EADS Pick Alabama For New U.S. Site - Sources Say

[ALBAIR]

ConcordeBoy,

Let me address your concerns.

Yes, New Orleans (actually LA in general) is famous for its cajun cuisine, but so what? Every place has it's own speciality when it comes to food. Places like Boston or NYC or LA or Chicago will still have more options when it comes to variety of food. As for Miami, I hardly consider it a Southern city. You see more New Yorkers, Europeans and Hispanics than you Floridians (is that even a word?) proper. All of Florida is filled with retirees or well off people who have a second home there because of the climate. What I have said until now doesn't apply to FL.


What kind of discrimination evidence do you deem tangible enough for your taste? I guess personal accounts don't fit the criteria since there is no way to prove them here. But I'll be more than happy to tell you a few stories if you want. Let me know about that.


As for manufacturing jobs, why do you mention places like OH, MI or CA. AFAIK these places aren't doing so great in the manufacturing sector. But I guess, you know better.

[billiam]

Yes, murder rate is pretty high for the state of LA, at 13 per 100,000. But DC is much higher at 44.2. Depends on whether you want to count DC as a city or a state. Overall violent crime rate is a slightly different story:
0. District of Columbia 1608.1
1. S. Carolina 793.5
2. Florida 730.2
3. Maryland 703.9
4. Tennessee 687.8
5. New Mexico 665.2
6. Delaware 658.0
7. Louisiana 646.3
8. Nevada 614.2
9. Alaska 593.4
10. California 579.3

Look, we can argue numbers all day long, but to say that the south is only good for cheap labor is insulting and borderline discriminatory (who's the racist discriminator now?). Remember that HP/Compaq is based in Texas, so is Dell. On the flipside, IBM just shipped a bunch of jobs to India, and guess where they're located?

In any case, eads picked the site because of guess what, state incentives in the same forms it complains about that Boeing gets from Washington state. I guess NY can give the NY Times a break for building its new HQ, but not to eads... lol

...
Yes, New Orleans (actually LA in general) is famous for its cajun cuisine, but so what? Every place has it's own speciality when it comes to food. Places like Boston or NYC or LA or Chicago will still have more options when it comes to variety of food. As for Miami, I hardly consider it a Southern city. You see more New Yorkers, Europeans and Hispanics than you Floridians (is that even a word?) proper. All of Florida is filled with retirees or well off people who have a second home there because of the climate. What I have said until now doesn't apply to FL.

I see, so lets compare what you would call "hick towns" to NYC. Just take a look at the restaurant listings for H-town or some other cities of similar size in the south, and then make your mind up, ok? My *personal* experience, with having visited many cities in the US in general, and lived on the west coast and Texas in particular, tells me that food choice is comparable, in cities of similar size regardless of region. If your experience tells you differently, fine, but stop making statements that you can't back up! Heres a great site for checking out restaurants across the country, http://chowhound.com

What kind of discrimination evidence do you deem tangible enough for your taste? I guess personal accounts don't fit the criteria since there is no way to prove them here. But I'll be more than happy to tell you a few stories if you want. Let me know about that.

Again, your personal experience differs from everyone else. If I let just a couple of isolated instances of racism/discrimination affect my overall view of a region, I'd be just as narrow-minded as those who committed the offense. I can say that I received the same about of "bad-stuff" in CA as I've gotten in TX, kinda surprising, eh?

[ALBAIR]

billiam,

The murder rate and crime rate is the highest in DC because it's a city. It's obvious it's going to be high since the population concentration there is the highest. Nonetheless, my point about the murder rate still stands.

Why is it insulting to say that the reason why EADS picked AL for tankers and MS for choppers, or the reason why all new car plants are being built in the South is because of cheap labor and union issues? State incentives play a role when deciding between let's say MS and GA, but not between MS and NJ.

HP, Dell, TI and many other big companies are based in TX, but so what? It's the second largest state. Obviously quite a few companies will be based there, and I know some smart people from TX. I never said Southerners are stupid, or unsophisticated or whatnot.
As for IBM and its outsourcing of jobs to India, when did I ever say I liked that? In fact, if you go to my first post, I mention both the South and India as places where engineering jobs are migrating.

NY might have given incentives to the NYT and not to EADS, because: 1) The NYT is a New York landmark, and 2) No matter what, the package offered to EADS by NYS would still not be able to offset the cheap production costs of the South.

I don't consider restaurant food important when it comes to quality of life, but I agree with you when you say you find comparable food selections in cities of similar sizes in principle. I wasn't comparing NYC to small towns in the South. It was C-boy who mentioned MSY and MIA, so it was obvious that I was going to mention the "big boys" in return. I was talking from an overall experience, and was comparing a small city of 30000 people, 4 hours away from NYC, and cities of similar size in the South. And guess who wins in that category? And I am not making statements I can't back up. You were the one who said that the food selection in TX compared to CA had added bonuses.

As for discrimination, how is my experience different from anyone else's? Even today, where do most klansmen come from? Unless you want to claim that the KKK is not a racist organization?

One of my co-workers is Indian and he got his MS at the University of Houston, and he generally has good things to say about Houston. However, he says that his professors would tell him and other students from the MidEast and Indian subcontinent that while it was perfectly safe in Houston, they had to be careful when they would leave the city and enter rural parts of the state. It's up to you to believe this story or not, but it's the truth. And there are plenty of other stories like that. You can do a quick search on the web about the rate of bias


This is my last post in this thread as I don't think we will ever agree on this, but I respect your opinion, even though I think it's wrong.

[ConcordeBoy]

Places like Boston or NYC or LA or Chicago will still have more options when it comes to variety of food.

...and yet again, you speak out of sheer ignorance based on nothing more than your own (obvious lack of) experience:

Conde Nast, whom just might be slightly more versed on the topic than yourself, voted New Orleans the nation's top city for culinary variety in 1993, 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2001.... ahead of New York, Chicago, Boston, Memphis, San Francisco, Miami, Phoenix, yadda yadda, yadda.

But of course, they're wrong too, right?

As for Miami, I hardly consider it a Southern city. You see more New Yorkers, Europeans and Hispanics than you Floridians (is that even a word?) proper. All of Florida is filled with retirees or well off people who have a second home there because of the climate. What I have said until now doesn't apply to FL.

For once you actually said something semi-lucent. I'd agree that (southern) Florida is more akin to being the 6th borough of NYC, than it is to anything in the South.

What kind of discrimination evidence do you deem tangible enough for your taste? I guess personal accounts don't fit the criteria since there is no way to prove them here.

Wow, two for two... perhaps you're only half as stupid as you come off here.

But I'll be more than happy to tell you a few stories if you want. Let me know about that.

*sigh*, if you must

AFAIK

...that being the problem right there: you don't

But I guess, you know better.

Apparently so, as all three of these states deal with more manufacturing than any southern state has thusfar seen