Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

straightdope.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 159 posts

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#131

Post by jaapz »

exidy wrote: post #130
Dr_Birdbrain wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to read about the impact on SE Asia that continue until today. Do you have a recommended resource?

It’s a broad subject. You have the existence of the Philippines itself, which is the only majority Christian nation in Asia, and given it passed from Spain to the USA, this influences everything from US force projection in the Pacific to the prevalence of BPO outsourcing to the sectarian conflicts in Mindanao. More directly from the trade itself and the silver it brought permanently altered the demographics, flora an…

The book 1493 by charles c mann is an interesting read about this

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#132

Post by euroderf »

gtech1 wrote: post #52
caminante wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? If you melt down gold, how are you not staring at the same gold? Moscow didn't steal anything either.

Hah, and me who thought they only stole Romania's national treasure, under the guise of 'safekeeping'. I guess Russia has always been a shitty country.

> I guess Russia has always been a shitty country.

Eight hundred years is time enough to perfect it.

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#133

Post by Peanuts99 »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #54
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Value is ultimately always in the eye of the beholder. If you mean value per se, not at all. There are difference kinds of value (intrinsic, instrumental). A piece of bread has objective nutritional value, for example. It doesn’t matter whether you personally dislike bread.

Nope. As a trivial example, someone with celiac’s disease is not going to value your gluten ridden bread very high.

There are intrinsic properties of bread such as calorific content that a celiac can't deny. Same with gold.

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#134

Post by CTDOCodebases »

colechristensen wrote: post #123
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is easier in hindsight isn't it? Especially with such a complex problem. > The COVID restrictions needed to be less and end sooner What would we have been optimizing for here? GDP? Deaths? ICU Capacity? Lifestyle? Or would we weight them? If so would we take 2nd and 3rd order effects into consideration? > An example graph, when restrictions should have been on or off left as an exercise to the reader I liv…

>Everything is easier in hindsight isn't it? Especially with such a complex problem. I wrote the following July 2020: >And with all of this money being injected into the economy, we are absolutely going to get an enormous amount of inflation... eventually. You could see it as already happening with the valuation of the stock market. And in January 2022: >It’s time to admit defeat and plan for what that looks like and…

Not so much hindsight as "what I've been saying all along".

It was a dynamic situation and it sounds like the only things that you were optimizing for in your mind was inflation and covid deaths whiles ignoring second order effects and data that likely wasn't available to the public.

You are like a person who kept telling everyone it was 12:00am but it wasn't, then when it finally became 12:00am and everyone agreed you jumped up and said "See guys it's 12:00am why didn't anyone listen to me! I was right all along!".

It's a bit rich to blame all the inflation on the financial response to the pandemic without taking into consideration the effect the pandemic had on logistics or considering what would have happened if the government didn't spend enough. Also it's probably worth mentioning that the Fed operates independently and is tasked with only financial functions.

> The science was out in the open in papers and government statistics for anyone with scientific training to read. Politicians were caving to polarized public opinions on both sides to take advantage of and encourage their chosen pole.

No argument here except to say it's one thing to know the science and it's another thing to act on the science.

> Those of us talking about moderation and common sense reactions were demonize by one side or usually both depending on the venue. Nobody in leadership had the balls to lead and try to make people understand a middle path based on reason.

If there is one thing I know it's that common sense only exists when people share the same values and assumptions. Why for example was it acceptable to you that 1 out of 1000 people died of covid? Why not more? Why not less?

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#135

Post by lo_zamoyski »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #54
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Value is ultimately always in the eye of the beholder. If you mean value per se, not at all. There are difference kinds of value (intrinsic, instrumental). A piece of bread has objective nutritional value, for example. It doesn’t matter whether you personally dislike bread.

Nope. As a trivial example, someone with celiac’s disease is not going to value your gluten ridden bread very high.

The nutritional value of bread is still in the bread, even if celiac disease impedes or frustrates access to that value.

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#136

Post by lo_zamoyski »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #71
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are of poorer quality by every utilitarian measure than a crystal-oscillator driven one, but command much higher prices and status. But the value of the watch is not reducible to its value as a timekeeping device. (Even here, you could argue that the mechanical watch has more instrumental value as a timekeeping device where batteries are unavailable.) A mechanical watch has greater value as a mechanical watch…

> A mechanical watch has greater value as a mechanical watch Note that this cannot work as a theory of value; everything has infinite value if you define value as "the ability of a thing to be itself".

There are various kinds of value and it is a mistake to confuse them or to reduce them to just one kind.

W.r.t. your imputed definition, there is a sense in which everything is irreplaceable, because the identity of two things that are otherwise entirely identical is never the same; that X is never this X.

