New to Frankfurt Airport – a vending machine which dispenses gold bars.
The prototype was trialed at Frankfurt Airport and is now being rolled out to 500 locations around Germany. It can dispense 1g, 5g & 10g gold bars/coins. The 1g wafer thin piece sells for around US42 and the 10g bar for $US341. However the price is updated every 2 minutes to reflect the gold price.
Given the premium on the smaller weights its not really an investment as much as a novelty or unique gift idea.
Luxury resorts used to sell status and spectacle. Now they sell something quieter: relief. Guests arrive overloaded, and the best resorts are redesigning around sensory calm, reduced friction, and emotional steadiness. Modern luxury is less about what you add, and more about what you remove.
In 2019 the Victorian Forestry Plan set a 2030 end date for native harvesting. That ten year horizon shaped every part of the transition. When the date was brought forward by six years, the logic collapsed. Part 2 examines how an interrupted timeline left towns exposed before the real work could begin.
AKD Yarram’s closure has been framed as a casualty of the native timber ban, but that story collapses two different industries into one. The mill processed softwood, not native hardwood. The real causes were national construction turbulence and a compressed transition timeline that left towns exposed.
The closure of AKD’s Yarram mill is more than a job loss. It’s a systemic emergency that exposes how vulnerable small towns become when economic shocks arrive without a formal response system. Yarram’s community is already mobilising, but goodwill alone can’t carry what should be a structured, predictable framework for regional crises.