Oldtent Archives 2007 - 2008

.. get the coals red hot, start up the engine, load up with water .. steam power .. a novel new idea .. but will it work lol

   I believe this is why now is a buying opportunity.

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Radomski/jun162008.html

   Good thing are coming.

and I would also never loan the FR any coin collection I had either…..they might return fakes or dollars back to you, instead of the real McCoy you lent them.

They didn’t exactly hire two guys with a truck to secretly move one of the world’s largest and most valuable coin collections over the weekend in Manhattan. But they did use five standard-issue moving vans.

No armored-car convoys. No helicopter gunships. No National Guard outriders flourishing automatic weapons. Just sweaty movers, in blue shirts with their names stitched at the front, schlepping 425 plastic packing crates that were filled with treasures trussed in humble bubble wrap and garden-variety vinyl packing tape.

Yes, the New York Police Department provided an escort, but during more than eight hours on Saturday, one of the great hoards of coins and currency on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was utterly unalarmed as it was bumped through potholes, squeezed by double-parked cars and slowed by tunnel-bound traffic during the trip to its fortresslike new vault a mile to the north.

In the end, the move did not become a caper movie.

“The idea was to make this as inconspicuous as possible,” said Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society. “It had to resemble a totally ordinary office move.”

The collection of 800,000 coins, bank notes, medals, commemorative badges, pins, historic advertising tokens, campaign buttons and other artifacts has been amassed during the 150-year existence of the nonprofit society.

It was transported from the society’s high-security headquarters at 96 Fulton Street, in the former Fidelity and Deposit Company building at the corner of William Street, to its future home, a secure $4 million vault and exhibition space 22 blocks away, on the 11th floor of One Hudson Square, at Varick and Canal Streets.

Even as the moving vans shuttled back and forth, the society’s 14 employees began the endlessly tedious work of unpacking the boxes. They began freeing 12,000 metal trays full of coins from their quarter-inch foam packing, then stacking them in their new locations in custom-built cabinets in a vault erected on the concrete floor of a former printing building.

The society’s holdings rival the comprehensiveness and rarity of those in the Smithsonian Institution and comprise “one of the world’s great collections, the equivalent of those in Berlin, Paris and the British Museum,” said Christopher S. Lightfoot, an associate curator in the department of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“It is a vast, encyclopedic collection of the highest quality,” he added.

Of the collection’s value, Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said, “It is priceless because it has so many unique pieces,” adding with deliberate vagueness that experts had valued it in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The collection “is incredibly valuable, so you can understand why they don’t want to publicize exactly how much,” said Rosemary Lazenby, curator of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

During the move, coded numbers on each sealed crate were checked again and again, and “nothing fell off a truck,” said Andrew R. Meadows, the society’s deputy director.

Society staff members were pledged to secrecy about the timing of the move, and “we didn’t tell our movers what the cargo was until the morning of,” said James McVeigh, operations manager of Time Moving and Storage Inc. of Manhattan, referring to the crew of 20 workers.

“How could you not think that there are crazy people out there who want to do crazy things?” he added, noting that he spent six months planning the move with his brother, Tom, another manager of Time Moving.

And so as bright orange rubber-wheeled crates concealing fabulous doubloons rumbled out onto the sidewalk, pedestrians obliviously headed into the Duane Reade two doors away at 130 William Street.

Amid much shouting and hand gesturing, the moving vans barely squeezed past a parked Duane Reade truck on the narrow street as the drivers maneuvered past water and gas main renovation work on Fulton Street.

Then, before arriving at their loading-dock destination on Watts Street, the trucks had to battle Holland Tunnel approaches clotted with weekenders on the way to the Jersey Shore.

“It’s our first coin collection,” said a New York police detective, Gregory Welch, of Emergency Service Unit Truck One, which shadowed the move with hidden heavy weapons “just in case,” along with patrol cars from the First Precinct. He said his unit was accustomed to protecting Federal Reserve gold transfers and gem shipments in the Midtown diamond district.

So the society lent hundreds of its rarest and most valuable holdings to a museum in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as some 250 gold and silver coins to the Metropolitan.

The society sold its building this year for $23.9 million, “which was mostly for the endowment, and some for the build-out in the new space,” Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said.

The oldest item in the society’s “cabinet” (the coin-maven word for collection) is one of the first coins ever produced, made of gold-silver alloy and issued around 650 B.C. by a Lydian king who was an ancestor of Croesus.

