Canadian pharmacies pay Canadian tariffs. Americans pay American tariffs. American importers are no longer exempted from paying American tariffs applied by the US government for goods de minimis goods they import from Canada.
This post is about American importers no longer having exemption on tariffs they would have otherwise paid to the US government.
At no point has Canadian pharmacies ever paid American tariffs. This is fiction you invented.
I don’t know what you’re saying, but for those confused. Starting in 2025, the de minimis exception was removed. This added delays to purchases of drugs from Canada to the US, and required consumers to pay new duties. These duties were collected by the pharmacies at order time, or at least my experience was that the pharmacies would charge your card for them. This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.
These duties were annoying but bearable. However these new changes will effectively shut down all consumer orders of drugs from Canada starting on Oct 22. So if you need these drugs to stay alive, order them right now.
PS This new rule is going to put my family’s health at risk and I’m deeply pissed about it. Having some HNer pick this moment for pedantry is incredibly on brand.
And that's the problem. It doesn't get much more simple than "Canadians pay Canadian import taxes" and "Americans pay American import taxes". Can you at least recognize that reality? For any country, its own people pay its tariffs.
> required consumers to pay new duties.
Required American consumers to pay new American levied duties.
This is an article about new rules for US consumers purchasing drugs for mail delivery from Canadian pharmacies. I understand that you want to make some point about the situation for Canadian consumers, and I appreciate that. But I think you should post that to the other thread, the one that deals with that topic.
> This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.
It's very dangerous to assume common understanding here when Trump has been loudly claiming the opposite, i.e. that the tariffs would be paid by the sender rather than the importer. It would have been more accurate to state that "Canadian pharmacies have already been including the tarrifs in the total order cost".
As a Canadian that sells products to the US I can say that we absolutely pay tariffs to the US government in place of our customers who should be paying it, depending on what shipping provider you use. USPS doesn't have the infrastructure or care to collect tariffs, so they won't, meaning the shipper has to just pay them up front and either jack the shipping cost by an arm-and-a-leg or just eat the cost. Canada Post even requires you as the shipper to pay them. If I ship UPS I can have the buyer pay upon delivery. It's 100% bullshit. I'm luckily under CUSMA, but the first month of tariffs when no one knew what was going on I paid out the ass on shipping and never got any refunds for it like Americans supposedly did, I just got fucked. In Canada and most other places it's normal to pay tariffs and duties when you order anything international (upon delivery) and all carriers know how to collect at delivery (or collect ahead of time online), but the US does not and it's alien to them (as seen by many customers screaming bloody murder over a $4 duty fee that anyone else in the world would kill to only have to pay).
And Amazon.com could only ever hope to deliver physical books?
Anyway, it's clear an AI data center has utility for crunching AI inference, and that there is and will continue to be demand for AI inference. The trillion dollar question is whether you can make money doing this, and so far the answer is no.
You are not disproving but rather reinforcing my point. Amazon survived the dotcom bubble precisely because they could hope to do more than deliver physical books. It was a more flexible, generally applicable business model than pets.com, and they started out targeting a market more susceptible to ecommerce conversion than pet food delivery proved to be. Similarly, a company selling a product that can only be used for the limited use cases we have found for chatbot-style text generating LLMs will be more likely to fail than a company selling something that is more generally useful. Data centers are more generally useful than LLMs, and the companies building them are more likely to survive than those whose fortunes are pinned entirely to unrealistically high expectations for replacing white collar workers with LLMs.
Data centers aren't just physical buildings though - the vast bulk of data centre costs is the racks of servers in them, and those are being bought and installed on credit at very high costs.
Its not about "is a computer thoeretically useful" its about if it's going to deliver value to cover the cost of installing it in the first place over it's expected lifetime.
You aren't substituting generic compute: you're substituting highly optimized GPU dense server space. The application is more limited then it looks.
There are over a million legal immigrants in China, plus an unknown but sizable number of illegal immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and Myanmar. Of course this is not a huge number compared to the overall population, but it's still a sizable number of people.
Really? "Estimates from the Office for National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 171,000 in 2025. This figure is lower than net migration levels during the 2010s and represents a sharp decline compared to the year ending March 2023, when net migration peaked at a historical high of 944,000 (Figure 2)."
So we're gonna treat 944000 as less than a million I guess? If we also count illegals, as we should since they exist and keep arriving, that year was probably around a million. Even if we don't count them - it's very close to a million.
