A struggling Rust Belt city pinned its revival on a self-chilling beverage can
propublica.org
propublica.org
Edit:
> Under these so-called enterprise zone agreements, delinquent companies can face penalties, including repayment of taxes and the termination of incentives. But in Youngstown, they rarely do. Officials have canceled 25 agreements over the past three decades, usually the result of the business closing, relocating or failing to move forward with a project. Records indicate that the city sought back taxes from an errant firm on just one occasion, although it’s unclear if authorities ever collected; city officials did not respond to questions on the matter. As a result, dozens of private businesses have profited from public subsidies in a city that can scarcely afford them.
Unclear what the reason is
Edit 2:
> Now, Youngstown’s approach to economic development is coming under greater scrutiny as the city’s former finance director and a prominent developer prepare to face trial on public corruption charges. At the heart of the case are allegations that officials steered taxpayer funds to favored projects in exchange for bribes.
Ah. Yep.
It's all very slimy or amateurish, depending on how charitable you want to be towards the principals involved.
What strikes me the most from this article:
> A consumer twists a knob at the bottom of a can and activates a cooling apparatus. In about 90 seconds, the beverage temperature drops about 30 degrees.
That's it? 30°F? So if my can is at 90°F, and I'd like a cold one, I can wait a minute and a half and get a lukewarm 60° beverage. I mean, that's kinda cool maybe, but I can't imagine it's worth whatever this costs.
[0] "In response to public records requests, Youngstown provided cost projections for just 30 of the 94 agreements it granted since 1991, saying it could not locate many of the early contracts."
Sure, there's some scenario where I might find myself in a temperate climate, and want a cold drink, and don't have an ice chest or fridge nearby. But does that happen often enough to make this technology viable? I just don't see it.
Corruption runs deep in Youngstown. Search for "Youngstown corruption" and you'll get a grab bag of "mob/mafia/politicians/FBI" from any decade post-WWII to present.
FTA: > Among the offenders are Enviva Materials, a tire recycling operation; Industrial Waste Control, a pressure-washing and waste handling business; and Domestic Linen Co., a uniform laundry and rental operation. All received 10-year tax abatements without creating a single new job or substantially missing their employment targets.
Some firms, like Allied Consolidated Industries Inc., a steel erecting and dismantling company, received back-to-back incentive packages, even after reneging on their initial agreement.
I think corruption is Occam's Razor here.
Source: grew up in Cleveland reading about Youngstown's corruption and watching clowns like former Congressman James Trafficant [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Traficant#Trial_and_expu...
That's not going to come back to haunt them.
> More than three years later, Youngstown is still waiting.
I wonder what's the hold up?
> Infrastructure problems, such as aging utility lines, have delayed the project...
Ah, there it is!
If there is a better definition of stupid I'm not sure what it is. It's been a consistent story of towns shorting the budget to cover tax breaks, usually at the expense of the school budget, to entice companies to migrate there. Then when they do they find out the workforce isn't educated enough for the tasks, or the infrastructure is in terrible shape, or it's simply a scam.
They have to pay people to get them to live there, but they can’t simply write them a check for obvious reasons, so this is the way it happens.
This is true of many, many cities with flat terrain, hot and humid summers, and cold and salty winters.
Self-heating cans have tried many times. Either the reaction isn't energetic enough, and most of the can volume powers the heating, or it's too energetic, and there's a safety problem. Or, after dealing with those problems, the can costs too much.
Starbucks has accustomed people to paying $5 for a coffee. So there's a self-heating can of coffee in market test.[2] With enough hipster adjectives and color choices, they think they can charge $5 per can.[2]
[1] https://www.poweredbyheatgen.com/
[2] https://www.fox29.com/news/la-colombe-develops-innovative-se...
Only saw them for a month or two. I wonder what happened?
> The Joseph Company has plans in the very near future to implement many facets of Artificial Intelligence into a variety of business applicatins
typo
and then later
> Using the AI subset of Deep Learning, the Joseph Company will enable robotic arms capable of performing partially supervised learning to the pint of needing only minimal human interaction
Another typo... and sort of the exact opposite of what they promised the town (jobs).
And then a font with horrific capital letters
Beverages.
Pint.
> By Matteo J. Joseph Director of Technical Operations and alumni of Stanford University School of Engineering Class of 2020
So their "Director of Technical Operations" hasn't even graduated college yet? Hopefully it's just a puffed up title and he's not actually in charge of anything. Not that you need a college degree to be a good technical leader or that young people can't be good leaders but I don't understand how he could really be in charge of tech ops if he's been busy at Stanford.
To be fair, a google search for "self chilling can" doesn't bring up stories about the decades old scam. And there's no obvious fraud in the story – I mean, the company apparently have an Irvine headquarters, which the city lawyer visited when he was out there, as well as production prototypes. But the novelty of the idea, and lack of actual market research (since they haven't really mass produced it yet) makes this as crazy as $1M to slick but ephemeral Indiegogo campaign.
