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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence?

In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?

> The machinery to make this is extremely complicated and takes 6 months or more to build, by which time there may be no demand. No amount of invoking the defense production act would change this reality.

We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point and no sign of reaching the end. Under a different administration, the Defense Production Act would have been invoked immediately at the outset, onshore manufacturing capability of PPE would have been dramatically ramped up, and it would now already be paying dividends (more than 6 months later!) in the form of significantly increased onshore production of N95 masks and other PPE.

So yes, invoking the DPA absolutely would have changed the reality. The problem is that we didn't do it, not that doing it wouldn't have worked (it would have).

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> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism. Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?

Yes, because of a set of beliefs about market fundamentalism. The masks aren't as important as maintaining the existing product structure of society and proving that government intervention in healthcare can't work; if it shows signs of working, those paid to sabotage it will make sure it doesn't.

Besides, denialism is widespread. There were all sorts of conflicting pieces of information about the effectiveness of masks and various other quick-fix cures. The informational infrastructure is broken in fatal ways.

It became impossible for the US to ignore Japan once the ships started sinking at Pearl Harbor. The striking thing about today is that the huge casualties haven't turned into a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 event, despite outnumbering both of those put together by orders of magnitude.

The difference was then that the government did want to go to war already, and it was just public opinion that was shifted to pro-war by Pearl Harbour.

Likewise, Bush already wanted to go to war with Iraq, but 9/11 shifted public opinion to make it possible.

Surely 200,000 people dying is just as big of an event (or bigger) as Pearl Harbour or 9/11, it's just that the government are refusing to acknowledge it as such because it is not what they want and doesn't serve their purpose.

Yes, the US government is uniquely corrupt/evil/incompetent so let's just write them off. Not to worry, I'm sure Germany, UK, France, Russia, Taiwan, Italy, Norway, etc. have all ramped up capacity massively and our hospitals can just order from them. Right?

Unfortunately not. And its not the free market or capitalism making countries react chaotically and incompetently. Its democracy.

When the dear leader in the Forbidden City tells companies to shift production it will happen. When a president or prime minister wants to do anything he has to go through channels- including an army of lawyers.

The UK has definitely suffered exactly the same problem. We still don't have even a track and trace app and testing is patchy.

I believe we (somehow??) spent 11 million quid on that app, which does not even work.

https://www.digitalhealth.net/2020/06/nhs-contact-tracing-ap...

Plus we haven't even bothered to adopt Apple's version. When you try to turn that on it says it's not been enabled by your local health authority.

Germany was actually planning to give away masks for free to other countries as they seemingly ordered too much. And before they are aging past their best-used-by date in storage, better give them away.

This is what happens when the free market becomes the accepted cultural answer to all problems. We forget that the defining quality of good government is not efficiency, but effectiveness.

I don't think it's market fundamentalism, Trump is not a neoliberal. He just doesnt want to attempt to fix it. It could be racism, it could be his narcissism is such that if he tried to do something now he'd have to accept his failures from the very start, and that would shatter his fragile sense of self...

There is no market fundamentalism exhibited when it comes to other bailouts, only when it comes to trying to harm the least powerful in society.

Better modeled as a pinball machine... try to avoid ascribing motives, as they change too fast to build a coherent model.

This is a somewhat ahistorical. The Defense Production Act of 1950 is what everyone is talking about. Withe respect to WWII, production increased every month of the war until the end, and the ramp up began in a limited fashion a year or two before the US entered the war.

The thing people miss is that a lot of what was produced by converted companies in the first year of the war was junk. The guns jammed, the planes fell out of the sky, and so on. Typewriter companies just don't know how to make rifles, and it took a lot of trial and error for them to figure it out. Literally they had to get back field reports on what broke and then try to reproduce and fix it, then put that fix into production. No amount of the government will it to be could make typewriter machinists immediately good at making rifles, even though those worker probably knew men who would depend on those same rifles.

Now consider that the weaving machines for n95 masks are probably several orders of magnitude more complicated than the lathes used to make rifles or the tools used to make a 1945 aircraft.

