Thule/Pituffik is why the whole "buying Greenland" thing never made sense to me, no matter how you try to look at it or steelman it... Before they were threatened with being purchased and invaded, Greenland and Denmark were our allies, and it's not like Greenland had a shortage of (non-green) land. If it was about military access, we could have just asked to build another base.
Greenland controls half of one end of the northwest passage. The other end is controlled by the US via Alaska and the Bering strait. Doesn't seem like there's much additional benefit to justify burning a bunch of international goodwill on the matter.
The northwest passage can be done by going through the Canadian archipelago. Greenland doesn't really factor into the northwest passage.
You can do it all via Canadian waters and you can't do it at all without using Canadian waters so no need to even consider greenland as they don't have any waters that would speed up the transit.
It's the wrong question though! The US is sitting on piles of rare earth deposits—it still doesn't mine them. It can't compete on pure cost with the mining industry in China. It's discussed extensively (e.g. here[0]) that the mining, and particularly chemical processing of ores, is labor/resource-intensive, expensive, and hazardous to ecology and to humans. It has nothing to do with the raw availability—these are super abundant ores, not rare at all, despite the name.
Jack Lifton in [0] adds the perspective that rare earth processing involves a large amount of institutional knowledge, that would take time for the US to reacquire, since we forget everything when we stopped mining many decades ago. While in the interim, China has spent its time as the world's rare earth monopoly optimizing the chemical processes, widening their moat. It's like the manufacturing question, where's it about institutional knowledge and industrial ecosystems—nothing at all like oil/gas where it's solely about where the minerals are.
Greenland has been under intense pressure from China and Russia trying to gobble up anything they can.
Just one example. There are others of China and/or Russian interests buying up British, Dutch, Australian, etc companies that have existing contracts and then switching it over to their control.
Commercial mining has little to do with Denmark withdrawing from treaties in favor of military partnership with our adversaries. And your link is about Greenland expelling a Chinese mining firm, so it seems like things were going reasonably well for the US on that front too.
That the firm was allowed in and then needed to be expelled is the issue. How many operators are still there but undetected, or so embedded that they cannot be easily expelled?
So are you saying that the US should make military threats against any ally where a Chinese-controlled firm sets up a mine, even temporarily? Or where it might have happened without being detected?
My wild guess is to make our adversaries and the world think we are capable of being a nation that attempts to conquer other lands. More so make our adversaries like Russia know we are not weak and we can conquer too and or we are now unhinged too don't even think about messing with us.
Whether my assumption is right or wrong its a different vibe then the peacemaker image/vibe previous administrations have followed.
A Different take. Greenland is strategic to the security of North America. And had been severely neglected by Denmark. Just like all Nato countries, not contributing financially to security as required.
This saber rattling had the desired effect and result. More military investment in Greenland. But, using other ppl's money... Denmark.
And in Canada's case with becoming a 51'st state... they too are now committed to meeting NATO $ obligations.
Agreed. Europe has been mooching off US military spend for decades. I also wouldn’t expect Denmark has the military capability to hold Greenland in a war.
Dependence on the US has been a great point of leverage, and not what I would call mooching. Also the EU and Canada have stood with the US and committed soldiers regularly to US led conflicts.
Finally, Greenland would fall under NATO protection so who exactly would Denmark need to protect them from?
Most likely they are actually, every country will have a certain "% of GDP" threshold where once they go above that number, it makes more sense for them to spend the money in their own home grown defense industry vs buying US made weapons.
It has also certainly served US interests to keep certain European countries "down" and have them reliant on the US for their security for other reasons too.
The idea that the US decided to "subsidize" European defense for multiple decades, out of their own generosity is.... nothing short of completely laughable imo.
...biggest pushers for European nations to rely on the US, to be precise. If that's no longer the objective, fine, but there's no need to rewrite history and call it "mooching". It was a strategic choice, to avoid a repeat of WWII.
Relationships change over the course of a century. The 2% GDP defense spending agreement came about during the Riga summit in 2006. So the objective did change twenty years ago and many member nations never abided by that agreement; much to the frustration of both Bush and Obama. What you're espousing is more of a history rewrite by assuming we have had a static relationship going back to the end of WW2 and that this defense spending agreement is newer than it actually is.
