Why America Can Make Semiconductors But Not Swabs (bloomberg.com) 135
U.S. factories are as productive as ever but they've lost the process knowledge needed to retool quickly in a crisis, writes Dan Wang, a Beijing-based technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, in an opinion piece on Bloomberg. From the story: In China, a vast pool of experienced engineers and a culture of nimble manufacturing have allowed companies to quickly shift production to critically needed goods during this crisis. Manufacturers such as BYD Co.(an automaker) and Foxconn (an electronics assembler) have helped to quadruple China's mask production since the beginning of the pandemic. Taiwanese companies, which make machine tools and can draw on deep pools of manufacturing expertise, were reportedly able to increase mask production tenfold. Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Marc Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should think of bolder proposals than sensible but long-proposed tweaks to R&D policies, re-training programs and STEM education.
What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to drop their dismissive attitude towards manufacturing as a "commoditized" activity and treat it as being as valuable as R&D work. And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process. The U.S. government has a crucial role to play. Bills winding through in Congress to re-shore some of the medical supply chain should be only the start. For too long, tax laws have encouraged offshoring; it's time for political leaders to remove the excuse for manufacturers not to bring production back home.
What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to drop their dismissive attitude towards manufacturing as a "commoditized" activity and treat it as being as valuable as R&D work. And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process. The U.S. government has a crucial role to play. Bills winding through in Congress to re-shore some of the medical supply chain should be only the start. For too long, tax laws have encouraged offshoring; it's time for political leaders to remove the excuse for manufacturers not to bring production back home.
Not a chance (Score:2)
We're going to keep buying from Mexico/China/Africa/Malaysia/CheaperBidderN
Re:Not a chance (Score:5, Informative)
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It's easy to make things when you don't have to worry about
Labor Regulations
Safety Regulations
Environmental Regulations
You can pay virtual slave wages
You don't have Unions
Your work force doesn't necessarily choose what job they perform or where they will work.
Re: Not a chance (Score:3)
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I wasn't exactly advocating for that that. But it does make sense to suspend some regulations (as the FDA did) in order to ramp up production of essential products during a national emergency.
It is more an argument that tariffs and other import agreements be predicated on the supplier meeting basic conditions which would come close to leveling the playing field with American manufacturers. if you can pick up any foreign factory and drop it lock, stock, and barrel in the US and not violate all those laws, an
Re: Not a chance (Score:5, Insightful)
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> Which means we cannot be chasing away heavy industry between now and then the way we have been for the last 50 years.
This reminds me of people fighting gentrification. It's a losing battle because you are fighting fundamental economic forces. It can be done, but it's like trying to push water uphill. Every step will be difficult, and it's almost impossible to win in the long term.
The US is wealthy, and thus low-value jobs with massive externalities are welfare destroying. You cannot sustain US leve
Re: Not a chance (Score:2)
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China isn't the world's manufacturer because that's the best outcome, it's the world's manufacturer because that's the best that a massively poor country could become. I'm certain it would (and perhaps will) be happy to switch places with the US in terms of GDP per capita by tossing all that manufacturing for jobs that make real money.
This is exactly why, as China has become more wealthy, manufacturing has started to move elsewhere when it depends on human labor. Much of the rest is becoming more and more automated.
I have a feeling that Americans won't be too happy when manufacturing returns. Small towns across America jump for joy when their old plant that once employed hundreds gets purchased and retooled by another company only to be crushingly disappointed when it hires a few dozen at most.
The blue collar nostalgia for manufacturing
Re: Not a chance (Score:2)
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That would explain how they come to owe trillions of dollars!
Or is it a culture of dishonest accounting?
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That's what the coming depression will enable.
People will work at any job and assume a lot more risks. Nobody will think twice about an increased risk in lung cancer 15 years from now if it pays a wage.
Re: Not a chance (Score:2)
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It's easy to make things when you don't have to worry about ...
It took me two years to get permits to put a 20' pipe in a ditch. Building a factory must be a nightmare.
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Wetlands and floodplain. Two years and $35,000 to get permits. Just permits.
At one point I had to hire people to search for ship wrecks. The water is 4 inches deep. When I finally do build the driveway and house, I have to have a historian on site for the entire project to watch for civil war relics because I'm 20 miles from the Bull Run Battlefield.
