Tipping should go away. Not until we pay servers better, but we should be working to head in that direction.
Right - they stay shiny longer. Smart magpies (AKA humans) always go for gold.
Silver does oxidize, gold not at all as far as we can tell. Both are rare: all the known gold would make a brick the size of a barn. Both originated from exploding stars: gold from red dwarves, silver from blue giants. But so did lead, and nobody’s fetishizing lead (at least not anymore, since lead crystal has been deemed unsafe).
The sucky, economically self-defeating thing is that their properties give them valuable technical industrial uses. Bit when jackasses hoard commemorative coins and ingots, it takes the metals out of use and drives up the price of goods.
Example: insulated window units are made from two sheets of glass each coated on their inner surfaces with silver, sealed and filled with inert gas against oxidization. This window reduces energy wasted on heating and air conditioning. And it produces jobs all the way down the supply and production chain for people who then put their wages into circulation. But you can’t afford one because some hoarder has trapped the silver’s value like Hans Solo in carbonite, as a hedge against economic insecurities they help create.
Like in Moby Dick, where Starbuck sees the whale as a God-given resource to serve his fellow man, while Ahab seeks its death as his pointless obsession. Rational vs irrational economics.
I agree that hoarding gold and silver is irrational, but using them for their original purpose - as raw material for the jewelry industry - is not. Humans want pretty things, almost as much as they want food and shelter.
BTW - did the end of film photography lead to lower silver prices?
I wouldn’t mind turning my yard native except that native landscapes can take a lot of work, more than just mowing and throwing weed & feed on the sod, to look nice and not be taken over by a single aggressive (and usually invasive) species. I suspect that my fine Illinois prairie reclamation project would soon turn into a half acre of phragmites, thistle and Queen Anne’s Lace.
Not that these are rational reasons, but:
- Up through the 1940s and 1950s, denim pants were pretty much worn solely by blue-collar workers
- Then, in the '60s and '70s, denim pants became adopted by young people as casual wear, and were seen by older people as a symbol of the counter-culture
I suspect that any “no denim” rule would be a holdover from those attitudes
Silver does not oxidize.
Pure silver does not tarnish either. But silver utensils, jewelry, etc. are made with silver alloys, which react with sulphur compounds in the environment (not oxygen) to cause some tarnish over time.
It doesn’t have to be, I don’t have a HOA and I’m subject to rules like this. In the United States local municipalities can generally pass ordinances that regulate how you use your property. There is a specification in my town’s ordinances about how high you can allow grass to grow. If you let it grow passed that you’ll receive a warning, and after a few warnings the city dispatches a landscaping crew to your property and will mow your lawn against your wishes. They then will charge you a fee a good 1000% higher than would typically be expected for a lawn mow (the number I’ve heard is like $500.)
There are also city ordinances specifying what types of vehicles you can have on your property and where. For example, boats and recreational vehicles cannot be parked in a driveway in the “frontage” of the house, i.e. on the driveway facing the street. If your driveway wraps around the back of your house and you have room back there, you can park such vehicles there, but they can’t be on the front half of the house. If your driveway doesn’t have that, to comply with the code you also have the option of pouring a concrete pad specifically for the boat/RV, but the pad has to be behind the frontage of the house as well. Additionally, no RV or boat can be parked on the city streets for more than 72 hours.
It’s one reason why in the big HOA thread I said that a lot of people who complain about HOAs had never lived in an ordinance-happy town. Towns can do a lot to regulate your activities on your property, and unlike a HOA towns have actual police power to enforce their ordinances. A lot of times HOAs are actually instituted in unincorporated areas that don’t have town government, so in a sense they are just replacing the ordinance schemes that are common in many towns.
Note most towns don’t use police to enforce these sorts of rules, they have a “Code Enforcement” bureau that has Code Enforcement Officers who drive around looking for violations, and they can ticket you for infractions.
Gold, sure, but silver tarnishes like anything.
Yes, it does. Not as fast as e.g. sterling, but it definitely does tarnish. It’s the actual silver reacting with sulphur there.
Not all lead…
I was about to reply and ask if you were in the US until I saw the last part I quoted there. Honestly, this is pretty surprising - I’ve never heard of a municipality having - or at least enforcing - these types of “keep up the character of the neighborhood” rules. I think if your landscaping, or lack thereof, interferes with the legitimate business of meter-readers (*), mail delivery, etc, the city may cite you, but not just for aesthetics. We also have (though the city has suspended the enforcement of during covid) a no-parking-on-the-street-for-72-hours rule that would apply to RVs, but that’s to keep parking turning over, not to keep the wrong kinds of vehicles off the streets.
(*) The city sent us a few years back a new electric meter that will send its readings to the utility electronically. It was strangely controversial with the tin-foil hat crowd. I don’t know if everyone in the city has them yet, and I’m pretty sure they still come out to read water and gas meters. But this use case may go away eventually.
It is quite common. Many municipalities have regulations dictating the style of architecture you can build, and the colors you are allowed to paint.
I will share this personal anecdote, from an incorporated village in suburban Chicago, with no HOA:
Twenty years ago, my neighbor decided to switch over his front lawn, from a traditional lawn, to prairie grasses – which are, of course, longer than a closely-trimmed lawn, and look, to many people, like weeds.
After he tore out the non-native grass, planted prairie grasses, and had most of a summer for those to grow, he got a letter from a village official. I’m not sure if another neighbor had filed a complaint over an “overgrown yard,” or if an official from the village had driven by and seen his yard, but either way, the village informed my neighbor that the prairie grass lawn had to go. It wasn’t cited as a safety concern, or interfering with official business – it was simply cited as “not appropriate.”
Architecture is pretty much a one-time thing, so I see that differently. But color choices have also always struck me as an HOA thing, not a municipality thing. Are these primarily smaller suburbs and exurbs that you’re familiar with that have such rules?
Wow. What happens if you don’t have a lawn at the front of your property, and go for shrubs instead? Do they dictate what kind of garden you can have? Blows my minds.
Also, where do you put your boat/caravan if you can’t park it at the front and don’t have a side/back entrance?
I find this all very strange considering Americans love of ‘Freedom!’
See my post above.
And, yeah, there are a ton of fussy little rules in the village where I live.
To be fair, certain places in the UK are classed as ‘conservation areas’ and therefore subject to certain building regulations, which generally relate to the exterior of homes and can (but not always) dictate house colours. It doesn’t generally extend to ephemeral things like gardens and where you can park your caravan though.
Sure, we have ‘historic areas’, too, but generally such a designation restricts removing existing buildings and redevelopment. Maybe they’re more hands-on about things like paint colors there - I don’t know having never lived in one.
What are the laws that allow this kind of rule making?
I have no idea; I’ve never really looked into it (and don’t care enough to do so).
I do know that, for example, if you are having your furnace or air conditioner replaced here, you need a building permit – the HVAC contractor which replaced my furnace a few years ago told me that this was a particular quirk of this particular village, and it was something that they bumped up against every time they did a job here.
My furnace had gone out on a Saturday night in early November, and we were without heat for three days, because that was how long it took the village to, on an “expedited” timeline, cut a building permit for the work.
Which explains why in my teens (in the late 60/early 70s) my mother refused to let me buy or wear blue jeans - or (as she called them) dungarees. White Wranglers were OK, but not blue denim…