The “allies” aren’t even hitting their NATO spend targets and probably haven’t ever. Beef up their military and the US doesn’t have to stop policing their world so much (currently the US is keeping European shipping open by bombing Houthis nonstop).
> currently the US is keeping European shipping open by bombing Houthis nonstop).
Keeping it cheaper.
When the Suez was blocked by a sideways ship[0], some of shipping went around Africa[1].
The USA also notably made it clear to the European powers that European powers absolutely didn't have any right to be the powers who controlled the Suez[2].
I also note that the official position of the Houthis is their attacks on shipping are supposed to be about Israel, the problem from the perspective of everyone else in Europe is that they're idiots hitting unrelated ships as well[3].
All of this complaining about NATO, or WTO, or IMF, etc... Any globalization.
People forget -> The US designed and setup these systems. These were all founded and built by the US, to project US power and interests. How can we complain now for things we designed and wanted.
It sounds like a bunch of whining. "Oh Boohoo, We got what we wanted. I'm the most powerful country on the planet because we forced globalization on everybody and now I don't like it, boo hoo."
Yeah I'm not certain what the end goal is, but I am certain that the entire thing is theater, meant for someone's consumption. My best guess is we want the world to believe we won't be there to defend them because it's the only way to get them to spend on their own defenses.
OK there's that (Site J is fascinating). But there's also another in-mountain base near Helheim Glacier, and an under ice research base midway between Helheim and Jacobshavn Glacier (Site G or H?)
lol given your background you should probably definitely know!
I don't disagree, however I find it a bit ironic to see a comment like this under one that mentions the SL-1. It's one of the few nuclear disasters we know of where the reactor for-sure went prompt critical, causing the fuel to explode and kill 3 people.
It was no Chernobyl, but I'd doubt you would find many that would call the design of that particular small reactor safe. Hopefully the developers of today's small reactors have learned the lesson: "don't build a reactor that can be controlled by just one control rod which also gets stuck all the time."
Eh... it's extremely flabby, like most of these franchise-tied TV series (all the Marvel ones have the same problem, both the Netflix and Disney ones, though the Netflix ones are far worse about it). Tons of scenes where I want to yell at the editor "fucking cut away! It's over!" and then it goes on another 20 seconds, shots where it clearly should have cut a couple seconds earlier, whole pieces of dialog that are painfully redundant, restating things or adding nothing to either plot or character, et c, and it adds up.
My best guess for why they do this is that it fills time with fewer set-ups and sets, saving production costs. I can't figure out another angle for how this could be saving money per minute of "content".
The new season makes that really clear, because each 3-episode "movie" is 130ish minutes long and clearly could have been one 90ish minute film without losing anything important at all, still with plenty of time for relaxed-pace character development and such.
> whole pieces of dialog that are painfully redundant, restating things or adding nothing to either plot or character
Modern TV is made to be consumed (I use that word intentionally, not watched) by people who aren't really paying attention to what's happening, so you need to restate any major plot point several times to make sure it sticks.
You've got 30 seconds you shot that, when the editor sits down to put it all together, definitely needs to be trimmed. But if you do that, it's 30 fewer seconds of "content". Your business measures output in terms of minutes of content, finished or watched. If you leave it in, the scene's worse, but how many viewers will stop watching because of it? Fewer than what it's worth to have that extra half-minute of "content". So it stays.
And operating this way, you can shoot 7 minutes of dialog that'd be trimmed to 4.5 minutes in a good edit (it's many individual shots, and most have at least a little on the beginning or end that need to go), instead trimming only what's absolutely necessary and get 5 or maybe 5.5 minutes out of it; do that over an entire 40 minute episode and you've saved yourself an entire longish scene that you'd have had to set up for otherwise, to fill the same time. Each set-up is expensive, so that's also saving you money despite being the same amount of "content".
Mandalorian benefitted a lot from being far more episodic, though of course it also had some longer plot lines. Most shows that try to make their main thing the prestige TV “big damn plot” just aren’t very good at it. Episodic’s easier to get right, or at least to do OK.
It’s also a better star wars, in that it’s playing in the same space as the originals, and not a lot of things do that very well, so it’s nice to see anything doing it decently well. Andor’s competition is basically all of political action-thrillers, and that’s a crowded space in which it doesn’t really stand out.
Way off topic, but it makes me wonder if Trump can't "get" Greenland the way he wants, if he'll just order Google et.al. to change their maps to show it as part of the United States anyway, and let cultural seepage do the work for him.
