Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises in Wisconsin | Hacker News Reader

Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises in Wisconsin

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515 pointsrhd1729247 comments

This is a great article around why "corporate welfare" rarely works out. Also, semes like a textbook example of "eminent domain" abuse?

We call this "expropriation" in Canada and it is rarely abused like this.

Taking peoples property to give it to a private corporation? I can understand the need to take property for public use (roads, infra) but the US needs to end eminent domain abuse. If Foxconn needed the property, go to the landowners and buy it, dont go to the gvt and claim 'road widening' to kick them off.

You can blame the worst supreme court decision in the 21st century for that. (Kelo v City of New London)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

worst? what about citizens united? how often is eminent domain abused for economic development, compared to how much favorable legislation was passed for corporations?

I knew someone would bring up Citizens United v FEC when I said worst. I know this will be an unpopular opinion on this forum, but I believe that case was decided correctly. I agree wholeheartedly with Justice Kennedy's opinion that

"If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech"

Read the opinions and dissents of that case and you may change your mind.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/#tab-opi...

The essential problem, which Justice Kennedy seemed not to understand, is that money is not speech. The easy test to show this as nonsense is quantification, i.e., it’s clearly the case that some citizens have more money than others, but it’s nonsense to think that some citizens have more free speech than others.

One of Justice Kennedy’s clerks in 2009-2010 was Misha Tseytlin, a Federalist Society member who undoubtedly helped write Kennedy’s opinion on the Bilski case, which widened the potential for business process patents and considered by many software developers to be a terrible decision regarding the patentability of software. Despite no connection to Wisconsin whatsoever, Tseytlin was later appointed Wisconsin Solicitor General by Scott Walker and worked on many of the voter suppression initiatives in Wisconsin. He’s been party to litigation on behalf of the Wisconsin Tavern League seeking to overturn Governor Evers’s executive order on masks and public gatherings. I’m a part-time resident of the state and grew up there, and it’s distressing to me that a fringe ideologue with no connection to the state continues to do it harm.

Does this quantification argument hold for citizens that are considered public figures? While they might not have more free speech than other citizens, they certainly have a more visible platform to communicate their opinions

Public Figures != Rich.

Bezos has no more free speech than Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders is only a millionaire.

Whether or not money is speech, most of the time speech needs money.

Banning spending money on newspaper is banning the newspaper. Banning spending money on advertisement is banning the advertisement.

Under the dissenting view in Citizens United, Congress could ban the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc. from talking about politics. That's just absurd. Congress could have banned the Federalist Papers!

I've always tried to find a middle ground that prevented for profit corporations from spending money. But like 99% of our media is for profit corporations. It doesn't make sense to ban Amazon from political speech, unless they buy the Washington Post, in which case they can do whatever the fuck they want.

I find your reply unconvincing and disjointed. Among many other potential avenues for debate, the lowest hanging fruit seems to be noting that you’ve seemingly forgotten about freedom of the press with all your examples.

> the lowest hanging fruit seems to be noting that you’ve seemingly forgotten about freedom of the press with all your examples.

That's a deep, deep non sequitur.

Citzens United was about whether the government can stop corporations such as the NYT from talking about politics. The majority held that they cannot; freedom of the press (in the form of the fist amendment) protects them.

The minority held that the freedom of the press does not protect them. The person you are replying to noted, correctly, that under this view the NYT could be stopped from discussing politics, and your reply is, essentially, "that can't be right, the first amendment would protect them!" I agree, of course, as did, thankfully, Justice Kennedy and four of the other justices. The dissenting justices, however, seem to have forgotten about freedom of the press...

Since Citizen's United, I can think of no effective or fair way to curtail corporate speech.

But I can think of dozens of ways to amplify and nurture non-corporate speech.

Yes, the torrent of bullshit is crippling democracy. But it's also true that other important speech is still not heard.

Yes. People blame the court for doing the correct (if not right, because courts don't really do "right") thing.

The problem is that there's no constitutional amendment making an exception to the first amendment to limit or forbid contributions to campaigns. It should never have been an ordinary law in the first place.

I fundamentally disagree with this, but on different grounds. I absolutely believe that groups of people have fewer rights than individual people. A corporation should have no right against self-incrimination, for instance. An LLC should have no right for freedom of religion. Groups are, by definition, not a monolith, and defending the rights of the group often infringes on the rights of the individual. Extending individual rights to the aggregate is absurd, and the abuses of it lead to the worst outcomes in case-law.

Supreme court cases build upon precedent. It sounds like your real issue is with corporate personhood. That was decided in a case that Citizens United built on, so I would recommend barking up that tree instead.

In any case, I personally feel corporate personhood actually does make sense. It’s absurd that I as an individual can engage in speech but if I communicate through a company that I solely own now I can’t.

Trying to “get money out of politics” is a fools’ errand; as Citizens v United demonstrates, speech often requires money. What we really need is the opposite: get politics out of my damn money!

(By the way, most who have been spoonfed the “get money out of politics” line are entirely ignorant on the facts of the CU case. As I recall Hillary Clinton was trying to suppress a documentary critical of her because it was too close to an election. Does that sound like something you’re a fan of?)

Without corporate personhood, you wouldn’t lose any of your rights as an owner (stockholder), employee, or officer of a corporation- you just wouldn’t get to magnify your individual rights by using the power of the corporation. As an individual, you’d still get to speak your mind on whatever. In my opinion, you just shouldn’t be allowed to take the enormous financial power of a corporation and turn it towards your own ends and call it “individual rights”.

The “corporation” in Citizens United was a dinky non-profit. Has the case gone the other way, nothing would stop the government from regulating how the New York Times used its “enormous financial power” for speech.

> In any case, I personally feel corporate personhood actually does make sense. It’s absurd that I as an individual can engage in speech but if I communicate through a company that I solely own now I can’t.

I've always struggled reconciling this with the notion of limited liability. A similar crime does not beget a similar punishment.

It's also notable that people who complain about money in politics tend to bring up the Koch brothers most often, but the Koch brothers are an example of individuals spending large sums on speech, not corporations.

Because then you have 2 voices via 2 distinct legal entities - you as a natural person and through controlling your limited company.

You also have an issue with foreign ownership of these entities having directly electoral influence.

On the corporate personhood movement, the problem is that it is cheery picking all of the rights of natural persons while trying to shy away from as much responsibilities as possible. This needs to be re-balanced somewhat.

Nothing like the very egalitarian principle that says, "One rich man can advocate for his interests, but 100 poor men may not pool their resources to advocate for theirs."

Just like the very egalitarian principle that says, "One rich man can advocate for his interests by himself and by the work of 100 poor man"

It takes 100 poor men to match the rich guy and that is fairness to you?

What makes more sense is limiting both groups.

Leveling the playing field by banning political speech entirely? I don't really get your suggestion here.

the commas in the first amendment make it confusing but

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

I think the reading 'Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech' makes more sense linguistically than 'Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or the right of the people to peacefully assemble', that is to say the freedom of speech is not limited to people by the first amendment.

Although I am in agreement that groups of people must inherently have less rights than the aggregate I believe the commas in the first amendment make it difficult to argue that it limits free speech in this manner.

In a nation with 330 million people, freedom of speech that cannot be aggregated is not freedom of speech. You'd shrink the first amendment to just covering someone arguing in a bar or shouting on the street corner.

A church shouldn't have freedom of religion?

a church is not a person, it cannot believe in anything. how does a church pray? how does it make a confession?

do not antropomorphize companies, it does not compute at all.

I agree that the church itself doesn't have freedom of religion. But for the members of the church to have freedom of religion they need to be able to exercise their freedom as an organized group. The end result is the same: the government is limited in what restrictions it can place on the group, because to restrict the group is to restrict the members.

