Wow. That looks really painful. I have multiple pianos, always used cable because I wanted it to work without problems in Linux and Mac. Also I can't stand delays.
I have created 20 utils or so with the help of Claude, in order to practice multiple things like reading sheet music, or rhythms, or different scales. I never expected it to be that useful as my new Yamaha was bought before Claude existed, and having a cable that just works is so great.
I have spent way less effort doing all my utils than this man into just connecting its machine.
Before using it with Claude I used them a lot with Synthesia and GarageBand, but with Claude is like having a personal trainer.
People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything".
They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days.
Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thinking about some of the people I spoke with being dead.
Since that I have also been in Dubai and Saudi Arabia as an entrepreneur and engineer. "What are you going to do when drones are used against your infrastructure?" If you followed the Russian war and first Iranian strike it was obvious that drones were going to be used against them. "not going to happen" again.
The have lost tens of billions for lacking proper preparation. They could have been protected spending just hundreds of millions of dollars over years.
According to [0] the military was basically doing under-the-radar preparations in the last few weeks before the attack, because the official narrative was that nothing's gonna happen.
> A small group of officers at HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, did begin quiet contingency planning in January, prompted by the US warnings and the agency’s own information, one HUR general recalled. Under the guise of a month-long training exercise, they rented several safe houses around Kyiv and took out large supplies of cash. After a month, in mid-February, the war had not yet started, so the “training” was prolonged for another month.
> The army commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, was frustrated that Zelenskyy did not want to introduce martial law, which would have allowed him to reposition troops and prepare battle plans. “You’re about to fight Mike Tyson and the only fight you’ve had before is a pillow fight with your little brother. It’s a one-in-a-million chance and you need to be prepared,” he said.
> Without official sanction, Zaluzhnyi did what little planning he could. In mid-January, he and his wife moved from their ground-floor apartment into his official quarters inside the general staff compound, for security reasons and so he could work longer hours. In February, another general recalled, table-top exercises were held among the army’s top commanders to plan for various invasion scenarios. These included an attack on Kyiv and even one situation that was worse than what eventually transpired, in which the Russians seized a corridor along Ukraine’s western border to stop supplies coming in from allies. But without sanction from the top, these plans remained on paper only; any big movement of troops would be illegal and hard to disguise.
What's the choice here? Start saying "Russia will attack" and then see 20% of your population flee, while Putin sits and waits until your economy runs into the ground, and THEN attacks? There's no good choices here.
I'd say that Ukraine were very prepared for the invasion, though? They managed to survive for the first 2 weeks, leading to a long-term war. The Donbas war had already been going on for 8 years, and I don't think Ukrainians were under some illusion that those weren't Russians.
On the flip side, all around the world you have "leaders" talking about imaginary conflicts with foreign countries that we must spend billions (they have a friend who really should get the contract) to prepare for and if the other side (tm) gets in your whole family will be killed instantly.
In hindsight, it's easy to be smart. You picked two examples where somebody said "never gonna happen" and then it happened. How about the countless examples where somebody said the same and then the thing actually didn't happen?
Take millions playing the lottery. To each of them, I can confidently say "you won't win, not gonna happen". For almost all of them I'll be right. There will be one who wins, were I was wrong, and they will say "see, told you so". That doesn't mean my prediction was wrong. It means you are having a reporting bias.
GP also probably had a sampling bias. The ones who were actually concerned about the impending Russian invasion presumably fled out of the country (or at least, away from the major cities to rural areas that probably see less fighting)
I was in a neighboring country in Europe at the time, not Ukraine, but we didn't see any Ukrainians move into our area until a few weeks after the war started.
That's not to say the country wasn't prepared though. If the GP did talk to people on the ground days before it started, saying it won't happen would match the public propaganda at the time coming out of the Ukrainian government and their allies. They knew it was coming and seemed to decide they were better to faint like the weren't ready and avoid public panic before it started.
> They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days.
They did though. While nobody actually believed Putin would be dumb enough, the Ukrainian army was still, just in case, extremely busy on preparing defences, organising stockpiles, preparing defensive tactics.
