The Zone Of Scarcity & Global Developments

Vikram Mansharamani published his global developments to watch from 2026 to 2031. These were a few that I found interesting:

Bio-fabrication technologies advance rapidly enabling human organs to be printed on demand. A new industry of “body mechanics” emerges and utilizes AI-driven prediction models to pre-emptively replace joints, bones, and organs before they fail. The expected lifespan of a child born in 2030 rises to 151 years.

Advancements in quantum computing lead to a geopolitical crisis as all formerly- secure communications become instantaneously vulnerable. Each breakthrough leads to a bump in gold prices as investors fear the possibility of quantum-enabled theft of cryptocurrency. Cybersecurity re-emerges as an area of top concern for corporate boardrooms, nation states, and individuals.

Deepfake technologies become indistinguishable from real life, leading to mass human confusion and cognitive dissonance. Reality Defender emerges as the world’s hottest company as it secures elections by providing voters assurance of authentic messaging from candidates, thereby saving democracy from being hijacked by technologically-savvy foreign actors.

A boom in next generation nuclear technologies combines with improved hydrocarbon extraction efficiency to keep energy prices contained in the face of exploding demand from technology applications and data centers. As copper emerges as the world’s most strategic resource, the Great Powers shift their focus from the Middle East to the Andean region.

The insatiable consumer appetite for protein continues indefinitely. Restaurants start disclosing the protein content of menu items, and Coke introduces a high-protein soda. Public health deteriorates as Americans’ religious focus on protein leads to elevated consumption of sugars and artificial sweeteners.

The global use of GLP-1 drugs skyrockets as an oral pill becomes readily available and is covered by most health insurance plans or government health offices.

Artificial intelligence generates deflation, leading to structurally rising unemployment and elevated debt levels.

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We are drowning in information and data. So much so that we’re obese in the mind. The same way the human body was not prepared for a world of abundant food, and we thus transformed our cities into feeding zones full of fat people, the human mind is not prepared for a world with infinite content and information. Less than two decades into social media and the world is already full of morbidly obese minds that cannot think or focus, let alone produce anything novel anymore.

Even the best of us are mentally overweight! There are few, if any, original ideas anywhere. Everyone, everywhere is in a constant, social-media induced mimetic trance, mistaking repetition for thought while parroting the same words as those in our little echo chamber.

The only solution is to shut it all out. I’ve come to the realization that selective ignorance on the other hand; I’m talking actual willful, intentional ignorance, is not only blissful, but is a holy virtue.

It’s the kind of ignorance that is deliberately oblivious to what is going on in the world because none of it matters an iota in the grand scheme of one’s life. It’s the kind of noble, savage and ruthless ignorance that doesn’t even waste energy saying: “I don’t care.” It’s just blissfully above to the noise, present only with what matters, here and now.

As the pace of things accelerates and the never ending cycle of hysteria continues, it’s dawned on me that none of it really matters. Sure, individual events may matter to some people, but because of how we’re wired and how the internet and social media have connected us all, the number of events that can (a) happen and also (b) be brought to our attention is infinite.

Which in short means that everything matters all the time. But when everything matters all of the time, then the only reaction for the mind and body is to become numb. In other words, nothing means anything or matters any more. This is not a way to live.

Attention, at the end of the day, is all we really have. It’s finite. It’s super super super finite. We have so little time. We have only so much energy. It’s hard to focus at the best of times, and here we are, on a daily basis, being either:

Distracted by things inside of a phone-size shopfront that most of us will either never have (picture-perfect women, hotels, cars, etc), or
Inflamed by things on that same stupid screen which we have no relationship to or influence over, happening in other parts of the world, thousands of miles away.

The end result of all this stupidity (for 99.9999% of people) is just a LOSS of attention. I’m sure some of you have found inspiration or motivation from these screens (this can happen), but if we’re all being TRULY honest with ourselves here, we can admit the truth: we can be just as inspired by a walk on the beach or a conversation with a loved one too.

