hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0613.txt

Episode: 613
Title: HPR0613: alternative investing and how the internet changes the game
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0613/hpr0613.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:53:05

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So
Good day.
My name is JWP and normally you can find me on the JWP Linux and open source podcast.
But today I'm doing a hacker public radio show and my topic doesn't really fit into Linux
or open source and so it fits really well into more of the geekiness of hacker public
radio.
What I wanted to talk today about was that for a while now I thought that the world was
changing and you know being an American I often think that the world changes without
me because of our views and the way our education system works and the fact that we don't
speak any other languages other than English normally if you're a wide American.
What I wanted to talk about the day was that the way that we're learning our online lives and
the way that we're reviewing our investments may be wrong.
You know I guess you could say I'm middle age now I'm 47 and I've been saving very regularly for
about since the early 80s and I've seen the 401k go down and I've seen equity and a number of
companies that I thought were pretty good end up not working and the internet has brought us to
a place where there's a bit more of a community a bit more of a touching and I actually looked
on Ron Paul's website where he talked about what was going on with him and his investing and how
that was working and I was really surprised that almost all of his things were in hard assets
gold, property, while a treasury bill or savings bond isn't a hard asset it's certainly a very
good asset and almost none of it was in an equity type investment and I find that that's pretty
amazing pretty amazing and back to the internet and how I managed it well I use e-trade and I have a
lot of other traditional things you know that I got while I was in the army back in the 80s and 90s
you know before the internet came but I use it pretty pretty much and I'm very happy with it
but I was very concerned that there wasn't any alternative forms of investment now recently
there's been some EFTs that you could invest in raw the raw metal itself you know you can look
it up EFT gold and you can invest in the pure gold and pure bouillon and pure several other pure
metal things out there where you actually physically invest in the thing and and and and I've tried
that and I think that that that works really well because it's a physical thing I mean savings bonds
you're only getting like half a percent off of now even though it's guaranteed a bank account and
I would have been really impressed with PayPal for currency or or for currency changes and
and what happens is that with the your PayPal and most people don't know this and only learned it
because of that I that I live in Europe and I have an American eBay account and also have a
Germany pay account and what they let me do is I let me set up a a a German PayPal account
that's funded by my American savings account and and of course you have to declare all of the
interest in everything but what it does is it gives you a cost-free way to convert dollars to
or sorry at least I haven't noticed any massive charge in doing that and so that's one way that you
can diversify a little bit the other way is is I found a way that you know I really like to
do it now it used to be that I would put like 25 bucks into my RRA every time I went to the bank
because if I went to the bank then I was being stupid not using the online so I would punish myself
take 25 dollars out and punish myself but what I do now is is through PayPal they have this thing called
micro place and what it is is it gives people a little loan you know I only do 20 dollars a
time they have like hundreds of these things there so if one of them goes bad well hey I'm out 20
bucks but it made me feel a lot better and that greater return is at least as what a bank gives
sometimes better and you get the you know the pleasure of knowing that you helped someone in need
and you know these things just aren't in Africa they have South Texas listed there as well you know
lots of women's programs are there and and you get your money back I've been doing it for a
couple of years and you do get your money back and they do pay the dividends on it and like I said
it's 20 dollars at a time normally that I put in there and I'm pretty amazed that the number one
that they've never ripped me off that nobody never did pay back their 20 bucks and number two that
it pays as good as a bank now nothing's guaranteed and so not all your eggs go in that basket but
I would definitely look at hard at hard assets and more of a charitable type of investment
of investment in such things you know it's you know if you go to the micro place website it says
what do your investments say about you and do they reflect your values and hopes for the world
and you know I had to look at it and you know chasing that stock that's going to return 40% a year
or you know I I think that there's a finite amount of gold in the world I also silver platinum
uranium oil and I think that as the east develops in Russia and in China and in India that these
people are going to want this oil this gold this copper these raw materials and I think that
companies that invest in these things and that if you own these things physically own these things
you're going to do much better than if you invested in say shares of IBM or you'll
the Packard or any of these other things and if you invest in these micro economies in South Texas or
in Africa or in I invested in one the other day that was he wanted to grow organic cocoa
in the Dominican Republic and I was like okay if he wants to do that it was quite quite fine
the other thing I haven't done it because there's a high cost to get into it and
is that in Germany and you can look on the internet and find places in America that do it too
you invest in shares of something not stocks but a share of something like I got a letter the
other day from a German investment company in Hamburg that was selling shares of a locomotive
right and like you would get a one one thousand share of a locomotive and you and a thousand
other people would own share and this locomotive and the locomotive would be fully insured so if
there was an accident with the locomotive you would get your money back but you would share
in one hundred of the profits of this locomotive for the harbor of Hamburg for the
duration of the life of locomotive and they do this with ships and solar panels and wind turbines
any kind of infrastructure asset that would require a long-term investing like investing in a
toll road maybe in America but I've never seen that offered to the normal people I would really
like to see American investing switch to more help I own three one hundredths of this windmill
in Utah that's turning and making this alternative energy I think that that's a
a better a better way to go because you know I look at the pillars of where I work there they say
growth they say cost control and they say return on shareholder value or our key things but to me
that's that's that's pretty empty and it's for sure not a hundred percent for sure that those
things are going to work out as a goal for a company and I find that with your personal money
that maybe hard assets or something that you own a share of or something like this micro place has
a bigger say and again it's microplace.com is the place again I'm not a sales rep for them or
anything there's several other places you can do it you can do it at but you know think about it
it's it's you know especially with the news of the of all the people losing their 401k's and
the jobs being bad and all of this stuff I think that you know you need to make a more holistic
approach to the investment structures that you're looking at now and you know if you buy a share
of a truck or a locomotive or a wind turbine and you loan or do this micro loaning to these
you know this various organizations and it might be a better way to go and if you buy hard
assets like crude oil and copper and gold through these ETFs you might do better it's certainly
better to look at the diversification and and you know try to diversify your currency a little bit
with the the PayPal you know dollar is at an all-time low against almost everything because
interest rates are nothing and I mean that's that's really good for us exports but it you know
it means almost you know if you travel a lot you'd be really surprised at the at what the value of
a dollar really is compared to a lot of the other currencies in the world all right uh again uh
this is uh jwp uh you can reach me at jwp5 at hotmail.com or you can look at my blog jwp5.wordpress.com
thank you very much bye
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