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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • These coins will never circulate.

    Commemorative coins like this are usually sold at a significant markup (even beyond the fact a “silver dollar” has about $30 worth of silver at today’s bullion prices. Some of the markup is often set aside for a fund-raising purpose.

    These will go directly into the albums of coin collectors, who to be blunt, tend to skew old, white, and MAGA. (If you go to a coin show, there will be plenty of right wing and Trump paraphernalia).

    The ironic thing is that “really successful” commemorative coins tend to not appreciate well, because they glut any market. The most valuable modern coins tend to be either stuff that was deliberately underproduced (example: the 1996-W silver eagle that was only available with the purchase of almost two ounces of gold coins) or stuff that was ugly and unexciting and so they produced far less than the original allotment.

    There are plenty of people who drag down their inheritance of 1970s proof sets, mail-order/shop-at-home products that are $10 worth of coin in $100 worth of packaging, high-markup bullion items, and market-glut commemoratives, just to discover that Grandpa should have bought AAPL instead. Often the “investment” didn’t even beat inflation, and in the worst cases, they actually lost money in nominal dollar terms. I suspect a bag full of Kirk dollars would be a red flag to any appraiser in 2050.





  • I expect the hype people to do hype, but I’m frustrated that the consumers are also being hypemen. So much of this stuff, especially at the corporate level, is FOMO rather than actually delivered value.

    If it was any other expensive and likely vendor-lockin-inducing adventure, it would be behind years of careful study and down-to-the-dime estimates of cost and yield. But the same people who historically took 5 years to decide to replace an IBM Wheelwriter with a PC and a laser printer are rushing to throw AI at every problem up to and including the men’s toilet on the third floor being clogged.












  • Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently “democracy” has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.

    They don’t teach that style of crazy in dictator school.

    As for the “Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up”, duh, but I figure there’s perhaps some chance to exploit some “we’ve been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it” and “we’re a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally” mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.