I have freely admitted for a while now that Wisconsin is a fairly corrupt place. (And WEDC, the guys who came up with this, has been among the organizations I've pointed out the most.) That said, the more this Foxconn thing goes on, the more I realize how much we've been screwed over in Wisconsin by Walker and his cronies.
The Foxconn thing never even sounded right from the outset. Four to five billion? To manufacture LCDs?
I mean, I know I'm a bit more technically inclined than most people in Wisconsin, but didn't anyone stop and think for a second, "Hmmm... Wait? Isn't the future supposed to be OLED? This doesn't make any business sense for them????"
Now these Foxconn guys come back with a story about "R&D"??????
I'm just saying, isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D? So the best you'd get is R&D to enhance their manufacturing processes maybe? Throw in a small chance at some business process R&D???? (I know, it's a stretch, but I'm trying to be generous.)
Now again, I realize I'm a bit more technically inclined than most Wisconsinites, but does anyone else find it more reasonable to do that sort of R&D in places closer to your actual manufacturing? Even suspending that disbelief for a moment, you have to ask yourself why you'd need 13,000 people to do that? You don't. You'd just never do that if you owned Foxconn.
This whole story just doesn't add up. Even from the start, it never did. How could Walker and his cronies have ever fallen for any of this?
As someone who grew up in rural Wisconsin, I can tell you that there has always been a streak of anti-intellectualism, but the past few years it has transformed into something even worse.
The suspension of critical thinking that comes from ingesting information, sourced from anything tagged as "Republican", has left the Wisconsin people vulnerable to being taken advantage of.
I speak from experience and discussions with people I had last summer. For example, some didn't believe me when I told them that Foxconn had to put suicide nets around some of their factories. They believed Foxcon is this shining star of a company come to save them, because that was what they were told by Republican leaders.
I also grew up in rural Wisconsin, but lived in Madison for several years as well, and I've seen the other side of that coin too. There's plenty of snobby progressives who live in their blue bubble, often working for the state gov't or university, and assume they know what's best for the hicks in the rest of the state. The /r/wisconsin subreddit is full of the type.
The tribalism from both ends is definitely disheartening.
As a politically moderate person, I agree that there are neighborhoods in that one blue city in Wisconsin that have an air of snobbery and resentment, but I'm not sure how Madison has made the state vulnerable.
I also agree tribalism is part of the issue, but not in the way you do. Whenever I brought up these issues of confirmation bias, the immediate discussion following would be "well whatabout..." or "us vs. them", with them being the hypothetical liberal boogeyman. Or in this case, the "blue bubble".
While it is true that Madison is liberal, the Willy-street hippies didn't strip the incoming Governor of his powers, gerrymander political lines, or push to evict Wisconsites from their land so Foxconn could build a plant.
Saying "both sides" are the problem does a disservice to Wisconsin by ignoring who has been controlling and responsible for the state for the past decade - who need to be held accountable.
I think we can all agree that anyone trying to blame ANY of the people of Wisconsin at this point are just attempts at deflection. Clearly the fault lies with Walker and his cronies.
On that everyone can agree.
Here's the thing though, it's the people who will have to pay the bill. ALL of us. There's no getting around it. There are a thousand ways for Foxconn to hose us in this agreement, and almost no ways for us to get out of it if I'm understanding this correctly.
So you guys, in Madison and in rural Wisconsin, can sit and call each other names until the cows come home, but in the end you'll all be kicking in a sizable chunk of tax money to pay off Foxconn. Just like I will.
The best thing that could happen for us is for the whole thing to fall apart, Foxconn to walk away, and we just eat the losses we have taken to date. I know that doesn't give farmers their land back, or give people in southeastern Wisconsin their homes back, but it does allow us to forego any further losses on this thing. (And the families that have already been hosed out of their property were never gonna get their farms back anyway.)
Probably won't happen though, this is Wisconsin. Wisconsin politicians are in charge, and there is a lot of money up for grabs. So my own bet would be that come hell or high water, they're gonna find a way to trigger those cash payments to Foxconn. (And consequently, "service" fees I'm sure will be paid to-, and construction contracts will be signed by-, their cronies.)
