Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Foxconn is going to build a new factory in the U.S. Because we don’t have a crony capitalist system it is presumably coincidence that the factory will be within the Congressional district of Paul Ryan, House Speaker (i.e., the factory will be between Milwaukee and Chicago).

“Wisconsin’s Lavish Lure for Foxconn: $3 Billion in Tax Subsidies” (nytimes):

According to a presentation by the state, the incentive package consists of $1.5 billion in state income tax credits for job creation, $1.35 billion in state income tax breaks for capital investment, and up to $150 million for a sales tax exemption.

Over all, the subsidies for the Foxconn plant, which would produce flat-panel display screens for televisions and other consumer electronics, equal $15,000 to $19,000 per job annually. … The new Foxconn jobs are expected to have an annual salary of at least $53,000 plus benefits…

I’m not sure why Foxconn would have paid any Wisconsin (or U.S.) corporate income tax. Wouldn’t they set things up Apple-style so that the Wisconsin factory paid a huge annual license fee to an offshore corporate shell in either a tax-free or low-tax (Taiwan is at 17 percent) country? If that wouldn’t have worked, it seems that Foxconn could have gone to North Carolina and paid state income tax at half the rate of Wisconsin’s or to South Dakota or Wyoming and paid nothing (Tax Foundation).

Readers: Does this mean that big companies, except those based in SD or WY, should be expected to move every 10 years or so when their state corporate income tax exemption runs out? So that they can get new exemptions from a new state? Would it make sense to design factories in advance for modular shipping via rail?

Related:

• Wisconsin family law (unlimited child support makes it straightforward to collect $53,000 per year without working at Foxconn…)

Back in 2008, I wrote up an “Economic Recovery Plan” for the U.S. that suggested, as part of a plan to achieve vibrant GDP growth, “corporate governance that relieves investors from worry that profits will be siphoned off by management”:

Right now the shareholders of a public company are at the mercy of management. Without an expensive proxy fight, the shareholders cannot nominate or vote for their own representatives on the Board of Directors. The CEO nominates a slate of golfing buddies to serve on the Board, while he or she will in turn serve on their boards. Lately it seems that the typical CEO’s golfing buddies have decided on very generous compensation for the CEO, often amounting to a substantial share of the company’s profits. The golfing buddies have also decided that the public shareholders should be diluted by stock options granted to executives and that the price on those options should be reset every time the company’s stock takes a dive.

If current trends continue, the CEO and the rest of the executive team will eventually have salaries that consume 100 percent of a public company’s profits and they will collect half ownership of the company via stock options every few years. Who would want to invest in that?

“State Street: corporate governance has grown up” (Financial Times), an interview with Rakhi Kumar, points out that things have gone in the opposite direction since 2008:

Top of the 43-year-old’s list of concerns is the move by many of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Snap, Facebook and Alphabet, to adopt controversial voting structures that limit the power of their shareholders. The issue came to the fore in February when Snap became the first US company to issue shares at its initial public offering that gave investors no voting powers.

With $2.6 trillion in assets under management, State Street has been able to achieve some of its goals:

State Street has also taken a tougher approach to companies that have failed to appoint women to their boards, vowing earlier this year to vote against company directors that do not commit to improving the gender balance in their boardrooms.  …  “[Our push against all-male boards] has been a great success,” she says. “Some companies have proactively called us and asked us not to take action against them. We will keep voting against those that don’t [improve], and we hope other investors will join us.”

A quota system for women on corporate boards will apparently make State Street happy, but what will it do for ordinary investors? If the CEO and pals on the Board are stealing from shareholders via fat salaries, stock options, etc., does an ordinary shareholder care about the gender IDs of the thieves?

A fit 68-year-old friend recently tripped over a laundry basket and broke her hip. She needed a replacement hip installed (at nearly 4X what it would have cost in France or the UK; see also nytimes for price comparison) and then a couple of months of rehab. This led me to wonder “Why don’t all of us wear hip pads all the time?”

A study from 2007 found that there was no benefit to simple pads (see also ABC News article: many fractures don’t even occur as a result of impact but from the unnatural rotation of the hip in a fall. “Fractures often occur prior to impact,” [the doctor] said.).

ActiveProtective is a company that has a great TED talk, but it doesn’t seem as though their airbag-based hip protector is available.

Will exoskeletons to improve stability be available before reliable protections against the consequences of falling are?

The Trumpenfuhrer’s pronouncement that he would like to get transgender-related medical costs off the military’s books has apparently changed the opinions of journalists:

• CNN, July 31, 2015, “The high cost of being transgender”: “the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery posts cost estimates for different procedures. Its price list mentions estimates of $140,450 to transition from male to female, and $124,400 to transition from female to male.”
• CNN, July 26, 2017: the cost to provide transgender-related services to active military personnel would amount to 0.004-0.017% of the Defense Department’s total health care spending

(I’m not sure that the accounting in the second article is correct, incidentally. The “total health care spending” may include retirees and not simply “active military personnel.” (Forbes provides a breakdown of the $52 billion total that was spent back in 2012; note that this number is in the same ballpark as the entire military budget of Russia.) Also, the military historically has rejected recruits based on the possibility of being on the hook for long-term medical costs. “Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden” says that ” Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for … psychiatric inpatient care.” A Guardian article from 2004, “Sex changes are not effective, say researchers,” suggests that long-term psychiatry costs could be significant.)

