The gold bug

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Partner, who knows a lot about finance, was advising a friend recently on the purchase of gold. “I want it,” she said, “but what happens if the government collapses? Can I trade the gold for a quart of milk?”

 

 

He tried to explain the system to her. He even helped her to buy some small gold coins on the Internet, from a reliable dealer who offers decent prices. (She bought half an ounce of gold, so the coins will be very small. I think she expects to receive a chunk of gold about the size of a manhole cover.)

 

 

Why gold? It occurs naturally worldwide. It’s malleable and can be made into almost anything. It’s beautiful. It’s rare, and difficult to obtain.

 

 

It is, in Karl Marx’s terminology, a “fetish.” You can’t eat it, or benefit from its ownership in any natural way. But you know that you (and many others) are fascinated by it, and will give you outlandish amounts of useful goods (currency, food, clothing) in exchange for a small amount of it.

 

 

Gold will keep its “value” if even a vestige of the current civilization continues. People will still want it, and will barter valuable items for it. (Don’t barter it for milk, however. You can probably find something else around the house to barter for milk. Extra bedsheets? Candles? A family member?)

 

 

I’ve seen gold coins in museums, and I can vouch for the fact that they’re beautiful. They are also usually (as I said above) very small.  (I saw a great advert in Reader’s Digest recently offering gold coins for $150. The picture accompanying the advertisement made the coins look as if they were the size of Oreo cookies. Given the price, however, they can’t be larger than the nail of your little finger, and perhaps smaller than that.)

 

 

But gold enchants people.

 

 

Partner’s friend has been bitten by the gold bug.

 

 

She will never be the same.

 

 

(I’ve looked at the websites too. My goodness, those coins are pretty. And they’re not all that expensive . . . )

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Consumers of the world, unite

 

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David Pogue had two related pieces in the New York Times recently.  One was a review of something called the Vulkano, which should be the answer to everyone's prayer: a TiVo that also allows you to watch your at-home TV programming on the road, and on your mobile device, and on your computer.

This sounds great, but according to Pogue, it's not. The device, as he describes it, is pretty flawed: it's technologically limited, the menus are overcomplicated, it makes you do all kinds of elaborate quasi-programming stuff. And it's $380.  Not cheap, especially for something that doesn't work very well.

Pogue (who is never at a loss for words) also spun a second piece out of this: a little essay wondering why companies sell sub-standard products. What do they gain, after all?  He posits three possible corporate mindsets:

• “We'll just fix it later.”

• “We don't know what we're doing.”

• “We're doomed anyway, so we may as well market the thing the way it is."

 

He leaves out the one that I tend to favor, however:

• “We're completely amoral and will make money any way we can, even with a substandard product.”

 

I still remember reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, with its depictions of the horrible pre-union pre-regulation Chicago meat industry, and I can still visualize the scene in which one of the workers falls into a vat and gets rendered into lard.  (It was a long time before I ate corned beef again, thank you very much.)

Most flawed products these days aren't quite Soylent Green, but the profit motive is still as lively as ever.  

This is where we consumers get to exert market pressure on these cheese-eating money-grubbing vile cynical companies, kids:

• Do your research.

• Read the reviews.

• Whenever possible, go to the store and look at / fondle / play with the technology you're interested in.

• Don't buy a piece of rubbish, just because it's new and makes a lot of promises.  

 

In a word: don't eat the corned beef unless you're pretty sure that it's good corned beef.

To quote another famous consumer advocate: you have nothing to lose but your chains.

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