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Comment by hitpointdrew | Hacker News Reader

Mass. Governor Charlie Baker coordinated with BJ's Wholesale to get a shipment of 2M N95 masks...they were all "sized" (stolen) by the Feds. The governor then coordinated with Patriots owner Robert Kraft to use the patriots private jet to go get 1M masks. Thank goodness to the Kraft family and their support in this situation. There has been 0 transparency or audit trail with where these masks are going that the Feds are seizing. If I were Charlie Baker I would call up the National Guard and tell them to retrieve the masks that were sized by any means necessary. This is an absolute disgrace, and blatant theft by the Feds.

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They are being reallocated (with strong indications being that it's for political gain by the current administration and to help vulnerable congressional candidates) or given to private entities.

This is yet another example of something that would be the greatest or one of the greatest presidential scandals in US history, but is hardly noticeable given the background level of scandal and distraction.

edit: related example - ventilators, not ppe - with potus tweets on the matter embedded https://www.cpr.org/2020/04/08/colorado-coronavirus-ventilat... edit: other reporting on the matter https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-..., https://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/coronavirus/article241...

Respond to me, don't downvote me. Also, explain how Blue Flame Medical started and got its inventory, and how inventory from Operation Airbridge were procured/where they went.

I was little curious why Newsom wasn't wanting to release details of California's billion dollar contract for N95 masks. His office even said disclosing details could threaten the supply. It makes a lot more sense if they're afraid the government will seize them.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Gavin-Newsom-s-...

"kleptocracy" is the word you are looking for

I believe "kakistocracy" is the proper term (it encompasses kleptocracy but that is just one aspect of it.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy

Clarifying question...the "strong indications" are that the best explanation of how Blue Flame Medical acquired the inventory it boasts of is that it must be conspiring with the feds?

They seem to have little prior experience, ramped up quickly in a competitive sector, and have had extraordinary success. Perhaps they are much better than their competitors, perhaps it's just luck, or perhaps they are less successful than they are presenting. There are other explanations, but you still have to account for the federal seizures of private orders and where they are going.

It's very likely that they're less successful than they're claiming. There have been a lot of really shady businesses set up claiming to be able to provide large quantities of PPE and ripping off desperate hospital systems. If they're new to the business, most likely they're either one of those companies or are being ripped off by another supplier doing the same scam. Has anyone confirmed actual, successful purchases from them?

Prior little experience in what exactly? This is the sort of situation where those with deep rolodexes and lots of connections are able to find opportunity.

I must admit it’s never a good look when a week-old company receives a sizeable federal contract. Especially when the founders are political insiders.

There could indeed be perfectly innocent reasons - but it smells funny.

> I must admit it’s never a good look when a week-old company receives a sizeable federal contract. Especially when the founders are political insiders.

I don’t see why. A politically well-connected person (previously well-known in their circles for other successful ventures) wants to help get something done; the obvious thing for them to do is to create a new company (for legal reasons, to separate it from their other ventures) and then get people to put money / contracts into it.

See also: Herbert Hoover with Belgium (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/). Which may have more parallels here than it seems.

> Respond to me, don't downvote me.

I wish the guidelines contained a statement like, "Downvotes are for posts that don't follow these guidelines, not posts you just disagree with." Downvoting for disagreement seems equivalent to replying "Shut up."

I have never found it productive to respond to a post saying "I downvoted this because I think you're needlessly injecting toxic partisanship into your response". (I'm not entirely sure it's productive even as a meta-comment here, but I feel obligated to explain it's not just a "shut up" button.)

Let me say I made a mistake mentioning it, and I don't care about points. I really only wanted to challenge people to reply in the case they disagreed. I respect their choice not to reply, also.

I don't know what you mean by productive, but I think it's just a matter of courtesy. There's no need to convince anyone or do follow-up discussion.

They mean that it’s more likely to cost the world utility (in terms of starting a flame war, often between third parties who are neither the OP nor the downvoter) than produce any utility (by satisfying the curiosity of the downvoted person.)

