Also denying shootings happened and harassing the families of their victims so the idiot customers consuming said supplements have something to rage about.
I hope the trials are successful at fucking up the rest of his life.
I didn’t know any of this going in, but it seems weird to me that the article kept tying the company back to this Glenn Beck guy, who seemingly only shilled for it. Is there something I’m missing?
I had an ex who couldn’t fathom why in a walking dead/fallout scenario I’d personally not choose to trade with gold, but actual useful and tangible goods like food, ammo, salt, skills…
Their whole argument was gold has always been valuable so it’ll always be valuable and I was like “the fuck good would gold do me when I’m starving”
Yeah. If anything, a gold coin is too much value in one piece. Like, who are you going to find with enough spare stuff to trade that would actually be worth the equivalent value of an ounce of gold?
I figure that someone with nothing but gold coin would end up with very very expensive food, and with some luck a very expensive gun of some kind.
I would expect that if I had a pile of gold, the first armed person to realize that I have that much gold would immediately shoot me to get the gold. Then the next half-crazed, highly stressed, armed individuals would take them out and the cycle continues.
But the value of gold still relies on a majority of apocalypse survivor’s collectively deciding that gold has value. We could just, not.
Or why not bottle caps, shells, cool looking rocks, dry salt, sugar, nutmeg, pickles, …
Cooper would hold more value than gold, as a metal that can be worked and given practical application with even primitive metallurgy skills. Or silver, with it’s antimicrobial properties would still be more valuable than gold.
Unless we’re all surviving the apocalypse and still trying to make chips for iPhones, what good is gold?
Gold is workable, conductive, and non oxidizing. It’s also used for jewelry. So yeah not great for survival but if you’re using copper, gold is similar or better except for its rarity or iron is available and much better
It does rely on people deciding it has value. It’s not the people who are still mostly logical who would value gold the highest. That’s why I would expect a highly stressed, armed person hopped up on memories of apocalyptic ads to go “ooh, shiny” and instinctively shoot to get at the stockpile of gold.
Thank you! It has never made sense to me, either. Hoarding gold did make some sense back in the day when you were fleeing a local or regional calamity, or could expect to see a return to relative normalcy in your lifetime. But if global civilization collapses from climate change or similar, gold will have no practical value to a refugee or survivalist.
It’s valuable because barter economies aren’t real and don’t work. All the alternatives you mention are difficult to transport, not fungible, or not scarce, so they won’t work as a currency. Either we revert back to gift economies where distribution of goods happens within a community and follows cultural rather than economic rules, or the market settles on a currency for standardized arbitrary transactions between strangers that has the necessary properties of a currency.
I have a spice rack that takes up a large portion of my bugout bag. I guarantee that when I start cooking and whip out some Saffron, powdered Sumac Berries, and Turmeric for a rice dish, and people will just want me to stick around and cook for them. Especially since I also have my, my father’s, and my grandfathers BSA manuals, each of which has different pictures of various edible plants, herbs, and spices that can be found in the various parts of the world.
When I’ve been watching the Republican debates and similar Fox News content I saw they have heavy advertising from some investment company that sells it as gold-backed securities or something along those lines. They know their audience and they’re collecting on that fact
I mean the economic arguement is sound. The problem is that capitalism remains on an imperative of full time employment of many for the insane wealth of a few, instead of distributing the productivity gained among all people to enjoy a better life.
Bonus points for having the same product from the same factory in different packages at different prices, because people were brainwashed into identifying themselves with certain brands.
I’ve seen this argument pushed unironically, and quite convincingly.
It of course depends on a lot of factors, and GHG emissions are not the only concern, but “short-circuit” consumption can (apparently, I did not run the numbers myself and read this a few years ago) emit much more CO2 than importing food from far away… simply because driving a car for 10 km to a farm for a bag of apples (or whatever) is a LOT worse per apple than the traditional container-on-ship->container-on-rail->semi-truck->local store supply chain which has a few times the fuel consumption of a car… but multiple orders of magnitude more cargo.
This is in reality not so much a dig on short-circuit consumption, which is obviously overall good, than a dig at how polluting cars are, even compared to cargo ships whose emissions we intuitively over-estimate. Still, it has stuck with me as a good example of the complexity of making a life-cycle emissions assessment.
Modern globalized economies are also often criticized to have gone too far into economies of scale, making them very brittle… as we saw in 2020/2021, as farmers re-discover every time one illness destroys an entire country’s mono-culture, and as we fear we may discover soon with TSMC.
Furthermore almost every country (even very economically liberal ones like the US) heavily subsidizes their local agricultural sector to shield them from foreign competition, as it is of the utmost national security importance that a blockade on agricultural imports could not result in widespread famine.
simply because driving a car for 10 km to a farm for a bag of apples (or whatever) is a LOT worse per apple than the traditional container-on-ship->container-on-rail->semi-truck->local store supply chain which has a few times the fuel consumption of a car
Uh. Do you think those semi trucks are bringing apples right into people’s homes? Guess how far the grocery store is from people’s houses lmao
That argument only works if every citizen in the country lives in high density, transit enabled city cores.
IIRC the hypothetical scenario assumed you had a supermarket on your side of town (say 1 km) but had to to on the other side of town to get to a local farm (say 10-15 km). As a suburbanite this seems quite reasonable to me on both fronts.
You ever see It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia when Mac has a garbage bag full of chimichangas? I’m just imagining that he got a whole pallet of Twinkies and put them in a garbage bag.
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