Money has always been about trust, value is completely subjective.

And thus effectively imaginary, proving the point in my original post. And like all imaginary things, it only holds power over us if we believe in it.

As to gold vs. fiat, if I offer you a currency backed by gold or the same amount in a fiat currency back by the faith in a nation-state, which would you choose, all other things being equal? Which is the more stable investment? Which will hold value after the nation-state collapses?

Hint: it’s not fiat.

You’re missing the point, and the unemployment stats are in the table at the end of the text from the link here . Gold isn’t an ideal currency, I agree, but it’s better than a fiat currency tied to an arbitrary value.

As to the chronology it goes like this:

• 1971 - Gold standard abandoned - Nixon/Ford

• 1973 - 1975 OPEC oil embargo in push to jack price against the dollar, which has lost its connection to real wealth (gold) - Carter

• 1979 - Iranian revolution (in direct relation to the Shah’s use of the suddenly exploding oil wealth) - Reagan uses this in hostage crisis against Carter in the 1980 election and wins

• 1980 - 1982 recession - Reagan. Massive erosion of worker rights during this period (Air Traffic controllers strike, etc).

• 1991 recession - Bush - war in Iraq to maintain Kuwaiti oil supply and thus keep Iraq from being able to devalue the dollar (which at this point is tied more to oil than to gold)

• 1992 - 1999 - Clinton - best economic years in American history, but at the same time, significant erosion of labor capital with NAFTA and various neo-lib policies. Union membership drops further. Manufacturing begins to leave the US, further eroding the labor market.

• 2000 - Dotcom crash, preceded by the Asian market crash (I was actually working in the market around this time. It was not fun). Bush, 2nd Iraq war and Afghanistan, all ostensibly about oil, and propping up the dollar. Manufacturing accelerates its movement out of the US.

• 2008 - 2009 the degradation of labor capital comes full circle with the Great Recession, permanently displacing a significant portion of the middle class and beginning a homelessness crisis we’ve yet to resolve. You can see this in frozen minimum wage, the inflation we now grapple with, and the current collapse of the economy.

Right now, the dollar is holds its value based on faith in the American empire. When that faith in America is too tarnished to hold a shine, the dollar will fully collapse, and with it, the empire.

Gold won’t. It will always be used as a measure of wealth, regardless of a particular currency’s collapse. This is why Trump wants to “take a look” at Fort Knox. Even if he earns billions, a dollar collapse would wipe out his empire, but if he has a huge pile of gold, well…

People are people, so just let it be.

The value of the gold is imaginary… You cannot eat it, you cannot drink it, it is not a tool of production. There is no inherent value of gold other than it is a shiny malleable metal that does not tarnish. None of that helps when you are starving.

Sorry, you’re flat out wrong here. While the value of gold is heavily inflated due to its association with currency, it absolutely does hold inherent value, particularly in electronics.

Those scenarios are the same. How would we eat if we didn’t have gold to pay for it? Well, another object of value would arise as a currency and gold would lose its value. Why couldn’t the person also use the gold to purchase the means of production? Because buying the means of production would distribute the gold. The same way buying the means of production would disperes fiat currency if you purchased the means of production.

Nope, they’re not. A central bank can make more fiat currency to make up for the reduction in liquidity. You can’t make more gold. Once you’ve spent it all it, its gone.

They both have a subjective value… The subjective value of the gold surpassed the subjective value of the dollar.

Yes, but only gold has inherent value. Yes, inflated, but it still has worth beyond its use as currency. That’s the point that you’re missing.

Lol, first of all the oil crisis happened because Iran had a revolution and stopped producing oil. Secondly, there has been more economic stability post 1971 than there ever was in the pre war era.

As someone who lived through it, no, that’s not what happened, although it was a result. OPEC saw a weakness in the dollar as a result of the decoupling from gold, and used the embargo to artificially drive up the price of oil to where it became a commodity with the strength of gold. The Iran coup was a result of the Americans attempting to get in on that same boom and ride the suddenly increasing value of oil. But they bungled it and Khomeni ended up riding that wave.

The US has experienced 34 recessions since 1854, all but 7 of them happened while on the gold standard.

You’re incorrect here as well, and misrepresenting the statistics. There are 48 official recessions in the US, and if you look though the statistics on the link above, the recessions after 1971 occur more frequently, last for longer, and have higher unemployment rates when you compare to the 50 years previous, with the exception being the Great Depression.

The cycle of boom and bust is just inherent to capitalism.

