In case you haven't contemplated this logistics challenge before: the key is you need to stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption and back fill the emergency stores with fresh lots of new shelf stable products. You're just buying more shelf-stable supply once and then managing the transit through the supply chain with speed bump before the last mile.
> stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption
Back in my days in retail, we were ordered to put resupply as FILO into the shelfs. It makes sense to sell the oldest products first. So why the transfer shuffle?
It's still FILO, the shuffle is needed for multiple locations. The emergency store keeps (for example) 5x the stock of canned beans, and feeds an area with 4 regular stores. They have 5x more stock then they could regularly sell, so if stock wasn't transferred then the canned beans would expire before they were sold. They need to transfer their surplus inventory to the 4 regular stores they feed before that stock ages, since in regular use they won't sell them in time.
Since I've had to deal with a similar issue professionally, maybe think of a retailer with 5 distribution warehouses and 50 stores. Normally you want to pick from the closest distribution warehouse to minimize transport costs. However, for food items that expire sometimes it might make sense to pick from the furthest warehouse if their stock is getting older, you need to optimize both for transport costs and the cost of having to throw food away. It's beyond a HN comment, and I'd have to review what isn't NDA, but the optimization math for such a scenario gets both really complicated and really interesting.
Hope this clarifies why they would be moving stick though.
This is a pretty common mechanism in several markets. I worked in the big paint store chain in the US and the local setup was a lot like this. Every store had as much stock as they can physically hold, and no two have the same capacity. It was a daily occurrence to shuttle stock to and from nearby locations, and very common for a small store to have a nearby large store order and hold stock for a job too big for the origin store to handle.
We also had commercial stores spread out which were in essence local warehouses. Those stores spent a large part of their time handling stock transfers. They held specialty products small stores rarely need and couldn't justify the minimum order quantity.
It's a lot more efficient and much faster than having product shipped across the country.
That's only a minority though (like me), most just pick whatever is convenient. I think it really depends on how fast they eat stuff. But a lot of stuff is only dated for two weeks here.
Honestly it seems like I am the only one in my local Aldi who does this. I see people picking up fish that is three days older than the one at the back.
I can only speak for myself here but I don't bother rummaging around for longer expiries because generally I'm buying food that I'm going to eat within the next 2-3 days. It just doesn't make any difference to me.
It would feel socially rude of me to take the freshest item from the back, knowing I don't need it, leaving the older ones to someone who might not have time to cook as soon. Someone has to take take the one in front, or the store has to throw it out, creating waste and ultimately raising prices for everyone.
Seems kinda like farting in a crowded room and then slipping out the door.
Meh, most things I’m never going to tell the difference in a few days freshness. We’re very good at preserving things with packaging now, and my cooking skill is going to have a much larger impact than the ingredients being marginally fresher.
Around here it is quite common to do with dairy products.
I however choose not to do so quite deliberately. I want to avoid food waste. I just check the date is "good enough". My regular shop has a good enough flow that I usually pick from the front.
Food waste is a trending concern around here. But I think you and I who cares about shelf life belongs to the same minority. The majority has enough other worries and does not spend bandwidth to care as it is usually good enough.
I consider fish a "fresh" item and care more for looks and smell.
Same as with vegetables. But I hate people who prod everything - that is detrimental to the product.
But the reason people do this is also food waste. If the food expires at my house it still goes in the garbage, the only difference is I'm also the one that got stuck paying for it. It isn't like there's a discount based on the expiration date.
I work for an online grocer, and I really do think it's not really an issue due to two things for us:
* the amount of stock going through one fulfillment center instead of landing on shelves in smaller stores, means we never have old products laying around. The cucumber you get from us came in a few hours ago. The one in your store has been laying there for days and touched by many. 10 stores each need their own buffer to handle variable demand and thus overstock and get deliveries for certain products rarely. We don't. Our spoilage is so so low compared to traditional stores.
* anyways, to alleviate the fears of ordering something that's about to expire, we guarantee x amount of days for perishable products.
Some supermarkets in the UK (e.g. Waitrose) literally just pick items already out and on display in the local store to give to delivery customers. So you’re getting whatever is at the front of the shelf in your local store, which is the least fresh.
What I found (but this was during the panny-D) that only grocery stuff had an even longer shelf life than the store itself, that is, it was really fast moving stuff apparently.
One of the design requirements is no one should be located more than 50km from a store, so I wouldn't be surprised if larger warehouses are part of the plan when that 50km radius includes densely populated areas.
What if people could have large residential storage units in their neighborhoods and apartment complexes, where everyone could stock up on their own personal supply as needed?
For the positive, see Finland, which is working hard to be a very well-prepared nation. Heavy buy-in from all across the populace. Exactly the kind of nation I was talking about - their survival depends on it. Poland, Sweden, Denmark all doing similar.
For the negative, see UK and US during COVID. The individualism that has underpinned society since Thatcher/Reagan as made us less likely be prepared, less likely to look out for our neighbour. Both are isolated by water, so we're naturally less bothered about invasion.
But if the time came, would you trust your neighbour to do the right thing? Sweden is a high-trust society based on friends in London and from visits there, especially outside Stockholm. The UK and US are definitely not.
I thought I had read that Sweden had made some changes to military service recently, is that not true?
I'm from Sweden, I 100% would not trust my neighbors. Sure, maybe if you live in a tiny tiny village in the countryside, but if that's the case you probably have the same thing if you're living in a tiny tiny village in a in the US too. Like that's more of an effect of living in a very small village, not anything about the country.
And regarding the changes to the military, that is still a very small amount of people who are doing the basic conscription service.
Interesting, thanks. Doesn't Swedish have a word for community responsibility, are you saying that sense is breaking down in modern Sweden, that people no longer feel that responsibility?
Friends in London seem to talk about it as if we don't have it in the UK (I know that's true) but that Sweden does.
You have to understand that sweden does a lot of marketing but at the end of the day it's just marketing. Things here aren't nearly as great as everyone abroad imagines them to be.
Not claiming it's a bad place to live in or that there aren't worse places, but the high trust society thing is a myth.
I've had my wallet disappear while I fell asleep on the shore of a lake, in one of those tiny villages where everybody knows each other for example :)
> But if the time came, would you trust your neighbour to do the right thing?
You don't know anything about sweden, clearly. The only people I speak to in the neighborhood are immigrants and homeless people who live in the nearby shelter.
> I thought I had read that Sweden had made some changes to military service recently, is that not true?
Yeah they are wasting time and money with conscription. Very useful.
Have you been to these countries lol ? It's not like they're all preppers who could be fully self sufficient in case of an alert, not even for 3 days.
The people in Warsaw, Stockholm and Copenhagen aren't more prepared than the people in Madrid or NYC, most people in medium/large cities give 0 shit about these scenarios, they're the same as everywhere else. Having studied in Denmark I can tell you that if anything the Danish youth is even more oblivious to risks in general given that they live in such an utopia. The state and older generations might be more aware of their perilous position but that's about it.
I've been to most of them, though since COVID only to Denmark. I have friends in London from all of them too, and my cousin from London lives in Stockholm.
In my opinion, and that's all I have here, they are much, much more likely to do the right thing for their neighbour in an emergency than a Briton or American.
All of my friends from Baltic nations are concerned about Russia. All of them. Maybe its an age thing, we're early 30s and some have children.
Or even better we could build cupboards in the aparments and people just keep their personal supply. /s
All my shelf stable products have been in my pantry for a few months before I even open them. You can do FILO yourself and have always a nice emergency supply and it can even cheaper because you can buy the stuff on sale most of the time. The problem is that many people just buy day to day and already have a problem when the shops are closed for a holiday they haven't anticipated because they buy just in time.
I'm sorry but it really wasn't obvious for me. So like an online shop for groceries but they don't deliver it to your home but at this shared storage location?
Doesn't realy change the second part of my answer though. People could already keep some stock at home right now but most just don't. I don't see how such a shared storage would change that.
Also stock up for a few months is what the government is for at least where I live. [0] Personel emergency supplies are only for the time till the government can start distributing their own stocks.
One of our biggest practical vulnerabilities is that our payment and electronic id infrastructure (nets, dankort, mitid) has been sold off to a private company (Mastercard) even though it was at one point a government owned and developed setup.
Nets sold its account-to-account payment business to Mastercard. Nets, which is itself a private company operating in many countries, has not been sold to Mastercard, nor has Dankort, MitID, or others been sold to Mastercard.
The services sold are, for example, Betalingsservice in Denmark and AvtaleGiro/eFaktura in Norway.
To be honest, my concern is that Nets is that Nets is entirely unable to competently provide any services competently and reliably, so while they shouldn't be moved to a US company, I sure do hope that we get everything they do replaced by something else.
Only Nets could somehow manage to make it much more expensive in fees to have a scheduled direct bank transaction (Betalingsservice - for reference, bank transfers are free and instant here) than using a VISA card with fees going to the US. They have also completely ruined Dankort adoption and reliability, and made MitID into a great big mess of a reliability and usability nightmare.
A lot of countries have learnt from this and maintain a govt mandated /supported standard for digital payments.
In India, the universal payments interface (UPI) has been hugely successful in providing instant, commission less payments for a vast majority of the population.
Similarly, RuPay is the common standard for credit and debit cards.
It's eye opening to see just how effective and impactful these two have been, particularly UPI. The smallest seller in the remotest village will likely accept UPI payments.
What's mind blowing is that all of this came about in the short span of just under a decade.
Denmark is in a crazy situation where what we saw as a key trusted partner (the US) all of sudden is extremely hostile towards us due its re-ignited territorial ambitions in Greenland. In public discourse this is being met with riducule and disbelief but I believe behind the scenes in government it is being taken quite serious. And obviously having our payment infrastrcture in the hands of an adversarial nation is unacceptable.
The worst thing is the lack of solidarity towards the danes here in Sweden. If Trump turns off Microsoft, Sweden will shrug its shoulders and privately say - thank god it's not us. yet.
It is crazy; but it is wake up time for us Europeans. We are already seeing US campaigns against judges and legal scholars in the Netherlands, Italy, and Brazil.
The Brazil stuff is related to the case againt Trump-ally Bolsonaro. The European cases so far have been related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The US uses its so-called SDN list which in general prevents the person having a bank account in any western country. It also caused Microsoft to kill off the email account (I believe the full azure services - ie. Active Directory - rendering his work computer useless) of a prosecutor at the international criminal court:
Microsoft didn’t cut services to International Criminal Court, its president says
Chief prosecutor’s email issues have spurred fears in Europe that Trump could trigger a “kill switch” through U.S. tech giants abroad.
...
A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
There is a book "Autocracy Inc." about this curious, somewhat recent phenomenon of autocrats everywhere supporting each other. It's like autocracy itself is more important to them than their countries' interests.
The wording is “legally correct” but meant to look like it was an ICC unforced decision. In reality the US sanctioned the ICC chief prosecutor and Microsoft gave the ICC 2 options: either the ICC cuts off their own employee, or Microsoft cuts off the whole ICC. ICC made a choice between these 2 options and all the public statements were then made to not further tarnish Microsoft’s reputation.
To be fair, under US law Microsoft doesn’t have much choice either. Companies operating under US law inherit the untrustworthiness that comes with this.
Yes. That is is the issue. These laws of the US have been around for a long time; what is new is that traditionally allied countries are now the target of them. And for activities that are at the heart of our legal sovereignty.
Because I too am a Swede and in mine I don't think the normal attitude is one where we have any limit to our commitment to Danish territorial integrity.
East Germany had a strategy for dealing with political opponents it referred to as Zersetzung. The FBI had a similar operation for political movements like the Black Panthers that's widely known as COINTELPRO. Both of those very evidently extremely successfully but ended decades ago.
We know that Russia still uses similarly subversive tactics internationally, especially in public messaging (popularizing multiple mutually contradictory narratives at the same time to compete with any attempt at "factual reporting", e.g. in its many justifications and descriptions during the early months of the invasion of Ukraine or following the infamous civilian plane crash during the "civil war" before that). There have also been credible accusations against China of employing disinformation campaigns to disrupt criticism. The first year of Israel's ongoing military campaign (initially in Gaza) also saw many people pointing out what they described as examples of Hasbara.
Under the first Trump presidency we saw the term "alternative facts" being used by US officials. Trump himself also popularized the term "fake news". Trump even bragged about "stopping Nord Stream 2", implying US involvement in the sabotage that so far has been considered to have been carried out by Ukranian nationals.
We also know (via Snowden and Wikileaks) that under the Bush and Obama governments the US actively used its intelligence apparatus even against its allies, at the very least for surveillance operations and infiltration (allegedly even industrial espionage). There's also the dissolved BND/CIA co-operation (via a Swiss proxy I think?) that came apart when the German BND was dissatisfied with the CIA's willingness to sell the faulty encryption technology they were disseminating to their shared allies to maintain cover for the operation.
During the Euromaidan protests (2014), the US diplomat was caught on tape exclaiming "Fuck the EU". During the Security Conference earlier this year, VP Vance explicitly promoted European far-right political movements and questioned the legitimacy of European countries' governments. Trump himself has repeatedly referred to the EU as an organization created for the specific purpose of screwing over the US.
In aggregate, the EU's nominal GDP right now is slightly higher than that of China. Germany alone has the third-highest nominal GDP in the world right now.
The US has for a long time at least engaged in hostile behavior against its own allies, including the EU. Trump has at several points been openly hostile against the EU. Trump has been promoting a policy of unilateral "peace through strength" over promoting cooperation and the pretense of mutual benefit and engaging in trade wars against all of its trading partners.
The US is acting as a hostile force against the EU and has redefined the EU as a hostile entity. It hasn't severed diplomatic nor economic ties to the EU but neither has it to China. Whatever you think the US might stomach to covertly do against China it therefore stands to reason they would have an interest in also doing against the EU. It's also worth considering that militarily China poses a much greater risk of retaliation and the EU is currently much more economically dependant on the US than China is (especially following the sanctions against Russia which previously acted as a major trading partner in the region and the rising tensions in the Middle East).
