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This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American inco

This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence? In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? > The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality. We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point and no sign of reaching the end. Under a different administration, the Defense Production Act would have been invoked immediately at the outset, onshore manufacturing capability of PPE would have been dramatically ramped up, and it would now already be paying dividends (more than 6 months later!) in the form of significantly increased onshore production of N95 masks and other PPE. So yes, invoking the DPA absolutely would have changed the reality. The problem is that we didn't do it, not that doing it wouldn't have worked (it would have).

swalsh 6y ago
I wonder if maybe one of the differences is this has always seemed "temporary"... Or at least that is how it has been portrayed. We're just in that period before we have a vaccine, and everything goes back to normal. When you think we're only a few months away, making huge investments like that doesn't seem to make sense. But WW2 was an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the war will come over here and our country will be destroyed.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  A global pandemic is an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the disease will take over here and our country will be destroyed. I live in New York, I can say for NYC took this seriously (eventually) and it still looks like someone Thanos-snapped half the economic activity in the city. Now imagine if the city had kept on its initial path by not taking the virus seriously and leaving hospitals so full they couldn't even handle the dead bodies anymore?
vorpalhex 6y ago
It's literally harder to produce N95 masks then to churn out rifles and ammo. Want to produce a rifle (in the 1940s)? Milling machines and operators. That's a factory order, done. Ammo? Couple four stage presses and some armorers, not even hard to train civilians instead. Want to produce N95 masks? Ok, well there's a custom built machine that produces the correct kind of fabric, there are only two builders in the world, and the machine has a meaningfully high failure rate... and requires special shipping, assembly, maintenance and so on...
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  You’re right, we’ve never produced cutting edge machinery en masse for a war before, this situation is completely new... Wait, that’s not right. That’s also ignoring scale. Getting a few machinists for rifles is pretty easy; getting all the machinists for total war is not. Comparative to the scale of government action and organization in WW2, manufacturing and distributing PPE is nothing.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    A lot of people know how to build or operate a mill well enough to do most tasks. My dad does, my grandfather did, most of my uncles do. The particular fabric machine for N95 masks is very specialized, and building those machines has a failure rate - you may be producing fabric only sufficient for a N90 or N85 application - a lot of "dust" or "atv" masks are exactly that. The machines are physically large enough and with specialized enough parts you can't build one out of a machine shop. It'd be like demanding we mass produce Titan IVs tomorrow. America has built a Titan IV before, we've built a few - surely we could just crank out one a day right?
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      I’m not saying that making the basic machinery for PPE is easy compared to say, simple firearms. They’re obviously more complex. But they’re also a known problem; we’ve been making PPE out of the same basic materials since 1972. Compared to other large scale efforts the US has undergone to fight wars or handle other national pride situations, making more PPE machines is both cheaper and simpler. It does not require the creation of new technologies, nor the whole sale mobilization and re-organization of our society. All it requires is the application of enough money to buy an F-35 or two to rebuild the machines that were dismantled back in 2000. This is not complicated, we just lack the will as a society to fix this.
rootusrootus 6y ago
This is what happens when the free market becomes the accepted cultural answer to all problems. We forget that the defining quality of good government is not efficiency, but effectiveness.
- epistasis 6y ago
  I don't think it's market fundamentalism, Trump is not a neoliberal. He just doesnt want to attempt to fix it. It could be racism, it could be his narcissism is such that if he tried to do something now he'd have to accept his failures from the very start, and that would shatter his fragile sense of self... There is no market fundamentalism exhibited when it comes to other bailouts, only when it comes to trying to harm the least powerful in society.
  - ponker 6y ago
    Better modeled as a pinball machine... try to avoid ascribing motives, as they change too fast to build a coherent model.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Corporate greed is at all time high I’m afraid. 0.1% may be all the companies that have an altruistic bone in their body in the US right now. Everything is tied to bigger and better profits because God forbid your stock falter even the tiniest bit in this era. Your CEO salary tied to its performance might go down!
vsareto 6y ago
