Category Archives: economy and money

Gold price

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With the current inflation surge, the precious metals have been acting disappointingly, despite the fact that they showed growth, because everything else grew more – food, fuel, cost of living in general. However, let me just show you this:

So, we have a situation where gold is being a “poor performer”, and the central banks are buying it at almost unprecedented rates, as if it’s a hot commodity on discount. The explanation for this apparent paradox is that the spot price of precious metals is, basically, the price of “paper” that says “gold” or “silver”, because that’s what most of the spot market consists of. This spot price is controlled by the UK and the USA, with the purpose of propping up their own paper currencies. The problem with controlling the price of gold by making it artificially lower is that the people “in the know” will buy all the physical metal you are holding, and they won’t even consider the “paper” gold. That’s what the chart is showing – the central banks are hoarding physical metal, while all the ignorant actors look at the gold price chart and think there are better deals to be had elsewhere. At some point, if things continue like this, the large buyers will leech all the physical metal from the market, and then the price will start spiking and everybody else will wake up and smell the coffee, but by then the scarcity will hit the market so hard that the price of gold will start following the pattern of Bitcoin (I mean the prices in the range of $60k per troy ounce).

 

Edit: It turned out there was an error in the chart above, and it was actually the record year:

Blaming the boomers

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I just watched a video by Wranglerstar where he blames the “boomers” and their selfish greed for the conditions in the present-day America, and I wasn’t very happy with him, so I wrote a comment which I’m reposting here, so that it wouldn’t get lost:

It has nothing to do with the “boomers”. The problem is that America attracted all the wealth and human capital from Europe that was destroyed in WW2, this human and material wealth created a burst of prosperity, which was spent, and when it was spent, you went into debt in order to continue riding that wave long after its momentum was exhausted. Not only that, but the petrodollar scheme meant that you could export your inflation to the rest of the world, because people outside America had to buy dollars with real assets in order to buy oil, and you could just print the stuff. That’s why the standard of living in America used to be so outrageously higher than anywhere else in the world. It’s not because you have such a great constitution or anything; you were just the only ones undamaged by the two consecutive world wars. Before WW1, there was no difference between you and Argentina or Chile. Now that you spent everything and went tenfold that much into debt, you’re starting to have the kind of life we in Europe had for a very long time, and of course you’re not happy about it, so you started another war in Europe in order to, again, wreck it for everybody else and hope to be the last ones left standing, and repeat the post-WW2 era that went so wonderfully for you. What you might find out is that the times where wars could not reach your shores are long gone, and the rest of the world doesn’t hate you because of your freedom, they hate you because you extracted resources and propagated wars and corruption in other countries, as can be seen in Biden/Burisma files. So, don’t talk to me about boomers, because in my country the boomers worked very hard and had nothing to show for it, and had to grow up in countries pulverized by war, suffered from malnutrition and they still managed to create the post-war Europe, and they had to compete with America – unrazed, with all the world’s gold and all the best engineers and scientists attracted from Europe. You went to the Moon with German scientists and Bretton Woods gold, while my boomer father had rickets from post-war malnutrition and worked very hard every single day translating scientific and engineering materials from and to French and Italian and had to go work as a translator on a construction site in Algeria among vipers, scorpions and heat to be able to afford the down payment for a small apartment. So, you Americans can now cry me a river and I will bathe in your tears.

Bait and switch

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Told you so; “the grid can’t handle electric cars so I guess you’ll have to do without cars in the future”. Electric car transition is in fact a way for them to take our cars away, it was never about giving us electric cars, which I figured when I observed that they are not building new nuclear power plants to energetically finance the new anticipated power expenditures from electric cars. The wind and solar power is all a fraud – it’s intermittent, dirty and weak, and the only truly good sources are nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal. The problem with “green” advocates is that they want to transition everything to electricity “because it’s cleaner” and then they want to ban most sources of electricity, except the “feel good” stuff that actually creates availability and quality issues, not to mention toxic waste, because solar and wind don’t produce electricity from sun and wind, they produce electricity from environmentally toxic hardware that eventually has to be disposed somewhere.