When I’m on my deathbed, I won’t remember wtf I saw on Twitter or Instagram from all those endless hours of looking at the screen. But I will remember the time I spent with the people who I truly loved. To find a solution, one must first understand the problem, and the problem is twofold:

Nobody is entirely immune to the siren call of dopamine. These platforms hack your biology in such a way that they hook you. Thus you are not fighting the platform, but your own biology – and this consumes energy. Energy that could be much better spent elsewhere.
Our cups are already full. Those of use who are strong learners have already had our fill, especially if you’ve been online for the last 5 – 10 years. We’re well past the point of diminishing returns. We have all the information we could possibly need to live and lead meaningful lives. Stuffing our minds with more stuff won’t improve anything, and at this point is just a distraction from living in the real world and implementing the things we’ve already learned or know.

The beautiful thing about value is that it always migrates to the zone of greatest scarcity. As a zone attracts more attention (and thus value), it begins to lose scarcity, until it gets saturated, and then one day, the value migrates away to a zone where scarcity prevails. People are starting to realize that being online is quickly becoming uncouth and that they need to run away. But where?

The answer: offline.

The Zodiac’s Cipher, China’s Strength & Social Media

There’s a new theory from an amateur code-breaker, Alex Barber, that links two of America’s most infamous unsolved cases: the 1947 mutilation murder of Elizabeth Short (known as the Black Dahlia) and the late-1960s killings by the Zodiac Killer.

Baber, a 50-year-old self-taught investigator from West Virginia with autism and no formal education beyond high school, claims both crimes were committed by the same person: Marvin Margolis (who later used the alias Marvin Merrill until his death in 1993). Baber says he cracked the Zodiac’s unsolved 13-symbol cipher (Z13) using AI-assisted methods, revealing the name “Marvin Merrill.” He connects this to the Black Dahlia case through circumstantial links, including:

Margolis’s brief living arrangement with Short shortly before her murder.
His Navy medical training explaining the surgical precision in her dismemberment.
A 1992 sketch by Margolis titled “Elizabeth” depicting a mutilated woman with the word “ZODIAC” hidden in the shading.
The possible murder site near a Compton motel called the Zodiac Motel, which Baber suggests inspired the killer’s later moniker.

Retired LAPD detectives (Rick Jackson and Mitzi Roberts) and former NSA codebreakers (Ed Giorgio and Patrick Henry) praise Baber’s work as compelling and “overwhelming” circumstantial evidence, with low probability of coincidence.

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The 2018 US semiconductor embargo against China changed the world. The age of cooperation and globalization was over.

With the 2018 embargo, the US essentially punched China on the nose. At the time, China had little choice but to take the punch. Take the punch and prepare its own economy for a future in which it would be less vulnerable to further US embargoes.

For seven long years China went on a diet, and went to the CrossFit gym. And as all of China’s savings were captured—through tighter capital controls, the suspension of IPOs, and the concentration of bank lending—and redirected towards China’s industrial supply chains, returns for investors were dreadful.

When Donald Trump came back to power in 2025, China, which had spent the past seven years getting toned, showed up and essentially said: “Gloves off. If you want a fight, let’s go. You tariff me, then I will tariff you. You embargo me, then I will embargo you.

China’s response was to de-Westernize its supply chain, at great cost to its investor base, to economic growth, to domestic consumption and even to its birth rate.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the US did absolutely nothing to de-Sinify its own supply chain. While China hit the gym, the US partied. And partied hard: US budget deficits expanded, but pretty much just funded expansions in social benefits—social security, Medicare and Medicaid. Between 2018 and 2025, US government debt increased from $21 trillion to $38 trillion. However, none of the US $17 trillion in debt went into building new Hoover dams, new Tennessee Valley Authorities, new interstate highways or new railroads.

China’s push to de-Westernize its supply chains came at great cost to the Chinese economy and Chinese society. Would US policymakers countenance such judicial repression?

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Readers used to outnumber non-readers 2 to 1. Now non-readers outnumber readers 3 to 1.

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One third of 8th grade girls spend 7+ hours per day on social media. Meaning: that’s pretty much all they do.