Personally, I think it's healthy that America drops this exceptionalism attitude. We can't keep living off of the WW2 laurels forever. And other nations are clearly approaching our "world's best" status in various sectors: China builds a shitload of stuff, Canada has pandemic payment support and healthcare. We're very clearly not united against something like fascism and we're more fragmented, so yeah, we kinda can't do the WW2 things any more.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  American exceptionalism isn’t just “we’re the best”, it’s also our (historical) optimism that we can solve any problem and that tomorrow will be better than today. There’s a baby in that bath water.
  - walls 6y ago
    Take a look around. That baby has been gone for a while now.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  When I say American exceptionalism, I'm not talking about the attitude of "We're better than all other countries". I'm talking about the attitude of "We can accomplish whatever we set our minds to, no matter how hard the task". The same attitude was at play in the Apollo program, if we don't want to use a wartime analogy. The problem is that while having a can't do rather than a can do attitude is "only" causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans right now, it is going to kill way more than that with our long-term ongoing failure to address climate change. That is where the costs of having a can't do attitude are going to be the most visible.
  - pariahHN 6y ago
    This is extremely frustrating. Every time I try to discuss big issues with my dad, his side consists basically of "its too difficult". This man witnessed the transition room sized memory to 1TB SD cards, the growth of the internet infrastructure, the development of international flight - all things which would have been considered magical miracles just a few decades before he was born, but now everything is just too difficult to bother implementing. I don't understand how he can have that attitude after everything he witnessed being built and even participated in building.
x87678r 6y ago
> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Its a big gap in my experience of economics/politics/management about how things were done back then to do this. Was it people doing the "right thing", or were companies paid to do it, or was it government controlled factories. Its a bit like the British empire - ie we need to invade Malaysia to get rubber, or Arabia for oil. How were things done in the old days? In today's globalized commercial world I (or most other managers) dont really know.
mindslight 6y ago
> We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point, and no sign of reaching the end The pandemic was a looming threat in January, but we'll give a one month pass due to bureaucratic slowness. If machine production had been started in February, we'd currently have two months of full scale mask production. Right in time for flu season.
Spivak 6y ago
> Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? Your "can't" is playing two parts here trying desperately to imply "unable" for dramatic effect but actually means "unwilling" which I think is super misleading. Like of course we could have, but politicians were more afraid of headlines like "The government invoked DPA and spent billions to produce masks, now they're sitting in warehouses" and "N95 mask producers cash huge government checks to produce masks no one needs." The actual politicians charged with making decisions have been (I think naively) optimistic about the pandemic and if that isn't us going back to our British roots of going to the pub and waiting for it all to blow over I don't know what is.
pjc50 6y ago
> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? Yes, because of a set of beliefs about market fundamentalism. The masks aren't as important as maintaining the existing product structure of society and proving that government intervention in healthcare can't work; if it shows signs of working, those paid to sabotage it will make sure it doesn't. Besides, denialism is widespread. There were all sorts of conflicting pieces of information about the effectiveness of masks and various other quick-fix cures. The informational infrastructure is broken in fatal ways. It became impossible for the US to ignore Japan once the ships started sinking at Pearl Harbor. The striking thing about today is that the huge casualties haven't turned into a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 event, despite outnumbering both of those put together by orders of magnitude.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  The difference was then that the government did want to go to war already, and it was just public opinion that was shifted to pro-war by Pearl Harbour. Likewise, Bush already wanted to go to war with Iraq, but 9/11 shifted public opinion to make it possible. Surely 200,000 people dying is just as big of an event (or bigger) as Pearl Harbour or 9/11, it's just that the government are refusing to acknowledge it as such because it is not what they want and doesn't serve their purpose.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    Yes, the US government is uniquely corrupt/evil/incompetent so let's just write them off. Not to worry, I'm sure Germany, UK, France, Russia, Taiwan, Italy, Norway, etc. have all ramped up capacity massively and our hospitals can just order from them. Right?
    - AniseAbyss 6y ago
      Unfortunately not. And its not the free market or capitalism making countries react chaotically and incompetently. Its democracy. When the dear leader in the Forbidden City tells companies to shift production it will happen. When a president or prime minister wants to do anything he has to go through channels- including an army of lawyers.
