Bah, humbug!

Scam

I think the problem is that "bullshit" is probably the word the kids would know and use. There may not be a word in common use that's acceptable to parents. I've heard people say bullhockey but that may not be either acceptable or known. I guess if they don't know baloney they're not likely to know horsefeathers or hogwash or fiddlesticks.

There's a place in Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka, that advertises "Genuine Humbugs" (in the sweetmeat sense). I liked that. (They also sell fresh strawberries in season, a real treat in the tropics.)

Bogus, fake, fraud, wanna-be, posers

like totally bogus

BS. Obvious lie. Absolute nonsense. (Imagine using "poppycock"!).

Anyway, something which I have been interested in confirming is the following. If you read this Wiki article, it suggests that about one percent of all above-ground gold (370 metric tonnes) was mined in the first five years of the California Gold Rush.

Can that be anywhere near the truth? Or is it just....

Short version is that it's estimated that roughly 80% of the gold in California has not been found yet. A lot of it, however, may not be economic to recover.

I'm not sure what they mean by "above ground gold." The article cited does not give that figure. The article says "in the period of the Gold Rush itself (roughly 1848-1853), perhaps 12 million ounces of gold were produced." Perhaps someone extrapolated from that.

The easy pickins were certainly gotten within the first few years. In fact, although you hear about the 49ers who came to California in 1849 in search of gold, it was actually discovered in 1848. The "48ers," people who were already in the area, who got most of the readily available stuff. That was large nuggets found in the bottom of stream beds, the result of weathering of larger veins of gold in rock. This was called placer gold. Since this is SiT, I'll go on to say that "placer" is American Spanish for a sand or gravel deposit of gold. One etymology is "a contraction of the words plaza de oro+ (the place of gold) and in Spanish means 'a place near a river where gold is found'." Others suggest +placel derived from Catalan, meaning "sandbank."

"By 1865 in California alone $750,000,000 in gold had been mined, and this figure is considered a conservative estimate."

I think toot means that 1% of the world's current stock of gold, not counting gold still underground in mines, was mined in the first five years of the California Gold Rush. I don't have any particular reason to doubt that.

I assume above-ground gold refers to all the gold in the world that hasn't been mined yet and hasn't been irretrievably lost yet. 370 tonnes (or 12 million ounces, if you prefer) seems reasonable to me for the California gold rush. At first glance, the figure of one percent would seem to be contradicted by this link:

In the world there are currently somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 tonnes of gold ‘above ground’.

But it transpires that their figure refers to the total gold ever mined:

That's all that has ever been produced.

I may be wrong, but I would expect that a significant proportion of the gold ever mined has been irretrievably lost. But I can't find any figures to back me up. It seems that the one percent figure was arrived at by just ignoring all gold that wasn't held in a central bank vault somewhere (central bank reserves are about 30,000 tonnes). So the true figure is somewhere between one and four percent.

Because of the density of gold, and the value of it, what most people don't know is, that if you put ALL of the world's discovered gold (ever, in history) into, let's say, Olympic sized swimming pools ....

that, all the world's discovered gold all put together would fit into 3 (THREE) Olympic sized swimming pools (size of Olympic sized swimming pool being, let's say, 50 meters long by 25 metres wide by 2 metres deep).

Or is that just....