> While nobody actually believed Putin would be dumb enough
I'm not sure why you'd say nobody thought they would invade. To me it was clear in December the year before when the Russian navy began sailing the long way around Europe, getting in the way of Irish fisherman and confirmed days before the invasion when they had stockpiled medical personnel and blood on the front lines.
And I didn't understand why anyone thought the warning was wrong. Who sends their navy around Europe, collects 100k troops on the border, and ships blood reserves to the front for a training exercise?
Because it was just so dumb. Putin had previously done things to sabre rattle to get concessions, and talks were happening at the same time, so many thought he wouldn't be dumb enough to invade, but just wants more to negotiate.
Whether it was a smart choice is separate from whether they were actually going to do it though. The naval movement was a big red flag IMO, but by the time blood supplies were brought up it was clear regardless of an outside perspective of the strategy.
Crimea was Feb 2014, and then in Jul 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down by "pro russian separatists" in eastern Ukraine. Seems like they were laying the groundwork for a while. I have no idea what portion of this wikipedia article is true:
I'm not sure, though, how any clear line could be drawn between 2014 and 2022. It was clear, at least to me, once the Russians stacked up military assets in a way they hadn't previously.
There was at least one other buildup of around 100k troops in the intervening years, but I don't think they moved their naval assets from the north or bring blood supply to the front.
It seemed to me like they went quiet for most of the 8 years, I'd be curious what you may have seen that made it more clear based mainly on the 2014 invasion(s).
Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.
Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.
Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.
The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.
That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.
The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.
The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.
If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.
Given the immense capabilities of the United States government, I don't think there is going to be a war inside the US. Or at least not one that lasts any amount of time.
This isn't really a given. Historically, whenever you have a civil war the existing state's military splits down the middle, with people generally unwilling to fire on friends, family, and neighbors. Former military officers usually form the core of the rebel military, taking their training, experience, and oftentimes equipment with them to fight for the other side.
The mistake here is thinking of the U.S. government as a monolith. Ultimately it's all just people, bound together by being paid for in dollars that are either raised as taxes or borrowed as treasuries. GP's post posits a world where the dollar is worthless; what's binding them together then?
The mistake you're making is assuming "historically" applies to the US. We had one Civil War, where part of the existing government decided to fight other parts of the government. They then sent the citizens to fight (often against their own interest) against each other via conscription.
An actual war against the people of the United States by the United States by the standing military would be so utterly one sided as to be incomprehensible. Let me just put it this way: no one at Waco was stopping those tanks.
Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
Iran itself in its current form is a continuous line of failures of CIA and MI6 that led to their revolution against highly unpopular shah that was undemocratically installed only by those powers.
Why do you think back then the us embassy situation evolved as it did. 'Embassy' my ass, full of cia folks regardless what shallow hollywood flicks try to propagate, meddling with internal affairs for profit and power of british and americans, while impoverished common locals suffered greatly.
As usual with cia it backfired tremendously, made huge mess for decades in entire region, killed gazillion of innocents but since there aint no us citizens its just some annoying background noise of some brown 'people', right.
Anybody with above-maga intelligence can piece together those few wikipedia articles, but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans. If at least you guys learned from your collosal mistakes...
I keep seeing comments that refer to Iranians as "brown people" - usually to emphasize their perceived "otherness" by the ignorant, as in this case. But Iranians aren't brown, or Arab apart from a small minority, and relatively speaking their culture isn't even that "other" - it would probably feel more familiar to the average American than some European countries even.
Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of durka-durka from Team America?
Iranians tend to have a little more pigment in their skin and it's not a minority.
I get why you'd say this, Iranians don't have particularly dark skin and some are as white as my English/swedish ancestors.
> Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of durka-durka from Team America?
Some do. But usually the "killing brown people" is a shorthand for the fact that US policy has mostly focused on immiserating non-western-European nations for the benefit of of the US.
It implies racism at the core of US policy because only Western European nations are considered civilized and deserving of fair international treatment.
