California In the Running For Tesla Gigafactory 172
An anonymous reader writes Thanks to some clean-energy tax incentives approved late this spring, California appears to be in the running again for Tesla's "Gigafactory". From the article: "The decision should have been made by now, and ground broken, according to the company's timeline, but is on hold, allowing California, which was not in the race initially — CEO Elon Musk has called California an improbable choice, citing regulations — to throw its hat in the ring. 'In terms of viability, California has progressed. Now it's a four-plus-one race,' said Simon Sproule, Tesla's vice president of global communication and marketing, referring to the four named finalists — Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada — for the prize. That's heartening. Having the Gigafactory would be a vindication of Gov. Jerry Brown's drive to make California the home of advanced manufacturing, of which Tesla's battery technology is a prime example. With its technology, 'Tesla may be in position to disrupt industries well beyond the realm of traditional auto manufacturing. It's not just cars,' a Morgan Stanley analyst told Quartz, an online business publication last year.
Texas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell is Texas in the running? I mean, it makes perfect sense to reward a state that makes it as difficult as possible [teslamotors.com] to sell a vehicle with Tesla's sales model.
Re:Texas? (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes perfect (business) sense to locate it in a state with depressed wages, huge amounts of available land, little-to-no zoning restrictions, lax environmental regulations, and politicians that are at least a buy-able as the rest. Hell, if it's good enough for the oil and gas industry...
Re:Texas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the next round of Tesla cars will be SUVs and bog standard sedans. Not pick up truck territory, but certainly Texas soccer mom and Austin city car markets.
Texas! (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes perfect (business) sense to locate it in a state with reasonable wages not drive up by unreasonable taxes and regulations, huge amounts of available land, common sense zoning restrictions, reasonable environmental regulations, and politicians that are actually interested in your business becoming a success . It's what's made the oil/gas/information services/computer/auto/semiconductor/etc. industry successful so far.
Re:Texas? (Score:4, Insightful)
what state is the largest producer of clean wind energy?
hint, it's not california
Texas is a big tech hub
Re:What are the other 99% supposed to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
A surprisingly large number. Going back to the early days of the model T, Ford (the person) recognized that if he paid his people better than the usual factory wages, he would 1) have lower employee turnover, 2) short-circuit squabbles with the nascent labor unions, 3) increased productivity and throughput (see 1 and 2), and most importantly 4) be creating a population that could actually buy the product he was trying to produce.
More recently, during the heyday that the GP spoke of (1940s through 1970s, then declining through the early 2000s), an auto worker could expect a modest, but stable, middle-class lifestyle from his (it was mostly men) factory job. It was blue-collar, didn't require a college degree, and could support a family on a single income. The large tracts of modest homes that made up Detroit are a testament to this fact. The decline in manufacturing around Detroit has directly led to the general poverty of the city, the depopulation, the urban blight (whole blocks of abandoned homes), and eventual bankruptcy of the city.
If you can get it, the same can be said for an automotive job today, or building airplanes for Boeing. Or, until their decline, the textile industries in the American southeast or the lumber industries in northern states. There are fewer guarantees with a manufacturing job today - it may not be lifelong employment, and your prospects during retirement look less secure. Still, they are decent jobs for decent people, and (right or wrong) the kinds of jobs that cities and states climb over each other to get.
Re:Texas! (Score:3, Insightful)
The over regulation and high taxes in CA are the killer for any business possibilities there. Large companies are leaving California due the the bad fiscal management out there and overbearing govt restrictions on businesses out there.
You'd think at some point, sensible folks would see this and do something to curtail the problem, but when you let political philosophy outweigh what common sense should present to the current vision, you get much of what you see in CA, and more recently in the entire Federal admin overall.
Sadly, some seem to hold their philosophical vision over and above solutions that could fix things at ALL costs. Some folks wold rather fail by breaking, rather than to bend and survive.
Re:Texas! (Score:5, Insightful)
What made the oil industry successful is oil. Whatever regulations or non-regulations you want to give, if there's no oil, there's no oil industry.
It can be argued that silicon valley grew because of California University school system. A good chunk of which is publicly funded. Remember Sun stood for Stanford Univeristy Network. Google started at Stanford. A good chunk of Apple Mac OSX and iOS is BSD, developed at University of California, Berkeley. The Internet as we know it started at Berkeley - one of the first TCP/IP stacks was just known as Berkeley Sockets. The Internet was at first a DARPA project (government funded) for distributed command and control. The work then went to California universities, trying to share scarce computing resources.
Plain business as usual. (Score:2, Insightful)
Or typical evil big business as usual.
As long as we coddle these "big" guys, they will take it all and come begging for more.
"An arm and a leg? That was last year? What are you giving me this year? How about the other arm and the leg?"
"Both arms and legs? That was last year? What about this year? Look, as business we are supposed to look for profit and not feel stupid things like gratitude. I hear the other state has both legs and arms. If I don't extract it from them, my shareholders will sue. So see ya."