Those rancid fucking ghouls want to kill Chinese online shopping platforms like AliExpress by introducing a 3€ fee per item starting from July next year. Member nations may also impose their own additional fees on top of that. Apparently, the Dutch get to pay an additional 2€ per package while Romanians pay 5€.
This isn't too bad if you buy more expensive individual items. For example, paying 3€ on top of 25€ would suck but it's still less expensive than trying to get the same thing from the EU. However, if you had a 15€ package consisting of 8 smaller items, you'd have to pay an eye-watering 24€ in fees.
It absolutely infuriates me how fucking smug EU politicians and bureaucrats sound while they boast about this new scheme, like cops who had just done major drug bust or foiled some terror plot. The media also talks about people who shop on AE and Temu like they're fucking crackheads or drunk drivers or something while also admitting that the "worst offenders" are pensioners and single parents, aka the poor. Fuck those people amirite
Most of the stuff I get from AliExpress is lower-priced items so this EU protection racket is gonna suck. EU and corporate mouthpieces like to go on about how cheap Chinese goods are bad for the environment but most of the shit I get is replacement parts and accessories for things I already own that I could not get locally at all, or only at some ludicrous markup. I saw some electronics repairman say that they buy individual components directly from China because otherwise you would have to buy many of them in industrial quantities
Edit: Just look at this fucking shit, dude. My latest purchase contained a couple of Micro USB to USB-C adapters because I have a bunch of older devices and I figured it would be easier to have a couple of adapters instead of finding new Micro USB cables. The adapters cost less than 2€. Look at these prices at local retailers:
See that 2.90€ listing? Yeah, that one has a 6€ shipping fee and I'm pretty sure they're just a middle man for Alibaba products anyway 
Also, as a sidenote, I was commiserating about this and other shit with some real life acquaintances, and we were all in agreement until I brought up how our shitty fucking government is going to gut the welfare state to buy military jets and other weapons from the Yanks, at which point the mood changed completely. "We've got no choice but to defend ourselves from Russia" 
All their anger at the government, the EU and the US completely evaporated in an instant. These people are lefties
This entire stupid continent is 99% Nato-brained and there's like 10 communists. I guess this is better than the time I was accused of being a tankie Russian stooge for disagreeing with the take that Putin's ultimate goal is to conquer Europe for lebensraum for the Russians and he's gonna do it any day now
Same. I remember being in a room full of people the first day of the war and while everybody was visibly upset, I simply said that it was no surprise this happened, "if they had let Russia into NATO before, we wouldn't be here today", and nobody disagreed, some even vocally agreed, and none of them were even remotely lefties. Nowadays, if you even attempt to say something like this, you're immediately reprimanded for being a putinversteher, no matter what their politics are. Propaganda is such a fucked up tool to exist, and I hate how universally accepted it is, especially in Germany.
A few hours after the declaration of war between Russia and Ukraine, shit literally sounded like I was back in South Africa but in 1982.
voluntary uKKKrainian colony of Estonia, btw