I have freely admitted for a while now that Wisconsin is a fairly corrupt place. (And WEDC, the guys who came up with this, has been among the organizations I've pointed out the most.) That said, the more this Foxconn thing goes on, the more I realize how much we've been screwed over in Wisconsin by Walker and his cronies.
The Foxconn thing never even sounded right from the outset. Four to five billion? To manufacture LCDs?
I mean, I know I'm a bit more technically inclined than most people in Wisconsin, but didn't anyone stop and think for a second, "Hmmm... Wait? Isn't the future supposed to be OLED? This doesn't make any business sense for them????"
Now these Foxconn guys come back with a story about "R&D"??????
I'm just saying, isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D? So the best you'd get is R&D to enhance their manufacturing processes maybe? Throw in a small chance at some business process R&D???? (I know, it's a stretch, but I'm trying to be generous.)
Now again, I realize I'm a bit more technically inclined than most Wisconsinites, but does anyone else find it more reasonable to do that sort of R&D in places closer to your actual manufacturing? Even suspending that disbelief for a moment, you have to ask yourself why you'd need 13,000 people to do that? You don't. You'd just never do that if you owned Foxconn.
This whole story just doesn't add up. Even from the start, it never did. How could Walker and his cronies have ever fallen for any of this?
As someone who grew up in rural Wisconsin, I can tell you that there has always been a streak of anti-intellectualism, but the past few years it has transformed into something even worse.
The suspension of critical thinking that comes from ingesting information, sourced from anything tagged as "Republican", has left the Wisconsin people vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
I speak from experience and discussions with people I had last summer. For example, some didn't believe me when I told them that Foxconn had to put suicide nets around some of their factories. They believed Foxcon is this shining star of a company come to save them, because that was what they were told by Republican leaders.
I also grew up in rural Wisconsin, but lived in Madison for several years as well, and I've seen the other side of that coin too. There's plenty of snobby progressives who live in their blue bubble, often working for the state gov't or university, and assume they know what's best for the hicks in the rest of the state. The /r/wisconsin subreddit is full of the type.
The tribalism from both ends is definitely disheartening.
> As someone who grew up in rural Wisconsin, I can tell you that there has always been a streak of anti-intellectualism, but the past few years it has transformed into something even worse.
Not just Wisconsin. I grew up in a rural town in the South, and it was horrible. I'm back there teaching and it's even worse, if such a thing is possible. The only light I see is that a vast majority of the non-"yee yee" kids are fairly left-leaning, and nobody actually questioned me when I mentioned global warming yesterday. Shame is, those kids usually get the hell outta Dodge and never return.
re:suicide nets. Their employee suicide rates are equivalent to China. Its just that they employee so many people, its cost effective to place the nets. If only the rest of China was as cost effective.
anti-intellectualism has been a strong part of American history from nearly the beginning. It only went away for a while when the entire country was being drafted for wars.
Foxconn is a bad business partner and that should have been more obvious to everyone. Self serving politicians like Walker and Trump are looking for a photo spray with golden shovels and a big American flag in the background to sell to people desperately looking for jobs.
I'm just saying, isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D?
I think it's a mistake to underestimate just how much native R&D goes on in the broad and deep ocean of China's modern manufacturing complex. That entire industry has been working hard for decades now at learning from its customers, continually seeking opportunities to "level up". The particulars of this specific, sketchy case aside, the idea that Foxconn hasn't invested in sophisticated R&D facilities at this point in the game is far less believable to me.
Indeed. What a lot of people don't get is that companies don't "buy American", because they can't. We simply do not have those manufacturing capabilities. It's not just the factories. It's the skilled, trained, and experienced workers needed to do that particular flavor of high precision work.
For the US to change this, to compete directly with China at large-scale electronics manufacturing, would take decades of work and untold billions of dollars of long-term focused government effort. And frankly, the US government isn't great at long term thinking. Makes you appreciate an old-school Marxist Five Year Plan.
> How could Walker and his cronies have ever fallen for any of this?
Maybe they didn't fall for anything? Who did Foxconn buy the land from? They presumably did OK in the deal, as did any of the parties (i.e legal/accounting/lobbying firms) who facilitated the deal. Walker lost his governership in the last election, but that was before the magnitude of Foxconn's reversal was clear, so it's not directly attributable to that.
Looks like the people duped here might just be the taxpayers who payed for it all, and the would-be manufacturing workers for whom the jobs haven't materialized. I'd guess those groups' interests weren't being represented by their elected officials when the deal was struck.