Uhhh, the people of Wisconsin voted for those in power, several times, even despite fairly clear evidence that walker and others were of questionable morals out motives.
When are Americans going to take responsibility for the society they continue to create, or allow to be created?
Funny thing: often enough, in person or in the media, you'll hear ex-voters give their reasons for sitting out an election or quitting voting altogether. I've never heard anyone say "it became obvious I was not any good at it" or anything of the sort.
I think the poster was using deliberately provocative words to call attention to the emotional angle of the debate, not making those judgements themselves.
It was one-sided because I was replying to a comment calling rural Wisconsinites easily-misled Republican voting robots. It was an attempt to show balance in the other side's perspective.
> As someone who grew up in rural Wisconsin, I can tell you that there has always been a streak of anti-intellectualism, but the past few years it has transformed into something even worse.
Not just Wisconsin. I grew up in a rural town in the South, and it was horrible. I'm back there teaching and it's even worse, if such a thing is possible. The only light I see is that a vast majority of the non-"yee yee" kids are fairly left-leaning, and nobody actually questioned me when I mentioned global warming yesterday. Shame is, those kids usually get the hell outta Dodge and never return.
re:suicide nets. Their employee suicide rates are equivalent to China. Its just that they employee so many people, its cost effective to place the nets. If only the rest of China was as cost effective.
I trust the numbers coming out of the U.S., grim as they may be. China has a habit of massaging numbers in a way that would have made Soviet propagandists blush.
I agree that the numbers in the US are unlikely to be changed post-collection, but there are still pressures that lead to the under reporting of suicide rates here as well. For example, accidental overdose can be very difficult to distinguish from suicide. If there is any question, coroners will often err on the side of ruling the death an accident to spare the survivors additional emotional hardship.
A good point, but it means you can make a high estimate by including a statistical model accounting for a percentage of accidental deaths (including overdose) that are likely suicides. As long as you have all of the data, and it’s reliable, the rest is easy. Misclassification is a much easier issue to deal with than outright fiction. The problem with China is you can’t tell what if any parts of the dataset are reliable so no methods can be employed short of espionage.
This kind of selective thinking/reporting has definitely hurt credibility of the "intellectuals". Who has the time to figure out how you lied or wrongly implied certain things with your data?
anti-intellectualism has been a strong part of American history from nearly the beginning. It only went away for a while when the entire country was being drafted for wars.
Is that backwards? ISTM when we let the intellectuals run things, they come up with all sorts of plausible pretexts for wars... Right now the most anti-intellectual politician in several years is the one who happens to be bringing the troops home from Syria, Afghanistan, etc.
I'm reminded of a great passage from ITBWTCL:
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
[EDIT:] Of course, in the next paragraph Stephenson describes a different sort of intellectual devolution in USA.
>Is that backwards? ISTM when we let the intellectuals run things, they come up with all sorts of plausible pretexts for wars...
Is the premise here that plausible pretexts for wars are less preferable than implausible ones? That an anti-intellectual launching a war on an irrational or purely emotional pretext is better than someone led by reason?
Because we had that with George W. Bush, and I'm not sure it was an improvement.
>Right now the most anti-intellectual politician in several years is the one who happens to be bringing the troops home from Syria, Afghanistan, etc.
He also said we should torture the families of terrorist suspects because fear is the only thing they understand, and warned North Korea that "the button for nuclear war is on my table". He would probably invade Iran tomorrow if someone told him Obama wouldn't have had the guts.
>> In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir.
Meanwhile, anti-intellectual zealots like Pol Pot forcibly relocated people from the cities to the countryside and murdered anyone who demonstrated any form of "intellectualism" including wearing glasses or literacy.
The most anti-intellectual politician in years has also repeatedly asked his aides to provide him with military options for dealing with Venezuela so I'm not impressed with the quality of your analysis here - especially coupled with your deliberate misreading of other people's posts.
