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[Schmaven]

I was shocked to learn that gold is not as good an electrical conductor as copper or silver.  But it's used to coat electrical contacts primarily because of its resistance to corrosion.  It is a better conductor than aluminum however, which was used in residential wiring for a brief period, but only about 75% as good as silver, copper being 96% as conductive as silver.

So it seems to me that if we had an overabundance of cheap space gold, we could make more electronic devices that last longer before having to be repaired or replaced.  Well, who am I kidding, in America there would be no repairs, just replacement.

[Loud Whispers]

I mean, the only real value for gold is down to the energy transfer/absorption/reflection properties, ignoring stupid-ape-want-shiny-rock nonsense.

Gold plating is goated though for providing a layer that doesn't oxidise. Gold leafing a wall engraving or making jewellery out of pure gold both good ways to preserve a piece of art. The real meta would be to make artistically arranged gold semiconductor wafer stacks that mine bitcoin

[scriver]

Okay so I have a question I've been thinking about. So we all know "the gold standard" is some kind of holy goat for a libertarians and similar in opposition to current "make believe economics". But isn't gold standard also a kind of "make believe" economy, in that the actual money becomes an abstraction of the gold reserve and is just as prone to inflation if the central bank prints more bills? Like just not prone but unavoidably so unless the gold reserve is increased too. The only other way is to print increasingly small percentages (pence, cent, whatever) of a "gold unit bill" for people to use but that also feels like it would be either inflation or deflation and either way it's still "make believe money" manipulation of the currency.

Anyway I got sidetracked by showcasing my ignorance of economics here, the actual thing I wanted to arrive at was this: Isn't the ultimate "anti-make-believe economy" system the pre-goldstandard "gold equals its weight in worth" of the ancient world? Why isn't returning to this the holy grail?

This ape would prefer tungsten anyways.

This is extra funny because "tung sten" just means "heavy atone" and all ape know, heavy stone better

[McTraveller]

Heh no that’s just the dirty secret: all money is fiat, in that you need faith that you can exchange the currency for what you really want.

The difference between gold standard and “true” fiat is that at least with a gold standard you need some gold versus just numbers in a ledger.

Monetary systems could be orthogonal to politics, but they are very easily made political tools. A way (the only way?) to avoid this is to take the power of regulating money away from the government. Bitcoin tried this and failed because eventually all users of bitcoin need to exchange for government-issued funds, which turned it into a virtual commodity instead of an independent monetary system.  Bitcoin also didn’t do itself any favors by making itself inherently deflationary and by making token creation independent from creation of goods and services.

A difficult-to-abuse system would be one where money creation is more directly tied to actual production of goods and services instead of the indirect link in all modern monetary systems where changes in money supply are based on changes in demand for money, which is only correlated with production of goods and services rather than being proportional to creation of goods and services.

It’s like a harmonic oscillator: money supply changes in response to supply and demand but with a gain and phase lag and a feedback term. But instead of treating it like an engineering control system where you don’t want oscillations and catastrophic resonance, politics ends up contributing to an unstable system instead of a stable one.

Also the goals of the Fed are likely outdated; inflation and unemployment rate are “too aggregate.” Instead the mandate could be some measure of standard of living, things like “95% or more of the population spends 35% or less of their income on housing” or “95% of the population has enough savings to cover being out of work for 6 months.”  Those metrics are less subjective and, while related to inflation, automatically scale with inflation.

That said though: the Fed cannot address housing or health care or energy costs, because the Fed cannot change production.

[Robsoie]

The real problem with gold is that you need to be very lucky with a moody dwarf in order to obtain a golden warhammer.

[Lord Shonus]

But isn't gold standard also a kind of "make believe" economy, in that the actual money becomes an abstraction of the gold reserve and is just as prone to inflation if the central bank prints more bills?

Sort of. Essentially you have three kinds of cash based economies.

The first is pure specie - your cash is either directly made of precious metals, or is worth a fixed amount of said metal. This is also called a "full reserve" system because for every dollar you print you have to have one dollar worth of specie (historically gold or silver, but you could use beads, pretty shells, jade, petroleum, etc) in storage, and you can't vary the price of specie because you are often directly using it for coins or have other factors fixing the value.

This is the absolute worst because it is indelibly linked to the amount of said material in circulation. If your economy grows too much, there isn't enough money to go around and even tiny denominations of currency can procure huge quantities of goods, but the lack of available money causes stagnation and your economy collapses (severe deflation). The best historical example of this is 14th-19th century China, which had an unlimited appetite for silver to keep the internal economy going. If your supply of specie goes up too much, your money supply explodes, you need enormous amounts of it to buy anything, and the lack of goods to spend money on causes stagnation and economic collapse (severe inflation). The best historical example of this is Early Modern Spain, which sucked in massive quantities of gold from the New World, producing short-term prosperity followed by economic disasters that led to Bourbon replacing Hapsburg and started the Spanish Empire on the long road to irrelevance.

