North Carolina locals question benefits of Apple's $1 billion server farm - Page 6

Cormac McCarthy told me, "Caint figure why a fruit company would put its friend Siri in such a big box. Don't make no sense talkin bout a cloud in there too. Gotta think bout this one. With my horse...."

Fixed for ya!

In fact they are so different I'm not sure where you get some of the ideas expressed below.


Yet that is exactly what people suggest in this thread! This is what is so appalling about the left, the occupy movement any every other whining liberal, they expect that
People should be GIVEN jobs qualified or not, willing to work or not.

More wishful thinking. Liberalism leads to unstable societies with defective leaderships and a rise in deviancy. Why do you think humanity came up with laws in the first place?

More BS! Liberalism is about handing out money to the lazy and stupid. It is all about pulling society down to a base, instinctive level instead of pulling people up. In fact liberalism requires the shiftless to have any sort of reason for being.

As for people caught up in circumstances beyond their control that can happen to anyone. That is why we have charities, public service organizations and volunteer efforts. Many of these organizations are staffed by conservatives. Why because they see it as an act of giving. On the flip side liberal organizations are often built around exploitation of others for self promotion.

Nope that again is stupidity. First it assumes that people must fit into certain niches. That is they must be either a blue collar worker, service worker or manger of some sort. It is a terrible thing to be squished into a box due to outside forces. A conservative would realize that his most important task is to work and not be caught up in the specifics of the job. The liberal desire to pigeon hole everybody is perplexing. Frankly I've seen many so called blue collar workers working full time while running a business or two on the side.

This whole idea that we must support blue collar workers is very demeaning, they can support themselves very well thank you.

Some might and then some see the world through rose colored glasses.

Please read what you have posted above. You basically insult blue collar workers in a most unpleasant way. Then you go on and on about what liberalism is all about, but unfortunately nothing you say reflects reality.

By the way I don't consider myself to be either a liberal nor a conservative. However that being said the liberal movement in America has a lot of ethical problems. More so the liberal cause is too closely aligned with societies failures these days. It really isn't about making life better for everyone it is about making life uncomfortable for everyone.

Malibu- but it's free (to me, not the company).

I've seen a lot of responses here that disappoint me in the forum's general understanding of business.

Before i get to that, did anyone read the AI link to the original story? Those who did, would have seen this, which the AI writer did not include in his article:

"Town Manager William “Todd” Herms said Apple’s presence boosts the town’s tax base and helps it lower overall taxes, not to mention providing an influx of construction jobs. (emphasis mine)

What many here have overlooked, or don't understand, is the difference between taxes produced on farmland and improved land. Taxes on improved property are multiples higher than before. An example of the principle, without using real numbers: If the tax on a piece of land is $100/acre, and it's developed into a big business site, the tax on the improved or developed property might increase to $1,000/acre. If the developer gets a 50% tax break, he'd end up paying $500/acre, compared to the earlier $100/per. In ten years, when the tax breaks expire, tax yield will jump again.

This isn't--or shouldn't be--a difficult concept: MY property taxes increased when I added a porch to my home. They increased again when I rebuilt my daughters' two bedrooms. Imagine if i'd originally owned only a field, and built a house on it. The taxes are determined after an appraisal of the property value. I'm reasonably confident that value skyrocketed after apple built its tremendously costly data center on farmland.

Oh: the full article (this also was not quoted by AI) cited three workers at a google data center in the furniture-manufacturing region, two of whom used to work in that business and were retrained for the tech jobs.

It's always appropriate to question whether tax breaks benefit the city/county/state. I'm objecting only to the preponderance of comments here that leap to a conclusion, often citing misunderstood concepts for their reasoning.

It was a sale of personally owned land. The state shouldn't benefit from it anymore than any other land sale.

Well if I wanted to be negative I could say that the data meter should givee the local moonshine and prostitution industries a boost! But I won't say that. Instead I will sit back and wonder if you have a clue.

A small business might employ two. As to the fifty well if you are one of the fifty then yeah it is a great job.

