Ironic that a forum about disinfo has some thinking the gold bars, thrown off the Titanic, here are literal.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation
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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.)
Credibility for .gov sources is only gonna get worse, it seems.
That's the point.
oh man and .gov was the sites I generally could trust. shit
You can trust* .gov sites archived through archive.org if they predate the current administration.
*for most environmental/health related information, at least
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jfc, this reads like super low quality seo clickfarm trash. I am horrified that this is anywhere near a .gov site.
Super low quality seo clickfarm trash is what's running the US government now.
2 weeks until it's .Fox instead of .gov
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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?
Yea good fuckin luck storing that much weight
That's all an armored car can take? My pneumatic pallet jack can hold 5500 lbs.
Your pneumatic pallet jack doesn't hit potholes while going 60 mph.
True but I figure they could carry more weight than 3000lbs. My car can tow that.
You also have to account for the weight of the actual vehicle, 3k lbs is the remaining cargo capacity
And that’s the part that surprises me. I figured it would be more as cash is very heavy.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
Trump and Elon found a place for it all, don't worry.
Trump and Elon want to "check" Fort Knox to "see if" the gold "is there", but "oh no" it's "all gone".
Yuuuuge bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago
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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?
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?
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.
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.
He stole the gold during his first term and Ivana’s coffin doesn’t contain her.
He hid the gold by melting it and turning it into commodes.
they're gonna rob fort knox.
sadly, i did not have that on this month's bingo card. (there wasn't room for it!)
According to the projection, they've already robbed it of $2 billion.
And not even in a cool way with lasers and henchmen in silver jumpsuits.
What a stupid world.
Let’s not forget that all their accusations are confessions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yup. We often have practices that go above and beyond the requirements. Doing the bare minimum isn't misappropriation, it's following the rules.
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.
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.
Meanwhile we need to ask what Trump is doing with $2 billion worth of gold bars.
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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).
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.
this is nuts. how can I trust any government communication with his people at the helm.
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.
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