crisdux 6y ago
What you are suggesting IS happening. Companies ARE investing in increasing American production of n95 masks in America. This was even reported by the wall street journal. There are signs we are reaching the end of this pandemic. We've made a lot of progress. We are protecting nursing homes better. In most states death rates at the lowest they've been. NYC has shown that immunity is causing the virus to slow down. Hospitals have better treatments available to them. A vaccine is likely to be available by the end of the year and the systems are in place for fast administering to needed populations. Schools are back in session with minimal issues. Your WW2 comparison would be tedious to even discuss. But in short, the economy did not switch overnight. And retooling and expanding is always easier than creating new production from nothing. Creating n95 masks isn't just an issue of "retooling". We do not know if invoking DPA would have changed anything and this unsupported smug certainty is what ruins actuals discussion on this. You do not have any compelling reasons for HOW the DPA would have changed things.
gdubs 6y ago
It’s been a while but I read Edwin Land’s biography — he was the inventor of Polaroid and considered the Steve Jobs of the mid-twentieth century — and the War effort was given a lot of credit for establishing their dominance. It didn’t seem like that in the short term, but after the War ended, if I recall correctly, they benefited greatly from having scaled up to meet its demands, and from incentives.
ch4s3 6y ago
> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? This is a somewhat ahistorical. The Defense Production Act of 1950 is what everyone is talking about. Withe respect to WWII, production increased every month of the war until the end, and the ramp up began in a limited fashion a year or two before the US entered the war. The thing people miss is that a lot of what was produced by converted companies in the first year of the war was junk. The guns jammed, the planes fell out of the sky, and so on. Typewriter companies just don't know how to make rifles, and it took a lot of trial and error for them to figure it out. Literally they had to get back field reports on what broke and then try to reproduce and fix it, then put that fix into production. No amount of the government will it to be could make typewriter machinists immediately good at making rifles, even though those worker probably knew men who would depend on those same rifles. Now consider that the weaving machines for n95 masks are probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than the lathes used to make rifles or the tools used to make a 1945 aircraft. You're also forgetting that the first thing we tried to ramp up with a government nudge was ventilators, and numerous companies tried. Most of them failed however, and that experience isn't forgotten by other companies. Then it turned out that no one was paying attention to data from China and Italy that suggested that ventilators may actually be causing WORSE outcomes, but when doctors noticed the demand plummeted. Those manufacturers were now left holding the bag. Who want's to sign on for that? Then, consider the PPE ramp up. A lot of companies participated, but cash strapped hospitals weren't buying because the moratorium on elective surgeries killed their cash flow, which no one had previously expected at a policy level. Sure the government could have stepped in, but again no one saw that coming before hand so extra funding for PPE for hospitals didn't get included in the Covid relief bill. Now, after 2 big misfires the political will is spent.
- wbl 6y ago
  Congress could always go back and spend more. They choose not to.
  - ch4s3 6y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree that the current will to power approach taken by both parties in congress has rendered them useless. My overarching point however was that money ins't a magical crank you can turn that makes goods come into existence. The N95 problem is complicated, and not many companies could produce them even if they were funded. They also don't want to get stuck with a factory floor full of mask machines after the pandemic is over.
hexbinencoded 6y ago
Yep. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Actual exceptionalism ended coinciding with the end of WW2. It's America's slow and steady decline like Rome. 250 years / 10 generations is about all a civilization typically lasts. Apathy, corruption, incompetence, disorder, inequality, poverty, decay, tyrants, and ultimately: dissolution. Here's an insightful prognostication by the late, great Chalmers Johnson around 2005: https://youtu.be/Q2CCs-x9q9U https://youtu.be/Q2CCs-x9q9U
craftinator 6y ago
> This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence? > In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? The really stunning thing here is that ~400,000 US troops died over a 4 year period in WWII. We've lost >200,000 US citizens in ~8 months due to COVID-19. I think American incompetence barely starts to cover this clusterf.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
What would the dividends be here? The article says "shortage", but it's my understanding that health workers are now getting all the PPE they need to stay safe; we're just not quite up to the normal level of abundance where it's disposable. If you sent me 6 months into the past with $10 billion to allocate, I'd surely spend it on vaccine funding.

