That would be a good thing for you to research to build an understanding for the scale of what you are simplifying. Here's a start; just alone during a rather non-pandemic of 2020-2022 the USA alone used about 1.8 billion, with a B, gloves per week ... week.
So 1 billion dollars buys about 8 billion gloves? Or about 4 weeks? So for 12 billion dollars that's a years slack?
I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment.
The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem.
So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.
That’s brilliant - the government could pay every hospital to stockpile the annual needs for itself and any local clinics and they would just rotate through the stock and replenish as normal.
Someone already decided US should. The important question is whether 1B should have gotten the job done, and if not... is it matter of throwing good $$$ after bad $$$... or is it just bad sign 1B wasn't enough.
The issue is that domestic sources of NBR are few because of the type of petroleum extraction we do here. This makes the cost of NBR relatively high and consequently makes the gloves pricey compared to imported ones. We can definitely make.a glove but no one wants to buy them.
It's all a question of price, based on the article. And not planning how much it takes to start up. In any case it's also not feasible to keep a plant on standby, just in case you need it one day.
Ballpoint pen tips was proxy Li Keqiang used to shame PRC industry to build precision micromachining capabilities (tungsten carbide for high-end munitions etc), TISCO did it in like a year and it upgraded entire PRC metallurgy chain. US struggling to make 100% indigenized gloves 5+ years after covid... is well maybe not something new relative to US industrial decline, but certainly something else. I'm sure US can... but at what cost and all that.
The article states some of the companies successfully made gloves, but customers such as hospitals considered the prices too high, which is why they're looking to the federal government to be the primary customer now.
More like the new "America can't manufacturer a grill scrubber" [1].
For those who haven't seen the video, YouTuber Destin Sandlin ("Smarter every day") tried to build a grill scrubber using 100% materials from the US and failed.
The claim he failed seems like hyperbole. He couldn't find an existing manufacturer for chainmail in the US but this is a fairly trivial and niche thing to create, and is more a reflection of how uncommon it is for people to need that specific type and size of chain mail than it is that the US is incapable of making it. The other part is from Costa Rica only bc he hasn't yet made the injection mold for it, like he did for the handle itself.
I disagree with that conclusion: even if the chainmail were indeed very uncommon (no idea), getting it from China was so easy that he even got it when actively trying to avoid it. And since the chainmail is the revolutionary part of the idea (and the most expensive part) it might as well be the product.
He set out to get "100% made in the USA", settled for "no part made in China", and couldn't even get that. That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
> That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
The US manufacturing industry moved on to better paying, more stable contracts because they could.
They have no incentive to do niche things for small time YouTubers who won’t be generating repeat business.
Even the small machine shops I know now have more high paying work than they can handle. They’re just interested in doing some niche temporary work in a race to the bottom with another country that can pay workers a fraction as much and ignore all of the health and safety regulations.
An industrial jumpring making machine is currently on ebay for $2500. I don't think a problem that can be solved so cheaply can be classified as a failure of an industry.
You have to separate the YouTube clickbait from the real learning content in there.
US manufacturing is expensive because wages are high, but also because we focus on the high end work that pays more . Even the small machine shops I used 10 years ago for small scale production runs are no longer interested in doing any small batch work. They have more contract work from big companies than they can handle, and the big companies pay more and have higher order quantities.
If you’re a shop or a factory in the US you’re never going to take some small orders for a grill brush from some YouTuber who doesn’t have any expertise in marketing grill brushes. Everyone is going to turn that order down because there’s no money or future in it, but there’s plenty of better work that pays better from companies who want to keep using your services in the future.
> Everyone is going to turn that order down because there’s no money or future in it, but there’s plenty of better work that pays better from companies who want to keep using your services in the future.
Until there isn't, and you go bankrupt because you didn't generate new independent business.
Maximally efficient is minimally robust. Or, perhaps you prefer: efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience.
And, by the way, China somehow manages to support these small manufacturers. For example: Chitu Systems supplies the small volumes of LCD screens for 3d resin printers.
One interesting point is that China "can't" (more like "is significantly behind on") manufacture jet engines -- the blades are the sticking point, they are ridiculously engineered.
How are these types of awards usually structured? Are they just grants? If so, doesn't that create a perverse incentive to take the money even if you never intend to deliver the result?
