Aceticon

The whole "hidding your face when doing evil" thing could just be considered as the American Flavour, kinda like having a Fashion Designer design the uniforms could be seen as European Flavour.

Well, it depends really: companies whose operations are mostly outside the US whilst being listed in USD in US stockmarkets will see their stockprice go up in dollars is there's a run on the dollar, not because their value went up but because each dollar is worth less.

So such stocks will actually hold a lot more of their value than it would if that money was held directly in dollars.

PS: I actually have a "funny" Brexit story around this - back when the Leave Referendum won Brexiters (the British MAGA, and as equally well informed as the American version) were celebrating how the UK stockmarket indices went up in value with the Leave Referendum result of Leave. However those indices were only up in pounds and down if quoted in any other currency than the British Pound, because what had happened was that the pound tanked about 20% following the Referendum result so naturaly values for companies with extensive international operations translated to more money in british pounds.

The size of $500 worth of gold - about 3.5g - is a small coin or a thin gold ring.

(Thinking of it, it's actually funny that we're back to the times of being able to buy a house with a bag of gold coins)

Regular people definitelly buy gold in physical form because it's such a concentrated form of storing wealth, though in the West this was a lot more common in the old days and currently is a lot more common in countries like China and India.

Oh, and if you buy gold certificates and the certificate issuer goes bankrupt (like so many companies go during Economic Crashes and Depressions), then in the eyes of the law that gold is not yours and you're just another creditor of the assets of that company, so forget all about getting most of the value of that gold back: you might want to reconsider gold certificates for value safe-keeping outside of the dollar in case of a major economic crash in the US since if the gold isn't actually in a legal structure were you own it (i.e. you legally have direct ownership of a chunk of gold and pay somebody to store it or store it yourself), you remain totally exposed to whatever economic upheavals happen where that company is based.

Yeah, a sudden artificial scarcity of gold because the US government is witholding other people's gold isn't going to make the price fall, quite the contrary.

That said, best not to invest in Gold that's physically stored in the US be it directly (you own it and it's in a US location) or indirectly (such as Gold ETFs whose physical Gold is stored in the US).

Silver spent most of the last 15 years going nowhere, whilst gold has been steadily creeping up (though accelerating in the last 3 or 4 years).

If you look at historical prices, in 20 years gold went up around 9x in dollar terms whilst silver went up 11x, which is not that much of a difference, but if you look at the silver price in the beginning of 2025 it was only about 4x from the beginning of that 20 year range, so most of the growth has happened just in this one year to the point that the peak from 2011 was only surpassed in September 2025 whilst gold passed its 2011 peak in 2020.

All this to say that IMHO Silver price growth just seems to be much more concentrated in time than Gold's, but in a longer timeframe it doesn't really add to a much bigger price increase.

Gold is for all effects and purposes the oldest currency around, mainly because it has been exactly that for millenia and still today, has very little industrial use and instead is mainly used for safekeep of value and decorative purposes (such as jewelery).

Comparied to common currencies of the present age (called fiat currencies because they're issued by states and their value is not inherent to the currency - i.e. not based on the value of the material of the cash - but rather it's backed by trust on the issuing government) gold and its value is not under control of any one government hence doesn't really suffer much from the policies in any one country and has a natural inflation rate of around 2% due to mining (i.e. the amount of mined gold increases by around 2% of the total per year).

So when trust in governments and the economies they manage falls, gold is a natural safe haven asset just like the currency of a different country would be, only gold's safe haven properties also work when the mistrust is more generalized globally (multiple governments or of governments whose policies have a significant global impact) whilst that doesn't apply for other fiat currencies. A simple example: if you move from the dollar to the euro and the dollar crashes, the euro will also be somewhat impacted by the consequence of that crash whilst gold would not and if, worse, the societal and political problems causing said crash of the dollar were alse present in the eurozone (which they are, by the way, just less so) there might also be an euro crash for similar reasons and gold would still remain unnafected*

(* actually that's not quite so because as seen during the 2008 Crash there are price pressures on gold due to on one side people more desperatelly trying to move into it to save their wealth from the crash hence pushing prices up and on the other hand people selling gold to pay for financial commitments they have that cannot be served by other assets that have crashed in value - for example somebody who has stocks and gold and has to pay a loan, during a crash/depression might have to pull money out of gold to pay the loan because the value of the stocks has crashed).

On the other hand, the value of all the gold ever mined in the world is "only" around $28 trillion whilst the US debt alone is $38 trillion, so there's not enough gold for even just holders of US treasuries to take refuge in it, at least not at the current gold price.

Then again, the more people who take refuse in gold, the more its price goes up - a mere year ago the value of all the gold ever mined in the World would only be around $17.5 trillion - which adds further to the expectation that a dollar crash would push gold prices up massivelly, in multiple currencies rather than just dollars.

Yeah, the malaise vastly predates Brexit and goes all the way back to Thatcher's policies, such as the selling of public housing and policies to make it harder for councils to build more, privatisation of a lot of public services especially natural monopolies such as water supply and rail, deregulating Finance and betting on it for growth in Britain, Press deregulation and concentration, and so on.

Then neoliberal governments of both the Tory and New Labor persuasion just kept and even doubled down on such policies (who can forget Thatcher's "greatest achievement", Tony Blair).

