Monthly Archives: October 2024

Gold

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Gold is starting to show signs of exponential growth.

If we look how long it took the price of gold to permanently double, historically, it was at €10000 in 2000, then doubled in 2009. Then it doubled again to €40000 in 2019, and again to €80000 in 2024. This means 9 years, then 10 years, then 5 years, but the steepness of the curve at the end is something I’ve historically seen only in hyper-inflationary circumstances. I think gold is catching up to the real estate, and consumer goods that have inflated first. It’s late in reaction because America and the UK are traditionally trying to suppress gold in order to prop up their fiat currencies, but if you look at this chart, it no longer seems to be working that well. Sure, they can bring it down at the end of the week, month or year in order to fake the short-term stats, but at some point soon enough, I don’t think they will have any control at all.

Update

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I’ve been out for the better part of a month; some covid variant, I guess. It was messing with my lungs, and I had a slight fever for weeks every time I exerted myself physically, so I had to essentially stay put and wait for things to get better. I lost September somewhere. The symptoms were reasonably mild, but persistent, and I didn’t feel like pulling the devil by the tail.

When I got better, I got myself a new lens to motivate myself to go out more and take pictures. It’s a Sony FE 50mm f/1.8, the cheapest and lightest 50mm for the system, and I like it a lot, since a heavy lens would be pointless for me – what good is the best image quality in the world if it’s so impractical I always leave it at home and take all the pictures with the iPhone, which makes everything look like crap? With this one, I get excellent image quality with very few compromises, and I can still use shallow depth of field for closeups.


Yeah, the autofocus is pretty awful, but I don’t care much, since I’m not shooting sports. That’s what I always had difficulties explaining to people on photographic forums: I don’t actually care for autofocus or some weird gimmicky features on the spec sheet. I care for things that matter for the kind of pictures I’m taking – smooth bokeh, tonal depth, color quality, dynamic range, landscape detail etc. I will nitpick forever over the things that matter to me, and just brush off stuff that doesn’t. I used to change cameras quite frequently before technology of the early digital cameras caught up with what I wanted, but once Canon 5d came out, I held on to it for decades and Biljana still uses it now. Now I’m using Sony A7II for I don’t know how long, 8 years or something. Those things became really, really good somewhere around 2006, and I simply don’t need the new and improved version. I did, however, need some motivation to start taking the camera with me again, and I guess I need to buy something new every now and then to change my perspective enough to make it worthwhile to take pictures, because shooting the same things gets old quickly.