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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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I'm not so knowledgeable for tractors specifically, but there definitely were car bubbles. When people realized that cars have reached a state close to horse-drawn carriages, will predictably become even better in the near future, and probably replace horses altogether, a host of new companies with various variants of car technology cropped up. Of course, as you should know, almost all modern cars have used the same basic style of engine, the internal combustion engine (and in fact, mostly a specific kind of it).

But it wasn't always so. There was a variety of companies with their own engine designs that overwhelmingly failed. And of course various companies experimented with non-engine related designs that also didn't work out. Some companies successfully made the switch early enough, but many just failed. You could do everything right, correctly predict the dominance of cars, invest in a reasonable company, and lose absolutely everything anyway.

The main difference now is that many of the current competitors are already giants so they can write off a lot of losses without going broke, and it's unclear whether governments will even allow them to outright fail. But a bubble popping on several of them (or even all of them - maybe the real breakthrough will come from a smaller competitor, though I consider it very unlikely) and them losing substantial valuation seems like a foregone conclusion, even if I think that eventually AI will be a technology of the future.

My understanding is that something similar happened for railways, even without the significant differences in engines (?). Revolutionary technology that generated multiple bubbles along the way that bankrupted many people.