Lead (Pb) price continues to skyrocket

Well, then, why not use rocks in place of toilet paper? After all, rocks are free, right?

Just because something is free doesn't mean it's good to be used for any particular thing.

Reply to
Adam Corolla
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I'm not sold on jacked at all. In fact, I shoot almost exclusively lead. Up until recently lead bullets were reasonably priced and allowed me to shoot my customary 300 rounds a week pretty inexpensively. Now it's getting way too expensive. Like I said, I don't relish casting over a thousand lead bullets a month. But what's worse than the casting is the lube/sizing that has to be done too. That really makes it a time consuming pain in the ass. But with .45 caliber bullets going to .09 a piece I may start up again. One good thing is that my supplier for .357 hollow base wadcutters has some in stock, not the 2000 I wanted but he has a few 500 piece bags and they still go for around a nickel each. That's more like it. I guess I'll have to hope for a recession so commodities will be in less demand and prices will come down. Looks like you get a bad deal either way. Prices only go in one direction...up. I sure wish they would stop printing so much money. It's getting to be worthless. I bought a loaf of rye bread today. It was $3.27. The money is getting worth less and less every day.

Hawke

Reply to
Hawke

Chuckle!

Getting to be worthless? I think we passed "getting to be" one hell of a long time ago.

Now there's a man after my own heart. I love rye bread. Good on ya', Hawke.

Harold

Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

Achieving the temperature isn't the problem. We can do that with an induction furnace. As you alluded, containing the heat is. Tungsten melts well above almost everything---something like double the temp required to melt high temperature refractories.

Harold

Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

although in this case "rock" is semi suitable

slighty more so than using unwanted laser printed sheets of paper as toilet paper (Can you imagine the paper cuts that would cause in the LAST place you EVER want a paper cut)

Reply to
Brent

Melting point [/K]: 3695 [or 3422 °C (6192 °F)]

Best Regards Tom.

Reply to
azotic

Funny you should mention that...

The place:- BALCO power station, India.

The problems:- Bog paper is in short supply and very expensive and the screaming s**ts are a regular occurrence.

The coincidence:-A large crate containing all our performance test equipment for two Turbine performance tests had sat at Calcutta in the monsoon after being opened by customs for inspection... 50lbs of HP Thinkjet printer paper gone wrinkly due to getting wet.

The solution:- HP Thinkjet printer paper, when cut into half sheets and well crumpled, makes excellent bog paper. Very strong. Quite soft and _much_ better than nothing!

We did try photocopier paper, It wasn't nice.

Mark Rand RTFM

Reply to
Mark Rand

'Thanks, Tom. Seems perfect for making toast! :-)

Harold

Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

Truly, information overload! :-)

Harold

Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

I see. Is it ever necessary to actually melt tungsten?

Reply to
Adam Corolla

Are you joking, or do you really believe that the amount of money that's printed affects its value?

Reply to
Adam Corolla

OK, I posted a message asking if you were joking about this, but I later thought it would make more sense to specify what part I am stuck on.

So here's the part I get, and the part I don't get.

Let's take the example of iridium, the element. It's price is around that of gold (I'm not sure if that's accurate, but this is just an example.) But, gold is much more common. The reason iridium isn't much more expensive than gold is because there's not much demand for it.

So, a thing's value is based on how many people want it (and how badly they want it) vs. how common or scarce it is (or more accurately, how easy it is to get.)

So, if gold nuggets the size of golf balls suddenly appeared on every square foot of the earth, the value of gold would drop to nothing, because if you want some you can just go pick some up. I think you agree that this is simple reasoning, I just want to set this as a starting point.

Money is probably the most desired thing there is, because it can be exchanged for just about anything. So, the varying factor in its value will be how easy it is to get.

If all the tree leaves and blades of grass became various denominations of money, then money would be worthless. Not because there's more OF it, but because it's easy to get. If the government printed five hundred trillion dollars tomorrow and sealed it all away so no one could get to it, the value of money wouldn't change even there's a hell of a lot more of it because it's no easier to obtain. Do you agree?

Now, do you see where I'm going with this? When the government prints additional money, how does that extra money make it easier to obtain a given amount of it? Let's say the government opened the vault with the 500 trillion in it and did with it whatever they do with all the extra money they print (which is what? I don't know.) How does that extra money make money easier to obtain? Do all companies suddenly give raises when they find out there's more money in the economy, so that money becomes easier to obtain? I think the key here is in finding out what the government does with the extra money. I'll be grateful to anyone who can explain that to me.

Reply to
Adam Corolla

Are you joking, or do you really fail to understand that it does?

It's a simple supply-and-demand issue.

Reply to
Doug Miller

In article , "Adam Corolla" wrote: [snip]

What you're missing is that it's easy to get because there's more of it.

Obvious -- but so what? They don't do that. They print it, and then release it into circulation.

