Gold is a poor asset no matter how you turn it. Most people don’t hold physical gold when they trade in it. If the current financial system were to fail, do you really believe that people will begin taking delivery of their physical gold positions in their garages? They’ll simply get wiped out, and that will be the end of it.
Even barring a catastrophic nosedive in the level of civilized trading, regular people aren’t equipped to store gold in their homes. The problem of securing such holdings isn’t something the average Joe will be able to solve well, and he knows it.
Unless you are storing the majority of your wealth in gold, it is not that hard to take possession of gold and store it in a decent removal resistant and fire resistant safe in your home. Your average smaller stand up gun safe can store more wealth in gold that I personally have. I personally take delivery of any gold I hold, but I really only hold enough as a unlikely but not impossible to happen insurance policy that society completely collapses.
The issue with doing that, is it is an insurance policy and not a immediately liquidate-able asset that can be traded in seconds. I think it is a sound strategy to take possession and store enough gold that in the event of a reset you can reestablish yourself. It is the closest thing to a guarantee that, that portion of your wealth will carry over into what comes next, in the unlikely possibility that it happens in your lifetime.
I don't know if I buy that. Show me how I can guy a commodity on the market and have it delivered to my house. And the guarantee that process will work when the global financial system starts imploding. For the vast majority of people holding gold, their holdings are only on paper, and that's all they'll ever be.
If I'm stocking up on items with physical value to hedge a complete economic collapse, I'd rather have butane lighters, buckets, vacuum sealed sugar/salt/grains, water storage, and ammo.
Yes you should have all those things in a realistic quantity but after a survival ration, hording those items is not realistically your best bet. Ammo would probably be the best out of the lot, but it will only hold temporal value while the unrest is happening, lets say it's a really long unrest say a decade until peace is restored you still only have a 10 year store of wealth if you put it all in more ammo than you need, while gold will almost assuredly retain at least a decent portion of the wealth you stored in it. It might loose some value in initial unrest when and if people are in pure survival mode but will almost certainly take a primary status in the period between the ending of unrest and the stabilization of a fiat.
Also for myself personally, I purchased a simple test kit that most jewelers use. It is an electronic test kit that is very accurate for gold and platinum and when I look to reallocate some of my wealth to gold I buy scrap gold and test it. The kit was about a $200 investment but It allows me to buy the gold at a deep discount (deeper if it is not 24K) under the spot price for the day, you can melt it with a propane torch, that can be purchased from Home Depot and they make plenty of bar molds. It takes me about 5-10 minutes effort (short of procuring the gold) to turn scrap into bars. But if one does not want to go thru the effort, it's pretty easy to buy gold bullion at the spot price for the day + shipping, even on ebay there are plenty of reputable sellers. I don't trade in millions of dollars in gold and I have yet to liquidate any that I hold as I only hold about 3% of my total wealth in gold and I try to keep that pretty stable. Again I view it as insurance, not an investment, that being said if I liquidated it all today, it would have turned out to have been a pretty good investment.
I think the point OP is making is: Say you have $1000 in a gold ETF with some brokerage somewhere. The Zombie Apocalypse comes. Banks are all failing, cities are burning, roads are torn up, and electricity is shut down.
Do you write a letter to your broker asking, "Dear, Schwab, I have $1000 in a gold ETF and shit is crazy now! Can you please have one of your customer care folks briefly stop stocking up on water and food, use a generator to turn your servers back on and verify I have that security? Then please deliver the equivalent amount of physical gold to my address via the postal system which is partially working? Thank you and look forward to continuing business with you!"
Point is, if you ever really need the physical gold behind the security it will not be available. To me, that makes the security worthless.
Society has collapsed several times throughout the millenniums of human existence and gold has been one of the few constant sources of wealth store and retention that has resurfaced with each new incarnation of society. Given this truth, it is a pretty good indicator that it will resurface after/when the next collapse comes. We know gold was used a exchange and storage of value since the dawn of recorded human history and probably was for sometime before humans started recording history and it is still used now, which could be argued that it is of least use to modern society yet it has endured. Simply put gold while maybe not the greatest investment, is one of the most stable sources of wealth. If I have a million dollars today and I want the equivalent of a million dollars in 100 years, gold is one of the best stores of that value. That does not mean I will get a return on my money (i.e my money working for me) but it means I have reasonable faith that I will at least get out close to what I put in and that is what gold has been traditionally good for. I heard it said one that in the 1800's an ounce of gold would buy a man a finely tailored suit. Today and ounce of gold will buy a man a finely tailored suit and that is really the point of gold, it is not an investment, it is a fairly secure long term storage of wealth.
