For Americans, that is.

Come to Australia

I'm happily in the EU

Doesn't change the fact that the advice is still beneficial. At worst you still have a good history of the effect of these tariffs.

I'd call the tariffs the second death of hardware though. The first was when we killed all the parts stores. That was a slower death, coupled with the loss of right to repair. But we've been making big strides in that domain, so I hope we can undo that death. If we can also undo the dumb tariffs too then ironically we might have a chance to bring back hardware which somewhat seems inline with what that party (claims to/pretends to) wants.

A new Radio Shack dealer just opened in a rural area, with an emphasis on radio (it's near an off-roading park), and your comment reminded me what terrible timing this is for them. Such a cruel twist.

https://tekshack.com

> we killed all the parts stores

We ran out of people buying from parts stores - hobby electronics became less popular.

Eras of hobbies:

  Mechanical
  Chemical
  Electronic
  Computer hardware
  Computer software
  [What's now?]

I'm not aware of the chemical hobby era. And as I watched it happen, the electronic hobby era died at the same time as the mechanical. Most of the mechanical one was cars. It happened as it became harder to repair things. The barrier to entry increased, the availability of parts decreased with decreasing demand. It is a negative feedback loop.

Mechanical: I was thinking more Meccano and home built steam engines - cars came later.

Chemical: I was thinking chemistry sets and the age when Chemistry was geeky cool (Du Pont, Uncle Tungsten).

My grand father was a structural engineer, my father studied chemical engineering, I studied electronic engineering (but got a job programming). So perhaps I was thinking more of the frontier of engineering shifting rather than technical hobbies.

It would be interesting to look at geeky hobby adverts in a magazine over time and see how the advert focus shifted.

  > I was thinking chemistry sets

I don't think those chemistry sets were ever widely popular. We see them and look back thinking how cool and dangerous, but every one I'm aware of was insanely expensive. Same with the atomic kit.

On the other hand, most mechanical things were relatively cheap. Cars were worked on since cars existed. People also worked on everything in their homes. There was the tradesman who takes a specific skill like being able to fix a washing machine, but a lot of these people had hobbies of building and making.

So we have a direct connection to the death of the repairman and death of the handyman. These were quite popular things even up through the 90's. You'll even see this in shows and movies.

Plus, you forgot the most popular hobby of them all: woodworking. Still alive, but nowhere near as popular as a few decades ago.

Yeah, totally—once fixing stuff got harder and parts disappeared, the whole scene just kind of faded out.

> Most of the mechanical one was cars. It happened as it became harder to repair things.

I don't think it has become harder to repair cars though. Most problems that need repair are the same old bushings, brakes, spindles, rust, bearings ...

I think it is some cultural change away from handy work in general.

Electronics have become harder to repair with smaller and more integrated circuits though.

Seems to me it's integration of whole systems.

Doomscrolling and influencing.

Telling AI to write computer software.

Mechanical.

Circle of life. ;-)

It is not just a question of popularity. Post 9/11 skillsets around chemical ( or other scary looking domains ) became vilified within general populace and then that vilification was normalized with shows like 24 ( which is a great show... it just sucks that people are unable to separate the world it presents from their world ). It does not help with the advent of red flag laws, where neighbors can effectively call cops on you if they see something that bothers them..

Yeah, it's already been like this in a lot of Europe where there is no De Minimis exemption.

E.g. in Sweden, PostNord has a government granted monopoly and charge about $20 per imported package, which adds up fast.

It really sucks, free trade and competition is what we need.

Why didn’t someone just set up domestic manufacturing for those hobbyist parts?

Assuming this wasn’t sarcasm: For many hobbies the parts come from all over the world. You can’t expect hobbyists in every country to set up manufacturing for every part.

Even if they did, the raw materials have to come from other countries. The machines probably come from other countries. Setting up little factories all over the world isn’t efficient so prices would be extremely high. Parts might be cheaper importing from other countries even with extreme tariffs.

It’s all just a mess of bad policy. We lose out when governments restrict our ability to make small, simple purchases from other countries without heavy cost overhead.

Sweden as an example is 10 million people. The world is 8000 million, 800x larger. The affluent parts of the world are somewhere between 100-1000 million, so the market potential is 10-100x larger. If one is able to address the global market, the economy of scale around manufacturing will be heavily in favor of that. This is particularly true for hobbyist stuff, because it tends to be both (relatively) low volume and low margin. And also price sensitive, in that people might just adjust their hobbies based on what is affordable/not.

This is just demand side. Of course producing in Sweden will be more expensive than in China - for electromechanical things, Shenzhen is likely better on every single metric...

Comparative advantage

Is this sarcastic? It does read like it.

