Peloton to invest $400M to build its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Ohio
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
It makes sense that Peloton foresees many, many years of sales without needing to update their hardware much.
PS - 2020 was their best year ever and 2021 could be even better. People are currently willing to pay American rates to avoid supply chain risk.
PPS - Ohio is a great location for Peloton. I bet they can get 70-80% of their product by value from supply manufacturers just within the state. Expand to Michigan and Indiana and you might be at 85 or 90%. This is in the Toledo metro area which already has a large auto manufacturing supply chain, as well as PV panel production. They’ve got plenty of workers and suppliers to draw from.
It makes sense, and also having enough diversity of locations to avoid infrastructure outages.
Very clever.
https://www.weather.gov/iln/climate_graphs_cmh#
Got to 90 deg today.
When the product is consistent, you can get competitive pretty much everywhere. That's a luxury you will never have unless you are already a big MNC.
On paper, US manufacturing been cheaper than in China for quite a few years already, but you have to spell that "ON PAPER" with big bold letters.
1. Labour — flyover states had wages comparable to South China for 2-3 years.
2. Education — supposedly best in the world, supposedly, at least beating Chinese public secondary school
3. Supreme "intellectual" property regime — no comparison to China at all, you can sue whomever, whenever, for whatever, and barristers here are even calling you themselves to offer their services to sue your competitors
4. Supply chain — world's biggest companies are there, if they are all here, there must be at least something they all buy.
5. Taxes — US vs. China's tax rate are incomparable: 30% vs 60%-70% something depending on incalculable amount of fees, charges, levies
How things are in reality:
1. People in US you can hire cheaper than highschoolers in China are really not-employable, in other words people with problems.
2. Education is there, but only for people who can already dish out a sum, otherwise even a passable secondary education is not a given.
3. Yes, you can sue everybody, and the same applies in reverse too!
4. Those companies really do buy, and sell a lot of stuff, just not from you, but the same guy you buy your stuff in China
5. US taxes are half that of China, but Chinese accountants know how to run from taxes 10 times better than American accountants.
There was a part we looked at, comparable came from the Nintendo Wii.
This part came from this little hackey shop in Shenzhen.
Essentially found out this 'world class product' had some very specialized parts made by tiny shops in China. That kind of adaptability is not quite in the USA.
Tool and Die as well.
But it could be I think if there were more demand for it.
Lots of analogs to great programmers in terms of when to optimize what, and how. Manufacturing process selection, optimal batch size, make vs buy, accounting for supply chain uncertainty, profitability analysis, etc.
Once you have production offshore it is even harder. They may have made a few jigs (not as many as labor is cheap enough to not need them), but and odds are even in the worst case they can re-use all but one of those jigs. Thus once you are offshore it is better to let offshore do the prototype work.
It gets far more complex than that.
Brains, even tiniest amounts of them, are.
Read my story above how my first line worker in Canada whom I found to not screw up a completely banal assembly was a 60k+ MEng.
At scale, there are also complications, like the cost of training, labor laws, or approving role changes with the union.
I'm unfortunately a little skeptical, but I hope it works for the city/state and Peloton. If you find the idea of new plants opening in the US interesting, I recommend the documentary American Factory. It is about a plant owned by a Chinese company opening in Ohio (Dayton), so the circumstances are completely different from this. It explores the clash of cultures and conflict of attitudes of the employers and employees. I liked how they dove into some employees and employers lives and circumstances.
I thought it was interesting, but I'm a little biased because I happened to be living near Dayton when it was filmed, and had no clue this type of thing was going on.
Population of Miami county is 100k. People in this part of the country travel 30-45 miles to work.
https://www.google.com/search?q=miami+county+population
They always talk about upto x number of jobs. Actual numbers are usually lower.
There are close to hundred Japanese companies/factories in Ohio.
Politics aside, I thought that was a pretty neat tidbit.
I bet no, and I bet they also went trying the cumbersome robotisation route yet again.
Is it really going to be that much bigger post Covid? It’s not like home gyms have never been thought of before, or there’s something new that happened that Peleton didn’t already have in 2019.
Sure Peleton has features that make it feel like you’re connected to a larger community. But ultimately many people want the actual ability to talk to the instructor, or feel the energy from others in the class (eg why live music/comedy cannot be replicated), or build bonds and social relationships with others. Those that don’t care about these things already would have worked out at home before. Sure maybe some bought this equipment during Covid, but that doesn’t mean it all of the sudden becomes “the future of working out.”
