The later form was part of the design from the beginning: relying on imports for something this critical in times of an epidemic was a supply chain risk. It was never intended to compete in terms of pricing.
It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
Agree. The problem is over extended lengths of time the people with the skills to make these things—or make tools that make them—will leave the workforce.
That's how this goes from being a market issue to a skill issue.
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.
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
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.
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.
The article mentions access to NBR latex being an issue, but doesn’t explain that this is less commonly produced in America because they produces much more shale gas these days which doesn’t result in enough butadiene needed. So the most important supply chain to build the product is mostly coming out of Asian and European crackers. Giving an advantage to the Malaysian factories on top of the other lower costs of business there.
Which makes you wonder why the government thought it was a feasible investment or if they didn’t care and hand waved it with ‘national security’.
Nice comment. And to me this just points out that due to specialization, you’re probably always going to be higher cost on something. But that’s not necessarily bad
How are these types of awards usually structured? Are they just grants? If so, doesn't that create a perverse incentive to take the money even if you never intend to deliver the result?
Interestingly govspending says only $8.7 million of the $10 million award has been outlayed but I guess it's possible it just doesn't have the outlay info for the $123 million contract?
I think the contract type is a 'firm fixed-price definitive contract' but what happens when the contractor doesn't manage to create the production capability in the contract?
I found a FOIA request on muckrock[3] but it didn't seem to have anything related to the contract in terms of penalties.
Asian manufacturing will continue to undercut Western manufacturing on cost due to the absence of safety culture and the spending that comes with it. The value of human life is higher in the West, and the manufacturing costs reflect that.
Asking this question only a handful of years after a global pandemic...
If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE.
And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.
As pointed out earlier, there is also rotation of a stockpile of gloves instead of manufacturing which reduces costs and solves the same issues.
Even things made in America were in short supply during the pandemic because workers were hard to come by as well. A factory isn’t any good if half the people to run it are sick, but it doesn’t take special training to hand out boxes of gloves.
You don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.
Why would this even be so. It's not magic it's just people doing stupid people things often to maximize short term factors. It only gets long-term planning insofar as embedded agents do. One of the things agents do is use incentives to inspire behaviour that is conta individuals short term incentives to achieve behaviour that contributes to long-term success.
Not only are many individual agents aligned with short term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.
It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us.
Our planet is literally dying.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
It actually can die but more accurately it can also become far less amenable to human thriving and kill off the majority of other species both of which appear to be happening
Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might.
In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature.
It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see.
Doing basic math makes someone a "spreadsheet head"? If the "actual world" wanted American-made gloves then this cash injection from the government would've resulted in a boom in glove manufacturing here, no?
I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.
Looks like most/all manufacturing happens in the SEA/China, so I can see the logic that it could be considered a military risk for it to not be manufactured/possibility to scale manufacturing in America.
Someone already decided US should. The important question is whether 1B should have gotten the job done, and if not... is it matter of throwing good $$$ after bad $$$... or is it just bad sign 1B wasn't enough.
It's all a question of price, based on the article. And not planning how much it takes to start up. In any case it's also not feasible to keep a plant on standby, just in case you need it one day.
The issue is that domestic sources of NBR are few because of the type of petroleum extraction we do here. This makes the cost of NBR relatively high and consequently makes the gloves pricey compared to imported ones. We can definitely make.a glove but no one wants to buy them.
That would be a good thing for you to research to build an understanding for the scale of what you are simplifying. Here's a start; just alone during a rather non-pandemic of 2020-2022 the USA alone used about 1.8 billion, with a B, gloves per week ... week.
So 1 billion dollars buys about 8 billion gloves? Or about 4 weeks? So for 12 billion dollars that's a years slack?
I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money on cost ineffective gloves just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment.
The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem.
So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost, which still seems excessive. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.
Some of my early research (elementary school) suggested that certain glues can form a peelable, skin-like layer. Maybe that could be a promising way forward?
I did the same research in elementary school! My parents were my seed investors. They asked for 25% of equity - all I ended up giving them was some collectible artwork for the fridge.