"This must be America. It says so on Google Maps!"
https://archive.ph/bTZuA
A couple other threads (on Project Iceworm and its tunnels),
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42262547 ("NASA aircraft uncover Cold War nuclear missile tunnels under Greenland ice sheet (space.com)"—42 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42249801 ("California scientists accidentally find nuclear fever dream in Arctic snow (sfgate.com)"—4 commments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28374013 ("The U.S. Army tried portable nuclear power at remote bases 60 years ago (atlasobscura.com)" (2021)—152 comments)
There's very interesting bases in Greenland even today.
Such as?
Presumably, you mean Pituffik Space Base[1], formerly Thule Air Base, and Thule Site J?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pituffik_Space_Base
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Site_J
Thule/Pituffik is why the whole "buying Greenland" thing never made sense to me, no matter how you try to look at it or steelman it... Before they were threatened with being purchased and invaded, Greenland and Denmark were our allies, and it's not like Greenland had a shortage of (non-green) land. If it was about military access, we could have just asked to build another base.
No need to ask. As mentioned in the article, the U.S. has the right, by treaty, to build military bases in Greenland already.
Are there mineral/energy resources there to extract? That's the only thing that would make sense to me.
Fishing rights and control of the northwest passage are up there.
Greenland controls half of one end of the northwest passage. The other end is controlled by the US via Alaska and the Bering strait. Doesn't seem like there's much additional benefit to justify burning a bunch of international goodwill on the matter.
The northwest passage can be done by going through the Canadian archipelago. Greenland doesn't really factor into the northwest passage.
You can do it all via Canadian waters and you can't do it at all without using Canadian waters so no need to even consider greenland as they don't have any waters that would speed up the transit.
https://www.mining.com/web/factbox-greenlands-rich-but-large...
It's the wrong question though! The US is sitting on piles of rare earth deposits—it still doesn't mine them. It can't compete on pure cost with the mining industry in China. It's discussed extensively (e.g. here[0]) that the mining, and particularly chemical processing of ores, is labor/resource-intensive, expensive, and hazardous to ecology and to humans. It has nothing to do with the raw availability—these are super abundant ores, not rare at all, despite the name.
Jack Lifton in [0] adds the perspective that rare earth processing involves a large amount of institutional knowledge, that would take time for the US to reacquire, since we forget everything when we stopped mining many decades ago. While in the interim, China has spent its time as the world's rare earth monopoly optimizing the chemical processes, widening their moat. It's like the manufacturing question, where's it about institutional knowledge and industrial ecosystems—nothing at all like oil/gas where it's solely about where the minerals are.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43953272
yes, significant amounts
Greenland has been under intense pressure from China and Russia trying to gobble up anything they can.
Just one example. There are others of China and/or Russian interests buying up British, Dutch, Australian, etc companies that have existing contracts and then switching it over to their control.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/11/23/greenland-mining-ch...
Commercial mining has little to do with Denmark withdrawing from treaties in favor of military partnership with our adversaries. And your link is about Greenland expelling a Chinese mining firm, so it seems like things were going reasonably well for the US on that front too.
That the firm was allowed in and then needed to be expelled is the issue. How many operators are still there but undetected, or so embedded that they cannot be easily expelled?
So are you saying that the US should make military threats against any ally where a Chinese-controlled firm sets up a mine, even temporarily? Or where it might have happened without being detected?
All Chinese or Russian firms should be considered, at least at first glance, as military or intelligence apparatus.
Yeah but I'm wondering whether we should make it that easy for China and Russia to ruin our relationships with our allies.
I think that is more to do with the current administrations "style" of state-craft (basically the "big stick" method)
My wild guess is to make our adversaries and the world think we are capable of being a nation that attempts to conquer other lands. More so make our adversaries like Russia know we are not weak and we can conquer too and or we are now unhinged too don't even think about messing with us.
Whether my assumption is right or wrong its a different vibe then the peacemaker image/vibe previous administrations have followed.
A Different take. Greenland is strategic to the security of North America. And had been severely neglected by Denmark. Just like all Nato countries, not contributing financially to security as required.
This saber rattling had the desired effect and result. More military investment in Greenland. But, using other ppl's money... Denmark.
And in Canada's case with becoming a 51'st state... they too are now committed to meeting NATO $ obligations.
