Phil Auger

Something interesting

[Ethical Skeptic ☀ @EthicalSkeptic]

Not good news on the Cancer front... 😕

4 mo surge in Cancer Treatment Expenditures during LOW Medical Svcs/Drug Inflation confirms prior aggressive growth trend.

Constant-$ Cancer Treatment growth is at 28.5% excess as of EOM April 2026. $55.3 billion in added cancer costs on backs of US Citizen.

Now that the 2023 CDC SEER release has validated my models - this is very concerning...

The current growth rate is 18 times the legacy growth in this inflation-adjusted metric.

This is our lens into the future of cancer diagnosis and mortality trends.

[Shooter McGavin @ShooterMcGavin]

Worst drive of all-time candidate

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Elon Musk avait dit un truc qui m'avait marqué sur l'allocation de ressources. En substance : passé un certain niveau de richesse, l'argent n'est plus de la consommation, c'est de l'allocation de capital.

Cette phrase change tout.

L'économie, dans le fond, c'est juste un problème d'allocation. Tu as des ressources finies et des usages infinis. Qui décide où va quoi ?

Imagine une cour de récré. 100 enfants, des paquets de cartes Pokémon distribués au hasard. Tu laisses faire. Très vite, un ordre émerge. Les bons joueurs accumulent les cartes rares, les collectionneurs trient, les négociateurs trouvent des deals. Personne n'a planifié. Et pourtant chaque carte finit dans les mains de celui qui en tire le plus de valeur. Le système maximise le bonheur total de la cour. C'est ça, la main invisible.

Maintenant fais entrer la maîtresse. Elle trouve ça injuste. Léo a 50 cartes, Tom en a 3. Elle confisque, redistribue, impose l'égalité. Trois effets immédiats. Les bons joueurs arrêtent de jouer, à quoi bon. Les mauvais n'ont plus de raison de progresser, ils auront leur part. Les échanges s'effondrent. La cour est égale, et morte. Elle a maximisé l'égalité, elle a détruit le bonheur.

Le problème de la maîtresse, c'est qu'elle ne peut pas avoir l'information que la cour avait collectivement. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises, formulé en 1920. L'URSS a essayé de le résoudre pendant 70 ans avec le Gosplan. Résultat : pénuries, queues, effondrement. Pas parce que les Soviétiques étaient bêtes, parce que le problème est mathématiquement insoluble en mode centralisé.

Quand Musk a 200 milliards, il ne les consomme pas, il les alloue. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Chaque dollar est un pari sur le futur. Et lui a un track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. Il a démontré qu'il sait identifier des problèmes immenses et y allouer des ressources avec un rendement spectaculaire.

L'État aussi a un track record. Hôpitaux qui s'effondrent, éducation qui décline, dette qui explose, services publics qui se dégradent malgré des budgets en hausse constante. Le marché identifie les bons allocateurs, la politique identifie les bons communicants.

Le profit n'est pas une finalité, c'est un signal. Il dit : tu as alloué des ressources rares vers un usage que les gens valorisent suffisamment pour payer. Plus le profit est gros, plus la création de valeur est grande. Quand Starlink est rentable, ça veut dire que des millions de gens dans des zones rurales ont enfin internet. Quand un ministère est en déficit, ça veut dire qu'il consomme plus qu'il ne produit. L'un crée, l'autre détruit, et on appelle ça redistribution.

Dans nos sociétés il y a deux catégories d'acteurs. Les entrepreneurs et les bureaucrates. L'entrepreneur prend un risque personnel pour identifier un problème, mobiliser des ressources, créer une solution. S'il se trompe il perd. S'il a raison, ses clients gagnent, ses employés gagnent, ses fournisseurs gagnent, l'État collecte des impôts. Il est la cellule de base du progrès humain.

Le bureaucrate ne prend aucun risque personnel. Son salaire est garanti. Au mieux il maintient une rente existante. Au pire il la détruit par excès de réglementation, mauvaise allocation forcée, incitations perverses qui découragent ceux qui produisent. Mais dans aucun cas il ne crée.

Regarde les 50 dernières années. iPhone, internet civil, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. Toutes des inventions privées, portées par des entrepreneurs, financées par du capital risque. Pas un seul ministère n'a inventé quoi que ce soit qui ait changé ta vie au quotidien.

La France est devenue le laboratoire mondial de la dérive bureaucratique. 57% du PIB en dépenses publiques, record absolu. Une administration tentaculaire, une fiscalité qui pénalise la création de richesse. Résultat : décrochage face aux États-Unis, à l'Allemagne, à la Suisse. Fuite des cerveaux. Désindustrialisation. Dette qui explose.

Et le pire c'est que la mauvaise allocation s'auto-renforce. Plus l'État prélève, moins les entrepreneurs créent. Moins ils créent, moins il y a de base fiscale. Plus l'État s'endette et taxe. Boucle de rétroaction négative parfaite. La maîtresse pense qu'elle aide, et chaque année la cour produit moins.