Ballpoint pen tips was proxy Li Keqiang used to shame PRC industry to build precision micromachining capabilities (tungsten carbide for high-end munitions etc), TISCO did it in like a year and it upgraded entire PRC metallurgy chain. US struggling to make 100% indigenized gloves 5+ years after covid... is well maybe not something new relative to US industrial decline, but certainly something else. I'm sure US can... but at what cost and all that.
The article states some of the companies successfully made gloves, but customers such as hospitals considered the prices too high, which is why they're looking to the federal government to be the primary customer now.
More like the new "America can't manufacture a grill scrubber" [1].
For those who haven't seen the video, YouTuber Destin Sandlin ("Smarter every day") tried to build a grill scrubber using 100% materials from the US and failed.
You have to separate the YouTube clickbait from the real learning content in there.
US manufacturing is expensive because wages are high, but also because we focus on the high end work that pays more . Even the small machine shops I used 10 years ago for small scale production runs are no longer interested in doing any small batch work. They have more contract work from big companies than they can handle, and the big companies pay more and have higher order quantities.
If you’re a shop or a factory in the US you’re never going to take some small orders for a grill brush from some YouTuber who doesn’t have any expertise in marketing grill brushes. Everyone is going to turn that order down because there’s no money or future in it, but there’s plenty of better work that pays better from companies who want to keep using your services in the future.
The claim he failed seems like hyperbole. He couldn't find an existing manufacturer for chainmail in the US but this is a fairly trivial and niche thing to create, and is more a reflection of how uncommon it is for people to need that specific type and size of chain mail than it is that the US is incapable of making it. The other part is from Costa Rica only bc he hasn't yet made the injection mold for it, like he did for the handle itself.
I disagree with that conclusion: even if the chainmail were indeed very uncommon (no idea), getting it from China was so easy that he even got it when actively trying to avoid it. And since the chainmail is the revolutionary part of the idea (and the most expensive part) it might as well be the product.
He set out to get "100% made in the USA", settled for "no part made in China", and couldn't even get that. That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
> That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
The US manufacturing industry moved on to better paying, more stable contracts because they could.
They have no incentive to do niche things for small time YouTubers who won’t be generating repeat business.
Even the small machine shops I know now have more high paying work than they can handle. They’re just interested in doing some niche temporary work in a race to the bottom with another country that can pay workers a fraction as much and ignore all of the health and safety regulations.
One interesting point is that China "can't" (more like "is significantly behind on") manufacture jet engines -- the blades are the sticking point, they are ridiculously engineered.
Whether the US can make "gloves" is actually less interesting than whether the US even has the technical ability, infrastructure, and knowledge to spin up a glove factory in an emergency. Just like drones, batter tech, etc. Another area where the current admin is failing, and putting our country behind China.
In most of the west, technically talented people are fully subjugated to suits so I'm not surprised.
Sometimes, there are brief moments when technical people are given the control they need to deliver... But after a few years, they are again subjugated to MBAs in suits again and the capacity is lost.
I see this constantly nowadays. As a technical person, there are many companies/roles where the constraints set you up for failure from the beginning. I've delivered some very complex projects but I've also worked at jobs on far simpler projects where I knew since day 1 that the project wouldn't pan out due to counter-productive technical constraints being imposed... but you know the company is well positioned in the financial system and that the outcome won't matter; so you take the job anyway. You still get the high pay and the prestige from the brand name. There are many companies like this where people seem to keep failing upwards and stock price always goes up.
Shouldn't free market reward companies that go the other way and where people don't "fail upwards"? It is kind of demoralising to think otherwise, but it seems it is true.
We see it everywhere. Bad companies making bad decisions keep surviving, and actually the vast majority of companies are like this.
One implication is that MBAs in suits that make bad decisions are actually right and their decisions are not bad. The other implication is that there is no free market, no meritocracy and the truth is, game was rigged from the start.
Edit: I should add that most of this is anegdotal evidence and a general feeling I have. It is not a very powerful argument I'm making.
