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.
The later form was part of the design from the beginning: relying on imports for something this critical in times of an epidemic was a supply chain risk. It was never intended to compete in terms of pricing.
It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
For an object-level example, look at the difficulties the Russians had reconstituting their industrial base in the post-apocalyptic wasteland they found themselves after the 90s. It took them a decade to figure out how to restart production of the Tu-160M bomber, and they had all the original blueprints! Likewise, for a while, we forgot how to make this "FOGBANK" substance that's somehow important for nuclear weapons.
It's all too easy to forget how to do something if you stop doing it for a while.
The main thing is to ensure you can continue to produce the machine tools, electronic components, and precision equipment needed to service each major industry. And the domestic engineering talent to run them. This allows you to add capacity quickly if self-sufficiency is needed.
Oh, and you also need to secure stable supply chains.
They really, really don’t. I’m sympathetic to the goal of moving manufacturing stateside, but fixing regulatory hurdles needs to happen first.
Just because a foreign glove manufacturer has to comply with the same safety/quality standards for their product only scratches the surface. Domestic companies also have to operate compliant with regulations regarding hiring, real estate, safety, finance, and many more.
To be clear, a lot of those regulations (most of them!) achieve good things and should be preserved! Working/environmental/low-corruption conditions in the US (though they could be better) are often superior to those same conditions in the places we import from precisely because of those regulations. But not all regulations (even those with good goals) are effective, others are not worth the burden, and all of them in aggregate do directly contribute to domestic manufacturing loss. It’s a hard problem that others (e.g. Pahlka) have written about much more wisely than I can.
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
You could rotate the inventory. Normally companies try to minimize inventory, but someone could pay them to keep six month’s or a year’s supply as a buffer.
It depends on the rationale. If the intent is self-reliance in the event of a trade war (or worse) with China, then even a year's buffer isn't enough to bootstrap home manufacturing from scratch.
It needs to be in-service and available before any serious conflict.
Maybe, combined with a buffer, there need to be plans in place to get a factory up and running in six months? Or it could be running at a low level with plans to scale in six months.
The US already has their Strategic National Stockpile for medicines.
Shorter expirations are managed by constantly selling the old to the domestic industry and purchasing new, like China does for grain and frozen meat while simultaneously being able to keep the market more stable by selling high and buying low. Switzerland has a lot of stockpiles, even including coffee[0], which the companies also go through FIFO.
0: "The 15 big Swiss coffee retailers, roasters and importers, such as Nestlé, are required by law to store heaps of raw coffee. Together, these mandated coffee reserves amount to about 15,000 tonnes—enough for three months’ consumption. The government finances the storage costs through a levy on imports of coffee. All 15 companies are in favour of maintaining the coffee reserve—as long as they are paid for it." Economist 2019
To be clear, I think a plan like that makes a ton of sense, because the only costs you have are the ongoing storage and admin costs, and in the grand scheme of things a big warehouse to store a 6 month rotating supply of PPE would have huge potential benefit and would also be a rounding error compared to things like the Iran war. I was just objecting to the idea that you buy "a billion dollars" worth of gloves because that's not a sensible or sane solution.
Stockpiles of masks and gloves where maintained in Canada, and I believe the US after SARS.
But a year before COVID, these warehouses were shut down, as the stockpiles were old, and needed a refresh, and politicians didnt see the need to spend tens of millions on new stockpiles.
The has happened several times over the last 100 years.
This is a congressional decision not a presidential obe and it was done after the dems lost the majority because of the incllination towards austerity that always develops when a dem is president. Would you like to go over exactly what republican votes led to this?
In California they were set up by Schwarzenegger and dismantled by Jerry Brown in 2011 to save 1.7 million per year.
“When the Department of Finance was looking at this, they asked a question: ‘How many times have the mobile field hospitals been used since we bought them?’ ” he said. “That was the same question they asked (the Public Health Department). ‘You’re not using it, why do we have it?’ ”
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’.
