Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

The article seems to be making misleading claims to make a questionable design sound more beneficial in numeric terms than it actually is.

The first words you see in the article are:

    > The current cost of buying 1,000 camp beds for a refugee camp is $110,000 to $220,000, it takes two weeks to produce them, another two weeks to ship them (by land or sea) and 24 hours to set them up. By comparison, 1,000 Humanitaria beds cost $17,000, can be produced in hours on existing, readily-available packaging machinery in every major city in the world, delivered folded flat by plane next day and can be set up in 20 minutes.

24 hours vs 20 minutes makes me think they are not comparing apples to apples. Either they are comparing the time it takes to set up 1000 beds with that of a single one or they are claiming the total setup time for these beds from flat pack to usable is 1.2s.

And 1000 camp beds in 24 hours is only 1.4 minutes per bed. Elsewhere in the article they say that “A single person can set up 70 beds in an hour”, which is 51 seconds, not so far off from the camp bed figure.

Also, why on earth would we be manufacturing new beds for each new occupant in every case? Tube and canvas camp beds are durable and reusable. Just because these beds necessarily can only be used when brand new and must be discarded after doesn’t mean you get to assume the same negative qualities for the thing you are comparing against.

The $100-200 claimed wholesale price for camp cots is also an order of magnitude off reality, as a few seconds browsing alibaba can confirm.

This is the worst kind of credulous “behold the power of design!” puff piece, complete with an insulting comment questioning the intelligence of the people at humanitarian agencies that this work is supposed to benefit:

    > In fact, the beds used by NGOs all over the world are still camping beds with an average price between €100 and €200 (US$110 to $220) EACH, and because no-one had ever looked at it logically before, they take between five and 20 minutes each to assemble and are not suitable for transport in large quantities.

Humanitarian work should be praised, but not if it’s counterproductive self-congratulation.

From past experience, NGOs are rarely buying the cheapest things available off Alibaba. They tend to work with large, enterprise-y vendors, which certainly don't charge that way (regardless of the ultimate source of the goods).

Also, this piece is specifically about the resources that are used in the initial 24-48h of deployment, when the camp beds are still sitting in a warehouse half a continent away. If you can use closest packaging factory to pump out designs within hours of the disaster, that's actually really useful.

> From past experience, NGOs are rarely buying the cheapest things available off Alibaba. They tend to work with large, enterprise-y vendors, which certainly don't charge that way (regardless of the ultimate source of the goods).

Of course. Did you think NGOs were there to benefit others? That is just words. They take a more administrative role for managing things - but do so with a charitable status, to lessen the tax burden. Look at any of these foundations - Bill and Melinda Gates, or whatever - these organisations are simply undertaking the preparatory work, to assist greater corporate control.

It's mostly militaries and NGOs like the Red Cross that handle rapid disaster response, so I think clarifying that NGOs don't buy random stuff off AliExpress is a valid response to someone asking why they're paying more than AliExpress prices.

The AliExpress comment is meant to be indicative of the approximate global wholesale price for the type of product being compared against. The article claims it’s as much as $200 at quantities of 1000, which simply is not true in the real world, where it is more like $10-20.

If it’s an innovation to be able to provide a cardboard bed at a production cost of $17 each, then surely it would also be worthwhile in some cases for NGOs to consider cutting their cost base even lower for a more reusable product.

Its a virtue signalling advertisement for a cardboard bed subscription service to these NGOs. Just give people durable beds. The cardboard beds would be broken after the first use. Just more garbage. Not very eco. Like you said, tube and canvas beds are durable and can be reused. What those cardboard bed makers are after is a subscription service.

Subscription services and charities looking for the minimal definition of "bed". Countless charities will buy these and then claim to be "buying X beds to refugees". After some creative accounting a flatpack of cardboard, or an online order for a flatpack of cardboard, will become a thousand-dollar tax deduction for donating a "bed" to some refugee fund. If any are ever actually delivered, i suspect they will be put to better use as kindling.

>Also, why on earth would we be manufacturing new beds for each new occupant in every case?

I can think of multiple scenarios: disaster relief is often staged in temporary regions where the most important thing - once the humans have rested - is to evacuate the region, and - also important, leave the beds behind, i.e. pandemic situations, mass casualty events, etc.

In addition, it should not be overlooked that the beds can be used as an energy source, so if you air-drop 100 of them to a camp site with 10 victims and 15 responders, they also have something to feed into the kettles while they triage/evacuate.

>Tube and canvas camp beds are durable and reusable.

In certain response scenarios, this is a liability - i.e. have to be portaged in and out. These cardboard beds could probably survive rather a longer fall from the back of a helicopter or out the back of a speeding emergency response vehicle.

>Humanitarian work should be praised, but not if it’s counterproductive self-congratulation.

I'm not sure the depth of your critique of this device matches the breadth of its potential application - the extension of which is, after all, the purpose of these kinds of "puff piece"'s .. but I would like to point out that insulting comments are a dime a dozen - whereas a creative conjecture might actually prove a bit more fruitful - especially in the humanitarian context.

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