4 ms·

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

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...

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...