You're also forgetting that the first thing we tried to ramp up with a government nudge was ventilators, and numerous companies tried. Most of them failed however, and that experience isn't forgotten by other companies. Then it turned out that no one was paying attention to data from China and Italy that suggested that ventilators may actually be causing WORSE outcomes, but when doctors noticed the demand plummeted. Those manufacturers were now left holding the bag. Who want's to sign on for that?

Then, consider the PPE ramp up. A lot of companies participated, but cash strapped hospitals weren't buying because the moratorium on elective surgeries killed their cash flow, which no one had previously expected at a policy level. Sure the government could have stepped in, but again no one saw that coming before hand so extra funding for PPE for hospitals didn't get included in the Covid relief bill.

Now, after 2 big misfires the political will is spent.

Congress could always go back and spend more. They choose not to.

I wholeheartedly agree that the current will to power approach taken by both parties in congress has rendered them useless. My overarching point however was that money ins't a magical crank you can turn that makes goods come into existence. The N95 problem is complicated, and not many companies could produce them even if they were funded.

They also don't want to get stuck with a factory floor full of mask machines after the pandemic is over.

The wonderful thing about the DPA is that you don't care what they want when you use it.

In theory I guess, but you’re still going to end up with a half-assed failure if you do force people to produce things.

Yep. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Actual exceptionalism ended coinciding with the end of WW2. It's America's slow and steady decline like Rome. 250 years / 10 generations is about all a civilization typically lasts. Apathy, corruption, incompetence, disorder, inequality, poverty, decay, tyrants, and ultimately: dissolution.

Here's an insightful prognostication by the late, great Chalmers Johnson around 2005: https://youtu.be/Q2CCs-x9q9U

Personally, I think it's healthy that America drops this exceptionalism attitude. We can't keep living off of the WW2 laurels forever. And other nations are clearly approaching our "world's best" status in various sectors: China builds a shitload of stuff, Canada has pandemic payment support and healthcare. We're very clearly not united against something like fascism and we're more fragmented, so yeah, we kinda can't do the WW2 things any more.

American exceptionalism isn’t just “we’re the best”, it’s also our (historical) optimism that we can solve any problem and that tomorrow will be better than today. There’s a baby in that bath water.

Take a look around. That baby has been gone for a while now.

When I say American exceptionalism, I'm not talking about the attitude of "We're better than all other countries". I'm talking about the attitude of "We can accomplish whatever we set our minds to, no matter how hard the task". The same attitude was at play in the Apollo program, if we don't want to use a wartime analogy.

The problem is that while having a can't do rather than a can do attitude is "only" causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans right now, it is going to kill way more than that with our long-term ongoing failure to address climate change. That is where the costs of having a can't do attitude are going to be the most visible.

This is extremely frustrating. Every time I try to discuss big issues with my dad, his side consists basically of "its too difficult". This man witnessed the transition room sized memory to 1TB SD cards, the growth of the internet infrastructure, the development of international flight - all things which would have been considered magical miracles just a few decades before he was born, but now everything is just too difficult to bother implementing. I don't understand how he can have that attitude after everything he witnessed being built and even participated in building.

> Yet somehow now we can't re-tool less than 0.1% of our total industrial capacity to make PPE? That's beyond us now? Really?

Your "can't" is playing two parts here trying desperately to imply "unable" for dramatic effect but actually means "unwilling" which I think is super misleading.

Like of course we could have, but politicians were more afraid of headlines like "The government invoked DPA and spent billions to produce masks, now they're sitting in warehouses" and "N95 mask producers cash huge government checks to produce masks no one needs."

The actual politicians charged with making decisions have been (I think naively) optimistic about the pandemic and if that isn't us going back to our British roots of going to the pub and waiting for it all to blow over I don't know what is.

> This kind of widespread attitude is a stunning reversal from the American exceptionalism of decades past. What do we call it, American fatalism? American incompetence?

The really stunning thing here is that ~400,000 US troops died over a 4 year period in WWII. We've lost >200,000 US citizens in ~8 months due to COVID-19. I think American incompetence barely starts to cover this clusterf.