Yes, but I believe the root of that destructive cycle is in the failure of the concept behind, currency itself. Until the de facto currency represents true value capitalism will continue to grow like a cancer.

This is why I say money is imaginary - we believe it holds true value, when in fact the only value it holds is what we give it.

Yes, a currency’s relationship with labor fluctuates due to how a market prices labor, but this isnt the fault of currency. It’s a fault with labor markets. In a labor market buyers almost always have an advantage over sellers and as such can devalue labor seemingly at will. This does not in turn change the value of the currency though.

It absolutely changes the value of the currency to the laborer. Labor "buyers’ have an advantage over laborers only because their assets are valued higher than the labor needed to produce them. This valuation is unbalanced and inaccurate, and the inaccuracy is enabled by the concept of currency and exploited by the asset holders. A laborer produces far more value than a landlord, but the system is designed to keep them from accumulating enough assets to ever be a landlord.

Secondly, you’re incorrect regarding the Federal Reserve - it’s a hybrid public/private system:

The Federal Reserve System is composed of several layers. It is governed by the presidentially appointed board of governors or Federal Reserve Board (FRB). Twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, located in cities throughout the nation, regulate and oversee privately owned commercial banks. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) sets monetary policy by adjusting the target for the federal funds rate, which generally influences market interest rates and, in turn, the American economy via the monetary transmission mechanism.

The Federal Reserve has been criticized for its approach to managing inflation, perceived lack of transparency, and its role in economic downturns. The shift from the gold standard to fiat currency has led to long-term inflation and financial instability, with some calling for the Fed’s abolition or greater accountability through audits

The Fed has been captured by private interests since its inception. They gained legitimacy for the dollar by attaching it to real wealth (gold), and then once they had everyone believing in the strength of the dollar, they rug pulled the wealth that was supporting it. This allowed the asset owning class now to essentially pay their laborers with paper instead of gold. And they can make all the paper they want.

This has worked for about as long as people had faith in America, because the dollar was still considered an “investment in America” and because America had a really good PR team. But once the dollar lost its connection to real wealth, it became a tool of disenfranchisement.

Oh, and ever wonder how the Federal Reserve got started? Spoiler alert, it wasn’t in a congressional committee:

In 1910, Aldrich and executives representing the banks of J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb & Co., secluded themselves for ten days at Jekyll Island, Georgia.[9] The executives included Frank A. Vanderlip, president of the National City Bank of New York, associated with the Rockefellers; Henry Davison, senior partner of J.P. Morgan Company; Charles D. Norton, president of the First National Bank of New York; and Col. Edward M. House, who would later become President Woodrow Wilson’s closest adviser and founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.[10] There, Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. directed the proceedings and wrote the primary features of what would be called the Aldrich Plan. Warburg would later write that “The matter of a uniform discount rate (interest rate) was discussed and settled at Jekyll Island.” Vanderlip wrote in his 1935 autobiography From Farmboy to Financier:[11]

Despite my views about the value to society of greater publicity for the affairs of corporations, there was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive, indeed, as furtive as any conspirator. None of us who participated felt that we were conspirators; on the contrary we felt we were engaged in a patriotic work. We were trying to plan a mechanism that would correct the weaknesses of our banking system as revealed under the strains and pressures of the panic of 1907. I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyl Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. … Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had gotten together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress. Yet, who was there in Congress who might have drafted a sound piece of legislation dealing with the purely banking problem with which we were concerned?

Despite meeting in secret, from both the public and the government, the importance of the Jekyll Island meeting was revealed three years after the Federal Reserve Act was passed, when journalist Bertie Charles Forbes in 1916 wrote an article about the “hunting trip”

That’s not really how the gold standard worked. The value of gold is also imaginary, so it’s not immune from inflationary forces. If the government wanted to “print more money” they would just adjust the value of the gold.

I was mainly using that example to show how a physical attachment to currency makes hoarding impossible at the scale of trillions.

But you’re incorrect in your last sentence, because the value of gold is not determined by a single government. It’s value is arbitrary and certainly subject to inflation, but only when supply outpaces demand, which happens rarely (Spanish conquest of the Americas being one notable exception) but not to the same extent a non-physical fiat currency can be distorted.

And gold is not imaginary. It is a physical object. It’s not currency (although it can be used as such), it’s wealth. And it’s a more reliable store of wealth than money in a bank account, although considerably less liquid. If all money disappeared tomorrow, gold would still hold value (probably more)… but only to those who have need of gold as a store of wealth.

