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.

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’.

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?

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?

Needs an orthogonal approach. Perhaps Elmer's glue that physician’s can dip their hands in and rinse off?

Is this the new “China can’t manufacture a ball point pen”? (Which I strongly suspect they can do at this point. :)

Paywall.

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.

Am I the only one, that can’t read the article because it requires subscription?

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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?