I think phonecards could have been huge if they came in a decade or two earlier. The development of mobile phone technology reduced the need for payphones.
In Australia we had massive amounts of hype when they are out and you could get a IPCS magazine sent to you monthly. Everyone on welfare payments got a free “limited edition” card as well. There was definitely something cool about them but they got phased out well before the collecting got popular.
It's very cool that you're thinking about the nature of what money, and there are people who think about and write about this topic. Money was discovered and latched on to because it made barter so much more efficient. This started around 10,000+ years ago with Copper, continued 6,000+ years ago with Silver, and came to full fruition with the discovery of Gold around 5,000+ years ago. Just as the industrial revolution was about to take off, Nickel was discovered and incorporated (circa 1750). Each of these metals can and does represent money, but each of them also possesses a different Wealth Storage Density Capacity (WSDC). Gold obviously stores the most purchasing power, followed by Silver, then Nickel, and finally Copper. They are meant for large, medium, small, and smallest purchasing amounts, but you can think of most of them as being a change-maker for the metal above them. Money is ultimately a claim on human labor and time. This is actually what you are storing in money. So each troy ounce of Gold or Silver that you hold represents hours, days, weeks, months, or even years of labor that you don't have to do in order to earn wealth or purchasing power that will allow you to transact within a society. Notice that I used the word "discovered" and not "created". Money is NOT a convention. It actually has an essence or a nature. Many things, which I would call "poor money substitutes" can be put in the place of money, at least for a time, but these substitutes will never work as well as money, even if they are things like the petro-dollar, which linked dollars to oil in order to create a universal artificial demand for dollars, thereby simulating, to some degree, Gold as a backing for dollars. Money has at least 4 functions and 12 properties. Money is a store of value, a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a standard of deferred payment. If you're interested in the definitions, I can provide those. Let me know. Those are the functions of money. The properties are that money is fungible, durable, portable, recognizeable, stable in value, not easily faked or counterfeited, divisible, verifiably countable, inert, relatively scarce, historically proven, and physical (a weight of some chemical element on the periodic table). Gold has the highest WSDC because it exemplifies these functions and properties of money better than anything else. Real money like Gold, Silver, Nickel, and Copper can be digitized and tied to a block-chain, so there is nothing keeping it from moving with us into the 21st century. The difficulty with money is that is requires transparency, honesty, and discipline in government spending, which runs contrary to fallen human nature that is always tempted to cheat and abuse power. Real money is akin to a kind of moral law within the economics of government, and that's something that politicians hate, particularly those who are low on moral character and high on self-absorption and corruption. They are removing physical cash in order to remove your freedom and economic privacy. Cash or the physicality of money represent a check on government and corporate power, and the one thing that government elites are after today is power over the people. If we had kept our money on a metals standard, we'd be in much better shape that we are today. In 1960, the minimum wage in the United States was $1.25. Today, that same money paid out in five 90% Silver quarters would be worth $20.84 today. The average minimum wage in the U.S. today is between $10.50 to about $13.00 hourly, and it hasn't even come close to keeping up with inflation. However, real money has succeeded in accounting for inflation. I recommend everyone regularly buy some amount of Gold & Silver to preserve their ability to transact outside of the system because CBDCs represent a kind of digital slavery system that should be avoided and refused. Without Gold, Silver, Nickel, and Copper you will not be able to avoid or refuse without massive massive suffering. I do keep physical cash outside of the banking system, as well as significant amounts of money on convenience store gift cards that can be used for food items or gas (petrol), but I hold a majority of my wealth in real money. Have you ever tried contacting "As Good As Gold Australia"? I've looked into crypto, but I can't see it as money, since it doesn't fit the categories and must necessarily be deflationary. There is a difference between a known and an unknown finite amount that makes a difference. Gold has an unknown finite amount as compared to Bitcoin's supposed known finite amount. Also, since Bitcoin can be theoretically divided infinitely to smaller and smaller increments, there are questions as to whether it can truly be said to be finite at all. Bitcoin also has far too much counter-party risk. It is dependent upon users, nodes, power grids, and a steady supply of semi-conductors that are themselves dependent upon massive uninterrupted power supplies and supply chains that are truly massive. Bitcoin is not and can never be actual money, though I do understand why people have been talked into the idea of a technological abstraction being money. Anyone operating outside of the CBDC slavery system will ultimately be tracked down and prosecuted. They will not have competitors to their power, though they may slow-walk that hostility over many many years. I try to hold Gold & Silver, and I passively collect Nickel & Copper, as well as keeping cash outside of the system. I think we are headed toward very dark times, and people who aren't thinking long-term are asking to have problems. If you can't be a contrarian in this kind of environment, then you are going to be a victim, full stop. Incidentally, I don't even own a smart phone. I have an old flip phone. Haha!
