"Jealousy and hatred are twin thieves. The one cannot live without the company of the other."
Sri Sathya Sai Baba
"In 2004, the BBC produced a documentary titled The Secret Swami, as part of its series "The World Uncovered".[144] One central theme of the BBC documentary was again Alaya Rahm's sexual abuse allegations against Sathya Sai Baba.[145] This documentary interviewed him together with Mark Roche, who had spent 25 years of his life since 1969 in the movement and alleged abuse by Sai Baba.[145] The show also featured allegations from Sai Baba critic Basava Premanand. Premanand stated in the documentary that, in his opinion, Sai Baba faked his materialisations. Here, he claimed that Sathya Sai Baba was "not just a fraud, but a dangerous sexual abuser". According to his interview, he had stories which spanned 30 years, and he stated that his stories were similar, a common practice being the rubbing of genitals with oil by the spiritual leader. Among his claims were that one ex-devotee claimed Sai Baba "put the oil on his hands, told me to drop my pants and rubbed my genitals with the oil". Premanand theorised that many Indian boys were abused but were never heard from because they too afraid to speak out, alleging Sai Baba was well-connected with the elite and powerful of India."
And historically, gold is a poor performer and among the first things to lose value in times of uncertainty:
"In his book Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell[66] argued that, in the long-term, gold's high volatility when compared to stocks and bonds, means that gold does not hold its value compared to stocks and bonds:
To take an extreme example [of price volatility], while a dollar invested in bonds in 1801 would be worth nearly a thousand dollars by 1998, a dollar invested in stocks that same year would be worth more than half a million dollars. All this is in real terms, taking inflation into account. Meanwhile, a dollar invested in gold in 1801 would by 1998 be worth just 78 cents."
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
It's an invalid comparison, currency measured against itself is not an investment.
Historically, gold is not a great investment- the price freakout of the last four years is an anomaly, one that is largely driven by the Fed keeping the interest rates artificially low.
Economics of Ice & Fire I: House Tyrell Is Richer Than House Lannister
By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Wednesday, April 17, 2013, at 3:40 PM
As you watch members of House Lannister and House Tyrell scheme for control over King???s Landing here???s something to keep in mind. The Westeroi conventional wisdom that that the Lannisters are the richest house in the Seven Kingdoms is dead wrong. House Tyrell is number one in all the ways that count.
To see why, just consider this observation from Warren Buffett in last year???s letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:
Today the world???s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce ??? gold???s price as I write this ??? its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
Let???s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world???s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
Today all that gold would be worth only about $7 trillion so we can just say would you rather have a 68 cubic feet of gold, or all the cropland in the United States plus thirteen ExxonMobiles. The answer is, obviously, that you take the farms and the oil.
And in Westeros, the Lannisters have the cube of gold and the Tyrells with the rich farmland of the Reach have the real resources. You can???t eat gold. You can???t feed it to your horse either. Gold doesn???t keep you warm during those lengthy winters. Gold is useful primarily because it???s a convenient medium of exchange (who wants to carry all that wheat around) and a durable store of value (keeping a whole bunch of horses alive and healthy is itself a resource intensive process). So people with claims over valuable real resources will often end up accumulating gold. But though the Lannisters have more gold than anyone else, that???s not how they got their gold. They just own gold mines.
Now don???t get me wrong, you???d rather own gold mines than not own them. But the ability to pull shiny metal out of the ground is trivial compared to the power of a well-fed army. Imagine a scenario in which the Westerlands are out of food, and the Reach is out of gold. The Tyrells and their bannermen will need to curtail their consumption of luxury goods until they can manage to sell food for gold, but the austerity will be survivable if a bit unpleasant. The Lannisters, by contrast, are going to find that if they try to trade a whole big pile of gold for a whole big pile of food that the price of food will skyrocket. The illusion of Lannister wealthy is based on the idea that we can take the marginal price of an ounce of gold, then multiply that by the total quantity of the Lannister gold supply, and then conclude that the Lannisters are hyper-wealthy. In reality, any effort to mobilize all that metallic wealth will lead to inflation rather than the ability to mobilize vast quantities of real resources.
You can see this historically from the Spanish conquest of the New World and the ensuing influx of newly mined ???treasure.??? This appeared to give the Habsburg dynasty a decisive wealth edge vis-??-vis its European rivals, but the Habsburgs??? struggles with France led to the inflationary ???price revolution??? and ultimately the victory of a French state built on the control of real resources???productive agricultural land and a large population. My guess is that by the time the Song of Fire and Ice is concluded we???ll see something similar. Real resources???not shiny gold???are the true test of wealth and the real source of power.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Whatever, if y'all want to argue that gold doesn't hold its value better than US currency does, go right ahead.
