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I find this thread fascinating. Everyone acknowledges we need solid manufacturing jobs to return to the US to help create more middle-class jobs. Peloton make

• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Might I bring up the Foxconn factory in WI... As a midwesterner, I'll believe it when it's built. Otherwise to me it's just another means of washing bribe money somehow.
  • SQueeeeeL 5y ago
    I remember hearing the governor of WI so proud of "WisconValley" as he dubbed it. And it was all basically an elaborate tax scam by FoxConn which sucked up a bunch of tax money and basically evaporated.
    • missedthecue 5y ago
      Foxconn didn't get paid cash up front. The tax breaks are on earned income over the next several decades. They didn't earn any income. They didn't get any tax breaks. Yes, the state of Wisconsin sunk some money into infrastructure in the area, but that just means infrastructure got built in Wisconsin. That's not profit for Foxconn.
      • valleyer 5y ago
        Good points. So what did Foxconn gain? Or was it really just a slip-up?
        • DiabloD3 5y ago
          It was a slip up in the sense that Foxconn didn't get to go home with the money, since there was hardly any up front. Foxconn is known for the, uh, con, so a lot of industry insiders weren't surprised this entire thing played out the way it did.
      • c618b9b695c4 5y ago
        >but that just means infrastructure got built in Wisconsin. Quite a bit of the infrastructure goes nowhere -it only benefits a factory built out at that location. As a Chicago resident who sometimes visits Milwaukee, I will personally note that the interstate construction was horrible and ripped up roads that had been completed just a few years prior. To say nothing of the people that lost their homes to eminent domain.
        • missedthecue 5y ago
          Yes but someone's domained home or your more miserable ride to Milwaukee isn't profit for Foxconn either.
  • tw04 5y ago
    Foxconn has a long history of doing exactly what they did in Wisconsin - over and over and over again. That's ignoring the fact their initial claim of investing $10 billion was absurd on its face. Peloton has a very real financial incentive to do this. Treadmills and bikes are HEAVY, and as they called out in the article the demand has outstripped supply and rush shipping from overseas has been extremely expensive for them. Foxconn's reasoning was essentially: we don't want to be caught up in Trump's trade war so we'll say we're building this factory and get a bunch of tax breaks.
  • nomoreplease 5y ago
    > Might I bring up the Foxconn factory in WI... You may, but might I mention those are different circumstances? In one case, it's a foreign company and a government leaders making grandiose statements with little action. In this example, it's a publicly traded US company that's making the move to control their own supply chain that was affected by foreign manufacturing. They stated they intend to break ground this summer. Could you wait a few months to see?
  • matwood 5y ago
    Everyone knew the Foxconn plant was a joke when it happened, and was mainly to get Trump off their backs by giving him a photo op.
• ibero 5y ago
  You are referring to 2 comments both heavily downvoted.
  • iaHN 5y ago
    I know the phrase gets overused but that would be a prime example of virtue signaling.
  • president 5y ago
    I don't agree with the comments in question but downvoting them to oblivion is a bit harsh and uncalled for. It's like that scene from the high school movie trope where a group of kids tells another kid they can't sit at their lunch table.
    • dang 5y ago
      That would be more like downvoting an account or a person. Downvoting a comment simply signals that there's something wrong with the comment. If the next comment is fine, it's welcome at the lunch table. It's true that comments sometimes get downvoted unfairly, but I'm not seeing that in this thread. In such cases, though, the thing to do is give them a corrective upvote: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corrective%20upvote https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
  • mediaman 5y ago
    As of this writing, the majority of root-level comments are some mix of extreme cynicism and knee-jerk reactions. But you're right, at least they're downvoted. I think the reason is that most of HN is not very knowledgeable of manufacturing generally (one commenter was shocked at spending $400m on a factory), combined with hatred for Peloton (for whatever reason) specifically.
• the_only_law 5y ago
  I’ll bite: are the majority of jobs going to support middle class lifestyles. I used to live in a town where there was a decent amount of manufacturing and your basic “machine operator” was probably getting paid less than what retail companies are offering right now.
• slver 5y ago
  > it's nothing but sarcasm and snark The average fella will always want to just drink a beer with friends and badmouth the politicians, their boss, a few celebrities and some rich people. Forums like this one are just the electronic version of it. It doesn't matter. That said, look for Peloton having solid business reasons to do this, maybe even tax subsidies and the like. A CEO may have their best intention to help America and create jobs and so on good things. But still ultimately it has to also make business sense, because they answer to a board and the board answers to shareholders.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    >because they answer to a board and the board answers to shareholders. Because customers will purchase alternatives that are 5% cheaper.
    • slver 5y ago
      That's fine. I wasn't trying to strike a cynical tone. A business is a business. It has to make choices that make business sense.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I was not either. I just like to point out that people like to blame executives and shareholders and owners, and yet it is the country as a whole knowingly voting with their dollars for cheaper products made with cheaper labor from overseas that enable those businesses to succeed (and consequently the businesses using domestic labor to fail). So a CEO answers to a board answers to shareholders answers to the collective population of buyers, which is us.
