As usual, Tesla's involvement in the original deal is reported incorrectly. Tesla had no involvement in the original deal. Nor did Solar City. In fact, Silevo did the deal, was then acquired by Solar City which was then acquired by Tesla.
Well, let's be clear about the timeline. Silevo was planning a factory in upstate New York, and the State of New York was planning to invest $225 million in that project.
In June 2014, SolarCity agreed to acquire Silevo.
Three months later, with Elon Musk's personal involvement, the Cuomo Administration agreed to increase their investment to $750 million, in a much-expanded deal.
Construction of the factory began under SolarCity ownership in September 2014.
Tesla acquired SolarCity in November 2016. One month later, Tesla announced that Panasonic would assemble the solar modules at Gigafactory 2/New York.
Interesting info. If they got 750 million statewide investment, the factory used $700 million of it then? 50 mil left over? I hate state investments in businesses via direct or tax cuts. But this couldn't be worse than Washington state's massive tax cuts for boeing, which proceeded to move more production and jobs to their east coast factory right after they got the tax brake.
> But this couldn't be worse than Washington state's massive tax cuts for boeing,
I see your Boeing deal and raise you one Wisconsin deal with Foxconn that will cost the state $4.5 billion and thousands of jobs that most likely never existed.
So the whole project is stuck in development hell? Is this going to be "Gigafactory/2"? I guess the question I need to ask is "is this project dead or on hold?"
> SolarCity was founded in 2006 by brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive, based on a suggestion for a solar company concept by their cousin, Elon Musk, who is the chairman and helped start the company.
There is an app that will tell you and another person with the same app how closely related you are and will show the ancestry chain between the two of you. It turns out the my wife and I are 10th cousins (common great-whatever grandparents in the 1600s). I started calling her my cousin-wife, but she didn't think it was funny, so I had to stop ;-)
Isn't this roughly how people talk about their relationship with Native American tribes? They don't do the log2 math, but they're happy to hit you with the fraction.
I come from an old Jewish family that's supposed to come King David, and I recently met a girl who comes from another family like that (rabbinical sources describe a dozen or so families with reasonable claims to Davidic lineage). We used to joke that we're longest removed siblings ever, and now I'm curious about what that natural logarithm would actually look like.
Wait wait, the evidence for "Musk was personally involved" was "his cousin did it"? I mean, it's hard to tell whether there's any wrongdoing here to allege at all, honestly. But to the extent there is: I think the upthread question is still unanswered. What does this have to do with Tesla?
If you follow the PV panel manufacturing industry this is actually not super uncommon, there's a number of companies that have gone belly up in the past ten years.
In some cases due to business models that relied on weird economic incentives for the panel manufacturing location, where 156mm cells purchased on the commodity market from a third party would be encapsulated and built up into 60 or 72-cell panels.
Google "solar panel manufacturer bankrupt" for some noteworthy examples.
Margins on PV panel manufacturing are REALLY thin.
Indeed they are. And manufacturer plants are expensive, so competition is kind of cut-throat to get high volume orders. Also capacities used to be largely under utilized in the last years. This forced prices further down, eroding more margin. No wonder all big manufacturers, with the exception thin film, are in China where it is easy for them to get financing.
I think most businesses could crush their competitors if one of the worlds largest economies decided to be their bottomless patron. Framing it as "getting financing" makes it sound like some kind of venture capitalist affair when the reality is that China decided to kill foreign competitors with heavy state subsidies and all the California hippies cheered for it because they cheer for anything with the word solar attached.
Yeah, that's true. But the China is communicating this fact in their five year plans. So the competition can hardly be surprised.
IMHO, it is still close to the VC model. Just in a very strategic and state backed way. e.g. Yingli Solar was for a very long period the biggest manufacturer of solar modules worldwide. Until they screwed up financially, now they aren't top ten anymore.
Contracts between entities don't just disappear when the entities involved change hands. Pending business arrangements should have all been factored in to the equity of the purchase.
Right. But the point is, depicting this as though Tesla bought $50M in solar equipment and just left it to sit in a warehouse is misleading. In reality, Tesla bought a company which bought another company which had $50M in solar manufacturing equipment. The fact that they aren't using assets which were brought into Tesla's possession with three layers of indirection is a lot less surprising.
This was an acquisition, not an inheritance. Though maybe he would have inherited control in the fullness of time since it came from his half brothers.
I'm slightly confused; is the story that the state of New York bought equipment for Tesla worth $300 million dollars, and a sixth of it is currently unused (meaning five sixths of it is being used currently)?
