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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'v

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?

moate 8y ago
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.
- yardie 8y ago
  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.
robdachshund 8y ago
OLED is not the future, it is a stopgap tech. It will be replaced by MicroLED and other similar designs. That's why samsung never made oled tvs. OLEDs degrade over time and are very expensive to produce compared to lcds. MicroLED is the same concept as OLED (having individual lighting elements that can be turned off entirely) but with tiny LEDs rather than organic substrate.
philippoi 8y ago
"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.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  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. [1] https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/whatever-happened-to-terry-mcauliffes-greentech-automotive-venture/ https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/whatever-happened-to-terr...
- XorNot 8y ago
  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.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Hunting trips and golf, is the impression I get is the lubricant of choice around here.
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>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? It's difficult for Scott Walker to understand things when his steady stream of bribes (err, campaign "donations"?) depends on not understanding them.
mensetmanusman 8y ago
Some counterpoints: 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.
- spicymaki 8y ago
  Try again: https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/lgs-new-88-inch-8k-tv-largest-oled-set-ever-3364238 https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/lgs-new-88-inch-8k-tv-la...
  - mensetmanusman 8y ago
    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)
- Taniwha 8y ago
  Ha! ... you think the middle class is growing ...
- baybal2 8y ago
  > Large format displays will be LCDs for many years due to inherent yield issues. There is nothing inherent in OLED having lower yields. Two TFT layers, metal , PEDOT, oled layer ,ITO, metal Not much different from LCD in its basic form. I'd say that there is a potential to make them even cheaper when printed OLEDs will finally get production ready
saidajigumi 8y ago
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.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  I think a lot of people haven't realized this yet
- beat 8y ago
  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.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    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.
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      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.
danans 8y ago
> 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.
- mackey 8y ago
  In regard to who sold the land... https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2018/07/17/foxconn-area-homeowners-prepare-new-lawsuit-over-blight-declaration/792262002/ https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2018/07/17/fox...
  - quasse 8y ago
    I was going to say, they didn't exactly buy the land on the open market... I feel really bad for the people who lost homes so that the WI Republican party could pull this publicity stunt. It's hard to even fathom
    - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
      Reading the transcripts from the board meetings is a pretty bad time, but it reminds me of the board meetings in my neck of the woods. It sucks.
- analog31 8y ago
  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.
logfromblammo 8y ago
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.
- jrs235 8y ago
  You forgot gerrymandering.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  Give the state some credit. It voted for Evers by a larger margin than Trump won and voted for Baldwin by a larger margin than she won in 2012.
  - quasse 8y ago
    Baldwin is a blessing to WI but you can't give the voters too much credit. They chose Ron Johnson over Russ Feingold twice.
bduerst 8y ago
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.
- yesimahuman 8y ago
  I don't think this is a problem unique to Wisconsin
  - bduerst 8y ago
    That may be true. I can only speak to my experience.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    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.
- abfan1127 8y ago
  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.
  - deogeo 8y ago
    re:re:suicide nets. The suicide rate in China is 8.0 per 100k people per year. In the US it's 13.7.
rtkwe 8y ago
> "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.
- RandomTisk 8y ago
  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.
  - pureliquidhw 8y ago
    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."
sbov 8y ago
> why you'd need 13,000 people to do that? 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.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Great. The news gets better and better. 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.
- j16sdiz 8y ago
  creating 13,000 jobs include all supporting business (e.g. cook, servers, bus drivers, etc..). Not all of them are hired by foxconn.
- aweiland 8y ago
  This is similar to the math used to sell Keystone XL. A temporary job that lasted 2 years was calculated as 2 jobs created.
howard941 8y ago
> Isn't the future supposed to be OLED? They're not bright enough for sunlight readability - yet
rconti 8y ago
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.
Agathos 8y ago
> 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.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
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.
- icebraining 8y ago
  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/ https://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn/
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pmorici 8y ago
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.
- sleevis 8y ago
  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.
  - pmorici 8y ago
    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.
tssva 8y ago
Believing that Walker and his cronies fell for any of it versus were in on it might be a little naive.
porpoisely 8y ago
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.
Tsubasachan 8y ago
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?!
- mtberatwork 8y ago
  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.
- pathartl 8y ago
  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.
coolaliasbro 8y ago
They didn't fall for anything. They intentionally laid alongside Foxconn.
close04 8y ago
> Wait? Isn't the future supposed to be OLED 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.