I agree, a free market would work that way... Yet 'fail upwards' and zombie companies seem to be the default. Personally I don't believe that what we have in the west is a free market. I think these days, it's probably less free than the one in China. The market here is completely smothered by regulations.
For example, about a month ago, I saw a video about people farming frogs in China... To collect secretions for medical use. At first I thought WTF. But then they mentioned how much it sells for and I thought "Wow. We have a lot of cane toads here everywhere, it would be a great business to do here." I actually started thinking of doing this... This is really out there for me because I'm a software engineer; but I started seriously considering this. But guess what? I did my research and turns out it's illegal to do it in my country (Australia) because the frog secretions would be considered an illicit substance and you need to go through some expensive process to obtain a license. Yes, you need a license to farm frogs...
A few weeks back, I read news about someone who got arrested for farming cockroaches (as reptile food for zoos)... It's like all the entry-point business opportunities have become illegal.
Every time I heard of a case like this where some really good niche business opportunity is illegal in Australia, I asked my AI if this practice is legal in China and the answer is almost always yes.
The other day, I was watching a documentary about Philippines and I saw a kind of makeshift resort built literally on top of a coral reef. Really amazing looking. They seemed to be getting good reviews and actually making money... This would NEVER be allowed in my country. At best, you could purchase a ship for millions of dollars then apply for expensive licenses, then you'd have limits on how many people you can take at a time, etc... So many constraints and regulations. Such artificially high capital requirements. It would be a worse experience and less profitable; and you'd have to be filthy rich just to get a chance to engage in that highly constrained, mediocre business activity.
I like your moxie and I also agree Australia is an over-regulated racket... but I'm also glad my neighbours aren't mass farming frogs or cockroaches in my suburb without talking to the council first.
My brother had a neighbour build a crematorium next door in NZ; not an industrial or rural area, just the suburbs, no permits, no consultation, no notification. Very entrepreneurial. They got shut down but the flip side of "you can just do things" is surprises like a plume of smoke and the smell of burning corpses when you step outside.
“Overhead to starting businesses” is not the only metric to take into account though. I’m not going to defend any given regulation necessarily, but your ad reductum fallacy is to think that’s the ONLY factor that must be considered. Consumer protection, environmental protection, worker protection, etc, etc, all can and should be taken into account in the calculus for regulations. Besides, many problems with starting a business come from monopolistic practices, not regulation, and reducing regulations will just make it cheaper for the mega corporation to keep their monopoly, at the cost of all these other factors.
So anyone who just goes “grr, regulation bad”, I can’t take seriously. If you have specific examples of regulations that are objectively bad, and should be removed, that’s fine, but the examples you cited protect something else, and ignoring that is intellectually dishonest at best, and blatantly partisan at worst.
I wonder whether with AI we will be able to document more efficiently all of the nuances of production so if we need to ramp up a forgotten process we can do it faster.
There is so much domain expertise that exists in production that is not documented, because who has time for writing documentation when your floor is on fire.
But if writing documentation is something free and can be automated (maybe from the company internal comms), maybe we have a chance?
The article headline makes it seem like the factories couldn't make the gloves.
But further down it says that the cost was double and factories couldn't get buyers.
These are very different failure modes, and speak to very different solutions.
Exactly, the article also mentions "Only about 1% of those used in the US are made domestically".
It's already being done so it seems more a cost related issue than lack of knowledge.
One sounds incapable from a skill perspective, the other is incapable from a market perspective. I’ll take the later over the former any day.
The later form was part of the design from the beginning: relying on imports for something this critical in times of an epidemic was a supply chain risk. It was never intended to compete in terms of pricing.
It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
Once the epidemic was over, stakeholders forgot about the original motives.
Also, the stakeholders decided the epidemic was a hoax in the first place.
Good thing the country isn't run by shareholders.
Note that a federal jobs program has something like 60-80% support by voters across all political spectrums in the USA.
Agree. The problem is over extended lengths of time the people with the skills to make these things—or make tools that make them—will leave the workforce.
That's how this goes from being a market issue to a skill issue.
