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

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

#131

Post by whatever1 »

shimman wrote: post #113
whatever1 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the slack complaints?

Friend, you need to seriously get out of your tech bubble and talk to real workers in person.

The shift managers are on IM, sending email escalations to the site managers for exceptions etc. Definitely at end of shift they do a summary for the handover and regular reporting to leadership. Maybe not slack but they do leave digital traces.

Workers in a well ran assembly line should not have to figure out anything.

I could search for “belt jam” in outlook decades ago. Why do you see it as a difficult technical task? The info is there, nobody has the time to organize it.

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

#132

Post by Danox »

black6 wrote: post #121

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…

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

#133

Post by cucumber3732842 »

croes wrote: post #126
reactordev wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the price is too high you aren’t skilled enough to make them cheaper

Or free enough. All that civil engineering, permitting, compliance checkbox BS has to be amortized over the stuff the factory makes.

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

#134

Post by philipallstar »

michaelmrose wrote: post #100
philipallstar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would this even be so. It's not magic it's just people doing stupid people things often to maximize short term factors. It only gets long-term planning insofar as embedded agents do. One of the things agents do is use incentives to inspire behaviour that is conta individuals short term incentives to achieve behaviour that contributes to long-term success. Not only are many individual agents aligned with short ter…

No one's saying it's magic.

This is the same market (or set of markets) that have lifted billions of people out of poverty. If you're arguing central planning does better then I'd love to see some evidence of it, but to my mind the fact that so many companies can coordinate, even across language barriers and legal systems, sometimes hundreds or thousands cooperating to make products, is incredible, and is not going to be beaten by any other system.

At least on average - of course an authoritarian country like the USSR can drag value out of its citizens by force and spend it on the space race, but that kills people and even, in that case, the country itself.

Far better to have cooperation and value exchange based on the demand generated by real people.

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

#135

Post by Danox »

matchbok3 wrote: post #56

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.

[dead]

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

#136

Post by Danox »

jongjong wrote: post #31

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…

Lawyers and finance people everywhere at the top, running everything with problem solvers shoved to the back of the line.

China will suffer the same fate if they allow lawyers/MBA’s to run their country.

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

#137

Post by Danox »

orphereus wrote: post #35
jongjong wrote: post #31

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…

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 problem with MBAs and lawyers is that they are not problem solvers. They are the embodiment of short-term thinking not all just most.

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

#138

Post by philipallstar »

vrganj wrote: post #60
philipallstar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is just silliness. Rich people got rich under capitalism by providing things people want for the best price. They're rich because they owns shares in valuable businesses that people want to buy the products of.

Some people get rich, on average by merit. And everyone gets the products they want at a low price. Can you imagine if the only cars available were made in the USSR, like Ladas? They were terrible because there was no capitalism, and so no competition. But if you'd rather have abysmal cars but know that no one got rich making them, I guess that's...a choice?

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

#139

Post by Danox »

mrkeen wrote: post #57
orphereus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In time, maybe? The problem is the damage done until that happens.

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

#140

Post by Danox »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #63
jongjong wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like your moxie and I also agree Australia is an over-regulated racket... but I'm also glad my neighbours aren't mass farming frogs or cockroaches in my suburb without talking to the council first. My brother had a neighbour build a crematorium next door in NZ; not an industrial or rural area, just the suburbs, no permits, no consultation, no notification. Very entrepreneurial. They got shut down but the flip side…

I am hopeful that Australia and New Zealand come to their senses like Canada has had to because of the mad king…

With friends like the United States, China, and Russia, they’re gonna have to decide to stop coasting and for once try to move to the front of the line.

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