Kinda of a morbid thought but when Hitler almost achieved global domination (Which would have happened if he did not invade USSR and spread his forces too thin-but thats another subject) he extracted gold tooth fillings & wedding rings from his jewish prey before exterminating them, they were all melted down into ingots and were circulated as currency in europe. Isn’t it likely many people are wearing jewelry from a melting pot with some questionable gold content some 60 years later?
Thanks for sharing…
And you know, maybe some of the food you eat is reconsitituted from the decayed body of the pet dog you burried 20 years ago. And maybe some of the air you’re breathing is the same air that Saddam Hussein breathed when he gassed the Kurds. And maybe…
Not to mention the gold Cortez slaughtered the Aztecs for.
Let’s face it, ‘precious’ metals and stones are a pretty dubious proposition.
Probably. So how do you think we shoud resolve the situation?
You might be breathing in some of the very same nitrogen molecules Hitler inhaled!
All good points of view! I’m not used to dealing with such intellectual accuteness on the web. I’ll have to think of something more challenging. But in the mean time is it true we all have an indentical twin somewhere? Statistically speaking, how likely it is that there is someone in the world that looks exactly like myself, or similar? Also, assuming the astronomical odds, would you consider lotto players, fools? FYI: I do not play the lotto. I heard you have a better chance of getting attacked by a shark, crawling up the beach looking for help and getting hit in the head by a coconut. Let me know if anyone knows of any probalitity/statistic websites, I find stuff like that fascinating, or at least mildly interesting.
Y’know, maybe untold billions of years ago the evil Emporer Florgg used his atomic zap-o-blaster to reduce the innocent planet Glindanar to rubble, all to impress his girlfriend. The rubble formed part of a nebula, which eventually formed a double star system, which eventually went supernova, fusing some of the mass into iron and nickel and even heavier elements like gold, which eventually condensed into the planet we call Earth…
So when you wear your jewelry, think of the screams of Glindanar, crying out in terror and then silenced forever.
Well, it depends what you mean by “similar”. The odds of having the same genetic makeup are so infinitesimally small, I believe, as to be for all intents and purposes impossible. But clearly, there are similar-looking people if you define “similar” broadly enough.
Well, long odds does not necessarily make the person a fool for playing. To some people, spending a few bucks a week for the very tiny possibility of winning millions of dollars may be a gamble worth making. It is not one that I find very appealing, but that is largely because the idea of huge fortunes doesn’t really wow me that much.
Of course, where people do get foolish is if they try to tell you that they have a high likelihood of winning or if they tell you that they choose numbers that haven’t come up in a while because the law of averages is on their side that way.
Some people like to argue that the lottery is stupid to play because it only pays out a fraction of its take (let’s say, for the sake of argument, 25%) and thus the expectation value for how you will come out is that you will lose money. However, that argument doesn’t really hold water. Expectation values only have much rigor in determining whether or not something is a wise gamble if you are going to repeat the experiment enough times to more-or-less realize this expectation value. In reality, what is going to happen is you are either going to not win the big prize (with high probability) or you will win the big prize (with low probability). While it might generally be better to play the stakes in something where the expectation value for winnings is higher, there is nothing magic about crossing the zero-point when you aren’t going to play enough to realize the expectation value.
One other note: It is interesting that some people who might say that it is stupid to play the lotto for the sort of reasons that I tried to debunk above might still buy fire insurance on their house. To me, this is a bit ironic since fire insurance is a bit of an inverse lottery. I.e., it is a situation where the rates are presumably set so that the insurance company rather than the buyers come out ahead in the long run, but you are buying it in order that you can pay a little money over a long period of time in order to guard against being out a hell of a lot of money if you get unlucky.
I would be more concerned about how many Africans died or were mutilated and/or tortured and/or stolen from and/or conscripted into militia in order to get those nice diamonds that are so popular.
Good point, because that’s happening today, and there’s theoretically something we can do about it if we’re offended – unlike with Pharaoh’s conscription of his slave laborers, Birkenau, etc.
The definition of a commodity is something that can be freely exchanged for another unit of its kind. Gold is pretty much the definitive commodity. So be it. If you’re wearing gold, you’re wearing the end result of years of melting, re-melting, scrapping, industrial reclamation, etc. Don’t wear gold if you’re squeamish about its having a history.
Actually, though, as the population of the world, and its wealth, has increased, the majority of gold floating around probably is not recycled from 1943. Most of it was probably heap-leached within fairly recent years.
One more thing about the lotto, Wouldn’t it make more sense to give 100 people a million dollars than one person a 100 mil jackpot? Your odds of winning would be greater and maybe more people would play. Also isn’t the Lotto bad for the economy when you take all that money out of circulation and give it to one person? :smack:
[Moderator Hat ON]
I think this is better suited to IMHO.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
I don’t wear gold around my neck and I never did inhale. 
Only if that one person puts it all under his brand new extra-large mattress.
There are economic arguments to be made against gambling, but I doubt concentration of wealth would be one of them. Gambling, for example, doesn’t follow a standard economic model, with economies of scale and costs of goods sold. If a lottery agency wanted to sell tickets for one cent, or one dollar, or one hundred dollars, it would make no difference to their variable expenses of printing tickets and hiring accountants and ping-pong ball-washers. Compare that to a geniunine industry which, if it experiences a high demand for its product or service, is encouraged to hire more employees, build more factories, buy more raw materials, improve production efficiency etc. State lotteries have none of these indirect economic benefits. They’re no different from simply deciding to hit everyone with, say, a five percent income surtax. If anything, the money “spent” on lottery tickets is indistinguishable from money “spent” paying taxes; there is no economic benefit to the activity. The negative economic effect of this is actually offset by giving one individual a large hunk of cash, on the assumption that individual will spend it on luxury goods he could not previously have afforded, spurring the economy rather than draining it, as taxation does.
The statistics are more people will play with one $100 million jackpot. And it isn’t bad for the ecomomy if someone invests a $100 million jackpot.
It is theorized that all of the heavier elements were synthesized in supernova explosions, later coalescing to form the planets.
I think Carl Sagan expressed this concepts as “We are starstuff… who have taken control of our destiny.”
Not bad.
looks down at gold rope around her neck
lower lip trembles
But my mommy gave it to me! sob
Remember though, that Lotteries are essentially a tax on stupid people. Now, it is generally a wise government policy to subsize what you want more of, and tax what you want to reduce the amount of. (Think public funds for education & high cigarrette taxes.)
If there were not taxes, the government would have to raise the money some other way, like raising the sales tax, which would hurt me directly. That is why I support lottos.
You know, this particular aphorism is starting to grate on my nerves a bit.