> do you really believe that people will begin taking delivery of their physical gold positions in their garages
They could set up a trusted storage facility to hold the gold in a vault for them. It isn't that hard to imagine. They could call it a "bank" if they really wanted to be traditional.
Just because you don't feel like being imaginative doesn't mean that people won't be when large amounts of money are on the line. People are downright ingenious when it comes to securing their wealth.
The problem of storing gold is the same as the problem of storing paper money, there is no difference. Have you tried storing a million dollars in your own home? It is not for the faint of heart.
There is no difference except that in a crisis gold will retain its value, and the stacks of paper money will only remind you of the better days.
Now, of course neither of them is optimal. The best way of maintaining your purchasing power is with a competent government. But that is even more rare.
Gold is very dense. $1M in gold is 25x 20-coin tubes of 1oz coins @$2000 per coin, which is probably around an 8" square surface area 6" tall. Bottom of pretty much any standing safe you can buy (typical gun safe, e.g.).
Most consumer gold trading is done in grams, tenths quarters and half an ounce, outside of numismatic (old real gold coins, not bullion) due to its insane cost, it's easier to move assayed grams@$50 than $2000 single ounce coins for "regular" people. Also because it's easier to fake in larger ingots and XRF devices are very expensive, smaller assayed quantities move fast and are traded heavily.
> Gold is very dense. $1M in gold is 25x 20-coin tubes of 1oz coins @$2000 per coin, which is probably around an 8" square surface area 6" tall.
Most/all Federal Reserve Banks have a "Money Museum" attached to them. They will have $1 million in one dollar bills, which is a cube approximately 3 or 4 feet on each side. They will also have $1 million in twenty dollar bills, which fits on a 2-3 foot in diameter table, stacked perhaps 12 inches high.
Lastly, they will have $1 million in one hundred dollar bills, which fits in smallish suitcase that's probably less than twice the size of your stack of gold and weigh hardly anything at all.
They are really interesting - you should definitely go to your nearest one when you can, not least for the free shredded cash they give out; you can have the most baller confetti at your next party.
Sure, neither can paper money be eaten. Well, it can, but it is not nutritious. All the problems of gold are the same with paper money, there's no need to type the wheelbarrow story again. And gold might've not been useful in germany, but other places did take your gold. No one took Reichsmarks.
If you are storing a million 'dollars' in assets then you are not storing a million 'dollars', you are storing assets currently valued at one million dollars OR also 500oz of gold.
> You lose the one huge opportunity in adult life for making new relationships - and that's at work, in the office.
Eh, there’s enough anecdata to swing this in either direction.
I have not grown up in the US, so I’ve truly started my social network from scratch when I began my professional career almost two decades ago. The people I’ve become friendly at work make poor friends.
Perhaps my definition of “friend” is different than yours, but I expect to have a trust based relationship with a friend. If I’m having trouble at home or trouble with money, I expect my friend to hear me out, offer a shoulder and maybe give me some advice.
I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here.
Remember: when a “friendship” begins in a context of making money, it’s most likely no friendship at all. Surely there’s the opportunity for an occasional exception to slip past this rule, but don’t you go around thinking that it happens as a base case.
Lastly, work isn’t the only place where adults interact. I’ve met lots of people through my kid. School and sports teams and other places where my child is involved: there are human adults there too. Those other parents are better than colleagues in many ways. For one thing, you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.
And what happened to meetups? Yes, the pandemic has put a damper on those, but they’ll be back eventually.
Edit: PS: Had I not been working remotely, I’d never have found the time to show up to my kid’s sports practice or school committee meetings. Commute and office shenanigans always eat up that time. That’s just life. One door closes and another opens.
