so my roommate is completely straight edge like no drugs no alcohol etc and so im sure y’all can imagine my surprise when i saw she brought home this sign
so i immediately inquired
and now you may ask. what the fuck did my roommate think that sign meant? well
anyways i moved the sign so it’s now front and center in our living room and ive been laughing every time i pass it
what a terrible time for me to remember that my roommate has a tumblr account and could theoretically find this post. *********** if you see this im sorry but it was funny and needed to be shared
I mean, botanically, “sativa” just means “cultivated” and “indica” means “of India”.
Cultivate
to change the things I can
run off to India
to accept the things I can’t
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #drugs cw #embarrassment squick #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #drugs cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
I keep thinking about how alcohol is unique in that in can be generated from bacteria in the air and sugar and therefore has been discovered and consumed by like almost every culture in history, but this property is unrelated to the fact that it’s a CNS depressant, like we could live in a world where human nature was exactly the same but the easiest to produce drug was a stimulant or a hallucinogen or deliriant and that would effect every culture in the world massively!
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #drugs cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Fae that keep uranium amulets, clothes made out of asbestos and bowls of lead-infused water around their residences as a human deterrent. They don’t know why humans loathe these items, but for as long as it makes them fuck off, these charms are useful.
you wake up and a fairy is snorting the line of salt you put on your windowsill like it’s coke.
‘doesn’t that shit kill you?’ you ask, deeply perturbed.
‘not very fast,’ the fairy says, and keeps snorting.
Tags:
#fae #story ideas I will never write #poison cw #drugs cw #death tw #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
in superman adventures #19, there’s a villain named multi-face who can convincingly disguise himself as anyone, even tricking dna tests and x-ray vision. Superman initially can’t stop him
and the only reason he gets caught is because multiface decides to disguise himself as, of all people, CLARK KENT i’m screaming
I especially love the fact that, in many depictions, Bruce Wayne somehow ended up looking similar enough to the one Kryptonian on Earth that they can Parent Trap people
i say “somebody’s making brownies in North Dakota” whenever my irl bizarrely strong sense of smell is bugging me plz reblog so ppl will get the reference thx
There’s an episode of the Superman animated series where Superman goes to Gotham because he hears it’s suddenly full of crime, as Batman has vanished. He teams up with Robin and dressed up as Batman to get crime back under control, while searching for him.
It turns out Bruce Wayne got mind-controlled by Brainiac who went after him just because he’s a billionaire, and is using his money to build a giant rocket. He doesn’t even know he was mind controlling Batman.
So Superman learns all this (while dressed as Batman, remember?) , and Brainiac is like “Well, Batman is only a human. Time to die” and blasts him with a big laser.
Since it’s Superman, this just damages his mask a bit, revealing that he’s actually Superman. And Brainiac goes “Kal-El? This development was highly improbable.”
Understatement of the century, bud. The chances of Batman and Superman being the same guy? Pretty fucking low!
Tags:
#Batman #Superman #comics #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #drugs cw #embarrassment squick #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #high context jokes #glowfic #drugs cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
attack of the clones leaves plausible room to theorize that there’s a raging death stick addiction epidemic going on in the jedi temple, and by “plausible room” i mean that i personally can overthink star wars faster than a hummingbird can beat its wings
in attack of the clones, obi-wan is approached by a drug dealer in a bar, and is offered death sticks for purchase. this immediately after anakin (the least helpful individual in space) helpfully shouts JEDI BUSINESS, BACK TO YOUR DRINKS and obi-wan is wearing distinctive jedi robes and is carrying a lightsaber, which even a slave kid (anakin, when he was more helpful) from the rural portion of the galaxy could recognize.
factor to note: the jedi are here in an enforcement capacity, they are actively chasing a criminal. the jedi clearly have the legal capacity to operate as law enforcement, although i doubt they operate as local coruscant law enforcement. but they are still quite literally government contracted law enforcement wizard monks, and death sticks are implied to be an illegal substance, and given the context of the bar, we can assume they’re a party drug.
