On the bright side, a disruption in supply may teach us what we really need, and what we don't need. Maybe after this breakout we'll realize the importance of slowing down, consuming less, and resting more.
Hopefully this will lead to the realization that most labour is in fact useless, and a normalization of that fact would be an incredible step forward, which will enable us to increase our quality of life by working less while sparing the environment.
So, your argument for continuing the current, unsustainable, unfair and in the long run suicidal economic model is that the most vulnerable - given the current economic system - would suffer?
To me it sounds like a perfect reason to rethink the current economic model.
It helps people not get severe cases of the flu, which means fewer healthcare resources, like hospital beds and medical personnel, being devoted to severe flu cases and more can be devoted to severe coronavirus cases.
I'm just tired of hearing people around me going "I had my shots, I'm going to that party / going to that event" or "It's just a flu, nothing to worry about".
I for one wouldn't visit a hospital unless i really needed to, considering it is the most high risk place of catching it from. People going to the hospital "presumably" sick only to come out of it with the virus is a popular tale out of wuhan.
Pretty sure the downvotes are for ignoring the elephant in the room, if we have a prolonged recession a lot of people in the US are completely fucked from losing healthcare and from losing the paycheck that they depend on. Most Americans do not have an emergency fund.
The problem isn't admittance or treatment the problem is the bill that comes in the mail 6 months later, as well as massive decline in spending, decline in social interactions, decline in nutritional choices, and the injection of the 2020 political circus towards the end of the year (in the US).
Because that's what happens in the aftermath of a scarcity event; all those people who were hung out to dry don't push harder for more in the future, and those who had it all decide to take less.
I'll tell you what I do really need: one pack of toilet paper, because I just happened to be running out of my last Costco pack right now. Trying to make whats left last.
I had a phone stolen a couple of weeks ago, and initially I was trying to buy a new phone outright (ended up filing a claim and having my new one overnighted, but lack of SMS access would have prevented me from doing my job, hence the urgency). None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain), but Best Buy did.
>None of the local Verizon stores had any phones (11 Pro Max) in stock (they explicitly said it was due to China supply chain)
That may be true...but it may be just as likely they are minimizing their own inventory to keep their own costs down/cash on hand, which is not something they would freely tell their own employees or customers.
Perhaps. They did tell me they could get me one as fast as Fedex could get it to me (probably a couple of days). If there is constrained stock, centralizing inventory probably makes the most sense.
Alternate theory: I spoke to someone who works at a Cricket. They never keep higher end phones in stock, as they are frequent robbery targets (though I often see armed security at larger carrier stores).
Verizon will hold inventory for priority customers once the parts are constrained upstream. Your state/local .gov and some medical users will get priority access to inventory.
Everybody has. There is Chinese New Year, always surprising companies exporting from China every year like Christmas, and than at the same time Corona. Now there is a huge backlog of produced goods in Chinese ports, a huge order backlog at Chinese manufacturers amyd not enough shipping and production capacity. Ultimately things will revert to normal, so. That Corona is now hitting the destinations of these backlogs doesn't help, obviously.
or a combination of the two: Verizon keeps less stock on hand in general, and they ran out of theirs, while Best Buy had a larger backstock and so could still sell theirs.
I actually agree with you. Aside from apps that don't offer anything other than SMS 2FA, I always opt for TOTP-based 2FA. However, one compromise I've made is with Authy: they back up your saved config, but you must SMS verify (or have it installed on a 2nd device to verify a new device)
Any 2FA is inherently susceptible to losing one of the factors. It's designed to deny access when only one factor is present, so this is kind of a feature not a bug, and part of the security-vs-convenience tradeoff. Do you have any specific reason to think SMS 2FA in particular is a terrible idea?
Not if you have a password-protected Yubikey with GPG/RSA signing, encryption, and authentication keys and a second backup Yubikey with the same keys. If you lose one, order two more ASAP, use the backup key to change your keys in every machine and revoke that key (thereby rendering the lost Yubikey and your backup useless). Wait for the new Yubikeys to arrive, generate new keys, change all machines to these new keys, and revoke the temporary keys you generated.
For 2FA specifically, SMS is weak because of its vulnerability to SIM swap attacks[0]. There's been a few reported incidents where attackers stole cryptocurrency from accounts protected by SMS 2FA[1].
So I guess they import the beans, manufacture the tofu, then ship it back to us? Sounds inefficient, though I'm not sure how much demand there is for a large-scale domestic tofu manufacturing industry in the US.
I'm not concerned about the food supply, I am a bit concerned about logistical problems of getting food to grocers if we have massive infection rates. This would hopefully be short lived though, as workers out could be back at work within 2-3 weeks. We'd just have to hope they don't all get it at once. I hope grocers are taking measures to prevent vendors from interacting with each other, and making sure their loading docks are sterile as can be.
Given that for the most part, our food supply chain is not composed entirely of 70+ year old people who will all simultaneously get the virus, while it's certainly not just "another day at the office" to keep food supplies running, it's not necessarily going to be as hard as your intuition may say, either. Especially if social distancing works and slows the infection rate, even the worst case scenario here is far from the metaphorical bodies in the streets and everyone lying at home in their beds, sick. On a day-to-day basis, it's more like a really bad flu season than "one day, the entire town just died".
The non-essential economy is looking at a kick in the face, but I'm not too worried about the essential economy. In the long run, I think we're going to individually remember this as an annoyance, not a catastrophe. There are some other social changes that may occur, but they're mostly going to be accounted as "social changes that were pretty much on track to happen anyhow, the Coronavirus just precipitated them a bit earlier and more suddenly".
Honestly, in a worst-case scenario, I would hope for the government to be rounding up able-bodied people who aren't sick and draft them into the Grocery Corps or similar to keep things moving. I really don't think it's going to come to that, but I pray that if it does, the people in charge are ready for that kind of task.
Damn knows I'll happily stop coding and go work wherever I am told to help with this.
I imagine a fair number of people would voluntarily agree to do that if it really came down to it. That said, I imagine nation guard, etc would be mobilized first.
From a BI article, "In general, because of poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely very low risk of spread from products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks at ambient temperatures," the CDC said on its website.
Part of the reason for the ridiculous corn subsidies is so if the whole rest of the world ends, the US will still have enough food. We'll have to stop eating some specific foods (like we export chicken dark meat to China and they send the breast meat to us), but in terms of overall calories the US will be fine. Domestic distribution is a bigger worry, quarantines or just plain shops shutting down.
It is not the food that is the problem , it is the packaging. A large percentage of packaging products are made in China, so a producer may have the food here , but packaging will have to adapt with low to no supplies from China.
We really need to get our factories out of China. This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks, let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city, doctored numbers, then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries!! And they are actively funneling uigher population into crippled factories in eastern China to replace migrants who aren’t coming back.
If anything, South Korea and Italy should be furious that their country is sabotaged by China. And the rest of the world should be wary of this bad actor in the world.
How did China "sabotage" Italy & South Korea? Italy & South Korea had ample time to ban travel to & from China, given how China was handling Coronavirus.
They chose not to.
China is free to make decisions handing an epidemic. We are free to criticize how they handle it. We were free to implement travel restrictions. We chose not to.
China didn't strike us with a bioweapon. We did nothing to stop a novel virus from spreading, and it spread. That's what happens.
Worth noting that even we today still haven't banned all travel from China and doing so FULLY is not really a great option unless we did a ton of other things first. We're still having goods imported from China and there are folks actually BRINGING those goods here. Our healthcare system currently depends on imported items, for just one example. China is mostly where we get our antibiotics.
This has happened to my company and a few others I know. We have about $15K of packaging stuck in China.
If this is doing anything (to me personally), it's making me reconsider shifting more of the supply-chain to the US. In many cases, the prices aren't really that different.
This is a net good effect in terms of resiliency, in the long term, and may also result in moving some manufacturing jobs back to the US. As the standard of living rises in China, labour costs will increase until eventually the only way it will really be cheaper to do things over there is because of either better logistics, or lax environmental/labour laws that enable shortcuts we can't/won't take here. The latter is something we could reasonably tariff or tax (considering how popular the idea of a carbon tax is amongst progressive folks, this shouldn't be too hard of a sell).
Mexico wages are already lower than wages in China. In fact, chinalawblog.com talks a lot about companies shifting to Mexico due to USMCA and short turnaround for supply chain.
This is a net good effect in terms of resiliency, in the long term...
Well, this is the problem, right. Resiliency only pays off when there's a crisis, otherwise it's a net cost. So if you're outcompeted by the other non-resilient companies before that crisis happens, it doesn't help.
I feel like societal resiliency needs to be rewarded (in many contexts, utilities are obvious but also food supply, etc) but I don't know what a good way of doing this would be, except making it government run and making resiliency a primary objective. I don't see how a for-profit system that rewards short-term gains could ever be made to value resiliency.
Ensuring that all companies account for and pay their true costs would take some of the 'efficiency' gains away from larger players. In the current system larger players are better able to bend laws to their favor.
resiliency mostly pays off when there's a crisis. You can reduce latency in systems by sourcing things closer to use, but having a fallback farther away.
It's a tradeoff though. If I have two suppliers, the odds that I have 'a supplier issue' are doubled. But the odds that I have no supply at all is lower.
Two suppliers are more resilient so, you always have a fall back. Suppliers run into trouble all the time, single sources screw you in that case. Cluster risks are always bad.
You can also play the suppliers off each other. My dad's employer did a lot of data processing. They had two computer vendors they liked to keep near a 50-50 split when they weren't punishing one of them for some perceived slight.