I don't have to look back too far to see that the last anti-intellectual occupying the hot seat had no problem getting us involved in more wars. ISTM that is not a defining characteristic.
[EDIT:] You mean Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. Bush the Lesser was not so much anti-intellectual as he was easily suggestible. If a Wolfowitz or a Paulson or a Cheney had a horrible idea, he didn't have the resources to challenge that idea. Of course all the worst neocons have some sort of Ivy League credentials.
I'm not certain of any of this, but if I may go by personal experience, I would say the two qualities are orthogonal. I have known intellectuals who could be bullied into just about anything, and I've known an "anti-intellectual" who wouldn't step out of the street if you told him there was a truck bearing down on him.
Wars are fought that are a net negative to the world and scratching out a win for even the victors in the long run is implausible as long as a minority that controls the levers of power stand to gain.
The troops aren't coming home because of trump. In the long run it was a fight that was never going to be "finished" and will to keep spending money indefinitely isn't there. As well blame the sunrise for clearing up your cold instead of your immune system.
> ight now the most anti-intellectual politician in several years is the one who happens to be bringing the troops home from Syria, Afghanistan, etc.
Trump said he wanted to pull of of Syria, but his cabinet second guessed it, it was a pure PR stunt. I would concede Afghanistan, but that has been the policy for years.
He is actively pushing for war with Iran and a commercial war with China, so the link between anti-intellectualism and pacifism does not compute. Let's not even get to Venezuela...
Correction: anti-intellectualism and the forces of ignorance have been a part of "history" from the beginning. I fail to see what makes America so special in this regard. There's plenty of ignorance everywhere you look. Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, South America. Yup.
The conservative movement has a very vibrant intellectual sphere, particularly when it comes to economics, politics, and the law. Much of the Republican Party platform is nominally premised on the Laffer Curve (i.e. trickle down economics), "Taxation is Theft" (political meme delegitimizing government), Original Meaning (a particular vein of constitutional originalism), and Realpolitik (the zero-sum, might-makes-rights approach to foreign policy of neoconservatives).
IMO, these radical concepts (at least radical in the context of conservatism) were reactions to leftist intellectual movements, and also have served to supplant moralism.
The problem with intellectualism and moralism (which is being revived on the left with the social justice movement), whether from the left or the right, is that it makes is easier for people to think and speak in absolutes.
Absolutism is where intellectualism and anti-intellectualism can reinforce each other.
Good point. I was being too loose with the language. But IME the two groups tended to mix. For example, John Bolton traveled in neoconservative circles during the run-up to the Iraq War even though he's rather Machiavellian.
It’s not, but Wisconsin is an example of the secondary demographic that the Republicans target heavily — white blue collar people who have lost the stability that they had.
Foxconn is a bad business partner and that should have been more obvious to everyone. Self serving politicians like Walker and Trump are looking for a photo spray with golden shovels and a big American flag in the background to sell to people desperately looking for jobs.
I'm just saying, isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D?
I think it's a mistake to underestimate just how much native R&D goes on in the broad and deep ocean of China's modern manufacturing complex. That entire industry has been working hard for decades now at learning from its customers, continually seeking opportunities to "level up". The particulars of this specific, sketchy case aside, the idea that Foxconn hasn't invested in sophisticated R&D facilities at this point in the game is far less believable to me.
Indeed. What a lot of people don't get is that companies don't "buy American", because they can't. We simply do not have those manufacturing capabilities. It's not just the factories. It's the skilled, trained, and experienced workers needed to do that particular flavor of high precision work.
For the US to change this, to compete directly with China at large-scale electronics manufacturing, would take decades of work and untold billions of dollars of long-term focused government effort. And frankly, the US government isn't great at long term thinking. Makes you appreciate an old-school Marxist Five Year Plan.
This is just random nit picking but the five year plan is a stalinist concern to rapidly industrialize an agrarian to fit into a marxist model of having a means of production to conflict over in the first place. Marx had no such concerns.
Makes you appreciate an old-school Marxist Five Year Plan.