[Since I’m not in the military and haven’t had gender-related surgery I don’t have a personal opinion on the merits of Trump’s proposed policy. I just think it is interesting that a statement by Trump has the power to effect such a dramatic change in point of view.]

Four of us, including two pilots, went to see Dunkirk last night. Since the historical story is well-known I won’t worry too much about spoilers.

Massive navy ships sink almost immediately after being hit by small bombs or torpedoes. Airplanes without engines, on the other hand, have near-infinite glide capability.

The movie is good at portraying the simple and non-redundant nature of the planes of the day, e.g., the Spitfire. But when a pilot is about to ditch in the English Channel, why doesn’t he take advantage of the near-infinite glide time to pull back the canopy and facilitate egress? There is also a pilot who has such great control of his aircraft that, after running out of fuel and thereby losing the engine, he can shoot down a German plane. After this heroic deed, however, he is unable to make a few turns such that he can land on the beach near the still-evacuating British and French soldiers. Instead he lands on a German-held beach (except that you wouldn’t know that the beach is held by “Germans” per se from watching the movie; the opposing forces are always “the enemy” and never “the Germans” or “the Nazis”).

The movie is about the individual experience of being in the midst of Dunkirk. There are no maps and there is no context provided. Nor is there the rolling text wrap-up at the end of the movie telling you what happened in real life. One friend complained that she was “confused” during the movie, but maybe that is the point. Being in the midst of a war is confusing, according to every first-person account that I’ve ever read.

Readers: what did you think?

[Separately, one member of our group had recently seen Valerian and pronounced it “the worst movie ever made,” based on the plot and acting. Who has seen Valerian and wants to comment?]

If we ask the average person “Why don’t you want to take a long bike ride?” I would bet that two big concerns are the following: (1) lack of sufficient fitness, and (2) fear of being hit by a car.

I wrote Business idea: Luxury bike tours with electric bikes about how the latest generation of electric bikes, combined with a sag wagon full of spare batteries, could completely address Point 1. What if the sag wagon were a self-driving van, though? Could it address Point 2?

Suppose that the sag wagon follows 10′ behind the cyclist. The sag wagon has some big flashing hazard lights on the back. Approaching traffic has to slow down and swing wide to get around the sag wagon and therefore can never be in a position to hit the cyclist. The self-driving sag wagon contains spare batteries. The sag wagon is immediately available in case of mechanical failure, rain, fatigue, etc.

Readers: What do you think? Will self-driving minivans revolutionize bike touring?

“Greece Looks to Turn a Corner After Years of Economic Pain” (nytimes) is interesting for what it tells us about how modern humans think about economic success:

The proposed bond sale, the details of which were released on Monday, offered hope…

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, the economy minister, said his country was “getting out of a rut,” adding: “There’s an opportunity for Greece to become a normal country.”

The bond offering does not mean that Greece is out of the woods. It is just the first of several steps that Athens must take to test whether it can raise money in international markets to support its economy and government operations when the latest bailout, worth €86 billion, expires in August 2018.

Greece continues to stagger under a mountain of debt, which is now worth €314 billion. [As is typical for American media, the journalists can’t be bothered to put information into context. With a population of 10.75 million, this works out to about $29,200 per resident of Greece. Compared to GDP of $195 billion, this is just shy of 2 years of GDP.]

Quick summary of the article: “This country has been so successful lately that it will be borrowing money in order to pay its bills.”

(Maybe in fact the money is going to be borrowed to redeem old bonds that are coming due? But the article makes it sound as though simply borrowing is a sign of robust economic health!)

Latvian immigrant Angelika Graswald is on track to be released from jail by the end of this year: “Woman Pleads Guilty in Fiancé’s Kayak Death on Hudson River” (nytimes). Ms. Graswald came to the U.S. as an au pair, married and divorced twice at a profit, and was on track to receive $250,000 in life insurance proceeds from the death of her fiance and kayaking companion.

Perhaps one of the New York tabloids will use this headline idea: “Immigrant to re-join the labor force”.

Readers: Can she now collect the $250,000? She pleaded to “criminally negligent homicide.” Is there an exception in a typical life insurance policy that would bar her from collecting? Also, what will her match.com profile say?

Related:

• Angelika Graswald Life Insurance versus Child Support net present value calculation
• Is Angelika Graswald’s purported confession a little too convenient for prosecutors?
• Atlantic article on Americans who don’t work: “Technically, the 1.1 million prime-age men in prison aren’t hurting the participation rate among men, because they aren’t being counted as participants or non-participants. The government omits prisoners before it makes labor-force calculations.”

Who has used Dropbox with a large number of files?

I recently added 761,765 files of Android source code to my Dropbox (accepting a shared folder from a friend). This is only 60 GB (out of a 1 TB quota), but Dropbox has been unable to push any of my own new files up to the cloud. Currently it says “Indexing 463,243 files” and seems to be stuck there (though the number of files fluctuates so I know that it is still running).

Did I launch a denial of service attack on myself?