It's not just land that was given to Foxconn. They were also relieved of a variety of environmental protections -- LCD manufacturing is a dirty industry that requires an enormous amount of water. Nobody did OK on that deal.
People pretty much knew the Foxconn deal was a fraud, because Foxconn, and the state government, both have a history of similar deals. There were some mining deals in northern Wisconsin that would make your hair stand on end.
"This whole story just doesn't add up. Even from the start, it never did. How could Walker and his cronies have ever fallen for any of this?"
Just a guess, sadly, they probably had the financial lubrication to fight for it. Not to mention that the "big numbers" play to their political audience, my Reagan Republican father, for one. Sure, someone who's a little more insightful about technology might be skeptical, but that wasn't Walker's audience.
Probably but I'm starting to think the corruption bar might be pathetically low for a lot of these people as well. As in, what they want most is to feel important - put them in a private jet, buy them fancy dinners and I suspect you don't actually have to pay out all that much cash.
This isn't the first time politically connected cronies sold a state on in-sourced manufacturing. Greentech [1] was going to make pitiful NEVs and sell them domestically plus export to China. No one seemed to balk at the stupid idea and funded a factory that produced nothing.
> "Hmmm... Wait? Isn't the future supposed to be OLED? This doesn't make any business sense for them????"
There's at least some life left in LCD. CES had some pretty interesting stuff like a TV that took a black and white 1080p panel and used it as the backlight for a 4k panel giving it really good contrast.
And I don't think anyone is absolutely sure that OLED is the future. It suffers from burn-in so it's really only great for smart phones and movies, for everything else LCD is king for the foreseeable future because there's no guarantee they'll solve the burn-in issues before the next great tech comes along.
Large format displays will be LCDs for many years due to inherent yield issues. (60” OLED displays is analogous to Intel trying to make a CPU the size of a full 300 mm wafer, one dust particle...). As the middle class grows, they will purchase large format displays.
R&D investment is Foxconn trying to move up the value chain. A dollar spent on R&D in China on innovative new ideas is less effective than that same dollar in the U.S. Especially since leading top tier LCD technology suppliers reside in the U.S./Korea/Japan.
They said they were going to build 8K displays and tons of new jobs. Then they said okay maybe not 8K displays but definitely some awesome displays. Now they're saying they can't even build TVs there. They cite "new realities" in the global marketplace, but this always looked like a scam.
We can blame trump and his ignorant tax policies, but the reality is that Walker scammed the taxpayers. The only question is, was he getting kickbacks? Or was it just to look good to voters?
And then, of course, once his crew gets voted out, they reduce the power of the incoming administration. And then blame this whole mess on the "uncertainty" of the incoming administration. What a joke.
I don't think "Joe the Average Wisconsinite" really had a say in this deal.
Yes yes, elected officials are SUPPOSED to represent their constituents, but no number of people protesting outside his office is legally capable of stopping Walker and Co. from misrepresenting their interests while they're in office.
And I mean, if there was some kind of quid pro quo between Foxcomm and Walker and Co., all the more reason for this not to benefit Joe Average.
They had a say. There was a recall election because of all the bullshit he had pulled before the Foxconn deal. Once it became clear he would keep his position he opened the spigot all the way up. In his mind he had the full support of Wisconsin voters.
From my understanding, creating 13,000 jobs means you will create 13,000 person-years worth of jobs. If you employ 1,000 people for 13 years you have satisfied the definition.
So essentially, Foxconn could build a small building, hire 1000 people, and after 13 years the state of Wisconsin would be legally obliged to pay them the full USD4 billion in guarantees?
I'm a little more educated, and a bit nicer than most Wisconsinites. I'll tell you right now though, if that's truly the case, you'd better make sure that doesn't become general knowledge here in Wisconsin. Most Wisconsinites are not gonna just sit back and accept that the way I do. Walker and his cronies would need round the clock security.
There are a lot of people around here who really bought in to the whole "13,000 jobs" thing.
People would get emotional. It would not be a good time in Wisconsin.
A lot of us knew it was bullshit from the start. They didn't even bother disguising the smell.
I knew Rod Blagojevich was a heel about 5 minutes after moving into his congressional district, in Chicago. When he got elected governor, I moved across the border to Kenosha, and was not surprised one bit when he went to prison.