When politicians act, they look for political wins, not financial ones. If they get both, great, but they could care less about fiscal responsibility. The system’s purpose is what it does.
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
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.
Asking this question only a handful of years after a global pandemic...
If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE.
And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.
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.
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?
Like the Sacklers who got rich by... providing the best opiates. Or Zuck, who got rich by... destroying the fabric of our society. Or Big Oil, which got rich by... destroying ecosystems and dooming us all. Or United Fruit Company which got rich by... brutally colonizing Latin America.
It's almost as if the profit motive optimized for profit, not any other outcome that was in any way beneficial to anyone but the ones... profiting.
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 term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
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.
It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us.
Our planet is literally dying.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might.
In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature.
It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see.
It actually can die but more accurately it can also become far less amenable to human thriving and kill off the majority of other species both of which appear to be happening
Doing basic math makes someone a "spreadsheet head"? If the "actual world" wanted American-made gloves then this cash injection from the government would've resulted in a boom in glove manufacturing here, no?
I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.
As pointed out earlier, there is also rotation of a stockpile of gloves instead of manufacturing which reduces costs and solves the same issues.
Even things made in America were in short supply during the pandemic because workers were hard to come by as well. A factory isn’t any good if half the people to run it are sick, but it doesn’t take special training to hand out boxes of gloves.
Looks like most/all manufacturing happens in the SEA/China, so I can see the logic that it could be considered a military risk for it to not be manufactured/possibility to scale manufacturing in America.
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 on cost ineffective gloves 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, which still seems excessive. 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.
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
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 manufacture 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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 medical use. At first I thought WTF. But then they mentioned how much it sells for and I thought "Wow. We have a lot of cane toads here everywhere, it would be a great business to do here." I actually started thinking of doing this... This is really out there for me because I'm a software engineer; but I started seriously considering this. But guess what? I did my research and turns out it's illegal to do it in my country (Australia) because the frog secretions would be considered an illicit substance and you need to go through some expensive process to obtain a license. Yes, you need a license to farm frogs...
A few weeks back, I read news about someone who got arrested for farming cockroaches (as reptile food for zoos)... It's like all the entry-point business opportunities have become illegal.
Every time I heard of a case like this where some really good niche business opportunity is illegal in Australia, I asked my AI if this practice is legal in China and the answer is almost always yes.
The other day, I was watching a documentary about Philippines and I saw a kind of makeshift resort built literally on top of a coral reef. Really amazing looking. They seemed to be getting good reviews and actually making money... This would NEVER be allowed in my country. At best, you could purchase a ship for millions of dollars then apply for expensive licenses, then you'd have limits on how many people you can take at a time, etc... So many constraints and regulations. Such artificially high capital requirements. It would be a worse experience and less profitable; and you'd have to be filthy rich just to get a chance to engage in that highly constrained, mediocre business activity.
“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.
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 of "you can just do things" is surprises like a plume of smoke and the smell of burning corpses when you step outside.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The later form was part of the design from the beginning: relying on imports for something this critical in times of an epidemic was a supply chain risk. It was never intended to compete in terms of pricing.
It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
Once the epidemic was over, stakeholders forgot about the original motives.
Also, the stakeholders decided the epidemic was a hoax in the first place.
Good thing the country isn't run by shareholders.
Note that a federal jobs program has something like 60-80% support by voters across all political spectrums in the USA.
oh but it is... oh but it is.
Over time, the latter becomes the former.
Only for a time until the market conditions improve. Humans are incredibly talented and we have a knack for picking up skills.
I wish it were so. It's not.
For an object-level example, look at the difficulties the Russians had reconstituting their industrial base in the post-apocalyptic wasteland they found themselves after the 90s. It took them a decade to figure out how to restart production of the Tu-160M bomber, and they had all the original blueprints! Likewise, for a while, we forgot how to make this "FOGBANK" substance that's somehow important for nuclear weapons.
