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Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Oct 17, 2026 3:56 pm There were 2 major railroad bubbles in the US (culminating in 1873 and 1893) at what could be thought of as the midpoint of the industrial age expansion. The two tech bubbles (2000 and 2026?) won't be the speed bumps people expect based on history but rather the end of the expansion.

There were 2 major railroad bubbles in the US (culminating in 1873 and 1893) at what could be thought of as the midpoint of the industrial age expansion. The two tech bubbles (2000 and 2026?) won't be the speed bumps people expect based on history but rather the end of the expansion.

AI Overview

Your observation draws a fascinating parallel, but it highlights a fundamental shift in how technology impacts economic cycles: The 1873 and 1893 railroad bubbles were infrastructure crises, whereas modern tech bubbles represent the saturation of automation and efficiency.

While the railroad panics were indeed "speed bumps" that ultimately paved the way for massive physical and industrial expansion, there is a compelling structural argument that today's technology cycles are ushering in the mature, late-stage phase of the digital expansion rather than just another temporary pause.

Here is a direct comparison of why the 19th-century railroad bubbles led to further growth, and why modern tech cycles might signal the tail end of rapid expansion.



Why the Railroad Bubbles Were "Speed Bumps"

When the banking firm Jay Cooke & Co. collapsed in 1873 due to worthless railroad bonds, it triggered the Long Depression. In 1893, reading the same script, over-extended railroad companies went bankrupt, causing a massive employment crisis.

However, these were capital supply shocks, not demand shocks. The physical infrastructure was left behind. Once the debt was wiped clean through bankruptcy, new operators bought the tracks for pennies on the dollar. Because the physical tracks were now incredibly cheap to operate, they radically lowered the cost of doing business across the United States. This directly fueled the Second Industrial Revolution, allowing companies like Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel to thrive. The expansion kept going because the physical frontier was still wide open.

Why Today's Tech Cycles May Signal the End of Expansion

If the railroad era was about building the network, the digital era has been about optimizing the network. The dot-com crash of 2000 wiped out speculative capital, but left behind fiber-optic cables that built the modern internet. The current AI and tech cycle of the mid-2026 era represents the apex of this optimization.

However, you can only optimize a system so far. Here is why this phase looks more like an endpoint than a midpoint:

Diminishing Marginal Returns on Efficiency: Railroads allowed a farmer in Iowa to sell corn to New York—a fundamentally new market. AI and software allow a corporation to do its accounting with 90% fewer people. This increases corporate margins, but it doesn't create a new physical product or expanding consumer base.

The Consumption Paradox: Industrial expansion relied on a growing, well-paid workforce that could buy the products being manufactured. Advanced software and AI shift the share of economic wealth from labor to capital. If automation scales to the point of displacing massive swaths of the workforce, aggregate consumer demand risks stagnating.

The Saturation of Data and Attention: The digital frontier is bounded by human attention and available data. Unlike the physical world of 1873, where millions of acres of land and resources were yet to be integrated into the economy, the digital world is hitting a ceiling where we are running out of novel data to train models and human hours to monetize.

The Verdict

You are likely correct that these tech cycles won't play out like the railroad panics. The railroad crashes were the growing pains of a young, physical economy learning how to scale. The modern tech bubbles—especially the ongoing shakeout of the mid-2020s—resemble the consolidation of a mature, hyper-efficient digital economy. Rather than a speed bump on the way to a larger expansion, it feels like the final polishing of an incredibly complex machine that has already conquered its frontier.

The news that three of the Pacific Northwest’s top companies — Microsoft, Amazon and T-Mobile — are prime financiers of President Donald Trump’s unapproved and garish White House ballroom, to the tune of a combined $20 million, sums up the new Gilded Age.

We have some of the wealthiest and most powerful companies since the robber baron days, greasing the skids for an authoritarian vanity project that the public doesn’t want, and no one approved of or consented to.

The 67 individuals and companies who gave a total of $330 million appeared to get something in return: federal government contracts or favorable regulation, and in some cases, pardons, The Washington Post reported.

Microsoft won a $144 million contract from the U.S. Air Force for cloud services. Amazon won a Department of Homeland Security cloud contract for $2.6 billion. T-Mobile also got contracts. Coincidence? Maybe. But you don’t see other big local companies like Costco, that don’t have federal contracts, embroiled in expensive back-scratching like this.

That the amounts were a secret, to be learned only via a leak, was the cherry on top.

Higgenbotham wrote: Fri Oct 16, 2026 12:20 pm

"This report shows that rebuilding soil health is one of the few measures that can improve nutrient density, yields and climate resilience all at once, and farmers can do it profitably today.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h ... 63325.html

Higgenbotham wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 4:01 pm I saw the discussion about food being the largest part of a family's budget in 1968. Again, they weren't eating factory farmed meat back then so, comparing apples and apples, food is much more expensive than what most people actually pay today if someone is applying standards from 50-60 years ago.

Vegetables are now half as nutritious than 60 years ago. Experts have worked out why
Fewer than a third of wheat varieties used in bread released since the 1960s meet the recommended zinc target, due to poor soil quality

Rebecca Whittaker
Thursday 08 October 2026 10:11 BST

Wheat, apples and carrots are half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s, a new study has suggested.

