Those rancid fucking ghouls want to kill Chinese online shopping platforms like AliExpress by introducing a 3€ fee per item starting from July next year. Member nations may also impose their own additional fees on top of that. Apparently, the Dutch get to pay an additional 2€ per package while Romanians pay 5€.

This isn’t too bad if you buy more expensive individual items. For example, paying 3€ on top of 25€ would suck but it’s still less expensive than trying to get the same thing from the EU. However, if you had a 15€ package consisting of 8 smaller items, you’d have to pay an eye-watering 24€ in fees.

It absolutely infuriates me how fucking smug EU politicians and bureaucrats sound while they boast about this new scheme, like cops who had just done major drug bust or foiled some terror plot. The media also talks about people who shop on AE and Temu like they’re fucking crackheads or drunk drivers or something while also admitting that the “worst offenders” are pensioners and single parents, aka the poor. Fuck those people amirite

Most of the stuff I get from AliExpress is lower-priced items so this EU protection racket is gonna suck. EU and corporate mouthpieces like to go on about how cheap Chinese goods are bad for the environment but most of the shit I get is replacement parts and accessories for things I already own that I could not get locally at all, or only at some ludicrous markup. I saw some electronics repairman say that they buy individual components directly from China because otherwise you would have to buy many of them in industrial quantities

Edit: Just look at this fucking shit, dude. My latest purchase contained a couple of Micro USB to USB-C adapters because I have a bunch of older devices and I figured it would be easier to have a couple of adapters instead of finding new Micro USB cables. The adapters cost less than 2€. Look at these prices at local retailers:

See that 2.90€ listing? Yeah, that one has a 6€ shipping fee and I’m pretty sure they’re just a middle man for Alibaba products anyway jokerfied

Also, as a sidenote, I was commiserating about this and other shit with some real life acquaintances, and we were all in agreement until I brought up how our shitty fucking government is going to gut the welfare state to buy military jets and other weapons from the Yanks, at which point the mood changed completely. “We’ve got no choice but to defend ourselves from Russia” maybe-later-honey All their anger at the government, the EU and the US completely evaporated in an instant. These people are lefties

This entire stupid continent is 99% Nato-brained and there’s like 10 communists. I guess this is better than the time I was accused of being a tankie Russian stooge for disagreeing with the take that Putin’s ultimate goal is to conquer Europe for lebensraum for the Russians and he’s gonna do it any day now

  • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    14·
    5 days ago

    It’s just banned in India

    Yeah, the Indian government wants you to use domestic alternatives like uhh… umm… ahh… i-spil-my-jice MODS, MOOOOOOODS!

    Seriously, though, are there domestic alternatives? It seems like India just doesn’t have industry for a lot of what China produces, especially electronics. Even less so than Europe, which already has basically none (and what it does have is mostly assembled from Chinese parts).

      • LeninWeave [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
        8·
        5 days ago

        Seems weird to ban Chinese e-commerce if there’s no domestic alternatives to what they sell and no importer ready to provide zero added value while collecting a bunch of extra money for dropshipping.

        There’s domestic industry in some sectors like automotive though, no? But that’s not competing with Aliexpress. I don’t know how much domestic electronics companies there are (like phone, etc.) where this protectionism could actually do something. I guess any textiles will be competing, but how many people are buying Aliexpress textile products?

        I think almost any country trying to do this style of protectionism is going to run into this issue, except those with domestic Amazon-type platforms like the US, where some leeches will make a ton of money reselling the same things people used to buy on Aliexpress for 5x as much.