The executive branch was granted the power, by Congress, to make rules and regulations about exporting munitions. Previous administrations put the entirety of that power under the State Department, which had really strict rules. Clinton's order just move encryption under the Commerce Department instead of the State Department, and the Commerce Department is a lot less paranoid. (Other munitions are still under State.)
I love how people have heard about Bush's illegal signing statements, learn they are like 'executive orders', and now presume all executive orders are illegal.
Executive orders, and signing statements, (which are just executive orders that get carried along with bills), are mostly used for the president to decide things that are left for him to decide under the law.
Congress gives the President a budget and the power to do something, he signs the bill and writes an executive order (Or attaches a signing statement to the bill as he signs it, so it will always be with that bill.) making an Office of Doing That Thing in the Department of Whatever, and gives them the money.
Executive orders are just public statements of policy that the executive branch must follow, they are not 'laws', and they move power around within the executive, they don't give the executive any power.
Bush, of course, did a lot of nonsense, things like signing a bill into law and, at the same time, asserting that no one has to follow it. This was obviously bad.
But you really need a basic civics lesson about how the executive works and about how Congress gives it powers. Very often, Congress gives 'regulatory power' over things to the executive, along with a few specific regulations, and the executive branch is in charge of figuring all that out, because you don't want the damn Congress figuring out licensing fees from a Chicago TV station or what roads to build in a national forest. Congress gives the executive branch the power to figure that out, and the President writes orders putting that power under the FCC or the National Parks Service.
Of course, often Congress does specify where in the executive branch things go, and even creates new offices, which the president cannot override. This is generally frowned upon at levels lower than cabinet positions....Congress creates the top level Departments, and maybe one level below that, but generally shouldn't be micromanaging within the offices, as it makes any sort of reorganization difficult. I.e., they create the Department of Homeland Security, and put the FBI (and others) within it, and assign specific crimes for the FBI to handle...but they shouldn't really be creating offices in the FBI to handle those crimes. (Because, over time, crimes change, and the FBI might find itself with one nearly empty office and one overworked one. I mean, at one time it would have made sense to have a 'train robbery' division.)
Congress can do that, though, legally. They just shouldn't, and don't, so it's up to the president to issue executive orders.
The entire 'buy coins, not bars' is a scam promoted by the 'scam gold industry' to hide their absurd markup. (The 'scam gold industry' vs. the actual legit gold trading industry.)
'Goldline' is just the most obvious member of that industry. But it has a lot of members, and it has a lot of people it has convinced, like you, that somehow gold coins are a better investment than just buying gold, which is total utter nonsense.
You don't know it, I'm sure, but the entire premise of your 'They can't ban is gold coinage' is a lie, intended to get people to 'invest' in gold coins that a) are being sold to them at absurd prices, and b) wouldn't be exempt even if Congress hypothetically passed the same law, because that's not the sort of rare coins anyone is talking about. And, of course, c) nonsense, because when they 'confiscate' gold, they actually just buy it from people at the gold list price, which means, duh, you're better off if all the value of it is the gold, and not some added value from collectiblity.
I know you're not one of the liars, but you've listened to them, or to other people who've listened to them. The entire premise that the US government somehow can't take coins is utterly wrong.
Goldline will happily list those coins, and even sell those coins...but that's not the coins they're selling to people who call in as 'investments'. These are the sort of coins they offer to 'investors' who call in.
That's a half oz of gold at 22 carats, $1,218.16 for $597 worth of gold, and not much collectible value at all. And you can buy them straight from a authorized dealer for $694.72.
That's 80% markup from the ask price. (Which already has the legit markup in it!) Seriously, look at their list vs. that legit dealer list.
No one's saying all their products are scams. But when people call in and don't know anything about gold, they talk long and hard about how gold is a good investment and how you should invest in coins instead of bars, and then they sell people 'investments' that can't ever make money. (Which is, incidentally, illegal.)
Oh, and they also promise to buy it back for the 'bid price', which of course everyone who calls in assumes is the price they're selling it for, because, unlike legit dealers, they don't display or tell the bid price in any way. Actually, they don't promise to buy it back for that, they say they're 'not allowed to promise' that, thus pretending to make a promise while not legally making one, but it's moot as the price they're promising to buy it back for is, unknown to everyone, much lower than the price they're selling for.
Try Kitco.com or any of the other brokers that are out there. It has nothing to do with Glen Beck All coins are sold at a premium because of the intrinsic value. As soon as a coin is minted it carries some intrinsic value.
I don't know why so many people assumed I am stupid, but I'm not calling 'intrinsic value' goddamn markup. That is not what 'markup' is. I know most coins have a value on top of the gold.
Goldline sells gold coins at an average markup of 90% of the value of the gold coin, all the way up to 208%. Not the value of the gold, they're selling them for 90% above what anyone will pay for the coins, which is about 75% more than you could buy the coins from anyone else even without shopping around
And, of course, they don't tell anyone this. You call and they quote the price of gold, and talk about how it goes up, and that you should buy it in coins because (somehow they magically know that) when the government comes to 'steal your gold', the government going to stupidly not notice for decades that people have put gold in 'coins' that aren't really worth much at all, and not take that gold.
