welshdog

Elected officials must have marketable "achievements" under their belt in order to get re-elected. Being able to claim they "created jobs" is the golden goose of such achievements. The big corporations know this and thus have the officials over a barrel.  They get outrageous and often unworkable concessions with little or no risk to their bottom line.  Also, not everyone is a genius, not everyone has outstanding bullshit detectors, not everyone is suspicious by nature, so city and state leaders often get taken in by the sketchy promises, even if they aren't solely focussed on re-election.  The dog-and-pony shows put on by these huge corporations are often elaborate, sophisticated and convincing.

Austin lost approx. $10 million (in waived fees and deferred construction costs) around 2001, because Intel abandoned a $65 million building downtown. Intel left the structure half finished for six years before blowing it up to make way for a new Federal Courts building.  Sports teams all over the country have used public money to build stadiums, even when team owners were worth billions and could have easily self-funded. Many, many of these deals are one sided and help people of means and power and screw everyone else. There are many stories like this from all over the country now that competing to make the best bribe has become the norm.

Sometimes, though, things work out differently.  Fort Worth Alliance Airport was built with cooperation between the FAA, City of Ft. Worth and Ross Perot Jr.'s company Hillwood Development. By any metric it has been immensely successful and used large amounts of public money to get done.  It created more than 37,000 jobs and has pumped over $50 billion cumulatively into the local economy.  In this case the FAA proposed the project to Perot & Co. and later Fort Worth was brought in and that is the key difference.  It truly was an alliance between various entities instead of a one-sided, pseudo-scam perpetrated by an egomaniacal billionaire.  Maybe Alliance should be used as a template for future private sector/public sector projects.  Of course FoxCon would not have been interested in such an arrangement since they would not have been able to take and hold the upper hand.  

People keep bringing up 5G.  Couple of problems there.  First, it is not rolling out widespread any time soon.  Some companies are doing small scale installs, but it will be years before it is ubiquitous.  Dropping the Airports now would be way too early if you are going to argue 5G is the reason.  Second, most of the carriers plan to deploy 5G in the higher frequencies which is actually millimeter wave radio.  Radio waves at that frequency can't penetrate, walls, windows or even leaves on trees.  Outdoors there will be small transceivers installed everywhere - on top of light posts, traffic lights, corners of buildings, the walls of buildings - they will be a plague of boxes, antennas and fiber optic cables.  If you want 5G inside your home you will need some as yet non-existant hardware to bring the radio waves inside and distribute them to each room.  Yeah, that sounds practical.  5G is going to take a very long time to reach the ubiquity of 4G.  In fact what I have been reading says that 4G will always reamain in use as a fallback for the frequent times your phone drops off 5G.  Yep, 4G will never go away.

I gotta figure that for the Airports, some person inside Apple has charts and graphs for every product line showing expenses, profitability, growth potential etc. etc.  Obviously the charts and graphs showed the Airport division was waning and becoming unprofictable.  Apple runs their business in a very different way from a lot of compnies, but they still want divisions to make money.  Like someone said, the routers from the cable companies/ISPs get the job done and probably severely ate into Airport revenue over the lat 10 years.  I will miss them and there's no way Apple is bringing them back.  It's goodbye forever.

danvm said: I suppose you have no idea the engineering and design involve in HP workstations.  I suggest you check the HP Z8, which is miles ahead off what Apple offers today.  This model is capable of 3TB of RAM (yes, Terabytes), two CPU's with a max of 56 cores, a three NVidia Quadro P6000.  Do you really think that a device like this is a "bunch of parts slapped together"?

I was facilities manager at a post house several years ago. We had Mac Pros everywhere running Avid, FCP, After Effects, Photoshop etc.  We also had a Discreet Logic (Now Autodesk) Smoke/Flame and later a Lustre color grading system. These systems ran on HP Z hardware and they were well built, rock solid and very powerful. I agree, there was nothing "slapped together" about these big iron units.  I loved my big aluminum Mac Pros, Xserves and Xserve RAIDs, but the HP kit was really good too. We also had a Boxx system for animation that was pretty sweet.

Initially 5G is going to be big disappointment to a lot of early adopters. The millimeter wave radio cannot penetrate wall, windows or even leaves.  Spotty coverage will be an understatement for 5G.  It will take many years before there are enough transmitters to provide usable coverage.  However, the huge fiber backbone they are installing/improving to support 5G will likewise give 4G a boost as the article mentions.  In fact, 4G will remain in place for a long time as it will serve as a fallback for when your phone can't receive 5G.