Western European nations have gotten a pass in recent history because they've been deferential to the US, are liberal democracies (ideologically aligned), and are not especially rich in strategic assets like oil. The same could be said of South Korea and Japan, highly civilized and in ideological alignment with the US.
In its history the US has engaged in military action against western and white majority nations: Great Britain (twice), the Confederate States, Spain, Germany (twice), Italy, and Yugoslavia. Not mention the perpetual rivalry against Russia/Soviets since the end of WW2 which has meant doing things like backing the "brown" mujahedeen against the predominantly "white" Soviets. Today it backs Ukraine against Russia, arguably making that war of "white" nations more deadly than it otherwise would be.
The US may have never fought against lilly white Scandinavian countries but neither has it done so against "brown" India or sub Saharan Africa.
But America is a big place. Americans living in cities probably know a first or second gen Persian, there’s lots of them everywhere. They even have a reality TV show.
Outside the urban archipelago the average person couldn’t
tell you the difference from India, Turkey. and everything in between.
> but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans.
We've simply had decades of propaganda teaching us that the US is the most moral nation that has only fought moral wars for moral reasons.
A lot of the history books are about American exceptionalism and triumph. Even when they cover topics like slavery and civil rights, they paint it as being temporary embarrassments that we got over and now everything is OK.
MAGA is just a bunch of people who swallowed that propaganda whole and never questioned it in the slightest. We can see that in the fact that they get really upset about history lessons that are even slightly critical or analytical of America's past.
>> the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts
How does this work exactly? It doesn't. It's a misunderstanding of public debt.
When you say stops buying US bonds, you're talking about the secondary market for US government bonds right - because in practice, contrary to the econ textbooks and common understanding, only a small number of institutions are allowed to purchase them in the primary market, not only that but these purchasers are compelled by law to continue buying them, to continue bidding for them at a fair price, and if they don't have the reserves to buy them then these purchasers will be given the reserves to continue to buy them. The entire premise of the argument falls apart as soon as you step away from the econ model and look at the legislation governing what actually happens by law.
How does the "petrodollar" exactly prop up the US dollar? The price of a barrel of oil has oscillated quite a bit in dollar terms, so it's not like there's anything like a fixed or artificially-maintained 'exchange rate' there. There's, what, a 10x swing between highest and lowest USD price of oil in the last 10 years alone? The dollar has fluctuated vs other currencies too. I've never fully followed how trading for a dollar just to sell that dollar immediately for oil would only help the USD. It all gets turned into oil quickly, so wouldn't that mostly balance out in how demand for oil then relatively-weakens the dollar against the value of toil itself? The "medium of exchange" need has some effect, but I don't see it by itself driving "store of value." If there was a better store of value for the people selling the oil, what prevents them from swapping out those dollars essentially immediately? And then switch to taking payment in those other things as well?
And "just printing dollars" has well-documented inflationary effects inside the US too.
Not an economist but the petrodollar concept helps the dollar because everybody that needs oil needs to buy dollars. You see it as small thing but it is fundamental thing because oil is used in so many places that as we have seen a disruption of 20% of it would start causing real problems on almost the entire world.
QED: oil powerful, only dollar buy oil, dollar stronger.
The use of dollars to purchase any commodity is a negligible fraction of demand for dollars.
What you should be looking at is investment demand for dollars, that is, in which currency does the seller store their surplus.
Think about it:
I need to buy a barrel of oil, but I am in Argentina. So I sell my pesos for dollars, I buy the oil with the dollar. The seller now has dollars, and sells the dollars for Swiss Francs and invests the money in swiss bonds.
Now, what happened? The global demand for dollars by the buyer was exactly offset by the seller. It is the seller that decides, by choosing where to store his surplus, of what currency is boosted by oil. And it is not the currency that oil is sold for, it is the currency that the proceeds are invested in.
So oil is completely irrelevant for the value of the dollar, what is relevant is that investors want to store their funds in the US capital markets. That's what matters, and it is investor preference to store their earnings in capital markets that determines why they want to denominate oil in dollars. It just saves on an extra transaction.