Thus is where you really get off track. They are no longer zoned as unimproved or farm land. You do realize that even though Apple may have gotten a tax break they are paying more in the way of taxes than if the land had stayed the way it was. I suspect the local town is doing very well with this deal.

That's AI for you.

But I question WHY does it increase taxes exactly? I always knew that it does, but it's so stupid. Especially if the value of the area hasn't increase. Me confused.

Not economical. Now I suppose the commenter would have no problem working in the kind of conditions China/Apple imposes on the Chinese.

"The factory workers, many who work making keyboards for Apple, were said to be working 100 to 120 hours of overtime a month, experiencing a high rate of workplace injuries, suffering mass layoffs of older workers, and frequently being verbally abused by managers."

"According to an official statement by Apple on the labor conditions at its global suppliers, there is much room for improvement. Earlier this year, 137 workers at a factory in Suzhou were found seriously injured by a toxic chemical used in making screens for iPhones."

I too like reasonably priced Apple products, but I have moral problem with expecting and demanding others live and work under conditions that I would find intolerable. Abraham Lincoln expressed something like "As I would not be a slave, I would not be a slaveholder". Too many Americans don't subscribe to that simple ethic.

Originally Posted by freediverx
...as it often happens, local politicians granted Apple ridiculous tax breaks in exchange for... what, exactly?

Can you present ANY documentation for the tax break having been ridiculous? What the heck are you basing your vehement opinions on? You're the kinda guy who roils the coffee break room without an iota of information or sense. Please, try to restore some faith in american education!

But I know far too many people who question "WOULD YOU WANT TO PAY OVER $200 FOR A PAIR OF NIKE SHOES?". It's usually my professors and business people (and usually Republican-I'm not taking a jab..just stating what I observed).

Well, I pay a lot of money for high quality services and will do so even more if I got payed more. I don't think a product should exist if it would have delplorable conditions. But, this issue is way beyond me and I DON'T KNOW what other options there are.

Must...block...stupid!

Really, furniture is the only thing I know. Those data jobs are not for us.

And so what should Apple do, make furniture at the data center?

You are clueless. Go back to being brainwashed. Enjoy using your iPhone at that OWS rally.

I think he means in a general sense. Perhaps media is blowing it out of porportion. If I'm 20 and a new liquor bar opens up....should I complain because I'm not 21 to work there? Or if Wal Mart opens a new store but I have an engineering degree? I wonder these things in my dark room.

You'd be right if the value of the land hadn't increased. But it did, by about 1000x. Thats why the people who oppose tax breaks on the grounds that they hurt the local economy are wrong. They simply don't have the numbers correct.

Let's see if we can figure this out. Property is taxed at its value. Apple's site is something like 100 acres which used to be farm and forest. What do you think the farm and forest land was worth? Maybe a few thousand dollars an acre. It is now worth $1 B. So whatever the tax rate is, the taxes will be many, many times greater now than they were.


Hint: You know you've gone off the deep end when you say that EVERYONE agrees with your proposal. The fact is that the "fair tax" is controversial and is NOT universally accepted. If it were, it would have been enacted.

I don't think that's what they meant. I think they discounted Apple's property taxes by 50%. I don't know what the discount on personal taxes means.

I'm of mixed mind here. For one thing, we don't know what Apple promised the town. If we assume that Apple was honest and told them there would only be 50 permanent jobs then the town government was simply extremely naive. But as someone else pointed out, those 50 jobs still reduced unemployment by 1.7%. (And even if those jobs went to new workers, presumably they live in the town or nearby, thereby adding to the town's economy.)

If those 50 people make $40,000 per year each, that's adding $2 million to the town's economy and that doesn't include any supplies that Apple buys locally. It's said that actual economic impact on spending is 6x. That means it's actually adding $12 million to the local economy. For a town of that size, that is certainly an impact. And that doesn't include the one-time construction costs, at least some of which was probably local companies. If 25 of those people bought houses and another 25 rented a home or apartment, that's certainly got to have major positive economic impact on the town.

