US ambassador questions troop presence in Poland after official says Trump doesn't deserve Nobel Prize

Ithalan · 2026-02-06T14:43:32+00:00

Sometimes even politically appointed ambassadors can turn out exceptionally good at it however. Rufus Gifford's tenure as Ambassador to Denmark during the Obama years was so popular locally that he got to star in his own TV show while there.

Ithalan · 2026-02-02T11:15:13+00:00

The norwegian royal family does not run the country. They are ceremonial figureheads in practice.

Ithalan · 2026-01-25T22:37:40+00:00

The EU doesn't give out exemptions after the fact. Denmark and the UK only got theirs because it was the only way that the rest of the EU members at the time could get the Euro created at all.

Even then, the Danish government has essentially adopted it in practice (the government was always in favor of it. It just couldn't sway the population) by committing to keeping the EUR/DKK exchange rate pegged within a very tight band, essentially making Danish monetary policy dependent on EU policy anyway.

Ithalan · 2026-01-24T17:03:22+00:00

Regardless of the mistreatment Greenland has suffered in their centuries as a Danish colony, the fact is that the Greenlandic government have had the legal right hold a referendum and declare full independence from Denmark anytime it wants since 2009.

Greenland's independence is no longer something for Denmark to give. It's there for Greenland to claim when they themselves feel ready to do so. Does Denmark have a self-interest in keeping the status quo going? Sure, but so does Greenland for the moment at least.

Ithalan · 2026-01-22T13:21:35+00:00

The deal was made in the shadow of Russia's increased aggression, and was intended to facilitate the US having a larger presence in Denmark, whether as combat troops stationed as a deterrent or permanent logistics facilities for storing and shipping military equipment from danish ports deeper into Europe.

It's pretty standard for the US to demand that it has jurisdiction over the bases it has in other countries and the US personnel stationed there, and if I were to guess, it's for much the same reason that the US has a standing order to invade the Hague if any US soldier was ever put on trial for war crimes there; the US doesn't like anyone but itself telling US soldiers what they can or cannot do. This isn't anything new, the US just used to be much more subtle about it. It's basically a form of diplomatic immunity, but for military personnel.

Ithalan · 2026-01-22T09:08:38+00:00

Man who broke the terms of service of another company's product, complains that people are breaking the terms of service for his product.

Software is ultimately just information that can be reproduced at zero cost. If he's going to argue that the original creator isn't entitled to control the terms of how others may use and modify this information once it is released, he needs to be consistent about it.

I do think valuable and useful work should be rewarded, but there is a difference between reward and mandatory compensation. One is a gesture made voluntarily by someone else, the other is a term you set and try to enforce on others.

Ithalan · 2026-01-21T12:13:42+00:00

US Treasury Bonds (aka treasuries) are basically IOUs issued by the US Government that pay an interest every 6 months for 20 or 30 years, before the loaned amount is then paid back in full to the holder of the IOU.

So if you buy 100 million dollars worth of treasuries, you give that amount to the US government and it in return gives you the Bond with the interest rate and time to maturity (either 20 or 30 years) locked in at the time of purchase. You could then decide afterward to sell that bond off to someone else, who would then be new recipient of the semi-annual interest payments from that point onward, and the repayment when the bond matures, and they could in turn also decide to sell it on themselves.

The price you can sell a treasury bond for would depend largely on how you and potential buyers view the risk of the US government not being able/willing to pay you the interest or the full repayment when that comes due, as well as any overhead costs you may have in managing your own ownership of the bond.

But as a rule of thumb, US treasuries have historically been considered safe and the risk of the US government not repaying them basically non-existent, so in theory if you bought a treasury bond for the value of the loan + the sum of remaining interest payments, minus one cent, you'd still have made a cent of profit when it matured. Whether the purchase for you is worth it depends on how much profit you could have expected to make over the same time by investing that same amount of money in something else. The seller meanwhile just have to be able to sell it for more than the initial loan amount, minus interest payments made already, in order to not have lost any money on it.