It seems extremely plausible to me that the US engages in activities intended to disrupt the integrity of the EU and consequentially the mutual trust and diplomatic relationships between EU member states. We know (with receipts) that Russia has been directly contributing to far-right nationalist anti-EU political movements throughout Europe prior to the invasion of Ukraine and even before Trump's first term and continues to support the anti-EU rhetoric of a "Europe of fatherlands" intended to fragment and individualize EU member states either as a "divide and conquer" tactic or at least to reduce their collective capability for actively opposing Russia's interests.
We don't know what the US has been doing or is doing beyond what it has been doing in the open. But given how much deeper the US's battle chest runs and how advanced its offensive technology (both from private industry and internally) that we know of is, it seems far more likely to me that this is not because it doesn't exist but because they've been better at not getting caught. Not to mention that European governments still refuse to treat the US with the same level of suspicion they treat China or Russia, thus making it far easier for the US to get away with actions even when they are caught. There's no need to worry about your covert operations becoming public when their target actively collaborates in supporting your operations against them.
>> Denmark is in a crazy situation where what we saw as a key trusted partner (the US) all of sudden is extremely hostile towards us due its re-ignited territorial ambitions
Canada will welcome you at thier clubhouse. Friends are enemies and enemies friends. And Putin is all smiles. (Let us not kid ourselves about who wants disharmony amongst arctic nations.)
Maybe the USA should do a better job at managing the USA? Compared to the EU, it has more crime, worse life expectancy, more alcoholism, problems with rail infrastructure… you see, that's a bit of a silly argument.
Truly silly. One can all of these bring up for "Europe".
Maybe not life expectancy (if you avoid public transport and Christmas markets), but all others match for Germany too.
The poor lifestyle statistics seem to be a property of Arctic life generally, it isn’t unique to Denmark or any country with Arctic settlements. Humans are adaptable enough to survive up there but they don’t really thrive.
That is pretty obviously the nature of the environment. You can’t blame Denmark for it being like that, it isn’t a function of resources delivered. No one has ever been able to convert any part of the polar regions into a glorious utopia.
You are entirely right. And apparently if you go to jail they place you in denmark so you can't receive visits.
Yes greenland is a colony. But I don't think that making them USA's colony would improve their situation… see how the natives of guam or hawaii are doing for example.
Not really. Since Greenland is a county, not a colony, their government has self-rule (albeit limited), including the option of pursuing independence, and their citizens have access to the amenities of the metropole (healthcare, education etc.).
In what other country does a jail sentence mean you get sent to another country to serve the sentence? (Except maybe the US now with detained immigrants)
Nuuk has had its own closed prison for a while now, with inmates in Denmark given the option to transfer there. I don't know how many are still in Herstedvester but it can't be many and afaik they are not forced to stay there. Is this what you're referring to?
I'm not disputing the colonial history of Greenland/Denmark or the oppression inflicted on the Inuit (which didn't end in 1953) but I struggle to see the point you and the other poster are trying to make. You both seem to be making insinuations based on facts that are simply not true/up to date.
Do you think the US is going to build railroads in Greenland?!
Anyway the campaign for Greenland is ramping up. And it goes from all the way from weird social media posts, oddly timed attacks on Danish companies (Orsted), huge US "diplomatic" build up in Nuuk, weird "little green men", various statements of agression by Trump and surrogates. And there is a Danish campaign on other side with a silly number of visits by the PM and the king, lots of political wins for the Greenlanders, Danish military build up, French involvement etc.
Entertaining to follow and also with consequences in unrelated fields like tech.
Swish is great, but it is sensitive infrastructure. It has already been down multiple times due to DDoS attacks (together with BankId). Don't let Swish completely replace a stash of cash at home.
There are lots of places where most customers still pay in cash. Mostly ethnic minorities in stores that cater for ethnic minorities. I find it interesting that ethnicity or religion would end up being a signal informing if one is using cash or digital money.
Unfortunately there is no term for "stop explaining my own country to me", but there are similarities with that other situation so… a rhetorical figure? Heard of those?
There was a term: condescending, which is ironic because you were being quite condescending in your reply to me about my observed experience being somehow a personal choice.
I could write a huge diatribe of statistics and behaviours that back me up, it's quite public that even in 2022 across the entire country only 8% of transactions were made in cash- which is even lower in the cities. https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/rapporter/betalni...
And it's also quite well known that many independent businesses do not accept cash (my Coffee Shop, the restaurants I frequent (Quan in Malmo, Marvin in Malmo)).
And yes I've visibly seen cashiers recoil after putting a transaction through to the payment terminal; only to have the person tell them that they'd rather pay in cash (leading to the cashier becoming flustered).
Yes, it's more common that old people use cash (from my observed experience) but increasingly they're using debit cards (not mobile payment methods like younger folks), but no: the country is pretty much cashless; and coming from the UK (where not accepting cash is definitely a more controversial decision outside of London): here it's seen as pretty normal to say "no cash" or "cash free".
Speaking for: Stockholm, Malmo, Gothenburg, Lund, Sundsvall, Oskarshamn and Umeå, and after being in the country for 11 years. I'm not sure what other representation I should be seeing.
Talking about my personal observed experience doesn't invalidate yours, but it feels like I can speak for the overwhelming majority of the population here.
And incidentally I'm also in Sweden right now (https://mrkoll.se/person/Jan-Martin-Harris-Harasym-Kattsunds...); if you'd like me to document a day trying to use only cash I'll let you know how it goes. But I won't be able to get to work (Malmo Busses do not take cash) and I won't be able to eat at any of the restaurants in Malmo (Saluhallen and the others I mentioned above are entirely cashless) so I'll have to use COOP, Willis or ICA exclusively.
Well I've seen a lot of incompetent cashiers. Especially in summer when the real ones are on vacation. I'm not sure what that proves besides that being a cashier isn't as easy as you might think.
I assure you that pressbyrån accepts cash and you can buy tickets there to get to work. Also having a long subscription for public transport on the phone is a bad idea, because if you drop your phone you'll also lose your subscription. And depending on how many days you had left and what phone you had, it could cost you more than the phone.
And handpicking restaurants that don't accept cash is no more a proof than if I were to do the same but handpicking restaurants that don't accept cards.
Many many restaurants and stores never accept cash here. This would be a huge problem if cash suddenly becomes the only way of paying for everyone at the same time.
On the other hand, Swish is fully owned by a couple of banks together. So they have full control over Swish and also over BankID, which means that they can deny people from access or if they are down then you know we're screwed. So even if it's not relying on one single company it's relying on a few companies that work together. So instead of a monopoly it's a cartel.
And as a practical matter, they make sure everyone has a smartphone firmly managed by either Apple or Google, with the excuse of protecting us from ourselves.
We've invited foreign occupation through the DCA with the US and there was very little resistance so clearly few swedes care about sovereignty and territorial integrity, which changes in which I assume is what you mean by "exogenous schocks".
As far as I know it sits on top of the payment services provided by Nets. But we have had some situations where part of Nets' services breaks down but MobilePay have been able to operate.
MobilePay starts by being direct bank transactions, and can still use this to some extend. Now it also has credit cards associated though, which depends on Nets to clear.
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?
I don't think Denmark in particular is preparing, because at the end of the year their national postal service will cease to deliver letters (after the government removed the legal requirement for it to do so), and more than 85% of Danes will only be able to receive government and commercial letters in digital form via a privately owned cloud service (e-Boks). That is an alarming level of concentration. If I were hypothetically in control of a state that was planning to go to war with Denmark and had the resources for hybrid warfare, I know which company's servers I'd want to take down first.
Denmark are. Only two days ago the danish PM on public TV said the had ordered the head of the danish military to "buy, buy, buy" [1][2] [as many weapons as the can get their hands on]. This is repeatition of of what she said 6 months ago[3]
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.
Belgian youngsters aged 17 wil get a voluntary call for 'vacation camps' in the army in a few weeks.
Recently a lot of people were hired four the federal and regional governments to handle strategic supplies. All Belgians were asked to stock their own 3 day emergency kit.
I mean war aside, the 3 day kit is always a good idea - power outages happen, freak weather events, supply chain issues, strikes, or even not feeling like going out which is very common.
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 think Belgium is the most stable unstable country in the world.
We're always on strike, only surpassed by the French. At any given moment one of our seven governments is in a state of crisis.
Somehow I feel like we'll make it though three days of lockdown without any issues.
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.
Wow. I'm in software and my whole house is as automated as can be, but I want my important documents physical, and delivered via the mail.
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.
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.
You seen to have failed to understand both solutions and changes you mention...
the technology stack of our digital post and the change of letter delivery (I don't blame you, many of my fellow Danes don't understand it either).
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.
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.
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.
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 ..
I have a feeling tens of thousands of drones would be a better investment if your concern is Russia vs NATO. But if it’s just a business reacting to popular sentiment then it’s a fine business strategy I guess. Or just useful spin / wealthy owners paranoia.
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.)
>We as a country are exposed to being attacked by Russia.
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.
Greenland can become independent if they wish. There would be some things to work out, but the legal framework has been in place since the 1970es. And they seem to be working towards the goal.
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 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.
Ahh yes. The military powerhouse that is Kaliningrad - which to make any kind of buildup or resupply you have to trample trough two NATO countries. Or to sail Russia's nonexistent or pathetic (in best of times) fleet trough a lot of hostile waters.
The west always assumed Russia would (attempt to) close the gap between Belarus and Kaliningrad at Poland's corner.
>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.
You know where Kaliningrad is but you couldn't find Denmark (aka the country that includes that big piece of land next to Canada that Trump and Vance have been talking about annexing) on a map?
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.
In the USA I try to have what we need for one week with food and without power or potable tap water. This just seems like common sense. After the SF earthquake in 89 you weren't supposed to drink the tap water for a couple days. Lots of things have taken out power and COVID made shopping difficult. Resilience is good.
3 days is a pretty long time unless the damage is catastrophic and very broad based. Extended preparations come with an overhead cost that must be offset by the benefit.
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.
It’s also reasonable to look at it as a “the populace goes nuts every time there’s some minor shock to the logistics chain, so might as well prepare for that reaction”
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.
Given people are already advised to stockpile for at least a week if not two, it's both deepening the resiliency capacity for all, and providing capacity for those too poor (either cashflow-poor or housing-poor) to stockpile.
Denmark is exposed via sea and practically neighbors with Poland that is already being probed by Russian military. People I know are volunteering for army training in Czechia and reportedly the number of such volunteers is rising.
That's only one possible scenario, but more realistic and actual is a regular power outage, like the one that hit Berlin the other day. (ok that was sabotage / someone started a fire, but you get what I mean).
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.
Yeah, in my humble opinion anyone in Europe that considers wider war breaking out to be farfetched is not paying enough attention.
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.
All out war shocked the shit out of the 20 somethings in Ukraine too, many fled, and yet Russia has not made significant advances in the following three years.
There's no plausible world in which Russia has the strength to take on the rest of Europe, in, say, the next ten years.
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.
yes, but we're talking of waging war against actual NATO and the EU, not a country which was vaguely friendly towards the west.
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.
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.
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?
That is basically NATO propaganda to convince people it's ok to stop paying for healthcare because we need to buy weapons, so that guys like Crosetto can become even richer.
Is it true? No.
Also air force is not so useful and we are spending insane amounts into that.
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.
Actually, those who remember the 90s and, before that, the Cold War see and understand that Europe is much safer now that it was then. The USSR was much stronger relative to Western Europe then. Now Russia is probably at its weakest relative to NATO (it might have been weaker in the early 90s but NATO had also not expanded to its current footprint).
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.
> 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":
Largest nuke arsenal that they could find even one in, that they would be sure enough it works to detonate even on their own vast wasteland as the show of force?
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.
Russia can't deal with small Ukraine for 4 years. Their outdated poor tech and drunkard band of villagers called "soldiers" can't defeat a country with 5 times less population. Even with the help of the equally poor and unqualified North Korea and the jihadists of Khadirov, Russia hasn't achieved anything substantial but lose north of a million poor conscripts.
> 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
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.
i'll gladly live as a nihilist coward in safety. will leave the optimistic and heroic option of getting blown up by a drone on a muddy field, slowly choking on your own blood and leaving behind your closest ones to people who aren't such cowards like myself.
Between the threat of war, the fragility of the systems we depend on, and the uncertainty of climate change it seems like a good idea to be a little more prepared for disaster than we've felt the need to be.
I sure am! And as a strategical prepper, I've left the entire continent behind well before shit hits the fan.
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.
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.
How would you feel if ww3 never happens and you moved from Sweden to Mexico for nothing? It seems like a major step down except if you have Mexican relatives
I dunno, Mexico is a pretty great place. You could do a lot worse than Mexico. Many people have moved there “temporarily” and then never went back to their native country.
The lifestyle is legit. No one requires you to go to the famously sketchy parts.
Still, you're giving up on your whole life for an hypothetical event that's been prophesied since the 50s. If you wanted to move in the first place or had family there why not, but if the sole reason is fear...
Imagine leaving the US for Mexico in 1962 because the "cold war is about to go warm"
Meh, it's sunny and nice here, I'll feel pretty good regardless. Living on the beach is underrated! And it's been great connecting a bit more with my wife's family.
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...
Better be ready and nothing happens than being sitting duck thinking Europe will be free of wars forever. Governments spend money on much more ridiculous things
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
It doesn't have to happen as last-ditch everyone gets a pike situation right on Danish soil, could be downstream effects of e.g. China closing all international ports. I think that much would be starting to get within realms of possibilities now.
There is land war in Europe. With the Russians agressively pushing for continuation!
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.
Very true, but there’s still a huge difference between acts of sabotage and missiles hitting cities. We might be at war, but so far it’s a comfortable one.
Everyone should give that some thought but look at Texas. In 2021 they were devastated by a snowstorm. This year they were devastated by flooding. Not to pick on Texas, they aren't the only ones caught under prepared for severe weather. Wildfires and drought in the western states is another thing we're under prepared for. And look at the hoarding of toilet paper etc. in 2020. I presume there's been problems in Europe that I'm not aware of that are more relevant to Denmark's calculus.
The climate is changing. Natural disasters are going to be more common. It's prudent to prepare for it.
Just this last week, all the major cargo train lines in northern Sweden suffered big derailments simultaneously, and several dozen roads were made unusable. This was all from a single incident of unusually heavy rain. The country will have badly damaged logistics on the North-South axis for weeks to come, maybe months. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasternorrland/stora-probl...