I don't understand your argument. The church members individually have the right to practice their religion however they want so long as it doesn't impinge on others' rights or laws. The group aspect really doesn't come into play at all. In the same way, those same individuals can contribute as individuals to whatever cause they choose. The problem is when resources get pooled and an organization rather than its individuals decides where to allocate those resources politically. That's where the parent comment thinks the line should be drawn.

Very few religious people would consider allowing the practice of religion “without the group aspect” to be “freedom of religion.” That freedom, especially in the United States, necessarily encompasses groups of religious people pooling resources to build houses of worship, educate their children, participate in the community, and advocate for causes.

None of that actually requires specific religious protection. Protection of the freedom of religion is necessary when the beliefs of religious groups clash with the values of the community at large - for instance, Christian Scientists do not vaccinate as they avoid modern medicine in general. This is a carve-out to mandatory vaccination programs, in favor of religious freedom.

The group version of this right would be the Church of Christ, Scientist not needing to provide healthcare to its workers (not all of whom may be Christian Scientists themselves), in order to protect their deeply-held beliefs.

> None of that actually requires specific religious protection.

It requires specific religious protection if you're afraid of countries that persecute specific religions and want to take every measure to avoid becoming one. The Pilgrims came to America because of religious persecution. England still has a state church to this day.

I guess what I'm saying sort of agrees with you, but that I'm seeing how "clash with the values of the community at large" could refer to "have any religion except the official one" or even "have a religion". There's a possibility that the community at large could become hostile to many or even all religions in the future.

> The problem is when resources get pooled and an organization rather than its individuals decides where to allocate those resources politically.

Like unions?

Yeah, I wasn't talking about money or political activism, but about freedom of religion.

> But for the members of the church to have freedom of religion they need to be able to exercise their freedom as an organized group.

There is no logic in this sentence. An organised group as an entity doesn't need to be treated the same as a citizen for the freedoms of the members of the group to be respected, I don't understand where is the leap between: rights of a citizen should be extended as rights of a virtual entity that groups citizens. Why?

The sentence is logical, you’re just incorrectly assuming it’s a simple syllogism. The OP isn’t saying that churches need to be treated substitutably with members of the church. But it’s apparent that churches as entities need to be protected in order to protect individual religious freedom. If the government banned mosques (as legal entities) from constructing buildings and holding gatherings, that wouldn’t ban Islam, but it would obviously be an impingement on the religious freedom of Muslims.

> The problem is that there's no constitutional amendment making an exception to the first amendment to limit or forbid contributions to campaigns.

Citizens United wasn’t about campaign contributions. It’s already illegal for corporations to donate to campaigns.

Citizens United was about whether a 501(c)(4) corporation—just like the ACLU or the NAACP—can be prosecuted for releasing a movie critical of a candidate. Justice Kennedy wasn’t analogizing money to speech—the case was whether the government could control political speech by controlling how a corporation used its money in publishing a movie.

Here is the ACLU’s take on a constitutional amendment: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/campaign-finance-refor...

To be clear, the law does limit contributions to campaigns. What they don't limit is third party organizations spending money on their own ads. Which is as it should be.

Since money is not speech there is no first amendment issue. There is however a conservative court determined to have the wealthy own politicians.

I would still put Citizens up there. We have rules around elections in the same way that we have some limits on individual speech (yelling fire, and all that) to effect the fundamental right that the First Amendment is meant to protect. Similarly, PACs were an unforeseen (and in some ways unforeseeable to eighteenth century framers) exploit of a well functioning democracy as it relates to people.

Kucho vs. Common Cause as well. Gerrymandering is a clear abuse of the system. Kagan’s dissent is heartbreaking.

Citizens United doesn’t have anything to do with PACs.

I’m amenable to the idea there is a core of campaign finance law that’s non-objectionable. But prosecuting a 501(c)(4) non-profit corporation for making a political movie about a candidate isn’t in the scope of that. That’s what the government chose to prosecute in that case. The “slippery slope” outcome—using a law ostensibly meant to keep Exxon from speaking to bludgeon a little non-profit—happened within a decade of the campaign finance law being enacted.

While your statement is strictly true, Citizens United is one of the two (very close together) decisions that enabled the creation of SuperPACs.

Yeah, but updating the constitution and election laws are congress' job, not the courts.

That would assume that there is a working Congress (for the laws) and working intra-state coordination (for constitutional amendments). The reality is that Congress has been locked up ever since the third year of Obama, and since 1971 (26th) there only got one constitutional amendment passed (27th, in 1992).

That is the reason why the courts have gotten so important, and why the Supreme Court and other federal justice nominations and their confirmation by the Trump administration will have such long lasting impact - given that there is no input from the legislative, governing has fallen to the executive and judiciary.

I understand that, but I disagree you should 'force' the SCOTUS to pick up where Congress stops. Scotus is not where laws or society should be progressing; that should be congress.

And of course the founding fathers didn't foresee today's' society, so they included ways to upgrade and amend the constitution and election laws.

That congress isn't doing its job is a different debate entirely, but not Scotus' fault.

The fact you can't move your agenda forward in the legislature because its "locked up" is a feature not a bug. To then think its appropriate to use the judicial branch to bludgeon your agenda through is an abuse of its intended purpose in our system of checks and balances.

So ten years of standstill, even a government shutdown (which is a word only heard in third world countries), because of one political party being utterly unwilling to participate in normal democratic process, that is a feature to you?

> an abuse of its intended purpose in our system of checks and balances

The intention was to stop a dictator from rising, not that the country would be essentially governed by executive degree for a decade.

Giving money is different than speaking. Do we have a right to anonymous speech amplified according to our means?

Yes, it's called "the press", and freedom of the press is explicitly protected by the government.

Corporations don’t have speech interests.

The majority’s opinion in Citizens United is premised upon the assertion that they do.

Sure they do. Corporations are owned by people, and those people have speech interests. If corporations didn’t have the right to free speech then a group of people campaigning for a politics cause would suddenly lose their right to free speech if they formed a corporation to simplify the activities, such as the joint handling of money or purchasing of ads.

Corporations also get a lot of benefits that individuals or unstructured associations don't - mainly things like liability protection - so it's not like it would be unreasonable to have corresponding limitations on what they are allowed to do.

And that's before we get to the point that corporations, as a practical matter, are formed under state laws, so why is the federal government giving them rights?

(and that's before the other issues with Citizen's United as a case, regardless of the decision as people usually remember it, but I'm starting to go off a bit..)

> And that's before we get to the point that corporations, as a practical matter, are formed under state laws, so why is the federal government giving them rights?

That's an interesting point. Marriages are formed under state law as well, and it doesn't seem controversial to me that the federal government grants that relationship special privileges.

> Marriages are formed under state law as well, and it doesn't seem controversial to me that the federal government grants that relationship special privileges

I think the only reason this isn't controversial is because people don't think about it. The fact that people are conditioned to get married, not to mention the tax benefits, is pretty fucking weird if you stop and think about it. Supposedly our country was meant to separate church and state, but it's obvious it was such a new concept that many of the ideas were stolen from the mores of the conventional religions of the time.

I mean, why is marriage a legal thing at all? Why is the government involved? It made sense when there was a dowry involved, but today? Nobody cares until they realize what a fucking nightmare getting divorced is, and the number of conditions and loopholes is asinine. It's almost like the lawyers invented it, because divorce lawyers make an insane amount of money on the suffering of others (they are heavily incentivized to push for people to be combative, because they make more money that way - and it's easy to rile people up when custody of children is involved).

This is obviously a bit of a rant that went in a weird direction but whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZTOT6DKfZ8

> The fact that people are conditioned to get married, not to mention the tax benefits, is pretty fucking weird if you stop and think about it.

