ERICOPOLY

That flight to USD also happened in the GFC panic.

Platinum jewelry (unlike gold jewelry) also tends to be almost entirely pure (950/1000).

Gold is an element and therefore fungible and investable at scale (central banks and large institutions can trade gold and, absent chicanery, know precisely what they’re buying / selling), not so with diamonds (or art or air cooled 911’s or whatever) I do not know this for sure but I’d expect the above ground gold supply to be far less volatile than diamonds (ie I think there are big diamond discoveries that can be large relative to existing supply). This has happened with gold several times in history, but is probably less likely to happen today than with diamonds; someone more knowledgeable than I can opine) I think diamonds are a really bad example here. That's due to many issues: price control by cartel, ability to crate them by industrial process, huge difference between retail and wholesale value, small and tightly controlled wholesale market which is very hard to get into and that's just off the top of my head. Basically the only thing diamonds are good for is if you need to take off quickly you can shove them up your ass and go through an airport metal detector then take a large loss on redemption. The thing with gold like pupil said is that it's fairly liquid and has transparent pricing. How do the markets for platinum and gold compare on those qualitative terms of liquidity and transparency? Poorly. Gold is really liquid. You can walk into any neighborhood jeweler and sell them an ounce of gold at a small discount to market. I wouldn't even know where to go to sell an ounce of platinum. I don't know what the rate is in the US, but in Canada these sell your gold/we buy your jewelry types charge a 5% discount to the market price of the gold. That is crazy cheap when you consider that jewelry gold is of lower quality and has to be smelted/purified to turn it into financial gold. Or maybe they just use it to make new jewelry, i don't know. Either way it's not bad. I imagine if Atlanta has a place, other cities do to: https://www.rkcojewelers.com/advice-on-how-to-sell-gold-silver/ But I see far more "we buy gold" signs in what feels like every mall. However, I was thinking (for our purposes) of just people like us buying a platinum or gold ETF. There is enough liquidity there?

Gold jewelry was preferred over platinum back in the day. Great trivia to feed your beloved when you want to spring the question but don't want to foot the bill for platinum. I take no responsibility for how that works out for you. Platinum was used for and is more suitable for intricate filigree work and so there are a lot of antique filigree jewels in platinum, but today people pay a big premium for some very plain platinum settings simply because SHE is expecting platinum.

Platinum has a higher density. In theory that should equate to lower storage costs.

It's not ideal money if a country relies on deficit spending to fund the government expenses. Think about earning $1000 worth of gold (or any fixed base currency). Ten years from now deflation results in increased purchasing power because you can buy more with your $1000 of gold if you saved it. Inflation, on the other hand, is a tax. I see the obvious personal advantage to hoarding gold if it rises in real terms in response to rising economic output. However, that violates the legend that it is stable in terms of purchasing power, and I can see social unrest if one can earn true real returns by simply holding money instead of investing it.

Gold is an element and therefore fungible and investable at scale (central banks and large institutions can trade gold and, absent chicanery, know precisely what they’re buying / selling), not so with diamonds (or art or air cooled 911’s or whatever) I do not know this for sure but I’d expect the above ground gold supply to be far less volatile than diamonds (ie I think there are big diamond discoveries that can be large relative to existing supply). This has happened with gold several times in history, but is probably less likely to happen today than with diamonds; someone more knowledgeable than I can opine) I think diamonds are a really bad example here. That's due to many issues: price control by cartel, ability to crate them by industrial process, huge difference between retail and wholesale value, small and tightly controlled wholesale market which is very hard to get into and that's just off the top of my head. Basically the only thing diamonds are good for is if you need to take off quickly you can shove them up your ass and go through an airport metal detector then take a large loss on redemption. The thing with gold like pupil said is that it's fairly liquid and has transparent pricing. How do the markets for platinum and gold compare on those qualitative terms of liquidity and transparency?

Further, why is gold a suitable money when rising real production would be rewarded with deflation?

The value of gold will still be real no matter what the money supply is, because the supply of gold won't increase (aside from mining). I'm just wondering how gold can maintain it's real price if it's supply is fixed on one half of the scale, versus increases in supply of real goods and serviceso the other side of the scale. The USD is irrelevant, just the real price of gold in consideration. I'm wondering why gold's real value wouldn't increase in that scenario in order to maintain supply and demand balance on the scale. If you are predicting deflation in goods, then the same aggregate amount of gold can purchase more goods. The real value of gold has therefore increased, no?

If real household income rises, or declines, then it may not be so. As well as other variables like interest rates. So 'all else equal' is virtually impossible in the real world, and over a short time frame like 1980-2020. While I saw your mention of "all else equal" in the post I replied to, I pointed only to "real" income because, and if gold maintains it's real purchasing power, then in theory it must stay out of lockstep with real estate if real estate is driven by real incomes (all other things being equal). Does anyone know what the theoretical effect is on gold price if there is real GDP growth? If you put the world's supply of gold (priced against all things real) on one side of the scale, and then keep increasing the world's supply of 'real' on the other side of the scale, then what happens to the purchasing power of gold? I'm wondering if the increasing supply of real goods upsets the price equilibrium of gold in real terms.

If real household income rises, or declines, then it may not be so.

I'm not so sure that their lockdown is entirely responsible for their low case count. Australia is in summer right now and it's becoming increasingly clear that this virus is highly seasonal. We didn't hit zero in the US during summer. The numbers actually went UP as we entered summer coincident with lifting restrictions.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/victoria-australia-no-new-coronavirus-cases_n_5fc2734ac5b61d04bfaa183a Australia’s second-largest state, Victoria, once the country’s COVID-19 hotspot, said on Friday it has gone 28 days without detecting any new infections, a benchmark widely cited as eliminating the virus from the community. The state also has zero active cases after the last COVID-19 patient was discharged from hospital this week, a far cry from August when Victoria recorded more than 700 cases in one day and active infections totalled nearly 8,000. The spread of the virus was only contained after a lockdown lasting more than 100 days, leaving some 5 million people in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city, largely confined to their homes.