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.
we may or may not but I don't think this is reflective of it. This is just the fragility of digital societies were one hack or outage can kill entire national payment systems. A few decades ago any store could run three days without power or telecoms.
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
The “no transaction cost” claim is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Cash may feel free to the person handing over a coin, but only because the costs are hidden upstream. Someone has to produce those notes and coins, swap out designs to keep ahead of counterfeiters, move them around in armored vans, count and recount them in tills, reconcile them at the bank, and insure against theft along the way. None of that is costless.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
For them, the risk of keeping cash on the premises is probably paramount. Of robbery, employee theft, of employees not being able to make change correctly (or getting taken advantage of by a quick-change artist).
The US experiences these situations regularly due to its somewhat unique exposure to a dizzying array of severe natural disasters.
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.
Precious metals fill all of your requirements. They do have other challenges, some shared with FIAT, some unique, but we've had the "technology" to solve this problem for thousands of years.
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?
Yes. War with russia is optimal course of action right now for Europe as russia extensively proved it can't be just left alone for any period of time. So some inconvenience for western Europe is expected and everywhere there are efforts to prepare for it.
The risk level for a land war across Western Europe is probably the lowest it has ever been.
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?
Yes, we are much stronger than they, but once we decide to actually have a war with them some difficulties will arise. They do have some useful weapons which will have effects on us, so we'll have to be ready so that disruption is not excessive.
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.
Yeah. The way we run our countries is idiotic. Zero resilience. First concern after floods is getting back to job, even before all the water is drained and mud cleaned, because working people live paycheck to paycheck and so on.
Businesses try to keep minimum stock. Single disruption in integrated circuit supply disables whole industries. And so on.
At least a decade. I’ve never been there and joined early in my career when I was told by mentors that it was a good source of up to date news on technology and the industry
I think the implication with that phrasing is that HN is more left-leaning (like Silicon Valley), which traditionally isn't into "prepping", so this "pro-prepping" article is an interesting anomaly, perhaps even a harbinger.
This is incorrect. Left-leaning preppers grow food and medicinal plants in their garden, install solar panels, and get vaccines, rather than stock up on guns and ammo.
We're nowhere near that, but EU leaders keep hinting that there is a big war coming and we should all be prepared. In fact my impression, as a European, is that if any war is coming is because EU leadership are actively rooting for one and waste no opportunity to stoke the tension. This news is just one of the many examples of this.
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.
> EU leadership are actively rooting for [a war] and waste no opportunity to stoke the tension
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.
> 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.
They'd fare much better. Ukraine had a large pool of conscripts, a professional cadre with combat experience from the Donbas, and deep Soviet stocks to draw from, while Western Europe abolished conscription and destroyed its Cold War stockpiles a long time ago. The current reintroduction of conscription and massive investment in defense are clear signs that European armies were (and for some time, will remain) inadequate.
Compared to Ukraine, Europe has enormous amounts of money and modern weaponry, including nuclear weapons, nuclear submarines, hundreds of f-16s, f-35s, and twelve times the population of Ukraine for twenty times the size. For God's sake.
There simply isn't an "enormous amount of modern weaponry", otherwise it would have been given to Ukraine a long time ago.
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.
Are you saying that if we had them, we would have given all our weapons to Ukraine? Lol.
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.
> Are you saying that if we had them, we would have given all our weapons to Ukraine?
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.
>The same applies to tanks, artillery, and pretty much everything else.
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.
Germany might have built 3600 Leopard tanks since the 1970s, but as of 2025, it has only about 300 in service with the Bundeswehr, of which roughly 200 are combat-ready. France, the UK, and Italy each also have around 200 tanks in active service; Spain has fewer than 100.
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.
Yes this is all BS but I don't think the EU is rooting for war. My suspicion is that EU countries want to build a stronger military and one more integrated at EU level. Both are hard sells especially when governments also keep telling us that there is no money for anything... So Ukraine is a very convenient scarecrow to "manufacture consent".
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.
>The idea is that no one should be more than 50 km from such a store and it should prevent hoarding/panic buying as people will know basic food will be available in an emergency.
I dont think that is how it works? That is assuming people wont flock out to buy everything in the emergency store. And do people visit it every day or are these "Emergency Stores". After all they need to replenish stock.
Or are these simply some form of marketing play?
Off-Topic: Its been while since I last visited a The Mastodon site and it seems a lot faster than before.
I think there’s a subtle difference between charging everyone $100 per umbrella in a rain storm vs charging $100 for your last few umbrellas. Former is price gouging; latter is just economics.
We all saw what happened with Covid and panic buying. I remember when initial reports about it started coming out and something about it told me this might actually become something serious. So I went and loaded up on flour and yeast, rice, cooking oil, lots of non perishable items and a bunch of meat in a huge costco run before it took off. I had enough to last me a good year if my family had to ration. Then it spread like fire and people went crazy. I remember being at costco for a couple things I didn't think to stock pile (toilet paper) and there was virtually no meat left on the shelf. They had to queue the door as so many people were there to panic buy.
So if an event happened that even slightly appeared to suggest things might get tough for a while people will always panic buy. Without limits those with money will buy it up.
I did the same thing like a couple years after initial Covid when we had massive flooding in Abbotsford. I heard on the news something like an estimated 100,000 chickens were killed in the flood. I stood up, grabbed my keys and got into my car. I went and bought like a few hundred dollars in chicken. 2 days later facebook was full of posts about how all the chicken is gone and none on the shelves. Luckily it didn't last long and I believe they managed to get a bunch from Washington state but it was all at an increased cost.
I am not rich but I am thankful that I am in enough of a position that I can load up if I feel there might be a need to. A few people said I was part of the problem buying lots like that buy I always did it preemptively before the surge started. And in my defense when you literally could not buy toilet paper, I kept a bunch in my car. I work as a health care working visiting people at home. I gave out dozens of rolls so elderly could have it meaning I would at times run out. I also have helped out countless clients with no food out of my own pocket. But I am the provider for my family so I need to ensure they are okay.
Its a thing. Living in hurricane alley, I see it all the time. Lines at gas stations, grocery stores, hardware stores. My strategy is to wait till the 11th hour after supply trucks have restocked everything and shop in peace.stores are open, quiet , sparsely trafficed, usually stocked up at this point. Works every time
Buying a bunch and then blaming everyone else 12h after you seems disingenuous.
It sounds like you’re trying to clear your conscious from panic buying. However, some people went to the store to find nothing because they weren’t able to go at the same time as you.
I didn't rush off to panic buy, but when I first heard about it happening, I did go to do a normal grocery run in case things later ran out. There was nothing on my list. Also, there was almost nothing on the shelves. It was like the supermarket had been looted. Well, of everything edible or useful anyway. Probably high-value, non-essentials were still there, unlike in real looting.
I walked and walked the aisles, and the only thing I could find that we might eat were black olives. I disliked black olives (as apparently did everyone else), but I bought (and later ate) them anyway. That wasn't the only thing edible in the supermarket - it was a while ago, so I forget what was still there. Perhaps condiments, and obscure baking ingredients.
I held out from panic buying right through, but once the shelves were restocked I started buying a couple extra of everything each time, as long as there were lots on the shelf. I gradually filled one cupboard shelf with 6-7 of every canned and jarred food we eat. Later on, there were a few more instances of people panic buying at the slightest provocation (1), and I now assume people will do it if allowed.
I am not blaming others at all but my point was more to ops question about people panic buying the answer is yes people will do so. Without limits those with lots of money will take the lions share.
I am not trying to clear my conscious. I know I am a good person and literally would give the shirt off my back. But I had a hint things might get bad and as a father of young children above all and everything in this world I had to make sure I had at least a bit or reserves if things got bad. I am not rich at all so when I say I did a costco run I am not talking like thousands of dollars. More like an $800 run which is nothing, but I know how to make that much last a long time. I got a bunch of flour and rice. Some meats and tomato sauce. I would not be eating in luxury had their been a long term shortage but I would at least be able to make some bread and basic foods to keep my family feed even if poorly.
There was very little paid buying in Denmark, as there were very few selfish people like you buying a years worth of food.
The government announced that there was plenty of stock, but panic buying would mean it couldn't be brought onto the shelves in time, so please don't. People didn't.
I don't get why you try to spin it as if you weren't part of the panic buyer crowd. You clearly were, you and people like you caused the unnecessary empty shelves.
I get you were anxious about what was going to happen and I hope that you now have emergency supplies that you regularly stock. That way it won't damage the normal supply chain.
If an emergency store costs 10% more to run, and emergencies are only 1 day in 10,000, then prices during emergencies would need to be 1000x normal for it to make business sense.
Unfortunately anti-price-gouging laws wouldn't allow that, nor would you manage to keep law and order in the shop when telling customers that a bottle of water is gonna cost them 2000 dollars/euros.
It sounds like the company is doing it as a community service. It doesn't make 'business sense' except perhaps by improving the company's image. Companies also donate to charities etc.
“This is our core task and a responsibility we take on, and we also believe that it is timely […] that we – like other countries – prepare for possible crisis situations, which a good and constructive dialogue with the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness has also confirmed. We hope that this will not be necessary, but should it happen, our customers can count on us.”
It's important to note that the Salling Group is privately owned with only a few owners [1]. It's easier for such companies to do such things than a publicly owned one.
Public companies do this sort of thing too, or at least they used to. It's typically grouped under 'Corporate Social Responsibility'. They aren't doing it out of pure altruism:
From https://benevity.com/resources/corporate-social-responsibili...
"CSR increases customer retention and loyalty: Research shows that 87% of Americans are more likely to buy a product from a company that they can align their values with, and over half of all consumers are willing to pay extra for a product if they’re buying from a company with a sturdy CSR strategy."
> It sounds like the company is doing it as a community service. It doesn't make 'business sense' except perhaps by improving the company's image. Companies also donate to charities etc.
I applaud this kinda thing.
In a sensible world, that'd mean not just positive PR alongside the actual social utility, but also maybe the government being a bit more encouraging when it comes to taxes etc.
Plus, who knows, if they stock up a bunch on canned goods and still need to sell them in a reasonable amount of time, it might lead to a few good discounts here and there and also be a good thing for the regular consumer.
Aside from that, having a generator and accepting cash payments just seems like good common sense stuff to do.
3 days to allow emergency response to arrive is a lot of buffer, when otherwise after 2 days you have to start moving to find water and plan to find food.
Combined with things in people's houses that likely gets you to about a week before anyone is going without.
Mormons also (are encouraged to) store water and other basic necessities like toilet paper. It's not unusual to see a couple 55-gallon drums of water in a basement or garage of a Mormon house. They've also heavily adopted the filtering straws/pumps for areas where there are natural sources of water
There is a regional chain where I live in Texas, HEB, that has a similar solution they solve via emergency distribution schedule. They found that environmental disasters can be profitable to operate at a loss and support the community because they are able to come back online faster than the competition and minimize disruption to regular operations.
Without power they could use backup sources but without telecoms isn't payment going to be difficult to impossible? (except those who had sufficient cash before the emergency)
When I was a kid, I remember the cashier at a department store checking a book for my mother’s credit card number.
I misunderstood the nature of the book, assuming it was a list of valid card numbers. It was, of course, the opposite, so when I said to my mom “I hope they find your number in there” she replied “I hope they don’t!”
Well I assume if they set it up in mind that they would be operating in an emergency they could have something like Starlink and connect to payment processors.
Well, there is always the question of who’s gonna pay for that resiliency. We see it all the time in software deployment. After each extended outage of a major network or cloud/service provider, there is always a flurry of sudden interest in disaster recovery, multi-zonal deployments, failover solutions, and redundancy up and down the chain of everything. 6 months or a year later, people and organizations get sick of paying for that. They either nerf it, making it just a useless checkbox or just abandon it completely because “if us-east-2 is down, then everything is down. Who cares”. A couple of years pass, then another incident happens, rinse and repeat.
These stores are not supposed to prepare you for three days of resilience in advance.
They are meant to be available as reliable and functioning stores throughout a crisis period. Your go-to destination for purchasing vital goods during the crisis.
It's the local supermarket. How many days in advance am I supposed to have food for? (I have prepper quantities of food and don't know what's normal. three days seems pretty normal to me.)
A big chunk of society has realistically 2-3 days of groceries in their house, plus maybe a 5-year-old bag of rice or pasta and can of string beans buried way in the back. If you have a 1-6 year old you're probably buying 1-3 gallons of milk per week, and need to get more tomorrow.
As much as I detest organised religion, the Mormons have a pretty good take on this. They strive to have a six month supply of food/water/cash on hand at all times.
I get it. But on the other hand, if you in a situation that requires a six month food supply, because there is no resupply available and you can’t relocate, you have bigger problems. Like the mob of hungry people outside your house.
If you have a six month food supply, and survivable disasters really only need a week or two tops, you will have no reservations helping out your neighbors, which helps you be a positive influence on your community in time of need.
If you've only got two days supply, you may not be so generous.
Exactly. There are surely some people that will be stingy (as Mormons are humans after all) but there's a huge emphasis on being able to help out the neighbors and the unprepared in a bad situation. Depending on the area too, they even have rough distribution/response plans in place so they aren't starting from scratch during an emergency. You'll occassionaly see comments like "I'm stocked up so my family is fine while all the city people are eating each other" but (anecdatally having lived in heavily Mormom areas most of my life) the vast majority do not feel that way. Even some of the people who I've heard said that, I'd bet a huge amount they would not sit by and watch another human starve
They may begrudge the 'city people', but they probably won't begrudge their neighbors. It's also nice to have someone to help eat your disaster food :) I've done small preparations before, and you've got to cycle it out for freshness every so often[1], which means someone has to eat it... might as well be you and your neighbors. If you're in a community of like minded, well prepared neighbors, maybe you can get some variety at least.
[1] My elementary schools had a good program of bring in canned food at the start of the school year in case of emergency, have a picnic to eat it in the last month of school. I also did have a disaster can when I lived in California; I'm less prepared at the moment.
I think about that too. My home is isolated with plenty of firewood, well water, solar power and a backup whole house generator with weeks/months of propane. I'm unlikely to last more than a few days into the apocalypse without it all being taken from me by someone stronger or better armed.