You might be interested in the concept of the relationship escalator, then.

https://solopoly.net/2012/11/29/riding-the-relationship-esca...

(Disclaimer: I'm not poly, but I really like how poly folk interrogate relationship norms. Don't be scared off by the poly blog!)

> a group of people campaigning for a politics cause would suddenly lose their right to free speech if they formed a corporation to simplify the activities

This doesn't make any sense. Every person in the group retains their free speech rights and can exercise them however they want, it's only the non-human "person" entity in the form of the corporation that would be limited.

No. The owners have speech interests because they are people. The corporation itself does not.

In a vacuum, it does not seem to follow from the 1st amendment that forming a corporation for financial expedience should also be protected speech. You don't lose speech by forming a new thing without speech if you retain your rights as an individual.

Don't candidates in political campaigns have some limits imposed by law? Amounts you're allowed to spend and so on. Their campaign is a corporation if I'm not mistaken

"Corporations" here typically being not for profit corporations such as unions or public advocacy groups (including the eponymous "Citizens United").

We don’t face a binary choice between granting all money-earning organizations speech rights and depriving all public interest non profits of speech rights because we have a legislative process.

Sure, and Congress could potentially draft such legislation, which could be constitutional depending on the specifics, unlike the provisions in the McCain-Feingold act.

The Constitution is legislation.

If a state passed a law that corporations may not put a kosher or halal marking on foods they sell, would you find that law constitutional?

(Certainly it's not interfering with the corporation's freedom of religion interests, is it? Corporations don't practice religion!)

The problem here is that there's no simple or intuitive description of the solution we want besides "The right to free speech does not extend to the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on electioneering." (And that should apply to individuals just the same as corporations.) I'd wholeheartedly agree with that, but it needs a constitutional amendment - there isn't another way out.

> If a state passed a law that corporations may not put a kosher or halal marking on foods they sell, would you find that law constitutional?

No, but not for the company, but for the harm that would cause harm to practitioners of their respective religions.

But the companies are under no obligation to include this information. If they are legally forbidden from including it, how does it become a violation of my rights as a practitioner when it is not a violation for them to just not bother?

Though maybe bringing in religion makes this distracting... Do you think a state government may permissibly make a law banning the sale of transgender flags? You're still free to make your own or even sell them as individuals.

Or maybe more directly to Citizen's United - can the government ban all non-indie films that negatively depict the military? Individuals have a free speech right to make whatever films they want, but do corporations?

This is the basic problem with the government’s case in Citizens United. There is no real limiting principle to the law; the government actually prosecuted a dinky little non-profit, not a giant corporation, making for a fantastic test case; and the government admitted at oral argument before the Supreme Court that there was no limiting principle to its theory of the first amendment that would keep the government from banning books.

Preliminarily, I do think such a law would be constitutional. However, you haven’t said why you think it wouldn’t be, so I’m not sure what exactly you’re inviting me to argue.

I think it wouldn't be constitutional on the same grounds as Citizens United, namely, it would be a violation of the right to free speech. If I have a constitutional right as an individual to label things kosher or halal, why would I lose that right if I go into business with some friends? (I'm assuming I have this right as an individual, right?)

I think it is a consistent view that I do lose that right when I incorporate to be clear, and you could probably design a coherent society on that model - I just don't totally follow why / what the constitutional grounds are.

YOU don't lose that right, but the corporation is never given that right

What's the difference, in practice? Not only can the corporation fire me for putting such a label on the food, they must, if such a law exists - if they don't, they're liable.

So, let's say I'm a baker selling, I dunno, kosher cookies. I can sell them to my friends and say, "By the way, these are kosher!" They're popular with my friends, and so I decide to make a business out of it. As soon as I do that, the business is never given the right of free speech, and the business is now given an obligation to prevent me-the-individual from saying certain things in the course of my job duties. That is, if I continue saying the same thing I said yesterday, the government can shut down my business.

You'd say that this is constitutional?

> kosher or halal marking on foods they sell, would you find that law constitutional

... no? It would be a law more or less targeting a particular religion. That's against both the letter and the spirit of the constitution. Unless I'm missing something here?

> (Certainly it's not interfering with the corporation's freedom of religion interests, is it? Corporations don't practice religion!)

Serious question: Why can't they? They're groups of people after all. (I'm not sure how that would fit with protected classes under federal employment law though. If a company openly supports a particular religion is that potentially a form of discrimination?)

That's the point of the analogy. Rights like freedom of religion and freedom of speech must extend to corporations as well.

I tend to agree, but I think (perhaps mistakenly) that OP was trying to illustrate via analogy that it's more complicated than that. I wasn't able to see the point being made with the analogy though (hence my reply).

I'd see it as infringing on the religious shopper's rights rather than the corporations though. That makes it towards impossible to practice your religion

Can corporations put “kosher” markings on food that is not kosher? Isn’t that already a limit on free speech?

I think the answer is that if it's misleading/deceptive they can't under trade practices laws, and yes, I'd certainly call that a restriction on free speech, but it's one that applies equally to individuals and corporations.

It'd be trademark infringement. the circle K thing is a trademark that a private Kosher organization allows companies to put on certified foods after they're satisfied with the inspection (as far as I recall.)

The cases that were really decided incorrectly were (and I'm afraid I don't know the actual case names offhand) establishing corporate personhood, and most especially making money equivalent to speech.

Yes, and...

The only way to win (on campaign spending) is to not play.

Moot campaign spending with (lowercase) democratic reforms. Public financing of campaigns, time boxing campaign season, restore fairness doctrine, etc.

As Sun Tzu advises, we should not fight on battlefields chosen by our opponents. Fund raising, campaign spending, mainstream media, Freedom Speeches™, presidential debates, ad nauseam, are all tar pits.

Citizens United merely acknowledged the existing status quo that it was impracticable to restrict clever campaign financing strategies. Kelo was far more odious because it created a new power for governments to seize property on a whim.

> what about citizens united

Sure, what about a decision that said individuals do not lose their free speech writes when they organise collectively, and that it would be a grossly illegal for government to muzzle groups like the New York Times or the Sierra Club just because they disagree with their speech? A decision that in the instant case was literally about the ability of government to limit the criticism of candidates?

I'm just fine with that decision, frankly.

To quote CU as the worst decision out there is laughable. Personally I fully agree with the ruling, but even if I didn’t, isn’t Dredd Scott far more disastrous? Or Korematsu (allowed detention camps based on race)? Or the one that allows forced sterilization of the mentally retarded?

I qualified the statement as the "worst of the 21st century". If you were to compile a list of worst decisions ever, I think most lawyers would say Dred Scott v Sanford, Plessy v Ferguson, Korematsu v United States, Bowers v Hardwick, and Buck v Bell.

Even if the local politicians are allowed to do it, do they have to?

Sure, it would have been nice if the supreme court had stopped it, but it's a deeply broken system that even requires the supreme court to decide it. Political decisions like this NEED political consequences.

This is a good example of how the craving for superlatives does not only generate a lot of empty hyperbole, but also how it can derail an entire thread.

>After the Court's decision, the city allowed a private developer to proceed with its plans; however, the developer was unable to obtain financing and abandoned the project, and the contested land remained an undeveloped empty lot in 2019.

Wait, so did the original owner get back their property then?

No. Even if they had gotten their property back, the houses had been razed. (At least one house was moved.) As of 2018, it's simply a vacant parcel of land.

If I'm reading this correctly (I'm not familiar with US jurisprudence etc.), the decision allows the state to expropriate private entities for the benefit of other private entities. How is it that the liberal judges were not able to foresee this decision's consequences?