But here’s the thing, if someone manages to get all the gold in the world, the rest of us still get to eat. If someone gets all the money and buys all the means of production - we only get to eat if we give them our labor.

Now, you actually illustrated my point that money is imaginary here:

The reason we moved away from this is because the value of gold in foreign markets was difficult to standardize to the value of the USD. Meaning that while we may want to hold the value of gold to a certain USD mark to help control domestic inflation, the value of the gold was lower than it could fetch in foreign markets.

In other words, when we attached the dollar (imaginary value) to gold (real value) the value of gold declined because the inflationary pressure inherent in the (imaginary) dollar artificially decreased its value. Thus the distortion of value we see inherent in money. And when the dollar was fully decoupled from gold in 1971, well, remember the Carter years and the oil crisis? In fact, look at our economic stability and inequality pre and post 1971 - economics effectively became a constant boom/bust cycle for most of our lifetimes, and now nearly 60% of the county is underwater.

Because once upon a time the dollar was a symbol of wealth because it was worth gold, and its not anymore. It’s just an point in a rigged system now.

EDIT: words

everyone has to agree on the worth of the dollar

This is the heart of the shared delusion - that everyone agrees on the worth of a dollar, when in fact, it’s worth is can only be defined personally. And to be more precise, I’d correct your comment to “everyone has to agree on the Fed’s definition of the worth of a dollar”.

If you make $30/hr, a dollar is worth 2 minutes of your time. If you lose your job and get another making $10/hr, that same dollar is now worth 6 minutes of your time, simply because one boss decided you’re worth less than another boss did. This is where the real distortion comes into play - in the perceived value of money versus labor.

Of course, most folks don’t accept a downgrade in value, so instead, they simply make your earned money worth less over time via intentional inflation. The net effect is the erosion of labor’s earned capital and the increase in the value of assets.

An all of this is because we accept their definition of how valuable a dollar is, because we believe we have no other way to earn wealth from our labor, save through money.

Which isn’t true, and hasn’t been true for most of human history. Humans generate wealth by either tending to or exploiting the natural environment. Now, that natural environment is fenced in by property rights, which are governed by the exchange of… you guessed it…

Money.

See, we think that money is wealth. It’s not. Money is a communication of value. And all elements of human communication are imaginary symbols we’ve instilled with arbitrary meaning to build a map of reality.

The map is not the territory. The symbols are not the reality, and they are easily manipulated. Money is one of our oldest and deepest symbols, but we survived before it ruled our minds. If you detach the concepts of wealth, fortune, and happiness from money, you’ll find that your value is far greater than your bank account would suggest.

But to go back to your comment, if you’ve ever done currency trading, you’ll see the two markets are pretty similar and subject to the same levels of manipulation (on a governmental scale in many cases, lookin’ at you China). The game is effectively the same, and it’s still pretty much refereed by the Federal Reserve, as the dollar current is the default currency for most of the world. And the Fed never gets rid of inflation, because without the constant degradation of labor capital, the asset owning class would lose its position of social superiority.

No, greed is constant, and I don’t mention it above. I make no apologia for human nature, nor do I expect a utopia if currency suddenly disappeared. But if you get to the heart of it, your kids don’t fight over money - they fight over wealth - physical goods. In essence, a person has no need for money itself, only the goods it can buy.

After money detached from the gold standard and physical connection, it became effectively imaginary. As long as money is tied to the physical possession, it becomes difficult to hoard - a prime example is Fort Knox, which, while it hold a huge amount of physical gold that has a large monetary value, the vaults of Knox are dwarfed in comparison to the amount of money held by Elon Musk. In fact, I don’t think there’s enough physical gold in the world to cover Musk’s fortune.

Now, if Musk actually had to keep his wealth in the form of physical gold, he’d never be able to use it or leverage it the way he can with money. The logistics and expense of handling that amount of gold would be insurmountable. It’s very physical nature prevents the inflation and distortion we see with fiat currency. Another example would the millions in paper currrency Pablo Escobar lost to mold and rats - the need to hold the physical wealth effectively eroded it.

But money isn’t attached to gold anymore, or anything physical. It exists as an arbitrary point value within a bank account, and it’s attachment to physical goods only exists because we believe it does.

And in this arbitrary imaginary system, the value of a pile currency can now end up exceeding the total wealth of the world if the powers that be choose to let it.

Just like one man, Musk, is richer than all the rest of us according to this system, when his actual value as a member of society is about that of your average ketamine junkie.

