Why do we view these metals as valuable?
The most understandable reason, obviously is utility. Certain properties of these metals can accomplish what nothing else can, or at least, at a far less cost.
However, that doesn’t seem to relate to the value of most of the precious metals.
(Note: I’d add copper) The value of these metals appears totally unrelated to any utility they have. Their utility as money (rare, stable units) may play a part today.
911 Metallurgist gives a good rundown of why people would want these metals for specific business / use purposes. And while that’s understandable, it doesn’t account for the massive price of the metals beyond what they can accomplish economically.
That’s my main point: these metals are valued at a price point far beyond their utility. So what makes them valuable?
The history of civilization does provide a massive clue: they have been used as currency for millennia. But the question regarding fiat currencies still applies: if no one values them, do they have any value?
Please feel free to show me I’m wrong.
Comments
211 responses to “Why Are Precious Metals Precious?”
Why is the chunk of lead and acid I bought for my car this weekend so goddamn expensive?
Delicious lead paint drags down the value of your house, but bathe it in sulfuric acid and suddenly it’s worth a week’s pay? Miss me with that bullshit.
Solution: Spray your house with sulfuric acid. Profit.
Maybe that’s what the Muslims are trying to do with their harlot women…
A. The cost of producing lead, acid and plastic
B. A bazillion bullshit taxes and bullshit regulations producers and distributors are required to comply with.
i.e., the price is artificially inflated by govt. dumbfuckery.
Can’t wait for mandatory electric vehicles and buying several-thousand dollar batteries every couple years.
Despite their fever dreams electric cars are not going to be a thing. Mandating them would collapse the economy in no time. I haven’t done the calculations but driving an electric car one mile requires exponentially more energy than a gasoline car one mile. Despite what the virtue signaling morons who buy them think electricity does not come from ‘the holes’.
Won’t stop California from trying, I suspect. Even Santa Fe is getting in on the act, passing measures to take the city carbon-neutral by such and such a date… I’m sure that flyspeck of an effort relative to lumbering pollutive giants like China and India will stave off calamity.
Half of the cost of a battery is the mandated government lucre related to the disposal of an item that has been labeled environmentally dangerous.
Also the cost of diesel to bring it where you are.
Don’t forget the cost of shipping the damned thing from the manufacturer to the wharehouse and then to the store. Costs which include all of the Hazmat transport regulations
There are no safe havens in currency.
What you have just described is the subjective theory of value. An item is worth exactly what a willing buyer and a willing seller can agree it’s worth. The Austrians have been trying to get people to understand this for decades.
Right, I get that, but if they have been valuable for a long time.
but they have…
“The most understandable reason, obviously is utility.”
It is funny how we are discovering all these special properties about gold & platinum related to technological applications, which would make them far more valuable than as just stuff rich fathers of less attractive women use to make them more attractive to a prospective mate.
Why’d we stop doing dowries, anyway? “Take this PITA off our hands, we’ll pay you.”
“She got yuge… tracts of land.”
In this reply is an answer to the OP’s question.
2 words: Indian Women
They want gold and they have the money to buy it. They hoard it and so, anyone wanting to also get some gold has to pay at least as much as people who like to leave their wedding looking like this: https://www.thedailystar.net/sites/default/files/upload-2014/gallery/image/online/indian-bride.jpg
All the Indian men I used to work with (in IT) wore some gold too – but not that much.
Yeah, any married person (who doens’t live in a slum) has at least 1 piece of gold jewelry from when they were a baby, plus 1 gold necklace from getting married, plus a wedding ring (since they adopted that western custom, why not, more gold!).
I don’t even like gold. I prefer the look of silver.
Reardon Metal or GTFO.
It’s a lot cheaper, too.
Thats what white gold is for. 😉
Platinum.
White gold is like white zin.
Ted gets it.
Am I the only guy here with a tungsten carbide ring? I paid $30 each for my rings and own 5 different sizes
I shattered one while on vacation and didn’t even blink before ordering a backup off of Amazon.
Just checked right now… $20 each with prime shipping.
I figure if SHTF I can always pawn it. Besides cheapness what is the point of a tungsten carbide ring? Doesn’t sound like it was the durable in the end.
It doesn’t scratch, looks nice, and is super cheap. It actually did exactly what it was supposed to. They build soft spots into the ring so that EMTs can cut it off if your fingers get messed up for some reason. I (accidentally) flung the ring into a tile floor from counter height, and it broke at one of those soft spots. I doubt a gold or silver ring would’ve come out of the accident unscathed either.
