by Gary Mintchell | Sep 4, 2025 | Commentary, Generative AI, News
I am on vacation, yet devoting hours to my avocation–assigning soccer referees to high school games. When disputes happen, I’m always in the middle. I’ve devoted several hours to that this week. Meanwhile, I still check the news.
I have two favorite news sources. One is called Axios; the other Morning Brew. But neither is infallible.
Today’s Morning Brew newsletter included this incendiary headline, Companies Are Benefitting from AI-drive Layoffs.
That is simply not true. Companies are laying off because they overhired during Covid and post-Covid times. Now they need to cut back. The CEOs, clueless though they may be, have called on managers to increase use of AI to do the work of the terminated employees. Studies show that this simply doesn’t happen. Like almost all automation technology, the reality of implementation is harder than marketing and trade journals make it sound.
by Gary Mintchell | Sep 2, 2025 | Commentary, Generative AI, News
How are you searching on the Web these days?
I still use Ecosia that realistically uses Google. Some, any way. You get many ads, a few links. Over time, though, the value of the links has continued to dwindle. When I want a deep search with follow up and deeper probe, I use Claude.ai.
But Claude does not show ads or links to sources (you can ask, but I usually don’t.)
Wonder what the ramifications are? Me, too. Then this article crossed my rss feed from Crazy, Stupid Tech.
Cloudflare’s CEO wants to save the web from AI’s oligarchs. Here’s why his plan isn’t crazy.
Written by Fred Vogelstein
Vogelstein writes:
Sixteen years ago Matthew Prince and classmate Michelle Zatlyn at Harvard Business School decided there was a better way to help companies handle hacker attacks to their websites. Prince and a friend had already built an open source system to help anyone with a website more easily track spammers. What if the three of them could leverage that into a company that not only tracked all internet threats but stopped them too?
Within months they had a business plan, won a prestigious Harvard Business School competition with it, and had seed funding. They unveiled the company, Cloudflare, a year later at the 2010 Techcrunch Disrupt completion, taking second place. And today, riding the explosion of cloud computing and armed with better technology and marketing, they’ve leapfrogged competitors to become one of the dominant cybersecurity/content delivery networks in the world.
I was immediately interested because I pay Cloudflare to protect my website. So far, it has been an excellent purchase.
Prince wants to talk about the future of the web and journalism with me because he thinks the AI chatbot revolution is killing both of them. And he thinks he can help fix that with something he calls pay-per-crawl, a gambit he and Cloudflare launched on July 1. He cares, he says, because “I love the smell of printer ink and a big wet press. So I kind of have a soft spot for the media industry and how important it is.” This isn’t spin. Two years ago he and his wife bought the Park City Record, his hometown local paper..
It’s a big enough problem that Prince and most publishers now believe a lot of journalism and anything else advertising supported online will die or be subsumed into AI companies in the next few years without intervention. And because 20 percent of websites use Cloudflare for security and traffic management, he can block enough AI chatbots crawlers – with his customers’ permission, of course – to at least force some big AI companies to the negotiating table.
I worked as an editor in trade magazine publishing for about 15 years. By the time I left in 2013, I could see the handwriting on the wall. During my entrepreneurial life, I’ve seen booms and busts. I can usually smell a bust coming. The advertising model of trade journals looked shaky. And digital funds are in short supply. In my 12 years as a blogger meeting many other former magazine writers also out on their own, I’ve met expenses with a little left over. But every year gets tougher.
The problem Prince is trying to solve is perhaps the biggest attack on how the web functions since Tim Berners-Lee created it in 1990. Until the AI revolution took hold two and a half years ago, the economic foundation worked like this: Search engines like Google and Microsoft freely and regularly indexed every site with web crawlers. In return, the search results powered by those indices generated referral traffic to those crawled websites. That has supported hundreds of billions of dollars in ad spending and search engine optimization.
But AI chatbots don’t work that way. Instead of ten blue links to choose from after a search – with advertising displayed at the top and right of results – AI chatbots just supply you with the answer. It’s a much better experience for users. Twenty years ago Google’s founders themselves in interviews with me and elsewhere talked about Google search only being an intermediate step toward creating an answer engine like this.