It's all too easy to forget how to do something if you stop doing it for a while.
And then you pick it back up. Yes, you will get rusty or need to train up but that’s better than lacking the technological capability.
The main thing is to ensure you can continue to produce the machine tools, electronic components, and precision equipment needed to service each major industry. And the domestic engineering talent to run them. This allows you to add capacity quickly if self-sufficiency is needed.
Oh, and you also need to secure stable supply chains.
(We may be in trouble here)
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.
Foreign made medical gloves have the same compliance to fulfill
They really, really don’t. I’m sympathetic to the goal of moving manufacturing stateside, but fixing regulatory hurdles needs to happen first.
Just because a foreign glove manufacturer has to comply with the same safety/quality standards for their product only scratches the surface. Domestic companies also have to operate compliant with regulations regarding hiring, real estate, safety, finance, and many more.
To be clear, a lot of those regulations (most of them!) achieve good things and should be preserved! Working/environmental/low-corruption conditions in the US (though they could be better) are often superior to those same conditions in the places we import from precisely because of those regulations. But not all regulations (even those with good goals) are effective, others are not worth the burden, and all of them in aggregate do directly contribute to domestic manufacturing loss. It’s a hard problem that others (e.g. Pahlka) have written about much more wisely than I can.
That might have been a bargain if you could have done it during peak Covid. Having the capability to make them is worth a lot in resilience.
Who’s paying to bring online a factory that sites idle just in case? Are you also paying workers to sit there idle?
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
Like the Jones act but for gloves
Or stockpile a two year supply. You can get a lot with a billion dollars.
These things expire you know, for latex gloves it's only 3 years.
You could rotate the inventory. Normally companies try to minimize inventory, but someone could pay them to keep six month’s or a year’s supply as a buffer.
It depends on the rationale. If the intent is self-reliance in the event of a trade war (or worse) with China, then even a year's buffer isn't enough to bootstrap home manufacturing from scratch.
It needs to be in-service and available before any serious conflict.
Maybe, combined with a buffer, there need to be plans in place to get a factory up and running in six months? Or it could be running at a low level with plans to scale in six months.
The US already has their Strategic National Stockpile for medicines.
Shorter expirations are managed by constantly selling the old to the domestic industry and purchasing new, like China does for grain and frozen meat while simultaneously being able to keep the market more stable by selling high and buying low. Switzerland has a lot of stockpiles, even including coffee[0], which the companies also go through FIFO.
0: "The 15 big Swiss coffee retailers, roasters and importers, such as Nestlé, are required by law to store heaps of raw coffee. Together, these mandated coffee reserves amount to about 15,000 tonnes—enough for three months’ consumption. The government finances the storage costs through a levy on imports of coffee. All 15 companies are in favour of maintaining the coffee reserve—as long as they are paid for it." Economist 2019
To be clear, I think a plan like that makes a ton of sense, because the only costs you have are the ongoing storage and admin costs, and in the grand scheme of things a big warehouse to store a 6 month rotating supply of PPE would have huge potential benefit and would also be a rounding error compared to things like the Iran war. I was just objecting to the idea that you buy "a billion dollars" worth of gloves because that's not a sensible or sane solution.
Stockpiles of masks and gloves where maintained in Canada, and I believe the US after SARS.
But a year before COVID, these warehouses were shut down, as the stockpiles were old, and needed a refresh, and politicians didnt see the need to spend tens of millions on new stockpiles.
The has happened several times over the last 100 years.
Republicans didn't see the need to be precise
Seems the decision to deprioritize n95s was done by the Obama administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile
This is a congressional decision not a presidential obe and it was done after the dems lost the majority because of the incllination towards austerity that always develops when a dem is president. Would you like to go over exactly what republican votes led to this?
In California they were set up by Schwarzenegger and dismantled by Jerry Brown in 2011 to save 1.7 million per year.