Because of course, we'd all be loons wearing our boxers on our heads to ever even think about investing in gold.
Seriously, how petty does this board get when it comes to ____________ ?
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
And maybe, just maybe gold is valuable beyond our current understanding because it's actually valuable beyond our current understanding.
With all due respect, bombs went off during the Boston Marathon, claiming 3 lives, dozens of amputations, hundreds of injuries, etc.
I get that threads can and will go off on wild tangents at times, but what the fuck is this?
HarveyCanal said:
And maybe, just maybe gold is valuable beyond our current understanding because it's actually valuable beyond our current understanding.
By the way, I have absolutely nothing against you, Harv. I'm honestly just puzzled.
you serious? paranoid conspiracy theorists are always championing gold. at least here in the US they are.
it follows pretty logically from the discussion here actually.
(BTW Harvey I hope you're not offended at being called a "paranoid conspiracy theorist." I mean, you're lots of things, but this is undoubtedly one of them).
i know that you were responding to harvey's specific point re: return on gold but that completely disregards gold's purpose as a relative store of value.
and everyone "in the biz" bought the fucking dip and that's why there's physical shortages all over
as far as "uncertainty" goes, that's quite an uncertain term and does nothing to illustrate a point.
a friend's mom was in that vietnam place during the war and everyone was like yo we gotta get the fuck up out of here. ways out were limited to say the least and one of the only ways was some bootleg ass aircraft sitch. seeing as how most people take advantage of situations like this, they were charging quite a bit if you wanted to be a passenger. guess what they were more than willing to accept as currency and what they scoffed at?
His girl wanted something shiny to put on her finger
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Also, I'm no Ron Paul disciple. He wanted to audit, then end the Fed. And he rejected senseless war for profit. Those are two things I've been into loooong before I became familiar with Paul (a guy I don't recall ever actually voting for). Plus, the dude is now retired...so shut the fuck up about him in every other post already.
And rootless, let's break it down.
Paranoid: Nope, the shit I complain about actually happens. Therefore, the antithesis to such a use of paranoid would be "clueless".
Conspiracy: How is increasing covert centralized control not a conspiracy? You really think all of these perfectly fitting puzzle pieces of current events aren't planned? Oh yeah, we just keep happening to be doing military drills at the same spots and same times that these random nutjobs that we have connections to go randomly beserk. What a recurring coincidence that is?
Theorist: Oh, I guess if it isn't coming from the unshakable fact machine of CNN/Fox/NBC/NY Times/etc. then it's inherently a theory. Sorry, but every fucking thing that any of us ever think or say is only a theory. But somehow because a criminal government creates and sanctions the theories you espouse, they are somehow better than the theories that I espouse. Okay, boss.
You complicit, true believers are FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR more rigid with your beliefs than anyone I've ever known y'all to label a conspiracy theorist. Y'all play apologist for thieves and murderers on the daily, period. So whether you think your arguments are somehow scientifically more sound, your whole foundation is wrong to begin with. It's like the fucking nuclear scientists from the 40's. Yeah, y'all are the smartest humans ever. But look what your stupid fucking "smarts" got us. Idiots!
Also, I'm no Ron Paul disciple. He wanted to audit, then end the Fed. And he rejected senseless war for profit. Those are two things I've been into loooong before I became familiar with Paul (a guy I don't recall ever actually voting for). Plus, the dude is now retired...so shut the fuck up about him in every other post already.
And rootless, let's break it down.
Paranoid: Nope, the shit I complain about actually happens. Therefore, the antithesis to such a use of paranoid would be "clueless".
Conspiracy: How is increasing covert centralized control not a conspiracy? You really think all of these perfectly fitting puzzle pieces of current events aren't planned? Oh yeah, we just keep happening to be doing military drills at the same spots and same times that these random nutjobs that we have connections to go randomly beserk. What a recurring coincidence that is?
Theorist: Oh, I guess if it isn't coming from the unshakable fact machine of CNN/Fox/NBC/NY Times/etc. then it's inherently a theory. Sorry, but every fucking thing that any of us ever think or say is only a theory. But somehow because a criminal government creates and sanctions the theories you espouse, they are somehow better than the theories that I espouse. Okay, boss.