When does that sort of thing work, and when does it dramatically fail? I suspect that it's the looser forms of central planning that succeed and the tighter ones that spectacularly fail.
Never underestimate the capacity of government, in ALL its forms, to fail.
The fault lies not so much in systems as it does in people. Certainly some systems are a better "fit" for people than other systems, but to say that having a 5 year plan or not having a 5 year plan is going to be the key to success or failure is incorrect.
Even more than how they are incentivized, WHO the people are you have working on something is the key to its success or failure. A team of uninterested geniuses will be as useless as a team of diligent dullards, and in either case, there is a high probability of failure for your project. It won't really matter how you organize either of those teams to get the job done.
Never underestimate the capacity of government, in ALL its forms, to fail.
It's the Thermocline of Truth. The bigger and more powerful the organization, the deeper the thermocline and the more threats can be hidden therein. National governments are the biggest organizations around. Ergo, they can fail the most spectacularly.
The Soviets decided where the factories were built, how much to invest, in whom, what the products would be, quotas, volumes, suppliers, quality, etc. etc..
The Chinese gov. is mostly centrally planning strategically, i.e. with investments, loans, subsidies, de-facto monopoly rights - which is another thing entirely.
In some ways, what the Chinese are doing is kind of like what Japan, S. Korea and even Europe did after the war.
But it's likely they are heading into a 'different stage' now where that doesn't work so well.
My take on Soviet Five years plans and the like is a plan is usually better than no plan. Good plans usually spec the what not the how. Also Soviet stagnation occurred under Brezhnev's policies which de-prioritized consumer goods and infrastructure.
On the other hand Communist China seems to have gotten better at planning over time. (What you do you get good at)
'No plan' would describe US industrial policy since Reagan.
When does it fail, and why does it fail? As I've noted elsewhere, per capita income in China has increased about 130x (in constant dollars) since 1960. They've gone from abject poverty to Western standards of living for most of their citizens. That's astounding.
Small nations that have stayed with old-school communism and are mired in poverty - North Korea and Cuba at this point - have been almost totally isolated from the rest of the world for decades, unable to trade with large, obvious, prosperous neighbors. Is it the five year plan, or the sanctions?
The USSR eventually failed, but they did improve a great deal over the economic situation Russia was in at the time of the revolution. And honestly, there's no guarantee that a financial collapse won't wipe out the world of western capitalism, either. The US came perilously close to that in 2008.
Deng Xiaoping and his advisors actually didn't turn to Marx for his 5 year plans. He looked at capitalism. Education, infrastructure and the rule of law would make Western/Japanese companies invest and they did.
> How could Walker and his cronies have ever fallen for any of this?
Maybe they didn't fall for anything? Who did Foxconn buy the land from? They presumably did OK in the deal, as did any of the parties (i.e legal/accounting/lobbying firms) who facilitated the deal. Walker lost his governership in the last election, but that was before the magnitude of Foxconn's reversal was clear, so it's not directly attributable to that.
Looks like the people duped here might just be the taxpayers who payed for it all, and the would-be manufacturing workers for whom the jobs haven't materialized. I'd guess those groups' interests weren't being represented by their elected officials when the deal was struck.
It's not just land that was given to Foxconn. They were also relieved of a variety of environmental protections -- LCD manufacturing is a dirty industry that requires an enormous amount of water. Nobody did OK on that deal.
People pretty much knew the Foxconn deal was a fraud, because Foxconn, and the state government, both have a history of similar deals. There were some mining deals in northern Wisconsin that would make your hair stand on end.
For something situated on a Great Lake, the question is whether it has sufficient wastewater treatment, pumping the water in and out isn't a big deal, it's how dirty it is when you pump it back into the lake that matters.
Well, apparently they needed the existing environmental regulations to be waived. It was never revealed why, e.g., what chemicals they wanted to dump. They could simply be required to re-use their wastewater in a closed system, like nuclear power plants (for a different reason, heat generation). Then it can be as dirty or clean as it needs to be.
Also, the water doesn't belong to us. Use of Great Lakes water is governed by a treaty with Canada and administered by an international body that includes the states and provinces in the Great Lakes watershed.