drug dealers do not typically go “would you like to buy drugs” to random people, especially people very obviously in uniform, carrying a weapon, here (which everyone knows, thanks to anakin) on official business. official business that involves law enforcement, because that is obi-wan’s job, he is literally stopping a hired assassin. so what we can assume is that this guy is either really dumb, really high, both, or that he has an active market of jedi who buy death sticks from him, and that market is so stable he is bold enough to walk up to random jedi #5 and offer him illegal drugs. hence, there might be a solid number of jedi doing death sticks.
factor to note: it’s mentioned in the prequels that the force was growing darker, more clouded and more hostile for the jedi to use. in legends, it’s said that death sticks could hamper a user’s ability to touch the force, so you could connect the two and say that death stick usage spiked because the force had really, really awful vibes suddenly. and then you send THAT vulnerable population, where they become MORE vulnerable.i can wring all of this out of a one-off gag scene, you have no idea what kind of insane thoughts about star wars i can make up.
Genius.
That, or it was just Obi-Wan’s dealer.
Tags:
#Star Wars #meta #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #drugs cw
the thing all sherlock holmes adaptations get wrong is making the guy an irredeemable asshole who treats everyone like shit . not only is it not reflective of the original stories they miss that “nice, smart, well mannered dude who snorts coke when he needs to think” is possibly the funniest character ever devised
I feel like the modern equivalent is that guy you think is super well put together until you find out exactly how much red bull he ingests on a regular basis.
Modern Sherlock is that very nice English Professor-seeming guy who you bring a problem and while walking from the door of his office to his desk he starts explaining the entire solution you need
And upon reaching his desk he’s like “Excuse me one moment.” and pulls out one of those huge Monster canisters they legally aren’t allowed to make anymore, cracks the whole thing, chugs it, takes a deep breath, and then nods at you and is like “Alright, and then what you need to do is…”
why even modernize it to energy drinks??? coke didn’t go anywhere. we still have coke. energy drinks aren’t NEARLY chaotic enough.
Its is more like you hiring some guy to do private investigation about how your husband maybe cheating on you and Sherlock comes to your house high as fuck. Walks into your living room and without taking a moment to even talk to you or sign any paperwork, he turns around—pupils as big as god—and just says
“Its your best friend Brenda. I’ll email you the invoice.”
Because when it was written cocaine was legal and even considered healthy and useful by some laypeople, even though doctors knew it wasn’t, and Watson was always trying to stop people from encouraging Sherlock’s addiction because HE KNEW BETTER.
So consider this, Holmes, at 2am, desperately searching the flat for the stashes of NOS cans, only to keep coming up with passive aggressive pamphlets about the dangers of caffeine overdose.
Watson wakes up to a stench like Satan’s ass to find Sherlock sitting by his bed with a re-heated pot of cold brewed Deathwish Coffee that had been hidden in the back of the toilet tank (brewing) for five months. Sherlock is trying to say he’s proud of John’s cleverness in finding most of the stashes, but he’s passed into the fifth dimension and all John gets is a creepy vibrating grin and a sound like a shaken cat.
TLDR, Sherlock did die when he fell off the Falls, but he was so coked up his body didn’t stop moving until like a decade later.
Sherlock as one of those cryptid types the baristas talk about (there’s a post floating around somewhere) who comes in and orders a venti with as many shots as they are legally allowed to add, plus a few more for good measure (and a hefty tip) and then adds energy drink on top of it before chugging the whole thing, to the absolute horror of the cafe staff.
Further discourse! Everyone is missing the fact that Sherlock used cocaine to “escape from the commonplaces of existence” when he didn’t have a case. The drugs are a substitute. Which means that when you hire him he’s stone-cold sober and JUST AS WEIRD.
So it’s more like realizing that your flatmate with the caffeine/sometimes drug death wish will only chill the fuck out when he has some strange mystery to unravel, so you spend your free time scouring reddit posts that might actually feature a real missing person. Or a ghost. You really don’t care which at this point. When you finally find something your flatmate is THRILLED and straight up stops eating because he thinks he can survive on intellectual curiosity alone, and yeah that’s not good, but it’s better than what he was doing to himself before. Your success is comparative, okay? You stick around for the meeting partly because you’re curious, partly because this is your home too remember, and partly because you’ve found that writing up these insane excursions helps pay off your student loans. Your Patreon is thriving. The entire time your flatmate is interviewing this poor SOB he keeps breaking into manic grins and you’re kicking him under the table, trying to help him remember that others aren’t happy about a death in the family. Halfway through he pulls a cigarette from a stash in his smelly bedroom slipper, offering the client one and yeah, that’s very nice, but… no. No thank you. He’s dressed impeccably and has a violin worth millions just lying on the floor, but the flat as a whole looks like a tornado just blew through and there’s something growing on the walls beside the makeshift lab. Is he rich? Dirt poor? Impossible to tell based on the surroundings. The entire time he rattles off observations about the client not at all related to the case and his continuing good mood depends entirely on how impressed the guy is. If he mentions “magic tricks” or “I saw that on Youtube” you’re prepped for damage control.
