It's even worse than "what will this look like in a year?". If it takes 4-6 months from when you pay the money to build a product to when you have that product available to sell to a customer, and you don't know how much your parts are going to cost OR how much you're going to have to pay to the federal government when those products finally clear customs (or what legal hoops you're going to need to jump through to get that product clear), how can you operate?

> 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.