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The frustrating truth is that we don’t really know for sure what the digital empire of short-form video is doing to our minds. But a systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory.

Several studies in the meta-analysis reported structural and functional differences in the prefrontal cortex and reward circuits among high-frequency users, while others found cognitive flexibility reductions and altered dopaminergic reward responses. None of this proves causation. But taken together, they suggest a plausible mechanism: a daily diet of hyper-rewarding, rapid-fire stimuli may gradually reshape attention and regulatory systems in ways that weaken our attentional control.

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The probability of men getting married increases with their income.

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The share of people between 20 and 24 who are not in a job, or seeking work, or in school, or raising a child has nearly doubled in the last quarter-century in both the UK and the U.S.

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A list of small things you can do, that compound positively over time, from Kevin Dahlstrom (founder of Bolt.health) who just turned 55 and said he feels much healthier now than he did 10+ years ago:

Walk 15+ miles a week, even if you do other exercise.
Eat real food. Not too much.
Stop drinking alcohol, even in moderation.
Explore minimalism (it’s not what you think it is).
Get 8 hours of quality sleep each night.
Invest in experiences, not things.
Stay lean. Men in particular are obsessed with muscle mass these days, but bulk doesn’t age well. The goal is to be strong but lean. The fittest guys in their 50s and beyond aren’t meatheads, they’re lean guys who are serious about a sport.
Stop drinking sodas and sugary energy drinks.
Show up on time, every time. Poor time management limits success more than most people realize.
Find a hobby and pursue mastery. You can’t have a happy life without a passionate pursuit that isn’t your vocation. Your work—even if you enjoy it—isn’t enough.
Try psychedelics. It’s one of those things everyone should do at least once, and it might be the breakthrough you’ve been looking for.
Be a lifelong learner. Your brain is just like a muscle—if you don’t feed and flex it regularly, it will atrophy.
Find your purpose. People with a strong sense of purpose are happier and live longer. Lack of purpose sucks energy and magnifies depression.
Only take advice from people who embody the traits you want to have. Talk is cheap—emulate those who have done it.
The goal is not to retire and do nothing, it’s to build a great day-to-day life that you don’t need to escape. A life of leisure is a slow death.
Have fun! Do frivolous and silly things that make you smile.
Accumulate assets—things that grow in value over time. It’s the #1 habit of rich people, and it can be done in tiny chunks. It becomes addictive (in a good way).
Make your own decisions. We live in an era where most of what society tells us is wrong. Don’t be afraid to break from societal norms.
Go all in on family. Get married, stay married, have kids. Burn the boats. In the end, family is all that matters.
Be ruthless with your time. Money comes and goes. Time only goes. Audit your calendar ruthlessly—cut the trivial, double down on the meaningful, and spend your hours like your life depends on it.

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Stocks are still the most expensive in the United States, by far, but the rest of the world also became more expensive this year after an enormous rise in global stock prices almost everywhere.

Income Traps, Unhappiness & Magic Internet Money

I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a Basic Needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the “Participation Tickets” required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024. Using conservative, national-average data:

Childcare: $32,773
Housing: $23,267
Food: $14,717
Transportation: $14,828
Healthcare: $10,567
Other essentials: $21,857

Required net income to live: $118,009. Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500.

I then ran the numbers on what happens to a family climbing the ladder toward that break-even number. What I found explains the “vibes” of the economy better than any CPI print.

Our entire safety net is designed to catch people at the very bottom, but it sets a trap for anyone trying to climb out. As income rises from $40,000 to $100,000, benefits disappear faster than wages increase. I call this The Valley of Death. Let’s look at the transition for a family in New Jersey:

1. The View from $35,000 (The “Official” Poor)

At this income, the family is struggling, but the state provides a floor. They qualify for Medicaid (free healthcare). They receive SNAP (food stamps). They receive heavy childcare subsidies. Their deficits are real, but capped.

2. The Cliff at $45,000 (The Healthcare Trap)

The family earns a $10,000 raise. Good news? No. At this level, the parents lose Medicaid eligibility. Suddenly, they must pay premiums and deductibles.