But focusing on the transactions misses the picture of the dollar's strength, because denominating oil in dollars is merely a consequence of the desirability of US capital markets as a destination for foreign capital. And that desirability drives everything else. It's not oil, it's deep, liquid capital markets with established foreign investor rights. That trumps everything else.
Think about it -- would you keep your earnings in a country with weak foreign investor rights or lack of financial transparency or illiquid markets where you couldn't easily pull your money out when you wanted to? That is much more important to the seller of the oil than anything else. It will drive what oil is priced in. And it will drive the demand for dollars.
Certainly correct, but I think you’re underselling the historical exchange part of this. Dollars being everywhere causes the financial infrastructure to be built out in dollar terms.
Part of what enabled that huge capital flow you’re talking about is that it was the Americans who came in and gave [country’s] banks a counterparty to exchange dollars for oil.
A lot of that soft power is not just the ability of America to print dollars, but also the ability of America to control the financial infrastructure. To surveil, KYC, sanction, etc. that is a huge part of it.
The petrodollar is less mechanically important today but back in the day it was huge to have “everyone who needs oil” be the counterparty to a currency exchange. It is what injected all that liquidity, which set the whole thing off.
I think what people are realizing and considering now is with the computerization of everything, capital can flow more freely. That is what is dangerous (for the US) about today’s moment; our political leaders are taking it all for granted.
I do think history is also important, but again it boils down "where is a safe place to store my money?". That really controls everything else.
Now, in the past we had a gold standard, so you could literally move your money from one country to another. Now during both WW1 and especially the runup to WW2, the wealthy moved much of their money to the United States as a safe harbor, since we were the only advanced economy with deep liquid bond markets, rule of law, and foreign investment rights (sorry, Canada, but it's true).
This was the greatest wealth transfer in history. By 1940, the US held 80% of the world's global gold reserves. 80%! And this was in the era when international trade was settled in gold.
So it all happened in single decade between 1930 and 1940, and the US instantly became the world's global reserve leader, an extremely dominant position, merely because people were afraid of war and wanted a safe place to park their money.
After the devastation after WW2, the flood of European money into the US continued and more than offset the Marshall plan.
So already at the end of WW2, the majority of the world's liquid savings was tucked away in America.
Now, people like to tell stories of American soldiers spending dollars somehow making the dollar a reserve currency, and those are the types of things that seem plausible to people who don't monitor global capital flows, but that's honestly a ridiculous story. That was chump change.
Bottom line, there are no special technical reasons beyond "I want a safe place to store my money". That controls everything else.
There is an adage in the world of money markets: "It does not matter what currency you trade in, what matters is what currency you store the proceeds in".
And the moment that some other nation opens its doors to foreign capital inflow, establishes rule of law (which takes decades to develop a reputation for stability and not confiscating assets), is safe, stable, and secure, establishes financial transparency, and has deep, liquid capital markets -- then the world's wealthy will flood that nation with money also. But unlike declaring that "I will sell my oil for euros", doing the above takes decades of building trust and reputation. Gimmicks aren't going to do it when you are looking for a safe place to store your money.
I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from the comment. How can you read that comment and not conclude that this is the way of thinking from before "Pax Americana"? They are talking about "wealth extraction" ... in other words, free labor (not money), without paying. In other words, slavery.
Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and the cause of many wars, before WW2. In fact WW2 is the last such war.
Before WW2, France and England extracted (a LOT of) tax, without doing anything, from Germany. That's how the wealthy in France and England got richer, you know, without producing anything.
Before WW1, the Ottoman empire (the "islamic world" as people like to refer it now) extracted wealth, by capturing slaves and forcing them, at gunpoint (well "at knifepoint", and by simply letting them starve chained up in ditches until they worked), from essentially all of Africa. By the end of the slave trade, Europe participated. Again, let's not pretend that either the caliphs or sultans or royal houses used what was effectively unlimited free labor to end poverty. In fact they made it a lot worse, everywhere, from England to "the islamic world" to India.