But I was not making the claim that the value of something is its “ability be itself”. I was claiming that a thing x of kind A is more valuable as an A than a thing y of kind B as an A, where A is not B. This is trivially true.

Consider the utilitarian value of a pencil as an object for writing and consider a particle accelerator. It should be clear that the utility of a pencil as a writing instrument is greater than the utility of a particle accelerator as a writing instrument. The particle accelerator is more complex as a piece of technology, but so what? It has no value as an instrument for writing down your grocery list.

In any case, I was not proposing a comprehensive basis for a theory of value on this notion alone, so I’m not sure how you managed to selectively read that into my comment. It was only listed as one way in which one could say that a mechanical watch is more valuable than a Casio.

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#137

Post by skybrian »

colechristensen wrote: post #103
nradov wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We sometimes see similar localized effects when wealthy foreign governments and NGOs go into poor countries to "help" with foreign aid and investment. When done correctly this can boost the local economy in a sustainable way, kind of priming the pump. But often it just dumps a lot of cash in, causing price inflation as the supply of goods and services fails to keep pace with the supply of money.

Outside influence heavily distorts local economies and needs to be done extremely carefully or you end up making a few people rich and starving everybody else.

Maybe, but not in this case:

> Early data from a sub-district pilot showed sharp reductions in extreme poverty and improved wellbeing with minimal inflation, showing direct cash is a scalable tool to accelerating the end of extreme poverty.

https://www.givedirectly.org/district-scale/

Perhaps things are different in Malawi?

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#138

Post by colechristensen »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #134
colechristensen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everything is easier in hindsight isn't it? Especially with such a complex problem. I wrote the following July 2020: >And with all of this money being injected into the economy, we are absolutely going to get an enormous amount of inflation... eventually. You could see it as already happening with the valuation of the stock market. And in January 2022: >It’s time to admit defeat and plan for what that looks like and…

Not so much hindsight as "what I've been saying all along". It was a dynamic situation and it sounds like the only things that you were optimizing for in your mind was inflation and covid deaths whiles ignoring second order effects and data that likely wasn't available to the public. You are like a person who kept telling everyone it was 12:00am but it wasn't, then when it finally became 12:00am and everyone agreed y…

>It's a bit rich to blame all the inflation on the financial response to the pandemic without taking into consideration the effect the pandemic had on logistics or considering what would have happened if the government didn't spend enough. Also it's probably worth mentioning that the Fed operates independently and is tasked with only financial functions.

The treasury spent an extra $2 trillion which the Fed facilitated the creation of and your response is "what about logistics??", hindsight isn't 20/20 for you and sky isn't blue it's a ham sandwich. It is pointless discussing this with people like you, this is why we can't have nice things.

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#139

Post by caminante »

gtech1 wrote: post #120
caminante wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read again and calm down. I expressly said "ex gold." >Bolsheviks ? Lmao. Where are you getting these falses premises? 1. Who rose to power after Russia collapsed in 2017? 2. There was no Bolshevik fighting or presence in Bessarabia? 3. Romania didn't intervene to fight Bolsheviks in Bessarabia? You must be hallucinating to think otherwise.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_military_intervention...

1. You use 'ex' to mean except ? In common parlance ex means 'example'. So your phrase becomes: National treasures (example gold) were returned in '35 and '56. Which is what I responded to. Gold was part bars and part rare historical coins. Also still unreturned, which is extremely valuable: Queen Marie’s jewels were not returned The Romanian Crown Jewels were not returned Royal and dynastic archives Private deposits…

>In common parlance ex means 'example'.

This claim is wrong.

You meant to say "ex." is common, noting the period for the abbreviation. Whereas ex is commonly used (See "ex dividend".) as I did above.

I'm skipping the rest of your reply because it's a waste of time after you loaded up with a spiteful tone -- "you don't know what you're talking about"-- only to be wrong about language and somehow you dispute the Wikipedia article which clearly mentions (anti-)Bolshevik opponents.

Re: What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

#140

Post by colechristensen »

marcosdumay wrote: post #117
colechristensen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people won't point to the actual causes: - The COVID free-money needed to be less and to end sooner - The COVID restrictions needed to be less and end sooner The disease didn't go away, we just at one point decided we were done with restrictions even though conditions didn't change. We needed restrictions ONLY during spikes and more consideration needed to be given to the long term economic effects of COVID polic…

If you are talking about the US, the COVID money needed to be distributed to the people, not to rich investors to buy stock and land.

... $900+ billion dollars in the US were given directly to the people.
Post reply on HN