swalsh 6y ago

I wonder if maybe one of the differences is this has always seemed "temporary"... Or at least that is how it has been portrayed. We're just in that period before we have a vaccine, and everything goes back to normal. When you think we're only a few months away, making huge investments like that doesn't seem to make sense. But WW2 was an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the war will come over here and our country will be destroyed.

BoorishBears 6y ago
A global pandemic is an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the disease will take over here and our country will be destroyed. I live in New York, I can say for NYC took this seriously (eventually) and it still looks like someone Thanos-snapped half the economic activity in the city. Now imagine if the city had kept on its initial path by not taking the virus seriously and leaving hospitals so full they couldn't even handle the dead bodies anymore?

vorpalhex 6y ago

It's literally harder to produce N95 masks then to churn out rifles and ammo. Want to produce a rifle (in the 1940s)? Milling machines and operators. That's a factory order, done. Ammo? Couple four stage presses and some armorers, not even hard to train civilians instead. Want to produce N95 masks? Ok, well there's a custom built machine that produces the correct kind of fabric, there are only two builders in the world, and the machine has a meaningfully high failure rate... and requires special shipping, assembly, maintenance and so on...

ashtonkem 6y ago
You’re right, we’ve never produced cutting edge machinery en masse for a war before, this situation is completely new... Wait, that’s not right. That’s also ignoring scale. Getting a few machinists for rifles is pretty easy; getting all the machinists for total war is not. Comparative to the scale of government action and organization in WW2, manufacturing and distributing PPE is nothing.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  A lot of people know how to build or operate a mill well enough to do most tasks. My dad does, my grandfather did, most of my uncles do. The particular fabric machine for N95 masks is very specialized, and building those machines has a failure rate - you may be producing fabric only sufficient for a N90 or N85 application - a lot of "dust" or "atv" masks are exactly that. The machines are physically large enough and with specialized enough parts you can't build one out of a machine shop. It'd be like demanding we mass produce Titan IVs tomorrow. America has built a Titan IV before, we've built a few - surely we could just crank out one a day right?
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    I’m not saying that making the basic machinery for PPE is easy compared to say, simple firearms. They’re obviously more complex. But they’re also a known problem; we’ve been making PPE out of the same basic materials since 1972. Compared to other large scale efforts the US has undergone to fight wars or handle other national pride situations, making more PPE machines is both cheaper and simpler. It does not require the creation of new technologies, nor the whole sale mobilization and re-organization of our society. All it requires is the application of enough money to buy an F-35 or two to rebuild the machines that were dismantled back in 2000. This is not complicated, we just lack the will as a society to fix this.

rootusrootus 6y ago

This is what happens when the free market becomes the accepted cultural answer to all problems. We forget that the defining quality of good government is not efficiency, but effectiveness.

epistasis 6y ago
I don't think it's market fundamentalism, Trump is not a neoliberal. He just doesnt want to attempt to fix it. It could be racism, it could be his narcissism is such that if he tried to do something now he'd have to accept his failures from the very start, and that would shatter his fragile sense of self... There is no market fundamentalism exhibited when it comes to other bailouts, only when it comes to trying to harm the least powerful in society.
- ponker 6y ago
  Better modeled as a pinball machine... try to avoid ascribing motives, as they change too fast to build a coherent model.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

Corporate greed is at all time high I’m afraid. 0.1% may be all the companies that have an altruistic bone in their body in the US right now. Everything is tied to bigger and better profits because God forbid your stock falter even the tiniest bit in this era. Your CEO salary tied to its performance might go down!

vsareto 6y ago

Personally, I think it's healthy that America drops this exceptionalism attitude. We can't keep living off of the WW2 laurels forever. And other nations are clearly approaching our "world's best" status in various sectors: China builds a shitload of stuff, Canada has pandemic payment support and healthcare. We're very clearly not united against something like fascism and we're more fragmented, so yeah, we kinda can't do the WW2 things any more.