This is the federal government. If your county had said you have to check for wetlands, and the soil in your ditch had calcium deposits that indicate seaso
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Unfortunately, many people don't understand this and our government failed to give any sort of incentives to manufacture medical supplies. Many companies would be able to produce medical supplies, but not many are willing to spend millions of dollars retooling and retraining to do this where it would lead us to bankruptcy because of our kindness. And if you attempt to raise prices to cover your costs, you get accused of price gouging. Sorry, not going to do it.
So enjoy buying from China. Make sure to give t
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Outsorce upper management (Score:2)
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I wasn't aware that the Community College of Philadelphia [ccp.edu] included a business management program!
Re:Outsorce upper management (Score:5, Funny)
Just cut the loss, it's not like any of them can't be replaced by a halfway decent magic-8-ball.
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No this would be a big mistake.
What happened in the last thirty years is that upper management would outsource everything but upper management, thinking they were immune. They then discovered that once everything else 2was outsourced the upper management could be replaced by the foreign countries.
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I think to increase long-term shareholder value we should outsource all corporate upper management to CCP. It is the next logical step!
That happens all the time. Every time a foreign company is contracted to do the work, instead of just opening factories in other countries, that is essentially outsourcing the entire process. Including corporate upper management.
Outsourcing can be just manufacturing, or it can include the R&D, or it can include the entire division being outsourced. All are common. There are even times when upper management resides outside the US while some R&D and manufacturing is done in the US. This is just called
In the tasteless buy funny category. (Score:5, Funny)
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because we freed our 'slaves' but china kept theirs and renamed them 'citizens'
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At least the Chinese oligarchs are honest about it and care about the Chinese in general, if not the individual worker.
The oligarchs in the US care about their own tribe most, and are actively undermining the group that produces and works the most, because their main goal is destroying that group's hegemony everywhere - making money is important, but secondary to that.
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You joke but this might be a bigger part of the real explanation. China does a lot of manual assembly work. Its a lot easier to tell a bunch of human works to put down the soldering irons and pick up these needles and threads for mask stitching than it is to get a FANUC robot to do it.
The more specialized your tooling is the more efficient you can be but the more difficult it is to just employee those assets to some other task.
Then there are things that represent degrees of refinement that simply don't len
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It's frankly amazing that, for example, an automotive factory can switch to making masks. Wait, you mean it's just the seat stitching sweatshop switching to being a mask stitching sweatshop?
Never mind, carry on.
Re:In the tasteless buy funny category. (Score:5, Informative)
I know this was just a joke, but it bears saying that when we talk about swabs, it's not just a cotton swab and a plastic container... because idiots.
The swabs have to be long and skinny enough to get to the nasopharynx, the upper part of the throat, behind the nose. They must be made of synthetic fiber and cannot have a wooden shaft. Nor can they contain calcium alginate, a substance typically used for swab tips in wound care, as that can kill the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These swabs are currently singled out by CDC and Food and Drug Administration guidelines as suitable for most coronavirus testing. Once used, they’re typically mailed in transportable vials full of a solution known as “viral transport media,” which keeps the virus testable.
https://khn.org/news/as-corona... [khn.org] ...and that whole kit has to be free from all sorts of contamination.
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Selective manufacturing (Score:3, Funny)
That's quite believable. The US can also manufacture cluster bombs that avoid civilians and only hit terrorists but can't build machines to count paper slips for elections.
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The US can also manufacture cluster bombs that avoid civilians and only hit terrorists
Not really.
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Whoosh.
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Don't they also have some low yield explosive warheads with like a powder as the shrapnel?
You can kill everyone in a small room without harming anyone in adjacent rooms, or only kill people on one side of a larger room.
The idea being the explosive yield is low enough and the "shrapnel" material so light it loses lethality very fast.
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You got that backwards - it's a super-smart bomb that priorities eye witnesses.
It's not about the manufacturing itself.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of them have 'black box' systems. These used to be completely VERBOTEN at my work place (big 3). Now, however, we hardly blink an eye when a company sells a product with portions of it - usally the programming - that we aren't allowed to see or edit.
This is going to come down to the US government redefining how we do business. If we continue the race to the bottom, we'll continue shipping all our expertise overseas.
Re: It's not about the manufacturing itself.... (Score:3)
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and will be use their money and power to build big walls and compounds too keep the unwashed masses out
Somehow walls are only effective when they protect the homes and neighborhoods of politicians and celebrities and popes. Walls that protect anything else — particularly the boarders of wealthy nations — are are obviously unworkable, you racist.
