How Trump's tariffs destroy our hobby (and small U.S. businesses, too)

In post #8, 'Khaibitgfx' wrote:

" But but tarrifs [sic] will bring jobs back to America ..."

Uncle Bernie comments:

If the Trump administration would have wanted this, or at least had wanted to  preserve  jobs in America, they they would have put these tariffs only on finished goods, such as the junk sold  on Temu or on AliBaba, or on ready-for-sale-to-end-user products imported by greedy American corporations who don't pay income tax because of the old 'transfer pricing' trick - all the profits from these imports occur in foreign jurisdictions with low or no tax. So even I would deem it fair to hit these products with tariffs.

But what they did is to put steep tariffs on everything, even on  components  used by small American businesses to produce their goods "Made in the USA". Such as PCBs. Or connectors. Or any other of these low margin, simple components which can't be made in any developed country.

Now, imagine some American small business producing electronics, what happens if their PCB costs go from $2 a piece to $10. They simply will need to close shop because the actual  market price  is fixed by Mr. Market himself.

Same applies to anything still being "Made in the USA". Most of the input materials and components are imported. Increase their costs and there goes the "surplus value" created by the American company, and along with that the American jobs go away, never to come back again.

I think the latest, disastrous "payroll" statistics published a few days ago already tell us about the impact of these tariffs on American jobs.

For Apple vintage computer hobbyists the best way is to stop buying foreign made stuff and to wait until alternatives are found which do not incur unexpected and unpredictable "fees" slapped on them by greedy carriers on top of the tariffs. It never has been smart anyways to source ICs for our hobby from Chinese vendors, because of the high risk of getting worthless counterfeits (I wrote about this in a separate thread).  Instead, use established American electronic components shops like Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara (www.anchor-electronics.com) or Surplus Sales of Nebraska (www.surplussales.com) - both have very good stocks of all sorts of vintage ICs you can't find anymore at the regular distributors because of obsolescence and the shift to SMD. These shops also have lots of leaded passive components and other stuff we need for our hobby projects.

But for sourcing the PCBs, we need to find and test local producers who cater to hobbyists. I think I found one candidate (www.oshpark.com), see my last post in the Apple-1 forum. So at least for small runs of PCBs there seems to be a viable domestic option.

- Uncle Bernie

Now the whole mess / trade war has escalated to a point where you can't even send private, non-commercial parcels to the US:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/08/28/countries-suspended-postal-shipments-to-us-list/85867109007/

Here is the current list:

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Norway, Poland,   Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand

... so nobody from these countries can send any parcel to the U.S.A. anymore, because their local postal services  refuse  to accept such parcels ! It does not matter if the sender is a business or a private person / friend.

I think this sabotages / makes impossible all hobby projects involving participants from these countries . . . it even affects some of my own projects under development, because no hardware can be sent to and fro anymore.

Oh, and in this context I have seen bad news that carriers could slap $80 - $200 of "flat rate tariffs" / "handling fees" on each (!) single (!) parcel ! 

So if a fellow hobbyist sends you an empty PCB worth $5 or some long obsolete vintage ICs or other parts worth essentially nothing, this may cost you $200 (unless you refuse to pay  / accept the parcel).

And this is the root of the parcel sending ban invoked by these countries. They simply don't want to deal with millions of rejected parcels.

I wonder how long this madness will last. I've put ALL of my projects needing parcels from abroad on hold. Don't want to pay $200 for $20 worth of components, which, alas, can't be sourced domestically (from the U.S.)

I can do this because it's a hobby for me. But small U.S. businesses who need small amounts of foreign components probably will go out of business. The big corporations who import finished goods are not affected by the parcel ban - they don't ship their stuff in parcels, they ship whole containers full of stuff, for which a $200 "handling fee" is a rounding error.

- Uncle Bernie

In post #16, "CVT" wrote:

" Looks like the UPU released the new API a couple of days ago "

Uncle Bernie comments:

Thanks for the interesting link !

But the bad news from the link is this (citation):

" The global network saw postal traffic to the US come to a near halt after the implementation of the new rules on 29 August 2025, which for the first time placed the burden of customs duty collection and remittance on transportation carriers or US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency-approved qualified parties. Carriers, such as airlines, signalled they were unwilling or unable to bear this responsibility ... "

The "near halt" is affecting one of my prototype PCBs I expected to get sent to me from the EU, and this stalls release of my Gen2 improved ACI "open source" / "free from third party copyright" to the Apple-1 builder community. Without having the sample in hand, I can't verify that the database is correct and can't release anything.

But what's worse is the thing with the "agency-approved qualified parties" which are supposed to collect the tariffs. These will not do the tariff collection free of charge ... so if they collect, say, $2.50 in tariffs for an item worth $10, the "fee" for the paperwork might exceed the value of the item ... we have already seen this with the $100 to $200 "handling fees" slapped on some parcels containing items worth a fraction of that "fee", even before the "de minimis" rule ended.

This is not acceptable.

Actually, it's a trade war, and the EU has started it with their insane customs rules ... about two years ago, I still could send Apple-1 component kits to the EU, but then the EU started to require me to list each and every component and a EU code for it, and a RoHS certification for it, and whether the component was certified to not have been made by slave lavor or child labor. WTF ???? How could I get these certifications for 40-50 year old components with most manufacturers long gone or absorbed by other corporations ? And even if these certifications could be obtained, obtaining them and making the paperwork the EU wants would cost thousands of US$, maybe tens of thousands of US$. The list for such a kit, printed out, would be several yards long. And worse, the EU customs goons would not even read it. They just would complain and reject my parcel if the list is not there. Ever noticed when you buy components at distributors like Mouser or Digikey that the packing / shipping list is full of weird numbers and barcodes for each and every line item ? This is the nonsense the EU requires !

