I work with a company that imports and exports physical products to the U.S. regularly.
Yes, you could probably get away shipping a dozen phones a few times. But they will catch it eventually. They do actually inspect paperwork and sometimes contents.
And if they find out you've lied on the paperwork, you've earned yourself a shit list that's going to extend to any travel you do to/from the U.S. for life, on top of penalties and possibly arrest warrants.
They don't mess around.
I should add: CBP shares offices at the border with the couriers. They're literally down the hall from each other. They're inspecting packages crossing the border all day long, but it's a random sampling, so whether it's your day or not is a matter of luck. They also have mobile x Ray trucks that scan full semi trailers.
Does this extend up and down the tree? The issue is not so much that John Smith needs to get randomly selected at every airport he goes to for the rest of his life.
The issue is that the business he worked for also hired Jane Doe who is doing the same thing - they'd need to trace the responsibility up to his employer/contracting company and back down to their other employees and contractors.
Businesses seem surprisingly good at providing scapegoats and deniability in situations like this, especially compared to our government's tendency to blame the individual.
As far as I'm aware, this applies to the person filing the documents. If a person does this on behalf of a company without referencing the company, he's personally liable. If the company is listed on the paperwork, they'd be flagged.
There's a big difference between sending something personally at the post office, and registering as an exporter/importer. If you're registered, you use your broker account number.
Can the company have thousands of employees attempt to send packages personally? Sure. But if discovered, the company would itself be shitlisted, with probably no way to undo it. The executives and any company that helped facilitate the fraud would be investigated.
I can't speak to whether the CBP maintains employment data or affiliations, but my guess would be yes. I'm sure they have back-office integrations with the NSA.
Misrepresenting information is lying under oath to a government agent. Even honest to God mistakes will get you fined, and flag you for closer inspection in the future.
As a non US citizen, the CBP is scary. I've been to exporter training sessions put on by them jointly with brokers and lawyers. I can't stress how seriously they take this, and how far their influence reaches. Even as a US citizen, I'd find them scary.
If they wanted a legal entity with legal protection and create a brand new company sure.
You can go buy shelf companies (companies that have been previously created and are presently unused) online all day long and effectively take instant delivery however.
And if they just wanted to be blackhat about it, you can go to the IRS website and generate an EIN (tax ID for companies) in a few clicks without showing any identification or documentation and then you just need a place to receive packages or have the packages held for pickup at the carrier.
You can also just go hire random people to accept delivery or pickup your packages. Those dealing in AAS (steroids), recreational drugs, carded merchandise etc do this regularly.
Crime exists because, more often than not, it's painfully easy.
Shelf companies is an interesting approach I hadn't considered.
I wouldn't call anything you described easy, but I'm not a nation state trying to illegal smuggle banned goods. I disagree that you can churn and burn these, but you've made a good point.
>They do actually inspect paperwork and sometimes contents.
I'm well aware, this has been my livelihood for 13 years. That doesn't change the fact that Customs inspects a fraction of shipments and that for a considerable chunk of shipments a human being is never even involved on Customs end, just a computer.
> They also have mobile x Ray trucks that scan full semi trailers.
Mobile x-ray doesn't magically reveal the manufacturer of a given product though, or tap into the akashic record and verify the given country of origin, it goes "yup, there doesn't appear to be missiles, people or hidden compartments in that container".
>And if they find out you've lied on the paperwork, you've earned yourself a shit list that's going to extend to any travel you do to/from the U.S. for life, on top of penalties and possibly arrest warrants.
Do you really think random people in China are concerned about this? Also the paperwork used for Customs clearance, the vast majority of the time, is supplied by the shipper and the importer of record is only contacted if something is missing or clarification is needed by the broker.
Have you ever ordered something form eBay or AliExpress that shipped from China? The Customs declarations NEVER have accurate information on them, they consistently flat out lie about the contents, value, will often indicate gift or not sold, they'll even lie about the country of origin frequently. While these items are often usually a few bucks and are often sectionable anyway, you can bet this happens are formal shipments too without carriers and/or brokers knowing and Customs probably only catches this a small fraction of the time.
Until we get AGI and much better imaging equipment OR Customs increases the number of people doing inspection at least one order of magnitude, this will remain true. The volume is simply too high to catch even half of the funny business/lies/contraband.
