Wait, so we're now approaching risk levels high enough that's its economically feasible for businesses to prepare for situations where their stores lose power, telecom, and resupply? Are we already preparing for land war across western Europe?
[1] https://www.dr.dk/drn-video/67b5f9f966d82a0507aeda6a
[2] https://www.berlingske.dk/politik/mette-frederiksen-vil-slaa...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmark-boost-2025-26-d...
We are thankfully on quite the shopping spree, we have also decided to include women into conscription (and that conscripts can be used for real missions, iirc) and we are financing and building Ukrainian weapons like the Flamingo.
Also, Scandinavia has pooled our airforces into one airforce, surpassing the UK, France etc. in size.
As for the army vacation camp, I think it's good experience (same with scouting for example), although there's probably a huge recruitment angle there.
Personally I wouldn't mind a stint in the military, but at the same time I'm nearly 40 and not exactly fit if you catch my drift. That said, the military is also looking for a lot of reservists, people who do some jobs outside of their day job, some in IT security, base guarding, that kind of thing.
I tried to sign up as a reservist - civil personell - because I feel like my logistic expertise could come in handy but sadly I passed 40 a few years ago and I'm deemed to old for service, even as a reservist.
Credit card bills, notices, etc. I don't want to have to log in every time I want to check a bill / notification, only to have to pull out my Yubikey or phone.
Not to mention having to click 'no' to all the popups about new credit cards or subscription upgrades.
The main one is a private company that provides an authentication system using private certificates. When you try to login to an authenticated website your phone pops up a message asking you to verify the login and enter your PIN. That signs the request with your private certificate and sends it back to the provider. Other actions such as transfering money or signing contracts require you to authenticate using a different certificate, with a different PIN. The private certificate stays on your device (there are mechanisms to generate a new one if you lose your device).
The other options are ID cards with a USB card reader or a mobile signature in the SIM card of your phone. For government website and utility companies you can usually authenticate with your bank as another option.
I prefer it to username/password as all I need is my ID number (which unlike the US doesn't need to be private) and my phone. And basically everything you need to use to adult uses this system.
I don't think the system you explain is bad. It's essentially PKI.
My issues are deliverability: what if I get the email and never open it? What if it gets marked as spam?
And it requires me to read emails, something I've actually tried to reduce because every subject is screaming for attention.
But Eboks is not holding all digital post of all our citizens, it's one of at least 3 services who we can choose from to read our mail from the governmental organizations. It's a freemarket compromise with multiple private and public solutions the public can choose from.
Also while yes the private company that did deliver physical mail no longer will, another have taken its place for physical letter... Isn't that freemarket capitalism? Why should one private entity have the contract for all time?
Your post does read like the old "Denmark is a specialist hellhole" posts from the conservatives when Bernie Sanders dared using the country as an example of doing Social Wellfare + Free market right.
They could have started some kind of certification thing for email providers and even funded a couple of certified email providers much more effectively than the digital post monstrosity.
That would have been awesome and forward looking, and perhaps even helped ordinary people get better security for their personal emails.
Perhaps we'll get there some day.
In the same way, it concerns me how much Sweden relies on BankID, but that's a different thing.
One particular concern I have is whether that company will be connected to the Universal Postal Union; if they aren't, sending letters to and from foreign countries will suddenly be a minefield. I don't know and have been trying to find out.
We as a country are exposed to being attacked by Russia. Be that cyber attacks or destruction of assets by sleeper agents.
So instead of decentalizing the electrical grid and making sure it's secure someone at Dansk Supermarked thinks it will earn them money to be prepared for some future crisis.
I find the article native.. it says they trust Nets (payment company) to work offline ..
(Worth noting: Your comment sounds like “I have a feeling fixing (critical bug 1) would be a better investment than (fixing critical bug 2)”. You fix both.)
Attacking a distributed grid would probably not be cost effective.
No you are not. First - no one can find you on a map. You are so tiny. Second for a conventional warfare Russia will have to go trough many many countries to get to you, no matter which road they take (also anyone that thinks Russia is a credible threat is smoking something strong - they don't have the capacity to subdue backwater as eastern Ukraine, let alone more developed and prepared countries as Poland, Germany or Finland, Sweden). And preparedness won't help you for nuclear.
China is betting on us rather pivoting than engaging with Russian army. If we seem tough enough, we call it.
We can then also negotiate better rate for the US protection racket, becauss the US fuckers decided to more than double the rate recently and we are unhappy about that. Long term we will rearm ourselves on our own terms.
Every country that has nuclear weapons has them because of the threat of using them.
If a state would say "we will never, in no circumstance, ever use these weapons" then why spend the money to have them in the first place?
USA, pakistan, russia, france, india and so on… they all have these weapons to threaten using them.
Sabotage by agents is an attack.
Russia is a terrorist state and will attack this country sooner or later. It's just a question of time.
