Sunday Reads and Listens...How Lies Spread, The Twitter Safety Lie Continues, Capitalism Finds A Way and How To Spend It!...

My friend Michael had a great post titled ‘How Lies Spread’

In the global, mobile, social world, our minds are being tortured and our souls crushed by lies.

Michael’s post focuses on a lazy Bill Ackman’s lie about $UBER that was given wild hot air by Elon Musk.

As Michael sums up perfectly:

This is the world we live in. Attention is the most scarce resource in the world, and people will do whatever they can to procure it. The sad truth is that negativity is the fastest car on the attention highway.

I have always assumed the markets are rigged, but in 2024 unless you command enough attention to spread lies, you are the investing sucker in the room and should think about indexing only. That is what I have been doing since last year.

It is not just the markets that are rigged.

Decades of cable news and journalist integrity degradation combined with shifts in attention power has moved the power to people that command attention and the companies with the distribution power to mess with our attention because of AI and algorithms.

Because of this I turned off TV news and CNBC in 2008 during the ‘Great Financial Crisis’.

While I lived on the Twitter app for too much time after…in 2024 my habits are much different.

I don’t use Facebook, and I do not have social apps on my phone other than Stocktwits so my only social/news/aggravation app is Twitter which I only use when I am sitting at my desktop or laptop. It is still way to poisonous for me despite my best efforts to curate and focus.

Each day Twitter’s CEO Linda blathers on about safety being the number one priority.

This is a huge lie!

For example, Iran’s supreme thug/leader spends his day tweeting lies and propoganda.

Elon and Linda have a very twisted sense of free speech. They believe murderers and terrorists from enemy countries that don’t themselves offer/believe in free speech should be allowed ‘free speech ‘on US platforms.

Switching subjects to ‘capitalism’, I liked Dare’s take on Capitalism finding a way…

A few more reads…

Replacing Israel With Palestine: A Dangerous Delusion - is excellent.

I got turned onto The Financial Times ‘HTSI - How To Spend It’ which is a new guilty pleasure I will pay for.

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The excellent FREE weekly Lumida Wealth newsletter covers so much ground on the markets.

Have a great Sunday.