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Illinois is investing $500 million in IQMP, as the quantum park is abbreviated, and the city of Chicago and Cook County are investing $5 million each. PsiQuantum will receive $200 million in further incentives from the state, requiring the company to create at least 154 full-time jobs as it builds out what it says will be the first U.S.-based utility-scale quantum computer in 2028.
Summary and audio linked here.
Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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Uh huh.
https://youtu.be/xcbZJDJlptk?si=Ng5P6X873Ucfai9M
Are people on this site genuinely this pessimistic about everything for the city?
Jesus Christ.
Yes. Also the state. It’s what they do.
It’s called observation, not pessimism. It’s understandable that this type of truth can be difficult for you to accept. You’ve been drinking the kool-aid over at CrapFax for years. By the way, is it true that Rich Miller and Dipwad Willy had a lover’s quarrel and split? Oh the humanity!
I am skeptical. Even the WSJ article depicts the role of this site in the future as modest: “A Boston Consulting Group forecast prepared for the Chicago Quantum Exchange projects that total global quantum economic value creation will reach nearly $1 trillion by 2035, up from about $3 billion today. Assuming continued public investment and support in the region, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana’s share of that windfall could reach nearly $80 billion by 2035, up from roughly $60 million, the forecast said.” So if the consultants getting paid by the project are right, the whole region — not just Illinois,… Read more »
Yes, this is exactly what I was going to say, not quite as eloquently, “…convincing the real VC money and the supposed Illinois-educated experts to commit their careers to a filthy slab of diseased concrete in a post-urban wasteland is the hard part.” The closest concentrations of PhD’s (other than near UofC) are dozens of miles away on the north side or the distant suburbs near the suburban research facilities. Convicing them to work on the Indiana border a few blocks from Roseland is a tough sell.
It is indeed right on the Indiana border. Even if it works, where will workers there chose to live? And I’ve still never seen an explanation about why the environmental concerns that killed so many other ideas for the tract have gone away.
Quantum computing isn’t for guys like me. It takes quants to do that kind of engineering. Most of them these days, outside of actual science, work on wall street or for the trading industry in Chicago. As for places to live, The abbott and abvie PhD’s have a lot of choices in Lake County which is arguably the largest concentration of non-academic PhD’s in Chicago with Fermi Lab being 2nd. My neighbor works at Fermi Lab, it’s a doable drive for him. The Quantum lab will need to poach these PhD’s or find a new ones to work at that… Read more »
$500 million for 154 full time jobs. Wow, such a deal. Only $3.2 million per job. Can anyone explain the benefit to the taxpayers of Illinois? Even if it ever gets built, and the result is what they say it will be, how does it translate into a good deal for the taxpayers? Sounds to me like a big puff project for a couple of politicians. And no one wants to mention the serious environmental issues with the site, which is loaded with the traditional steel mill poisons like slag, arsenic, coal waste and more. Three or four attempts to… Read more »