Frankly, I'm quite surprised Amazon, FedEx, UPS and USPS have done as well as they have under these conditions.

Yes, you can plan to some extent... but these are PEOPLE heavy issues. The only way this would have gone without issue is if it was pretty much ONLY robots, and had 3-4x the number of people needed, skilled and trained to support those robots, and that the robots themselves were under 25% utilization to begin with.

Telling a company they need to spend 4-5X as much for operations, just in case of a once a centuray global pandemic, is pretty unlikely.

Now, if you want to talk about getting domestic sourcing of more products, particularly in infrastructure, defense, medicine and communications/tech, I'm all ears. There's no reason more than half of medicine and telecom/tech equipment should be foreign sourced for a country the size/scale of the US as a matter of defense. With where we're at with China and Iran (effects on Taiwan of particular concern), it's even more amazing there aren't more talks about this.

I'm so tired of this holier-than-thou "they should know better/be better prepared" bullshit. Once-in-a-century black swan event - yeah, every company should definitely have plans for something like this!

Moving massive resources in an effort like this is no small feat, and trying to treat it like it's as simple as signing people up to Slack is silly. It's amazing how people think operations like just magically manifest "because".

Even companies with “pandemic” plans have a kind of outline of cascading triggers but a lot of the resulting triggers are undefined and those are things which basically say ($leadership) convenes talks things over and develop emergent plans and offer to their lower managers who take that and develop their own plans accordingly. And then that has to be revised with feedback from staff , etc...

Not every company. But maybe a global, near-universal online marketplace, logistics company, etc. has a 10-year plan.

I've had some opportunity to have insight into corporate pandemic planning over the years.

It's important to understand that U.S. corporate planning for a pandemic has assumed a certain level of urgency and competency from the federal response.

This has been reasonable, as the federal government has for the last 20 years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, taken potential pandemics very seriously, and responded aggressively to them.

The federal response to the 2019 novel coronavirus has completely failed to live up to these expectations and the result is that everyone is scrambling to catch up. Corporations and states are following their playbooks... but those playbooks were not written in terms of "let's be ready to fill in for the federal government when they fall on their faces." The whole point of the federal government is to be a backstop for everyone else in the face of huge national threats.

This is one reason you're seeing Republican lawmakers be so willing to pump money out of the government: they know the government screwed up the early response, and so it is fair that the government should pay to help mitigate that.

Most major Governments have an ability to print money on will, and yet they were caught red handed in handling covid19. Not to mention that the entire mandate of government is to keep their country safe as first thing, and yet their incompetence was on fully display. I for one, am glad that private companies didn't copy the government.

As someone reading through this thread, I have some feedback for you. This is partly to test the commonly held view that feedback is desired instead of blindly voting and partly to help you. I piped it through `base64` so that you can ignore it if you don't feel like it:

WW91ciBjb21tZW50cyByZWFkIGxpa2UganVzdCBvdXRyYWdlLiBUaGlzIGlzIG9mIGxvdyBpbmZv cm1hdGlvbiB2YWx1ZSB0byBtZS4gVGhpcyBpcyB3aHkgSSB3aWxsIGRvd24tdm90ZSB5b3VyIGNv bW1lbnRzIGluIGZ1dHVyZS4K

Thanks. I read it. I'm curious where is the mental block that prevents people from seeing the point I'm trying to make. Am I brow-beating around the bush too much, neither clearly nor concisely?

Unrelated, but base64 encoding feedback is a great idea.

I'm not convinced, as it creates the possibility of egregious violations of community standards being difficult for moderators to detect.

Less of an issue, but still worth some thought: Just like paywalled submissions must be by-passable so that we can all share in a conversation equally, base64 threatens to create subthreads that are not equally accessible. (Trivial easy if you are on a laptop, not on mobile).

That's a fair point. Acting in good faith I had not considered abuse of the technique.

I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.

Perhaps a good example is StackOverflow's Q&A format w/ comments and chats. You can comment and move to chats but the emphasis is on the important part: the question and the answers.

Allowing voting on these "asides" in StackOverflow permits all of the usual stuff while relegating them to the asides they are.

Of course, in the case of what I used it for, it is generally impolite to offer advice unasked but the nature of slow feedback loops means it's better for me to offer an ignorable piece of thing. i.e. if you think I'm an idiot, I want you to have the power to ignore me. That is only polite to compensate for the brain-hacking strength of having text describe you. You can't ignore it afterwards.

>I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.

That would either be PMs, or the forum equivalent of posting "sage" on an imageboard (which prevents the post from bumping,) neither of which HN supports.

Although given the forum's focus on quality over quantity, I think some kind of "whisper" mode might be worth looking at, to opt out of having such comments from appear on the new comments page.

Yeah, I considered PMs but they're really not the same because the point is that everyone benefits with low attention contribution. The whisper mode is totally what I was thinking of.

They could be comments that are automatically marked dead for everyone but the intended recipient. People with showdead on already self-select for higher noise content anyway.

I hadn't thought of that, that's interesting.

I learnt it from someone I know[0]

0: https://lobste.rs/s/lhijk2/horrifically_dystopian_world_soft...