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DHL, FedEx, and UPS are experts in overcharging to process a form and not caring about customers. Duty and VAT are usually low compared to this processing fee, and shipping has already been paid. Here is the catch in the EU, this simple duty form can be processed by the receiver, an agent (some related to the carrier), or an attorney-in-fact of the receiver. The big three carriers (and many others) threaten you if you refuse to use them.

At the end of the day, they don't care if we get phished or scammed; it is all of customs confusion. Next time process your customs form, you will realise how much money you will save, and the form only has less than 8 fields, the Union Customs Code is easy to read.


I've often felt frustrated by the processing fees. Can you elaborate on handling this yourself? Which EU country are you based in?


Does not answer your question, but related:

In Finland you can declare DHL/UPS/Fedex packages yourself with customs and pay directly to them, with no fees to carrier (it took a Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority decision in 2017 to get rid of the fees, though). But this is a bit different as it is not a hidden option but standard procedure (though you still get the option of paying the carrier to declare, instead).

Declaring inbound packages to Customs by yourself was already the standard here for postal parcels even before Customs internet services, so this was not a completely new way of working.


I'm in Portugal. If you put enough pressure, they release for you to process, it is the law.


Same in Canada, though, if I understand correctly, you have to visit a customs checkpoint in person to make a declaration: https://goingawesomeplaces.com/how-to-avoid-paying-ups-broke...


The processing fee is as high as $35 when the taxes are as low as $10, and then you get charged tax on the fee too!

CBSA should require affirmative opt-in to use the shipper as the broker, and allow you to file the paperwork yourself on their site.


This. They have been paid to ship an international package. Billing the recipient for delivery is just dishonest. I assume they do it, to make their price for the shipper look artificially low.

For this reason, whenever possible, I choose delivery through the post office.


Windy is a blast and I am a subscriber, but due to recent historic high temperatures some weather models are failing, usually inaccurate by 20 knots.


That's very interesting to hear. This last weekend down here in Florida was unbearable. I got my first sunburn in like 20 years, just last Saturday. And I'm out in the sun every weekend wakeskating.


I run two SMEs in Tourism, and as their size is small we opted years ago, to spend certification costs into CO2e offsetting. We use United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a pillars for managing.


New Hetzner ARM: sign verify sign/s verify/s

rsa 512 bits 0.000070s 0.000006s 14268.2 159885.6

rsa 1024 bits 0.000405s 0.000021s 2468.4 47757.7

rsa 2048 bits 0.002847s 0.000078s 351.3 12830.1

Hetzner x86: sign verify sign/s verify/s

rsa 512 bits 0.000067s 0.000004s 14893.9 240902.8

rsa 1024 bits 0.000127s 0.000009s 7845.9 114300.9

rsa 2048 bits 0.000874s 0.000027s 1144.6 36800.6


If it's of any value to anyone, perhaps as an indication of hardware/environment implementation, I get identical numbers (<1% difference) on Oracle's Ampere Altra servers with OpenSSL 1.1.1n on Debian 11.


Due to a peculiar design issue, Neoverse N1 underperforms when using RSA. It doesn't affect other use cases and is fixed on newer Arm cores.


The recent Netflix password-sharing cracking may create some Roku victims.

The other day, I reviewed the devices logging into my account, all inside my house. However, there was one caveat: two Apple TVs in IPv6 and one Roku in IPV4, with different ASNs, showing as two separate networks 900 km apart. I didn’t receive any Netflix notice so far.


The decrease in the typical duration of tourists' stays in Portugal, which has gone from 6.7 days to 4 days in the past decade, is likely to affect various aspects of the country's tourism infrastructure, including its airports. Additionally, there has been a problem with noise pollution in residential areas due to touristic establishments like bars and nightclubs.


The moment was just weird; "goes blank and disappears", for a moment, I thought it was my connection.


"Yubico has partnered with Cloudflare to offer its hardware authentication security keys — at prices as low as $10 per key — to Cloudflare customers." — Cloudflare Dashboard


Dangit! I just ordered a bunch for $WORK at full price a few days ago.


Cloudflare's JavaScript/Wasm Runtime now Open Source under Apache License 2.0


"science-policy specialists expressed concern that the Wuhan Institute of Virology" is precisely my concern. It is always a "wait and see", instead of planning in case something goes wrong. Public health is consistently the speciality among medicine students they don't want.


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