Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025) • Hacker News Board

Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)

#41

Post by SanjayMehta » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 3:26 AM UTC

ahahs wrote: post #18

SanjayMehta wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mouser has become unreliable. Most of the analog parts we've ordered get cancelled and customer service has no clue why. Just once I managed to get to some kind of manager who told me point blank "we won't sell this part to startups."

I worked at Mouser as a developer for a few years, the real reason is because our parts are used by terrorists, etc. to build weapons that kill people/bombs. We created a service that blocks people from buying various parts using a ton of different complex business rules (one simple rule we had was we straight up didn't sell ANYTHING to the middle east for a while). Startups were another business we didn't sell to si…

I figured as much that this was a combination of silly rules and corporate bureaucracy.

Although I'm intrigued why a 12 bit ADC would be of any use in an IED.

The people who build weapon systems have countries backing them and they have ways to source any thing.

Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)

#42

Post by hedora » Mon, Mar 16, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

PearlRiver wrote: post #40

hedora wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotes are not data, so here's some data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA US Factory build out investment increased from $80B/year to $240B/year under Biden. Trump's economic policy has managed to undo $30B of that so far, and the trend is accelerating.

Meanwhile China has a 1200 billion trade surplus. They are flooding the world with cheap Chinese shit despite the bloviating orange.

In other news, we’re still trying to backfill a reason for the Iran War.

One theory is that we’ll starve China for oil, so their navy won’t be able to hold Taiwan. (Projections show the US losing a war like that badly due to them have orders of magnitude more naval yards than us.)

Anyway, while enumerating all the ways in which that is a dumb plan, it occurred to me that the intentional slowdown in EV and solar uptake in the US is turning a manufacturing gap into an actual present day strategic gap.

China imports a lot of oil, but, as a percentage of their economy, they are way less dependent on fossil fuels than us, and tariffs on solar/batteries are basically equivalent to us shipping them free energy production and distribution infrastructure.

Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)

#43

Post by ahahs » Wed, Mar 18, 2026, 4:51 AM UTC

SanjayMehta wrote: post #41

ahahs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Mouser as a developer for a few years, the real reason is because our parts are used by terrorists, etc. to build weapons that kill people/bombs. We created a service that blocks people from buying various parts using a ton of different complex business rules (one simple rule we had was we straight up didn't sell ANYTHING to the middle east for a while). Startups were another business we didn't sell to si…

I figured as much that this was a combination of silly rules and corporate bureaucracy. Although I'm intrigued why a 12 bit ADC would be of any use in an IED. The people who build weapon systems have countries backing them and they have ways to source any thing.

"The people who build weapon systems have countries backing them and they have ways to source any thing."

I think this is a bit short sited. Many parties are interested in building weapons that cause lots of harm. And not everyone who is interested in making weapons has countries backing them, in fact they likely have countries against them building said weapons. Hence the needed work around to try and source parts from Mouser.