/s
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You kind of said what I wanted to. The other point I'd make is that China is strong in manufacturing because they have the supply chain that feeds the machine that builds machines. Someone has to make the pushers, pullers, picker ups, belts, chains, probes, indicator lights, buttons, pneumatic systems, and the list goes on; these let you build automation lines. If you want manufacturing to grow in the US, you also need this supply chain in the US to grow as well. Its very much a chicken and egg problem.
Yes, but who as the best lawyers? (Score:2)
The best bankers, the best tax accountants, the best movie produces, the best fashion consultants?
All these people earn far more than factory workers or even manufacturing engineers.
The future is all in services. Making things is like digging the dirt to grow stuff. Let the poor do it.
So it is more like a chicken vs peacock problem rather than chicken and egg.
You may enjoy the Glugs of Gosh and their problem with the Pugs of Posh, a classic Australian yarn
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks... [gutenberg.net.au]
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"Bullshit. Just found several US manufacturers that can in a simple search of "ball screws for sale"
But he said ***make*** not sell.
Re:It's not about the manufacturing itself.... (Score:5, Interesting)
My bro was tracking down alternate supply chains that didn't import from China, and all the secondary and tertiary suppliers that actually made things in the US still imported a number of parts from China. It was a struggle.
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cost optimization (Score:2)
Re:cost optimization (Score:5, Interesting)
Not entirely. The more specific your tools are for what you normally produce the harder it is to produce other things. The more you outsource, the harder it is to shift as well, since you might not be able to work with all the materials you need. Also, the more hazardous chemicals you work with the more complicated re-tooling can be.
I was amazed to see a manufacturer move a foundry from its old building into a spec logistics center in a week; it could be done because they designed their processes to work that way.
Edukeishn (Score:5, Insightful)
You need educated workforce to do that. So:
- First, must produce a generation of new teachers, and a generation of adults/parents who value intelligence, knowledge and achievement through skill.
- Then, that generation should produce another, that is able to learn and achieve required minimum level of knowledge and skill across the board.
- Then, you could begin manufacturing stuff.
You don't get to glorify laziness, greed and showmanship for 100 years and then suddenly switch tack.
we need more trades / tech schools and no loans! (Score:4, Interesting)
we need more trades / tech schools and no loans!
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This is insightful ?
You must've grown up in a different America than I did.
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Very true. Transferrable skills are fundamental to this. The less you need to re-learn in different contexts, learning just the once in a generic re-usable context, the more rapidly you can pick up new skills and invent new things. You're not rigidly stuck to a narrow path.
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So China is undercutting the US on price because the factory workers in China are better educated than factory workers in the US? I am pretty sure that if you believe that you have never been to a Chinese factory.
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Re: Edukeishn (Score:2)
Oh, yes! A million times yes.
I see only a tiny little problem with this scheme. It was reflected in the recent story about 'should we preserve meritocracy'?
As someone who is heavily invested in education and has the qualifications, I can assure you that the saddest event in recent western history is that BOTH ends of the political spectrum are anti science.
Nowadays the Asians are evil parents who force their children to study.
In the west you can't be demanding teacher. Immediately you'd be branded some 'ist
Re: Edukeishn (Score:3)
Re: Edukeishn (Score:2)
Re: Edukeishn (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not even SJW so much as it is relentless flailing over why black kids can't learn or graduate from high school, aka "the achievement gap".
Around here they're aiming for round 23 of district restructuring and one of the ironies is that some of the groups most opposed to it are immigrant families that figured out what schools had high achieving students and sent their kids there. The schools in "bad" neighborhoods have lost a ton of kids to immediately neighboring school districts, leaving the school with not even many high performing minority students.
The achievement gap is the only problem under consideration in the school system anymore and they'll dismantle the entire system trying to fix it. They won't, because the real problem is lack of parent engagement and poverty (in combination, it's especially bad, singularly it can kind of be dealt with, at least poverty alone if parents are engaged).
What will happen (again, its long term cylical) is that achievement oriented parents will again coalesce in the same schools over time, invest their own time and money elevating the school, and then near the end of the cycle we'll get another letter about how they need to restructure because the same demographic of poor kids is stuck as a group in an under-performing school.
