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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3244 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 25, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Do any Motters buy gold or other precious metals, to store at your dwelling?

If so: why do you do this? How much of it do you have? (E.g., one month's salary worth, or some other relative figure that can just give a sense.)

This has come up frequently in conversation among my friends lately, for some reason. I am asking with an open mind.

I know two guys who stash krugerrands in their home safes. One of them is bar none the most neurotic man I've ever met in my life.

They say they are concerned about the usual government collapse scenarios. Even accepting this as a likely scenario, I can't imagine that Krugerrands are particularly useful for exchange. A single $2000 coin is like ten months of groceries for myself at current prices. They didn't have a good response except to laugh that ten months of groceries might cost a lot more than $2000 in the future which of course totally misses the point.

Krugerrands are bigger than a half-dollar coin, and made out of a soft metal, so I would say chopping them into quarters shouldn't be a problem. Still, that only gets you to 500 USD.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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