I’ll take it on face value:

Cause domestic manufacturing for hobbyist parts is not economically viable

I wonder how that additional cost breaks down. Is it mostly cost of labor? Supply chain access? Environmental controls and compliance? Other overheads not present in China? Is economically viable production possible in the US?

For hobby parts? It’s not viable because you’d be setting up a manufacturing operation to serve a small number of people. The fixed costs would be so high you’d never get it back.

Contrast that with someone setting up an operation to serve the entire world, a market 1000 times larger than many localities.

If you're smart enough to design and build a LIDAR, you're smart enough to make $200,000 a year working for the big adtech companies.

You'd need an enormous hobbyist robotics market to be able to sustain a business making and selling $60 LIDARs with that wage bill.

This is not correct. There absolutely is a De Minimis exemption for tariffs. You always have to pay VAT, which you didn't always have to do before. You also don't have to pay that fee, you can order from a store that supports IOSS. The big ones do nowadays. You can also choose to declare the package yourself, but you need to live close to a tariff declaration office for this to be feasible. You can also have it delivered through a different delivery company, they usually declare it for you.

You often can't choose though:

https://www.tullverket.se/en/startpage/private/online/shoppi...

> When purchasing via an e-commerce platform, you can sometimes choose which forwarding agent is to send your parcel. However, when Chinese postal services are the forwarding agent, Postnord automatically handles all mail-order parcels in Sweden.

So you end up with a big markup either way - either on the PostNord / Tullverket side, or on the delivery side.

Local warehousing / distribution centers? The US is not short of space.

I’ve been jokingly calling my electronics hobby of the past few years “getting my EE degree.”

Putting together PCBs, reading and replicating schematics, designing my own hardware. It’s been really fun and has paid dividends for my career (firmware). If the US is interested in bringing knowledge of manufacturing back this is a very very bad way to do it. How many undergrad projects are now impossible because the BOM has quadrupled? How many future mechanical/electrical engineers are not going to get into hardware because of this?

It’s all going to be gone. I’ve spent roughly $1200 last year having PCBs and ordering sensors etc. that goes to $4000 with these executive orders.

It’s insanity, pure insanity.

There is a small part of that wonders if it is by design given how much it exposes a person to the inner workings of the things they use daily, but then I bring myself back to reality. I sincerely doubt now there is a real long term plan at work here. At best it is all situational and reactive ( tactical, maybe, but not strategic thinking at work ).

Both can be true. There was incentive to prevent people from building, repairing, and modifying things. It need not be malicious with the intent to prevent people from getting into the field. Instead it only need be naïve and selfish. Sony suing because people put Linux on their PS3. Remember these people will also try to sue white hat hackers who submit vulnerability reports. It's not a long term plan to destroy, instead it's an extremely short sighted and naïve plan to build a wall and protect.

You'll find that naïve shortsightedness often is indistinguishable from malicious foresight, when looked back upon. So remember how to stop it: think of the little things, the compounding effects. There's always costs and trades being made, there's no free lunch. As the world gets more advanced it gets more complex. The more complex it gets the more those little subtle things matter

There is no plan it’s instincts. Complete devoid of actual thoughts.

Side hobby insantities not limited to 'ee degree hobbies'! -> Many companies got started as 'side ventures' aka Facebook, MS Windows, Dell, Nerf and multitude of other companies.

Use VR / simuations to cut down on Milton Hershey[1] cost issues. Simulations can allow for 'timing the tarrifs'.

North American FPGA's may be a thing again! (once pi systems superceeds lambda systems as the multi-FPGA board connection theory of choice :-)

Save on robotic automation costs via software scripts!

Perhaps 3d printed circuit boards will now be a more realisitic alterntative than traditional outsourcing board production? [2][3][4]

Perhaps there'll be some motivation/inspiration for creating/combining standard programming logic/language/3d 'threaded' sock it programming by combining (2021) mathematics of knitting[5]; and more modern / inexpensive / upgraded 'general computational device' derived from apollo guidence computer[6] concept. aka instead of wasm, weave-em.

Do have to get over the 'stich in time, saves nine', since most modern computation 'saves in 8'. Easy to unravel program(s). Tight knit spreadsheets!

But, computational e-ink might scale better using DBOS concepts[7].

-------------------------------------------------------

[1] : https://hersheystory.org/milton-hershey-history/

[2] : https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1ajll6s/3d_prin...

[3] : direct desk top printed circuits on paper flexible electronics : https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01786

[4] : 3d printed circuit board : https://all3dp.com/1/3d-printed-circuit-boards-pcb/

[5] : https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-one-physicist-unrave...

[6] : https://nerdfighteria.info/v/f2ZCVnk-oRU/

[7] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBOS