UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on A Prophet of the Corn 1 hour ago:
It’s not going to be like last time
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 3 hours ago:
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.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 3 hours ago:
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.
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.
- Comment on 4 hours ago:
- Comment on Hmm 5 hours ago:
- Comment on my Lemmy feed 5 hours ago:
- Comment on Is this real life? 23 hours ago:
Black, White, and Red All Over
- Comment on Proof you don't have to wait for the new year for self improvement 23 hours ago:
Been saying that about a lot of these rich, reactionary fucks.
DARE promised me that five years of crack would put anyone in the ground. Meanwhile, Mike fucking Lindell is currently running for governor in Minnesota, fully coked out of his gourde. Dude’s been rolling deep in that powder since the 90s.
I feel extremely lied-to.
- Comment on Proof you don't have to wait for the new year for self improvement 1 day ago:
- Comment on Proof you don't have to wait for the new year for self improvement 1 day ago:
My Polymarket Bet isn’t printing. We’re still waiting to hear if Milo Yannapolis was right about him just being in hiding and saying racist things under a rock all day.
- Comment on My Religion 2 days ago:
Has that ever been a taboo?
Pretty much since their inception, although it has waxed and waned with public perception.
I still can’t think of many more significant examples
Pedophilia is always one that leaps to mind. Faith groups regularly wrestle with the age of consent, and largely shape their views around secular consensus rather than any liturgical instructions.
The Madonna / Whore Complex has it’s imprint stamped all over modern Christendom, with religious leadership being the textbook cases.
- Comment on My Religion 2 days ago:
Do you have examples?
Medicalized secular acceptance/resistance toward vaccination has been picked up by religious organizations and turned into a sectarian belief.
The NIH even had a study illustrating how outreach to religious leadership heavily impacted how communities adopted vaccination.
I mean, a lot of religions don’t particularly denounce cannibalism
Virtually every modern world religion has a stated position on murder generally speaking, human sacrifice specifically, and dietary taboos around cannibalism.
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 2 days ago:
Unironically what conservatives actually believed
- Comment on Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job 2 days ago:
you’re sick, buy some medicine
Absolutely how that works
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 2 days ago:
“My cardiologist smokes a pack a day”
- Comment on My Religion 2 days ago:
I can understand something like cannibalism and incest resulting in some diseases, which is fair, although they’re not exclusive to religion.
They don’t need to be. Religious and secular moral codes regularly inform one another.
- Comment on Women would rather do drugs than go to therapy 2 days ago:
Cocaine, famously great for your mental health
- Comment on We can play that game too 2 days ago:
stupid people vote Republican
That’s not true, though. Partisanship is far more tied up with local industry than individual intelligence or educational attainment.
People who earn money in Republican friendly industries vote Republican.
- Comment on We can play that game too 2 days ago:
I’ve heard this argument before. It seems to neglect how much modern libertarian ideology is packed into the modern school curriculum.
Conservatives scream about education being Marxist and Woke. Thousands of teachers are purged. Curriculum gets ratcheted further to the right. And by the time your own kids are going to school, they’re asking why history textbooks are venerating Newt Gingrich, bio textbooks include disclaimers decrying evolution and germ theory, and math class is just 8 hours a week of long division exercises the whole semester.
But you can’t just pretend we’re living in a Shepard Tone of a society, because we’re here now in spite of “superior” education we received a generation or two ago.
We can’t just blame this on “schools make you smart/dumb” because so much of your modem understanding of the world is formed after you’ve graduated.
- Comment on We can play that game too 2 days ago:
- Comment on We can play that game too 2 days ago:
If only there was some way to change that
- Comment on We can play that game too 2 days ago:
Sorry, but someone heard a story about a rich black woman using food stamps to buy a fancy car, so now we’re cutting the Give Surplus Food to Starving People program in half and giving twice it’s value to a company run out of Hondorus by Peter Thiel’s Ket dealer called QueefCoin.
- Comment on My Religion 2 days ago:
Harm inflicted across the general public, either to particular individual victims or as a negative externality experienced universally.
- Comment on My Religion 3 days ago:
Taboos aren’t just intended to uphold individual moral integrity. They exist to prohibit social harm
- Comment on Where are the arms bearers? 4 days ago:
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.
- Comment on Where are the arms bearers? 4 days ago:
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
- Comment on Where are the arms bearers? 4 days ago:
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
- Comment on they know what they need to do 5 days ago:
Famously, energy was cheapest when we used candles sparingly and is expensive now that we have always-on LEDs.
- Comment on It's the Lord's problem now. 5 days ago:
Says here the biggest buyer is… North Korea?
- Comment on Choose wisely! 5 days ago:
The thing about Anarchy is that, for many people, the cashless society where you own nothing and are fully removed from the machine of industry is already here. Its just called “poverty”.
The problem is that this kind of poverty isn’t equally distributed. You’ve still got this large, heavily armed occupying force that preserves money, capital, and the painful prodding of induced productivity for everyone else.
