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A comment on Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fight coronavirus. Parent comment

Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by petre on Thursday April 30, 2020 @03:31AM (#23028363)
The US produces lot of corn which is used to make ethanol, a key ingredient in sanitizer. Ethanol is already produced in large quantities in the US because it's used as a biofuel. So sanitizer is a pretty bad example. PPE is quite a different story. The US has got the resources (gas, cellulose), it only needs long term gov't contracts with manufacturers for strategic stockpiles. It's not black and white and you don't need to become a socialist society.
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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by shoo on Thursday April 30, 2020 @03:49PM (#23035284)
Bit of a tangent:

> The US produces lot of corn which is used to make ethanol > Ethanol is already produced in large quantities in the US because it's used as a biofuel

Isn't it kind of the other way round? Ethanol is produced from corn in large quantities because of government support requiring that more ethanol be used than the market would independently want, because of the political power of the subset of the US that grows a lot of corn.

I.e. oversupply of corn -> regulation to create artificially large market demand for corn+derived biofuel.

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Re:Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fig... by petre on Thursday April 30, 2020 @04:44PM (#23035884)
The EU also mandates use of ethanol in gasoline so no, it's not the other way around. Ethanol production in the US is not necessarily aligned with states mandating its use as fuel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_S...

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