“When the Department of Finance was looking at this, they asked a question: ‘How many times have the mobile field hospitals been used since we bought them?’ ” he said. “That was the same question they asked (the Public Health Department). ‘You’re not using it, why do we have it?’ ”
https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-...
Exactly, the article also mentions "Only about 1% of those used in the US are made domestically".
It's already being done so it seems more a cost related issue than lack of knowledge.
Headlines and articles are typically written by different people with different goals.
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’.
When politicians act, they look for political wins, not financial ones. If they get both, great, but they could care less about fiscal responsibility. The system’s purpose is what it does.
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
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040615/what-are-eco...
In cases of emergency, like COVID, is butadiene supply limited or for the right price the US, and in general, the world, could get enough butadiene ?
https://archive.is/wtC7m
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?
No way! That would be a handout.
You can see the two awards on govspending. [1][2]
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...
A very important question to ask.
Should the US make medical gloves?
1-200% tariff applied at random if you don't.
The US started the tariff game btw
That is what I'm referring to.
Also what the cost is. If the US really wants to reshore this sort of work then it will become materially poorer.
Yeah, you should make stuff medical staff needs.
Or maybe not start stupid wars but this is America we're talking so meh...
Asking this question only a handful of years after a global pandemic...
If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE.
And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.
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!
correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
Redundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.
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?
Sure!
Like the Sacklers who got rich by... providing the best opiates. Or Zuck, who got rich by... destroying the fabric of our society. Or Big Oil, which got rich by... destroying ecosystems and dooming us all. Or United Fruit Company which got rich by... brutally colonizing Latin America.
It's almost as if the profit motive optimized for profit, not any other outcome that was in any way beneficial to anyone but the ones... profiting.
Markets optimize for the current gradient, not for the local maxima
Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end
Sounds like a local maximum to me. Did you maybe mean a global maximum?
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 term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
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.
And yet somehow we had no toilet paper in the pandemic. The manufacturers all simultaneously refused to retool.
This proves that the market does not inherently work magic.
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.
>Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.
It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us.
Our planet is literally dying.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
It is quite sad how doomerism has taken so many people. Our planet cannot "die", it is not a person. Take a deep breath!
This feels like deliberately misunderstanding.
Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might.
In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature.
It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see.
E.g. here, they've got tons of raw data available too (german): https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/zeitreihen/zeitreihen.html
Don't know what you see there - but it sure does look like an exponential curve, doesn't it?
Sure, the planet can't die. But the people and animals on it can.
But I have a feeling you knew what I meant and are just being deliberately obtuse.
Sometimes we hate incorrect usage of the word "literally" as much as we hate apathy to a billion people suffering.
The Gaia hypothesis is science fiction compared to climate catastrophe, which is real.
It actually can die but more accurately it can also become far less amenable to human thriving and kill off the majority of other species both of which appear to be happening
Doing basic math makes someone a "spreadsheet head"? If the "actual world" wanted American-made gloves then this cash injection from the government would've resulted in a boom in glove manufacturing here, no?
I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.
There are examples of species encountering such species decimating pathogens and we are in a worse position than 2020.
Any investment in such is likely to pay dividends in much less dramatic ordinary catastrophes which have occurred repeatedly and constantly.
It's probably a better investment than our military.
Those who do not learn from history... probably don't make gloves.
And in the midst of a start-stop petrochemical supply crisis.
As pointed out earlier, there is also rotation of a stockpile of gloves instead of manufacturing which reduces costs and solves the same issues.
Even things made in America were in short supply during the pandemic because workers were hard to come by as well. A factory isn’t any good if half the people to run it are sick, but it doesn’t take special training to hand out boxes of gloves.
Looks like most/all manufacturing happens in the SEA/China, so I can see the logic that it could be considered a military risk for it to not be manufactured/possibility to scale manufacturing in America.
Yes. Next question
Why is it so simple? Instead of investing billions, perhaps a stockpile is a better strategy.
