Micron wants tax breaks for '$160b' Texas chip fab plant US memory vendor Micron is seeking tax incentives to build a new semiconductor fab outside Austin, Texas, according to documents filed with the state. The filing comes just weeks after Micron announced it would spend $40 billion over the next decade to expand its DRAM and NAND flash memory manufacturing capacity in the US. …
Or, it's a ridiculously inflated number to get the maximum cut of the free money, completely detached from reality.
Making and selling chips is hard, getting free money from government with China scaremongering is super easy!
Imagine the kind of prices they'd have to sell their chips for to cover the capital cost of a $160 billion plant. Of course those chips wouldn't be competitive, so they'd need a closed market like the US drugs market to get away with those prices. Which in turn would mean products made with those chips would be uncompetitive.
It would be self defeating to keep pumping free money into US chip production when they have access to infinite capital commercially.... but only on commercial terms. When they can plausibly repay the debt.
I just bought a Chinese DVR for the car, it cost $30. It has ACAS, it recognizes cars, and the lane and warns you of lane departures, stationary cars ahead, cars pulling away in stop-start traffic. You could buy 3 for every car on the planet and still not have spent $160 billion. Micron don't make the complex chip needed for that, let alone the DVR itself. The chip probably costs $2 to make, it will be Chinese or Taiwanese and certainly won't be some cutting edge "3nm with massive DNN" or some such marketing crap.
So who is going to buy Micron chips in a world where chips are used for actual real world use at real world prices?
If you're going to government with a begging bowl, may as well that bowl massive to try to grab as much free money as possible!
"Check latest version of software" on settings page.... upgrade. The ACAS enabled software is not shipped with it, I had the exact same issue.
I've just found the exact same Anytek camera for $10. FFS.
I have to say the upgrade birdview camera on my new head unit is amazing (~220 USD T6). It does an excellent 3D rendering as well as the 2D bird-view. I found I can tap the logo 2 times and the car turns transparent, now its only tyres and flashing indicators so you can see the full 3D front and side view (as if you have a camera mounted behind the car in the sky) without the car model getting in the way. Best of all, you can even see UNDER the car, it panorama stitches the road as you drive over it to get a view under the car.
Android however is a total POS.
/rant
I wanted the screen darker, so I write an app, I want it to turn back to normal brightness when the camera pops up. For that I need "Accessibility permission" (because they've crippled every other way of querying the active task). But Google Play turns off the permission after a few hours, or on reboot. It seems that if the app didn't come from Google Play it cannot have Accessibility Permission except for test and development. Disabling Google Play Protect, and you can NEVER have Accessibility Permission. The checkbox will now stays on, as if the user has assigned it, but the API doesn't get called.
So I try listening to broadcast intents for the indicators and reversing camera trigger, but since Android 10 I cannot get lots of broadcast intents, Android filters them to improve performance (FFS). I think that's why the head unit knows when the car indicators are being used, but the DVR cannot access those to suppress lane departure warnings as you intentionally change lanes. So lane departure warnings become annoying and you turn the whole feature off.
I notice that apps from Google Play are granted permissions like "overlay" automatically, but apps loaded any other way have to request it. And some permissions get turned off automatically, regardless of any setting in Google Play Protect. Also each upgrade, Google Play Protect grants itself the right to turn off permissions again. So you have to remember to tell it, again, to not remove permission for each upgrade. So unless you're installing a commercial app from Google Play you are screwed. It will keep attacking the third party software to degrade it.
I also made the mistake of clearing the USB permission from the camera, and there is no Android settings dialog to turn it back on. Uninstall, reinstall.....
Google are shit. Android gets worse and worse with each version . Each iteration of Android, it does less and less and is ever more flaky and unreliable with more and more dodgy optimizations.
([ Added ]another example, Octoprint for Android on Android 10 is has to request USB permission each and every time, rendering it useless as a printer server. Lucky I have an Android 7 box I can run it on, where you can grant that permission once and it isn't removed automatically).
/rant
This isn't "free money" a la Intel, it's cheaper property tax (according to the article). But Texas doesn't have property tax at the state level - just the local level for schools and services.
The big 160B will never happen, it's just a tactic to get a break for a few millions probably.
Outside of Japan, contracts are very fluid in East Asia, and finishing one contract as promised is used as leverage for the next contract.
It matters little how the money arrives. e.g. give them a tax break, and that simply will go to shareholders as larger profit, and management as bonus payments.