Income Gain: +$10,000
Expense Increase: +$10,567
Net Result: They are poorer than before. The effective tax on this mobility is over 100%.

3. The Cliff at $65,000 (The Childcare Trap)

This is the breaker. The family works harder. They get promoted to $65,000. They are now solidly “Working Class.” But at roughly this level, childcare subsidies vanish. They must now pay the full market rate for daycare.

Income Gain: +$20,000 (from $45k)
Expense Increase: +$28,000 (jumping from co-pays to full tuition)
Net Result: Total collapse.

When you run the net-income numbers, a family earning $100,000 is effectively in a worse monthly financial position than a family earning $40,000. At $40,000, you are drowning, but the state gives you a life vest. At $100,000, you are drowning, but the state says you are a “high earner” and ties an anchor to your ankle called “Market Price.”

In option terms, the government has sold a call option to the poor, but they’ve rigged the gamma. As you move “closer to the money” (self-sufficiency), the delta collapses. For every dollar of effort you put in, the system confiscates 70 to 100 cents.

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Bitcoin was never the future of money. It was a battering ram in a regulatory war. Now that war is wrapping up, and the capital that built it is quietly leaving. For 17 years we convinced ourselves that Magic Internet Money was the final state of finance. It was not. Bitcoin was a regulatory battering ram, a one purpose siege engine built to smash a specific wall: the state’s refusal to tolerate digital bearer assets.

That job is basically done. Tokenized US stocks are already being issued. Tokenized gold is legal and growing. Tokenized USD has a market cap of several hundred billion dollars. In wartime, a battering ram is priceless. In peacetime, it is a heavy, expensive antique.

Now that the financial rails are being upgraded and legalized, the Gold 2.0 narrative is collapsing back into what we actually wanted in the 1990s: tokenized claims on real assets.

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There is genuine and widespread despair in the U.S., but the primary reason isn’t economic, rather it is because human fulfillment requires more than material wealth, which in our quest for more stuff, we have forgotten. People need physical communities, and while the US excels at material wealth, it’s achieved it, especially in the last forty years, at the expense of the aesthetic, communal, stable, and personal, and so the bad vibes are justified.

Societies come with strong forces that shape expectations and even shape people’s understanding of a ‘good life.’ That is, society provides citizens playbooks that they are urged to follow which are supposed to end in happily ever after, and ours is that you can become a millionaire on your own terms as long as you hustle hustle hustle — and when that doesn’t happen, it’s very lonely and humiliating, because we as a culture have put all our eggs in that one particular basket. At the expense of community, friendships, and even family.

When you give your citizens a cultural script, built on the material, that promises hard work will lead to success, and then your policy design ensures it doesn’t, people will end up both economically frustrated, as well as spiritually empty, sitting in their living room streaming the latest movie wondering what exactly is the point of life. Or, they will feel they have failed at the material, while also having little else to give them meaning.

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In his investment classic Winning the Loser’s Game, Charley Ellis tells a great story about healthcare and simplicity:

“Two of my best friends, who are at the peak of their distinguished careers in medicine and medical research, agree that the two most important discoveries in medical history are penicillin and washing hands (which stopped the spread of infection from one mother to another by the midwives who delivered most babies before 1900). What’s more, my friends counsel, there’s no better advice on how to live longer than to quit smoking and buckle up when driving. “

The Lesson: Advice doesn’t always have to be complicated to be good.

Identity Switching, Work-Life Balance & College Graduates

One of the great causes of suffering is this maddening worry about what others think of us. I can go into its causes by pointing to evolutionary psychology and our hunter-gatherer roots, but that’s neither novel nor interesting. Rather, I want to delve into the asymmetry between what we know about ourselves, and the uncertainty surrounding what others know of us. Because at its core, the worry about what others think is ultimately a function of uncertainty.

Whenever we interact with someone – whether in-person or online – a gap emerges between who you are, and who you are presenting. This is why the person you are with your boss isn’t the same as the person on the couch watching Netflix. Or why the person you are with your best friend isn’t the same as the person you are with an acquaintance. Each relationship contains a culture of behavior that you oscillate between, which means that you’re constantly presenting a different version of yourself across a wide range of interactions.

