A couple of months ago I had a post wondering about the possibility of a Great Crash occurring in 2026. There were various reasons for concern, which I tend to focus on because in investment terms I’m what’s known as a permabear. Meaning I always feel like everything is about to collapse.

I was thinking more on this subject this past week for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was talking to an acquaintance who is a financial advisor and I told him how I thought the economy was about to go smash and that the trigger was going to be a debt crisis. This rhymed with something Andrew Ross Sorkin says in the introduction to his recent book 1929: “The almost singular through line behind every major financial crisis is one thing: debt.” If you had parents or grandparents who grew up in the Great Depression you know this because they probably drilled it into you. When things get bad, debt is the multiplying force, making everything much worse.

When I said this to the financial advisor he immediately asked what kind of debt I was talking about. I said every kind. Or all three levels, as these things are usually arranged. To go through them in order:

(1) National debt: A few days ago the U.S. announced that their debt had hit $40 trillion, a number that would have been simply unimaginable only ten years ago. In that same decade (actually it’s been less than ten years) the debt has doubled. As a result, the U.S. has spent almost $1.4 trillion in the last 12 months alone on interest payments, which is more than they spend on their military or on Medicare (and they spend a lot on those things). The numbers are staggering, and unsustainable. Note how this chart just begins in 1995.

There are only a few ways of getting out of such a debt spiral. First, the U.S. could renounce their debt completely and effectively declare bankruptcy. This is unlikely. Second: the usual right-wing talking point has it that the economy can grow its way out of any debt. This is frankly impossible now, so much so that my jaw actually dropped when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview just a couple of days ago that “there’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that.”

This is a fantasy and Bessent knows it. If he didn’t, he found out when he tried to bring bond rates down by buying up debt (at the same time as he was claiming $40 trillion was just a number), an action that brought less than 24 hours of relief. Nevertheless, his boss would echo Bessent’s statement just a little later the same day, saying “The way you take care of debt is with growth . . . the growth will take care of that [the debt] very easily.” The commander-in-chief then made the bizarre pronouncement that “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.” No one knew what he was talking about.

So that leaves the third alternative, inflation, which is already rising as a result of tariffs, an energy shock, and the rate at which the Federal Reserve has been printing money since COVID. This is the most likely scenario, but it’s one where the solution brings a host of other problems in its wake.

There are two things I’d add. First of all, I’ve been talking about the American situation only because any American crisis is going to be felt all over the world, maybe even worse than in the U.S. And second, the situation in the U.S. is all the fault of their federal government. The war in Iran was a war of choice. The One Big Beautiful Bill (a budget bill) blew up the debt. Trade wars and tariffs are inherently inflationary. What’s happening now is the result of deliberate policy decisions. None of it had to happen.

(2) Business or corporate debt: I think this is a huge problem but not discussed as much because much of the debt is hidden in the labyrinth of private equity and the shadow banking system. Enough is known about the sheer amount of debt being concealed though to cause some anxiety, as credit spreads are widening and lenders are looking to insure themselves (read: cover their asses) by creating the sort of hedges that will sound familiar to anyone who remembers 2008. Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Special purpose vehicles. Subprime lending. It’s all coming back. They haven’t even changed the names.

The purpose of all these maneuvers is to keep debt off the books. And we’re talking a lot of debt, though the exact figure is being kept as secret as possible. When the tide goes out though, as Warren Buffett has said, we’re going to see a lot of people have been swimming naked.

(3) Personal debt. Consumer debt and credit card debt is at an all-time high and personal savings are now at their lowest levels since it became possible to keep track of such things. What I find particularly concerning though is how margin debt in the U.S. (money borrowed to invest in the stock market) has exploded by nearly 50% in the past year, going from $1 trillion to $1.4 trillion. One place you see this is in the take-off in the number of leveraged ETFs that are being launched, though the preferred language now is to call these “enhanced” rather than “leveraged” funds. Note in this chart that the numbers for 2026 are lighter shaded because they only count funds launched so far, not for the full year.