I learned much later that the only way to get IBM and some other big vendors to do anything at all for you is to move your checkbook. That is, if the checkbook might be coming out of your pocket, they're interested. If you threaten to put it away, they are very interested. The rest of the time? Fuck you, we have other checkbooks to worry about.
Unfortunately you can't just spin supplies up as if they are in AWS EC2 zone. It takes years to built if they weren't already there. The more apprioriate comparison would be to have a home-hosted server cluster in addition to EC2 cluster which most companies simply don't do. It's just too expensive.
Sure, if companies start thinking about their supplier base just now, well that's just too late. I can only comment on physical supply chains, so. But even there building up suppliers takes time and money. Personally, I would love to see the risk of single sources be valued higher in the equations. One can dream, right?
Edit: Now I got the cluster thing. I meant cluster in the sense of risk, meaning you have a single point of failure and high degree of risk concentration. But your point is really interesting, I never thought about these aspects of cloud computing.
Rsillience can not be the primary objective of capitalism. It's not possible. Ironically, socialism is based on the idea of being most resiliant. Think hard why China turned that ship to a different direction.
"In many cases, the prices aren't really that different."
I beg to differ.
To be precise, for trade/production companies, even a 30% difference in price would be huge. But if you only buy souvenirs or gift wrappings etc, those might not matter that much, as they might just be less tha 1% in the final price of whatever you're selling. but for some companies or industries, it means 30% cheaper in terms of all their material and products, which would be insane increase for their profits.
I think you probably want to hold off your decision till this ends, moving out of China to be more resilient only works if You can be sure the country you are moving to won’t have the same issue
> In many cases, the prices aren't really that different.
What industry are you in? If you mean China isn't that different than [Vietnam/India/Mexico/etc] then I can see it. I used to work in Medical Devices for 5 years, and the cost of manufacturing something abroad (one company had several plans in Mexico) was astronomically lower than manufacturing in the USA.
I buy mostly paper and plastic packaging. When factoring in tariffs and shipping costs, it's generally cheaper in China like 70% of the time and there are more suppliers in China (so it's easier to find them on Alibaba). It's generally harder to find the American suppliers and there's a wider variance in price. It could be there are two American options and 25 Chinese options. One American company could be the cheapest and the other could be the most expensive. The Chinese companies tend to have lower variance in pricing.
We really need to get our factories out of China. This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks, let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city, doctored numbers, then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries!! And they are actively Forcing uigher population into crippled factories in eastern China to replace migrants who aren’t coming back. And China hasn’t even apologized yet!
If anything, South Korea and Italy should be furious that their country is sabotaged by China. And the rest of the world should be wary of this bad actor in the world. Many people I know will not buy from China again unless they absolutely have to
The Republican talking points right now are that coronavirus doesn't really matter, and it's being blown up as a democratic attempt to have an election year topic.
When all my Republican family is spouting the same BS, that means it's being pushed hard in the soft right wing information channels.
“This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks”
That’s the same as the USA refusing to test everyone in sufficient quantities right? South Korea is testing 10k per day, has the US completed even 10k tests yet?
“let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city”
That’s every state apart from perhaps 1 section on NY city and small parts of Seattle.
“doctored numbers”
Thats the refusing to test thing again right? There’s states with reportedly zero cases. Yeah right.
“then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries”
That’s the current right wing press stating this is all baloney from the dems for their benefit.
I’ve given a point by point refutation to the best of my ability, care to respond thoughtfully?
The difference is that in the US all of this is due to incompetence, but given the nature of our laws and society people are free to point out the shortcomings of the response.
In China you are publicly admonished and/or disappeared for going against the official government narrative. That is a stark difference between not just Western/Chinese government, but culture, and cannot be underestimated. It leads to a totally different society and hopefully because of freedom of speech people will be more likely to take protective measures sooner as they realize that the government is responding poorly.
Also you're much less likely to keep the majority of the population ignorant of an outbreak when you don't have a legal and judicial speech suppression machine. Yes, their authoritarian measures were effective in containing the spread (allegedly, all sources afaik from China have gone silent), but they did spend at least a month hiding the outbreak and keeping people from talking about it, for reasons I won't go into.
Not all governments are created equal. Not all cultures are the same. That's pure fantasy brought about by decades of indoctrination in the west.
Note that this isn't just blind nationalism. I fully recognize that under these circumstances the extreme authoritarianism in China may prove to be the best containment measure out of any other country short of North Korea. Good luck convincing 360MM Americans to stay home for a month.
>The difference is that in the US all of this is due to incompetence
I wouldn't be so sure. Trump's stock market is his best argument for re-election. It's very reasonable to think he would want to downplay anything that could disrupt the economy in the run up to the election.
That theory still alleges incompetence, because covering it up for an extra month or even two won't impact the elections which are a long time from now.
The virus can still kill you no matter how 'free' you feel you are. I'm pretty sure dead people are much more freer than us as they don't have to think about any of these non-sense.
You're missing the point. The freedom may make the virus less likely to spread as information about it is easier to come by. The more people know and the sooner, the better off we all are.
The White House just made coronavirus planning classified. And in such a capricious way, that critical staff were excluded from meetings. Not sure how America's "freedom" is helping here.
I know where you're coming from, but we don't live in a world where everyone CAN make seasoned decisions based on all these information available, they mostly just listen to auhtories of their choice maybe it's because of education, time or intelligence I don't know. And in this case your neighbor's choice hurt you regardless what your choice is. Just think about how many parents still refuse vacination for kids. Maybe on a college campus this could be true, but outside of it? I don't think so.
"freedom of speech people will be more likely to take protective measures sooner as they realize that the government is responding poorly."
This honestly is just a wishful thinking. Autocracy are more efficient than democracy in terms of that. It's just how it's designed. Democracy means debate, and it means time wasted, a lot more than in autocracy. The only problem with autocracy is that if they made a poor decision, all those people will die with it. And democracy is built in the way that a fair share of people will never do what the government says, this would be useful if the government made a bad decision, but not if they made a good one.
Just breaking: White House orders federal health officials to treat coronavirus planning as classified, something that has never been done for public health emergencies.
I'm a bit surprised this is being downvoted. It's quite clear the federal government has been suppressing testing. (I assume that's what the comment refers to, not that the USA is forcing anyone to work in factories).
I thought the comment was trying to get factories out of China and more manufacturing happening domestically (especially now that we're seeing the downsides to globalism with medical supply issues, etc). That's more or less been the whole point of the trade war. This is also good for the environment, people cut down trees in Canada, ship them to china, that get made into things, to get sold in the US, the carbon footprint on all that transport must be enormous, especially when you factor in the environmentally lax conditions in overseas manufacturing that effects the whole world.
It isn’t China’s fault that this disease happened to emerge in the country. And judging by what we see from other countries, their handling of it seems to be at least as good as mosts’, not even taking into account that countries like
US had two months extra to prepare.
So maybe chill on the nationalism (and the exclamation marks)
There were delays and suppression of vital news, but overall their response has been far more robust than our own. As for blame of the emergence, one has wonder, were it not for China's open market trade of wild animals, would this virus be with us now?
There is absolutely no proof that this originated with someone eating bats. Bats often life close to humans—in attics for instance—and aren’t eaten raw. That makes it far more likely initial transmission was due to someone accidentally touching bat shit than anyone eating bats.
That this theory is widely being accepted as proven fact is itself evidence of the accusation of racism you’re trying to defend against.
But there seems to be a consensus that this bug started in their wetmarket. I don't care if it was consumption of the animal or from fecal matter. Wetmarkets should be permanently banned. Wealthy CCP cadre members didn't want to do this and it cost the world big time
The US on a federal level 'has done nothing and is all out of ideas' as the memes go, except perhaps suppressing states to do their own testing. This is in a way inverse of what happened in China and arguably worse because in China when the federal-level authority caught wind of the scale of the problem they dropped the hammer so hard the whole world is still ringing. The US on the other hand knows there's an epidemic in progress and the CDC flip-flops from 'haven't been to china, won't get tested' to 'the virus is endemic, won't get tested' in 48h.
ha, no worries :) i'm sitting across the pond with my own share of incompetencies and complacencies abound. it's just hard to ignore what the US is (not) doing because it looks to be on a whole another level.
One of the biggest advantages of the US system is that power is spread out between the federal, state, and local governments, and corporations, and private individuals. Rampant incompetence at one level of the system can be fixed by other levels.
Can be fixed, but wont necessarily be fixed. In fact, it means that multiple levels can be incompetent or even actively malicious, increasing the dysfunction past what a central authority is capable of. Each "check and balance" can be used to force an otherwise working system into deadlock, which can have very destructive to whomever or whatever depends on that system.
You can see this in our easily manipulated and poorly deployed voting system, our poor response to the current pandemic, our limited and overly expensive healthcare, on and on.
Because awareness and testing has been poor, who's to say that some deaths attributed to pulmonary fibrosis in the last quarter of 2019, was actually due to Covid-19?
Why is this kind of comment allowed on HN? I see no difference between this and a comment a person paid by some government/organisation hostile to China would write.
This person is spewing nationalistic hate without any sources and arguments. Almost nothing in the comment is falsifiable.
Can dang elaborate on this issue? Are comments of this kind usually removed or not? I'm thinking of writing a browser extension which would remove those from new and problematic users. I come to HN to avoid this stuff.
This was all verifiable in real time and is consistent with the behavior of authoritarian regimes. You want to pretend China isn't interning Uigurs as well?