The history of the Buffalo "gigafactory" is rather sordid... In a nutshell, Tesla and its subsidiaries made large employment and economic growth promises to the state of NY in exchange for massive subsidies (almost $1B total). The state wanted to stimulate growth in an economically depressed region, but those growth expectations have not materialized at all. And now, at least some of the NY state taxpayer financed equipment is apparently being shipped elsewhere or sold instead of helping the economy of Western NY. That's the story here. But the entire story goes much deeper.
Tesla fans don't like to admit it, but the Buffalo "gigafactory" project has been a textbook example of government waste on corporate welfare. Multiple people have gone to jail for corruption / bid rigging on the project. Tesla's subsidies were supposed to be contingent on achieving hiring and economic output goals, but those original requirements have been retroactively watered down multiple times so as to prevent subsidy clawbacks. A local journalist (Dan Telvock) has been detailing considerably more chicanery that has gone done at the Buffalo gigafactory.
This is just not accurate. The Buffalo plant economic stimulus package had a clawback provision if Tesla doesn't meet employment milestones. They have been meeting those milestones and so will not have to pay the fee:
https://buffalonews.com/2020/02/13/tesla-looks-like-a-good-b...
I know people want to make this into some corruption scandal (blaming it either on the state or on Tesla or both), but the state did their job by putting these employment requirements in their contract WITH PENALTY, and Tesla is doing their job by hiring enough people to avoid the penalty.
What's really the problem, here? 5/6ths utilization of capital equipment seems pretty good, particularly in a fast evolving field like solar power (where things like bifacial panels and Tesla's integrated solar roof weren't really a thing when the deal was first signed).
You're trying to act like everything is A-OK with this project, when it has in reality been a huge waste of public money. First, there has already been a large corruption scandal centered on this project, with people in prison because of associated corruption (search Alain Kaloyeros). Second, those Tesla employment requirement milestones have been repeatedly reduced to require fewer jobs, and the types of required jobs has also been watered down. The requirements in the original agreement are more stringent than the 1460 jobs required now.
I had high hopes for this project when it was announced. It is near my hometown, and I thought it might be a good boost for the local economy. All it seems to have been is a big siphon from public funds, but not a siphon to where it is needed.
None of what you've said above justifies your completely misrepresenting the deal as having economic output goals that were watered down, and the parent corrected you on it. It's fine to not like the project, but let's not pretend that spreading misinformation about it is helping anyone.
From what I have heard recently, they may not end up doing the solar roof there. It sounds like the hardware for that is coming from China instead. OTOH, they are getting new production lines for superchargers and other things.
You are definitely right that it isn't clear cut. From what I can see, Tesla has met their contractual obligations even though things haven't gone as planned.
How much of these subsidies are cash, and how much are tax breaks? Cash subsidies from taxpayers are bad, I agree, but at least with the tax breaks, the taxpayers are not worse off: if the alternative is no factory at all, then they don't lose anything on the tax breaks, because that tax revenue wouldn't have had existed anyway.
Considering that Tesla will longer make solar cells in that factory (Panasonic is ending the relationship and withdrawing by September) I’d guess that it will all be unused shortly; this is just what has obviously been relocated so far.
What am I missing here? Is there any reason why another company can't just take over, seeing as they could probably get the equipment at a great discount?
More incentive money pissed away. Your hard earned tax dollars at work. There's a lot of things I miss about Buffalo since moving south, but this isn't one of them.
"One out of every $6 spent on machinery for the Tesla factory is now unused."
I'd imagine most healthy large companies operate this way. Utilizing the majority of their equipment and having some reserve capacity in parts and equipment stored.
You imagine healthy companies just having 17% of total investment sitting around in warehouses because they might need it someday? I encourage you to read up on Lean Manufacturing and just-in-time delivery, which swept the US in the 1980s. Even to an MBA, over-ordering gear by $50 million is pretty obvious waste.
To be fair the healthy percentage depends on other variables. If there is enough of a "bulk discount" and it doesn't depriciate or obsolete the 17% may be smart compared to the alternatives.
>You imagine healthy companies just having 17% of total investment
I imagine healthy companies keep enough manufacturing parts to be able to repair/replace/scale as needed. Particularly a company like tesla which is well known for scaling rapidly.
> I encourage you to read up on Lean Manufacturing and just-in-time delivery, which swept the US in the 1980s.