The problem this creates, however, is that there are no ads when AI chatbots give you the answer. If there are links to sources, users almost never click on them. AI chatbots also drive up publishers’ bandwidth costs because they crawl thousands of times a day. Wikipedia said back in April that these bots had raised their bandwidth costs 50 percent.
To larger entities than mine, this is a double hit. I hope Cloudflare can ignite a movement to bring some sort of sense to this market.
I highly recommend reading the entire interview.
by Gary Mintchell | Aug 20, 2025 | Business, Commentary, News
Mark Twain is one of the most famous people to be the subject of a death hoax. In his case, the newspapers were just careless. This is when he uttered his famous quote, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
Perhaps the death of manufacturing in America exists only in the minds of politicians and media people seeking a story with a clickable headline.
I’ve made a trip across Indiana’s US Rt 30 twice these past two weeks. Somewhere in the middle of the state stands a large billboard. It proclaims how many jobs exist in Indiana from automotive manufacturing. I was driving, but I’m sure it said greater than 200,000. That’s a significant amount of jobs.
A publicist sent a link to an analysis by EIG Chief Economist Adam Ozimek. For an economist, the research and thinking seems pretty rational. He reveals how the most popular arguments for tariffs on auto imports today rest on a misreading of history. It debunks four widely accepted but flawed narratives.
You need to read this entire analysis for a proper understanding.
Protectionists love talking about the auto industry. Believing it offers a potent example of the harms of globalization, their arguments have long been politically attractive to politicians on both left and right. Most recently they have justified the Trump administration’s 25 percent tariffs on auto imports by emphasizing the long-term decline of the industry.
It is time to set the record straight.
The protectionist argument for insulating the American auto industry from foreign competition not only draws the wrong lessons from history, it gets the history itself wrong. It rests on four myths, all of which I debunk in this analysis:
- The U.S. auto industry has collapsed.
- Globalization caused the death of Detroit.
- Japanese imports nearly destroyed the auto industry in the early 1980s…
- … until auto protectionism saved it.
Once these myths are set aside in favor of a clear, accurate understanding of the auto sector and its history, there is no reason to be optimistic that the Trump administration’s protectionist approach to the sector will work as intended. Indeed the case for it falls apart entirely.
Sometimes we extrapolate from similar, but different, data sets.
Apparel, for example, is a quintessential globalized good, its factories shifting across the globe in search of the lowest labor costs. The United States once made a lot of clothes. Today it employs more than 90 percent fewer workers in apparel than it used to, and produces 90 percent less of the output. Apparel was a classic “China Shock” industry, where imports caused substantial and long-lasting economic disruptions in the parts of the country where it used to be concentrated.
Extrapolating from apparel to automotive doesn’t fly.
But the domestic auto industry is different. It remains alive and well, with 10.5 million vehicles assembled in American factories last year. This number is down from the peak of the post-NAFTA boom period, but it is well above the depressed years of the 2000s and nearly equals the average of 10.3 million annual vehicles made in the pre-NAFTA period dating back to 1969.
What about economic value?
The economic value of the cars being made has climbed substantially through the years. As a result, real value added and industrial production — two different ways of measuring actual output — are now at all-time highs.
And jobs?
What about jobs? The auto industry today employs 1 million workers. Between 1950 and the signing of NAFTA in 1993, it averaged 1.1 million workers, just slightly higher.
Take a closer look.
But we are left with a puzzle. The perception that the auto industry has been decimated — and decimated specifically by globalization — is widespread. Where does it come from?
The likely answer is that in Detroit, the decline of the auto industry is certainly not a myth. But its very real decline was caused by competition not with the rest of the world, but with the rest of the United States.
The deindustrialization of Detroit is typically understood as a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, and it is therefore blamed on the growth of trade during this period. But the fact is that auto investment and employment had started moving out of Detroit decades earlier.
