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Comment by trebligdivad | Hacker News Reader

That might have been a bargain if you could have done it during peak Covid. Having the capability to make them is worth a lot in resilience.

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Who’s paying to bring online a factory that sites idle just in case? Are you also paying workers to sit there idle?

The logical thing is that the government buys them continually at the higher price which justifies the existence of the factory with the requirement that it is made here and if this is not sufficient motivation you make buying something more buying something profitable contingent

Like the Jones act but for gloves

Well I wouldn't pay for it to be idle; if you want to ensure you have the ability to do it, then you buy some proportion of it's potential output at their increased costs; but while that's happening you work on all the reasons it's more expensive.

Things like paying the workers a livable wage?

Or stockpile a two year supply. You can get a lot with a billion dollars.

Stockpiles of masks and gloves where maintained in Canada, and I believe the US after SARS.

But a year before COVID, these warehouses were shut down, as the stockpiles were old, and needed a refresh, and politicians didnt see the need to spend tens of millions on new stockpiles.

The has happened several times over the last 100 years.

Republicans didn't see the need to be precise

In California they were set up by Schwarzenegger and dismantled by Jerry Brown in 2011 to save 1.7 million per year.

“When the Department of Finance was looking at this, they asked a question: ‘How many times have the mobile field hospitals been used since we bought them?’ ” he said. “That was the same question they asked (the Public Health Department). ‘You’re not using it, why do we have it?’ ”

https://revealnews.org/article/california-created-a-massive-...

Seems the decision to deprioritize n95s was done by the Obama administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile

This is a congressional decision not a presidential obe and it was done after the dems lost the majority because of the incllination towards austerity that always develops when a dem is president. Would you like to go over exactly what republican votes led to this?

Yes, please do so. Because there's plenty of Democrat majority Congresses in that time range that chose to not renew the supply

Let's party like its 2009 We're dealing with the aftermath of the morgage crisis due in no small part to the legal and regulatory environment of 2001-2007 under George Bush. We are also dealing with the swine flu pandemic which is what actually depletes our strategic supplies in the first place.

By Mid 2010 we pass with great contention and argument both Dodd Frank and the ACA. By August we could finally declare the swine flu pandemic over and congress is worrying about their campaigns and the 2011 budget.

This would have been a good time to get the job done and indeed this was tried. They couldn't get the 60 needed to pass the senate in order to pass the 2011 budget and indeed no budget was passed we instead relies on continuing resolutions to fund the government at current levels which left no funds for the mission and no real time for some standalone effort. Fortunately we have 9 more years before this becomes a crisis.

2011-2018 Republicans controlled congress. In 2017,2018 Republicans controlled congress AND the presidency. In 2019 dems finally got congress back but couldn't do shit by virtue of Trump.

It's weird that you put this on the Dems when it is so so clearly a Republican fumble like the entire rest of the pandemic.

These things expire you know, for latex gloves it's only 3 years.

The US already has their Strategic National Stockpile for medicines.

Shorter expirations are managed by constantly selling the old to the domestic industry and purchasing new, like China does for grain and frozen meat while simultaneously being able to keep the market more stable by selling high and buying low. Switzerland has a lot of stockpiles, even including coffee[0], which the companies also go through FIFO.

0: "The 15 big Swiss coffee retailers, roasters and importers, such as Nestlé, are required by law to store heaps of raw coffee. Together, these mandated coffee reserves amount to about 15,000 tonnes—enough for three months’ consumption. The government finances the storage costs through a levy on imports of coffee. All 15 companies are in favour of maintaining the coffee reserve—as long as they are paid for it." Economist 2019

To be clear, I think a plan like that makes a ton of sense, because the only costs you have are the ongoing storage and admin costs, and in the grand scheme of things a big warehouse to store a 6 month rotating supply of PPE would have huge potential benefit and would also be a rounding error compared to things like the Iran war. I was just objecting to the idea that you buy "a billion dollars" worth of gloves because that's not a sensible or sane solution.

You could rotate the inventory. Normally companies try to minimize inventory, but someone could pay them to keep six month’s or a year’s supply as a buffer.

It depends on the rationale. If the intent is self-reliance in the event of a trade war (or worse) with China, then even a year's buffer isn't enough to bootstrap home manufacturing from scratch.

It needs to be in-service and available before any serious conflict.

Maybe, combined with a buffer, there need to be plans in place to get a factory up and running in six months? Or it could be running at a low level with plans to scale in six months.

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