By 8:00pm you’ve finally convinced your flatmate to look up from his research and go half on a pizza, but the second it gets there he shrieks in excitement and runs out the door, demanding that you follow with your legally dubious gun. You apologize profusely to the delivery guy and double his tip, begging him not to call the cops. No, not because you’re afraid of arrest, you just know the head of the local precinct and he’s a pain in the ass.
You run after your flatmate knowing damn well you have to be up early tomorrow because despite maintaining a private practice you still don’t make enough to get your own apartment.
Personally I see Sherlock as ADHD and no one will ever convince me otherwise
I mean — it’s textbook hyperfixation/understimulation right there — I Also forget to eat and sleep and do Human Things when I’m vibing with whatever makes my brain go, and I Also take (medically prescribed) stimulants when I need to think. And Also adhd understimulation makes mundane existence an agony that one will do nearly anything to escape but at least in the modern day we have things like video games and netflix so it’s a little easier to actually get that escape without y’know completely self-destructing along the way (Sherlock Holmes plays Among Us to fill the void between cases change my mind)
And while it’s entirely legit that a modern ADHD sherlock might self-medicate with energy drinks and home-brewed toilet-tank-coffee, I’d LOVE to see an adaptation where Sherlock just. has a prescription?
So instead of hunting down his secret Bad Habit Stash, John could be like “hey, sherlock- the pharmacy called, your meds are ready” and then sherlock would be all “LATER JOHN IM ON A CASE RN I DONT NEED THEM” and John’d be like “sherlock no that’s not how that works”
And then later once the case has been solved and the existential agony of understimulation sets back in, Sherlock could be like “hey John pass me my meds” And John might be “sherlock you already took them this morning I saw you” “yeah but they’re not working yet” “dude it takes time for them to kick in” “sure sure OR I could just take more. I missed some days y’know I gotta catch up” “sherloCK NO I am a DOCTOR that’s NOT HOW THAT WORKS” And then sherlock heaves a gigantic sigh and grabs a can of RedBull that’d been stuffed between the couch cushions and John like swats him with a shoe or something because SHERLOCK NO do you KNOW what that stuff DOES to your HEART PLEASE STOP
i’m just sitting here wheezing at the idea of Sherlock fucking Holmes dropping his phone in the middle of a game of among us to look at a reddit post like “you’re right John, this cold case looks… sus”
gen z holmes go off
Tags:
#Sherlock Holmes #story ideas I will never write #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #drugs cw
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.)
a lot of people would argue that you should at some point diversify into financial instruments which abstractly reflect the value of gold, but I think many of those people would say you should not buy actual physical gold.
to pin myself down a bit while still leaving a lot of wiggle room, here’s some points on my Gold Advice Spectrum:
if you need your money to be liquid in a normal economy any time soon, don’t buy gold
if you have enough money to retire indefinitely on, I think it’s worth having something like a month’s money or so in precious metals
if you’re bill gates you should actually should have buried a chest of treasure somewhere
What…what reasons do *they* give for wanting to diversify into gold? You can’t hedge against the collapse of your financial system by buying things that *depend on said financial system*.
I mean, okay, I guess you can hedge against *certain, partial* collapses that way, but it’s far more limited.
I should mention here that I literally wrote a post once titled “Diversification is an important part of building an investment portfolio” [link], in which I frame prepping as being essentially a way of shorting your civilisation: since almost everyone is very long civilisation pretty much by necessity, being also somewhat short civilisation is a good hedge (though I think you should still be net long). I also wrote a comment on a different post in which I called [maintaining stockpiles of soap and canned food and air filters] “pandemic insurance” [link].
