I’m fascinated by this silver hoard. It affected my breakfast. Here’s a photo:
That’s a stash of 293 silver coins. About 1,800 years ago, some dude buried them in what is now Switzerland. The timing is interesting. AD 200 is just about the last era when Roman coins were fully silver. After that, the Roman government debased their coins. They inflated the fuck out of their currency; good and hard. Eventually Roman coins were nothing but bullshit and hope. Of course, the Romans lacked the technology for our impressively, almost cosmic, levels of currency debasement. “It’s electronic data representing debt.” (You thought inflation was new?) At any rate, the coins have actual value and that would be true in all times. (This is in addition to the obvious historical and numismatic interest.)
It got me thinking. What would I bury if I had anything of value? A mason jar full of greenbacks? Why? That shit’s bled so dry it’s barely worth anything now. For example, suppose some farmer in 1920 buried half a year’s salary in greenbacks. It would be about $1634.70. If the farmer knew math he might change it out to silver at “then prices” of a $1.30 an ounce, leaving 1,257 ounces of silver. Who wouldn’t want 85 pounds of silver? That’s about $17,000 at current prices. The moral of the story is this; burying currency is basically setting it on fire but burying silver is taking a risk that someone else will enjoy it but not you. (Put another way, nobody’s going to buy futuristic space beer with a green slip of paper buried by an irrelevant blogger 1,800 years ago.) Luckily, it’s just idle thought. I have nothing of value to fret over… or at least nothing I’d bury to hide from Barbarian Hordes. I’ve got a freezer full of bacon; priceless but not a good thing to bury.
I read on the news that the government is going to “fix” infectious disease by squatting over the nation and defecating $2,000,000,000,000.00 in debt. Is this the same money that was going to change the weather as a Green New Deal? I doubt viral DNA will recognize the gesture, but I didn’t expect you could use money to change the weather either.
I guess you can’t expect mediocre minds to think up anything better. Since Congress is a corralled herd of mediocre thinkers, they’re going to keep shitting money. Meanwhile, there isn’t 2 trillion of anything in your personal experience. Molecules in a burrito? Grains of sand in the Sahara? Our government just pissed away a number beyond human scale.
If I get myself a hunk of that “free money” what would I bury for archaeologists to find in 1,800 years? Green paper representing data that designates debt? An iPhone? Tax forms? Ammo in calibers long forgotten? Nope, none of that. There’s only one thing I’m going to bury in 2020 and that’s my dead dog’s ashes. (Waiting for the ground to thaw.) Let the future archaeologists ponder that one.
Back to the poor bastard that buried the coin hoard… he was a baller eh? The pile was roughly half the annual salary of a Roman legionary! I’d love to have a shoebox with half the annual salary of a Navy SEAL. What did our guy do with it? He buried it. And then what? He died.
Seems like a waste doesn’t it? Dude’s got a wad, he buries it with some sort of plan in mind, and then he gets whacked. For extra irony I wondered if he got nailed by an epidemic. Unfortunately, he buried his shit after the Antonine Plague (year 180) and before the Justinan Plague (year 541) so it wasn’t likely an epidemic. Lucky bastard! I’ll just assume he died when an ox fart exploded the hut where he was sleeping. (It’s my imagination, I get to make the rules.) Then, through the rise and fall of empires, nations, cultures, languages, and a brief horrific moment called the disco craze, his wealth just sat there.
Such a shame. He never got to spend it on hookers and blow. It was too early in time to buy a motorcycle. He didn’t use it to make the down payment on a nice little starter castle. Aside from sex, motorcycles, and a fortress; what’s the point of money?
Why was I pondering this? Because I’m in quarantine. Society is giving me a chance to avoid whatever crud is carried by Gladys and I’m taking it. Even if this isn’t the zombie apocalypse it’s at least a full-dress rehearsal for when the space aliens/Canadians/weaponized elk attack. And that means I have to allocate my scant resources in a different way right now.
What am I doing with my tiny bit of wealth? Short answer is “not burying it”. At some point, the time is now. How about a global pandemic of hyperventilating people who are bad at math and hopped up on social media? Is that not a good time to you use the food and resources you squirreled away? Why not?
