• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Retract your claws, please. I can describe what they are doing and thinking without endorsing it.

    Perhaps you would find this other comment that I posted to Reddit more complete.

    Answer: (Please note that I’m going to detail what Trump and others are thinking here but that doesn’t mean I agree with them. Some of this is basic facts but a lot is POV. In particular I recognize that the American notion of “homeland defense” is incredibly aggressive, requiring a huge region of total control around the country and far afield, where the US wants to constantly project power toward its perceived adversaries).

    1. United States military believes that Greenland is of great strategic importance, especially as the ice up north disappears to open up more shipping lanes. Greenland is near some key shipping lanes, some key undersea internet lines, and is also just a big area of land between the US and Russia that the US wants defended to its general standard in terms of air dominance, missile defense, and readiness to repel invasion.
    2. United States military does not believe that Denmark is sufficiently guarding or even monitoring this region, and has already successfully negotiated to have some US bases up there to plug this hole. But they want more: complete control. The US does not like to have any dependencies on anyone for its defense.
    3. Greenland is rich in rare earth metals and those are importent for the future because they’re needed for advanced tech. China currently has a near monopoly on the world’s reserves and the US considers that a strategic threat. You can’t power a modern military without chips. And even if the US is able to get its own chip foundries going to reduce dependence on Taiwan, they still need the minerals.
    4. There is a long history of the US both criticizing Denmark’s management of the place (or lack of defense spending there), and of the US trying to buy the territory. Trump sees an opportunity to grab something and he doesn’t give a fuck if Europe or American liberals get flustered by it. In his view: the US is vulnerable unless Greenland is managed right, and no one is doing that. The country even lacks the population to truly mine their minerals or manage the corruption that is always a risk when a small nation comes into a flood of commodity wealth.

    So basically the hawkish elements of the US think that Greenland is 1. A strategic vulnerability for the US and 2. Just sitting there not being managed properly or at all. And since Trump has no respect for anyone, he actually likes the idea of grabbing this land. He doesn’t think anyone will actually do anything about it except complain. It will burnish his legacy and in his mind, strengthen America. He doesn’t think that Allies strengthen the US, he thinks that our Allies depend on the US. So in his mind we should be able to do what we think we need to because the entire world is depending on us for stability and defense.


  • We used to have a print news sheet for job listings in the non profit sector, which is very large in my home city. It would have one or two articles as well but was mostly job classifieds. Wish I could give you a specific recommendation, but I guess I’m saying just find another job?

    It sounds like you want to be in that job sector, but you experienced a disastrous turnover in management at one organization. To be candid it’s a mild story compared to many I have heard. Tyrannical EDs or crazy founders with too much authority, big funding swings, politics up the wazoo… the non profit sector seems to be particularly drama-laden. I’m not sure why. But take the hit and move on. It doesn’t sound like it was about you personally.


  • Far be it from me to defend a Trump in any way, but the American desire to control Greenland does pre-date his presidency by a good stretch and it will still be a fond wish of the Department of War after he is gone. Trump is in this one personally because he thinks it will be a jewel of his legacy to add territory to the country. And he is always up for confrontational harassment of Europe and brandishing his sword as CIC. But Greenland specifically was put on his agenda by others in security defense circles. There is a case for it, and that case isn’t old and tired, it’s getting stronger as ice melts.







  • The article has this to say:

    After cross-checking information obtained from reliable sources, including the Supreme National Security Council and the presidential office, the initial estimate by the Islamic Republic’s security institutions is that at least 12,000 people were killed in this nationwide killing.

    This makes it sound like their 12k number is coming from… the government doing the killing? I’m a little confused about that. It doesn’t seem conventional for dictators to release casualty counts for their pogroms. Are they perhaps trying to send a threatening message to everyone to stay home, and puffing up that number?






  • I agree with you that education is not primarily workforce training. I just included that note as a bit of context because it definitely made me chuckle to see these two posts right together, each painting a completely different picture of AI: “so important you must embrace it or you will die” versus “what the hell is this shit keep it away from children.”

    I fall in between somewhere. We should be very cautious with AI and judicious in its use.

    I just think that “cautious and judicious” means having it in schools - not keeping it out of schools. Toddler daycares should be angelic safe spaces where kids are utterly protected. Schools should actually have challenging material that demands critical thinking.


  • It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.


  • When the first dotcom bubble burst, I predicted that big companies would buy up all the major websites for fire sale prices and put them behind subscription paywalls. “Pay $30/month and get access to all 400 sites in the Yahoo network.”

    I underestimated how easy it is to spin up alternative sites. Most of the media brands I thought of as valuable then are shit now, or gone.

    And, like everyone, I didn’t anticipate social media. Even Google was still nascent at the time.