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....

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.

Iceland, but you'll find that other parts of Europe are pretty similar.

I think the problem is just misconceptualized. Think of read-only memory, like say DVDs. They're not *100* read-only. Data is written to them once in an irreversible manner before their operational life begins using an alternative write mechanism, and then during their design life they're read-only. If you apply the same paradigm to write-only memory, it's perfectly reasonable for, say, a datalogger: data is written during the operation of the device, then when the device has completed its task, the memory is retrieved and read in an irreversible manner.

This is just the tiniest fraction of what we can do with our banks over here; I just can't get over how backwards US banks are and how they can't seem to get into the modern world. Not only do we have instant free transfers (and to Americans: the ability to conveniently or easily pay absolutely anyone, anywhere, any time with just a computer or smartphone is a much bigger deal than you're thinking... it's so easy that it's to the point that when people want to collect money for a gift for a coworker, rather than going around asking for cash, they just put the destination account in the email).

The banks are also connected more closely to other major billing systems. For example, there's a page in your bank account to let you add credit to pay-as-you-go phones. Not just your phones, but anyone's in the country, all in one system, so I can fill up a friend's phone or what not.

All our bills come straight into our bank accounts. Not most of them - ALL of them, everything from rent to the gardener. All payable with a single select-and-submit interface (with delay pay options, of course). There's a page for charity listings, too, to make it easier to give - heck, there's even a stock trading section built in and the like.

  All of your documents associated with the bills are automatically filed into your bank account, you just click on the documents section and you can view, say, your wage slips or bills, from many years in the past if you want. Not like you typically need them, everything is automatically submitted through to our taxes - for most people, taxes are just a log-in to the tax site and click through a couple pages, and they're done, it just takes a couple minutes.

Single system (despite competition in the banking industry). Everyone's on it. Everyone uses it. And it works really, really well. To give an example: checks have become so rare that cashiers in banks look at them funny and often have to get their managers to figure out what to do with them ;)

Enough said.

I'll wait for the Netflix release.

In fact, he'd be safer in Sweden than the UK. EAW regulations require that extradition to a third party requires the sent of both the sending state (UK) and the receiving state (Sweden), rather than just the sending or receiving states alone. And Sweden has among the most restrictive extradition treaties in Europe, with a flat-out ban on extradition for intelligence or military crimes - which is why Assange was applying for a residence permit and moving Wikileaks' main base of operation there in the first place (he repeatedly called Sweden his "shield" in interviews.. right up to when he became wanted for rape, when suddenly Sweden transformed into an evil US lackey... funny how that works!). Sweden is home to hundreds of US defectors and is the country that sheltered Edward Lee Howard (highest profile CIA defector to the Soviets during the Cold War) from the US. In fact, their prime minister back then is the same foreign minister (Carl Bildt) that Assange rails against.