On the other hand, I'm sick of governments giving tax breaks to very profitable large corporations in return for benefits that never happen. If Apple wants to build a facility, they should built the facility based on the appropriateness of the locale for their needs. They shouldn't be asking for or receiving tax breaks (and I'm a stockholder). When companies receive tax breaks that aren't returned in the way of new jobs (and the taxes collected from those jobs), that lost revenue turns into increased local property taxes or ever-increasing deficits that reduce local services.

As far as the North Carolina furniture industry is concerned, they need to get their act together. I actually think there is a market for well designed and constructed American-made furniture. Not everyone is satisfied with IKEA or the junk that major American and European companies have made in China. My previous American-made couch (albeit from a company that went out business) lasted 20 years. My recent "Italian" Chinese-made furniture lasted only two years before collapsing (which is astonishing because a few feet of cheap 2x4s would have made the furniture indestructible) and the web is full of stories from unhappy consumers who have purchased from major retailers about poor construction and leather peeling away after a short time. But the NC furniture industry needs to learn how to design for today and how to market itself. Room & Board sells a lot of American-made furniture, although mostly from Vermont. There's no reason why the NC furniture makers couldn't be making similar furniture for sale to other retailers/chains. In fact, I've actually been a little surprised that in an economy where corporations are not hiring, that we haven't seen more of a return to craft in the U.S.

Would this be a form of gentrification then?

Your comment makes no sense.

So was Apple supposed to hire unskilled workers? Did they male a promise to NC that's gone unfulfilled?

The problem these days is that Americans don't want o learn modern usage skills; if there was a wealth of IT expertise in Malden, NC, these people would get hired. A modern data center only needs so many maintenance crew.

This was the quote you could have stopped on. It isn't true. Liberalism has one idea, and one idea only: Take more money from those who earn it and spend it on whatever we deem to be the need.

What they profess to be "new" or "progressive" thinking, isn't actually a NEW idea, and it never is. It is always, and has always been the same idea they tried before, except this time, they'll spend more money making it fail. No liberal or progressive has suggested an actual new idea in 40 years.

Education a problem? TAX AND SPEND MORE. Health Care? TAX AND SPEND MORE. Pick an issue, the liberal solution is always the same. Take more of your money, and spend it.

So far as I can see, the only actual NEW ideas I have heard in the last 40 years have come from conservatives and libertarians: Flat Tax, Fair Tax, etc...but every time a new idea is voiced, it is the liberals who scream loudest why it won't work, even though these ideas have NEVER been tried, and would likely succeed.

Politics make my head hurt.

This word doesn't mean what you think it means.

Do you mean taking an area with low income and adding money to it, sure. The other option is to take a poor area and not add more money to it.

Which is better for the residents?

I meant arfitifcially raising the prices of the area to have a higher income come in. I only said that because the property taxes would rise and would be harder on poorer residents and then they usually are indirectly evicted. Perhaps I'm looking too hard into this though. That's why I aske.d

Yeah, I might be mixing the too. But I'm looking up some of it now.

If you want to whine to someone, whine to obama, that's who you elected for change. All APple did was spend a small fortune in your state and create some jobs, maybe more later on but nevertheless they are not to blame. Would you hire you if you didn't need additional help? Of course not. Get the federal government out of the way and you'll see jobs created again.

You had best take an aspirin and start thinking with your head. Get involved with people who create things and don't gripe about how they've been screwed. The gripers are losers and moochers. Moochers never have any money and are a drag on everyone.

Property taxes rise if the residents start paying more to buy homes in the area. It's not something that a single purchase of land can do. Gentrification is no one entity's fault, it's the result of many actors doing what they want to do. EVIL, in other words, and to be stopped at all costs.

Bush spent more money than any democrat. And we got a useless war in Iraq and a devastated economy when he left.