All this is intentional and designed to sabotage / discourage  imports into the EU. And now the USA have found their own way to sabotage / discourage imports, too.

The conclusion here is that we have an ongoing trade war and even private, non-commercial shipments over the pond have become impossible. So, goodbye Ebay ... it's dead, at least for our hobby purposes. Simply because it's not feasable anymore to ship these items over the pond (direction does not matter). Americans can't buy stuff on Ebay Europe anymore, and Europeans can't buy stuff on Ebay USA anymore.

I think this trade war will has profound impact on our vintage computer hobby. In post #14, 'CVT' wrote this:

"... but I don't think it will affect our Apple II “hobby” businesses for one very simple reason: there is nothing to bankrupt."

This is correct, because a hobbyist does not need to generate income from selling these little "maker" gadgets worth $10 to $30 to other hobbyists, it's a hobby after all, and most of these gadgets being offered are excess production which is inevitable (i.e. if the minimum order for a PCB is 5 pcs, and you need only one, what do you do with the left over 4 pcs ? --- same issue with inevitable small production runs of SMD based gadgets which even have larger minimum order counts, due to NREs)

... but we have to keep in mind that most of this production of PCBs or small SMD based production runs happens in China, because only the Chinese manufacturers are willing to do such small hobbyist sized production runs, "mouse business", while Western manufacturers just laugh when your order does not make them at least $5000-$10000 (or even more).

Now, when these hobbyist maker scene (not even large enough to be called a "cottage industry") can't access these Chinese manufacturers willing to do hobby sized production runs anymore, then these hobby projects become infeasable / too expensive and the supply will dry up.

Look at these nice MMU and IOU substitutes seen in post #10. Very reasonably priced. And I bet, a very small production run, too, made by hobbyists for hobbyists. Same with the various Apple-1 and Apple II slot cards. And the various Floppy Emus.

Kiss them all goodbye ... I think if this trade war continues, they will be gone soon, and become "unobtainium".

- Uncle Bernie

P.S.: oh, and just as another anecdote, a week ago I sent a parcel with vintage electronic components the recipient uses to repair old pinball machines to Australia. Worth ~$230. I bought them for him because the vendor was not willing to do non-domestic shipments. And here may be the reason: the little screen on the USPS counter showed a "prediction" for the customs tariffs the recipient has to pay over $14577. Madness. Sheer madness. Who is writing this "code" or this "app" or whatever and who makes the decision to release this cr@p for use at the post offices ? I suspect a DIE hire (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) placed in a high government position who is unable to read or write or do "evil maff" because these skills are "raciss" and require an IQ above room temperature - we can only hope that Australian customs can sort this out.

In post #18, 'CVT' wrote:

" Besides, once the logistics are in place, they will simply become 15% more expensive for US customers. So instead of $35 USD, they will end up costing $40. No big whoop. "

Uncle Bernie comments:

Putting the "logistics in place" means a substantial investment in new software. Which, of course, will be bug ridden (like the $14577 tariff estimate for a $230 parcel mentioned in post #17 is an example for) and until the bugs have been fixed, which may take years, the costs for putting the "logistics in place" will have increased far above the initial estimate, possibly by orders of magnitude, i.e. if typical U.S. looting / grifting is involved, expect 100 x or 1000 x cost overruns, such as the story with half  a dozen EV charging stations they built for a budget / government grant in the billions of US$, and nobody wants to explain into whose pockets the bulk of the money disappeared - for that kind of money they should have built 1000's of such charging stations, and not just half a dozen. So we can reasonably expect that the "handling fees" these carriers have to slap on each parcel may again be in the $60 to $200 range, per parcel, as has happened just a few months ago, where a hobbyist's Chinese made PCBs worth $30 suddenly got slapped with such insane "handling fees" - which the carrier keeps / steals / extorts, it's not the tariffs as such doing that !

It has been my observation that for a lot of little vintage computer related gadgets, the parcel postage "over the pond" already exceeds the value of the gadget itself, so unless you desperately need the gadget, you better don't buy it, but build it yourself, and then you have the problem again what to do with the excess empty PCBs and excess components.

It can only get worse.

There has been a reason why the "de minimis" exemption existed - back then they knew that handling customs paperwork and related payment processes incurs extra costs, and if these extra costs exceed the value of the item(s) in a parcel, it makes no sense to even send that parcel in the first place. So they invented the "de minimis" exemption which was adopted in most civilized countries. A parcel below a certain value was waved through. This is how it should be.

So even being hobbyists, we need to develop alternative ways to pursue the "making" of gadgets just to keep the costs at bay which is only possible if these extra fees can be avoided. Since these fees get triggered on a per-parcel basis, the only way to get these costs down is to aggregate parcels into larger shipments. Which pass customs processing as one unit, incur only one processing fee, and then will be unpacked by the primary recipient, separated into the multitude of parcels, and sent out domestically to the other recipients. Anyone who already runs one of these "gadget selling" websites as a hobby could do this -  aggregating orders until it's worth to send a larger packet containing many smaller parcels over the pond. We would only need one such aggregator/deaggregator in the EU and one in the USA, and could dodge these insane handling fees and still get our gadgets at a reasonable price.

But we have to wait until the facts are out and the "handling fee" structure is known.

- Uncle Bernie

In post #21, 'CVT' wrote:

" ...this gives them the right motivation to fix it fast and make it work ..."

Uncle Bernie comments:

"fix it fast and make it work" ... by  g o v e r n m e n t   run postal organizations ? Are you joking ? --- I wish I had your sense of humor !

Here are the latest relevant news I could find:

" The UPU, a United Nations agency that oversees global postal cooperation, said 88 postal operators have either fully or partially suspended service to the U.S. . . . "

According to UPU, postal traffic to the U.S. on Aug. 29 fell 81% compared with the previous week.

