Foxconn's corporate welfare deal will cost Wisconsin taxpayers more than 3 billion dollars

I’m sorry if I was offensive. I didn’t mean to be. I was only trying to say that no one except lawyers can understand how these corporations work.

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No, the state is both giving Foxconn a tax break AND they’re giving Foxconn a cash subsidy, AND they’re giving Foxconn an in-kind subsidy in the form of infrastructure.

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You are correct on both counts. However, while I really did not enjoy the book, Rand’s portrait of how the government worked in that book was (to my eyes) a warning about monopolies, backroom deals, and cronyism. The breakdown is when half educated retards read the book and only take away ‘FREE MARKET GUD!’ as the message without seeing that Rand wasn’t really damning government - but the backroom deals that ruin capitalism.

I had to remind myself when reading it, that Rand was a product of early soviet corruption. When read with that light the message is a bit more nuanced than I think most give her credit for.

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I understand the point of enticing companies that will bring large numbers of jobs and the economic benefits that come with them. But it is hard to fathom that the costs on this will actually reap benefits. I mean, did they do a cost/benefits analysis and can we see that?

It seems to me too many cities are either sweet talked into deals and they are not smart enough to know they are getting conned, or the people in power must have some sort of kick back or ulterior motive.

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This Gov. Walker guy, is the he same Gov. Walker that shoveled $300 million to billionaire basketball team owners (and one of his fundraising chairs) based on the assumption that NBA salaries will increase 800% over 30 years (while ESPN sheds viewers like my dog sheds hair). Same guy?

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Not that surprising since “MAGA” head caps were produced post election win , manufactured in China of course.

Favours are being called in shouldn’t surprise any Trump supporters… they know how the money
grease works the ecomony wheel…

Yep, far as I know.

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I posed no question of better or worse. Its simply a statement of fact - Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. No comparison or qualification was implied in my comment.

You are off-base in your Huawei and Foxconn comparison, though. Only one of those companies has an entire division banned from the US market. I will let you guess which company that is.

Plenty of folks are quick to jump down the political rabbit hole, but talk to the young men and women (and some of the older ones too) in Janesville, Racine, or other Wisconsin cities not named Milwaukee. I think their attention is on something more tangible: 10,000 jobs in 4 years.

I would submit that it’s fair to call something from The Republic of China Chinese.

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It’s fair to be wrong. Fortunately, semantics do not dictate national territories.

The country of Taiwan is no more a part of the country of China than the DPRK is part of the country of South Korea, or that the DRC and Republic of Congo are the same country.

I took SamWinston’s comment as sarcasm, given the code-type closing statement at the end…

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Unlike your other examples, ROC vs PRC is something that’s actually disputed.

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Then you’ve missed how completely and utterly fucked Kansas has become, directly attributable to their “grand experiment” in reducing taxes. (The words “smoking ruin” have been thrown about.) Not only were public services being slashed as a result - schools were closing an extra day a week, for example - the economy was doing worse than average (and worse than it had been) according to every metric. Even the very people behind the tax cuts finally had to admit it wasn’t working and advocate for restoring the taxes.

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The dispute is a largely demagogic one. Taiwan continues to have its own government determining how its people are governed and how the country interacts with others. Until and unless Taiwan’s political leadership begins to call another country’s its own, Taiwan remains its own country for all purposes that matter (trade, war-time, setting policy, etc).

Officially, Taiwan and the PRC are the same country, with a minor dispute over the proper capital…

More to the point, things from North and South Korea are both Korean and things from the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo are both Congolese.

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You did come over a bit arrogant, but I was making a serious point. From having spent some years in research and then running an R&D department I think I understand the different mindsets. The temptation of the very expert is to overestimate the amount of knowledge needed to form a view in a more general sphere. The temptation of the non-expert is to underestimate it. The ring-holding job of the chief engineer or engineering director is to decide when there is sufficient information to progress. Several times I have had to overrule experts to advance a project; several times I have had to explain to the C-suite why it was not safe to proceed on current knowledge. It is quite a stressful job.

Edit: Examples of both sides in same manufacturing process.
Industrial process went wrong. It turned out that the metallurgist had authorised a material change on a large key component that handled gas. He had done an extremely thorough job from a metallurgical point of view - but had failed to realise that the cheaper material after a few thermal cycles became almost transparent to hydrogen at 600C. When a reversion to an earlier alloy was proposed, he argued that a lot more time was needed to study the problem before making a decision, and that the people who identified the probable hydrogen problem were not competent to make that evaluation. At that point the stopped line was costing around $25 000 a day. He was overruled.
The process developed another problem. This time it was traced to some flexible hoses. A technician had run out of the vacuum hoses and replaced them with similar fitting pressure hoses. He did not know that the design of flexibles for vacuum and pressure is completely different.

Edit - also, how corporations are structured is pretty much Business Studies 101. In which I had to learn about the differences between for-profit, not for profit, charity, co-operative, worker owned, AG, GmbH, Llc, partnerships and so on. It doesn’t take long to understand the difference between a for-profit shareholder owned subcontract manufacturer and a worker-owned vertically integrated electronics designer and manufacturer. No lawyer needed.

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I’ve worked in an excellent bit of a company parts of which were crap, so I know not to generalise too much. However, in the context of the article, Foxconn is only bringing over (as I understand it) an assembly plant. Huawei invests in things like R&D in the countries where it has a presence; so does Honda, Ford, Nissan, IBM, Microsoft and Google to name just a few. Therefore, companies like Huawei are much better businesses to attract because they generate better jobs.

Only one of those companies isn’t simply a contract manufacturer but has a great deal of R&D and own equipment manufacturing, and so is a serious threat to US companies like Apple. Huawei designs its own silicon and makes Apple-grade and Cisco-grade product at significantly below Apple and Cisco prices. Huawei after investigation is not banned from the UK market - far from it, their networking equipment is in the boxes in our road. But then we don’t have a phone-marketing industry to protect.

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$200m/year in cash subsidies at taxpayer expense

It would be cheaper to pay the employees a COLA to stay home and watch Netflix.

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