Tomorrow doesn’t always come. Ask our pal with his bag of Roman silver. Yes, the ant stored food while the grasshopper fucked off… but the ant followed through. The ant ate the food in winter. He didn’t put it in a pile and lay on it like a dragon. If not now, when?
A few years back I liquidated my chicken flock (they were delicious) and now eggs are scarce. What to do? Do I go to the store and queue up with the other putzes trying to score a dozen eggs? Give that hag Gladys another chance to infect me? Fuck no! Use your stores. I dusted off some of my older cans of Mountain House. I hate to use them. They cost so much per ounce that I only use them while camping. Or perhaps for the end of the world? They make a pretty bang up scrambled egg breakfast. (Especially when paired with a shitload of freshly cooked bacon.)
If you’re the ant, remember the ant followed through. If there doesn’t come a time to use what you stored, you might as well be burying Roman silver.
Also, If you didn’t store, it’s too late. There is a time to reap and a time to sow. You don’t need more guns and more ammo and more bacon right now. You need what you’ve got. (OK fine, there’s never a bad time to buy ammo…. but there are better times and this ‘aint one of them.) If you’re scurrying to “stock up” at this particular moment, you’re doing it backwards. Stock up in times of plenty. Consume in times of disrupted supply chains. Whatever you do, don’t die in an Ox-fire, taking with you the location of the silver which will now only serve to amuse bloggers two millennia in the future. Kick back and be happy with what you stored… or learn what you should have stored but didn’t… but don’t bury a damn thing. Eat it all!
Happy freeze-dried eggs with fresh bacon y’all,
A.C.
P.S. I’ve already ordered chicks for summer. I love me some eggs for breakfast. It was always my plan to gear up again and now I’m a little more motivated.
My dad owned a grocery store and he would always take the silver coins customers gave and keep them for himself, exchanging with equivalent non silver. My dad’s gone now but I still have the silver (buried womewhere) and it’s about a hundred pounds.
Yep. Around a hundred pounds of silver coins
Wise dad!
Chicken flock… yeah, that was on the to-do list. Alas, we arrived here in Ruritania right at the end of last year, and didn’t have time to set up things like poultry housing before the fewmets hit the windmill.
Oh, well. if things get at least semi-normal this summer, we should be able to get a few hens in; there’s a spot reserved for them, lacking only such details as a henhouse and a fence.
Meanwhile, it’s getting to be planting season here! A large portion of the former lawn is tilled, and many seeds and seedlings await tomorrow afternoon’s anticipated absence of rain.
The chant begins here…..Bowling Pin Chickens! Bowling Pin Chickens! Bowling Pin Chickens!
Supply chains are a bit sketchy so when I placed the order I was all business. I wanted to get the right breed egg layers. But now I think I may call back and see what else is available in ones and twos. If they have any useless dumbass runner ducks that will self identify as chickens and become a paragon of freedom I might get a few. If also had a few pretty cool turkeys, maybe I’ll get a pair. Hard to say. Shall I put it up for public comment?
Surprise us!
Between me deciding I want a fresh egg to having one was 7 months. I did order the chicks from McMurray….
That’s the way of it. It’s not all McMurray’s fault. (Though I source elsewhere.) A homesteader who wants bacon and eggs can start the process at ice out and barely close the deal by fall. It’s a whole different time frame from a world where today’s headline is forgotten by next week. That’s probably why homesteaders and pioneers aren’t prone to freaking out.
Incidentally, I’m very sure the food supply chain will be fine but I’m far more certain of the livestock feed chain. So it seems prudent in the uncertain times of 2020 to turn a little of that easily sourced feed into not 100% guaranteed meat supply. It’s probably nothing but I’m preparing anyway.
