N.C. Locals Question Benefits of Apple's $1 Billion Server Farm

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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You may remember the announcement back in 2009 of the building of Apple’s new data center in Maiden, NC and how it was going to boost the economy and lower unemployment in that area? Well, it turns out that the $1 Billion dollar facility did decrease unemployment in the area, but only by 50 jobs after the state legislature granted $46 Million in tax breaks to entice Apple to build in the state.
 
What is capitalism? It seems to have different meanings to different classes people.

To people like me, it's the ideal of a level and uninfluenced playing field for all businesses to compete upon, both small and large.

To others, it's the present reality of government tax breaks, bailouts, lobbyists, and political contributions that seems to always favor consolidation. And might I add, it inevitably falls upon the backs of the tax payers.

Everyone is in a line to fuck the little guy, and people wonder why there is an Occupy Movement. There is a distinction between capitalism and extraction.
 
With a little thought, it's obvious that this is what was going to happen. It's a data center full of servers, so the limited number of permanent jobs needed are going to be for network engineers, techs, and one person to clean the place. If you want to create jobs for the regular Joes that are out of work, build a factory or distribution center. NC politicians should have saved the massive tax breaks for one of those.
 
Maiden isn't far from I was born and I've been keeping up with this. NC I'd say has been overly aggressive with the business incentives. NC gave Dell a sweet to build a PC desktop factory in the state that shut down about 18 months ago. I mean a DESKTOP FACTORY? A market that everyone and their mother have has known for many years, long before mobile OS tablets was declining?

Got to love it though. We're business! We can't pay taxes, we're JOB CREATORS! But we'll be happy to take government incentives to the tune of a million dollars per job "created". This whole "job creator" bullshit is so much utter non-sense is laughable.
 
Ilive down the road 5 miles and apple and google are just loving the tax breaks and FREE land
 
"Project Dolphin" wasn't that the project name for one of Nintendo's consoles, Game Cube I think.

$46 million tax break/50 jobs/10 years= $94K per year. Isn't that roughly a salary for network techs?
 
ninjaturtle said:
"Project Dolphin" wasn't that the project name for one of Nintendo's consoles, Game Cube I think.

$46 million tax break/50 jobs/10 years= $94K per year. Isn't that roughly a salary for network techs?
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Indeed the deal is tantamount to free labor.
 
The state should have used their heads. It is a data center, not a manufacturing plant. I was talking to a HP employee at one of their datacenters here and he told me there were less than 20 people working there. Most of the people that work on the servers remote in from India. They only need some security, couple guys to replace hardware, and some maintainance guys. The rest of the 50 to 100 person staff at this Apple datacenter is all overseas somewhere.
 
I guess they didn't tell NC the whole story about how a data center is run? You need a handful of people to work security and a handful of technicians to be onsite; it's not a huge logistics operation unless I'm missing something.
 
hpglow said:
The state should have used their heads. It is a data center, not a manufacturing plant. I was talking to a HP employee at one of their datacenters here and he told me there were less than 20 people working there. Most of the people that work on the servers remote in from India. They only need some security, couple guys to replace hardware, and some maintainance guys. The rest of the 50 to 100 person staff at this Apple datacenter is all overseas somewhere.
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LOL +1 Same response, same time.
 
$46 Million over 10 years for 50 jobs and people get upset at welfare.
 
Ya know i have friends in Denmark and Sweden....they say that in their countries that small businesses (which I am small business person) get tax breaks for going into business....however the big companies don't....sort of the opposite from us here is USA.

I know their more socialist countries but you don't see stuff like this.....Apple should pay some taxes rather than getting their $46 million dollar break for a measly 50 employees.
 
Good old NC. They have been doing this for years. A chicken processing plant for Perdue Farms Inc was granted 20 years of tax breaks. After the 20 years was up they threatened to leave the area so they granted them another 10+ years of tax breaks.

And built them a Wellness Center with it's own Social Services person on the staff so the chicken workers can sign up for Food Stamps and WIC because they aren't paying the workers enough. Got to love NC!
 
What? They expected a large corporation to keep their jobs stateside?

It's all about maximizing profit these days. If the datacenter didn't need to be here, then it would also be overseas.
 
heatlesssun said:
Maiden isn't far from I was born and I've been keeping up with this. NC I'd say has been overly aggressive with the business incentives. NC gave Dell a sweet to build a PC desktop factory in the state that shut down about 18 months ago. I mean a DESKTOP FACTORY? A market that everyone and their mother have has known for many years, long before mobile OS tablets was declining?

Got to love it though. We're business! We can't pay taxes, we're JOB CREATORS! But we'll be happy to take government incentives to the tune of a million dollars per job "created". This whole "job creator" bullshit is so much utter non-sense is laughable.
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This. Business owners are the biggest welfare queens we have.
 
