I'd say the point is "An Ordinary Guy did X". Vs. an engineering genius, or somebody with deep pockets, or a Hollywood special effects model builder, or 3D printer junkie, or whatever.
Jesus christ this is pedantic. You do understand that not all statements can be universally distilled to true or false right? That there's nuance and opinion here right?
The kind of issue that's better decided by an ecologist than by a judge, true.
My curiosity is about how the legal system got it wrong - simplistic or outdated laws, or clueless or corrupt judges, or some combination, or something else?
Seems like pretty much all US citizens should rushing to amend city charters, county charters, state constitutions, etc. - to remove their so-called elected representative's legal power to approve many sorts of things...
For Germany's national interests, the ideal probably would have been repatriation back in early 2010. A decade after Poland had joined NATO, half a decade after the Baltic States had - the threat of Russia somehow seizing the gold was at a nadir. The 2007-9 fiscal crisis was safely past, the Euro crisis not yet too dire, Obama was in the White House, and the winds were otherwise favorable for quietly sailing Germany's gold back home.
Second best might have been for Germany to get its gold back in mid-2021 - Biden in the White House, but events of 6 Jan '21 making it really obvious that the US wasn't nearly so stable as in the good old days.
Vs. raising the subject now*, with a very temperamental administration in Washington, feels ill-advised. Though I'm probably marking myself as a senile idealist, to even think of a national gov't, or leading media outlet, intelligently working for its nation's long-term interests.
From another angle, I could see leaving it in NYC as a symptom of advanced calcification of Germany's politics and gov't bureaucracy. Moving the gold home would require major decisions, real organizing, and competent execution. Vs. the relative do-nothing of inaction, forever turning the crank of old routines, is so much easier.
Germany already repatriated about half of its gold reserves between 2013 and 2017 from paris and new york to frankfurt.
There has been a recent (as in "18th of march" recent) petition to the Bundestag to repatriate the gold.
The reason not to repatriate the remaining gold back then is because Germany has substantial trade with the US, which is why Germany held gold in new york to begin with: It's the easiest way to resolve USD-Euro currency exchange at the central bank level (this is also why germany got rid of the paris gold reserves: with the euro you don't need currency exchange anymore).
Also, as you mentioned, the idea of "officially" repatriating gold with the current administration is quite dicey. It is very possible that the correct way of resolving this is to just stop buying gold in new york and let the currency exchange flux deal with the slow unwinding of the reserves without explicit repatriation.
Effectively none. The US has a huge trade deficit with Germany/Europe so there is practically never a case where the US receives gold from Germany: It's always more then offset by the deficit.
The equivalent for the US would be the consumption goods that are already flowing into the US. I.e. US gets goods but doesn't sell enough to Germany, so the difference to maintain the total exchange rate is the Gold.
That's also why it was trivial for france to repatriate its gold compared to germany: Germany holds about 10x the amount of gold in the US compared to France (France was ~120 tons, Germany is roughly 1200 tons: France earned its gold through different trade).
That's also why it is such a complex thing to repatriate German reserves: France took almost 1 year to repatriate its gold. For Germany, the efforts would be decade spanning (though maybe with recent changes there is a little more urgency).
IANAL, nor political expert - but should Costco have just said "this is an unprecedented situation, the US Gov't is still figuring out how it'll work, and there's a lot of uncertainty - so we'll make our decisions after we actually get the check"?
Costco's position seems pretty unremarkable to me. What % of modern retail sales are both paid in cash, and unconnected to any loyalty/reward program? I'd bet it's under 10%. And even then, a company could refund everyone it knew about, then say "bring in your receipts" for the remainder.
I remember a story on Walmart's data analysis capacity being something like 2 years of line item data for a customer. I've read numbers that suggest 10PB / day ingested from their ecommerce operations and 2-3 PB/hr data processing. Pretty incredible.
For modern ecommerce, figurative recording every twitch of your mouse in their store, I'd believe that.
But to save only the "SKU, qty., unit price, date" receipt info - which you would need to process tariff refunds - that'd be maybe 16 bytes per receipt line? To hit even 1TB/day, you'd need a billion customers, each buying 64 items. On that one day.
Have you ever been conned into releasing something into the public domain? Me either. Its not a real problem. But signing over the rights to some corporate party? That happens all the time, and is permitted in Germany. Germany is being very stupid here. They're letting abstract reasoning about principles blind them to common sense (many such cases in German history.)
> [...] a Danish warship has been discovered on the seabed of Copenhagen harbour by marine archaeologists.
> Working in thick sediment and almost zero visibility 15 metres (49ft) beneath the waves, divers are in a race against time to unearth the 19th-century wreck of the Dannebroge before it becomes a construction site in a new housing district being built off the Danish coast.
Crippling visibility for the divers - but it's in a harbour, just 15m of water, and a future housing district. "Cofferdam and drain" ain't cheap - but how much of that cost could be recovered in the later construction phases? Or - could they box in the site, cover the bottom with a grid of heavy plastic sheets (preventing sediment from being stirred up), and mostly clear the water with a filter system?
> The Climate Crisis: Illusion of Action in the Age of Green Capitalism
The HN title is just one brief point in it.
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