Hell, that doctor whistleblower who ended up dead from the virus was officially "admonished" and forced to publicaly apologize for "spreading rumors".
The world isn't the Disney movie land that most Americans grew up. Plenty of organized evil exists throughout the world.
Trying to claim that the United States has some moral high ground above China is laughable. China has certainly committed plenty of human rights violations, but so have plenty of Western nations.
Laughable? The US does some pretty bad shit but the Chinese treatment of it's millions of ungyrs and confirmed organ harvesting of prisoners outweighs all the domestic bad shit that the US has ever done
It's starting to look like China will be getting back to more or less normal production much sooner than the US. 500 million people were put in lockdown, and it worked.[1] New cases in Wuhan have dropped to nearly zero, and restrictions are being lifted while surveillance continues.
The US approach is just to slow transmission down a little without impacting daily life too much. That just spreads the epidemic out over time. The US may spend a year or two in the current state, until there is a vaccine.
Mixing facts and lies, and write unintentional things as if they were intentional is really the best way misinform people.
I really don't see why should China try to hide an outbreak. China will be, and is hurt the most without a doubt. China isn't mother nature, you can't just assume its government is somewhat almighty, knows everything before its happened and blame it for not doing anything. No government can be that.
The only sane explaination why any government would try to downplay it will only be of one reason, they don't know how serious it could be, and frankly, when the outbreak starts in China, we know nothing about the virus, but at this moment, we have much more accurate data and research about how the virus works, and we should expect our governments to have better solutions at hand.
This is the cruel and predictable result of a society that has meticulously and senselessly offshored/outsourced most its industrial capacity. If your country can't manufacture, from raw materials, all the electrical/electronic/mechanical components, the tooling, the equipment, and the chemicals (industrial and pharmaceutical alike) it needs to keep everything running, you're dependent on these hyper-fragile and convoluted supply chains that are optimized for cost above everything.
This isn't a "China vs US" thing; i bear zero ill will towards China and their massive gain of industrial capacity, my ire is solely focused towards those in power (government and industry alike) who presided over the suicidal deindustrialization of the United States and Europe.
The net result is that it's China who's able to send medical aid (ventilators, masks, respirators, test kits, etc) to Italy, and not the US, if only because the US is incapable of meeting its own needs: https://twitter.com/VKJudit/status/1237448125800988675
Assuming that this travels into the country wouldn't the same impact be observed as areas of the country with particular specializations were affected? I don't know how one could prevent supply chain disruptions, they'd just come a little later than sooner.
But if most industrialized countries had retained their mfg expertise some factories would be active while some idle and there could be some kind of staggered affect as the interruption courses it’s way in and out.
So wouldn't the answer to this also be to just move the industrial base to various other developing countries? If we split our manufacturing between more of South East Asia, South America, and Africa, wouldn't that have the same effect?
It doesn't have to be (and likely wasn't) intentional.
Economic pressure will twist gravity towards specialization and supply chain consolidation. You need meticulous surveillance and testing combined with authoritative regulatory control to counteract these pressures and maintain a resilient supply chain (which doesn't necessarily need to be in-country).
The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history.
They were created not by some mysterious force, but by individuals making rational choices about how they want to allocate their time, their energy and their resources.
The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices that you happen to disagree with. They didn't want a $400 locally knitted sweater, made from neighborhood sheep. They wanted a $40 sweater that was made as efficiently as possible, and $360 of change.
Please don't mistake your belief that you could design a better society for an actual analysis of reality.
Was there some ninja edit that occurred here? I’m looking at both your comments fresh, with OPs only 5 minutes old, and I don’t see the word ‘nationalist’ anywhere.
Honestly you're coming off far more extremist than OP is.
OP's just arguing that in times of strife, we could potentially suffer because of a lack of self-reliance. He has a valid point, and should another even worse and longer lasting zoonotic(or any kind) disease spur up again, do you honestly think it's a good idea to make no steps towards developing emergency self-reliance systems in case of catastrophe? What about in times of war even, or other conflicts from upstream suppliers?
You're kinda putting words in OP's mouth and coming off as somewhat naive.
EDIT: Wow you really changed the tone and content of your comment. I'm glad you recognized the flaws in what you were saying and adjusted it, but I'm also semi concerned your original comment is your actual opinion on the matter.
As someone who thinks both parent comments have a point, I don’t really think they’re putting words in OP’s mouth at all. I think the interpretation that OP really seemed to suggest that we should bring it all home is a valid one. And I get it. I agree with you. There’s probably some things we should make here that we don’t. It’s becoming very clear that wholly interdependent Globalism isn’t a cure all, utopian destination for the future. But at the same time, I think the above post has at least some credence to it. There’s a reason people chose this. Perhaps it’s just the tone that makes it so off putting?
Edit: it’s been pointed out to me that the above comment was thoroughly edited after posting, which puts this into better context. Sorry about the confusion
> I think the interpretation that OP really seemed to suggest that we should bring it all home is a valid one.
"Bring" is the wrong word here, because building up industrial capacity in US for critical sectors (including but not limited to pharmaceuticals and electronic components / semiconductors) doesnt mean destroying the capacity that exists abroad.
But yes, I do believe there should be sufficient manufacturing capacity in CONUS so that if on 1 January 2020 all the borders of the US had been closed to all goods/people indefinitely; life could continue as usual in the US: no medication shortages, no ventilator shortages, no mask/respirator shortages, and no iPhone shortages.
> China's Xinhua News just posted a piece titled "Be bold: the world owes China a thank you", which says if China imposes restrictions on pharmaceutical exports, US will be "plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus".
How does this make you feel?
In the end there's no substitute for having manufacturing capacity in your own country -- whether it means resiliency in the face of these sorts of events, or whether it means that second-hand/surplus/inactive tooling/consumables/equipment/experience can find its way to smaller-volume sectors and enable what'd otherwise be unprofitable. You can go to a machine shop in the US today and there's a nontrivial probability of seeing equipment that was made in the 1940s because it still works! This is the enduring power of a robust industrial base.
> > China's Xinhua News just posted a piece titled "Be bold: the world owes China a thank you", which says if China imposes restrictions on pharmaceutical exports, US will be "plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus".
> How does this make you feel?
Amused. It's just saber rattling and propaganda. They've said similar things before. If they restricted exports it would hurt them too. (At one point they threatened to dump all their US treasury bonds, but that would also hurt them just as much as it hurts the US.)
Besides, plenty of other countries can make pharmaceuticals. It might cost more but we'd buy them.
Spot on! and it's not like drugs got any cheaper by outsourcing them to China. They are bloody expensive and of much lower quality than locally produced. The book "Bottle of Lies" exposes the low quality of all generics which make up 90% of the US supplies coming in from China.
The entire philosophy around open markets and globalization is that you don't need "self reliance" because it's one giant market that shares goals and interdependence.
I've never, ever heard globalization described that way. Globalization has always been about allowing the market to seek the lowest cost production locations and with free movement of goods this means the global (assumed to be homogeneous) consumer gets the cheapest prices possible for their basket. What you're describing is more akin to a network of bilateral trade agreements.
And I honestly do want a $400 sweater if we have a prospering manufacturing business. How many people stuff their house with clothes that they wear only once? How many people buy toys that their kids play only a few times? How many people hav a whole closet of shoes? Why do we have twice as large of closet room compared with people living in the 50s? Why do people just have to buy clothes every quarter, every month, every week? People around the world seem have been consumed by modern consumerism.
If people around me can get decent jobs because of local manufacturing, if US can keep developing talents in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and material engineering, hell yeah, bring me the $400 sweater.
See the second paragraph "If people around me can get decent jobs because of local manufacturing", and I'm not making that up. People used to buy $300 snickers (or loafer? I forgot) back in the late 80s.
A lot of now-developed countries had 100% domestic textile production 60-70 years ago and yet nobody went naked (OK not 0% obviously but very few). People owned fewer pieces of clothing overall, but everyone could still afford to be clothed.
If textile manufacturing became 100% local again, local wages would also rise by a similar amount. $400 wouldn't seem unaffordable for a sweater. Or the sweater would cost correspondingly less.
Americans used to spend 15% of household income on clothing, and they got fewer items of clothing in return.
I understand that you think it best if the government force me to support my inefficient local textile manufacturer, my local cotton mill, and my local cotton grower. However I don't think that's best.
I don't have an opinion on the subject frankly. There are plus and minus sides to both approaches. I was just pointing out the fallacy of the unaffordable "$400 sweater".
If local wages rise, wouldn't that include the wages of the people who work at the local cotton producers, textile workers, and clothing retailers? Thereby making the manufactured goods more expensive, rather than less?
If we could have cheap manufactured goods and also pay living wages to the workers who produce them, we would not have outsourced.
You can produce cheap goods with cheap labor (or robots), or expensive goods with expensive labor.
I think there will be an equilibrium. Again refer to the argument in my previous post: production used to be 100% local and everyone could afford clothes. Not as many as now, but enough. The only thing that's changed is we now have more automation, so domestic production should be even more efficient than before.
Maybe sweaters will be $200 and wages will rise enough to be able to afford one every year. But we won't have $3 sweaters on Alibaba. From an environmental perspective, having more clothes than we need at dirt-cheap prices isn't all that great.
Some people may call this a reduced standard of living, and they are right from a reductive viewpoint where less stuff = lower standards. But isn't there more to quality of life than filling your closets with cheap shit you don't really need?