You can go back thousands and thousands of years and compare the many situations (e.g. people would not tax foreign nations directly but tax things they needed, sometimes as dramatically as water, but lots of things, including access to international trade), but it goes back very, very, very far. The story of the Minotaur (slaves, militarily extracted from foreign nations would be thrown to a beast if they didn't work). The Exodus story. The Vedas. Right up to the story of Epic of Gilgamesj.
The comment you're replying to is a scream that this situation must be restarted. The US does wealth extraction, and, read the comment, their point is not that they want wealth extraction to stop. No. They want to ... uh ... participate in it.
I have a different opinion. I had access to real terminals when I was young and they had amazingly sharp fonts. They had hardwired optically etched fonts and were incredible. 100% smooth.
I had to work with DOS screens that were sketched to different aspect ratios and blurred and it was so painful, specially after having seen proper fonts on the screen.
One of the reasons for starting to use Linux was using high quality fonts with the terminal.
> One of the reasons for starting to use Linux was using high quality fonts with the terminal.
Yes! Speaking of Linux, I'm personally very font of Terminus.
I like it so much my main coding font is a modified, pixel-perfect (no AA at all) version of Terminus since forever (I modified a few letters like the 'l' and the 's' and took a few glyphs from a pixel-perfect Monaco font [like %, &, @ and modified those a bit too). I did it so many years ago I don't remember the process (but I've got notes about it, so I could redo it).
I'm on a (non-retina / non 4K) 38" ultra-wide display that does 3840x1600 natively (and it's the resolution I use). I love it for I can have three 1280x1600 "columns" side by side (but I'm using a tiling WM so I've got many preset layouts anyway). YMMV.
The ship has sailed. Vibe coding works. It will only work better in the future.
I have been programming for decades now, I have managed teams of developers. Vibe coding is great, specially in the hands of experts that know what they are doing.
Deal with it because it is not going to stop. In the near future it will be local and 100x faster.
This is not gain at all. At least in theory: You own some tons of gold at the start of the process, you have the same tons of gold at the end of the process.
The only real gain is that you have gold in the US custody and the US can be tempted to just use it without telling you anything.
In other words, you had "paper gold" or "virtual gold" that the US can confiscate anytime, for example after invading Greenland, blackmailing France to do nothing.
"In 2025 and at the start of 2026, while the volume of gold reserves remained
unchanged, the Banque de France had to align a residual portion (5%) with technical guidelines, resulting in a significant realised currency gain. This exceptional foreign exchange income totalled EUR 11 billion for 2025."
If you buy $100,000 of RAM and just hoard them, and a shortage happens, you won't update their value according to their market price, until you sell them.
That's it. It has nothing to do with whether your RAM is stored in New York or Paris.
If you're a retail business that sells RAM then yes, this is the way.
If you're a fund that holds RAM in some indirect manner (like you hold hypothetical RAM futures) then it depends on whether your country's laws ask for market-to-market value for that specific kind of security.
Bank of France "transported" their reserve by selling the gold held in New York, and subsequently buying the same amount in European market.
They opted to do so because it's just more efficient. It takes a lot of efforts to physically move 129 tonnes of gold after all. And as a side effect of this relocation project, they ended up recording a capital gain. It's nothing-burger.
For context, in 2025H1, 480 tons where moved from CH to the US (I assume originating from UK after being recast).
My guess is that the choice to sell rather than transport was also due to using the (at the time) price divergence between US and European markets. (arbitrage + not having to pay transport + refining)
Let's say I bought a 100-ounce gold bar in 1965, when gold was $35/oz, for a total price of $3500. Let's say I sold it today at $4700/oz, for a total price of $470,000. That gives me a gain of $466,500.
And let's say that I regret it. I decide that I really want to hold some gold, so I take the $470,000 and buy another 100-ounce gold bar.
The situation was that I had a gold bar worth $470,000 with a taxable basis of $3500. Now the situation is that I have a gold bar worth $470,000 with a taxable basis of $470,000, and I owe the IRS taxes on $466,500 of capital gains.