And then they sell you coins where they manage not to mention that, when they were were talking about buying $100 worth of gold, you're now only buying $50 worth of coins (And only $40 worth of gold.)...for $100 dollars.
Why would they leave the loophole? Dunno, maybe to keep their own collections intact?
Firstly, it's not 'leave' the loophole, it would require putting the old loophole in a new law.
Secondly, 'their own'? You think the government would otherwise be forced to turn in gold coins to themselves? Huh?
If you're talking about the rich, I assure you, they can keep their collections out of the country anyway, and they're not collecting rinky gold coins that are worth twice as much as the gold in them...they're collecting coins worth a hundred times the gold in them, what the loophole is actually supposed to protect, and not what Goldline is selling. If need be, they'll set a specific ratio, where the value has to be X times the value of the gold to be exempt.
But from my understanding, it was FAIR value, not ACTUAL value.
Fair value is supposed to be the actual market value. Property appraisals are really fucked up...people are always trying to game them one way or another, and there's a lot of political nonsense there keeping them high or low for different reasons. The 'value' used for eminent domain of real estate is always nonsense, and if you want to complain about that, go ahead.
However, gold has a value. A very specific, world-wide, well tracked value. There's no way in hell they could get away with assigning any other value. They might lock the value at a market low point, and get away with that, but it's going to be some actual market rate at some actual point after the law is passed. (If they're smart, they'll lock it at the rate the moment the bill passes, as it will just go up from there.)
Ironically, this means buying gold coins with intrinsic value is amazingly stupid as a henge against this, as those do have a debatable value, and the government will probably figure out how to lowball it to close to the value of the gold. Whereas people who bought actual gold and just gold get paid off the full value, because the government can't fiddle with that.
Thus producing an object lesson in 'Why not to listen to idiots'.
Xmarks was not really a plugin for IE. You don't need an 'IE plugin' to manage IE bookmarks, they're filesystem objects. Xmarks IE sync was just a program that edited them, and didn't really need an special permissions.
I always thought they missed out on having a program that does that that doesn't even require installation...put it on a flash drive, and it could keep a directory of 'Favorites' in sync. Regardless of whether or not that's the directory that shows up in IE, you can still double-click them in Windows and they open in the default browser.
In fact, I use my Start Menu's favorite list sometimes even though I use Firefox...I can add a bookmark in IE, and it makes the round trip through Xmarks and ends up in my Favorite list.
Oh, if you know an actual dealer who's willing to sell at, say, 1% over spot, that's also a fairly smart investment, although having it in the market is safer physical security-wise. If you do very small amounts, dealers are better than brokers, whereas for large amounts it's the other way around. (Aka, if it's actually an 'investment' where you buy $5,000 a year, as opposed to speculation.)
But there are all sorts of ways to buy and sell gold.
Smart people end up losing less than 1% buying and 4% selling, by using brokers or legit dealers. There might be other ways too, damned if I know.
Unsmart people buy from these vending machines and lose 15%, and then sell to pawnshops or scam brokers and lose another 15%.
Idiots buy from Priceline and lose 50%, and then sell to 'Sell us your gold!' places and lose another 50%.
Only the first group of people are currently making any money, although speculation has shot gold prices up so fast the second group has made money on occasion.
I'm not saying it's 150% markup from the value of the gold. It's 150% markup from the value of the coins.
The average Goldline markup is 90%. It goes as high as 208%.
It's a huge increase from the price you'd actually expect to buy the coins from at a rare coin dealer, which have a markup closer to 15%, sometimes 20%.
Yes, it's amazing how Beck's 'excellent advice' is neatly bracketed by conmen who are willing to con people by having a con that appears to be exactly what he recommends, but is not.
And I should point out that investing in a market that's at the highest it's ever been is not, technically speaking, a 'good idea'.
It is, in technical jargon, 'fucking goddamn stupid'.
But, hey, we've need a new bubble now that the rich can't defraud people by having them 'invest' in housing anymore. With the economic downturn, the rich are starting to feel the pinch, and really appreciate the morons willing to buy their gold from them at absurd prices.
If you want to participate in the actual gold market, as opposed to scammers selling nonsense and absurdly marked up gold, please locate a commodities broker.
They're like stock brokers, but for the gold and other commodities market. They charge no 'markup', just clearly stated transaction fees per sell and purchase. Records are kept electronically, just like stocks, but, just like stocks, you can get a piece of paper from them, or even actually go and get your gold from one of the exchanges. (You'll have to go in person, though, they won't ship it.)
Just like with a stockbroker, you can get a 'full featured' one that gives advice and is on call, or you can get a cheaper account that is essentially a web page with some charts and you do all the research. Either way you want. Sometimes you can trade commodities and stocks at the same place.