> People owned fewer pieces of clothing overall, but everyone could still afford to be clothed.
Note that owning fewer pieces of clothing overall doesn't significantly affect your yearly cost of clothing, it just affects your initial cost to fill out your wardrobe.
What drives up yearly costs is that most new low-cost clothing doesn't last for many wears - it either wears out quickly due to being of relatively low quality, or is eventually donated/thrown out after languishing in a closet for years.
I get that it's just an example but there would be much lower priced locally manufactured goods if they didn't have to compete directly with imports in that market segment.
Do you remember the early 90s and late 80s when clothes were much more expensive than in the late 90s on? That was really tough for a lot of us who didn’t come from rich families. I could probably deal with it now, but you aren’t considering a lot of people who would be absolutely ruined by a return to the old way.
The problem is the data doesn't support your position being even a minority position behaviorally - probably even for the things you own.
The results are in: The overwhelming majority of consumers buy the cheapest things/services that fit their need, and they do not price in externality discounts on their own accord.
But what knowledge is there to extract from people's behavior. It's massively dependent on context and paradigm. Give cheap cocaine to people they'll take it.
In the 1940s sweaters were american made, did not cost $400, and the median american had more disposable income than now. The people who benefitted from outsourcing were those buying shares, not sweaters.
If you think the median american had more disposable income in 1940 than today, you are hilariously uninformed.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96 (only goes back to ~1960, and the I think this is mean, not median, but also a huge enough trend that it is impossible to deny).
I am trying to understand that graph, it is not so easy actually.
What does it mean that 2020 shows 15K average disposable income in the US? That the average person has 15K left once they pay absolutely necessary to subsist? I find it hard to believe.
I think most people using the word "disposable income" would use the term the way I stated. Also the post you reply to uses it in that sense, not as a relative value to taxes.
I believe this graph shows something different altogether, it simply shows wages - taxes. It has no bearing as to the purchasing power of that salary and what you could afford with it.
However, the median American did not have more disposable income back then compared to now. In 2020, the median American has about $16763 in disposable income, whereas in 1959 (the furthest back data I could get in https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/disposable-person...) had about $351, which inflation adjusted would be $3,120.14 in 2020 dollars (5X less).
So while globalization didn't necessarily drop the cost of sweaters, I think we can say that the median American is better off today than in the past with regards to disposable income.
If you look at the prices of ordinary things over time, I'd guess that the prices stayed relatively same. But consider the fact that while median purchasing power has 5X-ed since the 1950s, prices staying the same is a testament to the power of free trade.
youre incorrectly asserting the sweaters are the same. The chinese one was colored with toxic waste and is eerily thin but you buy it anyways because ALL the clothes at Kohls are eerily thin and only the turbopriviledged can shop above the Kohls level of quality.
In the $7.95 transaction, the buyer spent a higher percentage of their wealth buying the sweater than the $80 transaction today. By keeping the inflation adjusted price the same but boosting a buyer's disposable income, free trade has allowed the buyer to spend more of their income on other things within the domestic economy.
Multiply this scenario across every buyer (i.e. everyone) in the domestic economy, the increased productivity has allowed for more consumption and economic growth.
Let's consider the scenario in reverse, if keeping $7.95 locally is the best policy, would you advocate someone in California to not buy goods made in Missouri? After all, labor is much cheaper in Missouri. How about someone in San Francisco not buying goods from someone in Central Valley?
An average person could build a house themselves and keep the money they would spend in their "domestic" wallet economy instead of paying some contractor. Why do we hire contractors who might live in a far away town then? It's because it's mutually beneficial. I get a house that's better constructed faster than I could ever build it, the contractor gets compensated for their money. The time and productivity I saved in that transaction far outweighs the cost paid to the contractor.
And why is that? Because it made sense based on the options provided to them. And who decides what those are? The people with money and power, not the consumer.
the average price of a house in 1959 was $10K for a disposable income o $351 (3.5%)
the average price of a house in 2020 is $270K for a disposable income of $16K (5.9%)
We have larger disposable income but the difference is not nearly as substantial as these other measures show. I do think that we earn more overall because we are more productive than back then.
The way capitalism works is that it ignores borders with some friction. And it is indeed more efficient. To a point where you suspect those borders don't exist, but they do. And that's the problem. Neither you or the OP are wrong. There is just no perfect way of doing it, but what we can decide is that if those damage that those extreme cases could do were worth the cost of upkeeping those industries when there were no such cases. Would people be willing to pay 300% taxes for everything everyday, I'm pretty sure then they would be damning the government for doing that.
The optimization from a hypothetical $400 sweater to $40 is completely blind to growing unaddressed externalities both in number and scale. Claiming this is the most prosperity for humans ignores the backsliding in prosperity for Americans - especially outside of financially quantified measures.
What prosperity does work off-shored to 3rd world sweatshops deliver? Greater profit for a tiny fraction of the population, and increased financial insecurity for the rest? Creating a tshirt doesn't take any extra effort in the US, the offshoring just adds overhead such as transportation of the goods and raw materials. Yes, labour costs and labour protection is higher in the US, but sidestepping these things does not create prosperity for US workers.
> They didn't want a $400 locally knitted sweater, made from neighborhood sheep. They wanted a $40 sweater that was made as efficiently as possible, and $360 of change.
Except that the difference was never that large and never had to be that local. What happened was that they didn't want a $42 sweater made on the same continent over a $40 sweater made on the other side of the world, because it gave back $2 in change. But monoculture and lack of supply chain diversification was never not worth $2 -- the bill just doesn't come due until it does.
And this didn't happen on its own either. This was conscious policy across the board. The first world was content to impose e.g. pollution and labor regulations locally but not impose the same requirements on the manufacture of imported goods, with foreseeable consequences to where things are manufactured.
Meanwhile China wanted to grow through exports, so they adopted policies like currency devaluation that not only made American and European manufacturing uncompetitive but even manufacturing in other countries with lower labor costs, so that many goods are now produced only in China.
It's one thing when something is produced in China but not the United States when it's also produced in Mexico, Brazil, India, Turkey, etc. It's something else entirely to make the whole world dependent on one country. And customers didn't choose this, government policies did.
Comparing almost boutique level jeans made in the U.S. with mass produced Levi's made elsewhere doesn't help us determine price differences in off-shoring vs. manufacturing in the U.S.
I think what we would need to know is how much would a pair of Levi's cost if all of them were produced in the United States.
The trick you're using is that Alibaba is essentially a wholesaler and most non-boutique US wholesalers don't list prices on their websites because bulk customers negotiate. I can't even find one that lists wholesale prices for that kind of sweaters.
You're also both times looking at sources direct from China, which are taking advantage of that Universal Postal Union treaty situation that makes it cheaper to ship from China to the US than to ship within the US. If they were paying market rates for shipping the shipping from China would itself be more than $2.90. Notice how similar sweaters on Amazon end up being closer to the price of the made in USA one (or more) even when they're made in China, because then they're being shipped from within the US. (This is also why comparing wholesale prices is more relevant; the "free shipping" that gets incorporated into the price is less of the total.)
And it's difficult to even find non-boutique apparel made in the US at this point, because most of the ones that try to compete on price rather than status then lose to China on price by a small percentage and go out of business. But the boutique prices don't represent what it actually costs to manufacture in the US, they're just the ones who can stay in business in the US.
The link you've posted to includes several deliberate misrepresentations (aka lies) about the nature of the product (i.e., claiming it is cashmere when it's just cotton-polyester).
In LA's fashion district I can find you a locally made cotton-polyester sweater for under $10, and the seamstress is making a living at that price and using quality cotton-polyester fibers rather than the scratchy cheap QA-rejects. I could probably even find an actual cashmere sweater for under $50, made out of cashmere wool.
You won't easily find one after the manufacturing base has already been gutted. It's too late to look now except for the higher priced boutique items that still exist.
> The supply chains that you rail against have successfully delivered the greatest levels of prosperity to the largest number of humans in all of history.
And they've delivered that by building a fragile system with too little safety margin or redundancy.
It's like building an application that can serve the absolute greatest number of requests for the absolute lowest price by having absolutely no redundancy. It looks great, until a disk fails.
> The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices that you happen to disagree with.
I wouldn't call those choices informed, it'd call them myopic. A smart, informed choice with a time horizon of 6 months can be an exceptionally stupid one with a time horizon of 30 years.
I was thinking of this the other day. Perhaps this pandemic will help reshape our global economy away from its current monolithic structure into self-sustainable micro-service economies where all regions can self-sustain to a large level.
(Apologies for the nerdy analogy but this is Hacker News...)
I'd argue it is currently assuring interlinked global mutual assured destruction in the form of climate change (while yes maybe it reduces the chance of mutual destruction in the form of nuclear war, at least at the moment while the exponential effects of climate change are still in the lower order distruptiveness)
If we were manufacturing everything in the United States, supply chains would still be disrupted because companies would be sending workers home, which is what they are doing already. No supply chain is safe in the event of a global pandemic.
One day there might be a pandemic which affects the West but not China, which would make outsourcing supply chains look pretty smart. You are drawing a general conclusion based on the circumstances of a single, rare event.
Besides, where is the suicide of the west here? The west has benefitted from this arrangement for decades. The west is better off with this arrangement than it would have been without it, and this pandemic would have happened anyway, and it would have disrupted supply chains anyway.
I have not yet seen any evidence that lack of western manufacturing capability has made this pandemic worse. However, there is a massive body of economic knowledge that tells us that exploiting comparative advantage increases wealth.
