I'm not late for #SaturdayNightCoinShow, it turns out time is an illusion (Lunchtime doubly so). Since I've started whimsical, I'll go with the fun piece I just wrote up - an Imitation Spade Guinea "In memory of the good old days". You should definitely read:https://coinofnote.com/imitation-spade-guinea-good-old-days-uk/ - it talks of #gold#coins I can't afford, imitations of which there are many, garden implements & late 1800s #theatre! Enjoy :)
@CitizenWald@histodons@numismatics I like that one :) A Thousand Guinea's Plus lists seven types for Fattorini:
7250: regular
7255: ribbon squared clear of F, leaves doubled. Rev point of shield clear of 8.
7260: plain serifs. leaf just after rounded &. ribbon to middle upright F. Rev LL aligned
7270: Aluminium
7280: Fancy serifs, Rev die flaw at base of SALE, date repunched
7290: Rev shield to start of E
7300: bronzed finish
Gold bleibt als Wertanlage und als Schutz vor Inflation bei den Anlegern sehr beliebt. Zwar schrumpfte der Goldschatz der Deutschen zuletzt leicht, aber die Attraktivität des Edelmetalls bleibt ungebrochen.
For centuries, goldsmiths have sought ways to flatten gold into ever finer forms. An approach based in modern chemistry has finally created a gold material that literally can't get any thinner, consisting of a single layer of atoms. Researchers have named this new two-dimensional material 'goldene', Science Alert reports: https://www.sciencealert.com/strange-new-form-of-gold-exists-as-a-sheet-thats-just-one-atom-thick
@ScienceDesk
The "restaurants catering to insanely wealthy people always on the hunt for the most frivolous ways to spend their money" market must be slavering.
Die Risiken am Aktienmarkt sind über Nacht deutlich gestiegen. Banker der US-Notenbank Fed äußerten sich extrem zurückhaltend zu Zinssenkungen. Anleger sind geschockt - dem DAX drohen deutliche Kursverluste.
@tagesschau
Anleger sind geschockt? Ja, aber höchstens die, denen jedes Hintergrundwissen fehlt, weil sie sich auf die täglich mehrfach gesendeten Jubelbotschaften ihrer "Wirtschaftsredaktion" verlassen haben.
Nach meiner Auffassung sind #Wasser-Quellen primär eine #Allmende, also eine #Gemeinressource (nach Elinor #Ostrom, „Jenseits von #Markt und #Staat“). Deswegen sollten sie nicht an Konzerne privatisiert, sondern über kommunale Verbände dezentral verwaltet werden. Das Anlegerportale wie #Wallstreetonline angesichts der #Wasserkrise Privatanleger zum Wasser 💧 als „flüssiges #Gold“ rufen, war dagegen zu erwarten. #Wirtschaft#Politik
While some way off its all time 1980 high ($3,000 inflation adjusted), nonetheless the gold price has risen considerably in the last six months..... given that gold is usually the haven for investors expecting economic instability & travails, might this be yet one more sign the global economy is heading towards a climate crisis induced crisis?
#Holz ist eine der besten Quellen der #Archäologie. An den Baumringen kann man sehr viele Dinge erkennen. Z.B. wann ein Baum gelebt hat, oder auch wie das Wetter in dieser Zeit war. Man kann manchmal sogar erkennen, ob ein #Baum extra angepflanzt wurde. Und das heißt manchmal: Eine #Kultur hat 30 Jahre im Voraus geplant, wie der Baum wachsen sollte, um ihn dann zu fällen und etwas ganz Bestimmtes damit zu bauen. Solche Erkenntnisse sind mit #Gold nicht aufzuwiegen: https://buff.ly/45sfEKq
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
ERDAL ARIKAN WAS born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker.
He loved science.
When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four.
This fuzziness disturbed young Erdal; he decided against a career in medicine. He found comfort in engineering and the certainty of its mathematical outcomes.
“I like things that have some precision,” he says. “You do calculations and things turn out as you calculate it.”
Arıkan entered the electrical engineering program at Middle East Technical University. But in 1977, partway through his first year, the country was gripped by political violence, and students boycotted the university.
Arıkan wanted to study, and because of his excellent test scores he managed to transfer to #CalTech, one of the world's top science-oriented institutions, in Pasadena, California.
He found the US to be a strange and wonderful country. Within his first few days, he was in an orientation session addressed by legendary physicist #Richard#Feynman. It was like being blessed by a saint.
The field was still young, launched in 1948 by #Claude#Shannon, who wrote its seminal paper while he was at Bell Labs;
he would later become a revered MIT professor.
Shannon's achievement was to understand how the hitherto fuzzy concept of information could be quantified, creating a discipline that expanded the view of communication and data storage.
By publishing a general mathematical theory of information
—almost as if Einstein had invented physics and come up with relativity in one swoop
—Shannon set a foundation for the internet, mobile communications, and everything else in the digital age.
The subject fascinated Arıkan, who chose #MIT for graduate studies.
There was one reason: “#Bob#Gallager was there,” he says.
Robert Gallager had written the textbook on information theory. He had also been mentored by Shannon's successor.
In the metrics of the field, that put him two steps from God.
“So I said, if I am going to do information theory,” Arıkan says, “MIT is the place to go.”
By the time Arıkan arrived at MIT, in 1981, Gallager had shifted his focus and was concentrating on how data networks operated.
