevant regardless of accuracy.

[dead]

This is the price of freedom /s

> For example, importers must declare the exact amount of steel, copper, and aluminum in products, with a 100% tariff applied to these materials. This makes little sense—PCBs, for instance, contain copper traces, but the quantity is nearly impossible to estimate.

I think if the shipper can't determine the amount of copper in their products, then neither can customs.

Nobody being able to figure it out is the entire point.

From TFA: "U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product. "

They WANT you to pay the full 100% in taxes.

Nah, this is how government bureaucracy works (especially Trumpian bureaucracy). They rush to implement some policy, and don't think of all the various edge cases and loopholes. That's how we got Section 174 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533). And look at how long it took for that to be repealed.

Pretty much every authoritarian regime tells a similar lie: They claim rule will bring order and consistency... but dig below the marketing, and it's actually chaos and caprice, because that's easier for them and there's no opposition to keep them honest.

From the article:

> U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product

Maybe they are hoping that we’ll chicken out if they try to follow the rules correctly, at our inconvenience?

I think if the shipper can't determine the amount of copper in their products, then neither can customs.

Customs doesn't have to. They can simply decide you haven't followed the rules, and it'll be up to you to prove you haven't or face paying fines/losing a shipment/possible prosecution. And they can decide the playing field: can you be wrong by 10% on that copper estimate? 1%? 0.001%? Good luck.