Now, is there a bit too much left-leaning navel gazing in the curriculum? Probably, but it's not the major problem.
Standards (Score:2)
That isn't to say all Chinese products are bad, but you can bet that some of the stuff that appeared seemingly at the drop of a hat is pure shit. Maybe any mask is better than none at all, but did an
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And yet there are no fires left and right. Not in the US, and not in the third world where those chargers are widely used.
Maybe fire isn't that easy to "happen", and standards are too conservatively strict. Guess what: they are. But only for liability reasons, not because they really care about your house not catching fire.
Uhm (Score:2)
How would a guy in Beijing know what business is like in the US? He wouldn't. However things look from there, you're looking a long distance through a long lens, and it isn't a clear view.
He probably doesn't even realize that lots of cotton swabs are made in the US.
He thinks we're slow to retool, because he's used to working with factories where the labor is primarily unskilled. He doesn't notice that he's only measuring the differences between skilled and unskilled labor, because he only has experience w
Re:Uhm (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from military manufacturing facilities, I have seen very few US facilities that could wholesale change the nature of products and materials they work with in under two months. A big part of that is environmental and safety regulations, but there is also a general lack of staff machinists and flexible resources to address the changes in tooling.
Contract military manufacturers are a whole other ball of wax though! I helped out at a facility that actively planned for flexibility, adding what I first thought was a hoarder’s warehouse. I was later educated on how that equipment could accommodate a different product line they were plamming to compete for, and they focused on understanding what they might need in the future, and getting it cheap.
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How would a guy in Beijing know what business is like in the US? He wouldn't. However things look from there, you're looking a long distance through a long lens, and it isn't a clear view.
The fact that he's looking in from the outside makes him uniquely qualified to comment. He's not stuck inside the bubble, with a political axe to grind, like many (most?) US observers are.
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For example, OP himself, who believes the chinese need other countries to retool. The chinese don't just produce anything you want, they also produce the machines for that AND they will sell you said machines.
I know because I do maintenance for a factory that used to use american machines, but later switched to turkish machines. In the past few years they've started buying more and more chinese machines. 1/5 of the cost of the american machine, and they work.
Swabs are being made though, and more (Score:5, Informative)
This headline hit me because of the company right near where I live, in rural Maine, is one of the primary producers of the long swabs used for the covid test. That's Puritan Medical Products in Guilford, ME. They're running at capacity to try to fill the need. Two shifts, overtime, etc. They can't get enough people to work, because no one is allowed to come into the area because all the hotels are closed by state order. However, they're ramping up production. a downstate defense contractor shipyard, Bath Iron Works, is quickly building the tooling Puritan needs to expand production, puritan is moving into a new, larger building in Pittsfield, ME, and things are moving forward at a rapid pace. The federal government is doing a lot to help get things done, while the Maine state government is sort of bumbling along. However, it is true that we've lost lots of flexibility in manufacturing capabilities. This is changing, in part because of such things as 3D printing. While it would be absurd to 3D print a cotton swab, in the near future much of the tooling for such things can be made in part by 3D printing and laser cutting. This will change the economy for the better.
10 fold increase in faulty masks (Score:3, Informative)
Taiwanese companies, which make machine tools and can draw on deep pools of manufacturing expertise, were reportedly able to increase mask production tenfold.
Being able to increase mask production doesn't mean shit when the masks are faulty.
F.D.A. Bans Faulty Masks, 3 Weeks After Failed Tests [nytimes.com]
Re:10 fold increase in faulty masks (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah Bloomberg Opinon (Score:2)
Where we can run an article about how America does not know how to build any more and government needs to play a role in encouraging domestic production of low tech manufactured goods runs mere weeks after "Tariffs terrible - Orange man bad."
Here is a clue Bloomberg editorial board, assuming we dont make the defense production act the norm and switch to a command economy - the options the government has for encouraging this type of industry are pretty much tariffs, or subsidies and those really just oppos
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It also seems Bloomberg himself is a big China owned asset/supporter.
Just my 2 cents
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Tariffs are the only policy that can actually reverse the offshoring trend, and then only if the captured regulatory regime — on behalf of Chinese owned senators and congressmen — doesn't permit the captains of industry to avoid them. Everything else is bullshit. If it doesn't hit business directly in the wallet then you're just talking to yourself; they'll pay no attention.
