Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Considering how industrial-scale asteroid mining probably won’t be viable for a while, let’s leave that to our descendants to figure out.
History What are some of your most contraversial takes on history?
- Thread starter Winston Bush
- Start date
Considering how industrial-scale asteroid mining probably won’t be viable for a while, let’s leave that to our descendants to figure out.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
Well, the really high-end estimates are real outliers, and not generally taken seriously. I went with the ballpark figure that all official institutions use, across the board, across the globe. (Which suggests that some "national interest" skewing the estimate can't be applicable, since they all agree that this estimate is credible.)
You want to know why the Gold Standard Institute says 2.5 million tons? Because when they came up with that number, it would have meant that the market price of gold at the time would miraculously have been fairly close to the actual "correct" price for gold. (How fortuitous!) So by making those kinds of claims, they can easily cut off the "BUT THERE'S NOT ENOUGH GOLD" objection, without actually having to explain deflation and such concepts to the public.
If you assume 200.000 metric tons, however, then by the logic that the Gold Standard Institute follows, the "correct" price for gold should be half a million dollars per kilogram. Which implies that gold is currently undervalued to a MASSIVE degree. Which is, in fact, the case. But trying to explain to people why gold being valued much higher than it is now isn't a problem runs into the issue that most people know fuck-all about economic issues, let alone monetary ones.
It's easier to come up with a bullshit number, which I strongly suspect is what the Gold Standard Institute did in this case.
Good luck getting to it. Even better luck getting any of it back over here.
(Ah, @Zyobot beat me to it!)
This kind of consideration is going to be relevant in the long term. Certainly. But let's face it, once we have basically limitless fusion power, and ships capable of zipping across the solar system, and a diaspora of explores off towards the final frontier... well, most of our economic premises will need to be re-evaluated to at least some extent, at that point.
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Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Agreed. However, even if it becomes dirt-cheap and superabundant, I can still imagine gold being valued because it "looks nice", not to mention its use as an electrical conductor and such.
That, and there's no shortage of resources out there in general, though as far as short-term (or, y'know, "short-term") exploitation goes, I'm not sure whether our Solar System lacks anything in particular? Space on the whole is one thing, but what's readily available in the asteroid belt matters a whole lot more for the foreseeable future.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
There's still a lake in South America that's chock full of gold from them. The "Urban Legend" was that there was a city made of gold, because the Conquistadors met the guys and said "not enough gold".(as it happens, when you only need gold every now and again, you don't tend to have terribly much day to day).
El Dorado, literally means "The Golden Man" and is the name of the legend because the first hints the Spanish got was hearing of a tribe who's king was crowned by being gold dusted.
EDIT: Have a source
The Mystery Behind The Lake Of Fool's Gold Colombia
A mysterious lake in Colombia is said to be the source of the legend of El Dorado - discover the mystery behind Lake Guatavita and its golden secret.
theculturetrip.com
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TheRejectionist
TheRejectionist
Mussolini and his ideology could have benefitted the world had he not aligned with Hitler.
But the bald cunthead reasoned like a cretin in 1938-1945 so my country is the aircraft of NATO and slave to the banks.
Basically I detest Mussolini for compromising my country for a hundred years if not more. Not just because he invented fascism and the whole mess with that degenerate bastard of Hitler.
So, I hate him for not "the right" reasons according to mainstream leftists.
But the bald cunthead reasoned like a cretin in 1938-1945 so my country is the aircraft of NATO and slave to the banks.
Basically I detest Mussolini for compromising my country for a hundred years if not more. Not just because he invented fascism and the whole mess with that degenerate bastard of Hitler.
So, I hate him for not "the right" reasons according to mainstream leftists.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
Except that never worked, and coinage would always - and very quickly, too - get devalued in the market to its actual value.
There is a reason why the best Roman emperors were ones which either maintained or reestablished the gold standard. Because debasement didn't work, while at the same time hurting economy.
In fact, one of most important aspects of Byzantine currency from the time of Diocletian all the way to 1025. was how stable it was. It was basically THE GOLD STANDARD of currency at the time, because everyone knew a) it is backed by the Byzantine Empire and b) it will not be debased. And then they debased it after Basil II died, and this among other things helped cause 1204., because it wrecked Byzantine trade and economy in general.
