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gregb
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Posts posted by gregb
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The period of "Judicial Politics" started on September 19th, 2006. Much shit still to hit the fan...
The period of "judicial politics" started way before that. At least as far back as 2000 when they cleared Thaksin of wrong doing in his asset concealment case in the face of overwhelming evidence that he was guilty.
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The court is correct in using law 68.
PT should be ban for questioning the court.
the law regarding article 68 is clearly stated above, along with the procedure, and it has not been followed so is therefore not an enforceable judgement. So maybe you can tell us all why it is correct, is it because you say so?
Or is 'law' 68 something completely different and you have just posted in the wrong thread?
It is true that it wasn't followed to the letter, however if the OAG did his job, then the case would have wound up before the Constitution Court anyway. So you are arguing a procedural detail when there was very likely to be violence by any delay.
It amazes me some people would rather have fighting than a very much needed delay. The Constitution Court even stated as such when they accepted the cases without waiting for the OAG. It is quite acceptable in periods of emergency for a court to expand their purview in order to accomplish a critically important task where lives or other serious consequences are at stake. Witness the US Supreme Court during the 2000 election. If everything was to be followed exactly, then Florida should have been allowed to complete its count first before the US Supreme Court could accept the challenge of the vote being unconstitutional. But they expanded their powers and intervened early to put a stop to the counting because of the importance of what was at stake.
The same is true here. A procedural rule is irrelevant when they were sure to receive the case anyway if the attorney general did his responsibility, and there was a critical need to stop a very destabilizing situation which very likely would have lead to bloodshed.
I applaud the justices for having the courage to make this call. Every one can breathe easier knowing there will be no bullets flying today. Those who attack them should truly ask themselves would they prefer deaths on their conscience simply because the attorney general was lazy, corrupt and/or politically unmotivated to do his job?
I don't want bloodshed. It seems the PTP supporters do. They are sure pushing hard enough for civil war.
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Red armies formulated in several countries, including Germany and Japan?
Khun Kanit seems to be confusing Thailand's domestic Redshirts with bona fide terrorist organisations such as Germany's Red Army [baader-Meinhof], or Italy's Red Brigade, groups.
Or perhaps he is privy to knowledge to which the rest of us are not . . .
I don't think he needs to be privy to any information that the rest of us aren't, and I don't see any conflict in his statement. There are several factions of the Thai red shirts who are quite clearly terrorists. The fact that the majority are simply employees collecting a paycheck doesn't diminish in any way the evil perpetrated by those who inflict fear on the rest of us or pine for civil war for their own nefarious ends.
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Yep. No problems. Used to do it all the time when I lived down in that area. My SIL worked at Time Square. I'd meet her at the Asoke skytrain station and exchange whatever we needed to exchange over the gate, then go back to the station where I boarded. 10 baht. (15 now) It used to be you only had 90 minutes. I don't know if they've increased it to 120 now due to the extensions.
Guards don't care. Lots of people do it.
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It is also extremely important that both parents put in face time with the children and speak to them in their native languages during the period from 6-9 months.
Watching TV or hearing the sounds isn't enough. It has to be spoken directly from a live person. Research has shown that it is during this period that the child forms feedback networks in their brain which inhibits the sounds that aren't going to be necessary for language processing. Before this, they essentially hear every sound equally. During this period, they construct a filter that selectively recognizes only the important sounds that they will need for language. Most children can always pick up another language even after 9 months, but optimal results come by making sure they get the proper stimulation in this critical period. Your ability to learn and recognize new sounds degrades continuously after this, although early on in life not by much. By the time you reach adulthood however, it may be very difficult to train your brain to hear different sounds. After 15 years in Thailand I still can't actually hear the tones in some of the words, and have to rely more on context to differentiate which variant of a particular phoneme was spoken.
So the takeaway from this is start to be multilingual when you are very young. Yes, the child may take longer to begin speaking, but much research shows that this is optimal from the child's perspective. The concern that something is wrong because speech is delayed a few months has been shown over and over again to be an ill informed opinion. By speaking both languages early he will quickly catch up and overtake those who were introduced to a second language after they were 2 years old.