No, the ruling allows the state to expropriate from one private entity to another IF there is a compelling public benefit. The benefit to other private entities (if any) is purely coincidental and not relevant to the legality.

It's not just eminent domain abuse, either... part of the Foxconn deal was set to bypass the Great Lakes Water Resources Compact and use water from Lake Michigan for LCD manufacturing.

The City of Racine basically argued that they could take the water for "public use" because they were allowed to do so (cities source drinking water from the lakes) and give up to 7 million gallons a day to Foxconn via a pipe.

Wisconsin environmental oversight signed off on this, but the plant hasn't happened so it hasn't been tested in court. Hopefully the Compact will be strengthened to prevent potential abuses like this in the future.

Yes, these sorts of "tax incentives" are a negative sum game. As long as they are done, companies will hop around to the best deals, depleting the tax base as they force more and more competition from struggling jurisdictions, forcing local citizens to foot the bill for more and more of the infrastructure and services that make those businesses possible.

NY Times covered it well 8 years ago https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-ba...

Corporate subsidies work very well in certain conditions. The biggest is in investing in industries have big long-term potential but huge upfront costs. Power generation is a good example. Subsidies also tend to work best with a portfolio like a VC fund.

The other option is for a very mature industries with inelastic demand where subsidies go directly to pushing down prices. Like with food and fuel.

Isn't Foxconn all short to medium term potential with sort of middle of the road upfront costs?

Their upfront costs are probably nominally higher than average, but state of the art manufacturing moves fast, the up front costs are either paid back quickly or a waste.

The same forces limit the long term potential; if they don't keep up, the investment quickly withers.

Well, plenty of manufacturing doesn't require state of the art. Start with that level today, and you can still use it a decade from now for products that don't require bleeding edge.

Take chip fab for example: 45nm chips appeared around 2008, and cutting edge today is 5nm. Yet something like an arduino may come in around 200nm, the Pi 4 is still 28nm. So there's a fairly long lifespan for manufacturing facilities. Some will retool for the latest tech sure, but plenty will simply pivot to a different market niche commensurate with their capabilities.

They said they were going to make a chip fab in Kenosha?

I was using that as an example of manufacturing capabilities that are not worthless as soon as something better comes along. It's a clearer example than more vague references to electronics that aren't as complex or cutting edge as the latest smart phones. That comparison is true as well, but I thought something more concrete would make the point more clearly.

Yes. This investment made no sense. The state would have gotten a better deal by just hiring people directly.

That's what I'm thinking too. The only way you can salvage this is by canceling the contract with Foxconn and buying the empty buildings at rock bottom prices and grant funding to local startups who are allowed to use the buildings for a low price. At a minimum this would replace the fake jobs with real ones.

Good luck with that. Startups aren't chasing real estate. Gov Cuomo sunk a load of money trying to build a startup hub in western new york and it didn't work at all.

In general, for such industries where corporate subsidies are really really worth it, a well run SoE will do the job with less risk.

For examples in power generation, EDF and HydroQuebec are cases where the government, instead of directly or indirectly subsidizing power generation, decided to just run it themselves, and they both have very clean (80% carbon free for EDF, 99.9% for HydroQuebec), and both make a solid profit while selling the electricty at very low costs (for HydroQuebec, the lowest unsubsidized cost in the world, full stop).

Hydro is clean in the sense that clean coal is clean. You need to measure and factor in the methane generated by the decaying biome behind the dam.

We also have a lot of electrical cooperatives and other non-mega-corp electrical providers in the US. All in all, it isn't a great analogy.

>You need to measure and factor in the methane generated by the decaying biome behind the dam.

how much are we talking about? does it work out to about the same as other fossil fuels, or order(s) of magnitude less? Also, is it possible to mitigate this by burning the vegetation prior to flooding the area?

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/nov/14/h...

About 1.3% of all human caused gas emissions, made worse because it is primarily methane.

As for burning first, that only works for new dams, and you need to de extensive excavation to get at the roots as well- depending on the plant, upwards of half of its mass is below the surface.

Biomass decay isn't the only problem; the article also cites downstream algae blooms, which I suspect would be exacerbated by the occasional dredging necessary to keep dams from being blocked by silt.

A direct comparison to coal is tricky, because a lot depends on the type of coal burned and thr type of plant it burns in. Certainly coal isn't a clean source of energy, but it is clear that hydro isn't either.

It's important to consider that Methane has a very short atmospheric half life, so that 1.3% becomes 0.06% in a few decades.

Moreso, this can be minimized.

In the end, it's clear that hydro, long term, is indeed clean, moreso than a battery+solar solution would be.

Indeed, this is 1.3% going to 0.06%, despite the fact that hydro represents almost 15% of global electricty generation.

Oxidizing the biocarbon to mitigate CO2 release? I think I see a bit of a flaw in that strategy.

I don't see why not? We flare natural gas at oil wells for this exact reason.

Natural gas burns pretty clean by comparison, and if we're taking methane, it's far better to burn it and produce those relatively low C02 amounts than let the methane into the atmosphere as it holds roughly 80 times more heat than C02.

C02 produced by biomass varies with moisture content, but is generally on the level of coal per unit of energy. Moister wood produces slightly more, dry seasoned wood slightly less than coal.

I think I read somewhere that Louisiana loses about 20% of its local municipal revenue per year due to corporate welfare and tax breaks.

That's an unfair way to say it. You could equally say "Louisiana spends about 20% of its local municipal revenue supporting local businesses."

I have no idea if that is a big number or how it compares to other states. I also have no idea if it's a good investment - perhaps it results in lots of jobs and ultimately more than 20% increase in tax take (you should also factor in if it's just pulling jobs and therefore taxes from elsewhere, rather than creating new value).

But the money is no more "lost" than it would be if they spent it on schools or roads or whatever else.

It's an accurate way to say it.

The companies that are getting the breaks are large multinationals who drop polluting chemical plants into towns and raise local cancer rates while getting sweetheart deals that true local corporations never get.

Furthermore, the end number is just going to be a reflection of how in-vs-out sourced the state .gov is anyway.

Does it really matter if the state is patching its own roads or running its own homeless shelters or cutting checks (aka "corporate welfare") for 3rd parties to do it? At the end of the day those things are state funded whether or not the people doing the work have state letterhead on their pay stubs.

> This is a great article around why "corporate welfare" rarely works out.

Any data to back this up? It's generally accepted that subsidies are effective in many cases (see corona virus stimulus packages).

This Foxconn deal was poorly thought out and horribly mismanaged, but it doesn't sound like Foxconn lined their pockets with taxpayer money. The subsidies encouraged them to take a chance, and it didn't work out - spectacularly.

This "Reply All" podcast episode explains the history behind this pretty well: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjwd

> Woo said these researchers would be developing Foxconn’s “AI 8K+5G ecosystem,” something that, other than being a list of different technologies, has never been coherently explained.

And we’re supposed to be surprised this didn’t work out? :)

In a best-case scenario, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found the state wouldn’t break even until 2043. Depending on how many people Foxconn hired, each job would cost taxpayers somewhere between $200,000 and more than a million dollars. The average subsidy in the US is around $24,000 per job.

-Shouldn't we simply ban these special tax breaks and credits and cash payments altogether? Isn't that what the free market is supposed to be about?

> In the base case scenario the state would break even in 2042.

The government ended up paying over $200k for each job created.

It sickens me what people will do to push their own little kingdom of power. This guy wanted to get reelected so he was willing to give away $3 billion of people's hard earned money and screw up hundreds of people's lives (all the students and others that were hired, left better jobs, then got fired).

When you put it that way it doesn't actually sound that abnormal or out of line for state politics.