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Anyway, for my controversial opinion, Tito was no better than Pavelic, and NDH itself was a legitimate state, despite all the issues with its leadership.
Doomsought
Well-known member
I consider it more unexploded ordnance from a soviet psychological warfare attack going off.
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Considering that young Scholz was siviet useful idiot,just like many other western politicians,i think it is true.
And yet intellectuals dare act surprised when anti-intellectualism is on the rise...
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
Actually, it's that "there is far too little gold per person to run an economy on, you need some way to correct this". It wasn't a continual problem in ancient times because the vast majority didn't work with currency, they worked with barter, and largely produced their own needs. But today? That mentality does not work. Too many people are too reliant on too much trade across too far a distance to go back to an inelastic hard currency.
"You need an income to match your expenditure" is no way to have industrial manufacturing work when the "income" is things like oil, iron ores, grain, and generally speaking raw materials. The distributions do not allow for what is necessary to sustain the current population and lifestyles, on the level of base inputs. The relevant function of modern economies I'm worried about is not the debt-spending, it's that we need global resource access to be cheap.
How? If they've invested it, what they have is the investment, not the currency. If they put enough into it to be "betting their future on it" previously, then it's likely still the case under deflation, but the bet has to have a higher margin to merely "break even". The calculation gets a bit more complicated because whatever savings are left are appreciating in value rather than depreciating, but you nonetheless need the investment to have returns.
What about the rare earths? What about the years and years needed to rebuild the factories? This is the bit all you gold standard nutters do not get, when you make trade zero-sum, you cannot handle the world-spanning raw resource demands, and modern economies cannot turn on a fucking dime to enact your pipe dreams. You can't just "stop trade with China", they will cash out all the currency, their raw materials are important, and we do not have enough factories.
When you have to give gold to get anything from somewhere else, this mess kicks in. It becomes mandatory to return to mercantilism, to go out and take the source of the resources so you aren't paying somebody else for them. The only available work-around to the zero-sum nature of an inelastic hard currency is piecemeal thing-for-thing trade, which does not remotely generalize enough to support the sheer variety of stuff modern economies needs.
Again, we've seen this before. It's why the Age of Empire happened, everyone was desperate to internalize as much as possible because to rely on imports was to give lasting ground, not just a momentary red number on a balance sheet. This is a great recipe for World War Three, waged over legitimately important resource access. People are not going to give up electronics, and those need resources from a lot of different places.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
Pro tip, @Morphic Tide -- If you're going to call the people who understand more about economics than you do "nutters", they won't be inclined to give you a free education.
Bye.
Bye.
From what I've seen the end of a modern period seems to always end with a purge of inellectuals, as in violent murder purge. The roman republic was pretty mild but had that, the end of the chinese modernity was like a cocain bender of violence.
An age of modernity seems to be an intellectuals best age, because its a time of social experimentation where you can test out new ideas, and the compitition between states means your pretty much always able to find a backer. The problem is unfortantly this a lack of accountability.
When an Intelectuals ideals fail in the real world, when they result in chaos destruction death and horrific suffering. There is no conquence for the Intelectual who created the plan. They simply go off and try their ideas some where else. That's pretty much been the case for the entire 20th century lots of ideas played out. Some worked some failed horrifically but no conquences for the people with the bad social plains and the results get swept under the rug.
Thing is a civilization only experiements for so long before people just want stability again, eventally the results of an experiement have to bear fruit and be counted. No age lasts forever and from the looks of things intelectuals do not handle the loss of power or prestige well. They get more rabid, more cult like more vicious.
And then when modernity ends they get murdered in fucking droves. If the populists win they die, if their choice of ruler wins even more of them dies because their pick rightfully sees them as an obstical to their power. I think we have only begun to see the rise of anti- intellectualism. I think this story ends with a whole lot of dead liberal professors.
