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
I will never understand why UK “leftists” have such a hard on for the EU.
The promise of good regulations; the UK's regulations have suffered because of brexit
this, plus the brexit movement was entirely fascistic in nature, and it's easier to just be anti whatever the fascists are doing than articulate a left-wing criticism of the eu to campaign on
Yeah, this is something the Chapos (mostly Amber) never seemed to understand when they were commenting on Brexit
Amber.
Amber.
Amber.
Amber.
Because it's a respectable liberal institution and they are in fact liberals
I think it's largely that the brexit campaign was fash in nature. Corbyn didn't particularly want to oppose brexit iirc but (rightfully imo) wasn't willing to join people like Farage et al., and there was no way to build up a principled LW opposition to the EU alongside brexit.
"Lefties" who've never read theory and have no principled stance just remember the socialists campaigning against brexit, and that brexit itself was largely just racism, and that's where the analysis stops. "People who hate the EU are racist, no further thought required".
I don't know about anywhere else, but at least in Finland joining the EU was very strongly originally framed around joining the progressive, civilized nations of the world bs. Along with free movement myths, freedom to work and study anywhere and just generally a very idealist "one world" framing. I originally fell for it as a teenager at the time and very much get now what was going on.
There was endless debate on how we don't want to be left alone or behind, how Finland is a part of Europe and every good progressive should want us to join in. Everybody fell for it, just like the Nato push a few years back. It's very hard to describe to anyone how all permeating the consensus culture can be in a small country like this where the discourses are completely controlled by the bourgeoisie. From education to the media.
There was never any discussions whatsoever about the economic side, the directives that would come or any of the real material changes it would cause. It was a fully idealist sale, much like the discourse around the Berlin wall falling. There was no internet or access to outside media really, so it was framed in just the one way.
This country is so deeply misinformed of even its own history, I mean the people are, and so homogenized when it comes to opinion that the flock mentality combined with the poor national self-esteem and uninterest in learning things outside the bougie sanctioned worldvies that the ruling class has drilled into the population makes us shoot ourselves in the foot every time. The propaganda and supression machine has been ongoing for well over 100 years and been very violent, so I can feel some sympathy for the clueless libs. They did not make themselves.