Wait But How?

Hate waking up this early @waitbut | Boost the channel!

The Tax Machine wishes you a productive week. @waitbut | Boost the channel!

Pirates were way too quick with this one. The movie literally came out yesterday globally 💀 @waitbut | Boost the channel!

Gift from Egypt 🇪🇬 @waitbut | Boost the channel!

The question is never who has how much. It's who allocates the next unit of resource best to maximize humanity's future. The answer hasn't changed in 200 years. It's not the civil servants. @waitbut | Boost the channel!

Beyond a certain level of wealth, money is no longer about consumption—it's about capital allocation. Economics, at its core, is just an allocation problem. You have finite resources and infinite uses. Who decides where what goes? Imagine a school playground. 100 kids, packs of Pokémon cards handed out randomly. You let it play out. Very quickly, an order emerges. The good players accumulate rare cards, collectors sort, negotiators strike deals. No one planned it. And yet every card ends up in the hands of the one who gets the most value from it. The system maximizes the total happiness of the playground. That's the invisible hand. Now bring in the teacher. She finds it unfair. Leo has 50 cards, Tom has 3. She confiscates, redistributes, enforces equality. Three immediate effects. The good players stop playing—what's the point. The bad ones have no reason to improve; they'll get their share anyway. Trades collapse. The playground is equal, and dead. She maximized equality; she destroyed happiness. The teacher's problem is that she can't have the information the playground had collectively. That's Mises's economic calculation problem, formulated in 1920. The USSR tried to solve it for 70 years with the Gosplan. Result: shortages, lines, collapse. Not because the Soviets were dumb, but because the problem is mathematically unsolvable in centralized mode. When Musk has 200 billion, he doesn't consume it—he allocates it. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Every dollar is a bet on the future. And he has a track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. He's demonstrated he knows how to spot massive problems and allocate resources to them with spectacular returns. The state has a track record too. Hospitals collapsing, education declining, debt exploding, public services degrading despite constantly rising budgets. The market identifies good allocators; politics identifies good communicators. Profit isn't an end goal—it's a signal. It says: you've allocated scarce resources to a use that people value enough to pay for. The bigger the profit, the greater the value created. When Starlink turns profitable, it means millions of people in rural areas finally have internet. When a ministry runs a deficit, it means it's consuming more than it produces. One creates, the other destroys, and we call that redistribution. In our societies, there are two categories of actors: entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. The entrepreneur takes personal risk to identify a problem, mobilize resources, create a solution. If he's wrong, he loses. If he's right, his customers win, his employees win, his suppliers win, the state collects taxes. He's the basic cell of human progress. The bureaucrat takes no personal risk. His salary is guaranteed. At best, he maintains an existing rent. At worst, he destroys it through overregulation, forced bad allocation, perverse incentives that discourage those who produce. But in no case does he create. Look at the last 50 years. iPhone, civilian internet, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. All private inventions, driven by entrepreneurs, funded by venture capital. Not a single ministry has invented anything that's changed your daily life. France has become the world's laboratory for bureaucratic drift. 57% of GDP in public spending, absolute record. A sprawling administration, a tax system that penalizes wealth creation. Result: falling behind the United States, Germany, Switzerland. Deindustrialization. Exploding debt. And the worst part is that bad allocation self-reinforces. The more the state takes, the less entrepreneurs create. The less they create, the less tax base there is. The more the state borrows and taxes. Perfect negative feedback loop. The teacher thinks she's helping, and every year the playground produces less. In our societies, it's always the entrepreneurs who advance civilization. Bureaucrats at best maintain a rent, at worst destroy it. No society has ever progressed by taxing its creators to subsidize its managers.

What a generational performance by Spain 🇪🇸🔥 Decades ahead of Argentina in terms of performance & strategy!! 🔥 @waitbut | Boost the channel!

Physically preparing for the finals 🇦🇷🇪🇸 @waitbut | Boost the channel!