    • unixhero 5y ago
      I bought one that does not come with a monthly subscription.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
• AzzieElbab 5y ago
  I suspect few people actually want to work at manufacturing factories
  • jpindar 5y ago
    WTF?
    • AzzieElbab 5y ago
      I worked at two, in two countries. Experience not worth reliving
• Analemma_ 5y ago
  Part of the cynicism is that we've seen announcements like this before get quietly abandoned once the fanfare fades away. Apple was making Mac Pros in Texas... then they stopped and moved production to China. Microsoft was making the Surface Hub in Oregon for a little while... then they stopped and moved production to China. And don't even get me started on the Wisconsin Foxconn fiasco. Cynicism is a perfectly justified response to announcements like this.
  • slver 5y ago
    > Apple was making Mac Pros in Texas... then they stopped and moved production to China. Quote: “It was an experiment to prove that the U.S. supply chain could work as good as China’s, and it failed miserably,” a former senior manager is quoted as saying. No one opens a whole factory just for the PR. They tried, and the experiment didn't work. The US has objective problems in supporting mass manufacturing and assembly. Guilting companies into it won't work.
    • makomk 5y ago
      The problem that the US has supporting mass manufacturing and assembly is that companies like Apple stopped making things there, and once that happened all the expertise and supply chains to support that manufacturing was lost, meaning that now it's not possible to make stuff in the US anymore and those companies are totally dependent on China which didn't make this mistake. Part of the problem Apple had was that they couldn't get items as basic as screws in the quantities needed from US suppliers, and why would they be able to when there's no US manufacturers which need those items in those quantities?
      • slver 5y ago
        There's a chicken egg problem, but let's not blame Apple for this trend. Apple's original move to China in the 90s was ALSO prompted by the need to scale. This wouldn't make sense if we interpret things the way you do.
• deleted 5y ago
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• foxyv 5y ago
  I always hesitate to praise new plants in the US. They added a Sketchers distribution center in my home town and they just closed the other locations laying off a ton of workers. It was so automated it replaced a couple other plants with less than half the workers that were laid off. With the tax breaks it was given, it was a net negative for the city even accounting for the jobs it "Made".
  • RandallBrown 5y ago
    How can a tax break be a net negative for the city if it creates new jobs in the city (assuming the other location layoffs were in different cities). Without the tax break, none of the new jobs would have been made in the city at all.
    • digdugdirk 5y ago
      In an ideal situation, that would absolutely be the case. The trouble comes when neighbouring suburban "cities" start competing against each other for the potential for a business like OP referenced. Oftentimes these are just incorporated industrial areas with minimal housing and little/no incentive to invest in public services. The businesses in this city/township are certainly running the show, and the few people living within those borders have little to no incentive or ability to organize and work for change. Afterall - people with surplus money/time would choose to live elsewhere. Its a vicious cycle to the bottom, since these types of cities/townships compete against the main city proper (in the case of large urban areas) or other nearby cities and towns that are actually trying to provide for their citizens.
    • sandworm101 5y ago
      >> How can a tax break be a net negative for the city if it creates new jobs in the city Any time the costs to the city outweigh the benefit of getting those jobs. Industrial pollution can be a greater detriment than a handful jobs. Or the city can turn over land that would otherwise be put to other uses. Or the jobs might all be people who don't actually live in the city, saddling the city with resulting traffic/pollution issues but with no practical job benefits. I don't know or think that Peloton is going to do such things, but it is very possible for downsides to be greater than the benefit of creating jobs. A classic example might be a distribution warehouse (not amazon, oldschool warehouse). Maybe there are five or ten people who work at the facility, but the city has to deal with a constant flow of trucks in and out. The downside of those trucks will probably be greater than the handful of jobs a warehouse may generate.
• dang 5y ago
  The contrarian dynamic strikes again! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objection%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... You're not wrong about the thread, or rather the initial time sequence of the thread—but it's important to understand that that is not representative of the community. It is only the self-selected first-to-comment. Unfortunately the comments with the fastest TTP (time to post) tend to be produced by reflexive reactions, and—also unfortunately—most reflexive reactions are negative ones.
  • deleted 5y ago
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    • dang 5y ago
      > Next steps after identifying the problem? The only step I know that seems viable is the long, slow process of community education. Technical solutions don't really seem like they would help. I suppose we could put up a nag screen when there aren't many comments in a thread, asking people to check whether they're posting from the right place...but we've always tried to avoid that kind of thing, and even if each such step made sense individually they would soon compound into something annoying. Fortunately, not everyone needs to understand these things, just enough to start feeding back into the system and affecting the culture.
      • fighterpilot 5y ago
        What about a nag screen that only pops up when the post sounds snarky or angry, as determined by a ML/NLP model
        • dang 5y ago
          I'd need to see such a model doing a good-enough job of identifying snarky / angry comments. The worst case of such a solution is that it's almost good enough but not quite—an uncanny valley type thing—in which case it will just piss people off. And anything less good than that would merely add noise. Edit: of course, since comments are all public data, anyone who wanted to could work on such a model, and if anyone came up with one that was good enough, that would be significant work and I would very much like to know!