Aldarion
Neoreactionary Monarchist
Problem is that intellectuals are fucking retarded. They tend to live in their ivory towers and forget the reality of human nature - reality that any self-respecting historian, or any 70-year old granny from bazaar, would be able to tell them:
When you look at intellectuals, well, there is a reason almost all of them are leftists: they haven't got a clue. They tend to act in exact same way that armchair generals (good example being dear old Saruman) do: they have this model in their head, and in their heads, it works out perfectly. It is all so simple, see; if people just followed my prescriptions, we wouldn't have any trouble at all; everything can be solved by science, reason, and top-down management.
Except, that doesn't work. Reality is messy, life is messy, humans are messy (and emotional, and stupid, and childish).
So no, lack of accountability is not actually the problem. Accountability would only work if intellectuals were actually capable of understanding that they are messing up, or about to mess up. But they don't, they can't. In such conditions, accountability would come down to, essentially, revenge: being able to hold intellectuals accountable for the shit they cause would certainly be cathartic and a good source of stress relief (especially if we are able to go all damnatio ad bestias with them), but it would not prevent anything. It would not, because intellectuals don't understand that what they are doing is wrong and evil, and thus have no reason to not do it even if there are massive consequences for failure - because they are literally incapable of forming an idea that they could fail in the first place. To our self-centered intellectuals, the idea that failure is a possibility simply does not occur.
What we need to do is to get rid of intellectuals in positions of power - go back to romanticism, if at all possible. Understand that humans are emotional beings first and foremost, with ratio being basically a thin veil of legitimacy, a cover-up for what are really emotionally-charged decisions.
Now, to be clear, I am not saying that there are not some intellectuals who are fully aware of what they are doing and the lies they are telling: but they tend to be in minority, and not be actual intellectuals but rather members of the elites who utilize the intellectuals in the first place.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
Let me point out where this bit started:
I said "zero difference between metals in this case, so long as you declare it to be a consistent hard material". As in, with regard to you saying that "if you only back your money supply with 50% gold... You have a 50% gold standard, and 50% fiat", I was saying that 50% "worthless metal" is not actually making the currency somehow half fiat.
To which you deflected with supply causing differences in practice, rather than an actual counter-argument of the point being made. You can back a currency with drinking water and it will not be fiat, even though it's insanely elastic, because fiat is specifically about the currency being nothing but the promises of a state and readily printed en mass.
Me trying to point out potential issues with consistent deflation has been dismissed with a profound incomprehension of my statements. I have seen no counter-argument to the return to merchantilism leading to the enormous trade networks needed to distribute base materials collapsing. And the notion that investments needing to compete with doing literally nothing may be a bad thing has been just completely fucking ignored.
What is ideal is for the currency to retain its value. Not to grow or shrink, but to stay level, because both directions of change lead to extremely distorting behaviors. Sitting on "value" is profoundly terrible for a wider economy. Again, if the currency deflates 2% per year, then a five-year investment with 10% added value is losing purchasing power against doing nothing. Which means that this value is likely never added, which means there's less goods for the people at large.
Furthermore, when most people are continually saving money, anything happening to provoke a large-scale spending spree creates an inflationary shock due to the sudden injection of liquidity, screwing over everyone who's planned based on the deflationary trends.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
Every point you raise has already been addressed in detail, @Morphic Tide. The "profound incomprehension" here is exclusively on your side. The fact that you fail to understand quite obvious explanations, and then just stubbornly act as if those explanations were never actually given, is likewise exclusively your problem.
I understand that you'd like to turn it into my problem, by treating me as a sort infinitely patient answering-automaton-for-dumb-and-dishonest-questions. That kind of attitude (shoving effort onto others and pretending they owe you something) is precisely what I'd expect from any maliciously-minded economic illiterate. It's basically socialism in a nutshell.
I'm not your monkey. I've been very patient in answering some of your really dumb questions, but frankly: you're clearly not trying to learn, and your questions aren't sincere. Typically, I get paid to educate people. If you're interested, I can contact you about my hourly fee. I'm not interested in doing this work for free, much-needed as it may be in your case.
I understand that you'd like to turn it into my problem, by treating me as a sort infinitely patient answering-automaton-for-dumb-and-dishonest-questions. That kind of attitude (shoving effort onto others and pretending they owe you something) is precisely what I'd expect from any maliciously-minded economic illiterate. It's basically socialism in a nutshell.