 “Furthermore, 88 postal operators informed the UPU they have suspended some or all postal services to the US until a solution is implemented”, UPU said in a statement.

UPU Director General Masahiko Metoki said that UPU is working with affected postal services and U.S. authorities on a “rapid technical solution” to restore normal mail flows. However, he provided no timeline for when shipments might resume.

Here is my take on this:

The needed "rapid technical solutions" can't be conjured up like a rabbit out of a hat: the industry standard development flow requires an "objective specification" first, before any work can be done, and then, based on that "objective specification", the amount of work is estimated and then the organization issues a "invitation to tender" (ITT) for the project, and potential suppliers or contractors then submit bids—sealed, competitive offers to provide the solutions (here: design of processes and coding and testing the software). Once the bids are in, the projected costs are known, and the funds must be made available. And only when the funds are available, the work can start.

All these steps will take time, lots of time.

So I don't expect any such solution coming online before mid next year, but that's just my own best case guess.

Until then, countless small businesses worldwide will be gone. The big corporations of course are not affected as they import their merchandize by the container load or by the ship load, and since decades already have had in place cost efficient solutions to handle the tariffs.

Here is another obstacle:

It has been customary for national, government run post offices to use hardware made by their own national electronics industry, unless the national industry was too inept to make such hardware.

This means that for this whole "zoo" of computers wordwide, all being different and running a different operating system, some of which are pretty proprietary and obscure, need an individual, tailor made solution.

I think that all these tailor made solutions could be done until the above estimated deadline, but this also means that the development costs can't be shared. An amount of N such tailor made, individual solutions may cost N times the money, everything else being equal.

Who are the suckers who will pay for this  ?

So the costs to implement the solution(s) will be immense and who will be the sucker who has to pay for this ? --- the sucker who still sends parcels around. Expect the postage for parcels to explode, even for domestic parcels not crossing borders. Because the post office bureaucrats will - most likely and for a reason - decide that all these extra costs shall be spread out over all customers. The rationale behind doing so is to make these immense costs appear to be smaller - if they would slap these extra costs only on the parcels who incur them - international parcels - almost nobody would want to send international parcels anymore, at least not for low cost items.

Excessive parcel postage has been here for a while

I've already mentioned that here in the USA, the postage for small parcels has increased so much since Y2020 that the postage may exceed the value of the item being shipped. Anyone who is a "maker" or hobbyist knows the problem: some little component of a project in the works is missing or jumped away to never be found again, and so it must be ordered by mail ... and the postage will exceed the value of that item. Foreign readers may not understand why it is so, but the root cause is that USPS wants to treat every padded envelope, regardless how small and thin, as a parcel, and the cheapest postage for a small and light parcel within the lower 48 is now US$6.80 --- and they dare to call this rip-off "USPS Ground Advantage". I wonder where the "advantage" is for the customer. "Being taken advantage of ..." comes to mind. ("Commercial rates" for "eligible users" start at $4.20, but most individuals / hobbyists do not qualify). During my last visit in the EU I found out that small padded envelopes could be sent as letters, with a letter postage, about half of what it costs here in the USA. OK, the whole of the EU can fit into maybe two U.S. states area wise, but distance is not the major cost factor here, the major cost factor is the fact that small padded envelopes can't be sent as letters within the USA.

Is there a conspiracy behind all this ?

I think that we can reasonably expect that parcels, even domestic parcels, will get much much more expensive everywhere in the world, because of the costs for the added hardware and software infrastructure will be immense and will be distributed over all parcels, whether international or domestic.

This will make parcels containing low value items economically infeasable, with a few exceptions, such as the case when a household appliance needs a spare part that can only be shipped. If you have the choice of having no heating in your house in Winter, due to a failed sensor worth $2.50, you will spend any postage needed to get the spare part, even if the postage far exceeds the value of the part. But for all discretionary purchases of cheap items, prospective buyers will get a "sticker shock" when they see the shipping costs, and refrain from online shopping of such items. This hurts small businesses peddling such merchandize.

So who benefits ?

You may have noted that some large corporations, such as "Amazon", have built their own warehousing and distribution infrastructure which includes delivery to the front door of every customer. They also are exploring air delivery of parcels by drones (good luck with that). But in the end, the postage cost pressure may nudge small businesses into using such services ... and this comes at a fee (which grows and grows ... look at what happend at Ebay, their fees now are  just a rip off).

So, in the end, the likes of Amazon and similar outfits will suck up most of the small business profits and no small business will be able to exist without that leech attached to them. A form of slavery. Pity the small business owner.

But all of this is in line with the Agenda 2030 - "you will own nothing and be happy" (the WEF said so). I believe the "own nothing" part is credible but don't believe in the "be happy" part, which is a lie - unless they find the formula for Huxley's "Soma". Looks as if the globalists want to turn our civilization into a sort of neo feudalism - they own everything, and the common people own nothing, and have to "rent" everything from the corporations of the globalist oligarchs. Killing off small businesses by tariff and postage shenanigans is just one little piece of the great plan !

- Uncle Bernie

In post #23, 'CVT' wrote:

" Canada Post is a government run postal organization, yet it had a working solution in place within days ... "

Uncle Bernie comments:

No, they didn't ... because their "solution" is not integrated in the Canadian Post Office ... nor was it specified by them, nor implemented by them.