I first heard about Walker in 2006, as a primary candidate for governor, and thought he was an ass then. Wisconsin was still fine under Doyle and Kohl and Feingold, though, and Paul Ryan was basically a do-nothing nobody (in my humble constituent's opinion) long before he somehow became speaker, out of nowhere. I moved to Tammy Baldwin's district in 2005, and left the state entirely in 2010. When Walker got elected governor, I suspected his tenure would be bad for the state, and especially bad for progressives. When the recall failed, I declared Wisconsin done. My Wisconsinite in-laws (and ex-Wisconsinite Arizonan in-laws) grew more Trumpy. Then the state legislation and executive policy turned into an avalanche of conservative favorites: union busting, ACA undermining, abortion restrictions, voter suppression, anti-pollution undermining, gun defending, immigrant intimidation, gay-marriage opposition. Dane county might hold out for a while yet, but Wisconsin is now a red state until further notice.
When the Foxconn thing came up, I guessed that it was all hot air and corruption, and that my Republican-supporting in-laws in the 1st would finally see first hand what they had all been voting for over the last 20 years.
Walker and company didn't fall for it. They engineered it for their own gain. Follow the money.
> isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D?
I tend to assume that everyone with that business model dreams of getting out of that business model. You want to develop your own tech and move upmarket somebody else bids a penny less per widget to steal your manufacturing customers.
From the article it sounds like they were planning to manufacture large screen TV's. That does make some sense because the cost of shipping large items often outweighs the cost advantage of manufacturing overseas.
In the case of flat panel displays, I don't think overseas shipping is an issue. Sea freight is priced by volume (not weight). Foreign TV manufacturers built factories in the US in the 80s because they were paying a lot to ship picture tubes, which are big, empty glass bottles. But flat panels are much denser; shipping flat panels overseas can't be that much more expensive than shipping the raw materials for making them.
Wisconsin doesn't really sound like a big R&D hub to me. How would they get all those MIT grads to move to Wisconsin? I'm sure its a great place for various economic activities but tech?!
Eh, you're underestimating the "In between Minneapolis and Chicago" aspect. Tech has risen here, and SE Wisconsin is the home of a lot of large tech-based companies like Rockwell Automation, Fiserv, Cherry. MSOE is also pretty well regarded as one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the country.
High salaries with low cost of living? Also, MIT isn't the only university with STEM grads. UW is right there in Madison and U of I, Northwestern, Purdue, ND, Michigan, etc are in the vicinity in terms of recruiting.
Depending who you ask OLED is just a stopgap measure before mLED. Thay being said LCDs still have a long life ahead of them. Not sure if anything worth such an investment but they're definitely not going away anytime soon. They offer a combination of cheap and good enough for most purposes.
The story adds up from a technical point of view and from a political point of view. Just because the future is OLED doesn't mean LCDs are going to disappear overnight.
Regardless, it was obvious foxconn intended to open operations in the US because of the political climate. The same reason japanese automakers opened up shop in the US and the south koreans and the germans and so forth. It's partly to win political favor, gain market access and for good public relations.
My guess is that china is using foxconn ( I know it's a taiwanese company ) to put pressure on Trump after canada arrested one of their executives. I'm guessing there will be more tit for tat ( arrests, projects delayed, etc ) going forward between the US and our allies and China until this trade war is resolved.
This is not an issue of corruption or necessarily incompetence of either party.
1) 'Tent pole' installations that employ a lot of people create substantial benefits way beyond whatever the investment is, at least on that basis subsidies can be rationalized. Of course there can be debate over whether they should be employed, the amount, and the means - and those details matter. But superficially, this is fairly normal practice.
2) You are probably smarter than 'most citizens of Wisconsin' but you're definitely not smarter than Foxconn's strategic planners :). A factory that makes one kind of screen can be adapted to another, and the world is massively bigger than modern markets and there are tons of applications for non-oled screens.
Superficially, again, their plans were within reason.
3) The political logic here, is that Trump was looking to make a 'big announcement' and 'foreign' companies wanted to placate him and give him his needed tweet, and then wait until the wind blows over to change their minds. An 'announcement' to me doesn't really have that much value anyhow, when they 'walk the talk' then we can count.
Remember that none of the '4 Billion' etc. will be realized unless Foxconn does make the investment, so it's not as though there's some kind of incurred debt, just possible lost opportunity cost.
...
Assuming the incentives are reasonably structured, and assuming Foxconn does actually start to hire in Wisconsin, well this might work out well. They may only end up hiring hundreds or a couple of thousand of people which case I suggest they aren't able to grab at the 'bilions' in incentives anyhow.
Consider that if Foxconn does not make an investment - even with billions of incentives on the table ... then it almost assuredly is not in their best interest anyhow.
Take these statements mostly at face value, with a grain of salt, but there's no reason to scream corruption or incompetence. There may be some ugliness in the terms of the subsidies, if someone wants to point those out that would be great, I'd love to hear about them.
