8 ms·
A very important question to ask. Should the US make medical gloves?
by karakoram 3mo ago
A very important question to ask.
Should the US make medical gloves?
- Hikikomori 3mo ago1-200% tariff applied at random if you don't.
- looksjjhg 3mo agoThe US started the tariff game btw
- Hikikomori 3mo agoThat is what I'm referring to.
- tonyedgecombe 3mo agoAlso what the cost is. If the US really wants to reshore this sort of work then it will become materially poorer.
- barrenko 3mo agoYeah, you should make stuff medical staff needs.
- expedition32 3mo agoOr maybe not start stupid wars but this is America we're talking so meh...
- kaashif 3mo agoAsking this question only a handful of years after a global pandemic... If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE. And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.
- raverbashing 3mo agoIt's amazing how much those spreadsheet heads know nothing about how the actual world works
- vrganj 3mo agoYou gotta optimize everything for the market man! It's magic! Everything will work out if we only make number go up! Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!
- ikari_pl 3mo agocorrection: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
- fartfeatures 3mo agoRedundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.
- philipallstar 3mo agoYou don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.
- vrganj 3mo agoHeh sure, it's great at optimizing. The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.
- philipallstar 3mo agoThis is just silliness. Rich people got rich under capitalism by providing things people want for the best price. They're rich because they owns shares in valuable businesses that people want to buy the products of. Some people get rich, on average by merit. And everyone gets the products they want at a low price. Can you imagine if the only cars available were made in the USSR, like Ladas? They were terrible because there was no capitalism, and so no competition. But if you'd rather have abysmal cars but know that no one got rich making them, I guess that's...a choice?
- jofzar 3mo agoLooks like most/all manufacturing happens in the SEA/China, so I can see the logic that it could be considered a military risk for it to not be manufactured/possibility to scale manufacturing in America.
- jerlam 3mo agoBerry Amendment requires US military to buy items manufactured in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Amendment
- roysting 3mo agoYes. Next question
- rileymat2 3mo agoWhy is it so simple? Instead of investing billions, perhaps a stockpile is a better strategy.
- roysting 3mo agoThat would be a good thing for you to research to build an understanding for the scale of what you are simplifying. Here's a start; just alone during a rather non-pandemic of 2020-2022 the USA alone used about 1.8 billion, with a B, gloves per week ... week.
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- rileymat2 3mo agoSo 1 billion dollars buys about 8 billion gloves? Or about 4 weeks? So for 12 billion dollars that's a years slack? I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money on cost ineffective gloves just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment. The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem. So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost, which still seems excessive. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.
- NetMageSCW 3mo agoThat’s brilliant - the government could pay every hospital to stockpile the annual needs for itself and any local clinics and they would just rotate through the stock and replenish as normal.
- maxglute 3mo agoSomeone already decided US should. The important question is whether 1B should have gotten the job done, and if not... is it matter of throwing good $$$ after bad $$$... or is it just bad sign 1B wasn't enough.
- petra 3mo agoI wonder if they can at least create a small scale NBR factory.
- einpoklum 3mo agoThe story says the US doesn't have the raw material(s): NBR. Not quite sure what that is.
- oasisaimlessly 3mo agoNBR = nitrile butadiene rubber, a synthetic rubber. Not really a raw material, as it's synthesized.
- RetroTechie 3mo agoWith all the chemical industry already in the US, and $1B to throw at it, production capacity for the raw material couldn't be included? It's not like you need a metric ton of it to produce a box of gloves.
- wildzzz 3mo agoThe issue is that domestic sources of NBR are few because of the type of petroleum extraction we do here. This makes the cost of NBR relatively high and consequently makes the gloves pricey compared to imported ones. We can definitely make.a glove but no one wants to buy them.
- PowerElectronix 3mo agoMaking them? Not in the least. But being capable of making them? It's a must, be it gloves, EVs, semis, or screws.
- fl0id 3mo agoIt's all a question of price, based on the article. And not planning how much it takes to start up. In any case it's also not feasible to keep a plant on standby, just in case you need it one day.
- warumdarum 3mo agoThe more important part is how to make people who ask this question a permanent pariahs?
- derektank 3mo agoYou think someone should be made a permanent pariah for suggesting medical gloves be manufactured in Malaysia or Thailand, rather than the US? Why?
- goalieca 3mo agoThe USA can make anything if there’s money in it. Right now, I just don’t think there’s any.
- like_any_other 3mo agoIt should be able to. A country that can't, cannot hope to remain sovereign in anything but name, for long.
- t0mpr1c3 3mo agoThe thing about autarky. It ain't for people who don't want to work in a plastics factory, I guess. And it contributed to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Funny coincidence that.
- rasz 3mo agonah, you can always import from friendly nations like Denmark, Spain, Canada, Mexico..