4 ms·

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 dri

by 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...
specialist 7y ago
What about access to contingency short term financing? Debt convertible to assets. Like US Gov did in 2008-9 for GM et al? Just throwing pasta against the wall here. There are plenty of people who foresaw this. But there are hoops to jump thru which deterred those people from being proactive. I'd like any post-mortem to propose structural, systemic remedies. So we're not just reliant on savvy leadership for future crisis.

by lxmorj 7y ago

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...

specialist 7y ago

What about access to contingency short term financing? Debt convertible to assets. Like US Gov did in 2008-9 for GM et al? Just throwing pasta against the wall here. There are plenty of people who foresaw this. But there are hoops to jump thru which deterred those people from being proactive. I'd like any post-mortem to propose structural, systemic remedies. So we're not just reliant on savvy leadership for future crisis.