I don't believe your claim that governments ask for something like a metal spectrometer analysis, especially since Digikey hasn't reported the same disruptions. There's no way Digikey did this for all 16.5 million parts.
In later comments on their blog they admitted they didn't even file the paperwork and left it up to the customer, who obviously wouldn't know how, causing the part to get stuck in customs.
It's a frustrating situation for them but there's no way CBP is making people break out lab equipment to import a PCB.
What are the most notorious offenders for hard to cancel services? I heard lots of horror stories in the early 2000s (AOL!) but I have not ran into this recently.
It’s not actually a fuzzy concept. CBP determines it at the port of entry and they basically have this huge list of every type of product. Fraud is taken extremely seriously so its not something companies mess around with.
The fuziness mentioned comes from when outside firms try and estimate the % domestic content. Unlike CBP they’re largely making estimated guesses, but luckily that’s not how the tariffs are calculated.
This headline is misleading because it makes it seem like tariffs are a step function that activate below 85%, which isn't true.
The formula is a simple, linear equation: tariffs = 0.25 * MSRP * (percent foreign content - 15)
Companies with 84% domestic content will pay a 25% tariff on 1% of the MSRP, companies with 70% domestic content will pay a 25% tariff on 15% of the MSRP, etc.
This is a common sense way to incentivize companies to make parts here without requiring perfection.
This is extremely low quality data, if you can even call it data.
They used survey results from the Nurses Health Study (NHS), which are decades long studies, still running, where participants fill out a food frequency questionnaire once every few on how often they ate various foods.
Not only do these questionnaires rely on memory, they rely on memory of a perception, because people don't actually measure how many cups of broccoli they eat each day. It's the worst quality of data. It's a memory of a guess, there is no measurement involved whatsoever, which is why I hesitate to even call it data.
Not only is the data itself low quality, it is compounded by lifestyle factors that are impossible to fully correct for. As an example, people that eat red meat are more likely to smoke and have diabetes, more likely to eat fast food, more likely to exercise less, etc etc. Eating foods that are perceived as healthy is correlated with healthy lifestyles. Butter has been "unhealthy" for years, so it is almost certainly correlated with an unhealthy lifestyle.
The nurses health study has led to many incorrect conclusions for these very reasons:
- It suggested hormone replacement therapy reduced heart disease risk, but randomized trials later proved it increased it due to confounding factors like healthy user bias.
- It linked vitamin E to lower heart disease risk, but trials found no benefit, showing the association came from health conscious behavior.
- It linked beta carotene to reduced cancer risk, but trials revealed supplements could increase lung cancer risk in smokers, not prevent it.
Many weak associations from the study, like diet and disease, were overstated as causal but didn’t hold up in trials due to confounding and noise.
If you are interested in how often studies like this are wrong, see "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by Ioannidis (spoiler: 70%).
In later comments on their blog they admitted they didn't even file the paperwork and left it up to the customer, who obviously wouldn't know how, causing the part to get stuck in customs.
It's a frustrating situation for them but there's no way CBP is making people break out lab equipment to import a PCB.