I have more than one friend who's life has been basically taken over, like Cross fitters can be. It's all she posts on Instagram! Have their own group, organize rides with custom t shirts and everything. Actually did a meet up in person from across the country. I think she does interact with her favorite instructor off the platform too.
Seems more personal than like a large brand spin class. Who knows maybe they make some in person gyms, like a bike-share program, since the bikes are so expensive.
But I am for sure in the category of building an intense home gym that I don't use as much as I should given the cost ;)
I got mine before COVID, but I know that it was a big to-do during COVID because everyone wanted a bike but people didn't want strangers coming in to their houses to install them. (Understandable at the time.)
The bike was designed in Denmark but the box came from Thailand. I would guess that ocean shipping for Peloton from China to Los Angeles or Long Beach and then truck or rail from there to Portland is slightly cheaper than just truck or rail from Ohio but probably not enough to matter.
I'd never tried an electric bike before. I can see why people use them instead of cars. It's pretty awesome.
1 million square feet
more than 2,000 jobs
Given how much automation is used in modern factory, I'm surprised it'll create that many jobs. Given the products are fairly consistent, wouldn't the production lines be robots?
People saying automation will save American manufacturing have zero experience with real manufacturing.
And nowadays automation rarely reduces the number of employees substantially. The days of a worker doing one very simple task day in and day out are long gone. Most automated manufacturing lines are designed with every step having an associated operator who can load material in and out (which is a very difficult task to automate generally), which also keeps a person conveniently located for handling errors, cleaning, light maintenance, handling edge cases, assisting people at neighboring workstations, etc. In fact, automation actually often requires more labor as robots tend to be slower than human workers and prone to various errors which humans would simply deal with. Their advantage though is in automation's consistency, which allows for much more efficient supply chain management. While some automated systems can be made to outperform human operators, this is usually prohibitively expensive.
I’m not sure of the _exact_ proportions required, but I first noticed this on food products (“Prepared in Canada from domestic and foreign ingredients” is frequently found on foods I buy).
So I'll say: kudos to you Peloton. Subsidy or not, providing some much-needed jobs to the Midwest. They could have just as easily setup the factory in Mexico to reduce labor costs, but didn't.
You're not wrong about the thread, or rather the initial time sequence of the thread—but it's important to understand that that is not representative of the community. It is only the self-selected first-to-comment. Unfortunately the comments with the fastest TTP (time to post) tend to be produced by reflexive reactions, and—also unfortunately—most reflexive reactions are negative ones.
On Reddit there's only a single-contrarian dynamic, where the contrarian post remains at the top, and is less liable to be questioned than the original article. Sometimes the top-voted, contrarian post has evidently not actually read the article.
Of course in older days of forums there was an infinite-contrarian dynamic, where the arguing back and forth continued forever.
Any assumption that a site frequented by people around the globe should be euphoric about a US manufacturing plant seems flawed.
I don't intend this comment to argue with them or with the assessment, but I've lurked on HN long enough to see the growing tide of early onset pearl clutchers who hit a quiet thread with a trite "Well I've never!" moral righteousness, then enjoying waves and waves of adulation while the target of their disdain are pummeled. What is the dynamic behind that? Shouldn't it have a name, because it is a negative, increasingly common tactic that sidetracks many threads.
Deleted comment
The only step I know that seems viable is the long, slow process of community education. Technical solutions don't really seem like they would help. I suppose we could put up a nag screen when there aren't many comments in a thread, asking people to check whether they're posting from the right place...but we've always tried to avoid that kind of thing, and even if each such step made sense individually they would soon compound into something annoying.
Fortunately, not everyone needs to understand these things, just enough to start feeding back into the system and affecting the culture.
Edit: of course, since comments are all public data, anyone who wanted to could work on such a model, and if anyone came up with one that was good enough, that would be significant work and I would very much like to know!
If you'd like a hand, please email me. I figure you have access to my hidden email address.
I think HN is suffering from its own success with a notable drop is comment / post quality.
The first rule of HN is you don't talk about HN. ... also, if you've found a new forum, please let me know!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I don't think this particular issue is related to new younger audiences, because—by inspection at least—the initial wave of objections isn't noticeably coming from newer users. I haven't specifically analyzed that though.