States in the Boston-DC corridor are rife with bullshit state police task forces that mostly just collect paychecks, government departments staffed with cronies, etc. etc. They spin up programs that do things and then shut them down and leave people and businesses hanging with similar results to all the people this left hanging.

Boondoggles are universal. I really don't see how laundering it through the mechanism of corporate welfare makes it any better or worse than any other boondoggle. It's just a different way of doing things so that the boondoggle can be marketed to a different political demographic.

The Boston-DC corridor is extraordinarily wealthy. Wisconsin is now the poorest state in the upper midwest. No one told our corrupt politicians that yes you can do boondoggles, but you shouldn't do rich man boondoggles. We're not rich, and we tried to play like a big shot state, and sit at the high stakes table. Well, now the bill is becoming clear, we're out about $1 billion so far, and people are starting to complain. The time to complain was when we first saw, now ex-, governor Walker go sit down at the big shot table. We should have snatched him back right at that point. We let him make a horrible deal, rife with corrupt payouts to his cronies, on our behalf. That was dumb of us.

It's a lesson for other poor states. If you're poor, you're probably corrupt, but come Hell or high water, you cannot allow your corrupt politicians to get you in too deep. It's your taxes that will end up paying both the bills they incur, as well as the pensions they get when they leave office.

Foxconn did this in India too. They use investments and manufacturing as a carrot to negotiate better subsidies and low taxes. https://wccftech.com/apple-foxconn-india-plant-abandon/

This keeps coming up over the years...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19037625

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21350837

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19099923

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22850723

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784924

Those are previous pieces on an ongoing situation. This is a new article just published with updates on the current situation.

Perhaps it's necessary to repeat some things. The only commenter on your third link still seems convinced the negative press is not true.

I see a lot of popular outrage here, and I love me some popular outrage against the big bad boy just like everyone else, but still, what was Foxconn's gain here? The billions in subsidies were in the form of tax relief, they will not see a dime if they don't build the factory. The bulldozed houses in Wisconsin, while a loss for the state, don't make Foxconn any richer. In the end, the only thing Foxconn achieved was some horrible PR in the US.

The gain was mostly in the form of payouts to Scott Walker's political cronies. I'll give you one guess which companies the hundreds of millions in highway and infrastructure "improvements" contracts went to. (Also, why did we even need to do those "improvements"?) Don't even get me started on the 3/4 of a billion dollar loan that the small suburb of Mt Pleasant took out. Which wouldn't be a problem, in a non-corrupt world, Mt Pleasant would have taken out a loan, and Mt Pleasant would have to pay it back. But in Wisconsin, Scott Walker, to help out his buddies down there, made a guarantee that tax payers everywhere except Mt Pleasant would have to pay back the loan. So now people in Dalton, Fox Lake, and Eau Claire have to pay the loan that people in Mt Pleasant unilaterally took out.

We can't even unwind that guarantee so that the people of Mt Pleasant have to pay their own bills. Because when we kicked Scott Walker out, his buddies in the legislature stripped the new governor we voted in of any power to unwind said deal before he could take office. Corruption in Wisconsin runs deep my friend.

So believe me, there was "gain" by corrupt parties all over the state. Just because Foxconn only breaks even, doesn't mean no one made money. It only means Foxconn won't lose money. The losers are all the taxpayers of Wisconsin, except for those taxpayers favored by Scott Walker.

At the risk of getting too political, the gain was getting Trump off their back. Apple did something similar in TX [1]. Give Trump a photo op (which everyone knows he loves), and then don't actually do anything. Trump moves on, and the business can continue as before.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/20/20974999/trump-is-lying-...

I guess we'll see if this hurt Trump in 2 weeks, but wasn't this thing part of why Scott Walker lost his reelection in 2018?

As an aside, does Wisconsin even make sense from a logistical standpoint for LCDs?

Put it this way: It's possible that you could manufacture LCDs profitably in Wisconsin...

...but nobody has ever proposed an even vaguely plausible plan to do so. Foxconn seems to have to viewed it as so obviously absurd they never even tried to develop a plan, much less started building a factory.

Whatever else you may say about Foxconn, they seem to be pretty decent at manufacturing things cheaply. If they considered the idea to be a joke, it's probably safe to assume it's utterly impractical.

The manufacturing process requires a lot of clean water. Racine built them a pipe directly to Lake Michigan to take all the fresh water they want for free. Dump the wastewater back in the farmland and you've got yourself a nearly free dystopia.

That’s mentioned in the article — no. It was going to be cost and logisticly prohibitive to make LCDs.

My sense is that wasn't something they considered relevant to their decision making.

Man I can’t wait for the Netflix movie about this. What should the title be?

"Fox in the cheesehouse"?

While you wait, American Factory is a pretty good documentary about a Chinese auto glass manufacturer trying to set up a stateside plant in an area that aggressively courted them.

I thoroughly enjoyed American Factory's take! It presented many aspects of such a venture without taking too strong of a narrative one way or the other. Petty politics big and small, cultural mismatch, the rich getting richer, union busting. But also the very real attempts at bridging the culture gap and the stories of some imported foreigner workers who develop a serious fondness for life in America.

With the minor difference being that the glass factory actually makes things.

Fox "con" surely.

Scott Walker and the $3,000,0000,000 Sheet of Paper.

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/handwri...

Faux con?

It was a real con, I think.

I am not sure about that, it sound like they lost money. Who is the con artist who lined their own pocket in this story? Is this about tariffs?

Had the state of Wisconsin not wised up last minute and begun a legal battle over the billions in subsidies Foxconn would receive, then they would have done quite nicely.

Fortunately the political pressure mounted as the plant didn't materialize as promised.

from what i known of the contracts foxconn would need to return the subsidies if they fail the even higher target numbers in the next years, and they don't just get the money, it is in escrow for years, and those multi-billion sums are figures calculated against decades ... i mean i know of Trumps pump&dump deals and everyone wants this whole thing to match some simple scam with foxcon on the evil side, but this doesn't look like the corporation is benefiting at all from failure. That's why i asked if this is a tariffs thing, if they get benefits on some other track, because it looks like they are loosing big for even trying to invest in the USA.

Foxconnfidence Game

Foxconned, duh.

Wasn't this whole thing being dropped until a certain head of state got involved to convince the deal to continue? I would be very interested in what was offered to keep Foxconn from walking away.

Nice. I was thinking Outfoxed 2.0 but I like Foxconned.

"The Last Graveyard"

Hopefully they incorporate poetry by Xu Lizhi: https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry

Outfoxed.

"League of Legends" by Foxxcon

This entire project was a shameful example of political pump-and-dump by our former governor.

He sold the more gullible elements of our state on this fairy tale about Foxconn, got lots of air time and Trump points out of it, made an abortive presidential run, and then got replaced and slunk into the shadows before the music stopped.

Now our new Governor is left cleaning up the embarrassing mess while simultaneously being blamed for its failure by the very people who made the whole thing happen.

I was upset about losing the high speed rail, but the Foxconn deal made me wild. It was so clearly a con job from the beginning.

And the only reason they obsessed over killing high speed rail was that it would make southern Wisconsin slightly more attractive to young people, who would tip the voting scales.

The WI legislature was also committed to stopping the governor from having any oversight.

What does Foxconn get out of it? From the article they seem to have lost lots of money.

If I had to guess, I would say that they thought that they'd still get the money anyways for a greatly stepped-down facility. The fact that Wisconsin is cancelling the money for Foxconn not delivering on their promises (which they probably never intended to keep in the first place) seems to have come as a surprise to Foxconn.

It says they failed to qualify for a subsidy so I assume they were planning on getting money from that.