It's not just guarantees; it's also stuff like people having their homes declared "blighted" so that they can be taken away: https://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn/
This is a fantastic Podcast on the situation and what went down in Wisconsin. The NDA Foxconn made council members sign to where the council couldn't even talk to their citizens about it will really rub you the wrong way;
The 2 things that will make your blood boil is when the city counsel couldn't get some residents to sell their property b/c they had nowhere to go, they declared it blighted/contaminated and forced eviction into actual blighted homes.
The second is the town took on a massive loan to buy all the land it needed, it will now default. The state of WI backed the town in the loan and will now have to pay out for this nonsense.
This is an inherent problem with city governments. I don’t know how rural Wisconsin city councils work but I know for damn sure Berkeley’s city council would be completely out of their depth negotiating a multi billion dollar deal with the likes of a Foxconn.
>The 2 things that will make your blood boil is when the city counsel couldn't get some residents to sell their property b/c they had nowhere to go, they declared it blighted/contaminated and forced eviction into actual blighted homes.
Not that it makes it less terrible but backhanded stuff like this is not uncommon at all. If you run a business in my state you basically give up your right to stand up to the state/local government about anything (because they will use its power of discretionary enforcement to destroy your business).
If you're in the right you can win the head on fight (well, win it 10yr later in court, if that counts) but the government will always out flank you if they want something done but you are in their way. Sucks but it's reality.
Not always. There's usually exemptions, not that I know how that applies here.
I used to (mid-2000s) work for a SaaS company whose main customers were municipalities and universities in the US. We always had NDAs on file for customers we did business with. It was SOP.
We weren't swindling them out of billions of dollars, though. It was something that had prices in the 30k-40k annually range.
The podcast really illustrates the anti-intellectualism that has overtaken politics (especially on the right-wing). Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. When questions were asked concerned citizens were shut down. Why listen to economists, technology experts, historians, and well informed citizens? When you can just go with your gut (really greed) and just disenfranchise the people in your constituents.
The secrecy was telling; if they actually had an informed democratic debate, the proposal would not cut the mustard.
The worst part is this really plays into the hands of the right-wing. Of course no one is going to trust government if they keep sabotaging it.
Interesting how the podcast mostly concentrated on the petty mayor as being responsible for cramming the deal through. Many of the comments here, though, put the blame up to the governor level. (Which probably makes more sense for something this big)
"...The local development agreement stipulates that, if, for any reason, Foxconn’s investment on the campus falls short, the company remains obligated to support a minimum valuation for the project of $1.4 billion, which will more than pay for all public improvements and development costs for the project."
And if the project is cancelled, it'd be logical that Foxconn will be limited to costs incurred to date. It's not like 1.4B is an open unconditional check.
I will never get over how "reporting" seems to amount to publishing a bunch of quotes by people without assessing their credibility. Why give Wisconsin Republicans, noted bad actors, a free mouthpiece in this article at all, let alone without context for whether their comments about "economic uncertainty" under the Dem governor hold any water?
Alternatively, the reporter is giving those Republicans rope to hang themselves. It all depends on how many people in the audience are capable of recognizing the bullsh*t for what it is.
And don't forget, that number might be small today but could grow much larger down the road. One aspect of reporting is creating a record. Without a record there can be no accountability. One function of a newspaper article is to provide context for quotations, and in particular a timestamp.
It’s a tenet of responsible journalism to allow those involved in a story to comment on it. Which is why mainstream news stories so often contain a line about “XY did not respond to a request for comments” or similar.
While journalists do choose who to talk to when seeking, for example, experts in a certainty j field of science, politicians are regarded more as the holder of their office, and not evaluated individually.
When they are lying or incompetent, the reader needs to be able to see so for themselves using the reported facts, I. e. “Show, don’t tell”. Anything else would rightfully be accused of editorializing.
And I expect that the report would include those facts alongside the quote so I could make that decision. This does not. Readers are not going to go on their own investigation.
So a lot of people seem to be saying something along the lines of "Wisconsin spent 4+ billion and now they're getting nothing in return."
But WI didn't write a 4 billion dollar check or anything. It was a promise of tax credits. If it turns out that Foxconn basically doesn't do anything in WI, then they won't make any money there so they won't owe any taxes so they won't use any of the credits.
So the whole thing becomes a much ado about nothing sort of situation (aside, I suppose, from the big waste of time spent negotiating everything).
Is this basically right, or am I misunderstanding something?