> In World War II, we retooled our entire economy to embark on years-long total war against fascism.

Its a big gap in my experience of economics/politics/management about how things were done back then to do this. Was it people doing the "right thing", or were companies paid to do it, or was it government controlled factories.

Its a bit like the British empire - ie we need to invade Malaysia to get rubber, or Arabia for oil. How were things done in the old days? In today's globalized commercial world I (or most other managers) dont really know.

It’s been a while but I read Edwin Land’s biography — he was the inventor of Polaroid and considered the Steve Jobs of the mid-twentieth century — and the War effort was given a lot of credit for establishing their dominance. It didn’t seem like that in the short term, but after the War ended, if I recall correctly, they benefited greatly from having scaled up to meet its demands, and from incentives.

> We're more than 6 months into the pandemic at this point, and no sign of reaching the end

The pandemic was a looming threat in January, but we'll give a one month pass due to bureaucratic slowness. If machine production had been started in February, we'd currently have two months of full scale mask production. Right in time for flu season.

What would the dividends be here? The article says "shortage", but it's my understanding that health workers are now getting all the PPE they need to stay safe; we're just not quite up to the normal level of abundance where it's disposable. If you sent me 6 months into the past with $10 billion to allocate, I'd surely spend it on vaccine funding.

I wonder if maybe one of the differences is this has always seemed "temporary"... Or at least that is how it has been portrayed. We're just in that period before we have a vaccine, and everything goes back to normal. When you think we're only a few months away, making huge investments like that doesn't seem to make sense.

But WW2 was an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the war will come over here and our country will be destroyed.

A global pandemic is an existential risk, if we didn't pull together the disease will take over here and our country will be destroyed.

I live in New York, I can say for NYC took this seriously (eventually) and it still looks like someone Thanos-snapped half the economic activity in the city.

Now imagine if the city had kept on its initial path by not taking the virus seriously and leaving hospitals so full they couldn't even handle the dead bodies anymore?

What you are suggesting IS happening. Companies ARE investing in increasing American production of n95 masks in America. This was even reported by the wall street journal.

There are signs we are reaching the end of this pandemic. We've made a lot of progress. We are protecting nursing homes better. In most states death rates at the lowest they've been. NYC has shown that immunity is causing the virus to slow down. Hospitals have better treatments available to them. A vaccine is likely to be available by the end of the year and the systems are in place for fast administering to needed populations. Schools are back in session with minimal issues.

Your WW2 comparison would be tedious to even discuss. But in short, the economy did not switch overnight. And retooling and expanding is always easier than creating new production from nothing. Creating n95 masks isn't just an issue of "retooling".

We do not know if invoking DPA would have changed anything and this unsupported smug certainty is what ruins actuals discussion on this. You do not have any compelling reasons for HOW the DPA would have changed things.

Corporate greed is at all time high I’m afraid. 0.1% may be all the companies that have an altruistic bone in their body in the US right now. Everything is tied to bigger and better profits because God forbid your stock falter even the tiniest bit in this era. Your CEO salary tied to its performance might go down!

It's literally harder to produce N95 masks then to churn out rifles and ammo.

Want to produce a rifle (in the 1940s)? Milling machines and operators. That's a factory order, done. Ammo? Couple four stage presses and some armorers, not even hard to train civilians instead.

Want to produce N95 masks? Ok, well there's a custom built machine that produces the correct kind of fabric, there are only two builders in the world, and the machine has a meaningfully high failure rate... and requires special shipping, assembly, maintenance and so on...

You’re right, we’ve never produced cutting edge machinery en masse for a war before, this situation is completely new...

Wait, that’s not right.

That’s also ignoring scale. Getting a few machinists for rifles is pretty easy; getting all the machinists for total war is not. Comparative to the scale of government action and organization in WW2, manufacturing and distributing PPE is nothing.

A lot of people know how to build or operate a mill well enough to do most tasks. My dad does, my grandfather did, most of my uncles do.

The particular fabric machine for N95 masks is very specialized, and building those machines has a failure rate - you may be producing fabric only sufficient for a N90 or N85 application - a lot of "dust" or "atv" masks are exactly that.