Then the 2008 Crash hit the UK hard thanks to the deregulation of Finance and excessive size of it as part of the British Economy (17% of it at the time of the Crash, if I remember it correctly) with some extra fueling from a housing bubble that had been inflated since Thatcher's days (which now is even worse).

Then the way that was handled was to save Asset Owners and make workers pay for it, exploding inequality (if I remember it correctly even already in 2015 real incomes for the bottom 90% if the population were falling at around 1% per year, whilst for the top 10% of the population they went up 23%) and hence poverty.

Meawhile paid up politicians, Press (remember Thatcher's deregulation of the Press) and Think Tanks spread far-right ideas such as ultra-nationalism and blaming foreigners (especially immigrants, but also "the EU") for the pain people were feeling as consequences of the post-Crash policies of their very own, 100% local, politicians.

Then that cristalized in the knee-jerk reaction against foreigners called Brexit (which, mind you, was still a less damaging far-right ultra-nationalist knee-jerk than the historically more comon one of "starting a war against some random foreign country").

And now here we are with Britain pretty much morphed in to a posh version of a Fascist country.

Only in "international university rankings" that treat essentially classes being given in the English language as about 1/3 of the score or as they call it, "easiness for international students".

Or in other words, "for international students" they're one of the best in the World, to a large extent because all lessons are in English so all else being the same, universities in English-speaking countries will always come above universities in non-English speaking countries because English is the main Lingua Franca at the moment.

Also a lot of the other quality metrics (such as number of published papers) actually measure research proeficiency rather than teaching quality, which whilst relevant for post-grads, isn't quite as relevant for most students.

Whether if measured from the point of view of the main student community they serve rather than "international post-grad student" MIT is the best in the World, is unclear.

Gold has actually been going up at a good pace for a while now, especially since Trump was elected in the US - for example its price went up 65% last year in US Dollars, whilst the year before it went up 40%.

The trend has been for a while of Gold going up in price or, the way I see it, the economies behind the biggest currencies becoming more and more disfunctional. Absolutelly, the latest Trump shenennigans have accelerated the price growth for Gold in USD, yet as I see it a person like Trump getting elected as US President is itself a sympthom of a larger malaise in the US so the entire Trump clown show would have played one way or another even with a different head clown.

Gold is basically the ultimate refuge against economic uncertainty - which in turn is often the indirect result of political and societal problems, the worst the economic uncertainty the more likely it's caused by such deeper problems - an since at least the 2008 Crash shit has jsut kept getting worse since the problems behind the 2008 Crash (over indebtness, Financial deregulation, growing inequality, a general political environment that vastly favors rent-seeking activities and so on) weren't actually fixed, just pushed to be solved later with things like "temporary" (but never significantly reversed) ultra-low interest rates, and, well, the Future is Today and the system is riddled with market bubbles, parasites and barelly hidden widespread empoverishment with the current generation being the first one since WWII that has worse economic prospects than their parents.

Personally having been in the middle of the Finance Industry in the 2008 Crash and seeing up close how things were "solved" by governments and central banks, I've been holding most of my savings in Gold (by now for over 15 years) in the expectation of the unsustainable economic and even social structure finally cracking, and whilst for years I didn't really gain much from it, for the last 3 or 4 years it really too of to insane levels (for example, Gold has had higher returns than Realestate).

Anyways, all this to say that whilst I agree that a major depression is definitelly going to happen, it has roots going back more than a decade, has been growing for a while and IMHO we can't really use Gold prices as a precise indicator of when shit will trully hit the fan, more of an indicator of how close it's getting so it's a bit premature to say that "it finally begins" just by looking at the recent Gold price increase. Certain my experience of betting on Economic Catastrophe based on the state of broader Economic fundamentals is that, as they say in the trade, "the Market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent", so the Economy might very well keep on limping for months or even years before that (on the other hand, the more things are stretched beyond capacity, the worst it gets when things finally break) - I mean, I kinda expected that in 2008 and instead masses of central bank printing just prolonged the ago into a decade of well below historical average growth, wage falls in real terms, several simultaneous market bubbles, explosion in inquality and in some countries even Austerity.

Well, yeah, it was pretty obvious that Trump did not control Venezuela since he has no troops on the ground.

He's just been threathening the current Venezuelan leadership with personally getting the same fate as Maduro, but that's not at all the same as controlling the actual country.

No amount of struting like some prized rooster by Trump on this (like he does for just about everything just before he TACOes) alters the reality that a special ops kidnapping isn't anywhere near the same level of military commitment as an invasion and at most will deliver chaos rather than control.

Well, it probably requires quite a lot of speed for the more elongated shape of a bicycle helmet to has enough impact on making the head rotate to actually cause damage and from what I read bicycle helmets are designed for collisions up to 15 km/h.

This would also explain why motorcycle helmets tend more towards a spherical shape as the average speed of a collision on a motorcycle is much higher.

Then I guess we were feeding each other's misunderstanding.

Those numbers from Denmark stuck in my mind for all these years exactly because I though they were counter-intuitive, and I thought they were counter-intuitive exactly because "helmets reduce the risk of head injury" is pretty much indisputable.