I lived a short time in my 20s with friends a few blocks from my parents. When I returned to live with my parents for a short period the entire dynamic changed. You leave the house so you don't go to your room, you visit. I started talking more and listening to music with them. I really appreciated my parents more. I hope my relationship with my children will be the same.
What do you mean by listening to music with them? Like, sitting around in the living room playing each other's favorite songs? I don't think I've ever done that with my parents, my kids, or anyone really.
Listening to music with my young kids is a favorite. My wife and I also frequently invite other couples over to listen to vinyl and enjoy a cocktail or two.
We like vinyl just because it has the physicality to it but I think anything here is fine. It's the music and the shared experience.
Their goal isn't only safe storage, it's also being able to sell when needed.
You can't quickly trade with the gold that's in their own safe storage facility in Zeist, because you would need to physically transport it. The reserve at the Bank of England is put there because there is a large market for gold trading there. So you can use the gold immediately to influence the markets.
Putting it in a safe place in another European country wouldn't have added value over storage in Zeist.
> You can't quickly trade with the gold that's in their own safe storage facility in Zeist, because you would need to physically transport it.
More specifically: very few people besides the NL government have any gold stored inside that facility, so intra-facility trade is basically nonexistent.
London has an old school gold exchange. Pretty much you can buy and sell by moving a part between vaults (at least that's how I understood it to work in the past). Now I expect it to be just a spreadsheet but who knows.
I wonder if anyone checks the gold. You could end up with the problem Amazon had, where people were inserting fake items into the supply chain and then it was just getting mixed into the real products and nobody could tell who was doing the fraud.
Because instead of treating each item as an individual thing, they were pooling everything with other items of the same type. So if I send in a brick and say it’s an iPhone 17 and you order an iPhone 17, you might get my brick.
There have been rumours like this about the US gold storage for decades.
Its audits only look at a tiny percentage of the holdings at a time, any kind of weighing or purity inspection is the exception rather than the rule, and third-party auditors or observers are not welcome. They basically look at a handful of bars, see that the seals on the other vaults are intact, and extrapolate that all the gold is perfectly fine.
In other words: the US could be pulling the fraud of the century here, and we'd never find out. But a full audit would be extremely expensive, there's no sign that there's any kind of foul play, and other countries are doing more-or-less the same.
And even if a country does notice that something is off with their US holdings, there's plenty of reason to keep it quiet and just play along.
Tungsten is 1.0015 times denser than gold. A gold-coated tungsten ingot could be adjusted (tiny internal cavity) to have exactly the same mass as a solid gold ingot of the same volume.
I've no idea what checks are done to exclude such artifacts from gold storage. If somebody accepted them and stacked them in a reserve vault, they might go decades without discovery.
I guess it's not something to worry about. It's improbable, and even so, if everybody agrees on the value of undetected bogus W/Au ingots, makes no difference from the real thing.
When it comes to being a financial hub English as a global language is paramount in modern world. You wouldn't expect a C-level executive from other side of the world to speak German. Further, if you've ever been in the financial scene in Frankfurt, it's unfortunately predominantly in German because most of the old people working in the institutions can only speak vacation English and they switch to German as soon possible.
Also from where did you hear that Frankfurt gets the business that's leaving London? What is your source? That was the hope for the Germans with the Brexit, but it never happened. German laws and bureaucracy is still far too hostile and outdated compared to London.
Agree, the younger generation, or at least every young German (mostly millennials/GenZ) I’ve met is completely fluent in English, almost like native English speakers.
Some even with an American accent which they picked up by watching YouTube videos
This post is weird. Finance people who work in Frankfurt and Amsterdam certainly speak English. Yes, they will also speak German, Dutch, and a variety of other langauges, but not speaking English is not the blocker here. I will also say that finance people in Paris under 40 are also (mostly) fluent in English. (Please don't bring up accent; no one in finance cares about your accent when speaking English; they care about your prices.)
