Many small claims court procedures, at least outside the US, include mandatory mediation that would fit this description, and there is nothing gross about it.
Given that a "retired judge" was present, I assume it was such a mediation meeting (i.e. the retired judge was most likely a neutral, court appointed mediator, whose job is basically to tell both sides to please come to an agreement, and potentially tell one side to pull their head out of their ass and stop being idiots before the court has to tell them that they are being idiots).
The ESA (Sentinel) data is somewhat delayed and has a low revisit period (AFAIK 6 days, although you might get lucky and get more due to overlap the further away from the equator you get) and low resolution. The Sentinel-1 data (SAR, synthetic aperture radar) might be somewhat useful for this as ships should be more easily identifiable on it and you don't have to worry about cloud cover, but probably still less useful than the delayed crossing data.
Ships don't move that quickly; AIS data refreshed once every few hours would probably be more than good enough.
AIS over there is jammed and spoofed. Nobody wants to get bombed and certain Greek and Chinese owners run the strait dark with their crews apparently very happy about the danger pay.
"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.
Including ads in Copilot-generated content (that is clearly marked as such or approved by a human before being posted in their name) would be a bad judgement call. Adding ads to other people's human-written content, without their knowledge or informed consent, is a criminally bad judgement call if it was intentional. And I don't use the term metaphorically: You're impersonating other people to post your advertising in their name. You are pretending that Zach Manson finds your product so awesome that he includes a recommendation for it in PRs that he personally posts.
Imagine what Microsoft's lawyers would do to me if I made a billboard "<my random product> is awesome, use it -- Satya Nadella" and started sticking it all over the city.
I don't see any effort to remediate it. Have you informed people whose names you used to post the ads and offered them to remove the ads?
The enshittifiers don't seem to understand inertia. By the time the enshittification becomes bad enough to do something about it, it's too late.
For that to happen, people have to be pissed off enough that it starts affecting metrics. Then, that needs to be detected, a decision to do something about it has to be made (we are probably somewhere around here), then that decision needs to be implemented step by step by removing all the enshittification... and in the meantime, the reputation as a terminally enshittified product keeps growing.
Even if most of the enshittification is removed, the reputation will stick for a while, just like the product was able to initially keep being successful despite the enshittification.
Nothing about intertia means it’s ever “too late”, just that there’s a lag between a change (positive or negative) and its effect.
People said the exact same thing about Linux ever taking off on the desktop, but slowly but surely it’s increasing. The effect always comes, eventually.
Is this reader mode or some sort of adblock-style list? (if it's the latter, I'm looking for one that I can easily add without it breaking too many sites - in my experience, the "annoyance" lists for uBlock cause too much breakage to have them enabled by default).
I realized that we may soon live in a reality where that's not an option, but I bet the car he had still allowed him to turn off the radio with the ad.
(I'm sure there would have also been countless ways to make the thing play actual music, but turning it off is the most obvious course of action.)
One of these sets of risk is mostly theoretical (aside from the large scale stoplight outage), one of them is happening often enough that anyone who takes rideshare repeatedly will have a story.
If we limit ourselves to risks that have actually manifested, not hypothetical risks, I'd rather risk getting stuck at an intersection if there is a city wide power outage than deal with the weird conversations I've had on rideshares (not even counting the countless drivers who demonstrated that it is possible to drive a car without crashing for the duration of one rideshare ride without taking your eyes off the phone for more than a few seconds at a time).
Given that a "retired judge" was present, I assume it was such a mediation meeting (i.e. the retired judge was most likely a neutral, court appointed mediator, whose job is basically to tell both sides to please come to an agreement, and potentially tell one side to pull their head out of their ass and stop being idiots before the court has to tell them that they are being idiots).
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