If your supply chain encompasses two countries then a disruption in either country will take you offline. If you keep everything in-house you only have to worry about one country.
You can also harden your supply chain by having multiple suppliers in different countries, so a loss of any one isn't an issue. For something like Covid-19 it's near impossible to avoid disruption, but for less-global outbreaks it can be a winning strategy.
Only in the case epidemics or natural disasters. And even then I would argue that's nit the case. E.g. there was a major accident in a Chinese chemical park last year, it closed down for the majority of the year. This park manufactured the raw materials for stuff like car lights, the glasses of them. It also was the only source. Did anybody outside the industry suffer any results? No, because supply chains actually adopt pretty well to stuff like that. What would happen so, if everything is in one place is higher costs off-crisis, you wouldn't survive economically to see a crisis that way.
Recovery is key, so. And that is where we will see which companies did their jobs supply chain wise and which didn't.
> If your supply chain encompasses two countries then a disruption in either country will take you offline. If you keep everything in-house you only have to worry about one country.
Yeah but you'd also have all your eggs in one basket.
Supply Chains have been global ever since the bronze age. So the principal isn't new. Supply Chain resilience is a crucial topic so. One that is, to a certain degree, under rated. Because it is more than buffers you have for general inefficiency.
China, the US and the EU are fundamentally different to most other countries/economies. They are political and economic super powers -- effectively.
Ireland simply cannot make everything the way China can from scratch. It's not even an option on the table let alone some abstract trade off. Complex supply chains are the only way to achieve any meaningful economic growth.
This also affects how our economy works. We don't get the same "multiplier effect" that the US will get from a stimulus package.
>Complex supply chains are the only way to achieve any meaningful economic growth.
I call BS. Complex supply chains are one of the ways to achieve questionably meaningful_GDP_ growth. Hopefully one of the outcomes of this crisis is that we start to question the "number go up" ethos of most conventional economists. It's true that Ireland can't make "everything" from scratch. But do they need to? Though, this becomes an almost circular philosophical discussion very quickly.
"It's better to be in a bad deal with good people, then a good deal with bad people"
China MFG was/is not a deal with the Chinese people. It's a deal with the CCP. Those of us who always understood this aren't surprised by any of this. We never expected China to be able to manage domestic risk well and we watched helplessly as they exported that risk abroad in the form of pollution, SARS, contaminated products and more. You may not be a citizen of China, but you're almost as impacted by their decisions. This is worth pondering.
..and I'm in no way suggesting that the US has a good track record on whistleblowers. I'm simply saying that it's a major stretch to argue that China has done a better job managing the Coronavirus outbreak given all of the reports of suppression that we've seen come out of there.
They created this crisis by silencing whistleblowers and hiding case numbers. Don't forget they banned wildlife markets during SARS, but allowed them again a year after. This is going to happen again.
Sure, but the U.S. is actively discouraging/thwarting testing efforts, because ~the economy~. And our chief executive is disseminating misinformation (whether out of ignorance or ulterior motives is unclear).
I'm not saying China did a great job. But they seem to have gotten a handle on things at least, meanwhile we've yet to even really start preparing. And we have the advantage of hindsight, which they didn't have.
And how do you account for the fact the US have been known this virus for a month since the Chinese outbreak, and still does very little to prepare for basic things like testing?
They did a horrible job in the beginning and a good job in the end. They wasted december and january (both for themselves and the world) but the february response was quite effective. https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop... is an informative illustration.
Right now, the USA response is somewhere between those two China approaches but it seems that it has been closer to the "early China" response than to the "late China" response.
I'm pretty sure when those officials decided to silence the whistleblowers, they are thinking exactly what some of the US officials are thinking right now: "Just another flu."
Personally, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my liberties to a PRC-style quarantine, but to insinuate it wasn't an astoundingly effective way to control the spread is false.
> We never expected China to be able to manage domestic risk well
Well, they have seemingly largely recovered and move their way back to normalcy, as other countries started catching fire.
I think a lot of people's takeways will be different than yours: China's ability to control crisis like this scale is going to be valuable assets to global investors.
> Well, they have seemingly largely recovered and move their way back to normalcy, as other countries started catching fire.
It's not time to start popping champagne bottles in China quite yet. They have a tiger by the tail. The country is shut down, and as they start rolling back travel restrictions it could easily blow up again. They still have well over a billion people who are vulnerable.
They just tried rolling back travel restrictions two days ago and immediately reversed course[1].
Plus who knows if the current numbers from China are accurate. They could still be underreporting as the world focuses elsewhere, we only have the CCP to go by.
> China's ability to control crisis like this scale is going to be valuable assets to global investors.
Their ability to control the crisis is useful from a public health perspective, but they're doing it by shutting down production. Look at how the markets have responded. Are you claiming investors wouldn't have been better off if these companies had invested in a more diversified supply chain?
For that matter, having a more diversified supply chain makes it easier to implement these kinds of public health measures in general. Shutting down production is much less costly when there is another region capable of quickly picking up the slack. And making it less expensive to implement measures to contain a contagion makes it more likely they'll be properly implemented, which helps everybody, investors included.
But that's exactly why diversification works. If you have manufacturing only in China and China shuts down, you lose. If you have manufacturing in both China and Mexico and China shuts down, you manufacture in Mexico. If six months later China is back online and Mexico is in quarantine, you manufacture in China.
Having presence in multiple regions lets you keep going the whole time. Having presence in only one region doesn't.
It's easy to say it'd be great to have diversification now but it also costs more to maintain that capability every day that nothing like this is happening. If supply is not interrupted for a 10 year streak that will add up and you fall behind riskier competitors.
It depends on a company's risk profile as to whether that is tolerable.
Diversification looks great, but is not easy. It is not like software where it can be easily replicated across continent.
Manufacturing requires logistics, capability of water/electricity and skilled labour. Those are not easily scalable across the globe. And manufactures do concentrate, it is easy to source parts to make stuff from the same region.
So in a way, expanding physical manufacturing is very hard and expensive. And in case of COVID-19, it is not the answer even, since, the disruption is almost simultaneously happening globe wise, capacity planning and shifting can't be that agile to adjust, let alone the demand will be hampered too.
So, I think unless it is for megacorp that has that much of money to burn, diversification on globe scale is just a dream.
But for key industry, like medical supplies, I think that is where the state should come and play, to incentivize a domestic capacity that could chime in handily when disruption happens.
> Manufacturing requires logistics, capability of water/electricity and skilled labour. Those are not easily scalable across the globe.
You don't need fully-distributed manufacturing where everything is literally made everywhere. Go ahead and cross off every place without water, electricity and skilled labor, you're still left with dozens of countries. Now pick one in Asia, one in Europe and one in America. You're now on three continents. There are three more available if you ever feel like expanding.
> And manufactures do concentrate, it is easy to source parts to make stuff from the same region.
Which is fine, so do that, somewhere on each continent. Not in only one place in the world. Obvious strong candidates are China, the US and Germany.
> And in case of COVID-19, it is not the answer even, since, the disruption is almost simultaneously happening globe wise, capacity planning and shifting can't be that agile to adjust, let alone the demand will be hampered too.
It isn't really happening everywhere at once, though. It's happening everywhere at different times. We may get to the point where some countries have to use the same measures as China, but by then China may have succeeded in containing it and be ready to reopen. Even if it hasn't, you've still reduced the period you've been offline by the several months in between, and in the meantime have had notice allowing you to run 24 hour shifts in every other facility to build up a surplus in preparation for what may come there soon.
There are also implications to the countermeasures. The US just suspended travel with Europe. If you had a factory in Germany and one in the US, you're still in business in both places, making products for US customers in the US factory and for European customers in the European factory.
> But for key industry, like medical supplies, I think that is where the state should come and play, to incentivize a domestic capacity that could chime in handily when disruption happens.
The problem is, nearly everything is in that category. Nobody cares about where toilet paper comes from until you can't get any for six months.
Is there really a point towards economic production when a massive number (2~4%) of people would die?
I can see how the Wall Street would respond, it's understandable, but whoever says that somehow makes it a bad governmental response has already missed the point about what's really the end goal for the development of our society.
You're thinking about this backwards. If undiversified capitalists are going to lose a lot of money then they're going to lean on governments to prevent it, and sometimes the governments will cave. If all they have to do is run two shifts in one factory instead of one shift in two factories, they barely even care and you reduce the perverse incentive to do something stupid.
However, such virus already exists in the wild, though the chances are there, it can jump to human anytime in the future regardless of national boundaries.
We should all be prepared but developed nations have a much smaller interface with the natural world meaning this kind of crossover is less likely, and many developing nations have a smaller global role meaning it won't spread as easily (see Africa & Ebola). I think China is somewhat unique here.
I've experienced living in a small, developing nation for years, and while they have the same dangerous mixture as China of live animals (and the associated excretions), dead animals, produce (unwashed, washed, and already skinned for consumption all available from the same table), fertilizer of human origins, farming supplies, pesticides, medical products, hygiene products, clothing, food transport, food storage, food preparation surfaces, cutlery, dish ware and dining surfaces all overlapping to alarming degrees (often sharing the same surfaces at different times), they don't have the potential global role, both based on their size, relative lack of population, lack of foreign travel and foreign entanglements, and so on.
Inadvertent power projection from a biological perspective is an interesting concept.
Edit to add: I can't judge the people working in these markets and offering products under horrendous conditions. They're trying to feed their families. But China needs to get serious about public health if it hopes to improve its reputation, which is roughly the same from Tehran to Toledo with some justification.
