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.
reactordev 4 hours ago [-]
One sounds incapable from a skill perspective, the other is incapable from a market perspective. I’ll take the later over the former any day.
stingraycharles 1 hours ago [-]
The later form was part of the design from the beginning: relying on imports for something this critical in times of an epidemic was a supply chain risk. It was never intended to compete in terms of pricing.
It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
SanjayMehta 31 minutes ago [-]
Once the epidemic was over, stakeholders forgot about the original motives.
wrs 15 minutes ago [-]
Also, the stakeholders decided the epidemic was a hoax in the first place.
samsolomon 4 hours ago [-]
Agree. The problem is over extended lengths of time the people with the skills to make these things—or make tools that make them—will leave the workforce.
That's how this goes from being a market issue to a skill issue.
quotemstr 36 minutes ago [-]
Over time, the latter becomes the former.
reactordev 4 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
trebligdivad 3 hours ago [-]
That might have been a bargain if you could have done it during peak Covid.
Having the capability to make them is worth a lot in resilience.
brianwawok 43 minutes ago [-]
Who’s paying to bring online a factory that sites idle just in case? Are you also paying workers to sit there idle?
trebligdivad 18 minutes ago [-]
Well I wouldn't pay for it to be idle; if you want to ensure you have the ability to do it, then you buy some proportion of it's potential output at their increased costs; but while that's happening you work on all the reasons it's more expensive.
michaelmrose 16 minutes ago [-]
The logical thing is that the government buys them continually at the higher price which justifies the existence of the factory with the requirement that it is made here and if this is not sufficient motivation you make buying something more buying something profitable contingent
wbl 33 minutes ago [-]
Or stockpile a two year supply. You can get a lot with a billion dollars.
hn_throwaway_99 31 minutes ago [-]
These things expire you know, for latex gloves it's only 3 years.
skybrian 18 minutes ago [-]
You could rotate the inventory. Normally companies try to minimize inventory, but someone could pay them to keep six month’s or a year’s supply as a buffer.
b112 30 minutes ago [-]
Stockpiles of masks and gloves where maintained in Canada, and I believe the US after SARS.
But a year before COVID, these warehouses were shut down, as the stockpiles were old, and needed a refresh, and politicians didnt see the need to spend tens of millions on new stockpiles.
The has happened several times over the last 100 years.
michaelmrose 14 minutes ago [-]
Republicans didn't see the need to be precise
aaron695 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dmix 4 hours ago [-]
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’.
gdhvkkk 49 minutes ago [-]
Nice comment. And to me this just points out that due to specialization, you’re probably always going to be higher cost on something. But that’s not necessarily bad
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?
Brybry 3 hours ago [-]
You can see the two awards on govspending. [1][2]
Interestingly govspending says only $8.7 million of the $10 million award has been outlayed but I guess it's possible it just doesn't have the outlay info for the $123 million contract?
I think the contract type is a 'firm fixed-price definitive contract' but what happens when the contractor doesn't manage to create the production capability in the contract?
I found a FOIA request on muckrock[3] but it didn't seem to have anything related to the contract in terms of penalties.
Needs an orthogonal approach. Perhaps Elmer's glue that physician’s can dip their hands in and rinse off?
fkdk 5 hours ago [-]
Some of my early research (elementary school) suggested that certain glues can form a peelable, skin-like layer. Maybe that could be a promising way forward?
biophysboy 9 minutes ago [-]
I did the same research in elementary school! My parents were my seed investors. They asked for 25% of equity - all I ended up giving them was some collectible artwork for the fridge.
marking-time 41 minutes ago [-]
:) Love the early research. It seems to me that your product could be useful, particularly since those gloves are hard to put on.
michaelmrose 10 minutes ago [-]
Gloves are sterile wouldn't this tend to embed whatever is on the hands in the surface as it dries?
karakoram 7 hours ago [-]
A very important question to ask.
Should the US make medical gloves?
kaashif 6 hours 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.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
And in the midst of a start-stop petrochemical supply crisis.
jeffrallen 6 hours ago [-]
Those who do not learn from history... probably don't make gloves.
raverbashing 6 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how much those spreadsheet heads know nothing about how the actual world works
vrganj 6 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
philipallstar 5 hours 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.
michaelmrose 2 minutes 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.
raverbashing 29 minutes 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 13 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like a local maximum to me. Did you maybe mean a global maximum?
vrganj 4 hours 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.
fartfeatures 5 hours ago [-]
Redundancy is just waste wearing a trench coat etc etc.
matchbok3 4 hours 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 3 hours 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.
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 2 hours 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.
Don't know what you see there - but it sure does look like an exponential curve, doesn't it?
vrganj 1 hours ago [-]
Sure, the planet can't die. But the people and animals on it can.