Instead, what they pulled out of the hat, is a dubious third party service provider called "Zonos" which just appeared out of  nowhere and even has an "app" ready to handle the payment of the U.S. customs duty AND their own "fees", which are hefty, here is what I found:

" When you use your Zonos Verified account, you can expect the following:

• $1.99 remittance fee: A flat charge for transferring the duties and taxes you collect to CBP.
• 10% of calculated duties (disbursement and bond fee): A service fee based on the total duties owed. This covers the cost of advancing the duties on your behalf and providing the required customs bond. "

In other words, another parasitic middleman / leech was popping up just a few days after Trump killed the "deMinimis" rule.

Expect the same kind of parasites / leeches to pop up in every other affected country.

And I dare a bet that all these parasites / leeches are owned by the same people who instigated that "deMinimis" stop - I don't think the idea to kill the "deMinimis" rule came from Trump himself.

Now you see why I called the whole thing a "conspiracy" in my previous post. Here you have the proof that it indeed is a conspiracy because the conspirators knew long ahead it would come and had time to write their "apps" which they could not do in just a few days. They knew !

Seems "they" just entered the "looting phase" of their controlled demolition of the worldwide economy. Just as Ayn Rand has predicted in her novel "Atlas Shrugged".  Dubious moves of parasites / leeches to suck life blood out of the economy, or what is left of it, at any opportunity, and if there is no such opportunity, politicians are bribed to create such an opportunity.

As far as I'm concerned, I went "Galt". Alas, no "Galt's Gulch" found yet. Where productive people can thrive without any government interference.

But this is not news. All governments around the world have increased the parasitism and the leeching on the productive part of the economy since decades.

The most disturbing observation of what is going on right now is that they (the governments) must be so bankrupt that all this parasitism and leeching has now progressed to suck out the life blood even of tiny "mouse" businesses who have to send their few merchandize out in parcels, and not in containers or by the truckload. This is the equivalent of the local Mafia protection racket cracking down on panhandlers on the street to get their "cut", because all the shop owners they had extorted before have closed shop and left town.

I'm inclined to bet that the "Zonos" operation in the end is owned by a bunch of corrupt politicians or banksters, or worse, but I could not find out who are the key people behind "Zonos". Their web site (www.zonos.com) has a "Company" button in the footer but it is not clickable (as of today). So, no official public statement which kind of "company" this outfit is, in which jurisdiction they are registered as a business, who their CEO is, all of this highly suspect and withholding this kind of information would be illegal in the EU, where every business website has to fully disclose all this legal information from the beginning.

But who cares about legalities when the system has switched to "looting mode" ?

Let's see how long it lasts and which further assaults on the economy (or what is left of it) will come !

- Uncle Bernie

In post #25, "CVT" wrote:

" Yes they did, because it doesn't need to be integrated or implemented by them. "

Uncle Bernie disagrees:

We could, of course, argue endlessly over what a solution is, or, to be more specific, what would be an acceptible solution.

From my standpoint as a Randian, the "solution" of the Canadian post office is not an acceptable solution, because it attaches a parasite to an economic process, that is, sending parcels.

Actually, in the strict sense, the levy of tariffs already is a parasitic process all by itself, but when a third party sticks their sticky fingers in the tariff money flow (the 10% of the tariff Zonos adds on top of their $1.99 "fee"), then there is yet another parasite attached to the economic process, a second parasite riding on top of a first parasite, a stack of parasites.

We don't need that.

We don't need parasitism in any shape or form.

An acceptable solution, a real solution, to the tariff problem would be full integration of the payment process into the Canadian Post Office processes, as I have suggested in my post #22 above, which would not involve third party parasites.

For those readers who are not Randians, let me explain where the issue with "parasitism" is in this case:

It is NOT the $1.99 "fee" which "Zonos" charges for their handling of the tariff process, which is a service, and incurs costs for the software, the servers, and the (few) personell needed to run the servers.

The parasitism of "Zonos" lies in the 10% surcharge they collect and keep on the actual tariff itself. This is plain, out in the open, parasitism, and is not acceptable, at least not for Randians - human sheep willing to be shorn won't complain, though, this is why the owners of the planet (who also own the politicians) call these human beings "speaking animals", but I will not further indulge into such religious arguments. Which has no place in a vintage computer related forum anyways.

But I will give you a sharper definition of parasitism in economical processes:

The tell is whenever an economic transaction involving an item occurs, a "fee" is levied based on the value of the item, and not on the actual work / costs expended for the transaction or for procuring the item.  This value based added "fee" goes to a parasite.

In our case, if the tariff process were done by the Canadian Post Office, as typical for government organizations, they would charge a handling fee, but this handling fee would - as usual for a typical government run post office - NOT depend on the value of the item. The fee would only cover the handling costs to collect the tariff, aggregate it, send the aggregate to the recipient countrie's treasury, and the transmission of the data. Which would cost them exactly the same, regardless whether the contents of the parcel is worth $5, $50 or $500. This would be an acceptable solution.

Enter the parasite. How come that "Zonos" thinks that they can slap an added 10% "fee" on their service, calculated from the tariff, which in turn is calculated from the declared value of the parcel contents ? This is disgusting parasitism in plain sight.

Now, to be fair to "Zonos" in this discussion, I am well aware that any currency conversion incurs costs = losses, so "Zonos" may have a point to add a fee proportional to the tariff, to cover these losses, but 10% is outrageous. But this is exactly the trick where they can skim away money (= parasitism) and still have an excuse for doing so (overcharging their customers).

I think that this opportunity to overcharge customers was the main motive for moving the parcel tariff handling to a third party, a privately owned company, and another tell is that there is NO competition allowed - "Zonos" is the only game in town, as far as Canada is concerned.

Such "exclusive" third party service contracts always reek of corruption and you can bet that some Canadian politicians have their sticky fingers in that "Zonos" pie.

I find it quite fascinating that whenever there are some sudden changes of long established procedures in commerce, that everybody pretends that nobody knew it was coming, excusing the chaos, as if it was a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane, and then, lo and behold, "solutions" pop up which must have been in the works for a long time before the changes happened, and massively increase costs ... so that unknown third parties can leech from the productive.