Nuclear plants often have an open outer loop for their cooling. It's cheaper.
Like if you grab the environmental impact study from this license renewal for Point Beach Nuclear Plant near Green Bay, at maximum capacity it draws 1433 cubic feet per second from Lake Michigan and discharges it 23 degrees Fahrenheit warmer:
"This whole story just doesn't add up. Even from the start, it never did. How could Walker and his cronies have ever fallen for any of this?"
Just a guess, sadly, they probably had the financial lubrication to fight for it. Not to mention that the "big numbers" play to their political audience, my Reagan Republican father, for one. Sure, someone who's a little more insightful about technology might be skeptical, but that wasn't Walker's audience.
Probably but I'm starting to think the corruption bar might be pathetically low for a lot of these people as well. As in, what they want most is to feel important - put them in a private jet, buy them fancy dinners and I suspect you don't actually have to pay out all that much cash.
This isn't the first time politically connected cronies sold a state on in-sourced manufacturing. Greentech [1] was going to make pitiful NEVs and sell them domestically plus export to China. No one seemed to balk at the stupid idea and funded a factory that produced nothing.
> "Hmmm... Wait? Isn't the future supposed to be OLED? This doesn't make any business sense for them????"
There's at least some life left in LCD. CES had some pretty interesting stuff like a TV that took a black and white 1080p panel and used it as the backlight for a 4k panel giving it really good contrast.
And I don't think anyone is absolutely sure that OLED is the future. It suffers from burn-in so it's really only great for smart phones and movies, for everything else LCD is king for the foreseeable future because there's no guarantee they'll solve the burn-in issues before the next great tech comes along.
I think burn in makes it a worse candidate for smart phones! There are a lot of static images (icons, clock, weather) that will burn-in over regular usage.
I love the OLED demos, but modern LCD screens these days are pretty solid. ~$2700 for a near flawless 75" LCD. That's crazy cheap compared to the ~$7000 a 77" OLED costs. And that's ignoring the completely watchable ~70" panels you can get for under $1000.
But like others in this thread have said, it never made sense to me for FoxConn to build LCD's in WI. Basically WI gave away land and access to freshwater for FoxConn could "bring jobs."
Large format displays will be LCDs for many years due to inherent yield issues. (60” OLED displays is analogous to Intel trying to make a CPU the size of a full 300 mm wafer, one dust particle...). As the middle class grows, they will purchase large format displays.
R&D investment is Foxconn trying to move up the value chain. A dollar spent on R&D in China on innovative new ideas is less effective than that same dollar in the U.S. Especially since leading top tier LCD technology suppliers reside in the U.S./Korea/Japan.
Yes, I should have mentioned that wOLED is the way around the yield issue, but you don’t gain much. That is why srgb is what Samsung uses for small displays and which look much better than srgb (because woled is essentially lcd, just replacing white with a giant white pixel with the rest of the LCD stack the same, which can handle defects because you can hide where it is dark with the layers above)
They said they were going to build 8K displays and tons of new jobs. Then they said okay maybe not 8K displays but definitely some awesome displays. Now they're saying they can't even build TVs there. They cite "new realities" in the global marketplace, but this always looked like a scam.
We can blame trump and his ignorant tax policies, but the reality is that Walker scammed the taxpayers. The only question is, was he getting kickbacks? Or was it just to look good to voters?
And then, of course, once his crew gets voted out, they reduce the power of the incoming administration. And then blame this whole mess on the "uncertainty" of the incoming administration. What a joke.
I don't think "Joe the Average Wisconsinite" really had a say in this deal.
Yes yes, elected officials are SUPPOSED to represent their constituents, but no number of people protesting outside his office is legally capable of stopping Walker and Co. from misrepresenting their interests while they're in office.
And I mean, if there was some kind of quid pro quo between Foxcomm and Walker and Co., all the more reason for this not to benefit Joe Average.
