Starlink has no ground stations on Iranian soil and is formally prohibited by its government, so there is nothing being "provided" to Iran, per se. Iranians smuggle Starlink dishes in, at great personal risk.
>Now I guess I get to do business with Chase again, which is neat. I’m happy to be part of an economy where I can vote with my dollar like this.
You were unusually unlucky. The US has a very decentralized banking system, with thousands of institutions. The Big Four (JPM, BAC, C, WFC) have under 50% of total deposits; the comparable figure for Canada's Big Five is ~85%,
>Greenland currently receives significant support (about $10000-15000 per capita yearly) from Denmark. So it is not clear how the country would run without that.
Greenland absolutely positively cannot run without outside subsidy. Pacific islands (barely) function as independent countries because their tiny populations are commensurate with their small areas. Greenland's 50,000 people live on an island three times the size of Texas.
Currently that subsidy comes in the form of €600 million in annual funds from Copenhagen. Now Washington has emerged as a potential outbidder.
>6. Congress does not authorize Trumps use of military, and Trump must withdraw within 90 days.
No US president, regardless of party, has ever recognized the constitutionality of the War Powers Act. When a president sends reports to Congress of the sort the act mandates, the report typically includes a disclaimer stating as much.
>If US economy crashes
Any European attempt to "crash" the US economy would result in worse results for Europe.
Only 7% of US GDP comes from foreign trade, by far the smallest of any developed nation. The US is Denmark's largest export customer, while Denmark is almost insignificant as a US customer.
Example: One often-suggested penalty against the US is Novo Nordisk suspending sales to Americans. Even setting aside the fact that the US's Lilly's own GLP-1 has handily commercially outperformed Ozempic (as seen in their relative stock prices), the US was *57%* of Novo Nordisk's sales in 2024. <https://www.novonordisk.com/content/dam/nncorp/global/en/inv...>
The US stock market is being carried by tech companies. Any large-scale sanctions against Europe would hit said tech firms hard, for no other reason than that they need all the customers they can get. Crashing the stock market could in turn induce panic, which in the end will reflect poorly on the president.
The whole goal of such a (economic) war would be to make US senators and congressmen take a stand, and decide if enough is enough. Americans vote with their pocketbooks. Just introducing extra tariffs on specific industries and companies in specific states can be politically devastating. Now imagine full-blown sanctions.
Not to mention that US competition will happily step up to take their lunch, while all this going on. China will instantly jump on that opportunity. US firms will also recognize that sanctions on things like tech will drive innovation in Europe to fill that void, in tandem with what China and others have to offer.
Will both recover? Yes, probably. But hopefully Trump will be out, as that will be the main objective.
I point out that any European attempt at economic warfare against the US would inevitably affect both sides, and that the US is much less dependent on foreign trade than Europe ... and yet you again speak as if any impact would be solely on the US. "Panic", "Politically devastating", etc., as if only the US has upsettable investors and distressed electorate.
>Now imagine full-blown sanctions.
This would surely result in formal American withdrawal from NATO.
"The US invading Greenland would destroy NATO!", you say. I don't believe that the US would invade Greenland militarily; it will likely buy it, or obtain some sort of ironclad investment rights not dependent on whether Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark or independent. But let's say that the US does, and NATO dissolves.
It comes down to net benefits. Would owning Greenland be more valuable for American national security, than the current NATO status quo of the US being willing to to accept its own cities being nuked if Russia invades Western Europe?
The calculus made more sense (if it ever did) during the Cold War, when NATO ended at Germany's eastern border. Does it make sense now, when Montenegro is a NATO member? I strongly suspect that the answer is not one that the rest of NATO would want to hear, regardless of the Ukraine War.
No, I didn't say that US invading Greenland would destroy NATO. It would cause a crisis, yes, but it's complex - members can only withdraw, no members can be expelled from NATO. And for withdrawals, it takes one year from notification to official withdrawal.
To complicate things further, there have been put up safeguards in the US to "Trump-proof" a withdrawal. Would Trump ignore these? Likely. But it would be challenged in court.
What likely would happen, is that NATO just lies dormant. And if the US successfully withdraws, it would set in motion things that are not resolved overnight. The US have bases, servicemen, caches of equipment, etc. spread across allied countries. And while most of these are covered by deals made with the host-countries, there's a pretty good likelihood those deals would have to be re-negotiated in the even US becomes hostile to allies. US pulling out of NATO because they don't see the value is one thing, US pulling out of NATO because they've become enemies of another NATO-ally is a completely different mater, as far as future deals go.
But then again, US taking Greenland by force is the absolute worst outcome - as far as the Greenland scenario goes. I truly do not think Trump will try that, anytime soon.
It's extremely, profoundly unprofessional to threaten a country with force. But that's how Trump operates. He makes big no-so veiled threats ("Would be a shame if...", "We have options...") to force the other party to negotiation, and then tries to low-ball. He's treating international relations the same way he treats business/real-estate deals. That's how he's always done business.
And as a bonus for him, it is taking up the news headlines.
My guess is that US and Denmark will meet, US will push on with offering to buy Greenland, Denmark will say no, but maybe they will buy some extra US equipment (they're already buying P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft to patrol the maritime area surround Greenland) or similar. Trump will announce this deal, and we won't hear anything about Greenland in another 6-12 months.
> It looks like the next Andrej Karpathy (born in Czechoslovakia, educated in Canada) will be taking their talents somewhere besides the US in the future.
Karpathy, with a Stanford PhD, would not have received or needed an H-1B.