This is a very well presented comment and I agree with a lot of your comments. I believe in the saying “if in doubt, diversify” so all forms of money should be considered in times of uncertainty. What you can accumulate easily should be gathered and some of it traded into more portable formats if possible (think kilos of copper for grams of gold) just in case. Each form of money has its pros and cons. I remember at the start of the pandemic people where selling toilet paper for 3x or even more. I believe silver to be one of the better forms due to its medicinal properties that gold doesn’t have. There is heaps of variables to consider and people will always have their own bias based on their experience and circumstance as well. Thank you for opening up this conversation and feel free to add some more of your insights as you see fit.
I wasn’t sure at first how to answer this but I think I’ll reply by saying I’d rather focus on promoting the scrapper community instead of making it about me.
fair enough, i just know several people that have been sick almost constantly after getting the shots and boosters. my boss always has a cold that never seems to go away completely.@@IndustrialPermaculture
in australia it was literally mandatory, if you did not get one you could not work, they passed law that compelled companies to sack you if you did not get the vaccine by certain date. I was not allowed into restaurant twice since i did not have the proof of vaccination.
I've been scrapping for about 15 years and almost everything has value to someone, even rubbish you just have to know how to move it onto the right places to make a buck from it
Thank you for sharing some of your scrapping experience. When I meet someone that might be a good fit to my barter network the hard work is usually to find out exactly what they are after without prying too much too quickly. Sometimes they will tell you on day one and other times it can take years.
I think phonecards could have been huge if they came in a decade or two earlier. The development of mobile phone technology reduced the need for payphones.
In Australia we had massive amounts of hype when they are out and you could get a IPCS magazine sent to you monthly. Everyone on welfare payments got a free “limited edition” card as well. There was definitely something cool about them but they got phased out well before the collecting got popular.
It's very cool that you're thinking about the nature of what money, and there are people who think about and write about this topic. Money was discovered and latched on to because it made barter so much more efficient. This started around 10,000+ years ago with Copper, continued 6,000+ years ago with Silver, and came to full fruition with the discovery of Gold around 5,000+ years ago. Just as the industrial revolution was about to take off, Nickel was discovered and incorporated (circa 1750). Each of these metals can and does represent money, but each of them also possesses a different Wealth Storage Density Capacity (WSDC). Gold obviously stores the most purchasing power, followed by Silver, then Nickel, and finally Copper. They are meant for large, medium, small, and smallest purchasing amounts, but you can think of most of them as being a change-maker for the metal above them. Money is ultimately a claim on human labor and time. This is actually what you are storing in money. So each troy ounce of Gold or Silver that you hold represents hours, days, weeks, months, or even years of labor that you don't have to do in order to earn wealth or purchasing power that will allow you to transact within a society. Notice that I used the word "discovered" and not "created". Money is NOT a convention. It actually has an essence or a nature. Many things, which I would call "poor money substitutes" can be put in the place of money, at least for a time, but these substitutes will never work as well as money, even if they are things like the petro-dollar, which linked dollars to oil in order to create a universal artificial demand for dollars, thereby simulating, to some degree, Gold as a backing for dollars. Money has at least 4 functions and 12 properties. Money is a store of value, a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a standard of deferred payment. If you're interested in the definitions, I can provide those. Let me know. Those are the functions of money. The properties are that money is fungible, durable, portable, recognizeable, stable in value, not easily faked or counterfeited, divisible, verifiably countable, inert, relatively scarce, historically proven, and physical (a weight of some chemical element on the periodic table). Gold has the highest WSDC because it exemplifies these functions and properties of money better than anything else. Real money like Gold, Silver, Nickel, and Copper can be digitized and tied to a block-chain, so there is nothing keeping it from moving with us into the 21st century. The difficulty with money is that is requires transparency, honesty, and discipline in government spending, which runs contrary to