Americans Are Receiving Unordered Parcels From Chinese E-Criminals - And Can't Do Anything To Stop Them
Well, this is an interesting adaptation to the term "junk mail" my guess is you turn around and sell them in bulk to anyone who wants them through EBay or something, and flood the market. All the ranking in the world won't help if there are no customers. Maybe that is just too much effort....
Technical magazines have been doing this for as long as I have been receiving them. Their ad value is in proportion to their subscription rates, so it is difficult to un-subscribe from them. They will ask you to pay expensive subscription prices, but if you do not, then they will ask you to pay discount subscription deals, but if you do not they will ask you to officially subscribe for free, but if you do not they will send you their trade journals anyway. If you directly contact them, and ask that you be removed, they will eventually remove you...but it is more important for you to count for ad value than for you to pay for the magazine.
Jan
It's also a nuisance to those receiving the mysterious packages trying to figure out what it means. It's creepy and a waste of time, and may be frightening. The disposal of an accumulation of unsolicited trash also costs money.
I have a story to share about this... and it is an extreme example. I did an experiment to see what would happen if I gave Donald Trump, the Libertarian Party, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders an undisclosed and small sum of money for their respective campaigns. The results were: two pictures of Donald Trump (megalomaniac or Nietzschean egoist response), a Libertarian Party pin and an occasional newsletter from the same (self-promotional form of social activism), possibly one hundred calls from the DNC asking for more (begging), and emails about grassroots liberal campaigns in my area (uniting looters). The truth is, Facebook now has no idea how to classify my politics and its exceptional. Minus the DNC calls. I regret that one, for sure.
"While the world politicians are doing their best to split the globe apart by means of iron curtains and brute force, the world postal services are demonstrating ... in their quiet, unobtrusive way ... what is required to bring mankind closer together: a specific purpose cooperatively carried out, serving individual goals and needs. It is the voices of individual men that stamps carry around the globe; it is individual men that need a postal service; kings, dictators and other rulers do not work by mail. In this sense, stamps are the world's ambassadors of good will." -- Ayn Rand, "Why I Like Stamp Collecting" (Minkus Stamp Journal, Vol. VI, No. 2 - 1971.)
No, I will not turn off adblock, statist tool!
The topic post itself may be an example of the same sort of thing: a great new problem you have to deal with ... but it is not a problem at all... just unsolicited mail.
A good reason to withdraw from international postal agreements, and to either privatize or wind down the U.S. Postal Service.
The USPS has been losing more than $5 billion per year since 2010. Guess who will be the bailer out of last resort. "Postal Service calls for pricing hike as losses mount" https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...
And according to the article I linked to: "The reason why it (the subsidy) exists isn’t because the USPS wants to give a helping hand to the hardworking merchants of China, but due to what the Washington Post dubbed a 'quirk in an international treaty.' International postage rates for incoming packages are set by a U.N. agency called the United Postal Union (UPU). . . Essentially, countries that it deems to be poorer or less developed pay less for shipping to countries that are categorized as being richer. So someone shipping from, say, China, will pay significantly less to ship to a country like the U.S. than an American shipper will pay to send that same package to China."
So I reiterate: the existence of this subsidy is a good reason (among many others) to withdraw from international postal agreements, and to either fully privatize or wind down the U.S. Postal Service.
I misused the word "ephemeral." I was thinking of "airy" as in "insubstantial." It is like claiming that the government subsities of Kennedy Space Center prevent private enterprise in space launches. They are a factor in that market, but if you are mad about the US Government launching Chinese satellites, attacking the market value of untaxesd KSC property misses the point. I grant that the government has no business in space launches or the delivery of first class mail. I just see a wider context for the problem.
And I do not see the crime of Chinese merchants boosting their own ratings. We have many examples of the same thing in the free market.
See below: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
"The 1874 Treaty of Bern succeeded in unifying a confusing international maze of postal services and regulations into a single postal territory for the reciprocal exchange of letters. The barriers and frontiers that had impeded the free flow and growth of international mail had finally been pulled down."
http://www.upu.int/en/the-upu/history...
What makes it different than food or shelter is that UPU is an agreement for reciprocal service. There is probably no way to make this "fair" in the market sense of each person paying only for themselves and yet have reciprocity. One thing that the UPU established was that I can buy "return postage" for you to send to me, but I do that at my rates, not yours. I pay for the first class coupons at my post office. I enclose them in my letter to you. You use them at your post office to buy the return carriage. For me, the rate in US dollars would be prohibitively expensive for you. That was true in 1874 when you could live cheaper in Switzerland on francs than you could in the USA on the same number of dollars.
International postage is about the transmission of ideas across borders. That some Chinese merchants make egregious use of the system does not invalidate it.
So if the original purpose of the Universal Postal Union was to facilitate the free flow of information between private citizens in different countries, that purpose has already been fulfilled (to the extent possible) during the last few decades, and the UPU should therefore now disband. Instead it has morphed into a redistributionist arm of the U.N., tasked with undercutting a free market in the transportation and delivery of goods and services across international borders. It does so by requiring its “developed” member countries to heavily subsidize the transportation and delivery of packages originating from “developing” countries. This, not Chinese merchants, is the source of the problem, and this is why the U.S. should withdraw from the UPU and allow U.S. businesses to compete on a more level (and fair) playing field.
I just bought a copy of Forever War which was recommended often by my officers from the national guard. The edition I picked up has an endorsement from William Gibson. He claimed to be a "draft dodger" but actually was never even that, and he says that this is the best war story he ever read. It might be. But his endorsement is just puffery, but no harm, no foul.
And you must, of course, know that eBay's success was built on fake stats. Again, no loss of rights was involved. I do not endorse caveat emptor as a business strategy, but take care of my own interests anyway.