But, anyway, go to a broker, like actual non-stupid investors use to invest in fungible things, while idiots are 'investing' in people selling shit out of their trenchcoat, stuff that, even if they were buying it at a reasonable cost (They aren't.), they'd still have no way to sell at full value when they needed to cash out.
These idiots are buying at 40%-100% markup (The 30% markup of these machines is actually amazingly low.), and the only place they have to sell their 'investment' is pawn shops and cash for gold places where they'll be lucky to get 40% of the actual value. That means when they buy something for $100, they'll be able to sell it for, I dunno, $25. (Assuming gold hasn't crashed by then, at which point we're talking $10.)
As an added bonus, at a commodities broker, instead of investing in gold, which is at a goddamn universal record high and certainly going to crash when this idiotic speculation dies down, you could invest in silver or platinum or something that might actually go up in value. Oh, and you can short gold if you think the gold crash is coming soon.
Erm, if you know about brokers, why the fuck are you buying gold any other way?
You do know you can actually have the brokers send you gold certificates, right? Pieces of paper redeemable in gold. Just like stockbrokers will send you actual stock certificates if you want? By law, you can always turn the electronic records of ownership at a broker into actual pieces of paper that they give you.
And, with that paper (And probably electronically too), you can pick up that amount of gold physically from the exchange, taking it out of the market entirely.
Note by 'the exchange', I mean many different places. There is one market, but the actual physical gold is at many locations, and you can get 'your gold' from any of them. If there's not one near you, you can pay third parties to pick it up in your name and ship it to you.
You know, like actual jewelry places do every day to get gold? They buy gold at their broker when it seems cheap, and then slowly but surely convert it into actual gold, letting them cut out all the middlemen except for their broker.
I'm not really sure what you're attempting to accomplish here, the gold market already works this way, except the gold isn't stored at banks. (Which have enough problem with theft to participate in something like that that wouldn't make them any money, thank you very much.)
They're calling it an 'ATM' because they want to think of the stuff you get from it as money.
Of course, it's not money, absolutely no one will take it anywhere in exchange for anything, but perhaps more people will use it if they just think of it like 'getting money from an ATM', which doesn't require making a cost vs. value roll.
In other words, the 'ATM' designation is a scam, like almost all things in the 'purchase gold' market.
You want to invest in gold, people, whatever. I personally think it's a very bad time, but whatever.
Get a damn account at a commodities broker and buy some damn gold at actual market price plus a set transaction fee, just like you buy stocks. Gold you can resell, later, in seconds, for another fee, instead of trying to find a pawn shop to give you 40% of the value. Don't buy from some idiot shilling on TV or some machine.
No, this is for moderately intelligent people conned into thinking they are smart investors.
Stupid people 'invest' with Goldline, aka, purchase gold at huge markups that gold prices will never reach, or, at minimum, take a decade to reach.
Actual intelligent people who wish to invest in gold buy gold at an actual commodity broker, where there's no markup, just transaction fees that are well documented, and you can sell it easily the same way.
Because of the magical exception not allowing them to ban gold coinage. Oh, wait, that doesn't exist, that's just part of the Goldline scam to sell gold at 100% markup.
'Oh, we're not selling gold bars, because we've invented a reason that the government might come take those. Take this gold coins instead.'...'Oh, did we forget to mention that, after all that talk of 'investment', that we were selling them at a huge markup, so gold would need to double or even triple in price before you could even make your money back? Oops.'.
So, to recap with actual facts instead of Goldline nonsense:
a) the government has to actually pay for stuff it takes, so would have to pay the actual price of gold at that point., like it did the first time. This actually is a constitutional premise, unlike the stupid 'coin' exception conmen have invented. No, it cannot pay the value stamped on the coins. Eminent domain requires paying the actual value of stuff, determined by a court. This is why the court struck down the first time...the currency devaluation had changed the value of the gold, and the government knew that would happen.
This doesn't mean the price will be what people want, the government will certainly pick a dip in the prices to set the price, and once the government starts the price of gold will go up even more, which the government will ignore, but there's no way in hell they could set the price to anything but the market value of the gold at some point.
b) if the government can confiscate gold bars, it can certainly do the same to gold coins. The exception was 'rare coins with intrinsical value', and was in the (overturned) law. I love the crazy idea that the US would go and confiscate gold, but somehow would put the same loophole in the new law, and, what's more, count all these 'Goldline' coins as 'rare'. You guys are asserting a loophole in a law that does not exist yet.
I understand Beck's POV on gold,
Well, it's not that hard to understand why most criminals operate. Money.
Beck is participating the Goldline scam because, duh, he gets a cut of it. Used to be a direct cut, now they're just keeping him on the air.
Um, no, Goldline is a scam, whether or not investing in gold is a good idea.
Why? Because Goldline is selling gold at a 150% markup, and hence no one will ever get their investment back.
You call, they give a little spiel about how the price of gold has gone up and is thus a good investment, or has gone down and hence is a good time to buy, and they they sell you gold at absurd markup and fail to mention that it has any markup at all.
They're pretending to be a commodities broker, and talk a lot about 'reselling' and whatnot. They're actually conmen, and under investigation by the Senate.