A little leverage can be a useful part of any investment portfolio, juicing your gains, but leverage works against you when things go south. This was seen in a couple of examples just this month: (1)  the frequent shutdown of the Korean stock exchange as single-stock leverage ETFs went into death spirals and (2) the collapse of the Situational Awareness hedge fund, which skyrocketed by making leveraged bets in AI infrastructure stocks but then had to be sold off when its positions (they were leveraged up to 400%) became untenable.

Retail investors buying stock on margin is of course one of the things that created the conditions for the Great Crash in 1929. It is taking off again now as more and more people come to view investing as the equivalent of gambling or sports betting. The consequences may be the same. Most people will lose.

No one can say for sure what’s going to happen to the global economy in the months ahead, but my concern is only growing more pronounced as I see these conditions worsening and not much in the way of a rational political response. Meanwhile, any increase in interest rates now will be seen as the sounding of the final trumpet in the Book of Revelation, which perhaps it would be since the debt accumulated has been the result of cheap money and any tick upward in its cost will be disastrous. There are a lot of bad loans out there.

So I think we’re moving ineluctably towards something more profound than a mere stock market correction, and I think the triggering event for a significant economic crisis is going to be related in some way to these debt issues. But as a permabear I always expect disaster, which means I’m always happy to be proven wrong. I hope for the best while fearing the worst. Nevertheless, I feel so sure about a crash coming within the next year that I’m happy to put a pin in this prediction. A year from now we’ll see if I was right or wrong.

In a story out of England that has gotten a lot of attention online a Cambridge professor named Jason Arday resigned last week after it turned out that he had plagiarized some of his work, including his Ph. D. thesis, and was a fantasist in telling the story of his life.

There’s no good way to spin this story for Cambridge University. Arday is both Black and claims to be neurodivergent, though I doubt the latter diagnosis. (I’ve used this site as a soapbox in the past to point to the shameless way that autism, a very real affliction and disability, has been turned into a scam by grifters.) As a dual threat in the game of victim credentialism, these were used by Arday to advance his career in a predictable way that I still found a bit surprising. I hadn’t thought the rot had progressed this far.

From the accounts I’ve read, Arday’s research was thin and he wasn’t highly regarded as a teacher. In the video clips I’ve watched he either talks in jargon or seems lost. And yet he impressed the faculty at Cambridge so much with his unimpressive qualifications (unimpressive even if true) that he became the youngest Black professor in the university’s history and went on to receive several honorary doctorates (!). Then, when exposed, Arday made things worse for himself by claiming he was the victim of racism in all this. Apparently calling people out on their bullshit is white privilege.

As an aside, and lest anyone think this is a left-wing mind virus, the playbook here was written by the Whiner-in-Chief with his incessant cries of “witch hunt.” Avoiding responsibility for one’s actions is an imperative today, no matter what your politics.

It seems academia is intent on digging its own grave by doubling down on all of the worst excesses that its critics (mainly on the right) have been accusing it of. What was the hiring and celebration of Arday but virtue signaling? And to what end? What I’ve never been able to understand about the death spiral higher education has gone into is why they are following this course when there isn’t any public or student demand for it. I’ve nothing against teaching critical race theory if that’s what students want to learn about. But it isn’t. In a long essay appearing in The Atlantic, “Why I Quit the Tenure Track,” Tyler Austin Harper observes “I had long privately believed that the specter of student demand was being used as justification to pass legislation that only senior administrators and a few tenured radicals were excited to see put in place.” Exactly, and it’s been that way since this started.

Things were already going downhill when I was in university, back in what I think of as the first wave of political correctness. The old guard of the professoriate, stuffy white men who fell asleep sometimes in seminars (honest!), were being replaced by modish tenure-hungry radicals who were, like Arday, seen as “stars” because they were media-friendly and always said the right things. Professionally, they may not have been great scholars but what they were good at was networking and exploiting the academic spoils system. Gender, race, or (now) neurodiversity were just part of their toolkit for getting ahead and milking higher education for its few remaining rewards.

If you have a system that rewards this kind of thing, more of this kind of thing is what you’re going to get. Which, in turn, makes universities look even worse at a time when their public reputation is already in free fall. It also smears the otherwise commendable goal of achieving diversity, inclusion, and equity with the taint of wokeism.

