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.

*Yes, I noticed the article's 2 Feb 2026 date.

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.

> [...] 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 [...]

Interesting. Might you know how much US gold is held in Frankfurt (Germany), for the same purpose?

Rather than centering on a "what it's like to be me" look at individual pop culture shunners, I'd focus larger-scale, and longer-term.

Over time, society as a whole benefits if some fraction of its members are adverse to putting their eggs in the same basket as everybody else is.

You can't have a mass market without forcing the masses in to it. And then consolidating into a single seller.

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.

Costco requires a membership, and they do store credit back at higher tiers. They absolutely know what every member buys.

I suspect they're looking at the cost of implementing a one time refund/credit vs. reducing prices without the need to implement anything special.

Yes, I'm being charitable but not having to spend part of the refund on an extra program could benefit their customers more in the long run.

(We're Costco members.)

My point was that the other stores do, too. Or 90-ish %.

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.

Did you mean to say "presumed to be too stupid, or too easily conned or coerced"?

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?

Not an insurance underwriter - but wouldn't the obvious counter-move be to exclude coverage for medical assistance/transportation when you're climbing mountains overseas, spelunking, within X miles of the north or south pole, traveling in a submarine, or have otherwise ventured into "high-dollar extraction" territory?

I went to Nepal two years ago. The standard insurance of my Mastercard Gold specifically excluded medical assistance/transportation for acute altitude sickness from the coverage (and rescue operators are reluctant to intervene without proof of proper insurance coverage).

As a precaution (having read about it on forums) I had taken an additional insurance from a French shop specialized in hiking and mountaineering (le Vieux Campeur) to cover more events.

Good thing I did because I ended up having to be evacuated for something that was initially considered as acute altitude sickness and turned out to be a lot more life threatening once in the hospital.

The obvious counter move is just to charge higher premiums. It works whether the crises are real or fabricated. The real losers are not the insurance companies, but other tourists overpaying on their premiums.

In my experience, it's only the cheap insurance policies bundled with credit cards and various memberships that consider high-altitude hiking a high-risk activity. Any travel insurance you buy as individual should cover it. If there is an altitude limit, it's usually 6000 m, so Everest Base Camp and Kilimanjaro would be covered but Aconcagua wouldn't. And any actual mountaineering would also be high-risk, regardless of altitude.

Priced into the premium. It's not your run of the mill health insurance.

When I actually climbed one of the 6K meter peaks I had to get some special alpine insurance. Don’t remember the details. Was a long time ago.

Extreme activities are excluded from standard travel insurance packages. This is happening with insurance specifically for these activities.

Normal travel insurance doesn't cover high-risk activities like mountaineering. You have to buy a specialist policy.

Not to rain on the parade...but this is innovation with a very small "i". Aircraft using guns against each other was SOP in WWI, and they were already using recoilless (in the air) back then.

Yeah but it's cheap and doesn't need putting pilots up there. The:

>When a Russian recon drone enters the zone, the system vectors an interceptor to chase it down and destroy it, without requiring a human operator to manually fly the engagement.

thing didn't happen much in WW1.

Yeah - in WWI, autonomous weapons were mostly mines (land or naval).

OTOH, fire-and-forget missiles have been around for half a century or so.

Bigger picture: Yes, obviously this is a good idea. My take is that it should be graded purely on how well they've implemented it - with no hype, and 0 extra credit points for "innovation".

No - but they could hire full-time panels of such experts, and never miss the money.

More to the point - if the CEO of DogFoodCo won't let his own family pets eat any of his company's flagship products, then maybe smart dog owners should follow his example?