Over time, the latter becomes the former.
Only for a time until the market conditions improve. Humans are incredibly talented and we have a knack for picking up skills.
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.
Who’s paying to bring online a factory that sites idle just in case? Are you also paying workers to sit there idle?
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.
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
Or stockpile a two year supply. You can get a lot with a billion dollars.
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.
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
Seems the decision to deprioritize n95s was done by the Obama administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile
The article mentions access to NBR latex being an issue, but doesn’t explain that this is less commonly produced in America because they produces much more shale gas these days which doesn’t result in enough butadiene needed. So the most important supply chain to build the product is mostly coming out of Asian and European crackers. Giving an advantage to the Malaysian factories on top of the other lower costs of business there.
Which makes you wonder why the government thought it was a feasible investment or if they didn’t care and hand waved it with ‘national security’.
In cases of emergency, like COVID, is butadiene supply limited or for the right price the US, and in general, the world, could get enough butadiene ?
Nice comment. And to me this just points out that due to specialization, you’re probably always going to be higher cost on something. But that’s not necessarily bad
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040615/what-are-eco...
https://archive.is/wtC7m
How are these types of awards usually structured? Are they just grants? If so, doesn't that create a perverse incentive to take the money even if you never intend to deliver the result?
You can see the two awards on govspending. [1][2]
Interestingly govspending says only $8.7 million of the $10 million award has been outlayed but I guess it's possible it just doesn't have the outlay info for the $123 million contract?
I think the contract type is a 'firm fixed-price definitive contract' but what happens when the contractor doesn't manage to create the production capability in the contract?
I found a FOIA request on muckrock[3] but it didn't seem to have anything related to the contract in terms of penalties.
[1][$123.1 million] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA850521C0005_970...
https://www.highergov.com/contract/FA850521C0005/
https://g2xchange.com/app/awards/contracts/CONT_AWD_FA850521...
[2][$10 million] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75A50525C00001_75...
[3] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/con...
No way! That would be a handout.
Asian manufacturing will continue to undercut Western manufacturing on cost due to the absence of safety culture and the spending that comes with it. The value of human life is higher in the West, and the manufacturing costs reflect that.
A very important question to ask.
Should the US make medical gloves?
Asking this question only a handful of years after a global pandemic...
If the next pandemic is 50% deadly, not being able to make gloves is surely the canary in the coal mine proving we wouldn't be able to make any other PPE.
And no country can rely on another if it's do or die. Other blocs will keep to themselves.
As pointed out earlier, there is also rotation of a stockpile of gloves instead of manufacturing which reduces costs and solves the same issues.
Even things made in America were in short supply during the pandemic because workers were hard to come by as well. A factory isn’t any good if half the people to run it are sick, but it doesn’t take special training to hand out boxes of gloves.
And in the midst of a start-stop petrochemical supply crisis.
Those who do not learn from history... probably don't make gloves.
It's amazing how much those spreadsheet heads know nothing about how the actual world works
You gotta optimize everything for the market man! It's magic! Everything will work out if we only make number go up!
Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!
correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
You don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.
Markets optimize for the current gradient, not for the local maxima
Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end
Sounds like a local maximum to me. Did you maybe mean a global maximum?
Why would this even be so. It's not magic it's just people doing stupid people things often to maximize short term factors. It only gets long-term planning insofar as embedded agents do. One of the things agents do is use incentives to inspire behaviour that is conta individuals short term incentives to achieve behaviour that contributes to long-term success.
Not only are many individual agents aligned with short term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
Heh sure, it's great at optimizing.
The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.
Redundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.
Well, for the most part this is actually true. Taking care of the exceptions is the hard part.
Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.
>Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.
It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us.
Our planet is literally dying.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
It is quite sad how doomerism has taken so many people. Our planet cannot "die", it is not a person. Take a deep breath!
It actually can die but more accurately it can also become far less amenable to human thriving and kill off the majority of other species both of which appear to be happening
This feels like deliberately misunderstanding.
Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might.
In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature.
It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see.
