Other than real estate, in what should a vampire that intends to live for several centuries invest his money?

...

And governments don't confiscate gold? Ha ha.

Governments and revolutionaries confiscate everything, there's no surety in anything.

Gold can also be traced, which means a sufficiently advanced civilization could discover the existence of a parallel vampire society if they were heavy gold users.

Also, stocks of gold were historically some of the most controlled and smallest substances in the world, more so than weaponry, tech or real estate.

>start a blood bank
Best post.

>Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love
That story was sick and wrong. does Heinlein just love slavery and incest?

In silver.

>does Heinlein just love slavery and incest?
...Seriously, do you not?

It's stupid for a vampire to own money that can be traced back to them.

Better to just enslave the occasional rich family, abandoning them for another one if they crash and burn.

Well, you know how some dishes might be great served separately but don't go too well together?

>Bury it where only you know where it is.
Not when they can't find it or don't even know you have it.

That said, the problem with hiding stuff is that some asshole might get lucky a hundred years later and find a fabulous pile of "lost" treasure.

This film was fantastic.

DON'T SING IF YOU WANT TO LIVE LONG

Zeppelins OP, those wacky, noisy aero-planes will never take off as a popular transportation option.

tobacco, firearms and alcohol

Doesn't tabacco go bad pretty rapidly?
And I wouldn't be so sure about alcohol past couple decades mark either (unless we're talking those bottles of wine from sunken ships, that nobody buys for actual consumption anyway)

Practice distant rulership and have the various governments and soverign nations swear to pay fealty to you. It doesn't matter if they fall and collapse because you know they will with enough time in which case you make the same deal to the next group who takes power or leverage one of the other loyal nations with free food (i.e. "Hey, these guys are up for grabs if you want it.")

Art, wine, debts, and most importantly families of servants whose name you can put your assets in to safeguard.

Charity. Make sure you have master keys and secret entrances to the hospital wings you sponsor, and design city parks with your convenience in mind.

Invest in the companies that make/sell it, and the departments/politicians that regulate its distribution.

>buying merchandise rather than structure
>laughingventrue.jpg

Don't you mean "fangtastic"?

Whats stopping some enterprising young city planner from just pushing ahead a new design fifty years down the road.

His family.

>my landlord is a vampire
I swear I've heard this before

A mercenary company might be a good idea, ensures quality guards during the day and keeps you relevant and powerful.

>We are werewolves, not swearwolves!
It was all around awesome.

That's a cost, not an investment, and before you say "investing in my future safety" remember insurance isn't an investment.

>Whats stopping some enterprising young city planner from just pushing ahead a new design fifty years down the road.
The charitable foundation, whose charter you wrote, continuing to control such rights.

>insurance isn't an investment
it is when you can convincingly fraud it

Public Utilities.

Water, electricity, rail roads and building materials.

Anything that helps the herd grow and everyone will always need. Investigating in farms is pretty much a wash, power companies rarely go away and you could wake up and manage it during some type of unrest to make sure it survives into the future. If he made it anywhere near today, investing in nuclear power and spending the time to know how to harness it would make an immortal invaluable until we find something to replace it.

If your nation went to shit and a blood sucker came to what remains of the government and offered to help create something like a nuclear reactor, they would be feeding the fucker virgin blood within the week.

Dynasties.

Don't invest your money, just blood bond mega-rich mortal families and mooch off of them until they go poor or get overthrown.

Then rinse and repeat.

Fake your death whenever you become too noticeable, then latch onto someone new somewhere else.

Spending money to make money is what the herd does, but you're the shepherd.

ayyyyyy

Fast food restaurants.

basic savings really - the temptation is to try to beat the market in long term investments but really the vampire intrinsically beats the market in sheer longevity.

Another alternative is to get a good state based job with a guaranteed state funded pension - when the vampire retires they've got a guaranteed income coming in indefinitely.

>gold
>not silver

Heinlein confirmed for not loving freedom enough to invest in Free Silver.

At some point someone will show up investigating how they've been paying someone forever.

...

Bonds and indexed stocks. If it's a good investment for someone in who lives 80 years it should be as good an investment for someone who lives 800. Presumably they'd have to change things around every so often as new financial instruments are invented.
Aside from that Art is a pretty good investment. Stored properly it doesn't spoil and is fairly easy to hide if you have to sleep for a couple of decades. The only problem is that you don't have a good way to know which artists are better investments.

worst girl
worst quest

Aqua Teen Hunger Force probably

DVD, Apple.

Why do I need to invest? Going by regular lore it doesn't seem like I need earthly possessions. Maybe I'd open some themed clubs where the bouncers formally invite all guests.

