jasong

Nice, that's basically acceptable living wages off working heavily flogged patches. Well, if you ignore the expenses of getting there first...

Hey David, I preordered one back in August, they never shipped it out though?

Garrett's Australian site (posted in that thread above by Geof_Junk) went from Sept to now saying Oct 2022. Their US site doesn't have any dates, and the dealer in my town said they haven't heard any updates from Garrett.

We got a guy for that.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here. But I think gold actually is still an inflation hedge and everything is still working as normal for the rest of the world. Just not in the US right now, because our currency is at historic levels of strength right now. IE - the rest of the world has much worse inflation than we do. Consider how strong the dollar has been against the Euro and Pound, here is a 1 year chart: Now look at the price of gold when priced in British Pounds - gold appears to have hedged against inflation nicely for Brits. Same with most of Europe, and Australia. Because gold has stayed more or less stable or gone down just slightly in USD, but the USD went way up compared to the pound and other currencies. So it depends on what lens one looks at gold through, it seems. As it stands now, it appears that even though US inflation is a major concern, it's a bigger concern almost everywhere else, and so for us - gold isn't hedging anything at the moment since our currency is so strong, relatively speaking. Which means it's been better to own US dollars than gold here lately. Also, in a global society with instant currency trading, gold no longer seems to be a hedge against inflation at a national level, it's more a multi-national inflation hedge now since one's own inflation rate doesn't matter but instead one's inflation rate compared to the rest of the world. Which brings up the question what exactly is the proper hedge against our local USD inflation on the smaller national (US) level now? Some commodity that isn't traded globally? Does it even exist? Real estate? Or, just owning USD is paradoxically a hedge against it's own inflation as long as it's better than the inflation elsewhere?

Ok, so it's still in space so not quite a meteorite technically speaking. First person view of the craft impacting directly into Dimorphos, I linked a few seconds before impact here. For those who don't know what this is - DART is NASA's test craft built to "Armageddon" an asteroid, which is to say it's meant to crash into an asteroid and divert it's course so that it won't catastrophically hit Earth and usher humans out like the dinosaurs. This is the kind of stuff I'm happy my tax dollars go to.

No, it's not the same thing as what you posted - look again.

Yep. Exactly what I've been saying for a while now too - that it wasn't just my machine but it must affect a lot of machines at once since I've noticed it on other machines I've run around/with too, even sometimes when the owners themselves didn't know what they were hearing. At least some aggravated people can stop inferring I was making something up now or saying I'm whining because they can't see it on their specific machine. I take a lot of pride in the accuracy of my field observations with regards to equipment and didn't much appreciate the inferrence that I was just whining or even lying about something that ML already knew was an issue. The 4500 upon first release had a recall to replace mainboards due stability issues, mine was one of them. ML was upfront about it and didn't hide the announcement in a place no one would find and half the world didn't even have access to, so when people reported problems with the 4500 they didn't look like pariahs. Would be nice to see them do the same with the 6000. Some (if not all?) US dealers aren't even aware of this fix yet and it's been out for a while.

I don't really like to talk about specific places I detect on forums, just brings too much of the wrong kind of attention to places. But so much of that area is private, state, or claimed that I guess it doesn't really hurt to say something here, it'd be difficult to prospect without knowing ranchers, getting a prospecting permit from the state, or running into that mining company's claims. Anyways, there were small nuggets and fine gold found on Crow Creek and it's forks going all the way into Cheyenne, reported all the way back to the days of the Transcontinental Railroad. A farmer used to find nuggets in his chicken's crops on one of the forks too. The propensity for poultry to peck up shiny things including nuggets, IMO was the likely origin of the "golden goose" myth, separately. Pretty much all of Wyoming is an intensely interesting area, geologically. The Wyoming Craton was basically it's own little subcontinent in the Archean times, is some of the oldest rock on Earth (some gneiss is 3.6 billion year old), so the suture zone where it long ago collided with the later rock that is now North America can host all nature of interesting mineralogical features. That mine is basically on or very near that suture zone. I believe some of the Montana mineralization is on that same suture zone as it extends north out of Wyoming too.