That said, I'm not entirely clear how the exchange's market cap should or shouldn't be thought of in terms of the total market cap of assets that the exchange lets you trade. Or indeed the float of those assets, which is a concept I've only learned about due to SpaceX's nonsense IPO, so take my thoughts with an appropriate pinch of salt.
The biggest chunk is in the Netherlands, but you want your gold also in other countries, so that you can still access is (and don't loose it) in case of an invasion. Hence almost half is in North America, a completely different (and (somewhat) allied) continent.
It's also easier to sell in certain markets, such as London.
Not just so that you don't lose it in case of an invasion, but it is proof that you would be willing to help out the host country in the case they were invaded. Also, that you would not invade them.
In the olden days, the local lords would marry their children together, to create familial groups and ensure that for the forseeable future the local areas would not have a conflict. Modern democracies don't have such valuable family members, we use valuable objects instead.
The United States and Canada must have enjoyed that feeling of safety, knowing that the Netherlands would not invade them. And of course, if someone were to invade the United States (or Canada), knowing that the mighty Netherlands would come to their help would be immensely reassuring.
England is definitely a European country. I'm tired of people constantly making this political abuse of language of conflating "the EU" with "Europe".
(And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).
The pedantry of being angry at the US for being the only country that actually has the word "America" in its name and yet calling itself American is almost comical in its ineptitude.
Nobody shakes their metaphorical fist at the Central African Republic for daring to use Central African as its demonym. It's simply understood that the surrounding countries are also African, yet simply do not have the name of the continent in its name.
But if you do want to be pedantic, England is not technically a country anymore, it's the United Kingdom.
> The pedantry of being angry at the US for being the only country that actually has the word "America" in its name
That is not the reason.
People say that Columbus discovered America. They don't mean the country, they mean the continent. The people in the continent of America are called Americans. About a century ago, US Americans came to view America as two continents.
Many countries still hold to America being a single continent, but there's no name for the people of America because US Americans stole it. The is very equivalent to how the EU is stealing Europe/European.
That's true in the sense that the Falklands have never been legally part of England. But Britain has exercised control over them since the 1760s, with interruptions, and they’re still a British Overseas Territory today. So saying they've never been British would be inaccurate, but saying they're "part of England" would also be inaccurate.
One of the smart moves the EU has performed is to bring all ideas of Europeanness and European identity and Europe as a continent under its exclusive umbrella. Even places like Switzerland are somehow now defined by their exclusion when you couldn’t get a more European country slap bang in the centre of the continent. Britain has always been an outlier due to being an island hanging off the edge, and is now a pariah and traitor state which will also be defined by abandonment and disloyalty to the EU project of total integration.
is now a pariah and traitor state which will also be defined by abandonment and disloyalty to the EU project of total integration.
Ugh, your concept of EU is closer to the USSR or maybe current Russia than to the actual EU. I sincerely hope that such nightmarish concept will never prevail over the relative sanity that we have now.
As a British person who was born in the EU and spent 35 years of their life as an EU citizen, the treatment of us since Brexit has felt like it. Naturally the standard comeback can be “yes but you all voted for Brexit this is your fault what did you expect” but I’m just reflecting what it has felt like and the difficulties thrown up towards people who even believed in the project of Europe who suddenly found that they were no longer a welcome part of it.
Personally, I am sorry that the British left, but coming from a small nation which had their sovereignty often trampled upon, I believe that consent of the governed matters fundamentally and that there is no project important enough to force people into it if they express their wish to the contrary.
> One of the smart moves the EU has performed is to bring all ideas of Europeanness and European identity and Europe as a continent under its exclusive umbrella.
But only the most imbecille people have fallen for that. Nobody with any kind of sense or basic knowledge considers EU to be Europe or vice versa.
> Britain has always been an outlier due to being an island hanging off the edge, and is now a pariah and traitor state which will also be defined by abandonment and disloyalty to the EU project of total integration.
Just like they were last time, but they won that war in the end.