Regardless of where lines are draws on maps, yes. Regardless of a whole host of other factors, not at all.
This particular pandemic was entirely avoidable in the first place. Food markets in developing nations frequently cause local health problems, and have all the ingredients to make a global one (as it seems to have in this case).
Here in Canada we had nation-wide disruptions for weeks due to rail service being blocked by First Nations (American Indian) people protesting a pipeline. The covid-19 virus just compounded that problem. I'm in an isolated rural town and even Walmart has bare shelves.
I used to be a globalist myself, which I still am, but I think globalization needs its urgent refactoring.
Not all industries need to be fully globalized, and it is better every country keep some share of production to itself to account for emergency situation like this virus.
Globalization had trade off robustness for efficiency, it is time to scale that back.
I once took a college course based entirely on answering the question 'What is globalization'
Globalization can be just about any interaction between two entities...
Moving production to China? Globalization
Moving production back to the US? Globalization
...
Anti-globalization movement? Globalization
Or maybe my professor was just nuts, I feel crazy typing this out
Yesterday I had this couple who do pool servicing out to look at some issues with our swimming pool. They told me their usual salt supplier has run out of salt. The salt supplier usually imports salt from China (to Australia), but the supplier has a shipping container full of salt they've ordered stuck in China and not sure when it will actually make it to Australia.
(They explained domestic Australian-made salt is still available, but it is 30% more expensive than the Chinese import salt.)
This is why you produce things domestically. We're at wartime. Alexander Hamilton understood this. George Washington understood this. This is going to be a turning point in globalization and offshoring things that will compromise our economy and ultimately undermine national security.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadThe issue is whether governments will step in to provide sufficient unemployment / welfare benefits to bridge the gap.
Always look on the bright side of life!
https://youtu.be/SJUhlRoBL8M
It probably won't happen.
To me it sounds like a perfect reason to rethink the current economic model.
I'm just tired of hearing people around me going "I had my shots, I'm going to that party / going to that event" or "It's just a flu, nothing to worry about".
Hospitals will just reduce their prices, because it's preferable to do that than leave beds empty.
I have some bad news.
This strikes me as child-level naivete.
Maybe now is the time to buy a bidet add-on seat.
That may be true...but it may be just as likely they are minimizing their own inventory to keep their own costs down/cash on hand, which is not something they would freely tell their own employees or customers.
Alternate theory: I spoke to someone who works at a Cricket. They never keep higher end phones in stock, as they are frequent robbery targets (though I often see armed security at larger carrier stores).
I ordered an Apple watch on March 3rd and it won't arrive until March 24th.
I'm pretty sure they are having serious supply chain issues.
And cargo operations staff may be reluctant to fly to China.
Staff wouldn’t be permitted to stay on the aircraft until takeoff. And would likely violate hours of service anyway.
Maybe at some point we will realize that it's a terrible idea.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_swap_scam
[1]: https://btcmanager.com/sim-swap-attacks-amplify-companies-re...
US Agriculture Exports to China = $25B US Agriculture Imports from China = $5B
Source: https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/inline-files...
A large quantity of imports will be used to make US domestic food as well.
The exported good is not the same as the imported one.
see: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1534286/12000-mile-t...
The non-essential economy is looking at a kick in the face, but I'm not too worried about the essential economy. In the long run, I think we're going to individually remember this as an annoyance, not a catastrophe. There are some other social changes that may occur, but they're mostly going to be accounted as "social changes that were pretty much on track to happen anyhow, the Coronavirus just precipitated them a bit earlier and more suddenly".
Damn knows I'll happily stop coding and go work wherever I am told to help with this.
If anything, South Korea and Italy should be furious that their country is sabotaged by China. And the rest of the world should be wary of this bad actor in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
They chose not to.
China is free to make decisions handing an epidemic. We are free to criticize how they handle it. We were free to implement travel restrictions. We chose not to.
China didn't strike us with a bioweapon. We did nothing to stop a novel virus from spreading, and it spread. That's what happens.
I don't disagree with your broader point.
If this is doing anything (to me personally), it's making me reconsider shifting more of the supply-chain to the US. In many cases, the prices aren't really that different.
https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/03/international-manufactu...
Well, this is the problem, right. Resiliency only pays off when there's a crisis, otherwise it's a net cost. So if you're outcompeted by the other non-resilient companies before that crisis happens, it doesn't help.
I feel like societal resiliency needs to be rewarded (in many contexts, utilities are obvious but also food supply, etc) but I don't know what a good way of doing this would be, except making it government run and making resiliency a primary objective. I don't see how a for-profit system that rewards short-term gains could ever be made to value resiliency.
The media messaging regarding tariffs being bad is ridiculous.
And if you have to spend most of your income on stuff, you too proportionately pay more sales tax than someone with excess to invest.
resiliency mostly pays off when there's a crisis. You can reduce latency in systems by sourcing things closer to use, but having a fallback farther away.
It's a tradeoff though. If I have two suppliers, the odds that I have 'a supplier issue' are doubled. But the odds that I have no supply at all is lower.
I learned much later that the only way to get IBM and some other big vendors to do anything at all for you is to move your checkbook. That is, if the checkbook might be coming out of your pocket, they're interested. If you threaten to put it away, they are very interested. The rest of the time? Fuck you, we have other checkbooks to worry about.
Edit: Now I got the cluster thing. I meant cluster in the sense of risk, meaning you have a single point of failure and high degree of risk concentration. But your point is really interesting, I never thought about these aspects of cloud computing.
If the prices weren't really that different then why did those parts of the supply chain go to China in the first place?
As automation increases China's position weakens.
I beg to differ.
To be precise, for trade/production companies, even a 30% difference in price would be huge. But if you only buy souvenirs or gift wrappings etc, those might not matter that much, as they might just be less tha 1% in the final price of whatever you're selling. but for some companies or industries, it means 30% cheaper in terms of all their material and products, which would be insane increase for their profits.
What industry are you in? If you mean China isn't that different than [Vietnam/India/Mexico/etc] then I can see it. I used to work in Medical Devices for 5 years, and the cost of manufacturing something abroad (one company had several plans in Mexico) was astronomically lower than manufacturing in the USA.
If anything, South Korea and Italy should be furious that their country is sabotaged by China. And the rest of the world should be wary of this bad actor in the world. Many people I know will not buy from China again unless they absolutely have to
When all my Republican family is spouting the same BS, that means it's being pushed hard in the soft right wing information channels.
EDIT: Even NBC news is hinting that government policies are getting in the way of determining real corona virus infection rates. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/n-y-gov-cuomo-questions...
The number of tested individuals are only about 2x the number of confirmed cases. Not a great margin of error.
“This is a country that hid the coronavirus case for 2-3 weeks”
That’s the same as the USA refusing to test everyone in sufficient quantities right? South Korea is testing 10k per day, has the US completed even 10k tests yet?
“let 5 million Wuhan residents leave the city”
That’s every state apart from perhaps 1 section on NY city and small parts of Seattle.
“doctored numbers”
Thats the refusing to test thing again right? There’s states with reportedly zero cases. Yeah right.
“then most recently had government press try to spin the disease as if it didn’t come out of Wuhan, but rather somewhere other countries”
That’s the current right wing press stating this is all baloney from the dems for their benefit.
I’ve given a point by point refutation to the best of my ability, care to respond thoughtfully?
In China you are publicly admonished and/or disappeared for going against the official government narrative. That is a stark difference between not just Western/Chinese government, but culture, and cannot be underestimated. It leads to a totally different society and hopefully because of freedom of speech people will be more likely to take protective measures sooner as they realize that the government is responding poorly.
Also you're much less likely to keep the majority of the population ignorant of an outbreak when you don't have a legal and judicial speech suppression machine. Yes, their authoritarian measures were effective in containing the spread (allegedly, all sources afaik from China have gone silent), but they did spend at least a month hiding the outbreak and keeping people from talking about it, for reasons I won't go into.
Not all governments are created equal. Not all cultures are the same. That's pure fantasy brought about by decades of indoctrination in the west.
Note that this isn't just blind nationalism. I fully recognize that under these circumstances the extreme authoritarianism in China may prove to be the best containment measure out of any other country short of North Korea. Good luck convincing 360MM Americans to stay home for a month.
I wouldn't be so sure. Trump's stock market is his best argument for re-election. It's very reasonable to think he would want to downplay anything that could disrupt the economy in the run up to the election.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-secrec...
This honestly is just a wishful thinking. Autocracy are more efficient than democracy in terms of that. It's just how it's designed. Democracy means debate, and it means time wasted, a lot more than in autocracy. The only problem with autocracy is that if they made a poor decision, all those people will die with it. And democracy is built in the way that a fair share of people will never do what the government says, this would be useful if the government made a bad decision, but not if they made a good one.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-secrec...
So maybe chill on the nationalism (and the exclamation marks)
China absolutely could have prevented this but there wasn't a desire to do so because CCP officials like to eat bats sometimes too
That this theory is widely being accepted as proven fact is itself evidence of the accusation of racism you’re trying to defend against.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51496830
But there seems to be a consensus that this bug started in their wetmarket. I don't care if it was consumption of the animal or from fecal matter. Wetmarkets should be permanently banned. Wealthy CCP cadre members didn't want to do this and it cost the world big time
Also, racism? When did I bring that up?
And the Trump did order masks from 3M early on.
I don't deny that there has been a display of incompetence to date be careful not to let partisanship blind you into denying credit where it is due.
