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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

My cube is actually a high tungsten carbide. I do happen to have a 1kg elemental tungsten cylinder though. I like to imagine dropping it from space on things that would be greatly improved by becoming a crater.

At some point I’d like to obtain matching gold and uranium cylinders.

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At my university we had access to lead bricks (roughly 5x10x20 cm) used for radiation shielding at a small accelerator. One Friday evening it became at great idea to take one of those to the seventh floor and let it fall onto the lawn below.

One of the most underwhelming experiences ever: there was hardly any indentation in the moist soil. Bullets go really fast.

(I realize you said "drop from space" which would be a completely different matter of course, so I suspect you have realized this without experiments.)

57k for 1kg of gold... You have very expensive taste in simple objects. Getting that 1kg made into an statue is only a rounding error.

I happened to be in a mayor’s jewelry store about 12 years ago when I saw someone walk in and purchase a gold paper clip for about $300 (want to say it was designer too, maybe Cartier).

Never forget he looked raggedy as hell, he was wearing crocks, an inside out polo shirt with stains and some fishing shorts...when he took out his wallet it was held together by a rubber band, it was awesome.

We can compare the view of expensive luxury stores in Pretty Woman (Julia Roberts attempts to walk into a top-end store and is summarily ejected by snotty staff) with the one in Breakfast at Tiffany's (staff are excruciatingly polite and bend over backwards to accommodate ridiculous requests from a guy who has already made it clear he doesn't have any money).

People imagine the first mode, but the second one is much closer to reality.

It is people who are pretending to be or aspire to be rich who get snooty about appearances far more than people who are or actually cater to the wealthy.

For the particular example, I'd think the scene in Pretty Woman is there purely for a particular storytelling reason -- the point is to illustrate how, if you suddenly become powerful, you can use that power to hurt people who were mean to you when you were small. So there's a scene where some people are abusive to Julia Roberts because the writer wants them to be, rather than for any in-world reason, so that she can come back later and take revenge.

In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Tiffany's represents how Audrey Hepburn thinks about the world of the rich, and is shown in a more positive light.

Well this was Miami, many jewelry stores you can’t even walk into but need to be buzzed in and I have seen on more than one occasion people not let in.

This wasn’t one of those stores, but staff was more than accommodating, before purchasing the paper clip he made a rather odd request - he wanted to see the largest diamond in the store, they actually brought it out from the back (it wasn’t even in a display case). Maybe that is something the Uber rich do when they walk into a jewelry store to test service or quality of the merchandise or both.

Oh but the delight of matching cylinders of pure metals? Priceless.

Tungsten is almost as dense as gold, at <1% the price. I don't think a gold cube/cylinder is a great idea, because it's easier to fake than coins.

You can sort that issue out by getting in the bath with it.

... How?

I mean, there are lots of ways to fake gold. At least one of these has some gold on the outside - which isn't going to simply wash off in the bathtub. And I'm guessing there are ways to make sure it sinks in water, as cheap and mid-grade jewelry tends to sink to the bottom too.

I think that was a wink to the classic story of Archimedes and the gold crown :)

https://www.bellarmine.edu/learningcommunity/eureka/about/

Yes, but that trick doesn't work so good when you use tungsten to fake gold, because they allmost got the same density. Thats also probably why the tungsten price recently went up together with the gold price, despite no significant increase in industrial demand for tungsten. Because thats how gold bars gets faked today.

It was a bit of a joke as you can use water displacement and weight to determine density.

If you’re buying a brick of gold you buy it from someone licensed to sell it (you usually have to be) and the regulations and verifications involved are pretty trustworthy.

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