And I guess I really have no idea how hard it is for Youngstown – suffering a massive population and jobs downspiral for the past few decades – to attract any big employer to the area, with any amount of incentive. It's not like they can attract the likes of Foxconn (which incidentally, also has failed to live up to promises in Wisconsin) or Amazon, especially with a budget too stretched to offer more than a few million in tax breaks.
[0] https://twitter.com/dicktofel/status/1259788560917581829
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/01/business/sec-cites-stock-...
I grew up a few minutes from Youngstown. These areas should focus more on small businesses, agriculture and other things that make a lot of sense with what is left there. Met with a ton of corruption at the local level, I don't see much of anything happening without a real and renewed interest in participation and accountability in our politics.
From 10 seconds of research, it seems to use depressurization. Actually a sort of cool idea... not sure why it didn't work out.
Soda, not so much.
Also isn't Youngstown the same city that had the big hubbub with Trump and GM, and is still shutting down and being outsourced overseas?
There are two problems here. Infrastructure and local business owners.
Infrastructure can probably be overcome.
Most local business owners, on the other hand, can basically die in a fire and nobody will mourn them. The problem is that local business owners don't really believe in deadlines. So, those business cards you needed before flying to the conference? Yeah, not done yet. That vehicle repair that needed to be completed before the end of the week, yeah, not really. I can go on and on.
And then shitty winter weather just adds extra uncertainty to the mix.
So, you wind up outsourcing to non-local companies that actually hold their deadlines. At that point, why are you located where you are?
I suspect that when you are too far off the shipping lanes it sort of sucks the motivation out of you to be fast because anything you do will take either n hours ± 3 days. Busting your ass to do n/2 hours ± 3 days barely accomplishes anything. Best case you get it to 2 days because you can get an order in to your supplier before the daily cutoff.
The only thing that does reduce the uncertainly dramatically is having a relationship with other companies in the same space that allows you to borrow inventory back and forth, but one freeloader or egotist in the mix can screw that up.
Point is, I wonder if perhaps the ethos hasn't caught up with the expansion of overnight and 2 day shipping. Or was the over/under a scapegoat and something else is really to blame.
The small town areas have gotten used to the fact that 99.99% of their clients care more about shaving off $5 than getting something done on a deadline.
Well, you get what you incentivize.
The problem is that when someone shows up on a deadline, the systems can't adjust to accommodate.
For example, I have been in the situation where a dealership was going to hold my car for a week for a mistake that they made simply because they were going to wait for their normal parts shipment because it would cost an extra $20 to get that shipment in tomorrow from the next biggest city. Well, that's ducky, I have to be at the airport 48 hours from now, and it's a 90+ minute drive. Uber isn't an option--so I'm renting a car. Well, I'm probably willing to pay that $20, but the system can't accommodate it (not entirely true--it can--if you're big and loud like I am--but I'll still waste several hours yelling to pay them $20 instead of simply paying $20 immediately and getting back to work).
If you get enough of these annoyances piling up, the friction is simply too high. Car repair is sluggish--you need to own an extra car. Cell connections are erratic--you need local cell boosters. Internet connectivity is poor--you may be trenching a lot of fiber to connect to somewhere useful or carrying an expensive, wimpy satellite plan simply to cover outages. etc.
Business are hard and the default is failure--you don't need extra friction on top of it.
https://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2012-06/first-ever-se...
It seems inaccessible now. Is there a way to read it?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190927072318/https://chillcan....
But it seems unavailable to purchase.
My sentiments exactly
It either needs to be super cheap or you need to somehow sell it in the high end luxury segment or else it's unlikely to make money. (I think).
Those are the people who businesses want to hire. Instead, Youngstown’s best chances of a brighter future are moving to Columbus nearby or the coasts to places that already have plenty of advantages.
Remote work could change this. But, these types of communities really need to embrace white-collar workers and not keep praying for a blue-collar comeback.
Lot easier said than done. Famously, Racine Wi tried to get legions of white collar workers. The result was similar to what we see outlined in this article. Only instead of spending millions to get blue collar jobs, in Wisconsin we spent hundreds of millions to billions to get white collar jobs. End result was the same, basically, a predictable crash and burn.
Here's reality. These places are a tough sell. And until these places are willing to accept the fact that they are a tough sell they will continue to be easy pickings for slick corporate attorneys in dark suits.
There's also been a lot of work to nurture additive manufacturing businesses (https://ysu.edu/center-for-innovation-in-additive-manufactur...). A mixture of federal grants (partly from the Appalachian Regional Commission IIRC) and support from the university going into that.
But to your point of embracing white collar workers ... does that solve the problem economic development agencies are actually trying to solve? An interesting case study a few miles down the highway is Pittsburgh. There's been a much-hyped boom in high skilled tech jobs seeded by CMU (robotics, software startups) plus a relatively strong healthcare/biotech sector there. But that doesn't do much to replace the big swath of steel and manufacturing jobs that were around a generation ago. So average wages go up and there's probably _some_ trickle down benefits, but the new tech jobs don't do much for the median Pittsburgher whose parents/grandparents would have worked in the mills.