Very interesting read! I always thought China’s gov’t just eats those shipping costs to subsidize exports. Turns out, we are! Since Canada Post is obliged to pay for the Chinese parcels delivered within Canada and Canada Post likes to keep its finances from going into the red, it’s has to recoup the costs where it can. Such as its domestic shipping rates. Essentially buying something shipped from Canada subsidizes the item shipped from China. That’s a nice deal for some of the participants.
This makes it harder for local businesses in Canada to compete with those in China, hurting local ecommerce and brick and mortar shops. The playing field should be leveled and no one should be subsidized.
Or at least make a distinction between commercial and non-commercial mail. I understand subsidizing a letter to a developing country but this is just extracting rent.
Yup. It definitely makes it harder.
Some will always subsidize others, unless you’re a libertarian, this is pretty much an obvious moral axiom. With that out of the way, China 30 years ago was probably worth subsidizing, but China today is not.
Better tl;dr than the bot. They should automate you!
AaaS (Amoeba as a Service)
There’s also some pretty big business deals and discounts going on. If you go directly to Canada Post or UPS or Purolator or DHL, you’re going to pay for the big price. If you go through a shipping company, you can get it for much much cheaper. I got over 5x cheaper on a few boxes I needed to ship across the border that way.
That puts individuals and small local companies at a pretty big disadvantage, on top of Chinese products generally being much cheaper to begin with.
Can regular nonbusiness users use them? This sounds fabulous
Yes, that’s what I did. Basically they take people’s smaller shipments, bundle it into a larger shipment that’s much cheaper, and can manage to charge you less and still make a profit on it.
Neat! I known nothing about these companies, could you give me names of the ones you’ve used?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When Neil Pitman was trying to buy a new piece for his pressure cooker, he couldn’t believe the price difference between getting it shipped from the United States to his home in Sherbrooke, Que., compared to the cost of it coming from China.
Serasu Duran, a University of Calgary assistant professor of operations and supply chain management in the Haskayne School of Business, says it can cost about $5 or $6 per kilogram to ship a package from China to Canada.
It used to be quite difficult to send a letter from one country to another, according to Paulus Schoorl, program manager and policy and regulatory adviser for the Universal Postal Union in Bern, Switzerland.
“The central idea is that any citizen or business should be able to send mail packages through the Global Postal Network to any destination,” said Schoorl.
In 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump pushed back on the rates and threatened to pull the country out of the Universal Postal Union.
"Canada Post determines shipping rates based on several factors, including the origin and destination, which also consider population densities.
The original article contains 876 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Bad bot. This summary is worse than useless.
This article has a unique style to it. I wonder if these bots are only decent at summarizing highly formulaic content (articles that are half written by bots).
Could be, but even the best case scenario for this bot is pretty bad. The bot “summarizes” by omission. That’s always going to be limited.
Eh, the classic newspaper article formula has a good reason for it. They’re designed for subscribers that read the newspaper every day. Some stories all you need is the headline and can move on to the next story. But if that’s not enough the first paragraph will be a summary of the new developments on the story. If you want to know more details, the next few paragraphs will provide details and quotes about the new development. If you haven’t read the paper for a few days and aren’t caught up on that particular story, no problem you can read on and you’ll get a summary of past events of the story. If you are caught up, no need to read the entire article, just move to the next story. If you aren’t caught up, read on and get the recap.
This is the most efficient way to format a story for people that read the newspaper most days. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes a day to stay informed when the articles are formatted this way. But if you didn’t read the news yesterday, it takes just a few more minutes to get caught up because you just read a few more paragraphs in the articles.
It just so happens that news articles formatted to be optimal for people that read the news every day is also easy for a bot to parse as well.
Sure formulaic is bad when when you’re trying to entertain people. But formulaic is good when you’re trying to inform people.