Here we go 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @waitbut | Boost the channel!

Bu Fransiya O’zbekistondan ham yomon o’ynayapti, to’g’risi. Dux yo’q, xarakter yo’q, hamma piyoda yuribdi. Taktika yo’q. Deshamp shunchaki omadi kelib qoldi, yaxshi avlod o’yinchilariga uchrab. Juda bir rasvo murabbiy. O’chakishib qaysarlik qiladi. 2022 yildayoq ketishi kerak edi. Tezroq Zidan kelsin.

Eh idk what happened to France this game.. @waitbut | Boost the channel!

Gold Is Money. Everything Else Is Credit. Most iconic quote of J.P. Morgan. He said it under oath, testifying before Congress in December 1912, a few months before he died. The exact words in the transcript were “Money is gold, and nothing else.” The old man was 75, half the country hated him, and a congressional committee was trying to prove he secretly controlled American finance. Many forget it was Morgan, personally, who coordinated the leading bankers, trust companies, and financiers to inject liquidity into the system during the Panic of 1907. No Federal Reserve existed. There was no lender of last resort, no bailout mechanism, no printing press to fire up at 2 a.m. There was one man in a library on Madison Avenue, locking the presidents of New York’s biggest trusts in a room and refusing to open the door until they pledged the money to stop the run. He effectively acted as the central bank of the United States, and he prevented a complete collapse of the financial system with little more than his own credibility and a pocket watch. But here’s the part almost everyone forgets. Morgan wasn’t a paper man. The empire underneath all that credibility was built on the gifts of Mother Nature... Rock, ore, and metal. He financed things you could drop on your foot. Start with iron. In 1901, Morgan assembled U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation in history and buried inside that deal was control of the Mesabi Range, the greatest iron ore district in America. The world saw a steel company. Then came nickel. In 1902, Morgan merged the Sudbury miners and the Orford refinery into the International Nickel Company. The Sudbury Basin, a deposit seeded by a meteorite strike nearly 2 billion years ago held most of the nickel on Earth, and nickel-steel armor plate had just become the most strategic material of the naval arms race. Orford’s owner was given a simple choice by his largest customer: cooperate or lose everything. He cooperated. Inco would control the nickel market for the next 40 years and armor the fleets of the First World War. Then copper. In 1906, the House of Morgan joined the Guggenheims to form the Alaska Syndicate and develop Kennecott, a mountain in the Alaskan wilderness where the ore assayed as high as 70% copper, so rich it was shoveled straight into sacks without milling. Getting it out required building 196 miles of railroad across canyons and living glaciers, in temperatures of 40 below, to a port that barely existed. Serious money said it was impossible. Morgan money built it anyway. And in the panic year itself, 1907, while Morgan was saving the banking system with one hand, he was absorbing Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad into U.S. Steel with the other, with the personal blessing of a president desperate enough to look past his own antitrust crusade. See the pattern. The man who defined money as gold did not spend his life shuffling abstractions. He spent it financing iron, nickel, copper, coal and settling the ledger in metal. He understood something that has been carefully unlearned over the past century: Credit is a promise, and promises are only as good as the collateral and the character behind them. Gold asks for neither. Gold simply is. Now consider the timing, because history has a savage sense of humor. Morgan died in March 1913. The Federal Reserve was born that same year. The private lender of last resort was replaced by an institutional one and the institutional one came with a printing press. Measured against the metal Morgan called money, the dollar has surrendered more than 99% of its value in the years since the man died and the machine took over. Central banks, the issuers of the credit, have been buying gold at a record pace, quietly, year after year, vault by vault. Ask them why and you’ll get a paragraph about diversification. Morgan answered the same question in one sentence, under oath, in 1912. Gold is money. Everything else is credit. @waitbut | Boost the channel!

Who’s going to watch the 🇫🇷 vs 🇲🇦 game tonight? @waitbut | Boost the channel!