Mark Oaten

Financial consultant and ALSI Trader. Interested in mental models and heuristics.

[Richard Wilkinson @wilkinsoncape]

I spent an hour this afternoon walking around the University of Cape Town’s upper campus. Everywhere I could see clear signs of neglect and decay.

Nearly ten years after the advent of Fallism, the physical costs of #schoolcapture are now undeniable.

Come with me on a thread.

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

Reading a couple of @theguardian articles in a last few days, I feel we may be seeing its final departure from the pluralistic liberal tradition that made it a great newspaper, thanks to its capture by – or its morally fuddled editorial cadre - surrender to, an activist, ideological, anti-Western and more than that, anti-factual front.
Our liberal democracy needs institutions of pluralistic discourse like this once-hallowed paper but it also requires a respect for facts and some sense of morals. Facts were once the essential ingredients of the coverage of a paper like the Guardian.
However at least there are comedic sides to this.
Two recent articles exemplify the Guardian’s embrace of illiberal anti democratic, anti fact forces and at the same time represent “a bonfire of the vanities” (an appropriate quotation from Savonarola who used the phrase to launch a bloodspattered but absurdly self-righteous purge of Florence that ended with his own execution.)
Today’s was a truly creepy review of the One Day in October documentary, by a comedy-writer Stuart Jeffries, on the October 7 Hamas massacres who seemed irritated and uneasy that the real record of the atrocities by Hamas and some Gazan civilians, gleefully documented by the killers themselves on GoPros and smart-phones, did not accord with his and the Guardian’s political prejudices.
How could these impertinent film-makers present these killers, decapitators, rapists, body-mutilators, corpse-abusers, kidnappers and looters as baddies? That is against the simplistic, rigid, flimsy framework of the ideology of anti-Israeli decolonization and must be wrong! This uncomfortable fact must be corrected!
The result: a piece of unintentional, amoral gallows comedy at the Guardian's expense.
The other was equally embarrassing and morally tone-deaf: a comically self-important and self-reverential but ugly and historically ignorant essay claiming the Israelis were guilty of memoralizing their October 7 fallen (so unlike every society, ever, in history from the 300 of the Spartans to the West with WW1 Armistice Day, the West and Russia with WW2, The Holodomor by Ukrainians, the Holocaust by the Jews, the Nakba by Palestinians, 9/11 by Americans and so on) by the clumsy Canadian provocateur Naomi Klein, all but indistinguishable from her alter-ego and fellow solipsist the other Naomi.
As I posted this amidst general contempt for these pieces across the X platform, the paper may have taken one of them down 'pending review.'
The fact is the paper has lost its heart and soul and sense of moral judgement but these preposterous pieces at least provide a sort of bleak, EndDays comedy amidst the heartbreaking civilian losses of Middle Eastern conflicts... @theguardian
@KathViner
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[Ben Hunt @EpsilonTheory]

New on ET: Joe Biden and the Common Knowledge Game

Common knowledge is what everyone knows that everyone knows.

Common knowledge is why the 2024 Biden/Harris campaign has collapsed.

All that remains is the cope.

No paywall on this one. Too important.
https://t.co/nbutCHnlGj

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

Sam Altman wants $7 trillion for AI. Tech firms will struggle if it is going to take that much to make machines truly as smart as people, @nfergus writes https://t.co/1xx5s9YSjF via @opinion

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

This Is The Best Way To Get Big Projects Done: 5 Secrets From Research https://t.co/mgQFSRZVtK

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About https://t.co/msjm9YW4IF via @collabfund

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

https://t.co/WL8wDXu0Do

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

How three amateurs cracked a 445-year-old code to reveal Mary Queen of Scots’ secrets https://t.co/sN0wVCsRll

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

Changing the Top Global Currency Means Changing the Patterns of Global Trade https://t.co/rfhPNb5dYv via @CarnegieEndow

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

An amazing website that provides 30 years of financial statements for free. https://t.co/rf4SpxjJG4

[Stuart Thompson @StuartDAA]

QOTD "Anywhere other than Wall Street, they’d call this type of behavior fraud."

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

Charted: Hardest hit in tech layoffs https://t.co/9H5YztEBSA

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

Technical Analysis Revisited: Moving Averages = Above Average Returns? https://t.co/OQtBHCeIJc via @enterprising

[Stuart Thompson @StuartDAA]

@hazelwood_dave Dave - do you like these trends?

[The Passive Income Guy @hazelwood_dave]

With Tencent's share price under pressure today, a good opportunity to read this piece on increased competition in gaming (last bit of the article). https://t.co/iOzWmwcnLG

[Joe Lonsdale @JTLonsdale]

It’s been a mystery why Roman concrete often lasted thousands of years, but ours decays in mere decades.

Turns out they incorporated chemicals in a process that induces self-healing; scientists at MIT just figured this all out - in 2022.

Extraordinary.

https://t.co/cOPyln0ifd

[Igor Schatz @Copernicus2013]

Ask your doctor about Covid.. 😂

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

TC|Daily | PayShap: The fintech revolution coming to SA's payments system https://t.co/umYwOfUrCj

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

How Florence Nightingale Changed Data Visualization Forever https://t.co/pYxwSIq60g via @sciam

[Mark Oaten @Mark_Oaten]

@gotacutloose All good on my screens.