What do they do with it? They give a hell of a lot of it away.

Suggest you start with a good textbook on macroeconomics from your public library.

Reply to
Doug Miller

Printed dollars are only a small portion of the "money" that's available in the economy. Most of it is in the form of demand deposits -- ciphers on a page, or, today, bits in a computer. The cash is just based on a calculation of how much of that "money" is needed to keep the wheels of commerce greased.

The story of money is a confusing and tricky one. There are good explanations written for college students of economics, and others written for laymen. One of the most enjoyable of the latter is John Kenneth Galbraith's _Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went_, but there are newer ones that probably are more to the point. He takes you by way of the Babylonians and ancient Greece to get to Wall Street.

-- Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

I think the answer to that would be that if we had the capability to do so, yes, melting it would open doors to making unknown items that are now not possible.

Harold

Reply to
Harold and Susan Vordos

That makes a lot more sense to me than the simplistic belief that inflation is caused by the government printing too much money.

I agree, but the particular questions I'm asking are not very complex at all:

What does the government do with the extra money they print?

Is there a particular mechanism (or example of a mechanism) through which printing more money directly causes the value of each monetary unit to drop?

It shouldn't take more than a few sentences to answer these questions for the most part.

That actually sounds somewhat interesting. However, can you answer the particular question of what the feds do with the extra money they print--how it gets into circulation?

Reply to
Adam Corolla

Cool... Thanks!

Reply to
Adam Corolla

You didn't really answer my questions. Probably my fault for my rambling, random style in my post--I apologize, I was very drowsy then. I'll try to state my questions as clearly as possible.

  1. How does the government's printing more money make money easier to obtain? Can you give an example, lease?
  2. What do you mean by "they release it into circulation"? This is the crucial point, because as I explained, there being more of something (like money) doesn't make that thing less valuable--it's the ease of obtaining it which determines its value. No one I know has access to some percentage of the "money in circulation." People draw wages or salaries, or sell things to people who draw wages or salaries. If the government dumped a trillion bucks "into circulation" tomorrow for example, by what mechanism would it cause prices to rise?

For example, let's say I raise corn. My sale price of corn is based on my cost to raise it and my profit margin. The only way I'm going to raise my prices is if the demand for corn goes up vs. the supply and I can make more profit, or if my expenses rise. My expenses may include electricity, water, fuel, equipment and various chemicals.

  1. "They give a hell of a lot of it away." So, when the government prints extra currency, they give much of it away? Do you mean in handouts such as veterans benefits, social security, disaster relief, foreign aid and such?
  2. During times of high unemployment and layoffs, money becomes more difficult to obtain. However, these times are not usually noted for low inflation or deflation. Why?

The questions I'm asking don't require pages and pages of complicated answers, just a few sentences will suffice. Therefore, the answer "go read a book" will be taken as an admission that you don't know the answers.

Also, I would like to know if you hold the belief that reducing taxes results in stimulation of the US economy which ends up bringing more income into the government by increased tax revenue.

Reply to
Adam Corolla

To the extent that monetary policy causes or limits inflation (it's a big factor), the policy that has most to do with it is the setting of overnight lending rates -- the rate controlled by the Fed, and the one that gets so much attention when the Fed makes a fractional change in the rate. Through an indirect chain of events this influences loans and thus the amount of money in circulation. There are other factors, such as changes in the reserve ratios that banks are required to hold, and then a whole variety of other things that get involved. And then there is fiscal policy.

The simple way to describe it is that changes in the money supply is the result of how many loans are granted by banks. I would not recommend trying to understand this by means of messages in a NG. You'll need a good book, especially to see the theory and the practice of controlling inflation.

I don't know what you mean by "extra" money. The government prints money to replace worn-out or damaged money, which is retired. And they print money at the request of banks, who make a deposit with the Fed equal to the amount of currency they request. People get their hands on that currency by in turn making a deposit of their own at a bank that got the currency from the Fed. The peoples' "deposits" include those that result from taking out a loan from the bank.

Paper money is not much of an issue. It's reserve ratios and loan policies that are the big issue.

If you want explanations of all this and you don't want to go for a book, look around the web. Here's a site that looks like it has good basic explanations, although I haven't checked it enough to be sure:

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There is a common misconception that the government prints currency at its whim and then tosses it out into the market somehow. That's not actually how it works. Any currency on the market comes about as the result of a deposit in some kind of bank. But the currency is just the grease. The questions you're asking should really be about the gears and wheels: the process of creating deposits, which are where most of the money is.

There are a couple of ways the government creates money, but, again, that money is in the form of credit and resulting deposits, in one form or another. The currency just comes about when someone needs currency for small trades of various kinds.

Take a look at that website and check the basic entries about what money is, etc. You'll get the general picture pretty quickly.

It's an interesting subject, IMO. I hope you enjoy getting into it.

-- Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

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