>PETER

You can't argue that the book comes out as pro-incest. No way, no how. Lazarus Long sleeps with his underage) twin sisters, and later his mother. The slave twins are a mated pair. The love of his life isn't genetically related to him, but he raised her from early childhood as his daughter. In a way, the whole book goes through different types of incest and doesn't just have them and present them positively, but goes on multi-page rants justifying them.

OK, so, given.

But *slavery*? Heinlein comes out as very anti-slavery. Miranda the computer is eventually given a body and granted by Lazarus the dignity of being treated as a person. The only slaves in the book are manumitted by Lazarus, and their dealer is tricked into being locked in a chastity belt. One other previous slavemaster is mentioned in passing, and Lazarus spaces him. Buck the sapient uplifted mule is treated very kindly, though admittedly still as a work animal in addition to being a companion.

Basically, while you're dead on right that incest is a major theme of the book, where slavery is mentioned at all it's in the most negative possible tones.

Stocks are a relatively recent invention. If ignored for long enough, their validity will be questioned and it'll be more trouble than it's worth to validate them.

Bonds are even worse. They have fixed durations after which they start losing value to inflation. More importantly, on a century-scale, I can't think of a worse investment. Governments default on their debt all the time. Or effectively do so, by inflating their debt away or putting surcharges and taxes on cashing them that are defaults in all but name. Wars, revolutions, and coups take their toll, too. The king will laugh you out of town if you try to cash in the 300 year old IOU you wave at him from some previous dynasty.

America's two century stock market and the iron-clad reputation of its T-bills has fogged your thinking about how valuable these instruments are in the rest of the world and through the rest of history.

Wealth changes form over time, and often requires careful tending. For truly liquid wealth, nothing beats precious metals and jewels. Keep some, carry some, bury some for a rainy day if all is lost. That's your portable wealth that you can use to found a new identity, and it's also pretty much the only wealth you can have that doesn't require periodic attention.

For the most part, wealth isn't a stack of coins to accumulate, but a power base and a living system that you control and nurture over time. And that just depends on the culture, country, and the vampire himself. Finance isn't fire-and-forget.

I will say one other type of investment is your investment in your personal capabilities. Knowledge, experience, and your own supernatural abilities. In V:tM terms, a couple points of Dominate will give you control of all the wealth you need so long as you can find a rich man not under someone else's control.

This seems like the best answer, really. Why own riches when you can own the rich?

Medical research. Cure anemia.

>Other than real estate

>The king will laugh you out of town if you try to cash in the 300 year old IOU you wave at him from some previous dynasty.

This is the problem with real estate. You have land, but really you have a title, a piece of paper, that grants you rights over land. That piece of paper might be recognized or revoked at any time. Especially if you're absent from it for a long time.

Kings preside over land reform all the time. They steal from their enemies and the wealthy who they don't need, and give to themselves, their allies, and people they do need. It's an ancient practice.

Obviously your claim is much more compelling if you stay around, reside on the land, and play politics yourself. If you play it well and for a long time, you can acquire vast tracts of land, then serve as a landlord, then gradually your tenants can become serfs. Also an ancient practice. But in that sense real estate is a long term investment just like any other productive operation. It has to be tended and administered over time.

>silver
Silver tarnishes into worthlessness. Gold can just be buried somewhere without worrying about it chemically decaying.

bump

Robotics.
All humans will eventually betray you, and all value is based on their puny societies that rise and fall faster than you can blink.
Invest in AI and mechanics, get yourself a robot army, rule as you are meant to.

>Gold. Lots of gold
thats stupid, money needs to be invested to make more money

This, the whole point of gold being valuable is that its notably inert

Which means that over time the amount of untarnished silver in circulation decreases while the amount of gold constantly increases due to mining!

Just gotta keep that silver in an airless room or submerged in a fluid that doesn't react with silver, bam.

You gotta appreciate a precious metal investment that only appreciates in value over time.

And you can also do some good with investing, help build society as it makes money for you - because whether you put the money in the market or not, an immortal has an innate greater investment in the long term improvement of their society.

random eclectic shit. you never know exactly what is going to be of worth in the future, best to just grab anything that catches your eyes. if you run low, open up your vast vaults of knick nacks you have put together over the years to make ends meet.

swap meets too. a shit ton of flea markets

whatever the jews are investing in

High interest savings account.

Or long term bonds.

We don't invest goy we extract wealth from you

Dank weed

The actual answer is stationary goods, these are goods that not matter what, cannot be manufactured or expanded in their supply. For example, while it might seem that there is a finite amount of gold in the world more gold can always been mined or discovered so it is possible that your investment might not pan out, but no matter what there is only one Time Square. Important pieces of real estate are some good examples, but things like status and political power are also stationary goods. If you are immortal in time then every stationary good that you collect make you permanently richer compared to everyone else in the world. Plus, as the world become more developed and people become progressively more equal in consumption (though less equal in wealth) you will always have more than everyone else in the few things that they cannot make more of no matter how hard they try. That's real dominance.

