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1905, probably: "The oil industry spent 17x more on drilling equipment than it brought in in revenue"

• jzb 3y ago
  Or 1848: “Prospectors spent 17x more on picks and shovels than they recouped by finding gold.”
  • RetroTechie 3y ago
    Iirc some got lucky & struck gold. Most didn't, and moved on empty handed. But businesses that did prosper long-term, were the ones that catered to the gold seekers: sellers of equipment, food stores, bars & room-for-rent type facilities. So you could say that (on average) the 'meta-suppliers' did better long-term than the gold seekers themselves.
    • lesuorac 3y ago
      Whats the definition of long-term? A lot of mining towns became ghost towns (i.e. Cerro Gordo [1]) and in those situations even the merchants are out of business. It's not like we stopped mining silver though; the prospectors moved on to other areas. Like if TPUs replace GPUs then Nvidia is looking at a decrease in growth. The horse shoe sellers go out of business just as fast as the horse shoe maker does. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Gordo_Mines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Gordo_Mines
• itioo 3y ago
  Difference being oil is still economically useful whereas nvidia and current AI won’t be in 100+ years. It’s not necessarily a building block to anything, either. Some alternative to transformers or some biotech based AI could come along with zero connection to current AI This is just another virtual economy, because the prior generations have monopolized the real economy, pump and dump to maintain social order
• moomoo11 3y ago
  Wrong industry.