—
That Gold Advice Spectrum seems pretty reasonable.
—
@cthulhubert replied: @brin-bellway there’s a certain degree of over-correction against physical gold buying because Alex Jones and some other right wing conspiracy nuts flogged buying real gold for ‘when the degenerate modern economy collapses’.
I mean, that’s traditionally how it works, right? If you think something is going to collapse, you short it and then write a report laying out your evidence and reasoning to try to convince others to do the same. Yeah, I disagree that one should be net short civilisation and think people who do that are setting themselves up for failure and pain, but short sellers are very often wrong and their existence is nevertheless a useful corrective.
(…yes, I think I *did* just draw a connection between the hate that Crazy Prepper People™ get and the hate that short sellers get.)
I think if you were genuinely going to short-sell civilization, gold’s a ridiculous thing to have. Like money itself, the value of gold is a social construct.
What you should be investing in is booze and pharmaceuticals. Set up a greenhouse that does not run on any electricity, or that gets all of its energy from solar panels, and grow food there year-round; you’ll have something to eat, something to trade, and if you are legally able to, maintain, like, one marijuana plant, so if civilization collapses you can go whole hog into growing marijuana. Once the pharmaceutical industry collapses, alcohol and marijuana will be incredibly valuable as painkillers again. And because drugs expire much more slowly than they claim on the label, keep a huge supply of ibuprofen, acetominophen, allergy meds, and so on… they’ll still be good ten years from now. Birth control, if you live in a place where it can be obtained OTC.
Hard liquor and wine are probably your best investment – they are commonly considered to improve as they age, and in a post apocalyptic world, everyone will want to get drunk. (I mean, not literally everyone. I wouldn’t drink alcohol after the apocalypse because it tastes disgusting and has no benefits I want. But most people.)
Me, I’d also get, like, a million solar chargers for phones and Raspberry Pis, and a whole lot of USB stick drives with adapters. Then I’d download Wikipedia every several months, and any medical database that allows me to download the whole thing, and as much info as I can get about maintaining phones and Raspberry Pis. Probably ebooks and databases on carpentry, plumbing, electricity, electrical generation, making wine and beer, etc, etc… I’d have a few hundred of the Pis in boxes, in a climate controlled room, probably with the boxes sealed in a plastic bin with a lid, and I’d have USB sticks with image files to put on the Pis. I’d use phones and tablets as monitors, or tiny monitors with low power requirements, so that I’d have a place to read my stored downloads. Then when the internet crashes I’d have huge amounts of information I could share with my neighbors so we could restore the amenities of civilization as quickly as possible, as many of them as possible. There won’t be making any new computers for a very long time- clean room tech is very complex – but keeping existing machines that use very little power in good repair, unused and protected from the elements, will help a lot.
Physical books are also very good but are heavy, not very portable, and easily destroyed by any kind of extreme weather – weather applies to computers too, but you can store vastly more information on 1 small computer than you can on 20 books, and then you put 20 replacements for your small computer in there. Still, if you’ve got space for a library and you don’t live somewhere it is likely to flood or burn, stockpile books. Nonfiction that give you information about how to survive, of course, but also, languages, books on cultures, history, and include a lot of fiction. People will trade a lot for escapism, and DVDs have a much shorter shelf life than books do.
All of these are more valuable trading goods than gold. You can’t eat gold, you can’t use it for anything but making things pretty (and making high-tech things you can’t make if civilization collapses.) I might buy silver and copper for antimicrobial purposes (and then I’d have to figure out how to keep them from tarnishing), but gold is overpriced and is only of use to a civilization – I mean it can be one with much lower tech levels, but you still have to have, like, blacksmiths.
You know what else would be valuable? Blade sharpeners and the knowledge of how to use them. Also, blades. Guns will be very useful for a while but modern guns require far too much technology to remain supplied with ammo, and all you can use them for is hunting and killing. But blades can be used for hunting and killing, and preparing food, and gardening, and so on and so forth. Knives, axes, scythes, machetes, and yeah, swords. Mostly because people think swords are sexy. They’d make good trade goods.