But I have a feeling you knew what I meant and are just being deliberately obtuse.
hypeatei 3 hours 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.
jofzar 6 hours ago [-]
Looks like most/all manufacturing happens in the SEA/China, so I can see the logic that it could be considered a military risk for it to not be manufactured/possibility to scale manufacturing in America.
maxglute 6 hours ago [-]
Someone already decided US should. The important question is whether 1B should have gotten the job done, and if not... is it matter of throwing good $$$ after bad $$$... or is it just bad sign 1B wasn't enough.
barrenko 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, you should make stuff medical staff needs.
expedition32 6 hours ago [-]
Or maybe not start stupid wars but this is America we're talking so meh...
PowerElectronix 5 hours ago [-]
Making them? Not in the least. But being capable of making them? It's a must, be it gloves, EVs, semis, or screws.
fl0id 4 hours ago [-]
It's all a question of price, based on the article. And not planning how much it takes to start up. In any case it's also not feasible to keep a plant on standby, just in case you need it one day.
goalieca 4 hours ago [-]
The USA can make anything if there’s money in it. Right now, I just don’t think there’s any.
tonyedgecombe 6 hours ago [-]
Also what the cost is. If the US really wants to reshore this sort of work then it will become materially poorer.
einpoklum 6 hours ago [-]
The story says the US doesn't have the raw material(s): NBR. Not quite sure what that is.
oasisaimlessly 6 hours ago [-]
NBR = nitrile butadiene rubber, a synthetic rubber. Not really a raw material, as it's synthesized.
RetroTechie 5 hours ago [-]
With all the chemical industry already in the US, and $1B to throw at it, production capacity for the raw material couldn't be included?
It's not like you need a metric ton of it to produce a box of gloves.
wildzzz 4 hours ago [-]
The issue is that domestic sources of NBR are few because of the type of petroleum extraction we do here. This makes the cost of NBR relatively high and consequently makes the gloves pricey compared to imported ones. We can definitely make.a glove but no one wants to buy them.
warumdarum 5 hours ago [-]
The more important part is how to make people who ask this question a permanent pariahs?
derektank 32 minutes ago [-]
You think someone should be made a permanent pariah for suggesting medical gloves be manufactured in Malaysia or Thailand, rather than the US? Why?
rasz 3 hours ago [-]
nah, you can always import from friendly nations like Denmark, Spain, Canada, Mexico..
like_any_other 4 hours ago [-]
It should be able to. A country that can't, cannot hope to remain sovereign in anything but name, for long.
roysting 6 hours ago [-]
Yes. Next question
rileymat2 4 hours ago [-]
Why is it so simple? Instead of investing billions, perhaps a stockpile is a better strategy.
roysting 3 hours ago [-]
That would be a good thing for you to research to build an understanding for the scale of what you are simplifying. Here's a start; just alone during a rather non-pandemic of 2020-2022 the USA alone used about 1.8 billion, with a B, gloves per week ... week.
rileymat2 10 minutes ago [-]
So 1 billion dollars buys about 8 billion gloves? Or about 4 weeks? So for 12 billion dollars that's a years slack?
I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment.
The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem.
So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.
14 minutes ago [-]
Hikikomori 6 hours ago [-]
1-200% tariff applied at random if you don't.
looksjjhg 6 hours ago [-]
The US started the tariff game btw
Hikikomori 6 hours ago [-]
That is what I'm referring to.
taneq 6 hours ago [-]
Is this the new “China can’t manufacture a ball point pen”? (Which I strongly suspect they can do at this point. :)
maxglute 6 hours ago [-]
Ballpoint pen tips was proxy Li Keqiang used to shame PRC industry to build precision micromachining capabilities (tungsten carbide for high-end munitions etc), TISCO did it in like a year and it upgraded entire PRC metallurgy chain. US struggling to make 100% indigenized gloves 5+ years after covid... is well maybe not something new relative to US industrial decline, but certainly something else. I'm sure US can... but at what cost and all that.
code_duck 4 hours ago [-]
The article states some of the companies successfully made gloves, but customers such as hospitals considered the prices too high, which is why they're looking to the federal government to be the primary customer now.
maxglute 4 hours ago [-]
Article says 1% of gloves are made in US, but US doesn't produce any of the rubber, so raw inputs not American.
probably_wrong 5 hours ago [-]
More like the new "America can't manufacture a grill scrubber" [1].
For those who haven't seen the video, YouTuber Destin Sandlin ("Smarter every day") tried to build a grill scrubber using 100% materials from the US and failed.