From what I understand, this isn't the case on two points. One, the incentive package includes hundreds of millions in construction (road building, utilities, etc) that would otherwise be unneeded and is being paid for out of pocket by the state government instead of Foxconn. Two, because Wisconsin doesn't have a corporate income tax, the subsidies would occur in the form of cash payments to Foxconn that the Walker administration claimed would be repaid via personal income taxes on the new Foxconn workers.
And Wisconsin is on the hook for around ~$1B in cash regardless of Foxconn's actual investments.
You're correct but don't let anything get in the way of ycombinator users blaming evil large corporations for problems. Most of the top posts appear to have not even read the article that was posted.
The reason things have changed is because of knock-on effects from Huawei, IMO. Foxconn would be in a very similar situation if they had proceeded.
I’m as willing to blame anything on big corporation as a Marxist flying United. But in this case I strongly feel responsibility lies with the state government, which should never have maneuvers itself into a position where it could be harmed in such a way. That’s what contracts are for, after all.
HN was also harshly critical of Amazon’s HQ2 search/reality show and the willingness to subsidies successfull corporate giants with race-to-the-bottom tax incentives.
That said, yes, there are already millions in "sunk costs" that have already been borne by the people of Wisconsin. But at a time like this, it's probably best not to let the "Sunk Cost Fallacy" get the better of you.
They _finally_ finished construction on the I-94/I-41 upgrade (also accommodating a new Amazon warehouse near Kenosha) a couple of years back, and this Foxconn agreement meant having to tear it all up again and redo it even wider than before. It's (IMO) unsafe to drive through in the Winter time.
It's a perpetual mess in Southeast Wisconsin. The problems extend far further than just the economics of the deal, into perpetual construction, shady eminent domain and reclassification of generational farms as "blighted", etc. It's criminal how much this one "deal" cost the area.
IDK that it's an option. Is the current administration in Wisconsin able to walk away from the deal they made with Foxconn? If so, then great, they can ignore the sunk cost fallacy and walk away only slightly injured.
But, and I'm not an expert here, I assumed that deals like these have some kind of protections in place to limit exactly that sort of course reversal from happening. From an outsider, this appears to be a situation where they may not be getting handed the full 4 Billion Dollars that everyone mentions, but they still used deceptive tactics in order to receive a sweetheart deal from the Wisconsin government.
My current understanding is that this isn't as good as some people are trying to make it seem (Net positive for the state! Much Gains!) but also not as bad as others seem to assume (we paid 4 billion dollars and get 0 return on that during the lifetime of the deal) and instead seems to be somewhere in the middle (we are paying more money than this deal is actually worth)
In fact, if a company is not going to invest after such massive subsidies are offered, then it's probably a huge valid signal that it really doesn't make sense for them.
fiscal responsibility is something the Republicans have only operated on when not in power. The democrats were making fiscal responsibility noises while out of power [on a national level], if it continues at all it is only because there is a division of power.
It's helpful to look past the illusion of the two parties and realize that most of the politicians in each party are more on the same side in the big picture stuff than not.
This is an oft trotted out saying that completely lacks any substance and serves as a distraction to keep people from recognizing how much more some politicians are working against their personal interest than others.
WI (the topic of this discussion) is a perfect example. We went from having Russ Feingold (a true shining star of progressive politics and the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT act) to Ron Johnson who is a true weasel.
Don't try and tell me that the guy who voted against the Iraq war, thought Dodd-Frank didn't go far enough, and worked actively for campaign finance reform is the same as a climate change denying, anti-abortion, anti-EPA shill.
Readit News
The Foxconn thing never even sounded right from the outset. Four to five billion? To manufacture LCDs?
I mean, I know I'm a bit more technically inclined than most people in Wisconsin, but didn't anyone stop and think for a second, "Hmmm... Wait? Isn't the future supposed to be OLED? This doesn't make any business sense for them????"
Now these Foxconn guys come back with a story about "R&D"??????
I'm just saying, isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D? So the best you'd get is R&D to enhance their manufacturing processes maybe? Throw in a small chance at some business process R&D???? (I know, it's a stretch, but I'm trying to be generous.)
Now again, I realize I'm a bit more technically inclined than most Wisconsinites, but does anyone else find it more reasonable to do that sort of R&D in places closer to your actual manufacturing? Even suspending that disbelief for a moment, you have to ask yourself why you'd need 13,000 people to do that? You don't. You'd just never do that if you owned Foxconn.
This whole story just doesn't add up. Even from the start, it never did. How could Walker and his cronies have ever fallen for any of this?
