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The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

nytimes.com

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Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#51

Post by burfog »

dang wrote: post #13

We changed the URL from https://dnyuz.com/2020/03/29/the-u-s-tried-to-build-a-new-fl... to that of the article that it fully ripped off (and banned that site).

They acknowledge the New York Times at the end of the article. Perhaps they licensed the content. I don't think that anybody aside from legal staff at the New York Times can determine if anybody was fully ripped off. If you have concerns about copyright and want to do something about it, you could report the issue. I assume that the New York Times is fully capable of hunting down violations without any help.

The site is much nicer than the New York Times. I'd prefer that the New York Times be banned, both for the paywall and for severe political bias.

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#52

Post by worik »

pdonis wrote: post #47
worik wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government is not congress, or a president. It is civil servants beavering away.

> Government is not congress, or a president. It is civil servants beavering away. The civil servants work on what Congress and the President set as priorities. They cannot execute plans that span multiple Congresses and Presidential administrations unless every single Congress and Administration over that time period agrees to support the plan.

They flew to the moon.

They built a horrifying arsenal.

I really do not see why they cannot build a health system. They have done so here.

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#53

Post by throwawaynerdy »

blunte wrote: post #10
m0xte wrote: post #2

I’ve always said that governments should use our tax money to design and validate key health and infrastructure components and only outsource manufacturing and only to local businesses. Governments are so utterly broken and inefficient that they can’t do it. However even if they produced a design now we have supply chain problems globally. Edit: I seem to have stirred up capitalist defence here. To clarify: The gover…

This story, if accurate, is simply an illustration of how low-regulation capitalism works. "Working as intended." Profit is the only motive, and thus as long as the company/investors profit, then it is a success. The fact that national or global human well-being suffered is irrelevant (so long as we accept that capitalism (as currently implemented) is the right way). Now, there's a strong likelihood that the governme…

Government patents and the heavily regulated medical cartels = capitalism?

Not to be a Communist when I say "not real capitalism", but it seems there's no pro capitalism political party in the US.

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#54

Post by m0xte »

pdonis wrote: post #37
worik wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree. If the government had done it in house they could have succeeded. The problem here was the profit motive. Cheep ventilators endanger profits. It is a side effect of free markets (I like free markets) that big firms get bigger, get more market power, kill off competition then price gouge. Health is a bad bad place to have free markets as the incentives are almost all wrong (exceptions: E.g. runn…

> If the government had done it in house they could have succeeded. Ok, so how do we get the government to do it in house, and stick to it long enough so that the stockpile is there when the next disease crisis happens, which might not be for another 10 years? That's five Congressional elections and at least two changes of Presidential administration.

Party politics is a separate shit show. It should be an elected council with no single representation. That would allow smaller, manageable policy changes rather than burn the entire universe every few years.

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#55

Post by onetimemanytime »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #48
romanows wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how long it would take to teach someone to be more help than harm? After 30 intensive days of training, what would candidates lack?

About 4 years of medical school, and around 4 more years of residency training.

Most Covid patients die on respirators anyway, can a nurse do 90% of the job ("good enough") and ask a doc if the rest is needed? The other option is worse and I doubt USA can afford to have docs sitting for decades waiting for another Covid like scenario. Remember these ventilators will be produced and go in storage to wait...

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#56

Post by m0xte »

pdonis wrote: post #39
neffy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The issue in some sense isn't government, it's the corruption of government by corporations that have been allowed to become to big and to powerful, to the extent that the US Government itself has been deliberately defunded. (Sure, I know Government spending grows every year, but so does the money supply and corporate profits. Control for monetary expansion, and the US Government's portion of the economy has…

> The issue in some sense isn't government, it's the corruption of government Ok, so how do we keep the government from being corrupted? Nobody has yet solved that problem, and people have been trying for centuries. > Control for monetary expansion, and the US Government's portion of the economy has been steadily shrinking. The money supply is not the same as the economy. Government spending as a percentage of GDP, w…

Well the first thing you do is ban professional politicians and lobbying.

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#57

Post by DanBC »

lukevp wrote: post #7

what is so complicated about ventilators? Serious question as I don’t know enough about this. I see a lot of DIY posts that are probably not 100% the same thing but are they even close? This opens up a bigger question too, is there such a thing as a path for open source medical devices to be built and certified and deployed? Is there a company that supports something like this? I follow Scott hanselman, a Microsoft e…

Partly this is a problem with jargon. When healthcare professionals talk about "beds" or "ventilators" they mean "the bed and all the staff needed for the patient in that bed", or "the ventilator and all the staff needed to put a patient on, and take a patient off, the ventilator".

Ventilators turn out the be pretty complicated.

Here's a useful thread: https://twitter.com/aroradrn/status/1243091107149418496

And another simplified cheat sheet for people who use machines in one setting which are now being used in other settings, but it has replies from doctors asking questions that give some hints at the complexity: https://twitter.com/aroradrn/status/1244134454001635329?s=20

Then you have all the "human factors" stuff caused by machines having different layouts.

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#58

Post by burfog »

pdonis wrote: post #18
maxerickson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's one thing contracts are used for, to specify what you get in exchange for payments, in a durable way.

But the government agreed to cancel the contract at the big company's request. I don't see how the deliverable being the design instead of the ventilator itself would have changed that.

Agreement to cancel could be made conditional upon publishing the design and releasing it into the public domain.

If the big company detests that idea, well, they don't get out of the original contract.

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#59

Post by dang »

burfog wrote: post #51
dang wrote: post #13

We changed the URL from https://dnyuz.com/2020/03/29/the-u-s-tried-to-build-a-new-fl... to that of the article that it fully ripped off (and banned that site).

They acknowledge the New York Times at the end of the article. Perhaps they licensed the content. I don't think that anybody aside from legal staff at the New York Times can determine if anybody was fully ripped off. If you have concerns about copyright and want to do something about it, you could report the issue. I assume that the New York Times is fully capable of hunting down violations without any help. The site…

Normally I use less emphatic language. However, I looked at the submission history for the site. Of 11 articles posted to HN, every one was a copy. They've copied from NYT, bgr.com, Polygon, FT, and Fast Company. That's a lot of "licensing".

True, they were nice enough to link to the originals, but for some reason the vast majority of blogspam sites do that. Only the very bottomest of the barrel do not. I assume there's a reason for this other than invariable last-minute scruples, but who knows? Maybe an HN user knows that business and can explain.

The paywall question is a separate one, and decided here as follows: if there's a workaround, it's ok; if there's not a workaround, we bury the submission. Users usually post workarounds in the threads. The result is that more or less everyone can read more or less every submission that makes HN's front page, just with varying degrees of annoyance. I think that's the right tradeoff. The annoyance is real, but HN would be worse without links to these publications. Paywalls suck (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), but this is the best we can do until the publication industry sorts itself out the way music eventually did.

All publications are biased. We're not going to ban the NYT.

Re: The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators

#60

Post by noelsusman »

oefrha wrote: post #30

I find it strange that all we hear about these days is the shortage of ventilators (okay, PPE too), as if it’s the only bottleneck. The reality is ventilators are useless without intensivists to operate them, and you need anesthesiologists and probably other skilled personnel too. I learned through a personal connection who was actually on the ground in Hubei (but not Wuhan) caring for serious but non-ICU patients th…

You answered your own question in the last sentence.
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