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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

Tornados have been a regular event in this region for almost a century and not a sudden and random event related to climate change. Why did they choose to store such a large quantity of USA’s medicines here? was it just the cheaper land prices? There’s plenty of east coast that isn’t very high risk for tornados/hurricanes/flooding/earthquakes

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North Carolina tornadoes are way more infrequent than the midwest. Climate change does change calculus, not always in predictable ways, ie there was a tornado in dc last year, extremely rare. In general North Carolina has a trifecta of cheap energy, talent (research triangle / unis), and inexpensive land costs.

Agreed, this tornado thing sounds like a made up excuse.

These companies, which are granted legal monopolies, have not safeguarded US interests.

It's not Pfizer's job to safeguard US interests, it's the US Government's. If the US Government wants to ensure reliable supply of medication they need to develop a policy and administrative framework to make that happen.

Well, we can't seem to have it both ways: either the government is allowed to develop and enforce regulations with teeth that protect the general public, or cimpanies are given a free hand to do the right thing and proudly serve the general public responsibly and fairly with the privileges they are given.

Yes, the government should do that. If you get a drug patent and failure to ensure supply causes the patent to be terminated I would bet the behaviors would change quite a bit.

In this case, providing an environmentally safe region for storing critical medications, along with a reasonable amount of security would be an excellent solution. There's ample amounts of both federal lands and national guardspeople who could take that on.

Infrastructure is more fragile than anyone realizes because everything just magically shows up at the store. Pfizer doesn't keep empty plants ready to go in case one gets hit by a tornado. If they make say 5000 medications, each medication is probably only made in a few places globally. A tornado tearing a plant to shreds is definitely going to fuck with that.

This article has North Carolina ranked at 25th in the list of most disaster prone states: https://moneywise.com/insurance/home/most-disaster-prone-sta...

So if you aren't going to build anything high risk in North Carolina, skip Minnesota, Alaska, Nebraska, West Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Dakota, Mississippi, Montana, Alabama, Nevada, Colorado, Louisiana, Arizona, New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Florida, Washington, Oklahoma, California, and Texas as well.

Those same East Coast locations are very much high risk for flooding as well as blizzards. There is always some hazard--that's not the real issue.

The issue is that Always Late Inventory(tm) has made it such that there is zero resiliency and zero inventory in the system.

Consequently, a single event immediately puts you behind in such a way that it takes years to catch up. Because nobody can increase their production because everything is already tuned to be on the edge of their production capacity.

Not to mention how many medications are patented. The patents do serve a purpose — taking a drug to market is both incredibly expensive and has a high failure rate, so a company needs a guarantee of some kind of return to take that chance. Maybe regulations requiring some level of redundancy for essential medication production provides a necessary middle ground. The return on such products will be slightly less, but if such a medication is so important, the revenue it generates is likely to still be large.

The answer is almost always some kind of special local tax break. Companies go where they can get the best deal.

In theory, capitalism is supposed to be a bunch of companies competing against each other to attract consumers. In reality, it often turns out to be a bunch of local governments competing against each other to attract a few BigCos.

By definition in formal economic theory, capitalism is rewarding people for saving/investing instead of spending all their money.

By definition in formal economic theory, the free market is a bunch of companies competing against each other.

By definition in formal economic theory, fascism is government regulation of companies to promote political agendas.

All of these definitions get skurvy, elided and re-purposed for propaganda, but when talking about economics, correct and accurate usage is often helpful.

Still not clear how this is an appropriate topic for Hacker News for startups?

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