11 ms·

Just in time manufacturing is a recipe for disaster when you allow a single nation to do the lion's share of everyone's manufacturing, and that nation is the fi

• ReptileMan 7y ago
  On the other hand the land in US in non coastal or agricultural places is very cheap. You can have whole factories build for critical supplies and just conserve them. When the crisis and unemployment hits - just put people there to work. This spare capacity can be maintained on the cheap.
  • adrianN 7y ago
    The last time we had a pandemic like this was 100 years ago. Do you honestly believe we'd maintain unused factories for that long and then start manufacturing modern medical equipment with century old technology?
    • twomoretime 7y ago
      There are other reasons to maintain domestic emergency capacity. We're still a bunch of apes living on a hostile rock. Except we also have war machines.
    • ReptileMan 7y ago
      No. We will update them from time to time. And of course we had three close calls in the latest 20 years - sars, mers and ebola. And btw - this is literally what 3M did with the N95 masks - they had spare production lines that turned on in a heartbeat https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-25/3m-doubled-production-of-n95-face-masks-to-fight-coronavirus https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-25/3m-double... This is 3M’s moment, one for which the staid, 118-year-old Minnesota manufacturing giant—the maker of Post-its, Scotch tape, touchscreen displays, and scores of other products—has been preparing for almost two decades. Coming out of the SARS epidemic of 2002-03, the company realized it wasn’t fully equipped to handle unexpected explosions of demand in the event of a crisis, or what it calls an “X factor.” It decided to build surge capacity into its respirator factories around the world. And with terrorist groups and state actors realizing that animal viruses are potent biological weapons, and legitimate research centers working on making viruses airborne - chances of another screeching halt in the next 10 years due to malice or incompetence are not that low.
      • makomk 7y ago
        The trouble is, whilst that 3M surge capacity might be enough to handle something like a slighly worse SARS or MERS, it doesn't seem to be adequate to deal with a once-in-100-years pandemic like this one - and it'd take a hell of a lot more surge capacity with much worse utilization to make that possible.
    • Maxious 7y ago
      There are sufficient amounts of crises that make disaster recovery sites commercially feasible https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200320-how-firms-move-to-secret-offices-amid-covid-19 https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200320-how-firms-move...
  • em500 7y ago
    > When the crisis and unemployment hits - just put people there to work. How do you imagine this to be implemented in reality? Does the Federal government send a random selection of people a letter that they are to be relocated to Wyoming for the next 3 months? The US is not a command economy.
    • aphextron 7y ago
      >Does the Federal government send a random selection of people a letter that they are to be relocated to Wyoming for the next 3 months? No. They offer a solid wage to anyone who wants a job and is willing to be trained. Like we did by the millions to build our national parks, dams, roads, and other infrastructure in the 30s and 40s.
  • lxmorj 7y ago
    A better idea is to subsidize flexible-enough factories. Fir example, the Feds pay your local cardboard box company a yearly stipend to run 1-week emergency drill where there swap production to n95s. They could maintain a database of "wants" that any manufacturing company could elect to maintain the capability for. "Spin up production for X units of Y product for Z weeks per year and we'll give you $N. In the event that we need you to swap over for a national emergency, we'll pay you $M per week of production."
    • akie 7y ago
      Guess which factory will be the first to be sold off to private investors if we haven't had a pandemic in, say, 5 years? You can't run long-term planning like this in a country where one party has short-term gains as one maxim, and limited government as the other.
      • kazagistar 7y ago
        Both parties have been selling off and privatizing everything possible for decades now. Gut everything into the private market which has the ultimate short term aims for short term efficiency increases is the Liberal prime directive.
    • ed_balls 7y ago
      You don't need to subsidise anything. > On March 1, 2018, Trump announced his intention to impose a 25% tariff on steel and a 10% tariff on aluminum imports. > Trade Act of 1974 allows the president to impose a 15% tariff for 150 days if there is "an adverse impact on national security from imports >NAFTA originally required automakers to use 62.5% of North American-made parts in their cars to be imported duty free You can just require that 25% of PPE purchased by the government has to be made domestically. That would give you 3-4 factories. You make a requirement so they are 1000 miles away from each other and be able to 4x capacity within 2 weeks.
    • greedo 7y ago
      The machinery for making cardboard boxes is quite different than for n95 respirators. The cost of maintaining this dual capability at one factory would make the company uncompetitive. So eventually some legislator will cut the funding that allows the company to have this unused capacity. It's like my company. We used to have a robust DR capability. We replicated our data to another site, and could have that site up (with all the servers/services running) within a 24 hour period. We had plans and equipment for running our call centers, for staffing at the secondary site, everything all bolted together in an annual exercise that helped us catch changes. Then new IT management comes in and sees what they think is wasteful spending and view the annual exercise as disruptive. So they start to gut the entire process, instead relying on sandbox exercises for specific applications. Not taking a holistic view of our computing environment. So now this manager gets promoted 2x for reducing "unnecessary costs", as well as improving productivity because IT no longer has to focus on that wasteful DR stuff...
• BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  The thing is, we always knew this, but we did it anyway. Like we know that destroying all insects and and global warning are not sustainable. We know we can't have 7 billion humans eating meat. We know we should let not power concentrate too much into some entities. But we keep it up. Since we don't react unless something forces us to, I'm starting to believe we need some medium crisis to happen like the covid19 so that a bigger one won't wipe us out in the future.
  • koonsolo 7y ago
    Your final thought is exactly what I'm thinking. We should be all very happy that Covid-19 was the teacher, and not something much worse.
    • Avalaxy 7y ago
      Did it really teach us anything for the long term? Or will we just forget everything we learned and resume life as usual in 2 years from now.
      • iso1210 7y ago
        Probably we'll go backwards -- the end death count will be compared with normal death counts and be likened to a bad flu season. People are less likely to panic next time, but also less likely to pay attention to things like lockdowns. I suspect one outcome will be a long term reduction in civil liberties
      • LeifCarrotson 7y ago
        2 years? People here are planning to resume life as normal on May 1st.
        • atomi 7y ago
          Those people should reconsider their plans.
      • roenxi 7y ago
• alephnan 7y ago
  Sounds like the Zara model. To catch up with fashion trends fast, avoid the latency of cargo ships, and localize
• jl6 7y ago
  Remember that our generals will always fight the last battle. We will be well prepared for the next pandemic. But the next big thing probably won’t be a pandemic.
  • antibland 7y ago
    I would argue that the last battle was what the US saw occur in China and Italy. We knew the virus would reach us within weeks of those countries being hit, knew the risk potential of it, but did little to adequately prepare.
    • assblaster 7y ago
      The virus was circulating in the United States undetected, by January. As one of the largest, most heavily traveled countries in the world, there was little hope that they would be able to shut their borders early enough to stave off any infections.
      • zuminator 7y ago
        All that is saying is that shutting borders is not by itself an effective method of limiting the virus. We also needed extensive testing/tracking, early aggressive self-isolation, adequate protective gear and other medical equipment, consistent messaging on how to limit exposure. Along with universal screening of returning travelers. All things that we failed at.
        • assblaster 7y ago
          A high percentage of COVID-19 infected people are asymptomatic. How would temperature and subjective screening prevent these asymptomatic patients from infecting many others?
          • zuminator 7y ago
            In terms of screening people returning from abroad to the US, if we had immediately established a regime of either testing or mandatory self-quarantine, that would have greatly reduced the rate of transmission. Doing widespread spot testing across the country would've identified the communities where the virus was extant. From there we would've known where to focus the brunt of universal testing, tracking and quarantining. Just the fact that we are still fiddling with estimates of what percentage of CV infected people are asymptomatic is a travesty. We should have long ago conducted enough statistical sampling to have a very clear picture what was happening in our communities.
• econcon 7y ago
  We need several fixes: Force most countries to adopt freemarket, remove trade barriers, remove import and export duties (except for extreme situations like pandemic) Right now lots of market imposes duties on import of American goods, this reduces American exports. Some countries like India, Brazil play extremely unfair - this only helps few industrialists in these countries but overall public suffers usually as they are forced to buy substandard goods from local providers, instead of someone internationally competitive. But yes, it helps the politicians who usually get their money from those handful of those industrialists monopoly setup through import taxes. In hyper competitive market, local producers will usually figure out the niches worth exploiting and they'll build long term advantage there rather than aiming for some generic niche where they've no competitive advantage. This prevents countries like India or Brazil from becoming Taiwan
  • mafuy 7y ago
    Is this serious? It is exactly what led to the current situation.
    • mercer 7y ago
      When all you have is a neoliberal hammer...
  • thefounder 7y ago
    >> 1. Force most countries to adopt freemarket, remove trade barriers, remove import and export duties (except for extreme situations like pandemic) Who wants that? Just look at the US and the trade war. As soon it realizes it can't compete/lead in the said industry it declares it a national security issue, be it communications(5G) or raw materials. I don't even want to mention the millitary procurement or oil. It was never about a free market. It was always about a market ruled by the most powerful where everyone can make a buck but not too much.
    • econcon 7y ago
      What's the alternative? Every country should become island with no import or exports? Politicians should understand that there are many things which can't be locally produced and penalising local businesses from importing those things from other countries is only going to disrupt the value add chain and lower their net exports. This is something developing countries like India need to learn. Get bad quality local machine = product crap quality end product = can no longer compete in international market = business goes bankrupt = local machine manufacturer is also dead in long term.
