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Comment by Fluorescence | Hacker News Reader

You've got to love this tale:

> While performing a conjuring trick for the amusement of his children in 1843 Brunel accidentally inhaled a half-sovereign coin, which became lodged in his windpipe. A special pair of forceps failed to remove it, as did a machine devised by Brunel to shake it loose. At the suggestion of his father, Brunel was strapped to a board and turned upside-down, and the coin was jerked free.

It feels like the hacker spirit - the enthusiasm for dumb tricks and then having to invent your way out the pickle you have got yourself in.

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"At the suggestion of his father, ..."

We shouldn't forget Marc Brunel was also a great engineer and no doubt a very practical man. :-)

He was a Hacque man after all.. (born in Hacqueville)

Ha, I know! And son Isambard spent time in France training. Funny isn't it that the British don't spend more time emphasising the French connection.

;-)

The average Briton might well have awareness through this documentary, where Brunel came second to Churchill in a public vote following the "Great Britons" TV series :

https://youtu.be/QwHnVH9jWmU?si=lFShZQ4WMvRQwiys

The French origins of his father Marc are mentioned very early on.

Half-sovereign is a small gold coin (4g). Face value £0.50, but current gold value £194.15, so ~400% inflation since Britain came off the gold standard in 1931. Definitely worth extracting.

Interesting about the inflation here.

In 1931 mean wages in the UK are reckoned to have been 1s (£0.05) per hour [1].

Currently mean wages in the UK are £617 per week (40hrs) or £15.42 per hour [2].

So a half sov in 1931 was worth 10hrs of work, while today it's worth 12.60hrs of work. Quite interesting that it's value has risen (in real terms) even while it's stopped being a currency (more or less). Perhaps because it's actually useful in electronics now (not so much in 1931).

So gold has had real

[1] https://www.pocketpence.co.uk/wages-1930s-12269131.html [2] https://www.forbes.com/uk/advisor/business/average-uk-salary...

Nothing to do with industrial use of gold, which is negligible, compared to mine supply (~3,000t/yr) and jewelry consumption.

Labor in UK (and wider western world) has lost out compared to gold, due to globalization (net benefit to the world). That is irreversible.

Gold has lost out to tech and speculative risky investments, for now. That is certainly reversible. Watch this space 2024-5.

I think globalisation is very much reversable and in fact is being reversed at a rate of knots by things like Biden's green deal

Yes, it's somewhat interesting that gold is now more expensive (in terms of worth in hours worked) than when countries where on the gold standard.

I think you mean 40,000% inflation?

Yes, of course!

Slip of the orders of magnitude.

Hard to believe, but true.

Compound interest/inflation - the most powerful force in the universe (see Einstein). For good (interest) and ill (inflation).

All those investment advisors never mention the real interest rate, which is the key factor (and famously hard to measure, after all the Goodhart's Law shenanigans of govt and central banks manipulating RPI/CPI core/not and TIPS/breakevens).

Compare https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-t...

I don't think the real interest rate is that hard to measure. You don't have to pick your local government's favoured measure of inflation, just pick your own.

Eg in the long run you could pick the Big Mac index. Or you could pick some other country's official price level measure and multiply it by the exchange rate with their currency. (In the short run, you have different real price levels between countries, but perhaps they even out in the long run.)

...And the coin'd be tremendously handy if one lived to 200!

It's precisely the same spirit.

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