Great for Hyundai. Not such a good ROI for the taxpayers who kept BD afloat with decades of DARPA funding.
I presume this is mostly because US manufacturing industry is relatively dead so capex for potential automation gains don't make sense for US firms.
Here's where we need to be spending our tax money. We should be buying overseas firms and onshoring manufacture.
Like many of the EU industries, viable U.S. industries tends to produce and export unique things with relatively small physical volume: complex chips, complex chemical compounds (like medicines), precision mechanics, high-performance agricultural equipment, aircraft, spacecraft, etc. Of course the U.S. does produce higher-volume things, too, from cars to foods to fuels, but these are more for domestic consumption, and often face competition from imported goods even domestically.
Provide path to citizenship and education opportunities for children of immigrants, but host all manufacturing domestically at rates comparable to overseas facilities. Beat them on opportunity and subsidize workplace safety and vacation.
Provide tax incentives or transferable/sellable credits. We could even federally purchase the land and provide no-cost ground lease.
Dollars to dollars, this would make way more sense than extending Amtrak. It'd also stop population decline and create a next generation of American consumer.
Before the big dip caused by covid, the value of US manufacturing output had never been higher. [1]
Even in inflation adjusted/real value terms, US manufacturing output is 50% higher today than it was 30 years ago.
My guess is that the perception is cause by a few factors:
- fewer people are employed in manufacturing than were in the past because of improved manufacturing technology/productivity
- other sectors of the US economy have grown at a faster rate than manufacturing (tech for example) which means manufacturing represents a smaller share of a bigger pie
- the US is no longer number 1 in the world as China surpassed the US about 10 years ago. But the US still manufactures more than Germany, Japan and South Korea combined, for example.
[1] https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2020-united-sta...
This is a good outcome, the money wasn't 'wasted' since it spurred development in a particular area of interest to DARPA - advanced robotics.
https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
This is called "biobucks" in the industry. There's an incentive to close big deals for management and business types in biotech, so they love to craft these large headlines to drop it on their resume and grift at another big pharma.
I'd be surprised if they ever received the $180MM, although $240MM upfront is really impressive.
The larger point is that Moderna was flush with cash for years before COVID, and the DARPA money wasn't that 'crazy' of an investment, or essential to Moderna's progress.
If Google can't figure out how to get a messaging app right, there's no way they can make sense of this purchase.