These are only efficient when you are pushing all your externalities on the other guy. Tesla doesn't globalize their supply chain nearly as much as other manufacturers, which would explain the stock of machinery.
Your first bit is just tautological. Yes, healthy companies are healthy. The questionable part is your notion that 17% of investment is healthy.
As to the bit about Lean Manufacturing, you're just wrong. Toyota in particular is known for close relationships with suppliers where they are well supported and trained in Lean approaches as well.
Absolutely is a hot piece. Look how they went out of their way to mention that Musk is a billionaire (is that even true?). Hating on billionaires - so hot right now.
People don't hate the billionaires, they disapprove of a system structured to allow some people to acquire vast wealth on the order of billions while large numbers struggle with the basics like healthcare, childcare, education, and housing, while that system pays lip service to their struggles while doing little to change it.
Western European countries, Japan, South Korea, for example, have billionaires, and many 100-millionaires, but do a much better job providing universal benefits.
Rational people may do that. There is a sadly sizable contingent which absolutely does hate on billionaires though and let it become a distraction from /actually doing something about the system/. Hell often they violently oppose change to the same system which actually helps because of their own spite and selfishness. And it shows up in so many different ways and contexts.
From the racists on food stamps and welfare who want it cut and then are /shocked/ when they lose it after their canidates are elected. Everyone with a rent controlled apartment who opposes building more housing while blaming billionares simutaniously for gentrification jobs and lack of jobs causing the area to go to hell. Those complaints about traffic while opposing public transit expansion, or the sorry state of roads while angrily rejecting gas taxes to fund it.
Blaming billionares or any other helps them deny that the source of all of their life problems can be found in the mirror.
> From the racists on food stamps and welfare who want it cut and then are /shocked/ when they lose it after their canidates are elected. Everyone with a rent controlled apartment who opposes building more housing while blaming billionares simutaniously for gentrification jobs and lack of jobs causing the area to go to hell. Those complaints about traffic while opposing public transit expansion, or the sorry state of roads while angrily rejecting gas taxes to fund it.
Many of these cases are examples of tragedies of the commons, where people "rationally" advocate for their individual maximum utility, while suffering the costs when the commons is overwhelmed by the everyone doing the same.
Wait until they hear about the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of all sorts of stuff sitting idle that has been purchased by the DoD and USG paid for by tax money.
Reminds me how the US continually produces tanks despite the armies recommendations, to the point where we have enough tanks to essentially fight WW3 with purely tanks and still have some left over, just so some congressmen can keep jobs in their constituency.
At least that was the situation in the 2000s, no idea if that wackiness is still continuing
The production of armaments is a bit of an economic anomaly, to be honest. All businesses, including arms manufacturers, require a constant flow of business in order to cover their fixed costs and remunerate their investors (debt holders and shareholders). If governments only order weapons when they need them to fight a war, then the arms manufacturers would shut form at the end of a conflict and would take ages to “gear up” again when a new conflict arises, stymying response and lessening the deterrence implicit in having a standing army. Consequentially, it actually makes sense (from a strategic point of view) to keep weapons manufacturers “ticking over” with a constant flow of orders even if that just results in growing stockpiles. One of the reasons that profits are di high for weapons manufacturers is that according to the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) the rush of a government suddenly cutting off orders during peacetime and rendering the company unprofitable and probably bankrupt needs to be offset by high dividends in the here-and-now and with low historic volatility.
Now, I’m not saying I support this, far from it, but that’s (one of) the rationale(s).
When I was growing up my father had an ashtray from his days in the navy, which was made from the bottom of a three inch shell. On the bottom stamped in the metal was '1944', which as a child confused me because I knew my dad was in the navy from 1959-1965, so I asked him. "Let's just say they made A LOT of those in 1944."
It seems like it would be a better use of resources to just build up enough of a stockpile that the industry would be able to safely retool into a similar civilian industry, such as railroad locomotives, and then have time to switch back without a loss of combat capability. You'd just have to keep a small industry around for upgrades and maintenance.
That is unfortunately no longer realistic. The skills and supply chains needed to produce high-end military equipment are too different. The production lines have to be kept continuously running or else they would take so long to reestablish that in any serious conflict it would be too late.
The problem isn't that the skills and supply chains are fundamentally different but that supply chains for non-military equipment become globalized if not outright off-shored (often to geopolitical rivals) and therefore cannot be counted on in case of a major geopolitical conflict.