I’ve had the replacement on my finger since then (2014) with nary an issue. I could polish it up and it would look brand new. No scratches, no dents, no nuthin.
SP and I have titanium wedding rings. This replaced the original Romeo y Julieta cigar bands.
Hey, I’m a cheap Jew. Gold is for putting in little bags I wear around my neck.
Mine is a thin strip of meteorite over cheap gold, it looks amazingly nice. I don’t expect it to be durable.
If that is actually all gold she’s gotta be wearing at least 40 lbs worth
The article it comes from claims she had 400,000 pounds worth (brit currency), so could be.
One of my wife’s friends got married to some politician’s son and she literally fell over because they put so much gold on her.
“Ten thousand pounds per pound.”
“God, I love being English.”
“Here here, cheerio!”
I think the value of these metals is at least in part due to them being historically forms of currency, leading to lockdown similar to driving on the right versus left, or the QWERTY keyboard: once its established as the standard, it’s hard to change certain things. And these metals gained that historic designation because they were useful, identifiable from each other at a glance, and easy to subdivide into different currency sizes.
Plus, they’re hard enough that they hold their shape and thus can be stamped, and they’re at least roughly a X10 difference in value going from copper to silver to gold, when is handy when you have a base 10 numeric system because we have ten fingers.
Along this line of thought I’d add, aside from meteoric iron, most other metals aren’t sitting around in their elemental form, ready to melt and reshape.
Meteoric iron is a giant pain in the ass to work with. Your point stands, though.
Unless you live in Wakanda.
They are rare and have a finite amount, hence their value as currency. They have some interesting properties for specialized applications (think Pt being used a catalyst), however their value, such as it is, comes from their rarity. Diamonds are the same way. They have utility as the hardest mineral, but most of their value to people comes from the way they look and how rare they are.
Think of an engagement ring. It is typically comprised of gold and diamonds, two rare and expensive goods. It is valued by a female specifically *because* it has no utility. It’s an advertisement that the man has so many resources, he can afford to waste some on something pretty but useless (but enough about his fiancée…).
These metals work as currency because you can’t go out and just make more gold; if you could, its value would drop in proportion to the increase in supply. That’s why fiat currencies are doomed to eventual failure.
TL;DR – “Precious” metals don’t have “intrinsic” value (whatever that means anyway), it has the value we assign to it based on the supply and demand of said metal.
The primary use for gold is in circuitry. It is a better conductor than copper or aluminum and is stable enough that it does not (mostly) corrode.
It’s also why the aliens came to earth and created mankind to mine the gold for them….
/conspiracist
Unless your around tellurium, which would be weird, gold doesn’t corrode. There are a few things that will dissolve it, and it amalgamates very easily with mercury, but those are different processes than corrosion.
Unfortunately, silver does corrode, as it is a better conductor of both heat and electricity. Silver is the most electrically conductive element and the most thermally conductive metal, pure diamonds being slightly better. Those properties are ruined by corrosion though, so it isn’t as useful as gold in the long term unless it can be adequately protected.
Gold very much does NOT have better conductivity than copper. But it doesn’t corrode, so it’s useful for plating electrical contacts.
This. It’s particularly better for RF/microwave circuits because the skin depth is shallower and copper oxidation heavily affects performance.
The point of an engagement ring is that it is a lightweight way of carting around something valuable, and thus is a way for the potential fiancee to make sure that potential spouse is committed enough to the relationship to buy her such an expensive present. The latter part is pretty much what my fiancee said when I asked why she wanted an engagement ring, though put less bluntly.
Well except you can go out and make more gold. People do it all the time. It is called mining.
Sure going out and making new gold is not easy or cheap but it is absolutely doable.
Furthermore, the idea that you would want an eternally fixed quantity of currency (in whatever form) is just as dumb as the idea that pure inflationary fiat currency is a good idea. If you have a totally fixed supply of currency then as the economy grows with gains in population and technology driven productivity you will first experience significant deflation, not as bad as inflation but not exactly a good thing either, and then eventually you reach a point where it is no longer easy to subdivide the currency into ever smaller units eventually reaching a point where the cost of a pack of bubble gum is measured in individual atoms of gold being transferred
Supply and demand must obviously be a big part of it. It’s much easier to find copper, than silver, than gold.
You leave of rarity/difficulty to acquire off as a factor. They have both utility and rarity. Getting gold out of the ground, or silver, was often a difficult and expensive process. At least, from my cursory reading of history. That’s also why it became currency; it was hard to fake it because it was difficult to get.