And Glenn Beck and Fox News knows this damn well, but are paid a lot.
This is totally irrelevant to whether or not gold is a good investment. It might be if you actually purchase gold at market price, but it sure as hell isn't if you purchase from Goldline.
All those things you list are the requirement for any government and any economic system.
All governments require compulsion, confiscation, and subjugation. That is what governments do. They require people to do things, they take taxes from them, and they imprison them if they get out of line. That's 'a government'.
And all economic systems 'make slaves' of people. Unless you're talking literal, at which point I have to mention that under 95% of communism countries people aren't literal slaves. You can choose to work, or not work, in China. If you don't work, you don't get any food...but that's the same as anywhere. It's just more indirect elsewhere.
The only added 'slavery' is that you're assigned a job, but, despite what people think, there's no evidence that people in communism countries are more likely to want to work some other job than in capitalist countries. There's just an illusion of choice in capitalism societies, but in both if you are skilled, you're working the job you're skilled in, and if you're unskilled, you're working whatever random job you can get.
Now, North Korea, that's different. You don't work, they shoot you, but North Korea is batshit insane. If we're counting outliers, I'll point out in at least 5% of capitalistic countries you can be 'made slaves of'...by becoming an actual slave.
What actually makes communism different is that, as you said, it rewards mediocrity, although strictly speaking it's more that it doesn't reward anything.
Which means it fails, economically.
And a failing economy, or rather, one that cannot succeed due to the way it is structured, turns to totalitarianism.
It doesn't have anything to do with 'communism'. The same thing would happen if a country crazily decided to operate on the barter system.
In fact, it's happened over and over to economies that failed for other reasons...look at the rise of Nazi Germany. Or, hell, half the countries in Africa.
And it obviously hasn't helped that most communism countries got that way via revolution, with the government having a lot of power and no ability to fix anything.
If politicians wanted, they could tax electricity whatever they wanted anyway.
I'm sick and fucking tired of having to discuss what politicians 'could' do with new laws, when in actual fact if they wanted to pass laws to screw us over, they'd just pass laws to screw us over.
It's like not selling children soda because they could rip the bottles apart and stab people with the edges. Or, you know, they could just get a damn knife from their kitchen and stab people with that, be a lot easier.
I swear, it's like this entire county has become brain damaged or something.
The question is can you have the level of control needed to operate communism, which essentially require that the government be in charge of every single job, without it slipping into totalitarianism.
All the case studies appear to say 'No'.
That said, almost none of the governments started out as non-totalitarian in the first place. So they didn't really 'slip' anywhere. They had a very powerful leader that forced the country into it.
That, OTOH, just raises another question: Will any non-totalitarian government ever choose communism in the first place? Why would it?
I feel the same way about each generation of 'really this time conservative' politicians, who this time won't be like the last forty decades of borrow-and-spend conservatives.
At some point you just have to say 'Either this political philosophy is unworkable, or it's too easily hijacked, to be usable in the real world.'.
I don't know why the hell we can't seem to ever do 'progressive' utilities.
The idea that the cost of everything should be linear is idiotic.
I'm sorry, there's a standard amount of power a house should use.
If you're using three times that, maybe your power bill should be six times the people using sane amounts, aka, you're paying twice as much.
Same with water.
Or do it like taxes, where the first X kWH is one rate, and the rest is another. And let people have 'deductions' where they can pay another 10% under the first rate per person living in that house, or another 25% because their house is heated using electricity. (Vs. gas heating people, who should really be using less electricity.)
And before anyone thinks I want to raise the rates...I actually want to lower them for people with sane power usage, and subsidies those people with higher costs on people with inefficient houses. (Or just very large ones.)
Before anyone points out that the utilities are private, not government, I will point out that utilities really shouldn't be. Or, rather, private industry should sell power to the grid, and the government should sell power from the grid.
And, yes, yes, I'm sure there would be cheats, but the point isn't to raise money, it's to discourage electricity overuse.
As long as the light can't escape the room, it's heating it regardless. Light bouncing off walls eventually turns into heat. Unless you've got a bare window or something that light can escape out of. And a bare, even if insulated, window is causing a lot more heat loss via heat transfer than any hypothetical light going out the window, and that assumes more light is going out than in, which is often not true.
So functionally all energy from a light bulb turns into heat.
However, just because electric heaters, including light bulbs, are 100% efficient in the conversion of electricity into heat, does not mean they are the most efficient heaters. Converting almost anything else, like gas, into heat, wastes less overall, and most people have devices that move heat without having to make it, aka, a heat pump.
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Um, no.
The executive branch was granted the power, by Congress, to make rules and regulations about exporting munitions. Previous administrations put the entirety of that power under the State Department, which had really strict rules. Clinton's order just move encryption under the Commerce Department instead of the State Department, and the Commerce Department is a lot less paranoid. (Other munitions are still under State.)
I love how people have heard about Bush's illegal signing statements, learn they are like 'executive orders', and now presume all executive orders are illegal.