You can see this in our easily manipulated and poorly deployed voting system, our poor response to the current pandemic, our limited and overly expensive healthcare, on and on.
This person is spewing nationalistic hate without any sources and arguments. Almost nothing in the comment is falsifiable.
Can dang elaborate on this issue? Are comments of this kind usually removed or not? I'm thinking of writing a browser extension which would remove those from new and problematic users. I come to HN to avoid this stuff.
Hell, that doctor whistleblower who ended up dead from the virus was officially "admonished" and forced to publicaly apologize for "spreading rumors".
The world isn't the Disney movie land that most Americans grew up. Plenty of organized evil exists throughout the world.
I don't think anybody is saying that. What I'm saying is that criticism of the Chinese response/government is neither sinophobia nor nationalism.
The US approach is just to slow transmission down a little without impacting daily life too much. That just spreads the epidemic out over time. The US may spend a year or two in the current state, until there is a vaccine.
[1] http://archive.is/qWmFw
I really don't see why should China try to hide an outbreak. China will be, and is hurt the most without a doubt. China isn't mother nature, you can't just assume its government is somewhat almighty, knows everything before its happened and blame it for not doing anything. No government can be that.
This isn't a "China vs US" thing; i bear zero ill will towards China and their massive gain of industrial capacity, my ire is solely focused towards those in power (government and industry alike) who presided over the suicidal deindustrialization of the United States and Europe.
The net result is that it's China who's able to send medical aid (ventilators, masks, respirators, test kits, etc) to Italy, and not the US, if only because the US is incapable of meeting its own needs: https://twitter.com/VKJudit/status/1237448125800988675
They were created not by some mysterious force, but by individuals making rational choices about how they want to allocate their time, their energy and their resources.
The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices that you happen to disagree with. They didn't want a $400 locally knitted sweater, made from neighborhood sheep. They wanted a $40 sweater that was made as efficiently as possible, and $360 of change.
Please don't mistake your belief that you could design a better society for an actual analysis of reality.
OP's just arguing that in times of strife, we could potentially suffer because of a lack of self-reliance. He has a valid point, and should another even worse and longer lasting zoonotic(or any kind) disease spur up again, do you honestly think it's a good idea to make no steps towards developing emergency self-reliance systems in case of catastrophe? What about in times of war even, or other conflicts from upstream suppliers?
You're kinda putting words in OP's mouth and coming off as somewhat naive.
EDIT: Wow you really changed the tone and content of your comment. I'm glad you recognized the flaws in what you were saying and adjusted it, but I'm also semi concerned your original comment is your actual opinion on the matter.
Edit: it’s been pointed out to me that the above comment was thoroughly edited after posting, which puts this into better context. Sorry about the confusion
"Bring" is the wrong word here, because building up industrial capacity in US for critical sectors (including but not limited to pharmaceuticals and electronic components / semiconductors) doesnt mean destroying the capacity that exists abroad.
But yes, I do believe there should be sufficient manufacturing capacity in CONUS so that if on 1 January 2020 all the borders of the US had been closed to all goods/people indefinitely; life could continue as usual in the US: no medication shortages, no ventilator shortages, no mask/respirator shortages, and no iPhone shortages.
Right now we have China openly stating (https://twitter.com/YanzhongHuang/status/1235300037875335170) stuff like this:
> China's Xinhua News just posted a piece titled "Be bold: the world owes China a thank you", which says if China imposes restrictions on pharmaceutical exports, US will be "plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus".
How does this make you feel?
In the end there's no substitute for having manufacturing capacity in your own country -- whether it means resiliency in the face of these sorts of events, or whether it means that second-hand/surplus/inactive tooling/consumables/equipment/experience can find its way to smaller-volume sectors and enable what'd otherwise be unprofitable. You can go to a machine shop in the US today and there's a nontrivial probability of seeing equipment that was made in the 1940s because it still works! This is the enduring power of a robust industrial base.
> How does this make you feel?
Amused. It's just saber rattling and propaganda. They've said similar things before. If they restricted exports it would hurt them too. (At one point they threatened to dump all their US treasury bonds, but that would also hurt them just as much as it hurts the US.)
Besides, plenty of other countries can make pharmaceuticals. It might cost more but we'd buy them.
If people around me can get decent jobs because of local manufacturing, if US can keep developing talents in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and material engineering, hell yeah, bring me the $400 sweater.
Local manufacturing is for rich people who can afford it.
If textile manufacturing became 100% local again, local wages would also rise by a similar amount. $400 wouldn't seem unaffordable for a sweater. Or the sweater would cost correspondingly less.
I understand that you think it best if the government force me to support my inefficient local textile manufacturer, my local cotton mill, and my local cotton grower. However I don't think that's best.
If we could have cheap manufactured goods and also pay living wages to the workers who produce them, we would not have outsourced.
You can produce cheap goods with cheap labor (or robots), or expensive goods with expensive labor.
Maybe sweaters will be $200 and wages will rise enough to be able to afford one every year. But we won't have $3 sweaters on Alibaba. From an environmental perspective, having more clothes than we need at dirt-cheap prices isn't all that great.
Some people may call this a reduced standard of living, and they are right from a reductive viewpoint where less stuff = lower standards. But isn't there more to quality of life than filling your closets with cheap shit you don't really need?
Note that owning fewer pieces of clothing overall doesn't significantly affect your yearly cost of clothing, it just affects your initial cost to fill out your wardrobe.
What drives up yearly costs is that most new low-cost clothing doesn't last for many wears - it either wears out quickly due to being of relatively low quality, or is eventually donated/thrown out after languishing in a closet for years.
The results are in: The overwhelming majority of consumers buy the cheapest things/services that fit their need, and they do not price in externality discounts on their own accord.
Really? In what kind of bubble are you living?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96 (only goes back to ~1960, and the I think this is mean, not median, but also a huge enough trend that it is impossible to deny).
What does it mean that 2020 shows 15K average disposable income in the US? That the average person has 15K left once they pay absolutely necessary to subsist? I find it hard to believe.
I think most people using the word "disposable income" would use the term the way I stated. Also the post you reply to uses it in that sense, not as a relative value to taxes.
I believe this graph shows something different altogether, it simply shows wages - taxes. It has no bearing as to the purchasing power of that salary and what you could afford with it.
That's "discretionary income" you're thinking of.
However, the median American did not have more disposable income back then compared to now. In 2020, the median American has about $16763 in disposable income, whereas in 1959 (the furthest back data I could get in https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/disposable-person...) had about $351, which inflation adjusted would be $3,120.14 in 2020 dollars (5X less).
So while globalization didn't necessarily drop the cost of sweaters, I think we can say that the median American is better off today than in the past with regards to disposable income.
If you look at the prices of ordinary things over time, I'd guess that the prices stayed relatively same. But consider the fact that while median purchasing power has 5X-ed since the 1950s, prices staying the same is a testament to the power of free trade.
Multiply this scenario across every buyer (i.e. everyone) in the domestic economy, the increased productivity has allowed for more consumption and economic growth.
Let's consider the scenario in reverse, if keeping $7.95 locally is the best policy, would you advocate someone in California to not buy goods made in Missouri? After all, labor is much cheaper in Missouri. How about someone in San Francisco not buying goods from someone in Central Valley?
An average person could build a house themselves and keep the money they would spend in their "domestic" wallet economy instead of paying some contractor. Why do we hire contractors who might live in a far away town then? It's because it's mutually beneficial. I get a house that's better constructed faster than I could ever build it, the contractor gets compensated for their money. The time and productivity I saved in that transaction far outweighs the cost paid to the contractor.
the average price of a house in 2020 is $270K for a disposable income of $16K (5.9%)
We have larger disposable income but the difference is not nearly as substantial as these other measures show. I do think that we earn more overall because we are more productive than back then.
Except that the difference was never that large and never had to be that local. What happened was that they didn't want a $42 sweater made on the same continent over a $40 sweater made on the other side of the world, because it gave back $2 in change. But monoculture and lack of supply chain diversification was never not worth $2 -- the bill just doesn't come due until it does.
And this didn't happen on its own either. This was conscious policy across the board. The first world was content to impose e.g. pollution and labor regulations locally but not impose the same requirements on the manufacture of imported goods, with foreseeable consequences to where things are manufactured.
Meanwhile China wanted to grow through exports, so they adopted policies like currency devaluation that not only made American and European manufacturing uncompetitive but even manufacturing in other countries with lower labor costs, so that many goods are now produced only in China.
It's one thing when something is produced in China but not the United States when it's also produced in Mexico, Brazil, India, Turkey, etc. It's something else entirely to make the whole world dependent on one country. And customers didn't choose this, government policies did.
American-made jeans are anywhere from $160-300. I can also buy some jeans at Levi's for $60-100.
It is not as small as you depict and also not as large as you are responding to, but it is still a very real gap.
https://www.allamericanclothing.com/made-in-usa/jeans.html
Comparing almost boutique level jeans made in the U.S. with mass produced Levi's made elsewhere doesn't help us determine price differences in off-shoring vs. manufacturing in the U.S.
I think what we would need to know is how much would a pair of Levi's cost if all of them were produced in the United States.
tl;dr: What is, isn't necessarily what could be.
Here's a basic sweater for $3.19: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/women-s-autumn-clothi...
Find me one made in the US within a factor of 10 of that price.
Again, the factor of 10 thing.
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Live-Womens-Cardigan-Sweater/dp/...