Modern methods of extraction make it far less difficult to obtain, but people still perceive it as relatively rare and difficult to obtain while also having utility, thus the perceived high value.
It’s more than just perception though. Technology advances may reduce extraction costs, but increasing the supply without increased demand driving it winds up eating all the profit the reduced extraction costs were expected to increase.
Wait until they drag asteroids made up of these valuable metals (or loaded with diamonds) into orbit and mine those. I suspect the treasury will then demand to go back to the gold standard because it will be able to print trillions of new dollars!
/meathead
We also would have accepted /metalhead
We also would have accepted Accept.
I don’t know about ‘less difficult to obtain’. We already mined out the majority of the gold close to the surface. Modern mines are unbelievably complex. We are mining gold a mile or two underground these days which requires pumping, shoring and cooling solutions on a vast scale.
Copper, silver, and gold were valued in the past because they were pretty, useful, and relatively rare.
These metals are available in small amounts and require huge amounts of energy to refine. The price on the user end is determined first by cost of production, then you figure in demand.
The demand for precious metals comes from their utility and their beauty. They don’t corrode. They can be melted and cast into intricate shapes; drawn into fine wires; or hammered into thin sheets. And in a strange coincidence, the workability of these metals is inversely proportional to their availability. Copper can be worked into mugs and kettles (and there is plenty of it), whereas gold can be hammered into sheets thinner than paper (whic is good because there isn’t a lot of it).
Modern plastics and ceramics have replaced the precious metals in many, perhaps most, of the uses that made them so valuable. So today, we only worry about how pretty they look in the few items we make from them.
It isnt a strange coincidence. Their physical and chemical properties are products of their electronic states.
Aluminum used to be a precious metal, before they figured out how to extract it from bauxite.
To me, the value of historically, non-utility precious metals (gold, silver) has always been like a toddler asking his parents “why?” after each answer they give. I understand fully that something’s value is whatever a buyer and seller agree to, but it seems odd that people buy up gold when they expect economic ruin. In that scenario, you would want as much utility as possible (canned goods, weapons and ammo, water, shelter, etc.)
Silver has utility in an end of the world level scenario as it can be used to sterilize water. So, that’s nice. But I agree with your general sentiment, I’d rather have extra goods than extra currency in the case of economic collapse.
And, of course, it’s utility in putting down werewolves.
Just for fun and because my wife is a bit of a sci-fi/fantasy nerd I made some silver bullets for her. She loved it.
You will notice Pie is conspicuously absent in this thread.
Cool.
Live rounds or just for show?
So you pissed in an aluminum can?
It also kills werewolves, vampires, and shapeshifter… Where is Pie when you need him for a confirmation…
They buy up gold because it is reliable as a form of money and the whole point of money is that it is fungible. Utility items are not fungible. They expect to be able to use the money to acquire whatever utility items they may need.
I guess my idea of “economic collapse” might be different than of those who buy up gold. I suppose if society collapses, but not to the point where you can still trade with people, gold is useful, but if it’s so bad that it’s literally you and your family alone in the world, it becomes less useful.
If thing actually collapse to the point where trade disappears for longer than a few weeks there will be a 90% plus die off. Higher if you live in an urban area, and any stockpiled goods will just make a you a bigger target. Prepping for disaster makes sense; hiding some hard money for survival if we follow a Venezuela path makes sense, but if it gets to the point you describe the only people surviving will be folks who are both lucky as hell and who have practiced skills almost no one has today.
And humans are natural traders. Even in an end of the world scenario, the utility of fungible currency is such that it’s going to still be useful. Why not use the old reliable methods?
I prefer to stock up on chickens. You can always trade with chickens.
True. the other thing with precious metals as currency is that they are small and portable, and easily hidden in small quantities which helps with their utility in trading by allowing one to travel with them. OTOH, you can’t eat gold and chickens is tasty.
Its the eggs that are the real tradable good, not the chicken.
Yes, but you can’t get the egg until you’ve got a chicken, so the chickens are tradable too.
But, I thought you couldn’t get chickens unless you had eggs.
I’m so confused now . . . .
You don’t need to possess eggs to steal chickens.
Yes, but you can’t get a chicken unless you have an egg. You see?
My head is hurting now after this…
Whiskey. I’ve been reading about the Whiskey Rebellion and it makes a lot more sense when you learn that whiskey was often used en lieu of hard currency west of the Alleghenies.
Anyone with a source of grain and a pot-still would probably do pretty well for themselves in hard times.
Value is derived from anything that is both scarce and desirable. Precious metals are undeniably scarce and why they are desirable doesn’t matter. They are utilious because people use them. That’s all that matters. The more they are desired, the more they will be valued.