If Apple isn't a charity, why is it asking to pay less taxes then it ordinarily would have to pay under the premise of bringing jobs to the center? Is the State a charity? Somebody has to pay to maintain the roads, keep the street lights on, and the fire and police personal on the job. What is the pay off to the State for waiving its taxes that you or I would have to pay, if the State isn't getting something significant in return? Is Apple struggling, and therefore qualify for welfare?

If the Federal government wasn't in big government's pocket, we'd have a law preventing any State from giving tax breaks to large corporations with certain guarantees. Doing so undermines local communities and places the short fall of taxes on the citizens who aren't getting tax breaks. Google came to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Everybody bent over backwards to give it millions of tax breaks and other incentives. Google promised thousands of jobs. This was about three or four years ago. Google has fallen way short. Pfizer was also in Ann Arbor. It wanted to buy land from the University of Michigan, but it wanted millions in tax breaks. It promised jobs. The City gave in and handed out millions in tax breaks. Pfizer a couple of years later decided to close the facility down and fired thousands of people. Mind you the company was highly profitable. So the City forego taxes there as well and obtained nothing in return.

The state's are quick to give tax breaks, but do not require any guarantee's for anything in return. As a regular citizen, I'm pissed as the City continues to scrap services and my taxes keep going up.

War is better than a useless and wasteful stimulus.

Liberalism or Progressivism is not about all about "new ideas", it is OPEN to new ideas (the antithesis of true conservatism). It is more about that the role of government is to protect the rights of the citizens. (also apparently the antithesis of conservatives who seem very concerned about how I spend my time in the privacy of my own home. Conservatives also seem to spend a great deal of time thinking about the gays for some reason. Wonder why they are so obsessed? )


and conservatives simply SPEND and charge it to the next generation, then blame Liberals for the debt that was incurred. Republicans started new wars during the Bush administration with no way to pay for them. None. Well, to be honest we were told that the oil in Iraq would pay for it. How did that work out?
How did Bush take office with a budget surplus (thanks Clinton!) and control of all three branches of government, but leave it trillions of dollars in debt after 8 years?


Those are not new ideas and they have been tried, some with success as well, but in former Eastern Bloc countries and the Russian Federation.
Is that the economic model you wish to push comrade?
You would see farther if you took off the blinders and stopped viewing politics as a sporting event where half of America is your enemy.

That war cost us trillions. I didn't think the stimulus was a great idea necessarily but it pales in comparison. Thousands of Americans killed and tens of thousands maimed. War is better if it's other people making the sacrifice. Unless your posting from Afganistan your full of it.

better to waste lives than money eh?

You sound like you play a lot of Call of Duty. until Mom calls and tells you that dinner is ready.

Well, sometimes war is necessary and a useless stimulus is not.

I bought Call of Duty Modern Warfare from the appstore a couple of weeks ago. I installed the many gigs directly on an SSD, and that game seems to be pretty nice so far, though I've only gotten around to testing it out for about 30 minutes. Now that you mentioned it, maybe I'll test it out later on tonight again.

Yes, we will see jobs created. But before that happens we will have to do away with those silly labor and environmental laws that americans fought a hundred years to gain and that protect workers and require corporations to treat people like people. Once minimum wage, child welfare, environmental protection, and safety laws are trashed we might see some very low paying demoralizing jobs created provided we can make the conditions less friendly here to workers then they are in places like China were workers can't vote and are used to be treated like animals set for the slaughter house.

For instance, I love how some people who are brain washed are calling for the end of the EPA. Meanwhile, there are places in the US were corporations have polluted the ground water so badly you can light your tap water on fire (search you tube, the videos are there), and companies like BP and Exxon have destroyed entire local industries despite the EPA being in existence. Yes, we need less regulation.

This is not refutable. In the eighties and nineties our Country had the greatest economic boom our Nation has ever seen. Companies couldn't count their money fast enough, and new corporations were being created daily. There was far more government regulation then than there is now. At the height, a liberal democrat was in charge (I am independent). More people became millionaires then any other time.

