Toy Wars
"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shipping Delay" As I pen this, most media sources are reporting that a deal has been reached to reopen the Strait of Epstein to shipping. Color me skeptical. I am guessing that Polymarket betting on Israel’s breach of the ceasefire in Lebanon is now laying odds measured in hours, not days. Oh, to be on the Crime Family’s side of that bet, out to nine or twelve digits in crypto. This new cold war did not arrive with marching bands and shoe-banging speeches so much as with a buzzing sound overhead and a polite notice that your delivery may be delayed. It is not, as the old one was, a contest of two lumbering superpowers flexing behind an iron curtain as they fought proxy wars in the two-thirds world. It is a war of swarms and shortages, of cheap flying toys and boating machines and breathtakingly expensive asymmetries. The battlefields stretch from the black earth of Ukraine to the salt water off the Arabian Peninsula, t...