They still have enough unskilled labor they can pull from the country side. They pack up the village and ship them (relocate the people) to a city in need of workers.
They increasingly don't (much of rural China is depopulating rapidly, with only the old folks left) and "pack up the village and ship them to a city" is not a thing, unless it's being demolished for a dam etc.
So where's Snowden in all this? The article talks at great length about everybody he gave copies to and how they've all gone silent, but obviously he holds copies as well and is not beholden to the US on what he does with them. (Although he is surely on a short leash with his Russian masters as well.)
> In January 2014, he told a German TV interviewer that he gave all of his information to American journalists reporting on American issues.[56] During his first American TV interview, in May 2014, Snowden said he had protected himself from Russian leverage by destroying the material he had been holding before landing in Moscow [0]
Because I know that's what we'd all do when fleeing our home country with a couple million highly desirable classified documents, attempting to avoid prosecution.
We'd all make sure to "protect" ourselves from "leverage" by the people who might (and ultimately did) help us achieve our goals by destroying our one and only bargaining chip.
His autobiography is worth reading. Yes, he wrote it, so it can be skewed all kinds of whichways to suit his agenda, but the picture it paints is of someone born into the US establishment (government / military / intelligence) and essentially a strong belief in the outward impression the US presents to the world. Freedom and Liberty!
I may be all kinds of naive in saying this, but I think he did it for relatively purely "the US must be better than this" motivations. I can't see his motivation being of the same ilk as The Cambridge Five.
People with ordinary levels of moral weakness would never become whistleblowers in the first place. They'd keep their excellent, comfortable and stimulating government careers.
I'm pretty sure he's staying quiet as fuck because he doesn't want to come to any public attention and get deported from Russia. Which would mean he would end up on a one way trip for life to ADX Florence. I haven't seen anything out of him since 2022 on the topic of the russia/ukraine war for instance.
Edit: If I would have to guess, he has some form of Russian intelligence minders who are responsible for oversight of him and his lifestyle and public profile (the russians aren't stupid, of course they have such people), and he has specifically told them he's going to remain completely quiet on everything political and make no further public statements of any sort
It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.
I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The single potentially illegal US government program in the leaks was shut down, the big email providers require SMTP over TLS, and https everywhere happened as a direct result of the leaks.
> I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.
The guy still doesn't understand PRISM. He's a tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout, so I wouldn't be surprised about a lot of things regarding his mental state.
I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever.
> I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS.
He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was completely wrong about PRISM.
> Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do.
The US intelligence agencies were limited by the 4th Amendment before the leaks and continued to be limited by the 4th Amendment after the leaks. The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government. An absolute monarch is not limited by a construction, and we'll see how close Trump gets to that.
> He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was wrong about PRISM.
The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.
> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.
Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.
Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.
> The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly
I take him at his word.
> Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden
It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused. None of that turned out to be true, but you can see that people in this very forum who have the technical background to know better still fell for it.
> It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused.
1. Trump's rise was and is mostly about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.
2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does. Claiming its significance here just sets up a fruitless semantic discussion in which you can claim almost anything about whether it applies.
I'm willing to entertain this idea. Gellman says that Snowden explicitly asked him to publish the full PRISM slide deck within 72 hours as his first request. What is the correct interpretation of Snowden's words? Do you believe he cared about targeted surveillance of non-Americans enough to effectively renounce his citizenship and potentially become subject to that surveillance?
> 1. Trump's rise was and is mostly [emphasis added] about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.
Then we agree. You originally said it had "nothing" to do with deep state conspiracy theories. I said that deep state conspiracy theories "helped lead" to Trump.
> 2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does.
As Trump has done. He specifically mentioned the security apparatus in his conspiracy theories. People blamed Obama for domestic spying that wasn't happening because they believed Snowden's nonsensical description of PRISM.
> I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..
> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever."
Both these ideas still stand.
Yes, PRISM was misinterpreted, but the larger matter was exposing a massively overpowered surveillance apparatus. An apparatus that is more powerful than before. Had Snowden known the lack of effect of his actions, he would not have taken them. This is what you seem to miss, tunneling on PRISM and deflecting to Trump's rise.
> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed
The public wasn't unperturbed. The ones who didn't know any better believed Snowden's PRISM cock and bull story and rabidly froth about it to this day. The ones who knew better got the phone metadata program shut down, just like the email metadata program that Obama had already shut down according to Snowden's leaks. There were no other programs that could possibly be interpreted as illegal, the government implemented oversight and reporting to make sure the legal programs weren't abused, and the tech companies fixed their security postures to account for state actors that can tap international WANs.
> but they aren't massively limited in what they can do
Once again, the 4th Amendment massively limited them in what they could do. Any recent reductions in the effectiveness of the 4th Amendment are due solely to the concentration of power in Trump, which was helped by conspiracy theorists like Snowden and those who fooloshly believed him.
The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit integrates with email and other Internet communication providers to implement wiretaps for accounts they have a court order for. They present the company with a court order, and the company forwards the account's data to the FBI (often via FTP, according to a New York Times article at the time). PRISM is simply a data integration project between the NSA and the FBI for ingesting data for accounts under a Section 702 order (for specific accounts belonging to non-citizens outside the US whose communications are of national security interest).
Ok, but nothing in that leaked slide says anything about a court order or disproves much of anything about PRISM. I'm not saying you are wrong, in fact I sincerely hope you are 100% correct, but all that slide says to me is that the "FBI DITU" got the data somehow, and forwarded it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the FBI. Additionally, lets be honest, a single image of a slide posted on imgur is a lot more "trust me bro" than it is proof.
Snowden and Greenwald interpreted DITU as being a box in these companies' networks with access to everything because they were too stupid to look up what it meant. That slide was the basis of their entire claim. If Snowden's claim isn't "trust me bro," nothing is. Instead, the companies said they didn't do any integration with the NSA (they hadn't, only with the FBI), and they didn't give access to every account's data (they didn't, only with a court order or Section 702 order for a specific account's data).
The NYT got the story right on day one because unlike The Guardian, their editorial standards require asking someone who knows something about what was going on. In this case, they asked workers at the companies. Subsequently, every single mainstream news agency got the reporting correct except for Greenwald, who continued to argue against tech industry workers correcting him on Twitter.
So, I read those links and it seems to me your basis for calling Snowden a "tinfoil hat wearing high school dropout" with "high school dropout reading skills", is that he misunderstood that slide to mean that the US gov had direct access to servers at those companies, when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request. Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
> when in fact it was just a government program that forced those companies to query their own data at the government's request
Still got it wrong. The 4th Amendment allows the US to wiretap its citizens or people in the US only with a court order like a warrant. We give the government this power so that it can effectively prosecute crimes. People who are noncitizens outside the US have no such protections, but US companies aren't going to allow the government to search all of their data willy-nilly, nor will the courts allow it. Instead, they must give Section 702 orders for each of those foreign accounts with national security interest. The government then gets those accounts' data to search themselves.
> Am I correct in saying that your argument then, is that all of this is completely overblown and noone should be concerned at all with this because it is all the product of a barely literate government contractor and an unscrupulous journalist?
Also incorrect. I'm saying that this program breaks no laws. If you would like to protect the data of non-citizens living outside the US beyond the current protections, you should propose such a law. In the meantime, we should recognize that Snowden's claims about what the government did were completely incongruous with reality.
The reason this matters is that if Snowden's claims were true, it would mean the law doesn't matter. People who believe that would be willing to tear down a democracy in order to clean it up. The law does matter, and the government abides by it. We don't need to give power to charlatans like Trump.
I'm an American citizen who read news about Ukraine back when it was a niche thing to care about and I have Ukrainian friends who tell me how it's going. You can't imagine how stressful it is to live there and get drafted into their drone target lottery.
This is a classic Russian perspective on the war - that Ukraine is a gang of neo-Nazis that are dead set on eliminating Russian speakers from Ukraine by force. Russians will further claim that this gang of Russophobic neo-Nazis is led by Zelenskyy, a Jewish man who speaks Russian as his mother tongue and Ukrainian as a second language.
The absurdity of this claim should be self evident.
FYI "Jewish Nazi" isn't actually an oxymoron. In WW2 there were hundreds of thousands of Nazi party members who were Jews - they mostly got gassed along with the other Jews. Plus the whole Palestine thing.
Zelenskiy isn't a Nazi, but the reason he isn't a Nazi isn't because he's Jewish.
However this is one of the weakest possible grievances you could raise because Putin also released rapists and murderers from prison to raise manpower, most famously during the spring 2023 Bakhmut offensive. There is no moral highground on that point.