Executive orders, and signing statements, (which are just executive orders that get carried along with bills), are mostly used for the president to decide things that are left for him to decide under the law.
Congress gives the President a budget and the power to do something, he signs the bill and writes an executive order (Or attaches a signing statement to the bill as he signs it, so it will always be with that bill.) making an Office of Doing That Thing in the Department of Whatever, and gives them the money.
Executive orders are just public statements of policy that the executive branch must follow, they are not 'laws', and they move power around within the executive, they don't give the executive any power.
Bush, of course, did a lot of nonsense, things like signing a bill into law and, at the same time, asserting that no one has to follow it. This was obviously bad.
But you really need a basic civics lesson about how the executive works and about how Congress gives it powers. Very often, Congress gives 'regulatory power' over things to the executive, along with a few specific regulations, and the executive branch is in charge of figuring all that out, because you don't want the damn Congress figuring out licensing fees from a Chicago TV station or what roads to build in a national forest. Congress gives the executive branch the power to figure that out, and the President writes orders putting that power under the FCC or the National Parks Service.
Of course, often Congress does specify where in the executive branch things go, and even creates new offices, which the president cannot override. This is generally frowned upon at levels lower than cabinet positions....Congress creates the top level Departments, and maybe one level below that, but generally shouldn't be micromanaging within the offices, as it makes any sort of reorganization difficult. I.e., they create the Department of Homeland Security, and put the FBI (and others) within it, and assign specific crimes for the FBI to handle...but they shouldn't really be creating offices in the FBI to handle those crimes. (Because, over time, crimes change, and the FBI might find itself with one nearly empty office and one overworked one. I mean, at one time it would have made sense to have a 'train robbery' division.)
Congress can do that, though, legally. They just shouldn't, and don't, so it's up to the president to issue executive orders.
The entire 'buy coins, not bars' is a scam promoted by the 'scam gold industry' to hide their absurd markup. (The 'scam gold industry' vs. the actual legit gold trading industry.)
'Goldline' is just the most obvious member of that industry. But it has a lot of members, and it has a lot of people it has convinced, like you, that somehow gold coins are a better investment than just buying gold, which is total utter nonsense.
You don't know it, I'm sure, but the entire premise of your 'They can't ban is gold coinage' is a lie, intended to get people to 'invest' in gold coins that a) are being sold to them at absurd prices, and b) wouldn't be exempt even if Congress hypothetically passed the same law, because that's not the sort of rare coins anyone is talking about. And, of course, c) nonsense, because when they 'confiscate' gold, they actually just buy it from people at the gold list price, which means, duh, you're better off if all the value of it is the gold, and not some added value from collectiblity.
I know you're not one of the liars, but you've listened to them, or to other people who've listened to them. The entire premise that the US government somehow can't take coins is utterly wrong.
Goldline will happily list those coins, and even sell those coins...but that's not the coins they're selling to people who call in as 'investments'. These are the sort of coins they offer to 'investors' who call in.
That's a half oz of gold at 22 carats, $1,218.16 for $597 worth of gold, and not much collectible value at all. And you can buy them straight from a authorized dealer for $694.72.
That's 80% markup from the ask price. (Which already has the legit markup in it!) Seriously, look at their list vs. that legit dealer list.
No one's saying all their products are scams. But when people call in and don't know anything about gold, they talk long and hard about how gold is a good investment and how you should invest in coins instead of bars, and then they sell people 'investments' that can't ever make money. (Which is, incidentally, illegal.)
Oh, and they also promise to buy it back for the 'bid price', which of course everyone who calls in assumes is the price they're selling it for, because, unlike legit dealers, they don't display or tell the bid price in any way. Actually, they don't promise to buy it back for that, they say they're 'not allowed to promise' that, thus pretending to make a promise while not legally making one, but it's moot as the price they're promising to buy it back for is, unknown to everyone, much lower than the price they're selling for.
Try Kitco.com or any of the other brokers that are out there. It has nothing to do with Glen Beck All coins are sold at a premium because of the intrinsic value. As soon as a coin is minted it carries some intrinsic value.
I don't know why so many people assumed I am stupid, but I'm not calling 'intrinsic value' goddamn markup. That is not what 'markup' is. I know most coins have a value on top of the gold.
Goldline sells gold coins at an average markup of 90% of the value of the gold coin, all the way up to 208%. Not the value of the gold, they're selling them for 90% above what anyone will pay for the coins, which is about 75% more than you could buy the coins from anyone else even without shopping around
And, of course, they don't tell anyone this. You call and they quote the price of gold, and talk about how it goes up, and that you should buy it in coins because (somehow they magically know that) when the government comes to 'steal your gold', the government going to stupidly not notice for decades that people have put gold in 'coins' that aren't really worth much at all, and not take that gold.
And then they sell you coins where they manage not to mention that, when they were were talking about buying $100 worth of gold, you're now only buying $50 worth of coins (And only $40 worth of gold.)...for $100 dollars.
Why would they leave the loophole? Dunno, maybe to keep their own collections intact?