The only circumstance where gold is useful is where your specific country’s financial system has collapsed, but everyone else is okay. If you’re American, that’s not gonna happen. We’re too intertwined with the world’s financial systems. If we go down, so does most of the world. (This is not a good thing.)
…yes? Both/and, and gold is certainly one of the lowest-priority items for the reasons you give.
However, it’s important to note that people think gold jewellery is sexy and trade-good-y too, and also I am not American (well, okay, I pay the Americans tribute in exchange for right of return, but that just makes it easier to become a refugee there: it doesn’t mean never becoming a refugee in the first place).
—
You either got the idea of solar-powered phones and downloading Wikipedia *from me*, or else it is *very* strange that people in your apocalypse stories aren’t doing this: I once commented on one of said stories remarking on its absence and doing a special-interest infodump about it.
—
>>keep a huge supply of ibuprofen, acetominophen, allergy meds, and so on… they’ll still be good ten years from now.
Naproxen doesn’t just suppress the pain of menstrual cramps: at higher doses, it actually *makes periods lighter*. I would go with naproxen over ibuprofen, though acetominophen still has its place.
Didn’t know that about naproxen… very interesting!
I actually have had the ideas about solar-powered phones, Wikipedia, and the like for a very long time, but I just haven’t done that many stories about apocalypses, and one of them, everyone who survived is a child, so they’re not really going to have thought of most of that. The only other one I can think of is the zombie apocalypse one, and there, I have been mentally working out details like that… among other things, in that world there’s still an Internet, because there’s enough people who managed to keep power plants and data centers running that Wikipedia is still up. (Netflix, sadly, is not.) The only people we’ve spent a lot of time around in that story are specialized for being medical professionals and scientists, but I’m pretty sure there are techy types around. (It might possibly have been that one you commented on? Not sure.)
I’m working on another one I call “Mad Max The Librarian”, which has pigeons carrying USB sticks, and a guy going on a road trip with weapons and fighting off all kinds of bandits and cultists to find surviving books and bring them back to a protected, well-defended library.
>>Didn’t know that about naproxen… very interesting!
Yeah, I found out when I went to my doctor for dysmenorrhea. She told me to get a bottle of OTC naproxen and take double the dose given on the label, starting two days before my period’s due (or when it starts if it catches me off-guard) and ending when I’m far enough along that the problems would have stopped by now anyway. It’s working great.
(Doubled-up OTC naproxen is a bit cheaper than buying prescription naproxen out of pocket, but if I ever get drug coverage she’ll write me an official prescription.)
((Don’t take prescription-strength naproxen without medical supervision if you can help it: you can fuck up your liver. Peri-menstrual naproxen is relatively safe because you’re only taking it a few days a month, but it’s still best to be sure.))
—
>>(It might possibly have been that one you commented on? Not sure.)
It was the zombie one, yeah. I originally messaged you with it privately (possibly you don’t get messages properly on the sideblog?), but I’ve been wavering for ages on whether to post a slightly edited version publicly, so here it is:
(Please treat what I am about to tell you as more of a “you have accidentally stumbled into a special interest” than as criticism per se.)
The tech level in “Norris and the Plague Doctors” feels off to me. It’s too low: there’s stuff missing that should still be working.
It first struck me when they’re talking about electricity, and they *never mention solar power*. Not once. The hospital compound doesn’t have it, the homesteaders don’t have it, the rich people’s houses are never explicitly ruled out as not having it but if even the homesteaders don’t…
(*By default* the kind of solar setup a rich household would get would immediately stop working when the grid goes down, but if you pay extra (batteries are getting cheaper over time, but for now: for the most popular brand (Tesla), it’s USD$4,500 fixed cost + USD$6,500/13.5kWH of storage) you can install power-outage-insurance batteries. Most household roofs can’t fit enough solar panels to go fully self-sufficient, but from what I’ve been able to tell so far in my research, if done right a roof setup can let you switch to merely rationed electricity during a long-term outage.)
[edit: I found out later that the keyword to search for regarding rich-people’s-houses-resorting-to-off-grid-electricity-in-a-crisis is “hybrid solar systems” (a hybrid of on-grid and off-grid).]
Once that got me thinking I started noticing other stuff.