Companies do this all the time... Negotiate long term tax breaks under the allure of jobs in an area. Smarter states get the amount of jobs in writing as part of the tax break and then put conditions in that revoke the breaks if those targets are not met.

Apparently, this state & town are not very smart. Maybe that is why unemployment is high.
 
Old Man said:
This. Business owners are the biggest welfare queens we have.
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Corporations are the biggest welfare queens. Small businesses generally get shafted just like everyone else; because they don't have millions to throw at politicians through lobbyists.
 
cditty said:
Companies do this all the time... Negotiate long term tax breaks under the allure of jobs in an area. Smarter states get the amount of jobs in writing as part of the tax break and then put conditions in that revoke the breaks if those targets are not met.

Apparently, this state & town are not very smart. Maybe that is why unemployment is high.
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+1 to this!
 
cditty said:
Companies do this all the time... Negotiate long term tax breaks under the allure of jobs in an area. Smarter states get the amount of jobs in writing as part of the tax break and then put conditions in that revoke the breaks if those targets are not met.

Apparently, this state & town are not very smart. Maybe that is why unemployment is high.
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its not that the state or town are not smart, the ones who set it up are the ones that screwed the people, when politicians aren't held responsible this is what you get, people need to wise up and vote for a person/people that values doing the right thing instead of lining their wallet (easier said than done im sure)
 
Really... who's to blame here? NC for being stupid enough to give huge tax breaks on a data center or Apple for abusing the system in the first place?

Either way, it just sickens me to know that the more money you have, the less money you end up paying on stuff (taxes, etc.) the rest of us can't get out of. So, once again, the rich get richer...
 
Guys, I agree with all of your sentiments, and I just wanted to add, that this is something that is only going to become more commonplace as time goes on. Karl Marx doesn't generally get good press in America, but in the 19th century he predicted precisely this: as productivity goes higher and higher due to technological innovation, there will be less and less need for workers, and as the wages fail to keep up with the gains in productivity, both real wages and employment will suffer as mechanization goes up.

Now I'm not a communist or anything, but I think that however the incentives and programs are set up, as a whole the business and government needs to fulfill the needs of its society, and that's not happening in Maiden, NC.
 
Here are some illustrations to clarify my ^^^ point:

WxA4O.png
dude-wheres-my-job-300_0.jpg
 
XacTactX said:
Guys, I agree with all of your sentiments, and I just wanted to add, that this is something that is only going to become more commonplace as time goes on. Karl Marx doesn't generally get good press in America, but in the 19th century he predicted precisely this: as productivity goes higher and higher due to technological innovation, there will be less and less need for workers, and as the wages fail to keep up with the gains in productivity, both real wages and employment will suffer as mechanization goes up.

Now I'm not a communist or anything, but I think that however the incentives and programs are set up, as a whole the business and government needs to fulfill the needs of its society, and that's not happening in Maiden, NC.
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Quite right. Unfortunately most people are so myopic and single-minded in their economic and political views and lack so much understanding of history and its great thinkers that Marx is simply used a symbol to attack socialism and communism and few even know what he actually said and predicted. Much of what he said has been eerily correct. One thing that he seemed to not get quite right is the ability of capitalism to adapt.
 
XacTactX said:
Here are some illustrations to clarify my ^^^ point:
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Excellent point about productivity and indeed it's the key to why there is no such as job creation. The point of business to to create WEALTH not jobs. Of course business requires labor in order to produce goods and services but job growth isn't the key in producing wealth, it's productivity. Less time and/or fewer and/or less expensiveness resources to perform work. Job and wage growth are ANTITHETICAL to wealth creation.
 
This is way offtopic.

Also, the indirect benefits and indirect jobs aren't being counted. The datacenters require lots of power. That means that people out there are being employed to keep the power going, all the way from the substation, power lines, power plants, to the source of the fuel (coal? hydro?)

The issue with the lower median wage growth is probably more due to structural issues. If there is a crap ton of supply of labor, price won't go up. If wages are kept artificially high, less people will be employed. People in highly demanded specialties have seen their wages grow much faster than the overall trend.
 
wtiger said:
Corporations are the biggest welfare queens. Small businesses generally get shafted just like everyone else; because they don't have millions to throw at politicians through lobbyists.
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Someone should shoot all the lobbyists or put them on an island or something. I never hear anything good about them. Why keep them?
 