The Guvmint basically puked out 2 trillion it doesn’t have to give most, not all, of us about 1,200 bucks. Now I’m no mathematician, but I am an engineer, and guessing at 350 million as the population at 1,200 per is only 420 billion. So where the hell is the other 1.58 trillion going? Good time to be a lobbyist or a political donor, methinks. If they’re actually going to parcel out 2 trillion to all 350 million of us, it’d be more like 5,700 each, give or take a few shekels. They’re pretty much allocating enough unsecured debt to pay the population of China, all 1.6 billion of ’em, the very same 1,200 each. Given that same 350 million population, even if there’s 1 trillion worth of bullshit pork (not the good bacony kind) in this atrocity, it still works out to around 2,850 per person. There’s something shady going on…..
Ha ha ha. So about 1/4 goes to taxpayers and 3/4 goes to God knows what. There’s nothing so expensive as “free shit”.
Things that might keep value over 2000 years:
Uranium and thorium: Fusion is hard and energy is always useful. Maybe.
Random future A: The sky is filled with planet-sized heliostat solar concentrators and power gets microwaved back to Earth. Totally doesn’t cause cancer outside the state of California. No one cares about uranium.
Random future B: Post-apocalyptic biker gangs raid farms for food. No one has time for nuclear engineering, and no one cares about uranium.
Random future C: Turns out tokomaks are stupid and there’s an easier way to do fusion. No one cares about uranium.
…..
Books are always interesting. I inherited a lot of my grandfather’s books from 1900. No monetary value though.
Tools are useful, but how valuable they are is variable.
Ammunition is handy currency if you’re anticipating a mad-max world.
On the 1,800 year timeframe probably nothing is valuable and everything is priceless. Books are really information…probably the best thing to stash for the future is information. (Since they’re a form of information…Seeds maybe?)
I actually wish I had stocked up earlier. I projected the growth rate of the virus, figured things wouldn’t get bad until April, then got scooped by everyone raiding the stores at the beginning of March and no one resupplying durable goods. At least I have toilet paper. :/
For the most part, I didn’t stock for this event particularly. 90% of my stores are “leftover” from earlier events or just standard practice. On Feb 29th I did sheepishly suggest to Mrs. Curmudgeon that we buy a bit of extra canned goods. I said something like, “I’m sure this is all bullshit but just in case let’s drop a couple hundred bucks on cans of stuff. You know, whatever is on sale. We’ll just eat it up when this thing is another nothingburger.” She agreed and that’s what we did, good move! We were probably fine anyway but it was nice to have. Sometimes I call it right, while I refuse to think this is the end of days it wasn’t quite a nothingburger either. Who knew? That said, it never occurred to me in a million years to fret over toilet paper… that’s just weird. My main miscalculation was not realizing how much I like eggs… who expects the egg supply to run dry?
I have a suspicion a lot of people plan to bake their own breads and eggs are needed as I understand it – dont bake myself, that’s the wifes job.
Just a thought
I wasn’t lucky. I didn’t get to self-quarantine. I had just started a new job, and that new job wanted me present.
Predictably, I caught Corona. At least, I assume I did. I had 5 days of feeling like I got hit by a truck complete with sore throat, then burned with a fever for a day, then spent a day feeling like I couldn’t breath. It was bad enough that I went to the hospital, where they promptly did “fuck all”. The took a chest x-ray, said I didn’t have pneumonia, told me they couldn’t test me for coronavirus unless they were admitting me to the hospital for pneumonia, and sent me home. I laid and suffered for about 12 more hours then started feeling better, now I feel fine.
But during the whole time I was sick, I stayed home from my new job. Unpaid leave. I didn’t want to inflict this one anyone else, and while the loss of income sucked, I was ready for it. I had supplies to see me through, I had savings to keep the lights on and the water flowing. I like to feel like I “Took one for the team”. I’m still living off my stockpile and can continue to comfortably do so for quite some time.
The one thing I think that I’ve learned from all of this is that I, and society and general, can soldier on through quite a bit… as long as the electricity keeps flowing. But stop that juice for a day, food will spoil, and (I believe) things will get nasty very quickly. I certainly wouldn’t have weathered the storm as well as i did with the loss of my stocked freezers. It made me think that I need some solar panels – because I don’t have enough fuel to run a generator for very long.