In context I wouldn't assume so. An opt-in experience assumes someone has provided proactive, affirmative consent. An opt-out experience assumes no such consent.
By saying "opt-in by default," author is making the subtle point that positive, affirmative consent is assumed - not just that the features are literally on by default.
I have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.
I don't think this is a "fear sells" issue. Arsenic green is remarkably toxic. In the 19th century, the toxicity just wasn't known or recognized as serious. Now, we know better. Medical diagrams from the time period show hand injuries on people who worked with arsenic compounds regularly (deep sores that won't heal, e.g.)
I do not think you are aware that most people's process of writing good poetry is quite involved. It's okay not to understand, but be cautious about implying that another person's artistic work could be done in a spare hour here or there between coursework. It is disrespectful to the hard work of the written word.
I don't think this is exactly correct. One purpose of a de minimis exemption is to clear the way for small overseas businesses to integrate more easily into the national economy by minimizing border wait times and overhead importation costs on cheap goods / goods only found overseas. It has the dual benefit of reducing customs labor costs for the taxpayer. From an economic perspective, business models like these are a desirable and purposeful consequence.
We focus on businesses like Temu because everyone agrees they sell cheap garbage, but a lot of overseas businesses sell high-quality or even essential goods. (And clearly, for many people, whatever Temu sells is good enough.)
This rule goes back to the 30s and for most of its history the goal is to reduce administrative burden. The fact that small business around the world might benefit from it is indirect and never the main goal.
We focus on Temu because they are running a large dollar value business on imports that skirt duty tax. The dollar volume is the important piece here as they playing on an unfair advantage.
If the purpose of the exemption were only to reduce the labor cost of importation, some other scheme (such as prohibiting the importation of cheap goods entirely) would be far more effective. Several other options would be at least equally effective. Factors besides labor are clearly also considered.
In your view, what are the factors in addition to customs labor costs that were weighed in 2016 the choice to increase the de minimis exemption? I'm curious, because you seem to feel very strongly that global economic integration is not one of them.
I’m not saying global integration wasn’t ever discussed or considered, just that historically, the primary driver behind de minimis was administrative efficiency. You can trace it all the way back to original rule in the 30s. The idea was that the cost of collecting duty on low-value goods often exceeded the revenue collected, so it made sense to wave them through.
That’s very different from encouraging large-scale commercial exploitation. When entire logistics chains are built specifically to stay under the threshold, intentionally bypassing duties that domestic importers would have to pay, that’s a policy failure, not a success. You can absolutely argue that it incidentally helped smaller exporters or increased consumer access, but that’s a long way from saying it was intended to support global e-commerce platforms arbitraging regulatory gaps.
You asked what factors were weighed—labor costs and shipment volume handling, sure. Maybe some light consumer benefit. But "building duty-free pipelines for billion-dollar drop-shippers" probably wasn’t in the memo.
Supply and demand is one driver of economic pricing, but not the only driver. Efficient pricing is a complex topic and not as black-and-white as it seems. As demand falls, the price may be expected to fall, but there is an inelastic limit set by material, labor, transport, and taxation cost. A company may elect to decrease their profit margin per sale to offset increased costs, but there is only so much margin to eat.
In the current circumstances, though, companies do not have a choice to lower prices. The basic cost of taking an item into inventory from these suppliers has risen significantly, in most cases well above 2024 margins.
The net effect is that, despite the market's best effort to correct prices to within an affordable range, costs may rise considerably and availability may still fall regardless. Under severe shock to the system, the usual maxims that account for nominal shifts in day to day trading no longer apply.
> Both supply and demand change depending on the price.
But that's a massive oversimplification. It's like saying programming is "just typing". Technically, sure; accurate, no. There's latency in the real world. Bad actors. Information asymmetries. Regulations. Monopolies. Stuff you can't do without and can't even always decline (ambulance ride for an unconscious person). Fake news about a supply crunch changes demand without changing supply for a while.
Most relevant in modern global economies: lack of available alternatives.
One of the primary reasons for combination in low-margin markets is to gain pricing power. And even if there are 2-5 entities in a given market, informal price collusion is far from unheard of.
It's not just acceptability. Jokes written even just five or ten years ago often fail to land on modern audiences. That taste in humor changes is neither morally positive nor negative. It's easy to look for deeper meaning in the notion that what once was funny now isn't, but often, there isn't a deeper meaning to find. Life is different now; so too must humor change.