Tariffs were haram prior to the political ascendancy of Trump. Now they're even more so. No respectable member of the est
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Where we can run an article about how America does not know how to build any more and government needs to play a role in encouraging domestic production of low tech manufactured goods runs mere weeks after "Tariffs terrible - Orange man bad."
Tariffs are hated by economists. The same economists that tell us that free trade will make our lives better and are a win for all. The same economists who twenty years after letting everything go to China said opps, our bad, we didn't think it would crater things as hard as it did for the average worker. Tariffs actually got China to the table, which is more than the previous 5 administrations ever achieved on trade with China.
Don’t blame Silicon Valley (Score:4, Insightful)
It is the MBAs that got us here. From an economics perspective though it is pretty hard to produce low-margin goods that are easy to ship in a high cost environment.
Re: Don’t blame Silicon Valley (Score:2)
âoeThe MBAâ(TM)sâ were taught Milton Friedman.
Labor costs (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly!
This kind of pitch is no more than protectionism and populism. Human economy has always evolved in the direction of efficiency through specialization. That's why lower- and mid-end manufacturing works has shifted from England workers to steam engines, Americans, Japanese/South Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and eventually robots. Conversely, lots of productions of staple agricultural goods are done in the USA because that's more efficient.
And Americans never mention their biggest pain during this kin
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China does not share the West's liberal positive-sum approach to trade and international cooperation. They have a zero-sum approach and long-term plans for global domination. If one player is takin
"Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley" (Score:2)
What strawman's ass did we yank that particular phrase from? This silicon valley (employed, anyway) sophisticate agrees that we've made a mistake being overly dependent upon foreign trade for manufacturing all the things, not just semiconductors. Sure software guys are naive, but they're *soft*ware guys. They are nothing without the hardware we carefully build for them.
It is not "silicon valley sophisticates" who have enabled our current model, this is US trade policy, attempting to tighten bonds with China
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So was the "knowledge economy" which is driven by technology just a fucking snow job to make a quick buck by gutting the manufacturing sector?
Or was it just an awful, short-sighted guess that we could have a high value economy without actually doing anything materially useful -- doing for information what finance did for money, allow it to be shuffled from place to place and somehow magically increase in value? Basically turning labor into MMORPG object farmers.
Hilarious (Score:2)
"And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process."
Yes, they will start doing that right after they replace all those manufacturing jobs with automation!
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"And corporate America should start viewing workers not purely as costs to be slashed, but as practitioners keeping alive knowledge essential to the production process."
Yes, they will start doing that right after they replace all those manufacturing jobs with automation!
Also: They'll start doing that after they stop viewing TECH workers the same way and replacing them with H1-Bs.
I'm not holding my breath waiting for either event.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Swabs being low profit margin mean you make them where you don't care about dumping chemicals into the ground water, bleching smoke into air and working employees in unsafe conditions 60+ hours a week.
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Face it, even chip making is mostly robotic with a ha
The cube root of two. (Score:2)
In my misspent youth, I remember reading have Spacesuit Will Travel. The father asks Kip "How do you find the cube root of three?"
Kip replies "Look it up in the back of the book."
In the martial arts ( Japanese style ) people are thought that mastering something requires process. Whether it is something glorious like becoming as good as Miyamoto Musashi, arranging flowers, or drinking tea.
Part of that process is mastering the fundamentals. Another part is that it takes time and repetition.
With the wa
Good (Score:2)
GM ventilators (Score:4, Interesting)
Manufacturing IP is also a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
To make production more nimble we also need to get rid of the bullshit legal minutiae it takes to design and build goddamn near anything in the US without violating someone's IP. Let's look at cotton swabs. I'd imagine there are many engineers who could come together and build a machine that takes in a roll of paper and a bale of cotton and makes swabs. But if any part of that process is covered by someone else's patent even if the final product is noninfringing and identical to one made by another process you are doomed either to lengthy negotiating to work out licensing or you push forward with the risk of being sued.
We already farm out this production to countries where this nonsense on the production line means fuck-all, and the only thing anyone cares about is whether the final product is coming in with someone else's logo on it or not. If that is honestly the attitude by which our goods are made, maybe it's time to loosen up a little bit on the draconian laws and practices that perpetuate barriers to those who would want to do the same thing here.