You complicit, true believers are FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR more rigid with your beliefs than anyone I've ever known y'all to label a conspiracy theorist. Y'all play apologist for thieves and murderers on the daily, period. So whether you think your arguments are somehow scientifically more sound, your whole foundation is wrong to begin with. It's like the fucking nuclear scientists from the 40's. Yeah, y'all are the smartest humans ever. But look what your stupid fucking "smarts" got us. Idiots!
I don't know if "paranoia" necessarily implies *unfounded* suspicion. If so, we can disagree about the extent to which you're paranoid. I mean, I'm suspicious of shit too, but you're suspicious about more shit.
Good example is the trails of white stuff that are left behind airplanes. I've heard it explained as water vapor from commercial jets, which I believe. You think it's the government dropping poison on the population below.
As for conspiracies, shit man they happen all the time. I don't deny it.
Theories are just that. It's hard to prove things sometimes.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Only reason why not every single person in Texas is John Wayne is because some of us are Charlton Heston.
b/w
Such an exercise of yours to always be lobbing softee freeze insults based off of lame stereotypes.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
rootlesscosmo said:
Good example is the trails of white stuff that are left behind airplanes. I've heard it explained as water vapor from commercial jets, which I believe. You think it's the government dropping poison on the population below.
Whether they are dropping poison or nothing at all is one thing, but they clearly aren't commercial passenger planes, if that's what you meant.
Comments
You're too easy.
Will quickly research a counter argument to anything in 5 minutes or less.
And if statistical data says that Texas sucks, damned all those happy Texans, especially those actually telling him how great it is down here.
In other words...Wikipedia > Real Life.
That Roger Nicholson is some douchebag-of-the-year material alright.
Yeah, that would be so incredibly wacky to do, so please continue to clown the practice. It suits you.
$1,000,000 in 1991 now worth ~$600,000.
$1,000,000 in gold purchased in 1991 now worth ~$40,000,000.
Where did you get this nonsense?
Gold has gone up about 4x since '91, not 40X, and most of that was just in the last few years.
http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf
And pretty much everybody in the biz knows it's going to go way down soon, it's lost over $200/oz in the last two years.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/15/investing/gold-prices-china/index.html
And historically, gold is a poor performer and among the first things to lose value in times of uncertainty:
"In his book Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell[66] argued that, in the long-term, gold's high volatility when compared to stocks and bonds, means that gold does not hold its value compared to stocks and bonds:
To take an extreme example [of price volatility], while a dollar invested in bonds in 1801 would be worth nearly a thousand dollars by 1998, a dollar invested in stocks that same year would be worth more than half a million dollars. All this is in real terms, taking inflation into account. Meanwhile, a dollar invested in gold in 1801 would by 1998 be worth just 78 cents."
But still...$4,000,000 versus $600,000.
Which would you rather have?
It's an invalid comparison, currency measured against itself is not an investment.
Historically, gold is not a great investment- the price freakout of the last four years is an anomaly, one that is largely driven by the Fed keeping the interest rates artificially low.
On the one hand, you're investing your $1,000,000 in gold.
On the other hand, you've got your $1,000,000 sitting under a mattress, and you're comparing it to inflation.
By Matthew Yglesias | Posted Wednesday, April 17, 2013, at 3:40 PM
As you watch members of House Lannister and House Tyrell scheme for control over King???s Landing here???s something to keep in mind. The Westeroi conventional wisdom that that the Lannisters are the richest house in the Seven Kingdoms is dead wrong. House Tyrell is number one in all the ways that count.
To see why, just consider this observation from Warren Buffett in last year???s letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders:
Today the world???s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce ??? gold???s price as I write this ??? its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.
Let???s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world???s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?
Today all that gold would be worth only about $7 trillion so we can just say would you rather have a 68 cubic feet of gold, or all the cropland in the United States plus thirteen ExxonMobiles. The answer is, obviously, that you take the farms and the oil.
And in Westeros, the Lannisters have the cube of gold and the Tyrells with the rich farmland of the Reach have the real resources. You can???t eat gold. You can???t feed it to your horse either. Gold doesn???t keep you warm during those lengthy winters. Gold is useful primarily because it???s a convenient medium of exchange (who wants to carry all that wheat around) and a durable store of value (keeping a whole bunch of horses alive and healthy is itself a resource intensive process). So people with claims over valuable real resources will often end up accumulating gold. But though the Lannisters have more gold than anyone else, that???s not how they got their gold. They just own gold mines.
