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There have been many of these announcements that never amounted to anything: 2017: "Apple promised to give US manufacturing a $1 billion boost" 2018: "Apple w

• MaxPock 1y ago
  The reason why they don't amount to anything is because there is usually no follow-up and accountability. In China,after such an announcement ,a CCP official(whose promotion hinges on successful implementation of the investment)would have been assigned to Apple to see to it that the project is completed
  • bamboozled 1y ago
    Because it’s an authoritarian dictatorship that forces people to do things to achieve its goals ?
    • mbs159 1y ago
      Them being forced to do things due to the dictatorship is not a compelling argument, as people are forced to do things in Western societies too, via other external factors like risk of poverty and hunger.
      • ulfw 1y ago
        What does this have to do with Apple or manufacturing investment pledges? Who is going hungry?
        • darthoctopus 1y ago
          that is the point --- precisely because the usual mechanisms of enforcement do not apply, there will be no accountability for Apple.
          • pjc50 1y ago
            Accountability of what and to whom? Which law are they supposedly breaking?
            • nxobject 1y ago
              I think we're so far down the discussion thread, that we've forgotten that we're skeptical about whether Apple will be held accountable to their American investment promises...
        • analognoise 1y ago
          About 17.9% of households with kids under 18: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
          • ulfw 1y ago
            And that is because of Apple Inc.?
    • tekno45 1y ago
      didn't our president say they'd be a dictator on day one?
      • bamboozled 1y ago
        Yup, and all this needing to appease behavior is part of the shtick
        • Buttons840 1y ago
          He doesn't pay enough attention to see past the headline though.
      • rayiner 1y ago
        grep -C 5 “I’ll be a dictator on day one.”
        • estearum 1y ago
          For anyone curious, the context here is that he said he'd be a dictator only on day one. First, even one day of dictatorship is in direct violation of the Constitution. Second, we're coming up on day 200 and the Trump administration continues to assert an expansive view of executive power far beyond any historical precedent and to degrade the systems designed to check that power, following a 100% run of the mill authoritarian playbook.
          • rayiner 1y ago
            > For anyone curious, the context here is that he said he'd be a dictator only on day one. Still not correct.
            • felixgallo 1y ago
              https://youtu.be/dQkrWL7YuGk?t=26 https://youtu.be/dQkrWL7YuGk?t=26
    • mayama 1y ago
      > Because it’s an authoritarian dictatorship that forces people to do things to achieve its goals ? That's just part of the puzzle. What makes CPC different from most dictatorships is like NK or SU is that most of ruling elite of CPC is made up of engineers. Along with mandatory CPC ideology leaning, they also have notion that a developed nation is one that builds things. Bankers and Lawyers are ranked way down on power rankings. On the other hand, most of American ruling elite are lawyers or bankers. So their worldview is mostly rule lawyering, interest earning, hedge fund etc.. Power brokers in these fields make the rules. Builders and engineers rank pretty low in power totem pole.
      • sswezey 1y ago
        Do you have more information about this engineering culture of CPC?
        • MaxPock 1y ago
          https://archive.md/DrquB https://archive.md/DrquB
          • benterix 1y ago
            Looking at the chart it seems like it's a relatively new phenomenon though.
            • rayiner 1y ago
              According to the chart it started under Deng, and that’s also around when China’s current phase of development started. We forget these days that Chinese communism was a tire fire for the first half century. In 1990 China had the same per capita GDP (PPP) as India. Now China is 4x India.
    • FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
      It’s an authoritarian president that forces Apple to make these promises, even though they will most likely never fulfil them. It’s all just one big play to appease to Trumps love for big numbers.
    • MaxPock 1y ago
      project management and accountability are communist ideals .
  • pjc50 1y ago
    Well, yes, because it's a "state capitalism" hybrid regime. If your position is that US companies should have a shadow board member who gets to dictate company policy over the wishes of and at the expense of investors, people might reasonably call that .. communism.
    • presentation 1y ago
      Communism is a more specific term than that
    • benterix 1y ago
      They may call it that, but to be precise it would be just an aspect of a planned economy[0]. NB democracies use a similar mechanism but only via companies where the state has the majority of shares which is completely different. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy
    • Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
      > have a shadow board member who gets to dictate company policy This will happen sooner than you think if the US continues on its current path. Already Trump is asking for something similar for universities. He can use the same hammer for companies as well; deny them all government funding/contracts until they 'voluntarily' give in. The 'c' word for this is not communism, but corruption. The special thing about corruption is that it can happen in any political 'ism'.