The suspension of critical thinking that comes from ingesting information, sourced from anything tagged as "Republican", has left the Wisconsin people vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
I speak from experience and discussions with people I had last summer. For example, some didn't believe me when I told them that Foxconn had to put suicide nets around some of their factories. They believed Foxcon is this shining star of a company come to save them, because that was what they were told by Republican leaders.
The tribalism from both ends is definitely disheartening.
Not just Wisconsin. I grew up in a rural town in the South, and it was horrible. I'm back there teaching and it's even worse, if such a thing is possible. The only light I see is that a vast majority of the non-"yee yee" kids are fairly left-leaning, and nobody actually questioned me when I mentioned global warming yesterday. Shame is, those kids usually get the hell outta Dodge and never return.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16164106
Foxconn is a bad business partner and that should have been more obvious to everyone. Self serving politicians like Walker and Trump are looking for a photo spray with golden shovels and a big American flag in the background to sell to people desperately looking for jobs.
https://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/styles/cd_l...
It is transparent and a damn shame for the politicians and voters involved. It's like a Nigerian email scam bilking your grandma out of her savings.
I think it's a mistake to underestimate just how much native R&D goes on in the broad and deep ocean of China's modern manufacturing complex. That entire industry has been working hard for decades now at learning from its customers, continually seeking opportunities to "level up". The particulars of this specific, sketchy case aside, the idea that Foxconn hasn't invested in sophisticated R&D facilities at this point in the game is far less believable to me.
For the US to change this, to compete directly with China at large-scale electronics manufacturing, would take decades of work and untold billions of dollars of long-term focused government effort. And frankly, the US government isn't great at long term thinking. Makes you appreciate an old-school Marxist Five Year Plan.
Maybe they didn't fall for anything? Who did Foxconn buy the land from? They presumably did OK in the deal, as did any of the parties (i.e legal/accounting/lobbying firms) who facilitated the deal. Walker lost his governership in the last election, but that was before the magnitude of Foxconn's reversal was clear, so it's not directly attributable to that.
Looks like the people duped here might just be the taxpayers who payed for it all, and the would-be manufacturing workers for whom the jobs haven't materialized. I'd guess those groups' interests weren't being represented by their elected officials when the deal was struck.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2018/07/17/fox...
People pretty much knew the Foxconn deal was a fraud, because Foxconn, and the state government, both have a history of similar deals. There were some mining deals in northern Wisconsin that would make your hair stand on end.
Just a guess, sadly, they probably had the financial lubrication to fight for it. Not to mention that the "big numbers" play to their political audience, my Reagan Republican father, for one. Sure, someone who's a little more insightful about technology might be skeptical, but that wasn't Walker's audience.
[1] https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/whatever-happened-to-terr...
There's at least some life left in LCD. CES had some pretty interesting stuff like a TV that took a black and white 1080p panel and used it as the backlight for a 4k panel giving it really good contrast.
Large format displays will be LCDs for many years due to inherent yield issues. (60” OLED displays is analogous to Intel trying to make a CPU the size of a full 300 mm wafer, one dust particle...). As the middle class grows, they will purchase large format displays.
R&D investment is Foxconn trying to move up the value chain. A dollar spent on R&D in China on innovative new ideas is less effective than that same dollar in the U.S. Especially since leading top tier LCD technology suppliers reside in the U.S./Korea/Japan.
There is nothing inherent in OLED having lower yields.
Two TFT layers, metal , PEDOT, oled layer ,ITO, metal
Not much different from LCD in its basic form.
I'd say that there is a potential to make them even cheaper when printed OLEDs will finally get production ready
We can blame trump and his ignorant tax policies, but the reality is that Walker scammed the taxpayers. The only question is, was he getting kickbacks? Or was it just to look good to voters?
And then, of course, once his crew gets voted out, they reduce the power of the incoming administration. And then blame this whole mess on the "uncertainty" of the incoming administration. What a joke.
Yes yes, elected officials are SUPPOSED to represent their constituents, but no number of people protesting outside his office is legally capable of stopping Walker and Co. from misrepresenting their interests while they're in office.
And I mean, if there was some kind of quid pro quo between Foxcomm and Walker and Co., all the more reason for this not to benefit Joe Average.
From my understanding, creating 13,000 jobs means you will create 13,000 person-years worth of jobs. If you employ 1,000 people for 13 years you have satisfied the definition.
The news gets better and better.
So essentially, Foxconn could build a small building, hire 1000 people, and after 13 years the state of Wisconsin would be legally obliged to pay them the full USD4 billion in guarantees?
