Helene ravaged the NC plant that makes 60% of the country’s IV fluid supply
Helene ravaged the NC plant that makes 60% of the country’s IV fluid supply
arstechnica.com
Helene ravaged the NC plant that makes 60% of the country’s IV fluid supply
21 comments
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It is crazy to think about how centralised, and thereby vulnerable, the production of medical supplies is. Knocking out a single plant, for whatever reason, should not cut the supply of something as basic as IV fluid for hundreds of millions of people in half.
It's the range with medicines. The reason why ADHD meds has skyrocketed is a combination of US regulators fucking with the supply of amphetamine salts and US pharma sitting on their stockpiles, deliberately causing artificial scarcity. If capitalism worked the way we're told it is supposed to, plants in Europe or Asia or Latin America would pick up the slack but no, the entire world's supply of an entire group of medicines depends on a bunch of yanks not fucking people over.
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and ooh boy do they love fucking people over
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Doesn’t congress go back to “work” in about a month or so? Everything is fine.
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Has US government announced any form of aid/help over to NC/Tennessee outside of the usual "aid" to Israel/Ukraine/Taiwanese province of China?
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That would require congress to stop their vacation. So no :(
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I don't even think trump/Vance or Harris/walz are going to pay them a visit.
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"We must immediately act to conserve fluids"
Heh
21 comments
It also totally shut down the only supply for high quality quartz in the world. Like literally every electronic device that requires a silicon chip is dependent on those 2 mines in Spruce Pine.
It's wild how so much of the worlds critical raw material is still extracted in the most chronically impoverished parts of Appalachia.
I legitimately had no clue
Learning more about economics and media over the years has made me realize how much of "business news" in the west is just bourgeois mouthpieces conspiring to bury unflattering stories that might scare the markets and hurt their owners' bottom lines
Like that should be pretty obvious in retrospect looking at how mass media in the west is funded and who owns and invests in it as a material analysis, but it's shocking how thoroughly "huge example of how fucked (aspect of American economy) is" stories get relegated to brief passing mentions if not completely buried and totally verboten to report
Democracy Dies in Dogshit™️
first learning about appalachian mining towns in the "good old days" before they were left to deteriorate was quite an experience. It was pretty much just a system of mineral-serfdom. The mining companies owned literally everything, including all the stores (which were basically one megastore), and they wouldn't even pay the workers real money. They'd pay the workers in scrip, ie fake money that could only be used in the stores they owned (LITERALLY MONOPOLY MONEY). So even if people wanted to move, they had no way to ever save up to because they weren't actually being paid in real wages. No wonder appalachia was so revolutionary. The ruling class deserve(d/s) worse than the coal wars tbh
does china really not have its own source?
Wait what? That is actually astonishing
I was just about to comment on the quartz mining. The rail lines have been destroyed as well, so they can’t access what has been mined. Plus, a lot of that ended up washed away in the floods, it’s why some of the flood deposits look like straight up beach sand.