Dans nos sociétés, ce sont les entrepreneurs, toujours, qui font avancer la civilisation. Les bureaucrates au mieux maintiennent une rente, au pire la détruisent. Aucune société n'a jamais progressé en taxant ses créateurs pour subventionner ses gestionnaires.

La question n'est jamais qui a combien. C'est qui alloue le mieux la prochaine unité de ressource pour maximiser le futur de l'humanité. La réponse depuis 200 ans n'a jamais changé. Ce ne sont pas les fonctionnaires.

[Voodoo the Viking @VooTheViking]

Tim Horton’s is kinda like Canada. It was once a great place to go but now is just a dirty mess where no one speaks English, everything costs too much and is just riding on its past credibility.

[Benjamin Grundy 🇦🇺 @benjamingrundy]

Since they keep asking for it. Here's the Canadian one:

[Phil Auger @mowitlow]

@twitandrewking Used to be an apple orchard:)

[Andrew King @twitandrewking]

Q: “What was it like being a kid in the 80s?”

*deep reflective pause, stares into the distance

A: “It was a world where everywhere and everything was a mix of nightmare and fantasy”

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Peter McCaffrey @peteremcc]

I promise I am not joking...

This is Canada's spaceport.

Last month, the federal government paid $200 million to a company called Maritime Launch Services to lease it for 10 years.

[Bruce @bruce_barrett]

Canada showcases a prototype of the high speed rail from Toronto to Montreal.

[Bet105 @bet_105]

Tiger Woods has arrived at the Masters

[Tom Quiggin @TomTSEC]

The Alto High Speed Rail project is not designed for transportation.

It is designed to transfer large amounts of taxpayer money to friends of the Liberal Party through studies, assessments, planning, evaluations, appraisals, environmental reports and Indigenous consultations.

It is unlikely in the extreme that it will ever get built.

ALTO - by the way - is simply a rebadging of SNC Lavalin.

[Shazi @ShaziGoalie]

🇨🇦 isn’t collapsing. It’s splitting in two.

Young 🇨🇦 now rank 71st in happiness globally while those over 60 are still in the top 10. That gap didn’t happen by accident. Housing became the economy. Older generations built massive wealth just by holding assets, while younger 🇨🇦 are locked out unless they have high incomes or family support. Youth unemployment is pushing ~15% and nearly a million young people aren’t in work or school.

But there’s another layer underneath this. Labour supply has surged. The TFW program has expanded far beyond seasonal work into retail, service, and even parts of white-collar jobs. At the same time, higher-value roles are being offshored. More competition, fewer quality opportunities. That’s not just stagnation, that’s pressure on wages and on the future.

And yet 🇨🇦 still has everything most countries don’t. Resources, talent, world-class universities, a top-tier AI ecosystem, deep institutional capital. On paper, this should be a powerhouse economy. The problem isn’t what 🇨🇦 has. It’s how it’s being run.

If that gap gets addressed, this story flips fast. If it doesn’t, the divide only gets worse.

[Ethical Skeptic ☀ @EthicalSkeptic]

Virtucide

A gradual societal decay driven by shallow moral reasoning that dissipates coherence and resilience and undermines the structure of a healthy society - resulting in the extinction of that society.

When you mollycoddle the worst of society, don’t act surprised when they show you no mercy in return. No good deed goes unpunished – but misplaced virtue punishes everyone.

[Phil Auger @mowitlow]

Yup:). The old ‘newfie firing squad! 😂lol

[Andrew King @twitandrewking]

This was like the Holy Grail to have as a kid in the 80s. You felt like a millionaire if you got this for a birthday, payment for lawn work etc.

[Phil Auger @mowitlow]

😂

[adam auger @augeradam]

@SParchewski Sasquach coffee company, their beans are grown on the warm sunny slopes of mount Mickinley and roasted by master Sasquach coffee baristas. Who need south America to grow our coffee? Elbozos UP.......

[Cary Kelly @CaryKelly11]

Fascinating! @JoelSalatin talks about ancient grasses that his pigs have awakened.

Nobody can identify these grasses & the leading theory is that their seeds have lay dormant for 100s of years, waiting for the right conditions.

This is environmentalism by participation.

[Phil Auger @mowitlow]

… and the city of Ottawa rail system has a top speed of 80 km/h….and cost billions….

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Seventeen years ago, a steel-wheel train shattered records by reaching an astonishing 574 km/h.

[John Lamoureux @JohnLamoureux1]

Last mow ⁦@thegenesisinv⁩ at the Riv. ⁦@PGATOURAgronomy⁩ ⁦@JohnDeere⁩ ⁦@PremierEquip1⁩ ⁦@StotzEquipment⁩

[Dad Jokes @Dadsaysjokes]

The funeral of the man who invented tupperware has been postponed while they try to find the right lid for his coffin.