I'm a little more educated, and a bit nicer than most Wisconsinites. I'll tell you right now though, if that's truly the case, you'd better make sure that doesn't become general knowledge here in Wisconsin. Most Wisconsinites are not gonna just sit back and accept that the way I do. Walker and his cronies would need round the clock security.
There are a lot of people around here who really bought in to the whole "13,000 jobs" thing.
People would get emotional. It would not be a good time in Wisconsin.
I knew Rod Blagojevich was a heel about 5 minutes after moving into his congressional district, in Chicago. When he got elected governor, I moved across the border to Kenosha, and was not surprised one bit when he went to prison.
I first heard about Walker in 2006, as a primary candidate for governor, and thought he was an ass then. Wisconsin was still fine under Doyle and Kohl and Feingold, though, and Paul Ryan was basically a do-nothing nobody (in my humble constituent's opinion) long before he somehow became speaker, out of nowhere. I moved to Tammy Baldwin's district in 2005, and left the state entirely in 2010. When Walker got elected governor, I suspected his tenure would be bad for the state, and especially bad for progressives. When the recall failed, I declared Wisconsin done. My Wisconsinite in-laws (and ex-Wisconsinite Arizonan in-laws) grew more Trumpy. Then the state legislation and executive policy turned into an avalanche of conservative favorites: union busting, ACA undermining, abortion restrictions, voter suppression, anti-pollution undermining, gun defending, immigrant intimidation, gay-marriage opposition. Dane county might hold out for a while yet, but Wisconsin is now a red state until further notice.
When the Foxconn thing came up, I guessed that it was all hot air and corruption, and that my Republican-supporting in-laws in the 1st would finally see first hand what they had all been voting for over the last 20 years.
Walker and company didn't fall for it. They engineered it for their own gain. Follow the money.
I tend to assume that everyone with that business model dreams of getting out of that business model. You want to develop your own tech and move upmarket somebody else bids a penny less per widget to steal your manufacturing customers.
Deleted Comment
Depending who you ask OLED is just a stopgap measure before mLED. Thay being said LCDs still have a long life ahead of them. Not sure if anything worth such an investment but they're definitely not going away anytime soon. They offer a combination of cheap and good enough for most purposes.
Deleted Comment
They're not bright enough for sunlight readability - yet
Regardless, it was obvious foxconn intended to open operations in the US because of the political climate. The same reason japanese automakers opened up shop in the US and the south koreans and the germans and so forth. It's partly to win political favor, gain market access and for good public relations.
My guess is that china is using foxconn ( I know it's a taiwanese company ) to put pressure on Trump after canada arrested one of their executives. I'm guessing there will be more tit for tat ( arrests, projects delayed, etc ) going forward between the US and our allies and China until this trade war is resolved.
Dead Comment
1) 'Tent pole' installations that employ a lot of people create substantial benefits way beyond whatever the investment is, at least on that basis subsidies can be rationalized. Of course there can be debate over whether they should be employed, the amount, and the means - and those details matter. But superficially, this is fairly normal practice.
2) You are probably smarter than 'most citizens of Wisconsin' but you're definitely not smarter than Foxconn's strategic planners :). A factory that makes one kind of screen can be adapted to another, and the world is massively bigger than modern markets and there are tons of applications for non-oled screens.
Superficially, again, their plans were within reason.
3) The political logic here, is that Trump was looking to make a 'big announcement' and 'foreign' companies wanted to placate him and give him his needed tweet, and then wait until the wind blows over to change their minds. An 'announcement' to me doesn't really have that much value anyhow, when they 'walk the talk' then we can count.
Remember that none of the '4 Billion' etc. will be realized unless Foxconn does make the investment, so it's not as though there's some kind of incurred debt, just possible lost opportunity cost.
...
Assuming the incentives are reasonably structured, and assuming Foxconn does actually start to hire in Wisconsin, well this might work out well. They may only end up hiring hundreds or a couple of thousand of people which case I suggest they aren't able to grab at the 'bilions' in incentives anyhow.
Consider that if Foxconn does not make an investment - even with billions of incentives on the table ... then it almost assuredly is not in their best interest anyhow.
Take these statements mostly at face value, with a grain of salt, but there's no reason to scream corruption or incompetence. There may be some ugliness in the terms of the subsidies, if someone wants to point those out that would be great, I'd love to hear about them.
It's difficult for Scott Walker to understand things when his steady stream of bribes (err, campaign "donations"?) depends on not understanding them.
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/132-negative-mount-ple...