• happytoexplain 5y ago
  >people that are all in Silcon Valley and completely oblivious to the plight of Midwest Americans I'm not seeing this attitude here. The (heavily downvoted) comments are all criticizing feasibility. A factory quickly shut down helps nobody. Maybe they're wrong, but not everything needs to immediately devolve into binary identity politics, with the clueless elites vs the struggling Americans.
• colinmhayes 5y ago
  Good paying manufacturing jobs are not coming back in any meaningful way, globalization made sure of that. That doesn't mean manufacturing won't come back, just that it will be highly automated or the jobs won't be high paying.
  • mediaman 5y ago
    No disrespect meant, but this sentiment is common among those without any experience with US manufacturing. Industrial maintenance mechanics make $25-35 an hour depending on skills. Machinists make $30-50/hr. Skilled machine operators earn $22-30+ hourly depending on the type of machine and skill required. Plants like these hoover up industrial, mechanical, electrical, process, mechatronic engineers all at over $100k. Perhaps you meant that completely unskilled labor is less in demand at manufacturing facilities. Even that isn't really true: the idea that 100% of these roles are automated is often believed by people without exposure to manufacturing; the reality is that you still need a lot of unskilled people making $15-20/hour for the plant to work, even with plenty of automation. There are certainly fewer jobs than before, due to greater efficiencies and automation, but they aren't bad paying.
    • colinmhayes 5y ago
      I'd say $20-25 is the cut off for good paying so really only the well paid people are the skilled ones. Those jobs will continue to exist, but will not be as numerous as unskilled jobs that paid well once were.
• baybal2 5y ago
  > Peloton makes this announcement and it's nothing but sarcasm and snark. Because people expect another Juicer here. There is no way in the world for a bicycle factory to cost $400M. For such money, I can setup you 400 bicycle factories, and somebody who is an industry insider can probably do even more. I myself been involved with company trying to start a scooter knockdown kit assembly line, with some parts manufacturing 7 years ago in BC, Canada, and Washington state in USA. It was all around $800k USD, which includes 1 year of operation. It was all a complete disaster though on the manpower, and supplies side, as everybody except for the company owner expected. The first line worked who did not manage to miswire a colour coded, mechanically keyed harness with just 6 connectors was a MEng graduate who wanted 60 something thousand USD, and was slow as molasses. And yes, custom fasteners were impossible to procure in North America as such. Fastener companies wouldn't even talk to you if you don't put up n*$100k up front. Same thing in China starts in under $10k.
  • jjk166 5y ago
    Yeah there's a big difference between a 1 Million square foot factory for a major manufacturer and a couple used tormachs in a garage.
    • baybal2 5y ago
      Even just hearing "tormachs" is already telling. If anybody done serious manufacturing, they know to avoid machining like a curse. I really feel they (and pretty much everybody else in this "manufacture in USA" bunch) don't really know what they are doing.
      • jjk166 5y ago
        I'm a manufacturing engineer. Anyone telling you to avoid machining like a curse has no idea what they are talking about. For small production runs it is almost always the most economical option, and even mass produced parts typically need secondary machining for any applications that require tight tolerance. And even if the things you're actually producing can be made without machining, any self respecting factory should have a machine shop for tooling and fixtures. I am also dying to know how you made a scooter without any machined components.
• xsmasher 5y ago
  The comments I see are mocking the product as rich-people toys; completely ignoring the software/services side of the equation. We wouldn't see the same snark if it was a Razer mouse factory, even though that's also rich-people toys, because it's more line with average HN user's interests.
  • elzbardico 5y ago
    We should be glad we keep finding ways for the uber rich to spend at least some of all the money they've been hoarding the last 20 years.
    • wyre 5y ago
      That's why I'm glad about NFT's
• pie420 5y ago
  No. Stop giving kudos before anything is done. Give kudos when the money is spent, the factory is running, and the peletons say "Proudly made in Ohio". Until then, this is another foxconn free press incident. Peletons makes an announcement "Built in USA", it helps the brand, consumers get a vague feeling that all Peletons are built in the USA, then peletons quietly nixes those "plans" outsources to China, and they keep the consumer goodwill while exporting jobs to China. You give kudos for actions, not words. At this point you are just anti-anti-peleton circlejerking
• ano88888 5y ago
  is manufacturing job middle class? It is a dire job that people should only hold when they have no other choice and should grow into other jobs whenever they can
  • imtringued 5y ago
    The inverse is true as well. If there are people who cannot find jobs, then employers wont have an incentive to be productive, they can afford to waste people on bullshit jobs.
• imtringued 5y ago
  The manufacturing jobs actually don't matter, it's the investment rate that must go up to match the savings rate. If you can build factories and nobody has to work in those then you should just keep building factories. It would be even better if those factories produced solar panels or wind turbines.