Booming

According to a Harvard economist, spending on data centers and artificial intelligence accounted for 92% of U.S. economic growth in the first half of last year.    That's fueled speculation that we’re in an AI bubble, because spending on that level doesn’t feel sustainable. If the bubble pops and the spending stops, the shockwave could hit all of us. Past economic collap...

Austin, Texas is not a cheap place. But for the last few years, it’s been a real outlier. While many cities saw rent go up, Austin’s average rent actually  fell . A  lot .  On today's episode, what is Austin doing right? And what could Seattle learn from it?  GUEST: Audrey McGlinchy , Housing reporter at KUT Austin Thank you to the supporters of...

Happy New Year! The Booming team is taking a week to rest and recharge before the new year begins...we’ve got lots of new episodes up our sleeve that we’re excited to share with you.   In the meantime, we wanted to revisit some of our favorite episodes. This one is about the rising costs of Seattle sports tickets, and how you can enjoy games on a budget. This episode first ai...

The Booming team is hard at work on some new episodes coming out next year. In the meantime, we wanted to revisit some of our favorite stories this holiday season. We think this one will be particularly useful for those of you still doing some last-minute holiday shopping. It explores the ways AI is being used by some of your favorite retailers to get better at selling you stuff. This story first...

We all know the cost of living is really high in Seattle. Whether it's housing or groceries, this town is a tough place to make ends meet.  But just how expensive is Seattle compared to other cities? On today's episode, Monica talked to a researcher who sends armies of shoppers to find out. And we get his tips for making your dollar stretch as far as possible in this very expensive city. GUES...

The Pacific Northwest has been booming for decades, and home builders have struggled to keep up.   That’s led to a housing shortage, homelessness crisis, and transportation headaches. But we may see an even bigger population boom here as climate change makes more places unlivable.   Climate migration is difficult to study, and even harder to predict. But some researchers...

You may have heard that the economy is maybe... definitely... probably... in an “AI bubble.”  Companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build the AI infrastructure of the future. The hope is all that spending will pay off with super-advanced AI that will more than cover the cost of building it. But that payoff isn’t coming — at least not yet. Companies...

Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you enjoy this bonus episode. The Booming team recorded a live event a few weeks ago at the Seattle Public Library about the future of Seattle’s highways – so we wanted to drop it in the feed in case you missed it.   Booming's Joshua McNichols co-hosted the event with Ian Coss. Coss is a reporter from WGBH in Boston and host of The Big Dig , a podc...

Our power grid is maxing out. We're plugging in electric cars, massive data centers, and heat pumps all at once. And it's not stopping anytime soon. Demand is expected to grow by 30% over the next ten years.   And the increasing demand is spiking our energy bills. But Big Tech is betting on a solution straight out of science fiction. Nuclear fusion. Today, could nuclear fusion fix our gr...

On our most recent episode , we reported on how tons of young people are choosing trade school over college out of fear of white-collar jobs drying up. Companies appear to be making big bets that AI can replace huge chunks of their workforces.  It seems like “go to trade school” has become the new “learn to code.”  But Dan Grossman -- professor and vice director o...

When it comes to the white-collar workforce, warning signals are blinking red. That uncertainty has more kids going blue collar. Trade schools are booming . On today's episode, as artificial intelligence and economic uncertainty reshape the labor market, could trade schools be the new ticket to the American Dream? We want to know what you think of the show, and what you'd like us to cover. Fill ou...

Seattle has more single people living alone than any major U.S. city. The average new apartment size in Seattle is just 650 square feet -- that’s the smallest in the nation. If you’re single, that might work for you. But if you want to raise a family in a larger space, that can get expensive: $3500 a month on average for a 3-bedroom apartment. That’s more than double what a studi...

Seattle and Portland are wrestling for the title of the city with the lowest birth rate. But it's not just the Pacific Northwest. Birth rates are declining across the country.  Environmentalists say there are benefits to slowing population growth, like less consumption and strain on resources. But economists start to worry when birth rates dip well below the replacement rate. That’...

In the debate over how fast we should be embracing artificial intelligence, one thing comes up again and again. The claim from tech CEOs that AI can cure cancer.  So can it? On today's episode, we get into what new AI developments in Seattle's biotech industry could mean for finding a cure.  Sign up for our first FREE live event at KUOW.org/events . Join Joshua and The Big Dig...

Electronic Arts (EA), one of the largest video game companies in the world, just sold for $55 billion, a record for a leveraged buyout.  The sale is sending shockwaves through Seattle's video game industry. Not just because a lot of people in Seattle worked on EA games, but because the company is banking its future on generative AI.  Generative AI has created a cultural conflict so deep,...

Coding looks like one of the first real-world skills AI is close to mastering. And AI coding tools are helping a lot more people build apps and websites – no technical expertise required.   But there’s a problem. It turns out, handing the keyboard over to a robot can end up costing more time and money than hiring a human to do that work.  Today, the unintended consequenc...

The long-awaited trial between Amazon and the FTC is over... after just a few days. Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the case over its Prime membership program.  On this bonus episode, Joshua and Monica were in the courtroom during the trial, so they sat down to chat about what they heard during the hearings and why they think Amazon might have settled the case so soon. Thank y...

Have you ever found it impossible to find the “unsubscribe” button? Maybe you’ve accidentally opted into “accepting all cookies?” Then you may have fallen for a "dark pattern." Dark patterns are at the heart of a lawsuit between Amazon and the federal government. The FTC claims Amazon used dark patterns to trick millions of users into subscribing to Prime without mean...

College football season is here! If you follow college athletes on Instagram, you may have noticed -- they're doing a lot more commercials lately. And for doing this work, some athletes are raking in big bucks.  A court settlement this summer determined that students have a right to make money from sports. And for the first time ever, universities will be the ones to pay them.   How...

Every year, tens of millions of tourists visit Seattle’s Pike Place Market, the Elliot Bay waterfront, and sports stadiums.   That tourism industry is growing -- this year, a record number of cruise ships are expected to fill Seattle’s piers. Next year, the population of Seattle will swell- to about double its normal size when it hosts the Word Cup.  On today's episode,...

Thrifting has long been a favorite pastime of Seattleites, so much so that we have the biggest Goodwill store in the world.   But buying second-hand is also an economic survival strategy for people who can't pay full price on back-to-school clothes or home appliances.   Now, in this increasingly expensive city, there's a sense that thrift stores are no longer fitting that need. On today'...

It's music festival season. Seattle's own Bumbershoot is just days away. But music festivals across the country are on shaky financial ground, and their futures could be in trouble. Over the past few years, dozens of small festivals have been canceled, and even the biggest ones are showing some signs of softening demand.  On today's episode, why is it so hard for this generation of music fest...

For decades, owning a home was considered a golden ticket to economic security. The reality looks a lot different today -- the median price of a single-family home in Seattle is around $1 million, and the greater Seattle area is the third most expensive in the nation.  So, why do prices keep going up? And what would it take to make the dream of owning a home in this city affordable again?&nbs...

Millions of people are asking tools like ChatGPT questions every day. But your questions don’t just fly up into the ether. They go to a real place.  AI has a backend, and it looks like massive data centers sprawling across farmland in places like central Washington.   Data centers provide the essential infrastructure needed to run AI apps and everything else we do on the internet....

It's been almost 25 years since the Nisqually earthquake, the last "big one" to hit Seattle.  But the region is due for an even bigger one -- one that could be more massive than the underwater quake that just hit off the coast of Russia.  The Nisqually quake did at least $2 billion worth of damage across the Puget Sound region. It hit Seattle’s historic brick and stone buildings ha...