Month: April 2021

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

rustingbridges:

controversial personal finance opinion: if you have enough wealth you should own some physical gold

financialized gold has most of the downside of real gold and also none of its special upside, so not that

gold does not, as a rule, gain in value, and it’s vulnerable to theft, but it also does not, as a rule, lose in value, and also the rest of your assets are vulnerable to theft too. gold might have a higher risk but diversification is still valuable

in the event you lose access to your financials and have to leave – maybe not likely, but not impossible, apparently something like 1% of humans in 2021 are or have been refugees – gold jewelry particularly is both portable enough you can take it and universally recognized as valuable enough you can trade it. just don’t get it in your teeth

*Is* this controversial, even in the broad form stated here?

I kind of figured that there was broad agreement that there exists *some* level of wealth at which diversification into gold is worth pursuing (for the reasons you give), but that different people’s estimates of what that wealth level is vary by orders of magnitude, and some people would put enough forms of philanthropy above gold on the to-do list that in practice no one would ever reach the gold stage given our world’s current amount of philanthropic fruit to be picked.

(I’m not sure where I would place the threshold: I think it’s probably somewhere feasible to reach, but far enough beyond where I am now that it’s not urgent for me to figure out the specifics.)

Tags:

#probably I should obtain a clearer sense of which pieces of our current jewellery collection are costume and which are valuable #and know how to grab the valuable ones quickly #seems like a good short-term action #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #jewellery #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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whatsdifferentincanada:

 

Tags:

#yes but only if it has butter chicken sauce instead of gravy #fuck gravy #fusion cuisine all the way‚ baby! #(yes butter chicken poutine *is* a thing and it is *amazing*) #(very rich though) #food #our home and cherished land #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

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princesshamlet:

my friend sent me this and im-

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Doctor Who #covid19 #tag rambles #the future is another country: make sure to get your shots before you go #(and it has disturbed me for some time that no companion ever seems to consider this) #(the Red Panda Adventures went a little far the other direction but at least they *thought* about it) #((in RPA the Nazis invent time travel but can’t use it)) #((because anyone they send through promptly catches several extinct strains of disease at once and dies)) #illness tw #death mention #(((re: that post going around a while back about how fiction often gives the Nazis too much credit))) #(((and they were actually *much* less competent creators than–especially–occult!AUs tend to portray them as))) #(((I would like to be clear that at least two or three other entities in RPA invent time travel and *none* of them have this problem))) #(((only the Nazis have failed to build proper safeties into their time machine))) #P.P.S. can I just say that it’s *especially* disturbing that the companion who literally #goes to *an infectious-disease research facility from the year five billion* #and is *explicitly told that the struggle against disease is perpetual because viruses are constantly evolving* #*still* never expresses concern about her safety or cross-temporal transmission or *any* of that #like damn you were so close #and yet

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maryellencarter:

@brin-bellway asked: What’s that unicorn(?) on the kitchen table?

It is an ELEPHANT! :D It’s a Better Homes and Gardens brand wax warmer I found at Walmart for $15. (There was going to be a $6 rebate but I forgot to include my receipt.) You put a lil cube of scented wax in the bottom tray, and then you switch it on, and a little 25watt lightbulb inside the porcelain body of the elephant melts the wax and makes your house smell good.

I’d been thinking about getting a wax warmer for a while, and then I picked up a bunch of Joann’s brand candles on uber-sale that don’t function terribly well as candles because the wicks burn down faster than the wax burns up, so I was looking at wax warmers and I found this one. I think it’s really cute, and also the porcelain and glaze look reminds me of the Red Rose Tea figurines we used to have when I was a kid. You can use a single cube of wax several times till all the smell is gone, so it might be more cost efficient than candles, also. It really depends how often I use one versus the other.

Tags:

#love the decor fandom #huh #I did not know wax warmers were a thing #the more you know #(25 watts is a Lot for a lightbulb these days but I suppose you need the heat) #(and it’s still fairly small in the scheme of things)

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afloweroutofstone:

If there’s one college assignment I had to do which I could force on all college students, it’d be this paper I had to write for a Research Methods class. It was later in the semester, and the professor gave us a very straightforward assignment: you need to find a news article which reports on the results of an academic study, read the actual study, and then explain in detail why the article did not properly represent the study’s findings.

Not only was having to do that a really useful exercise in terms of figuring out how misinformation gets passed around, but talking with a class of 25 other students who all had to do the same thing for 25 different articles makes you realize that the majority of all “studies show…” news articles misrepresent the studies they’re based on

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tlcook:

“Solar Sparrow” – Three guesses as to what movie inspired this little glow-ball.

Tags:

#birds #art #adorable #(apparently the movie they’re referring to is Tron) #(which I had not actually guessed but I can see it)

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ofthefog:

femmenietzsche:

You don’t hear so much about lesbians wanting to be destroyed by gigantic women these days

Tags:

#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #death tw? #sexuality and lack thereof #(…huh) #(I just double-checked and the dictionary entries I’m seeing claim that ”dead men tell no tales” is purely about) #(secret-keeping and how people can’t betray you if you murder them before they get the chance) #(and while I’m *aware* of that meaning‚ I would have said the *primary* meaning is closer to the bullet-hole thing) #(be wary of bias in the stories you hear about which things are safe‚ for dead men tell no tales) #(I wonder what the dialect determinant is there‚ or if it’s a me thing) #language