My counterexample is that I sell mid-high end vintage bicycle parts.

There’s about a 0% chance of Shimano or Campagnolo bringing that production to the US because they haven’t made this stuff in several decades.

I’ve now jacked my US shipping prices to account for tariffs. I’ll probably lose all US sales.

US buyers probably won’t realize that ~5-10% of its supply has disappeared for these parts. They also may not recognize that US sellers can/will raise their prices accordingly but they will have that increase in price.

Heck, I know some Canadian sellers that set up their supply chain well enough that they put down a US location and buyers think they’re buying domestic. Those will be toast (or have to vastly inflate their pricing).

The tradeoff here is “pay the middleman markup tax” for the most part.

Instead of getting cheap Chinese made clothing for $5, you now get to pay Walmart $17 for the same thing.

If we are going to outsource production in order to save on consumer goods costs, the consumer should be the one reaping the surplus - not capital. Properly informed buyers were quite capable of getting quality product out of China for a tenth of the cost of exactly the same thing stocked on major retailer shelves here.

While there are certainly abuses of the current system, it would be best to close those loopholes vs. just give a bunch of profits to giant companies for effectively doing nothing more than having scale and volume. If you’re lucky they may do some curation too.

Not everything was Temu or Shein. Plenty of smaller factories basically going direct to consumer in a win win sort of scenario. They get paid more, and the customer doesn’t pay any middlemen.

This is more like setting `trade: off`.

>the Korean version (which I use)

Beauty of Joseon?

> and we wind up with pollution, additional landfill, and relentless consumerism that's harmful to the country

But that happens regardless of whether or not you import manufactured goods, doesn't it?

Everything does not have a tradeoff. This philosophy alone is bullshit.

You're on a tangent of a tangent, but:

Old school helmets use the philosophy that in a crash, you want your head to be harder than its opponent.

New school helmet use the philosophy that a helmet should absorb or deflect as much energy as possible, so that energy doesn't get translated to your brain.

They are actually diametrically opposed. Fortnine (the same channel I linked earlier) has a video on the SNELL standard. Its origins are as a beefier version of the DOT standard. They recently found themselves at a crossroads where it's impossible to both meet SNELL and meet ECE 22.06 (today's state-of-the-art standard). They ended up bifurcating SNELL into two standards: one that meets old DOT-based SNELL, and another that basically says "if it's 22.06, they can call it SNELL variant B." It was the only way they could keep the SNELL brand alive across both halves of the transition.

Do they use Japan Post?

For anyone who wants more data, Virginia Tech runs a helmet impact testing lab and publishes results and rankings: https://www.helmet.beam.vt.edu/bicycle-helmet-ratings.html

Not really the case in at least Europe and the gulf states

MIPS is actually pretty rare in motorcycles helmets. I know Bell makes a helmet with it, but the premium helmets tend to come up with their own solutions to the same problem.

ECE 22.06 is the standard to look for for rotational protection in 2025.

MIPS isn’t a standard, but an enhancement (and there is some argument that its benefits are overstated: e.g. you’ll get some beneficial slippage in your helmet if it isn’t as tight as possible, if you have hair, or if the thing you hit is more slippery than asphalt)

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45018181

MIPS AB is actually a company, known for predatory patent lawsuits. They've used clever marketing to make MIPS the technology desireable and in my opinion totally unnecessary, or maybe even outright more dangerous for majority of bike riders.

MIPS is a technology, not a standard. There are other technologies for rotational trrauma protection.

The current best standard for consumers is ECE 22.06.

> De minimis makes no sense and the EU doesn't have it either

You're conflating tax with tariffs here. EU does not have a de minimis rule for tax - you always pay tax on import - but it does have a 150 Euro de minimis rule for tariffs.

The government can't solve for everything at all times. That's why free markets exist and are important. You could have the best most awesome helmet safety regulation get passed on Friday and have it completely blown up by a new discovery on Monday. How long will it take for regulators to catch up?

> The way you fix that is by fixing regulatory processes

Well, that kinda hand waves away a lot of the roadblocks you run into with government and elected officials. In an ideal world, yes, we have regulatory and legislative bodies that can react quickly and do the right thing everytime but that isn't reality.

Two things are happening at the same time.

On the one hand, government is broken writ large. It's been dominated by politicians who care more about power than improvement for as long as I've been alive. The problem becomes worse and feels more intractable every year. I'm not convinced there's anything individuals can practically do to help resolve it. (Those in power would ruin your life if you actually did a good job at making the world better in a way that impinged on their power.)

On the other hand, technology is enabling rules to be enforced in a more automated way. You see this with speed cameras, and now also with these stricter shipping requirements.

These rules were written to have an exhaust valve: for speed limits, that's police discretion. For imports, that's the de minimus exemption. Nobody cares what individuals do; they care what markets do (which is part of why bans are usually bans on selling, not on owning).

I touched on this a little bit about self-driving cars the other day too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987516

The ratcheting of rules into automated policy is dystopian.

Grey markets aren't the same black markets. Ideally the government would be omniscient, efficient, and benevolent so that it could properly regulate things to the benefit of the masses, but in practice it government isn't very responsive and in many cases has to consider different viewpoints on an issue. Even worse, regulations usually create winners and losers in a way where even if it's beneficial to change the regulation, whoever would lose out will automatically be opposed to the change. Americans - mostly working and middle class, not wealthy - bought 50+ billions of dollars of goods imported this way last year. The American people have voted with their wallets but the government is not responsive to their desires in this case.

You can have either a free market or a market tightly controlled by a government plus all the cronyism that entails.

We generally refer to the latter option as "communism"

If motorcyclists had the power to demand common sense policy improvements, filtering would be legal everywhere, and cities would start adding PTW (powered two-wheels: motorbikes and e-bikes) lanes alongside the current acoustic bike lanes.

It's a relatively small constituency. Most politicians don't want to upset the status quo to advocate for them. A lot of non-riders have enough negative experience (hearing scary stories or being startled by delivery drivers working within the current system) to actively add friction to the conversation.

For instance, NYC's current chief-of-police is a nepobaby. Her mom is a high society type who is afraid of bicycles, so the police have been actively abd specifically harassing cyclists this year.

For sunscreen, they just make a separate less effective version for the US market. The market of people who would say "well, I won't buy sunscreen at all unless it's as good as foreign variants at blocking UV-A rays" is pretty small.