It's the first here in longer than I've been alive. Hopefully more projects to come too, Wyoming is a great state for mining. Lots of rare earth exploration going on right now too, plus a few large precious metals exploration projects in their infancy as well. Scottsdale Mint is opening up some kind of gold minting and crypto trading facility in Casper too. I believe they are minting a few dozen country's coinage, as well as a lot of raw gold/silver bullion for commodity and dealers. I'm pretty stoked to see that, going to have to visit them and see if they want to mint some coins or bars out of some of my native Wyoming gold.

Wow, that's one of the coolest nuggets I've ever seen!

Gold production still near all time highs plus the world's largest gold/copper mine (Oyu Tolgoi) about to open up, so lots of supply. Demand for gold jewelry going down as other metals come into popularity. Investments in gold is also decreasing both in banking and individual investors as more investment options are created - why own gold when you can own a mining ETF and diversify? Maybe some people put some of that money towards Bitcoin or real estate now, or other potential inflation hedges? And then we have Russia and China both possessing tons of gold to pivot from the dollar, and it's in the best interest of the West to make sure those holdings don't skyrocket in value and fund aggressions. Those are some of the major factors affecting downward prices near as I can tell, but man who knows the days.

Looks like slag and/or smelting glass to me. Maybe a piece of clinker brick in there too. IIRC, the green comes from fluxes that get oversaturated with Fe, reds were often Pb. Unevaporated zinc films gave opalescence. It's been a year since I was playing around with smelting, can't remember exactly. One photo (the one that appears copied from a webpage) is the only real looking rock to me, and it's some kind of sage green quartzite or grainy chert.

Unfortunately no yellow gold in these, just an unusual looking bookend or desk rock basically. These things come out of a deep marine shale that isn't really noted for any precious metals...but it is noted for black gold (oil).

Nothing of great value here, just something fun to do while taking a break from prepping a house to put siding up and paint. I knew that there was septarian nodules found in Wyoming and Utah, so last night I decided to do a bit of research and figure out where they might be coming from. It's been raining lately so I didn't want to make a long journey just to get stuck or not be able to get all the way to my destination, so I decided to just go right outside of town now that I knew what I was looking for and where they might be, geologically speaking. There were a couple areas that seemed like they'd host septarian right close in. Actually I was so close to town still that there were houses within sight! Yet this location seems to be entirely unknown and uncollected. In a few minutes I was able to locate some highly fractured septarians. A bit more poking around and I was able to find some nodule fragments that were competent enough to not fall apart entirely. I decided to dig into the fragments a bit more and came out with on larger, seemingly unfractured large chunk which I spent about 15 minutes digging out with my rock hammer. It's bigger than it looks, it's about 75lbs. I have a 3ft rock saw that is big enough to cut this one with, but it's not set up just yet as I've moved and need to fix my new place up first with water, a proper electrical outlet, etc. I'll cut it later on though, along with the first two pieces. The big one will be a mystery since it's so covered with dirt that I can't see what kind of veining or crystals it has in it through the grime yet. I love cutting rocks, every one is like a surprise inside, never know what you will get. I did cut some of the smaller hand sized fragments I found. Unfortunately, at this locality all the nodules are extremely fractured. Even some of the more compentent rock still displays small fractures inside when cut. So the specimens aren't the greatest, but still kinda cool. And it's like a 5 minute trip from town too. Anyways, this is what the smaller ones look like. I think the cutting oil vs using water to cut them turns the grayish limestone part darker than normal septarians. They'd probably look a bit lighter and more gray/less brown if polished. This one turned out pretty nice I think. I wish I would have cut it about 3/4" further into the center and exposed that calcite geode effect a bit more though. Cutting rocks is like my zen time, I like it a lot. There is a real bonsai type art to sizing up a rock, looking it over carefully, and figuring out exactly where to put the cut. I have a long way to go to reach master bonsai cutter level. Anyways, a bit of a change from ID requests. Figured I'd post some more everyday prospecting/rockhounding type stuff here, just stuff to keep an eye out for. Maybe someone will see this and recognize them in the rough while out on a hike now too, as they are definitely one of those rocks easy to walk right past but that can look really cool when cut.