It's all pre-planned, folks. Don't fall for their foul excuses.

- Uncle Bernie

In post #27, 'CVT' wrote:

" ... I would be more than happy to pay this $3.50 myself ... "

Uncle Bernie comments:

Accepted. This is your point of view, which is the microscopic view of an individual in the larger scheme of things. And your $3.50 --- do with it as you wish. You can also throw it in the gutter. I don't care. Nobody would care.

The point I wanted to rise (and show evidence and reasoning for) is that the Canadian Post has opted for a "solution" (in my eyes, actually a non-solution) which enables third party parasites to grift from each and every parcel which leaves Canada towards the USA. And the volume of this grift / theft / parasitism is not just your $3.50, it will be in the millions of CDN$, and each and every Canadian small business shipping merchandize by parcel to the US is a victim of these grifters - this is the macroscopic view. And it is not looking good !

Had they implemented a "solution" run by the Canadian Post Office (a government operation, not a private business) then they could not slap these excessive fees on the parcels - this is supposed to be dictated by law (at least in most civilized nations, I'm too lazy to read the 1000's of pages of laws and regulations for the Canadian Post Office). Typical  government run post offices are required by law to provide reasonably priced services to all of the population (even remote places, mind you, where each letter delivered incurs a loss) and they are NOT allowed to jack up their prices such that they make profits. Instead, they should set their service fees such that they make neither profits nor losses over the whole fiscal year. They need permission by the government comptrollers if they want to increase their prices / postage, and they need to prove their need for such a price increase. As a consequence, most government post offices around the world rake up losses which have to be paid for out of the general budget, which means the tax payer. But despite of this obvious drawback and inefficiency, this is a far better and fairer solution than to allow a greedy, privately owned corporation to have a monopoly on postal services - they could extort the last dime out of every customer, and consequently, the whole postal service would collapse. This is the reason why almost all governments in the world run their own post offices. It is a necessary public service, even if it operates at a loss. The virtue of being "government" is that they can provide services at a loss. No privately owned corporation can do this.

But somehow, the Canadians have found out a way to graft a private leech on the parcel tariff process. WTF ?

This being said, I think any further bickering over the Canadian affair is pointless and a waste of time. If some of the readers of this thread got their eyes opened and their awareness turned towards the grift and theft that has been put in place by the Canadian Post Office, then the time and effort I have invested was not in vain, because I think that people should know how they get ripped off and how to detect grifters and parasites.

This is a necessary skill in any end phase of an industrial society where fraud, grift, graft, and parasitism grow like a cancerous tumor. Are you a hunter ? Then you will know that every wild animal is crawling with gazillions of parasites - so parasitism is one of the most successful ways to make a living, even in the animal and plant kingdom. But any industrial society depends on productive people, and can only tolerate so many parasites before it collapses. So, know their tells and their warning signs and avoid them the best you can.

- Uncle Bernie

In post #29, 'CVT' wrote:

" However it is really strange that you have fixated so much on the 10% of the 15% and not the 15% itself that US customers have to pay now  ... "

Uncle Bernie comments:

Obviously, you don't pay attention to what I wrote.  I wrote in post #26:

" Actually, in the strict sense, the levy of tariffs already is a parasitic process all by itself, but when a third party sticks their sticky fingers in the tariff money flow ... then there is yet another parasite attached ... "

So I clearly made the statement that the tariff itself already is a parasitic process by itself. In other words, theft / leeching from productive people.

You, 'CVT', obviously are ignorant on how politics work. But I can help you to get up to speed:

In a nutshell, if politicians want to steal money from the people of a country, they can't steal this money directly by walking into the treasury and carry out sacks of money. This would be too obvious, and these politicians would get arrested, and sentenced to jail terms, like any common thief.  Instead, the 'legal' way for politicians to steal money from the people is to set huuuuuge flows of money into motion, billions of US$ or trillions of US$. And then they stick their sticky, thieving fingers into that flow of money, and a tiny, tiny fraction of the money sticks and goes into the pockets of these thieving politicians. But as long as the amount stolen is relatively low, compared to the total flow of money set in motion, nobody notices the theft. And so these thieving politicians walk free - they never get indicted for their theft and never end up in jail.

All these skims, scams and frauds like "global warming", "climate change", "carbon credits", "green energy", "development aid", "refugee asylum seeker immigration", etc., etc., all this is set in motion by politicians who want to skim off a small fraction of the total money flow, which is immense.

And the economical damage they cause by this is far, far worse than the damage done by common thieves. Because these thieving politicians must set in motion / squander billions to skim off millions for themselves (or their family members put into recipient positions). In other words, if they want to steal one million US$, they must set in motion (and squander) one billion US$, which is extorted from the taxpayer.

Part of the reason for this poor efficieny of the theft (a measly 0.1% in this example) is the fact that most financial statements are only written down rounding to 1/1000th of the actual line item / expense involved. So what these politicians steal is swamped in the "noise" of rounding errors. Very hard for any auditor to prove any wrongdoing.