Arıkan was trembling when he went to Gallager's office for the first time. The professor gave him a paper about packet radio networks.
“I was pushing him to move from strict information theory to looking at network problems,” Gallager says.
“It was becoming very obvious to everyone that sending data from one place to another was not the whole story
—you really had to have a system.”
Reaching consensus on the parts of a mobile platform is complicated. Decisions have to be made about dozens of specifications for transmission speeds, radio frequencies, security architecture, and the like.
To make that happen, engineers gather in a series of meetings every year to choose which new technologies will be deemed #standard in the next generation.
The stakes are high: The companies that provide the fundamental technology for 5G will be embedded in a global communications system for years to come.
So in the background are financial, nationalistic, and even geopolitical considerations.
“From the year 2001 to the present—three administrations—not enough attention has been paid to this,” says #Reed#Hundt, a former Federal Communications Commission chair during the Clinton administration.
Hundt is one of a number of current and former officials alarmed that the United States has no equivalent to Huawei
—that is, a major telecommunications company that both develops next-generation technology and builds it into equipment.
“In Europe, they have an Ericsson.
In Japan, they have companies.
And in China, they have not just Huawei but also ZTE.
But Huawei is the one that covers the whole range of products.”
All of this made Huawei's 5G standards bid an alarming prospect.
“Huawei's IP and standards are the wedge they intend to use to pry open the Western computing world,” Hundt says.
The body that develops 5G standards, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project ( #3GPP ), is an international umbrella organization of various telecommunications groups.
In 2016, it made a key decision on what was called #5G#New#Radio#standards
—the part that helped determine how data would be sent over 5G and how it would be checked for accuracy.
After spending millions, undergoing years of testing, and filing for multiple patents, Huawei was not going to pull punches at the critical juncture. It needed the certification of an official standard to cement its claim.
The problem was that reasonable people argued that other techniques would work just as well as polar codes to achieve error correction in the new framework.
Some suggested that a revamp of the current 4G protocol, turbo codes, would be sufficient.
Others, notably San Diego-based #Qualcomm, which makes chipsets for mobile technology, liked a third option:
Robert Gallager's old #LDPC idea, the one that had nearly reached the Shannon limit and had inspired Arıkan on his own intellectual journey.
Since the early 1960s, when Gallager proposed LDPC, technology had improved and the cost of commercial production was no longer prohibitive.
Qualcomm's R&D team developed it for 5G.
Though Erdal Arıkan did not know it at the time, his work would be squared off against that of his mentor in a competition that involved billions of dollars and an international clash of reputations.
The #gold price is surging (but has yet to reach the peaks of 1980s, in inflation adjusted terms):
Generally speaking, a shift into gold suggests #investors anxiety about the future. At present that may also be compounded by a surge in demand in #China where people are looking both to hedge against disruption, and by some accounts are looking to have mote portable wealth due to political concerns.
Whatever the reasons, historically rises gold prices have been a warning of trouble ahead.
"Today, mining is a high-technology industry, but it is still governed by the Mining Law of 1872. As was true 150 years ago, companies can mine valuable mineral deposits from federal lands without paying any royalties to the U.S. Treasury.
"Even when lands that formerly were available for mining receive new protected status as national parks or monuments, the 1872 mining law protects existing mining claims on those lands. That’s why a company called Energy Fuels Inc. just started mining uranium in January 2024 at a site in Arizona 10 miles from the Grand Canyon and inside a new national monument.
[...]
"Reform advocates support adopting the type of traditional leasing model that is used for most other resources on public lands in the U.S. and elsewhere. As an example, for oil and gas production on federal lands and offshore in federal waters, agencies identify areas with development potential and hold competitive auctions to lease parcels for exploration and development.
"Reformists also favor tighter environmental safeguards that would address issues such as management and disposal of mining wastes. Finally, they argue that mining should be prohibited in areas that are ecologically sensitive or are important to Indigenous peoples or tribal nations."
Gute Nachrichten aus dem US-Technologiesektor treiben zum Wochenschluss die Kurse am deutschen Aktienmarkt. Der DAX durchbricht seine Bestmarke vom Dezember - wenn auch denkbar knapp.
#Gold is often seen as a refuge from #economic turmoil, so what do we make of two groups buying sprees that are supporting the current $2,000 gold price?
Central banks' demand for gold is currently high & this is compounded by a major shift by #investors & private individuals in #China which has seen demand for Gold greatly exp[and in the last year.
It may be just one more sign that the mid-2020s are going to be a rough time for many of us....
Marktbericht: DAX scheut vor Rekordhoch erneut zurück
Der deutsche Leitindex dürfte mit Verlusten in die neue Börsenwoche starten. Am Freitag war den DAX-Käufern noch knapp unter dem Rekordhoch die Puste ausgegangen. Nun müssen sie erst einmal wieder Kräfte sammeln.
Der DAX ist nach einer erfolgreichen Woche knapp an seinem alten Rekordhoch gescheitert. Trotz mauer Konjunkturdaten setzen die Anleger damit weiter auf Aktien. Rückenwind kommt derweil aus New York.
@NatureMC thanks Petra...yes some people can't afford gold. I certainly cant either. It is not commonly known that it is in a lot of electronic and computing equipment as well...it is worth knowing about however otherwise people become complacent about it!