Arday, once the poster boy for diversity, has now become “professor plagiarism”: the poster boy for the sort of cynical careerism that, always a part of academia, has metastasized in universities everywhere under the false flag of progressivism. This is what end-stage higher education looks like: as the ship goes down the last on board will be the worst products of the system, trying to grab anything that’s left of value and still be on the last lifeboat. I don’t like saying it, or reading about it, but there’s no turning away from the miserable sight.

(The title for this post derives from the book Lowering Higher Education, which I reviewed here.)

I just posted a review of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How it Shattered a Nation over at Good Reports. I didn’t think it was very good, in large part because it didn’t address, directly or at any length, the causes of the crash and what lessons it might have for us in 2026. But on the plus side it did get me wondering.

While a stock market crash like 1929 might be unlikely today, I do think we’re in for rough weather. I went over some of the reasons for this in an earlier post about the collapse of the Canadian subprime lender goeasy, and my concerns have only grown. Two seemingly unstoppable forces are coming together in the U.S., the country that is still the world’s economic driver: (1) inflation brought on by Trump’s tariff regime, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz (which affects a lot more than oil, as if oil wasn’t enough), and the Fed’s easy money policy; and (2) the threat of higher interest rates — the raising of interest rates being the main tool in the toolkit of central banks for fighting inflation. The problem is that higher interest rates dampen economic growth, threaten a lot of bad loans (and there are a lot of bad loans out there, especially in the world of private credit), and make government borrowing vastly more expensive (at a time when the U.S. national debt is hanging around $39 trillion). And so the end of last week saw the reporting of better-than-expected jobs numbers being met with a big stock market dip because of fear that lower unemployment might lead to a rate hike.

On top of all this is the question of whether we are witnessing a bubble in A.I. spending. A.I. has been the sole force driving growth in the American economy for the past year or so and there is some suspicion that it is a bet that is never going to pay off, at least to the point where it will justify the money invested in it. Not to mention the fact that while there will be some A.I. winners, there will be more losers, and those losers are going to make a lot of money disappear.

I have no idea what’s coming next. Contraction? Correction? A dip? A crash? A recession? Stagflation? One thing I do feel confident about is that the market at least as a whole isn’t going to keep rocketing up to the degree it has over the last decade. I do a bit of investing myself and I find nearly everything in the stock market to be overpriced right now. On the other hand, I don’t think people are going to start taking their money out and sticking it under their mattresses anytime soon either. With so much money being passively invested (that is, just buying an index) a lot of inertia builds up in the system. It will take quite a shock to upset all that, but it feels like we’re primed for a shock now and I don’t think it will be easy to ignore when it arrives.

As reported by the CBC this past week:

Canada’s population dropped last year, marking the first time the country has seen an annual net decline in residents since Confederation.

According to the latest quarterly estimate from Statistics Canada, the population of citizens, landed immigrants and non-permanent residents in Canada stood at 41,472,081 on Jan. 1, 2026 — a decrease of 0.2 per cent, or just over 102,000, from Jan. 1, 2025.

StatsCan said that even though the population increased by just over 77,000 people in the first six months of last year, it wasn’t enough to outweigh the decline of almost 180,000 in the second half of 2025.

This preliminary estimate said a reduction in the number of non-permanent residents was the “leading factor in slowing population growth.”

The falling numbers are the result of the policies of the last two Liberal governments to limit the number of permanent and temporary residents. I don’t know whether there will be any long-term effects from this. One immediate effect already being felt is on the housing market and colleges. Foreign students were really pumping up the demand for housing and keeping colleges afloat (as those students pay far more in tuition fees). Just from my own experience, I think it’s also true that new Canadians, temporary or otherwise, were doing a lot of jobs that native Canadians just won’t do. So I think certain industries are also going to be hard hit.

Anyway, it’s an interesting development and seems a meaningful milestone. One I didn’t think I’d ever see. I’m interested if the numbers get adjusted going forward and if the trend continues. For all the talk about getting tough on immigration, I think having people coming here is a net plus. Which means when they don’t come it turns into a net minus.

Last week shares in the Canadian subprime lender goeasy (they don’t capitalize the “g”) crashed 70% and it’s an open question whether the company, which at the start of the week had a market cap of over $5 billion, will survive. For the last several years goeasy has been a champion dividend stock, paying investors big returns. But one of their divisions specializing in loans for autos and “powersports” (ATVs and snowmobiles) recently had to report a much higher than expected amount of charge-offs (loans that were not going to be collected). All dividends have been cancelled. The bloom is off the rose.