Due to declining soil quality the nutrients in fruit and vegetables have also drastically declined.

The study, by researchers at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), found twice the number of fruit and vegetables need to be eaten today to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper than 60 years ago.

Researchers found food such as cereals and bread, as well as carrots, apples and peas had lost 20 to 50 per cent of several key nutrients.

Sian Ferguson, Trust Executive at The Mark Leonard Trust said: "Healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food. This report shows that rebuilding soil health is one of the few measures that can improve nutrient density, yields and climate resilience all at once, and farmers can do it profitably today.”

Higgenbotham wrote: Thu Oct 15, 2026 2:38 pm

By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.

https://fortune.com/article/how-did-us- ... n-parents/

The printing press and textbooks were great technologies that worked for the industrial revolution. They were also low cost. Maybe a few private schools will pop up that continue to use them while shunning computers but that won't be enough to turn the tide.

Amazon, Microsoft and T-Mobile among top donors to Trump’s ballroom
Oct. 15, 2026 at 11:48 am
By Alexis Weisend
Seattle Times business reporter

Three Seattle-area corporate giants, Microsoft, Amazon and T-Mobile, collectively donated $20 million to fund President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project, according to an internal spreadsheet obtained by The Washington Post.

The donations put them among the project’s top donors.

Although the White House shared the names of some donors last year, the list of 57 donations over $100,000 details just how much money donors were willing to hand out.

Tech titans Apple and Nvidia each donated an eye-popping $25 million. But Redmond-based Microsoft’s $10 million was also one of the project’s top 10 publicly named donors. Seattle-based Amazon and Bellevue-based T-Mobile each donated $5 million.

The donations have been criticized as an attempt to curry favor with the president. The Washington Post report alleges that some donors, which include individuals, have benefitted from favorable regulatory decisions, government contracts and — in one case — a pardon for a family member.

Microsoft and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A T-Mobile spokesperson declined to comment.

Previously, the companies would not specify how much money they had donated.

Higgenbotham wrote: Thu Sep 10, 2026 11:28 pm

Higgenbotham wrote: Thu Sep 10, 2026 12:23 pm What is your view regarding the end of industrial civilization and the fact that an information age has not happened?

I'll speak for myself but I interpret Burja to be saying essentially the same thing - that industrial civilization is reliant on a set of social technologies and, as those technologies degrade, industrial civilization degrades.

I'll use references to previous posts to illustrate this using the example of one social technology that industrial civilization is reliant on - the public education system in the United States. A previous post made reference to the printing press which came on the scene in 1455 before the advent of the industrial revolution. In less than 500 years, the printing press and other things, but the printing press being key, eventually enabled the mass production of school textbooks that were low cost, standardized and uniform. These textbooks appeared in nearly every or essentially every public school classroom in the United States.

A previous post referenced the 66 years from Kitty Hawk to the Boeing 747, the years from 1903 to 1969. What public schools accomplished during those years was a high school graduate was ready to hit the factory floor. Practically any male high school graduate could go to the employment office at the front gates of a factory, be employed that day, and work on that same factory floor until retirement, supporting a wife and children. Some could go onto college and do the same. No BS, no list of job requirements, no online application, no ridiculous multi-week interview process, just a diploma and a willingness to show up and be trained, which was enough to be factory floor ready.

That system (the US public school system as it existed from approximately the years 1900 to 1970) is part of what designed and built the Boeing 747 right here in America without any reliance on any other education system. No H1-Bs needed. It was a social technology tailored specifically to the industrial revolution. It developed over centuries.

As the US public school system degraded little by little starting circa 1971 or so, as the US entered the maintenance phase of a declining civilization, that didn't suddenly mean that the degradation of the public school system automatically began to tailor it for the new incoming information age. What it meant was the degradation of the public school system degraded the functioning of the industrial production system, slowly but surely, and that's it, period. The public school system, after all, wasn't designed over centuries, seamlessly interlocking with other social technologies to produce factory floor human robots willing to work 45 years until retirement only to be presented with a company watch or some such thing, science lesson by science lesson, math lesson by math lesson, reading lesson by reading lesson, ass paddling by ass paddling as needed, to just degrade little by little and therefore be just perfect for the new incoming information age paradigm. That's not how systems work.

As the public school system degrades, the industrial production process will degrade. People will home school. People will send their kids to a variety of private schools that prepare kids for a variety of things. People will pull their kids out of schools and do nothing. Public schools will shut down in some areas. Where public schools shut down in some areas, maybe some of those people will move so they can continue to send their kids to public school and maybe some won't. But none of that is suddenly going to produce information-age-ready 18 year olds. The industrial production system is going to continue to degrade, collapse, hit bottom, not entirely going away, and then something, some spark, some series of sparks over decades and centuries will create a new set of social technologies specifically tailored for the new information age or whatever it is that is going to come.

Innovation
Education
The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents
By Sasha Rogelberg
Reporter

July 12, 2026, 7:56 AM ET

In 2002, Maine introduced a program to allow students widespread access to technology in school.

In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.

By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.

King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.

Earlier this year, in written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology. He said Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the previous one.

While skills measured by these tests, like literacy and numeracy, aren’t always indicative of intelligence, they are a reflection of cognitive capability, which Horvath said has been on the decline over the last decade or so.