> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't LEO satellites only going to reflect light from the sun when they're at low angles near sunrise and sunset? For night time stargazing, they're going to be in Earth's shadow, too.
Iridium's LEO satellites were sometimes (impressively) visible after midnight.
We would fund nationwide health care and more robust social programs if it weren't for all the money we are spending on defense is simply not something the US right-wing and centrists ever put out there. When they fought those things it was with the ideological argument that they were intrinsically wrong. OMG Socialism!
> The US is more stable than the powers of Europe (which have constant political upheavals, snap elections that completely remake the political landscape, etc)
How many European powers have had their incumbent head of state violently attempt to hold onto power after losing an election after January 6th, 2021?
A stable country would do what South Korea or Brazil did: imprison the criminal.
Instead, in the US, we have our supposed captains of industry wielding chain saws on stage to publicly support the wannabe tyrant, and donating billions behind the scenes to privately support the wannabe tyrant.
A new civil war that drives the US to fragment into several independent regions over the course of the next ~five years would kind of be the best scenario from a global perspective.
We’ve apparently abandoned the meaning of the word “best,” for staters.
> For countries outside the US, it would actually not be a bad scenario.
I really don’t think I can help you, but the two obvious crazy ideas encompassed here are that civil wars never turn into wider regional conflicts and that losing a major trading partner never tanked an economy. Or that the ideological conflict here won’t possibly spread anywhere else (did you not even notice Vance and Musk’s support of afd ?) Good luck with all that.
I don't think it's all that nutty, considering that large regional blocs in the United States basically voted against all this and have less than zero desire to be dragged along for the ride, having our lives ruined for someone else's insanity.
What examples of digging through that amount of ice for the purposes of mining are you familiar with? What's a good example?
It'd be interesting to understand how much the environment there increases the cost of mining. Anything is possible, but it'd be cool to know whether it makes any sense. (and yes, I think our leadership in the US is fully capable of causing an international crisis over mineral assets that would in financial terms be best left in the ground)
It's not for mining, but the US built Camp Century and Camp TUTO in the ice to determine how feasible Project Iceworm would be. A construction film about the former was declassified some decades ago [0]. Icefield construction wasn't feasible even in the context of cold-war era MAD spending.
Actual subglacial mining has only been attempted a few times. Kumtor gold mine in Kyrgyzstan is in the middle of a couple glaciers and reshaped the landscape to redirect the glaciers a bit. Svea Nord in Svalbard ran tunnels under a glacier for coal. Canada's Granduc mine wasn't technically on or under a glacier, but it was just below one.
I guess I don't even know what to do with some of this information. It occurred to me that you'd also probably have to build some infrastructure (power plant, railroad, fuel terminal, a real port... I don't know) in order to even get the ball rolling. I don't think anyone's going to pay for that by taxing the citizens of Nuuk.
I also wonder if there has ever been a real geopolitical obstacle to doing this stuff, since the Danes and Greenlanders seem amenable to doing business. It would seem the obstacles have all been financial.
As I said in a comment elsewhere, arctic mining is doable with nation-state level resources. There's just no reason to do so that isn't better accomplished by other means. It would be stupid, expensive, and devastate a beautiful country.
As for "amenable", my experience is that people in the arctic are relatively unhappy about that sort of industrial development. They like the places they live.
"Zero backlash" isn't fully accurate. You could complain about the focus of current protests in the United States being in other areas, but that's what happens when masked thugs are brutalizing and abducting your neighbors under color of authority.
> Greenland is important piece of land for US security - and the US has eyed it for a long time.
The US have the ability to do everything up to and including basing troops and missiles there, today, under treaty so it's unclear what is meant by the US need for "security."
That's what I don't get. We had a solid relationship with our fellow NATO country and that relationship left all the room in the world for collaboration, including what you're describing.
We're trashing that relationship not just with Denmark but with NATO. What gains do we see that can offset that?
I guess this is not just a rhetorical question, but what is more secure than stable relationships with existing allies?
All interesting questions that fall short unless you’re willing to assume the American president will act deliberately in the national interest. I feel we’ve clearly moved past that point.
I may be biased, but I think that if you have a budget that's reasonable in the industry for some project size and includes not only the initial development but also maintenance and evolution over the software's lifetime, especially when it's not small (say over 200KLOC), and you want to choose the language that would give you the fastest outcome, you will not get a faster program than if you chose Java. To get a faster program in any language, if possible, would require a significantly higher budget (especially for the maintenance and evolution).
I don't think so, but it may not be far behind. More importantly, though, I'm fairly confident it won't be Assembly, or C, or C++, or Rust, or Zig, but also not Python, or TS/JS. The candidates would most likely include Java, C#, and Go.
Purely by the numbers, an "average programmer" is much more likely to use Javascript, Python, or Java. The native languages have been a bit of a niche field since the late 90's (i.e. heavily slanted towards OS, embedded, and gamedev folks)
Iridium's LEO satellites were sometimes (impressively) visible after midnight.
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