Sadly, my twins are 2, but most of the Chinese language schools won't take the children until they are 4. I wish I could find a place to send my kids now. They don't need to learn anything specific, but I want to get them exposed to the tones and sounds of the language as early as possible. The longer I wait, the harder I know it will be for them.
Does anyone know of a Mandarin school near Rangsit that has a program for toddlers?
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There is a 60 baht store in the basement of Future Park, Rangsit. Never seen a 20 baht store. I would be afraid to see what they actually carried there. There also used to be a 99 baht store in the old Merry King's out in Bang Yai.
You have to be careful shopping at these places. Some things are very good value, some things turn out to be grossly over priced. But it is fun to look around and see what they have. I go to the place at Future Park a few times a month to check out the new inventory. Most of the time I wind up leaving several hundred baht poorer. Most of their inventory comes from Japan.
But my children love the stuff I pick up there. Where else can you find a large stuffed frog magnet?
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In my book peacefull is described as not to hinder other people life.Has the direction to disperse being issued? Have protesters assaulted anyone? Have they produced any kind of weapons? Have they threatened to physically hurt anyone?
Have they stormed any hospital or shopping mall?
I don't know, it wasn't in the news report. However obstructing legal government activities strikes me as illegal, even if no charges have been filed yet. Of course that doesn't matter, does it. You already wrote that it's acceptable for the PAD to break the law in order to preserve the law.
sorry to tell you but peacefully demonstrating outside of the government offices is NOT illegal, but is part of democracy and all the rest of the big words
By that definition, the parliament is about the least peaceful group there is. They are consciously trying to create civil war by passing divisive legislation that does nothing but hinder the lives of law abiding citizens. Peaceful at this point is whatever you want it to mean. It has lost all objective reality. To red shirt sympathizers, peaceful means burning the businesses of anyone who disagrees with them.
The only way to restore any sanity to this situation is to rely on a rule of law that supreme and is above all these petty politics. But the PTP won't leave the rule of law alone to do its job and try and restore peace.
So if even the elected representatives are pushing for war, how can anyone expect the rest of the population to sit quietly on the sidelines?
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How any democratically-minded person here can support the PAD is beyond me...
Don't worry. Your ignorance is forgiven. If you haven't figured out by now that the PAD are fighting for the triumph of rule of law over the dictatorial Thaksin regime, then you will probably never understand. It is only too bad that the PAD is forced into positions where they have to break the law in order to stop the travesty of justice that Thaksin would inflict on Thailand for the benefit of himself.
Rule of law is the very foundation of any democracy. The PAD supports it. Thaksin doesn't. Simple as that really. Everything else is simply people reacting in predictable ways to that basic fact.
When Thaksin submits to the rule of law, and places himself subservient to it, then all the problems stop. As long as he doesn't, the problems don't. Since his personality means he will never do it, nothing short of his demise is ever going to bring peace.
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Has anyone ever seen a place in the greater Bangkok area selling one of these?
http://www.all-packs...emid=64〈=en
It doesn't have to be a Brother DZ-280A. A Chinese knockoff would be completely acceptable also. And I don't even mind if they spell "kept" with a "c". Just someone who sells a small, counter top vacuum sealer for the home. Everyone sells the simple green nichrome wire models where you push down the handle and it seals the bag, but I am specifically looking for one that pulls a vacuum first.
Thanks for any advice.
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Double post.
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Threres ton's of girls working in Pattaya with this same story. That's why many of them are there. They are not liiving a civilized country where there is a justice system worthy of the name and has any state agency to help track down the deadbeat father and forces payment of child support.
Or on the other hand, Thailand is one of the few civilized countries in the world that does have a FAIR justice system.
Their bodies, their choice to have a baby without a husband, their responsibility to support the baby.
Too many deadbeat mothers in the west, that expect somebody else to pay for their irresponsible choices.