I'm in Utah and the idea isn't that you're going to be a lone wolf and somehow survive in a bunker then come out in 6 months. The point is that you should have plenty of extra supplies on hand for your family, friends, and neighbors. Instead of a mob people are more likely going to work together instead of fighting over a bag of rice.
After covid, we keep a stock of extra dry goods on hand. If you need that much milk, it can just be frozen when found on sale. As long as it completely defrosts, you don't get any ice
A Camp Chef or Turkey fryer is also a great investment for this purpose as they are very useful on their own, and double as a gas-powered source for cooking in an emergency. They can also boil large pots of water quickly should you need
This is why it's important to build a diet with grains and beans. They are cheap and last for months/years at home if stored properly. So you can easily have enough stored at home to eat for at least a few weeks.
They're realistically not preparing for a zombie apocalypse
If power goes out really bad, there's some kind of major weather event in some part of the country etc 3 days is a reasonable time frame for emergency measures to be put in place
Feels a bit like cheeky marketing from Salling Group, when its just a concept years away from being rolled out. I don't see them running stores with sub optimal stock and other complexities, just for the good of their hearts. Or maybe they just looked at the odds and concluded that likelihood of a lockdown-like event is enough to make it a sound investment.
By treaty, both sides were limited in missile defense. The Soviets placed theirs around Moscow (to hell with the krest'yanin), while the US placed them around larger cities (also likely targets but this diffused the effectiveness of the system).
Civil Defense was taken seriously in the US for a while (I was trained as a radiological monitor in high school) but fatalism and optimism took over. Countries like Switzerland made changes to their national building code requiring all homes and larger buildings to have shelters. IMO the US should have standardized shelter plans as an optional part of our building code, so if someone wants one, there's a proven design available.
With regard to Denmark, look to the Mormon Church. They have a mandate (not always followed!) to keep a years supply of food in the house. So the church has distribution warehouses and publishes information about long-term storage.
On a nationwide scale, yeah probably not, but nor do I think it should be done at the federal level. You could get economies of scale on purchasing and storage, but I suspect there would be more inefficiencies emergent from such a large scale thing than would be worth it. Each geographic area has very different needs, very different population makeups, and more, so somebody local is much better equipped to evaluate and plan. Even just "how much water to store" varies immensely. If you're on a water shed in an area with frequent rainfall, it would be wasteful to store a ton of water, but if you're in a desert water storage is one of the most important things. But even just communication setups like ham radio and designated response personnel is something that needs to be worked out locally.
I've been involved in several different cities emergency preparedness plans though, and there is actually a lot more happening in the US than most people think or know. It rarely if ever makes the news, but it happens.
The better question is will it seriously increase the number of people’s access to goods during an emergency. Or is it just an extra stop for the panic buyers buying up everything in bulk on the way back home on the first day or two before the rest of the people start taking it seriously.
IRL market demands are massive for a western country so it’d require a lot more than a single chain of grocers staying open late. Or more accurately a huge devastating emergency to kill off essential industry like food production/distribution.
The US has more good ideas than any other country. Don't be pessimistic, look at how things are actually going and you'll see how the US has more startups, R&D, and new products than any other county.
Also: This might be a good idea for them, but it's not a good idea for the US, the US is not exposed to a level of risk that makes this worth it.
Not sure if this is of interest but I was living in Denmark during the "announcement" that the country was closing flights as COVID was now being taken seriously.
Being somewhat of a "cautious" prepper mentality, though never having really done any prepping, I thought I would walk to the supermarket at night in a suburb of Copenahgen to get some extra tuna just in case. Mind you this was about an hour after the announcement say 8pm.
There was a queue of about 30 meters out of the supermarket of danish citizens, scared and ( possibly for the first time ever thought as a visitor I couldnt know for sure - the queue had ever been so long. As I walked away I could see through the window, that they were limiting the amount of people going into the store to a handful at a time.
And, very suprisingly I saw a normal Dane running round the aisle grabbing the milk cartons so quickly he knocked some onto the floor before continuing to run off down the aisle. Very movie like so to speak. Not something I ever saw in the UK during the same announcement a month earlier. Bear in mind this was also at night! A night food panic.
Well, the good news, is ( other than this one incident that lasted an hour or so), the Danes IMO handled the whole COVID thing with a stable level headed attitude, that night was the only mild panic I witnessed.
Months later they had a very honed and IMO fair, calm approach to testing and although teachers were forced to "take the vaccine" or "get into trouble" ( a teacher was expected to show they had taken it or a test or they simply coudln't be in school, thought the punishment was never explained), they were also the only country I noticed where if you were not vaccinated yet , you could still go to cafes as long as you had a "free" test in one of the many marquees around the city. ( To compare, in the UK for about half a year ALL cafes were closed, and it was mandatory to wear masks in public - not so in Denmark). One old lady started shouting at me whilst I drank coffee ( below my mask), on a train in the UK. When I asked her to calm down and stop shouting, that masks were not even worn in Denmark, she actually got extremely confused. (Just a memory.)
I just thought this was of interest. Clearly they are still trying to learn lessons. Good stuff.
EDIT> Sorry and my one funnny memory ( Im not complaining honest). Was a time in Denmark when it was (a) Cafe was open (b) You could go to cafe if you had been tested (c) You were given a literal FLAG that you would put on your table to warn other poeple you had ben tested but NOT vaccinated. A little white flag!!! Only once, I think that was at it worst, and about a month later I never saw the little flag again. Ah good times though.
I was in Denmark at the time they announced they were closing flights. I was flying out the next day. My experience was orderly, as I would expect, but things took on a strange vibe.
you right, WAY too much to go into, but the more I think about the Danes response, the prouder I am to share a world with them, knowing nothing else about them at all,but this as you say "basic resilience" speaks volumes
The Danish word for hoarding is "hamstering". Perhaps the most adorable thing about the language. (P.S. the pronunciation of hygge is anything but hyggelig)
I always wondered why, until I actually got a hamster. Turns out that when presented with a large amount of food, they "hamster" it by stuffing their massive cheeks until they're bulging, then scurry off to consume in peace.
Hah yeah Denmark is very boring compared to many other countries :) ... and not meant as a warrantless dig against a large country with a high ratio of pistols-per-capita, but I did research it yesterday and from what I can tell America hasn't changed the 10 rights in their Bill Of Rights ever, whereas Denmark has made major revisions to its entire constitution multiple times.
We change our Bill of Rights all the time. We just do it by "reinterpreting" it, i.e. applying the prejudices of the last 4 or 5 Presidents.
Conveniently, none of it actually means anything at all, so it is routinely reinterpreted to mean exactly the opposite of what it might appear to mean.
That's not quite true. You still can't quarter soldiers in somebody's house. We Americans have a firm fixed belief in the Third Amendment.
What I said was the US hasn't changed the 10 amendments (as far as I know) - they're written exactly the same way they were hundreds of years ago, right?. Agree with you it seems like people are playing whack-a-mole trying to fiddle with the interpretations, but maybe they need to have a look at the actual core 10 amendments in the first place?
There is no practical way to amend them. People are absolutely and fervently attached to their interpretations, and the bar to amendment is extremely high.
If it were possible to amend them, then it wouldn't be necessary; we'd already agree on a less-unreasonable interpretation.
I think it is entirely clear that after 250 years they aren't even slightly fit for purpose, if they ever were. But I cannot see a way to revisit them without re-applying the process under which they were written in the first place.
It's funny that these guys found a way to exploit the war to get free marketing from probably a warehouse expansion / warehouse-store hybrid they'd do anyway, and people think they are some prescient preppers. If war starts, 3 days supplies helps with effectively nothing and people will go to supermarkets to hoard anyway.
In case you haven't contemplated this logistics challenge before: the key is you need to stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption and back fill the emergency stores with fresh lots of new shelf stable products. You're just buying more shelf-stable supply once and then managing the transit through the supply chain with speed bump before the last mile.
> stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption
Back in my days in retail, we were ordered to put resupply as FILO into the shelfs. It makes sense to sell the oldest products first. So why the transfer shuffle?
It's still FILO, the shuffle is needed for multiple locations. The emergency store keeps (for example) 5x the stock of canned beans, and feeds an area with 4 regular stores. They have 5x more stock then they could regularly sell, so if stock wasn't transferred then the canned beans would expire before they were sold. They need to transfer their surplus inventory to the 4 regular stores they feed before that stock ages, since in regular use they won't sell them in time.
Since I've had to deal with a similar issue professionally, maybe think of a retailer with 5 distribution warehouses and 50 stores. Normally you want to pick from the closest distribution warehouse to minimize transport costs. However, for food items that expire sometimes it might make sense to pick from the furthest warehouse if their stock is getting older, you need to optimize both for transport costs and the cost of having to throw food away. It's beyond a HN comment, and I'd have to review what isn't NDA, but the optimization math for such a scenario gets both really complicated and really interesting.
Hope this clarifies why they would be moving stick though.
This is a pretty common mechanism in several markets. I worked in the big paint store chain in the US and the local setup was a lot like this. Every store had as much stock as they can physically hold, and no two have the same capacity. It was a daily occurrence to shuttle stock to and from nearby locations, and very common for a small store to have a nearby large store order and hold stock for a job too big for the origin store to handle.
We also had commercial stores spread out which were in essence local warehouses. Those stores spent a large part of their time handling stock transfers. They held specialty products small stores rarely need and couldn't justify the minimum order quantity.
It's a lot more efficient and much faster than having product shipped across the country.
Isn't selling older products first first-in-first-out (FIFO) instead of first-in-last-out (FILO)?
</hn programmer pedantry>
Thanks for asking this, I'm also confused and I thought I must be misunderstanding what FILO means in this context.
Perhaps fresh in, last out?
> FILO
Hard to address the consumers' tendency to "reach out in the back", to get longer expiration time products.
That's only a minority though (like me), most just pick whatever is convenient. I think it really depends on how fast they eat stuff. But a lot of stuff is only dated for two weeks here.
Honestly it seems like I am the only one in my local Aldi who does this. I see people picking up fish that is three days older than the one at the back.
I can only speak for myself here but I don't bother rummaging around for longer expiries because generally I'm buying food that I'm going to eat within the next 2-3 days. It just doesn't make any difference to me.
Even if you're eating it tonight surely you want the freshest item? Most foods deteriorate after harvest.
It would feel socially rude of me to take the freshest item from the back, knowing I don't need it, leaving the older ones to someone who might not have time to cook as soon. Someone has to take take the one in front, or the store has to throw it out, creating waste and ultimately raising prices for everyone.
Seems kinda like farting in a crowded room and then slipping out the door.
I do that, too. Why take something that I don't need, but somebody else might?
Meh, most things I’m never going to tell the difference in a few days freshness. We’re very good at preserving things with packaging now, and my cooking skill is going to have a much larger impact than the ingredients being marginally fresher.
Around here it is quite common to do with dairy products.
I however choose not to do so quite deliberately. I want to avoid food waste. I just check the date is "good enough". My regular shop has a good enough flow that I usually pick from the front.
Food waste is a trending concern around here. But I think you and I who cares about shelf life belongs to the same minority. The majority has enough other worries and does not spend bandwidth to care as it is usually good enough.
I consider fish a "fresh" item and care more for looks and smell.
Same as with vegetables. But I hate people who prod everything - that is detrimental to the product.
But the reason people do this is also food waste. If the food expires at my house it still goes in the garbage, the only difference is I'm also the one that got stuck paying for it. It isn't like there's a discount based on the expiration date.
Some dairy products here - milk mainly - moves so fast there's only ever one expiration date available, lol.
Also can't rule out the 'OCD' types who don't want a gap left in the shelf where they've taken the product, so they remove one from the back
The greatest downside to online grocery delivery is that you can’t then do this.
I work for an online grocer, and I really do think it's not really an issue due to two things for us:
* the amount of stock going through one fulfillment center instead of landing on shelves in smaller stores, means we never have old products laying around. The cucumber you get from us came in a few hours ago. The one in your store has been laying there for days and touched by many. 10 stores each need their own buffer to handle variable demand and thus overstock and get deliveries for certain products rarely. We don't. Our spoilage is so so low compared to traditional stores. * anyways, to alleviate the fears of ordering something that's about to expire, we guarantee x amount of days for perishable products.
Some supermarkets in the UK (e.g. Waitrose) literally just pick items already out and on display in the local store to give to delivery customers. So you’re getting whatever is at the front of the shelf in your local store, which is the least fresh.
I know for a fact that the orange supermarket encourages pickers to pick the least fresh item
What I found (but this was during the panny-D) that only grocery stuff had an even longer shelf life than the store itself, that is, it was really fast moving stuff apparently.
That's a paddlin'.
Is that so? I presumed they would always be open as normal stores, but prepared to stay open as “emergency stores” when necessary.
They are normal stores.
The OP is talking about how they handle keeping fresh stock of products with lower sales volume. (Or at least, that's the way I'm reading it)
What is the difference between this and a slightly larger warehouse?
One of the design requirements is no one should be located more than 50km from a store, so I wouldn't be surprised if larger warehouses are part of the plan when that 50km radius includes densely populated areas.
Yeah I was about to say, I think it makes some sense for warehouses to also have an open store where people can buy things in bulk.
Marketing
Intent and the number of goods kept on hand.
This is completely obvious, yet before covid the British government paid a private company to fill warehouses with face masks, etc.
By the time covid started all of this PPE had gone past its use by date. The incompetence is breathtaking.
What if people could have large residential storage units in their neighborhoods and apartment complexes, where everyone could stock up on their own personal supply as needed?
90% of people won't do it
They will in small countries with high trust and community, near to Russia and currently or formerly having national service.
In fat, lazy, individualist countries like the UK and US? No way.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45155471>
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Source for this obviously false statement?
Did the guy above source their made-up number?
For the positive, see Finland, which is working hard to be a very well-prepared nation. Heavy buy-in from all across the populace. Exactly the kind of nation I was talking about - their survival depends on it. Poland, Sweden, Denmark all doing similar.
For the negative, see UK and US during COVID. The individualism that has underpinned society since Thatcher/Reagan as made us less likely be prepared, less likely to look out for our neighbour. Both are isolated by water, so we're naturally less bothered about invasion.
I live in sweden and I can tell you that over here it's all idle talk, nothing and nobody is prepared for anything at all.
