Australia Post halts transit shipping to US as 'chaotic' tariff deadline looms

Considering that US is now funding the Pakistani war machine, India knows which side to pick.

> Vietnam is one of the first countries to get a trade deal.

Mexico and Canada also had trade deals, which went from Trump calling it "the largest, most significant, modern, and balanced trade agreement in history":

* https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/pr...

To Trump asking "Who would ever sign a thing like this?":

* https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-accidentally-insults...

They already made it pretty clear that if America forces them to choose, they pick Russia.

Considering USA appears to basically change sides to Putin, nah, USA does not mind Russian war machines. USA president admires them.

Also, those trade deals are not worth much.

100 years ago the British Empire ruled the world, today it's a small island nobody care about.

People underestimate how fast things can move

Surely hardware has much more of an economic moat than software, services, and payment services. And the manufacturing of that is dominated by China and to a lesser extent Korea and Taiwan. All of whom have an interest in seeing hardware take a greater cut of value and for software to be commoditised. And it is common and possible for powerful countries or regions to build alternatives. India already has a payment system that is larger than Visa for digital and includes P2P and P2M.

With all due respect, can you outline why the current version of America is actually better than China? I mean China has major issues but I'm starting to lose sight of what makes the USA a better more trustworthy ally who protects freedom and democracy? I'm not saying "it's over" but there are a lot of troubling signs it's going in the wrong direction fast.

In the case of India and China, I think it's more of a case of India becoming more independent, which is "good" on the one hand ,but probably terrible for American hegemony and they will just side more with Russia and continue to buy resources from them.

I'm not sure if Americans can really grasp how their soft power around the world is vaporizing by the day. Even at it's peak, probably Obama era, I wouldn't say America was default popular, now, I don't know what to say but it's really looking as if people are just deciding to move on from the American experiment as we realize it might not be coming back. Look at places like Switzerland cancelling orders of F35s, just a coincidence ?

I guess smaller countries aren't being left with much choice, that's the fundamental issue.

Edit: I'm not worried about the down votes, but I also think it's sad and maybe even a sign that people have sore feelings about reality?

Most of the US's power is contingent in part on them not rocking the boat too much. That's what the current US administration is destabilizing; by harming its own allies, those allies in turn are starting to look for other options. With the exception of IT software, the US has little dominance in any individual sector. IT hardware largely isn't produced in the US, it's produced in Taiwan (TSMC) and Europe (ASML), and then assembled in China.

Payment services aren't a source of US power, they're a consequence; the US allowed itself to be a delivery market, making those payment services a soft requirement for anyone dealing with the US. If anything, the US payment networks are generally seen with scorn outside the US; they're painfully dated (US banks largely rely on a system designed for physical cheques to this day) and the companies running them are often subject to the whims of astroturfing activists, resulting in legal transactions being blocked because someone thinks buying porn is icky, even though it's legal. US payment companies are also notorious for being hard to get a hold of to enforce your rights as a customer; Paypal has to follow several EU laws, but they mostly dodge enforcement by putting their HQ in Luxembourg, which is so small that they can effectively employ all well-paid financial lawyers in that country, leaving any duped customers with very little options because of conflicts of interests.

Most of the worlds dependence is on the US as a delivery market; if the US stops being attractive (ie. because it's too expensive bc of tariffs for US importers to buy goods), then the world will gradually compensate, even if it is economically unpleasant for a while. The only other dependence is military, but don't worry there; the US is doing a great job making it's military allies realize that it's bad at helping them, since POTUS is actively interested in working with the enemies of the US instead.

Offshoring is going to become more common because of how the tariffs are blanket rates; if I am going to make a product, there's only two possible options to avoid tariffs as much as possible: only import primary goods to the US and process everything on-site (keep in mind, you're still paying a tariff for even these materials). That's very expensive, in part because American labour is expensive. It's also not very realistic; your average product these days flies it's components across several countries before it ends up being put together. Even if you source all your manufacturing locally, you're still dealing with the fact your suppliers don't. The other option is to... just pay the tariffs at the end of the supply chain. Raise prices on US customers, try to route your entire production chain around the US. That's what the great brands are doing right now. They aren't going to publicly declare price increases if they can help it (because the risk of political retaliation is real under the current US administration), but expect the next products in their pipeline to have significant price increases to make the customer eat the tariffs. This in no small part happens also because ultimately, the tariffs are seen as temporary; moving a production pipeline entirely to the US can take up to a decade. Most companies are assuming that the tariffs will be gone in ~3.5-4 years when the administration leaves. That's not worth setting up a real production pipeline for in the US.

For all i care, he represents all the US citizen. He is your president.

> About half of us are shocked and revolted by pretty much everything he says and does.

Only 65% voted, so it’s probably safe to say that only 35-40% of the population support him.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-pre...

> About half of us are shocked and revolted by pretty much everything he says and does.

I'd put that at less than 1/3, actually.

The problem is that there is a good third of the US that seems to be completely oblivious that bad shit is going down until it shows up and kicks them in the balls personally.

This is, sadly, neither new nor limited to the US.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." John Philpot Curran--1790

Based on the turnout you have 36% who silently approves the result since they didn’t turn up for the election.

Followed by 32% of the voting population which strongly approves of the result.

The ”not all of us” is a very tempting copout but it is quite evident that the American psyche is in general aligned with Trump.

.