TL;DR: Selling and re-buying the same asset gives you the accumulated gains, and resets the price basis.
They had gold worth X to the market but X minus 11 billion on paper. So when France accounted for its gold in euro terms they would say they have X minus 11 billion Euros worth of gold.
Now they still have the same amount of gold but they "realized" a gain of 11 billion. They don't have that much cash left after the repurchase but now they say they have X Euros worth of gold which is 11 billion more than before.
So no they didn't make a profit from this as gold is higher on both sides of the Atlantic than last time they did their accounting updates.
It's just accounting terms. They have to show it in their annual reports (afaiu they have to take into accounts unrealized losses, and realized gains, it's the case for many companies as well -- eg it came up with some Bitcoin treasury companies).
No, it becomes realized when it is sold. They held a bunch of gold that appreciated in value. On paper, they became richer. By selling it that became realized. After that, they bought gold again (different type elsewhere but it doesn't matter). That did not make them any poorer; they just converted cash to gold.
No. Firstly the gain is to a certain extent a matter of accounting. The most accurate method of accounting is “mark to market”. So if you have some gold and you think in dollars, then every day you look at how much gold you have and you look at the price of gold in dollars, you multiply the two and the difference between that value and the value you got to the previous day is your “mark to market pnl”.[1] This means you have a very accurate valuation for your asset but the downside of this approach is that your pnl is very volatile as the gold price moves around. This is the approach taken for most assets by most wall st firms. In fact at JPMC and Goldman it’s not stretching a point too far to say mark to market is nearly a religion. In this methodology there is no such thing as “unrealised” pnl.
Another approach is “historical cost” or “cost basis” accounting. In this approach you officially hold assets at the price you bought them, and only realise pnl when you dispose of them. This means you don’t get pnl volatility from marking to market and then you get a big lump of pnl when you sell.[2] Until you sell or otherwise crystalize the pnl, the profit is “unrealised”, which is just an imaginary amount that you may or may not get but you look at in your brokerage statement and smile if it’s green or frown if it’s red. The advantage of this method is you don’t get the pnl volatility and you can wait until an advantageous moment to take the profits. The downside is if you want to, you can deceive yourself by holding these assets at a valuation that is unrealistic and store up pnl pain for the future. This methodology caused a lot of problems in the 2008 crisis with institutions holding bonds at prices that they could never hope to sell them.[3]
“Moving” the gold from NYC to Paris may not (for practical reasons) have involved actually physically taking the bars from one place to another. They may have found a buyer in NYC and then bought some bars on the IME in London and had them delivered to Paris. (This would clearly have required crystalizing the profit if they were holding them at historical cost). It sounds from a brief read of the article as if the bars were in some non-standard format so they may have had them melted down and recast, which would have required an assay and so would have triggered a new valuation, realising the profit. Assuming they were holding them at historical cost, which it sounds like they were.
[1] Technically, if you sell some gold during the day, then the pnl on the portion you sold is “trading pnl” and the pnl on the remainder is “mark to market” but whatever. It’s pretty much the same for the French reserve bank which has gold and thinks in EUR, except they not only have gold MTM pnl but also FX pnl in the EUR/USD rate (because gold prices in USD but they think in EUR).
[2] Or do some other event which requires valuation. There are rules about this kind of thing.
[3] When Lehman collapsed they had bonds marked at 100 that were trading at less than 40 cents. One weekend I’ll never forget I got a call from a very senior partner and was asked to value the European part of that portfolio as part of the US regulators frantic attempts to find a buyer for Lehman before the market opened.
Assets like this are one of the complexities in calculating national import and export figures.
For example, imagine there's some German-owned gold in a UK bank vault, the owners sell it to a UK broker who sells it to a Chinese investor? The physical bars don't move, but on paper it's been imported to the UK then exported.
But a lot of people looking at export figures are expecting to learn things about the manufacturing industry, and picturing exports as washing machines, cars and computer chips - which imply lots of well paid jobs for skilled labour. So the UK reports import/export figures with 'non-monetary gold' listed separately.
