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Comment by arijun | Hacker News Reader

Are these laws so inflexible they can’t differentiate between a traveler and a shipping container?

Or a traveler and a company doing $30 billion in de minimus import sales annually.

But Temu/etc aren't sending a shipping container. They're sending a tiny package addressed to an individual directly. They look a lot more like family sending a souvenir from their holiday than large scale commercial freight.

Are these laws so inflexible they can’t differentiate between a traveler and a package?

Well, possibly yes, US law is one of the most regulation heavy countries making this sort of stuff impossible.

However the point really is, do there really need to be issues at the border when flights land? I guess you could exempt travellers so that there is the appearance of normality to people IRL, but that wouldn't prevent issues at the border for packages, and most people get a lot more packages than they do fly in/out of the US, so I'd imagine it wouldn't take long for people to really notice the impact directly (let alone several steps removed as companies can no longer import effectively).

I could see a regulatory environment where if a package is personally escorted through commercial flight, it falls under a different set of rules than as a package sent from one place to another.

Or not! But I don't think the problem is that we cannot craft regulation, it's whether we ought to.

Isn't the entire point that people should order their packages from companies subject to US jurisdiction? Or at least from countries that make a good faith effort to enforce compliance with US regulations.

On the other hand, that point is not as legitimate in the US as in Europe due to domestic companies such as Amazon that don't act in good faith. Stores that pretend to be marketplaces and therefore try to avoid responsibility for the stuff they sell for their subcontractors.

This isn’t a well thought law, but a rash executive order. I have a trip to Beijing coming up in April and I’m a bit worried about this and potential retaliation.

It's not the laws it's the skirting around. Chinese sellers are already notorious for waaay under declaring package value so buyers aren't hit with customs charges. So many packages cheap enough to be sent without insurance but expensive enough that customs duty should be collected.

What if the traveler is a celebrity on a chartered jet bringing home a shipping container's worth of souvenirs? Where do you draw the line?

There are personal exemption limits already at $800 per person returning from abroad.

At that point it costs so much that the rule doesn't make a difference.

Doing the work on a large amount of miscellaneous parcels is going to have pretty much the same problem.

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