So you're saying we're improving US security, by making our allies think we're actually their enemies so they beef up their militaries to fight us?
To defend themselves knowing the US won't be there to back them up but yes
Then I guess when we live in a world where lots of countries have powerful militaries and none of them are our friends, that means we've won.
Agreed. Europe has been mooching off US military spend for decades. I also wouldn’t expect Denmark has the military capability to hold Greenland in a war.
Dependence on the US has been a great point of leverage, and not what I would call mooching. Also the EU and Canada have stood with the US and committed soldiers regularly to US led conflicts.
Finally, Greenland would fall under NATO protection so who exactly would Denmark need to protect them from?
The US has been one of the biggest pushers for European nations to rely on NATO.
The US isn’t making most NATO members in Europe not hit their defense spending targets.
Most likely they are actually, every country will have a certain "% of GDP" threshold where once they go above that number, it makes more sense for them to spend the money in their own home grown defense industry vs buying US made weapons.
It has also certainly served US interests to keep certain European countries "down" and have them reliant on the US for their security for other reasons too.
The idea that the US decided to "subsidize" European defense for multiple decades, out of their own generosity is.... nothing short of completely laughable imo.
...biggest pushers for European nations to rely on the US, to be precise. If that's no longer the objective, fine, but there's no need to rewrite history and call it "mooching". It was a strategic choice, to avoid a repeat of WWII.
Relationships change over the course of a century. The 2% GDP defense spending agreement came about during the Riga summit in 2006. So the objective did change twenty years ago and many member nations never abided by that agreement; much to the frustration of both Bush and Obama. What you're espousing is more of a history rewrite by assuming we have had a static relationship going back to the end of WW2 and that this defense spending agreement is newer than it actually is.
So the correct response to that is brownian motion in foreign affairs?
The Netherlands during the cold war had an entire tank division stationed in Germany waiting for the USSR to invade.
Where does this idea come from that Europe wasn't spending any money on defense?
Won't alienating all your allies lead to increased US spending in the end?
The “allies” aren’t even hitting their NATO spend targets and probably haven’t ever. Beef up their military and the US doesn’t have to stop policing their world so much (currently the US is keeping European shipping open by bombing Houthis nonstop).
> currently the US is keeping European shipping open by bombing Houthis nonstop).
Keeping it cheaper.
When the Suez was blocked by a sideways ship[0], some of shipping went around Africa[1].
The USA also notably made it clear to the European powers that European powers absolutely didn't have any right to be the powers who controlled the Suez[2].
I also note that the official position of the Houthis is their attacks on shipping are supposed to be about Israel, the problem from the perspective of everyone else in Europe is that they're idiots hitting unrelated ships as well[3].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Suez_Canal_obstruction#Ec...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Route
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_attacks_on_commercial_v...
So let's invade Greenland and Canada. That'll fix it.
"Europe has been mooching "
All of this complaining about NATO, or WTO, or IMF, etc... Any globalization.
People forget -> The US designed and setup these systems. These were all founded and built by the US, to project US power and interests. How can we complain now for things we designed and wanted.
It sounds like a bunch of whining. "Oh Boohoo, We got what we wanted. I'm the most powerful country on the planet because we forced globalization on everybody and now I don't like it, boo hoo."
Yes, and hopefully investment will be predominantly in European/Canadian companies.
"attempts" is certainly accurate
the latest example being Afghanistan
Interesting assumption. Could be the administration is attempting to seem “relatable” before negotiating with Russia and China.
Yeah I'm not certain what the end goal is, but I am certain that the entire thing is theater, meant for someone's consumption. My best guess is we want the world to believe we won't be there to defend them because it's the only way to get them to spend on their own defenses.
OK there's that (Site J is fascinating). But there's also another in-mountain base near Helheim Glacier, and an under ice research base midway between Helheim and Jacobshavn Glacier (Site G or H?)
lol given your background you should probably definitely know!
The most interesting ones are probably secret.
“Helix” was a fictional TV show about a bio lab in the arctic.
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/world/greenland-us-camp-century-nuclear-...
Is this the one where they brought in a nuclear reactor?
edit: Yes, it was the PM-2A. A "portable" (but larger) version similar to the infamous SL-1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program#Lis...
I feel like commercial nuclear power would be better off using these much safer and smaller reactors than building massive powerplants.
