What is Thucydides’s Trap, and are we headed toward it?

It seems somehow fitting that this piece was published the same week that Apple became the first company in history worth more than a TRILLION dollars. For all his vision and brilliance, Steve Jobs was a toxic egomaniac who alienated everyone he was ever close to, including his own daughter. The way he treated her was nothing short of monstrous.

I get asked a lot these days about the next recession, primarily when I think it might happen and what I think might cause it. I’m honestly less concerned about the next recession than I am a prolonged conflict, hot or cold, between the US and China. Both sides are playing a dangerous game right now, and the odds are against the inevitable transfer of power ending without bloodshed at some point in the future.

If you signed up for MoviePass at some point in the last year or so, then you probably realize that the service is on its last leg. Thankfully, there are alternatives. I’ve been really satisfied with AMC’s lower tier Stubs offering, which allows me to buy tickets to Tuesday movies (any movie, regardless of format) for $5 apiece.

Imagine trying to convince your parents to give you $250,000 to start a bookstore that doesn’t really exist, in an imaginary place called “the Internet” which no one has heard of or knows how to get to, and you basically have Thanksgiving dinner in the Bezos house in 1995. Jeff somehow convinced his parents to throw in $245,000 to get him started, and that stake is now worth $30 billion, a 12 million percent return.

Nothing to see here except a beautiful story of a grocery store employee with a well developed sense of empathy whose simple act of kindness made our dark world a little brighter for a moment. Well done, sir.

Y tho?

Seriously, as fascinating as it is that these things have been frozen for eons and then just come back to life and immediately start eating stuff, does it strike you as a really good idea to revive these things?

Orwell was a scary visionary, but even he couldn’t have imagined the power of smartphones and our addiction to them. They’ve taken over our lives, and we’re long past the point of no return. We crafted our own fetters.

I’ve been writing about the looming student loan crisis for a while now, and the statistics just keep getting worse. Money problems are a factor in the vast majority of divorces, but the specific problem of student loan debt is now responsible for 1 in 8 divorces. As total student loan debt closes in on the $2 trillion mark, you can expect to see a lot more of this.

Stop the world, I want off.