fallen human nature that is always tempted to cheat and abuse power. Real money is akin to a kind of moral law within the economics of government, and that's something that politicians hate, particularly those who are low on moral character and high on self-absorption and corruption. They are removing physical cash in order to remove your freedom and economic privacy. Cash or the physicality of money represent a check on government and corporate power, and the one thing that government elites are after today is power over the people. If we had kept our money on a metals standard, we'd be in much better shape that we are today. In 1960, the minimum wage in the United States was $1.25. Today, that same money paid out in five 90% Silver quarters would be worth $20.84 today. The average minimum wage in the U.S. today is between $10.50 to about $13.00 hourly, and it hasn't even come close to keeping up with inflation. However, real money has succeeded in accounting for inflation. I recommend everyone regularly buy some amount of Gold & Silver to preserve their ability to transact outside of the system because CBDCs represent a kind of digital slavery system that should be avoided and refused. Without Gold, Silver, Nickel, and Copper you will not be able to avoid or refuse without massive massive suffering. I do keep physical cash outside of the banking system, as well as significant amounts of money on convenience store gift cards that can be used for food items or gas (petrol), but I hold a majority of my wealth in real money. Have you ever tried contacting "As Good As Gold Australia"? I've looked into crypto, but I can't see it as money, since it doesn't fit the categories and must necessarily be deflationary. There is a difference between a known and an unknown finite amount that makes a difference. Gold has an unknown finite amount as compared to Bitcoin's supposed known finite amount. Also, since Bitcoin can be theoretically divided infinitely to smaller and smaller increments, there are questions as to whether it can truly be said to be finite at all. Bitcoin also has far too much counter-party risk. It is dependent upon users, nodes, power grids, and a steady supply of semi-conductors that are themselves dependent upon massive uninterrupted power supplies and supply chains that are truly massive. Bitcoin is not and can never be actual money, though I do understand why people have been talked into the idea of a technological abstraction being money. Anyone operating outside of the CBDC slavery system will ultimately be tracked down and prosecuted. They will not have competitors to their power, though they may slow-walk that hostility over many many years. I try to hold Gold & Silver, and I passively collect Nickel & Copper, as well as keeping cash outside of the system. I think we are headed toward very dark times, and people who aren't thinking long-term are asking to have problems. If you can't be a contrarian in this kind of environment, then you are going to be a victim, full stop. Incidentally, I don't even own a smart phone. I have an old flip phone. Haha!
This is a very well presented comment and I agree with a lot of your comments. I believe in the saying “if in doubt, diversify” so all forms of money should be considered in times of uncertainty. What you can accumulate easily should be gathered and some of it traded into more portable formats if possible (think kilos of copper for grams of gold) just in case. Each form of money has its pros and cons. I remember at the start of the pandemic people where selling toilet paper for 3x or even more. I believe silver to be one of the better forms due to its medicinal properties that gold doesn’t have. There is heaps of variables to consider and people will always have their own bias based on their experience and circumstance as well. Thank you for opening up this conversation and feel free to add some more of your insights as you see fit.
Did you get the wu flu shot?
I wasn’t sure at first how to answer this but I think I’ll reply by saying I’d rather focus on promoting the scrapper community instead of making it about me.
fair enough, i just know several people that have been sick almost constantly after getting the shots and boosters. my boss always has a cold that never seems to go away completely.@@IndustrialPermaculture
in australia it was literally mandatory, if you did not get one you could not work, they passed law that compelled companies to sack you if you did not get the vaccine by certain date. I was not allowed into restaurant twice since i did not have the proof of vaccination.
I've been scrapping for about 15 years and almost everything has value to someone, even rubbish you just have to know how to move it onto the right places to make a buck from it
Thank you for sharing some of your scrapping experience. When I meet someone that might be a good fit to my barter network the hard work is usually to find out exactly what they are after without prying too much too quickly. Sometimes they will tell you on day one and other times it can take years.