Not everyone has time to articulate their disagreement and since that is often more work than was put into the original statement, not really fair to expect.

I would interpret it as a more general "nah". The author could then reflect and likely see reasons why someone would disagree.

It does have the effect of shutting them up by obscuring the comment, though.

Reasons for disagreement could be many. Doesn't seem right to shut them up and leave them to guess what the problem was.

Downvoting is for cowards.

I find 90% of downvotes are douchebags who disagree on HN. Maybe 99% on sites like reddit. It leads to an echo chamber effect. People with different points of view feel unwelcome.

I create throw-away accounts (one per device, until I clear cookies, and then a new one). I have one where literally everything I post gets a pile of downvotes. I'm assuming someone's stalking that one and using an army of bots to downvote everything I post, presumably because I offended them at some point.

I think the fix is for a downvote to require a rationale -- you need to state why you're downvoting. Poster learns what not to do. Downvoter needs to do it for a quasi-rational reason.

I mean you have to have 500 karma to down vote and they can detect bots especially if you contact admin and report it. If you require explaination it enables trolls to do the equivallent of logic bombing the discussion, requireing an asymettric amount of resources to respond and spamming the thread with meta convos.

I don't know that's why that account always gets downvoted; that's just a hypothesis. I don't know who downvotes. And I've never bothered reporting to admin.

The internet has a small set of hyperactive people. It has a larger number of people (like me) who don't bother with karma. And a huge number of people who check out and don't participate in discussions. I don't think there's much alignment between the groups, and who you want posting.

The mods / downvoters / etc. are in the hyper-active group, and on most sites, overactive mods tend to lead to echo chambers, and to a lot of people checking out. I haven't left HN because of this (I think the karma minimum for downvoting helps a lot), but I've left many web sites when they became too dumb or too one-sided.

HN hasn't yet gone stupid, but there is a strong correlation between downvotes and political alignment. I'm not so much talking about just left/right, but also libertarian, tech elitist, etc. I think 90% of whether my posts end up +10 or -2 depends on how well they align.

You're the one in the wrong place. That's reddiquette etc.

Behold, Word of God: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

> pg: I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

I honestly wish sites like HN would get rid of downvotes. It's generally only useful for generating an echo chamber. If a comment is particularly disruptive, it should just be reported. Otherwise lack of upvotes will naturally send it to the bottom of the page and comments giving reasonable responses if the comment is wrong about something are more than sufficient.

If I’m editing code and I see some code that doesn’t belong, then I delete it. Sometimes a downvote is similar. To comment further is to perpetuate a conversation which is, perhaps, better deleted.

Please don’t take offense, but that includes this post of yours. I don’t need to read this down-vote debate for the 1000th time. This entire comment chain is basically off-topic and breaks the flow of an interesting discussion.

>If I were Charlie Baker I would call up the National Guard and tell them to retrieve the masks that were sized by any means necessary. This is an absolute disgrace, and blatant theft by the Feds.

you are not the first to suggest this. and, in fact, the massachusetts national guard defended the shipment from kraft's plane to ensure it was not seized upon arrival.

by all appearances, the federal government is stealing and redirecting life saving and critical equipment on the basis of cronyism and political loyalty. this is an attack on the population of the states being stolen from.

make no mistake: just a bit further down this very road is the dissolution of the union between the states that comprise the country.

Whoa, you got a link about the NG guarding the Kraft shipment? That’s wild!

I don’t think dissolution is in the future because dissolution doesn’t make any sense for anyone. Nobody but Putin’s propagandists want to split up the American geopolitical pie, everybody wants to control the whole pie. The geopolitical conditions just don’t exist for that to happen.

Now we may see some wild intra-federal conflict, for sure, but nobody is going home with anything other than the full prize or nothing. More likely than not, Jonny Reb’s ancestors take a foolish stand and get Sherman’d just like their forefathers.