They were tax credits with requirements they did not meet. If they were planning on taking advantage of those credits, it seems like they would have put in the minimum effort to at least appear to meet them. Something a little stranger happened here. I think related to global politics, not just something with Trump or Scott Walker.

I got the sense that they did try to put in that minimum but misjudged how high the bar would be. They sent in their "we hired enough people so give us the money" message, but then (unexpected, I suspect) scrutiny by some civil servants revealed that they hadn't hired enough.

Yeah, I guess what the article describes seems shockingly incompetent. That's what I'm struggling with. The feeling that if they were really trying to a do a fraud they would have gotten closer to succeeding. But what the article describes seems like what would be in a satirical movie. I mean, I know multinational corporations have their moments, but this seems so beyond just average incompetence.

I don’t know anything about the leadership but it makes me wonder if they’re used to a certain grift-effort level in China and they weren’t adjusting to the slightly higher grift-threshold in the US.

I don’t entirely disagree but I do think that’s explained by, they weren’t actually planning on having to actually meet any benchmarks, rather than just having a friend in the Governor’s mansion.

Terry Gou was running for president of taiwan, and he needed support and endorsement from Trump. He got it, and he still lost.

At least that parallels Walker's story well...

Foxconn provided a bulk quantity of unicorn farts to power the Walker and Trump administrations through tweets, photo ops, TV ads, etc. In return they were expecting the angel of tariffs to skip their door, in addition to the river of incentives money that was to be directed their way.

Promises are easy, ask any politician.

Now it sounds a lot like what Bush left behind for Obama.

> The other initiative, called Foxconn Future Leaders, targeted recent college graduates

> Employees ..., no matter what role they had been hired for, were told to figure out what Foxconn should do in Wisconsin themselves.

> The new management seemed increasingly open in its disdain for the local workforce. “Why are Americans paid so much and do so little? I can’t tell you how many times we heard that,” said one employee. “It was certainly a toxic work environment”

> the office began to fill with people who had nothing to do. Many just sat in their cubicles watching Netflix and playing games on their phones

Well its obvious: politic and corporate are at fault: should have hired at least some people who actually know what the job is they got hired for, not just slackers and slavers. This is far too typical for large corporations: no real plan, hire cheap, have n-layers of management where everyone pretends everything is going well, but since no one has any clue the whole thing grinds to a halt, fails and burns once the initial inertia runs out.

This is not what happened clearly.

Foxconn didn't know what to do with the facility at all and had no material plans, it was like expansion without a cause. The hiring had no purpose other than to probably break even on the subsidies, which I don't think they met profits from, so it was a big debacle from start to end.

The 'problem' was Foxconn didn't have a business plan for the facility.

The 'subsidies' meant that it took way too long to fail.

It is easy to say "they just hired to fill a quota" when the only person who seems to do any actual work is the person hiring to fill their quota.

There was no goal other than to get some subsidies and handshakes with Trump. Anyone who was hired was there to game some arbitrary hiring quota.

Were any subsidies actually paid? My understanding is that Foxconn was ultimately not eligible for any actual credits given how their plans had changed: https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/state-t...

And if that's true then didn't the state subsidy system work exactly as intended?

NY's Amazon subsidies were designed very well. They provided tax credits for the incremental progress Amazon made on the terms of the subsidy. So the state was not paying up front and then at risk of being left in the red if Amazon were to change plans. It's up to the government to design an airtight subsidy structure that protects their interests - but it can be done.

We're down about 1 billion at the moment. A $750 million dollar loan that the people of Mt Pleasant took out for "improvements". In addition to about two or three hundred million spent on things like highway construction, wastewater infrastructure, stuff like that. My own hope is that we walk away from the table. You have to know when to fold a bad hand.

Oh, I forgot the best part. Even though the people of Mt Pleasant unilaterally decided to take out the loan for 3/4 of a billion dollars, the now former governor Scott Walker guaranteed that taxpayers from the rest of the state would pay the loan off. So Mt Pleasant got 3/4 of a billion in what is effectively free money, because people in Green Bay and Superior are obliged to pay it back, not them.

We got a new governor, but he's been prevented from unwinding the loan guarantee by the state legislature that stripped the governorship of pretty much all powers before he could take office.

The corruption in Wisconsin runs deep. We can't catch a break up here. So remember, no matter how bad you think things are in Florida, or Texas, or New Jersey with respect to corruption, you could always be worse off. You could live in Wisconsin.

> But in actual reality, the project has succeeded in manufacturing mostly this: an endless supply of wonderful things for the President to promise his supporters. This past weekend, in an interview with a local Wisconsin TV station, Trump insisted Foxconn had built “one of the most incredible plants I’ve ever seen” in Mount Pleasant and would keep its promises and more if he was reelected. “They will do what I tell them to do,” he said. “If we win the election, Foxconn is going to come into our country with money like no other company has come into our country.”

IMO a fascinatingly complex story about the kinds of plays which occur at this level, and how much money it takes to keep up an empty story going. The city and state legislature acted most shamefully in denying its citizens any insight or oversight into what was happening.

I live in WI and I don’t think anyone is fooled at this point. If there is a minimum amount needed to keep a lie going until an election, they didn’t hit the target.

I'd love to agree with you but the Wisconsin election results are going to prove otherwise.

Wisconsin has been gerrymandered into a Republican run state with a minority of the vote. Add in efforts to disenfranchise Democratic leaning voters and Republicans can now get a 60% supermajority of state legislature seats with 48% of the votes in the state.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/gerr...

I don’t think this is a very important issue to most people. It gets harder to deny truths that are physically close and more tightly tied into personal networks. I don’t think enough people are affected by this scandal to have many change their vote because of it.

I would say the Scott Walker election was more closely linked than the national president race (but we'll see)

Following a link from the article, I'm surprised that someone with the post of Director of US Strategic Initiatives at Foxconn would have such an unprofessional twitter account https://twitter.com/alansyeung

When you realize this was all a political scam to make the Republican (ex-)governor of Wisconsin look good it makes perfect sense.

This was a nice absurdist short story that gave me a peek into the life of giant corporations with idiotic management. This is what happens with zero accountability.

Did any voters actually fall for this? It seemed laughably fraudulent to me at the time, and it's not clear to me if the con worked or if politicians are so non-responsive to the voters that it didn't really matter if anyone was actually fooled.

It was mostly Republicans, and yes they fell for it hard.

The governor lost the election very shortly after announcing this. I think that's evidence to show that most people did not think it was a good idea.

Question was did any, and a lot did. Most didn't.

Tesla did something similar in Buffalo, NY.[1]

[1] https://buffalonews.com/business/local/teslas-buffalo-plant-...

Anyone know what was in it for Terry from the start? It sounded like access and favor from Trump, but the trade war still happened and he’s still saying there’s going to be a LCD factory to this day.

Foxconn stayed out of the cross-hairs, unlike Huawei, ZTE, SMIC, etc. Honestly they should've been since they are a prime facilitator of outsourcing of high margin manufacturing. Pretty much any major computing giant you think of gets their stuff made by Foxconn.

I'd argue that a _real_ trade-war didn't happen. If it did, color me underwhelmed[1]. We got some tariffs put on Chinese goods, China started buying Brazilian soybean instead of American. To put an end to this, a deal was struck were China buys much more agricultural products, which has been going poorly[2]. Sure, there was some economic damage, but I don't think this can be classified as a 'trade war'. Unfortunately (or fortunately), a proper definition doesn't exist in terms of a financial impact threshold.

One angle that I don't think anyone has discussed. Terry Gou is running for Presidency in Taiwan, and this could be a way to show him rubbing shoulders with international leaders. The US is big ally to Taiwan, and who better to be in the good graces of than the President of the US?

Apart from the above discussed angle, I think my comment from Jan 2019 is still relevant[3]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93United_States_tr...