And the only ones who do buy-in are gun lovers and preppers, which are not a major demographic.
But if the time came, would you trust your neighbour to do the right thing? Sweden is a high-trust society based on friends in London and from visits there, especially outside Stockholm. The UK and US are definitely not.
I thought I had read that Sweden had made some changes to military service recently, is that not true?
I'm from Sweden, I 100% would not trust my neighbors. Sure, maybe if you live in a tiny tiny village in the countryside, but if that's the case you probably have the same thing if you're living in a tiny tiny village in a in the US too. Like that's more of an effect of living in a very small village, not anything about the country.
And regarding the changes to the military, that is still a very small amount of people who are doing the basic conscription service.
Interesting, thanks. Doesn't Swedish have a word for community responsibility, are you saying that sense is breaking down in modern Sweden, that people no longer feel that responsibility?
Friends in London seem to talk about it as if we don't have it in the UK (I know that's true) but that Sweden does.
You have to understand that sweden does a lot of marketing but at the end of the day it's just marketing. Things here aren't nearly as great as everyone abroad imagines them to be.
Not claiming it's a bad place to live in or that there aren't worse places, but the high trust society thing is a myth.
I've had my wallet disappear while I fell asleep on the shore of a lake, in one of those tiny villages where everybody knows each other for example :)
> But if the time came, would you trust your neighbour to do the right thing?
You don't know anything about sweden, clearly. The only people I speak to in the neighborhood are immigrants and homeless people who live in the nearby shelter.
> I thought I had read that Sweden had made some changes to military service recently, is that not true?
Yeah they are wasting time and money with conscription. Very useful.
Maybe all the nice people left and came to London to work with me!
Have you been to these countries lol ? It's not like they're all preppers who could be fully self sufficient in case of an alert, not even for 3 days.
The people in Warsaw, Stockholm and Copenhagen aren't more prepared than the people in Madrid or NYC, most people in medium/large cities give 0 shit about these scenarios, they're the same as everywhere else. Having studied in Denmark I can tell you that if anything the Danish youth is even more oblivious to risks in general given that they live in such an utopia. The state and older generations might be more aware of their perilous position but that's about it.
I've been to most of them, though since COVID only to Denmark. I have friends in London from all of them too, and my cousin from London lives in Stockholm.
In my opinion, and that's all I have here, they are much, much more likely to do the right thing for their neighbour in an emergency than a Briton or American.
All of my friends from Baltic nations are concerned about Russia. All of them. Maybe its an age thing, we're early 30s and some have children.
Yeah, this is not true.
Or even better we could build cupboards in the aparments and people just keep their personal supply. /s
All my shelf stable products have been in my pantry for a few months before I even open them. You can do FILO yourself and have always a nice emergency supply and it can even cheaper because you can buy the stuff on sale most of the time. The problem is that many people just buy day to day and already have a problem when the shops are closed for a holiday they haven't anticipated because they buy just in time.
> Or even better we could build cupboards in the aparments and people just keep their personal supply.
Hate having to annotate explanations to obvious things but I guess it wasn't obvious:
Stock up for the next few months. (after paying for it)
If they don't need/use it, it gets redistributed. (from the local shared storage unit)
I'm sorry but it really wasn't obvious for me. So like an online shop for groceries but they don't deliver it to your home but at this shared storage location?
Doesn't realy change the second part of my answer though. People could already keep some stock at home right now but most just don't. I don't see how such a shared storage would change that.
Also stock up for a few months is what the government is for at least where I live. [0] Personel emergency supplies are only for the time till the government can start distributing their own stocks.
[0]: https://www.bwl.admin.ch/en/we-advise-emergency-supplies
[dead]
One of our biggest practical vulnerabilities is that our payment and electronic id infrastructure (nets, dankort, mitid) has been sold off to a private company (Mastercard) even though it was at one point a government owned and developed setup.
Nets sold its account-to-account payment business to Mastercard. Nets, which is itself a private company operating in many countries, has not been sold to Mastercard, nor has Dankort, MitID, or others been sold to Mastercard.
The services sold are, for example, Betalingsservice in Denmark and AvtaleGiro/eFaktura in Norway.
To be honest, my concern is that Nets is that Nets is entirely unable to competently provide any services competently and reliably, so while they shouldn't be moved to a US company, I sure do hope that we get everything they do replaced by something else.
Only Nets could somehow manage to make it much more expensive in fees to have a scheduled direct bank transaction (Betalingsservice - for reference, bank transfers are free and instant here) than using a VISA card with fees going to the US. They have also completely ruined Dankort adoption and reliability, and made MitID into a great big mess of a reliability and usability nightmare.
A lot of countries have learnt from this and maintain a govt mandated /supported standard for digital payments.
In India, the universal payments interface (UPI) has been hugely successful in providing instant, commission less payments for a vast majority of the population.
Similarly, RuPay is the common standard for credit and debit cards.
It's eye opening to see just how effective and impactful these two have been, particularly UPI. The smallest seller in the remotest village will likely accept UPI payments.
What's mind blowing is that all of this came about in the short span of just under a decade.
In Sweden, we have Swish, thank God. We don't have Greenland either, so people aren't as worried about 'exogenous shocks'.
Denmark is in a crazy situation where what we saw as a key trusted partner (the US) all of sudden is extremely hostile towards us due its re-ignited territorial ambitions in Greenland. In public discourse this is being met with riducule and disbelief but I believe behind the scenes in government it is being taken quite serious. And obviously having our payment infrastrcture in the hands of an adversarial nation is unacceptable.
The worst thing is the lack of solidarity towards the danes here in Sweden. If Trump turns off Microsoft, Sweden will shrug its shoulders and privately say - thank god it's not us. yet.
It is crazy; but it is wake up time for us Europeans. We are already seeing US campaigns against judges and legal scholars in the Netherlands, Italy, and Brazil.
Mind sharing those articles?
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/08/us-sanctions...
The Brazil stuff is related to the case againt Trump-ally Bolsonaro. The European cases so far have been related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The US uses its so-called SDN list which in general prevents the person having a bank account in any western country. It also caused Microsoft to kill off the email account (I believe the full azure services - ie. Active Directory - rendering his work computer useless) of a prosecutor at the international criminal court:
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
Microsoft didn’t cut services to International Criminal Court, its president says
Chief prosecutor’s email issues have spurred fears in Europe that Trump could trigger a “kill switch” through U.S. tech giants abroad.
...
A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
>Trump-ally Bolsonaro
There is a book "Autocracy Inc." about this curious, somewhat recent phenomenon of autocrats everywhere supporting each other. It's like autocracy itself is more important to them than their countries' interests.
The wording is “legally correct” but meant to look like it was an ICC unforced decision. In reality the US sanctioned the ICC chief prosecutor and Microsoft gave the ICC 2 options: either the ICC cuts off their own employee, or Microsoft cuts off the whole ICC. ICC made a choice between these 2 options and all the public statements were then made to not further tarnish Microsoft’s reputation.
To be fair, under US law Microsoft doesn’t have much choice either. Companies operating under US law inherit the untrustworthiness that comes with this.
Yes. That is is the issue. These laws of the US have been around for a long time; what is new is that traditionally allied countries are now the target of them. And for activities that are at the heart of our legal sovereignty.
In which kind of environment is this?
Because I too am a Swede and in mine I don't think the normal attitude is one where we have any limit to our commitment to Danish territorial integrity.
Your government is probably just as shit scared of the US as our is.
They do as they do.
We do as we have said we will. There's no reason to be afraid. We get what we get and if they come we'll fight.
Not if they come for the Danes, we won't!
If they come for the Danes, we can't. You know as well as I that that is not tolerable.
But, meming-aside: you know we will.
East Germany had a strategy for dealing with political opponents it referred to as Zersetzung. The FBI had a similar operation for political movements like the Black Panthers that's widely known as COINTELPRO. Both of those very evidently extremely successfully but ended decades ago.
We know that Russia still uses similarly subversive tactics internationally, especially in public messaging (popularizing multiple mutually contradictory narratives at the same time to compete with any attempt at "factual reporting", e.g. in its many justifications and descriptions during the early months of the invasion of Ukraine or following the infamous civilian plane crash during the "civil war" before that). There have also been credible accusations against China of employing disinformation campaigns to disrupt criticism. The first year of Israel's ongoing military campaign (initially in Gaza) also saw many people pointing out what they described as examples of Hasbara.
Under the first Trump presidency we saw the term "alternative facts" being used by US officials. Trump himself also popularized the term "fake news". Trump even bragged about "stopping Nord Stream 2", implying US involvement in the sabotage that so far has been considered to have been carried out by Ukranian nationals.
We also know (via Snowden and Wikileaks) that under the Bush and Obama governments the US actively used its intelligence apparatus even against its allies, at the very least for surveillance operations and infiltration (allegedly even industrial espionage). There's also the dissolved BND/CIA co-operation (via a Swiss proxy I think?) that came apart when the German BND was dissatisfied with the CIA's willingness to sell the faulty encryption technology they were disseminating to their shared allies to maintain cover for the operation.
During the Euromaidan protests (2014), the US diplomat was caught on tape exclaiming "Fuck the EU". During the Security Conference earlier this year, VP Vance explicitly promoted European far-right political movements and questioned the legitimacy of European countries' governments. Trump himself has repeatedly referred to the EU as an organization created for the specific purpose of screwing over the US.
In aggregate, the EU's nominal GDP right now is slightly higher than that of China. Germany alone has the third-highest nominal GDP in the world right now.
The US has for a long time at least engaged in hostile behavior against its own allies, including the EU. Trump has at several points been openly hostile against the EU. Trump has been promoting a policy of unilateral "peace through strength" over promoting cooperation and the pretense of mutual benefit and engaging in trade wars against all of its trading partners.
The US is acting as a hostile force against the EU and has redefined the EU as a hostile entity. It hasn't severed diplomatic nor economic ties to the EU but neither has it to China. Whatever you think the US might stomach to covertly do against China it therefore stands to reason they would have an interest in also doing against the EU. It's also worth considering that militarily China poses a much greater risk of retaliation and the EU is currently much more economically dependant on the US than China is (especially following the sanctions against Russia which previously acted as a major trading partner in the region and the rising tensions in the Middle East).
It seems extremely plausible to me that the US engages in activities intended to disrupt the integrity of the EU and consequentially the mutual trust and diplomatic relationships between EU member states. We know (with receipts) that Russia has been directly contributing to far-right nationalist anti-EU political movements throughout Europe prior to the invasion of Ukraine and even before Trump's first term and continues to support the anti-EU rhetoric of a "Europe of fatherlands" intended to fragment and individualize EU member states either as a "divide and conquer" tactic or at least to reduce their collective capability for actively opposing Russia's interests.
We don't know what the US has been doing or is doing beyond what it has been doing in the open. But given how much deeper the US's battle chest runs and how advanced its offensive technology (both from private industry and internally) that we know of is, it seems far more likely to me that this is not because it doesn't exist but because they've been better at not getting caught. Not to mention that European governments still refuse to treat the US with the same level of suspicion they treat China or Russia, thus making it far easier for the US to get away with actions even when they are caught. There's no need to worry about your covert operations becoming public when their target actively collaborates in supporting your operations against them.
> There's also the dissolved BND/CIA co-operation (via a Swiss proxy I think?)
sounds like Crypto AG[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
>> Denmark is in a crazy situation where what we saw as a key trusted partner (the US) all of sudden is extremely hostile towards us due its re-ignited territorial ambitions
Canada will welcome you at thier clubhouse. Friends are enemies and enemies friends. And Putin is all smiles. (Let us not kid ourselves about who wants disharmony amongst arctic nations.)
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Maybe the USA should do a better job at managing the USA? Compared to the EU, it has more crime, worse life expectancy, more alcoholism, problems with rail infrastructure… you see, that's a bit of a silly argument.
At least there are rails or roads! Imagine the only way to get from LA to SF was 5 day ferry that goes every two weeks, or tiny cesna!!!
Have USAID and the National Endowment Fund moved their soft power operations from Georgia and Thailand to Greenland and Venezuela?
Truly silly. One can all of these bring up for "Europe". Maybe not life expectancy (if you avoid public transport and Christmas markets), but all others match for Germany too.
The poor lifestyle statistics seem to be a property of Arctic life generally, it isn’t unique to Denmark or any country with Arctic settlements. Humans are adaptable enough to survive up there but they don’t really thrive.
That is pretty obviously the nature of the environment. You can’t blame Denmark for it being like that, it isn’t a function of resources delivered. No one has ever been able to convert any part of the polar regions into a glorious utopia.
Job opportunities, access to education...
There is no basic infrastructure there! First deliver that, than blame "polar regions". Denmark ks treating Greenland as it's colony!!!
Iceland has very similar situation, but farfar better infrastructure!!!
You are entirely right. And apparently if you go to jail they place you in denmark so you can't receive visits.
Yes greenland is a colony. But I don't think that making them USA's colony would improve their situation… see how the natives of guam or hawaii are doing for example.
Greenland is an autonomous territory, not a colony. Hasn't been since 1953.
Poteto potato…
Not really. Since Greenland is a county, not a colony, their government has self-rule (albeit limited), including the option of pursuing independence, and their citizens have access to the amenities of the metropole (healthcare, education etc.).
And why do people end up in denmark in jail then?
What does this have to do with whether or not Greenland is a colony?
In what other country does a jail sentence mean you get sent to another country to serve the sentence? (Except maybe the US now with detained immigrants)
Nuuk has had its own closed prison for a while now, with inmates in Denmark given the option to transfer there. I don't know how many are still in Herstedvester but it can't be many and afaik they are not forced to stay there. Is this what you're referring to?
I'm not disputing the colonial history of Greenland/Denmark or the oppression inflicted on the Inuit (which didn't end in 1953) but I struggle to see the point you and the other poster are trying to make. You both seem to be making insinuations based on facts that are simply not true/up to date.
Do you think the US is going to build railroads in Greenland?!
Anyway the campaign for Greenland is ramping up. And it goes from all the way from weird social media posts, oddly timed attacks on Danish companies (Orsted), huge US "diplomatic" build up in Nuuk, weird "little green men", various statements of agression by Trump and surrogates. And there is a Danish campaign on other side with a silly number of visits by the PM and the king, lots of political wins for the Greenlanders, Danish military build up, French involvement etc.
Entertaining to follow and also with consequences in unrelated fields like tech.
I expect US would build more infrastructure. Maybe even rail eventually. So yes!
Alaska seems to be doing pretty well!
Denmark treats Greenland as pristine natural reserve, where people should not exists, and are just nuisance!
I suggest you look at a map, and then look at a list of cities and their populations.
> Alaska seems to be doing pretty well!
Alaska has towns not connected by roads and rail, so maybe you could start there. Maybe start by connecting Nome[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nome,_Alaska
Rubio has really repurposed USAID to regime change Greenland.
It's a self governing entity, why are you blaming Denmark?
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Swish is great, but it is sensitive infrastructure. It has already been down multiple times due to DDoS attacks (together with BankId). Don't let Swish completely replace a stash of cash at home.
I've got bad news for you on that front: https://www.explorsweden.com/sweden-destinations/sweden-a-ca...
(tldr Sweden is pretty cashless and a lot of shops don't accept cash)
speaking from a Swedish perspective, I haven’t even seen Swedish currency in about eight years.
I’m not even joking.
There are lots of places where most customers still pay in cash. Mostly ethnic minorities in stores that cater for ethnic minorities. I find it interesting that ethnicity or religion would end up being a signal informing if one is using cash or digital money.
That's your personal choice. Doesn't mean stores don't accept cash.
No, its the nature of the country.
And, most companies don’t take cash, especially smaller ones.
Large companies (ICA the supermarket) takes cash but it’s like 1/200 who use cash and the cashier is often visibly flustered when cash is presented.
Please stop mansplaining (and wrongly so at that!).
I happen to be in sweden in this very moment. And no, cashiers are not flustered and alarmed when they see cash, old people pay with cash every day.
Yes there is some restaurants that will not take cash.
Last april I was in a place where they did not take cards :)
There's more to sweden than what you personally experience.
What does gender have to do with this conversation?
Unfortunately there is no term for "stop explaining my own country to me", but there are similarities with that other situation so… a rhetorical figure? Heard of those?
There was a term: condescending, which is ironic because you were being quite condescending in your reply to me about my observed experience being somehow a personal choice.
I could write a huge diatribe of statistics and behaviours that back me up, it's quite public that even in 2022 across the entire country only 8% of transactions were made in cash- which is even lower in the cities. https://www.riksbank.se/globalassets/media/rapporter/betalni...
And it's also quite well known that many independent businesses do not accept cash (my Coffee Shop, the restaurants I frequent (Quan in Malmo, Marvin in Malmo)).
And yes I've visibly seen cashiers recoil after putting a transaction through to the payment terminal; only to have the person tell them that they'd rather pay in cash (leading to the cashier becoming flustered).
Yes, it's more common that old people use cash (from my observed experience) but increasingly they're using debit cards (not mobile payment methods like younger folks), but no: the country is pretty much cashless; and coming from the UK (where not accepting cash is definitely a more controversial decision outside of London): here it's seen as pretty normal to say "no cash" or "cash free".
Speaking for: Stockholm, Malmo, Gothenburg, Lund, Sundsvall, Oskarshamn and Umeå, and after being in the country for 11 years. I'm not sure what other representation I should be seeing.
Talking about my personal observed experience doesn't invalidate yours, but it feels like I can speak for the overwhelming majority of the population here.
And incidentally I'm also in Sweden right now (https://mrkoll.se/person/Jan-Martin-Harris-Harasym-Kattsunds...); if you'd like me to document a day trying to use only cash I'll let you know how it goes. But I won't be able to get to work (Malmo Busses do not take cash) and I won't be able to eat at any of the restaurants in Malmo (Saluhallen and the others I mentioned above are entirely cashless) so I'll have to use COOP, Willis or ICA exclusively.
Well I've seen a lot of incompetent cashiers. Especially in summer when the real ones are on vacation. I'm not sure what that proves besides that being a cashier isn't as easy as you might think.
I assure you that pressbyrån accepts cash and you can buy tickets there to get to work. Also having a long subscription for public transport on the phone is a bad idea, because if you drop your phone you'll also lose your subscription. And depending on how many days you had left and what phone you had, it could cost you more than the phone.
And handpicking restaurants that don't accept cash is no more a proof than if I were to do the same but handpicking restaurants that don't accept cards.
Happy to hear of any restaurants that only take cash in Sweden tbh
Wasn't your claim that they won't take cash at all? Why the sudden shift?
Anyway it was a place i went in april, i'll have to look it up, i don't really remember.
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patronizing
Many many restaurants and stores never accept cash here. This would be a huge problem if cash suddenly becomes the only way of paying for everyone at the same time.
Stores accept cash. Some restaurants don't, but restaurants aren't really something necessary for survival.
Yeah, I don't know if I even seen the new money.
It's another knife in the drawer.
On the other hand, Swish is fully owned by a couple of banks together. So they have full control over Swish and also over BankID, which means that they can deny people from access or if they are down then you know we're screwed. So even if it's not relying on one single company it's relying on a few companies that work together. So instead of a monopoly it's a cartel.
And as a practical matter, they make sure everyone has a smartphone firmly managed by either Apple or Google, with the excuse of protecting us from ourselves.
Those banks are under Swedish jurisdiction. Big difference.
We've invited foreign occupation through the DCA with the US and there was very little resistance so clearly few swedes care about sovereignty and territorial integrity, which changes in which I assume is what you mean by "exogenous schocks".
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And? Remember when all coops closed for a few days due to a ransomware to some USA company?
You should join EPI or EuroPA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Alliance
What are your thoughts on Vipps MobilePay?
As far as I know it sits on top of the payment services provided by Nets. But we have had some situations where part of Nets' services breaks down but MobilePay have been able to operate.
MobilePay starts by being direct bank transactions, and can still use this to some extend. Now it also has credit cards associated though, which depends on Nets to clear.
Didn't they move over to Adyen a few years ago?
Do you have a source for the Mastercard ownership? I haven't been able to find information about them being in control of MitID.
In an emergency, electronic payment won't work at all, right? People will have to use cash I think.
Yeah, it's such a massive infrastructure weakness. Once digital currency is the only option, things will get wild.
That's likely a non-issue when actual crisis happens. A voucher app + paper vouchers are doable in under a month if needed.
You will get riots and looting long before "under a month".
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?
I don't think Denmark in particular is preparing, because at the end of the year their national postal service will cease to deliver letters (after the government removed the legal requirement for it to do so), and more than 85% of Danes will only be able to receive government and commercial letters in digital form via a privately owned cloud service (e-Boks). That is an alarming level of concentration. If I were hypothetically in control of a state that was planning to go to war with Denmark and had the resources for hybrid warfare, I know which company's servers I'd want to take down first.
Denmark are. Only two days ago the danish PM on public TV said the had ordered the head of the danish military to "buy, buy, buy" [1][2] [as many weapons as the can get their hands on]. This is repeatition of of what she said 6 months ago[3]
[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...
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.
Belgian youngsters aged 17 wil get a voluntary call for 'vacation camps' in the army in a few weeks. Recently a lot of people were hired four the federal and regional governments to handle strategic supplies. All Belgians were asked to stock their own 3 day emergency kit.
I mean war aside, the 3 day kit is always a good idea - power outages happen, freak weather events, supply chain issues, strikes, or even not feeling like going out which is very common.
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 think Belgium is the most stable unstable country in the world. We're always on strike, only surpassed by the French. At any given moment one of our seven governments is in a state of crisis. Somehow I feel like we'll make it though three days of lockdown without any issues.
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.
Damn, France's plan to retake Wallonia has been discovered!
Au contraire, mon ami. In all the geopolitical madness it's time to reclaim what was ours onder Charles Quint. Habsburg rises again! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor#...
Fun fact: Karel spoke Flemish natively.
She repeated it two days ago on live danish TV. See link 1 and 2 in my previous comment
Aaaaaand we just bought for 7.7 billion euro earth-based European airdefenses.
Wow. I'm in software and my whole house is as automated as can be, but I want my important documents physical, and delivered via the mail.
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.
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.
Sounds exactly like the system we used in Belgium.
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.
What if phone is destroyed? It's a mobile device, can happen any time.
From next year, national post will be handled by a different company than currently does the job.
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.
You seen to have failed to understand both solutions and changes you mention... the technology stack of our digital post and the change of letter delivery (I don't blame you, many of my fellow Danes don't understand it either).
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.
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.
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.
"specialist hellhole" :D
I'll leave the autocorrect as is
This is because of the Ukraine war.
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 ..
I have a feeling tens of thousands of drones would be a better investment if your concern is Russia vs NATO. But if it’s just a business reacting to popular sentiment then it’s a fine business strategy I guess. Or just useful spin / wealthy owners paranoia.
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.)
I don't want to fix any legacy code. I want a design that doesn't contain the bugs.
Attacking a distributed grid would probably not be cost effective.
A distributed grid is not a one-and-done solution to everything. Supply chain can stop for a number of reasons, not just electricity.
The important thing is stocks. My guess is that more and more people has some cash lying around, esp. with NETS' last failure
>We as a country are exposed to being attacked by Russia.
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.
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.
I don't think denmark has any moral high ground while holding greenland as a colony.
Greenland can become independent if they wish. There would be some things to work out, but the legal framework has been in place since the 1970es. And they seem to be working towards the goal.
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.
Please check your history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Greenlandic_self-governme...
Oh since 2008 it is slightly less bad! (I knew). And? It's still bad.
Ridiculous imo but that aside. Do you think any other country involved here has a moral high ground? Russia, The US?
Whatavoutism?
Good work.
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.
Ahh yes. The military powerhouse that is Kaliningrad - which to make any kind of buildup or resupply you have to trample trough two NATO countries. Or to sail Russia's nonexistent or pathetic (in best of times) fleet trough a lot of hostile waters.
The west always assumed Russia would (attempt to) close the gap between Belarus and Kaliningrad at Poland's corner.
>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.
You know where Kaliningrad is but you couldn't find Denmark (aka the country that includes that big piece of land next to Canada that Trump and Vance have been talking about annexing) on a map?
Denmark's kingdom includes Greenland. It's the 12th largest sovereign country.
Well, it's not Russia Greenland is worrying about currently.
Bingo.
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.
Of course they threaten going nuclear.
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.
3 days isn't very long, it's reasonable to look at this as a generic resiliency thing rather than response to some identifiable risk.
In the USA I try to have what we need for one week with food and without power or potable tap water. This just seems like common sense. After the SF earthquake in 89 you weren't supposed to drink the tap water for a couple days. Lots of things have taken out power and COVID made shopping difficult. Resilience is good.
3 days is a pretty long time unless the damage is catastrophic and very broad based. Extended preparations come with an overhead cost that must be offset by the benefit.
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.
> US military airlift capability
That'll cost them Greenland.
Fair.
It’s also reasonable to look at it as a “the populace goes nuts every time there’s some minor shock to the logistics chain, so might as well prepare for that reaction”
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.
Given people are already advised to stockpile for at least a week if not two, it's both deepening the resiliency capacity for all, and providing capacity for those too poor (either cashflow-poor or housing-poor) to stockpile.
Denmark is exposed via sea and practically neighbors with Poland that is already being probed by Russian military. People I know are volunteering for army training in Czechia and reportedly the number of such volunteers is rising.
That's only one possible scenario, but more realistic and actual is a regular power outage, like the one that hit Berlin the other day. (ok that was sabotage / someone started a fire, but you get what I mean).
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9J5D8jzrRo
Yeah, in my humble opinion anyone in Europe that considers wider war breaking out to be farfetched is not paying enough attention.
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.
All out war shocked the shit out of the 20 somethings in Ukraine too, many fled, and yet Russia has not made significant advances in the following three years.
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)
> 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.
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.
yes, but we're talking of waging war against actual NATO and the EU, not a country which was vaguely friendly towards the west.
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.
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.
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?
That is basically NATO propaganda to convince people it's ok to stop paying for healthcare because we need to buy weapons, so that guys like Crosetto can become even richer.
Is it true? No.
Also air force is not so useful and we are spending insane amounts into that.
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.
Actually, those who remember the 90s and, before that, the Cold War see and understand that Europe is much safer now that it was then. The USSR was much stronger relative to Western Europe then. Now Russia is probably at its weakest relative to NATO (it might have been weaker in the early 90s but NATO had also not expanded to its current footprint).
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.
> 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.
Are you suggesting that NATO is going to start a war against Russia, the country with the largest nuke stockpile?
That's bonkers on all levels, and more.
Largest nuke arsenal that they could find even one in, that they would be sure enough it works to detonate even on their own vast wasteland as the show of force?
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.
Russia can't deal with small Ukraine for 4 years. Their outdated poor tech and drunkard band of villagers called "soldiers" can't defeat a country with 5 times less population. Even with the help of the equally poor and unqualified North Korea and the jihadists of Khadirov, Russia hasn't achieved anything substantial but lose north of a million poor conscripts.
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.
> 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
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.
This is called cowardice and nihilism. If we all run to "safety" when evil comes, evil will happily take over everything.
i'll gladly live as a nihilist coward in safety. will leave the optimistic and heroic option of getting blown up by a drone on a muddy field, slowly choking on your own blood and leaving behind your closest ones to people who aren't such cowards like myself.
thanks for your service.
Between the threat of war, the fragility of the systems we depend on, and the uncertainty of climate change it seems like a good idea to be a little more prepared for disaster than we've felt the need to be.
I sure am! And as a strategical prepper, I've left the entire continent behind well before shit hits the fan.
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.
Asia, Australia or south America?
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.
How would you feel if ww3 never happens and you moved from Sweden to Mexico for nothing? It seems like a major step down except if you have Mexican relatives
I dunno, Mexico is a pretty great place. You could do a lot worse than Mexico. Many people have moved there “temporarily” and then never went back to their native country.
The lifestyle is legit. No one requires you to go to the famously sketchy parts.
Still, you're giving up on your whole life for an hypothetical event that's been prophesied since the 50s. If you wanted to move in the first place or had family there why not, but if the sole reason is fear...
Imagine leaving the US for Mexico in 1962 because the "cold war is about to go warm"
Meh, it's sunny and nice here, I'll feel pretty good regardless. Living on the beach is underrated! And it's been great connecting a bit more with my wife's family.
