Not 2 days ago, but in February, iirc.

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.

My country does this, however there are multiple authentication options.

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.

From next year there will still be one private company claiming to offer this service, yes, but they are under no obligation to keep doing so, and if the market is already so unprofitable that the national postal operator immediately exited it once freed from the obligation of remaining in it, it is questionable how long a private company will remain.

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.

Yeah, the only dumb thing about the digital mail is that they're not just using email with an official registry.

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.

I don't think a massive market concentration in a single cloud service is good for societal preparedness, regardless of whether there are technically other options.

In the same way, it concerns me how much Sweden relies on BankID, but that's a different thing.

"specialist hellhole" :D

The people in a position to buy thousands of drones and the people in a position to build emergency supermarkets aren't the same people. And regardless, if you do find yourself in a war--especially if it's a defensive one--you need both.

Don’t worry, most countries are buying tens of thousands of drones. That investment is happening. (Source: I work in this sector)

(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.)

A cyber attack is still an attack.

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.

The distance between Kalilingrad (Russia) and the island of Bornholm (Denmark) is only about 300 km (or 200 miles). They don't have to go to 'many many countries' to get to Denmark. Please look at a map.

Denmark's kingdom includes Greenland. It's the 12th largest sovereign country.

Sorry, but Russia is a credible threat that keeps killing people in Ukraine and threatens going 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.

Yeah, there doesn't need to be a shortage of toilet paper to cause problems, just the fear that panic buying might start so you better stock up before they hit. It's basically a prisoner's dilemma, you know you shouldn't panic buy, but if you don't and other people do it's rational to do it.

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.

> US military airlift capability

That'll cost them Greenland.

Most of the cost of currency is up-front in it's production and initial distribution. The cost of handling it is also mostly up front (purchasing a wallet to hold it, buying a cash register with a drawer for the bills and coins). The transactional costs are things like taking it to the bank for depositing. But if you have cash to deposit - your business is probably doing things right and this is negligible.

Tell me, what weight in gold do I exchange for a loaf of bread? Do you have a way to measure and subdivide it to hand? Do you trust the scales being lent to execute this?

Well, just a day or two ago Russia sent drones into Poland, most likely intentionally.

Not to mention we get to deal with all the refugees from that godforsaken war.

Rest - maybe not. But russia currently holds territory about the size of the 3 baltic states. And Ukraine before 2022 had about 10 times larger army than those 3 countries combined.

Not conventionally, but they still can cause a nuisance with long range weapons and even few nukes out of thousands they advertise might still be accidentally operational.

> There's no plausible world in which Russia has the strength to take on the rest of Europe, in, say, the next ten years.

Sure they do. Total war + support from norks and China will do it.

Something the fresh european patriots overlook is that the parts of Ukraine Putin managed to hold on to overlap very closely with the areas most hostile to the rehabilitation of Ukrainian nationalism/most positive to Russia (at least to some largely imaginary Russia which defeated the Nazis but wasn't really communist, i.e. Putin's Russia).

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?

> Russia is probably at its weakest relative to NATO

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_...

> Now Russia is probably at its weakest relative to NATO

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.

Military spending is healthcare -- think of it as preventative medicine so that you don't get sudden massive lead poisoning when Putin decides it would be nice to have more territory.

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.

This is called cowardice and nihilism. If we all run to "safety" when evil comes, evil will happily take over everything.

Technically North America! But people don't tend to think of Mexico that way.

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.

Does anyone have an English language post for this story? That sounds like quite a yikes!

Yup, sometimes people joke that H-E-B is the 4th branch of the Texas government given how much they do during disasters. When food was going to go bad and payment terminals were having issues during the big 2021 winter power outage, pictures of them just giving out cartfuls of groceries were circulating on social media.

The Fat Electrician did a great video on them on his second channel

https://youtu.be/23sehACMR6s

Fantastic. Good on HEB.

That depends. How many people from the list are we leaving in for dinner?

> Silicon Valley Bulletin Board

The participating commenter base on this site has been much wider than could be described that way for many years.

Silicon valley is hardly an oracle of all things to come

This is a perennial topic:

- 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.

> Let's roll out a red carpet for Russians all the way to Paris (or maybe Lisbon?)

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.

I would understand that but in the end we're going to spend enormous amounts of money to buy most of our weapons from the US and each on its own. In fact, just by integrating our militaries we could increase our strength and keep the expenses at the current level. The impression is that all this, including cutting ties with Russia (who is selling us the gas now?), is done to the benefit of the US rather than ours.