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 on cost ineffective gloves 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, which still seems excessive. 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.
I wonder if they can at least create a small scale NBR factory.
The story says the US doesn't have the raw material(s): NBR. Not quite sure what that is.
NBR = nitrile butadiene rubber, a synthetic rubber. Not really a raw material, as it's synthesized.
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.
Making them? Not in the least. But being capable of making them? It's a must, be it gloves, EVs, semis, or screws.
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.
The more important part is how to make people who ask this question a permanent pariahs?
You think someone should be made a permanent pariah for suggesting medical gloves be manufactured in Malaysia or Thailand, rather than the US? Why?
The USA can make anything if there’s money in it. Right now, I just don’t think there’s any.
It should be able to. A country that can't, cannot hope to remain sovereign in anything but name, for long.
nah, you can always import from friendly nations like Denmark, Spain, Canada, Mexico..
Needs an orthogonal approach. Perhaps Elmer's glue that physician’s can dip their hands in and rinse off?
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?
:) Love the early research. It seems to me that your product could be useful, particularly since those gloves are hard to put on.
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.
Gloves are sterile wouldn't this tend to embed whatever is on the hands in the surface as it dries?
Which is fine - when you put on gloves, they just cover up whatever is on your skin in the same way.
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
Medical gloves are not sterile (outside maybe of ones specifically packaged for use in an OR).
Every glove is tested for conductivity to ensure it's not got tiny holes in, you can't do that with 'glue gloves'.
Is this the new “China can’t manufacture a ball point pen”? (Which I strongly suspect they can do at this point. :)
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.
Article says 1% of gloves are made in US, but US doesn't produce any of the rubber, so raw inputs not American.
More like the new "America can't manufacture 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.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
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.
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.
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.
That has nothing to do with the issue here, which is that the raw materials cost more because we don’t have access to the right natural resources.
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…
https://archive.is/wtC7m
Am I the only one, that can’t read the article because it requires subscription?
One of the comments provides an archive link to the story.
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.
Cheap agentic robotics can change this by decreasing the cost of labor.
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 do good price for you my Amerifriend
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.
Paywall.
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.
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 medical use. At first I thought WTF. But then they mentioned how much it sells for and I thought "Wow. We have a lot of cane toads here everywhere, it would be a great business to do here." I actually started thinking of doing this... This is really out there for me because I'm a software engineer; but I started seriously considering this. But guess what? I did my research and turns out it's illegal to do it in my country (Australia) because the frog secretions would be considered an illicit substance and you need to go through some expensive process to obtain a license. Yes, you need a license to farm frogs...
A few weeks back, I read news about someone who got arrested for farming cockroaches (as reptile food for zoos)... It's like all the entry-point business opportunities have become illegal.
Every time I heard of a case like this where some really good niche business opportunity is illegal in Australia, I asked my AI if this practice is legal in China and the answer is almost always yes.
The other day, I was watching a documentary about Philippines and I saw a kind of makeshift resort built literally on top of a coral reef. Really amazing looking. They seemed to be getting good reviews and actually making money... This would NEVER be allowed in my country. At best, you could purchase a ship for millions of dollars then apply for expensive licenses, then you'd have limits on how many people you can take at a time, etc... So many constraints and regulations. Such artificially high capital requirements. It would be a worse experience and less profitable; and you'd have to be filthy rich just to get a chance to engage in that highly constrained, mediocre business activity.
“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.
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 of "you can just do things" is surprises like a plume of smoke and the smell of burning corpses when you step outside.
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.
There are plenty of businesses that could be built under current regulations.
It might be a bit Harder, but business is difficult.
The market rewards companies that know how to play the market, and the market isn't a free market.
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.
In time, maybe? The problem is the damage done until that happens.
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.
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.
Decline and Fall of the American Empire
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...
That time is coming to an end…
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?
How would the "AI" figure out what the process is? That's non-sense.
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.