I'm not your monkey. I've been very patient in answering some of your really dumb questions, but frankly: you're clearly not trying to learn, and your questions aren't sincere. Typically, I get paid to educate people. If you're interested, I can contact you about my hourly fee. I'm not interested in doing this work for free, much-needed as it may be in your case.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
This is all you ever gave on investments competing with deflation that I've seen:
Your reasoning seems to be that people will throw away buying power on low-margin investments because "their future isn't necessarily on the line if they do". Where are you getting that? Do you seriously think that the vast supply chains to sustain current comfort would be perfectly fine with burning purchasing power this way?
2% deflation is barely noticeable year-by-year, lower than the US has had in inflation quite often. Wal Mart had only 2.39% profit margin last year. Even with 1% deflation, Wal Mart's losing nearly half its net gains to the depreciation of the currency. How many small retailers do you think would close shop because the business gives less buying power than doing nothing?
A gold standard is a tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. Whether it's businesses closing shop because they can't keep up with deflation, wars being declared to internalize resource needs like fertilizer so that the aggressor country can feed itself without a trade deficit, or savings turning into inflation shocks whenever a demand surge kicks off.
Also, debt-based economics is a cause for inflation, not the other way around, and arises from time preference. More specifically, early industrial time-savers, where the entire basis of the utility was satisfying time preference. Which meant the strongest demand was among those most likely to turn to credit instead of savings.
And again, the whole non-sequitur about me trying to talk about the definition of fiat currency being dismissed with "but copper's so much more common!". Completely different talk. Also:
Again, this is the condition for Merchantilism. Zero-sum trade like this is full-on World War Three waiting to happen over it. Do you seriously think China will hesitate for an instant to declare war if its food supply is threatened? Shit is simply too thoroughly interconnected.
Your reasoning seems to be that people will throw away buying power on low-margin investments because "their future isn't necessarily on the line if they do". Where are you getting that? Do you seriously think that the vast supply chains to sustain current comfort would be perfectly fine with burning purchasing power this way?
2% deflation is barely noticeable year-by-year, lower than the US has had in inflation quite often. Wal Mart had only 2.39% profit margin last year. Even with 1% deflation, Wal Mart's losing nearly half its net gains to the depreciation of the currency. How many small retailers do you think would close shop because the business gives less buying power than doing nothing?
A gold standard is a tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. Whether it's businesses closing shop because they can't keep up with deflation, wars being declared to internalize resource needs like fertilizer so that the aggressor country can feed itself without a trade deficit, or savings turning into inflation shocks whenever a demand surge kicks off.
Also, debt-based economics is a cause for inflation, not the other way around, and arises from time preference. More specifically, early industrial time-savers, where the entire basis of the utility was satisfying time preference. Which meant the strongest demand was among those most likely to turn to credit instead of savings.
And again, the whole non-sequitur about me trying to talk about the definition of fiat currency being dismissed with "but copper's so much more common!". Completely different talk. Also:
What good are those manufacturing jobs when there's no access to their mines for the resources to make the stuff with? Again, you critically misunderstood the problem I was concerned with, I was talking rare earth metals. We need their mines to sustain volume of product, we merely like their labor for doubling down on boosting profit margins.
Again, this is the condition for Merchantilism. Zero-sum trade like this is full-on World War Three waiting to happen over it. Do you seriously think China will hesitate for an instant to declare war if its food supply is threatened? Shit is simply too thoroughly interconnected.
Though just how much trade does Israel have with the Muslim world right now? Some or even many Muslims might view Israel as a present-day Judeo-Crusader state, after all.
Here's an unpopular take: The Iraq War was a good thing for Iraqis if the alternative to the Iraq War would have been an even bigger bloodbath for the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein's rule during the Arab Spring.
A bad situation, no doubt. But what does it have to do with the question of whether fiat currency is sustainable?
Simonbob
Well-known member
A "tragedy of the commons" is when a communally property isn't maintained, because nobody is responsable for it.
I'm not sure why you're adding that in.
I won't bother with the Gold Standard stuff. We'd be better off if people couldn't just make this stuff up, even if the current system is somewhat reliant on it.