Pure specie economies are also vulnerable to peculation (Bad Things happen if the bank doesn't have the amount of specie they think they do) and debasement (where the specie is diluted with baser metals or counterfeits and people stop trusting it).

The second is a partial fiat, or fractional specie reserve. This is the "gold standard" that persisted in the early part of the last century. Under this system, there isn't enough specie to cover all the money in circulation, in recognition that most people are perfectly happy with banknotes for day to day use and thus rarely actually go out and grab the gold or silver they're entitled to. This greatly reduces the impact of shocks to the specie supply, as you can print more money to cover a shortfall or just keep a larger fraction in reserve if you have a supply glut. Supply mismatches that go on for too long or are too severe can still crash things, and it is vulnerable to economic anxiety that might cause more people than usual to hoard solid cash. Note that "fractional reserve" also applies to pure-fiat banking as well, referring to banks that don't keep enough banknotes on hand to cover all their creditors - this is a related but different concept.

The third system is pure fiat, which is what we primarily use today. The currency of a nation is "backed" only by the size and health of the economy - the value is whatever the government says it is, modified by how much people trust that government's honesty and the health of their economy. This is completely unaffected by shocks to most individual commodities unless said commodity is important enough to damage the entire economy by itself, but a country in economic disaster will have trouble digging itself out because their money is worthless.

[Starver]

I was shocked to learn that gold is not as good an electrical conductor as copper or silver.

I've been seeing over the last few months (notable enough to go "this again?") various revistiings of "What element has the best conductivity?" in all kinds of quizes (highhbrow like* University Challenge, or maybe shoehoened* into an Only Connect sequence, or lowbrow like* The Chase; and I'm fairly sure I've seen Richard Osman mention it, so add either some Pointless trivia question or a House Of Games round of some kind).

I'm sure it's also typical pub-quiz info. So just remember that silver is the best (indeed, benchmark) electrical conductor, at everyday temperatures/etc. It's also the best metallic thermal conductor. But carbon (as diamond) beats it, if your question isn't specifically towards metal/electricity.

* - can't be sure it was on any of these, but I do occasionally catch even the low-brows being watched when I'm in sight of a telly...


As for gold standard, that's also why Goldfinger's (movie) plot was going to be particular destabilising. America being practically unable to account for the bedrock upon which the whole house of cards is built, and physically unable to honour such demands from third-parties (domestic and fofeign) that might legitimately be placed on it (however nominal or theoretical that normally would be to happen). Of course with a certain amount of movie liberty-taking (above and beyond the original book's libert-taking with 'reality'), but it would certainly not help matters (unless you were ready to bet against the status-quo).

[anewaname]

A fine example of how powerful advertising is... years of 'gold-plated" cables for stereo and video equipment going back to the 1970's... to the point where knock-offs had that golden color just to be more appealing to the uneducated eyes.     not like I didn't also have this idea firmly embedded in my mind

[Loud Whispers]

The real problem with gold is that you need to be very lucky with a moody dwarf in order to obtain a golden warhammer.

Platinum warhammers were the GOAT if you got them. IIRC Broseph Stalin did some tests with modded slade warhammers and found they were surprisingly ineffective; about the same combat potential as steel warhammers but significantly exhausted dwarves due to their immense weight. Maybe stronger, larger creatures could use slade warhammers more effectively. Silver warhammers I found to be amazing, though I never did get a gold one - I assume it would be as good

A fine example of how powerful advertising is... years of 'gold-plated" cables for stereo and video equipment going back to the 1970's... to the point where knock-offs had that golden color just to be more appealing to the uneducated eyes.     not like I didn't also have this idea firmly embedded in my mind

Reminds me of those $1500 gold HDMI cables... The reviews are legendary

[anewaname]

Someone was arrested and charged for Samantha Woll's murder (the woman who was heavily involved in bridge-building between the Illinois Muslim communities and local Jewish communities).

When Oct 7th happened, the first thing she would have done is reaffirm with the local Illinois Muslim groups that they should work together to keep the Israel-Gaza conflict from ripping through their communities, as they did in the years before when the Dearborn community became a focus of hate-group crap.