ashtonkem 6y ago
American exceptionalism isn’t just “we’re the best”, it’s also our (historical) optimism that we can solve any problem and that tomorrow will be better than today. There’s a baby in that bath water.
- walls 6y ago
  Take a look around. That baby has been gone for a while now.
CydeWeys 6y ago
When I say American exceptionalism, I'm not talking about the attitude of "We're better than all other countries". I'm talking about the attitude of "We can accomplish whatever we set our minds to, no matter how hard the task". The same attitude was at play in the Apollo program, if we don't want to use a wartime analogy. The problem is that while having a can't do rather than a can do attitude is "only" causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans right now, it is going to kill way more than that with our long-term ongoing failure to address climate change. That is where the costs of having a can't do attitude are going to be the most visible.
- pariahHN 6y ago
  This is extremely frustrating. Every time I try to discuss big issues with my dad, his side consists basically of "its too difficult". This man witnessed the transition room sized memory to 1TB SD cards, the growth of the internet infrastructure, the development of international flight - all things which would have been considered magical miracles just a few decades before he was born, but now everything is just too difficult to bother implementing. I don't understand how he can have that attitude after everything he witnessed being built and even participated in building.

x87678r 6y ago

> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Its a big gap in my experience of economics/politics/management about how things were done back then to do this. Was it people doing the "right thing", or were companies paid to do it, or was it government controlled factories. Its a bit like the British empire - ie we need to invade Malaysia to get rubber, or Arabia for oil. How were things done in the old days? In today's globalized commercial world I (or most other managers) dont really know.

mindslight 6y ago

> We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point, and no sign of reaching the end The pandemic was a looming threat in January, but we'll give a one month pass due to bureaucratic slowness. If machine production had been started in February, we'd currently have two months of full scale mask production. Right in time for flu season.

Spivak 6y ago

> Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? Your "can't" is playing two parts here trying desperately to imply "unable" for dramatic effect but actually means "unwilling" which I think is super misleading. Like of course we could have, but politicians were more afraid of headlines like "The government invoked DPA and spent billions to produce masks, now they're sitting in warehouses" and "N95 mask producers cash huge government checks to produce masks no one needs." The actual politicians charged with making decisions have been (I think naively) optimistic about the pandemic and if that isn't us going back to our British roots of going to the pub and waiting for it all to blow over I don't know what is.

pjc50 6y ago

> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? Yes, because of a set of beliefs about market fundamentalism. The masks aren't as important as maintaining the existing product structure of society and proving that government intervention in healthcare can't work; if it shows signs of working, those paid to sabotage it will make sure it doesn't. Besides, denialism is widespread. There were all sorts of conflicting pieces of information about the effectiveness of masks and various other quick-fix cures. The informational infrastructure is broken in fatal ways. It became impossible for the US to ignore Japan once the ships started sinking at Pearl Harbor. The striking thing about today is that the huge casualties haven't turned into a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 event, despite outnumbering both of those put together by orders of magnitude.

jonplackett 6y ago
The difference was then that the government did want to go to war already, and it was just public opinion that was shifted to pro-war by Pearl Harbour. Likewise, Bush already wanted to go to war with Iraq, but 9/11 shifted public opinion to make it possible. Surely 200,000 people dying is just as big of an event (or bigger) as Pearl Harbour or 9/11, it's just that the government are refusing to acknowledge it as such because it is not what they want and doesn't serve their purpose.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  Yes, the US government is uniquely corrupt/evil/incompetent so let's just write them off. Not to worry, I'm sure Germany, UK, France, Russia, Taiwan, Italy, Norway, etc. have all ramped up capacity massively and our hospitals can just order from them. Right?
  - AniseAbyss 6y ago
    Unfortunately not. And its not the free market or capitalism making countries react chaotically and incompetently. Its democracy. When the dear leader in the Forbidden City tells companies to shift production it will happen. When a president or prime minister wants to do anything he has to go through channels- including an army of lawyers.