Suspicion has now been raised that management knew about the trouble the company was in and was concealing this information from investors. Comparisons have been made to the kind of thing that happened in the mortgage meltdown in 2008, and what is happening with private credit markets now (I should point out that goeasy is not a mortgage lender, nor is it a private credit company, being publicly-traded.) Some class action suits are in preparation, and as of this writing it’s still unclear how this will all play out.

I have some goeasy stock, but not a lot, and at this point I’m assuming it’s a write-off. Easy come, goeasy. Overall I’ve done well as an amateur investor the last thirty years so I’m not jumping out of any windows. You win some, you lose some. Still, the news did make me want to “think in ink” a bit here about what’s going on. What other shoes are waiting to drop?

I think you should always assume the worst in life, as it means you’ll have fewer bad surprises. So where are markets at and where are they heading?

If you listen to voices on the Internet, and there are a lot to listen to, you might have picked up on the increasing note of panic. Does this reflect something real, or is it just that these are the sort of voices that get magnified by the algorithm? I’d be inclined to attribute most of it to clickbait, but there are some prominent voices joining the chorus of doom, with much talk of a “reckoning” that’s on its way. Which leads me to a preliminary observation: if there is some kind of collapse coming it will be, if not the biggest, the most widely predicted in history.

I think there are some real grounds for concern, and I’ll arrange them under four headings. The four horsemen, if you want to pump things up, of the market apocalypse. And just to underline a point in advance: these are all interconnected. Each one affects all the others.

(1) Credit crisis:

In his book MegaThreats the economist Nouriel Roubini uses the concept of debt as a master metaphor for the various faces of the polycrisis the modern world faces, from economics to politics to environmental collapse. He has a point, especially when looking at the big picture. A bill is coming due for the way we’ve been living beyond our means, both as states and as households and individuals. Since 2008 the national debt in the U.S. has gone from $7 trillion to $38 trillion. And it’s set to explode even further, given the massive tax cuts handed out by Trump. The “debt death spiral,” where a government must borrow just to pay interest on the debt, is in sight.

More specifically, however, what we seem to be entering into now is the tight-money part of the credit cycle. This is partly what happened in 2008 with the financial crisis. A lot of bad debt had to be written off, leaving lenders feeling gun-shy. This is the same signal being sent up by what happened to goeasy. And, on a much larger scale, it seems to be what’s behind the headlines regarding the private credit market, whose full exposure to bad loans we can’t determine as it’s not publicly reported. But for sure some lenders are now going to have to take a haircut or go under (again, as in 2008). This will of course have knock-on effects throughout the rest of the economy. Someone is lending lenders that money, after all.

(2) Economic stagnation:

Unemployment numbers in both Canada and the United States have slipped into the red, with Canada losing a remarkable 84,000 jobs just last month (the U.S. lost 92,000). The only sectors that can still be seen as holding their own are health care and some government work. Last year was also a record year for corporate bankruptcies in the U.S. And even the stock market (“the DOW is at 50,000!”) has been kept afloat by questionable means. As I understand it, take away the investment in building A.I. infrastructure and the U.S. economy shrank this past year.

(3) Incoming inflation shock:

In the tight-money phase of the credit cycle prices usually go down. This is what we see already happening in many housing markets, and it comes with its own set of problems. But that doesn’t mean inflation isn’t a bigger threat, and what Trump has done with his scattershot imposition of tariffs and beginning a war in Iran makes it hard not to see prices on essentials (food, energy) going up. Also, given Trump’s resistance to raising interest rates, it isn’t clear to me what his plan would be to address that situation. This may lead to quite a whipsaw effect, and if consumers choose (or are forced) to cut back on their spending that could lead to a greater slowdown in the economy, more unemployment, and market collapse.