They had a say. There was a recall election because of all the bullshit he had pulled before the Foxconn deal. Once it became clear he would keep his position he opened the spigot all the way up. In his mind he had the full support of Wisconsin voters.
From my understanding, creating 13,000 jobs means you will create 13,000 person-years worth of jobs. If you employ 1,000 people for 13 years you have satisfied the definition.
So essentially, Foxconn could build a small building, hire 1000 people, and after 13 years the state of Wisconsin would be legally obliged to pay them the full USD4 billion in guarantees?
I'm a little more educated, and a bit nicer than most Wisconsinites. I'll tell you right now though, if that's truly the case, you'd better make sure that doesn't become general knowledge here in Wisconsin. Most Wisconsinites are not gonna just sit back and accept that the way I do. Walker and his cronies would need round the clock security.
There are a lot of people around here who really bought in to the whole "13,000 jobs" thing.
People would get emotional. It would not be a good time in Wisconsin.
A lot of us knew it was bullshit from the start. They didn't even bother disguising the smell.
I knew Rod Blagojevich was a heel about 5 minutes after moving into his congressional district, in Chicago. When he got elected governor, I moved across the border to Kenosha, and was not surprised one bit when he went to prison.
I first heard about Walker in 2006, as a primary candidate for governor, and thought he was an ass then. Wisconsin was still fine under Doyle and Kohl and Feingold, though, and Paul Ryan was basically a do-nothing nobody (in my humble constituent's opinion) long before he somehow became speaker, out of nowhere. I moved to Tammy Baldwin's district in 2005, and left the state entirely in 2010. When Walker got elected governor, I suspected his tenure would be bad for the state, and especially bad for progressives. When the recall failed, I declared Wisconsin done. My Wisconsinite in-laws (and ex-Wisconsinite Arizonan in-laws) grew more Trumpy. Then the state legislation and executive policy turned into an avalanche of conservative favorites: union busting, ACA undermining, abortion restrictions, voter suppression, anti-pollution undermining, gun defending, immigrant intimidation, gay-marriage opposition. Dane county might hold out for a while yet, but Wisconsin is now a red state until further notice.
When the Foxconn thing came up, I guessed that it was all hot air and corruption, and that my Republican-supporting in-laws in the 1st would finally see first hand what they had all been voting for over the last 20 years.
Walker and company didn't fall for it. They engineered it for their own gain. Follow the money.
She's in no way a unifier, and has absolutely no support outside of her base. Which wouldn't be so bad, but she doesn't even try to reach out to anyone outside her base.
I mean, ok, maybe you don't want to try to bring conservative rural people on board because you think they're never gonna support you. I get that, I don't agree with it, but I get it. Baldwin goes further though. You won't even see Baldwin interact with, say, young urban minority adults in Milwaukee, Kenosha, or Racine. You'd think that would be a natural democrat demographic, the woman never even talks to them. Sheez, even Paul Ryan would at least talk to everybody.
This state is in dire need of decent leadership. Someone who doesn't hold entire segments of our population in contempt. Baldwin, Johnson, Ryan, Walker...
> isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D?
I tend to assume that everyone with that business model dreams of getting out of that business model. You want to develop your own tech and move upmarket somebody else bids a penny less per widget to steal your manufacturing customers.
From the article it sounds like they were planning to manufacture large screen TV's. That does make some sense because the cost of shipping large items often outweighs the cost advantage of manufacturing overseas.
In the case of flat panel displays, I don't think overseas shipping is an issue. Sea freight is priced by volume (not weight). Foreign TV manufacturers built factories in the US in the 80s because they were paying a lot to ship picture tubes, which are big, empty glass bottles. But flat panels are much denser; shipping flat panels overseas can't be that much more expensive than shipping the raw materials for making them.
I have direct experience with building and selling a low density product in the US and found I could substantially undercut Chinese offerings on price because domestic shipping costs were so much cheaper.
Wisconsin doesn't really sound like a big R&D hub to me. How would they get all those MIT grads to move to Wisconsin? I'm sure its a great place for various economic activities but tech?!