crisdux 6y ago

What you are suggesting IS happening. Companies ARE investing in increasing American production of n95 masks in America. This was even reported by the wall street journal. There are signs we are reaching the end of this pandemic. We've made a lot of progress. We are protecting nursing homes better. In most states death rates at the lowest they've been. NYC has shown that immunity is causing the virus to slow down. Hospitals have better treatments available to them. A vaccine is likely to be available by the end of the year and the systems are in place for fast administering to needed populations. Schools are back in session with minimal issues. Your WW2 comparison would be tedious to even discuss. But in short, the economy did not switch overnight. And retooling and expanding is always easier than creating new production from nothing. Creating n95 masks isn't just an issue of "retooling". We do not know if invoking DPA would have changed anything and this unsupported smug certainty is what ruins actuals discussion on this. You do not have any compelling reasons for HOW the DPA would have changed things.

gdubs 6y ago

It’s been a while but I read Edwin Land’s biography — he was the inventor of Polaroid and considered the Steve Jobs of the mid-twentieth century — and the War effort was given a lot of credit for establishing their dominance. It didn’t seem like that in the short term, but after the War ended, if I recall correctly, they benefited greatly from having scaled up to meet its demands, and from incentives.

ch4s3 6y ago

> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? This is a somewhat ahistorical. The Defense Production Act of 1950 is what everyone is talking about. Withe respect to WWII, production increased every month of the war until the end, and the ramp up began in a limited fashion a year or two before the US entered the war. The thing people miss is that a lot of what was produced by converted companies in the first year of the war was junk. The guns jammed, the planes fell out of the sky, and so on. Typewriter companies just don't know how to make rifles, and it took a lot of trial and error for them to figure it out. Literally they had to get back field reports on what broke and then try to reproduce and fix it, then put that fix into production. No amount of the government will it to be could make typewriter machinists immediately good at making rifles, even though those worker probably knew men who would depend on those same rifles. Now consider that the weaving machines for n95 masks are probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than the lathes used to make rifles or the tools used to make a 1945 aircraft. You're also forgetting that the first thing we tried to ramp up with a government nudge was ventilators, and numerous companies tried. Most of them failed however, and that experience isn't forgotten by other companies. Then it turned out that no one was paying attention to data from China and Italy that suggested that ventilators may actually be causing WORSE outcomes, but when doctors noticed the demand plummeted. Those manufacturers were now left holding the bag. Who want's to sign on for that? Then, consider the PPE ramp up. A lot of companies participated, but cash strapped hospitals weren't buying because the moratorium on elective surgeries killed their cash flow, which no one had previously expected at a policy level. Sure the government could have stepped in, but again no one saw that coming before hand so extra funding for PPE for hospitals didn't get included in the Covid relief bill. Now, after 2 big misfires the political will is spent.

wbl 6y ago
Congress could always go back and spend more. They choose not to.
- ch4s3 6y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree that the current will to power approach taken by both parties in congress has rendered them useless. My overarching point however was that money ins't a magical crank you can turn that makes goods come into existence. The N95 problem is complicated, and not many companies could produce them even if they were funded. They also don't want to get stuck with a factory floor full of mask machines after the pandemic is over.

hexbinencoded 6y ago

Yep. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Actual exceptionalism ended coinciding with the end of WW2. It's America's slow and steady decline like Rome. 250 years / 10 generations is about all a civilization typically lasts. Apathy, corruption, incompetence, disorder, inequality, poverty, decay, tyrants, and ultimately: dissolution. Here's an insightful prognostication by the late, great Chalmers Johnson around 2005: https://youtu.be/Q2CCs-x9q9U https://youtu.be/Q2CCs-x9q9U

craftinator 6y ago

> This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence? > In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really? The really stunning thing here is that ~400,000 US troops died over a 4 year period in WWII. We've lost >200,000 US citizens in ~8 months due to COVID-19. I think American incompetence barely starts to cover this clusterf.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

What would the dividends be here? The article says "shortage", but it's my understanding that health workers are now getting all the PPE they need to stay safe; we're just not quite up to the normal level of abundance where it's disposable. If you sent me 6 months into the past with $10 billion to allocate, I'd surely spend it on vaccine funding.