In Finland you can declare DHL/UPS/Fedex packages yourself with customs and pay directly to them, with no fees to carrier (it took a Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority decision in 2017 to get rid of the fees, though). But this is a bit different as it is not a hidden option but standard procedure (though you still get the option of paying the carrier to declare, instead).
Declaring inbound packages to Customs by yourself was already the standard here for postal parcels even before Customs internet services, so this was not a completely new way of working.
The issue isn't the import duty and VAT, the issue is the 20€ or more fee that the shipping companies charge for the privilege of handling the customs administration for you.
In Belgium for example books have 0% import duty and 6% VAT. Adding 20€, long delays, and a terrible customer experience (good luck trying to correct any data submitted to customs) to that is rarely worth the hassle.
That actually is via the postal service (BPost). The postage rates are reasonable, it's just the fee that they add for handling the customs administration that is unreasonable.
And this is more or less the same for the other shipping companies such as DHL, UPS, and FedEx.
Because the fee is per shipment, it's not that bad if you're receiving several hundred euros worth of products. But if you just want to receive a book, it can easily double the cost.
Hmm maybe it’s specific to Belgium? I remember in Germany you would pick up packages directly from the zollamt (customs office). You would pay any owed tax there, but I don’t remember there being any extra fee.
I know FedEx and UPS offer shipping options that are supposed to pre-pay any owed tax, but I don’t know if they charge a fee to do so and I’ve also had a terrible time getting things through customs using them in other countries.
Was this before the introduction of the IOSS rules? I can't imagine picking something up directly at customs. International shipping volume has increased a lot, customs does not have the capacity to store much.
The new rules have actually made shipping from Aliexpress easier. VAT is displayed and payed to Aliexpress, they handle customs (as long as total order value is less than €150). In practice they consolidate packages from several sellers into one shipment where possible (although of course with a long-tail delay), and fly it to their new distribution center in Luik.
Customs has a small presence, but because VAT is paid they're mostly concerned about other things such as counterfeits.
Last-mile shipping is then done by postal service, without any additional fees.
context: "Tomorrow on @oxidecomputer and Friends, @ahl and I will be joined by our colleagues @SyntheticGate and @cliffle to talk about the role of rapid hardware prototyping in building a system -- and specifically how our ability to go quickly from ideation to hardware in hand has been essential for a surprisingly wide range of tasks at Oxide."
I strongly agree, the innovation needed is in haptics on the actuator side.
Can you expand on the static and low frequency? My impression was that if you're aiming for fingertips, higher frequency has more resolution. Iirc braille is mostly sensed by the vibration of the ridges of your fingerprint, when moving your finger over the dots. For this reason single character braille displays never really took off, you need an entire row (typically 40 characters) to make a usable refreshable braille display.
It's made with "standard" multilayer pzt actuators, with a displacement of 1000nm at 60V. That's apparently above the sensing threshold, but imho not enough for practical applications.
I am curious about the fabrication methods though. The 1mm actuators are in a checkerboard pattern, and apparently reflow soldered. I'm curious how they did that while staying below the curie temperature of the actuators (typically <150°C for PZT), and if that is mechanically sufficient.
Perceptual modes are specific mechanical stimuli we learned to recognize as specific sensations.
Some of them are: stiffness which is skin indentation and tendons strain in function of space, vibrations which is skin indentation in function of time for frequency above 10/20 hz.
These modes resides a bit on the neurophysiology of touch (how mechanoreceptors respond) and a bit on how we learned to recognize touch sensations.
The problem reside that the first thing you want to do is manipulate, not simply touch.
Manipulation is a bitch because it mostly needs small indentation of the skin which are 1-3 mm of continuous displacement at 1 mm resolution under the fingertip.
They piezo they are using displaces 1 mm at the resonance frequency, I imagine 150 hz (I believe?) or something similar, not in continuous (again, I believe).
Which means that a contact on the sensor is rendered as a local vibration, which requires a lot of mental gymnastic to think of it as a contact.
That is the haptic metaphor. Basically you expect an indentation and you get a vibration, and this sucks and for users.
If they got it in static displacement that is cool and might be something noteworthy
Displacement is 1000nm, so 3 orders of magnitude less than 1mm. As for frequency response, looks like they tested up to 1000Hz. I see no reason why it wouldn't work at any frequency from 0Hz up to 1000Hz, and even higher. But because the displacement is so small you really need the higher frequencies to be able to sense the actuation.
That's just piezo's, you need to stack several layers to get a usual displacement. You do get high force, so they're typically used for high precision positioning.
I've been looking at piezo bimorph actuators as used in braille displays. Because they're cantilevered you're trading displacement for force (and size). That could perhaps be used to create a high resolution array with enough displacement at low frequency. Not really wearable like a glove, but certainly portable.
1) That "ADHD is overdiagnosed" metastudy is frequently referenced, but always for the wrong reasons:
"Overdiagnosis is defined here as occurring when a person is clinically diagnosed with a condition, but the net effect of the diagnosis is unfavorable. Misdiagnosis (when a child is incorrectly labeled with an ADHD diagnosis instead of an alternative condition) and false-positive diagnosis (when a subsequent clinical encounter reveals a wrong initial diagnosis) are not the focus of this article."
Unfavorable here is:
- medication can have side effects
- it might be used as an excuse to stop trying/caring
- there's a social stigma
2) Your second link provides no evidence of drug-seeking behaviour. It only claims that it's possibly to get a high score on an ADHD checklist with fake answers. It makes no claim that people without ADHD actually seek an ADHD diagnosis to get prescription stimulants.
Note that I'm not claiming they aren't, just that this article doesn't support that claim.
3) The third link is just an article on time with the headline that 1 in 4 adults who seek treatment are faking it. I can't find any reference to this number in the article body, nor a link to the paper.
Color me surprised: this one does actually support the claim that 22% are exaggerating symptoms.
There are of course some limitations to this study. And it makes no claim that those that are exaggerating symptoms are doing so to seek medication (again, I'm not claiming otherwise).
The good news is that there are methods to identify these patients. And given that this study is from 2010, I hope that those are in use to aid with (mis)diagnosis today.
Mitchdoogle, do you have any other evidence to support your claim of overdiagnosing and drug-seeking?
In the future, please take the time to read through the articles you link.
And please take the time to read the last paper before you reply.
> Overdiagnosis is defined here as occurring when a person is clinically diagnosed with a condition, but the net effect of the diagnosis is unfavorable.
... So if, let's say, the existing treatments for some disease are bad and often make the problem worse, then the people designing this terminology consider the problem to be "the disease is diagnosed too often" rather than "doctors treat this disease badly"? And the solution to be "avoid diagnosing this" instead of "change the way doctors treat or don't treat it once it's diagnosed"? I mean, that's what the term seems to imply.
Wiki agrees with you... and with me:
> Overdiagnosis occurs when a disease is diagnosed correctly, but the diagnosis is irrelevant. A correct diagnosis may be irrelevant because treatment for the disease is not available, not needed, or not wanted. Some people contend that the term "overdiagnosis" is inappropriate, and that "overtreatment" is more representative of the phenomenon.