There is one exception in know, which has better "efficiency": so-called "development aid". I can give you an example: a "rich", industrialized country gives $20 Million US$ of  "development aid" to a poor African country. Fine. How noble ! What the public never learns is that 10%-20% of the "development aid" money is paid ("kicked") back, by the government of the poor African country, to the anonymous bank accounts of certain politicians of the industrialized country who instigated that "development aid". Back in the day, when I learned this first hand, from the deputy of an African dictator I met by happenstance, these anonymous bank accounts were Swiss number accounts. I can't tell you how they do it nowadays, 30 years later, where anonymous bank accounts should not exist. But back then, these accounts existed and were used for this very purpose (among other criminal purposes). Oh, and there is a little  cherry for you, dear reader, on this pie: the other sock-puppet (lower ranked) politicians who followed the "party line" by voting for the "development aid" to be granted, they don't get no kickback payments, no, but they might get rewarded by a free "work visit" to said African country, where they reside in the five star hotels, get wined and dined, and enjoy the pristine, white, clean beaches on the crystal clear Indian Ocean. The only down side for these lower ranked parasites was that they were flown in by a small government jet of their country which - I know the type - has a very cramped cabin in which you can't stand upright and the seats are cramped, too, a joke, not exactly Business Class. But they stayed at the same five star hotel where me and my GF of the time stayed. So I even met these parasites in person. I met the deputy of the dictator a few days later and he complained that the kickback they have to pay to the parasitic politicians of my own home country (now ex-home-country) was twice of the kickback they had to pay to the parasitic politicians of other nations. Well, no real diplomat would ever disclose such a "secret" to some random businessman visiting to make a deal, but mind you, this was Africa, the deputy was a black guy, and these are more temperamental than other races. So he just could not resist the urge told me the story about this "unfair" treatment. (Frankly, in his place, I would have gotten upset / agitated, too. Too much "kickback" is too much. No honor among thieves !)

Long story. But it's factual, not made up. For me this was a key event / disclosure how my countries'  "government" works, and how their politicians steal from the people (including me) to enrich themselves. Once I got that initial insight, I kept my senses tuned to detect any such kind of theft / grift, in any country I visited or chose to live in, and there was plenty which I saw in the next half of my life.

And the same alert senses were triggered by this Canadian scam involving their "solution" to handling the tariffs. I stand with my accusation that Canadian politicians or their family members - most likely - may have their fingers in that "pie" and may skim monies from that "Zonos" money flow, but of course, I have no proof, as I'm not an accomplice / insider of this scam. Still, the people of Canada should insist on a third party audit of that dubious outfit. It stinks. Something is not right !

Foreigners, like 'CVT', which don't live in Canada, of course need to only think about their measly $3.50 "fee" they are willing to pay. They don't need to care about the corruption in Canada. Rather, they should care about the corruption in their own home country. (I do care about Canada and their corrupt political class because I do own Canadian assets, and I don't like how the CDN$ goes down the toilet, thanks to said political class).

- Uncle Bernie

In post #32, 'CVT' wrote:

" This will also be implemented through a third-party platform, so please stay tuned for UncleBurnie's rant on the corruption of Australian politicians. "

In my post #24, I predicted this to happen:

" In other words, another parasitic middleman / leech was popping up just a few days after Trump killed the "deMinimis" rule. Expect the same kind of parasites / leeches to pop up in every other affected country. "

And this prediction was based on my observation that government run organizations are just too inefficient and slow to change their processes / ways in any useful amount of time. So any country who wants to resume sending parcels to the USA will highly likely use third-party solutions.

Which is not wrong as such.

But when these third parties, private companies, get:

a) a monopoly on providing this service, and

b) get the "right" to levy   y e t   a n o t h e r   t a x   on the value of the parcels,

then this is parasitic in nature and must inevitable rise the question if corrupt politicians are involved in that grift / skim - who else could pressure government postal offices to foist such a "solution" on the people ?

The magnitude of this grift /theft is not peanuts. When I use 'CVT's numbers, then at a tariff of 15%, and a 10% surcharge as seen with 'Zonos', then a private corporation is allowed to levy a "tax" - which ends in their pockets - of ~1.5% on the  total value  of all parcels leaving the country towards the USA.

Note the '~' sign meaning "approximate" ... because as I mentioned in my post #26, such as service provider must buy insurance against fluctuations of the exchange rate of the domestic currency (in which they collect the tariffs) and the currency of the country which receives them. But the period of time this insurance ("hedge") must cover a few days at most,  so its costs are negligible. Here is the cost factor which really matters: the foreign currency exchange ("forex").

Here is a hint from 'Uncle Bernie' - who, according to 'CVT', has no idea about how the economy works:

For larger amounts of money, never use the "international wire transfers" offered by your local bank branch, as they might "steal" maybe 0.3% over the real, honest forex exchange rate, so, as an example, when you wire Euros over the pond, and expect to get US$1 million, based on the forex spot exchange rate, you might only receive US$997000, which clearly is a ripoff ... $3000 went missing, the bank kept them. (These are numbers from another EU emigrant who sold his house in the EU and bitterly complained to me how the banks ripped him off - I just rounded the amount down a little bit, to make the point clearer for the reader, but the 0.3% is very faithful to what really happend).

Instead, when you need to transfer larger amounts of money internationally, first open your own online forex brokerage account, but watch out for their fine print and their "fee" structure. Beware there are lots of hidden fees, skims, and other pitfalls. I was lucky that my sister had worked the forex trade desk at a major bank with lots of industrial clients for decades, she traded 10's of millions of EUR each day, and gave me good advice about the pitfalls and what to watch out for. So I was quickly up to speed and able to transfer all my assets from the EU at total costs in the order of a good bottle of Champagne, or around US$150 at the time.

(If you ask why forex exchange trades can be had so cheap, if you know how to do it, they move more than 1 Trillion US$ worldwide daily, so if they only skim 0.001% from each transaction - most is hidden in the "spread" - these forex traders still "skim" $10 Million per day for their banks --- I use the word "skim" here instead of "make", as nothing is really "made", this is the fine point I wanted to emphasize with this choice of words).

