Some (many? most? IDK) gold sellers are scammers. They will sell you overvalued stuff and insist it’s extra-valuable because of some feature they made up. They are the ones being loud on the web and making you hear about it all the time. So, if you hear an ad, and buy gold, you’ve probably fallen for a scam.

But investing in gold by itself is just like any other commodity. And just to say, the rule on that last phrase is valid for almost everything (it’s absolutely valid for stocks and investment funds).

The amount changes all the time, and depends on what you define “money” as.

Almost every country (every one on the WTO) publishes monthly volumes. Here’s the one for the US if you consider that money is cash and the contents of all the bank accounts:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

That “M1” is a standard definition, that is easy to search for any country.

If you start to add things like credit card balances and government papers that can be used in most large transaction, you arrive at the other definitions. There’s a wiki page for them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

The M1 to M3 set is an international standard, but many countries add other definitions to their publications.

EDIT:

And of course, I didn’t tell how the amount changes.

Each kind of money changes by its own particular process, that is actually quite obvious once you think of money that way.

Cash is printed by the government, and destroyed mostly by it too (but some times by accident). It’s a form of government debit.

Bank deposits are created when banks make loans (that is, they get somebody’s money and give to another person, but still keeping the first person’s money on their account), and destroyed when the loan id paid back.

Credit card debit is created when people buy stuff on credit, and destroyed when they pay it back.

And so on.

officially informed when Brazil achieved enrichment capabilities in the 80s

That one was about the official nuclear program, that wasn’t intended to create nuclear weapons. The Brazilian nuclear weapons program was a secret out of the clearance level of the official nuclear program so there was never any interaction between them.

And yes, it was in the later 80s, when Brazil was trying to repair the damaged relations with Argentina.

I have no deep sources in English, but Wikipedia has some references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

Argentina’s last dictatorship was extremely afraid of Brazil attacking them.

During the last dictatorships in South America, Brazil and Argentina were in a bit of an arms race.

One day, the Brazilian government created a nuclear program that over the course of several years managed to enrich some nanograms of uranium. The Argentinian gov started their own program as a response.

When both countries published their data, the Argentinians had plenty of spying documents saying that the Brazilian program had incredibly security, they could only discover a small lab and some people digging missile silos.

(And yeah, the Argentinians managed to enrich milligrams of uranium, beating Brazil by 2 orders of magnitude.)

As kolanaki already said, but as a general rule: if it’s simple, probably everybody already knows it.

But if you are sure you discovered something nobody else knows, you can always bet against some companies and tell it to everybody. If you didn’t need internal access to discover it, it’s legal almost everywhere.

If the Global Economy can be destroyed by something a random person can discover in a garage, it’s up to the Global Economy to deal with it.

In Brazil every expense that is required by law just keeps getting paid, whether there’s a budget or not.

We spent 4 months this year without a budget due to neither house agreeing with each other and none agreeing wit the Executive. Almost nobody noticed, it didn’t even make it into news.

In a high-level, you don’t design them anymore. You write them, in code. The compiler turns your code into the chip masks, and has an optimizer that will mangle the hell out of the relatively simple stuff you wrote.

In a lower level, that compilation is not really done automatically, and people will intervene in lots of places, and AFAIK, how people divide it and interact with it are well guarded secrets from the chip makers.

If you use moodle, it has a plugin for that, with instructions.

If you don’t use moodle, you may want to check the instructions on the plugin anyway.

You think you are tacking ‘real’ issues with your servers, but to the average user you seem just as crazy as a guy with a basement full of beans and piss jugs, screaming about the government is watching us constantly.

The government is watching us constantly. There’s no doubt about this and if you think it’s not, you are the crazy one living in fantasy land.

At the same time, how do you think a basement full of beans would help? The entire path from “the government is bad” to “therefore I’ll have a hole full of food where I can live by myself for years” is dumb magical thinking that can be shown to not work by simply looking around or reflecting about oneself for a second.

There are many valid reasons to be concerned about a disaster. And yet nobody doing your traditional prepping for anything larger than a tornado deserves respect.

But somehow he is still old and scarred.

Ouch, I never even considered the idea of private prosecution in criminal courts. Looks like a remedy that is worse than the disease.

It doesn’t matter if there are entire battalions of lawyers looking for it. Persecutors have the monopoly on getting people charged with crimes.

The other question you can ask is: why isn’t the entire press on fire complaining about government workers committing crimes all day over all over the country?

Anything can be “pseudo”-any other thing if you apply enough pressure on the definitions.

Also, honest question: Are you cake?

It kinda is.

There exist a hierarchy of needs, it’s a subjective one but all people share a large part of it. There also exists a very objective and measurable hierarchy of production.

Interpreting that as “low-herarchy factors are X” is useless and dishonest unless X means “things we need to prioritize in a crisis”. And saying any of that comes from Marxism or any kind of communist theory is just bullshit.

At the end of the day all governments are desperately afraid of making people angry (at them), from the healthiest democracy to the most totalitarian dictatorship

One would think so. But a quick glance at Russia, or even the current US one would show you otherwise.

Most governments don’t seem to pay a lot of attention to it. Democracies tend to be the most concerned ones, but it still varies a lot.

China seems very stable to me. Their government is afraid of making people angry, and removing basic help like that is very likely to make people angry.

But also, it seems to me that the “generally” in “generally free” is doing some work. AFAIK, some care is free, some care isn’t. And the pretty good quality of life doesn’t seem to be universally distributed. Both of those seem to be improving quickly, but the “people are better than in the US” impression one may take from that comment seems to be a misrepresentation.

He’s supposed to be super-strong.

It’s a very beautiful moon. Too bad one needs a telescope to see it.

What are you doing? If we can see the cat, we will know if it died.