      • rayiner 1y ago
        Going after universities using government contracts as leverage was literally on Trump’s platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. People voted the guy who promised to do that to be CEO of the branch of government that manages government contracts. I don’t even know what to call someone who thinks the government should give private parties discretionary grants and contracts, but shouldn’t be able to use those to influence private actors. I’d call it libertarianism, but the principled libertarian would say we should abolish all funding to private universities.
  • teamweightloss 1y ago
    [flagged]
• rayiner 1y ago
  Fair point. But one difference is that Trump 1.0 was still full of globalist neocons while Trump 2.0 is full of true believers. There is follow-through this time. We now have the highest tariffs since 1910, which was inconceivable a decade ago. The landscape has also changed. In 2018, Apple could wait out Trump hoping to get the Bush GOP back. That party is dead. It will still be corporate friendly, but not on immigration or trade. Big Ag couldn’t even get carved out of the immigration raids. The Clinton Democratic Party is dead too. What’s the odds that either Vance 2028 or AOC 2028 are going to let Apple off the hook on commitments?
  • estearum 1y ago
    Why would that change anything? Apple already got the exemptions it wanted. If Trump changes his mind and comes back, they just need to give him another shiny object and a headline. The tariffs themselves obviously do not have the requisite durability to justify actual high scale capex. It would be quite literally stupid to invest much in US manufacturing just to get undercut in either 1) a few months when courts rule the entire endeavor unconstitutional or 2) a few years when Trump is out of office.
    • rayiner 1y ago
      > Why would that change anything? Apple already got the exemptions it wanted. If Trump changes his mind and comes back, they just need to give him another shiny object and a headline. Because before, the administration was staffed with Bushies who were happy to let things go when the boss lost interest. Now it’s staffed with people who would be happy to burn Apple down. > The tariffs themselves obviously do not have the requisite durability to justify actual high scale capex… a few years when Trump is out of office. Trump is the moderate one. When Trump leaves office in 2028, he’ll either be replaced with JD, or a progressive Democrat. The Bush GOP definitely isn’t coming back, and I suspect the Biden Democratic Party isn’t either. Cutting tariffs isn’t going to be a high priority of the incoming administration either way. And even Biden didn’t cut many of Trump’s tariffs from his first administration.
• AlecSchueler 1y ago
  Have we also seen them couple the announcements with similar gifts of gold given personally to the sitting president? https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-trump-ceo-tim-cook-glass-corning https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
• os2warpman 1y ago
  > that never amounted to anything They did amount to something. Those announcements were part of Apple's initiative to build/assemble certain Mac Pros in Texas. The idea is to do it on a high-margin, low-volume product so that any hiccups can be absorbed in the accounting and aren't as impactful to millions of customers. Hiccups like a dearth of US suppliers of subcomponents. If a North American customer purchases a Mac Pro its final assembly occurs in Austin, Texas. According to local media and government reports Apple has spent over a billion dollars in Austin and directly employed about 10,000 new permanent workers so far. If you count local suppliers, the total is higher. You can see some of the billion dollars here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dHy52bEoWizDC5qz5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/dHy52bEoWizDC5qz5 You can click on "See more dates" and select 2020 to see that in two years that site went from "empty lot" to "hundreds of thousands of square feet and thousands of workers". The Flextronics facility about a mile-and-a-half to the south is another chunk of cash. Additionally, many, MANY, components from audio codecs to SoC cores to sheets of glass used in Apple products are made in the US and exported for integration into products that are assembled overseas. If you think 5 years from announcement to construction is a long time, I've been working about that long on a committee to build a tiny 4-bay fire station. It isn't about money, we have the money and infinite money wouldn't really change anything. It's about permits, contractor availability, and subsystem/subcomponent lead times. The diesel fume extraction system installers had a year-long backlog of work alone. If you're waiting for the iPhone to be built in the US, you're going to be waiting for a long time, perhaps an infinitely long time. Other, higher-margin lower-volume, products? That's more likely. I'm more familiar than most with how difficult it is to build things in the US, because I build satellites for a living and fire stations as a civic duty. It's hard.
  • xnx 1y ago
    Excellent details. No disrespect to the long and difficult work of real-world projects. I could've been more precise in my wording. Sometimes these announcements (from Apple and other companies) are realized into completed projects, but very often they are misleading/exaggerated claims about money that was already going to be spent, or could possibly be spent.
    • 1y ago