Complaints about "notable" drops in quality go back all the way to the beginning of HN. Of course it's possible that they're all true, but that would be a lot of notable drops. Or maybe some are true and some aren't, in which case we're fluctuating within a range... or maybe they didn't use to be true but now they are true? That's of course what the person perceiving the "notable drop" always feels—but there are also other explanations for this feeling, such as sample bias and nostalgia bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It's pretty hard to establish anything objective about it. If I randomly look at past frontpages and past comments, they don't seem consistently better or worse (but see the previous sentence).
I'm confused. If you give tax breaks then you take a loss. That's what tax breaks are. Tax breaks usually exist to buy reputation for the local politician with tax payer money. They never made sense economically because the overall tax burden for non subsidized companies goes up. If your tax rates are not competitive then you just change your tax rate for everyone.
Without the tax break, none of the new jobs would have been made in the city at all.
Oftentimes these are just incorporated industrial areas with minimal housing and little/no incentive to invest in public services. The businesses in this city/township are certainly running the show, and the few people living within those borders have little to no incentive or ability to organize and work for change. Afterall - people with surplus money/time would choose to live elsewhere.
Its a vicious cycle to the bottom, since these types of cities/townships compete against the main city proper (in the case of large urban areas) or other nearby cities and towns that are actually trying to provide for their citizens.
Any time the costs to the city outweigh the benefit of getting those jobs. Industrial pollution can be a greater detriment than a handful jobs. Or the city can turn over land that would otherwise be put to other uses. Or the jobs might all be people who don't actually live in the city, saddling the city with resulting traffic/pollution issues but with no practical job benefits. I don't know or think that Peloton is going to do such things, but it is very possible for downsides to be greater than the benefit of creating jobs.
A classic example might be a distribution warehouse (not amazon, oldschool warehouse). Maybe there are five or ten people who work at the facility, but the city has to deal with a constant flow of trucks in and out. The downside of those trucks will probably be greater than the handful of jobs a warehouse may generate.
There are very few things in the light industry today making pollution. PCB etchants, dyes, solvents — all being actively reclaimed for decades.
* It sets a precedent for other companies to leverage the same tax breaks.
* Facilities still use public roads and infrastructure. A road with 50 more trucks per day deteriorates more quickly, but the facility isn't paying for that directly.
Are you sure? Those jobs would exist even if no city gives tax breaks, tax breaks didn't create them, therefore you cannot make this calculation.
The average fella will always want to just drink a beer with friends and badmouth the politicians, their boss, a few celebrities and some rich people. Forums like this one are just the electronic version of it.
It doesn't matter.
That said, look for Peloton having solid business reasons to do this, maybe even tax subsidies and the like. A CEO may have their best intention to help America and create jobs and so on good things. But still ultimately it has to also make business sense, because they answer to a board and the board answers to shareholders.
Because customers will purchase alternatives that are 5% cheaper.
It would be a multi-decade project, but we could (and imo, should) government subsidize our way out of that.
A business is a business. It has to make choices that make business sense.
So a CEO answers to a board answers to shareholders answers to the collective population of buyers, which is us.
We wouldn't see the same snark if it was a Razer mouse factory, even though that's also rich-people toys, because it's more line with average HN user's interests.
I think the reason is that most of HN is not very knowledgeable of manufacturing generally (one commenter was shocked at spending $400m on a factory), combined with hatred for Peloton (for whatever reason) specifically.
It's true that comments sometimes get downvoted unfairly, but I'm not seeing that in this thread. In such cases, though, the thing to do is give them a corrective upvote: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
I'm not seeing this attitude here. The (heavily downvoted) comments are all criticizing feasibility. A factory quickly shut down helps nobody. Maybe they're wrong, but not everything needs to immediately devolve into binary identity politics, with the clueless elites vs the struggling Americans.
Because people expect another Juicer here. There is no way in the world for a bicycle factory to cost $400M.
For such money, I can setup you 400 bicycle factories, and somebody who is an industry insider can probably do even more.
I myself been involved with company trying to start a scooter knockdown kit assembly line, with some parts manufacturing 7 years ago in BC, Canada, and Washington state in USA.
It was all around $800k USD, which includes 1 year of operation. It was all a complete disaster though on the manpower, and supplies side, as everybody except for the company owner expected.
The first line worked who did not manage to miswire a colour coded, mechanically keyed harness with just 6 connectors was a MEng graduate who wanted 60 something thousand USD, and was slow as molasses.