I pieced together data from a variety of sources, which shows that auto manufacturing employment in the City of Detroit had already peaked in 1950, at just over 220,000 workers. [3]
By 1970 the biggest declines had already occurred, with employment falling by more than half, to fewer than 100,000 jobs.
An important nuance is that many of these lost jobs migrated to other parts of Michigan, at least for a while. So while auto employment was collapsing in Detroit, the rest of Michigan managed to hold auto employment stable for another five decades until the 2000s, when it started falling everywhere in the state.
What about investments?
The historical record paints the picture. Henry Ford II announced in 1950 that his company’s investments would no longer be concentrated in their established industrial centers. By the mid-1960s, Ford had made major investments not just in the southern states of Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia, but also in New York and New Jersey.
For its part, GM made investments in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Mississippi, and California, while Chrysler invested in New York, Delaware, Indiana, and Ohio — all by the late 1950s.
He continues his analysis with data from Japanese imports through foreign investment in the US. For anyone concerned with manufacturing in America, this is an essential read.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 8, 2025 | Commentary
There are two groups of people I’ve yet to see anything approaching intelligence about manufacturing—politicians and journalists.
M.G. Siegler writes in his latest newsletter about the new pressures from the Trump administration to get Apple to manufacture iPhones in the US. These politicians seem to think there is a magic wand that will immediately set up factories, find workers, build automation, establish supply chain, and start production at a competitive cost.
Now we know what the magic wand is—AI.
Siegler quotes:
White House trade advisor Peter Navarro criticized Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday over the company’s response to pressure from the Trump administration to make more of its products outside China.
“Going back to the first Trump term, Tim Cook has continually asked for more time in order to move his factories out of China,” Navarro said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “I mean it’s the longest-running soap opera in Silicon Valley.”
I first ran across Siegler when he wrote for Michael Arrington’s old TechCrunch website. He then became a VC for a while after Arrington sold TechCrunch. He’s on his own, now, writing about technology, especially Apple, and entertainment.
Siegler continues:
On one hand, it’s sort of wild that the administration has zeroed in on Apple here given not only all of Cook’s legwork over many years now to get into the President’s good graces, but also because the entire idea of manufacturing the iPhone in the US is just pure crazytown fantasy. Even if it were possible for Apple move such manufacturing, it would take years to get all the pieces up and running. And it would all-but destroy Apple’s business as we know it today because it would destroy the economics of their most-important device.
Siegler then offers advice to Tim Cook:
It’s not that complicated. Cook should just say they’re going to move iPhone manufacturing to the US – and then never actually follow through with it. Sure, this takes some amount of soul-selling to do, but honestly, we’re past that point already. How many other companies have promised things to give the President a good soundbite that simply are not going to happen? Undoubtedly a lot.
But then Navarro has a simple solution:
With all these new advanced manufacturing techniques and the way things are moving with AI and things like that, it’s inconceivable to me that Tim Cook could not produce his iPhones elsewhere around the world and in this country.
So, all of you manufacturing technology geeks who read my musings, what are you doing? Why haven’t you used AI yet to magically reduce manufacturing costs and smooth the supply chain and source materials?
Am I being sarcastic? Those are all questions (except the AI part) I wrestled with 50 years ago. I bet you are all wrestling with them today. Every day. As we used to say, it’s nontrivial.
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 27, 2025 | Commentary, Workforce
OK, I’ll admit it up front—I am a white male.
I’ve never lived in a gated community with people only like myself. I grew up in a small village where I associated with a wide variety of people. I’m glad I became more cosmopolitan over the journey of my life, but I maintain my history of associating with just about anyone.
I bring this up partly over the little media splash caused by Apple’s shareholders overwhelmingly voting down a proposal put forward by a conservative “think tank” to specifically end Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) policies. I have never seen where Apple has ever had such policies as defined by current discussions.
In the National Lampoon seasonal classic movie, Christmas Vacation, Clark explains to Ruby Sue that “Christmas means something different to everyone…”
Similarly, DEI means something different to everyone.