[2]: https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/us-china-phase-one...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018486

> Terry Gou is running for Presidency in Taiwan, and this could be a way to show him rubbing shoulders with international leaders.

Was running; he lost fairly decisively.

Would be funny to see the same article about TSMC be posted 3 years later.

I am not an American, but it is not hard for me to see the benefits of local chip manufacturer, for the same reason China is wanting chips made locally even if they cost more and require government subsidy.

Foundamently it came down to the reality that it is not profitable to build a factory and manufacture lcd in Wisconsin. Probably in none of the US states.

The fact that local governments in every state make deals with companies for reduced property-tax rates is why I'm terrified about Prop 15 killing California.

The big businesses, Facebook, Google, Apple, will all negotiate special property tax rates and only the small businesses will have to pay the double or triple tax prop 15 would bring.

This is a very incorrect view of property taxation in silicon valley. Google and Apple are not going to be harmed in the least, because Google and Apple already pay a disproportionate amount of real property taxes in Santa Clara County. If Prop 15 makes legacy businesses pay a fair assessment on their parcels, relative newcomers like Google will be helped, not harmed. Google is Santa Clara County's largest taxpayer, paying $65 million in secured property taxes last year. If older large companies like Intel begin to pay realistic assessments, it won't be so skewed.

This sounds like you're in agreement. The big companies will benefit, at the expense of the small companies

I think newer companies benefit at the expense of older ones. For example in Berkeley there's a biotech startup that pays as much in property taxes for their tiny building as Bayer pays, right across the street, for their 50-acre facility. Under Prop 15 Bayer will pay much more.

That's exactly what I said. Big companies that will build a campus the city wants will get special treatment. The small machine shop that buys a quanset hut for $4,000,000 in mountain view will be taxed to death.

Does anyone in the bay area have experience working with Foxconn?

We tried to set up internships with them through AIESEC once. They were super gung ho about it, it was like a bolt of lightning struck this dude (some sort of engineering manager in houston) when I was telling him about the program when he visited our campus. We had, like, three or four meetings, setting up for something crazy like fifty interns (AIESEC is a non profit that sets up local internships for international students) was on the table. We even had created the job descriptions and put them on our little internal internship board. Then they simply stopped returning our calls. Never found out what happened.

seems like they could have at least considered bitcoin mining and negotiated for subsidized energy contracts

The story was certainly interesting, but the lack of conciseness was brutal.

Just for those who don't understand the business side of this.

Chinese mfgs. don't and won't make anything in the USA except in remarkable circumstances. There's many reasons, but supply chain, labor force, eco, and costs are the main ones.

What's funny is when a Chinese businesperson is doing an interview in the US, and they're asked, "how many jobs are you creating in the US?" Cue the stammering, since they were expecting a puff piece about non-business questions.

They do launder money using US and Canadian real estate for a "rainy day" - like when the CCP decides to arrest them and their family members. That's what all those empty, dark condos in Vancouver are for.

You might want to look up who owns Foxconn and what nationality the company is.

Well you can't ignore the reality of the situation. It's one thing for american blue collar workers to get paid more.

It's another thing for blue collar american workers to get paid more and be 10x slower and worse at getting things done.

lol, did you even read the article? the situation had absolutely nothing to do with the pay of American workers and everything to do with the fact that Foxconn management went into this situation without a plan, and the situation was exacerbated by their almost feudalistic management structure.

Everyone knows American workers are way worse than chinese blue collar workers. This is a well known fact among factory owners in China.

Foxconn is not stupid, they've done such a thing before when migrating manufacturing to China. If American workers were good they'd take this project seriously too. They aren't, and the screw ups are just a result of certain executives not taking the project seriously and not providing enough resources to lower management.

This project was done for optics. It has an ulterior motive because it's not logical to hire workers in America when you can get better workers in China.

Nothing in this article indicated that the problem was the quality of the American workers. They were given no business plans, no money, no authority to make final decisions. It doesn't matter who you hire at that point, that's a recipe for failure.

And I'm claiming the article hit the wrong point. It's not covering the fact that Foxconn has no intention of running an actual operation in America. Partly because it's a 1000x better deal to just open another factory in China. This whole thing is obviously done with an ulterior motive.

Either the topic is deliberately being avoided or the writer doesn't know.

Every single thing in this lengthy article comes together to make one clear point: they had no plan at any step of the way and just tried to BS it all, and they've done it several times around the world. Blaming this on lazy Americans when they were literally begging for something to do is strange.

The article is gathering plenty of facts and interviewing plenty of people. If you've got insider information with some good sources, by all means, provide it.

I'm not blaming it on lazy americans. Huge difference. I blame the chinese directly. They never had the intention of hiring American workers. They know American workers are capable but inferior and they screwed them over on purpose.

>Every single thing in this lengthy article comes together to make one clear point: they had no plan at any step of the way and just tried to BS it all, and they've done it several times around the world.

And I'm saying there's a reason for this. It's not an accident. It's because they don't give a shit about American workers. They think American workers are inferior. They don't want to put any real money into the project they bought it up for some ulterior motive.

Not only American factory workers. But many places in the world. It's hard to beat the industriousness of Chinese workers.

I'm not gonna lie, I don't have hard evidence. I'm just guessing the situation but it's also somewhat obvious. You seriously think if China (taiwan technically) was serious about investing in blue collar workers in America they would let it just slide like this? We're talking about the fastest growing economy humanity has ever seen that has transformed from a backwards 3rd world country to a super power within your lifetime. They will eat up and devour any opportunity or deal in front of them. Why would the Chinese miss out on the American Factory Worker???? Probably because they don't give a shit.

The following isn't evidence but if you read my post and watch the linked video... it is an actual short snippet of a real life example of a serious chinese investor who tried employing American factory workers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24834199

American factory workers can't hold a candle to chinese industriousness. You think those Asian dad memes don't have an actual origin?

https://www.pinterest.com/lindaschloss/asian-father-memes/

Those memes aren't that far from the truth.

watch the movie if you're interested.

Can you define the meaning of "worse" here and then back up your claim with evidence?

https://youtu.be/9KRe08n0d3o?t=7

Just watch it. I'm an american born chinese. I'm basically a lazy bastard like every other american. If you go to china you'll see these people are industrious af. They will work their ass off no question under slave labor until they kill themselves. You've heard of the nets to prevent suicide in Foxconn right?

The movie spins the whole situation as a cultural problem. This is partly true. The other part that is 100% true is that Chinese people work 400% harder and faster than you or I. I know from anecdotal experience both from going to China, working in a chinese store with other chinese people under my mom as a kid (and getting fired by my own mom for not being as efficient as the other chinese people) and watching this movie. It's real.

I'm not sure how my single, limited point of view is relevant when discussing the work culture and productivity of an entire nation. I say that as someone who has worked extensively in china, Taiwan, japan, and the usa. So for the same reason I don't see why your anecdotal evidence is relevant.

I saw that movie. I saw a lot of chinese foreman types expressing their own bigotry towards american workers. I saw a lot of american foreman expressing their bigotry towards union workers, blue collar workers, and imo black workers.

I didn't see any actual meaningful evidence to back up the claim that all chinese workers are harder working than american ones. That would be an extremely difficult claim to make evidence for, of course, like all prejudiced positions that paint with a brush as large as a race, culture, or country.

By the way, I can't know why foxconn employees (in china, not in Taiwan) died by suicide individually, but I suspect it has a lot to do with the massive poverty divide in china, as well as the lack of social services. I imagine they worked in such awful conditions for such long hours because they wouldn't have shelter or food otherwise, which as we know take precedence over all other needs.

This is why some people need to open your eyes to reality. Not all stereotypes are untrue.

