Tungsten

We were talking at lunch today about the morality of walking away from a home loan when you are underwater, financially speaking. I'm of the opinion that morality doesn't play into it. It's like in the gangster movies where the one mob guy tells the other mob guy just before he plugs him: it's nothing personal, it's just business. Banks are amoral as they come. It's always just business with them, or at least you hope so. So if it's just business for them, it shouldn't be any more than that for you.

Which got us started talking about trust and how so many things that we take for granted operate on trust. Like grocery stores. Don mentions that three or four hundred years ago things weren't like this. Marc points out that they are not like that right now down in the Caribbean. If you found a store like an American grocery store, someone from the store would follow you around as you made your way down the aisles. People were only admitted on a limited basis. The hoi polloi were kept out by an iron curtain.

Shoot, you don't have to go to the Caribbean, you can find this kind of thing in downtown Chicago: 7-11's where everything is locked up. You want something, you ask for it.

I remember a lesson in grade school about the advent of self serve stores and how it was a great boon. Used to be everything was behind the counter and you asked the clerk for what you wanted. At the time, it was presented (or I understood it as) a better, more modern idea had supplanted an old, out dated one. Now I think it was our society had reached a level of trust were a self serve store was a viable idea. Evidently there are some places in our country where the level of trust has not reached this level. Or perhaps it is falling.

Now while we are talking about trust and money, Don trots out a new one: the gold in Fort Knox is fake! All those bars of gold are actually bars of tungsten covered with a thin veneer of gold. This was discovered when the US had to make a payment to China and China insisted that the gold be tested. This sounded both plausible and outlandish, so I did a little checking. I found the same story repeated, almost verbatim on several web sites. This one seems to be the original. No reports about it from any recognized news organization, but then if this were a real conspiracy, there wouldn't be, would there?

You know, if you think about it, it does make a lot of sense. I mean what's the point of keeping all that gold locked up in a vault? Any material is only really valuable if you can use it for something, and using it to keep the floor of a vault flat does not really sound very valuable. I mean I could say I have a ton of gold in my basement, and who's to say I don't? Because I wouldn't do that, I would sell it off and invest the proceeds in something useful, like building a factory, or buying a Ferrari or something. There is just something wrong about keeping gold locked up.

Anyway, while I was poking around looking for info on this story I stumbled across these photos on a Chinese Tungsten site (where they are extolling the virtues of fluorescent and LED lights. Huh? You are panning your own product? Do I smell big brother?) I believe these are tungsten elements going rapidly up in smoke. Kind of cool I thought.

Oh yes, the tungsten for gold substitution? It might actually work. Tungsten & Gold have very similar densities. A bar of gold weighs about 33 pounds. A similar sized bar of Tungsten would be about one ounce lighter. As I suspect each bar is weighed individually, this would not matter so much. Only if you actually did an accurate measurement of the volume and calculated the density, or actually drilled a hole in it, would the deception be discovered. And why should anyone suspect anything? I mean the bars have all the authentic marks on them, and they're locked in US Government vault. The Government wouldn't lie, would they?

Update January 2017 replaced missing pictures.