(4) AI bubble:

Is all the investment going into AI the sign of a bubble? The current valuations don’t make sense to many analysts. Still, maybe it isn’t a bubble, at least to the extent that crypto is (though I don’t know if I’d characterize crypto as a bubble so much as call it gambling app, which makes it the perfect investment vehicle for our casino/betting economy). As with crypto, or a casino, there may be winners in AI. But there will be more losers, and they now stand to lose a lot, with (again) major knock-on effects throughout the rest of the economy. We’ve already been getting reports of this in connection with rising energy costs due to how much power AI data centers use and predictions of massive job losses. And that’s just the start.

So these are the four big areas of concern I have moving forward. To be honest, the only reason I’m not more full of doom and gloom is that nobody knows anything. We could ride this long bull market for another ten years. But it’s good to keep the potential downside in mind. You’ll often hear it stated how the market, in the long run, always goes up and that all you have to do is invest in index funds and you’ll be fine. Timing the market never beats time in the market, as the conventional wisdom has it. And this is good advice. But I’d want to register two caveats.

In the first place, when the market goes down it can stay down or be flat for ten years or more. It’s done that twice in my lifetime, in the 1970s and the 2000s. You could easily see the last 125 years as consisting of just two or three big booms. So the wealth elevator may be out of order for a while, and the “long run” might need to be longer than most people will want or be able to manage.

The second point is that while it’s true the history of the market is one of growth, there’s no reason to believe in that as some kind of natural law. The market doesn’t have to go up, even in the long run. Because Canada and the U.S. have never suffered a total collapse of their monetary system, with money becoming worthless and “blood in the streets,” doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Just something to keep in mind.

According to some new survey results, about three million Canadian adults are taking GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic or Mounjaro, primarily for weight loss. This would correspond to roughly eight per cent of the population. Another six percent (approximately 2 million people) responded that they would like to take a GLP-1 drug but can’t afford it.

I thought this seemed like a really high number, but apparently in the U.S. it’s even higher, with 11 per cent of Americans surveyed saying they take the medication.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised. Roughly two-thirds of Canadians are reported to be overweight or obese (obesity being the medical condition, affecting about one-third of Canadians). And the numbers have been increasing, especially during the COVID shutdown. In the U.S. the stats are even worse, with just over 40% of Americans being obese. That’s a big (and yes, I’ll say it, growing) problem, and it seems as though these drugs do help people lose weight so they may be helping in that regard. But I still have to shake my head at that amount of drug use among such a large segment of the population. I’m also always surprised at the high rates of obesity. We’re all familiar with these numbers now, but the thing is, when I go out for a walk I don’t see a third of the people I meet as being obese. Not even close. Maybe 1 in 10, tops. The only way I’ve ever made sense of this is by figuring that all the really heavy people stay at home, never leaving their house. Or if they have to go anywhere, staying in their cars. Does that explain it?

I don’t personally take any GLP-1 drugs. I do, however, invest in pharmaceutical companies. I have for years. They’ve always been a pretty safe bet.

The release of the documentary Melania, which is about what the wife of Donald Trump was busy doing during the lead-up to his second inauguration, has been met with a predictable chorus of critical carping. Most if not all of which I’m sure is well deserved. Yes, the film itself was a $40 million bribe that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was making to the Trump family in order to curry favour. And I’m sure it’s every bit as bad and soul destroying a movie as reviewers have been saying. Here’s Mark Kermode, a reliably level-headed Everyman: “It’s horrible. It’s the most depressing experience I’ve ever had in the cinema and I’ve seen A Serbian Film, I’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust. I’ve never felt this depressed in my life in the cinema.”

That may be a fair take, but Melania is not a unique phenomenon. The way celebrities use their money and power to shape the public presentation of their lives is a subject I’ve been banging on about for years. Most recently I talked about how the tennis player Naomi Osaka was being lionized by the media for her attempt to assert “narrative control” of her public image, and related it to other sports figures like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Venus and Serena Williams who had all been the subject of documentary and autobiographical films they had also been involved in the production of. As I put it then:

Everyone wants that kind of control. But who has that privilege? Only the most powerful. Billionaires. Those with “massive social-media followings.” Celebrities who own their own media companies.

Melania Trump is another figure in the exact same mold, and served as a producer on Melania. As I said over ten years ago in a post on celebrity biographies:

Whatever or whoever the subject, the same rules of the dance apply and the “sausage-making process” does its job. There’s nothing sinister or even wrong with that, but you have to always keep it in mind any time you’re getting access to a source that has a clear interest in spinning a story a particular way. Which is to say, any source. The story you’re hearing is the one they want you to hear. It may be true, but that’s beside the point.

