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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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