So, dear reader, you now know realistic numbers for the forex part of the parcel tariff conundrum. The costs are nowhere near the 10% "Zonos" rings up and wants to add to the tariff. In my eyes this is blatant theft / rip off and they gaslight the people with their blather about "exchange bond purchases" and the like. See, a measly local bank branch might  "steal" maybe 0.3% from a typical forex transaction. A professional forex broker can do it at 1/100th of that, or even cheaper. And I'd bet that "Zonos" has their own in-house forex broker with access to all the "professional grade" trading tools, which you never can get for your own online forex brokerage account, and he can do these trades as cheap as it gets.

Conclusion

This said, be alert and reject these "third party" rip-off artists for your parcels. Voice your protest against this non-solution foisted on you ('CVT' will argue it's a "solution"). The best thing, of course, would be a general strike, all commerce grinds to a halt, nobody shows up to work, all wheels standing still, until the pressure on the politicos is high enough to bring back the "deMinimis" rule. But this is not gonna happen in the real world. The people are sheeple and willing to be shorn and ripped off and injected with slowly acting lethal poison and everybody who does not go along with the flock of sheep and refuses / protests is called a "conspiracy theorist". I'd rather call myself a "critical observer of the controlled demolition of the worldwide economy". Despite, as 'CVT' told you, I have no idea and no knowledge about economics (I have a MBA, founded and ran several successful businesses, and worked together with people in the C-suite of international tech corporations, so, sure, I must have no idea about economics, money, and business). Oh, and before I forget, absolutely zero insight into politics, too, because of a bunch of politicians in my extended family.

- Uncle Bernie

In post #34, 'CVT' wrote:

" ... especially if a general strike is your best idea. "

Uncle Bernie comments:

Oh no, it's not  my  best idea, go read some books about the topic of civil resistance against government diktats: in a nutshell,  a general strike is indeed the best way to make stubborn governments listen to the will of the people, and it avoids the risk of escalation to violence, such as demonstrators  getting brutalized by jackbooted thugs. Look how things escalated in Nepal in the last days. We don't want any of that in our countries. Besides the facts that governments tend to shrug off demonstrations, even if millions of people protest in each major city. They might take a bit of their diktats back, to calm the people down, just to bring the same (or even worse) diktats back a while later. This is how politics work !

The topic of "deMinimis" exemptions being gone, and parcels now being subject to tariffs and further leeching on top of that by third parties is affecting far too few people so there won't be any demonstrations to bring "deMinimis" back, and a general strike also won't happen for that topic, which I already stated in my post #33. It is highly unlikely that the people of any Western nation would go on a general strike for any cause. Look, they even took the depopulation jabs. Only very few resisted and were willing to risk losing their job for not taking the "vaccine". How could such meek sheeple ever do a general strike ?

But we should be quite alert about how the tariffs affect our economy here in the USA. In the end, NAFTA is dead, and there is talk about major foreign car companies planning to close their U.S. based assembly plants, some of which may be moved to Canada. This will destroy a lot of U.S. jobs, the opposite of what was claimed by the Trump administration.

The destructive impact of the tariffs  on small businesses which depend on foreign sourced components still needs to manifest itself. And here, I agree with 'CVT' that if a parasitic  middleman leeches off just another 1.5% of the value of the components on top of the tariffs does not really matter anymore ... that leech won't leech for long, as many small businesses will die off anyways, and the parasite dies with the host.

Still, we still should always watch out for and expose parasites and point fingers at them, as a matter of principles. They like to hide behind the curtains, and like cockroaches they scatter if light is shined on them, but they must be exposed.

- Uncle Bernie

In post #36, 'CVT' wrote:

" The probability of that [ = general strike] happening in the US is virtually 0%. "

Uncle Bernie comments:

Fully agree on this with you 'CVT', and I wrote  in all my posts above, that general strike won't happen. I mentioned 'general strike' only because I wanted to make the point how the people (any people, of any nation wordwide) can force a government to undo diktats which hurt the people, without exposing themselves to be brutalized by jackbooted thugs of the government - which regularly happens if the people go to demonstrations.

But here is the irony of all of this: I do agree with Tump's tariffs. I have studied business administration and part of this is economics. I disagree with John Maynard Keynes as I think he was a mere charlatan.  The "Austrian School" (Menger, Mises, Hayek et al) makes more sense to me but also has fatal flaws, IMHO. (If I had more lifetime left I probably could write 'Uncle Bernie's Theory on Economics" ;-)

Still, with my (admittedly, poor) background in the study of economics, I think that tariffs are the only way to stop foreign nations to take advantage of the USA, hereby ruining the U.S. economy. But, I disagree with how these tariffs were implemented in a haphazard way, and in particular, I disagree with the way the "deMinimis" exemption was killed suddenly, with no early alert, and no reasonable timeline to allow other nations to adapt to it.

Will the tariffs bring back American jobs ? I think, no. Instead, they will destroy American jobs and they will accelerate the deindustrialization of the USA. Which, in the best case, will end up as an agricultural nation feeding the world. We have the immense areas of fertile soils, the most efficient farmers, and we have enough natural gas reserves to run the Haber-Bosch process to make synthetic fertilizer. The only other nation in the world which has these advantages is Russia - except for their yet inefficient farmers, but this can be improved by copying us. Every other nation will need to buy our (or Russian) agricultural produce and give us their (industrial ?) products in turn --- or else. Which means their ever growing populations would starve. So the gun to their head is: "Build and give us industrial products or your population starves".  Note that hunger is the greatest motivator ever to do hard work !

Never forget that the USA government ran mostly on tariffs until the turn from the 19th to the 20th Century. There was no income tax, which made the best and the brightest and most skilled people from all over the world want to emigrate to the USA. Nicola Tesla was one of them - and all of our current electrical systems worldwide still run on Tesla's patented polyphase AC system (patents long expired, of course).