So, in your view, it was a virgin birth? If I remember my biology lessons correctly, under normal circumstances, it takes two people to make a baby. You seem to want to excuse the father of the child completely. FAIL!!
"Thailand is one of the few civilized countries in the world that does have a FAIR justice system"
In the words of my wife " why should I pay taxes to support some dozy cow?"
Frankly I agree with her, thankfully this is Thailand not some fascist Euro state where Big Brother knows best.
Its called personal responsibility, the girl chose to have unprotected sex and all that it entails,no one forced her to have unprotected sex, live with the consequences.
There are always two sides to every story, maybe the girl told the boy she was on the pill, we dont know, and until we do its too easy to jump to conclusions.
Still her choice let her deal with it.
Must be wonderful to live in fantasy land where men have no responsibilities. I guess you were sick the day they explained to you in grade school how babies are made. Perhaps that is why you can be forgiven for thinking this was solely the woman's choice. After all, men aren't supposed to have personal responsibility for their unprotected sexual encounters. At least, not according to the sexpat community in Thailand.
Here's an idea...use a condom and then you never have to worry about this issue. But of course, it is so much easier to simply blame the women. For those of us who struggled to have children, the idea of any man simply abandoning such a precious gift and claiming no responsibility to the child is truly abominable. Yes the woman chose to have the child. But it was equally the man's decision to father the child.
So while you can argue the West may not place enough emphasis on the mother's responsibility, there is no moral basis for trying to claim the man should be able to shirk his. And Thailand doesn't do nearly enough to enforce the latter.
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Let's be clear here. When a bike is coming straight at you full speed you have no time at all to weigh out a rational response. You are in instinct mode. Fight vs. flight. This has happened to me enough times that for myself I do know that I feel BOTH things going on when threatened that way. I'm not sure if that is typical or not, but that's what I have felt. OK, first flight maybe but weirdly I feel fight pretty much simultaneously. So generally as I have survived this so far, in a split second I move (and/or they veer), I survive, and then I can feel myself STARTING to attack the bike (if I'm carrying anything) but by then I have survived and it is over, so I stop myself because there is nothing to hit. The impulse to attack the bike is not retailiation, it is intended defense. I wasn't suggesting I was ever going to successful defend against a bike attack. Bottom line, because these responses are automatic, no matter how people may intellectualize this here, I'm not sure how much control we have over these split second automatic instinctual responses.
JT,
If your brain is wired in such a way that you subconsciously believe you can attack an oncoming motorcycle and win then you have much bigger problems than the fate of your pickles. As someone else pointed out, reasonable people don't do that. The natural reaction of anyone with a huge object bearing down on them at high speed is to get the hell out of the way. I would suggest that rather than trying to study the Thai legal code to find out if an adhoc Muay Thai battle with condiments in the middle of the street is legal, you address that portion of your neural programming that even thinks such stupidity is a good idea.
You might just live another day to tell us about it.
In answer to your question, since very few people would share your proclivities, you likely would find yourself at the losing end of a legal battle. This is one of those cases where you need to conform to the majority. War like instincts are not a protected human right.
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+ 1 thermostat fault.
Simple part for a technician to replace.
Also if the fridge has been put on its back.. the oil from the compressor at the bottom will run up the element at the back of the fridge. If you switch it on with out waiting a while for the oil to settle it might damage the fridge.
If it is damaged by putting on its back .. could that be different damage then thermostat.
It is possible if it was left lying on its back for an extended period of time, and you did not leave it upright for an hour or so before turning it on, that oil could have leaked into the refrigerant. Any refrigerator, no matter how it was stored or transported, after standing upright for an hour will be in a state where all the fluids have drained and properly separated, and there will be no issues from this.
