Reminds me of Japanese Mundane Halloween costumes, dressed up as a person holding a tray in a food court trying to find a table to sit at or some other similarly common life scenario.
I have a longstanding suspicion that paying for internet service makes people feel like they've paid for everything on the web, and thus expect it to not cost more after that initial fee. That the companies who provide software and content online are, generally, not at all connected to their ISP isn't necessarily intuitive to the average person outside of tech.
That's increasingly changed, thanks to some combination of Netflix and other consumer-facing subscriptions, the App Store's easy payment mechanisms, and in-app purcahses for digital goods in games spilling over into the real world. There's still more mental friction to paying for things online and more expectation of free by default, for most people, in tech than in the real world.
Agreed. I've used the em dash for well over a decade and love it, but am having to train myself to not use it simply to not appear as though my text is written by AI.
At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Smart for OpenAI to launch, from a product lock-in perspective, since most similar chat sidebars in apps tend to let one choose the AI model from a list that always seems to include Claude as well....
But for that same reason, not sure I'd want to implement this into products since it does lock you into OpenAI, only.
I have tried it and must say it just doesn’t work well enough. Too high latency, video calls are impossible and you regularly run into arbitrary issues. I ended up buying a standalone monitor again.
Fun fact: The Asian arm of Toys 'R' Us never shut down, and while it's far from the most popular retailer (and, IMHO, broadly overpriced), it's maintained a retail presence in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and more.
There's an interesting tradition of dead American brands getting a second life in Asia. Swenson's, Sizzler, Dean & Deluca, and Mr. Donut in Southeast Asia, Tower Records and Kinko's in Japan, even 7-11's outsized popularity in Asia versus its more moderate presence in the States. Yahoo! Japan almost counts as well.
There's been talk of a bit of a retooling to make the American stores more Japanese, but I haven't lived in a 7-11 region for a while. (Though I thought they'd bought out one of the chains locally and were going to rebrand them, it hasn't happened)
interestingly, 7-11 is doing quite well in Texas, where it operates under the brand Stripes. They also have kitchens in some called “Laredo Taco” that sell primarily Mexican food and are quite beloved, esp. by blue collar workers
No, absolutely, just the concentration in Asia generally and Thailand/Japan specifically makes it a far bigger deal. That was a bad example to include versus Toys R Us.
> 7-11's outsized popularity in Asia versus its more moderate presence in the States.
I just got back from a two-week-long trip in Japan. When I was there I ate 7-11 (or Family Mart) every single day - the Japanese konbini blow their US equivalents out of the water. I live a block away from a 7-11 in California and now have zero desire to ever set foot in it again (the only real casualty being the Jalapeno Cream Cheese taquitos which pale in comparison to onigiri and "juice box" sake). I'd like to think that if US locations were stocked similarly to their Japanese counterparts that they'd have greater success but this is a country where people turn their noses up at vegetables on cheeseburgers... I'm not holding my breath.
Recommendation since I haven't seen it mentioned here yet:
Annie Jacobsen's _Nuclear War: A Scenario_
A second by, at times, millisecond, tale of what could and would happen after a nuclear attack on the US is detected. Been a long time since I read a book in just over two days.
If you haven't seen the tv show Madam Secretary (minor spoiler warning), there's an episode that more or less films this scenario playing out. You can find clips on YouTube of just the "nuclear war is about to happen" part of the episode, and I highly recommend it as a dramatization of this kind of thing. (It's a great show in general, too.)
reply