A very fair point with which I can only agree. Care to hazard a guess as to why gold is rising though? The rock isn't changing.

Gold gets used in electronics, so real world demand is up, and it's actually fairly hard to extract. This is being made harder by environmental protections that are making it illegal in many places to do things that are more efficient but come at a high environmental cost.

I wish we would actively foster panning for gold. It's environmentally friendly. It's "blue collar" work that doesn't require a college degree, spiffy resume and do forth and it doesn't take much gold per year to potentially support someone who otherwise might be homeless or flipping burgers (or both).

Panning is very location-specific, though. How does access for panning relate to land ownership / public management of rivers?

I don't know the answer to the land management piece. I do know that we live in a world that increasingly makes it hard for people just do a thing and make a living, without a college degree, a raft load of student loans and on and on.

I do know we have too little well-paid manual labor and too much of a divide between the have and have nots. I know you don't need much more than a gold pan to get started, which can be had for under ten dollars from places like Walmart.

I didn't research the land owenership/public management of rivers angle very much. I do know that it's not illegal in some places to dredge rivers on public land, which is extremely disruptive of the ecosystem.

This is more of less the summary of the research I did into the subject:

https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2016/11/h...

A richer world (both from more people and more economic activity) increases demand for things like jewelery, more use for gold (booming semiconductors) increases demand too.

There's then the perception that in bad times gold is a "safe bet". Low returns in savings accounts too.

We can’t print more gold.