If compressor oil has leaked into the refrigerant, that is an expensive fix. If it is simply the thermostat (and it sounds like that is your problem) then it shouldn't cost you more than 1000 baht. Your biggest problem is finding a reputable guy to fix the problem. Most of the little mom and pop shops in my experience will change the part for you and replace it with an equally defective part. Then they will try and say that the problem is the compressor and proceed to charge you an exorbitant price for a rebuilt compressor, while simultaneously taking your good compressor and selling it. But they know full well what they have done. We even had a guy "fix" ours, and then call back a week later surprised we hadn't called him to complain it wasn't working. He wanted to steal and sell our compressor. My wife gave him a tongue lashing on the phone for being a criminal. I knew exactly what was going on when I got home and looked at what he had done, and had told my wife.
Call the manufacturer and pay a higher fee to get a certified technician to come look at it. I've been through this all before. Just a word of advice worth every cent you paid for it.
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Khun Sombat seems like a level headed and reasonable person. Someone that you could actually have a meaningful conversation with and come away from it with some hope of moving forward together. That is why he is a nobody.
Sadly, he doesn't speak for the vast majority of reds, and in particular the violent, thuggish faction, who are still strongly devout followers of the demagogue in Dubai, and who still happily hold the rest of the country in contempt, and would fire bomb everyone else if it meant they got paid 500 baht from their square headed deity.
Wake me up when the bulk of the red shirts have developed intelligence and no longer follow their current plan to destroy the country and put their chosen tyrant in power.
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This seems the most logical. It's the market right near Galaxy on Sukhumvit in Bang Saen Chonburi. Each stall is literally identical to the next one. I can understand the Law that people were quoting on Wikipedia. However I don't think it would be included in this type of venue. Yes if there were two stores next to each other logically they could compete with each other and have a lot of the market from the north and south. But I'm sure they would also have different shoes and have competitive pricing. All the pricing is the same. All the crap is the same.usualy its one owner for the whole lot and they hire people for peanuts.
Or they rent their areas to non-savvy people, just like people renting bars to dumb farangs in pattaya and phuket.
In phuket, all the boots at central and tesco are owned by the same few people. they hire girls for 3-5k baht per month
This is basically the crux of the issue. In the West, you also see all the shops together. Ever wondered why when a McDonalds franchise opens up, suddenly there are 5 other fast food outlets on exactly the same corner? Your best option is always to open a shop right next to a successful shop already selling that product. That way, you get traffic that you know are interested buyers.
The problem is, in the West, you get diversification. The branding is done slightly different, the presentation is done slightly different, people compete to try and get customers, and they innovate on how to do it. Thus, you get a hammer market, with 10,000 different kinds of hammers catering to all manner of consumers. The result is basically successful.
In Thailand, instead of that competitive instinct, you get collusion. Usually the person who is renting the stalls, or in the case where there is no rent the individual with the most authority, decides to set the price and you aren't allowed to deviate from that, lest you be cast out or put in an uncomfortable situation...and Thais don't like uncomfortable situations. Thais also aren't generally very good at sourcing unique brands because traditionally the customs and import procedures were so painful, and they don't speak enough English to find new products anyway. So they all buy from the same place, and sell at the same price. It is a truly distorted version of what should happen in a market. But when you are poor, even this distorted market mechanism seems to provide enough to put rice in your bowl. And the market owners like it because they get more rent from 10 people selling the same things than they would from a single shop.
It is a cultural thing and one that everyone simply accepts. You can be sure that if you come up with a unique idea, it will be copied and there will be 10 people doing exactly the same thing right next to you, so it kind of kills any desire to innovate.
Just part of living in Thailand.
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Have sent literally thousands of items from Thailand to the West since I moved here. Thailand Post Registered Mail is the cheapest and most reliable option there is. If you find this too expensive, then your business model isn't viable. You aren't going to get it for less.
You can always try wholesale shipments to established retail outlets overseas. Then you can ship container loads at more cost effective rates. But it will also take 2 months.
Otherwise you will need to concentrate on small, lightweight, high value items where the shipping cost is not prohibitive.
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If you are thinking of getting out of Dodge you best hurry.