(The fact flows of gold are highly volatile allows a classic bit of political sleight-of-hand - if you include gold, UK exports are both up and down since Brexit, depending on the pair of dates you choose)
It's probably just a technical accounting update. Old assets are often kept valued at their buy price and not reevaluated every year to avoid taxes (Banque de France is not exempt from taxes). As they swap a type of gold by another and do a sell/buy action, the new gold is valued to current market price while the old one was valued in accounting at an old value.
They had a deficit last year, so they can probably avoid to pay tax this year by balancing last year loss with this year profit.
The concept of "paper" assets isn't specifically about whether you hold physical custody of the asset, its whether the asset exists at all.
If the US holds 100 tons of gold on behalf of another country and possesses that full amount, it isn't paper gold.
Derivatives are where paper assets come into play. You buy the right to own 100 tons, for example, and whoever owes you that either owns only a fraction of their total liability or plans to buy it when delivery is requested. That's an over simplification of a much more complex market, but the key is that "paper gold" owed doesn't exist in the full amount.
[] they sold their 'non-standard' (seems to be bars below the modern purity standards) US reserves, and replaced them with new reserves purchased elsewhere which are now stored in France. As the price of gold continued to rise as they did this, they ended up making a bunch of dinero while also centralizing their reserves.
A gain of $15b? That's roughly the value of 100 metric tons of gold, remarkably close to the 129 tons that the article says was moved... did they double the value of their gold?
When something is "realized" is a matter of accounting. It means to make the change, they sold the gold fo currrency, then bought it back. For many of us, realizing a gain is when taxes happen, though I'm not sure what it means for a nation state.
> This is not gain at all. At least in theory: You own some tons of gold at the start of the process, you have the same tons of gold at the end of the process.
I see a lot of comments like this but I just can't get my head around what you are trying to prove (or disprove).
Every definition of gain (or loss for that matter) implies that the same amount of _something_ is now worth more (or less) than when you bought it.
Following you logic, if I buy a share of MSFT at $10, sell it for $100, there is no gain because I still have 1 share of MSFT?
Even if you rebuy it at $100 it's the same, your profit didn't change, you just exchanged cash for an asset.
Before you sold it you had unrealized gains, after you sold it you had realized gains, after you bought it again you have the same gains but materialized as shares.
Paper/virtual gold perhaps bought ages ago at a far lower price point, now turned into real, solid gold in parity with today's price point. To me this sounds like the implied gain.
> The only real gain is that you have gold in the US custody and the US can be tempted to just use it without telling you anything.
What if you're at war, you can't risk to get your gold out and the US doesn't sell you anything because.. you can't pay?
If your solution is to "write France's debt on a piece of paper and hope they honor it", I've got some news to tell you about the system you just "invented."
It's more of a loss for the USA, which IMO is the unwritten point of the article.
France upgraded their gold bars to a new standard and as they were doing that, gold has appreciated massively in price, so France has the new shiny easier to trade bars, and the USA has the old harder to trade bars.
They can be melted and brought to the modern standard, which is what they did with the rest of their holdings on the old continent. They sold these only because it was cheaper than transporting it.
> This is not gain at all. At least in theory: You own some tons of gold at the start of the process, you have the same tons of gold at the end of the process.
Correct. A better way to put it is you shorted the USD. Which is a smart move at any rate. So a gain indeed.
which can be the difference between losing that entire amount or gaining it, and in this situation with this America, this is a big win if they manage to get it back in fact, if it hasn't been stolen or sold already
And not even British. For example most of the Enigma decryption was the genius work of a Polish man. Britain received the immigration of half the Nobel prices of the world in a couple years as the jews escaped nazism.
The original Bomba was the genius work of a Polish man, but was no use from 1938-1939 when the Enigma cipher was strengthened. At which point the Turing-Welchman Bombe was developed. The Battle of the Atlantic ran between 1939 and 1945.
For the much harder Lorenz cipher used by German High Command from 1940, the Colossus machine was developed by Tommy Flowers at the GPO and became operational in 1944.
None of which involved the US Navy, which was my original point.