There’s only one of me and mom says I’m precious, but I can’t give this away.
Speaking of batteries, I recently saw something about a new development using zinc in batteries. If it’s for real, it sounds like a significant step forward in terms of cost and reduction of reliance on rare and toxic components.
I’m still long on beanie babies.
Stay the course man, don’t blink when the going looks tough.
Beanie Babies
They’re pretty, easy to work, and were easy to identify in the world at large.
Which one of you made this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/56u3yn/my_buddys_jackolantern_this_year/
Swiss, obviously
Ah, the Putin!
We’ve not had a good ‘cat-butting’ in some time. Honestly, I thought the founders were going to have a harder time fending off the trolls than they’ve have. After Butt-Plug I think the rest must have gotten the memo.
Did BP show up?
Very, very, early on and they blocked him immediately. I believe cat-butting started with him.
Boston Globe update:
binary is hard
There are only 10 kinds of people who understand binary. Those that do and those that don’t.
Is it time to Nelson laugh yet? Wouldn’t about half the human race show that much native American genetics?
Half, hell. I would say more like 99.9999999999…..
By that standard I am an eskimo.
Some of my immediate family members got tested recently, I’ll need to call them and see if I can claim to be an Injun like ol’ Lizzy does.
Also, that was my first gander at BG comments; wow. You can’t even parody condescension and projection like that.
somewhere between 5th (great great great grandparent) and 10th (great great great great great great great great grandparent) generation.
my bad. the researcher said between 6 and 10 generations so at most she’s 1/64th and that would be four “greats”, not three.
Let us not forget — Tiger woods is a least 4 generations closer to a native american ancestor than Fauxachontas is.
Just adjust the million bucks for the fractional amount of DNA compared to what she claimed.
I really don’t get how she “won” this.
She can’t give the name of the person, or the tree back. It’s just junk dna at that point.
Ooh look, I’m somehow slightly maybe related to north Africa.
10 generations ago. Maybe.
I love how the commenters are screaming “SEE!!! IN YOUR FACE TRUMP!!!!” Everything about the whole farce is cringeworthy
Yep, this morning in the links I thought we were just having a good laugh at how ridiculous it is. Even Splinter shit on her for it.
And yet, she’s actually running with it.
I know I shouldn’t be shocked……but it really is a shocking lack of self-awareness. I would think most real native-americans would be universally muttering “are you fucking serious?”
Then again the native vote doesn’t matter for shit and the white liberal woman vote is still solidly hers so, zero sum game?
“I know I shouldn’t be shocked……but it really is a shocking lack of self-awareness. I would think most real native-americans would be universally muttering “are you fucking serious?””
She is counting on how stupid the people thinking she made her case are, on those that know better to be drowned out, and the media to inform those unaware of the details in her favor. I hope some native american points out no tribe recognizes you as one of their own unless you have more than 1/32 blood, and more importantly, neither does the fed gov. So Liawhata is full of shit.
It’s her story and she’s sticking with it. sure it wasn’t a test run by 23 and me… and it totally contradicts every story she’s ever said about how she was Native or how she claimed it. But she’ll get away with it.
Because she says she won and because the media will say she won.
Apparently, her Indian ancestry is supposed to come from her great-great-great grandmother (that is, five generations ago), based on family lore about a marriage application which has never been found (as far as I know). The DNA report said “six to ten” generations ago. To me, that refutes, not confirms, her specific claim about a specific ancestor.
Note, also, that the DNA report could be supported by multiple ancestors from even longer ago, although six to ten generations already gets you back to when there weren’t a lot of Euros making whoopie in North America.
The most generous estimate (22 years per generation) would put it at 132 – 220 years before she was born. for example one of my 6th generation grandparents was born 180 years ago and died 150 years before i was born.
Things are a bit different for the family of President John Tyler.
Our species is only about 5-10 kilogenerations old. Only, say, 100 kilogens since climbing down from the trees?
In a statement provided today, Tallbear pointed out that Warren shouldn’t continue to defend her ancestry claims despite refusing to meet with Cherokee Nation members that challenge her. “This shows that she focuses on and actually privileges DNA company definitions in this debate, which are ultimately settler-colonial definitions of who is indigenous,” Tallbear writes. “She and much of the US American public privilege the voices of (mostly white) genome scientists and implicitly cede to them the power to define indigenous identity.”
hey, live by the sword..
Lordy, they’re all just terrible aren’t they?