Pre-massive-globalization, we had no problem gearing up for WW2. Our industrial capacity was largely in-house. There were some things like rubber that were off-shore, but generally the industrial toolchain was domestically produced.
Nowadays, many domestic industrial producers rely heavily on these (bloated) military contracts to maintain relevance in a globalized industrial setting where the center of gravity for a lot of heavy industry and tool production has shifted to Asia.
I love international trade and I'm skeptical of military spending (and even more so of military adventurism), but this effect should be kept in mind when making trade policy. The military-industrial complex is keeping alive much of our industrial know-how that would otherwise be entirely be off-shored and retired domestically.
The skills and supply chains are just fundamentally different in crucial areas. A prime example is the specialized techniques for welding together thick hull sections of specialized steel alloys to build a complete submarine. There's no equivalent in civilian industry. If that production capability is ever lost due to a long gap in new submarine orders then it would take many years to reestablish. Institutional knowledge if a fragile thing.
One of the benefits of globalization (and the EU) is that it's to everyone's economic advantage to not have a war between trading nations. This maintains supply, reduces costs, and crazily enough - reduces conflict.
You may lose the ability to make widgets because it's easier/cheaper to buy them from another country, but in theory, you make it up by selling them sprockets, and through the overall economic gains.
In WWII it was the domestic auto industry that converted over to building tanks. However today most of the domestic auto manufacturing is for foreign companies like Toyota, while our domestic companies largely manufacture overseas or in Mexico now.
It would be amazing if WWIII broke out and we had to call on Tesla to manufacture tanks.
> then have time to switch back without a loss of combat capability
It's not that easy. You loose knowledge and vendors and people. Going from 0 unit production per year to 10 per year is more difficult than going going from 10 per year to 10000 per year.
They used to do exactly this. Various agricultural and construction equipment manufacturers operated in such a way that they could shift production to tanks at a moment's notice.
If you look at Electric Boat Company (they make our subs), and Newport News Shipyards(carriers), there is a big reason they get refit work etc. Because they would collapse as an industry and it would be impossible to build that kind of staffing/expertise up in short order again.
This fact is supposedly a part of the reason the f35 went to lockheed vs boeing.
It's also half the reason behind the Jones Act. Shipping between US ports must be done with US-made ships with US crews. If it weren't for this, US shipyards wouldn't have enough orders or expertise to stay open, and thus wouldn't be available for military orders in case of war.
It isn't as though they've been building the same old thing since the 2000s, they've been incrementally and steadily improving them as technology and materials science improves.
I’d say this is false, even as I myself am a US Army veteran who spent a year in Iraq 2003-2004. Tanks are still useful, but aren’t as useful against non-conventional forces.
The pentagon has spent the past 4-5 years retooling for what they call “near peer” threats which is to say China in the Pacific and Russia in Europe. Tanks, and really good ones in specific, would be required to push back a Russian incursion into our allies.
I just can't imagine a plausible scenario where a war between nuclear powers comes down to which side has more tanks. Does the US military actually think that it could invade China or Russia with a conventional army without the other side quickly threatening to use nukes? At that point it would become a two true outcome scenario: either the conventional fighting stops or we are all in big trouble.
The EU is integrating it's military further. So Poland would essentially be a nuclear power. Even right know, Poland has allies, who have made the mistake of ignoring them being invaded for too long, and would probably not do so again.
I do have some blindspots when it comes to Poland. Would you be willing to elaborate further? From what I could tell, everything was done to prevent Poland from going on nuclear path. Why would that approach change now?
What I was hinting at was: France is a nuclear power and given a joint military, Poland also would therefor be one. Still a long way ahead before something remotely like this will happen, but there is movement in that direction.
You don't keep tanks around for what happens before the nuclear bombardment, you keep them around for afterwards. Most nuclear assets are pointed at either other nukes or military infrastructure; you'd still a large amount of civilian infrastructure around filled with angry civilians that would want to finish the fight one way or another before nuclear winter fucks everything. And tanks being tanks a fleet would survive everything short of nuclear carpet-bombing fairly well
I could be totally off base here but my impression, based on the staggering amount of nuclear warheads that could be deployed in a war, is that this line of thinking is wildly optimistic. I expect that any humans who survive a nuclear war will be focused primarily on staying alive and preventing human extinction, not continuing whatever geopolitical conflict led to the war.
You're talking about threat assessment while I'm talking about something slightly different, which is the usefulness of tanks in past (modern) and active conflicts.