And yes, custom fasteners were impossible to procure in North America as such. Fastener companies wouldn't even talk to you if you don't put up n*$100k up front. Same thing in China starts in under $10k.
If anybody done serious manufacturing, they know to avoid machining like a curse.
I really feel they (and pretty much everybody else in this "manufacture in USA" bunch) don't really know what they are doing.
I am also dying to know how you made a scooter without any machined components.
I haven't said avoid machined parts. I said avoid machining as part of your own manufacturing process.
It looks very odd to have a lone, expensive n-axis CNC sitting on the shop floor just to do few parts.
> any self respecting factory should have a machine shop for tooling and fixtures.
For most of my career by now, it was always faster, and easier to have tooling made by a contractor, than on-site. I can email a solidworks sketch in the morning, and get a perfect mold/die by the evening.
> I am also dying to know how you made a scooter without any machined components.
As said before without machining, not machined parts.
We were buying Yadea kits. Assembly was very straightforward. Slide two parts of a frame with slide locks, and welds. Affix other parts, and panelling. That was all to it, except for local workforce not being able to handle pretty much everything.
If you don't need it to do a lot of work, a cheap used cnc is incredibly cheap. You can easily get a decent one for under 30k and if you can wait for a deal you can probably snag something for under 10. Lathes are even cheaper. They're easily the most accessible machine tools.
I used to work for a tool and die shop. It took us weeks from when we quoted a job to when it would ship and people came to us because of how fast we were. I don't know where in the world you're getting same day molds and dies, but that's not normal at all.
If you can build factories and nobody has to work in those then you should just keep building factories. It would be even better if those factories produced solar panels or wind turbines.
That doesn't mean manufacturing won't come back, just that it will be highly automated or the jobs won't be high paying.
Industrial maintenance mechanics make $25-35 an hour depending on skills. Machinists make $30-50/hr. Skilled machine operators earn $22-30+ hourly depending on the type of machine and skill required. Plants like these hoover up industrial, mechanical, electrical, process, mechatronic engineers all at over $100k.
Perhaps you meant that completely unskilled labor is less in demand at manufacturing facilities. Even that isn't really true: the idea that 100% of these roles are automated is often believed by people without exposure to manufacturing; the reality is that you still need a lot of unskilled people making $15-20/hour for the plant to work, even with plenty of automation.
There are certainly fewer jobs than before, due to greater efficiencies and automation, but they aren't bad paying.
As a midwesterner, I'll believe it when it's built. Otherwise to me it's just another means of washing bribe money somehow.
You may, but might I mention those are different circumstances? In one case, it's a foreign company and a government leaders making grandiose statements with little action.
In this example, it's a publicly traded US company that's making the move to control their own supply chain that was affected by foreign manufacturing. They stated they intend to break ground this summer. Could you wait a few months to see?
Yes, the state of Wisconsin sunk some money into infrastructure in the area, but that just means infrastructure got built in Wisconsin. That's not profit for Foxconn.
Quite a bit of the infrastructure goes nowhere -it only benefits a factory built out at that location. As a Chicago resident who sometimes visits Milwaukee, I will personally note that the interstate construction was horrible and ripped up roads that had been completed just a few years prior.
To say nothing of the people that lost their homes to eminent domain.
Foxconn is known for the, uh, con, so a lot of industry insiders weren't surprised this entire thing played out the way it did.
Peloton has a very real financial incentive to do this. Treadmills and bikes are HEAVY, and as they called out in the article the demand has outstripped supply and rush shipping from overseas has been extremely expensive for them.
Foxconn's reasoning was essentially: we don't want to be caught up in Trump's trade war so we'll say we're building this factory and get a bunch of tax breaks.
Cynicism is a perfectly justified response to announcements like this.
Quote:
“It was an experiment to prove that the U.S. supply chain could work as good as China’s, and it failed miserably,” a former senior manager is quoted as saying.
No one opens a whole factory just for the PR. They tried, and the experiment didn't work. The US has objective problems in supporting mass manufacturing and assembly. Guilting companies into it won't work.
That's a lot of money...
People in other countries can open a few car factories with money like that.
And not of a OEM kit assembly type, but a proper on with body shop, and everything. Price? A bit more than $110M
And what do you mean a body shop? Do you mean like a fabrication facility where they form body panels, and then do paint after assembly?
