9 ms·

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

by kaashif 2mo ago

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.

raverbashing 2mo ago
It's amazing how much those spreadsheet heads know nothing about how the actual world works
- vrganj 2mo ago
  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!
  - ikari_pl 2mo ago
    correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
  - fartfeatures 2mo ago
    Redundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.
  - philipallstar 2mo ago
    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.
    - vrganj 2mo ago
      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.
      - philipallstar 2mo ago
        This is just silliness. Rich people got rich under capitalism by providing things people want for the best price. They're rich because they owns shares in valuable businesses that people want to buy the products of. Some people get rich, on average by merit. And everyone gets the products they want at a low price. Can you imagine if the only cars available were made in the USSR, like Ladas? They were terrible because there was no capitalism, and so no competition. But if you'd rather have abysmal cars but know that no one got rich making them, I guess that's...a choice?
        vrganj 2mo ago
        Sure! Like the Sacklers who got rich by... providing the best opiates. Or Zuck, who got rich by... destroying the fabric of our society. Or Big Oil, which got rich by... destroying ecosystems and dooming us all. Or United Fruit Company which got rich by... brutally colonizing Latin America. It's almost as if the profit motive optimized for profit, not any other outcome that was in any way beneficial to anyone but the ones... profiting.
    - raverbashing 2mo ago
      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
      - BobaFloutist 2mo ago
        Sounds like a local maximum to me. Did you maybe mean a global maximum?
    - michaelmrose 2mo ago
      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.
      - philipallstar 2mo ago
        No one's saying it's magic. This is the same market (or set of markets) that have lifted billions of people out of poverty. If you're arguing central planning does better then I'd love to see some evidence of it, but to my mind the fact that so many companies can coordinate, even across language barriers and legal systems, sometimes hundreds or thousands cooperating to make products, is incredible, and is not going to be beaten by any other system. At least on average - of course an authoritarian country like the USSR can drag value out of its citizens by force and spend it on the space race, but that kills people and even, in that case, the country itself. Far better to have cooperation and value exchange based on the demand generated by real people.
    - bsder 2mo ago
      And yet somehow we had no toilet paper in the pandemic. The manufacturers all simultaneously refused to retool. This proves that the market does not inherently work magic.
  - matchbok3 2mo ago
    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.
    - vrganj 2mo ago
      >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-impacts-record-ocean-heat-intensifying-climate-disasters https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w [3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-locked-arctic-ice-millennia-unleash-wave-deadly-diseases https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l... [4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disaster-bushfires.html https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
      - matchbok3 2mo ago
        It is quite sad how doomerism has taken so many people. Our planet cannot "die", it is not a person. Take a deep breath!
        lompad 2mo ago
        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 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?
- hypeatei 2mo ago
  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.
  - michaelmrose 2mo ago
    There are examples of species encountering such species decimating pathogens and we are in a worse position than 2020. Any investment in such is likely to pay dividends in much less dramatic ordinary catastrophes which have occurred repeatedly and constantly. It's probably a better investment than our military.
    - jerlam 2mo ago
      Funny that you mention the military, as the US military is required by law to buy domestic to ensure some sort of domestic supply chains. Even for trivial things like t-shirts and gloves. Berry Amendment-compliant work gloves, cost more than 4x more than the imported equivalent: https://www.mechanix.com/us-en/all-work-gloves/GVMP-B55.html https://www.mechanix.com/us-en/all-work-gloves/GVMP-B55.html
jeffrallen 2mo ago
Those who do not learn from history... probably don't make gloves.
JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
And in the midst of a start-stop petrochemical supply crisis.
NetMageSCW 2mo ago
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.

by kaashif 2mo ago

raverbashing 2mo ago

It's amazing how much those spreadsheet heads know nothing about how the actual world works

vrganj 2mo ago
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!
- ikari_pl 2mo ago
  correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
- fartfeatures 2mo ago
  Redundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.
- philipallstar 2mo ago
  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.
  - vrganj 2mo ago
    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.
    - philipallstar 2mo ago
      This is just silliness. Rich people got rich under capitalism by providing things people want for the best price. They're rich because they owns shares in valuable businesses that people want to buy the products of. Some people get rich, on average by merit. And everyone gets the products they want at a low price. Can you imagine if the only cars available were made in the USSR, like Ladas? They were terrible because there was no capitalism, and so no competition. But if you'd rather have abysmal cars but know that no one got rich making them, I guess that's...a choice?
      - vrganj 2mo ago
        Sure! Like the Sacklers who got rich by... providing the best opiates. Or Zuck, who got rich by... destroying the fabric of our society. Or Big Oil, which got rich by... destroying ecosystems and dooming us all. Or United Fruit Company which got rich by... brutally colonizing Latin America. It's almost as if the profit motive optimized for profit, not any other outcome that was in any way beneficial to anyone but the ones... profiting.
  - raverbashing 2mo ago
    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
    - BobaFloutist 2mo ago
      Sounds like a local maximum to me. Did you maybe mean a global maximum?
  - michaelmrose 2mo ago
    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.
    - philipallstar 2mo ago
      No one's saying it's magic. This is the same market (or set of markets) that have lifted billions of people out of poverty. If you're arguing central planning does better then I'd love to see some evidence of it, but to my mind the fact that so many companies can coordinate, even across language barriers and legal systems, sometimes hundreds or thousands cooperating to make products, is incredible, and is not going to be beaten by any other system. At least on average - of course an authoritarian country like the USSR can drag value out of its citizens by force and spend it on the space race, but that kills people and even, in that case, the country itself. Far better to have cooperation and value exchange based on the demand generated by real people.
  - bsder 2mo ago
    And yet somehow we had no toilet paper in the pandemic. The manufacturers all simultaneously refused to retool. This proves that the market does not inherently work magic.
- matchbok3 2mo ago
  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.
  - vrganj 2mo ago
    >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-impacts-record-ocean-heat-intensifying-climate-disasters https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w [3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-locked-arctic-ice-millennia-unleash-wave-deadly-diseases https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l... [4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disaster-bushfires.html https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
    - matchbok3 2mo ago
      It is quite sad how doomerism has taken so many people. Our planet cannot "die", it is not a person. Take a deep breath!
      - lompad 2mo ago
        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 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?
hypeatei 2mo ago
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.
- michaelmrose 2mo ago
  There are examples of species encountering such species decimating pathogens and we are in a worse position than 2020. Any investment in such is likely to pay dividends in much less dramatic ordinary catastrophes which have occurred repeatedly and constantly. It's probably a better investment than our military.
  - jerlam 2mo ago
    Funny that you mention the military, as the US military is required by law to buy domestic to ensure some sort of domestic supply chains. Even for trivial things like t-shirts and gloves. Berry Amendment-compliant work gloves, cost more than 4x more than the imported equivalent: https://www.mechanix.com/us-en/all-work-gloves/GVMP-B55.html https://www.mechanix.com/us-en/all-work-gloves/GVMP-B55.html

jeffrallen 2mo ago

Those who do not learn from history... probably don't make gloves.

JumpCrisscross 2mo ago

And in the midst of a start-stop petrochemical supply crisis.

NetMageSCW 2mo ago

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.