The claim he failed seems like hyperbole. He couldn't find an existing manufacturer for chainmail in the US but this is a fairly trivial and niche thing to create, and is more a reflection of how uncommon it is for people to need that specific type and size of chain mail than it is that the US is incapable of making it. The other part is from Costa Rica only bc he hasn't yet made the injection mold for it, like he did for the handle itself.
probably_wrong 40 minutes ago [-]
I disagree with that conclusion: even if the chainmail were indeed very uncommon (no idea), getting it from China was so easy that he even got it when actively trying to avoid it. And since the chainmail is the revolutionary part of the idea (and the most expensive part) it might as well be the product.
He set out to get "100% made in the USA", settled for "no part made in China", and couldn't even get that. That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
gcanyon 4 hours ago [-]
One interesting point is that China "can't" (more like "is significantly behind on") manufacture jet engines -- the blades are the sticking point, they are ridiculously engineered.
Cheap agentic robotics can change this by decreasing the cost of labor.
jongjong 5 hours ago [-]
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.
orphereus 5 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't free market reward companies that go the other way and where people don't "fail upwards"? It is kind of demoralising to think otherwise, but it seems it is true.
We see it everywhere. Bad companies making bad decisions keep surviving, and actually the vast majority of companies are like this.
One implication is that MBAs in suits that make bad decisions are actually right and their decisions are not bad. The other implication is that there is no free market, no meritocracy and the truth is, game was rigged from the start.
Edit: I should add that most of this is anegdotal evidence and a general feeling I have. It is not a very powerful argument I'm making.
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
The market rewards companies that know how to play the market, and the market isn't a free market.
mrkeen 4 hours ago [-]
The market does reward proficiency. We live in the punished timeline. No contradiction. Most software is buggy and most businesses fail.
orphereus 4 hours ago [-]
What does punished timeline mean?
mrkeen 4 hours ago [-]
It's the corollary to your statement about the market rewarding competent companies.
The market punishes incompetent companies.
Just being aware that the market rewards competent companies is not enough to magically turn companies competent.
jongjong 5 hours ago [-]
I agree, a free market would work that way... Yet 'fail upwards' and zombie companies seem to be the default. Personally I don't believe that what we have in the west is a free market. I think these days, it's probably less free than the one in China. The market here is completely smothered by regulations.
For example, about a month ago, I saw a video about people farming frogs in China... To collect secretions for medical use. At first I thought WTF. But then they mentioned how much it sells for and I thought "Wow. We have a lot of cane toads here everywhere, it would be a great business to do here." I actually started thinking of doing this... This is really out there for me because I'm a software engineer; but I started seriously considering this. But guess what? I did my research and turns out it's illegal to do it in my country (Australia) because the frog secretions would be considered an illicit substance and you need to go through some expensive process to obtain a license. Yes, you need a license to farm frogs...
A few weeks back, I read news about someone who got arrested for farming cockroaches (as reptile food for zoos)... It's like all the entry-point business opportunities have become illegal.
Every time I heard of a case like this where some really good niche business opportunity is illegal in Australia, I asked my AI if this practice is legal in China and the answer is almost always yes.
The other day, I was watching a documentary about Philippines and I saw a kind of makeshift resort built literally on top of a coral reef. Really amazing looking. They seemed to be getting good reviews and actually making money... This would NEVER be allowed in my country. At best, you could purchase a ship for millions of dollars then apply for expensive licenses, then you'd have limits on how many people you can take at a time, etc... So many constraints and regulations. Such artificially high capital requirements. It would be a worse experience and less profitable; and you'd have to be filthy rich just to get a chance to engage in that highly constrained, mediocre business activity.
xyzzy123 3 hours ago [-]
I like your moxie and I also agree Australia is an over-regulated racket... but I'm also glad my neighbours aren't mass farming frogs or cockroaches in my suburb without talking to the council first.
My brother had a neighbour build a crematorium next door in NZ; not an industrial or rural area, just the suburbs, no permits, no consultation, no notification. Very entrepreneurial. They got shut down but the flip side of "you can just do things" is surprises like a plume of smoke and the smell of burning corpses when you step outside.
LadyCailin 4 hours ago [-]
“Overhead to starting businesses” is not the only metric to take into account though. I’m not going to defend any given regulation necessarily, but your ad reductum fallacy is to think that’s the ONLY factor that must be considered. Consumer protection, environmental protection, worker protection, etc, etc, all can and should be taken into account in the calculus for regulations. Besides, many problems with starting a business come from monopolistic practices, not regulation, and reducing regulations will just make it cheaper for the mega corporation to keep their monopoly, at the cost of all these other factors.
So anyone who just goes “grr, regulation bad”, I can’t take seriously. If you have specific examples of regulations that are objectively bad, and should be removed, that’s fine, but the examples you cited protect something else, and ignoring that is intellectually dishonest at best, and blatantly partisan at worst.
matchbok3 4 hours ago [-]
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.
swarnie 5 hours ago [-]
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.
lthi747 5 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one, that can’t read the article because it requires subscription?
CoastalCoder 5 hours ago [-]
One of the comments provides an archive link to the story.
