Dishonesty. Lots and lots of it. I get targeted (your Television provider has information about your interests and since they probably have your internet browsing catalogued the same way) advertising on TV and even spam email urging me to buy precious metals. Since one of my low-paid and no-benefits jobs is recycling, I’ve logged in to the websites of recycling centers for almost 20 years. So I can see where the problem lies. However, they’re urging me to buy gold. While that’s an amusing little screwup of the Mighty Google and their buying and selling everybody they can. Not selling to us. Selling us. Beside all that, they want me to believe they have a really backward business model of selling Gold which they value greatly using Currency which they say is practically worthless (it is) So how do they expect to make a profit, if they’re being upfront about the equation?
Especially in a time when currency is very devalued. So, let me get this straight, how am I supposed to make a theoretical profit if I buy gold for more currency, while the currency is steadily worth less, in the hopes I’ll make a profit when it’s reversed, and the gold I (and I ain’t) bought for a lot of currency is going to be valued at a lot less currency? If it really works, I mean.
Theoretically I could put down a thousand dollars for a chunk of gold that won’t be worth 500 if the currency rebounds. That’s a guaranteed loss of 50%. Not that I actually have currency anyway. Further, if currency is no longer of any value for trade, at that point civilization would be defunct. I mean, to the point when a loaf of bread will be of more immediate value to me than any amount of gold. You can’t eat gold. Or you could, but you would just poop it out later after getting exactly no nutritional value from it.
You can’t make tools out of gold. It’s a big deal in electronics but if civilization is gone, the internet is gone, television is gone, my recycling skills combined with the sudden available of otherwise useless electronic goods would get more money (assuming that civilization rebounds, see similar snark about currency) worth of gold from discarded electronics. Which would take some time which would be better spent foraging and gardening for food.
As for any stupid comments about vegetables as food versus Meat, don’t embarass yourself. If you have a garden you have all kinds of prey animals. The best Cherokee method of hunting deer is to plant a cornfield. Ask anybody who farms corn.
Maybe the evil Google Empire could take a hint and figure out, finally, that I won’t be buying any gold. Although the customers which buy my profile as composed by Google probably won’t get any honesty from them. Which is a nother subject for a nother rant.
But the buy low – sell high capitalist dream has fallen flat several times in my short lifetime. There are Anarcho-syndicalist communes founded about the start of world war one which have steadily outperformed Wall Street for that entire century and a couple of years.