Good work.
The reason it hasn't happened yet is that they'd either have to increase tax income greatly, or reduce public spending greatly with financial support from Denmark. As I gather, infrastructure up there is really expensive.
>The military powerhouse that is Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad actually does have a sizable (for Russia) military investment, which is why the west would expect them to defend it in that way.
I don't think Russia COULD do that anymore, unless it was entirely a Belarus operation. But if they succeed at rushing that gap, current war "meta" is extremely defensive-sided. Russia may not have a meaningful "fleet" but they certainly have enough working and pretty good submarines to make hell for anyone trying to then supply Lithuania.
What would be a signal that you should panic buy to beat the rush? A drone shot down over Poland? Article 4 being invoked? What if a falling drone causes a casualty?
Simply having deeper stocks will let them avoid the empty shelf photos that can tip the balance into panic buying.
Denmark specifically is not a populous country. You could probably keep the entire country fed with just the capacity of e.g. the US military airlift capability, which has been used in these situations. The emergency reserves mostly only need to exist until supply chains are established. It is a balancing act.
That'll cost them Greenland.
Germany had their nationwide emergency test yesterday. there are various suggestions in countries about how to stack essentials for few days without anything - mostly means power that drives everything -, keeping some amount of cash at home, train citizens (mandatory) for basic defensive abilities.
Since there are these stupid 'we are good, fuck everyone else' kind of movements all around the world including US and parts of EU (look at the practically Russian ally Hungary by the way, protecting Russian interests directly inside EU) the whole thing became very reasonable, approaching essential level.
In the Netherlands the power grid is at capacity, which effectively means new businesses are on a waiting list to get connected; they do that to try and prevent power outages, but it does imply (to me, a layperson) that it wouldn't take much for the grid to get overloaded and shut down. It happened a few years ago [0], with high-voltage cables getting so hot they started sagging etc.
Here in Germany foreigners often scoff about how prevalent cash is, but to this day nobody has yet invented a payment technology that works without electricity, without transaction costs, and without a third party. As far as I'm concerned cash is still the most futuristic technology we ever invented
1g is ~100 of money today, which would be enough for a weekly supply of groceries for a person in HCOL areas.
Having survived an above average number of these in my life myself where basic services were down for many days, I have a pretty good idea of what happens. Having cash versus digital doesn’t matter. No one is keeping track, people just take care of people. Everyone writes it off, moves on, and the community becomes stronger.
This is pretty wired into the culture. No one will accept your money in these scenarios even if you have it.
In fact, many retailers will tell you that cash is more expensive to handle than card, because every deposit requires staff time and often explicit bank fees. Society also pays indirectly through tax evasion and black-market activity, which cash enables far more easily than digital systems.
You’re right that cash is robust in a blackout, and there’s something elegant about a technology that works offline, peer-to-peer, and without needing servers to stay up. But the idea that it has no transaction costs is not realistic.
It's not neglible to the point that some sellers where it's legal don't take cash because credit cars fees there cost less than cash handling.
Not to mention we get to deal with all the refugees from that godforsaken war.
You can be forgiven however if you're a millennial (as I am) or younger, because the long peace has been so long that it seems crazy that Russia might start dropping bombs, say, on Copenhagen or London. "They wouldn't dare attack NATO" we would have said 10 years ago. But today, NATO is at risk since too much of its credibility is tied to the US and the US is now unpredictable. With one stroke of an "executive order" pen the US could just call backsies and pull out if one man considers it politically advantageous to him to do so. That has been unthinkable for 75 years and now it's just reality.
Russia is a lot less afraid of Western Europe than they were/are of NATO. Would they win? IDK. But my perception is that the very notion of war would shock the s**t out of the 20-somethings that Western Europe would need to conscript in order to fight an all-out war. If too many refused to fight, Putin might just roll in there relatively unchallenged.
Note: US civilians are certainly not any more ready to enlist than Europe's! But the US is the only Western country with (almost) enough people already enlisted to be a credible threat in a major war.
There's no plausible world in which Russia has the strength to take on the rest of Europe, in, say, the next ten years.
(Let's assume nukes are out of the question)
Sure they do. Total war + support from norks and China will do it.
If it's that costly to hold onto areas where most people actually like Putin relatively speaking, how much more expensive wouldn't it be to hold onto areas to where people hate him?
No european country has actually put a lot of effort into supporting Ukraine, but if an actual EU+NATO member was attacked things would be different. Even without the US.
It's not accidental that Russia invaded Ukraine and Georgia but not the baltic states.
Is it true? No.
Also air force is not so useful and we are spending insane amounts into that.
I'm being cute above with the phrasing, but your attitude of "why spend on military, it's wasted money" is obsolete thinking. It's based on a world where the US was spending enough to intimidate Russia or anyone else from stepping out of line, and where the US could be relied upon to keep their commitments.