I don't think that's a problem, and it doesn't mean that Britain is not in Europe, IMO. Comes naturally with human perspective. "Where did you go this summer?" A) "I stayed in England"; B) "I travelled around Britain"; C) "I went to Europe". All perfectly understandable, I think..
And you actually traveled in Scotland and Wales but England was synonymous with UK for you. Technically incorrect of course.
B) "I travelled around Britain"
And in actuality you only traveled in England.
C) "I went to Europe"
As an American (yes, a US-ian) and you start in Poland at the Baltic sea and then via some nice Eastern European countries with other attractions like Kroatia, all the way down to Greece. But without further explanation and context most people would've assumed you probably traveled Spain, France, Italy etc.
But almost invariably in this context they mean "the continent" ie France, Spain, Italy and so on, probably not Scandi and not Ireland. So that's more like how people would say they're going "to the UK" when actually they're travelling to like the Isle of Man or even sometimes Jersey which are not in the UK but like sure, people who speak English live there, if some lunatics attacked them the military forces would work for the UK, and in Man's case it even makes geographical sense (Jersey is basically in France, it isn't French for historical reasons) but these places are not part of the United Kingdom any more than Canada or Australia. Same King, different government.
The British Isles lie on the Eurasian tectonic plate, on the northwestern part of the European continental margin. Going to "the continent" is an incorrect expression. You are already on it.
If you want to be pedantic, then this also wrong: half of Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Scotland are actually on the Laurentian plate, which split apart. The Scottish Highlands used to be part of the same range as the Appalachian. Plates are not continents.
I live in continental Europe, and we also say "going to Europe" when talking about holiday trips abroad. It's just a natural thing to say when you want to stress you're going outside of the border, buy without being overly specific.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the locals refer to SF proper as “The City” (not “Frisco”.)
So, they may live in Cupertino, Palo Alto, or Oakland, but when they say “we’re going to The City for a concert on Saturday!” we can hear them pronounce those capital letters as an unambiguous reference to the one, true City.
I live in a city (a quite small one) and if I say that I'm going into the city, then it means I leave my neighbourhood (it's in the same city) and I'm going to the city centre.
The city of London literally has a city also named London inside it and yeah, "Where are you going?" "The City" means clearly that tiny part. There is another small older city inside London, Westminster, but if you meant Westminster you'd say "Westminster" never "The City" in general.
What’s the problem? We took nationalist names (Mexico, Ontario) and used the hemisphere appropriate term. If anything we’re more culturally progressive for doing it.
Lake Ontario wasn't a "nationalist" name. It's an anglicised version of the Wyandot name for the lake. The Canadian province is named after the lake, not the other way around.
Americans are from the United States of America in the same way Mexicans are from the United States of Mexico.
When South Americans refer to Americans as "estadounidense" is that imperialist Mexico erasure? The USA is not the only "United States" in North America.
> (And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).
Hmm, maybe I should be pro-imperialism. I’ll do that before calling a Brazilian, Canadian, or Mexican an American to satisfy the whims of the language police.
But if you want to go to uni and call Americans United Statesians and fight a made up culture war, you’re certainly free to do that (in America at least, wherever that is).
> Hmm, maybe I should be pro-imperialism. I’ll do that before calling a Brazilian, Canadian, or Mexican an American to satisfy the whims of the language police.
We say "America", because "United States of America" isn't really a name. Just like we say England or Britain, because "United Kingdom" isn't really a name either.
"The Soviet Union" wasn't really a name either, as "soviet" just means a governing council. But since it's a foreign word it sounds like a name.
It's interesting that some of the historically most powerful entities don't have proper names.
As for England being European, is it really? Traditionally people don't always count the Nordic countries as Europe, and I'd assume the same would be true of England? Culturally it is of course, just as much as France or Germany.
The narrative is that the continent is going to be overrun by Russia (at the rate of mile per year like in Ukraine). So the elites think they need the gold in London to pay for their exile government luxury.