• threatofrain 7y ago
  In the end, California and Texas are projected to not exceed ICU capacity, but the most serious outbreak first happened on the east coast and I think that made all the difference for NY, NJ, MI, etc. It means that states on the east coast would have needed far more acute preparation than states on the west coast. The fact that there could be such a difference in timing implies that this should be handled at the federal level -- or all major cities must prepare to be ground zero, which sounds very inefficient.
  • Nightshaxx 7y ago
    How is that inefficient? If anything preparing major cities to be ground zero for crisis makes sense. Major cities have way more people from way more places, so it makes sense they would be the ones hardest hit by famine/disease/terrorism/etc.
    • bilbo0s 7y ago
      I think the comment is positing that each major city making it's own preparations is inefficient and ineffective. What if the pathogen escapes that city and is now floating around the country? We got lucky. Covid19, while deadly, is not as deadly as it could be. If we'd run into Spanish Flu, we'd be in a world of hurt right now. The more deadly pathogens out there are just not to be met with half measures. If you're talking Spanish Flu, you don't want to be putting Dallas on lockdown, and still have who knows how many people on the road to Norman, or Tyler, or Nacogdoches. All because they left before the city of Dallas was able to close the city. The city of Dallas would not even have the ability to know where those people are, or where they are headed, or what planes they are on, or what cars they are in. There really are no other options here, if you want to ensure maximum survival, you must have the coordination be at the federal level. Again, with something like covid19, it probably doesn't make much difference. Sloppiness is not going to kill 10 or 20 percent of your population in the case of covid19. So we can tolerate the kind of Keystone Kops thing we've got going on right now. But if something comes along like Spanish Flu? I'm sorry, but we shouldn't be pussy footing around with a bug like that.
      • 7y ago
• Gravityloss 7y ago
  I think rewarding preparedness or other supporting functionalities is somehow a categorically unsolved problem. It's like being a defense player in team sports. You don't score any goals and if the others score, it's your fault. It's only through some super fuzzy altruistic mechanisms that such work is supported.
  • geomark 7y ago
    I don't think of preparedness as in have huge stockpiles of everything you might need in all crises is the answer. You could never make that happen. It's preparedness as in having competent leaders who are good at interpreting data. Seems like very, very few bureaucrats like that exist. I think I saw Paul Graham on Twitter a couple of days ago responding to someone who was ranting about how they can't understand the moves made and not made by bureaucrats. PG's reply was it's because they are a lot dumber then you think they are.
  • mhb 7y ago
    It's not unsolved at all. The people who advocate for anti-"price-gouging" laws subvert the solution.
    • specialist 7y ago
      Please explain, if you don't mind. I straddle the protect-the-consumer vs let-the-markets-decide chasm. The best heuristic I can come up with is "it depends". Not very useful. To wit, here's some disjoint things I've been pondering: A- Disaster preparedness is a tension between price (or efficiency) and resilience. We don't want to waste resources. But we also don't (or won't?) manage risk very well. B- Why are different states bidding against each other for scarce resources? I thought it was illegal to charge different people different prices for the same stuff. C- Something like price controls are preemptive. Are there rear facing anti-incentives? Something like windfall taxes? Let's say a scarce resource becomes very expensive in a bursty fashion. Spinning up N95 production capacity is capital intensive. So though price goes (way) up, but profit margins don't. I'm ok with that. But if profit margins skyrocket without any other changes in the fundamentals, that's a problem for public health.
• throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  This story is not about manufacturing, it is about incompetence and inaction at the very top of the US government. Bringing manufacturing into it at this point is just a distraction; yes it's an issue not it's not the main issue. (Edit: very much a distraction. Completely sidesteps what the article is saying. Very dead cat on table. I should have been suspicious a bit earlier).
  • assblaster 7y ago
    Every government got this wrong, local, state, and federal. Democrat and Republican. The most important lesson is that you can't trust the government, they're not capable of saving you. You need to be able to save yourself.
    • octodog 7y ago
      Except there are governments around the world that are handling this crisis well. Just because American government(s) are incapable doesn't mean all are.
      • assblaster 7y ago
        There is a stark difference in population, density, and economic activity between the United States and every other country in the world. The United States is the global hub of business, it's easy to see why they would be different compared to Norway.
        • monocasa 7y ago
          Singapore is very much a global hub of business, and it's high population density makes outbreaks even harder to contain. And yet they're doing a much better job.
          • blunte 7y ago
            Not only that, but if you compare the public presentations on the COVID situation given by Trump to those given by Lee (Singapore PM), the difference is stunning. One is nearly incomprehensible and full of unrelated matter (name calling, politicizing, even campaigning), and the other is polite and clear and comprehensive.