US Senators Charles Schumer and Bob Casey to restrict the right of Americans to renounce citizenship – a populist reaction to Facebook co-founder Eduardo Savarin renouncing his US citizenship, saving him millions of dollatrs in US taxes.
The two Senators call Saverin’s renunciation “an outrage” and describe a plan to tax expatriates even after they renounce citizenship, that would also bar such individuals from re-entering the USA.
The bill is to be called the “Ex-PATRIOT” Act, which stands for the “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy” Act – whatever that is supposed to mean.
Q BYTES – 19 May 2012 – HOW WILL YOUR OFFSHORE BANK WEATHER THE STORM?
Good god...now this is just unfair. Read the summary of the proposed law:
That means every single person who has renounced over the past decade, and everyone in the future, even if they do it before this law gets passed, is going to be taxes on any asset they have in the US at 30% forever. Also, every single person is going to be reevaluated for whether they should be permanently barred from the country.
Note that they are doing this retroactively. Never mind that they wrote the rules to begin with and people simply followed them. Now they can just invent new laws and apply them retroactively to things people did in the past.
Makes me proud to be an American. What a great country I come from....
Meanwhile, Dominca passports are only $130K. Tempting...very tempting. Not for tax reasons. Just so I no longer have to say that I have any association at all with these jerks.
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I was at a banking / insurance type trade show in chiang mai next to airport plaza eilier this year. They had royal Thai government minted gold coins of , quarter , half and 1 oz. but the premium was a bit more than bars- I don't remember exactly but about 4% or 5% . Never seen before or since at any gold shop though. Maybe you can half a friend search google in Thai?
The Thai mint makes these proof coins every once in a while for special occasions. If this was last year, the one you probably saw was their recent issue for the King's 84th birthday. It was a 1 baht 96.5% gold coin with a face value of 16,000 baht. They were selling it at the mint for 25,000 baht early in 2011, which was well over the gold value at the time. It needed to be preordered 6 months before the production date.
I have seen them on the secondary market just recently for around 30,000 baht, but you need to look around. They are not easy to find. Most people who bought them intend to hold them.
Picture is here:
http://numis-asia.blogspot.com/2011/07/thailand-king-bhumibols-7th-cycle.html
This is the only thing I could find on a web search.
This was an auction which is now over. I don't know what the final bid was.
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disclaimer: nowadays high yield investments are not buy and hold. they require constant daily monitoring and are neither suitable for inexperienced investors nor for the faint-hearted. that's the reason why you find people like me daily in serious financial forums to exchange views and intermittendly in a forum like this one for entertainment and relaxation which they require as a diversion from the hard work looking for 6-8 hours at three screens, trying to make a few extra bucks for dog food
And this is exactly why you buy gold if you are still in the work force. I can think of no more unpalatable job than sitting around like some scrooge on a keyboard trying to time the market and move in and out of hundreds of different investments, every day for days on end.
The days when you could stick your fiat into a bank CD and concentrate on the interesting challenges of life are long gone. You can either be like Naam, get yourself all wound up playing financial games for 6 hours a day, and then come here and denigrate others to blow off steam, or you can simply buy gold and hold.
30 years from now, when we are all as old as Naam is today, that gold may not have completely outperformed all of his investments, but we will not have needed to spend a miserable 6 hours a day that we didn't have trying to find better means of investing it. I only get about 3 hours a day with my kids as it is. There is something seriously wrong with society when it is necessary to spend multiple hours a day trying to find investments that can stay ahead of inflation. Gold is the antidote to this plague of modern finances, and this infuriates financial advisors no end, who make money convincing you to play this silly game.
My time is worth enough to me that I am not willing to spend 6 hours a day looking for investments. My children are infinitely more valuable than that.
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As a student I use to listen to speeches predicting the inevitable collapse of capitalism from representatives of the revolutionary left and now I am listening to weird stuff from gold bugs with their bags of coins. Maybe it is the same people a little older?
It is usually, but rather than being representative of the revolutionary left, their views have morphed into the extreme rabid right.