Eh, you're underestimating the "In between Minneapolis and Chicago" aspect. Tech has risen here, and SE Wisconsin is the home of a lot of large tech-based companies like Rockwell Automation, Fiserv, Cherry. MSOE is also pretty well regarded as one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the country.
High salaries with low cost of living? Also, MIT isn't the only university with STEM grads. UW is right there in Madison and U of I, Northwestern, Purdue, ND, Michigan, etc are in the vicinity in terms of recruiting.
Depending who you ask OLED is just a stopgap measure before mLED. Thay being said LCDs still have a long life ahead of them. Not sure if anything worth such an investment but they're definitely not going away anytime soon. They offer a combination of cheap and good enough for most purposes.
The story adds up from a technical point of view and from a political point of view. Just because the future is OLED doesn't mean LCDs are going to disappear overnight.
Regardless, it was obvious foxconn intended to open operations in the US because of the political climate. The same reason japanese automakers opened up shop in the US and the south koreans and the germans and so forth. It's partly to win political favor, gain market access and for good public relations.
My guess is that china is using foxconn ( I know it's a taiwanese company ) to put pressure on Trump after canada arrested one of their executives. I'm guessing there will be more tit for tat ( arrests, projects delayed, etc ) going forward between the US and our allies and China until this trade war is resolved.
This is not an issue of corruption or necessarily incompetence of either party.
1) 'Tent pole' installations that employ a lot of people create substantial benefits way beyond whatever the investment is, at least on that basis subsidies can be rationalized. Of course there can be debate over whether they should be employed, the amount, and the means - and those details matter. But superficially, this is fairly normal practice.
2) You are probably smarter than 'most citizens of Wisconsin' but you're definitely not smarter than Foxconn's strategic planners :). A factory that makes one kind of screen can be adapted to another, and the world is massively bigger than modern markets and there are tons of applications for non-oled screens.
Superficially, again, their plans were within reason.
3) The political logic here, is that Trump was looking to make a 'big announcement' and 'foreign' companies wanted to placate him and give him his needed tweet, and then wait until the wind blows over to change their minds. An 'announcement' to me doesn't really have that much value anyhow, when they 'walk the talk' then we can count.
Remember that none of the '4 Billion' etc. will be realized unless Foxconn does make the investment, so it's not as though there's some kind of incurred debt, just possible lost opportunity cost.
...
Assuming the incentives are reasonably structured, and assuming Foxconn does actually start to hire in Wisconsin, well this might work out well. They may only end up hiring hundreds or a couple of thousand of people which case I suggest they aren't able to grab at the 'bilions' in incentives anyhow.
Consider that if Foxconn does not make an investment - even with billions of incentives on the table ... then it almost assuredly is not in their best interest anyhow.
Take these statements mostly at face value, with a grain of salt, but there's no reason to scream corruption or incompetence. There may be some ugliness in the terms of the subsidies, if someone wants to point those out that would be great, I'd love to hear about them.
It's not just guarantees; it's also stuff like people having their homes declared "blighted" so that they can be taken away: https://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn/
The Foxconn thing never even sounded right from the outset. Four to five billion? To manufacture LCDs?
I mean, I know I'm a bit more technically inclined than most people in Wisconsin, but didn't anyone stop and think for a second, "Hmmm... Wait? Isn't the future supposed to be OLED? This doesn't make any business sense for them????"
Now these Foxconn guys come back with a story about "R&D"??????
I'm just saying, isn't their entire business model manufacturing other people's R&D? So the best you'd get is R&D to enhance their manufacturing processes maybe? Throw in a small chance at some business process R&D???? (I know, it's a stretch, but I'm trying to be generous.)
Now again, I realize I'm a bit more technically inclined than most Wisconsinites, but does anyone else find it more reasonable to do that sort of R&D in places closer to your actual manufacturing? Even suspending that disbelief for a moment, you have to ask yourself why you'd need 13,000 people to do that? You don't. You'd just never do that if you owned Foxconn.
This whole story just doesn't add up. Even from the start, it never did. How could Walker and his cronies have ever fallen for any of this?