E.g. here, they've got tons of raw data available too (german): https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/zeitreihen/zeitreihen.html
Don't know what you see there - but it sure does look like an exponential curve, doesn't it?
Sure, the planet can't die. But the people and animals on it can.
But I have a feeling you knew what I meant and are just being deliberately obtuse.
Sometimes we hate incorrect usage of the word "literally" as much as we hate apathy to a billion people suffering.
The Gaia hypothesis is science fiction compared to climate catastrophe, which is real.
Doing basic math makes someone a "spreadsheet head"? If the "actual world" wanted American-made gloves then this cash injection from the government would've resulted in a boom in glove manufacturing here, no?
I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.
Looks like most/all manufacturing happens in the SEA/China, so I can see the logic that it could be considered a military risk for it to not be manufactured/possibility to scale manufacturing in America.
Someone already decided US should. The important question is whether 1B should have gotten the job done, and if not... is it matter of throwing good $$$ after bad $$$... or is it just bad sign 1B wasn't enough.
I wonder if they can at least create a small scale NBR factory.
Yeah, you should make stuff medical staff needs.
Or maybe not start stupid wars but this is America we're talking so meh...
Making them? Not in the least. But being capable of making them? It's a must, be it gloves, EVs, semis, or screws.
It's all a question of price, based on the article. And not planning how much it takes to start up. In any case it's also not feasible to keep a plant on standby, just in case you need it one day.
The USA can make anything if there’s money in it. Right now, I just don’t think there’s any.
Also what the cost is. If the US really wants to reshore this sort of work then it will become materially poorer.
The story says the US doesn't have the raw material(s): NBR. Not quite sure what that is.
NBR = nitrile butadiene rubber, a synthetic rubber. Not really a raw material, as it's synthesized.
With all the chemical industry already in the US, and $1B to throw at it, production capacity for the raw material couldn't be included?
It's not like you need a metric ton of it to produce a box of gloves.
The issue is that domestic sources of NBR are few because of the type of petroleum extraction we do here. This makes the cost of NBR relatively high and consequently makes the gloves pricey compared to imported ones. We can definitely make.a glove but no one wants to buy them.
The more important part is how to make people who ask this question a permanent pariahs?
You think someone should be made a permanent pariah for suggesting medical gloves be manufactured in Malaysia or Thailand, rather than the US? Why?
nah, you can always import from friendly nations like Denmark, Spain, Canada, Mexico..
It should be able to. A country that can't, cannot hope to remain sovereign in anything but name, for long.
Yes. Next question
Why is it so simple? Instead of investing billions, perhaps a stockpile is a better strategy.
That would be a good thing for you to research to build an understanding for the scale of what you are simplifying. Here's a start; just alone during a rather non-pandemic of 2020-2022 the USA alone used about 1.8 billion, with a B, gloves per week ... week.
So 1 billion dollars buys about 8 billion gloves? Or about 4 weeks? So for 12 billion dollars that's a years slack?
I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money on cost ineffective gloves just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment.
The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem.
So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost, which still seems excessive. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.
1-200% tariff applied at random if you don't.
The US started the tariff game btw
That is what I'm referring to.
Needs an orthogonal approach. Perhaps Elmer's glue that physician’s can dip their hands in and rinse off?
Some of my early research (elementary school) suggested that certain glues can form a peelable, skin-like layer. Maybe that could be a promising way forward?
I did the same research in elementary school! My parents were my seed investors. They asked for 25% of equity - all I ended up giving them was some collectible artwork for the fridge.
:) Love the early research. It seems to me that your product could be useful, particularly since those gloves are hard to put on.
Gloves are sterile wouldn't this tend to embed whatever is on the hands in the surface as it dries?
Is this the new “China can’t manufacture a ball point pen”? (Which I strongly suspect they can do at this point. :)
Ballpoint pen tips was proxy Li Keqiang used to shame PRC industry to build precision micromachining capabilities (tungsten carbide for high-end munitions etc), TISCO did it in like a year and it upgraded entire PRC metallurgy chain. US struggling to make 100% indigenized gloves 5+ years after covid... is well maybe not something new relative to US industrial decline, but certainly something else. I'm sure US can... but at what cost and all that.