This, like the new $100K fee, is about shutting down the Indian body shops that consume the vast majority of "tech" H-1Bs.
There's so many Americans who have this intuition you're expressing, that there must be some good immigration system for responsible people who obviously ought to be allowed to stay in the country. The reason there isn't is that immigration reform deals have been sabotaged for decades by the people who are feeding you this disinformation. To emphasize, the person who told you this information knew it was false, lied to you about it in order to serve their political goals, and you must not trust anything they tell you going forwards.
The actual law, dictated by the F-1 visa program allowing foreign studies, is that a foreign Stanford PhD must permanently depart the United States within 60 days after graduation. There's a one-time extension available under the OPT program, where they can stay up to one additional year so long as they maintain employment complementary to their education for at least 20 hours a week. But after that year they must either obtain an H-1B or leave.
Thank you so much for this factual reply debunking the GP's (very common) misconception.
Via popular media, there's a narrative that "it's easy to come here legally". Having done that myself, I know that it's not straightforward -- even if all of your paperwork + travel history is in order.
It's not easy for an individual to come to the US because it is such a popular thing to do. From the perspective of Americans, it appears that large numbers of regular people are accomplishing it (because they are - they're just numerically small compared to all the world's people who want to accomplish it).
>you must not trust anything they tell you going forwards
I respect the rest of your comment and have no reason to disbelieve you factually. But this comes off as propaganda. It's a hateful assumption about a person and a conversation you have no idea of. You shouldn't say this to strangers if you're trying to convince them of something.
I'm quite confident, based on my interactions with both strangers and non-strangers in the past, that the original commenter got their information from anti-immigrant propagandists. It does me no good to convince them of something if they're just going to read another paper or tune into the next podcast episode and get more false reasons why immigration should be restricted.
Meanwhile, I didn't ever qualify for H1B because I don't have a degree, but getting a kennismigrant visa to the twelve starts of harmony jurisdiction was basically "find a place that can pay you above 4k month and file one form with the government".
>The actual law, dictated by the F-1 visa program allowing foreign studies, is that a foreign Stanford PhD must permanently depart the United States within 60 days after graduation. There's a one-time extension available under the OPT program, where they can stay up to one additional year so long as they maintain employment complementary to their education for at least 20 hours a week. But after that year they must either obtain an H-1B or leave.
Strange how you accuse me of intentionally lying, yet write the above. I will be more kind than you, and assume that you are unaware of (for example) the EB-2 visa which someone like Karpathy would certainly qualify for immediately. All a H-1B allows, from the "dual intent" perspective, is to temporarily extend the time one can stay in the US while looking for a job that will sponsor for another visa type (typically EB-2); it by itself *does not automatically lead to a green card or US citizenship*.
EDIT: I somehow overlooked another, ahem, inaccuracy in your riposte. Someone like Karpathy would easily have qualified for the 24-month STEM OPT extension to the base OPT year.
Bottom line: A Stanford PhD (not necessarily in a STEM field) who wants to stay in the US has very good odds of being able to do so.
EB-2 application timelines are measured in years. If you qualify for a national interest waiver and are not from China or India, it's plausible that you can get a green card before the STEM OPT extension runs out. If any of the three conditions (STEM; national interest waiver; not from China or India) fails, OPT doesn't give you enough time to get a green card.
Calling him an engineer would be a stretch. As others aid, he was a hardware technician on an assembly line.
That said, that experience, and this article, that Jobs had an understanding of computers and electronics when founding Apple beyond the "Woz = engineer, Jobs = sales guy" oversimplification. It's just that compared to Woz—one of the century's greatest engineering minds—anyone would look third-rate.
>NeXT tried to get its own NeXT RISC workstation to market (chased a chimera) and looked at Motorola 88000 and PowerPC
Jobs made a huge mistake by going with the 68K in the first place. DEC would prove just a few months after NeXT's October 1988 launch the viability of a MIPS-powered workstation.
Even better, in the long term, would have been to go with the 80386.
In fairness, I think it wasn't obvious that Motorola would run into so much trouble with the 68k line, or that 80386 would be the far-away winner. Sun and many others were betting on 68k, too.
My understanding is that issues in scaling 68k line were already well known by then, same as with VAX (even if crucial people at Digital didn't want to believe).
The difference is that 68k was ubiquitous, reasonably cheap 32bit capable platform with MMU that had huge availability of parts and made porting software easy. Sun was working with 68k partially because they chose it in 1980, a year after it was made available, and by 1986 they published SPARC ISA and shipped first systems a year later
Sun launched its first SPARC-based system more than a year before the NeXT launch in October 1988.
Sun came out of Stanford and was aware of the Stanford and Berkeley RISC architectures (the latter of which led to SPARC). NeXT had academia heritage, too, via Mach from CMU, but I guess it wasn't enough to persuade Jobs to go for a more exotic architecture than the one he was familiar with from Apple, or the "enemy" in Intel.
One can see a world in which NeXT goes with 80386 from the beginning, eventually pivots much earlier to software-only, and becomes a real rival to Microsoft and IBM in the early 1990s to provide a multitasking successor to DOS. Or, for that matter, IBM goes with NeXTSTEP (or just buys NeXT) instead of the AIM Alliance.
No dispute on the facts about Sun etc. "more than a year before" is not a lot of time in hardware launches, and that was a very dynamic time.
Regarding Sun, some good old HN discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082150
But the alternate computer history is interesting to imagine, could have been via x86 or PowerPC with IBM or something else. Same with Be.
