Christopher Mims

the champagne of canned beans

you may not like it, but this is what peak physical performance looks like

among other things

This is one way I feel like AI really is different from past industrial revolutions.

Unreal. I’m so jealous!

This is true.

That said, I think the ways we’ve made the laws so much more hostile to labor unions, and encouraged outsourcing and corporate personhood has more to do with work getting worse than automation per se.

Technological progress happens. What we do about it is up to us.

Greg's Ip's piece is a masterclass in economic writing, if you are concerned about potential fallout from the AI investing boom please read it

oh, I'd say I'm no less concerned than Greg -- I actually knew his piece was coming and thought it the perfect follow-up to my own

A graph of manufacturing growth broken down by subsector

America has lost 116k manufacturing jobs over the last year—that's the fastest pace of job loss since the early COVID era and worse than any period from 2011-2019.

Big drops in the transportation (-49k) & electronics (-32k) industries drive most of the decline

Discovered today that not everyone considers this nine year old viral tweet a seminal text in the field of social media studies but I do

Interior Order Chokes Off Permits for Solar and Wind on Federal Lands The department creates a seemingly impossible new permitting criteria for renewable energy.

HUGE: The Trump administration will no longer permit any solar or wind projects on federal lands unless they produce more energy-per-acre than coal, gas or nuclear power plants.

Solar and wind literally produce less energy per acre, so simply this may just kill off any project on federal lands.

It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy. It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.

What to make of POTUS's attempt to fire the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)?

Let's run down what knowledgable people are saying...

Turkey’s Erdogan Fires Statistics Chief After Record Inflation The president of the Turkish statistical institute, Sait Dincer, was removed from office and replaced by Erhan Cetinkaya, who had been deputy president of Turkey’s Banking Regulation and Supervision A...

um. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

Honest question: Given how much of Wall Street runs on federal data (like jobs), if it becomes apparent the "official" data is cooked, would it be possible for a few of the big banks / funds to get together and just fund alternative numbers that are better?

not sure how much it does, other than layoffs at e.g. Microsoft so they could redirect capital to this (but that's a tiny fraction of total jobs in those aggregate numbers)

Trump fired the Commissioner of Labor Statistics by tweet just now, in case you're wondering about how reliable job numbers might be getting over the next 3.5 years

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP” despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting “Kamala” elected – How did that work out? Jerome “Too Late” Powell should also be put “out to pasture.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Okay you can officially get ready for an attempt to cook the books.

yeah but their revenue on this could suffer for awhile

I do think you're right about the next financial crisis and its causes but I honestly think it will go the other way -- complete tokenization of the economy will result, hopefully with better regulations but maybe not

we will literally end up re-inventing all of financial regulation (if we're lucky

can always turn these back into crypto mines

"WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 1, 2025) – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced today that it will begin an orderly wind-down of its operations"

cpb.org/pressroom/Co...

I feel like a run's a run tho. if the big whales go down confidence in the whole market will be shaken -- all the more because they're likely to go down because of exogenous macro forces like today's terrible job numbers

...except 89% of people who have saved for retirement have some portion of that in stocks, and the way indexes are weighted that's gotta be a lot of exposure to this and related companies -- no?

chart: capital expenditures, quarterly shows hockey-stick like growth in the capex expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and meta, almost entirely on data centers in the most recent quarter it was nearly $100 billion, collectively

The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/

The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone*

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sili...

thanks!

Trump's IRS chief finally said IRS Direct File is "gone." Intuit lobbied hard against free federal filing for years.

Here's Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi defending that record in a Decoder interview last year. Intuit later asked us to cut this part. We refused.

I’d like to introduce yall to Rosner’s Law of Double Garnish:

Every savory dish is made better by not one but TWO finishing elements added just before serving: one brightening (green herbs, lemon zest/juice, pickled onion), one deepening (cheese, nuts/seeds, toasty breadcrumbs, oil drizzle)

Can Pittsburgh’s Old Steel Mills Be Turned Into an AI Hub? Two Trump visits span the city’s legacy industry and its higher-tech pursuits.

In an almost too-perfect parallel to the bygone age of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, some of today’s power-hungry data centers are actually being put on the sites of former steel mills, because of their proximity to energy sources.

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/can-...

/fin

One explanation for the U.S. economy’s ongoing strength is that spending on AI infrastructure *is so big it’s acting as a sort of private-sector stimulus program.*

3/