When I re-watch comedy like ‘The Young Ones’ or many other funny series from the 80s or 90s, I don’t find it funny any more. It’s not that the jokes weren’t good and that I didn’t find it funny at the time, it’s just that humour changes. In that case, it’s nothing to do with the jokes becoming ‘unacceptable’.
I watched the entirety of Yes (Prime) Minister relatively recently despite being younger than the show and not British; and found it delightfully entertaining and often surprisingly relevant to contemporary political issues.
Many of my academic colleagues are considering emigration. A nontrivial fraction have already begun (or in certain prescient cases completed) the process. It is sad to say, but it is difficult to imagine a career in science in the US right now. I am also considering whether that future for myself is best pursued elsewhere. Or, I'm sadder to say, whether the opportunity has been foreclosed upon for good. There is no way to know yet what the future truly holds, but the rhyme history offers for our times is an unpleasant one to imagine.
Where are they planning to go if you mind me asking? My brother is considering moving to Canada, but he's already living in Ohio, so that wouldn't be a huge move in absolute geographical terms. Another friend is in the process of moving to Spain, but there really doesn't seem to be a particularly safe place.
Most nations appear to have their own brand of populist hard-right political leaders at the moment and I've cautioned people that unless they know a lot about where they are moving to, they are likely to just be exchanging one scary regime for another and taking on outsider immigrant status in that new society.
I'm genuinely curious about this, no sarcasm of cynicism here.
It isn’t just the young. My father is a professor of clinical psychology with a long and storied career and is looking outside the country. He works a lot with the government on psychometric personality evaluation for security clearances and has gotten lists of words that are banned and guidances towards discrimination against certain groups in denying security clearances. He’s seeing grants for his doctorate and post doctorate students denied if their focus is not aligned against certain groups (including pregnant women and depression in men, as odd as it sounds). He came of age in the 1960’s, and this is everything his parents and his generation fought against come to fruition. He is torn between staying and putting up a fight or going somewhere where he is valued and give value to people who seek his mentorship without constraints and political ideology imposed on it. Frankly, I think he should give to humanity what he has to give and let my generation do the fighting - if there’s any that we will do.
Several friends and I have been tossing around the idea of sending a solid billet of osmium in a small flat rate box, matching its size. "One rate, any weight," right?
Sadly this experiment would cost in the high tens of thousands of dollars. We may try with titanium some day. That would only be ten thousand dollars.
Midwest Tungsten sells a 1.5" cube (1 kg) for $200. I have one, as well as a magnesium cube of the same size. They look identical but the Mg cube weighs 1/10 as much. It's fun to let someone hold the W cube to feel the weight and then toss them the Mg cube with "Here, catch!"
Broken tungsten carbide drill bits are a much cheaper way to get dense weights (I made a running vest one time) if you can find a machine shop or online, etc.
If you just used lead the billet would be 31lb, it'd be procurable and shippable for under $100.
Osmium is about twice as dense so yeah that would still be shippable at around 60 lb... I don't think that's even tens of thousands at that point? Isn't it going to be in the millions? I'm just thinking that like if you went for gold instead, 50 lb is 800 oz, at $3300/oz these days doing this with gold is $2.64M, no? And surely osmium blows gold out of the water by like 10x, right?
Jokes on you when the $100 of insurance is all you get back from the post office...
Edit: a sibling comment points out that you can probably do this under $100 with tungsten too and get up into that 50lb+ range.
Depleted uranium would be my first choice for this; we had big bars of the stuff laying around the lab that we used for door stops. (The lab was a place that designed nuclear weapons.)
DU is harmless unless you eat or breathe it but alas it's now illegal to possess more than a minute quantity of it.
Tungsten is actually slightly denser and it has the advantage of being obtainable.
It's both. DU is never completely "depleted" because radiation falloff is asymptotic. DU is primarily an alpha emitter and alpha particles cannot penetrate skin, but they can cause damage if you breathe, eat, or inject DU dust.
That's why our use of big lumps of DU as door stops was considered "safe" (at that time several years ago) but in labs where people machined the stuff they were a lot more careful.
By saying "opt-in by default," author is making the subtle point that positive, affirmative consent is assumed - not just that the features are literally on by default.
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