Actually, this is actually a near universal issue with Russian grievances against Ukraine. Virtually any grievance that Russia can claim against Ukraine, Ukraine can claim that exact grievance back at equal or greater measure.
You're finally getting it. Russia and Ukraine are truly the same when it comes to seeking their own interests. Ukraine was happy to fund far-right psychos to go terrorize Russian citizens of Ukraine after 2014 because that's the bargain they made. Russia invaded to stop NATO/EU from ending the kleptocracy because they are horrible shit stain oligarchs.
This is part of it. Previously governments felt the need to hide skullduggery, but the Trump admin doesn't even bother to pay lip service to this, so to the public revelationa about whatever the Obama admin was up top don't really register. And the political polarization where the mere word "Obama" gets half the population for thing at the mouth doesn't help.
All that said, it doesn't explain the total radio silence we've seen for years now.
Lasers or anything similar like a rail gun require extraordinary amounts of power to work, and that power generates side effects like heat which strain and damage the current materials that we have and are known.
The physics change entirely when its Air to Air laser defense vs Ship to air laser defense.
There are numerous things that shift the math
1. Speed difference
The Stealth fighter is moving at mach 2
The Ship is moving at 40 mph
A fleeing stealth fighter will be able to fire at the incoming missile far longer
2. Atmospheric difference
At sea level, humidity, salt spray, and atmospheric thermal turbulence absorb beam energy, causing thermal blooming
At Sea Level: Air density is 100%. A 100 kW laser beam diverges quickly and may struggle to keep a tight focal point beyond 3 to 5 km.
At 45,000 Feet: Air density drops by 80% down to roughly 20% and water vapor is almost zero.
3. Missile types and threat profiles
The missile likely to take down a stealth fighter is a infrared air to air missile. They have glass domes that allow light and heat to enter. Thus vulnerable to getting blinded
The missile likely to take down a ship is a hypersonic antiship missile, is likely using a AESA seeker and sporting a extremely tough and heat resistant ceramic dome. You cannot blind a AESA seeker, a ship would need a hard kill and to try to burn through a missile body designed to survive the extreme heat and force of moving at hypersonic speeds at low altitudes.
The physics change entirely, it makes tons of sense from a physics standpoint to have a defensive laser on a fighter jet to defend from air to air missiles. A laser system would prevent infrared missiles from hitting your stealth jets.
While for ships it makes no sense, A laser system can't burn through a hypersonic antiship missile fast enough and will just be a waste.
And before you bring up, muh power the J-36 has 3 engines this is why the chinese put in a 3rd engine inside their 6th gen fighter, the intent of the design was always to install a defensive laser
> The Stealth fighter is moving at mach 2 The Ship is moving at 40 mph
Irrelevant, lasers move at the speed of light.
> At sea level, humidity, salt spray, and atmospheric thermal turbulence absorb beam energy, causing thermal blooming
> At Sea Level: Air density is 100%. A 100 kW laser beam diverges quickly and may struggle to keep a tight focal point beyond 3 to 5 km.
> At 45,000 Feet: Air density drops by 80% down to roughly 20% and water vapor is almost zero.
THis may all be true, but the problems of heating dynamics remain. A laser cannot requires cooling times for both plane and ship because of heat, which limits the frequency it can be used.
> The missile likely to take down a stealth fighter is a infrared air to air missile. They have glass domes that allow light and heat to enter. Thus vulnerable to getting blinded
> The missile likely to take down a ship is a hypersonic antiship missile, is likely using a AESA seeker and sporting a extremely tough and heat resistant ceramic dome. You cannot blind a AESA seeker, a ship would need a hard kill and to try to burn through a missile body designed to survive the extreme heat and force of moving at hypersonic speeds at low altitudes.
Dont tell me, tell the he navies of the world who have tried and failed to create lasers mounted on ships.
TL;DR: AUD 19,900 driveway (means taxes, registration etc included), or about US$14k. The main limitation is the 220 km (135 mi) range, which is fine for a city runabout but not great for road tripping.
Australia doesn’t tariff Chinese car imports, on account of no longer having any car industry of our own to defend.
That said we do still have a hefty “luxury car tax” for anything over $80k, which is a hangover from when there was an industry here. The government aren’t going to lift that any time soon.
Its current function is to select for expensive trucks over expensive sedans, because trucks are “commercial” and exempt, making our roads less safe overall. Thanks government.
