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Exactly. There's a general and very real disconnect with what it takes to make things. I watch the White House and Gov. Cuomo's press conferences every day.
by robomartin 7y ago
Exactly. There's a general and very real disconnect with what it takes to make things. I watch the White House and Gov. Cuomo's press conferences every day. The repeated questions about test kits, beds, ventilators, etc. drive me up a wall.
I calm down when I realize none of the people asking the questions understand manufacturing one bit. And then I get rattled again because they are communicating falsehoods to the general population. We don't have enough masks, test kits or ventilators because you can't Superman hardware production.
It isn't Trump's fault or anyone else's. It takes time --lots of time-- to setup a manufacturing process and start to produce product at scale with consistent quality and performance. Weeks for the most trivial of products, years for more complex hardware. Yet people don't have an understanding of this.
Ventilators? Holy cow. Talk about not being able to Superman something into existence.
If people understood they would realize that we made a massive mistake over the last 50 years by allowing our industrial base to evaporate and migrate to China to the extent it has. Consumers are as much at fault as the decades of incompetent politicians who allowed this to happen. While we bothered with nonsense (wars, etc.) China quietly went from an agrarian society to the second economy in the world. And, even worse, the world's factory. We, quite literally, cannot make anything in the US or Europe without Chinese components and, in some cases, all we are able to do is design in the US or Europe and have no choice but to manufacture in China.
I suspect things might change over the coming years. The money we wasted in wars would have been far better spent keeping industry alive locally. Yes, subsidies, no taxes for manufacturers, relaxed regulatory burden, etc. Either we do those things or the next pandemic will, once again, find us not being able to even manufacture face masks at scale. How laughable is it that people have to sew face masks at home in the US? Sad.
BTW: In Spain they just woke up to the reality that they received 340,000 bad test kits from China.