Norris assumes that rich people’s cars all run on gasoline and gasoline alone, and while that could be an in-universe oversight on his part, I would expect a modern-day rich neighbourhood to have some electric and/or plug-in-hybrid vehicles. If such a vehicle is in either the same household as a solar+storage setup or they’re in two cooperating households, you’ve potentially got long-term car access. You’d have to use it very sparingly: we’re probably talking an entire day’s electricity ration for a 40mi round trip (a decent rule of thumb as things stand is 4 mi/kwH, though it depends on car and driving style). (Plug-in hybrids don’t currently have a 40mi full-electric range from what I’ve seen, so you’d need a full-electric car or restrict to even shorter trips: 30mi would be pushing it.)
One of the main reasons Norris is glad to have Internet access is because it means he can read Wikipedia, and while again that could well be an in-universe oversight by the characters, the fact is that anyone reliant on *continuous* Internet access *during an apocalypse* to read Wikipedia is doing it wrong. Somebody please get this child a Kiwix server.
And speaking of devices that can run Kiwix, there are no smartphones. The only computer is a rigged-together desktop that probably doesn’t even have an emergency uninterruptible-power-supply battery, let alone the ability to actually *function* for extended periods on intermittent power while on the run from zombies. You can get quite a bit done, info/comms-infrastructure-wise, with just a bunch of Android smartphones (iOS is much more dependent on access to Apple servers and therefore much less useful in a grid-down), ~USD$25 – $50 of portable solar chargers per person (characters who didn’t already have these may well be able to salvage them at a camping-supplies store), and at least one (1) group member who didn’t have mobile data and oriented their smartphone setup around not having reliable Internet access (who can then bootstrap the rest). Apps to turn smartphones into off-grid walkie-talkies (or more likely walkie-writies) are still in their early days overall–I wrote an entire post about this recently: https://brin-bellway.dreamwidth.org/67770.html–but file-sharing alone should have a fair number of uses, especially if at least one of you packed the right files (or can obtain access to the broader Internet long enough to fetch them).
—
I look forward to Mad Max the Librarian.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #reactionblogging #apocalypse cw #discourse cw? #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #drugs cw #zombies
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.)
a lot of people would argue that you should at some point diversify into financial instruments which abstractly reflect the value of gold, but I think many of those people would say you should not buy actual physical gold.
to pin myself down a bit while still leaving a lot of wiggle room, here’s some points on my Gold Advice Spectrum:
if you need your money to be liquid in a normal economy any time soon, don’t buy gold
if you have enough money to retire indefinitely on, I think it’s worth having something like a month’s money or so in precious metals
if you’re bill gates you should actually should have buried a chest of treasure somewhere
What…what reasons do *they* give for wanting to diversify into gold? You can’t hedge against the collapse of your financial system by buying things that *depend on said financial system*.
I mean, okay, I guess you can hedge against *certain, partial* collapses that way, but it’s far more limited.
I should mention here that I literally wrote a post once titled “Diversification is an important part of building an investment portfolio” [link], in which I frame prepping as being essentially a way of shorting your civilisation: since almost everyone is very long civilisation pretty much by necessity, being also somewhat short civilisation is a good hedge (though I think you should still be net long). I also wrote a comment on a different post in which I called [maintaining stockpiles of soap and canned food and air filters] “pandemic insurance” [link].
—
That Gold Advice Spectrum seems pretty reasonable.
—
@cthulhubert replied: @brin-bellway there’s a certain degree of over-correction against physical gold buying because Alex Jones and some other right wing conspiracy nuts flogged buying real gold for ‘when the degenerate modern economy collapses’.
I mean, that’s traditionally how it works, right? If you think something is going to collapse, you short it and then write a report laying out your evidence and reasoning to try to convince others to do the same. Yeah, I disagree that one should be net short civilisation and think people who do that are setting themselves up for failure and pain, but short sellers are very often wrong and their existence is nevertheless a useful corrective.
(…yes, I think I *did* just draw a connection between the hate that Crazy Prepper People™ get and the hate that short sellers get.)
I think if you were genuinely going to short-sell civilization, gold’s a ridiculous thing to have. Like money itself, the value of gold is a social construct.