"Gov. Charlie Baker will greet the NFL team’s plane when it arrives at Logan Airport with Patriots owner Bob Kraft and Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito. From there, the state's National Guard will transport the equipment to a strategic stockpile in Marlboro"

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/02/bob-kraft-patriots-...

Trump could've federalized the national guard if he wanted to make it ugly.

Congressional Research Service: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/LSB10121.pdf

Disobeying the commander-in-chief isn't taken too lightly. FYI.

States have their own police forces as well.

Present situation's already bad. Federalising the Guard would drive it up a notch.

Link to story:

https://www.wcvb.com/article/3-million-masks-ordered-by-mass...

Edit: Removed accidental amp link.

Touchy bunch around here with all the downvotes for helping.

The coalition arranged a purchase of the masks in China, which were flown back to Massachusetts Thursday aboard a New England Patriots private plane.

non-amp link to story:

https://www.wcvb.com/article/3-million-masks-ordered-by-mass...

The same happened all over europe. European countries seizing equipment in transit toward other european countries. Even France did it (despite Macron's insistance on European cooperation).

Just to point out a distinction, this more similar to the EU as an entity seizing shipments headed to Germany or France rather than another country within Europe taking them.

To clarify: the shipment for Sweden was eventually released by France. This was clearly a snafu, but it was eventually resolved.

Only half from what I read [1]

[1] https://www.lyonmag.com/article/106690/quatre-millions-de-ma...

More details here [1]. 4 million masks from Sweden (although newspapers had initially reported they were for Sweden) were seized while stored in France. This includes 1 million that were shipped towards France, 1 million towards Switzerland, 2 millions towards Italy and Spain.

After much diplomacy, 2 millions were released. My guess is that these are the masks meant for Italy and Spain (part of the EU) and that the masks shipped outside of the EU (Switzerland) were requisitioned.

[1] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2020/04/03/la-france-a-t...

That's certainly not ideal, but still completely different. Many countries have understandably banned/slowed exporting these supplies. Some of those restrictions certainly went too far: Canada, for example, depends on US suppliers for some materials, and cutting them off completely is going to hurt them rather badly while, due to size differences, not being all that significant for the US. The same is true for some European countries. Sometimes country A depends on B for X, and B depends on A for Y. The first or second most important region for ventilator manufacturing, for example, happens to be... northern Italy!

What the Federal Government in the US is doing is something different altogether. They're confiscating material within individual states. It's not even clear why they have jurisdiction. They seem to sometimes argue from a default assumption of shipments being destined for the black market, and otherwise simply rely on raw power, FBI badges, and ill-defined emergency powers.

The Great Pumpkin is sending them to rustbelt states and donor companies to setup for November. The exact where doesn't matter.

The "exact where" matters in that our governmental institutions should act with transparency and that we should act on facts.

I agree that it should matter. I just meant we don't need to know what warehouse it is in to know it was stolen for reelection purposes. It's disgusting, people are dying directly because of this behaviour.

When you say 'theft', did someone pay for and then not receive the supplies?

Yes, these were paid in advance by MA. There have been dozens of similar reports. Nobody is currently shipping anything without up-front payment.

Here's a detailed account from a hospital administrator in the New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2010025 (Edit: did the linked article change? Anyway: the up-front payment is described in the article, that I somehow managed to link here again).

This one ends well. Others didn't.

Note that this isn't about the money. It's literally life-saving equipment.

The Federal Government has to either take responsibility, take over all purchasing, and distribute the material in a transparent, need-based process.

OR it can tell the states to each do their own thing. They'll outbid each other and end up paying far more than necessary, many will buy more than needed to be on the safe side because the political risk is highly asymmetrical. It's a stupid way to do this, and it will cost lives (and money). But, unlike testing, it's not totally impossible.

What the Federal Administration can't do is tell the states do buy their own supplies, then intercept any shipments and... well, nobody really seems to know what they're doing with it.

