Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/29/foxconned.html
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“The rest of us are going to cheer and figure out how we are going to get this thing going forward.”
“Strike that, reverse it! Wait, you know what, let’s do it in that order, I guess.” Still working on the second part.
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The wealth does trickle down, but along the way it transmutes into environmental disasters, business friendly anti-union legislation, and cuts to public education and safety net programs.
Republicans have been telling us for decades that if we just kneel under the table while they eat and drink the banquet, our share will trickle out to us very soon. Promise kept, I’d say!
Edited, post-coffee, for brevity and clarity.
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Wait …he paid in advance?
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Look, anti-suicide nets are expensive. Saving some human resources means that there might be fewer hired overall.
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More than likely, he also got a big fat kickback, too.
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Bah! Wisconsin is a “Right to Work” state: Jump all you like, we’ve got more
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Somebody has to pick up those bodies…= MORE JOBS!
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If only we had a “village idiot” job class where we could forcefully put disgraced and disgraceful politicians. Or something. Something to make them pause for a few minutes and think, “Do I really want to be doing this?”
You know. Like… accountability, consequences, or something.
“Mommy. Who’s that man with the bells on his head, rolling about in the street muck?”
“That’s Scott Walker, dear. He’s an idiot. You’re allowed to kick him as you pass, but aim for his groin. That makes the best noises.”
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I still don’t get how this gets through the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Water Resources Council. Water use of that magnitude has to be passed by a majority of the states that are adjacent to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River. It’s federal law, so Walker can’t bypass it. One of the provisions:
In general, there is a ban on new diversions of water from the Basin but limited exceptions could be allowed in communities near the Basin when rigorous standards are met.
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Boy, who could possibly have foreseen that this promised Foxconn factory was going to end up like all the other Foxconn promises… I mean, besides anyone who had been paying attention.
“These LCD displays will be made in America for the very first time, right here in the state of Wisconsin.”
“So we won’t have to pay tariffs on them and… actually, that’s about the only benefit. It was totally worth all those billions of dollars, though.”
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This lesson never gets learned. Been reading about these kinds of things for as long as I’ve been an adult, and the subsidies are both morally wrong and never end up showing the benefits pitched so I give up.
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Anyone who doubts the value of a staff pessimist would do well to consider the utility of such specialists when one encounters a jerk with raging action bias, as below:
”There’s a whole lot of people out there scrambling to try and come up with a reason not to like this,” he said in July of last year. “They can go suck lemons. The rest of us are going to cheer and figure out how we are going to get this thing going forward.”
There are in fact many, many, plans that are worse than just doing nothing. And if ‘you can go suck lemons’ is your excuse for a feasibility study you are probably embarking on one(or, as is tragically often the case, shoving other people into the steerage section of one while remaining free to hop off at any time).
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the thing that seems under-reported about the tariffs is that ( so far as i understand ) they mainly affect components. finished goods aren’t on the lists.
so it’s totally fine if you build a whole monitor, it’s only a problem if you need just a screen.
which is fascinating because so much of american manufacturing these days is the final assembly. all things being equal, the tariffs seemed designed to gut american jobs in favor of the bigger companies that ship in and out the finished products.
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Hoping you are correct. Here in Texas, the problems we face are enforcement of existing law. Like Wisconsin, Texas is very very pro-business.
https://water.usgs.gov/edu/gallery/global-water-volume.html
Spheres representing all of Earth’s water, Earth’s liquid fresh water, and water in lakes and rivers
The largest sphere represents all of Earth’s water. Its diameter is about 860 miles (the distance from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Topeka, Kansas) and has a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (mi3) (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers (km3)). This sphere includes all of the water in the oceans, ice caps, lakes, rivers, groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant.
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The component tariff was extra-stupid, wasn’t it, given that it encouraged US businesses to relocate their manufacturing offshore. Although at this point Trump is now threatening to put tariffs on all Chinese imports, so… (But ok, it’s likely an empty threat, what with those tariffs finally impacting Trump’s made-in-China goods.) But yeah, it likely may not even be immune to tariffs because of the component issue (depending on where those components come from - China does import quite a bit).
So there’s no benefit to speak of to the state by having the factory located there, except for the handful of jobs it will theoretically provide. The per-job cost was going to be huge to begin with, now I’m wondering how totally absurd that number has become.
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It’s worse than that, even. Assuming the price of the end product manufactured in the US is inelastic, and the distribution of component sources is roughly 1/3 each North America/Europe/Asia, where are the component cost increases due to tariffs going to balance? With negative price pressure against US component suppliers.
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There’s a particular irony with the electronics companies that rely on imported parts from China but do assembly in the US - they’re usually doing assembly here because of intellectual property issues (i.e. they don’t want the Chinese stealing theirs). The tariffs were ostensibly to pressure China over intellectual property theft issues, but by just putting the tariffs on just components, they were pushing the US companies to also do the assembly in China, thus making the problem worse.
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