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Comment by tosser0001 | Hacker News Reader

I was certain by this point in the crisis we'd be seeing video akin to WWII/"Rosie the Riveter" stuff of PPE flowing out of factories around the country.

Is the U.S.A. simply not capable of this level of production any longer? What the heck is going on? It's sobering.

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It seems to be happening at the individual state level, but without smarter coordination between states there's a lot being left on the table.

WWII had the benefit of an extent Works Progress Administration [1] that had lot of power to swing jobs between and among states. It also had a lot of little powers that added up, like the Federal Arts Project (FAP) that pulled together the artists to create such works of art as "Rosie the Riveter" to motivate.

Maybe little things like a Federal Dank Memes Project could help in a time like this, maybe not. The "Rosie the Riveter" equivalent memes are out there, in some states, scattered and crowd sourced to social media. That more states don't even realize what their neighbors are up to in mobilizing PPE is itself a failure in coordination at the Federal level.

As we get through this we're probably going to need to talk a lot about renewing the New Deal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

I work at Nike and we've already retooled our major local factory to making PPE but it's all going to local hospitals at this point I believe so there hasn't been any big national news about it. I feel like this is probably happening elsewhere as well.

The USA is capable, they just lack the leadership in Washington to do so.

The implementation of disaster federalism

It certainly sows doubt when I see things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9lchhBE7cE

Taiwan increased their production of N95 masks from 100,000/day earlier this year to over 20 million/day now.

Asia can build N95 plants, starting with concrete foundations, in <14 days and 3M hasn't managed to start up any new production lines in existing facilities since announcing them nearly a month ago.

I'd like to imagine this is primarily a leadership issue. I'd like to think that if money was given to the right highly motivated people that it wouldn't matter than "we don't have melt blown fabric machines" because we could design and manufacture them from scratch in our machine shops.

Sometimes though, I do worry about a potential domestic shortage of skilled machinists and manufacturers. And of our ability to allocate either public or private capital to the right entities during national emergencies. I'd imagine $10 million could go pretty far right now, but I haven't heard of any millionaires trying to work outside of the capitalist systems by building something philanthropically. I also haven't seen anyone try to crowdsource money for some plants here.

It took a while for the US to get the war production really going during the war. Logistics and production was a mess in 1942 and it wasn’t really until 1944 that they were pumping out dozens of carriers and hundreds of liberty ships a year.

The US completed 542 liberty ships in 1942, and 1943 was their peak production year: https://www.mathscinotes.com/2018/05/liberty-ship-production...

They reduced liberty ship production in 1944 to produce warships (which are more complex and were produced in much lower numbers)

We seem to have spent an amazing percentage of that energy on spooling up ventilator manufacturing instead. Most of that capacity will be ready once the crisis is well beyond its peak.

I also do not understand why we weren't able to scale basic PPE quickly.

Because retooling is expensive and time consuming. And there is no guarantee how long this level of demand will sustain. And no guarantees on cheap chinese goods flooding the market and taking all your customers in a few months.

This is an incredibly easy problem to solve, relative to the current crisis: it only requires the federal government allocate enough money.

There is some price per mask at which the N95 respirator manufacturers that currently exist in the US would be willing to hire more people, buy more supplies, etc and start running 24/7. The only reason they aren't already is because nobody has agreed to pay for it.

From what I've heard, the US federal government agreed contracts fairly early on in the crisis where they'd buy up any excess US production of N95 masks that goes unsold in order to guarantee a market for exactly this reason.

We subsidize American agriculture because its important. We should do the same for other industries. I'm not sorry public services and concepts like this fly in the face of economic ideology that profit motive is the end-all be-all.

> And no guarantees on cheap chinese goods flooding the market and taking all your customers in a few months.

You might could fix that with strong tariffs. There was a guy recently, can’t remember his name, who was very much in favor of domestic manufacturing and tariffs against China. Seemed to catch a lot of flak for those policies! Wish I could remember who that was...

Bingo. It's amazing, this could have been the shining moment for his platform. Give domestic mask manufacturers immediate long-term federal contracts and a promise of significant tariffs when the dust settles. Instead he denied the problem even existed, encouraged people to get infected, and delayed our response by six weeks.

Does anyone know why these shortages haven't been sorted out? I don't work in manufacturing but aren't these things relatively simple to manufacture? We have factories and employees that are sitting idle, why can't they be repurposed to manufacture these en masse? It would resolve our supply issues while providing employment. Am I missing something?

I don't really understand why the existence of a "factory" means it can produce arbitrary product in any meaningful fashion in a short period of time.

Well it is happening [0,1,2], just not at the scale I would expect when you consider the fact that a large portion of our economy is at a standstill. You would think it would be all hands on deck when there are trillions of dollars on the line. And like the GP pointed out, we've achieved things that are magnitudes more difficult when it comes to quickly repurposing our industry when the situation calls for it.

[0]: https://news.nike.com/news/nike-ppe-face-shields-covid-19-su... [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211028 [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/15/21222219/general-motors-v...

You need the right machines. In the factory. A cnc lathe is no use. The large collection of jigs for whatever they made before don't help.

They can get the right machines and jigs but that means making them which takes time. They you need the right materials, you aluminum supply chain isn't helpful (unless they retool to make your raw materials...)

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