The world is built by normal people and ruined by “great” ones.

Lots of accounts probing the system for weakness, to be sure. But there’s just not much of an audience to manipulate. And you’ll virtually never find a Lemmy thread indexed in Google results with the high profile of a comparable Reddit thread.

Guy from Langley spending 80 hours a week posting hundreds of SpongeBob memes to convince the Wendy’s PR company flak that we need to invade Greenland for national security reasons.

If you’re a fascist who needs to believe in the righteousness of your movement, there’s every reason to believe it.

A ghoul who will suffer no consequences, because while Europe is sending parade units to flex on the beaches of Qeqertarsuaq this asshole is allowed to continue operating Estée Lauder across the continent.

If he were Russian, he’d be drowning under sanctions right now. Instead, the guy gets to bait the US into the worst Intra-NATO conflict since Cyprus and pocket a windfall no questions asked.

Five Eyes down by at least two

Right. 70 is, though.

I actually have no idea what my IQ is.

I mean, safe bet that it’s within 10 points of 100. Guessing 96 is as valid as any other number in that range.

Fucker better wipe my tree. >:(

It’s free fertilizer! You should be thanking him!

my grandfather ran up the beaches of Normandy

Then he’d have told you how much of a bloody mess taking a beach head is with 1930s equipment. Again, nobody in Europe actually wants that noise. That’s why there was no major European intervention in Ukraine. Y’all just let the Ukrainians piss away their best and brightest as cannon fodder while up-selling them on Wundertanken that got stuck in the mud.

You have no concept of suffering during war.

If I didn’t, I’d be significantly more blase about a military engagement in Greenland.

I’ll spot you Trump has no concept, and will presumably fling every member of JSOC into the meat grinder if he thinks it’ll win him a 51st state and a Nobel Prize in Bribing The Right People. But the fact that folks in the EU do seem to have a meaningful contingent of anti-war locals would suggest they aren’t thrilled with the prospect of sending their kids and grandkids to die over an oversized ice cube.

There’s simply no appetite for this shit, which is why Trump (very rightly) believes he can take Greenland without a serious fight. That’s the nature of imperialism. The cost of opposing the empire is astronomically higher than the cost of acquiesce, so people tend to duck their heads until the pain is intolerable. And Greenland isn’t painful enough to fight over.

It’s funny, because you literally never see people mention that they’re within a standard deviation of the average, even though that’s supposed to be 70% of the people who take the test.

Everyone’s either bragging about their 140 IQ or accusing someone else of being “room temperature”. Nobody seems to understand 96 is normal human intelligence and normal humans are - by and large - smart enough to get the job done.

The first time you get tricked by this can be written off as experimentation. It’s the folks that are suckered in over and over again, and take some kind of personal pride in receiving a little “You’re Such A Smart Little Guy” certificate from a random website that have you looking sideways.

I suspect you have puddle-deep insight into global economic dependencies, the fragility of the US economy, the EU + Canada Arctic warfare capabilities, and the likely outcome of an invasion of a northern neighboring country that looks like you, sounds like you, and can hide in plain sight or hop over the indefensible border to bring violence to your homes.

Now say it in German.

Serious question: how will a carrier group fare in arctic ice during winter?

Climate change has made this a receding problem, which is one reason why Greenland is suddenly hot property. In another ten years, you may be able to sail the perimeter of Greenland fully unobstructed all year round.

An answer: they can take it, but when winter comes, holding it will be difficult.

Holding it from whom? Nobody in NATO actually has the stomach for the kind of losses they’d take.

That was during very hard economic times for Poland, still recovering from communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcerowicz_Plan#Effects

:-/ Like saying they’re still recovering from a charlie horse after you put a shotgun to their kneecaps.

But yes, Poland limped into the Iraq War and managed to catch several hundred strays over the course of the conflict. In exchange, the Bush Administration kicked the country back $200M in relief (contingent on further privatization and financialization of their nascent market system).

Blood money spends well, at least.

Do you believe that other countries have been training alongside Americans for decades and have never picked up any knowledge of their skills, methods, strategy, tactics, doctrine, weapons, etc?

I think when you’ve got 100x players on the field to their 1x, the learning curve tilts in your favor. EU members in subordinate roles and supporting positions, without command and control access to the biggest pieces of hardware, aren’t going to have the accumulated experiences of US veterans. Nevermind the amount of time the US has spent in the field relative to their European peers.

The Americans are the most visible military on the planet, and the most gregarious, they’re in every country and training with all of these countries, and somehow no one ever figured out how they do it?

I don’t think it’s a mystery at a high level. But that’s like saying “It’s no mystery how Tom Brady won all those football games”. When you get into the finer details, you discover why 13 years of Superbowls never produced a rival defense that could consistently shut down the Patriots’ Offense.

The Chinese government doesn’t want to have to deal with routing the world’s email spam through their domestic servers. Nevermind the nightmare of latency going round trip from a terminal in Sao Paulo to a data center in Beijing, just so some mid-level bureaucrat can know the porn habits of Brazil.

I would say the bigger threat of Chinese hardware is an end to the effective technology embargo the US sanctions regime has imposed on the Global South. Far scarier to Americans than a Chinese bureaucrat with access to the Amazon web store history is a Cuban Communist with a standard of living that outpaces their Miami peers.

NATO isn’t a partnership between democratic member states, its a partnership between regional militaries.

The end state of the conflict over Greenland will be - if anything - a series of US-backed coups in European countries that preserve NATO by realigning the civilian leadership with the foreign policy of the US.

We’re already seeing this with the AfD in Germany, the Reform UK in England, and National Rally in France. These countries are functionally aligning with Trump as white-nationalist governments working towards the same end goals. And they’ve all heavily infiltrated their domestic militaries.

I mean, that’s absolutely where this is going at a business level. Cloud computing has been in the cards for decades, and the only real question is who will do the hosting.

With the price of RAM and CPUs going asymptotic, these big cloud compute companies are building an effective monopoly on high end processing capacity. They’re cornering the market on hardware. Eventually, you either use their computers or you stick with legacy hardware (that’s seeded with Planned Obsolescence time bombs) or you (shudders just to think of it) start buying computers from CHINA.

When you think about it, there’s really only one option.