3 ms·

"The cost of 1,000 beds for a refugee camp ranges from €100,000 to €200,000 (US$110 to $220) a bed" What? Has nobody involved with this article ever seen a mi

"The cost of 1,000 beds for a refugee camp ranges from €100,000 to €200,000 (US$110 to $220) a bed" What? Has nobody involved with this article ever seen a military camp? A military cot is setup in seconds, can be shipped basically instantly, will not disintegrate in contact with water, and has served millions of soldiers well for decades. Amazon can deliver one to my house for less than 100$. If you need beds for people, dont obsesse over labels. It doesnt matter whether it is sold as a bed or as a cot. What matters is having a safe place to put it.

uoaei 3y ago
In the choice between sponsoring the costs of $100*1000 beds plus chartering planes and logistics personnel to bring them from wherever they may be warehoused, or calling up packaging manufacturers and truckers close to the disaster site to churn out and ship pallets of beds in hours, it's a no-brainer. Have you ever worked in logistics? Products don't magically materialize when you click "Order now" on a website. They either have to be stored somewhere (somehow always inconvenient vs where you want them to be) or manufactured to order. The reason the military is so good at this is because they learned in WWII that winning wars is largely a matter of logistics and attrition. Their movements are planned weeks or months in advance and they're constantly shipping things around to accommodate those plans. (Ironically this made them vulnerable to guerrilla warfare and its emphasis on stochastic sabotage tactics, which is why they lost in Vietnam and the Middle East, but that's besides the point.) Commercial logistics systems don't have this kind of central planning because of the fetishism around market forces so you are at the whim of whoever has the stuff you want (or the means of production) when you want it.

3 ms·

"The cost of 1,000 beds for a refugee camp ranges from €100,000 to €200,000 (US$110 to $220) a bed" What? Has nobody involved with this article ever seen a mi

by sandworm101 3y ago

uoaei 3y ago
In the choice between sponsoring the costs of $100*1000 beds plus chartering planes and logistics personnel to bring them from wherever they may be warehoused, or calling up packaging manufacturers and truckers close to the disaster site to churn out and ship pallets of beds in hours, it's a no-brainer. Have you ever worked in logistics? Products don't magically materialize when you click "Order now" on a website. They either have to be stored somewhere (somehow always inconvenient vs where you want them to be) or manufactured to order. The reason the military is so good at this is because they learned in WWII that winning wars is largely a matter of logistics and attrition. Their movements are planned weeks or months in advance and they're constantly shipping things around to accommodate those plans. (Ironically this made them vulnerable to guerrilla warfare and its emphasis on stochastic sabotage tactics, which is why they lost in Vietnam and the Middle East, but that's besides the point.) Commercial logistics systems don't have this kind of central planning because of the fetishism around market forces so you are at the whim of whoever has the stuff you want (or the means of production) when you want it.