Some people need to cling to these sorts of beliefs; it is a comfortable and convenient worldview for them. It helps explain the chaos of modern life; a chaos and uncertainty that most of us are happy to accept and adjust to.
Sadly you are wrong, in that this world view is neither comfortable nor convenient. In fact, it is a terrifying and unsettling view, and one which I would rather not have. Life would be convenient if I could simply put my head in the sand and pretend that the status quo could continue and that business as usual would return. The problem is I understand too much about the physics of energy depletion, and I have studied way too much on the reasons and mechanisms which have caused civilizations throughout history to collapse.
We are on a collapse trajectory. You don't need to be a prophet to see that, only look at the data and accept what it is telling you. But there will always be people who refuse to accept what is happening, even as the Titanic is sinking around them. There is nothing anyone can do to help them. They will go down with the ship. The real problem is, the ship is so big and sinking so slowly that we may all die of old age before there is any consensus that the sinking is irreparable. That is one of the other things history tells us. Even if you know you are in a collapse scenario, it will be too difficult to convince the vast majority of the danger and change their habits in time.
So I just keep buying gold as I can. I like it when it goes down, because I know long term it is going up. But Naam is correct that short term predictions require a crystal ball. Whenever I try to talk to him about the price in 30 years though, all I get is that he isn't interested in that time frame as he will be dead. But I can't even begin to speculate what might happen on a scale shorter than that. As I said above...the ship is sinking slowly.
So I just keep moving slowly towards the exit away from all fiat currencies, and hope for the best. My children will hopefully appreciate my efforts.
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I have had numerous opportunities to witness the care given at government hospitals under the universal care scheme. There is a long queue, and it is spartan, but it does provide a minimally effective service, and in life threatening situations even exceptional care at extremely low cost. In short, the existing system is working.
The universal health care scheme requires you to go to your designated hospital for treatment. All other hospitals, whether participating in the scheme or not, are only obliged to offer care as necessary in an emergency situation, and then only so far as is necessary to stabalize you and transport you to your designated hospital.
So there are 2 questions in this very poorly written article.
1. Was this Chukiat's designated hospital under the universal care scheme? It seems unlikely a hospital in Min Buri would be if the man typically lived in the lower Sukhumvit area. Gluay Nam Thai would have been a more likely choice.
2. Was there anything that should have been immediately obvious to a doctor examining him that his ailment was immediately life threatening? Since the article doesn't say that Chukiat died, my suspicion is that he was not in any danger of dying, and thus the doctor and the hospital were correct to reject treatment.
There are simple rules to follow, and while they can be frustrating at times, if you do follow them you get very basic care for free in Thailand. No, it is not top notch care at your convenience. That is never going to be available to everyone. But the point is that the universal care scheme in Thailand meets the "good enough" standard. Care beyond this is a want, not really a need.
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As far as finance goes I'm a complete simpleton but one thing has always puzzled me. People talk about gold as though it has some intrinsic value whilst paper has none. They're both just physical things. It seems to me that the only reason gold is more valuable than paper is because people believe so. If Apocalypse arrives which is more likely to fill your belly - paper or gold? Or neither?
I think those that hold gold as more than a hedge....meaning the types you are speaking of....see Fiat as an IOU where as gold
is nobody's marker.
As to which will fill your belly.....yes neither is edible but one can be traded for food after monetary collapse & one cannot.
That's only if the people you're trading with want gold. If the world's gone to hell in a handcart I would imagine gold would be the last thing on their mind.
But the world never goes to hell in a hand basket, simultaneously absolutely every where. There are always wealthy people in relatively safe areas behind castle walls with good defences who have a surplus, and looking to trade that surplus. What else would a wealthy person is such a situation accept if not gold? He already has all the food he can use, and as we've discussed before expanding your land exacts a cost for defence of it. One of the reasons why peace is considered so valuable an asset to have. It subsidizes the cost of defence making land and transport, and everything that comes from land and transport, appear cheaper. It is a primary driver behind why simple feudalism will nearly always evolve into a kingdom over time.