In May, Trump claimed he was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent covid-19: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-reveals-taking-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus And later when he had covid-19 they didn't give it to him at Walter Reed.

It was Trump's slogan too until, as the Woodward tapes reveal, Kushner & Trump decided they would run a campaign to "reopen" and politicized the whole thing.

And it would last two-three weeks and the pandemic would at that point be over. Unless... Unless... Unless... Someone leaves the house and spreads it to someone from ANOTHER household!

The test results from the hospital say that she came in presenting with a cough. She never told them that, she hasn't coughed a single time during this entire episode. Do they just make things up in hospitals? Before bringing her to the ER, I called the hospital to ask what the procedure is for checkin. Do we call from the parking lot, etc... They told me to just bring her in the front door of the ER and register at the desk. We do so and just inside the front door we tell a greeter that we both have covid-9 and she says it's okay for both of us to come to the front desk to register. THEN they tell us to sit in the FLU section. Are you kidding? Seating my wife with a positive covid-19 test next to the people they think have the flu, and on purpose? Finally, someone on staff tells me that I need to leave because there is a new hospital policy for NO VISITORS for covid patients. Yet they didn't tell the person at the front door or the phone operator who I spoke to.

My wife gets anxiety in a clinical setting and her self-administered-at-home blood pressure reading is far lower than what the nurse or doctor will see. I took her into the Mercy Hospital ER a couple of days ago when her blood pressure dropped to 84/57 with a pulse of 91. The triage nurse then took her blood pressure and it was way back up again. This happens to my wife a lot, but she's never had a reading THIS low. What the hospital should have done, but didn't, is lay her down on a bed in a quiet room alone with a machine periodically measuring her pressure every 5 minutes. Her primary care doctor has measured her low blood pressure using that method, and tells her to eat pickles and put salt on her food to manage it. If not, she gets dizzy.

It sounds like most of you haven't had covid-19 yet in your household. Just in case, I recommend adding a fingertip pulse oximeter and a blood pressure monitor to your first aid supplies. Do you really want to be in a situation at home with covid and not knowing what your readings are? For a period of time yesterday evening I started feeling weak like I was experiencing blood loss and my saturation dropped to 94. Then the weakness subsided and went back up to 97. If anything, it gives you something interesting to monitor while you pass the time.

Given the description of the symptoms and 'epidemiological' circumstances, the two negative results are not enough to completely rule out CV. So, the idea is to behave as if the virus disease is present. Behaviors (altered or not) depend on various beliefs but information coming out of imperfect collective organizations whose recommendations are based at least on some level of trust and peer-reviewed processes suggests that at least self-quarantine versus others that are presumed to not have the disease is the minimal way to go. Further testing may not be helpful unless there is a specific reason. The above assumes a gradual process to recovery. If there is a specific reason to know or simply want to know, the way to go is to obtain another test in another testing area in order to control for collection technique, different lab, different test (antigen vs PCR) with a slightly different sensitivity/specificity (false negative, false positive) profile in general and evolving according to stage of clinical presentation. Another possibility is to wait for at least 2 to 3 weeks and get an antibody test. The sample from Monday's test, 4 days ago, was done at my primary care doctor's parking lot in Folsom by a gowned nurse who came out to my car's window to swab me (but only 1 nostril). That swab was sent to the lab at Quest Diagnostics and my online Quest account is where I viewed the result last night. The type of test was "SARS CoV 2 RNA(COVID 19), QUALITATIVE NAAT". Another online resource says that test "includes RT-PCR or TMA". Off hand, I don't know which lab or which type of test it was from the testing done last Thursday (now 8 days ago) when we both were tested by the same PA at Med-7 in Roseville. Both nostrils were swabbed and my wife's came back positive. I don't have online access to the test -- they notified me of the result by phone. It is not showing up in my Quest Diagnostics account, so I assume they didn't process it at a Quest lab.

I checked my result from Monday's testing: again, 'negative'. I give up. What do I need next, an antibody test?

Not to mention several politicians who got caught breaking their own rules to have Thanksgiving gatherings. I don't blame the public for becoming increasingly jaded by political leadership. People seem to relish in the discovered hypocrisy so that they can feel righteous in their own opposition, although that's pretty childish. But from what I can tell people don't get too bothered when they feel the rules are just and in place to serve the greater good. I watch Fox News (not exclusively of course) and they're obsessed with Gavin Newsom's lunch, but the liberals channels don't really care at all to the same extent.

Thanks! Looks like personal responsibility is a really great theory: US air travel sets a pandemic-era record despite calls to stay home for Thanksgiving https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/covid-air-travel-thanksgiving-trnd/index.html

First, a bulk thank-you for the well-wishers. We continue to not get any worse. All of my stepson's friends appear to be well and their families too. So maybe I got it at Costco where I wore a mask and spoke to nobody except from behind a window at checkout. Maybe my wife caught it ordering at the counter the one time in a restaurant in El Dorado Hills that prior weekend. But my stepson says he was showing symptoms all week, but then again my wife says he's a hypochondriac. I really don't care. Anyhow, we should have immunities for a while and we've booked ourselves six days on Oahu in late December -- we'll need to be tested again (ouch!) before the flight per travel restrictions.

If women are mandated to wear bikini tops (so others aren't offended), is it so much to mandate a man to wear a mask during a pandemic so others aren't killed? Where is the "cry freedom" when it comes to other articles of clothing? No mask, no shirt, no shoes, no service.