Firstly, it's not 'leave' the loophole, it would require putting the old loophole in a new law.
Secondly, 'their own'? You think the government would otherwise be forced to turn in gold coins to themselves? Huh?
If you're talking about the rich, I assure you, they can keep their collections out of the country anyway, and they're not collecting rinky gold coins that are worth twice as much as the gold in them...they're collecting coins worth a hundred times the gold in them, what the loophole is actually supposed to protect, and not what Goldline is selling. If need be, they'll set a specific ratio, where the value has to be X times the value of the gold to be exempt.
But from my understanding, it was FAIR value, not ACTUAL value.
Fair value is supposed to be the actual market value. Property appraisals are really fucked up...people are always trying to game them one way or another, and there's a lot of political nonsense there keeping them high or low for different reasons. The 'value' used for eminent domain of real estate is always nonsense, and if you want to complain about that, go ahead.
However, gold has a value. A very specific, world-wide, well tracked value. There's no way in hell they could get away with assigning any other value. They might lock the value at a market low point, and get away with that, but it's going to be some actual market rate at some actual point after the law is passed. (If they're smart, they'll lock it at the rate the moment the bill passes, as it will just go up from there.)
Ironically, this means buying gold coins with intrinsic value is amazingly stupid as a henge against this, as those do have a debatable value, and the government will probably figure out how to lowball it to close to the value of the gold. Whereas people who bought actual gold and just gold get paid off the full value, because the government can't fiddle with that.
Thus producing an object lesson in 'Why not to listen to idiots'.
Xmarks was not really a plugin for IE. You don't need an 'IE plugin' to manage IE bookmarks, they're filesystem objects. Xmarks IE sync was just a program that edited them, and didn't really need an special permissions.
I always thought they missed out on having a program that does that that doesn't even require installation...put it on a flash drive, and it could keep a directory of 'Favorites' in sync. Regardless of whether or not that's the directory that shows up in IE, you can still double-click them in Windows and they open in the default browser.
In fact, I use my Start Menu's favorite list sometimes even though I use Firefox...I can add a bookmark in IE, and it makes the round trip through Xmarks and ends up in my Favorite list.
Guess I have to figure out some other way.
They're making poor choices based on what a 'news network' is telling them.
Oh, if you know an actual dealer who's willing to sell at, say, 1% over spot, that's also a fairly smart investment, although having it in the market is safer physical security-wise. If you do very small amounts, dealers are better than brokers, whereas for large amounts it's the other way around. (Aka, if it's actually an 'investment' where you buy $5,000 a year, as opposed to speculation.)
But there are all sorts of ways to buy and sell gold.
Smart people end up losing less than 1% buying and 4% selling, by using brokers or legit dealers. There might be other ways too, damned if I know.
Unsmart people buy from these vending machines and lose 15%, and then sell to pawnshops or scam brokers and lose another 15%.
Idiots buy from Priceline and lose 50%, and then sell to 'Sell us your gold!' places and lose another 50%.
Only the first group of people are currently making any money, although speculation has shot gold prices up so fast the second group has made money on occasion.
I'm not saying it's 150% markup from the value of the gold. It's 150% markup from the value of the coins.
The average Goldline markup is 90%. It goes as high as 208%.
It's a huge increase from the price you'd actually expect to buy the coins from at a rare coin dealer, which have a markup closer to 15%, sometimes 20%.
Yes, it's amazing how Beck's 'excellent advice' is neatly bracketed by conmen who are willing to con people by having a con that appears to be exactly what he recommends, but is not.
And I should point out that investing in a market that's at the highest it's ever been is not, technically speaking, a 'good idea'.
It is, in technical jargon, 'fucking goddamn stupid'.
But, hey, we've need a new bubble now that the rich can't defraud people by having them 'invest' in housing anymore. With the economic downturn, the rich are starting to feel the pinch, and really appreciate the morons willing to buy their gold from them at absurd prices.
Nope. I mean 250% of the correct market value.
The average Goldline price is 190% of the correct market value.
The average markup of Goldline coins is 90%. Some are as high as 208%.
I'm not sure what's going on with ebay, but prices listed on ebay are hardly the actual value of something.
150%, believe it or not.
Goldline's average markup is 90%. Markups as much as 208% have been located.
Interesting damn 'investment'.
It's worth pointing out that this machine is at 30% markup, which is still really really high for a commodity, but less utterly absurd.
If you want to participate in the actual gold market, as opposed to scammers selling nonsense and absurdly marked up gold, please locate a commodities broker.
They're like stock brokers, but for the gold and other commodities market. They charge no 'markup', just clearly stated transaction fees per sell and purchase. Records are kept electronically, just like stocks, but, just like stocks, you can get a piece of paper from them, or even actually go and get your gold from one of the exchanges. (You'll have to go in person, though, they won't ship it.)
Just like with a stockbroker, you can get a 'full featured' one that gives advice and is on call, or you can get a cheaper account that is essentially a web page with some charts and you do all the research. Either way you want. Sometimes you can trade commodities and stocks at the same place.