This is also one of the countless reasons I lose sleep at night, we are far far far far far too dependent on be able to order this piece from that country, that piece from this country, those widgets from 2 other countries, and having everything show up at our home/place of business 1-3 days later to replace something that broke. All it takes is a natural disaster, a war, a trade war, and BAM.
This trade war with China for example had companies like Regal Beloit scrambling to move their manufacturing to Mexico, then it was announced we'd be starting a trade war with Mexico and these companies began to panic even more, fortunately that one seems to have been resolved.
Better transit to new neighbourhoods, outside the "core".
It's nothing mind blowingly bleeding edge, but it's an improvement over current practices. I see nothing committing them to any of this though, so who knows what gets cost engineered out of the project.
But you're right. It's misdirection. They want more data, and to establish a precedent.
Google is a highly profitable company with tons of smart engineering talent, that can put the time and effort into planning future projects like this. I honestly believe they have good intentions. I also honestly believe that corporate interests will win in the end and this wouldn't turn out well in 20 years.
The wood and timer building are surprisingly folksy, I agree.
However the awnings will do nothing to prevent windblown snow from accumulating.
I mean if they did, then you'd see Torontonians install all kinds of non IOT awnings for this purpose.
I also hear that they will install special pavers that will be heated to melt ice/snow, but that will be very expensive energy wise.
None of it seems practical.
I appreciate that they are proposing better transit connections, but the TTC has a stranglehold on that kind of thing in this city, and I don't see how they are going to get past that.
Also it's a bit patronizing to the local residents to assume that, just because they are Google, that they will immediately have better insights into solving local problems.
It reminds me a bit of that form for telling people why their anti spam idea would never work.¹ They should have one for IOT projects too.
The core problem with their entire proposal, is that they are proposing technical solutions to political problems.
The heated pavers would be terribly wasteful. It's a bad idea.
And awnings aren't a replacement for good indoor walkways. Shitty weather is shitty weather. But they're a huge benefit on sidewalks, for the 90% of rain/snow that isn't shitty weather. I live in a build that has these along the entire block and it's a godsend.
But mass timber / cross-laminated timber is actually projected to be an ideal future building material. Even for high rises. It's not folksy. Almost every architect I've talked to would love to build a mid/high rise with it.
> It's not folksy. Almost every architect I've talked to would love to build a mid/high rise with it.
I didn't mean 'folksy' as an insult. I was just surprised that google would propose a material outside the usual brutalist design palette (concrete, glass, steel, etc...)
Many towns have found that heated sidewalks actually save money vs snow removal (when lawsuits from slips and falls are included). The main problem with it is public perception its a wasteful luxury item instead of the money saver it is.
> Holland also calls its heating system a money-saver, saying it has reduced slips and falls, requires no snow removal, salt or sand, and has extended pavement life.
And yes, they might save money on snow removal. Downtown Toronto though, I don't see it. Even if 3 blocks have heated sidewalks, the sidewalk plow has to drive over them to reach the next segment. Those costs wouldn't decrease.
Saving on salting and sidewalk damage from freeze/thaw could be impactful.
But the cost of digging up sidewalks (which happens _all the time_) would increase significantly. Then there's the added expenses of maintenance - leaky pipes that requiring digging up the sidewalk.
The installation and maintenance requires skilled labour - union plumbers. Installing concrete sidewalks and plowing requires much lower wages.
Overall, the article makes no solid argument for it saving money, and does nothing more than speculate it could be cost saving. Where's the actual numbers from other cities who have implemented this?
Yes but they all require a ~1bn dollar investment by somebody. Let's not forget the price alphabet is paying for this. And they have already agreed that they would not have IP level access to any of the data collected. Nothing personally identifiable. And all data goes through a 3rd party committee over which they have no control. I'm not sure what would lead somebody to vandalize the sensors besides ignorance and paranoia. What people fail to realize is that mass data collection, when done right, can be an extremely useful tool in improving convenience and efficiency of service. While alphabet may have a dodgy history of collecting information they had no right to, they are not Facebook or Equifax. As far as I am aware they havent mishandled or abused the data they've collected and it genuinely seems like they are committed to honest data collection this time around. Honestly I'm more concerned that the privacy committee that Toronto puts together will botch the data collection/storage end up leaking the data. And most likely they will blame alphabet for it in an "see we knew this would happen" kind of way. I lived in Toronto for a decade. Maybe it's because of Rob Ford but I have zero faith in the competence of Toronto city politics and fully expect them to over involve themselves beyond their capacity and royally fuck things up and then shift the blame to somebody else. #blockthesidewalk really says it all.
