With all the crazy tariff nonsense going on, I’m keeping a close eye and it’s getting really bad. I keep checking the gov site and these fuckin guys have never worked so hard in their lives… even they can’t even keep up with all the crazy tariff changes. This is the preface from today’s release of the new guidelines…
They don’t even have the Executive Order number in there or the federal regulation number hahah just placeholders… wtf.
finalCopy.pdf (128.0 MB)
It’s going to hit me pretty hard. I’ve been preparing all year by stocking up what I can as much as I can to weather this out. But 125% tariff is ridiculous.
I can’t see the future… don’t have ESPN… but I would consider the significant amount of bloviation against the actual sustained action in this case.
My workplace stocked up on material before the tariffs get any worse. Now we have no room left to work.
Indeed. What is uttered over media is not necessarily the same as reflected in the bureaucratic documentation linked above. No mention of 107% or even 125% on anything from china… in fact the major HTS codes we deal with have seen no changes in the above document. That might change tomorrow, who knows… but so far the specific products we deal with from China have not seen any changes… specifically proxmark3 units.
Worse than the actual tariffs, is the chaos surrounding them. I wanted to order something from china, in one week it went from 10% to 54% to 125%, and now most of the rest of the world has been rolled back, except certain specific tariffs, PLUS now there’s talk of exempting “certain specific” companies in the U.S. and those choices will be made “instinctively”.
If I did order something, on a one month shipping wait, how the fuck do I plan for that ever changing target?
There was an exception for goods under a certain amount, which they announced would be cancelled, then they announce they cancelled the cancellation when the post office would have basically have had to stop the flow of all incoming parcels to evaluate tariffs on each individual one.
Chaos.
Any potential for anything positive to come out of this would be entirely reversed by the sorts of protectionist anticompetitive policies I’ve heard this guy seems to support. I hope we don’t come out of this with Apple, Amazon, Walmart and the likes granted state monopolies or some nonsense.
“Instinctively”, I think “certain specific” is code for Tesla, and anybody else willing to cozy up.
At least the trial lawyers will make bank off of it.
I am sure it is just a strategy for those in the know to sell shares, up tariffs, watch the markets crash, buy in, remove tariffs for a period, watch markets rise, and sell, make a fortune and then repeat.
But then I don’t know anything. It sure sounds a beautiful thing though.
145%
finalCopy (3).pdf (128.0 MB)
I gotta ask, is that the 9th revision for April, or the 9th revision on April 11th?
I believe it’s the 9th revision of calendar year 2025… so yeah a lot of revisions so far… I don’t know how many revisions 2024 had but I don’t think it was even close to 9 for the whole year.
finalCopy(10).pdf (18.3 MB)
Revision 10 (April 15th)
Did you see where they “clarified” that on “some” goods it’s 245%? I don’t think they even know what the rates are.
In related news, the law of unintended consequences and it’s boomerang effect.
Basically, everything for Christmas is ordered in April, and those orders have been zeroed out. Gonna be some deeply pissed off people around black friday.
The tariff document used to be kinda easy to read… you would check the table for the normal tariff, then there was a “special case” applied and you checked that special case and it was “normal tariff + 25% if coming from china” … but now holy shit… the document is unreadable as a human. They have references to subsections and “special cases” on top of “special cases” everywhere.
I literally could not have sorted out a current tariff issue with UPS without chatGPT. It was able to dig through the document and follow all the references and arrive at the correct tariff which I had to manually verify… but verifying is far easier to do when you have a guide. Currently, as far as I can tell, most things we deal with are;
So, for example, importing the base proxmark3s we modify here in the lab… they will now cost a total of 45% more to import… and I have to place an order right now or risk running out.
Fucking hell.
My big issue is, that’s not the tariff rate.
The tariff rate is whatever it is, when it passes customs. Whenever that is. You might as well pull out a crystal ball to try to determine what temper tantrum will be in effect on that random date.
Please note, I’m not wanting to get political in this thread, but I’m 1000% (see what I did there? 
) anti chaos.
Yes absolutely correct. However, the current tariff situation on proxmark units in particular are not affected by the blustering on TV, at least not yet. The 25% was from Trump’s first term and the additional 20% was applied in March. So far none of this 100% or 200% tariff nonsense has applied to the majority of things on the schedule. Our proxmark factory pretty much ships immediately and DHL gets it into customs within a couple days so I’m assuming, probably stupidly, that the current tariff schedule will still be the case in 2 days when they arrive in port. But, you are correct, it could be disastrously different by the time these make it into a customs warehouse.