When someone says chinese people have slanty eyes it's a stereotype but an aspect of it is true. Many many chinese people do have slanty eyes. When most of china says American blue collar workers aren't hard working, when china manufacturing out performs the US, when every chinese person I know won't hire an American worker... Trust me... Is it racism? Yes but a large aspect of it is true.

People like you don't like to believe certain things so you're unable to use anecdotal evidence to verify anything. You hide behind science and demand quantifiable research. As a chinese person I don't need science to verify the racist statement that more chinese people have slanty eyes than white people, because I don't hide from reality. It's a truth that is real. Many things are obvious without science.

The problem with other people like you is you hide behind racism as well. The reality of this world is that not all people are equal and all races have certain idiosyncrasies in behavior and physicality originating from either genetics or culture that fit a general truth. When someone says something racist or stereotypical that asians are generally shorter than white people or asians have slantier eyes or asians do better in school or asians are harder working... If you analyze these statements and are unbiased you would know that these statements illustrate a truth about reality that you are denying yourself of because of self inflicted blindness. I'm assuming you're white and I can tell you as much as I don't like to hear a white person say things about slanty eyed chinese people I have to objectively admit it's true EVEN without scientific evidence because I can make judgements about the world without it. So when I say that my people think americans workers are lazy, slow and unskilled workers you tell me how much of it is true and how much of it is made up for no reason.

Maybe you don't like to hear that my race and many chinese people think americans are lazy. Maybe you don't like to think that an aspect of this is true. Whatever. At least maybe you'll understand one thing: Foxconn does not give a flying shit about building a factory in the US. They don't care and they have no intention of doing so because if they did they could make it happen but they don't. This is a company that built millions of iphones... they wouldn't have the comical screw ups you see in the article if they gave a shit. Hopefully your mind can digest this fact without scientific evidence.

As for your own anecdotal experience in Asia I can only say that if you're white then your experience is colored. Asians will treat you extremely differently, and likely you won't hear an asian call you a lazy factory worker. They won't even hire you for such a role, most likely you'll be hired to be in some bs management role or teaching English if you're a white guy in china. Your experience will be largely shielded. The stuff you heard chinese people saying unfiltered in the conference room is something you won't hear just the same as how I don't hear all the shit white people say about asians. I have to live in the US for at least a decade before I sniff out aspects of the crap that's talked about among white people in private. But consider this, there is a huge anti racism movement in america that goes to the point of absurdity. I can't say anything about a race even if it's true because it will be construed as racism. So even in many white circles the individuals either keep their traps shut if they have racist thoughts or they buy into the whole movement. Which one are you?

Oh and it's legal to talk shit about your own race in this movement. I can say asians have slanty eyes because I'm asian but if a non asian says it than he or she is a racist. Pretty logical rule.

Amazing corporate power play by Foxconn. Congrats. The fact that they do it around the world with little repercussions is amazing.

Alarming if true. Seems to me, being someone from Wisconsin, that Evers coming in and them pulling out are pretty coincidentally timed. It's almost is if he drove them out, but that can't be true because someone wrote this article that so caringly fears it's worse than that! Egad, it makes one wonder what to believe!

By the way how does this article interest hackers/tinkerers in any way? Answer without bias.

The plan was stupid from the get go. It was never going to work and was simply a give away at the expense of the tax payers. I'm from Wisconsin also and can confirm those buildings are not creating any jobs.

It was obviously stupid and controversial at the beginning and this was going to be the obvious conclusion.

This is very good information, but the wrong narrative.

This was not some 'fake deal' by a Chinese firm to get subsidies, it looks like they probably barely broke even on this one - if that - and no company wants to have big ugly stain failures like this.

It looks like Foxconn just bit off more than they could chew, maybe saw an opportunity, but then realized they couldn't make use of the plant. They knew what the thresholds were, could barely meet them, it had no business objective there.

Foxconn didn't win from this and so the narrative should be about states making more careful deals for payouts with companies.

Even good companies make stupid ventures here and there - the bigger the company, the more inane it looks. The huge problem here of course is the public dime. The Governor should be destroyed over this.

Foxconn is Taiwanese, not Chinese.

True, but Foxconn and Terry Gou have a very tight knit relationship to China and its ruling party

That is correct, but doesn't make calling foxconn a "taiwanese firm" accurate, unless one was doing so as a means of political criticism, i.e. "they might as well be a chinese firm for all the support they give to xi jinping."

I'm only careful to make the distinction because the ccp works to impress upon international website users that there's no difference between the countries.

The governor responsible isn't in office anymore.

Agreed that Foxconn doesn't sound malicious here. But it does seem like more than typical bumbling.

In particular, I can't see how this management structure is supposed to work - competing subdivisions is fine, and having divisions just do what the CEO says seems like it could work, but combining them is wild.

There is probably something to the story here, because superficially it doesn't look like Foxconn benefited from this, so why did they do it?

The journo tried to paint this as some kind of 'big fraud by FoxConn' but that's clearly not it, a big part of the story was missed.

Often, sometimes corporations just make mistakes and have units that are poorly managed, we just usually don't get to witness their failures publicly.

Foxconn thought they were licking the boots of the American despot and his henchman, the Governor of Wisconsin. This is the accurate assessment of the American regime abroad: it is a corrupt autocracy where the guy at the top hands out favors and punishments capriciously. It seemed to Foxconn leadership that they could break even on the boondoggle, but perhaps benefit greatly from avoiding trade sanctions.

First - 'Licking the boots of politicians' is something that happens in every country involving politicians of ever stripe.

"but perhaps benefit greatly from avoiding trade sanctions." - I don't think this is the case directly, there doesn't seem to be evidence of that, however, it might be true. Trump hasn't really singled out Chinese manufacturers.

Second - the populist/lazy/naive theme here is the supposed belief that 'political bootlicking magically prints money' - which is ridiculous - businesses have to make money somehow, there are generally no easy/magic handouts of this kind.

So the bootlicking in this circumstance enabled Foxconn to take on some really nice subsidies (!) but there is no way Foxconn comes out of that in the black without doing something productive. Even if it's on the margin.

Foxconn blew this, and possibly lost money on this and we can all agree that 'bootlickers' do not like losing money.

Nobody does.

Foxconn makes the #1 consumer product on Earth - the iPhone, and that is definitely no joke. There are divisions of Foxconn that are not only not fuckups just the opposite, are world leaders in manufacturing, probably surpassing everyone of their peers, anywhere.

So given that 1) bootlicking gets you nice things but not free profits and 2) Foxconn has operationally superior divisions ...

... the story runs short.

There are just as many question marks as answered questions.

Finally, I would say that whatever one thinks of this guy Scott Walker is besides the point - superficially this was probably a reasonable deal. Such subsidies are not uncommon and usually done with credible companies. There was risk obviously but what happened is outlandishly weird. I don't think the politicos who made this deal are so much 'to blame' other than the subsidy thresholds should have been tighter obviously.

I would say this is a good example of 'How even good Chinese companies do Business in 2020' and the results should be on display for bureaucrats and would-be belt-and-roaders everywhere.

> I would say this is a good example of 'How even good Chinese companies do Business in 2020' and the results should be on display for bureaucrats and would-be belt-and-roaders everywhere.

This is a Taiwanese company. Belt and Road is a PRC thing.

That said, this is more of an example of "how practically any company will behave when offered poorly designed subsidies". There's a _place_ for state subsidization of industry, but it has to be done very carefully or this happens.

""how practically any company will behave when offered poorly designed subsidies""

No, it's not at all - again - these cases are not that common.

Frankly, offering subsidies this silly is not that common, at least on this scale. This stuff is usually quite carefully designed.

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