Trump was democratically elected. Twice. Sure, all US Citizens are not like this, but a lot of them are.

> Friendly reminder to please not confuse the Trump administration with all U.S. citizens.

None of us do at the personal level. At the international level we are compelled to.

Even in an ordinary administration, internationally a state is indivisible from the government it chose, and any strategy to pretend otherwise is doomed to failure or various kinds of corruption. The larger the amount of money that is staked on ignoring/going around/subverting the national policy of the state in which a business partner is based, the greater the chance of encouraging turning-a-blind-eye grift from elected officials, at the very least. "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

But this isn't an ordinary administration. Trump is fully into "l'état, c'est moi" [0] and he goes there more and more by the day. From the outside, the degradation just in the last seven months is extremely obvious.

Given that international trade policy seems to have been entirely handed to the executive, anyone wishing to trade with a US business must simply assume the USA is Trump.

None of the old sense of continuity can be trusted. It's all new. This is deliberate, it's what his voters wanted, but it's also our reality.

[0] I anticipate some pushback here. I would accept the criticism that if we're talking about the USA as a single entity, it's intellectually dishonest to focus on matters of internal policy to back that up. To people who want to make that criticism I would simply ask: what international policy, separable from Trump's own grievances, explains the tariffs on Brazil?

It's better if the sender includes tariffs/import duties in the price the customer pays originally, but it's easy to set up a system where the receiving country collects taxes on incoming deliveries. Ireland has it: https://www.anpost.com/Post-Parcels/Receiving/Pay-Customs-Ch...

I get an SMS saying that my parcel has arrived in the country but I have to pay customs before it's released for delivery, done via the site above.

When I order things from China to the UK, on AliExpress, they arrive 'delivered duty paid' - i.e. aliexpress collects certain taxes from me at checkout, then the item doesn't get held up at the border.

So there does seem to be some mechanism for closing the buyer-seller-taxman loop. Unfortunately I have yet to find a reliable way to send things using this system.

The real question is why people buy such products, and the answer is because the quality for that specific price point is decent.

When you buy Anker for example, you are buying, pure China products, but still a very good choice.

Many US companies choose to manufacture in China because the tooling is more advanced than in other countries + scalability is high.

If you buy a 2 USD dress don’t expect it to be super high-quality but at the same time the price is reasonable for that.

There are specific regulations that exist and are enforced in Germany (2009/48/EC) and the US (CPSC), that also exist in China (e.g. GB 6675) but enforcement is relatively weak, especially for cheap toys from small manufacturers that end up in the hands of children.

It's not that China is into junk production exclusively as your dishonest straw man claims. It's that china can make an overwhelming amount of it. The weird shipping situation subsidized the flow of junk from China to the US. It subsided everything else too but everything else didn't necessarily benefit as much from the subsidy so the junk is what really changes in volume based on the nickels and dimes of it.

China has very many start-ups and one man shows shipping utter junk. Germany and the US are not even in the same league. The companies in those countries tend to follow the local laws because they know there are consequences.

Good luck getting compensation when that product from AJDHJk sets your house on fire or makes you sick.

In consumer products, the German and US brands do indeed manufacture in China, but then do their QC and supervision to get to an acceptable level.

You can see how this goes wrong with Anker’s recent recall, where they got blindsided by their supplier and now have to do a recall because their portable batteries can cause fires.

And if my neighbor purchases a cheap battery-powered product that violates all electrical regulations from TEMU and the fire started by it burns down my apartment too, who's responsible then? I guess my neighbor, and the insurance will probably cover the costs, but I will still have lost the apartment and all the stuff that was in it. And customs will maybe look at big shipments, but can't hope to check even a tiny fraction of the millions of small packages.

"n Switzerland if you import dangerous junk and sell it in your store, you are liable."

The same in the UK, and a lot of other countries. The retailer is responsible to the customer, the importer or wholesaler to the retailer.

> Of course the end consumer can also directly purchase from China as well but then it is their responsibility

Providing an easy workaround to safety regulations does not sound like a great idea to me. If you let consumers easily buy unsafe things it will lead to problems. Consumers often do not even realise that things do not meet standards, especially if they buy it through somewhere like Amazon.

You could argue that consumers should do their own checks, but then why have the regulation of what can be sold in the first place?

The article is mostly about duties. If you buy from someone outside of Switzerland that doesn't take care of the customs fees it's a pain for you. I once bought something that was only around 40chf from someone in the eu but then had to pay an extra ~40chf to Swiss customs for tax + plus handling fees (they had to open the box, inspect it, repackage it and send it to me).

Free trade? With no adjustment given to the CO2 emission intensity of production or CO2 emission per capita which are much higher in China than Switzerland?

That's basically subsidizing climate change and encouraging production to move to dirtier regimes. Seems fairly wild.

In Switzerland if you import dangerous junk and sell it in your store, you are liable.

Oh, that's why amazon.ch redirects to amazon.de... In general, manufacturers and retailers have more legal responsibility for what they sell here in Germany than in the USA, but it feels like Switzerland takes that even further, in good but more expensive ways.

Er, words mean things, you know? If Trump pulls a tariff out of thin air because he doesn't like it that the US has a trade deficit with a certain country (or because he doesn't like that that country is prosecuting one of his allies, as in Brazil's case), that maybe makes the tariff "retaliatory", but not "reciprocal". Last time I checked, the EU wasn't charging a 15% tax on imports from the US, but the US was.