• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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      6 hours ago

      I mean the disinfo is definitely leaning into the confusion. I included quote marks, but they did not. I fully expect that Trump or one of his people will announce the story taking it literally, if it gets wider traction (which seems not unlikely.)

  • qprimed@lemmy.ml
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    23 hours ago

    jfc, this reads like super low quality seo clickfarm trash. I am horrified that this is anywhere near a .gov site.

  • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    A gold bar weighs 400 troy ounces.

    Right now gold is at $2,948.85 per troy ounce.

    That’s about 1,695 and a half gold bars.

    A gold bar weighs 27.4286 lbs, so that is 46,507lbs of gold.

    The standard armored car can carry up to 3,000 lbs, so it would take at least 16 armored cars to move that many bars.

    I guess my point is that is a fuck load of gold. Where the hell do they think Biden was hiding it? In his guest bathroom?

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      17 hours ago

      And while the title mentions gold, the body of the article seems to indicate it’s just money in a bank account? I don’t see the gold thing repeated again.

      • booly@sh.itjust.works
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        11 hours ago

        Your pallet jack can’t safely carry that cargo, plus people, at highway speeds, 3-5 feet off the ground. I also assume your pallet jack isn’t armored, so you’ve got to subtract the weight of the armor to get the surplus capacity actually useful for cargo.

        The typical big armored bank truck you see transporting cash is rated at 25,000 lbs, but already weighs something like 13,000 lbs empty. The smaller vans, like what I assume the parent commenter is talking about, probably has to devote a larger percentage of its gross vehicle weight to the actual vehicle and armor.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        I find it extremely unlikely that your pneumatic pallet jack is allowed to hold more than 5,499 lbs.

        It’s a “max weight” not a “suggested weight”.

        But yes, a regular armored van can carry around max 3k and a super-heavy can carry max 9k.

        • warbond@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          In my experience “max” safe working loads on electric and hydraulic pallet jacks are tested to 150% capacity to make sure it’ll perform as advertised. Perhaps pneumatic jacks are tested to different standards, but that doesn’t sound right to me.

          What makes you say it’s unlikely?

          • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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            12 hours ago

            Overloading equipment will inevitably lead to early failure, even if not right away. It’s the same logic as skipping load bearings in a building because the beams are rated to a lower value than their average strength.

  • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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    23 hours ago

    Anyone have a link to the real story this is based on? This page is practically unintelligible. Are the gold bars metaphorical? What the fuck are they talking about?

    • RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Anyone have a link to the real story this is based on? This page is practically unintelligible. Are the gold bars metaphorical? What the fuck are they talking about?

      https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/20/fort-knox-gold-donald-trump-elon-musk/79314407007/

      They’re talking about the gold at Fort Knox.

      “We’re going to go to Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there. If the gold isn’t there, we’re going to be very upset,” Trump said, per a C-SPAN recording.

      Now today’s update is that “gold is missing” (I use quotes because it’s so obviously untrue). And according to Trump it’s the Democrats that took it. Always the democrats. Black female ones too.

      As if politicians need to steal gold bars. They receive that as a gift from Egypt as a bribe maybe, but they don’t steal from Fort Knox. Makes zero sense. They can just trade stocks with insider info like everyone in congress.

      • kn0wmad1c
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        19 hours ago

        If gold really is missing, the first two places I’d check are Trump’s pockets and the Mar-a-Lago bathrooms next to the classified documents.

      • adarza@lemmy.ca
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        23 hours ago

        they’re gonna rob fort knox.

        sadly, i did not have that on this month’s bingo card. (there wasn’t room for it!)

    • takeheart@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      The Washington Examiner:

      In the Wednesday video, Zeldin accused the Biden administration of rushing out these funds and said they should remain under the control of the government.

      He referred to the funds several times as “gold bars,” referencing a December 2024 video put out by the conservative group Project Veritas in which a former EPA employee told an undercover member of the group that the administration was attempting to distribute as much of the promised funds as possible before President Joe Biden left office.

      So it’s just someone using a metaphor. And shoddy journalism. Wrapping gold bars in quotes does exculpate anyone from shoddy journalism.

      • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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        22 hours ago

        So literally just normal government operations that they are trying to spin into some kind of scandal, same as all the other bullshit coming out each day.

        • GorGor@startrek.website
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          21 hours ago

          One could make the argument that they didn’t do their due diligence and rushed out funds without proper oversight. Honestly it doesn’t sound great rushing out that amount of money (IF true), but with the backdrop of what was coming, it is obvious WHY they rushed.

