I used IAU for the few instances I banked gold as a hedge. But I’ve never held longer than a year and it’s never outperformed by overall portfolio returns.

It’s just not a good long term investment.

Get the fuck off Twitter, get the fuck off Reddit, get the fuck off Facebook.

I mean, way ahead of you. But we’re just jerking each other off if we think saying this downthread of a Lemmy post is changing anyone’s mind. This is the most Preaching To The Choir ass post you can make outside of an actual church.

We weren’t ready for the internet and it’s time to turn it off.

eye-roll

Listen, if you want to walk around downtown with a big sandwich board that says “Log The Fuck Off And Touch Grass”, I’ll cheer for you when I see you. But there’s a reason people flock to an easily accessible portal for social engagement. And its naive to keep shouting “Log the fuck off!” from within the medium you can’t seem to quit yourself.

Idk, man, but its a statement that gets you upvotes.

New Zealand will go where its billionaire expat refugee community tells it to go.

Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?

You can get a good office chair for $80-150. Hell, you can get a bench seat for $30 and its guaranteed not to give you a bronco ride. $600 buys you a couch.

I totally agree “Gaming Chairs” are for rubes, though.

Literally the plot of The Chair Company.

This is either a horrifying “Life Imitates Art” moment or some excellent bit of guerrilla marketing.

please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up…

I mean, in so far as inflation is almost guaranteed to occur in a productive economy, gold is almost guaranteed to go up over the long term.

A better question might be “Is an investment in gold going to outperform another asset class?”

I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.

That’s been the gambit with gold for a while. Point to a short term up-cycle in price and insist that’s a long term ROI you can count on.

But when you look at the actual price history

there are long periods when the price is either flat or negative. Risk of holding gold relative to, say, the S&P or even basic Treasuries can get pretty high, unless you’re very confident we’re in one of those rare '04-'11 sustained price rises.

Even as a hedge against short term downturns, it kinda sucks. If you look at the big historical recessions - '81, '90, '01, '08, '20 - the price of gold had typically already jumped ('01 being a notable exception) and subsequent years were fairly flat. Spikes in gold prices aren’t a bad prediction of future recessions, but they rarely make for good shelter on the eve of the crash.

Fungible, portable, valuable.

It isn’t fungible. Anyone who has tried to trade physical gold at anything close to the market rate can tell you that. And no retailer is taking a dribbling of yellow sand as payment.

It isn’t portable. You can’t produce a finite denomination of it easily or transfer it electronically or even carry it in a wallet economically.

It isn’t intrinsically valuable. It produces nothing consumable in the way an oil well or corn field or machine shop can. It’s a speculative asset with the potential to be turned into something more useful. But it has no practical use or purpose in a raw state.

Gold isn’t a scam, as far as the concept of wealth and hierarchy isn’t a scam.

The means by which commodified gold is packaged and sold to gullible investors is very often scammy. And the sales pitch promising future returns on investment are inevitably larded up with rosy predictions unsupported by current data.

The socialized mythology around gold (especially relative to peer commodities like copper or oil) radically inflates its sales price in bubble economies. But there’s no reason you’re going to see better investment performance than a purchase of real estate or commercial equity. And there’s certainly no reason you would want to buy and hold gold long term if you had an opportunity to build or invest in an actual value-accruing business.

At best, a long gold play is a hedge against deflation and economic decline. At worst, its a fad that cycles in popularity relative to cryptocurrency or beanie babies.

If they went after every musician who banged an underage girl on a tour bus, you could put a pro rock band together in every penitentiary.

I would settle for maybe getting every tenth musician and creating some kind of stigma against statutory rape.

But even that seems too much, in a country that wants to spend a trillion dollars bombing Venezuelan fishing boats and lynching legal migrants in concentration camp black sites.

I meant to say, everyone was doing it back then.

They still are. If anything, I’d put money down that its even more common and more industrialized today than it was 30 years ago.

But they do exist. What’s more, they have fully infested every corner of business, politics, entertainment, and law enforcement. FFS, one of the more horrifying aspects of ICE has been the degree to which it has served as a hot-house for child sex predators.

I’m not sure what to do about it. I guess we can post harder.

It isn’t that bizarre when you consider how poorly enforced these laws are even in the modern day.

Older, wealthier men pursuing sex with teenagers is a tale as old as time. What’s “bizarre” is MeToo, a sporadic and short-lived effort at changing cultural norms spanning centuries, that was snuffed out by the same cadre of older richer men who feel it is their privilege to fuck kids.

We live in a patriarchal plutocracy with a puritanical veneer. Not only was “everyone doing it” but everyone is still doing it. Sean Combs was just convicted of sex trafficking a few months ago and has been shopping around the possibility of a Presidential Pardon. Former Congressman and aspiring AG Matt Gaetz was paying for the dental work of a 17-year-old in exchange for sex and has gone unprosecuted. Bill Gates and Elon Musk remain at large.

The story Kiedis tells is downright wholesome by comparison to the kind of abuse that occurs for the benefit of American sex-tourists in Dominican Republic and Thailand. And go check out the long and sordid history of human trafficking out of Ukraine. The Russia invasion has supercharged exploitation of refugees from the region.

But what about those on the left?

Idk about the rest of y’all, but I’ve been volunteering with the Houston Chapter of Food Not Bombs at every opportunity.

There’s far fewer of us than cops, and we’re more focused on keeping our impoverished neighbors alive than getting in gunfights with the police.

But maybe that’ll change. I guess we’ll see.

Who wants to be the first to martyr themselves getting turned into Swiss cheese after firing the first shot?

Thomas Matthew Crooks tentatively raising his hand

鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|

Is a regular hater and chronic pot stirrer. You’ll get used to them.

Where are the bearers of arms who bear arms in case of government tyranny?

They’re the guys in the ICE uniforms, more often than not

Oh yeah man, the 1930s brought some real prosperity.

It was bad that the Nazis invaded Ukraine, I agree. Postwar, they saw more economic growth in a decade than they’d experienced in the prior century.

you believe Soviet Union to be a tragically lost utopia

Every industrial era country gets it’s golden age. The question is whether you’re allowed to enter the industrial era or you’re trapped in subsistence for the benefit of your neighbors.

Soviet governments prioritized industrialization, which is what made them rapidly improve in the postwar era.

That upsets a lot of anarchist diehards, because they are convinced the mean old Leninists simply cheated them out of an equivalent heyday

wasted

Putting on the “They Live” glasses

deliberately paid out to those complicit in the imperial occupation

You seem to make the mistake of subsuming the whole of anarchist Ukraine under Makhno.

I don’t think that’s a mistake I made, because it was wrapped up long before I was born. But the Anarcho-Communists of the Ukraine failed to reconcile with their neighbors in Russia, despite having a host of overlapping priorities. There were clearly more Red Guards than Makhnovists. And so they lost to a numbers game long before a shot was fired.

The factory councils sure didn’t rely on him leading all of a sudden.

Didn’t they? We saw what happened to organically constituted Workers Soviets without an armed defense in Shanghai and Paris. Makhno was pivotal in defeating the Whites when they came knocking. So his army was definitely instrumental to the movement lasting as long as it did. And there was even a generous overlap between membership of the Bolsheviks and Makhnovists, given how easily guys like Peter Arshinov changed sides.

How many Ukrainian factory councils slide effortlessly into USSR colors when Lenin came knocking?