What I think is shocking is that 99% of the software engineering world these days would have zero ability to comprehend this explanation. In my opinion, you could not be a real programmer without the ability to understand what your program is under the hood. You might be able to get away with it, but you're just faking it.
And yet, 99% of the people I've ever seen in the industry have no idea how any of the code they write works.
I used to ask a simple interview question, I wanted to see if potential hires could explain what a pointer or memory was. Few ever could.
What you're describing doesn't exist in Switzerland, which you could tell by doing a quick Google Maps view.
Nothing in Switzerland is cheap, least of all land. Practically nothing in Switzerland is flat either. What little flat land we have is used for agriculture and cities.
There are various precious metal trading companies that will buy the bullion from you at close to spot if it's kept in its original assay and has documentation. If not in assay, they will have to test its purity and potentially remelt it so that adds to the spread.
I used to buy gold bullion as a sneaky way to get credit card points on the cheap (and then use them for first class flights around the world). You could usually do the trade profitably and quickly and quite safely with insured shipping via USPS. $50k at a time. It was a bit sketchy to have that much in bullion at home, and I quickly got bored of it.
So I'm basically reading this as putting blame for Iran's reprehensible regime and its crackdown on its citizen yearning for freedom on Britain and the US.
No… let's stop with this rewriting of history. The only party to blame for the awfulness in Iran is their evil regime.
Insolvent has a precise meaning in accounting. FRB was not insolvent. The book value of their bond and loan portfolio was accounted as held-to-maturity keeping it at cost value and not market value. As long as they could hold to maturity they'd be just fine.
The Fed put in a facility that was supposed to let banks borrow against their securities portfolio at their book value and not at their market value, plus on top of that there's also the discount window facility, which means FRB had plenty of access to capital to handle any withdrawals.
The FDIC is just on a power trip here. They don't _like_ that the market value of those securities is down based on the inverse relationship between yields and price. So they force killed the bank. There was ZERO need to do that, FRB could have just held the loans to maturity, and sure they'd lose some money on the interest they'd have to pay to borrow from the Feb to make up for lost deposits, but in no way were they insolvent and in need of a shut down.
The FDIC killed a bank that was absolutely fine. For the 3rd time in 2 months.
FRB was solvent and had plenty of liquidity if the FDIC didn't force kill it. The FDIC just wanted to flex its muscle because it didn't like the situation — but there was zero reason FRB couldn't have held all its good loans to maturity and been totally fine.
Fuck the FDIC and fuck Jerome Powell for causing all this unnecessary destruction.
This is the fault of of one person: Jerome Powell. That man has done more damage to the US and the world than any of the biggest calamities that come to mind (9/11, Katrina, Trump/Biden/Fauci depending on your politics).
The last 3 years of monetary policy have been the biggest destructive f-up ever imaginable. Printing endless money causing the collapse of the value of the dollar, causing serious inflation, to an insane raise in rates to try to undo the damage which (1) not only destroys the entire banking sector and tech industry, and (2) did absolutely nothing to fix the destruction of the USD.
He's lost his ambassadorship (at the request of the US govt) recently. It was quite obvious that pressuring Grenada to drop their protection was the precursor to filing charges.
When I first got Disney+ because an ex-girlfriend wanted to watch Wanda, the app was misconfigured to have the audio description turned on. It's a pretty weird show, so it took me 3 episodes of being confused by the weirdness of the show to realize something was really off and it wasn't meant to be watched like that. Took me forever to find the setting to turn it off; and it got a bit more watchable after that.
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