Now don???t get me wrong, you???d rather own gold mines than not own them. But the ability to pull shiny metal out of the ground is trivial compared to the power of a well-fed army. Imagine a scenario in which the Westerlands are out of food, and the Reach is out of gold. The Tyrells and their bannermen will need to curtail their consumption of luxury goods until they can manage to sell food for gold, but the austerity will be survivable if a bit unpleasant. The Lannisters, by contrast, are going to find that if they try to trade a whole big pile of gold for a whole big pile of food that the price of food will skyrocket. The illusion of Lannister wealthy is based on the idea that we can take the marginal price of an ounce of gold, then multiply that by the total quantity of the Lannister gold supply, and then conclude that the Lannisters are hyper-wealthy. In reality, any effort to mobilize all that metallic wealth will lead to inflation rather than the ability to mobilize vast quantities of real resources.
You can see this historically from the Spanish conquest of the New World and the ensuing influx of newly mined ???treasure.??? This appeared to give the Habsburg dynasty a decisive wealth edge vis-??-vis its European rivals, but the Habsburgs??? struggles with France led to the inflationary ???price revolution??? and ultimately the victory of a French state built on the control of real resources???productive agricultural land and a large population. My guess is that by the time the Song of Fire and Ice is concluded we???ll see something similar. Real resources???not shiny gold???are the true test of wealth and the real source of power.
Because of course, we'd all be loons wearing our boxers on our heads to ever even think about investing in gold.
Seriously, how petty does this board get when it comes to ____________ ?
I get that threads can and will go off on wild tangents at times, but what the fuck is this?
By the way, I have absolutely nothing against you, Harv. I'm honestly just puzzled.
I've heard this ad too! They play it on AM radio all the time
What, you mean this:
you serious? paranoid conspiracy theorists are always championing gold. at least here in the US they are.
it follows pretty logically from the discussion here actually.
(BTW Harvey I hope you're not offended at being called a "paranoid conspiracy theorist." I mean, you're lots of things, but this is undoubtedly one of them).
Too late, I already did.
*like*
and everyone "in the biz" bought the fucking dip and that's why there's physical shortages all over
as far as "uncertainty" goes, that's quite an uncertain term and does nothing to illustrate a point.
please tell the people in cyprus about gold
a friend's mom was in that vietnam place during the war and everyone was like yo we gotta get the fuck up out of here. ways out were limited to say the least and one of the only ways was some bootleg ass aircraft sitch. seeing as how most people take advantage of situations like this, they were charging quite a bit if you wanted to be a passenger. guess what they were more than willing to accept as currency and what they scoffed at?
And rootless, let's break it down.
Paranoid: Nope, the shit I complain about actually happens. Therefore, the antithesis to such a use of paranoid would be "clueless".
Conspiracy: How is increasing covert centralized control not a conspiracy? You really think all of these perfectly fitting puzzle pieces of current events aren't planned? Oh yeah, we just keep happening to be doing military drills at the same spots and same times that these random nutjobs that we have connections to go randomly beserk. What a recurring coincidence that is?
Theorist: Oh, I guess if it isn't coming from the unshakable fact machine of CNN/Fox/NBC/NY Times/etc. then it's inherently a theory. Sorry, but every fucking thing that any of us ever think or say is only a theory. But somehow because a criminal government creates and sanctions the theories you espouse, they are somehow better than the theories that I espouse. Okay, boss.
You complicit, true believers are FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR more rigid with your beliefs than anyone I've ever known y'all to label a conspiracy theorist. Y'all play apologist for thieves and murderers on the daily, period. So whether you think your arguments are somehow scientifically more sound, your whole foundation is wrong to begin with. It's like the fucking nuclear scientists from the 40's. Yeah, y'all are the smartest humans ever. But look what your stupid fucking "smarts" got us. Idiots!
I don't know if "paranoia" necessarily implies *unfounded* suspicion. If so, we can disagree about the extent to which you're paranoid. I mean, I'm suspicious of shit too, but you're suspicious about more shit.
Good example is the trails of white stuff that are left behind airplanes. I've heard it explained as water vapor from commercial jets, which I believe. You think it's the government dropping poison on the population below.
As for conspiracies, shit man they happen all the time. I don't deny it.
Theories are just that. It's hard to prove things sometimes.
b/w
Such an exercise of yours to always be lobbing softee freeze insults based off of lame stereotypes.
Whether they are dropping poison or nothing at all is one thing, but they clearly aren't commercial passenger planes, if that's what you meant.