Anyway I'm not sold on tomatotomato37's claim that recent levels of American tank investment are unwise, but also don't have enough information to know otherwise.
You're describing the Stryker Combat Vehicle, and it has a remotely operated weapons turret. However, it can only carry 9 infantryman (in addition to its crew).
Generally speaking, ICBMs are strategic weapons exclusively. The tactical version of ICMBs are just tomahawk cruise missiles, and they're in nuclear submarines all around the world just waiting for the signal.
Oh of course. Missile submarines carry both however. They're more likely to use the tomahawks however. The Navy loooooves to use them.
During the very first 48 hours (sustained) in the war in Afghanistan, a tomahawk missile was launched, on average, every 12 seconds night or day. The amount of boom those things made is unbelievable.
One of the problems with entirely ceasing production of a category of incredibly complex military system is that the engineering knowledge to build it retires, goes elsewhere or becomes unavailable.
The UK faced a number of problems with their domestic construction of the Astute class nuclear attack submarines, as they had not built a nuclear sub in more than 15 years. The institutional knowledge of how to build such a thing had become scarce or retired.
you are not wrong..
However we have lost a lot of such knowledge from the vagaries of the Space programs, civilian nuclear reactors, Tech in many ways far more important. It seems wrong tanks and nuclear subs should get better treatment than space.
Why not instead build them slowly enough so that the last submarine of class n-1 would be finished just before/after beginning of the build of the first submarine of class n?
Because that makes the costs much higher. At some point, the unit costs are dominated by fixed costs, so producing 1 a year costs 10 times as much per unit as producing, say, 15 per year.
That’s OK - they can burn kerosene, diesel, jet fuel... I’m not 100% sure of it, but I bet they would run just fine off used McDonald’s fry oil if push came to shove.
I read an interview with an NRO scientist, who described his group as following carefully the progress of the Hubble team who were independently solving many of the same problems their teams had solved earlier. From a national security perspective, they had to sit on their hands and not offer any help, but from an engineering perspective, they valued having another team do it to see if they would validate their design by coming up with similar solutions.
Unless they also donated launch costs, and $90 million per year to run it[1], it's no surprise that they're not actually using it. It's small compared to the overall budget, but not free.
Those were mirror and optics/satellite body assemblies, not two fully completed unused spy satellites. The electronics, power systems and communications systems were entirely absent.
We've bought "surplus" Dell and HP servers from different government entities that were two generations old, basically brand new in the box. I wonder what % of purchases go unused for whatever reasons.
I'm sure that they need spares for some of their critical infrastructures, that could be it. Not to say that I don't believe that it could just be unused stuff lying around for years, that could definitely be it too.
I've heard you need to use it or lose when it comes to gov budgets. Anecdotes of jets dumping fuel into the ocean just to come back and refill to keep a budget.
That action in itself has some legitimate technical reasons at least - fighter jets are very envelope pushing and often cannot land safely while carrying a sufficiently full load of fuel. Say the jet can only land safely at 35% or less fuel capacity, is at 50% and needs to reach a target which requires at least 70% capacity to reach, fight, and return. Midair refueling isn't an option for whatever reason and others are logistically committed. Dumping 15% and landing to refuel before launching could make sense.
Granted stupid waste without any valid tactical or strategic edge case reasons aren't exactly unheard of in the military either.
It's a shit ton more work, and the government takes about 18 months to come up with the annual budget already. The only reason it works at all is the ability to let hundreds of thousands of small projects coast on their last budget.
"I wonder what % of purchases go unused for whatever reasons."
the same happens in big companies. W have budget cycles so we buy test equipment when the money is in the budget even at the risk of it never being used. Otherwise you can't buy stuff when you actually need it because at that time the budget isn't there.
Same with hiring people. We are letting good interns go because there is a hiring freeze. 8 weeks later we scramble to find new hires because now we have headcount.
Not sure how to do better but it just shows that planned economies tend to produce waste, be it in a corporation or in a communist state.
Why not just give them a savings "buffer account" for the budget? Let them build up the remnants so that the available funds can build up some. Obviously you need to watch it still and be sure "underbudgets okay with surplus" don't deplete it entirely or too much builds up (as in multiples of the budget).
Have you used that site in the past? I see a lot of listings saying something like “24 ea” to describe a lot of 24, but can’t find what the ea means. I’d think it might mean “bid is per item,” but that makes no sense (I’m seeing bids at multiples of what the individual items are worth).
And see monitors of various sizes and vintages, listed as "24 ea". Do you win all the monitors if you win, or is it first come first serve for the 24 highest bidders?