The article states some of the companies successfully made gloves, but customers such as hospitals considered the prices too high, which is why they're looking to the federal government to be the primary customer now.
Article says 1% of gloves are made in US, but US doesn't produce any of the rubber, so raw inputs not American.
More like the new "America can't manufacture a grill scrubber" [1].
For those who haven't seen the video, YouTuber Destin Sandlin ("Smarter every day") tried to build a grill scrubber using 100% materials from the US and failed.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
You have to separate the YouTube clickbait from the real learning content in there.
US manufacturing is expensive because wages are high, but also because we focus on the high end work that pays more . Even the small machine shops I used 10 years ago for small scale production runs are no longer interested in doing any small batch work. They have more contract work from big companies than they can handle, and the big companies pay more and have higher order quantities.
If you’re a shop or a factory in the US you’re never going to take some small orders for a grill brush from some YouTuber who doesn’t have any expertise in marketing grill brushes. Everyone is going to turn that order down because there’s no money or future in it, but there’s plenty of better work that pays better from companies who want to keep using your services in the future.
The claim he failed seems like hyperbole. He couldn't find an existing manufacturer for chainmail in the US but this is a fairly trivial and niche thing to create, and is more a reflection of how uncommon it is for people to need that specific type and size of chain mail than it is that the US is incapable of making it. The other part is from Costa Rica only bc he hasn't yet made the injection mold for it, like he did for the handle itself.
I disagree with that conclusion: even if the chainmail were indeed very uncommon (no idea), getting it from China was so easy that he even got it when actively trying to avoid it. And since the chainmail is the revolutionary part of the idea (and the most expensive part) it might as well be the product.
He set out to get "100% made in the USA", settled for "no part made in China", and couldn't even get that. That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
> That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
The US manufacturing industry moved on to better paying, more stable contracts because they could.
They have no incentive to do niche things for small time YouTubers who won’t be generating repeat business.
Even the small machine shops I know now have more high paying work than they can handle. They’re just interested in doing some niche temporary work in a race to the bottom with another country that can pay workers a fraction as much and ignore all of the health and safety regulations.
One interesting point is that China "can't" (more like "is significantly behind on") manufacture jet engines -- the blades are the sticking point, they are ridiculously engineered.
Paywall.
https://archive.is/wtC7m
Whether the US can make "gloves" is actually less interesting than whether the US even has the technical ability, infrastructure, and knowledge to spin up a glove factory in an emergency. Just like drones, batter tech, etc. Another area where the current admin is failing, and putting our country behind China.
Cheap agentic robotics can change this by decreasing the cost of labor.
I do good price for you my Amerifriend
For 500m i'll make all the gloves you want, we can slap as many X's on the size as you desire/require.
Let me know. Waiting for your call.
In most of the west, technically talented people are fully subjugated to suits so I'm not surprised.
Sometimes, there are brief moments when technical people are given the control they need to deliver... But after a few years, they are again subjugated to MBAs in suits again and the capacity is lost.
I see this constantly nowadays. As a technical person, there are many companies/roles where the constraints set you up for failure from the beginning. I've delivered some very complex projects but I've also worked at jobs on far simpler projects where I knew since day 1 that the project wouldn't pan out due to counter-productive technical constraints being imposed... but you know the company is well positioned in the financial system and that the outcome won't matter; so you take the job anyway. You still get the high pay and the prestige from the brand name. There are many companies like this where people seem to keep failing upwards and stock price always goes up.
Shouldn't free market reward companies that go the other way and where people don't "fail upwards"? It is kind of demoralising to think otherwise, but it seems it is true.
We see it everywhere. Bad companies making bad decisions keep surviving, and actually the vast majority of companies are like this.
One implication is that MBAs in suits that make bad decisions are actually right and their decisions are not bad. The other implication is that there is no free market, no meritocracy and the truth is, game was rigged from the start.
Edit: I should add that most of this is anegdotal evidence and a general feeling I have. It is not a very powerful argument I'm making.
