Reporting on the persecution of intellectual curiosity is clearly in scope. Sorry that even the basics our existing have been politicized these days. Totalitarianism knows no boundaries.

It's not a surprise. The discussion isn't the curious/interesting sort based around such actions being anything novel, rather it's a straightforward response to hacker ideals and our open society in general being under attack.

What is the (fake) moral dilemma of hackers reacting to government censorship?

We want both. We don't need nearly enough airplanes to employ everyone assembling airplanes. The airplane workers and engineers being in close contact with the aluminum workers and engineers will enable innovation from both. And if it becomes harder to get aluminum from another country, having the domestic plant means we can keep making airplanes. But of course Trump's senile "plan" will get us neither.

If your desired goal is to reduce our dependence on Chinese imports you should actually be completely against what this administration is doing. The doubled cost of importing equipment to build new factories, the unpredictability of policies changing by the month discouraging investment, the locking up of our economy (consumer and industrial) from everything we currently rely on doubling in price. All of these are things that will destroy domestic industry, and at this point it should be painfully clear that there is no plan for actually constructively growing our economy. Yet meanwhile killing the constructive attempts by the Biden administration (eg CHIPS), because you can't have the other team be successful at helping the country!

Then let's look at some of the second order effects. A container of cargo going to a US (eg Amazon) warehouse has to pay tariffs up front, whereas a direct-from-China purchase can pay the tariffs at the border with cash-in-hand. So that gives a leg up to Chinese vendors and marketplaces.

Think about Chinese companies building out factories in other countries. The tariff tax enthusiast response is to imagine we'll respond by raising tariffs on those countries as well like some game of wack-a-mole. But the reality is that trend will be spreading Chinese investment and influence even further throughout the world, and any post-facto attempt at punishment will just push that country fully into the Chinese sphere of influence!

When examined, every single action by this administration seems to be much closer to supporting the desires of our adversaries rather than helping our own situation. It's hard to know exactly whether these people are directly working for foreign interests, just following the winds of social media campaigns working hard to promote edgy feel-smart but society-killing memes, or somewhere in the middle with a wink-wink. But regardless, we need to pull up hard from this societal embrace of team-sport ignorance if we want to have any future that isn't being a hollowed out backwater.

This feels like the exact kind of thing Chinese vendors/marketplaces are going to be figuring out at scale, but that still won't stop them from doubling their prices even if they do avoid paying many of the high tariff taxes. Market disruptions are an excuse to raise prices (see the first round of Trump inflation from the completely inappropriate economic response to Covid), and I wouldn't be surprised if the shipped-direct-from-China business drastically grows because of the recent tariff tax changes.

Another perverse incentive is that to get items sitting in a US warehouse (eg Amazon), the seller has to pay the high tariffs before they can even start selling them, while also hoping that tariffs aren't lowered before they can sell them all (and the expectation is that Trump is going to have to dial back this idiotic "plan" of his some time). Meanwhile the seller of a direct shipped item has a confirmed sale and cash-in-hand by the time the shipment gets to the border. So I expect the selection of US-stocked items is about to drop dramatically, and the poor economic conditions and abjectly poor leadership is going to leave many people not feeling too bad about (or even gleefully embracing) shopping direct.

Aliexpress was already huge in 2016. And obviously the government could see the volume of parcels arriving via international mail and getting dumped off on USPS, because they did something about that.

Trying to ascribe it to "the left" or "the right" is trying to form a political weapon. The shape of the world is that we now have a clown car administration of utter retards, each pushing their own strain of feel-good harmful nonsense. The root cause of what has allowed these moronic ideas to take hold and grow ultimately comes down to affluenza and anti-intellectualism. The political leanings of the pockets where each of these strains were allowed to fester doesn't particularly matter, because the overriding commonality is that they make believers feel good and special for "knowing something others don't".

$126/ea in quantity after tariffs.

Why do I have this sickening feeling that in a few years anyone doing anything with hardware is going to be ordering everything direct from China, like we're some kind of undeveloped client state?

You are already living in this reality. And it has already been happening for quite a few years by now. People that are especially vocal and badly hit by tarrifs at the moment, are the people who have already been doing just that.

This transition happened so quickly that most people haven't fully cought up to the implications to the full extent. In my mind, China is already the center of gravity.

We've still got local US distributors though, regardless of everything being made in China. Like if you decide you need something tomorrow, you can go on Amazon and get most things pretty quick (despite overpaying 1.5-2x compared to Aliexpress). And there's a whole cottage industry of 3d printing shops selling canned solutions to people who don't want to hunt Aliexpress themselves.

It's been well over a decade since I was doing embedded design professionally, so my perspective is coming more from a hobby/3d printing/"maker" place. But it feels like one of the main results of these tariffs is that the bottom is going to drop out on Chinese and Chinese-adjacent sellers preloading so much stuff into US warehouses ahead of sale, and instead just shipping orders direct from China. Using a US warehouse means the seller has to front the money for the tariffs as well and takes a risk of them being lowered depending on Krasnov's whims. Whereas shipping direct from China, even if the seller is handling the tariffs (eg Aliexpress Choice), they've already got the cash in hand from a confirmed purchase.

Which tariffs? Microcontrollers are exempt from recent reciprocal tariffs.

I was just being facetious about the general pain we're feeling from the US's new tariff-based national sales tax. And I haven't been following any reciprocal actions for what is now expensive to get into China. Are -C5's only made in Taiwan or something?

No, ICs are explicitly exempt (along with a lot of other electronics parts categories.)

Ah, well that's handy to know. For this week, at least. I've just been watching the 3d printer parts I just squeaked in under the de minimis wire triple in price due to the new taxes.

We already are!

There are also the larger flawed premises that this autocratic administration actually cares about digital security or is working for the larger interests of the United States. I certainly understand Schneier's desire to push for more secure systems, and hoping to use the current political winds to do that. But autocrats only reference higher ideals as a cover for their actual agenda of power and control - they're frustrated they can't (yet) just pull this journalist's fingernails out for having embarrassed them. Treating their announcements as if they contain earnest statements of universal values we can work with is actually just validating their propaganda and supporting them.

What we need to be doing is mocking them instead. Like, really, "I didn’t see this loser in the group" ? Maybe the problem was that he was only expecting to see a list of fellow losers like himself? And maybe this loser-who-failed-upwards needs to listen to his grandkids when they try to tell him that a cell phone works a little differently than TV remote?

Discussions of digital security are better when they are focused around how us citizens can protected ourselves from the government, and that goes so much more with this current government.

By my reckoning, Trump is just the reactionary talk radio monster of Limbaugh, Gingrich, and others finally escaping its cage. They'd get people all riled up with low-information rage against the gubmint, and then dial it back just enough to herd them to the booth to vote for establishment republicans. The main way the party has morphed is that the inmates have finally taken over the asylum.