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...
> Sweden to Mexico for nothing
Unless you like to ski, and the long dark winters, weather in mexico is an upgrade, except for the occasional hurricane.
Better be ready and nothing happens than being sitting duck thinking Europe will be free of wars forever. Governments spend money on much more ridiculous things
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
It doesn't have to happen as last-ditch everyone gets a pike situation right on Danish soil, could be downstream effects of e.g. China closing all international ports. I think that much would be starting to get within realms of possibilities now.
There is land war in Europe. With the Russians agressively pushing for continuation!
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.
We are not preparing for war in Europe. Europe is at war with Russia, with all the murders and sabotage acts of the last years.
Very true, but there’s still a huge difference between acts of sabotage and missiles hitting cities. We might be at war, but so far it’s a comfortable one.
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.
Everyone should give that some thought but look at Texas. In 2021 they were devastated by a snowstorm. This year they were devastated by flooding. Not to pick on Texas, they aren't the only ones caught under prepared for severe weather. Wildfires and drought in the western states is another thing we're under prepared for. And look at the hoarding of toilet paper etc. in 2020. I presume there's been problems in Europe that I'm not aware of that are more relevant to Denmark's calculus.
The climate is changing. Natural disasters are going to be more common. It's prudent to prepare for it.
Just this last week, all the major cargo train lines in northern Sweden suffered big derailments simultaneously, and several dozen roads were made unusable. This was all from a single incident of unusually heavy rain. The country will have badly damaged logistics on the North-South axis for weeks to come, maybe months. https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasternorrland/stora-probl...
Preparedness is vital!
Does anyone have an English language post for this story? That sounds like quite a yikes!
Your browser can translate the page automatically.
Texas also has a grocery store chain that is particularly well-prepared for disasters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/us/texas-heb-winter-storm...
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.
Fantastic. Good on HEB.
The Fat Electrician did a great video on them on his second channel
https://youtu.be/23sehACMR6s
we may or may not but I don't think this is reflective of it. This is just the fragility of digital societies were one hack or outage can kill entire national payment systems. A few decades ago any store could run three days without power or telecoms.
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
The “no transaction cost” claim is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Cash may feel free to the person handing over a coin, but only because the costs are hidden upstream. Someone has to produce those notes and coins, swap out designs to keep ahead of counterfeiters, move them around in armored vans, count and recount them in tills, reconcile them at the bank, and insure against theft along the way. None of that is costless.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
For them, the risk of keeping cash on the premises is probably paramount. Of robbery, employee theft, of employees not being able to make change correctly (or getting taken advantage of by a quick-change artist).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLDgLOga6oE
The US experiences these situations regularly due to its somewhat unique exposure to a dizzying array of severe natural disasters.
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.
Precious metals fill all of your requirements. They do have other challenges, some shared with FIAT, some unique, but we've had the "technology" to solve this problem for thousands of years.
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?
Check "valcambi combibar". Its a gold plate pre-divided into 1g pieces you can break away (like a chocolate bar).
1g is ~100 of money today, which would be enough for a weekly supply of groceries for a person in HCOL areas.
Additionally, one need not use gold; silver is easier to subdivide into manageable units for even smaller monetary values.
Yes. War with russia is optimal course of action right now for Europe as russia extensively proved it can't be just left alone for any period of time. So some inconvenience for western Europe is expected and everywhere there are efforts to prepare for it.
[dead]
The risk level for a land war across Western Europe is probably the lowest it has ever been.
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?
Yes, we are much stronger than they, but once we decide to actually have a war with them some difficulties will arise. They do have some useful weapons which will have effects on us, so we'll have to be ready so that disruption is not excessive.
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.
>> Russia started open war against neighboring European country
>> 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!
> The balance of power is tilted against Russia much more than during the Cold War.
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.
The economic collapse of the west. The great reset is coming...
How is 72 hours of rice going to matter?
That depends. How many people from the list are we leaving in for dinner?
Yeah. The way we run our countries is idiotic. Zero resilience. First concern after floods is getting back to job, even before all the water is drained and mud cleaned, because working people live paycheck to paycheck and so on.
Businesses try to keep minimum stock. Single disruption in integrated circuit supply disables whole industries. And so on.
Capitalism is incompatible with resiliency.
If this is the sentiment on the Silicon Valley Bulletin Board that is Hacker News it may be time to take this stuff seriously
> Silicon Valley Bulletin Board
The participating commenter base on this site has been much wider than could be described that way for many years.
At least a decade. I’ve never been there and joined early in my career when I was told by mentors that it was a good source of up to date news on technology and the industry
I think the implication with that phrasing is that HN is more left-leaning (like Silicon Valley), which traditionally isn't into "prepping", so this "pro-prepping" article is an interesting anomaly, perhaps even a harbinger.
This is incorrect. Left-leaning preppers grow food and medicinal plants in their garden, install solar panels, and get vaccines, rather than stock up on guns and ammo.
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.
We're nowhere near that, but EU leaders keep hinting that there is a big war coming and we should all be prepared. In fact my impression, as a European, is that if any war is coming is because EU leadership are actively rooting for one and waste no opportunity to stoke the tension. This news is just one of the many examples of this.
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.
> EU leadership are actively rooting for [a war] and waste no opportunity to stoke the tension
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.
> 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.
They'd fare much better. Ukraine had a large pool of conscripts, a professional cadre with combat experience from the Donbas, and deep Soviet stocks to draw from, while Western Europe abolished conscription and destroyed its Cold War stockpiles a long time ago. The current reintroduction of conscription and massive investment in defense are clear signs that European armies were (and for some time, will remain) inadequate.
Compared to Ukraine, Europe has enormous amounts of money and modern weaponry, including nuclear weapons, nuclear submarines, hundreds of f-16s, f-35s, and twelve times the population of Ukraine for twenty times the size. For God's sake.
There simply isn't an "enormous amount of modern weaponry", otherwise it would have been given to Ukraine a long time ago.
https://archive.is/W6yv1The same applies to tanks, artillery, and pretty much everything else.
Are you saying that if we had them, we would have given all our weapons to Ukraine? Lol.
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.
> Are you saying that if we had them, we would have given all our weapons to Ukraine?
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.
>The same applies to tanks, artillery, and pretty much everything else.
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.
Germany might have built 3600 Leopard tanks since the 1970s, but as of 2025, it has only about 300 in service with the Bundeswehr, of which roughly 200 are combat-ready. France, the UK, and Italy each also have around 200 tanks in active service; Spain has fewer than 100.
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.
I'm sure it's EU that completely accidentally, first time in 3 years sent more than dozen drones over Poland for the NATO to shoot down.
Yes this is all BS but I don't think the EU is rooting for war. My suspicion is that EU countries want to build a stronger military and one more integrated at EU level. Both are hard sells especially when governments also keep telling us that there is no money for anything... So Ukraine is a very convenient scarecrow to "manufacture consent".
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.
There is no doubt that Ukraine has benefited the US a lot while Europe loses (including by keeping shooting itself in the foot).
>The idea is that no one should be more than 50 km from such a store and it should prevent hoarding/panic buying as people will know basic food will be available in an emergency.
I dont think that is how it works? That is assuming people wont flock out to buy everything in the emergency store. And do people visit it every day or are these "Emergency Stores". After all they need to replenish stock.
Or are these simply some form of marketing play?
Off-Topic: Its been while since I last visited a The Mastodon site and it seems a lot faster than before.
Quotas. My Trader Joe's had a limit of one roll of toilet paper during the pandemic breadlines.
> That is assuming people wont flock out to buy everything in the emergency store.
Well, you could make everything really expensive in these emergency stores during an emergency.
Isn’t this just price gouging which is illegal in much of the US at least, I don’t know about internationally.
I think there’s a subtle difference between charging everyone $100 per umbrella in a rain storm vs charging $100 for your last few umbrellas. Former is price gouging; latter is just economics.
Screwing the poor in deference to the rich doesn’t seem like good policy
Yeah my impression is shortages are generated by everyone buying _just a bit more_ at once given how so much is just-in-time-y
We all saw what happened with Covid and panic buying. I remember when initial reports about it started coming out and something about it told me this might actually become something serious. So I went and loaded up on flour and yeast, rice, cooking oil, lots of non perishable items and a bunch of meat in a huge costco run before it took off. I had enough to last me a good year if my family had to ration. Then it spread like fire and people went crazy. I remember being at costco for a couple things I didn't think to stock pile (toilet paper) and there was virtually no meat left on the shelf. They had to queue the door as so many people were there to panic buy.
So if an event happened that even slightly appeared to suggest things might get tough for a while people will always panic buy. Without limits those with money will buy it up.
I did the same thing like a couple years after initial Covid when we had massive flooding in Abbotsford. I heard on the news something like an estimated 100,000 chickens were killed in the flood. I stood up, grabbed my keys and got into my car. I went and bought like a few hundred dollars in chicken. 2 days later facebook was full of posts about how all the chicken is gone and none on the shelves. Luckily it didn't last long and I believe they managed to get a bunch from Washington state but it was all at an increased cost.
I am not rich but I am thankful that I am in enough of a position that I can load up if I feel there might be a need to. A few people said I was part of the problem buying lots like that buy I always did it preemptively before the surge started. And in my defense when you literally could not buy toilet paper, I kept a bunch in my car. I work as a health care working visiting people at home. I gave out dozens of rolls so elderly could have it meaning I would at times run out. I also have helped out countless clients with no food out of my own pocket. But I am the provider for my family so I need to ensure they are okay.
This reads like "Confessions of a Panic Buyer".
Its a thing. Living in hurricane alley, I see it all the time. Lines at gas stations, grocery stores, hardware stores. My strategy is to wait till the 11th hour after supply trucks have restocked everything and shop in peace.stores are open, quiet , sparsely trafficed, usually stocked up at this point. Works every time
Buying a bunch and then blaming everyone else 12h after you seems disingenuous.
It sounds like you’re trying to clear your conscious from panic buying. However, some people went to the store to find nothing because they weren’t able to go at the same time as you.
I tend to agree.
I didn't rush off to panic buy, but when I first heard about it happening, I did go to do a normal grocery run in case things later ran out. There was nothing on my list. Also, there was almost nothing on the shelves. It was like the supermarket had been looted. Well, of everything edible or useful anyway. Probably high-value, non-essentials were still there, unlike in real looting.
I walked and walked the aisles, and the only thing I could find that we might eat were black olives. I disliked black olives (as apparently did everyone else), but I bought (and later ate) them anyway. That wasn't the only thing edible in the supermarket - it was a while ago, so I forget what was still there. Perhaps condiments, and obscure baking ingredients.
I held out from panic buying right through, but once the shelves were restocked I started buying a couple extra of everything each time, as long as there were lots on the shelf. I gradually filled one cupboard shelf with 6-7 of every canned and jarred food we eat. Later on, there were a few more instances of people panic buying at the slightest provocation (1), and I now assume people will do it if allowed.
1) https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/473591/you-don-t-need-to...
I am not blaming others at all but my point was more to ops question about people panic buying the answer is yes people will do so. Without limits those with lots of money will take the lions share.
I am not trying to clear my conscious. I know I am a good person and literally would give the shirt off my back. But I had a hint things might get bad and as a father of young children above all and everything in this world I had to make sure I had at least a bit or reserves if things got bad. I am not rich at all so when I say I did a costco run I am not talking like thousands of dollars. More like an $800 run which is nothing, but I know how to make that much last a long time. I got a bunch of flour and rice. Some meats and tomato sauce. I would not be eating in luxury had their been a long term shortage but I would at least be able to make some bread and basic foods to keep my family feed even if poorly.
> I know I am a good person and literally would give the shirt off my back.
action speak louder than words I'm afraid
There was very little paid buying in Denmark, as there were very few selfish people like you buying a years worth of food.
The government announced that there was plenty of stock, but panic buying would mean it couldn't be brought onto the shelves in time, so please don't. People didn't.
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I don't get why you try to spin it as if you weren't part of the panic buyer crowd. You clearly were, you and people like you caused the unnecessary empty shelves.
I get you were anxious about what was going to happen and I hope that you now have emergency supplies that you regularly stock. That way it won't damage the normal supply chain.
It was gone because of people like you.
This is eerily similar to Finlands scheme: https://www.azernews.az/region/239068.html
Which is backed up by stock piles of essential goods: https://www.huoltovarmuuskeskus.fi/en/organisation/the-natio...
The 72Hour emergency preparedness sites suggest every household have some emergency cash: https://72tuntia.fi/en/
What pays for this?
If an emergency store costs 10% more to run, and emergencies are only 1 day in 10,000, then prices during emergencies would need to be 1000x normal for it to make business sense.
Unfortunately anti-price-gouging laws wouldn't allow that, nor would you manage to keep law and order in the shop when telling customers that a bottle of water is gonna cost them 2000 dollars/euros.
It sounds like the company is doing it as a community service. It doesn't make 'business sense' except perhaps by improving the company's image. Companies also donate to charities etc.
“This is our core task and a responsibility we take on, and we also believe that it is timely […] that we – like other countries – prepare for possible crisis situations, which a good and constructive dialogue with the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness has also confirmed. We hope that this will not be necessary, but should it happen, our customers can count on us.”
https://www.esmmagazine.com/retail/salling-group-advances-wo...
It's important to note that the Salling Group is privately owned with only a few owners [1]. It's easier for such companies to do such things than a publicly owned one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salling_Group
Public companies do this sort of thing too, or at least they used to. It's typically grouped under 'Corporate Social Responsibility'. They aren't doing it out of pure altruism:
From https://benevity.com/resources/corporate-social-responsibili... "CSR increases customer retention and loyalty: Research shows that 87% of Americans are more likely to buy a product from a company that they can align their values with, and over half of all consumers are willing to pay extra for a product if they’re buying from a company with a sturdy CSR strategy."
> It sounds like the company is doing it as a community service. It doesn't make 'business sense' except perhaps by improving the company's image. Companies also donate to charities etc.
I applaud this kinda thing.
In a sensible world, that'd mean not just positive PR alongside the actual social utility, but also maybe the government being a bit more encouraging when it comes to taxes etc.
Plus, who knows, if they stock up a bunch on canned goods and still need to sell them in a reasonable amount of time, it might lead to a few good discounts here and there and also be a good thing for the regular consumer.
