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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

I guess the headline has been changed? The HN title says "illegally drills wells" but the article now says "prepares to drill".

Reading the article and the linked government statement, it sounds like the issue is that the company did receive permits to ship their equipment to one location in Greenland, and then moved that equipment to a second location without permission, while the overall drilling operation is still waiting for approval.

Still bad in the sense that they're presumably trying to push boundaries, but it's a far cry from actually carrying out "illegal drilling".

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While you're waffling on whether it's technically "illegal drilling" or "illegal not-yet-drilling":

1. the US president has previously threatened a war of conquest in Greenland, a territory of a NATO nation

2. the executive chair of the firm that is doing the illegal not-yet-drilling -- and also a top stakeholder -- is friends with said US president and donated to his campaigns.

That can all be true, but this is still posturing and they haven't yet broken any laws.

The article reads like the act of landing the drilling equipment in Greenland was in itself illegal. Not the same as drilling, and ofc IANAL, but still...

Whenever conservatives, far right or large businesses clearly and openly plan something unethical or illegal or plain damaging, everyone else has a duty to pretend they dont see it. We must extend infinite amounts of benefits of the doubt, even at the price of making ourself look like dumb. (Or course, no benefit of doubt is extend to their opposition.)

Or something.

And now in 2026 with NSPM-7 anyone who speaks up against literally anything the US does, can get put on a domestic terrorist list, which sets them up to be punished extrajudicially such as being de-banked. And then if the administration gets their way such individuals will be stripped of citizenship, detained in a concentration camp for a while because contractors make money off of that, and then eventually deported to some unknown place.

> That can all be true, but this is still posturing and they haven't yet broken any laws.

Posturing is to say that "they haven't yet broken any laws". Transferring equipment to a place for which the company had no permit is breaking the law. Once again, this is what happened and it's an act of breaking the law - both formally and substantively:

Quote from the OP:

That has prompted Greenland’s government to issue a “strong warning” that no approval had been granted to land the kit.

They are deliberately lying to US investors to persuade them to purchase or take sale decisions on the basis of false information. This falls directly in the category of "Security fraud / Stock Fraud", that is a crime prosecuted by The United States Securities and Exchange Commission if I'm not wrong.

It used to be, anyway.

I believe it is also completely legal for Greenland to plant high yield weaponry and ordnance pointed to the site of the American company's operations. I could be wrong.

A large part of the problem is that trust has gone completely out of the window, because the US is being run by an autocratic rapist. This phrasing isn't meant to be inflammatory, rather I'm merely describing a technical problem here - someone who doesn't respect "no", the idea of consent, the rule of law, etc. The reality itself is what is inflammatory.

One correction: the US is not being run by an autocratic rapist. The US is being run by a cabal of authoritarian/monarchist billionaires, and the aforesaid autocratic rapist is just their representative in the executive branch, supported by the majority in Congress and the Supreme Court.

The US is being run by the autocratic rapist, but he's got stakeholders just like everyone else. It's the CEO/board distinction that Yarvin laid out in support of Trump, while he was going through the process of compromising his views for political expedience. No need to value competence or love of country like the idyllic kings of old when it's easier to find a rabid dog that just bites people and shits all over the place, but can always be removed by the board.

> While you're waffling on whether it's technically "illegal drilling" or "illegal not-yet-drilling"

How can one be guilty (“illegal”) of something if you’re not doing it (“not-yet”)?

> I guess the headline has been changed? The HN title says "illegally drills wells" but the article now says "prepares to drill".

Unrelated to the topic here, but does anyone else get pissed when news sites change articles, without any indication, without any differences and/or old version linked somewhere?

I've sometimes read the article, had a whole argument with someone, where they quoted something from the article that completely changed the meaning of the first version of the article and what I was arguing about. With more and more sites blocking archiving services (archive.org etc.), it's even harder to find the original texts, some existing for weeks or even months before being changed.... it gives me a total "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" vibe.

> when news sites change articles, without any indication, without any differences and/or old version linked somewhere?

I take that as a strong indication that the news outlet is not to be trusted.

How do you know you’re not gaslighting yourself?

Maybe the article never changed, it always read how the other person interpreted it.

You read it through your filters and took something completely different than what it said.

I’ve seen this happen heaps. Even with articles where I’ve been able to prove it hasn’t been edited, and books too.

No news sites change headlines and edit articles all the time. Often there's a "last updated" date on the article and it can be days or weeks later than the original posting date. The last-updated date is better than nothing, but without a changelog it's very hard to know what version of the article you or anyone else read at any given time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/public-editor/liz-spayd-n...

It's a well known thing for years.

> I guess the headline has been changed?

No. Check internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260808055323/https://www.thegu...

The HN poster got the title wrong.

Hn has strict length limits that often force people to editorialize. They could be more careful to not alter the meaning when they do so.

The correct title was within the HN title length limit.

And it was previously submitted under that title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49251785

> it sounds like the issue is that the company did receive permits to ship their equipment to one location in Greenland, and then moved that equipment to a second location without permission, while the overall drilling operation is still waiting for approval.

It seems that they just lied to the investors about having any permit, even after Denmark government denying repeatedly that.

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