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Devil's advocate: Why would a manufacturer consider damaging what is a potential mega cash cow? I read earlier that ventilators generally sell for $40-70,000US
by shiftpgdn 7y ago
Devil's advocate: Why would a manufacturer consider damaging what is a potential mega cash cow? I read earlier that ventilators generally sell for $40-70,000USD to hospitals (who then go on to charge $20-40k for ventilator based treatment.)
We're much better off right now with the government seizing the means of production and figuring out how to make as many as possible.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lightgreen 7y agoBecause that manufacturer is not a monopoly, if they won’t produces, other will. Also, government is much less effective at producing things than private companies.
- reillyse 7y agoIs there actual evidence for this? That governments aren't as effective at producing things. This gets bandied about a lot but I'm not sure it's true. I think governments can be highly effective at producing things.
- DenisM 7y agoThe evidence was presented 50 years ago under the label of Soviet Union. USSR couldn’t produce shit.
- geomark 7y agoYet they somehow beat the US to space. And for some reason the US is still buying rocket engines from Russia.
- jonathankoren 7y agoRocket engine purchases were/are a strategic decision to keep the rocket scientists employed rather than having them sell there wares on the black market. I thought this was common knowledge for 30 years.
- geomark 7y agoThen why all the angst among US military and government about being unable for so long to produce their own rockets?
- lightgreen 7y agoWhy produce something when you can buy it cheaper? Economy 101.
- salawat 7y agoCounterpoint: Global geopolitics and Military Logistical Strategy 101: sometimes you can't trust who you're buying that widget from when the widget in question has a significant contribution to maintaining National Security. There are also risks to having someone else manufacture a widget that incorporates technology you'd rather not spread around. This is why there will always be at least one domestic chip foundry, and most of the critical components of ICBM's /nuclear weapons are manufactured domestically as I understand it. Medical equipment also falls under that umbrella. Hell, even taps and dies do. God bless Admiral Rickover in that regard.
- jonathankoren 7y agoThis isn’t an opposing point. You want both.
- redis_mlc 7y ago> Yet they somehow beat the US to space. Somehow? With captured German rocket scientists. Same as USA.
- lightgreen 7y agoThey actually didn’t. German rocket scientists were smart people and they surrendered to US to avoid horror of dealing with NKVD. That said, there are reasons why USSR was first in space. For example, USSR deliberately ignored human life cost. In particular, they seriously considered first human flight to be a failure, so they announced it publicly only after Gagarin landed successfully.
- jjeaff 7y agoIt is well documented that some Nazi scientists worked on Russian rocket programs after ww2.
- lightgreen 7y agoSome, yes, but I think most of them went to US.
- lightgreen 7y agoThey got first to space, but people were starving, healthcare was shit, there were no freedom (including no freedom of moving within USSR), and generally quality of life was very poor. Hardly an achievement. If these rocket engines are cheaper, why not buy something from someone who is producing them below production cost? Good for US, they save money.
- antpol 7y agoDuring crisis times wild [T-34](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34) appears and overwhelms with numbers and firepower/versatility
- redis_mlc 7y agoWell ... kind of. Stalin fleeced the Kuleks to pay for Americans to build factories just before WW2, after Ford's River Rouge industrial city was completed. He did a good job on T-34 production, but around half of Soviet armaments came from the USA during WW2. The tanks were directly driven to the front - no parking lot needed! :) Stalin is portayed as a monster because he was. But he was also the great leader his country needed at that time.
- lightgreen 7y agoNo he wasn’t British Empire and US managed well without such a horrible dictator.
- lightgreen 7y agoBecause USSR was doing a huge land war. British empire did war mostly on the sea, so US and British Empire were much better at producing ships, aircrafts, and also radio, radars and other electronics. Tanks is good but it is much less important than strategy, logistics, food, drugs and saving human lives. USSR killed a huge number of own citizens (including execution of so called deserters). Well, good for the rest of allies.
- wwweston 7y agoIt often couldn't figure out how to produce enough of the right things -- pricing signals were better across a wide variety of consumer goods. It did pretty well at some things. Pricing signals are also bad at some things. Saying "the government is bad at producing things" is an overgeneralization. It'd be bad to put it in charge of producing everything. But putting markets in charge of producing everything has points of failure too, which is why we're having this conversation.
- lightgreen 7y ago> But putting markets in charge of producing everything has points of failure too No it doesn’t. As soon as governments clearly states that they want to purchase a hundred billion masks and ventilators, market will react very quickly. They government did not post that request yet.
- jjeaff 7y agoRead up on Venezuela's oil problem. They seized the oil from private entities and then royally destroyed the entire industry as the equipment fell into disrepair and production efficiency fell until nearly stopping.