Live in the gobbledy-gook, drown in the gobbledy-gook
Science-by-race sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
My European brother in law did the 23 and Me test which said he was a small percentage Native American. We are all at a loss at how that could happen. I’m guessing they classified some Yakut DNA which shows up in the Baltics and in American Indians as American Indian. I wonder if Warren is part Baltic too.
We all share common DNA, which is why we are all mutts.
CNN’s currently running segments titled;
Warren challenges Trump to donate Promised $1M; Trump says, “who cares?”
According to 23andme, I’m more Scandinavian, Iberian or French/German than Elizabeth Warren is Native American. Apparently I had ancestors of that kind five generations ago. While Warren at best had a Native American ancestor six generations ago.
Let’s see if I can put this in a nutshell.
Gold, by itself, is very electronically stable. This means that it doesnt like to chemically combine with other elements. When it does it combines with highly reactive elements because those highly reactive elements are very desperate to stabilize their electronic configurations by stealing electrons from gold. That results in a chemical bond that is very difficult to break.
The most common way of refining gold is to dissolve the ore in acid and them mix into an arsenic solution. Arsenic is more reactive than gold so while all of this stuff is dissolved in an acid soup the arsenic grabs hold of whatever the gold was bonded to. Everybody is happy, except the miner who is now stuck with gold dissolved in solution. He cant do much with that. So the next step is to put the gold solution into a tank with electrical wires stuck into either end of it. You hit the switch, the circuit completes through the solution and the gold is drawn to the wires and sticks to it, coming out of solution as a lump of solid metal. The problem here is that enough electricity to run a medium sized town is required for this to happen.
Mining eqpt is expensive and gobbles up gasoline like you wouldn’t believe. You have to dig up the ore and haul it to your concentrator. You have to buy shit-tons of arsenic, manage it and dispose of it properly. You eat up multiple shit tons of electricity. Now you have a chunk of gold but you are out a hell of a lot of money. If anyone wants to buy that gold they first need to recoup your expense and buy your dinner. If more than one person wants to buy the gold then demand (competition) comes into play.
None of this explanation takes into account the labor, licenses, fees, bribes, leases and other legal obligations involved. Before we even get to utility and demand the cost of production has to be taken into account. The reason south africa leads the world (or used to) in gold production is that they have slave labor. One metallurgist told me once while examining some of their ‘ore’, “Nowhere else in the world would this dreck be considered ore”. Mexico could easily replace South Africa but the Mexicans have a bit of a bug up their ass about history. You can close your eyes and throw a rock just about anywhere in Mexico and hit a potential gold mine. The reason no one is mining it is because they have a law forbidding the exportation of gold. Mexico isnt the only country like that. Gold isnt that rare, it’s just expensive to get your hands on.
Below are the 15 countries that exported the highest dollar value worth of gold during 2017:
Switzerland: US$67.9 billion (21.9% of total gold exports)
Hong Kong: $52.2 billion (16.8%)
United Arab Emirates: $20.7 billion (6.7%)
United States: $19.8 billion (6.4%)
United Kingdom: $17 billion (5.5%)
Canada: $13.2 billion (4.3%)
Australia: $13.1 billion (4.2%)
Singapore: $11.5 billion (3.7%)
Japan: $8.4 billion (2.7%)
Peru: $7 billion (2.3%)
Turkey: $6.6 billion (2.1%)
Thailand: $5.7 billion (1.8%)
South Africa: $5 billion (1.6%)
Germany: $4.7 billion (1.5%)
Mexico: $4.4 billion (1.4%)
The listed 15 countries shipped 82.9% of all gold exports in 2017.
http://www.worldstopexports.com/gold-exports-country/
Am I missing something or is that unrelated to where the gold was actually mined?
Those are gold traders, not producers.
My apologies, I left something out of my comment: I know personally that what was at the time the largest gold mine in the world was mining and exporting ten times the amount of gold they were reporting in order to skirt that nation’s ridiculous laws. The concentrator (the gold/ arsenic mix) would just lie about how much gold was there and then shipped it to Netherlands to have it refined. The ignorant [REDACTED]s had no idea what they were looking at. It was just a pot of black goo to them.
This is common practice.
Copy. I took your comment as meaning that it was illegal to export gold from Mexico. I take it there is a difference in the law between pass through exports and domestically mined gold?
It used to be strictly illegal to export any gold from Mexico at all. Not one ounce.
I have a hard time believing that Switzerland exports any (((gold))).
Laundering involves trading dirty currency for clean currency, right?
Most gold comes from meteorites.
That’s the only fact that matters.
We value gold because aliens.
