Foxconn gets green light for $270M factory in Vietnam

I know the Supreme Court case that opened the gates to these shenanigans (Kelo v. City of New London) back in 2005 ended similarly.

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

Pfizer wanted the land and said they would create jobs and give the state more tax revenue, the state said "well that sounds like 'public use' to us," seized the land, bulldozed the houses, wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and then Pfizer picked up and moved out of town.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/nyregion/13pfizer.html

Nothing was built and the property where the homes were demolished still sits vacant:

https://www.theday.com/section/specialreports&Profile=1268

I feel like we're focused on the wrong axis. To me it is is less about authoritarian versus non-authoritarian as much as competent versus incompetent. Although in Wisconsin's case no credits were given to Foxconn (https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/foxconn...), the state did pursue a number of improvements to roads and infrastructure that were not appropriately tied to the agreements with Foxconn. The contract should have clearly required reimbursement (to the state, and by proxy, to affected citizens) if the project were to be canceled. The deal they had forged had bad return on investment and for it to break even would have required an enormous period of time (https://reason.com/2020/10/20/wisconsins-foxconn-boondoggle-...).

Compare this to NYC/NY State's now-cancelled but well structured deal for Amazon, where they stood to make a 9:1 return on investment, with only $505m in capital outlays for the public, and that itself was tied to a minimum $3b investment from Amazon, with projected new revenue of $28 billion for the city and state over 25 years (https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/16/18098589/amazon-hq2-nyc-que...). NY gets a lot of flak for mismanagement on other fronts (for example transit infrastructure) but they were able to select the right incentives, terms, and conditions to create a highly favorable subsidy deal that wouldn't have left them high and dry if the company changed direction.

My conclusion from all this being - it doesn't make sense to demonize either subsidies or eminent domain or whatever else, as much as it does to just demand competence.

By its nature if an authoritarian gov wants a thing done it happens to some extent, how much you hear about failures is also likely to be limited at that point.

They have the possibility of doing things quickly, but also by its nature they aren't subject to much transparency, review, criticism, or accurately reporting results.... thus they really don't even have to be very good or fair about it ...

That's largely because the authoritarian governments have stronger controls over the press; trumpeting their successes and hiding their failures.

Mussolini didn't actually make the trains run on time; he only convinced people he did.

On HN, we are supposed to respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment.

CNC machines add capabilities that are not possible by hand. In these shops, you might see deburring done as an extension of the machine cycle where labor cost is high, but by hand where it is low.

GP is right that automation is a huge commitment in design and manufacture. If there are any finicky parts, it's likely that humans will have to do or correct the robot's job, and now you have an idle robot and an engaged human.

For metal fabrication, yes. CNC mills do make quite a lot of commercial sense for even low volume fabrications. But we here talk about electronics manufacturing, not metalworking.

That's a little unfair. CNC are a type of machine that do something every machine shop would need to do. Manufacturing and assembly typically require very specific automation that would be useless to anything else...hence why it only makes sense with volume.