I don't disagree, however I find it a bit ironic to see a comment like this under one that mentions the SL-1. It's one of the few nuclear disasters we know of where the reactor for-sure went prompt critical, causing the fuel to explode and kill 3 people.
It was no Chernobyl, but I'd doubt you would find many that would call the design of that particular small reactor safe. Hopefully the developers of today's small reactors have learned the lesson: "don't build a reactor that can be controlled by just one control rod which also gets stuck all the time."
Here's a documentary on Camp Century https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.2569752
This seems a color version of the same,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG5tWbTCocA ("Camp Century, The City Under The Ice - 1964 - CharlieDeanArchives / Archival Footage")
(Found via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30408226#30411047 (under "Newcomer's Welcome Package: Thule Air Base, Greenland [pdf] (militaryonesource.mil)"—60 comments (nb. the OP is a dead link)))
reminds me of stargate sg1
The ideas in fiction come from somewhere…
Is the nuclear reactor still there?
This is amazing. Would love to see what it looks like down there now.
I have a friend that was stationed there. He's pretty old. I think it was in the 1960s.
What's old is new again! :)
Wild. The most Hoth-like thing I've seen.
Hoth was almost certainly inspired by Camp Century (first profiled in the Saturday Evening Post in 1960)
Really.
Offtopic: Andor series is the best Star Wars.
I too will use any excuse to proselytize Andor. Speaking of Andor, it's the best Star Wars anything of all time and some of the best TV period.
Can confirm, peak Star Wars. All the references to the original movies are on point
Eh... it's extremely flabby, like most of these franchise-tied TV series (all the Marvel ones have the same problem, both the Netflix and Disney ones, though the Netflix ones are far worse about it). Tons of scenes where I want to yell at the editor "fucking cut away! It's over!" and then it goes on another 20 seconds, shots where it clearly should have cut a couple seconds earlier, whole pieces of dialog that are painfully redundant, restating things or adding nothing to either plot or character, et c, and it adds up.
My best guess for why they do this is that it fills time with fewer set-ups and sets, saving production costs. I can't figure out another angle for how this could be saving money per minute of "content".
The new season makes that really clear, because each 3-episode "movie" is 130ish minutes long and clearly could have been one 90ish minute film without losing anything important at all, still with plenty of time for relaxed-pace character development and such.
> whole pieces of dialog that are painfully redundant, restating things or adding nothing to either plot or character
Modern TV is made to be consumed (I use that word intentionally, not watched) by people who aren't really paying attention to what's happening, so you need to restate any major plot point several times to make sure it sticks.
I do think the cost thing is a factor.
You've got 30 seconds you shot that, when the editor sits down to put it all together, definitely needs to be trimmed. But if you do that, it's 30 fewer seconds of "content". Your business measures output in terms of minutes of content, finished or watched. If you leave it in, the scene's worse, but how many viewers will stop watching because of it? Fewer than what it's worth to have that extra half-minute of "content". So it stays.
And operating this way, you can shoot 7 minutes of dialog that'd be trimmed to 4.5 minutes in a good edit (it's many individual shots, and most have at least a little on the beginning or end that need to go), instead trimming only what's absolutely necessary and get 5 or maybe 5.5 minutes out of it; do that over an entire 40 minute episode and you've saved yourself an entire longish scene that you'd have had to set up for otherwise, to fill the same time. Each set-up is expensive, so that's also saving you money despite being the same amount of "content".
Its all talk and very little action. The Mandalorian was better in this regard.
Mandalorian benefitted a lot from being far more episodic, though of course it also had some longer plot lines. Most shows that try to make their main thing the prestige TV “big damn plot” just aren’t very good at it. Episodic’s easier to get right, or at least to do OK.
It’s also a better star wars, in that it’s playing in the same space as the originals, and not a lot of things do that very well, so it’s nice to see anything doing it decently well. Andor’s competition is basically all of political action-thrillers, and that’s a crowded space in which it doesn’t really stand out.
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Way off topic, but it makes me wonder if Trump can't "get" Greenland the way he wants, if he'll just order Google et.al. to change their maps to show it as part of the United States anyway, and let cultural seepage do the work for him.
"This must be America. It says so on Google Maps!"
[dead]
yes, nuclear submarine can not shoot nuclear warhead thru ice that is true.