I don't fear it; I'm amused by people who tell me that fiat currency is going to collapse any day now unlike super-safe gold, but that they will nonetheless be happy to exchange some of their super-safe gold for my soon-to-be-worthless fiat currency. Out of the goodness of their hearts or something.
The dollar has lost roughly 97% of its value (per the Fed's own assessment) since the Federal Reserve was created. And that's a good outcome, we could talk about the ruble, or the real, or the bolivar.
Gold has not lost any value in the last century by comparison.
Gold has plenty of issues, confidence as a store of value is not one of them. By comparison, the global economy is filled constantly with stories, from one country or another, of fiat being demolished through constant inflation / aggressive devaluation.
Countries can drown their citizens via all sorts of schemes involving debt (ala Japan and the Yen), that then become currency devaluation schemes (QE) to debase that debt and chop down the standard of living of its citizens as a stealth move to pay for that debt. Such a thing inherently can't happen with gold.
The Euro zone for example is in the middle of seeing its citizens standards of living chopped down via QE, to debase the vast debt that has been choking off the growth potential of much of Europe since 2007 (the European economy has seen zero net GDP growth since roughly 2007). How many Euro zone citizens understand what the ECB is doing to them exactly? Do they realize that what they're about to suffer, is what Americans went through from 2002 to 2014 as the Fed debased the dollar to try to avoid multiple recessions, leading to a substantial decline in the US standard of living?
If the ECB drops the value of the Euro by 1/3 via QE, that substantially reduces in real terms the standard of living of anyone living on that currency. Gold shields against that abuse.
Trouble is, that for all your dire warnings about the horrible things the ECB might do, the one store of value that actually has dropped in value by a third in recent years is gold (it lost nearly a third between mid 2012 and mid 2013, and its a little lower than that now)
Sure, in the long run, gold holds its value, though it doesn't perform nearly as well as stock markets, or real estate. In the long run, a predictable 2% annual inflation erodes the value of savings, which is why people participating in the dollar economy tend to put their money in bank accounts paying interest rather than burying their cash in vaults,
But it's economically illiterate to pretend that gold price crashes haven't been a far more serious wealth destroyer over the last couple of years than the relatively stable and predictable inflation in developed countries, despite all the predictions that QE was going to make the sky fall in.
You can't eat gold. I'd be more interested to see their value measured in loaves of bread, apartments, or hours of human labour - the kind of thing I'm actually going to want to buy with my store of value.
I see where you are coming from, but as these numbers are inflation adjusted the USD isn't really the frame of reference, the purchasing power is - as a result of adjusting for inflation the purchasing power represented by one USD stays constant, so USD can be cancelled out on both sides of the equation.
The 97% loss in value of the dollar is brought up again and again as if it's some shocking fact. But that drop happened over a century, and fiat money is not expected to be s long term store of value. So really, that "shocking"drop is a non-issue unless your retirement savings account was a bed mattress.
> You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words.
I don't like the weaselly binary assumption here. You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not." That's an unbelievably narrow (and, honestly, childish) view of human interactivity. It also implies that you alone hold a monopoly on how "well-meaning" is defined and that it is your sacred duty to impose that doctrine on others.
You're basically attempting to confuse people into accepting your moral ethos as a candidate for common assumptions of what "well-meaning" should be.
This is underhanded and not well-meaning at all.
Perhaps you should try avoiding causing unnecessary harm with your words next time.
'You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not."'
I think that's appropriate, actually. That you've defined well-meaning to encapsulate more people than it does is probably the core of the disagreement, but I think it's fair to say that most people are well-meaning, but not all people are.
Comparing and contrasting "almost everybody" to "Ann Coulter", and I think it's easy to draw such a distinction. Most people are simply trying to communicate without deliberately pissing everybody off, while Ann Coulter gets pretty decent play out of pissing people off for the hell of it.
That said, your point on "well-meaning" being an arbitrary distinction holds, though I would assert that if more people assumed good faith until proven otherwise, we wouldn't find ourselves being offended by every little thing.
Huh, I don't get it. I'm being really sincere here; I want you to think seriously about what it means, to you, to be kind to others, and then change your use of language -- or not -- however you see fit.
But that message didn't even get past the firewall. Instead you decided to elaborately deconstruct what is probably the least presumptuous part of what I wrote, as a way to impute some contrived ulterior motive to me, as a way to not engage with what I was saying, at length.
I guess I don't see what you're hoping to get out of this interaction at this point. Like, okay, you don't need to think about how your words affect other people... if you really don't want to?
If you think pronoun accuracy is a primary concern regarding women in tech, I'm going to guess you have never seen a woman in tech. They are far more concerned about memory leaks and pointer management.