You're also both times looking at sources direct from China, which are taking advantage of that Universal Postal Union treaty situation that makes it cheaper to ship from China to the US than to ship within the US. If they were paying market rates for shipping the shipping from China would itself be more than $2.90. Notice how similar sweaters on Amazon end up being closer to the price of the made in USA one (or more) even when they're made in China, because then they're being shipped from within the US. (This is also why comparing wholesale prices is more relevant; the "free shipping" that gets incorporated into the price is less of the total.)
And it's difficult to even find non-boutique apparel made in the US at this point, because most of the ones that try to compete on price rather than status then lose to China on price by a small percentage and go out of business. But the boutique prices don't represent what it actually costs to manufacture in the US, they're just the ones who can stay in business in the US.
In LA's fashion district I can find you a locally made cotton-polyester sweater for under $10, and the seamstress is making a living at that price and using quality cotton-polyester fibers rather than the scratchy cheap QA-rejects. I could probably even find an actual cashmere sweater for under $50, made out of cashmere wool.
Bare essential goods have never cost that multiple of minimum wage.
Capital wanted margins, that which they don't pass on to the consumer. How much does Apple make on earbuds, again?
Is this a good thing that our oh-so-rational society can’t even cope with such predictable problems?
I estimate truthiness of this statement at 10%
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And they've delivered that by building a fragile system with too little safety margin or redundancy.
It's like building an application that can serve the absolute greatest number of requests for the absolute lowest price by having absolutely no redundancy. It looks great, until a disk fails.
> The "suicidal deindustrialization" you refer to is the result of people making informed choices that you happen to disagree with.
I wouldn't call those choices informed, it'd call them myopic. A smart, informed choice with a time horizon of 6 months can be an exceptionally stupid one with a time horizon of 30 years.
There is still lots of manufacturing of high quality here. However they're costly and smaller in scale versus overseas.
(Apologies for the nerdy analogy but this is Hacker News...)
Just like having redundant servers for your applications and backups for your data.
I'd argue that this is a feature. Economic codependence is a much safer and effective deterrent to war than mutually assured destruction.
One day there might be a pandemic which affects the West but not China, which would make outsourcing supply chains look pretty smart. You are drawing a general conclusion based on the circumstances of a single, rare event.
Besides, where is the suicide of the west here? The west has benefitted from this arrangement for decades. The west is better off with this arrangement than it would have been without it, and this pandemic would have happened anyway, and it would have disrupted supply chains anyway.
I have not yet seen any evidence that lack of western manufacturing capability has made this pandemic worse. However, there is a massive body of economic knowledge that tells us that exploiting comparative advantage increases wealth.
You can also harden your supply chain by having multiple suppliers in different countries, so a loss of any one isn't an issue. For something like Covid-19 it's near impossible to avoid disruption, but for less-global outbreaks it can be a winning strategy.
Recovery is key, so. And that is where we will see which companies did their jobs supply chain wise and which didn't.
Yeah but you'd also have all your eggs in one basket.
Ireland simply cannot make everything the way China can from scratch. It's not even an option on the table let alone some abstract trade off. Complex supply chains are the only way to achieve any meaningful economic growth.
This also affects how our economy works. We don't get the same "multiplier effect" that the US will get from a stimulus package.
I call BS. Complex supply chains are one of the ways to achieve questionably meaningful _GDP_ growth. Hopefully one of the outcomes of this crisis is that we start to question the "number go up" ethos of most conventional economists. It's true that Ireland can't make "everything" from scratch. But do they need to? Though, this becomes an almost circular philosophical discussion very quickly.
China MFG was/is not a deal with the Chinese people. It's a deal with the CCP. Those of us who always understood this aren't surprised by any of this. We never expected China to be able to manage domestic risk well and we watched helplessly as they exported that risk abroad in the form of pollution, SARS, contaminated products and more. You may not be a citizen of China, but you're almost as impacted by their decisions. This is worth pondering.
The US has a crappy record on people who leak government data, but that's an entirely different thing.
I'm not saying China did a great job. But they seem to have gotten a handle on things at least, meanwhile we've yet to even really start preparing. And we have the advantage of hindsight, which they didn't have.
According to the Chinese communist party.
Right now, the USA response is somewhere between those two China approaches but it seems that it has been closer to the "early China" response than to the "late China" response.
Personally, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my liberties to a PRC-style quarantine, but to insinuate it wasn't an astoundingly effective way to control the spread is false.
"seem" being the operative word. You only know what the CCP wants you to know.
Well, they have seemingly largely recovered and move their way back to normalcy, as other countries started catching fire.
I think a lot of people's takeways will be different than yours: China's ability to control crisis like this scale is going to be valuable assets to global investors.
It's not time to start popping champagne bottles in China quite yet. They have a tiger by the tail. The country is shut down, and as they start rolling back travel restrictions it could easily blow up again. They still have well over a billion people who are vulnerable.
They just tried rolling back travel restrictions two days ago and immediately reversed course[1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
Their ability to control the crisis is useful from a public health perspective, but they're doing it by shutting down production. Look at how the markets have responded. Are you claiming investors wouldn't have been better off if these companies had invested in a more diversified supply chain?
For that matter, having a more diversified supply chain makes it easier to implement these kinds of public health measures in general. Shutting down production is much less costly when there is another region capable of quickly picking up the slack. And making it less expensive to implement measures to contain a contagion makes it more likely they'll be properly implemented, which helps everybody, investors included.
Other countries will catch the virus at some point too.
Without stringent measures, it will take more time for other countries to come back from it. In other words, China becomes safer after this.
Having presence in multiple regions lets you keep going the whole time. Having presence in only one region doesn't.
It depends on a company's risk profile as to whether that is tolerable.
Manufacturing requires logistics, capability of water/electricity and skilled labour. Those are not easily scalable across the globe. And manufactures do concentrate, it is easy to source parts to make stuff from the same region.
So in a way, expanding physical manufacturing is very hard and expensive. And in case of COVID-19, it is not the answer even, since, the disruption is almost simultaneously happening globe wise, capacity planning and shifting can't be that agile to adjust, let alone the demand will be hampered too.
So, I think unless it is for megacorp that has that much of money to burn, diversification on globe scale is just a dream.
But for key industry, like medical supplies, I think that is where the state should come and play, to incentivize a domestic capacity that could chime in handily when disruption happens.
You don't need fully-distributed manufacturing where everything is literally made everywhere. Go ahead and cross off every place without water, electricity and skilled labor, you're still left with dozens of countries. Now pick one in Asia, one in Europe and one in America. You're now on three continents. There are three more available if you ever feel like expanding.
> And manufactures do concentrate, it is easy to source parts to make stuff from the same region.
Which is fine, so do that, somewhere on each continent. Not in only one place in the world. Obvious strong candidates are China, the US and Germany.
> And in case of COVID-19, it is not the answer even, since, the disruption is almost simultaneously happening globe wise, capacity planning and shifting can't be that agile to adjust, let alone the demand will be hampered too.
It isn't really happening everywhere at once, though. It's happening everywhere at different times. We may get to the point where some countries have to use the same measures as China, but by then China may have succeeded in containing it and be ready to reopen. Even if it hasn't, you've still reduced the period you've been offline by the several months in between, and in the meantime have had notice allowing you to run 24 hour shifts in every other facility to build up a surplus in preparation for what may come there soon.
There are also implications to the countermeasures. The US just suspended travel with Europe. If you had a factory in Germany and one in the US, you're still in business in both places, making products for US customers in the US factory and for European customers in the European factory.
> But for key industry, like medical supplies, I think that is where the state should come and play, to incentivize a domestic capacity that could chime in handily when disruption happens.
The problem is, nearly everything is in that category. Nobody cares about where toilet paper comes from until you can't get any for six months.
I can see how the Wall Street would respond, it's understandable, but whoever says that somehow makes it a bad governmental response has already missed the point about what's really the end goal for the development of our society.
However, such virus already exists in the wild, though the chances are there, it can jump to human anytime in the future regardless of national boundaries.
I've experienced living in a small, developing nation for years, and while they have the same dangerous mixture as China of live animals (and the associated excretions), dead animals, produce (unwashed, washed, and already skinned for consumption all available from the same table), fertilizer of human origins, farming supplies, pesticides, medical products, hygiene products, clothing, food transport, food storage, food preparation surfaces, cutlery, dish ware and dining surfaces all overlapping to alarming degrees (often sharing the same surfaces at different times), they don't have the potential global role, both based on their size, relative lack of population, lack of foreign travel and foreign entanglements, and so on.
Inadvertent power projection from a biological perspective is an interesting concept.
Edit to add: I can't judge the people working in these markets and offering products under horrendous conditions. They're trying to feed their families. But China needs to get serious about public health if it hopes to improve its reputation, which is roughly the same from Tehran to Toledo with some justification.
This particular pandemic was entirely avoidable in the first place. Food markets in developing nations frequently cause local health problems, and have all the ingredients to make a global one (as it seems to have in this case).
COVID-19 may be from China, but a pandemic can come from anywhere and will come again. You can taking chance on its virality/mortality.
Not all industries need to be fully globalized, and it is better every country keep some share of production to itself to account for emergency situation like this virus.
Globalization had trade off robustness for efficiency, it is time to scale that back.
Globalization as how it operates, it means to assign the job to whichever country that is most cost-efficient for that part of the production.
Moving production to China? Globalization
Moving production back to the US? Globalization
...
Anti-globalization movement? Globalization
Or maybe my professor was just nuts, I feel crazy typing this out
(They explained domestic Australian-made salt is still available, but it is 30% more expensive than the Chinese import salt.)