There will always be people who want gold, because it is the only thing you can really accumulate in unlimited quantities without ever worrying about having too much. Nobody ever has too much gold. If there is no fiat currency because most governments are in chaos, almost nothing else on the planet fits that niche.
People need to wake up and realize Mad Max was a movie. That is not what we are facing in the future. There are many historical examples of what really happens, of which the fall of the Roman empire is probably the one closest matched to us that most posters here would be familiar with. That took between 2 and 8 centuries, depending on if you are looking only at the west or if you consider the eastern empire as well. And despite many people's individual lives and communities going rapidly to hell in a hand basket, gold was still considered universally valuable.
Ignore history at your own peril.
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In case of hyperinflation, you could make use of gold by paying for larger amounts of other commodities, and exchange those for food or other goods.
I had thought of this too, and it is possible, though it can be an inconvenience if you don't really need the commodity that you exchange your gold for. You could buy a lot of food at once with a single bar of gold, but you'd need space to store it, and you'd want to consume it all before they expire to prevent wastage.
I'm thinking that very small coins would be the most practical form of gold as a medium of exchange as opposed to bars. So what are the smallest coins around in Thailand? I've read that 1/20th of an ounce is available in other countries.
There was a discussion on Kitco around last year about the smallest practical gold denomination. The consensus was gold dust was probably the most practical, small form of gold. I remember one guy stated that is was possible using a low surface tension solvent such as an oil or alcohol to measure volumetric displacements of around 10 microliters on extremely fine graduated cylinders. Combined with a good digital scale, that is sufficient resolution to allow you to verify with low tech methods that the substance you were given was in fact gold down to about a gram. Of course, if the dust is very fine you may have to use a good filter to recover it from the solvent.
Low tech is important, because if you wanted to use an idea like this in a market place setting, it would require everyone to be able to determine with confidence that the gold was real gold. Using dust and paying for an item would go something like this: 1g of gold dust verified to be real gold. From that, the vendor extracts the mg or even ug of gold necessary to complete the purchase, and returns the remainder of the gold gram to the customer. This system would require everyone to have at least 1g of gold at all times to facilitate the transaction, and that may turn out to be impractical.
Personally, if it is going to happen at all, the more likely scenario in my opinion is that something will develop similar to the food court system here in Thailand. You go to a booth with proper and expensive equipment and exchange your gold for vouchers. You spend vouchers in the market, and then you go back to the exchange booth to retrieve the remainder of your gold you didn't spend. The exchange booth could be compensated by rent from the vendors, so no need to resort to a transaction fee. Do keep in mind that as industrialization winds down and the overproduction of "stuff" is resolved, prices of everything will start to rise and the number of people on the planet will be reduced. Eventually, it would be possible to get back to using coins and realistically sized gold pieces as they did for thousands of years.
But in the hypothetical scenario where we need to use gold directly with the 7 billion people, the amount of gold for ordinary transactions would be vanishingly small and require some creativity on how to make it work.
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I think some of you guys living in fear of international collapse need to grow a pair of testicles.
Yes, some national economies will need to readjust, to recalibrate, but that's been going on ever since the Romans and Greeks minted coins. , The gold notion is predicated on there being a systemic worldwide financial collapse. That;'s about as likely as me waking up naked with a katoey. Aint gonna happen. In my case, I have a sharp eyed broomstick flyer keeping an eye on me. In the case of the world economy, there are too many central banks working together. Despite all the negativity we can read about in the media, when push comes to shove, the central banks of China, Russia, the EU, and the USA all come together because they know that if one goes down, they will all suffer.
Do you remember what happened at the peak of the financial crisis, when there was a real fear that the USD would collapse? The Australia Canada, Sweden, the UK and the EU central banks went to work. Even the Chinese were obliged to prop up the USD. The world is too integrated and too dependent on each other to allow such a thing to happen.