This is my experience too, I have a single long term friend that started as a colleague, but the rest have drifted into acquaintances after leaving companies. I liked the majority of them, and we socialised outside of work but when that main anchor of seeing each other during the week was removed the friendships faded too.
I suppose it is a problem to form proper relationships with people outside of work if you're not left with any time outside of work though, so for some people being sociable in the office is a good way to mask that work life balance issue in the short term.
It could also just be an age thing, when I was younger I would have probably preferred to be in the office, but now I want to be with my family as much as I can be and removing things like the commute makes a huge difference in available time.
> you’re not bound to them in a commercial context, so there’s no incentive to play politics. People are more relaxed because it’s more purely a social environment rather than a business one.
Coworking spaces offer this plus - depending on the space - potential friendships with people in your field. I was at a space for awhile and there was a great group of fellow software people who all sat together.
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I wouldn’t tell such things to anyone I’m “friendly” with at work. Don’t get me wrong: I like these people, but would I want another team’s manager to know that I’m deeply in debt or fighting bitterly with my spouse? I’d think not. This is America: land of dog eat dog. People will use such information against me without hesitation. Corporate politics are real here.
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That's a shame - you should be able to get some closer friends from a work environment and not have to consider or contend with this. Definitely a difference between 'colleagues' and 'friends'. It still makes sense to keep most private things at a private level. Being cautious always applies, with some work environments, far more caution clearly is needed
It's not the social isolation as much as it is being disconnected from your work environment. There's a very real benefit (that varies a lot on individual circumstances) to being close to the flagpole.
What happens when everyone’s work environment is the same across a given company? Doesn’t this level the playing field? Evergreen communication seems to specifically serve the goal of reducing or even eliminating the need to be “close to the flagpole”, as you called it.
There were a lot of companies that were remote work first before COVID. The issue is that this is only possible for companies in certain fields (tech being one of them) that have the right tools and management structures in place, and where explicit knowledge is more important than tacit knowledge.
I'm not familiar with Evergreen communication (the closest I could find was a consulting-ish company online), but I'm sure that small companies in a larger number of fields could, theoretically, go remote work first.
I saw the words "evergreen communication" in a job posting this week, and they stuck with me. I've no idea if this is a common expression, but it seems to make sense to me. My interpretation of it is: words said during an in-person conversation tend to fade away into participants' imperfect memories as soon as they're said. Words that make up written communication (Slack, wiki, ...) tend to stick around, thus allowing others to who weren't directly around for the conversation to benefit from the knowledge later on.
"Asynchronous communication" likely refers to the same thing.
Google: our business is ads, and you’re the product. Put more of your data into Gmail so that we can show you more ads and do a million other things that benefit us.
Microsoft: our business is software and services and hardware and a bunch of other stuff you can pay us money for. E-mail service is the product, and you’re the customer.
"""Microsoft uses the data we collect to provide you with rich, interactive experiences. In particular, we use data to: [etc and so forth]; Advertise and market to you, which includes sending promotional communications, targeting advertising, and presenting you with relevant offers."""
It's much more insidious at the operating system level. It's easier to change email providers than your entire operating system. I'm shocked there isn't a louder outcry over Microsoft's intrusions this way into Windows.
If Microsoft doesn’t show you ads why is “Upgrade to ad-free Premium” a thing? You can turn off ads by buying g suite (albeit its more expensive) or just use adblock of some kind.
> People want gasoline or gas. People don't want to pay for CO2 removal, because they don't get anything back immediately - maybe a slightly cooler planet and better biosphere 50 years in the future.
I don’t want gas; I want some means to propel my car from A to B. I’ll choose the most economically practical option, gas being the currently most available one. I live in Florida, so the “underwater in 50 years” meme hits very close to my home: about 3km away, to be precise. Lots of people will see the incentive to use less gas, or to pay for carbon sequestration in the absence of a non-gas option.
natural gas is used for heating, and for the time being it's more energy efficient to heat using natural gas directly than using electricity from generated from the grid which for me is a mix of nuclear hydro & natural gas
Even barring a catastrophic nosedive in the level of civilized trading, regular people aren’t equipped to store gold in their homes. The problem of securing such holdings isn’t something the average Joe will be able to solve well, and he knows it.