Hiawatha Bray

From day one, the promise—and the business proposition—of @TheFP was simple: We would marry the quality of the old world to the freedom of the new. We would seek the truth and tell it plainly. And we would treat readers like adults capable of making their own choices. So many people told us this was no longer possible. That the premise of a media company built on trust rather than partisanship was, at best, a relic from the past—and, at worst, a fantasy that never was. That the internet killed journalism. That there simply weren’t enough Americans out there in search of media driven by honesty, independence, and integrity. Our readers proved them wrong. Our subscribers demonstrated that there’s a market for honest journalism. And they’ve given us a mandate to pursue that mission from an even bigger platform. thefp.com/p/the-future-o…

This is one of the more interesting revisionist histories of modern US economics I've heard in a long time. The story I thought I knew about China and the decline of US manufacturing is that opening trade with China created a "shock" to blue-collar labor that moved manufacturing to Shenzhen from Ohio. @pkedrosky offers a (somewhat complementary) counter-history: What also happened is that the broadband Internet build-out of the 1990s required so much capital that it sucked investment away from manufacturing. If that's true, then the Trump administration's re-industrialization plan is INCREDIBLY ironic. Trump is trying to reverse the China shock by raising tariffs. But the AI boom is recreating the capital shock, as data centers replaces fiber-optics as the new death star that's sucking capital, which might have, at the margins, gone to manufacturing. And, in fact, what we're seeing today is declining manufacturing (and construction) employment at a time when AI capex is contributing 30-50% of GDP growth.