Basically, it’s not about “green” anything, it’s about destroying the underlying assumptions of a technological civilization, which would result in more dead than a nuclear war, and if you think the WEF people don’t know that, you have a surprise coming. The entire thing looks like somebody’s long-term depopulation project, considering how they seem to be undermining the moral and intellectual basis of society, energy, agriculture, manufacturing and finances all at the same time. It’s a full-spectrum degradation. Russia is the only major country that has a sustainable economic structure at the moment, which was actually helped by the sanctions, which is an incredible irony; they have independent energetics, petrochemical industry that produces fertilizers, agriculture, heavy industry capable of producing machinery, they have all the raw materials they would ever need, they have educated people to work on solving actual problems, and they have the morality and worldview to back a healthy society. Basically, the only places where Russia needs to improve things is semiconductor lithography in the single-digit nanometer scale and, possibly, some other specialized areas such as optics, which is more-less trivial and seems to be in the process; what’s actually hard to do is educate scientists and create a morally and intellectually healthy society with a free market economy that incentivizes innovation and progress; technology follows easily.

 

Rule 34

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I finally found out why the Americans are putting pressure on the Germans to give their tanks to Ukraine, while they themselves won’t give them their own Abrams tanks, with an excuse that they are too high-maintennance.

You see, the Americans told all countries who will give their Leopard II tanks to Ukraine that they will receive free Abrams tanks from America’s own stock. Apparently, being high-maintennance is not a problem in this context. The Germans are freaking out because this is removing them from the market for tank purchases and harming their industry.

As the 34th rule of acquisition clearly states, war is good for business.

The endless spiral

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I must admit that this Andrew Tate person (or at least his public persona) pissed me off more than I expected, but probably for reasons other than one might expect. For instance, I agree with most of what he’s saying. I don’t like his flamboyant behaviour, or the way he doesn’t seem to really connect with women, but that’s not what pissed me off.

What pissed me off is that he tries to teach people never to be content with anything, never to settle for “good enough”, never to transcend base greed, never to stop trying to acquire status by flaunting status symbols, never to stop and think and understand that appearance of power and appearance of freedom do not magically produce the real thing, when acquired. I kept having an argument with a simulated Tate in my head, and it bothered me that I couldn’t answer some of his boisterous arguments in an immediate and satisfactory way. “Where’s your Bugatti?”, for instance, is something I can’t answer with a satisfactory sound bite. I don’t have enough money to be able to afford such an object, and then decide against it because I’m being reasonable, or because I don’t really want it. It is true, however, that when I acquired a significant amount of money, I stopped caring about “status symbols” to a very large degree, which is something I understand; when I was financially threatened, I felt the need to maintain a defensive posture that would prevent the “sharks” from smelling my blood in the water, so to speak, so I kept the appearance of having money when I was deeply in debt and everything felt very fragile. I would buy the most expensive car I could possibly manage, in order to maintain the appearance of wealth and security, in order to discourage attacks by my enemies. I don’t know if any of it worked, but that was my reasoning. It was all based on instinct, the way a cat puffs itself up to appear bigger when scared, and acting on such instinct probably only depleted my scarce resources, but in hindsight I don’t see how those resources could have been used for something constructive; the situation was too profoundly bad for constructive measures at that point, and I correctly felt that I need to just buy time, survive while maintaining a defensive posture, until the situation that was presently outside of my control improves. One would expect that, later, when I not only got out of debt, but started making quite a bit of money, I would start preening like that Tate peacock, but that didn’t happen. What I noticed is that I was buying the stuff that I would normally need, but I could do it properly now. If I needed a laptop, I could just buy a proper one that meets my needs, not something second-hand from ebay, or something barely adequate because it’s cheap. If I needed clothes, I could just walk into a store and buy whatever I needed. I pay the bills immediately, not postpone it until the latest possible moment. I buy the fuel when I need it, not when I can afford it. If I feel like going somewhere for a day, I just do; I don’t have to wait until I have enough money for fuel. If I need a computer, I buy really good components, not the cheapest ones that barely work for me. So, money is good, and poverty is shit. However, what I noticed is that this peaked quite quickly; basically, for the most part, I still buy the same kind of stuff that I previously used, but I can easily afford it now. Before, I had to buy a seven year old car, and even then it was a stretch. Now I can just go to a car salon and buy something, but I still drive cars of exactly the same type and class I did before; it’s just that I buy them new now, and I can easily afford it. I once thought that, if I could buy a new BMW M5, that I would immediately do it, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I bought normal cars, and when I found a good deal on them. I wondered why that was, and one possible answer was that I don’t have enough money to buy such a thing and not reduce the amount of money I have significantly, and that certainly is one factor, but that would not have stopped me in the bad years, when I felt financially vulnerable and threatened; I’d spend everything I had on such a status symbol, and go into debt as much as possible; the self-preservation preening instinct was just too strong to allow for reasonable action. When I look at Tate, it seems that for some people this never goes away even when they become wealthy, they develop an insatiable greed in their years of poverty, a greed that can never be sated, a hole that can never be filled. That didn’t happen to me; I reacted with defensive instincts when I was in real trouble, but once I replaced all the things that wore out or broke during the bad years, I basically got to a point where I relaxed and calmed down, capped my expenses at a reasonable, slightly above average level, and started saving money.