But, anyway, go to a broker, like actual non-stupid investors use to invest in fungible things, while idiots are 'investing' in people selling shit out of their trenchcoat, stuff that, even if they were buying it at a reasonable cost (They aren't.), they'd still have no way to sell at full value when they needed to cash out.
These idiots are buying at 40%-100% markup (The 30% markup of these machines is actually amazingly low.), and the only place they have to sell their 'investment' is pawn shops and cash for gold places where they'll be lucky to get 40% of the actual value. That means when they buy something for $100, they'll be able to sell it for, I dunno, $25. (Assuming gold hasn't crashed by then, at which point we're talking $10.)
As an added bonus, at a commodities broker, instead of investing in gold, which is at a goddamn universal record high and certainly going to crash when this idiotic speculation dies down, you could invest in silver or platinum or something that might actually go up in value. Oh, and you can short gold if you think the gold crash is coming soon.
And selling it 30% above market price? Why would anyone 'invest' with this machine when it costs less to buy from a dealer somewhere?
In the 'preying on people's fears to sell them gold' market, 30% markup is a steal. Goldline's selling at an average of 90% markup.
Erm, if you know about brokers, why the fuck are you buying gold any other way?
You do know you can actually have the brokers send you gold certificates, right? Pieces of paper redeemable in gold. Just like stockbrokers will send you actual stock certificates if you want? By law, you can always turn the electronic records of ownership at a broker into actual pieces of paper that they give you.
And, with that paper (And probably electronically too), you can pick up that amount of gold physically from the exchange, taking it out of the market entirely.
Note by 'the exchange', I mean many different places. There is one market, but the actual physical gold is at many locations, and you can get 'your gold' from any of them. If there's not one near you, you can pay third parties to pick it up in your name and ship it to you.
You know, like actual jewelry places do every day to get gold? They buy gold at their broker when it seems cheap, and then slowly but surely convert it into actual gold, letting them cut out all the middlemen except for their broker.
I'm not really sure what you're attempting to accomplish here, the gold market already works this way, except the gold isn't stored at banks. (Which have enough problem with theft to participate in something like that that wouldn't make them any money, thank you very much.)
They're calling it an 'ATM' because they want to think of the stuff you get from it as money.
Of course, it's not money, absolutely no one will take it anywhere in exchange for anything, but perhaps more people will use it if they just think of it like 'getting money from an ATM', which doesn't require making a cost vs. value roll.
In other words, the 'ATM' designation is a scam, like almost all things in the 'purchase gold' market.
You want to invest in gold, people, whatever. I personally think it's a very bad time, but whatever.
Get a damn account at a commodities broker and buy some damn gold at actual market price plus a set transaction fee, just like you buy stocks. Gold you can resell, later, in seconds, for another fee, instead of trying to find a pawn shop to give you 40% of the value. Don't buy from some idiot shilling on TV or some machine.
No, this is for moderately intelligent people conned into thinking they are smart investors.
Stupid people 'invest' with Goldline, aka, purchase gold at huge markups that gold prices will never reach, or, at minimum, take a decade to reach.
Actual intelligent people who wish to invest in gold buy gold at an actual commodity broker, where there's no markup, just transaction fees that are well documented, and you can sell it easily the same way.
What it can't ban is gold coinage.
Because of the magical exception not allowing them to ban gold coinage. Oh, wait, that doesn't exist, that's just part of the Goldline scam to sell gold at 100% markup.
'Oh, we're not selling gold bars, because we've invented a reason that the government might come take those. Take this gold coins instead.'...'Oh, did we forget to mention that, after all that talk of 'investment', that we were selling them at a huge markup, so gold would need to double or even triple in price before you could even make your money back? Oops.'.
So, to recap with actual facts instead of Goldline nonsense:
a) the government has to actually pay for stuff it takes, so would have to pay the actual price of gold at that point., like it did the first time. This actually is a constitutional premise, unlike the stupid 'coin' exception conmen have invented. No, it cannot pay the value stamped on the coins. Eminent domain requires paying the actual value of stuff, determined by a court. This is why the court struck down the first time...the currency devaluation had changed the value of the gold, and the government knew that would happen.
This doesn't mean the price will be what people want, the government will certainly pick a dip in the prices to set the price, and once the government starts the price of gold will go up even more, which the government will ignore, but there's no way in hell they could set the price to anything but the market value of the gold at some point.
b) if the government can confiscate gold bars, it can certainly do the same to gold coins. The exception was 'rare coins with intrinsical value', and was in the (overturned) law. I love the crazy idea that the US would go and confiscate gold, but somehow would put the same loophole in the new law, and, what's more, count all these 'Goldline' coins as 'rare'. You guys are asserting a loophole in a law that does not exist yet.
I understand Beck's POV on gold,
Well, it's not that hard to understand why most criminals operate. Money.
Beck is participating the Goldline scam because, duh, he gets a cut of it. Used to be a direct cut, now they're just keeping him on the air.
