OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

Cheap gold would be great! Lots of things would be made of gold or its alloys if it hadn't been so expensive! Yes, the economy would be severely upset if gold were to suddenly become a commodity like steel and copper.

Diamonds are useful too, hard, inert, abrasion resistant and the best solid heat conductor. Wouldn't you love to have diamond heat sinks?

Jeroen Belleman

Absolutely. It was a joy to program in assembly.

Isotopically pure diamond heat sinks.

Seems like gaseous diffusion or centrifuges would work better for light elements than it does for uranium.

Many subcontinentals will take it off your hands no name no pack drill wise.

That is probably true. The ARM has arrived as about equvaleiunt to a low power X86, and RiscV is presumably better The android/IOS scene means that more and more people are uses to pother than Apple OS/X and Windows. And windows sort of runs on ARM....

An IT site may not be the optimal source.

That's not the whole story. We discussed this on SED in May 2013, title "Edison Did Not Invent Light Bulb!".

Joe Gwinn

No one knows how much gold the US has as they've repeatedly refused to have an independent audit carried out. That should tell you something. Also, when Germany requested the US to return its gold - which had been stored in America for safe keeping - it took several years for them to get it all back. That too should tell you something.

True.

True.

True.

True.

This is what the BRICS members are in the process of finalising. The core constituent will be gold, but will be augmented by various other valuable commodities in various proportions. The whole lot will underpin the value of the new currency expected to be announced in October. If they get it right, it could pose an extremely serious threat to the US dollar just for starters and may well provoke a *major* war.

Can't fault your friend's timing. He bought around the time of the 'Brown Bottom' of the gold price. It came down to a very low figure following Gordon Brown's incredibly moronic announcement that he would sell off the Bank of England's gold reserves. He should -of course - have said

Inflation is a defect built into the very idea of money - because the currency tokens don't have any intrinsic value, they can be counterfeited without limit. Governments are by no means the only people who exploit the defect, and government control is what - in practice - mostly stops it form happening.

Counterfeiters are the thieves, and they don't have to be members of a government.

Economists seem to agree that you need about 2% inflation a year to keep the economy ticking over smoothly, but anything more is counter-productive.

The main virtue in inflation is that it motivates people to use their wealth to invest in productive investments, rather than leaving it under the bed.

There's nothing safe about it. The price goes up when people are worried about inflation, and goes down again when they aren't, and they aren't all that rational.

But they have lots of ways of finding out.

People make them, by vapour deposition. They aren't all that thick and they are quite expensive.

This is just one more of your demented conspiracy theories. If you knew a bit more you'd be aware that the area didn't get "politicised" until the late 1990's when there had been enough anthropogenic global warming for it show up over the natural variation form effects like the El Nino/La Nina alternation and the slower Atlantic Multidecal Oscillation.

Because you don't understand this, you ignore all climate science observations since the very crude work from the 1890's.

Climate scientists have always been academics, and they publish primarily for other academics. In the last twenty years, the media has has publicised their work, adding in their own preference for finding sensational implications in the published data (not always correctly).

Wrong.

Cursitor Doom is wedded to his fatuous conspiracy theories. I'm not gullible enough to fall for that kind of rubbish.

A false assertion.

CO2 does serve as plant food, along with water, sun light and a bunch of minerals. Give plants more CO2 and they have fewer stomata in their leaves, so that they can get the same amount of CO2 while losing less water.

It's also a greenhouse gas, and more of it generates global warming, which isn't great. Calling it pollution is odd, but more of it does cause problems.

Although I tend to agree that in its day the 68k had a nice clean 16 register structure not unlike the IBM 360 mainframes I still have a soft spot for the TI9900 and TI99k for realtime embedded code.

Having all your registers in ram may not be fast but it is versatile (until the day come when you find that your program counter is in ROM!). It makes multi process context switching a doddle.

I didn't truly appreciate how quite good the TI offerings were until we tried to do the same job on a more powerful (on paper) 68k series CPU.

And not bother paying you for it either. If the government doesn't know you've got it, it's hard to report the theft.

There are *no* "greenhouse gases" in our atmosphere, you damn fool. Granted there are on other planets in our solar system, but not Earth. So, which planet are *you* on with your greenhouse gases, Bill? It clearly isn't this one.

Yeah, yeah. I've seen all that CRAP. The NASA site's the same; all spouting the same complete nonsense as directed by your pal, Klaus Schwab (who fancies himself as some sort of Bond villain) and his cronies. Do some proper, reference book-based research for a change and you'll see a completely different picture emerge.

So you don't understand how black markets work either then, Bill.