The market rewards companies that know how to play the market, and the market isn't a free market.
The market does reward proficiency. We live in the punished timeline. No contradiction. Most software is buggy and most businesses fail.
What does punished timeline mean?
It's the corollary to your statement about the market rewarding competent companies.
The market punishes incompetent companies.
Just being aware that the market rewards competent companies is not enough to magically turn companies competent.
I agree, a free market would work that way... Yet 'fail upwards' and zombie companies seem to be the default. Personally I don't believe that what we have in the west is a free market. I think these days, it's probably less free than the one in China. The market here is completely smothered by regulations.
For example, about a month ago, I saw a video about people farming frogs in China... To collect secretions for medical use. At first I thought WTF. But then they mentioned how much it sells for and I thought "Wow. We have a lot of cane toads here everywhere, it would be a great business to do here." I actually started thinking of doing this... This is really out there for me because I'm a software engineer; but I started seriously considering this. But guess what? I did my research and turns out it's illegal to do it in my country (Australia) because the frog secretions would be considered an illicit substance and you need to go through some expensive process to obtain a license. Yes, you need a license to farm frogs...
A few weeks back, I read news about someone who got arrested for farming cockroaches (as reptile food for zoos)... It's like all the entry-point business opportunities have become illegal.
Every time I heard of a case like this where some really good niche business opportunity is illegal in Australia, I asked my AI if this practice is legal in China and the answer is almost always yes.
The other day, I was watching a documentary about Philippines and I saw a kind of makeshift resort built literally on top of a coral reef. Really amazing looking. They seemed to be getting good reviews and actually making money... This would NEVER be allowed in my country. At best, you could purchase a ship for millions of dollars then apply for expensive licenses, then you'd have limits on how many people you can take at a time, etc... So many constraints and regulations. Such artificially high capital requirements. It would be a worse experience and less profitable; and you'd have to be filthy rich just to get a chance to engage in that highly constrained, mediocre business activity.
There are plenty of businesses that could be built under current regulations.
It might be a bit Harder, but business is difficult.
I like your moxie and I also agree Australia is an over-regulated racket... but I'm also glad my neighbours aren't mass farming frogs or cockroaches in my suburb without talking to the council first.
My brother had a neighbour build a crematorium next door in NZ; not an industrial or rural area, just the suburbs, no permits, no consultation, no notification. Very entrepreneurial. They got shut down but the flip side of "you can just do things" is surprises like a plume of smoke and the smell of burning corpses when you step outside.
“Overhead to starting businesses” is not the only metric to take into account though. I’m not going to defend any given regulation necessarily, but your ad reductum fallacy is to think that’s the ONLY factor that must be considered. Consumer protection, environmental protection, worker protection, etc, etc, all can and should be taken into account in the calculus for regulations. Besides, many problems with starting a business come from monopolistic practices, not regulation, and reducing regulations will just make it cheaper for the mega corporation to keep their monopoly, at the cost of all these other factors.
So anyone who just goes “grr, regulation bad”, I can’t take seriously. If you have specific examples of regulations that are objectively bad, and should be removed, that’s fine, but the examples you cited protect something else, and ignoring that is intellectually dishonest at best, and blatantly partisan at worst.
Am I the only one, that can’t read the article because it requires subscription?
One of the comments provides an archive link to the story.
I was kind of able to read that on my Android phone, but something on the page made panning really janky so I gave up.
Decline and Fall of the American Empire
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/decline-and-fall-of-the-a...
On the other hand the US is still very good at bombing small, poor countries...
I wonder whether with AI we will be able to document more efficiently all of the nuances of production so if we need to ramp up a forgotten process we can do it faster.
There is so much domain expertise that exists in production that is not documented, because who has time for writing documentation when your floor is on fire.
But if writing documentation is something free and can be automated (maybe from the company internal comms), maybe we have a chance?
How would the "AI" figure out what the process is? That's non-sense.
Because of the slack complaints?
Friend, you need to seriously get out of your tech bubble and talk to real workers in person.