The best-case scenario for what's happening is probably just incompetence. If, in six months or so, a gigantic stash of PPE is found in some warehouse, people in the administration will point to that as vindication: see! we didn't intentionally kill anybody.

Second best scenario: Are they giving it back to commercial resellers that happen to be golf buddies with the son-in-law, who then get to sell the same shipment several times? Somehow, commercial distributors seem to be involved. We'll hopefully find out about the why and how in due course.

Nightmare scenario: if the narrative about conservative and swing states receiving far more, both in terms of population as well as disease burden, than blue states turns out to be true... I don't know what happens? That's so far beyond the pale it would never even be considered possible in normal times.

I mean...I don't have a link to back this up, and would be happy to be corrected, but my understanding was that your "Nightmare Scenario" is already known to be verifiably true, and possibly even explicitly stated as intentional by Trump himself. (Though I'll certainly grant that "stated by Trump" and "verifiably true" do not have a particularly high positive correlation.)

I was hedging a bit...

Even assuming it's true, it might actually be preferable to allow them to come up with some face-saving "clerical error" and reverse course. That's assuming they are at least somewhat spooked by these stories coming out now and have belatedly realised the trouble they are in otherwise. Yes, I know that isn't likely to happen.

That's not because I have any sympathy –- it's the rare occasion where every fibre of my being is yearning for the pitchfork. It's like the logic where you catch your spouse cheating, and they kinda know they were caught. But you somehow muddle your way through with even implausible deniability because you both want the relationship to survive and the standard playbook just doesn't allow that.

Assuming it's true, the normal result, and the only result that would allow reconciliation, would be impeachment/resignation and criminal prosecution. The charge is somewhere between thousand-fold negligent homicide up to (but not including) something not entirely unlike Genocide?

But given recent experience, none of that would happen. Imagine Biden becoming President and a second or third wave hitting in early 2021. Then what? People will be out for blood. Would the new admin have the grace and political capital to resist calls for retribution? Or would that just be seen as rolling over, chumps doing good-governance as if nothing had happened, setting themselves up for even worse next time around?

This is a road that leads to only very dark places.

> That's so far beyond the pale it would never even be considered possible in normal times.

Isn't this the other way around? Allocating government resources to swing districts and party constituencies is politics as usual, with typically no real exceptions even for life-saving resources like funding for emergency services.

What's unusual is to see it happening in the middle of a crisis when that is usually the sort of thing to bring people together and put aside party differences. But that's what happens when you destroy all the moderates and make everything into a tribal war.

Absolutely. The Massachusetts tax payers paid for those masks. The Feds stole them. Massachusetts didn't get a reimbursement check for the "seized" masks.

This I think is still the wildest story out of this entire ordeal.

When you say the Feds, I am finding it hard to believe they even have the capability locally (logistically/politically) to pull this off...doesn't make sense.

Maybe a couple of areas there is an over enthusiastic Trumper in a Fed office...but I doubt many have the balls to tell Governors to fuck off. They have to continue to live in those states you know...

They don't have to tell the governors anything. Federal agents seized the PPE that MA had sourced when it was in transit. No "balls" required.

On what grounds are they being seized... ?? This is absolutely theft and the FBI and DHS need to be prosecuted and hopefully sued individually.

Nothing about the FBI/DHS charter allows them to commit crimes.

"The federal government has dropped the ball when it comes to this epidemic and needs to show more leadership".

-Feds seize and take over PPE procurements and distribution-

"Why did you steal my masks?"

See, I know you think you are being clever, but you're not. Here is the problem.

The fed has dropped the ball already. It needs to show more leadership going forward. The time for the fed seizing PPE procurement and distribution has already passed though, at least in the way they are doing it. The only thing they are doing is taking PPE that is needed now and keeping it away from those that expect to get it.

Basically, the fed are putting on seat belts after the car crash.

My comment was more about the grandstanding and politicizing of the epidemic.

It doesn’t really matter what choices were made, if either political party can score points, they will do it.

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