It was logical for Germany, for instance, to spend only 1.2% for the past 25 years because the NATO obligations guaranteed the US's support and the US's leaders understood the qualitative ROI of having all of Europe firmly in its own sphere of influence.
Now, regardless of how we feel about it, it's foolish to depend on the US anymore. NATO still has some value -- the US may defend parts of Europe, and under this presidency it probably depends on stupid stuff like how impressed Trump is by your head of state's handshake, how hot their wife is, whether they compliments Trump, etc. But you can't stake your safety on that silliness.
USA could not defeat afghanistan so I doubt it intimidates anyone really… if we are talking conventional warfare.
Anyway despite all of Trump's bullshit talking points, USA will do as always militarily, because it's convenient to them that EU doesn't become independent.
Rememeber also that there was a hot war in the middle of Europe (former Yugoslavia) during the 90s with the US even carrying airstrikes on an European capital (Belgrade).
Obviously this does not mean that European countries should have weak militaries or not show strength. But the threat of Russia is overblown and used to manufacture consent in public opinion for more spending and more EU integration at a time when people already suffer economically and are already squeezed, and growing disatisfied with the EU.
IMHO, the highest risk of violent instability in Western Europe now and in the coming years is not Russia but mass immigration and islamist terrorism at large. And perhaps that's also partly why governments are trying to deflect attention...
> it seems crazy that Russia might start dropping bombs, say, on Copenhagen or London.
Yes, that is totally crazy.
That's exactly why there's gonna by full scale war with russia. It's simply the best moment for it and russia showed it can't be left alone.
That's bonkers on all levels, and more.
I want to remind you Russia's long distance rockets have largely self destructed on Russian territory even without a liftoff: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/24/europe/russia-sarmat-miss...
A single misstep of the Russian war criminals on EU soil, and they will be obliterated in seconds. It's bonkers to think otherwise.
Ask yourself why despite ample amount of scaremongering russia didn't detonate even one, just for show? If they tried and failed they'd demonstrate weakness.
And rockets? All they could demonstrate in 3 years was a single stripped down monkey patched small sort of ICBM and even that after making some very nice crater in russia on previous attempted launch.
Might of russia is mostly American PR stuck from the times of cold war.
What NATO? The one that included the US? Have you not been paying attention to Trump directly stating that he might not honor Article 4 if he doesn't feel like it?
And let's be completely honest, I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that European governments would for their part completely decline to send any significant manpower to intervene if the US were attacked by China or North Korea. In spite of Article 4, public opinion would be that the US "deserves it" for its poor diplomacy and for electing Trump.
NATO is no longer relevant, sadly, unless the US makes a huge turnaround in its commitment to it. NATO is in 2 parts: America, and everybody else, and neither side any longer has a firm commitment to actually go to war for the other. So the relevant part of NATO is "all NATO countries except the US":
https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1cud48e/nato_...
as a 20-something western european i don't see why i should die because some politicians behave like absolute fucking pieces of shits. if war breaks out in my country or they start conscripting people like me i'll just flee the country together with whomever would like to join me.
thanks for your service.
Hopefully I'll have my new life sufficiently set up to help those I love and left behind, and even more hopefully they'll be able to get out, once the shit actually hits.
I'd like for them to come to me earlier, but I don't think I'll get more than visits until bombs start falling. If I'm lucky some of them will already be here visiting me when that happens. Then they can just stay. The rest will at least know they have a safe haven if they can just manage to get here.
It's not trouble free, not by a long shot. I have family connection to here though and I recon Mexico is not very likely to partake in WW3 in any meaningful way, so should be safe from what I worry is coming soon for Europe.
For now tho, I'm definitely less safe than my friends and family back in Sweden. In the short term at least. I don't think Putin is going to change that this year, and probably not next year either, but honestly who knows.
The lifestyle is legit. No one requires you to go to the famously sketchy parts.
Imagine leaving the US for Mexico in 1962 because the "cold war is about to go warm"
Gotta focus on the bright side, and I do love the climate here!
I could do with a little less cartel parties that go on through the night at the neighbours house. They're loud and it's not like I'm gonna go knock on that particular neighbours door, knowing fully well who the guests are...
Unless you like to ski, and the long dark winters, weather in mexico is an upgrade, except for the occasional hurricane.
These things are the equivalent to people having an emergency backpack with their travel documents a bottle of water and a few dehydrated meals, statistically you will never need it but if anything happens you'll be glad you're not roaming the streets in pyjama, barefoot and without any documents/food
The climate is changing. Natural disasters are going to be more common. It's prudent to prepare for it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/us/texas-heb-winter-storm...
Preparedness is vital!
- 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
- 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
It’s tougher to quantify and building a connected community than just profiting off users, though.
The participating commenter base on this site has been much wider than could be described that way for many years.