Ideally, this data should be _fully_ publicly available. Zero exemptions for Sidewalk to harvest data that isn't released publicly. This is the only way to ensure accountant.
Primarily, I think, because an individual contribution/overpayment has almost zero effect in the big picture. It's the systemic issue that needs to be addressed.
This is like giving someone a bottle of water, when what they need is a well built.
A compounding factor is that billionaires are by nature, competitive. Giving away half of your net income puts you at a disadvantage against other billionaires who can use that against you. Taking away half of everybody's net income keeps the playing field level.
Google needs to deliver it or the browser wouldn’t be able to pre-cache the content for the user since it would leak to the publisher that the content was shown in a search result.
We don't need to pre-cache results. We just need faster loading websites without the bullshit JavaScript that does... Nothing.
Google can, and has since inception, shown a 2-sentence description plus a title. If I as a searcher find that useful, I click through to the publisher site. This is a good system.
AMP simply steals the entirety of the content from the publisher and serves it for them. That's not Google's job. And that's absolutely terrible for publishers.
The solution is to provide tools and guidelines for publishers to follow for a better user experience, not cut them out completely. Fix the problem at the root.
How is showing a page in < 100ms versus 2+ seconds a made up problem? There is no way without pre-fetching to deliver an instant experience.
Also, what do you mean that google steals content from publishers? Publishers are in control of the ads running on amp pages (and receive the revenue), with over 100 ad networks supported by it.
I don't need a page to show up in 100ms. 2 seconds isn't a problem. 5 seconds is, but I'll wait it out for something I'm really interested in.
Regardless, this stuff can all be done externally with current tech. Fairly easily. Serving up cached pages and lazy loading images resolves 90% of pagespeed issues. Removing JavaScript where it's not needed (almost everywhere) is another huge step.
There is no legitimate reason - zero - for Google to go so hamfisted with this. The only reason it's being shoved down everyone's throat is because it gives them more control over publishers.
Tech should be instant. 100ms is near enough instant in my book. Anything more is sub-par. It's wasting human time and attention. It's slowing people down from doing what they want to do.
Imagine pages loaded in 100ms. You could flick through them by holding down a key like scrubbing through a video for a scene you like. You could eliminate tabs in a browser because there's no need to have many open at once when you can switch to any webpage with no delay. Think about it - tabs are simply a crutch to have a small set of webpages ready-loaded and quick to switch to! Thats how badly we need instant load webpages - we have invented workarounds!
Just because people have become normalized to something taking too long isn't a reason to not strive to make it better.
>Think about it - tabs are simply a crutch to have a small set of webpages ready-loaded and quick to switch to!
Usually not because the page takes long to load, but because we need to quickly switch between contexts. The biggest slow down here is not the page load speed, but the _human_ interactions required to get to that other context. Tabs exist because we don't have enough screen real estate to display all the multiple contexts we need at the same time.
Frankly I don't perceive a performance difference between AMP results and regular results. There are abysmally slow pages, but those are the minority of pages I visit, and they often do not invest in AMPifying their page.
I mean really, if AMP was so valued by users, Google wouldn't have to artificially pin all AMP results at the top of their search results. They wouldn't have to limit the ability to opt-out. They could offer an AMP sibling result and see which one wins out the SEO war. But by forcing AMP links to the top, they force publishers to give over their content to Google's servers or be dropped from search results. This is a monopolizing play, not an openness play.
I'd say it's a stronger signal that they're a smart company that knows when to say enough is enough. 900,000 is objectively a large number of users, but if those engineering resources are better put to use service the larger customer base, it's simple a good business decision.
I get pissed every time a service drops support for something I haven't updated in 5 years, but as a business owner, I also actively discontinue services that cause more headache than revenue. It's simply specialization.
Valve still need an effective hedge against Microsoft and Apple walling off their desktop/laptop platform in the same way virtually every platform is presently walled off.
Convincing someone else, like valve to do some or all of the work would have avoided the negative PR that Canonical ate.
An archive.org search shows it was rented for 2 months in the last 7 years.
I don't agree with ICANNs proposal in the article, but squatting is an issue.