I'm guessing it's the former, but it's not like any of the FAQs on the site are going to clue you in. Instead they tell you that their web guys don't know how to scrub input properly:
Message received:
"Your bid is not in the correct format"
This means you have entered a dollar sign, or comma.
Here is an example: (Correct) 1000 (Incorrect) $1,000.00
I found another doc that may have the answer:
2. Items that have no tag number and are of identical kind and condition may be grouped on one SPMD-1A. Example (25 ea. chairs, wood w/arms).
Typically in an auction, a situation where you are bidding price-per-item for multiple items would be described as "24 times the money" or "24 x money". Only some auctioneers do this because it is confusing to novice bidders. Seems to be more common in live auctions than online.
"24 ea" would generally mean that you're bidding one price for all 24.
Your price may be increased by a buyer's premium as well, but again, this is more common in live auctions than online auctions. Typically it would be in the paperwork you sign to register for the auction (...which online auctionhouses often don't do at all).
The site is horrible in a sense of trying to figure out what you are buying. Also things like hard drives are usually removed, so you may be looking at a pallet of desktop towers that are unusable until you do some work to them.
I never purchased anything off that site but I did turn stuff into the department that had the responsibility to list stuff on that site.
There was a link to googlemaps where you see endles rows of Abrams tanks sitting in the desert. Quite impressive. But say what you want, at least this keeps the industrial capacities and capabilites alive!
While it is whataboutism, it’s saying (in less words) that instead of painting Tesla in a negative light for $50M, the candle should be shining on the government for the billions wasted in the military every year.
I read it as a dismissal of the article because it seems like it was written just for clicks. An article about the government’s waste doesn’t get as many clicks.
>Wait until they hear about the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of all sorts of stuff sitting idle that has been purchased by the DoD and USG paid for by tax money.
What is your point? This is "whataboutism".
Do you not see a difference between government entities and private companies (owned in majority by one billionaire)?
I don't particularly care about what Tesla, SolarCity or Silevo does or doesn't do. What is concerning is handing over hundreds of millions in socialist corporate welfare that goes to waste, when that money could've helped the homeless and desperately poor who get austerity instead.
> State government documents put the final price tag at $958,600,000 for the property, building construction and equipment. The cost for the equipment alone is close to $300 million.
What a staggering number. How does our government get away with wasting so much money without any accountability?
> any alternative option is crushed with voter suppression
With early voting, free or very cheap ID for poor people, mail in ballots, and literally a year or more to confirm one’s voter registration, voter suppression is a ridiculous excuse. If people cared about voting, they would do it. I honestly don’t want people voting that can’t be bothered to take the responsibility seriously enough that they allow themselves to be “suppressed.” More voters isn’t the answer: more voters that care about fiscal responsibility is the answer. Many voters don’t care one bit about waste because those voters aren’t paying very much in the taxes that are getting wasted. They want “someone else” to pay. Many voters vote for the “stuff” they can get for themselves.
Totally agree we need to fix these issues with lines and ID requirements. But Texas and California are very different.
California has mail-in so I do think something is going on where people don't know about the vote by mail. You can even just get your ballot by mail and drop it off at a polling place or mailbox day of if you want to decide late.
And gerrymandering is definitely a huge issue, but not the whole issue. You can't gerrymander the Senate, for example, but it is still Republican-controlled.
It does seem like there are still extreme get-out-the-vote issues beyond the (totally unacceptable) vote suppression. Turnout is still unbelievably low.
It's hard to follow what's actually happening, but it doesn't seem like it's wasted at all. It's just going slower than expected. The factory is in use and has promised to meet its hiring obligation on time. It sounds like they made a bet on its value and came up a bit short. This sort of thing actually happens pretty frequently and it's fine because we don't have all our eggs in one basket. No different than buying stocks, these investment funds pay for a lot of projects knowing that some will bust and some will do well enough to cover the losses.
Honestly, the way the deal is structured, it encourages all kinds of minor borderline graft along the way with every two-bit local politician and community organization with their finger in the pie. No accountability is a feature not a bug.
Contrast that with the aborted Amazon deal. The deal was fairly straightforward, but but it was simply coordinated between Amazon and the governor's office. They shot themselves in the foot by not playing with every local assemblymen and community boards -- not that any of them would have had any useful input.
Because with every election we increase its power and size. Turns out when you pay the bill with someone else’s money, you won’t be so concerned with how much it costs.
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