A Boondoggle?
Maybe. Maybe Not but Odds are Boondoggle
Politicians like to propose big, dreamy projects to make people feel good about themselves. They also do it in order to deflect from the things they are doing. If the chumbalones are talking about the big dreamy project, they won’t notice the politician slipping tax dollars to his cronies over here or doing things the chumbalones don’t actually like over there.
JB Pritzker did just that. He announced a $500MM quantum computing spend—→NOT INVEST since governments can only spend. They are putting his idea next to Lake Michigan on the far south side, where steel plants used to be.
Quantum computing is cool. It’s going to be groundbreaking. It is very difficult to program and expensive to build. Here is a clip of Google’s CEO talking about quantum on the All-In Podcast. (41:00 in he starts talking about quantum)
I think JB’s effort will be a boondoggle. Why?
Yes, I know there are smart people at the U of C, Illinois, and Purdue who are agog at the idea. Those three schools are top schools with bright people. The internet would not exist without the University of Illinois College of Engineering. But it was mostly built in Silicon Valley by U of I engineers who went there.
I also know Fermilab and Argonne have research facilities in Illinois. IBM has said they will participate. Are those people going to commute or move their families to the area where JB wants the quantum computing “factory” to be? Probably not.
Additionally, significant research is already underway in Silicon Valley, where a dense network of individuals with the expertise to work on quantum computing exists. They aren’t leaving the Valley for the south side of Chicago. Google is leading.
Almost all of the time, when the government engages in this sort of thing, it fails.
How’s JB’s 1871 doing? Out of business, and no meaningful startup progress for Chicago was made. Startup funding is no better either. All the hangers-on can pat each other on the back about what a great job they did but all they did was suck up taxpayer money and get appointed to official sounding titles. 1871 was a fail. The reason was that the effort was not organic. Forced and done purely so JB could put it on his resume, and the quantum thing is no different.
There are no plans for electricity. The existing grid cannot support quantum in that area. Surely, some Democratic acolyte will propose a wind/solar power generation thing for it. We know that won’t work.
IBM isn’t a sign of anything. Why? Here is an example.
When I was at the CME, we used to come up with ideas for new futures contracts all the time. We’d socialize them with a community to get feedback. If the feedback was good, we would keep at it until we thought we had enough actual momentum to launch a successful contract. We’d spend $150-$200k on legal to get it through the CFTC. We’d spend money on marketing and get the community that gave us the positive feedback on board. Then launch. 99% of the time, the contract wouldn’t work.
The most egregious was when CME tried to launch some very innovative currency contracts. The NY banks all said they’d participate. They even put money up. They never participated.
IBM is keeping its options open.
Notice, no one else is in the deal except local education institutions. They are pretty agreeable to participate in things that will benefit them, that they don’t have to pay for.
Of course, the proof will be in the pudding, and fortunately for JB, he will be long gone by the time the proof is available. But he will be talking about it a lot right now. If it fails, it will be someone else’s fault.
A good piece. Anything Pritzker is NOT good.
Nobody wants to work at those South Side sites. Those sites have not been developed even with their prime lake front locations because they’re polluted brownfields from the steel mills, all polluted with heavy metals. My whole family is from there and they all worked in the steel mills. Just the other day I was looking at a photo of my Dad’s mill at 106th Street and Torrence Avenue. Here’s what these areas used to look like. Some of these photos are very old, but I can verify that it looked exactly the same in the 1960-70s. https://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2020/07/wisconsin-steel.html
There was a plan decades ago to strip the top 5 feet of soil off of these brownfield sites and barge it down the Illinois River to downstate Illinois landfills, but it never happened because those communities didn’t want Chicago’s toxic waste sitting in their backyards. My Dad’s mill is still an empty lot.
Just a note that these steel mills were all on the Chicago lakefront because iron ore pellets were shipped directly from Minnesota’s Iron Range on Lake Superior to the Chicago steel mills on ore ships owned by the steel companies. All of these mills had large slips for their ships to dock at and unload the ore which was then turned into steel. My Dad’s steel mill was Wisconsin Steel, which was part of International Harvester Corp., which was the successor to the McCormick Reaper Works.