Interestingly govspending says only $8.7 million of the $10 million award has been outlayed but I guess it's possible it just doesn't have the outlay info for the $123 million contract?
I think the contract type is a 'firm fixed-price definitive contract' but what happens when the contractor doesn't manage to create the production capability in the contract?
I found a FOIA request on muckrock[3] but it didn't seem to have anything related to the contract in terms of penalties.
US does not need to manufacture medical gloves. Medical workers just need to recieve all vaccines against all known and unknown diseases, to be fully immune. In that case medical gloves are not necessary!
Edit: such medicine exist, it was developed by shamans in africa. You are denier and colonialist if you disagree!!!
Some of my early research (elementary school) suggested that certain glues can form a peelable, skin-like layer. Maybe that could be a promising way forward?
I did the same research in elementary school! My parents were my seed investors. They asked for 25% of equity - all I ended up giving them was some collectible artwork for the fridge.
On the outside of the surface as well which is not fine. Goo would tend to irritate the skin stick in your pores and be challenging to quickly change when you contaminated one exterior which happens a lot
In most of the west, technically talented people are fully subjugated to suits so I'm not surprised.
Sometimes, there are brief moments when technical people are given the control they need to deliver... But after a few years, they are again subjugated to MBAs in suits again and the capacity is lost.
I see this constantly nowadays. As a technical person, there are many companies/roles where the constraints set you up for failure from the beginning. I've delivered some very complex projects but I've also worked at jobs on far simpler projects where I knew since day 1 that the project wouldn't pan out due to counter-productive technical constraints being imposed... but you know the company is well positioned in the financial system and that the outcome won't matter; so you take the job anyway. You still get the high pay and the prestige from the brand name. There are many companies like this where people seem to keep failing upwards and stock price always goes up.
Shouldn't free market reward companies that go the other way and where people don't "fail upwards"? It is kind of demoralising to think otherwise, but it seems it is true.
We see it everywhere. Bad companies making bad decisions keep surviving, and actually the vast majority of companies are like this.
One implication is that MBAs in suits that make bad decisions are actually right and their decisions are not bad. The other implication is that there is no free market, no meritocracy and the truth is, game was rigged from the start.
Edit: I should add that most of this is anegdotal evidence and a general feeling I have. It is not a very powerful argument I'm making.
The article mentions access to NBR latex being an issue, but doesn’t explain that this is less commonly produced in America because they produces much more shale gas these days which doesn’t result in enough butadiene needed. So the most important supply chain to build the product is mostly coming out of Asian and European crackers. Giving an advantage to the Malaysian factories on top of the other lower costs of business there.
Which makes you wonder why the government thought it was a feasible investment or if they didn’t care and hand waved it with ‘national security’.
Nice comment. And to me this just points out that due to specialization, you’re probably always going to be higher cost on something. But that’s not necessarily bad
Well I wouldn't pay for it to be idle; if you want to ensure you have the ability to do it, then you buy some proportion of it's potential output at their increased costs; but while that's happening you work on all the reasons it's more expensive.
The logical thing is that the government buys them continually at the higher price which justifies the existence of the factory with the requirement that it is made here and if this is not sufficient motivation you make buying something more buying something profitable contingent
Whether the US can make "gloves" is actually less interesting than whether the US even has the technical ability, infrastructure, and knowledge to spin up a glove factory in an emergency. Just like drones, batter tech, etc. Another area where the current admin is failing, and putting our country behind China.
As bad as the current administration is, this is one area where they are trying to reverse globalization in the stupidest way possible, so not their fault. These things happened years before now.
I wonder whether with AI we will be able to document more efficiently all of the nuances of production so if we need to ramp up a forgotten process we can do it faster.
There is so much domain expertise that exists in production that is not documented, because who has time for writing documentation when your floor is on fire.
But if writing documentation is something free and can be automated (maybe from the company internal comms), maybe we have a chance?
Asian manufacturing will continue to undercut Western manufacturing on cost due to the absence of safety culture and the spending that comes with it. The value of human life is higher in the West, and the manufacturing costs reflect that.
Most Coastal areas, lakes, rivers, river deltas near large human settlements say differently in the USA and across the world, the United States had better start thinking long-term and figuring out where they want to be in the world, time is running out. The trajectory right now is downward…
83 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] threadShould the US make medical gloves?