The machines are physically large enough and with specialized enough parts you can't build one out of a machine shop.

It'd be like demanding we mass produce Titan IVs tomorrow. America has built a Titan IV before, we've built a few - surely we could just crank out one a day right?

I’m not saying that making the basic machinery for PPE is easy compared to say, simple firearms. They’re obviously more complex. But they’re also a known problem; we’ve been making PPE out of the same basic materials since 1972. Compared to other large scale efforts the US has undergone to fight wars or handle other national pride situations, making more PPE machines is both cheaper and simpler. It does not require the creation of new technologies, nor the whole sale mobilization and re-organization of our society. All it requires is the application of enough money to buy an F-35 or two to rebuild the machines that were dismantled back in 2000.

This is not complicated, we just lack the will as a society to fix this.

What is your hypothesis on why the UK, France, Germany, Norway, etc. have not just dictated new capacity into existence? If they could do that, then even if the US was uniquely sucking wind, we could just buy from them. We can't.

No idea. I don’t know enough about those countries to have a meaningful opinion.

Of course there are difficulties. Everything is difficult compared to just buying stuff from China. The entire point is that we used to tackle the difficulties and work hard to succeed, rather than simply give up and recite reasons why things cannot be done.

Machinery, and machine-making-machines was a bottleneck for all the war powers. The US least, but it was still an effect.

Hence things like the Allied bombing of the German ball-bearing factory to wreck the aircraft engine supply chain.

Sorry, but this just isn't true. It was far more difficult to manufacture an M1 Garand in 1940 than it is an N95 mask in 2020. There was a huge amount of custom Pratt & Whitney machinery built just to produce the rifle, some of which is still used today to produce other things btw!

What is your hypothesis on why the UK, Germany, France, Norway, Russia, China, etc. have all been relatively unable to dictate sufficient capacity into existence? Even if the US is uniquely sucking, why can't we just buy it from all these other countries which should hypothetically have been able to create production also?

They have been able to, and Chinese respirator masks in particular are abundantly available in the US. But they use different industrial standards, so the Chinese masks are KN95s, and some health organizations don't want to use them.

For good reason: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/22/covid-...

I strongly disagree.

I have a small lathe and mill sitting in my office right now. With those, I have everything technically necessary to build a Garand. Don't get me wrong - it would take a long time, and I would have to make substantial improvements to my tooling - I'd need to build a button rifling machine, for instance - but I have everything necessary to bootstrap production of M1 Garands in my office.

No amount of time or hacking would let me produce the fabric necessary for disposable N95 masks. I'm quite confident of this - I worked on the issue for quite a while, as I was unemployed at the beginning of this pandemic. The best solution I found was making filter cartridges for existing reusable respirators from HEPA furnace filters and 3D printed parts.

You won't be able to produce materials neither for M1 Garand nor for masks. But at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance if any of the commonly used ones isn't available and complicated stuff is only testing filtration properties of the material with cheap test equipment (you can even make test equipment yourself, it's relatively simple for such purposes, "dust sensor" kind of stuff). Everything else is way more primitive than lathe and mill.

> at least for N95 masks there are plenty of substitute materials available in abundance

Can you name any? That would literally be world changing right now.

As far as my research has revealed it is literally only melt-blown fabric that can meet N95 standards and the vast, vast majority of melt-blown fabric does not (we use tons of the stuff in sofas and mattresses but that stuff isn't anywhere near N95).

And no, your dust sensor will not meet lab requirements for N95 testing unless it had a very large price tag.

You can make a M1 Garand, maybe, assuming that you don’t get the heat treat wrong and it wears out or blows up. What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced. Nor any of the other firearms used, nor the literal mountains of ammunition required to train and equip all of the men who would eventually carry just that one rifle into combat.

The US effort for WW2 consumed damn near the entire manufacturing capability of the United States, required that civilians ration almost all consumer goods to make the war possible, created record breaking debt, and involved the mass training of heretofore economically excluded demographic groups in order to keep it going. Individual sub components of that war effort might have been “simple”, but at scale they are not simple at all. Comparatively the effort it would take to spin up half a dozen factories to produce PPE doesn’t come anywhere close to the mass efforts this country has sustained within living memory.

