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Comment by rwyinuse | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, if you want to fix electronics more often than not China is the only place you can buy spare parts. I don't think buying spare parts to devices counts as "stupid shit".

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If you were to interpret the comment you’re responding to charitably, you’d understand that electronics components are a minuscule minority of all of Chinese exports.

Sure! I understand that everyone buying stuff on Temu and Shein is horrific. At the same time, me paying $$$ for ordering electrical components from China is rough for me. And also, I find it mind-blowing and ridiculous that Ali offered free shipping for small orders for so long whereas if I'd buy local I need to pay up for shipping, and if I'd start a small business in the Netherlands, shipping to the rest of the EU for small parcels is prohibitively expensive, not even taking into account PPWR

The problem with overarching regulations is that they kill the good along the bad, which is the original topic of the article being discussed...

I'm tired of being told I don't matter because I'm in a minority. You'd never dare imply a tax making gypsy folk singing unviable is fine because it's a "miniscule minority" of all music played, so why do it for electronics repair?

But a ban on making loud noises after midnight would also impact a gypsy who likes to folk sing after midnight and it would be pretty ludicrous to cite that as a reason not to do it.

The right thing to do is not to sweep him under a rug because "there's only a few such gypsies", but to look at what he's doing and say "yes, this is what we want to ban". Being a in minority is not a shield from consequences, but it shouldn't be a reason for dismissal either.

In the case of the 3-EUR-tariff, nobody has come out and said "we want to make small electronics production/repair untenable", so I'm optimistically assuming its effects are not intentional.

But the stupid part of stupid shit doesn't apply to the electronics, while Gypsy singing is still loud

Yup and those parts often cost literal cents making the €3,60 per item a ridiculously high fee. All while we're protecting the environment by repairing things.

the fee goes per product category, not per item...

I know but in practice those categories are very narrow. If I order two different things I'll still pay the fee twice in practice.

I did two orders from Aliexpress recently. On the first one they did count the fee per item, on the second they already had the categories figured out & counted the fee only per category.

Since then I am now getting "duty saving" adverts for them where they help you to get items on sale & in the same category. So it took them like two months not to only adapt, but to use the fee as apart of their marketing. ;-)

Oh ok I kinda stopped ordering from them since it was introduced. I've been ordering lots of stuff before it came in so I could have some stock of things I use a lot, like WS2812B LEDs, micro screws etc.

I was really infuriated when I heard that it was mainly the big chains like Lidl, Aldi, Ahold that have been lobbying for this crap. They are always trying to kill the little guy.

I don’t think the electronics spare parts market makes up a sizable chunk of Chinese exports to the West but I could be wrong

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