- dionian 7y agonot sure gov't can do that without legislation - which would need support of voters
- Johnny555 7y agoPlanned obsolescence - just tell the hospitals that the cheap $5K ventilator is less durable than the $40K model, and won't be supported after the outbreak. And get the FDA (or whoever certifies medical devices) to do the same - give the cheap units an accelerated approval with a short expiration date.
- brokenmachine 7y agoWe'll need strong glue to hold those batteries in... Can we make a ventilator require a dongle?
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago>We're much better off right now with the government seizing the means of production You don't know how happy I am to see you say that.
- dirtyid 7y agoSomewhat related: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1239675564199481347.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1239675564199481347.html >The President said today that governors should try to get things like respirators and masks on their own. The problem with that approach is that suppliers will have to emergently engage w 50 different state purchasers who would in effect be competing for supply. 8/x >Instead, the US fed gov should be central buyer and partner to this industry. It brings substantial immediate resources, and clarity. And when manufacturers make new ventilators in a mass effort, the fed gov would help organize their distribution around the country. 9/x >What we need is a massive fed gov program to buy ventilators on unprecedented scale and with unprecedented speed. They don’t need to be the fanciest ventilators on the market. They need to be able to keep ARDS pts alive through course of COVID infection. 10/x >This @forbes article gives snapshot of vent industry and a sense of what might be possible. It quotes one US manufacturer from 2 days ago saying he could ramp up production 5 fold but he hasn’t been asked to do it yet.
- ashildr 7y agoThe US fed gov just tried to buy an early vaccine candidate “on unprecedented scale”. I’m not sure that they will do the same when shit hits the ventilators.
- nicoburns 7y ago> Why would a manufacturer consider damaging what is a potential mega cash cow? Why would we give them a choice?
- vorpalhex 7y agoVentilators aren't expensive because manufacturers are sitting around scheming how to buy more yachts. Those devices require a lot of testing, insurance and quality assurance. If someone dies because your device malfunctioned, you're going to get sued - and you should. The last thing we want is for "the government" to go around seizing production capacity from companies that have successfully produced these units for decades. When you imagine "the government", don't imagine your ideal policitian in a cape - you should imagine the bloke down at the local tax office who keeps opening obvious malware emails. Corporations are not your faceless enemy, they're the ones who've helped your hospitals become amazing in the last few decades.
- dwild 7y ago> Why would a manufacturer consider damaging what is a potential mega cash cow? There's no way the current problem is only the price, for sure they are already trying to sell the most they can, they simply can't produce enough of them. Allowing some kind of shadow production, handled by the manufacturer can only means much more product made thus sold. It's a win-win for both the manufacturer and the government. > We're much better off right now with the government seizing the means of production and figuring out how to make as many as possible. Sure that would work, but that's always been true for anything. If the government could seize production, it would be "cheaper" to produce because the cost of R&D and production has been already done. That's not healthy though, that will now be an added risk in the industry that will have a cost to be mitigated. Lets works together, not against eachother.
- randomsearch 7y agoBecause the government will seize their assets to the sound of the cheering public, and after this is over they will end up in jail. In war time conditions, governments ask nicely only once. So choose good publicity and being ethical vs having no business anymore.
- salawat 7y agoSo, believe it or not. The Government is a lot better as a procurer than a manager in the long run. Private industry is much more free to morph the way they do things than the government is, and a lot of the government is already specialized around the logistics of outsourcing to private industry vs. doing any of the work themselves. The arrangement does actually work fairly well in a crisis; you just need the sense of urgency to get everyone in the private sector all cranking on the same problem. Or at least it has worked well before. Things like the F-22, F35, and Littoral Combat Ship aside... There is a point where stuff turns into a nightmare. The medical equipment needed though isn't really a problem where you should run into the sort of slog those projects ran into though.
- zozbot234 7y agoGenerally when this kind of thing happens, the private supplier is paid quite handsomely for their "IP". It's a win-win arrangement; think of it as funding open research by paying a "prize" after the fact as opposed to an ordinary "research grant". I don't generally support strict IP rights in the first place but if they're going to exist, opening them up to "shadow" suppliers should be commonplace.
- craftinator 7y ago> Devil's advocate: Why would a manufacturer consider damaging what is a potential mega cash cow? I read earlier that ventilators generally sell for $40-70,000USD to hospitals (who then go on to charge $20-40k for ventilator based treatment.) Because capitalism only works with a functioning economy. If everything goes all pear shaped, and we have tens of thousands of people dying because we don't have enough ventilators (and the numbers suggest that this is quite possible), these companies that have been filling their bathtubs with cash are going to have angry gun toting mobs of newly homeless and bereaved Americans using their office windows for target practice. This will happen regardless of what's right or wrong, legal or illegal. We haven't seen this here before because we haven't had a strong enough economic collapse yet (excluding the Great Depression of course, where some of this did happen). It's happened in many other countries, and may happen here too if CEOs don't take a more long term perspective on pricing.