I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment.
The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem.
So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.
It's not like you need a metric ton of it to produce a box of gloves.
It ain't for people who don't want to work in a plastics factory, I guess.
And it contributed to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Funny coincidence that.
For those who haven't seen the video, YouTuber Destin Sandlin ("Smarter every day") tried to build a grill scrubber using 100% materials from the US and failed.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
He set out to get "100% made in the USA", settled for "no part made in China", and couldn't even get that. That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
The US manufacturing industry moved on to better paying, more stable contracts because they could.
They have no incentive to do niche things for small time YouTubers who won’t be generating repeat business.
Even the small machine shops I know now have more high paying work than they can handle. They’re just interested in doing some niche temporary work in a race to the bottom with another country that can pay workers a fraction as much and ignore all of the health and safety regulations.
US manufacturing is expensive because wages are high, but also because we focus on the high end work that pays more . Even the small machine shops I used 10 years ago for small scale production runs are no longer interested in doing any small batch work. They have more contract work from big companies than they can handle, and the big companies pay more and have higher order quantities.
If you’re a shop or a factory in the US you’re never going to take some small orders for a grill brush from some YouTuber who doesn’t have any expertise in marketing grill brushes. Everyone is going to turn that order down because there’s no money or future in it, but there’s plenty of better work that pays better from companies who want to keep using your services in the future.
Until there isn't, and you go bankrupt because you didn't generate new independent business.
Maximally efficient is minimally robust. Or, perhaps you prefer: efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience.
And, by the way, China somehow manages to support these small manufacturers. For example: Chitu Systems supplies the small volumes of LCD screens for 3d resin printers.
Interestingly govspending says only $8.7 million of the $10 million award has been outlayed but I guess it's possible it just doesn't have the outlay info for the $123 million contract?
I think the contract type is a 'firm fixed-price definitive contract' but what happens when the contractor doesn't manage to create the production capability in the contract?
I found a FOIA request on muckrock[3] but it didn't seem to have anything related to the contract in terms of penalties.
[1][$123.1 million] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA850521C0005_970...
https://www.highergov.com/contract/FA850521C0005/
https://g2xchange.com/app/awards/contracts/CONT_AWD_FA850521...
[2][$10 million] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75A50525C00001_75...
[3] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/con...
Edit: such medicine exist, it was developed by shamans in africa. You are denier and colonialist if you disagree!!!
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/decline-and-fall-of-the-a...
On the other hand the US is still very good at bombing small, poor countries...
Sometimes, there are brief moments when technical people are given the control they need to deliver... But after a few years, they are again subjugated to MBAs in suits again and the capacity is lost.
I see this constantly nowadays. As a technical person, there are many companies/roles where the constraints set you up for failure from the beginning. I've delivered some very complex projects but I've also worked at jobs on far simpler projects where I knew since day 1 that the project wouldn't pan out due to counter-productive technical constraints being imposed... but you know the company is well positioned in the financial system and that the outcome won't matter; so you take the job anyway. You still get the high pay and the prestige from the brand name. There are many companies like this where people seem to keep failing upwards and stock price always goes up.
We see it everywhere. Bad companies making bad decisions keep surviving, and actually the vast majority of companies are like this.
One implication is that MBAs in suits that make bad decisions are actually right and their decisions are not bad. The other implication is that there is no free market, no meritocracy and the truth is, game was rigged from the start.
Edit: I should add that most of this is anegdotal evidence and a general feeling I have. It is not a very powerful argument I'm making.
China will suffer the same fate if they allow lawyers/MBA’s to run their country.
For 500m i'll make all the gloves you want, we can slap as many X's on the size as you desire/require.
Let me know. Waiting for your call.
I was kind of able to read that on my Android phone, but something on the page made panning really janky so I gave up.
Which makes you wonder why the government thought it was a feasible investment or if they didn’t care and hand waved it with ‘national security’.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040615/what-are-eco...
But further down it says that the cost was double and factories couldn't get buyers.
These are very different failure modes, and speak to very different solutions.
It's already being done so it seems more a cost related issue than lack of knowledge.
There is so much domain expertise that exists in production that is not documented, because who has time for writing documentation when your floor is on fire.
But if writing documentation is something free and can be automated (maybe from the company internal comms), maybe we have a chance?