Arsenic is a byproduct of gold mining, the actual chemical used to put gold into water solutions that it can be precipitated out of is cyanide. So you’ve got two incredibly toxic things to dispose of.
Also, gold is incredibly rare. Current estimates of the entire supply of the earth’s gold, both what is currently available and what remains to be mined, could be gathered into a cube 21 meters on each side. Even assuming that producers are lying about their reserves and production numbers by an order of magnitude like you suggest, it will still be one of the rarest elements on earth.
Well there ya go. I am old. I guess I am starting to get things mixed up. All of my experience in this is back pre 1985.
No worries, I don’t even have experiences from 1985 and I mix things up.
*too lazy to insert bowling for soup song here*
Who knew you and Ms. Ford had so much in common.
During my vacation I watched an episode or two of “Gold Rush”. Lots of heavy machinery needed to even get a smattering of gold dust. I wonder what the operating cost vs. profit percentage is for the smaller producers. Given gold’s current high value – $1228/oz as of today – it must be worth all the trouble or else it just makes good television. (I enjoyed the heavy machinery use and fixing).
You are correct.
Before you even break ground with a shovel you have to plan ahead because profit margin is small. You have to know every penny you are going to spend.
1. Locate ore body
2. drill cores to find extent of body
3. lay out a grid and drill the grid to find the size, shape, depth and volume of ore body
4. dig up a shitload of ore from various locations around the body
5. spend a week stirring those samples up with a bulldozer to make it homogenous
6. have an assay done to determine average concentration of gold
7. calculate total amount of overburden to be removed, exactly how much gold can be extracted
8. design the mine down to the last detail. Know how much electricity will be needed right down to the last lighbulb
9. buy all of your equipment and build the mine.
Now you can go dig. We are talking big money before you even break out the shovel.
All of what I have explained also applies to other metals. Copper in particular is done much the same way as gold. Silver and platinum are usually side products from gold mining.
Those small producers you are talking about are just hobbyists. They dont make money.
I love those shows. And I always come away with the impression that the people making, selling, and repairing the equipment are the real winners in the industry.
Mining equipment is terribly expensive.
For years I have been in the market for a good deal on a smallish bulldozer. I have yet to be able to pull the trigger on even fairly good deals because the cost is just so high, and betting on piece of equipment to not have a major failure is betting 10s of thousands of dollars.
Bulldozers are like boats. Look at your initial cost and figure you will spend that much in maintenance over the next 5 years.
I had to buy a replacement pin for one. The pin was 1-1/2″ by 8-1/2″. The dealer wanted 200 bucks. Fuck that, I made one. The arm on the ripper ate through my shit-rig in a couple of hours. Chewed it up like it was Juicyfruit. Goddammit. The factory pin is case hardened.
Only $200? That’s not too bad.
I’ve seen far worse.
That was a long time ago, before Obama stuck his dick in the energy/metals industry. I cant imagine what it’s like now.
On of the shift rods in the transmission of my 75 horse alice chalmer 175 earlier this year. It’s made from a very hard alloy of which I didnt know how to identify. I had zero luck finding a replacement either. Luckily, I work in a steel mill.
I took the broken piece to out metallurgy land and them identify it. I then collected a cut off from one of our products tion runs of the correct material and took It to a machinist buddy i have. A couple days later I had a brand new shift rod. It worked out great, but had i had it made out of regular mild steel i doubt it would have lasted more than an hour or so.
There is a lot of difference between grades and levels of heat treatment for different types of steel.
Well, don’t keep a girl waiting. What kind of steel was it?
I dont remember the number. It was a high carbon grade and had to be quenched to get the desired hardness. The machinist I had make it for me knew exactly what the numbers meant. Me, not so much.
Don’t buy one right now. Wait for the next market correction, which is shortly forthcoming.
Also, watch out for parts availability issues. New Holland abandoned all support for the US market a few years back and if you have a New Holland dozer, you’re kind of screwed.
Agreed about the parts availability. As I mentioned above, I have an old Alice Chalmers tractor that getting parts for is terribly difficult. I had to fabricate a shift rod and a radiator fan for it and it took some serious digging to find a fuel lift pump.
Lachowsky, you sir, need to speak to Sloopy. He used to work for an auction house that specialized in heavy equipment. I think he knows everything there is to know about that market. I am confident he could give you some valuable advice.
these metals are valued at a price point far beyond their utility.
Gold, silver, platinum all have as part of their “utility” that they are stores of value. Their value is driven to some degree by that rather than mere industrial applications.