What this means is that it becomes increasingly difficult to know who you really are. If a certain version of you emerges with this individual, but in the very next moment you toggle another set of behaviors with another, then that means your very identity is switching upon context. And the more you have to maneuver between various projections of yourself, the more difficult it becomes to get a handle on what “yourself” means in the first place.

This is why you’re likely exhausted after large social gatherings, and yearn to turn on the TV and watch something brainless until you drift off to sleep. The fatigue is not caused by the rigor in which your mouth is moving to talk, but rather by the constant switching of identity that occurs in these situations. When you’re worried about what someone thinks of you, it’s rarely about that person’s opinions of you. It’s about your own opinions of yourself.

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Is A.I. taking jobs from young college graduates? It depends on the job.

Stanford economists studied payroll data from the private company ADP, which covers millions of workers, through mid-2025. They found that young workers aged 22–25 in “highly AI-exposed” jobs, such as software developers and customer service agents, experienced a significant decline in employment since the advent of ChatGPT:

On the other end of the spectrum, they found for entry level workers in fields like home health aides, there is faster employment growth. That suggests this isn’t an economy-wide trend. The decline in employment really seems to be more concentrated in jobs that are more AI-exposed.

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A new analysis of 39 nations reveals where employees enjoy the healthiest mix of work and personal life and on the other end of the spectrum – where long hours, limited leave, and lack of support take the greatest toll. The study assessed 10 factors including working hours, paid leave, commute length, parental support, remote work availability, and happiness scores.

Unsurprisingly, the United States finished dead last, ranked 39th out of 39. The US suffers from some of the longest working hours in the study, averaging 1,799 annually. It is the only country in the ranking without federally mandated paid annual leave or paid parental leave, and Americans devote only 14.6 hours per day to personal care and leisure.

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Interesting point on why college students are putting less effort into class: courses don’t prepare them for real jobs (like they should), so they have to spend more and more time making up the difference after class:

“A student said that coursework doesn’t prepare students to answer interview questions for finance and consulting jobs. The only way to get ready is through extracurriculars or on one’s own time. By sophomore year, his friends were fully absorbed in the internship-recruiting process. They took the easiest classes they could find and did the bare-minimum coursework to reserve time to prepare for technical interviews.“

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From Kevin Kelly on how the relationship between book publishers and authors has changed:

“Traditional book publishers have lost their audience, which was bookstores, not readers. It’s very strange but New York book publishers do not have a database with the names and contacts of the people who buy their books. Instead, they sell to bookstores, which are disappearing. They have no direct contact with their readers; they don’t “own” their customers.

So when an author today pitches a book to an established publisher, the second question from the publishers after “what is the book about” is “do you have an audience?” Because they don’t have an audience. They need the author and creators to bring their own audiences. So, the number of followers an author has, and how engaged they are, becomes central to whether the publisher will be interested in your project.

Many of the key decisions in publishing today come down to whether you own your audience or not.”

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Canada’s Great Condo Crash: For years, low interest rates fueled a big-city condo-flipping frenzy. Profits got bigger and condos got smaller. Now the bubble has popped, leaving behind thousands of unsellable, unlivable units.

In the first quarter of 2019, the average Toronto condo cost $560,000. By the first quarter of 2022, they had soared to $808,000. Since that peak, the market has been in a painful reset.

By the first quarter of 2024, average condo values in the city had dropped by over $100,000 to $696,000, and they have continued to fall. As of this spring, the inventory of unsold units in Toronto totaled more than 23,000, which would take nearly five years to sell at the current rate. Of those, nearly 2,000 are built and sitting empty, more than 11,000 are under construction and roughly 11,000 more are in pre-construction projects.

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As of July, there has been no reduction in import prices since Liberation Day, which are measured pre-tariff. Thus, foreign exporters in aggregate are not absorbing the tariff costs by reducing prices. This means most or all of the tariffs are being paid by American consumers and American businesses. For context, it takes about a 13% reduction in prices to offset a 15% tariff, or a 16% reduction in prices to offset a 20% tariff.