Businesses try to keep minimum stock. Single disruption in integrated circuit supply disables whole industries. And so on.
Capitalism is incompatible with resiliency.
The Ukraine- Russia war is a regional war that is happening outside our borders- all we should have done was to use diplomacy to make sure that our interests and good commercial relations with all sides were preserved.
Yes, we should all just stop building our defenses and increasing our resilience and roll over. Let's roll out a red carpet for Russians all the way to Paris (or maybe Lisbon?). The same peaceful folks who talk about bombing our cities every week on their national TV.
This is the kind of platitudes I'm talking about.
Russia is struggling to advance in a couple of regions in Ukraine, how do you think they would fare with attacking Europe and reaching Paris or Lisbon? Seriously.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has underscored the importance of air defence, as Kyiv begs the west for additional systems and rockets to protect its cities, troops and energy grid against daily bombing raids. But according to people familiar with confidential defence plans drawn up last year, Nato states are able to provide less than 5 per cent of air defence capacities deemed necessary to protect its members in central and eastern Europe against a full-scale attack.
The same applies to tanks, artillery, and pretty much everything else.
Europe's aid to Ukraine is also limited by the fact that it doesn't want to be seen as an active part in the conflict, so it provides only arms with a limited range and that can be used only defensively. All this of course would not apply if it were attacked directly.
No - I am saying that this "enormous amount of modern weaponry" that you speak of doesn't exist anymore. The large Cold War era stockpiles were simply destroyed. Even basic weapons, like artillery shells, are now in short supply.
It literally does not.
US built 6700 Bradleys. US built 10,000 Abrams. Thousands of these machines are already stationed in Europe just waiting to shoot Russians.
Germany built 3600 Leopard 2 tanks. They built 2k Marder IFVs.
Saab built 300 Grippens.
The Brits alone built over 400 main battle tanks. France alone built 800 of theirs.
You should divide all these numbers by half or more to estimate ones with modernization upgrades, but Russia ran out of modernized equipment a while ago, and NATO 80s equipment has demonstrably outclassed Soviet leftovers.
The US is bad at producing Artillery shells because we utterly refuse to use State power to induce business nowadays, because of stupid "Capitalism good, gubermint bad" ideology, but Europe ramped up shell production. Manufacturers have openly said that all they need is a commitment, and they will build capacity.
The anti-air missile problem is because NATO always intended to rely on US air power (and our thousands of aircraft) to utterly own the skies and deny any air attack. Also the Shahed situation is somewhat novel. The US once produced 40,000 HAWK Anti-air missiles, which would be perfectly sufficient against something like Shahed.
Nobody wants to disarm themselves to give everything they have to Ukraine, but there is substantial arms that are just waiting for use, while Ukraine suffers. US alone could arm Ukraine twice over and not even feel the pain. Most of our equipment is considered not useful against China and is slated to be replaced, but we STILL refuse to sell it.
Nor are there thousands of American tanks in Europe ready to fire at the Russians. The last permanently stationed US tanks were withdrawn from Europe in 2013. At any given time, about 100 to 200 US tanks in total are scattered across Europe on temporary rotations (exercises etc).
These figures pale in comparison with independently verified Ukrainian tank losses, which currently stand at 1267, with total losses estimated between 1500 and 1900. In early 2023, the Ukrainian high command requested 300-500 tanks from allies for the next counteroffensive. The US was unwilling to provide such support, and other countries could not supply anything comparable, even through a joint effort. Hence the stalemate.
If Europe had deep stockpiles to draw from without compromising its own military readiness, the picture would be completely different. During the Cold War, Europe maintained such stockpiles, but they were dismantled in the 1990s and early 2000s as a cost-cutting measure.
The balance of power is tilted against Russia much more than during the Cold War. That threat does not stand the most basic scrutiny. Russia couldn't reach Western Europe if they tried. Claims that it is the worst since WWII conveniently ignore the Cold War and even the 90s. Western Europe is better off now.
It is incredible the amount of BS we are spoon-fed by the media and governments in Europe... but perhaps even more worrying is how docile the people are and just eat it.
The good question is: what is the ulterior motive of the alarmists?
>> Russia openly subjugated Belarus
>> Russian jets, drones and war ships routinely enter NATO without any response
> Urop has never been safer than this, comrades! No reason for panic at all!
My view has been that we should be going in, bombing the Russian positions in Ukraine with stand-off weapons, bombing war-relevant infrastructure in Russia and going in where they don't have forces to oppose us-- seizing ships at sea. I'd like to see the Russian Baltic fleet sunk. It'd like to see parts of the Russian Northern Fleet sunk.
I'd also like to see a surrender of Kaliningrad forced by means of blockade.
If we want to do things like this we have prepare a bit.
That's exactly why the full scale war is going to happen. There wasn't any better time to deal with russia than it is now.