So you are saying that there's a widespread problem with people looking to buy a car for $100k but realizing there's a $6k tax they go, "I can't afford that" and instead buy a unsafe truck?
Another part of the picture is that you can more often get away with buying a truck “for business” if you’re a small business-person, regardless of whether it actually ends up being used for that.
And by ‘unsafe’ I mean for pedestrians and they contribute to the vehicle-size arms race on the roads, they’re generally very safe for the occupants.
$80k AUD isn’t far off from the American average car price, so I can see it being a reverse incentive for people at the boundary if the tax isn't graduated in.
For now, flash charging is in China, Europe, UK, and Malaysia (soon). The chargers actually have battery packs in them because the charging current is almost always too much to be supplied by the grid directly.
It’s pretty tiny too, so not a road trip car IMHO.
That said, coupled with home solar to power it, this is a very cheap way to get on the road and I will likely go this direction in future - one of these for the city and something a bit bigger/more rugged to go bush once in a while.
Been thinking more along the lines of the Munda-biddy actually :)
But I haven’t got on my bike for a few years now because at the moment all my spare energy goes on managing our plot. There’s always something needs moving, sawing, building, repairing, digging… So I’ve gone from having a (pudgy) cyclist’s physique with very strong calves to more of a farmer’s build with bigger arm and shoulder muscles than I’ve ever had before and a big ‘ol belly.
But in all seriousness I also like to go remote once in a while and access national parks. I’m not going to be hooning it round destroying dunes, but getting to beautiful places like Cape Peron is tough without a the right vehicle.
I've been through the Bungles on a push bike - so that's a thing, but yeah, Cape Peron would be a hard slog without a boat or vehicle that can push across deep sand - water would be a tough carry.
> without the right vehicle
A loong time ago (late 1970s) I got to traverse the horizontal falls a couple of time in a home made sea kayak after being dropped off "nearby" (and later picked up again) by an old pearling lugger .. pretty low carbon effort that one, just a lot of paddling (and fishing, and digging for fresh water, and dodging the odd shark and salty croc).
I want solar and a battery (don’t have it yet, it’s on the list) to cut my energy bills and guard against power cuts anyway.
So neither of these things is an ‘extra’ expense for me getting a small EV.
There are a total of 5 corollas available in Australia for $2k or less. Each one is ratty, beat up and 19+ years old, I wouldn’t want to chance taking any of them on the freeway, and you’d still have to fuel them.
Then why respond to a post in which I say what I'm thinking about doing?
You don't care.
> You’re good mate, you’re rich.
I'm not rich, I'm just a homeowner, 66% of the Australian public live in houses they own, so your cost-of-owning-a-house discussion points are irrelevant to most people.
> It’ll still be cheaper than having to buy a new car, plus house, plus solar & battery.
Which most people won't have to do, as they live in houses they have already bought, solar is subsidised, and is useful far beyond EV charging so a lot of people already have it. Plus maybe they can take advantage of the free electricity period tariffs on offer in a lot of states now. Makes this car very cheap for a huge number of people. And that's before we get into the possibilities of novated leasing with zero FBT on EVs.
> Choose a different car for under $5000 then.
No thanks, they're still all shitboxes at that price and they still need to be fuelled. Given that's probably in the range of $2-3k per year on average mileage and current fuel prices, and that I wouldn't expect a $5k car to last all that long, it'll be pretty quick to make up that price difference.
> Also won’t work for anyone living in a unit / flat / appartment, whether they rent or own.
Charging at public points, in car parks etc is still cheaper than petrol mate.
I bought a 4 year old leaf with 25k on the clock in May for £7k ($10k). Get about 150 miles on a full charge. I’d rather a little more as I tend to do 90 a day, so if it doesn’t charge offpeak overnight for some reason I’m left with a manual recharge during the day. But I do a lot of miles (25k a year)
The main downside on long trips is the DC is chamedo, not standard ccs, so there are fewer locations and they are sometimes broken or full.
Singapore residents are not limited to one car. There's a lot of regional ultra rich in Singapore, and it's not unusual for them to have half a dozen or more cars, all of which count against the total cap.
Due to its aging population and lack of mass immigration, Japan has a desperate labor shortage in many fields.
I don't think taxi driving in Tokyo is one of them (because, as noted, the qualifications needed are pretty minimal), although eg bus drivers are in extremely short supply.
https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/on-the-road/ev-c...
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