I find the way people try to draft celebrities or billionaires onto different political teams ridiculous. Some rich and powerful people may be slightly better than others, but none of them are the friends or (shudder) “allies” of the common people, and their program when it comes to trying to “control the narrative” of how they are presented in the media is always exactly the same. To call it whitewashing or propaganda or advertising for their personal brand should go without saying. No one should be surprised at what Melania is like, not because of the kind of person Melania Trump is but because they’ve already seen this movie and read this book countless times already. If you’re not seeing or reading something that someone doesn’t want you to see or read then it’s just an ad.

Last week I read a news story about an apparent murder-suicide that had happened in the U.S. Except it wasn’t reported as being a murder-suicide. Instead, the police chief was quoted as referring to it as possibly being “a murder-[expletive].”

I have to admit that when I first read this I did a double take. I couldn’t figure out what the police chief had said. It took a couple of moments for the penny to drop.

Was this an example of the “language police” riding again? Apparently it’s been considered wrong for a while now to say “committed suicide” because “commit” implies or suggests that suicide is a sin or a crime, as this is how it’s been looked on in the past, albeit not recently. And by “not recently” I mean probably not in many people’s memory.

There’s still some stigma attached to suicide, but this has more to do with the act itself than the language. But let’s stick with the word. As the medical director for The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention puts it: “We wouldn’t say commit cancer or a heart attack. It implies something that’s willful and morally reprehensible.”

This sounds fair, though I still don’t think I’d want to ban the use of the expression outright. And thinking about it more deeply, I’m not sure the analogy holds. Cancer and a heart attack aren’t acts. People don’t do a heart attack or cancer. Saying that suicide isn’t a “willful” act is also problematic. Surely in some cases, like medically-assisted suicide in this country, it is profoundly willful. To say otherwise would be to deny personal agency in what is an agonizing decision over how to end one’s life.

But the news story went further, choosing to see the word suicide as an “expletive.” This is where things got interesting for me. Let’s take a couple of dictionary definitions of “expletive”:

Merriam-Webster:

a syllable, word, or phrase inserted to fill a vacancy (as in a sentence or a metrical line) without adding to the sense

an exclamatory word or phrase, especially one that is obscene or profane

Wikipedia:

An expletive is a word or phrase inserted into a sentence that is not needed to express the basic meaning of the sentence. It is regarded as semantically null or a placeholder. Expletives are not insignificant or meaningless in all senses; they may be used to give emphasis or tone, to contribute to the meter in verse, or to indicate tense.

The primary definition comes from the Latin expletivus, meaning to fill out or take up space. The secondary meaning defines it as a word considered to be offensive, a profanity or curse.

Now I’ll be honest and say I didn’t even know the primary meaning of expletive as a placeholder. For people my age I think the word expletive first came into public consciousness with the release of the expurgated transcripts of the Oval Office tapes of Richard Nixon, which made famous the phrase “expletive deleted.” My father had a political cartoon of Nixon swearing his oath of office with one hand on the Bible and the oath itself peppered with “expletive deleteds.” I’ll never forget it.

So what has happened is that the word “suicide” has been redefined as an expletive, something offensive to be deleted from reported speech. Not just “committing suicide,” but the suicide itself. Unfortunately, what this has resulted in, at least online, is an awkward grasping for euphemisms or circumlocutions to fill the gap. Most of these have been, frankly, ridiculous. Self-deletion? Or, even worse, “unalive”?

In 2024 Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture actually got in trouble for rewriting a Nirvana exhibit to say that Kurt Cobain had “un-alived himself” rather than “died by suicide.” There was a public backlash to that and it had to be corrected, but the fuss underlined what has become a digital-age phenomenon. The thing is, digital media platforms, most prominently YouTube, can and do demonetize content that runs afoul of speech codes. Which is why, watching some videos or listening to podcasts, you’ll hear certain words blanked out or else substituted for something less likely to trigger the algorithm.

This has become so prevalent that the resulting language even has its own name: algospeak. This refers to the code words that are used to evade automated or human moderation. “Unalive” is one such example.