This shows up in a combination of higher consumer goods prices and/or compressed business margins of goods-heavy businesses, depending on how quickly businesses are able to pass those prices on to consumers (which will vary by industry and company; those with in-demand products can eventually pass on price increases, and those with thin margins have to eventually pass on price increases).

Consumers on the higher end of the income spectrum are less likely to change their consumption behavior and thus will basically just pay the tariffs, giving the government more revenue. Consumers on the lower end of the income spectrum are more likely to have to curtail consumption because their disposable income is scarce.

Another excellent newsletter from Lyn Alden on tariffs, fiscal income/spending, monetary policy and the implication on global economies and asset prices.

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This chart shows the change in active housing inventory by state for 2025 compared to the average of 2018/2019. Orange colors mean higher inventory levels and prices are susceptible to fall, while green colors mean very low inventory and likely still price increases.

Hedonic Adaption, Gold & The Dungeon Of Insularity

“I love the challenge … it’s one of the greatest joys of my life, but does it fill the deepest wants and desires of my heart? Absolutely not.”

That was the killer quote from a recent interview with the world’s number one golfer, Scottie Scheffler, that went viral this week. And I think this one went viral for a reason: It taps into a universal truth or two about humanity that we know at a subconscious level, but that rarely shines through the manic malaise of our achievement-oriented culture.

“It feels like you work your whole life to celebrate winning a tournament for a few minutes – it only lasts a few minutes, that euphoric feeling,” Sheffler further explained. “You win it, you celebrate, get to hug my family, my sister’s there, it’s such an amazing moment. Then it’s like, ‘OK, what are we going to eat for dinner?’ You know, life goes on.”

While his language is a touch more approachable, Sheffler is practically quoting ancient wisdom literature attributed to the world’s then (in the 10^th century, BC) number one, King Solomon, in Ecclesiastes: “Then I considered all that my hands had done… and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

That fading feeling is explained in the field of behavioral economics through the term “hedonic adaptation.” This theory notes that we, as humans, can marshal an enormous amount of energy to achieve certain goals, only to experience a pretty rapid dilution of the intensity felt in peak moments.

The other upside of hedonic adaptation is that it doesn’t just apply to the good and great things we experience, but also to the bad and even horrible. Yes, humans are designed to bounce back pretty quickly, and that, too, is explained by hedonic adaptation.

So, if being the very best in the world at something doesn’t provide lasting satisfaction, what does?

“Every day when I wake up early to go put in the work, my wife thanks me for going out and working so hard. When I get home, I try and thank her every day for taking care of our son.… I’d much rather be a great father than I would be a great golfer. At the end of the day, that’s what’s more important to me.”

Arthur Brooks may summarize it best: “Money, power, pleasure, and fame won’t make you happy. Faith, family, friends, and meaningful work will.”

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Between 2003 and 2024, the amount of time that Americans spent attending or hosting a social event declined by 50 percent. Almost every age group cut their party time in half in the last two decades. For young people, the decline was even worse. Last year, Americans aged 15-to-24 spent 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did in 2003.

As late as the 1970s, the average US household entertained friends at home about 15 times a year and went out to a friend’s place about every other week. After the 1970s, Americans pulled back from just about every form of socializing. By the late 1990s, the share of Americans who said they visited the homes of friends in the previous week had declined by more than 40 percent.

Women have long been the keepers of the family social calendar. Wives, not husbands, historically planned the quilting parties, the bridge games, and the neighborhood potlucks. But in the second half of the 20th century, many women swapped unpaid family jobs for salaried positions. In 1970, right around the inflection point of America’s social decline, the share of women between 25 and 54 who participated in the labor force surged past 50 percent for the first time; it’s currently near 80 percent. As more women poured their weekdays into 9-to-5 work, men failed to take over the logistical labor required to fill out the social calendar, and adult gatherings gradually eroded in the age of the dual-earner household.