DeathPrincess said:
Someone should shoot all the lobbyists or put them on an island or something. I never hear anything good about them. Why keep them?
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Because so few people think logically and rationally and demomize things without actually thinking it through. Almost everyone either benefits or agrees with some lobbyist group, it's simply a matter of which ones.
 
heatlesssun said:
Because so few people think logically and rationally and demomize things without actually thinking it through. Almost everyone either benefits or agrees with some lobbyist group, it's simply a matter of which ones.
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Lobbyists were supposed to be a tool of the people. They ended up being a tool for the corporations.
 
heatlesssun said:
Because so few people think logically and rationally and demomize things without actually thinking it through. Almost everyone either benefits or agrees with some lobbyist group, it's simply a matter of which ones.
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From observation, it's just a fancy word for bribary. Even the definition of it is almost identical. You can have good bribary and bad bribary, but it's still bribary.

If you told most people "in China all the buisness officials give lots of money to politicians so they can ignore the workers and do whatever the hell they want, contrary to public opinion, rights or needs". They'd think China was an evil country full of corruption with evil corporations beating the workers. It's also not exactly what "democracy" is supposed to stand for (popular opinion of the masses, rather than opinion of the few that pay for their viewpoint to be louder than everyone else). If you took this to be how a goverment was supposed to be, then the elections should just be 2 bank accounts and whoever had the most at the end would be the president.

You could perhaps argue that it protects the views of "the little guy", but then, if it is a compelling argument that stands on it's own merit, why do you need to pay officials money? If you go to a cake store to buy a party cake, and someone shows you 2 cakes, shows you the ingredients, gives you a sample, then you generally know you are doing the best thing and choosing the best option for everyone. If the clerk offers you some strange new cake you hadn't thought of, and lets you try, you can make an educated guess and might consider it. But if your friend pays you $20 to get an orange chocolate cake because he really likes orange chocolate, then this probably isn't going to be the best thing for everyone. :p
 
cditty said:
Companies do this all the time... Negotiate long term tax breaks under the allure of jobs in an area. Smarter states get the amount of jobs in writing as part of the tax break and then put conditions in that revoke the breaks if those targets are not met.

Apparently, this state & town are not very smart. Maybe that is why unemployment is high.
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This I hate Apple but its the fools who signed the contract to blame really. They shoulda gaurenteed more benefits for the community from this deal. Otherwise that 46mil coulda been used for alot more..
 
Ozymandias said:
With a little thought, it's obvious that this is what was going to happen.
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Obvious to anyone who knows what a server farm is. Politicians are stupid or corrupt, or both. So they were too stupid to know, or have gotten payoffs.

This is why politicians can't be trusted to spend money.
 
wizdum said:
Lobbyists were supposed to be a tool of the people. They ended up being a tool for the corporations.
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There are tons of lobbies, from the NRA to NAACP to the AFL-CIO to womens groups. Sure the ones that are the most powerful tend to represent the most moneyed
interests but when in human history has money not afforded power, access and opportunity beyond the average citizen? I think that we often bemoan things forgetting that its the nature of the world of man and it's always been that way. Not saying it makes it right, simply human.
 
Well, NC still did better than the FEDS who spent at an average $1.2M for each job created. In this specific case, NC did it at less than $1M per job. It makes one wonder who's worse the FEDS who ran a nanny state or NC who ran a sucker's state?
 
wizdum said:
Lobbyists were supposed to be a tool of the people. They ended up being a tool for the corporations.
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yes but corporations = people according to the supreme court... money equals speech too, and rules have changed where there are no limits to how much money you can give... so unless you're a billionaire... you're fucked.

wait we've had this convo before ... carry on
 
heatlesssun said:
There are tons of lobbies, from the NRA to NAACP to the AFL-CIO to womens groups. Sure the ones that are the most powerful tend to represent the most moneyed
interests but when in human history has money not afforded power, access and opportunity beyond the average citizen? I think that we often bemoan things forgetting that its the nature of the world of man and it's always been that way. Not saying it makes it right, simply human.
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I'll try to clarify my point a little more here. Lets take your example of the NRA. The NRA represents thousands of Americans, and receives contributions from thousands of Americans (and most likely some gun shops and US Arms manufacturers). They allow a lot of people with a little cash to pool their resources for what they believe in, so they don't get trampled by the larger players that have more cash then them. That is a lobby group. The lobbyists that take money from the big telco companies, or the RIAA do not represent large groups, they represent 1 entity (or maybe up to 3 entities). Thats not a lobby group, its an escrow account.
 
wizdum said:
The lobbyists that take money from the big telco companies, or the RIAA do not represent large groups, they represent 1 entity (or maybe up to 3 entities). Thats not a lobby group, its an escrow account.
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It's a little more complex than that in large corporations either directly or indirectly employ so many people. We live in a world of competing interests, what's good for some is simply not necessarily good for most. People with money and power get tend to get their way, such as it's always been. I really have no idea how or why this would ever change.
 
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