t there in the universe, that we can now put a price on the impeachment in lives, actual people who would die who might not have died otherwise because of a slow preparation and lack of focus on this emerging problem at the time. Could it be that impeachment will kill a million Americans? You know, did you just scoff at that? Did you just scoff when I said that impeachment might kill a million Americans? Because you shouldn't have. I think that's the upside. I don't think you'll need more than that. But if you were to price, you know, sort of Freakonomics economic pricing of the impeachment, you would have to look at the opportunity cost. That's how economists think. They say if we're doing this, we can't simultaneously be doing this other thing because you can't be everywhere at once. It's true with money but it's true with any resource. If you're doing something you can't be doing something else with the same resources.

So I think the argument is fairly solid that a late start will make a big difference in the outcomes and we probably got started later than we should have. I mean we should have been printing ventilators like crazy in mid-January so we didn't have to worry about it in February and March.

All right, here's a question that's really making me angry and I don't know the answer to this, which is why are we not seeing reporting on the ground of an actual manufacturing company in the United States who is going balls-to-the-wall to ramp up to make ventilators even if they've never made a ventilator before? Now is that because it's not happening? Is that because there's only one little ventilator company in the United States and all the rest of them are in other countries and that poor little company can't do anything so it's better to ignore it and people are gonna die because we don't have enough ventilators? What exactly is happening with the ventilator situation?

I'd like to see a news crew camped out outside of an American manufacturing plant and watch them work 24 hours a day making ventilators that they maybe even never made two weeks ago. Where's my Apple ventilator? Serious question. If Apple Computer made a ventilator and they said we don't know if or when you'll ever use this but here's one you can have at your house, it's a thousand dollars, whatever it is, would there be enough senior citizens, people like me, I'm in that risk category, over a certain age, some history of asthma, would I pay a thousand dollars to have an Apple-made ventilator just in case, you know, just to have it sitting there just in case? Yes. Yes I would. So Apple Computer, if you're listening, I would buy an Apple ventilator. Now you're saving yourself. How hard is it to make a ventilator, right?

So an alert follower of my Twitter account showed me a tweet around an article from 2010. All right, so context is important. This is ten years ago. Ten years ago MIT had a contest, I guess, to see if somebody could, see if the students could develop a low-cost ventilator for exactly this reason, an emergency low-cost ventilator. Students made one with a hundred dollars in parts and I think they used mostly off-the-shelf parts. I don't think they invented parts. I think they just bought parts and assembled them in a little do-it-yourself kit and actually made working ventilators in a reproducible way for $100. Now obviously an Apple-made ventilator would not be $100 and be maybe $1,000 or whatever, but the point is apparently it's not hard to make them. There doesn't seem to be too much to it.

Now someone else weighed in and here's a fact check for you saying, Scott, Scott, Scott, it's not good enough just to have ventilators. You also have to have trained operators. If you don't have a trained operator it's not going to help you with your ventilators. To which I say, seriously? We couldn't, you know, you couldn't do a telemedicine call to a doctor and say, hey, I got my ventilator, am I putting this on right? And the doctor says, no, better you better tighten up the mask a little bit. If I were there I'd make sure there are no holes. Yeah, stuff like that. Is that really a problem? That these ventilators that students can make for $100, it was just a little mask thing. You don't think we can figure out how to put that little mask on our faces without a trained operator and hit the button turning it on? I don't know. There I got questions.

In World War II this country ramped up to produce tanks and weapons and all kinds of stuff and we did it pretty quickly. Over in China you saw them ramp up to create hospitals. They built hospitals in two weeks. It almost sounds like, it almost sounds like I misspoke. China built entire hospitals in two weeks. Now of course they were temporary etc. but good enough for the job. We can't build enough ventilators with this much warning? If you give the United States 30 days warning of a problem we can't build stuff anymore? There's nobody in this country who can build stuff really fast? Maybe. I mean could it be that our manufacturing capability, you know, just generally has dropped so low that we can't ramp up quickly and build a little device that a student can make for a hundred dollars and we can't crank these out by the hundreds of thousands with two weeks of notice? What's wrong with our country if we can't? And I don't know that we can't. Let's have some, I'm asking for some reporting on that.

So news business, please find some companies in that business and ask them what's happening and you know, and can we help? If you said to me, Scott, there's a ventilator company down the road from you and they're, you know, the only thing they need is more labor because you need somebody to assemble the parts and we can't build a robot to do it this quickly so we just need lots of people just to assemble them, I'd be down there in a heartbeat. I would. I would stand up. I would go to my car and I would drive down there and I would start assembling for free. You don't even need to pay me. I'll work all day. I'll assemble some ventilators for you. Just tell me what I need to do.

All right, so very disappointed in the media for not focusing on that problem. Maybe they will.

I've started a new policy today. You can of course make your own decisions but I'm blocking anybody on Twitter who comes into my mentions and into the comments and keeps saying that this is the common flu and it's gonna be like the common cold and we're all panicking and we should stop worrying because it's not going to be a problem. That is exactly what a baby yet, I don't know, a Chinese agent might say. So I'm gonna block everybody no matter how long you've followed me. I'm gonna block you for coming into Twitter and saying it's just a common cold, it's regular flu, or even comparing it to the regular flu. So anybody who compares it to the swine flu, compares it to Ebola as if that's making a point that it's not so bad, I'm just blocking you all for now. All right, because this is a crisis. It's an emergency.