Comment on Gold

melfie@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  will there be advantages for daily life if gold is trivially affordable? probably, it’s a good material for many applications. and is extremely rust resistant.

  Coating all exposed metals with gold would be trivial.

  [Skip a few paragraphs of technical world building. ]

  it’ll be an increments tech step without any changes in inequality and a minor change in the public quality of life.

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  • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Image

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  • wabasso@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I think it’d be more than incremental. Any place used use copper could likely have the gold upgrade. That’s all your wiring in your house and the EV market, maybe plumbing, heat pumps, and electronics too.

    The headache would be all the power grabs (durrr it landed near my country so it’s mine) and the capitalist machine taking forever for the means of manufacturing to lower the cost of finished goods via genuine competition.

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    • IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I miss being naive and thinking “technology will save us”. But technology advancement without social progress only leads to the entrenchment of unjust systems.

      All those tech and infrastructure sectors will improve, but whatever possible quality of life improvement will be compensated by worse socioeconomic divide.

      I’m tempted to tell about a science fiction book where that happens (not with gold asteroids but other tech) I’m currently writing that chapter, although the metaphor in my version is more obvious: Its a generation oNeil cylinder in a multicentury journey, originally set as a solarpunk utopia, it has degraded after a century and now they have heavy industries sapping energy that was meant for lighting and heating. That results in regular frosts and the poor struggling while those who can afford it can get electric heating (sapping more energy). The individualistic solution works for an individual but makes things worse for all and only benefits those wealthy who live in another part of the cylinder that’s unaffected by the energy drain.

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      • wabasso@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I take your point that tech advancement without social progress can go awry. Automation replacing jobs at too rapid a pace feels like a very real threat to me right now. Maybe I’m biased by the last century where tech either lessened inequality or at least raised the standard of living for everyone, even if disproportionately applied across the population.

        But yeah since tech advancement is accelerating, it seems more likely society will be unable to keep up.

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  • Eheran@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If you coat steel with gold and there is even the tiniest scratch/void/… it will extremely accelerate the rusting. Galvanic corrosion is no joke. That’s why you use zinc for the job.

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    • IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      The chemistry behind that is magic to me.

      Although I hope my assumption that there are so many applications for cheap gold is likely true, I’m assuming you’ll be able to come up with more uses

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• DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s funny that people can understand every person having a lump of gold won’t improve their standard of living, but at the same time refuse to understand that owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could. This can be done directly with raising the minimum wage or indirectly via taxes. But in the end, even the most pessimistic calculation I was able to make on how much the owners take was only about 50% of the output. Probably more like 30%.

  So the billionaires owning too much is IMO a distraction. Pushing politicians to implement policies that would improve quality of life would have much bigger impact. Consumer protections, walkable cities, good public healthcare, … And it does not involve the massive risks of trying to switch to a differwnt economic model that always collapsed before.

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  • explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could.

    Would workers owning the company not reduce this fraction to zero?

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    • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It would. Eliminating the HR would reduce the overhead from HR to zero. Eliminating the tax office would reduce money spent on that to zero. But these things fulfill a function. Could it be done better? Maybe, but why risk on maybes when that’s not the biggest problem we have with society at all. Probably not even be top 10.

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      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        The people just getting paid just for owning something don’t seem to be contributing anything useful, and they’re using that wealth to make bad long-term decisions on our behalf. We can’t fix all the other stuff without the power to do so.

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  • LePoisson@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Why do we even need owners in the first place? We don’t need to be beholden to the borgeousie and have a class that owns the means of production and gets rich off the labor of others while all they have to do is spend their money and not do any work.

    Like employee owned businesses can be a thing.

    It’s not like we’d have to upend our whole society, just change how employees are compensated, give them some equity in the company they work for and bring up individual incomes. Also tax the ever loving fuck out of profits (or revenue it’s arguable which is better) after a certain threshold so the only way to get more money is to reinvest and grow the business. Same with individual wealth taxes.

    Nobody needs to be a billionaire. Companies don’t need to constantly push their profit up quarter after quarter. We don’t need to be beholden to the shareholders just because they have a bunch of money and own stock, we should be the shareholders ourselves.

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    • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      We need solutions to issues like capital allocation, keeping money circulation speed relatively constant and many many more. Capitalism is one solution to these problems. Perhaps not the best one, but the only one we know can work.

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      • LePoisson@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Capitalism is the cause of those problems. Last I checked the people hoarding money in off shore accounts weren’t exactly keeping money circulation speed constant. Well, perhaps constantly zero in that case.

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  • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Lmfao the billionaires are why we can’t have nice things, they put their finger on the scale all the time for their own benefit.

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• tackleberry@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  True… There are lots of billionaires in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina

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• osanna@lemmy.vg ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yep, we’d just end up like Zimbabwe was. Where a loaf of bread costed trillions or whatever

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