Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (74345)	8/2/2001 8:01:10 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 116815

Petey is an interesting lad. If he was not politically conflicted I might toast him a brewski or two. But alas, our basic long term vision of humanity (who knows?) has a political divergence somewhere at the road sign that says "where we ought to go" and "destiny's dream". I tend not to drive my bulldozer into encampments of low life squatters with tablets of higher authority in hand. I believe this reinforces my position as an all around nice guy with lots of people and assures in small portion my survival. Never know when those low lifes will get dozers of their own. Pete did in Clairtone, and idle dream that looked good in 1960. He lucked in with Bob Smith, an excellent prospector (almost as good as I) with high gold and some neglected mountains of it in the 80's. Friends of mine back when copper was 4 bucks a pound looked enviously at those supposed mined out areas and could not get the money. Pete himself was unceremoniously booted from many a New York office with ridiculous claims about the potential of his golden dream. The Betze was a bet that extremely high grade feeders existed for epithermal extreme (700.00 ounce per ton) top down drip precip situations. Bob was right. It was a prospector no brainer. Pete the money raiser finally got it right with the initial money which was rumoured to be no questions asked slush fund of "mustache petes". Since Bob has now got angel wings I had my doubts that their all around what_will_mine geo vision, preforce hardened in the grimy practical camps of make-money-on-this-by-inches-or-bust mining towns is now in demand. I foresee mistakes and I wonder if all the acquisitions are prescient of a higher price or just some other engineer's mistaken vision of what will make it. After all if you look at blithering idiots like SNC Lavalin (Cullaton Lake could have made millions, Lavalin put in all the high risk, unproven technologies they could to lose money and the idiots C. Red Lake followed suit. I could have specified a mill that would have got 92 per cent of the gold and built it for 12 million in 3 months.) - and the many overextended companies of the last price-bankruptcy debacle you can see that economic vision in the industry does not run deep. Gold mining companies stagnate because they hire drones with no basic engineering/economic horse sense or technical geological capabilities. They need low level pencil pushers for the hockey team and the glee club for what they think is a no brainer job. When it comes to finding a million ounces of payback stuff, a mining method that will cut costs by 70% and a milling method that will get what they are losing or at least tech people that can tell what they are losing, they find that deadwood won't do it. That is all I found in the industry. lack of vision, huge mistakes and dead wood. Major companies (Kerr Addision) used people who barely could read and write to run their underground. Mining had fallen a long way since the 30's when a mining engineer was a good job. ABX may find that the level of vision they need to keep going and make money is more than they have got. The hand writing was on the wall with the South American debacles that were improperly planned at too low a margin and improperly drilled off. We also saw a startling level of large scale incompetence in Margarette Witte's low grade ventures as well. They had the goods in Ontario. Squandered the money everywhere else. Sad. Other gold companies have not fared well. ABX did some planning and survived. But I ran from their Holt McDermott venture. I applied as an assayer. They had 4 fire assay furnaces and I had been trained in that. They said they were bringing in some Phillipine chemist and installing atomic absorption and it would be much better. I had done that too. In fact I had worked, curiously, at two other outfits that had hired Asian assayers of varied experience to do just that. (Cost saving?) I asked about the head grade. They said 0.14. The mill recovery? 0.11. I walked. This was a quintessential head up the ass organization at this level. There are a 1000 reasons not to use AA for assaying and they knew none of them. I had run into a few from hard won experience. EC<:-]