> What you are nowhere close to doing is manufacturing the 5.5 million M1 Garands that were ultimately produced.

Correct - reasonably, I could produce one in about six months of work with subsequent ones coming faster after having built up the tooling and knowledge. My point is that there are millions of people like me and that the tools required to do that are common.

More to the point I could produce a working, reasonably polished firearm in a couple of weeks or less if I were doing so full time and were not restricted by US federal law. If I were basing my design off of something like a Sten submachinegun, now we're talking days at most and rapidly ramping up production speed after that.

There are no alternate designs for N95 masks that will meet the needs of healthcare workers. There are no alternate materials that are "good enough" for expedient use. This is not a product that can be reasonably manufactured in a distributed fashion.

The question is not “who is capable of doing this”. The question is “what percentage of society’s resources must be focused on this task in order to fix it”. It’s kind of obvious that there’s a difference between making a firearm and a n95 mask, but that was never my point.

Yes, making an M1 Garand is simpler than making PPE. But the process of training tens of thousands of machinists, many of whom had never had an industrial job before in their lives, in order to make millions of firearms in a short order is a huge undertaking that literally changed the entire fabric of American society. And that is only one tiny sub portion of a gargantuan effort that saw entire industrial centers dismantled in order to feed the war effort. As another example, the Swiss are only “famous” for watches because American watch factories were dismantled in order to make bomber components, giving the neutral Swiss an opportunity to take over from what had historically been an American lead industry.

The level of societal change that WW2 created was so massive that there are literally country bars in Chicago to serve the former residents of Appalachian states who were moved around due to the war and decided to not return to their original states; just the industrial aspect of that war deeply changed who we were as a society, and affected everything.

Compared to the gargantuan effort required to do all of that, creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing. All that needs to be done is rebuild a few factories to recreate a product that until 2000 or so was almost entirely made in the US. Yes, it’s more complicated than making a small number of firearms, but in the scope of resources that America has poured into other problems, recreating a factory or two doesn’t even register on the scale.

Also, whatever happened to American optimism? This is not a hard problem to solve. We invented the damn N95 mask in the first place, why is everyone so down on our ability to redo something that we did without even thinking about 20 years ago. This is not a problem of capability, this is a problem of public will.

We're obviously "speaking different languages" here :).

I don't disagree at all with what you're saying about the scale and nature of wartime production. I get it, and we're totally on the same page there.

> creating a few factories required to make PPE on shore is nothing

Creating the factories is straightforward, as is hiring and training the workers. Expensive, sure, but that's not the problem. The problem is that there is a single material used in N95 masks for which we have limited sources and for which expanding the manufacturing capacity is very slow.

From https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n95-mask-shortage-melt-blown-fi...

> Even established companies are having trouble boosting production because they can't simply buy more machines, according to Dave Rousse, president of INDA, the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry.

> "There are only five or six companies across the globe that make these machines, and they're not inexpensive. These are sizable machines, a lot of technology, a lot of air handling, a lot of electronics, a lot of precision moving parts," Rousse said. "Normally it's nine to 12 months before you could get a machine delivery."

My understanding is that even if you can obtain the tooling, they're very difficult to keep operating - there are lots of variables to tweak and every batch has to be independently tested to verify that they meet the filtration standards. If they don't, that material ends up being used as "dust masks" and such. I would expect that means that training machine operators would be both time-consuming and expensive as well.

The bottom line of my point here is that the problem we're facing isn't one of resource allocation or of commitment to a goal - it's the tooling required to scale production significantly is slow to produce, and we don't know how to make it faster. The problem that needs to be solved isn't mask design, it's improving the production and testing equipment necessary to make the filtration media.

It’s not like the machines to make the base materials for PPE are magical items brought down from olympus to be used but never recreated. Literally everything I’ve said applies to those machines too. We could use the DPA to create more of those machines, but we’ve decided not to. The issue isn’t that any step of the chain is insurmountable, the issue is that we’ve decided as a country to just ... not bother.

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