Most important part of these tariffs:

“The trade rule allows packages to be shipped from foreign countries directly to consumers or businesses without paying tariffs, as long as the shipments do not exceed $800 per recipient per day. The new proposal would strip that exemption from a wide array of products and most likely have a significant impact on large importers of Chinese goods such as Shein and Temu, two online marketplaces that have become popular with American shoppers.”

This trade rule being taken advantage of by Aliexpress, Temu, and Shein is the sole reason why significant amounts of Americans could still afford to buy a lot of consumer goods despite having their real wages crash year after year. This would genuinely trigger another cost of living crisis

  • pastalicious [he/him, undecided]@hexbear.net
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    4 days ago

    America is so fucking weak. All they’ve got is arm a proxy, wage trade war and fund increasingly ineffective propaganda. You can’t meme your way into revitalized productive forces.

    • Dickey_Butts [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      I’ve ordered from Aliexpress a bunch of times and never had a problem except for it sometimes being slow. There’s lots of random stuff on there that’s incredibly hard to find over here. This shit sucks.

      • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        There’s videos on how evil Temu and Shein are with working conditions that I’ve seen on Yotube but never watched. I think it’s also a thing on TikTok. Every comment section is filled with people shaming any influence that promoters one of the two as a sponsor.

        Americans also say “Temu-___” of something to imply low quality, bootleg products in their slang.

        • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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          I’ve seen some of those sorts of videos. The work was…regular factory work. Not exactly sweatshop conditions, just workers putting clothes on coathangers for an entire shift. Dull and mindnumbing, but most of them seemed to have headphones in or were watching videos on their phone.

          I think a lot of this stuff is due to westerners being so used to their “service economy” ideas, they can’t even imagine what actual work looks like.

    • MaoTheLawn [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      Shein makes absolute shite, it’s completely run of the mill fast fashion. Cheap, synthetic, and above all else, completely tasteless.

      People with consumption addictions buy Shein garbage to use for one night out, and repeat that week after week. I would not believe such behaviour existed had I not witnessed myself.

      Fuck knows where and how they do their labour but I would assume it’s poverty wages in tough conditions somewhere in the process.

      • GaveUp [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
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        Have you actually bought Shein clothes? They’re much better quality than H&M and oftentimes every other “cheap” chain where a T-shirt is 20+ dollars and a hoodie is 50+

        Their production is the same as Western companies or even better (since a lot of textile moved out from China to south Asia and SEA) except they sell direct to westerners so they cut out all the middlemen markups

        • MaoTheLawn [any, any]@hexbear.net
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          I would never buy Shein but I’ve felt the fabrics and it feels like ASOS. H + M is shite too. It’s all shite. Not to mention the air miles and water usage. With the amount of clothes in the world there is practically no reason to not buy secondhand clothes most of the time.

          • GaveUp [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
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            Not to mention the air miles and water usage

            It’s largely the same since the other companies also have to ship overseas

            And yea, I do agree with thrifting but just me personally, 99% of all the women’s clothes at a thrift shop/clothing swap do not come close to fitting me (trans 😔)

            • MaoTheLawn [any, any]@hexbear.net
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              Huh. That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed that would be a problem. Maybe you need to go thrifting somewhere with a higher population of fat people, cos I’m a pretty hefty man and there’s a lot of womens clothes I can get into in thrift shops around me. Though I guess it depends on the item.

              What I can never find is anything stylish from the 70’s that fit me other than jackets. People just didn’t go to the gym back then, and if they did they weren’t the ones with any sort of fashion inclination.

              • GaveUp [love/loves]@hexbear.netOP
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                It’s not just the size, but also the silhouette. Even comparing to men, I’ve had and still have a very broad shoulder to waist ratio so most women’s clothes in “my size” still look awful on me. There are a lot of cuts that can never look good on me unless it’s custom tailored so I can only buy certain styles of tops

                But also yea, I live in the Bay Area so also just one of the fittest places if not the most in US

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    Isn’t right right after Harris ripped into Trump during the debate about his tarrifs on Chinese goods, saying that Trump’s tarrifs would make consumer goods more expensive? Lmao. Trump was right about one thing, given the Democrats border policy and this, you might as well give Harris a MAGA hat at this point.

  • stink@lemmygrad.ml
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    Love it when dems trashed on trump for his trade war and then there are crickets when biden does worse

    • somename [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      There’s competing factions in the US deep state right now. Some more invested in US hegemony are trying to force reindustrialization because they are starting to realize that finance capital has been eating away at the core productive forces required to project real military power abroad. Other factions resist this, as it cuts into the immediate profit margins, and so they awkwardly fight.

    • EmoThugInMyPhase [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      The appearance of being tough on China, and possibly short term profits. If Chinese goods become prohibitively expensive, then consumers will have no choice but to turn to American (or perhaps other countries’) goods which will benefit those companies. These profits, positive reception from muh mom and pop shops and big domestic brands like Ford and co., and the optics might prove meaningful for the bird brained democratic voter.

      But so many of these companies rely on Chinese supplies. The US sucks the cocks of ‘farmers’ so hard that they might as well build a milking facility. If they’re unable to source elsewhere at comparable prices, they will force the government to walk back on these policies. So far they have been able to survive’s Trump’s tariffs, but Biden is being even more brazen.

      • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        I mentioned it before but this feels so much like the modern day version of the Peloponnesian war we learned about.

        Amerikkka: the modern day Sparta, simply attacking China out of envy.

    • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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      And does the EU have this problem?

      Yes, even harder than America, but the sole reason is because USA wants to cut Europe from any geopolitical alternative and thus the EU compradors cut off from Russia, causing serious crisis, and for example in Poland we hear talk about taxing Chinese imports more and more. Thing that stops them somewhat is the fact that nearly everything sold in EU including all the treats, are made in China.

  • EmoThugInMyPhase [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    To be fair, a lot of Temu and Aliexpress shit is just landfill trash pushed by tiktok and gadget youtube channels. But there are a lot of good stuff on Ali, but those things aren’t exactly pushing the economic levers like the more useless stuff.

    • MayoPete [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      A lot of people are “employed” by running dropshipping businesses based on marking up cheap stuff from AliExpress. This is going to fuck over a lot of people in precarious financial situations.

      I don’t expect Dems to care

      • EmoThugInMyPhase [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        I forgot about dropshippers lol. There’s no way they’ll be able to profit by selling American junk, and I don’t think most places have the industrial capacity to pump enough junk into the US like China