The second is the town took on a massive loan to buy all the land it needed, it will now default. The state of WI backed the town in the loan and will now have to pay out for this nonsense.
Not that it makes it less terrible but backhanded stuff like this is not uncommon at all. If you run a business in my state you basically give up your right to stand up to the state/local government about anything (because they will use its power of discretionary enforcement to destroy your business).
If you're in the right you can win the head on fight (well, win it 10yr later in court, if that counts) but the government will always out flank you if they want something done but you are in their way. Sucks but it's reality.
Wtf? They could have just used eminent domain. Probably wouldn't have had to pay as much too.
Gotta think that would run afoul of open records laws and open meetings laws and etc...
I used to (mid-2000s) work for a SaaS company whose main customers were municipalities and universities in the US. We always had NDAs on file for customers we did business with. It was SOP.
We weren't swindling them out of billions of dollars, though. It was something that had prices in the 30k-40k annually range.
The secrecy was telling; if they actually had an informed democratic debate, the proposal would not cut the mustard.
The worst part is this really plays into the hands of the right-wing. Of course no one is going to trust government if they keep sabotaging it.
"...The local development agreement stipulates that, if, for any reason, Foxconn’s investment on the campus falls short, the company remains obligated to support a minimum valuation for the project of $1.4 billion, which will more than pay for all public improvements and development costs for the project."
https://www.mtpleasantwi.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=219
And if the project is cancelled, it'd be logical that Foxconn will be limited to costs incurred to date. It's not like 1.4B is an open unconditional check.
And don't forget, that number might be small today but could grow much larger down the road. One aspect of reporting is creating a record. Without a record there can be no accountability. One function of a newspaper article is to provide context for quotations, and in particular a timestamp.
While journalists do choose who to talk to when seeking, for example, experts in a certainty j field of science, politicians are regarded more as the holder of their office, and not evaluated individually.
When they are lying or incompetent, the reader needs to be able to see so for themselves using the reported facts, I. e. “Show, don’t tell”. Anything else would rightfully be accused of editorializing.
But WI didn't write a 4 billion dollar check or anything. It was a promise of tax credits. If it turns out that Foxconn basically doesn't do anything in WI, then they won't make any money there so they won't owe any taxes so they won't use any of the credits.
So the whole thing becomes a much ado about nothing sort of situation (aside, I suppose, from the big waste of time spent negotiating everything).
Is this basically right, or am I misunderstanding something?
And Wisconsin is on the hook for around ~$1B in cash regardless of Foxconn's actual investments.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/29/18027032/foxconn-wiscons...
The reason things have changed is because of knock-on effects from Huawei, IMO. Foxconn would be in a very similar situation if they had proceeded.
HN was also harshly critical of Amazon’s HQ2 search/reality show and the willingness to subsidies successfull corporate giants with race-to-the-bottom tax incentives.
Corruption from the so-called party of "fiscal responsibility"
That said, yes, there are already millions in "sunk costs" that have already been borne by the people of Wisconsin. But at a time like this, it's probably best not to let the "Sunk Cost Fallacy" get the better of you.
It's a perpetual mess in Southeast Wisconsin. The problems extend far further than just the economics of the deal, into perpetual construction, shady eminent domain and reclassification of generational farms as "blighted", etc. It's criminal how much this one "deal" cost the area.
But, and I'm not an expert here, I assumed that deals like these have some kind of protections in place to limit exactly that sort of course reversal from happening. From an outsider, this appears to be a situation where they may not be getting handed the full 4 Billion Dollars that everyone mentions, but they still used deceptive tactics in order to receive a sweetheart deal from the Wisconsin government.
My current understanding is that this isn't as good as some people are trying to make it seem (Net positive for the state! Much Gains!) but also not as bad as others seem to assume (we paid 4 billion dollars and get 0 return on that during the lifetime of the deal) and instead seems to be somewhere in the middle (we are paying more money than this deal is actually worth)
In fact, if a company is not going to invest after such massive subsidies are offered, then it's probably a huge valid signal that it really doesn't make sense for them.
They seem to be more "anti-tax" and "anti-entitlement" at this point.
Dead Comment
WI (the topic of this discussion) is a perfect example. We went from having Russ Feingold (a true shining star of progressive politics and the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT act) to Ron Johnson who is a true weasel.
Don't try and tell me that the guy who voted against the Iraq war, thought Dodd-Frank didn't go far enough, and worked actively for campaign finance reform is the same as a climate change denying, anti-abortion, anti-EPA shill.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
The inevitably was sadly clear to all but those who had the power to make it happen.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/11/18136020/foxconn-wiscons...