There is also a 2,000-year-old gold aureus coin of the Roman Emperor Augustus; a gold stater of Alexander the Great, dating to about 330 B.C. (minted in Babylon from Persian loot); and one of the rarest examples of Confederate States currency, a $1,000 note printed in Alabama in 1861. Fewer than 700 were printed.

The society also has a library of 100,000 books, pamphlets, manuscripts, catalogs and other items, which will open to the public in September. Read More

Those pistons take water in, and give water out!  No CO2 there either.  I was wrong all along ……

A normal petrol engine is about 25% efficient.  That means to say, of the total energy in a gallon of gas, 25% is used to get you from A to B, and 75% is lost through heat and sound.  So the absolute maximum improvement in gas consumption would be a 3x gain, if you could make the engine 100% efficient.  But they claim a 9x improvement ……

Maya:  lol too!

Hey, Ment! Let’s go for a ride. I’ve got a Gold Train that is powered by water! <G>

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=239564

“Theses firms are running commodities,…      Goldman, Morgan Stanley Profits Conceal Reliance on Commodities”

Aren’t these the same firms that have been telling us Gold is ‘just another commodity’ ?   Maybe someday soon they will follow through and invest in the yellow metal commodity!

step right over here folks .. let me show you how save a bundle.. by spending two,

it will clean the teeth, save your breath, and add glow to the flow.

transform the car into a miracle mile, quanity limited ..only the select few will be chosen ..

give us your blood type, any information on bank accounts ..

also included your favorite bridge. we do deliver.. as promised ..

“I gave up on perpetual motion machines when I was about ten. Water in one end, water out the other and you’ve gone from New York to L.A.”

Yeah, those are the significant inputs/outputs of my body… and I can’t walk nearly that far!  <G>

spend the 2 or 3 grand or more on a test let us know.. then try to get your money back lol

I was recently offered to buy this with with a guarantee that if I do not get at least 50% better

gas mileage,I will get my money back. Did anyone come across this?

http://www.preignitioncc.com/ps/index.htm

who often has little gems he’s picked up from somewhere, although most of his stuff is negated, IMO, by his belief in the accuracy of govt. statistics for his analysis (CPI, unemployment, productivity etc.).

”

As Donald Coxe has noted, North America has had an 18-year run of remarkably good weather in our growing season. You have to go back 800 years to get a string of years that were that good. Yet today food reserves of all types are at decades-long lows. There is very little room for any type of problem.

This growing season is not off to a good start. It looks like the yield on the corn crop will be lower than normal, and that is if we get very benign weather this fall. Given how late much of the US corn crop was planted, and how torrential rains in the corn belt have devastated crops (not to mention flooding cities, and our thoughts and prayers go out to those who have lost their homes to flooding), an early frost would be disastrous.”

ferret would just add, that not only are food reserves at all time lows, but populations are at all time highs too.

Important issue to me is that at least there is R and D focusing on various means to bring alternative systems to production, with more efforts to present potential energy systems to the public (especially by some of he auto manufacturers)”Perpetual motion machines”? Important advances in battery technology are being developed. But, of course no energy will ever be free. I recall from my youth Mechanics Illustrated articles about all types of vehicle power from nuclear to kinetic, etc. virtually free forever. Of course, cynic that I be, I fully expect any new vehicular energy system that is allowed to be produced for the general public, will first require a system for the government leaches to heavily tax it..even if it runs on compressed air, water, or anything else.

“the company’s membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.”

“A chemical reaction.”  Therefore you will have to replace the chemical when it has been used up.  I bet the chemical manufacturer uses CO2 somewhere along the line …..

I gave up on perpetual motion machines when I was about ten.  Water in one end, water out the other and you’ve gone from New York to L.A.  More like NY to La La land!

All figures gleaned from this Perf Chart…
with the Dow along just for fun

stockcharts.com/charts/performance/perf.html?,,

………………………………..HUI….. GOLD….. DOW…….% Move

Jan 1 00 till present….. 500 …..216…… 9
Jan 1 01 till present…. 1034….. 237 …..19
Jan 1 02 till present….. 556 …..225 …..25
Jan 1 03 till present….. 186 …..155 …..52
Jan 1 04 till present….. 72…….114 ……21
Jan 1 05 till present….. 106……109…….20
Jan 1 06 till present….. 39……..66 ……16
Jan 1 07 till present….. 25……..40………1
Jan 1 08 till Present……….2………6 ………-5

No Matter when you start Gold beats the Dow…..somebody tell Erin and Maria….

and…Look at how Gold has outperformed the BIG Gold Stocks for 5 years…..who would coulda thunk it ?