One interesting question on which I could write a Ph.D. thesis in economics is whether the nation who has the world's reserve currency (the US$) is able to keep their status as an industrialized nation in the long run. I would claim it can't do so and would defend this thesis against the brightest professors of economics you could find. But alas, my lifeline is running out and I chose to spend my last few years for the Apple-1 and Apple II user community - lots of work still to do. I want to make these computers immortal. They are just right to teach young people how computers really work.

Here is one of my bold predictions for the future: the US$ will lose the reserve currency status, the USA will revert to an agricultural society, but still prosper due to being able to "feed the world" (together with Russia) - as food is the most important commodity - China will become the new nation having the world's reserve currency, the "EU" will collapse (unless it turns into a brutal police state dictatorship, which will only spawn a further mass exodus of the best and the brightest), but "BRICS" will never gain any traction or significant influence on the world economics scene.

So far my predictions. Take it with a grain of salt. I might be in error. Yogi Berra once wisely said:

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future".

- Yogi Berra

In this sense, can we now end this discussion about tariffs ? It stole too much of my time already.

- Uncle Bernie

In post #41, 'Khaibitgfx' asked:

" Has anyone here in the retro scene been hit hard by these tariffs personally ? "

Uncle Bernie answers:

I can only speak for myself, and yes, I have been hit badly by these tariffs, although not financially, as I simply refuse to play that stupid game (importing things from abroad), a game with mostly unknown rules and even if known, the "game makers" can change their "rules of the game" at any time to the great surprise and financial damage of the purchaser of these foreign sourced items. It is illogical - and outright stupid - to play any game with unknown or ever changing rules. Being a logical person, I don't play that game.

The consequence of this (not being able to import PCBs at a good price) is that I had to put a lot of my hobby projects on the backburner. I spent the last five years to develop nice Apple-1 and Apple II projects which other hobbyists would like to build. But to make this feasable, these hobbyists must be able to source the PCBs at a reasonable price, even at low quantities. And the tariffs sabotage this - it's not only the tariffs as such, but also the various "handling fees" the carriers slap on these parcels to cover their costs for the additional paperwork, or so they say. I think they lie, because IMHO no "paperwork" is involved as everything is paperless today, no multi carbon copies in white, yellow, and green as it was decades ago, nowadays everything is handled over the internet and hence is paperless. The entry of some customs related data into a computer system should not take more than 30 seconds at most (for one sort of item). If so, how come that the "handling fees" the carriers may slap onto your parcel are - I was told - between $60 and $200 per parcel. This is a rip off. The carriers do not pay their data entry slaves a wage of $24000 per hour. They may pay $24 per hour. So how come that they dare to charge 1000 x that as "handling fees" ? It's a ripoff, a scam, and it's extortion because if you don't pay the ransom for your parcel you lose the merchandize in it. If it's PCBs worth $20 then of course you can opt for the loss. Makes no sense to pay $60 to $200 "handling fees" for PCBs worth only $20.

And this is the core of the problem. The "handling fees" make the whole game of importing a few cheap PCBs from China into the USA not worth playing. And alternatives like U.S. based PCB manufacturing via OSHPARK etc. only are viable for PCBs of a small area - the proverbial "Altoids tin can" size. These may even be cheaper to be had from OSHPARK than for pre-tariff JLCPCB. But you can only fit so much on a PCB that small.

Since I don't want to be unfair to U.S. based builders of my projects, putting them into a disadvantage, and so they would only get angry or even enraged when they get hit with these tariffs and "handling fees", I decided to put my projects on the back burner, and not to pursue them any further. The more important projects like the YAAK keyboard would require a PCB revision (mechanical improvements, some mounting holes should be moved and added) and for the trial runs of that I'd need to play the stupid tariff game myself, which I refuse to do, so no revision, and no release of the Gerbers to the public. I could release a few smaller projects for which the ordering of the PCB from OSHPARK does not break the bank, but all these are supplements / tools for the larger projects and hence make no sense to release unless my larger projects can be released, too.

Let's see how the Supreme Court ruling affects the "tariff game". Maybe we get lucky and will be able to source cheap PCBs from China again, without getting ripped off by tariffs and without getting extorted by greedy carriers charging insanely high "handling fees".

IMHO these tariffs had one fatal flaw from the beginning, and this is that they leveraged tariffs on components, too, and not only on finished goods ready-for-sale to consumers. I've seen a lot of whining from American manufacturers who depend on imported components and they say that the tariffs eat up most (or all) of their profit margins for their honestly "Made in the USA" products. So all the can do is to lay off their staff and close shop until the tariffs are gone. This means that the tariffs actually destroy American jobs and American manufacturing, while the government claimed that these tariffs will bring back American manufacturing and generate American jobs. This is typical for all government meddling with the economy - the promised advantages never materialize, and the opposite happens, such as the "Affordable Health Care Act" (aka "Obamacare") which made health insurance totally unaffordable for most people. They should have called it the "Unaffordable Health Care Act" or "An Act to Destroy Affordable Healthcare".

Note that if these tariffs had been constructed properly, that means, exempting components going into U.S. based manufacturing, and only leveraging tariffs on finished goods ready for sale to consumers, the tariffs would have had the promised beneficial effect. And maybe the F-35 fighter jets being delivered now without radar systems installed (and a concrete ballast instead to make them flyable) would come with the promised radars - but this is only a guess that the supply chains disrupted by the tariffs also affect contractors and subcontractors for the MIC, and not only small businesses. But scuttlebutt has it that the delays with the new radar system may also be due to supply chain disruptions caused by the tariffs and the associated trade wars.

We can only hope that these tariffs go away and supply chains will come back on line, undisturbed.

Then I can proceed with refining my projects to a point where I can release them to the Apple-1 and Apple II retro scene. Just be patient !

- Uncle Bernie