If you want a demonstration of this, try to look up the design standards for plastic bottle screw caps/closures (not the bottles, just the caps). Now go do a patent search for the same. Because we have only forced a standard for the bottles themselves, making caps for them now becomes an exercise in spinning up a couple of mechanical engineers, an IP lawyer, and some tooling manufacturer in the US. Maybe if you can get all of the agreements in place you can start making tooilng in a month or so. Just before you go live, huzzah you can get a big licensing if you would just be so kind as to mould a logo into the part.. oh but it must be recessed, so now you have to make a new tool!
In China, you just run across town, pick up some dies and slap them in your moulding machine and you're shooting caps this afternoon. Or you just download some DXFs and make your own tools.
I'm not saying I want to abolish IP laws; but I believe they do largely overexert themselves. Both Copyright and patents for instance holds work ransom for far far too long.
US culture is the problem. (Score:2)
All was sacrificed for profit and planning for a robust economy and civil defense ignored. Our "culture" is degenerate popular trash which improves no one and nothing. Our masses thus the leaders it spawns are greedy, lazy, fiercely proud of their ignorance, and revel in their corruption.
Even in planning for our cherished wars, the sport of our kings, government "leadership" (who, like the masses that spawn them, are boobiosie) and industry ignored biowarfare and all forms of civil defense. (We're luck Al Q
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There are not words for the contempt in which the US should be held for its collective sloth, greed and incompetence.
Well, we're really good at manufacturing new grievances. Yeah, having 5 different kinds of bathrooms won't win a war, but at least we're not indolent in all things!
Great idea (Score:2)
All I'm hearing is that this is going to be used as the justification for the trillions in QE Congress dumped on us. They'll figure out how to explain why the companies still don't come back later.
Yes, sounds good, but (Score:2)
Flexibility vs Worker Protection (Score:2)
The article overlooks the differences in power balance in China vs the U.S. Workers have nearly no rights in China. In the U.S., workers have the power to shut down the factory with strikes, NLRB complaints and other regulatory actions. Manufacturing in the U.S. often has complex labor rules that spell out precisely what each employee is required to do; changing it requires a new contract negotiation. That impedes flexibility.
A side-effect of protecting the worker from the risk of capricious demands and
Comparative advantage (Score:2)
It's a bit hard to have those kinds of companies.. (Score:2)
When even trying to make one will surely get you trounced by submarine patents and taxes.
China complete disregard for IPs helped it quite a bit.
Nothing will change (Score:2)
Risk management (Score:2)
If you are leading a company with global sales, you would want to diversify risk. Moving to a country where corruption has become the rule at the top, which wants to avoid any international cooperation and wants to pick fight with most of your customers doesn't make much sense. When a lot of residents actually still stand by it, and facts/science are seen as bad - you could run into other issues as well. You need sane and smart employees.
Sure, you want to pay some lip service to stroke the orange ego, bu
Re:Free America (Score:5, Insightful)
He also manufactures his cars, batteries, etc. in the USA but he's currently being vilified by the press for wanting to go to work.
So it goes.
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Exactly. Elon is the only rational person I hear from. It doesn't make sense to not go back to work. You cannot "stop" a virus. It will run its course no matter what happens. And there won't be a vaccine any time soon and even if it appears the virus will mutate and it will be ineffective. California has 2,700 deaths with 40,000,000 population! The virus has been here for SIX MONTHS (yes, December is when it got here). 3,800 people die from traffic accidents in California per year. That is about the amount
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That's because you're a sociopathic troll that defines "rational" as it suits you.
A view you hold because choose you philosophical view points so as to define yourself as morally superior.
I am not defending Elon, he clearly has a dog in this fight but I am pretty tired of the sanctimonious bullshit from people saying stuff like what you just posted as well. The only reasons you can "stay-at-home" is because other people the world over did not get that choice. Those 3M respirators (made in China) how does that happen because the Chinese government did not implement their lock downs with t
Re: Free America (Score:2)
Re:Free America (Score:5, Informative)
No he did not. He purchased machines from China [thehill.com]. Also, what he did produce were biPAP machines [forbes.com], not ventilators as he claimed.
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Why are you lying? He purchased nothing from China and your links make no mention of China, only that some hospitals received BiPAP and CPAP machines. Worth noting is that this was *by request*. After all non-invasive ventilation is more critical for someone suffering respiratory distress and prevents people escalating to the point of needing ventilators.
You and several idiots in the media are conflating what the original snap judgement requirement was and what was actually required, specifically the WHO's
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