$160 billion is a laughable fiction. A typical 1600 man plant, they'd be saying "give us a tax break worth 100 MILLION per employee".
$160 billion is a laughable fiction. A typical 1600 man plant, they'd be saying "give us a tax break worth 100 MILLION per employee".
It need not be completely fictitious. I'm not familiar with the tax break law in question but mention of a sunset date in the article suggests they are staking their territory for the maximum possible expansion of that plant, the article does say it is over several possible phases after all. Put in a claim for the most they could possibly want - if the later plans don't go ahead nothing lost. If they do they have the claim in under this scheme prior to the deadline.
Not that a $160B investment would equate to that much subsidy in any case. I don't understand how this is so difficult for people to grasp, it just comes off the tax assessment rather than a complete refund. So in the case of corporation tax the taxable profit is reduced by the investment and then that figure is assessed for tax. For property taxes as here the facilities built are not assessed for those property taxes - it is not as if they get a cheque in the post.
Although even having said that, I agree the levels of subsidy make no sense at all as I mentioned here a few weeks ago. Semiconductor fabs have a relatively short lifespan and are incredibly capital intensive compared to the numbers employed. I can't see any justification for millions in subsidies for each job that may only last 10-15 years.
"If Micron is unable to obtain such a cap, the chipmaker says it will likely pursue other locations with more favorable incentives. The application cites Singapore, Taiwan, or Japan as potential alternatives."
Threaten the United States? A President with balls would tell Micron to leave and enjoy the U.S. embargo anywhere it sets up shop.
Decades ago, the beancounters at various US chipmakers decided to quit making certain types of chips (e.g., DRAM) so they could concentrate on making higher-profit-margin chips.
The US government at that time either failed to recognize the national security aspects of that, or simply chose do to nothing about it, which is why they're in the spot that they're currently in.
Upto now the US market has been dominated by large, noisy, inefficient, polluting presidents. But recent trends suggest this has gone too far and people now want smaller stylish european style presidents with lower emissions.
Since they aren't allowed to import them from Canada, America is now trying to manufacture them locally
The title really says it all. When I had a small manufacturing company I could have used loads of grants, tax breaks and discounted loans. I look at these multi-nationals and have to wonder why the hell some lawyers feel it's a good idea to give them C-5's full of cash. I just know they're playing one city or state off the other when the already know the best place to locate their facility. I also don't see, in this case, where all of the jobs would come from. Fabs these days don't actually have a large number of employees turning handles and the ones they have need to have good skills and often technical degrees.
"Well if you wanted grants why didn't you just get off your butt and offer all the local politicians non-exec directorships to help them believe your claims of 1000s of jobs to revive the Nevada deep sea fishing industry"
The problem is I did. I got a nice form letter back telling me about all of the wonderful work said politician has been doing and how proud they are about the stance they're taking on a subject where I have the opposite opinion. They did thank me for expressing my concern about **something that had nothing to do with my letter** and they take the input from their constituents very seriously.
This will likely turn into a giant corporate tax scam like Foxconn in Wisconsin, only with Texas being gerrymandered to hell so that Democrats have no realistic chance of ever winning control of any branch of the government, Texas residents will just be fleeced and the Texas legislature will happily cover up everything, and then conspire with the AG and governor's office to pass laws that excuse anything that they can't cover up leaving the taxpayers holding the bag.
"This will likely turn into a giant corporate tax scam like Foxconn in Wisconsin"
In a battle of contracts, whose team of lawyers do you think are going to win? The giant multi-national or the local group of minnows with no experience in contract law?
This is another reason why government shouldn't be handing out free money/land/tax abatements. The terms they thought were in the contract are not what they thought they were. I'd bet a stack of rare coins that Foxconn pulling out was well within the terms as written.
I'm not a lawyer so I paid one to help me create contracts that I use and I don't use something a customer presents. The government agencies should do the same thing if they are going to continue to hand out free money to billionaires. Either they hire the said number of people within the specified time frame, pay them at least the set amount of salary/benefits and do so for the time set in the contract or the SWAT team evacuates the facility and welds the doors closed.
If you look back the records for incentives given to US big corps
It totals the USA national debt
It makes no sense to keep giving rich mega corps these tax breaks
You have bridges falling down cities rotting and homelessness on an industrial scale and you want to give this money to these people
Cancel student debt, cap property prices
Finally give some hope to the people of the west
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