Well as soon as your pricing is available and full onboarding is done, I will be pushing for it at work. We just left bitbucket and I have everything stored locally until we find an alternative and I just found it.
I keep a personal list of links to defend my non-AI stance. It is weird I even need to. If I am a carpenter and I was ordered to use a robot and tell it what to do there would be lawsuits and what not but as a software developer I am the idiot that does not want to modernize.
I still point to this document as the base of DevOps. Most people I work with in IT never read it. If you want to do proper DevOps these are a requirement not optional.
Last time I pointed someone to this site was last week.
> Organizations are using agentic coding tools to build software in-house in lieu of purchasing it. Nearly a third of respondents (32 percent) report that their organizations have decided against buying one or more software products or features because they could be built internally with agentic coding tools.
People think they can do it themself... kind of like how everyone build their own database using Microsoft Access in the 90's. When all software developers needed to repair all the issues...
I am at a point in my career where I'm figuring out where I want to spend the last 15 years of it. I don't want to work in corporate for a long stretch of it. It seems to me, being a consultant to fix all those messes could be a good seam of code face to get stuck into...
No, it's been my experience asking LLMs to explain complicated code to me. They can do a pretty good job of it. You can also ask them to write a bunch of tests and then rip out the old implementation and fix it with a new one. LLMs aren't perfect but they are really good at understanding and writing code.
It depends on what one's idea of an implementation is and what one's expectations are.
If an implementation is "a black box that works," absolutely, LLMs are fine. They can create complex programs in full.
But if one expects a tight implementation... it's a horror. LLMs vastly overengineer code (I believe they're intentionally designed to do so). I really struggle to make LLMs generate lean code.
In the best case, they generate bloated designs (in terms of complexity, not necessarily performance), but in the worst case, they generate gaps in the specification. And even in the first case - cognitive load is a problem also for LLMs, not just for humans (although obviously at a larger scale).
I think LLMs are essentially modern compilers, with similar problems, but designed more like "deoptimizing compilers" than optimizing ones. :)
These days ppl often (usually?) simply ask an LLM to replce something rather than debugging it (or if they ask the LLM to debug they get a different snarl of code).
So rather than debug a steaming pile of code you might be be able to treat it as a greenfield opportunity.
Yeah, unreasonable deadlines (these are the norm) spent trying to untangle a mass of overly verbose spaghetti code, and chances are there is no budget for you to do it properly, they contracted you only for a ‘bugfix’. It’s just more technical debt on top of technical debt.
No, thank you. I’ll leave the underpaid disinfestation job to someone else.
The best fun is when you’ll be called in not to untangle the LLM mess, but to build new features on top of its nonsense architecture and API design, but expected to do it by hand because they have lost confidence in AI.
It will be messes of python scripts running on some ancient version of python that you have to switch between scripts. All in a folder on some laptop with an outdated OS that you cannot update or everything will break. Business logic obviously not documented anywhere, just mountains and mountains of slop readmes that might be accurate, but also might not be.
On the other hand, if you let in-house devs own your enterprise software, in many places it's going to be months of meetings to get the smallest change implemented.
Plenty of companies run most of their internal operations on Excel and Access for exactly this reason. And most developers barely know anything about databases anyway.
Except that isn't how it played out. Most of the Access DBs, spreadsheets, and even SharePoint, Notes, and early Salesforce apps worked just fine without any help from devs. Yes, the devs got called in when those solutions needed to scale beyond a single department, but most of them never did.
It is far more plausible that we'll see that pattern again - small, department-level vibe coded apps will be around. And things that need to scale bigger will need professionals.
We can do it ourselves. Simple custom tools are so much more effective than a conglomeration of general purpose ones. I've been ripping out SaaS offerings left and right, it's great.
I once needed to maintain an application written in everything Oracle. If I ever encounter the original author of that product: I have things to say to him.
We quickly replaced part by part by easier, less costly parts.
Software development is not just writing code; I think all HN users know that.
reply