The problem with attitudes like this is timeframe. Minus a miracle energy technology or aliens landing to save us from the results of our bad decisions, there will be a prolonged, continued decline and collapse of global industrial civilization. In every country. Period. We are way past the time when collapse could be stopped. We might be able to mitigate it slightly (and we almost certainly will try), but that will only push out the time a small amount. With peak oil now in the rear view mirror and energy and resource depletion stretching in front of us for generations, economic growth is an anachronism. Declining oil production necessarily means declining economies. There is no way around that fundamental fact. Since modern fractional reserve banking absolutely requires economic growth to pay the interest on loans, it means that unless the energy crisis is solved, the government will need to print money to pay the interest on loans. It can not be earned.
Money printing necessarily means devaluation of the currency. Gold doesn't have to become more valuable. It simply needs to remain gold. All fiat currencies backed by collapsing economies will return to their intrinsic value of 0. And no, there won't be armeggedon. This is an exceedingly slow process, and none of us here are likely to be alive by the time the current global industrial economy has completely disappeared. That is something our great grandchildren might experience. But throughout this time, gold will remain the best store of value, for the same reasons it has always been throughout history, minus the last 2 centuries when the bonanza of oil production made us forget reality.
No, as economies bifurcate again into their historical norms with a small number of wealthy nobles and a massive number of poor peasants, healthcare will again become unaffordable to most. Diseases and plagues will rule. There will be wars over the remaining resources, squandering away the few remaining resources we have. This is not armegeddon. This is a reality that will play out over centuries, the way it always has throughout history when civilizations collapse. Sometime in a few centuries the earth will need to get back down to under a billion inhabitants where stability can once again be achieved. That means death on a scale we can't even contemplate today.
I highly suggest anyone who hasn't considered the physics behind what is happening in our world today to pick up a copy of Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" so you can understand why we have chosen failure, and get a picture of what the future will look like by examining the past.
During this time, as economists try unsuccessfully over and over to apply the rules of economics they learned during growth years to a physical reality of decline and collapse, fiat money systems will be born and die in the throws of hyperinflation over and over. Gold however, will always be gold. It will always have trade value, as there will always be wealthy, and it is the one asset a wealthy person can always use. He may not be able to defend more lands, and food stores go bad over time, but gold is the perfect wealth. It costs almost nothing to hold.
I hold gold because it is obvious gold is the only thing you can count on during these times. There may be short periods of relative stability during our lives where the fiat currency of the empire de jure seems solid enough, but that is an illusion if you extend your horizon long enough. So I will hold gold, and teach my children and grandchildren to hold gold, and hope for the best. As I need to use it, I will exchange it for whatever the currency is at the time and place I need it, secure in the knowledge that I will never go bankrupt if I have gold and defend it against theft. As I earn money in these fragile economies, I will buy gold and add to my wealth. I find it extremely unlikely in our lifetimes that gold will ever become a direct medium of exchange, but as industrialization fails, semiconductors fab lines become economically impractical, and computers and the trappings of modern life die away, then one of my descendants may eventually experience it.
Technological civilizations have died before in the past leading to agrarian lifestyles, and this looks to be in our far future as well.
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Where Is Gold Going In This Market
in Jobs, Economy, Banking, Business, Investments
Posted
"Taken to its logical conclusion, this means governments would eventually agree to once again use gold as the basis for their currencies, says James Swanson, chief investment strategist at MFS, a mutual-fund company.
That is a fantasy, he argues, because some powerful nations have relatively little gold and some gold-rich nations have little power."
Ahh yes. The words of someone who believes business as usual will continue as always and that the yellow metal is a barbarous relic. He conveniently fails to consider that those nations who have gold may find their power increasing, and those nations who do not, will find themselves in decline and sidelined. As the global industrial economy we have today continues its collapse due to energy and resource depletion, that "power" he refers to will necessarily be redefined, based as it is today on consumption habits that can not possibly be maintained. Gold is a likely candidate for the rallying point behind which the new upcoming power block will emerge.
Powerful nations are only powerful for a short time. Eventually, all empires collapse. Our period is no different from every other one throughout history.