When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts

And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of an item. The officially published rate of X matters little when the assessed value is up to an overworked official (in the most generous of readings of the situation). Nothing's exempt; somehow gifts from family and used items always seem most likely to trigger the tripwire.

Ship something through DHL or a similar service, and they follow the letter of the law so you'll both end up paying the official duty (at least there, it's almost guaranteed to follow the declared value) plus their processing fee, storage fee, and whatever else they include. I've easily paid double the price of a product for all of those fees together.

And worst, it's all unpredictable. At least if there's a 10% sales tax you can calculate that into if you want to buy an item. But once you get hit enough times, you start just not feeling like it's worth the mental load, time, and random financial hit to order stuff.

America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.

>America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.

The downside is the insane consumption associated with that. Americans are responsible for an insane amount of pollution, far more per capita than any other people in the history of the world, much of which is tied to how easy/cheap it is to order shit we don't need. So, good if ya wanna buy cheap pollution, pretty bad if ya care about the next generation.

> Americans are responsible for an insane amount of pollution

So does Canada.

> far more per capita than any other people in the history of the world

Not even remotely close to true. Aside from that it's down 20% from it's peak 40 (!) years ago.

> much of which is tied to how easy/cheap it is to order shit we don't need.

The data does not support this conclusion.

> pretty bad if ya care about the next generation.

Speaking of trends.. care to guess which country has doubled it's pollution in the last 10 years?

> Speaking of trends.. care to guess which country has doubled it's pollution in the last 10 years?

I really don’t. I genuinely have no idea and I have zero interest in guessing. Just say it and stop wasting everyone’s time.

> > Americans are responsible for an insane amount of pollution

> So does Canada.

it's not as good of a comeback as you think it is...

Tariffs are great for a left wing, socialist, anti-globalist, green agenda.

America isn’t #1 in pollution per capita, that’s largely a function of per capita income and America is a long way from #1 on that metric.

For example, we where ranked 16th in terms of CO2 per capita in 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... We are just #3 by population and far richer per capita than the other 2.

> For example, we where ranked 16th in terms of CO2 per capita in 2023

For home soil central north american CO2 production, sure.

Things change if such rankings were to account for the CO2 production as a result of satisifying US consumption habits .. the "benefit" of having off shored industry to China is the final goods come to the USofA while the emissions and waste of industry occur elsewhere.

You may want to take another look at that list. Proudly declaring you’re only the 16th worst per-capita (already very high!) when ahead of you are tiny places like Pulau, New Caledonia, Gibraltar and Curacao is really quite funny.

are these bad things?

As an American, I always smirk when people in the US say that gas is expensive.

I think the answer is China (CO2 emissions). But the longer answer is that they are mainly making stuff for the US and the EU.

> While China emits over one-third of global CO2, it is also the world’s factory, producing more than one-third of global manufactured goods (IEA, 2024a; Norton, 2024) . Research indicates that China remains the world’s largest generator of embodied trade carbon emissions. The gap between emissions embodied in China’s exports and those in its imports widened from 0.7 GtCO2 in 1990 to 1.8 GtCO2 in 2019 (CGTN, 2024) . According to the Global Carbon Budget, China’s 2021 consumption-based CO2 emissions are about 10% (or 1.2 GtCO2) lower than the territorial emissions (Friedlingstein et al., 2025).

- https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

If you are poor, you should be terrified, because what those policies mean is that the rich are pulling the ladder up behind themselves now that they’re rich beyond their wildest dreams.

No. It's just ironic to see them coming from a capitalist demagogue desguised as a republican.

> America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.

The de minimis exception was absolutely insane. It was a full-blown loophole that caused tens of billions of dollars in goods to come through the border almost completely unregulated, ranging from the stuff that should have had tariffs on it, to knockoffs, to drugs and chemicals that shouldn't be in the United States at all.

Even if you are a free trade enthusiast, having 100 million individually wrapped packages not checked by anyone rather than organized container shipping and warehousing is still insane and wasteful and makes a mockery of the concept of even having an international border.

Closing that loophole is literally the only sane path forward. Yes, also, it is a rule that government regulations should be easy to follow and well-administered to avoid the confusing and difficult process of trying to send a package to your friend or order some computer parts.

But, way we had it in the "before times" was absolutely unworkable. It was being exploited to the detriment of American businesses.

America has huge trade deficit from China but America imports more from the EU (605.8) and Mexico (505.9) than China (438.9) followed closely by Canada (412.7). At the same time just under 15% of China’s exports are going to the US, so America really isn’t a large fraction of their emissions.

