patrick.net

Great piece. Although I'm not so hot on gold since you can bet your ass that if push comes to shove, the powers that be will F the gold holders, esp. the paper ones.

Ag Land seems to be the better choice. Commodities aren't bad these days, they might turn downwards sharply, but the land and commodities is always worth something.

John Bailo says

there is the unpaid or underpaid Thought Workers who are pouring this stuff out in Patrick.net and in comments sections. There are people reading Facebook posts day after day put out there by everyone from businesses to housewives. But The Markets are not valuing or rewarding these things that are starting to constitute a big part of our lives.

There is nothing wrong with it. Market is not a panacea. It is not supposed to value new and revolutionary developments. There are other cultural mechanisms in society that take care of that. Humanity developed great values and ideas long before the “markets” existed in the modern sense of this word.

Modern markets are a part of democratic societies (just another type of voting mechanism); they inherit all the traditional problems of democracy. Markets (and democracies) tend to either destroy the new ideas (Socrates, anybody?) or overvalue them (market bubbles).

Of course, the need for a better mechanism exists, because we now have massive value creation that utilizes information technology (web, blogosphere, wikipedia, patric.net etc.). But the “market” is not it and never will be.

Good read