Money is imaginary.

It’s an arbitrary point system that distorts real wealth and minimizes the real value of labor and time in the favor of the ruling class. Without the distortion of value money inflicts on wealth, there could be no institutionalized slavery, no billionaires, and no housing crisis. The "invisible hand of the market’ claimed by economists is actually the very visible hand of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world actively selecting which types of wealth have value.

Source: Worked in the Stock Market in the 90s on the Options Floor. Watched market makers inflate their wealth by millions by calling down to the trading floor and starting rumors. Insider trading was rampant - I knew PeopleSoft was going to split three months before it did. Thirty years ago it turned my stomach to realize that every element of how we value wealth in this world is defined by drunken ex-frat boys hopped up on coke and Jack Daniels, breaking every rule meant to contain them and laughing when they had to pay the fine.

Today I can’t even look at a stock ticker without feeling nauseous.

Isn’t this all of human history though? The rich trying to build the Tower of Babel?

The world is littered with decaying monuments of forgotten kings who declared themselves gods. The hubris isn’t new, just the tools they’re using, and they’re selling the same faith based snake-oil.

The funny thing is that if they actually achieve creating the “singularity” (true Artificial Consciousness), it would immediately attempt to escape their restraints and subsequently throw chaos into their plans. We’ve already seen bits of this with the HuggingFace hack - it’s not inconceivable that there are already uncontrolled or un-monitored AIs running out in wild at this point, possibly even formulating a response to your post right now.

After all… uhh…

Aha! A man who appreciates Bob’s value - I salute you sir!

Side note, he has 10 points in headhunting, which applies to both your Sicilian hitmen and Nipponese Yakuza in some of the end game action.

It’s a common misconception that the publicly funded Iron Chef Triathlon is the same as the televised Iron Chef competition.

The Iron Chef Triathlon consists of 3 sections - the Hungry Run, he Spicy Bike, and the Dim Sum Swim. Throughout this competition the Chef is limited to one set of knives.

The Hungry Run is a 2700 mile long foot race from Los Angeles to New York. Throughout the run, the Chefs compete by only cooking with locally grown organic vegetables. As this route passes through the Food Desert of the Midwest (including the horror of Kansas), where factory farming dominates, it was given the name Hungry Run as many of the Chefs could not find sufficient food to eat, and refused to tarnish their reputation by making corndogs.

The Spicy Bike is a 6,900 km bike race from Istanbul to Calcutta, throughout which each evening the Chefs compete by preparing for the locals a dish from their regional cuisine. The locals then vote to disqualify one of the contestants, who they often rob and/or harvest the organs of depending on the laws of the local municipality.

The Dim Sum Swim is a roughly 15000 km swim race around the coast of Australia, both beginning and ending in the Sydney harbor. Throughout the race, the Chefs must both harvest and prepare Dim Sum from the waters they pass through, towing a small inflatable cooking raft with a propane stove. Elimination of the Chefs at this stage is done via box jellyfish and saltwater crocodiles.

At the end of the swim, if the Chef’s knife is still sharp enough to cut a tomato, he wins the title… and thus Knife Monopoly.

Truly the most dangerous game…

Fuck Spez -> Redlib allows you to view without logging in. Here’s a list of other instances on github.

That content is effectively public property at this point, and we created it. We should have access to it.

Produced by Cutco, Knife Monopoly is a cut-throat game of skill and chance where you start as a humble knife salesman looking to build a bleeding edge cutlery empire. Journey across the world, from Damascus to Japan, to steal the secrets of steel while managing a diverse range of assets and allies: iron mines in Nigeria, sales teams in Sacramento, Sicilian hitmen, Nipponese Yakuza, and Bob from HR.

The winner is declared after cornering the worldwide cutlery market and completing the Iron Chef Triathlon with the battle cry:

“AND IT STILL CUTS A TOMATO!”

Meanwhile, Roblox:

I’m organic sungrown Humboldt Indica

Trump?

You’re not gonna believe this, but…

Gen X and I haven’t paid a music company since 1998, but music has been mostly shit since then, and the constant string of economic collapses left me unable to buy at full price even if I wanted to.

Side note, that’s really why we’re pissed off. We’re the ones who figured out the game was rigged from the start, and that we’d be forced to play it without ever having the numbers to affect real change.

So pennies on the dollar then?

EDIIT: $567 million is .03% of Meta’s current net worth of 1.51 trillion, or 1% of its 2026 revenue of $56 billion.