| Well. There's enough quality content in this thread to start a dedicated cable television channel, a la Viceland ;) Not sure if it's my favorite. And the subject is more technology than "tech". But the talk that keeps haunting me is Michael Dearing's lecture from the Reid Hoffman "Blitzscaling" class at Stanford: Heroes of Capitalism From Beyond The Grave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vCdfa_aeI8 Dearing draws upon an obscure letter by Daniel McCallum, superintendant of the New York and Erie Railroad, written to his bosses in the 1850s. In the report, McCallum bemoans the stress and frustration of operating a railroad system spanning thousands of miles. All of the joy and magic he used to revel in whilst running a fifty mile stretch back in his home town has long since dissipated. Furthermore, the unit cost per mile seems to be exploding rather counter-intuitively! Dearing goes on to elucidate the absolute necessity of the railroads ("the thing to know about the railroads is: they were startups once") themselves. As guarantors of civilization and progress. Beacons bringing light and reason to the dark swamps of ignorance and inhumanity. And not just in the physical transport of goods, people and ideas across the continent. But as the wealth created from that creative destruction remains the best cure for all of our other inimical maladies: poverty, injustice, disease and stagnation. So, no pressure. But civilization depends upon you! Links to References in the Talk: Estimates of World GDP: From One Million BC to the Present http://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf The Process of Creative Destruction by Joseph Schumpeter http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CreativeDestruction.html The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674940529 Report of D. C. McCallum to the stockholders of the New York and Erie Railroad https://books.google.com/books?id=4Gc9AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA33#v=one... Things As They Are In America by William Chambers https://archive.org/details/thingsastheyare04chamgoog |