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

theverge.com

71 pointsaeontech19 comments

10days ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24831809

https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wi...

[off topic] If R wins this time, it is a huge failure on the so many protests & rallies: to not have converted those into votes against R .

Republican state leaders sure do talk a lot about being pro-business. It is interesting that California and Washington headquarter all four of the world’s trillion dollar public companies, plus a boatload of $100B+ companies, and vibrant startup centers.

Businesses care about things other than low taxes. Hiring well educated and talented people is certainly top of the list. States that want to grow their economies should focus on making attracting/maintaining/developing those types of people. That means focusing on livability (livability != low cost of living).

Adding on here, I think you can make a pretty good argument that California does capitalism better than anyone else in the world. Just within a few miles of each other, you have Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, Nvidia, Adobe, PayPal, Netflix, Intel, Oracle, and Salesforce. All worth >$150B.

That those business are concentrated in such a small area would seem to suggest it's not because of California, but in spite of it. Concentration begets concentration, so when you have a preexisting concentration of tech companies, that concentration will continue almost regardless of the local or statewide political environment.

Even still, why aren't said companies concentrated in other states ?

It kind of makes sense they're geographically pretty close?

If you were going to start a tech company in 2010, why wouldn't you build near other campuses ? Hiring etc would be so much easier. You'd be at a disadvantage to be in another part of California?

Seems like your arguing that Silicon Valley does capitalism better then anywhere else in the world. If it were a California thing then you would expect similar results in more than one city within the state.

Los Angelas has a tremendous concentration of the film industry, so its not just one city.

...They know this. They aren't stupid (a non-negligible portion at least)

The people they can easily pander to don't, for various reasons. Public education has been widely dismantled, especially in areas hit by industrial and white flight. Hookworm/malnutrition/lead poisoning are all also legitimately a hell of a fuckin drug.

The biggest charade of the past 50 or so years has also been convincing a decent portion of the U.S. that California is some democratic/liberal orgy of a state. It's not. California has historically had and still does have a large republican presence.

Sheer ignorance along with cognitive dissonance makes grifting easy as hell.

"In Vietnam in 2007, in Brazil in 2011, in Pennsylvania in 2013, and in Indonesia in 2014, Foxconn announced enormous factories that either fell far short of promises or never appeared."

Wow! Smoke and mirrors on an epic scale!

This is what happens when governments meddle with a free market by offering tax cuts and cash incentives. The businesses optimize for the wrong thing.

> The businesses optimize for the wrong thing.

The wrong thing for whom exactly?

The person offering the incentive, obviously

I wouldn't say person but rather country or citizens. It might actually be beneficial for an individual politician but bad for the country as a whole.

Excellent reporting, I think.

It’s offering some fascinating insight into Foxconn internals where warring fiefdoms of business units mean insane amounts of wasted human effort (not that that is unique to Foxconn).

That also offers an interesting contrast to the recent post on Apple internal organization of the business into functional lines instead of product units (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24903764)

I don't understand what Foxconn's endgame is.

Did they really have a good-faith plan to build a mega factory going into this? And then they failed because of befuddling incompetence as the article suggests? Or did they do the whole thing as a Potemkin village to curry favor with the Trump administration? If so, where did they cash it in? Seems convoluted.

Occam's razor says it was incompetence, but how does Foxconn get on in the world if they are so dysfunctional? Shouldn't they be bankrupt by now?

Ford did something similar in Brazil many decades ago. Google too with its massive book scanning many years ago. I think it is more of incompetence and gutsy "let's try" like a bridge to nowhere hoping dumb luck to happen. Yahoo's investment in Alibaba is a good example. No one would say Yahoo has incredible Buffet-level-competent team knowing Alibaba is great investment prior.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com