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Comment by biglyburrito | Hacker News Reader

Never interrupt your enemy when they are busy making a mistake.

Never assume your enemy is making a mistake either, unless you possess the gift of perfect knowledge.

Hard to see how making things more expensive for consumers is not a mistake, but I could totally be missing something.

It's not just making it more expensive, it's tying every single little thing that comes into the country up in an endlessly-growing loop of red tape that CBP has no way to handle. The de minimis exemption in most countries isn't motivated primarily by not hitting the little guy but by the fact that trying to enforce it for millions of low-value items would bring postal systems to a standstill.

This was exploited from the other side by sending billions of low-value packages, so now the EU adds €3 per article category (so 2 shirts = €3, 1 shirt and 1 spoon = €6) to every package that's under other customs thresholds (€150 usually). With the view this will be eventually replaced by automating the tariff calculation for every package in a few years.

As a result, the number of imported packages dropped anywhere from 30% to 80%, we'll have to wait for the full numbers, but there is a reason to expect something similar will happen in the US.

> This was exploited from the other side by sending billions of low-value packages

Billions and billions... of hearsay.

from 1.3bn in 2022 to 5.9bn in 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/29/eu-introduces-...

surely you will apologise now, right?

For what? Only 10 packages per person/year, less than one per month. Previously you made is sound like 10s of billions of packages were saturating the services.

Don't bend over backwards to defend utterly oppressive regulations, simply increasing the de-minimums would reduce or eliminate package splitting, limiting the number of packs per shipping address would help too - there are many ways to solve this self-inflicted problem which comes from Byzantine regulations that use protectionism as a Trojan horse to achieve other sneaky objectives.

You could have checked the facts yourself, you didn't, and now when it's clear I was right you moved the goalposts. You are arguing in bad faith.

Don't get personal, I'm not fighting with you. All I said is true and it matters, consider it from the viewpoint of better Europe.

More or less anything you said is wrong and the path to better Europe is certainly not through dropping import controls.

It's a strategic decision. Pharma companies promised campaign donations if Trump can make sure their profits go up.

you'll soon find out that I'm _also_ the bond market

--Scott "The House" Bessent maybe?

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