Some organizations implemented a version of the initiative that was clearly meant to be discriminatory toward white men. A solid voting block for our current President was white men who had not been to college. Therefore a call to end those practices seen as discriminating fits a solid political payoff. That’s just politics as expected.
My observation is that not all DEI programs were purposely discriminatory toward white men. I don’t think all programs were as over the top as some elite organizations. Studies show that the best operating teams include people from a diversity of backgrounds, genders, races, ages.
The best companies are going to hire the best candidates for the position while encouraging a diverse set of applicants.
From my youth I have bought into Martin Luther King’s thought, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
I have a dream that that holds for everyone (with no qualifiers).
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 17, 2025 | Commentary, News
[By the way, this is the 3,600th post on this blog. Thank you for reading. It just keeps growing even though manufacturing and production in general seem to have been enduring a little period of stagnation.]
Many years ago, my health insurance would not pay for a routine annual physical checkup. I thought that was just about the stupidest thing imaginable. Long a student (and practitioner) of fitness, wellness, and health, I viewed prevention and early detection as essential ingredients of what is now called a healthspan.
Then two emails came my way in a span of 12 hours on this topic and more. Please read these and spread the word. Our Congresspeople appear to be pretty powerless right now. Maybe some will have the courage to take up the battle. Maybe if enough of us continue to raise the alarm, some changes will happen.
And we do need change.
The Peter Diamandis newsletter came yesterday. I appreciate what he has to say even when I sometimes find him a little over the top optimistic or disagree with him.
He begins the newsletter with a story and a point:
On January 7th at 11:30am, I looked out my home-office window to see black plumes of smoke billowing over a nearby hill. My first thought: What the hell is going on?
That was the beginning of a 5-week forced evacuation from our Santa Monica home, on the boarder of Pacific Palisades.
I’m writing this from a friend’s home, where we’ve taken refuge. We’re among the lucky ones – our house is still standing. But more than 18,000 homes have been destroyed, and 200,000 Angelenos have been displaced. The devastation is estimated between $100 billion to $200 billion, and honestly, I think that’s a low-ball estimate.
But here’s what really pisses me off: This was preventable. ALL of it.
This is happening because we’re stuck with systems and institutions that are centuries old and business models that are sub-linear and fundamentally broken.
Take the insurance industry, it’s perverse and inappropriately incentivized.
Read the entire essay with his proposed solutions.
No sooner did I finish this essay when a similar one came from Seth Godin.
Godin provides a list of problems with the healthcare system. He concludes:
And so, a system that’s organized around treatments and status, that misallocates time and effort, causing stress for practitioners and patients. Historical bias in training leaves more than half of the population underserved and unseen, and, as a result, stress is high, many people don’t get the right treatment or hesitate to get any treatment at all, and costs continue to rise.
Systems change is difficult, because persistent systems are good at sticking around. They create cultural barriers that make their practices appear normal, and there are functional barriers as well.
When a change agent (often an external technology or event) arrives, the system must respond, often leading to change. All around us, we see systems changing, and often, that change agent is the smart phone. 91% of adults in the US have a smartphone, and it’s even higher among people under 65.
He then postulates a smartphone app:
The ubiquity of the connected supercomputer in our pockets has overhauled the taxi industry, the hotel business, restaurants and most of all, pop culture. But it hasn’t transformed the healthcare system. Add AI to the mix, and it’s possible that change is about to happen.
Imagine an app.
He continues with a list of possibilities. I’m not going to reproduce them. Visit his blog page. It’s thoughtful.
His conclusion.
The biggest information shift here is the more accurate collection and correlation of symptoms and treatments. The secondary (but ultimately longer-term) shift is finding threads of common interest and comparing doctors in their responses to symptoms. (And the side effect of giving patients agency and the solace that comes from insight can’t be ignored). Because both of these data shifts will lead to better patient outcomes (usually at much lower cost, with less trauma) the healthcare professionals who signed up for precisely this outcome will also thrive.
It’s not a panacea. But shifting information flows, improving peace of mind and the quality and timing of diagnosis are problems we can work to solve.