Algospeak has its critics. Some people in the suicide prevention community, for example, see it as potentially confusing individuals who may be looking for help and who can’t decode the new slang. But it’s interesting to see the forces at work that push language to evolve.

Are we better off today than when I was a kid? In public and high school kids in my generation listened to songs like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and Queen’s “Don’t Try Suicide.” I can still remember in grade 7 or 8 hearing the latter come on at a dance:

Don’t try suicide, nobody’s worth it
Don’t try suicide, nobody cares
Don’t try suicide, you’re just gonna hate it
Don’t try suicide, nobody gives a damn

A teacher who was standing nearby turned to one of his fellow teachers and laughingly remarked: “Nobody gives a damn? That’s not being very positive.” And that’s as far as things went back in the day. Were we made stronger by listening to such lyrics? Or damaged by them? Osbourne was actually sued after someone listening to “Suicide Solution” killed himself but the claim failed at trial. On the broader question of the role language plays in such cases, the jury’s still out.

There were 3,866 investment fraud victims reported in 2024, who collectively suffered a financial loss of $310.6 million, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC). These numbers include all types of investment fraud, not just online scams.

So far in 2025, Maude Blanchette, chair of the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) Investment Fraud Task Force, estimated that there have already been about 3,000 cases reported. The official tally will be released by the CAFC in 2026.

Blanchette said the number of reported cases has levelled off since 2022, but added that scams tend to be severely underreported to begin with. According to the CAFC, just five to 10 per cent of fraud incidents are reported.

“It’s very scary because it means that it is only the tip of the iceberg,” Blanchette said.

I found this news report upsetting for a number of reasons. Assuming only 10 per cent of fraud incidents are being reported, the total annual losses would be over $3 billion. And perhaps double that if 10 per cent is too high. That’s a lot of money, and victims, for one country without a large population.

The thing is, as much as we can shake our heads at the foolishness of people who fall for some of the more obvious scams, I think we are all vulnerable. I even got scammed by one online retailer about fifteen years ago, but it was only for $10 so I didn’t feel too bad. And while most frauds are pretty transparent, I’ve known a couple of people who were fooled by operations that were really quite sophisticated. And with AI these scams are apparently getting even better. The bottom line is: even if you think you’re much too smart to fall for an online fraud, you probably aren’t. You just haven’t been caught yet.

What also bothers me is the inability, or unwillingness, of law enforcement to do much of anything about the problem (I won’t even mention the platforms who are basically accomplices in all this). It’s just too much work for authorities, or too difficult. I knew a lawyer who worked in the field twenty years ago and back then he told me that the police wouldn’t even investigate a complaint that was under $75,000.

I think we should take this kind of thing a lot more seriously, and while there may be jurisdictional issues I don’t see why it should be so hard to crack down on these people. As it is, they all know they can get away with it so it’s a problem that keeps getting worse. And as the numbers indicate, it’s a big problem now.

For those who don’t know, poutine is a French-Canadian dish consisting of french fries covered in cheese curds and gravy. This past weekend the World Poutine Eating Championship was held in Toronto, an event sanctioned by Major League Eating (yeah, I’d never heard of it either) and sponsored by Smoke’s Poutine at their annual Smoke-a-Palooza festival.

Two years ago the contest was won by a guy who ate 20.4 pounds of poutine in 10 minutes. That number was crushed the next year though by competitive-eating legend Joey Chestnut, who swallowed 28 pounds of the stuff in the same time. This year Mr. Chestnut won again but only ate 26.5 pounds. Maybe he pulled up seeing how far ahead he was.

Needless to say, I couldn’t imagine eating 28 (or 26, or 20) pounds of anything in ten minutes. I will say that Mr. Chestnut is very good at what he does, and he trains hard for these events (yes, training is involved). This is a guy who can (and has) eaten 76 hot dogs in twelve minutes. But this kind of thing, in addition to looking gross, isn’t healthy. Most deaths from these stunts occur due to choking, but even assuming you get everything down it seems to me like you’re ravaging your body. I think you could get clogged arteries just from watching this amount of poutine being consumed.

Still . . . 28 pounds. Disgusting, sure. But you have to be impressed, just a little.