Um, no, Goldline is a scam, whether or not investing in gold is a good idea.
Why? Because Goldline is selling gold at a 150% markup, and hence no one will ever get their investment back.
You call, they give a little spiel about how the price of gold has gone up and is thus a good investment, or has gone down and hence is a good time to buy, and they they sell you gold at absurd markup and fail to mention that it has any markup at all.
They're pretending to be a commodities broker, and talk a lot about 'reselling' and whatnot. They're actually conmen, and under investigation by the Senate.
And Glenn Beck and Fox News knows this damn well, but are paid a lot.
This is totally irrelevant to whether or not gold is a good investment. It might be if you actually purchase gold at market price, but it sure as hell isn't if you purchase from Goldline.
All those things you list are the requirement for any government and any economic system.
All governments require compulsion, confiscation, and subjugation. That is what governments do. They require people to do things, they take taxes from them, and they imprison them if they get out of line. That's 'a government'.
And all economic systems 'make slaves' of people. Unless you're talking literal, at which point I have to mention that under 95% of communism countries people aren't literal slaves. You can choose to work, or not work, in China. If you don't work, you don't get any food...but that's the same as anywhere. It's just more indirect elsewhere.
The only added 'slavery' is that you're assigned a job, but, despite what people think, there's no evidence that people in communism countries are more likely to want to work some other job than in capitalist countries. There's just an illusion of choice in capitalism societies, but in both if you are skilled, you're working the job you're skilled in, and if you're unskilled, you're working whatever random job you can get.
Now, North Korea, that's different. You don't work, they shoot you, but North Korea is batshit insane. If we're counting outliers, I'll point out in at least 5% of capitalistic countries you can be 'made slaves of'...by becoming an actual slave.
What actually makes communism different is that, as you said, it rewards mediocrity, although strictly speaking it's more that it doesn't reward anything.
Which means it fails, economically.
And a failing economy, or rather, one that cannot succeed due to the way it is structured, turns to totalitarianism.
It doesn't have anything to do with 'communism'. The same thing would happen if a country crazily decided to operate on the barter system.
In fact, it's happened over and over to economies that failed for other reasons...look at the rise of Nazi Germany. Or, hell, half the countries in Africa.
And it obviously hasn't helped that most communism countries got that way via revolution, with the government having a lot of power and no ability to fix anything.
If politicians wanted, they could tax electricity whatever they wanted anyway.
I'm sick and fucking tired of having to discuss what politicians 'could' do with new laws, when in actual fact if they wanted to pass laws to screw us over, they'd just pass laws to screw us over.
It's like not selling children soda because they could rip the bottles apart and stab people with the edges. Or, you know, they could just get a damn knife from their kitchen and stab people with that, be a lot easier.
I swear, it's like this entire county has become brain damaged or something.
The question is can you have the level of control needed to operate communism, which essentially require that the government be in charge of every single job, without it slipping into totalitarianism.
All the case studies appear to say 'No'.
That said, almost none of the governments started out as non-totalitarian in the first place. So they didn't really 'slip' anywhere. They had a very powerful leader that forced the country into it.
That, OTOH, just raises another question: Will any non-totalitarian government ever choose communism in the first place? Why would it?
I feel the same way about each generation of 'really this time conservative' politicians, who this time won't be like the last forty decades of borrow-and-spend conservatives.
At some point you just have to say 'Either this political philosophy is unworkable, or it's too easily hijacked, to be usable in the real world.'.
I don't know why the hell we can't seem to ever do 'progressive' utilities.
The idea that the cost of everything should be linear is idiotic.
I'm sorry, there's a standard amount of power a house should use.
If you're using three times that, maybe your power bill should be six times the people using sane amounts, aka, you're paying twice as much.
Same with water.
Or do it like taxes, where the first X kWH is one rate, and the rest is another. And let people have 'deductions' where they can pay another 10% under the first rate per person living in that house, or another 25% because their house is heated using electricity. (Vs. gas heating people, who should really be using less electricity.)
And before anyone thinks I want to raise the rates...I actually want to lower them for people with sane power usage, and subsidies those people with higher costs on people with inefficient houses. (Or just very large ones.)
Before anyone points out that the utilities are private, not government, I will point out that utilities really shouldn't be. Or, rather, private industry should sell power to the grid, and the government should sell power from the grid.
And, yes, yes, I'm sure there would be cheats, but the point isn't to raise money, it's to discourage electricity overuse.
As long as the light can't escape the room, it's heating it regardless. Light bouncing off walls eventually turns into heat. Unless you've got a bare window or something that light can escape out of. And a bare, even if insulated, window is causing a lot more heat loss via heat transfer than any hypothetical light going out the window, and that assumes more light is going out than in, which is often not true.
So functionally all energy from a light bulb turns into heat.
However, just because electric heaters, including light bulbs, are 100% efficient in the conversion of electricity into heat, does not mean they are the most efficient heaters. Converting almost anything else, like gas, into heat, wastes less overall, and most people have devices that move heat without having to make it, aka, a heat pump.