In terms net imports vs exports staple agricultural products have a very high carbon footprint per dollar and America exports a lot of low value food. So the carbon balance is way more tricky than just suggesting America has exported its manufacturing.

Facts are neutral, when someone says something incorrect it’s worth pointing out the truth.

UAE, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Russia, and Australia are mid sized countries that emit more CO2 than the US per capita but you need to come up with a new metric to get that list. CO2 emissions by countries with more than 10m people or whatever. Perhaps bump it to countries with over 100m people so America is #2 on a list of 16 countries, or 300m so America is #1 on a list of 3 countries.

It was only exploitable by lying about the value of a shipment.

The only was you can stop that sort of loophole exploitation is by massive enforcement (i.e. large numbers of random package investigations to establish the actual value of the shipment and comparing it with the declared value).

The cost of such enforcement is very high - possibly not as high as the value of the goods imported by lying about their value, but there's actually no way to know that (since we don't know the actual value of goods that entered under the de minimis exception).

If significant parts (either in numbers or purchasing power) of your population are willing to lie to break the law, you've got problems larger and more widespread than the de minimis exception.

I'm not sure if you understand what the de minimis exception was. That's just factually incorrect.

Literally billions of dollars were getting through because they were being shipped one at a time to fulfill e-commerce type orders, which completely circumvented the spirit of the law, if not the letter.

It was absolutely a loophole. The word betrays the loophole, since de minimis is a legal term that means something is too small to matter or worry about. But it became tens of billions of dollars in merchandise.

The stated purpose of the exception was to allow individuals who are the "final destination" to import relatively low value items from overseas without the hassle and work of customs duties.

Your claim appears to be that this was abused in an organized way that led to a scale of use that was not anticipated when the exception was created. What evidence do you have for this claim?

It's expensive to fill the tank of a typical V8 truck though.

And people in US drive much more. I spend 50€ per month on gasoline for 1.5L SUV for example.

> Just say it and stop wasting everyone’s time.

I didn't waste your time. I posed a question. Your options were to ignore it, answer it, or complain about it. You've decided to complain and thus have maximally wasted your own time.

The point was, perhaps instead of saying things that are absurd, one should look at the graphed data to draw conclusions. I didn't /want/ you to guess, I wanted you to just go look. Or probably just admit to what you almost certainly could have guessed or already know is true.

It's not a comeback. I'm not trying to win a diss war. I'm adding information to the conversation. Information which is true and laughably apparently offends most of the HN audience.

This forum loves to invent negative facts to justify it's default misanthropic positions. I find this pathetic.

> I didn't waste your time. I posed a question.

So you don’t know what country doubled their pollution in the last 10 years? Was that a genuine question?

> The point was, perhaps instead of saying things that are absurd, one should look at the graphed data to draw conclusions.

What graph? What are you even talking about?

> Or probably just admit to what you almost certainly could have guessed or already know is true.

As I already said I genuinely don’t know. I could find sources for any answer if I interpret the question appropriately. As you posed the question any answer could be correct. Is it China? The United States? A developing African nation? Who knows! You brought it up. It’s on you to answer.

To those of us with more than a passing interest these details matter a lot. I don’t have the energy or desire to go back to first principles on this with you.

It’s really cool to see progress in most developed nations in terms of co2 per capita emission today vs 25 years ago. Thank you for the reference.

It’s also important to note that America is largely a service economy not a goods economy.

For every American citizen importing lumber from Canada there’re a thousand Canadian citizens who have a Netflix subscription.

Looking only at trade deficit is purposely blinding yourself.

Companies are also heavily cooking the books with IP and trade.

Netflix Canada Inc and Netflix Services Canada Ulc two local companies are collecting payments in Canada and they don’t want to look like they have any profits whatsoever. https://insights.greyb.com/netflix-subsidiaries-and-acquisit...

How about the 600,000 packages daily from just Shein and Temu alone?

This isn't even remotely confusing to anyone who's bothered to look at it.

I assume you haven't done that, because you said this:

> It was only exploitable by lying about the value of a shipment.

That's not true at all. It was made perfectly legal for shipments under $800, and what was supposed to be a personal use type exemption was wildly exploited until it accounted to over 90% of all shipments to the US, and over $60bn in goods, annually. That was a mistake. Correcting it was well overdue.

No. But some people have been successfully brainwashed by decades of propaganda to believe otherwise.