The mega rich folks, however, got greedy and wanted to make even more money by screwing over everybody else (the ninety nine percent). The problem was government was standing in the way. There were these import tariff laws that were created at about the time our Country was founded that protected Americans' from having to compete against what we'd consider foreign slave labor and foreign government subsidies. A tax had to be paid on imports from these types of Countries. The taxes kept American made products competitive, americans working, provided wages, and generated taxes to pay for government services. Everybody was profiting. Yet, that tax had to go because the one percenters 1) really didn't like treating workers fairly because that cost a little money (again even though they were making more money then any other period of time in our Country's history), and 2) they wanted to sell americans out to be able to sell to the Chinese market (there is more people there then in the US).

So NAFTA was passed. Americans were told this was so that American, Canadian, and Mexican made products could freely pass over the respective Countries' borders. Not a problem, as Americans can compete fairly with these two Countries. They are democracies, and the governments don't subsidize manufacturing. What wasn't told to us, is that the products that would be shipped over the borders wouldn't be made in these Countries, but in China. So, NAFTA was a way to do away with the import tax that kept our Country profitable, secure, and the envy of the world for a hundred years. American companies moved operations to China (and got tax breaks to do it), and shipped products to Mexico and Canada that would then get shipped to the US to get around tariffs.

Within ten years, millions of jobs were lost. These jobs will never be replaced UNLESS we go back to the system our Country was founded on. That means more government, not less. Otherwise, the only incentive for american companies to create jobs in the US will be for the way of life for regular americans to be utterly destroyed to such an extent we become worst then the Chinese system our leaders used to condemn. You want jobs to come back, the government need to resume the reigns, and kill the so called free trade agreements that sell americans out.

The problem with politics in our country is many people treat it as a sporting event. You pick one of two sides, and stick with your team no matter what, regurgitating its talking points.

The issue with Apple and the data center is not expecting Apple to hire more people then it needs as that would be silly, but for Apple treating the State like a charity and expecting massive tax breaks the rest of us will not be given. Should the State have given away millions in tax revenue merely to have less then 300 jobs created? Apple is getting much more than it is giving. The average taxpayers make up for the shortfall. I can say this as a person who 1) owns Apple stock, and 2) owns practically every product the company has built.

Only thing bush did wrong was not take the country over, make them employees to Exxon, and drain that country dry. We'd payem a fair wage and they'd have better lifestyles than they do now. Hell- spend all that $ on a war, get it back in oil plus some. Don't let those dumb shieks get another gold (literally) Mercedes.

Half kidding- kind of. No lectures please. I realize this would likely never happen.

so which half are you kidding about?
We invaded a sovereign nation that did nothing to us, allow their infrastructure and economy to be destroyed and you kid about this?

Gold plated Mercedes? Are you confusing Iraq with Saudi Arabia?
Is the entire Middle East all just the same place for you?

Are you aware they we literally paid the Iraqis a cash salary for a long long time after Saddam was deposed because we screwed up their economy so badly? And WE were told that the oil would pay for the war. That never happened. We paid for the war with the lives of innocent American soldiers (and National Guard who should never have been sent there...)

More Americans died for a useless war in Iraq than died in the 9/11 attacks.
And you think it's funny.

Do you expect Apple to hire more people than they need to run the datacenter just because they are a big and profitable corporation and the area is hurting? If so, then you are must be living in La La Land because no company hires more people than they need to, in the real world at least.

PS You don't need to re-post the entire article to comment on it.

Oh my. Maiden, NC is "unhappy"? This is the kind of thinking that got us in the financial mess we are in right now. There is no entitlement clause with the data center is there?

We need to show ANY business, large, medium or small the same consideration no matter where we they want to locate. Trouble is, the little guy isn't getting any slack at all. So many little businesses have gone bust because we see through the eyes of Scrooge!

Let us all re-read Dicken's Christmas Carol anew and consider how many chains we forge in this life. How many times will the chain circle the spirit of Maiden, NC?

My goodness, Folks. Have we not learned our lesson yet? We need, I say, to root for the home team and give our nieghbors a little love and be grateful for whatever they give in return.