          Really, the accusation of corruption is comical given this administration’s actions.

          • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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            20 hours ago

            Simply moving something along faster isn’t malfeasance though, it’s efficiency. Unless there was some issue with what they did, but so far no one has pointed to anything that I can find. They just executed the grant programs as directed by congress.

            • 🔍🦘🛎@lemmy.world
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              9 hours ago

              Yup. We often have practices that go above and beyond the requirements. Doing the bare minimum isn’t misappropriation, it’s following the rules.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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      22 hours ago

      There’s a link early on to a separate, earlier page on epa.gov, which is also insane, which makes it clear that the “gold bars” are metaphorical. Someone allegedly said something about “throwing gold bars off the Titanic,” some sort of nugget of theoretical truth I guess being that a lot of people were trying to get as much money out the door as possible before Trump came in and destroyed everything, and then Newsmax and Breitbart seized on the opportunity to deliberately misunderstand the metaphor as something literal, and also make up a whole bunch of total bullshit out of the whole cloth.

      I didn’t look too deep into it because it’s clearly all gibberish. What I just typed is as far as I went. But there are links on the page, if you have some mental fortitude and want to go adventuring. I honestly don’t think it’s worth much time to look into.

    • frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io
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      22 hours ago

      Looks like a grant based program to electrify housing etc. was included in the inflation reduction act, and a fund to distribute funds to grant recipients was created. I’m guessing the total funding was $20 billion, to be distributed over several years. One of the manager/admins previously worked at a group that was one of those receiving the initial set of grant funds. Claims conflict of interest without citing evidence. Another group appears to involve Stacy Abrams, and looks to have been created from other groups to carry out the kind of work the fund was designed to address. Thus, it’s new and has only 1 year of tax reporting available with little revenue.

      What I’m getting out of this is that non-profit volunteers or admins who go into the federal government aren’t allowed to work in their area of expertise, even with sufficient conflict of interest reporting, and that private citizens who support their preferred candidate for president aren’t allowed to work with groups that recieve any federal grants, ever.

    • emmanuel_car@fedia.io
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      16 hours ago

      My guess is a toilet that only needs to flush once to get rid of those pesky classified documents.

  • adarza@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    already trying to smear a potential (she has not declared her intent to run yet) democrat candidate for georgia’s open governor’s race (kemp is term-limited).

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      17 hours ago

      Yep, you’re never going to hear the end of ‘Gold Bars’ or whatever from conservative media, to the point that it becomes shorthand and they just have to repeat those 2 words to get the Pavlov reaction from the base who won’t even know the actual story it’s based on.

      It’s like the Seth Rich thing they did to Hillary.

    • adarza@lemmy.ca
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      21 hours ago

      it’s “opposite day”. today, tomorrow, and every day until this nightmare ends. pretty much everything that spews out of the anuses of this administration is a lie.

  • forrgott@lemm.ee
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    22 hours ago

    So all that’s actually happened is a $20 billion contract was officially disbursed - as in, transferred to a private installation. So the contract is closed.

    Just to be clear, I don’t believe there’s enough gold bullion in existence to represent 20 billion; besides, is gold did go missing from fort Knox, we all know trump stole it.

    Final note: there’s no way in hell 20 billion isn’t just a made up amount. Maybe 20 million? But they been caught just straight up lying about total monetary amounts.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      22 hours ago

      Well, there’s certainly enough gold bars to cover that amount, gold is stupid expensive. You’re right about the rest though.

      There’s about $290 billion in bullion in fort Knox, which is something like 4.5 metric tons.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      17 hours ago

      I think the 20 billion is the full amount that was appropriated in the IRA, to be disbursed to various NGOs. Part of which went to the specific organisation lead by Abrams. At least that’s what I got by paying attention to the specific weasel words used in the ‘article’, chances are they’re outright fabricating stuff and even that’s a lie, of course.

      • forrgott@lemm.ee
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        17 hours ago

        You clearly have more patience than I to read it that closely, lol. Still, a billion dollars is an inconvenience amount; it’s not impossible that 20 billion was the total…but that number raises suspicion.

  • forrgott@lemm.ee
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    21 hours ago

    Color me surprised. I guess I drastically underestimated the current monetary value of gold, mainly on account of how long ago we went off the “gold standard”.

    But still, it’s like they fed their grievance through a stupid LLM. Very painful read.