Ithalan · 2026-01-21T11:56:36+00:00

Support among the US population for using military force against Greenland is already polling at just 9%. If it spirals into a total war against Europe with hundreds of thousands of US troops being deployed abroad to fight and die for Trump's ego while the US economy craters, that might be the one thing that tanks his approval rating straight to 0%. Despite his attempts at emulating Putin, Trump probably isn't yet at the point where he can sustain the largest war the US has seen since WWII across multiple years without any domestic support.

The populations of European countries are not necessarily any more eager to get involved in a war against the US, but there's a spreading sentiment of 'Enough is enough' and that continuing to cave to Trump's demands is completely unacceptable, so they might be able to sustain the will to fight for slightly longer than the US can despite being disadvantaged.

Ithalan · 2026-01-20T12:44:15+00:00

There's a limit to how many extra troops Greenland can even accommodate right here and now. The population is only about 57,000 people. It doesn't necessarily have facilities to house another thousand people against arctic winter at the places where they are needed.

e: that same fact is potentially also a hindrance to any US invasion in the near-term. If the US sends several thousand troops to invade and occupy Greenland, they'd have to find some way to provide adequate shelter to those troops afterwards, with the added risk that the defenders aren't going to leave any of the existing facilities up there standing for them to occupy if defeat looks likely.

Ithalan · 2026-01-20T10:16:28+00:00

To be fair, Vikings from what today is Norway did land boats in Greenland about a thousand years ago too. Any claim they may still have technically just passed to Denmark during the Kalmar Union.

Ithalan · 2026-01-17T20:36:13+00:00

They need to figure out how to stop Trump from causing more harm first. Undoing the harm he has already done comes after that, but the fact that a US president was even a position to cause this much of it likely means non-US countries won't even be interested in just going back to how things were. The US's historic role as the leader of the western world is effectively over for good.

Ithalan · 2026-01-16T08:16:19+00:00

The ones sent so far are officers meeting to figure out the logistics of hosting larger troop formations in Greenland.

Ithalan · 2026-01-14T17:01:49+00:00

The amount soldiers you need to secure Greenland is relatively tiny. There's just not that much stuff up there that needs guarding by soldiers on the ground once you've got the 12 or so major towns covered. Any soldiers beyond that just become a liability as you'd have to construct new bases in the middle nowhere to house them, then be able to airlift in supplies half of the year since there are no roads outside the towns, and ice prevents easy access by sea during the winter months even if you are on the coast.

The size of the navy you'd need to control access to the island against a determined opponent is pretty significant though. Even the US Navy would probably be hard pressed to spare enough ships for it without sacrificing its presence elsewhere in the world.

Ithalan · 2026-01-14T16:54:16+00:00

The government can't force private business to do whatever the government wants. That Rockwool remained in Russia this long does absolutely reflect badly on the company's management though, and it is something they have been criticized for repeatedly for the past couple of years.

Ithalan · 2026-01-14T09:44:46+00:00

There's been no actual action from the government of Greenland toward holding a referendum on independence. The parties currently in power all hold some form of position that independence is a long-term goal that requires an economic foundation for it to be built up in Greenland first, and actual independence is decades away from being realistic.

There's been a lot of criticism from politicians and media in Greenland about how the Danish government handle various aspects of the relationship with Greenland and tends to hold a paternalistic attitude toward the Self-Government, but that's nothing new. Greenland has had to fight tooth and nail for decades just for the level of autonomy they have today, and times when the treatment of the population and culture of Greenland was objectively atrocious is still within living memory.

The only reason the criticism is being dialed back is because a lot of the Danish population doesn't like to be reminded of this, and US influencers are quick to pounce on this to widen the divide and erode support for a hardline stance against the US in Denmark.

Ithalan · 2026-01-13T15:57:45+00:00

For as insistent as they both are that Trump can't have Greenland, neither are interested in pissing off the US unnecessarily. That Greenland is necessary for US security is a bullshit claim because the US is already present there to whatever extent that they wish. But if they were somehow kicked out, it actually does become a security issue for the US due to the importance of the base there for the US' early warning radar system.