So, I believe the police did their work with diligence, but also believe they found the evidence someone else wanted them to find. I mean, breaking in and stealing stuff, then believing murder was a better option than fleeing? And, stabbing someone 7 times in the face and neck, meaning blood all over the place, and in 2023 this guy is the only guy who doesn't understand DNA evidence and he keeps the coat? More likely she was the specific target of an assassination and he was marked before or after the act as the scapegoat and it just took time for the investigation to play out.

[scriver]

Burglars attacking their victims when caught is not exactly unheard of. But the biggest argument against an assassination would be the question of why would they (who are they?) assassinate an ecumenist in Detroit of all places?

[Lord Shonus]

Burglary is low-margin (increasingly so, because the price of goods has dropped to the point that reselling anything you steal from most people is really hard and most people don't have a lot of simple cash lying around) and quite dangerous. This means that the vast majority of burglaries are committed by people who are aggressively looking for money to feed a drug habit, which means people who are both desperate and not of fully rational mind, as anybody else looking to get money by theft will hit better targets. Attacking a homeowner when discovered is incredibly common.

[Frumple]

There being a homeowner to attack is pretty rare, though, isn't it? Even cokebrained twits usually have enough sense to just wait until the residents aren't there. Significant majority of house burglary is of unoccupied residences, far as I'm aware.

[McTraveller]

This 30-minute Veritasium video on the prisoner's dilemma - or its content anyway - should almost be codified in law. I wish our politicians would follow it.

1. Be nice.
2. Be forgiving.
3. Don't be a pushover.
4. Be clear.

Basically it highlights some of the good and bad that our current policy-makers exhibit. One is I think in international politics we're a bit too much of a pushover, we need a little more tit-for-tat.  But at the same time, we are also not forgiving enough - once someone strikes back, we keep attacking instead of forgiving after a time.  We're also too slow to ensure clarity: we have both too much assumptions of the other side being hostile or too much lenience in assuming it's not as bad as we think.

[Loud Whispers]

This 30-minute Veritasium video on the prisoner's dilemma - or its content anyway - should almost be codified in law. I wish our politicians would follow it.

1. Be nice.
2. Be forgiving.
3. Don't be a pushover.
4. Be clear.

Basically it highlights some of the good and bad that our current policy-makers exhibit. One is I think in international politics we're a bit too much of a pushover, we need a little more tit-for-tat.  But at the same time, we are also not forgiving enough - once someone strikes back, we keep attacking instead of forgiving after a time.  We're also too slow to ensure clarity: we have both too much assumptions of the other side being hostile or too much lenience in assuming it's not as bad as we think.

One of the best gameshows ever was a gameshow called golden balls. Game started with a few elimination rounds where players vote to eliminate a player. Players have a bunch of balls, with a few "killer balls" and a few big cash balls. Players want to avoid killer balls entering their prize pool, but ultimately also want to survive, whilst establishing credibility as honest.

At the very end, only two players remain. And no matter how well or badly they did, in the end it comes down to one choice. Players can pick to steal, or split. If they both split, they share the prize pool equally. If they both steal, they both walk home with nothing. If one of them splits and the other steals, the thief gets the whole prize pot.

This one math teacher and this mother of 3 made it to the final round. The mo of 3 said he could trust her, she was honest, she was an integrous mother, she intended to split. The math teacher said "I am going to pick steal."
The mother got very flustered and began offering quick counters and questions like "WHY?!" getting red in the face, but the math teacher remained firm. "No matter what, I do not trust you. I am going to pick steal, and then split the pot with you equally. If you pick steal, we both walk away with nothing."

The host asks them both to finalise their selection. The glum faced mother sullenly reveals she picked split. The math teacher reveals he also picked split. They both walked away with half the prize pool. Afterwards they interviewed them both and asked what they would have picked had he not pulled off his gambit. She said yeah, she would've picked steal. Had 3 kids to feed XD

Of these 4 points though, the last one is most important. USA has great power, but internationally, no one has any idea what the hell the USA considers a red line or not, because it acts in very unclear ways as to what it will support in one state, or bomb another state for. Even to its own government servants and military officers. I remember this one fucking hilarious interview where a US Army General was informing an Air Force Marshal they were invading Iraq. "Why?" The air marshal asked. "I don't know," the army general replied, exasperated. Probably one of the classic and recurring tragedies is whenever the USA encourages a popular uprising, with US presidents giving strong public rhetoric indicating they will support people taking power into their own hands. Then when the uprisings happen, the USA just watches impassively whilst the popular uprisings are crushed by the government. From the Shiites and Saddam to the Kurds getting the rug pulled out from under them in Syria and Iraq today, it dislocates US foreign policy if the USA isn't dependable or predictable to its allies or competitors.