> how can you operate?

It's much easier for huge, established companies to do this (easier to absorb because they already have huge teams of procurement specialists, lawyers, etc). I think that's at least part of the point in the first place.

To give you one idea of this: Christmas starts in January for consumer stuff. That's how long it takes and if there is any hick-up then you might miss the time slot. These tariffs are wreaking havoc with the planning of just about every major company because there are almost no players that are 100% vertically integrated that just use stuff made in the USA. Everybody is dependent on everybody else and some of those parties are abroad.

This tariff thing - to quote Dirk Gently - utterly misses the fundamental interconnectedness of everything.

In a functioning society these people would be in jail. It is worse than the worst cases of insider trading and yet they are just sitting there gleefully counting their money. Utterly disgusting, traitors to their own country.

The high capex however needs to be paid, if tariffs are dropped, instantly imports become cheaper and they're less likely to compete. They'll probably play it safe and not make any investment at all. Wait it out.

> replacing/reducing domestic headcount with the more physical automation

But if wages continue to fall, due to the looming recession, your automation may be more expensive than headcount.

Stuff like physical automation is going to require a lot of capital investment in equipment coming from outside the US. If that's going to be 15%+++ cheaper if the Supreme court rules against the tariffs, or when Trump chickens out, any sane company is going to delay that automation.

> All values in the risk assessment systems must be reassessed if an American partner is involved. For two companies, this must be done on a monthly basis.

Very similar to what I'm coming across, including parties that are out of nowhere tasked with making everything they've got as cloud agnostic as they can with budgets available that they could not have dreamed of less than a year ago. As long as it gets done, not so that they will move out tomorrow morning but so that they could move out if they wanted to. I'd love to see some internal figures from AWS or MS about their serverless offerings and other such lock in mechanisms, what the trend in adoption is.

Only a few years ago, I was told on this very forum that it would be foolish for the Dems to try to pack SCOTUS.

It's pretty clear now that it was foolish of them to not have.

"bring manufacturing back to America" keeps getting thrown around and I'm genuinely curious how that would work. Let's say we do bring the bulk of manufacturing jobs back to America, what does the country look like in 10 years?

- Which manufacturing jobs? All of them? We'll have Americans sewing t-shirts and making every widget?

- How much would those jobs pay? More or less than China pays their workers now?

- If it's more, where does the extra money come from? If it's not more, who's going to do those jobs? If the answer is automation, then there aren't going to be a whole bunch of jobs created.

Also fundamentally, if American in general can work in positions higher up in the value chain. Shouldn't we be pushing for more jobs in healthcare, tech, finance etc vs low value manufacturing?

To reduce dependence on China, tariffs should ONLY be on China, and not the entire world including neighbors and close allies.

To help bring manufacturing back to the US, the tariffs should have been fixed, in legislation, with 2+ years of advanced notice before implementation, to allow companies to plan for them and implement something.

The ad-hoc approach taken by the current administration ensures 100% that neither of those will happen.

Who would build a factory right now in the US?

Next month, those tariffs might be gone and your investment with it.

That may or may not be true. But what is immediately clear is that Trump has no idea how to accomplish it. Americans are in I believe 6 months of contraction in manufacturing jobs.

Reducing economic dependence on China is a bipartisan issue. Biden passed plenty of large bills that aimed to bring manufacturing to America with the continuation of the Trump 1 tariffs and additional subsidies.

That's too subtle and long term for Trump. The subsidies have been torn up and the tariffs tripled. Now it'll be far more expensive to build the manufacturing capacity in America.

Color me skeptical of tariffs that include Heard and McDonald islands, which are exclusively populated by penguins and seals.

There's a fair argument to be made that surgical application of tariffs could potentially raid in restoring manufacturing jobs in the US. However, the ham-fisted manner in which Trump's tariffs were applied can at best be explained by incompetence and at worst deliberate economic sabotage.

Every big industrial manufacturer like them is going to be HURTING in the next several years. That double-whammy you describe can apply to basically any industrial sector that uses large vehicles/equipment.