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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a conversation I had with someone in the pharmaceutical industry. He lamented that the box was by far the most expensive component for many of their products. Paracetamol is cheap, glossy full-colour printing with embossing is not!

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Related: a lot of drug shortages right now are driven by shortages of package inserts. That page of printed instructions, warnings, etc is often sourced from China, so even if the drug is manufactured in America, and the delivery device is manufactured in Europe or Mexico or something, you can't sell it without that folded packet of finely printed paper that basically nobody reads.

That sounds like the easiest thing in the world to source elsewhere on short notice. High-quality printing services exist literally everywhere in the world. What am I missing?

There has actually be a pretty significant general paper shortage over the last two years due to difficulties sourcing the raw materials. Not sure if that's the root cause for the issue mentioned here but I'd bet it contributed to it.

To make a completely uneducated guess, probably recertifications from a change in bill of materials? These are medical drugs we're talking about.

A change like that shouldn't be a big deal. A meeting to decide whether or not it constitutes a Design Change (it doesn't!) and if the new insert needs to be Validated again (likely not) and you're pretty much done from a Compliance standpoint and on to Vendor Qualification.

My guess is that the problem is more likely to be finding a vendor that can print/cut to your specification at the scale you need and, critically, who can produce it on your schedule. Any capable printer is likely already booked solid for months.

If it was a real problem I dare say they could ship with loose leaf pages detailing everything nobody reads.

Assuming they fit into the existing manufacturing process, sure. But that still doesn't solve the problem of finding a printer to print those millions of pages.

It sounds like it should be easy? Do you remember the TP shortage of 2020? That also sounded easy.

The scale makes it hard.

What makes you think toilet paper manufacture is equivalent to printing?

It involves a supply of specialty paper.

Ding ding ding! Got it in one

It's not as cheap as the stockholders want it to be in the US.

Probably true.

Better to keep profit margins up than actually make revenue.

You're assuming that there are high-quality, high-volume print suppliers with slack time / idle machinery. I wouldn't be so sure. And even then, existing literally everywhere in the world now becomes a problem of finding them.

You're doing something VERY wrong if you don't read whatever is written on your pill's instructions!

It depends on the medicine! For example, I have a medicine that I take regularly, and to reduce the amount of doctor visits, my doctor just prescribes me several months of medicine in one giant box.

The box contains smaller boxes of the medicine and they all come with the same description paper - all 30 boxes! I have read that paper 100 times already, there is no need for me to read it anymore.

Medicine inserts were my reading material at the bathroom before smartphones were invented.

Most people take familiar medcine. I won't read the instructions in the n+1th pack of ibuprofen I'm buying.

Kind of yes, but you usually either a) get instructions from the doctor, or b) have already read the instructions for this drug before.

Instructions? Sure. But those inserts also can include lots of information on pharmacokinetics and far more technical details about the drug's method of action.

I need to know when/how to take the drug, for how long, and what side-effects to look out for. Basically the rest is irrelevant to me.

Friend works for a company who does various networking things. They’re losing big long-term contracts because the super-enterprise RJ45 network jacks they sell aren’t available.

Where is the benefit in super-enterprise rj45 connectors?

They are demanded by the people ticking boxes at the kind of super-enterprises that buy super-enterprise rj45 connectors.

It’s obviously ludicrous and I can’t remember the specifics except it seemed very different from my efforts at crimping a cable.

A brief search alerts me to the presence of Cat 6A to Cat 8 shielded pass-through design with triple prong gold plated contacts, supporting POE++. Does your connector have integrated magnetics? Led indicators? Are they ruggedised? No? You’re losing out.

Here you go:

https://www.truecable.com/blogs/cable-academy/selecting-the-...

https://www.cuidevices.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-rj45-c...

> Where is the benefit in super-enterprise rj45 connectors?

They're super.

And more importantly, they are enterprise!

Honest question: is it really so hard to manufacture these inserts in the US?

No, not really. But the margins aren't great, and you've got to allocate the manufacturing capacity to make the paper, which takes time.

It's not hard but it's much cheaper to do it abroad, even after factoring in shipping.

Last or year-before-last's container shortage + Evergrande shook that one up though.

Once you did the initial capital investment, no.

I read it.

This blew my mind when going into hardware.

People be proud as hell of their box businesses!

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