They are stores of value because, well, people agree they are stores of value. There are good reasons for that consensus across just about every known culture.
(1) Rarity – not a lot around, which means a small quantity can “hold” a lot of value.
(2) Stability – they don’t rust or decay.
(3) Divisibility/malleability – unlike, say diamonds, you can divvy up metals into small, very equal units, and can even mark such units for convenience.
In a world of fiat currency, why is there still a consensus that these metals are stores of value? Because people who think about monetary systems inevitably have to be historians, and have to take the long view. They know that fiat currencies are all fated to hyperinflationary failure; its just human nature. And that when fiat currencies fail, specie (gold, silver, platinum) will continue to hold value, or at least they always have and that’s the way to bet.
At one time, BTW, aluminum was a precious metal as well, before modern refining and extraction techniques made it so common.
That’s correct. I forgot to mention that earlier. Aluminum was once more valuable than gold. Louis XVI had a set of flatware made from it.
It wasn’t until the technology for electrolysis (see above about gold and copper) was available that more than a handful of people in the world saw metallic aluminum.
I’d forgotten about that. Here’s an idea for a cheesy movie: Young punk helps his scientist grandfather building a time machine. Just as it’s finished, grandpa dies. So the punk melts down all his empty PBR cans, uses the time machine to go back to the 17th century, and sells his empties to the King.
“…melts down all his empty PBR cans…”
I could barely finish reading after that. Wife is looking at me funny.
Aluminum is also an interesting case study is monopolies. Alcoa had a monopoly on aluminum production for a long time, and is one of the few examples of a non-government enforced industrial monopoly; you know, the kind that every one thinks of when they hear the word monopoly outside of boardgames.
While nothing has no intrinsic value as value requires a subject to value it (ie even oxygen the most life precious thing in the known universe is of no value to an anaerobic creature). However gold is so almost universally valued by humans as far back as we can tell such things, that it is almost true on the human level. Gold was valued for its beauty by people as disparate in time and space as the Incas and the Egyptians, and for similar reasons because it’s golden hue was representative of the sun god. Of course, to the Inca it was less rare so to them it’s value wasn’t as much as a currency.
It is this condition which seems to be true across so much of human history where gold derives value, but its particular use as a currency goes to its rarity. In some places it wasn’t as rare so its value as a currency wasn’t that high, however globally it is still rare. That rarity leads to stability in value. It’s not so rare as to be unattainable, but yet so rare to keep a steady price. The earliest known currencies were sea shells, but I’m guessing some asshole found out he could actually grow them and bottomed out that market. The rarity of beads in the Americas led to what is known universally as a rip off in the purchase of Manhattan, those suckers didn’t know any better. This disparity between other currencies is another thing makes gold a good base for trading globally.
Of course, gold can be discovered en mass ala gold rushes. This can lead to inflation, which can lead to market crashes and corrections. I am just now perusing a little history on US gold rushes and looking at how those line up with market problems. I will collate some of this in another post, I still haven’t come to any conclusions, but it will be interesting, to me anyway.
North American Gold Rush
1799
1829
1848–55
1896-1899
1791 ,1796
1819
1837
1857
1869
1893
1896
1901
1907
The natives making the deal probably thought the same thing… nothing special about Manhattan unless you’ve got the technology to make it a trading hub.
To this kid, the guitar was worth more than gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=lrchj43VEXk
I saw this from a video taken from a different point of view.
Something I forgot to add to the original – an article on the Historical price ratio between gold & silver.
How did he die? He OG’d .
BTW guys, I am a libertarian, so I do understand non-intrinsic theories of value. (And agree that utility should not be the sole measure of it). It’s just that most items with no, n-intrinsic value lose their value over time. (Scruffy mentioned Beanie Babies above). As several of you have mentioned, gold and silver have been valued by people since at least a few thousand years BC. So there is obviously something to it.
I’ll take the answers you gave above
Are you saying I should stop averaging down my costs on beanie babies? The markets gotta turn sometime.
There could be a nostalgia rally in the prices. Stranger things have happened.
*scours ebay for more opportunities*
In my opinion, the only things that have intrinsic value are life and the things that directly sustain life: food, shelter, water, etc. Everything else, is a proxy based on its relative utility.
0.02.
Yeah, and boobs sustain life.
Seriously though, I don’t think you’re wrong.
The traditional Philosophical answer boils down to only happiness (Aristotelian Human Flourishing) as having intrinsic value. Everything else has value only insofar as it promotes happiness.