I was kind of able to read that on my Android phone, but something on the page made panning really janky so I gave up.
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.
It baffles me that this wasn’t made more explicit? That seems to be the root cause of the failure.
That's how this goes from being a market issue to a skill issue.
But a year before COVID, these warehouses were shut down, as the stockpiles were old, and needed a refresh, and politicians didnt see the need to spend tens of millions on new stockpiles.
The has happened several times over the last 100 years.
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’.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040615/what-are-eco...
Interestingly govspending says only $8.7 million of the $10 million award has been outlayed but I guess it's possible it just doesn't have the outlay info for the $123 million contract?
I think the contract type is a 'firm fixed-price definitive contract' but what happens when the contractor doesn't manage to create the production capability in the contract?
I found a FOIA request on muckrock[3] but it didn't seem to have anything related to the contract in terms of penalties.
[1][$123.1 million] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA850521C0005_970...
https://www.highergov.com/contract/FA850521C0005/
https://g2xchange.com/app/awards/contracts/CONT_AWD_FA850521...
[2][$10 million] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75A50525C00001_75...
[3] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/con...
Should the US make medical gloves?
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.
Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!
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.
Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end
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.
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...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
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
Don't know what you see there - but it sure does look like an exponential curve, doesn't it?
But I have a feeling you knew what I meant and are just being deliberately obtuse.
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.
It's not like you need a metric ton of it to produce a box of gloves.
I am not sure what you are getting at, continuously spending money just in case there is a problem sometime, including the upfront investment.
The scale of the storage? We have 6000 hospitals in the US. which would have to store about 2 million gloves a piece if you decentralized it. The storage space would be about 2 10x10x10 cubes in each location, probably varying dramatically by hospital size. Of course that is just proper hospitals, we have many many more medical facilities that use them. I don't see storage being a problem.
So what is the scale we are talking here? A complete 6 month supply would be half the cost. And this is a pandemic scenario we are talking about that uses a lot of gloves, not a national security concern where we would not have that much additional use.
For those who haven't seen the video, YouTuber Destin Sandlin ("Smarter every day") tried to build a grill scrubber using 100% materials from the US and failed.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
He set out to get "100% made in the USA", settled for "no part made in China", and couldn't even get that. That definitely feels like a failure of the US manufacturing industry.
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.
We see it everywhere. Bad companies making bad decisions keep surviving, and actually the vast majority of companies are like this.
One implication is that MBAs in suits that make bad decisions are actually right and their decisions are not bad. The other implication is that there is no free market, no meritocracy and the truth is, game was rigged from the start.
Edit: I should add that most of this is anegdotal evidence and a general feeling I have. It is not a very powerful argument I'm making.
The market punishes incompetent companies.
Just being aware that the market rewards competent companies is not enough to magically turn companies competent.
For example, about a month ago, I saw a video about people farming frogs in China... To collect secretions for medical use. At first I thought WTF. But then they mentioned how much it sells for and I thought "Wow. We have a lot of cane toads here everywhere, it would be a great business to do here." I actually started thinking of doing this... This is really out there for me because I'm a software engineer; but I started seriously considering this. But guess what? I did my research and turns out it's illegal to do it in my country (Australia) because the frog secretions would be considered an illicit substance and you need to go through some expensive process to obtain a license. Yes, you need a license to farm frogs...
A few weeks back, I read news about someone who got arrested for farming cockroaches (as reptile food for zoos)... It's like all the entry-point business opportunities have become illegal.
Every time I heard of a case like this where some really good niche business opportunity is illegal in Australia, I asked my AI if this practice is legal in China and the answer is almost always yes.
The other day, I was watching a documentary about Philippines and I saw a kind of makeshift resort built literally on top of a coral reef. Really amazing looking. They seemed to be getting good reviews and actually making money... This would NEVER be allowed in my country. At best, you could purchase a ship for millions of dollars then apply for expensive licenses, then you'd have limits on how many people you can take at a time, etc... So many constraints and regulations. Such artificially high capital requirements. It would be a worse experience and less profitable; and you'd have to be filthy rich just to get a chance to engage in that highly constrained, mediocre business activity.
My brother had a neighbour build a crematorium next door in NZ; not an industrial or rural area, just the suburbs, no permits, no consultation, no notification. Very entrepreneurial. They got shut down but the flip side of "you can just do things" is surprises like a plume of smoke and the smell of burning corpses when you step outside.
So anyone who just goes “grr, regulation bad”, I can’t take seriously. If you have specific examples of regulations that are objectively bad, and should be removed, that’s fine, but the examples you cited protect something else, and ignoring that is intellectually dishonest at best, and blatantly partisan at worst.
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.
I was kind of able to read that on my Android phone, but something on the page made panning really janky so I gave up.
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...