Sunday, March 6, 2011

Commercials & Infomercials

Lordy.  I thought I had seen it all with the 'Amish Fireplace' (it's free! limit two per household!).  If you watch the 40 minute version, as I did one sleepless early morning, there's a shot in the middle with an "authentic amish worker" that has an electric nail gun in his hand. Working on a fireplace mantle.  Pretty funny. He's easy to spot. He's the young guy with what looks like a stick on beard.

I just saw a short commercial on IFC for the $50 buffalo nickel-style gold piece.  Proper disclaimer about not being legal tender, it starts by saying that production was going to have to be stopped due to a lack of available coin blanks.  Near the end comes the meat of the pitch. "Clad in the purest gold - 0.9999 pecent 24K gold".  Wow, that's impressive.  Next is a quick remark about 14 mg of gold used on the gold 'clad' coin.  Hmm.

1 oz of gold = 28 grams.  14 mg is .014g of gold.  That makes 14mg = 0.000493 oz of gold.  The current gold price is $1,433/oz, so this 'limited edition collector's piece' actually has about 70 cents worth of gold in - or more accurately - on it. There could be some intrinsic value in the craftsmanship or the limited 'collectibility', but I'm pretty sure that won't equal the rest of the $49.30 in value.

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