>Window tinting
>Insect pest control
>Satellite Radio
>The cremation industry
>Genetic modification to improve crop yields
>Digital cameras
>Bitcoins
>PETA
>Art restoration
>Social media
>Video Conferencing
>Mobile games
>Outback Steakhouse

Tech speculation and natural resources. Specifically, natural resources that are currently useless but will become valuable commodities later as technology develops.
Imagine if that vampire has locked up China's rare earth deposits back in the 1800s. Or the Middle East's oil, or Australia's uranium.

Art. Be the Medici to the Michelangelos of the universe.

The Church

Mr jewman, would you help me do my taxes?

>>Bitcoins

Yeah... about that...

The price dropped something like 48% in the last day or so due to a major bitcoin bank/exchange getting hacked. I have a suspicion that if bitcoin becomes more popular, we're going to see more of this kind of thing happening.

That'd require knowing what will be in demand in the future, which is hard. As is actually getting control of it; you can try for mineral rights or the like, but stockpiling barrels or oil or crates of uranium ore figuring it'll be more valuable in a century is going to be a storage nightmare.

Also as a nitpick, rare earths are the opposite of valuable. They're called rare because the only way it's economically viable to acquire them is incidentally to digging up more valuable stuff. If there was a lot more demand, it wouldn't be hard to start grabbing them directly.

>rare earths are the opposite of valuable.
Rare earths are a vital component in strong permanent magnets, which are in great demand, among dozens of critical uses in electronics and alloys. The entire category is priced by the gram, with some reaching four figures. Without these elements, flat-screen tvs and modern batteries would not exist, just to give a couple examples.

>the only way it's economically viable to acquire them is incidentally to digging up more valuable stuff.
On the contrary, it's exactly the opposite. Rare earths are found in such thin concentrations and require so much work to separate them from the uranium and thorium they tend to bond with (and still more expensive is then disposal of the resultant radioactive waste) that only the very richest deposits can turn a profit.
China, meanwhile, controls 97% of the planet's production, and they're intentionally restricting exports to below demand in order to force the exhaustion of stockpiles and boost their own manufacturing sector, in addition to undercutting cost of production by an order of magnitude thanks to nonexistent environmental standards.

Rare earths are not in any way cheap or common. They're a critical component of most modern technology.

I'm sorry you hate incest, you're loss

I haven't read the book but maybe it's mote about the general strong presence of a theme or topic even if portrayed with its negative elements. An author can portray all the awful negative sides of something but still leave the impression that they enjoy writing about that awful thing a little too much.

Nothing wrong with incest as long as it's the right kind of incest

Honestly serious about this one, no troll: are there vampires or something like vampires in Jewish mythology? Cause I've been wanting to do Jewish vampires for a while now.

Vampires are very much a thing from Slavic folklore which just managed to spread elsewhere because it's a kickass myth. The closest you'd find that actually originated in the middle east outright would be ghouls, or some kind of revenant.

Just play a jew who got bit by a vampire. Easy.

Akshually, lilim from Jewish mythology are pretty much all female vampire demonesses who prey on children, and they've been around for millennia. Probably inspired by some kind of Mesopotamian myth, like most of Jewish folklore.

>lilim
A Lilin is a succubus, not a vampire. It comes and attacks men at night while they sleep. They're not even associated with the dead/undeath. Just because vampires stole some of their modern inspiration from succubi/incubi doesn't make succubi 'pretty much all vampires.'

Ghouls are much closer to actual vampires, and even they aren't very close, because they're graveyard-dwellers who consume people-parts, and strongly associated with undeath.

Yes but more than that: China controls so much of the rare earth metal production, but not the actual quantity of supply. Rather, mining horribly mutilates the surrounding environs, and China is one of the few countries with the both the capability to mine them and the willingness to poison their own rivers.

I expect the prices of rare earth metals gradually and moderately valley over the next 50 to 100 years, as other nations become desperate to secure their supply, safer and more innovative methods of mining them are developed, and other supplies are found, before the inevitable spike when someone announces reserves that we have mined 70 percent of all known reserves.

Hopefully by then we'll have some kind of alternative, maybe mining from asteroids, but it also wouldnt shock me if we just destroyed each other

Yeah, any previous low prices for rare earth metals was entirely due to a lack of demand.

This actually make for an interesting thing in post-apocalyptic scenarios - where there's less easily accessible oil and power sources, but rare earth metals can be be more readily scavenged from the ruins of the old world in a usable form than at any other time in history.

No vampires are like that unemployed uncle that crashes on your parents sofa for a couple of months every year?