Body shops are where they do repairs for collision and dents after a car is already completed. A domestic factory might have one to fix flaws in the paint and body incurred during manufacturing... Cars imported from overseas get bodywork done at the port, generally due to shipping damage. (Yes your brand new car may have already been repaired.) It's not really the big part of building a car at all though. I feel like you might be missing something, or misunderstanding something. Or maybe it's just me.
A type of a factory that does assembly only from parts, without making parts themselves
> And what do you mean a body shop? Do you mean like a fabrication facility where they form body panels, and then do paint after assembly?
I mean a shop where they manufacture a car body, and its parts.
Normal car factories run $500m for something smallish to $4bn for a facility with more volume.
Yes, the panelling lines is half the cost, and assembly would be mostly manual for the beginning.
Clearly you can open a very small car factory for $1 million with a body shop if you want to.
400 million in some locations would be bigger than the annual budget for the country. But in some locations you wouldn't even get a call back trying to buy a basketball or baseball team or soccer team.
On top of the safety key which was easily removable, they've now added a PIN on top - so if pulling out the magnetic key is too much effort you don't even have to do that.
that too me is something that would fall under a "factory fix."
The only thing that plastic guard will do is create a spot for clothing and fingers to get caught.
It is absolutely a massive design flaw that this treadmill lacks a protective guard and/or an automatic cutoff that triggers when it sees an unexpected level of resistance. You know, like if a child's head gets caught in it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4350594/Girl-3-seri...
Most gym areas have restrictions such as not allowing kids under a specific age (I can't remember the exact number, I think it was 14). Even gyms in residential buildings have this restriction.
Now, many treadmills don't have enough space under them to enable the kind of stuff that Peloton treadmills do to pets and kids ("sucking" them under the treadmill and killing them).
So may well be many nuances at play in this selection, or might even be down to some CEO living nearby and just wants to pop a made local/USA sticker on the product.
Time will tell.
But whatever, I’ll do it this time too. I downvoted your comment because it bored me with how repetitive the idea it expresses is. I don’t need to go into every Apple thread and be reminded they have a walled garden, every Microsoft thread and reminded of their antitrust stuff, every Peloton thread and reminded of the treadmill. It was mainstream news in the US, dude.
I have only so much time and I don’t want to spend it reading the same thing over and over again.
Hence a downvote for boring me.
my 2 cents.
But do they sell in the Netherlands? Point being that exercise can be built into your life, cycling to work, the shops or to see friends and family.
As much as I am impressed by the Peloton product, here I am right now in a nature reserve with ample birdsong, having taken 45 minutes to get here by foot with my flask and phone. I am not likely to buy their products, my real bicycle cost a fraction of a treadmill and it actually gets me from A to B as do my boots.
There is something wrong when mankind is buying SUVs and these glorified hamster wheels.
I only saw a few regular dog walkers on my stroll today but they are neighbours and I said hello. I don't want a virtual hello on a hamster wheel, thanks.
Moreover, having a Peloton does not conflict with also going outside for exercise; most of the Peloton users I know engage in outdoor activities like (trail) running and mountain biking and have the machine because it's convenient to just hop on whenever.
There is something wrong when a man thinks that a slow stroll through a nature reserve constitutes anything even remotely close to the type of exercise one gets in a cycling class.
If I am on a glorified hamster wheel I have none of that motivation. I also lack the exhilaration from having survived. It means nothing to me.
This is what irritates me about this platform. So I work hard all day, go for a stroll up a very big hill, sit down with my flask and phone to read the news, but, due to low bandwidth, bother with this silly website for a few minutes. To get petty comments about putting my phone down for a bit! I think you over assumed.
Bro, pick a side...
Edit: it was $47 million. See you all in 6 to 12 months when this goes the way of Foxconn.
But also (as an Ohio resident) there isn't really all that much in the way of incentives for a business to move here. The state has to do something. But this won't go the way of Foxconn - mark my words, because it's not nearly as complicated to set up.
Like it or not, the future state for not just the world but individual states will be competition for jobs and revenue, so they're going to have to give companies a good reason to locate to their sovereignty. Tax advantages are a tool they can use (among other things), and unlike the federal government the state governments (at least Ohio) have to actually balance their budgets and spend somewhat responsibly - so they can't just do whatever they want and have to be strategic. Not collecting taxes is fine because if Peloton wouldn't locate here without that nothing is really being lost. At least there are jobs.
What if they put that money into better technical education facilities, or tax credits for Ohio residents paying off student loans. Increasing services so that people working remotely will want to come.
