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416 points floverfelt | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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krainboltgreene ◴[] No.45055969[source]
> All major technological advances have come with economic bubbles, from canals and railroads to the internet.

Is this actually correct? I don't see any evidence for a "airflight bubble" or a "car bubble" or a "loom bubble" at the technologies' invention. Also the "canal bubble" wasn't about the technology, it was about the speculation on a series of big canals but we had been making canals for a long time. More importantly, even if it was correct, there are plenty of bubbles (if not significantly more) around things that didn't have value or tech that didn't matter.

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tptacek ◴[] No.45056300[source]
I don't know enough about the early history of the airline industry but there was very definitely a long series of huge bubbles in the railroad industry.
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daveguy ◴[] No.45058644[source]
I would be very interested in reading about huge bubbles in railroad, airline, or any other industry. Do you happen to have references (genuinely asking; the original article didn't include any references)?

Edits--

Found one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

Another good one:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Holding_Company... (from cake_robot here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45056621)

For reference, apple and spotify links to the Derek Thompson podcast in reply below (thank you!):

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...

https://open.spotify.com/show/3fQkNGzE1mBF1VrxVTY0oo

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1. tptacek ◴[] No.45058665[source]
There was just a long Derek Thompson podcast with a Transcontinental Railroad scholar about this! (That's why I knew about it.)

The whole subtext of that podcast was how eerily similar the Transcontinental Railroad was to AI (as an investment/malinvestment/prediction of future trends).