Meanwhile, parenting norms have changed. Americans used to have more kids whom they watched less; now they have fewer children whom they watch more. Between 1975 and 1998, they found, mothers increased the amount of time they spent with their kids by about 200 minutes a week. For married fathers, the increase was even more dramatic—about 240 minutes per week. Parents are more anxious than they used to be, not only about neighborhood crime and playground accidents, but also about their children’s achievements.

It’s impossible to host a cocktail party when your second job is to be your son and daughter’s part-time limo driver who escorts them to 13 weekend extracurricular activities (that you kind of forced them to do, in the first place).

Then, there are the screens. The television landed in the US living room in the middle of the 20th century like an asteroid from deep space, displacing settled habits and sending ripples through the social fabric. Between 1965 and 1995, the typical American’s leisure time grew by about 300 hours a year, but we seem to have spent almost all those hours watching more TV. By the 1980s, people who said that television was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every other form of social interaction.

I don’t like the simplistic idea that smartphones are purely anti-social. Digital technology has not obliterated our social connections but rather warped them. Many of us spend hours every week with our favorite TikTok stars, YouTube gurus, Instagram influencers, Twitter gadflies, podcast buddies, Reddit friends, and other people we kind of know and sort of care about, even though they might not even know we exist, at all. Keeping up with these people—watching them, listening to them, giving ourselves over to them—necessarily requires pulling our focus out of the world of flesh and blood. To be a citizen of the Internet is to spend hundreds of hours inside the minds of virtual people we couldn’t party with, even if we desperately wanted to.

Finally, while one needn’t be drunk to have a good time with others, I cannot ignore the fact that the great American party deficit has coincided with an extraordinary decline in teen drinking. Last year was the first on record, going back to 1975, that fewer than 50 percent of high school seniors said they’d ever had a drink of alcohol.

Like the rise of the dual-earner household, the turn against alcohol among the same young people whose socialization has plunged is a complicated phenomenon that defies easy good-bad categorization. I cannot deny that abstinence is good for young people’s livers; but I worry that it’s part of a larger set of behaviors that’s bad for their hearts.

We’ve built ourselves a world of greater professional ambition, more intensive parenting, and lavish entertainment abundance. But in making this world, we’ve lost a bit of each other. If summoning these magnificent technologies incurs the death of our social lives, a permanent surge of anxiety, and the long-term demise of deep friendships, then we’ll have built ourselves a glittering dungeon of insularity and called it progress.

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What if gold goes the way of diamonds? The supply of gold is limited – limited by miners’ ability to dig it out of the ground and process it, what happens if a new supply of gold comes online? Not a new mine, but actual alchemy. A company researching fusion energy, Marathon Fusion, believes that it could produce gold alongside energy:

Marathon’s proposal is to also introduce a mercury isotope, mercury-198, into the breeding blanket and use the high-energy neutrons to turn it into mercury-197. Mercury-197 is an unstable isotope that then decays over about 64 hours into gold-197, the only stable isotope of the metal.

While the science needs to be confirmed, it seems not out of the realm of possibility. If so, it has big implications for fusion energy AND the gold market itself.

Another industry is already facing pressure from an ‘artificial’ competitor: Diamonds can now be made in labs that mimic the earth’s extreme pressure and temperatures, but for a fraction of the price. A decade ago, such man-made gems were novel. Today they are mainstream, and increasingly challenging the perception of diamonds as a luxury accessory.

This is bad news for the ‘natural’ diamond industry, which is facing incredible pricing pressure. The industry’s response seems to be to double down on the natural aspects of traditional diamonds and hope that they can at least hold the high end of the market.

Nobody knows if large scale production of gold will eventually come online. Even if it does, it is years, if not decades, into the future. The point here is to think through the hypothetical impact of an abundant gold supply. For example, would gold still a be a store of value if it’s supply were dramatically increased? Would we find new and novel uses for a now abundant shiny metal?

If you were involved in the diamond business in 2016, and knew how the market for manufactured diamonds would mature over the next decade, you may have done things very differently.

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There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment. If you dig a little closer a striking story emerges: Unemployment is climbing among young graduate “men,” but college-educated young women are generally doing okay.