I feel like a place with a low cost of living that attracts highly talented people for a variety of reasons is a better long term investment than a treadmill factory. If I was looking to open a satellite office, I can tell you that proximity to a treadmill factory is pretty low on the list.
Tax breaks like this are tactical, state and city governments need to be strategic. While tactics like tax breaks can be part of a strategy, it doesn't seem to be a great one since it doesn't build "moats", and all it takes to be defeated is the next state over offering something slightly better. Ohio of all places should know that manufacturing facilities can be closed on short notice for reasons they have no control over.
1. Not collect the first $47mm/$??mm of taxable revenue they generate
2. Not collect any taxable revenue since they didn't build there
Not to mention that there are other ancillary benefits to choice 1 since they'll be paying for land, paying wages, paying truckers to shop things ect.
Therefore there are no other programs that $47mm in uncollected taxes could have been spent on, since the money only exists if they even choose to move there.
Are we on the same page about that or is that not how tax breaks work? (assuming the company refuses to operate at any dollar amount fewer of tax break)
Well, a few issues. This is money that has to be collected and spent - more taxes or a change in the budget. Not collecting taxes on new construction isn't money the state has to spend, it's just money it isn't collecting. The alternative, at least in this case is that this factory just isn't built in Ohio. It wouldn't affect doing other things to attract residents. Frankly, I think we should create large-scale corporate subsidies to relocate jobs to the state. If you build your facility or office here, no corporate tax on that entity. More jobs and more money and revenue from other taxes will be enough.
> I feel like a place with a low cost of living that attracts highly talented people for a variety of reasons is a better long term investment than a treadmill factory.
Well, the cost of living isn't all that low, and where it is low no talented person without connections to the state wants to live here. Why live in Ohio when you have the exact same thing almost everywhere else in the country, from Oklahoma to Iowa, to Indiana to Michigan. There aren't many unique reasons to locate a business here, unfortunately. There are plenty of talented people here, though many leave for other locations.
> If I was looking to open a satellite office, I can tell you that proximity to a treadmill factory is pretty low on the list.
Sure, but you're also generally not opening a satellite office here unless you have a very good reason, and that reason would have nothing to do with the existence of a treadmill factory. In other words, Ohio is very low on your list, so if you have a reason for being here it's a very good one that this won't affect.
> Tax breaks like this are tactical, state and city governments need to be strategic. While tactics like tax breaks can be part of a strategy, it doesn't seem to be a great one since it doesn't build "moats", and all it takes to be defeated is the next state over offering something slightly better. Ohio of all places should know that manufacturing facilities can be closed on short notice for reasons they have no control over.
Yes. We should grow a coastline, build some mountains and ski resorts, and have great weather instead.
I agree that state and city governments need to be strategic, but you're paining a mutually exclusive picture where one doesn't exist.
Personally I think the only thing we can do is create walkable neighborhoods with mixed-use development - make Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other towns and cities more like places in Europe where people would actually want to live. Otherwise Ohio is pretty indistinguishable from most of the country.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjwd
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128133/foxconn-deal-wis...
This is just a company that actually wants to build what they're saying they'll build (at least I believe Peloton wants to build treadmills and exercise bikes because that's what they do, I have no idea why anyone would build a "state of the art" facility for a technology that's already been largely obsoleted as was the case with Foxconn and LCD screens) and hoping for a tax break.
[1] https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2017/sep/17/...
Yes but the fact that either extreme can bubble up to the top such that if you say anything you immediately get hit with the strongest disagreement, is I think one of the hallmark properties and biggest problems with the internet/social media
Renting makes sense if you can not afford it at all or only will use it for a small period of time. If you are going to use something long term you are usually better off buying that thing.
Also try to buy used equip. Many times people realize they did not really want to do it at all but made an excellent coat hanger. Usually it is in very good condition and you can save a decent amount of cash.
You do not need a lot of money to exercise. You can get in cheap. Mostly it is about setting up a routine and doing that. Basically 'procrastination is the thief of time' and 'by repetition I get things done'.
Part of this investment is likely to be expansion of their product range.
I wish they'd use something like a Pi CM4 that could be upgraded at least once or twice over the 10+ year lifecycle, but I also understand why this will never happen.
Its clear that they are thinking of a broader market and company.
Its not hard for me, for example, to see how they can scale this to rowing and treadmills and beyond given their strong brand.