
Faraday Future picks Nevada over California to build a $1B plant - e15ctr0n
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-faraday-nevada-20151210-story.html
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jondubois
They won't succeed. Nobody can compete against Elon Musk. Elon could build a
better manufacturing plant using nothing but his bare hands and a couple of
paperclips.

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LAMike
Not sure if this is a parody or not

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eru
I think jondubois overdid it a bit. Just slightly less, and I wouldn't have
been able to tell.

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awalton
I dunno, the post still reads like "Elon Musk built this in a cave, with a box
of scraps" to me.

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WesternStar
Totally fine for California. I'm deeply convinced that tax incentives have
negative impacts on the places that offer them. They only seem to attract race
to the bottom businesses.

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refurb
Why is competition good for private goods and services, but bad for government
goods and services?

The "race to the bottom" is the reason why we don't pay $3000 for a mid-range
desktop computer anymore.

If the gov't cleaned up it's act I'd bet you'd hear a lot less of the "my
taxes are going to waste".

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abfan1127
because governments spend other people's money, so the choice to opt out of
the market due to loss of value in participating is distorted.

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refurb
Not sure I follow. Can you explain it another way? I'm curious what exactly
you mean.

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abfan1127
Sure. Let me first start with this: There are four classifications to spending
money (in this context): 1) spending your own money on yourself - this yields
the most appropriate level of thriftiness and the most appropriate level of
focus on the individual's needs. 2) spending your own money on others - this
yields an appropriate level of thriftiness (I can only spend so much on Jane's
birthday gift), but your ability to best predict the recipient's needs is
lower than the individual. i.e. Jane would never spend this much money on a
coffee maker, so I will. 3) spending other people's money on yourself - this
yields a poor level of thriftiness (Its not my money!!!), but it does get
spent on things the individual wants (although a bit more recklessly). 4)
spending other people's money on other people - this yields a poor level of
thriftiness and a poor level of focus on the individual's needs and wants.

With this groundwork laid, now I can answer your question. Companies spend
their own money to deliver a product or service to market because of the
profit associated with the effort. At some point, that effort isn't worth it,
and the participation in the race to the bottom ends. Hence, companies that
can profit at the end of the race win, and consumers win because the goods or
services are much lower priced.

However, governments don't follow the same thought process. When the profit of
participating in a market (attracting businesses) disappears or never appears,
they don't experience the negative response and therefore don't make the same
decisions as companies would. They may stay in this particular market longer
than they _should_ and their drive to participate in the market may not be
measured in profits. However, somebody is paying for this endeavor. Taxpayers
don't get a choice to "opt-out" of these decisions. Further, a fraction of the
tax base may want to spend other people's money attracting businesses (via
taxes) however very rarely will write a check to do so, indicating it's only
worth it if its with other people's money (see #3).

I hope that helps.

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refurb
Thanks for explaining it.

I guess my comment back would be it appears that this is an issue with
governments, not with competition. I would hope that the government has some
incentive to spend tax payers' money wisely (re-election would probably be the
only one).

Ignoring the whole "lets give tax breaks to businesses that move here" issue,
I think we'd all be better off if there was a _strong_ incentive for the
appropriate spending of tax payer money.

I mean Singapore seems to do it reasonably well, why can't we. And yes, I know
a little about how Singapore trainings and attracts top talent to government.

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georgemcbay
"re-election would probably be the only one"

Unfortunately (in the USA) due to our current campaign financing situation,
lobbying and media outlet consolidation the elected representatives voting to
write big government checks are far more beholden to the corporations than to
the people, which explains the crazy boondoggles like the TSA and congress
buying military hardware the military doesn't even want (causing it to be
regifted to local police, causing all sorts of carry-on negative impact).

And then those same corporations/wealthy individuals that profit from this
system point to it as an example of how the government can't be trusted with
our money and thus shouldn't be allowed to regulate anything they do.

The entire system is just ridiculous at this point and possibly unfixable
(without some kind of huge society-shifting event).

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alvern
Smart move. They will be able to poach a lot of the manufacturing talent that
lives in ex-urb LA.

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jzawodn
The article seems to omit something fairly important: Where in Nevada? Which
city?

Am I missing that somewhere?

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awhitty
The closest this article gets to a location is the quote mentioning the
proximity to I-15. NYTimes reports it's a suburb of Las Vegas [0]

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/automobiles/faraday-
future...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/automobiles/faraday-future-north-
las-vegas-jia-yueting.html)

