Shortened #SONA2024
• Mourn thy neighbour- Namibian prez.
• Remember that horrible time in 1994? 😉 Vote emotionally.
• Cue in Mandela's name and that one famous Zulu king.
• Talk of the constitution and imaginary kumbaya session between South Africans of different backgrounds.
• Bragging about creating opportunities that, and I quote, "never existed before."
• 2008 global recession blamed for local poverty.
• Putin and Zelensky's war also got stray bullets.
• Money was stolen from the government, by government. Everyone knows all who are implicated, but we're all just gonna wait for one of them to die off or something. State capture!
• More thinly veiled jibes at Jay-Z now that he's got a new gig.
• Covid. Bladdy covid.
• Men are beating and killing women. Guys we gotta do something about it. Anyway...
• Climate change, hey.
• Tinswalo was born in 1994 and we're going to use her life as an analogy for this country's devolution. (I'd hate to be Tinswalo)
• Tinswalo lived a state-funded life so she's lucky to be alive because we funded her existence.
• I'm mentioning some facts that you're aware of as an ordinary South African so that you can see that I'm aware of things. Unemployment. Uhm... youths are unemployed. The Unemployment of youths. Yes.
• We have more black managers in the country (the country where the majority is black. Yes that country.)
• Let's rebuild (the things that our government neglected for years)
• State capture! Again.
• We're going to end loadshedding. One day. Some day. At some point in time.
• We're building more power lines over the next 5 years. 😉 vote for my party.
• There's a new fund to steal from: the Climate Change Response fund. Yay!
• There was traffic at our ports. We haven't fully cleared it, but we want you to know that we know. Also, the war in the Middle-East means we can gain by being a docking station. Hello Vasco da Gama.
• More people have Internet because of us (✋️😀 daddy, that's a global thing hey.)
• There will be a really really fast train between Joburg and Durbs. (But sir, the slower, cheaper train has failed for years now...)
• We're going to end loadshedding. You'll see. Stru. Mafra. I swear.
• On employment, we're doing great guys. Forget what I said earlier. We created jobs. We're also giving out free money.
• People are dying later in life now (so that they can enjoy this pitiful existence for an extended period. Yay)
• You think you have no water? Huh?! Apartheid was worse. Enjoy watershedding, you thankless lot.
• Political jargon and gibberish to pass time and make the speech longer.
• Crime! Ohhh we're definitely dealing with those guys hey. Look at all the security forces we're forming. We're fighting crime. Bringing our bicycles to an F1 race right here, baby. Winning!
• We are solving global wars! Well, not solving, but saying something about it. (READ: We are writing stern letters to the BBC.)
• Mention of Africa, for ambiance.
• Covid again.
• Cue in the violins as I speak like we're equals.
• We've been through a lot together, guys.
• I know what you're thing through.
• Democracy. My party. Economic growth.
• Apartheid. Jibe at EFF.
• I was physically there when the constitution was penned. In not your mate. I'm superior.
• The next 30 years are gonna be a jol, guys. (lol)
• Cue in the Mandela quote. Blah blah, fishpaste.
• "Like Madiba, we must keep moving, always forward." (Does he know about 5 Dec 2005? 👀)
whenever people say “tax the wealthy” I want to cry because wdym?
SARS sliding scale already taxes the highest earners at 45%+ 💀.
We collect taxes pretty well - what needs to happen is for it to be controlled and used better by the gov.
Microsoft: Sam, we are fully in support of OpenAI’s mission and we are ready to provide any resources needed to advance your vision:
Sam Altman: I need $7T
Microsoft:
Sometimes the hardest person to convince is yourself. You have the gifts, you just have to use them. What you have is more than enough, you just have to apply it. Your solutions are bigger than your problems, you just have to trust in it. What’s hidden isn’t hiding from you
A "cognitive bias" is a systematic error in thinking that ruins decision-making.
My last 2 threads on the topic were read by over 5,000,000 people.
So here's the 15 more powerful cognitive biases I've found:
"So Sam how much do you need for this new project?"
"I'd guess about $5-7 trillion"
"That's....that's almost 7% of the entire world GDP"
"The worst they can say is no"
You can't make this up:
The Fed said that a March rate cut is "unlikely," yet futures are still pricing in a 39% chance it happens.
Even as the Fed said they cannot cut rates until inflation is comfortably moving to 2%, markets still see 6 cuts in 2024.
There's even a growing 23% chance of 7 interest rate cuts this year.
Markets are pricing in a rate cut at EVERY remaining Fed meeting this year.
If the Fed is on track for a "soft landing," why do we need to many rate cuts?
Natural selection’s trial-and-error process allows improvement without anyone understanding or guiding it. The same can apply to how we learn. There are at least three kinds of learning that foster evolution: memory-based learning (storing the information that comes in through one’s conscious mind so that we can recall it later); subconscious learning (the knowledge we take away from our experiences that never enters our conscious minds, though it affects our decision making); and “learning” that occurs without thinking at all, such as the changes in DNA that encode a species’ adaptations. I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I’ve since come to understand that it produces less rapid progress than experimentation and adaptation. To give you an example of how nature improves without thinking, just look at the struggle that mankind (with all its thinking) has experienced in trying to outsmart viruses (which don’t even have brains). Viruses are like brilliant chess opponents. By evolving quickly (combining different genetic material across different strains), they keep the smartest minds in the global health community busy thinking up countermoves to hold them off. Understanding that is especially helpful in an era when computers can run large numbers of simulations replicating the evolutionary process to help us see what works and what doesn’t. #principleoftheday
Cutting your parents off because they disagree with your politics is classic cult mentality: The cult comes first, everything else comes last. If your parents disagree with the cult’s sacred tenets, excommunicate them.
[Excerpt from @annbauerwriter via the Persuasion newsletter]
acts of courage heal the world. even if the act itself fails, being bold and courageous publicly reminds people that they can do the same. and the second order effects of activating others to step into courage can have a much wider, deeper impact than the initial courageous act.
It's official: markets are no longer expecting a rate cut in March 2024.
There's still a ~42% chance of rate cuts beginning in March, but this is a major shift in expectations.
Just two weeks ago, markets saw a 90% chance of rate cuts beginning in March.
Odds of rate cuts beginning at next week's Fed meeting are now down to ~2%.
We are still seeing ~150 bps of interest rate cuts priced-in to futures.
But, Fed pivot hopes are slowly pulling back.
Stocks will outperform bonds as long as the economy keeps going.
The economy will keep going as long as stocks / home prices don't fall too much.
Prices of stocks and homes wont fall too much as long as bond yields don't rise too high for too long.