Oh, so Denmark is going to pull a Putin and cut off whatever sections of Greenland it wants for itself?

Only half of Americans typically turn out to vote in binding presidential elections. 72% of Greenlanders turned out to vote in the *non-binding* referrendum on independence. I'd say that's some pretty serious interest. Even if every last Greenlander who didn't show up didn't want independence, they *still* wouldn't be in majority.

This is false. Greenland's GDP is 2,3 billion USD. The subsidy is under 700M USD. They would lose about a third of their GDP if the subsidy cut off. On the other hand, they would also stop *paying* about that much in taxes to Denmark.

People in Greenland voted overwhelmingly to terms that called for eliminating the subsidy, in exchange for Denmark butting the heck out of their land.

The terms of the vote made pretty clear what the people of Greenland want. It was to terminate Danish subsidy, remove Danish as an official language, take full control of Greenland and Greenlandic waters (even foreign policy), take control of the majority of the mineral royalties, etc. So even they don't end up with, say, a UN seat, it's still pretty hard to say that's not "independence".

And there are Danish politicians who have made clear that they don't think Greenland should be let loose.

Macroscopic analogies help people envision what one's talking about, though. Saying "an electron does its own thing" doesn't really help people conceive just what that "thing" is.

I think the basic macroscopic analogy for particle/wave duality is to just go with the pilot wave theory and have them picture a boat bobbing along on a frictionless lake, where its wake is so powerful and so fast-responding that it steers the boat, and it never dies out - the boat creates the wake but is governed by it. There's even an experiment to visualize it involving bouncing a silicone droplet on a vibrating fluid bath, where you can even roughly reproduce a (non-quantized) version of the double slit experiment - the wake goes through both slits, then steers the droplet on the other side.

Of course, the analogy fails when you add quantum effects like virtual particles, uncertainty, etc....

You have to take nonbinding referenda with a grain of salt. It's easy to wave the flag and claim nationalism when you don't have to deal with the difficulties of actually running a country when you do.

I'm not saying that the Greenlanders don't genuinely want independence. I'm just saying that 75% is the high-water mark. At least 25% genuinely don't want independence, and that were it to come down to a binding vote, they could well find another 26% who get cold feet at the prospect of having to deal with the consequences.

If Denmark does indeed manage to win them trillions worth of oil, they may well decide to keep it all for themselves, and vote for that. And then the sticky wicket would be getting to a binding referendum, which the Danes would not permit easily. The easiest route to it would be to buy their independence by promising a fraction of that oil revenue.

We have an odd kind of expectation of privacy even in public places. I'm not saying we don't; I'm just pointing out that the expectation strikes me as not obvious. The Fourth Amendment calls out "their persons, houses, papers, and effects", which notably omits anything outside your immediate control.

The expectation comes from a pre-technological age, and I certainly don't fault the Fourth Amendment for failing to see how technology would change the ways in which we expect to be private even in public. But I do think it ends up calling for a recalibration of both the law and our expectations.

Ideally, I'd like to see that codified in a new amendment. Unfortunately, given that even simple, popular legislation seems impossible to pass, I can't imagine getting agreement on something with even the faintest whiff of controversy past the rather higher bar of a Constitutional amendment. So I'd be happy for a decent national conversation on the topic.

Personally, I wouldn't have thought that the law extended to an expectation of privacy on your front lawn, since you already expect your neighbors to be watching. It's interesting to see a court disagree. I wouldn't be surprised if this is overturned at a higher level, though unfortunately, at this point I've given up thinking of the Supreme Court as anything other than an ideology engine, so really just figure out which side is which and assume that it'll go that way.

That's not how international law about exclusive economic zones works, because there's not a convenient pole between every disputed area in the world (and why the pole anyway, what not say the center of the arctic ocean?). One doesn't carve out a brand new approach just for this one dispute. As much as I'm sure Russia would want them too, since they'd get half of the arctic ocean.

They are claimed by big ass oil companies.

Obligatory.

No, sorry, I've been too busy learning about archaeology from reading papers published in the 1800s and reading about how physics works by reading the works of the ancient Greeks.

... honestly think that they can keep Greenland under their thumb for that long? Greenland already doesn't want to be part of Denmark - 75% voted for independence in a nonbinding referrendum in 2008 with a 72% turnout. The wealthier they become and the greater the percentage of the wealth that Denmark siphons away, the more they're going to want it. If Greenland and its EEZ start raking in trillions of dollars annually (which is the sort of mineral wealth up for grabs), how low in the single-digits do you think the popularity of remaining part of Denmark will be? For every trillion of GDP that'd be nearly $17M per capita, at Greenland's current population.

Is Denmark going to force Greenland to stay with them by the gun?

What gets me is that unless they've lived elsewhere, most Americans don't even realize that they're in the banking dark ages. They assume that everyone else still has the same stupid broken kind of system that they manage their money with.