OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

And a lot of giant companies faded away because management had no ideas. DEC. Kodak. HP. Xerox. Intel.

Wealth is the capacity to buy things, including human labour. It can be spent in all sorts of ways, some of them constructive.

Karl Marx wasn't a moron. He corresponded with Abraham Lincoln.

Capital is what you need to turn ideas into profitable reality. If you've had good ideas in the past, and been able to realise them, you may accumulate enough capital to be able to invest in realising new ideas, but there are other ways of accumulating capital and it certainly isn't just a symptom of having had good ideas in the past.

Communist countries are autocratic, which does mean that powerful people have are influence in areas they don't understand, and suppress good ideas they don't appreciate.

The US is plutocratic, which means that rich people have influence in areas they don't understand and can suppress good idea that they don't appreciate. Your own attitude to anthropogenic globla warming is a classic example.

Actually, money can seek out ideas. That's what venture capitalism is all about.

But a lot more of them start out in universities and research labs, which are set up to find them. This kind of institution is good at publicising their better ideas and attracting capital to exploit them.

Any sensible development program starts small, aiming at those applications - niche markets - where a limited capital investment can generate generous returns. Once you've plucked the low-hanging fruit you will probably have enough income to invest in going after mass markets.

It's a mechanism that allows co-operation to work.

Capital can be under the control of a single individual - with inherited wealth it frequently is.

That's what right-wing lunatics like to think. Lenin's hobby-horse - when he finally got control of the Soviet Republic - was rural electrification, which benefited most of the population.

Any autocratic system crushes lots of individual initiatives, but not the initiatives of the autocrats.

If you aren't well-connected in the US or the UK, your individual initiatives won't get far either.

What's a "debt bomb" and how would it explode? As long as society keeps generating and exchanging goods and services it's not going to run out of money, which is just medium of exchange.

Granting the level of design skill Cursitor Doom has exhibited here, he's asking a rather higher price than any rational negotiator would offer him. He's be better off looking for a vanity developer - like John Larkin - who would charge him what it cost to realise his design, and clean out the worst mistakes, so that it might work - after a fashion.

And understood none of it.

What use is the means of exchange if you can't exchange it for anything meaningful?

We are already past the point where the alternatives for many countries are default or hyperinflation, which is just s more spectacular form of default, and an involuntary one. It happens slowly at first, then all at once.

None at all.

Such countries stop using their own currency, and use somebody else's, or invent a new one.

Advanced industrial countries keep a close eye on inflation, and tinker with their economies to keep it under control.

Lunatics like Cursitor Doom imagine a re-run of Weimar Republic Germany and it's hyper-inflation, but that's unlikely unless you get a demented clown like Donald Trump in the top job.

Inflation is a government's way to spend (and usually waste) money that it doesn't have, by borrowing money that will never be paid back. It is essentially stealing from its citizens, especially from savings.

It's dynamically unstable and often runs away. The thing about inflation is that there's never enough of it. The more you have, the more you need.

The price of a loaf of bread, in terms of gold, hasn't changed in 600 years. A friend bought £10,000 worth of gold in 2004, Its worth £80,000 now

That's a gross simplification, and not guaranteed to work in the short term. It's subject to random ups and downs like any other target of speculators. Moreover, when s*it hits the fan, you'll be required to surrender it to your government in exchange for money that's being inflated. It has happened before.

The US has huge stockpiles of gold. It's a bit of a pity to just hoard a metal that has so many *useful* applications.

Jeroen Belleman

I have a little gold. Its appreciated about 15% in the last year It is the only really safe long term inflation hedge

The government cant take it off you if they dont know you have it.

Edison was a great self publicist and plagiarist but arguably the filament light bulb was invented by Swan in the UK a decade before.

Ideas as such don't generate anything unless they can be exploited.

Kodak digital had plenty of ideas - Bayer worked for Kodak and for a while their digital cameras were the best in the world. I had a DC-120 (looked like a StarTrek tricorder). They couldn't see that digicam mass production would annihilate the wet chemistry film market and paid the price. They also got lazy - Fuji film had way better film products.

HP split into two when demergers were all the rage. They put a complete idiot in charge of one half for reasons that escape me completely.

Xerox always was a bit of a one trick pony but their print engines were the best in the world very reliable. My last one survived for 20+ years with a moderately heavy workload. When it finally croaked I got a new model containing one of the last print engines of their old design.

AFAIK Intel is still going at the moment and remains profitable. ARM now has the mass market consumer products volume and AMD/NVidia the AI/graphics. It is Zilog and Motorola CPUs that have sunk without trace.

Gold is fascinating. As a chemical, it wouldn't be worth anything like what is has always been. You can't eat it or build much out of it.

Given a starving village or country or world, gold won't feed people by itself.

People talk about finding a solid-gold comet that's worth a trillion trillion dollars. That's silly. It would grossly devalue the price of gold.

Diamonds similarly have an undeserved dollar equivalent.

Money pinned to gold is fairly stable. It coud be pinned to a weighted average of a number of things, steel and corn and oil maybe.

Land is good.

Eventually it needs to be sold.

What's remarkable is that you can still buy MC68332 CPUs from Digikey.

Intel dropped the ball on small-feature fab, ironically after investing billions in ASML and then not buying EUV machines. And X86 is a dinosaur, the only one they know. ARM and RiscV will eventually kill the expensive bloated buggy X86.

The 'climate scientists' are being paid to lay on the doom as thickly as possible. Their 'research' is heavily compromised. That's why I prefer data from *before* this area became politicized, but I wouldn't expect you to understand that, Bill. There's no cause for alarm and CO2 at ~400ppm is harmless. Its levels are the same now as when Lincoln was president, despite all the pollution pumped out during the 20th century.

CO2 is not pollution. It is plant food that keeps us alive. More would be great.