> Projects started using eminent domain and destroying lives rarely succeed
Is there data on this? I’ve heard the opposite from admirers of more authoritarian governments, which “get things done” in part by moving quickly because they don’t have to deal with eminent domain proceedings.
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.
I learned about Kelo v. City of New London from the 5-4 podcast[1] (a progressive slanted podcast analyzing bad/controversial Supreme Court cases). Interestingly, it was one of the few cases covered on the podcast where the 'liberals' on the court decided the case.
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.
We should be extremely critical of the sweetheart corporate giveaways and if the Amazon project had gone forward I'm sure it would have had more then it's share of reality not living up to promises.
It's easy for politicians and companies to make nice PR statements about theoretical jobs that will be created but reality frequently doesn't live up to it
These sort of subsidizes should be banned. Cities should complete on infrastructure and we'll educated work force not giveaways
The Amazon subsidy was entirely based on previously shown results, meaning that Amazon would have only received breaks if they had created jobs in the prior year or had made particular investments already. The city and state would not be making ahead-of-time investments due to how they structured it. I think that's fine and protects the public's interest sufficiently. It's also worth noting that a substantial portion of the Amazon deal was through existing city/state programs like Excelsior, ICAP, and REAP (the article goes over those), which other companies can also try to get qualification for.
Personally, I don't think subsidies should be banned, because public agencies must be allowed the freedom to make smart business decisions when the opportunities arise. The one danger I see is that big corporations that can navigate the legal and political landscape may have better access to these deals than a smaller player, which stifles competition. To fix that, my suggestion is that any subsidy deal should also be made available in some smaller scaled-down form to smaller competitors.
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 ...
There is also an empty lot in Pennsylvania which predates the Wisconsin site by several years.
In 2013, Foxconn promised to spend $30 million over two years building a robotics manufacturing facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that would have employed five hundred people. They also planned to invest $10 million into R&D at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as part of the arrangement. In return, the state, county, and city offered Foxconn tax incentives and property improvements. Seven years after the ribbon cutting ceremony, the property is still an empty lot and CMU never received the investment.
On the plus side, nobody's home was seized as they were in Wisconsin.
I wouldn't necessarily be as bearish on the one in Vietnam. The dynamics are very different. To wit, I have already purchased AirPods bearing Designed in California, Assembled in Vietnam markings a few months ago.
One good side effect of globalization is to create opportunities to bootstrap the local economy (by whatever magnitude) and increase the standards of living for the local population and once the local economy is good enough that the wages and quality of life rise a bit, pick up and move to the next country that's cheaper and hopefully by then the local economy is good enough to support it self, at the very least better off than it started with. Hopefully in the future we would have the entire world above a certain standard of living :)
This creates an incentive for international corporations to keep a few banana republics around - nations constantly kept in shambles to ensure a fat profit margin by minimizing manufacturing costs.
It also eats away at the earning potential of the middle and lower classes in more advanced nations. If your nation's cost of living is high, finding a way to outsource your economic productivity is the goal of a titanic mountain of cash.
Because of this economic uncertainty, it ALSO makes some middle and a lot of lower class people in advanced nations latch onto the first nationalist they see.
Question for people in the tech factory industry:
who has the coolest factories?
I love the Intel museum at their campus, but have
never been inside a Fab or even a computer assembly
factory (or automotive factory, etc). Closest I've
come is the place where they make all the Cape Cod Potato chips.
If you were to put together a world "most advanced factories" sightseeing tour, what would be on the list?
I myself only saw Chinese manufacturing, and to lesser extend Vietnamese (which is mostly run by Chinese, and Japanese anyways.)
The PCB stages were fully automated for decades, and even very small shops may have zero manual population. PCB shops look more or less the same anywhere in the world.
Most interesting things come after that.
"Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly.
Automation has economic advantage in very narrow sets of circumstances.
Though the variance in non-automated assembly lines can be giant. You can easily spend 10 times to assemble a widget with same amount of people, and equipment by getting the process management wrong.
>"Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly.
Go find me a reasonably profitable machine shop that doesn't have mostly CNC machines. You won't find many. Even in places with low cost labor like China CNC machines are pretty ubiquitous outside of fairly specialty shops.
You can look on YouTube and see tons of examples of factories that have a mixture of robotic automation and human labor. The production world has changed a ton in the last ten to fifteen years!
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.
I mean, even in electronics manufacturing the level of automation and robotics has drastically increased. Pick and place machines for the low end are cheap and ubiquitous these days. Go look up videos of battery factories and look at the level of robotics they have involved. It's incredible!
Automatic board population has been the case for decades, yet electronics factories are for larger part non-automated past that.
Batteries are too a very easy to understand case for automation. You have to make a single widget without alterations by billions for year on end — exactly the case for maximum automation.
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.
Does anyone know if Foxconn pollutes? I imagine Vietnam doesn't have the best infrastructure so polluting is the norm there and they'd go unchecked in devastating the environment.
It's not a binary question -- every factory pollutes. If only because energy, transport, etc is necessary and people generate biowaste. The question is how much and what types. The best way to clean up any environmental damage in a poor country is to help it become a rich country. At that point, the people and gov will start to prioritize it.
I guess that Apple and the the rest of the pack had no say in that. Maybe they will find out about Foxconn's plans from this HN post.
Ignoring everything ignorant with your comment you should know that Foxconn uses that factory to manufacture computer devices for U.S corporations just like they've been doing in China for decades.
Well, they have moved to a mixed-economy and are still moving.
There was a documentary several years back that had a VC General who was being interviewed. He was walking down a street talking about his grandchildren's interests and walking by all those American company's logos. He was not pleased.
It's important to note that Vietnam, much like China, only promises the mixed economy temporarily, and officially at least claim that they will move away from it once the country is sufficiently developped.
They claim the current semi-planned economy is a transition to true socialism. It's been in transition for over thirty years, and sounds more like ideological justification than a real plan to change.
It certainly could be ideological justification, however as early as the 1880s communists and socialist started advocating for 50-100 years of state capitalism in less developed countries before socialism would be attempted.
Lenin for example had this position in the USSR once he realized central planning wasn't going to work out well enough, but Stalin took the USSR in another direction when Lenin died.
That's just plain stupid. Extreme socialism doesn't solve any problems that capitalism couldn't solve with the right policies. It is entirely possible to build a capitalist society that treats worker fairly. You only need leadership that is caring about the population instead of personal gain. Socialism isn't immune against that, in fact it often goes hand in hand with authoritarianism which means economic outcomes will be worse in most cases.