Just as a reminder on fiat money (from 2016)
HM to the white courtesy telephone please…
http://missliberty.com/how-jack-became-black-film-review/
I remember from before the intertubez reading that an ounce of gold was worth as much as a decent man’s suit. According t the article this held true since the time of Shakespeare.
That’s a man’s suit that’s decent, not a suit a decent man would wear.
There are no decent men.
/intersectional feminist
Well taking these as a proxy, it looks like you can now get at least 1.25-1.36 very good suits. If you’re not looking for something that spiffy, you could probably get 2 decent suits for an oz of gold today.
SF’d the link
Crap. I thought that might happen. The one above had a shit ton of additional characters. This one is easier: https://www.brooksbrothers.com/
Also platinum is only 68% of the price of gold today. That could mean it’d be a good time to buy.
Sets the Jesse Signal fully ablaze.
Old stories: Beto totally can win!!!
New stories: It totally doesn’t matter that this vapid fraud is going down to massive defeat because hope or something.
Spoke to an old buddy this past weekend who manages about $2B in private pension funds. His take on the markets is we’re going to see a correction in the next couple of weeks followed by a short rebound. The real fun starts 4 months out over a period of a year to a year and a half. His recommendation is to grab your ankles, because it’s going to get ugly.
He also said that all of his pension customers continually ignore his advice, and as such, their funds, which look fine now, are going to be way short two years out. Take that for what it’s worth.
so what is the advice they ignore?
As with most pension funds, they don’t contribute sufficiently and depend on continual 7.5% percent stock market gains to make their long term outlook acceptable.
i enjoy the scorn as it drips off their email in response after you call them on their unrealistic expectations.
Oh, so the usual
So… get ready to graduate into a moribund economy? Goody…
Could be worse.
You could be looking at retirement as the market tanks your 401K fund.
But should I be screaming about boomers or millennials?
Definitely boomers. This is their economy.
Why not both?
I’ll save the screaming about millenials for when they’re enacting the next Bolshevik Revolution
Doesn’t matter anyway. The FedGov is gonna confiscate all private retirement funds.
That will lead to violence.
This.
The Fedgov will only do that after confiscating the guns because that’s how you get a shooting revolution.
I’d say in the long term, you’re probably right. They’ll take the funds and issue bonds as compensation a la Argentina. I just wouldn’t want to guess when that will be. Even talking about it would tank everything.
If you can land a job, a moribund economy when you graduate is the best thing for you if you have a traditional retirement horizon. You get a jolt of super-normal returns without having to pay for the previous downside.
That’s… rather reassuring. Thank you.
its what happened to me. I started investing in my retirement and purchased my home after starting my first big-boy job about 9 or 10 years. My home has appreciated about 60% and my 10 year returns on my retirement account are like 12%. I started investing and I purchased this home for life reasons, but it just happened that I timed the market doing so. I don’t suggest you try.
If you want to try, play this game a hundred times and see what happens.
who’s economy will it be at that point?
Pretty sure it belongs to Greenspan and Bernanke and all that helicopter money.
Baked – you are assuming that the social utility of precious metals is not a thing. When an Indian woman drapes herself in 40 lbs of gold to send a social signal, or when I purchased matching gold rings when my wife and I got married in order to send a social signal, that’s utility. I commend you as a good aspy libertarian for discounting social utility, but its a thing, and its what sets the price of gold.
Yes but part of the point of social signaling like that is that Gold is Valuable. If you donned 40 lbs of Toilet Paper only the people in Venezuela would think you were very rich.
So what. Giffen goods still have utility. Nothing you said makes anything I said incorrect. I said gold has utility because it gives a social signal. You said this thing that doesn’t give a social signal is not valuable for giving social signals.
Why gold gives a social signal is because humans are no Homo Sapiens, not Homo Economicus.
Leap – The question I should have asked was “why do we, as humans, place such value on precious metals even when they can do little to directly sustain our lives?” I suspect that some of the responses would have remained the same, however I think that it would have been a slightly different conversation.
A few commenters (including you, if I’m understanding you fully) seem to think I was trying to say or imply we shouldn’t view them as valuable. What’s ironic is that I first thought of the idea for this post when I was at monex.com looking at silver prices
I would expect Harvard (y’know, with how smart they are) that if there are a fixed number of slots in an undergraduate class, giving “help” to one group automatically comes at the expense of another group; it’s a zero sum game.
https://apnews.com/cf75643781a84d109a276104af915288
Ivy League = overpriced joke.
Of course not – you might as well put religion on trial.
Also… businesses are pretty open about using race to judge applicants and promotions. Everybody is aware of it Not sure why colleges are so adamant to hide it.