Friday, May 04, 2012

waste unrivalled by anything short of uranium production...,


6 comments:

umbrarchist said...

Gold is not produced.  Gold is extracted.

What good is it?  Dig it out of a natural hole to stick it into a man-made hole.

European culture is so intelligent.

CNu said...

Is it either fair or accurate to lay the peculiar lust for and exorbitant effort to obtain gold at the feet of europe alone? Rather, I suggest that you humans have an odd quirk when it comes to this "precious" metal.

umbrarchist said...

 Of what use was gold 1000 years ago?  What are the uses for it now?

What was known about the structures of atoms 1000 years ago?

The dumb group think is a form of not-think.

CNu said...

There are more uses for it now in electronics than there ever were (as best I can gather) during its lengthy history of preciousness. The most exotic and outlandish use for it that I'm aware of is in nuclear weapons. Gold is actually indispensable to nuclear weapons construction  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_(nuclear_weapon)#Material_considerations - which kind of makes for a fine irony given that the unspeakable nuclear weapon is the ultimate instrumentality of tyranny.

Ed Dunn said...

As far as I'm concerned, if OPEC is dumb enough to not create an "oil standard" based on their highly demanded natural oil reserves and  just sell it on a currency system based on some shiny mineral dug out of a ground, that's their problem and our advantage. Go USA! WooHoo!

John Kurman said...

It was thought gold and silver would be of use in metamaterials, but with the advent of direct laser printing using polymers and other dielectrics, it turns out gold is best used only in corrosive environments. http://phys.org/news/2012-05-metafluids-german-material-class.html

So long as we carbon-based units are the only self-replicating von Neumann machines on the block, food will be the only commodity closest to money. Everything else is fantasy land.

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