That’s one thing that annoyed me with Tate – he tries to provoke people into keeping up the endless spiral of greed and preening, into destroying themselves financially and making potentially dangerous financial moves in order to be able to afford a lifestyle of incredible wastefulness, because he convinced them that freedom and safety are only possible at the upper echelons of wealth. Considering how he and his brother are currently in a Romanian prison, under whatever fake charges America told the Romanians to invent, and his opulent and boisterous lifestyle not only didn’t prevent that, but arguably caused it, I could flip the question and ask him where his Bugatti is, now. This, however, doesn’t satisfy me, because the fact that I don’t actually have enough money to really do all the things I would want to is something I feel to be a valid argument against me, so let’s see how I would actually answer it if I wanted to be perfectly honest. I would answer that I am a slave, a prisoner and a cripple. I can’t fly, or teleport, or change shape of my body, or extend my mind as well as I would want to. I am confronted with my limitations whenever I try to do anything I have no talent for – I can’t read or compose music, for instance; I have only limited understanding of electronics, and always had issues with mathematics, because I am slightly dyslexic to the point where I make mistakes copying long sequences of numbers and symbols, and I make mistakes when solving long equations, even when I completely understand how they should be solved. Some things come to me with trivial ease, and for some my brain just doesn’t work and it feels like trying to push through a brick wall. So, I’m limited by my lack of ability, by my lack of talent, by fundamental immutable physical limitations of my body, by the characteristics of the world, by limited resources at my disposal, and so on. The most painful limitation is that God hides himself from my sight; I feel the presence, and I can be much more than I can see, but for the most part I have to try really hard not to think about it because it hurts like fucking hell. I can’t meditate because I immediately hit an artificial wall, that was put there because God apparently thinks I have to remain in the state of separation in order to do the things I have to do, so when I meditate and hit that wall I feel helpless frustration caused by the fact that it’s not up to me; I actually sometimes wish that it were because I fucked up, because then I could work on fixing it, I could repent, or work hard to repay whatever debt, or something. So, I am limited, and I hate it, but the point where I get incredibly pissed at the imagined “where’s your Bugatti?” question is that the damn fool asking it doesn’t understand the enormous extent of my problem. Sure, I can’t buy a 5M USD car, but honestly, I can buy a 200K USD car, and I still bought one that’s ten times cheaper, just because I knew that a more expensive car won’t solve my problem. I won’t get my abilities back. I will still hit a “presence, but no information” barrier when I meditate. It will still hurt like a motherfucker when I accidentally think about all the things I can’t reach. I will still feel damaged when I try something that’s outside of my talents. I will still feel vulnerable to attack. I don’t have a Bugatti because I’m not wealthy enough, but that’s beside the point; the reason why I don’t have an M5 is because I know it wouldn’t solve my problems. The illusion of power doesn’t interest me. The illusion of safety doesn’t interest me. I want the real thing, not illusions and trinkets. I mentioned my weak points and limitations, but this one is not one of them; you see, I am not prone to self-deception. I know what the problems are, and I know what doesn’t solve them, even if I don’t have the actual solution available. I don’t do stupid moves that have the purpose of creating pleasant illusions. If truth hurts, I would rather feel the pain. So, that seems to be the root of my irritation with Andrew Tate – I see the guy who’s taking the path of self-deception, and by some instinct this makes me do the opposite, and it hurts.