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Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

bloomberg.com

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Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#51

Post by LadyCailin »

jongjong wrote: post #38
orphereus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

I agree, a free market would work that way... Yet 'fail upwards' and zombie companies seem to be the default. Personally I don't believe that what we have in the west is a free market. I think these days, it's probably less free than the one in China. The market here is completely smothered by regulations. For example, about a month ago, I saw a video about people farming frogs in China... To collect secretions for m…

“Overhead to starting businesses” is not the only metric to take into account though. I’m not going to defend any given regulation necessarily, but your ad reductum fallacy is to think that’s the ONLY factor that must be considered. Consumer protection, environmental protection, worker protection, etc, etc, all can and should be taken into account in the calculus for regulations. Besides, many problems with starting a business come from monopolistic practices, not regulation, and reducing regulations will just make it cheaper for the mega corporation to keep their monopoly, at the cost of all these other factors.

So anyone who just goes “grr, regulation bad”, I can’t take seriously. If you have specific examples of regulations that are objectively bad, and should be removed, that’s fine, but the examples you cited protect something else, and ignoring that is intellectually dishonest at best, and blatantly partisan at worst.

Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#52

Post by orphereus »

mrkeen wrote: post #49
orphereus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

The market does reward proficiency. We live in the punished timeline. No contradiction. Most software is buggy and most businesses fail.

What does punished timeline mean?

Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#53

Post by reactordev »

Illniyar wrote: post #48

The article headline makes it seem like the factories couldn't make the gloves. 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.

One sounds incapable from a skill perspective, the other is incapable from a market perspective. I’ll take the later over the former any day.

Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#54

Post by wildzzz »

RetroTechie wrote: post #25
einpoklum wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story says the US doesn't have the raw material(s): NBR. Not quite sure what that is.

With all the chemical industry already in the US, and $1B to throw at it, production capacity for the raw material couldn't be included? It's not like you need a metric ton of it to produce a box of gloves.

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.

Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#55

Post by matchbok3 »

vrganj wrote: post #19
raverbashing wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how much those spreadsheet heads know nothing about how the actual world works

You gotta optimize everything for the market man! It's magic! Everything will work out if we only make number go up! Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!

Well, for the most part this is actually true. Taking care of the exceptions is the hard part.

Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.

Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#56

Post by matchbok3 »

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.

Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#57

Post by mrkeen »

orphereus wrote: post #52
mrkeen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market does reward proficiency. We live in the punished timeline. No contradiction. Most software is buggy and most businesses fail.

What does punished timeline mean?

It's the corollary to your statement about the market rewarding competent companies.

The market punishes incompetent companies.

Just being aware that the market rewards competent companies is not enough to magically turn companies competent.

Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#59

Post by samsolomon »

reactordev wrote: post #53
Illniyar wrote: post #48

The article headline makes it seem like the factories couldn't make the gloves. 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.

One sounds incapable from a skill perspective, the other is incapable from a market perspective. I’ll take the later over the former any day.

Agree. The problem is over extended lengths of time the people with the skills to make these things—or make tools that make them—will leave the workforce.

That's how this goes from being a market issue to a skill issue.

Re: Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves

#60

Post by vrganj »

philipallstar wrote: post #40
vrganj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta optimize everything for the market man! It's magic! Everything will work out if we only make number go up! Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!

You don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.

Heh sure, it's great at optimizing.

The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.

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