moate 8y ago

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.

yardie 8y ago
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.

robdachshund 8y ago

OLED is not the future, it is a stopgap tech. It will be replaced by MicroLED and other similar designs. That's why samsung never made oled tvs. OLEDs degrade over time and are very expensive to produce compared to lcds. MicroLED is the same concept as OLED (having individual lighting elements that can be turned off entirely) but with tiny LEDs rather than organic substrate.

philippoi 8y ago

"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.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
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. [1] https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/whatever-happened-to-terry-mcauliffes-greentech-automotive-venture/ https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/whatever-happened-to-terr...
XorNot 8y ago
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.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Hunting trips and golf, is the impression I get is the lubricant of choice around here.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

>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? It's difficult for Scott Walker to understand things when his steady stream of bribes (err, campaign "donations"?) depends on not understanding them.

mensetmanusman 8y ago

Some counterpoints: 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.

spicymaki 8y ago
Try again: https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/lgs-new-88-inch-8k-tv-largest-oled-set-ever-3364238 https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/lgs-new-88-inch-8k-tv-la...
- mensetmanusman 8y ago
  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)
Taniwha 8y ago
Ha! ... you think the middle class is growing ...
baybal2 8y ago
> Large format displays will be LCDs for many years due to inherent yield issues. There is nothing inherent in OLED having lower yields. Two TFT layers, metal , PEDOT, oled layer ,ITO, metal Not much different from LCD in its basic form. I'd say that there is a potential to make them even cheaper when printed OLEDs will finally get production ready

saidajigumi 8y ago

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.

CodeCube 8y ago
I think a lot of people haven't realized this yet
beat 8y ago
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.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  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.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    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.

danans 8y ago

> 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.

mackey 8y ago
In regard to who sold the land... https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2018/07/17/foxconn-area-homeowners-prepare-new-lawsuit-over-blight-declaration/792262002/ https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2018/07/17/fox...
- quasse 8y ago
  I was going to say, they didn't exactly buy the land on the open market... I feel really bad for the people who lost homes so that the WI Republican party could pull this publicity stunt. It's hard to even fathom
  - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
    Reading the transcripts from the board meetings is a pretty bad time, but it reminds me of the board meetings in my neck of the woods. It sucks.
analog31 8y ago
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.

logfromblammo 8y ago

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.

jrs235 8y ago
You forgot gerrymandering.
akhilcacharya 8y ago
Give the state some credit. It voted for Evers by a larger margin than Trump won and voted for Baldwin by a larger margin than she won in 2012.
- quasse 8y ago
  Baldwin is a blessing to WI but you can't give the voters too much credit. They chose Ron Johnson over Russ Feingold twice.

bduerst 8y ago

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.

yesimahuman 8y ago
I don't think this is a problem unique to Wisconsin
- bduerst 8y ago
  That may be true. I can only speak to my experience.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  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.
abfan1127 8y ago
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.
- deogeo 8y ago
  re:re:suicide nets. The suicide rate in China is 8.0 per 100k people per year. In the US it's 13.7.

rtkwe 8y ago

> "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.

RandomTisk 8y ago
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.
- pureliquidhw 8y ago
  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."

sbov 8y ago

> why you'd need 13,000 people to do that? 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.

bilbo0s 8y ago
Great. The news gets better and better. 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.
j16sdiz 8y ago
creating 13,000 jobs include all supporting business (e.g. cook, servers, bus drivers, etc..). Not all of them are hired by foxconn.
aweiland 8y ago
This is similar to the math used to sell Keystone XL. A temporary job that lasted 2 years was calculated as 2 jobs created.

howard941 8y ago

> Isn't the future supposed to be OLED? They're not bright enough for sunlight readability - yet

rconti 8y ago

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.

Agathos 8y ago

> 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.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

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.

icebraining 8y ago
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/ https://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn/

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pmorici 8y ago

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.

sleevis 8y ago
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.
- pmorici 8y ago
  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.

tssva 8y ago

Believing that Walker and his cronies fell for any of it versus were in on it might be a little naive.

porpoisely 8y ago

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.

Tsubasachan 8y ago

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?!

mtberatwork 8y ago
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.
pathartl 8y ago
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.

coolaliasbro 8y ago

They didn't fall for anything. They intentionally laid alongside Foxconn.

close04 8y ago

> Wait? Isn't the future supposed to be OLED 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.