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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • When you enter the United States, customs “inspects” all the stuff you’re bringing back. If it’s more than $850 worth of stuff, then you have to go to the cashier and pay a tax.

    The tax is a percent of what the stuff is worth. The percent rate can depend on what type of goods it is, and what country it’s coming from. There are massive tables to look this stuff up.

    The stuff you carried out of the country and are now bringing back with you doesn’t count toward the $850 limit.

    If you’re shipping stuff in but not traveling with it, there is no exemption. Tax applies right away. You also have to hire a guy called a broker to help you with the CBP paperwork and to submit payment.

    So let’s say somebody is importing sugar from the Caribbean, and there’s a tariff. They have to pay a percent to the feds every time they ship in some sugar. They raise the price they charge on the sugar to cover that. Then sugar from Louisiana looks more attractive on the store shelf because it’s cheaper.

    Who pays? Whoever is shipping the goods in pays, but they make it up by charging more for the imported products.

    Why do it? Usually, you want to make some domestic industry more attractive by raising the price of the foreign competition.

    In the sugar example, sugar is more expensive to farm in Louisiana because people get paid more, and the equipment is more expensive. If there wasn’t a tariff, people might stop farming sugar in Louisiana entirely. That might make some people sad. On the other hand, all Americans would be able to pay less for sugar without the tariff.











  • The Geneva conventions are not monolithic documents, and they are not completely uncontroversial. I believe the article 51 you refer to is in a 1978 addon protocol that Israel has not ratified. For reference, there is a different article 51 in the original 1949 conventions, that talks about when an occupying army may conscript civilian labor.

    Like any other international treaties, the conventions only apply to countries that have signed on and ratified the treaties. The United States and Israel have not ratified the additional protocol, so from their perspective they are not bound by the text.

    The original 1949 conventions do have protections for civilians, but they are weaker protections. Ratiometric evidence of civilian casualties is heartbreaking, but unfortunately simply not relevant to the 1949 conventions. Under those rules, if a facility is used by your enemy to harm you, you can attack that facility. Period.

    IDF is always careful to portray how they scrupulously follow the 1949 conventions when they speak to the media. Clear violations that become public are referred to investigation.

    As in any war, some elements of IDF are almost certainly violating the conventions. But as a USian I don’t think I’ll get close to understanding the truth any time soon. I basically don’t trust any news source coming out of that region any more.




  • mkwt@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzlittle hopper
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    2 months ago

    Well you see, in 1793, 'Merica requested the metric artifacts from France so we could be metric too. France sent over a kilogram, but the shipment was lost at sea. And that was a little sad.

    All joking aside, US feet, inches, pounds, and so on have been secretly really metric since 1893.





  • A large part of food cost is processing.

    A regular burger patty is processed by butchering a cow, running meat through a grinder, and then pressing the grind into patties.

    A vegan burger patty has to combine multiple ingredients and seasonings with different preprocessing steps, and then it still has to be pressed into patties.

    Out of this, cow butchering is by far the most intensive and costly processing step, but the cost of that is amortized over many cuts of meat, not just the hamburger.

    The vegan patty has more things to process in it. And if you’re looking at Beyond or Impossible, then some of those things are fancy lab grown proteins.