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?
Is this the new “China can’t manufacture a ball point pen”? (Which I strongly suspect they can do at this point. :)
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.
A very important question to ask.
Should the US make medical gloves?
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.
Those who do not learn from history... probably don't make gloves.
It's amazing how much those spreadsheet heads know nothing about how the actual world works
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!
correction: the number must go up FASTER. if it just keeps going up same as yesterday, we will lose investors
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.
Yeah, you should make stuff medical staff needs.
Or maybe not start stupid wars but this is America we're talking so meh...
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.
The story says the US doesn't have the raw material(s): NBR. Not quite sure what that is.
NBR = nitrile butadiene rubber, a synthetic rubber. Not really a raw material, as it's synthesized.
Also what the cost is. If the US really wants to reshore this sort of work then it will become materially poorer.
1-200% tariff applied at random if you don't.
The US started the tariff game btw
That is what I'm referring to.
Yes. Next question
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