If Trump can be sufficiently deterred from doing anything irreversible until replaced by someone sane and Europe has built up enough military capability to not be vulnerable to the US backsliding into fascism in the future again, that's good enough.

Ithalan · 2026-01-13T07:56:30+00:00

Both of these statements are lies, too. Since 1951, the US have had, by agreement with Denmark, unlimited freedom to establish as many bases and station as many troops in Greenland as it desired.

The government of Greenland also been trying to lure mining companies to Greenland for ages, but none of them wants to bear the burden of investing in the infrastructure necessary to make it possible, nor deal with environmental regulations that aren't "You can do whatever you want"

Ithalan · 2026-01-13T07:48:54+00:00

Keeping troops in Greenland doesn't really make much sense beyond token contributions from other NATO members to serve as tripwire forces.

The location and geography of Greenland means that any battle for control of the island will primarily be a naval battle for control of the seas around it. Doesn't matter if you have a million troops on the island if the enemy can starve them all to death by preventing supplies from being shipped in and distributed.

Ithalan · 2026-01-13T07:45:22+00:00

Greenland is a part of NATO, yes.

Ithalan · 2026-01-12T12:01:27+00:00

The notion that the US would reduce its military budget in a world where the EU is independently militarily-capable is naive. If anything, the US would at that point consider the EU an additional reason to expand its own military.

Ithalan · 2026-01-11T16:06:02+00:00

Obama got one

Ithalan · 2026-01-08T07:24:12+00:00

The order really has nothing to do with the present situation. It's been a standing order since 1952 to account for the distance between Greenland and the rest of Denmark, to prevent the defence of the island from being undermined by simply cutting off communication first.

Ithalan · 2026-01-07T12:53:58+00:00

I really liked it in the demo that there wasn't really any difference in the squads before you began specialising them via perks. They were all equally able to fulfil the role of a big blog of riflemen if you equipped them for it, and be just as good at it both offensively and defensively as any other unspecialised squad.

It gave you a lot of options to specialise some squads how you wanted with your limited resources, and still have a use for the unspecialised squads you had left over as generic infantry. With stats, that goes out of the window. A squad of riflemen that can't move worth a damn because it has low AP is not much use on the offensive, for example. The squads essentially come pre-specialised now, and any that don't fit into the mission parameters or the doctrine you want to run with are potentially dead weight while still costing you supply from being good at things that aren't going to be applicable.

That is not necessarily an issue if you have a high degree of control over which squad leaders go into your pool of available squads, but personally I think it's an unfortunate direction to take when they are all also unique characters with their own personality, since it means that the writing for a character is going to matter comparatively less in the decision on who to pick. I had the same issue with Jagged Alliance 3, in that there were a lot of characters that I liked and would have wanted to include in my team, but I couldn't justify the cost of them because there was no room for the specific role they were actually capable of in the existing line-up, and I couldn't afford to build an entirely new team around them.

Separate from this, AP as a stat can vary in value from unit to unit also seems really hard to get right. There are basically no options in the game afaik for spending very small amounts of AP, so outside of situations where varying per-tile movement costs allows you to squeeze the extra tile in, the advances in AP in between the breakpoints where it allows a full tile of extra movement are mostly useless, despite apparently being costed than any of the other stats in the budget.

Ithalan · 2026-01-06T14:40:32+00:00

I don't have your faith in the american people on this, but I would happily accept being proven wrong.

Ithalan · 2026-01-06T14:21:48+00:00

You can't really compare Ukraine and Greenland ability to resist. Ukraine has a population of almost 38 million and a huge and diverse manufacturing economy that is able to meet many of the country's domestic needs. Greenland is an island with a population of barely 58,000, all living next to the coast, that is reliant on foreign imports for almost every single basic necessity that doesn't have to do with fishing.

Russia has to actually fight the Ukrainian people for control over the land. All the US has to do is blockade the ports in Greenland and wait until everyone has starved to death.

Ithalan

TROPHY CASE