Interesting news that Boeing is starting back its 787 production line...in South Carolina. Metro Seattle is their home base and where most of their workforce is, but they're opting to go with their ununionized plant in this case.
South Carolina is about as conservative a state as they come, but it has also become a rather globalized industrial locale in the last quarter-century, not the textile-mill mecca of my youth. A friendlier business climate and a less-hostile political environment for a firm that is both symbolic of globalized econ and of fossil-fuel use makes since; an increasingly green and computer-centric Washington State might not be as interesting in Boeing as they used to be.
When Seattle got its basketball team a half-century ago, Boeing was working on the Super-Sonic Transport plane that was supposed to be the next big thing; hence, they got christened the Supersonics. The SST got shelved when the cost of production and pushback on sonic booms, leaving the supersonic field to the Anglo-French Concorde and a Soviet alternative that Aeroflot flew to select locales. Circa 1970 Seattle was so Boeing-centric, that naming the team the Sonics was like the Milwaukee Brewers or the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Seattle's has released the Kraken (their new NHL team) and may have started to release Boeing as well.
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