What you should be investing in is booze and pharmaceuticals. Set up a greenhouse that does not run on any electricity, or that gets all of its energy from solar panels, and grow food there year-round; you’ll have something to eat, something to trade, and if you are legally able to, maintain, like, one marijuana plant, so if civilization collapses you can go whole hog into growing marijuana. Once the pharmaceutical industry collapses, alcohol and marijuana will be incredibly valuable as painkillers again. And because drugs expire much more slowly than they claim on the label, keep a huge supply of ibuprofen, acetominophen, allergy meds, and so on… they’ll still be good ten years from now. Birth control, if you live in a place where it can be obtained OTC.
Hard liquor and wine are probably your best investment – they are commonly considered to improve as they age, and in a post apocalyptic world, everyone will want to get drunk. (I mean, not literally everyone. I wouldn’t drink alcohol after the apocalypse because it tastes disgusting and has no benefits I want. But most people.)
Me, I’d also get, like, a million solar chargers for phones and Raspberry Pis, and a whole lot of USB stick drives with adapters. Then I’d download Wikipedia every several months, and any medical database that allows me to download the whole thing, and as much info as I can get about maintaining phones and Raspberry Pis. Probably ebooks and databases on carpentry, plumbing, electricity, electrical generation, making wine and beer, etc, etc… I’d have a few hundred of the Pis in boxes, in a climate controlled room, probably with the boxes sealed in a plastic bin with a lid, and I’d have USB sticks with image files to put on the Pis. I’d use phones and tablets as monitors, or tiny monitors with low power requirements, so that I’d have a place to read my stored downloads. Then when the internet crashes I’d have huge amounts of information I could share with my neighbors so we could restore the amenities of civilization as quickly as possible, as many of them as possible. There won’t be making any new computers for a very long time- clean room tech is very complex – but keeping existing machines that use very little power in good repair, unused and protected from the elements, will help a lot.
Physical books are also very good but are heavy, not very portable, and easily destroyed by any kind of extreme weather – weather applies to computers too, but you can store vastly more information on 1 small computer than you can on 20 books, and then you put 20 replacements for your small computer in there. Still, if you’ve got space for a library and you don’t live somewhere it is likely to flood or burn, stockpile books. Nonfiction that give you information about how to survive, of course, but also, languages, books on cultures, history, and include a lot of fiction. People will trade a lot for escapism, and DVDs have a much shorter shelf life than books do.
All of these are more valuable trading goods than gold. You can’t eat gold, you can’t use it for anything but making things pretty (and making high-tech things you can’t make if civilization collapses.) I might buy silver and copper for antimicrobial purposes (and then I’d have to figure out how to keep them from tarnishing), but gold is overpriced and is only of use to a civilization – I mean it can be one with much lower tech levels, but you still have to have, like, blacksmiths.
You know what else would be valuable? Blade sharpeners and the knowledge of how to use them. Also, blades. Guns will be very useful for a while but modern guns require far too much technology to remain supplied with ammo, and all you can use them for is hunting and killing. But blades can be used for hunting and killing, and preparing food, and gardening, and so on and so forth. Knives, axes, scythes, machetes, and yeah, swords. Mostly because people think swords are sexy. They’d make good trade goods.
The only circumstance where gold is useful is where your specific country’s financial system has collapsed, but everyone else is okay. If you’re American, that’s not gonna happen. We’re too intertwined with the world’s financial systems. If we go down, so does most of the world. (This is not a good thing.)
…yes? Both/and, and gold is certainly one of the lowest-priority items for the reasons you give.
However, it’s important to note that people think gold jewellery is sexy and trade-good-y too, and also I am not American (well, okay, I pay the Americans tribute in exchange for right of return, but that just makes it easier to become a refugee there: it doesn’t mean never becoming a refugee in the first place).
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You either got the idea of solar-powered phones and downloading Wikipedia *from me*, or else it is *very* strange that people in your apocalypse stories aren’t doing this: I once commented on one of said stories remarking on its absence and doing a special-interest infodump about it.
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>>keep a huge supply of ibuprofen, acetominophen, allergy meds, and so on… they’ll still be good ten years from now.
Naproxen doesn’t just suppress the pain of menstrual cramps: at higher doses, it actually *makes periods lighter*. I would go with naproxen over ibuprofen, though acetominophen still has its place.
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Brinens and Things 