As an attractive person myself that studied engineering in several countries of Europe and some years in the US I don't believe there are many opportunities for you to take advantage of your attractiveness. Most examinations were in written form.
I have huge doubts about the study. In cinema, theatre, sure, you need physical presence, but engineering... I don't believe Von Newman would have needed presence to impress other people.
Another very important thing is that there are very important differences between sexes. The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody.
I am what is called a sigma male. I was never interested in power, dominating others, being the boss. Women prefer ugly and short people if they are leaders to tall and beautiful man that are not social.
In fact, if you get uglier as you age but get more successful, you will receive way more attention. If you command a group of people, run a company or are a big boss, women will get in love.
Also, if you are tall and beautiful, men will get envious of you.
Billy Bob Thornton dating Angelina Jolie is the quintessential example of this. He had presence and charisma but was very average lookswise. Claviculars head would explode if he saw a picture of them together.
I'm not sure what or why you use AI for this text (translation?) but even in foreign language universities, it is "von Neumann" - wouldn't be translated as your AI did.
It must be said: Mr Ford created way more wealth in the world than what it destroyed.
For example, the Japanese discovered that importing Ford cars from Japan was cheaper that manufacturing those in Japan, including all the shipping cost.
The same happened in Russia, Germany and most places of the West world.
The new manufacturing method was a revolution that have generated trillions.
I think what they're getting at here is that it's cheaper for countries to import the car from themselves because you don't have to cover the cost of manufacturing, just the cost of transport (which is low, because you are importing it from yourself).
And now an authoritarian one-party country (I think it's decidedly sliding into a dictatorship) is winning car manufacturing - and possibly almost all of manufacturing except high-end semiconductors and optics.
Gets undue credit for assembly lines, guns and pocket watches were moving that way too, I wonder what middle school history book publisher cemented his legacy
I don’t understand why you’re downvoted. Hitler considered him an inspiration and praised him in Mein Kampf. Ford funded and published “The Dearborn Independent” which was a newspaper full of libel against Jews. Sure he was a visionary industrialist, but also a vile human being.
So is Elon Musk and yet he is the richest man on Earth, has meddled in government freely and fanboys still believe every fart that is coming out of him.
He used to be into making cars too but that clearly fell off the wayside
... and has very little respect here. Some fanboys aren't a guide to amount of respect one deserves, regardless of topic.
I must say he redeemed himself tiny little bit in my eyes when he blocked russian use of starlink in their war in Ukraine, I didn't register any apparent reason apart from stopping murdering of civilians by russians, but thats been happening during whole war in non-trivial numbers. But he also famously sabotaged their naval drones mid attack by disabling all of them during early phase of the war, to not sink half of black sea naval fleet at one go, so... a complicated, highly unreliable person.
I think everybody can easily find deep flaws in him, be them personal or professional (ie he is POS father based on many accounts for example, thats not flying with most parents that know this). Then it matters if folks have firm hard-to-bend moral values or are more flexible with them. Based on experience most people are quite a bit flexible, otherwise they would have to hate themselves too a lot.
That is not what I said. The gp used the term "antisemitic" which by definition means having a negative opinion on semites. You are looking to argue semantics while I'm trying to answer a question.
Would you at least allow a distinction between having theories about Jews and publishing theories about Jews?
Parent poster wasn’t disparaging Ford for merely committing WrongThink, IMO it’s quite another thing to support a newspaper to put your libel in front of the public to misinform and cast ire against a race of people
To be clear I don’t think Ford should have been prevented from publishing his opinion, as an American I am a free speech hardliner, but I do think we can decide not to celebrate people based on their public speech and actions
I have created 20 utils or so with the help of Claude, in order to practice multiple things like reading sheet music, or rhythms, or different scales. I never expected it to be that useful as my new Yamaha was bought before Claude existed, and having a cable that just works is so great.
I have spent way less effort doing all my utils than this man into just connecting its machine.
Before using it with Claude I used them a lot with Synthesia and GarageBand, but with Claude is like having a personal trainer.
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