Aside from that, having a generator and accepting cash payments just seems like good common sense stuff to do.
Maybe the shops are also open during normal times?
Good idea. Smart that they can withstand 72-hour power issues. 3 days still seems short, but much better than current.
I'm with the mormons on this issue, who emphasize preparedness for emergencies. Typically storing up to a year of non-perishable food.
3 days to allow emergency response to arrive is a lot of buffer, when otherwise after 2 days you have to start moving to find water and plan to find food.
Combined with things in people's houses that likely gets you to about a week before anyone is going without.
Mormons also (are encouraged to) store water and other basic necessities like toilet paper. It's not unusual to see a couple 55-gallon drums of water in a basement or garage of a Mormon house. They've also heavily adopted the filtering straws/pumps for areas where there are natural sources of water
There is a regional chain where I live in Texas, HEB, that has a similar solution they solve via emergency distribution schedule. They found that environmental disasters can be profitable to operate at a loss and support the community because they are able to come back online faster than the competition and minimize disruption to regular operations.
I'm a fifth-generation ex-Texan — the only thing I miss is HEB.
Its not clear to me whether this is stores as in "shops" where you can go to buy things, or as in "storage" ie distribution hubs. Anyone know?
> beredskabsbutikker
be-red-skab-s-butikk-er
Prepper store (as in grocery store).
Butik, from French boutique.
Beredskab, From German Bereitschaft.
Prepper store is potentially misleading, it's shops that are prepared to respond to a crisis for those that didn't prep.
Without power they could use backup sources but without telecoms isn't payment going to be difficult to impossible? (except those who had sufficient cash before the emergency)
You can do offline verification of payment cards, there's just higher fees and lower limits on payments.
This is a common way people get their current accounts into debt without authorising an overdraught.
When I was a kid, I remember the cashier at a department store checking a book for my mother’s credit card number.
I misunderstood the nature of the book, assuming it was a list of valid card numbers. It was, of course, the opposite, so when I said to my mom “I hope they find your number in there” she replied “I hope they don’t!”
It's used by alot of vending machines or public transport. The bus can be off-grid while still allowing a ticket purchase.
Im not that familiar with the protocol, but i could see there being a special clause to allow larger off-grid payments in emergency situations.
EMV cards can do offline auth
Well I assume if they set it up in mind that they would be operating in an emergency they could have something like Starlink and connect to payment processors.
Three days seems low, but any resilience is better than no resilience.
Well, there is always the question of who’s gonna pay for that resiliency. We see it all the time in software deployment. After each extended outage of a major network or cloud/service provider, there is always a flurry of sudden interest in disaster recovery, multi-zonal deployments, failover solutions, and redundancy up and down the chain of everything. 6 months or a year later, people and organizations get sick of paying for that. They either nerf it, making it just a useless checkbox or just abandon it completely because “if us-east-2 is down, then everything is down. Who cares”. A couple of years pass, then another incident happens, rinse and repeat.
These stores are not supposed to prepare you for three days of resilience in advance.
They are meant to be available as reliable and functioning stores throughout a crisis period. Your go-to destination for purchasing vital goods during the crisis.
It's the local supermarket. How many days in advance am I supposed to have food for? (I have prepper quantities of food and don't know what's normal. three days seems pretty normal to me.)
A big chunk of society has realistically 2-3 days of groceries in their house, plus maybe a 5-year-old bag of rice or pasta and can of string beans buried way in the back. If you have a 1-6 year old you're probably buying 1-3 gallons of milk per week, and need to get more tomorrow.
As much as I detest organised religion, the Mormons have a pretty good take on this. They strive to have a six month supply of food/water/cash on hand at all times.
I get it. But on the other hand, if you in a situation that requires a six month food supply, because there is no resupply available and you can’t relocate, you have bigger problems. Like the mob of hungry people outside your house.
If you have a six month food supply, and survivable disasters really only need a week or two tops, you will have no reservations helping out your neighbors, which helps you be a positive influence on your community in time of need.
If you've only got two days supply, you may not be so generous.
Exactly. There are surely some people that will be stingy (as Mormons are humans after all) but there's a huge emphasis on being able to help out the neighbors and the unprepared in a bad situation. Depending on the area too, they even have rough distribution/response plans in place so they aren't starting from scratch during an emergency. You'll occassionaly see comments like "I'm stocked up so my family is fine while all the city people are eating each other" but (anecdatally having lived in heavily Mormom areas most of my life) the vast majority do not feel that way. Even some of the people who I've heard said that, I'd bet a huge amount they would not sit by and watch another human starve
They may begrudge the 'city people', but they probably won't begrudge their neighbors. It's also nice to have someone to help eat your disaster food :) I've done small preparations before, and you've got to cycle it out for freshness every so often[1], which means someone has to eat it... might as well be you and your neighbors. If you're in a community of like minded, well prepared neighbors, maybe you can get some variety at least.
[1] My elementary schools had a good program of bring in canned food at the start of the school year in case of emergency, have a picnic to eat it in the last month of school. I also did have a disaster can when I lived in California; I'm less prepared at the moment.
That’s a good point I hadn’t considered.
I think about that too. My home is isolated with plenty of firewood, well water, solar power and a backup whole house generator with weeks/months of propane. I'm unlikely to last more than a few days into the apocalypse without it all being taken from me by someone stronger or better armed.
I'm in Utah and the idea isn't that you're going to be a lone wolf and somehow survive in a bunker then come out in 6 months. The point is that you should have plenty of extra supplies on hand for your family, friends, and neighbors. Instead of a mob people are more likely going to work together instead of fighting over a bag of rice.
No reason not to solve the smaller problem though.
After covid, we keep a stock of extra dry goods on hand. If you need that much milk, it can just be frozen when found on sale. As long as it completely defrosts, you don't get any ice
You can also get shelf stable, canned, or powdered milk. That way you have it even with a power outage.
A Camp Chef or Turkey fryer is also a great investment for this purpose as they are very useful on their own, and double as a gas-powered source for cooking in an emergency. They can also boil large pots of water quickly should you need
This is why it's important to build a diet with grains and beans. They are cheap and last for months/years at home if stored properly. So you can easily have enough stored at home to eat for at least a few weeks.
They're realistically not preparing for a zombie apocalypse
If power goes out really bad, there's some kind of major weather event in some part of the country etc 3 days is a reasonable time frame for emergency measures to be put in place
Three days is realistic timeframe for restoring power and rudimentary network connectivity.
Feels a bit like cheeky marketing from Salling Group, when its just a concept years away from being rolled out. I don't see them running stores with sub optimal stock and other complexities, just for the good of their hearts. Or maybe they just looked at the odds and concluded that likelihood of a lockdown-like event is enough to make it a sound investment.
If they mostly cover food and other products specifically aimed at preppers / a time of crisis.
How can these store be profitable when there isn't a crisis? Or will they be closed when there isn't a crisis?
Does this just mean bags of rice/beans? 10kg of rice will store quite a while and provide many days of food.
The sensible thing would be to store more of existing non-persishables and then cycle through to other stores.
10kg bags of rice is not a common supermarket item in Denmark.
Having a government operated emergency stock and a military with the capacity to move it is how Switzerland does it.
And we stock coffee too, not just grain. :)
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/mandatory-reserves_why...
they (the gov) also provide a calculator which shows you how much stuff you need for your household for a given amount of days :)
https://www.notvorratsrechner.bwl.admin.ch/en
Item #388293 of things that would never happen in America.
During the Cold War, even the Soviet Union had better missile defense and civil defense infrastructure than the US.
By treaty, both sides were limited in missile defense. The Soviets placed theirs around Moscow (to hell with the krest'yanin), while the US placed them around larger cities (also likely targets but this diffused the effectiveness of the system).
Civil Defense was taken seriously in the US for a while (I was trained as a radiological monitor in high school) but fatalism and optimism took over. Countries like Switzerland made changes to their national building code requiring all homes and larger buildings to have shelters. IMO the US should have standardized shelter plans as an optional part of our building code, so if someone wants one, there's a proven design available.
With regard to Denmark, look to the Mormon Church. They have a mandate (not always followed!) to keep a years supply of food in the house. So the church has distribution warehouses and publishes information about long-term storage.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/topics/food-storage/long...
Thanks for your informative comment. For real.
On a nationwide scale, yeah probably not, but nor do I think it should be done at the federal level. You could get economies of scale on purchasing and storage, but I suspect there would be more inefficiencies emergent from such a large scale thing than would be worth it. Each geographic area has very different needs, very different population makeups, and more, so somebody local is much better equipped to evaluate and plan. Even just "how much water to store" varies immensely. If you're on a water shed in an area with frequent rainfall, it would be wasteful to store a ton of water, but if you're in a desert water storage is one of the most important things. But even just communication setups like ham radio and designated response personnel is something that needs to be worked out locally.
I've been involved in several different cities emergency preparedness plans though, and there is actually a lot more happening in the US than most people think or know. It rarely if ever makes the news, but it happens.
It's a very good idea. I wish we had good ideas in the United States.
It's a private grocer, it's not like the government is doing it. So anyone could set this up.
It also doesn't even sound like that great of an idea. Is each store going to have enough to serve everyone in the 50km region for 3 days?
The better question is will it seriously increase the number of people’s access to goods during an emergency. Or is it just an extra stop for the panic buyers buying up everything in bulk on the way back home on the first day or two before the rest of the people start taking it seriously.
IRL market demands are massive for a western country so it’d require a lot more than a single chain of grocers staying open late. Or more accurately a huge devastating emergency to kill off essential industry like food production/distribution.
The US has more good ideas than any other country. Don't be pessimistic, look at how things are actually going and you'll see how the US has more startups, R&D, and new products than any other county.
Also: This might be a good idea for them, but it's not a good idea for the US, the US is not exposed to a level of risk that makes this worth it.
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How are people going to pay for things? With no power or network, card payments stop working, and so do ATMs.
I like anything that adds resilience to a system.
Not sure if this is of interest but I was living in Denmark during the "announcement" that the country was closing flights as COVID was now being taken seriously.
Being somewhat of a "cautious" prepper mentality, though never having really done any prepping, I thought I would walk to the supermarket at night in a suburb of Copenahgen to get some extra tuna just in case. Mind you this was about an hour after the announcement say 8pm.
There was a queue of about 30 meters out of the supermarket of danish citizens, scared and ( possibly for the first time ever thought as a visitor I couldnt know for sure - the queue had ever been so long. As I walked away I could see through the window, that they were limiting the amount of people going into the store to a handful at a time.
And, very suprisingly I saw a normal Dane running round the aisle grabbing the milk cartons so quickly he knocked some onto the floor before continuing to run off down the aisle. Very movie like so to speak. Not something I ever saw in the UK during the same announcement a month earlier. Bear in mind this was also at night! A night food panic.
Well, the good news, is ( other than this one incident that lasted an hour or so), the Danes IMO handled the whole COVID thing with a stable level headed attitude, that night was the only mild panic I witnessed.
Months later they had a very honed and IMO fair, calm approach to testing and although teachers were forced to "take the vaccine" or "get into trouble" ( a teacher was expected to show they had taken it or a test or they simply coudln't be in school, thought the punishment was never explained), they were also the only country I noticed where if you were not vaccinated yet , you could still go to cafes as long as you had a "free" test in one of the many marquees around the city. ( To compare, in the UK for about half a year ALL cafes were closed, and it was mandatory to wear masks in public - not so in Denmark). One old lady started shouting at me whilst I drank coffee ( below my mask), on a train in the UK. When I asked her to calm down and stop shouting, that masks were not even worn in Denmark, she actually got extremely confused. (Just a memory.)
I just thought this was of interest. Clearly they are still trying to learn lessons. Good stuff.
EDIT> Sorry and my one funnny memory ( Im not complaining honest). Was a time in Denmark when it was (a) Cafe was open (b) You could go to cafe if you had been tested (c) You were given a literal FLAG that you would put on your table to warn other poeple you had ben tested but NOT vaccinated. A little white flag!!! Only once, I think that was at it worst, and about a month later I never saw the little flag again. Ah good times though.
I was in Denmark at the time they announced they were closing flights. I was flying out the next day. My experience was orderly, as I would expect, but things took on a strange vibe.
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You seem pretty het up over some basic resilience.
you right, WAY too much to go into, but the more I think about the Danes response, the prouder I am to share a world with them, knowing nothing else about them at all,but this as you say "basic resilience" speaks volumes
The Danish word for hoarding is "hamstering". Perhaps the most adorable thing about the language. (P.S. the pronunciation of hygge is anything but hyggelig)
I always wondered why, until I actually got a hamster. Turns out that when presented with a large amount of food, they "hamster" it by stuffing their massive cheeks until they're bulging, then scurry off to consume in peace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-3x7dLXoAk
Hah yeah Denmark is very boring compared to many other countries :) ... and not meant as a warrantless dig against a large country with a high ratio of pistols-per-capita, but I did research it yesterday and from what I can tell America hasn't changed the 10 rights in their Bill Of Rights ever, whereas Denmark has made major revisions to its entire constitution multiple times.
We change our Bill of Rights all the time. We just do it by "reinterpreting" it, i.e. applying the prejudices of the last 4 or 5 Presidents.
Conveniently, none of it actually means anything at all, so it is routinely reinterpreted to mean exactly the opposite of what it might appear to mean.
That's not quite true. You still can't quarter soldiers in somebody's house. We Americans have a firm fixed belief in the Third Amendment.
What I said was the US hasn't changed the 10 amendments (as far as I know) - they're written exactly the same way they were hundreds of years ago, right?. Agree with you it seems like people are playing whack-a-mole trying to fiddle with the interpretations, but maybe they need to have a look at the actual core 10 amendments in the first place?
There is no practical way to amend them. People are absolutely and fervently attached to their interpretations, and the bar to amendment is extremely high.
If it were possible to amend them, then it wouldn't be necessary; we'd already agree on a less-unreasonable interpretation.
I think it is entirely clear that after 250 years they aren't even slightly fit for purpose, if they ever were. But I cannot see a way to revisit them without re-applying the process under which they were written in the first place.
Wait til the national guard gets sick of sleeping on floors during their terrorism deployments to Blue cities
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I'd add that some U.S. states are actively attempting to make it harder/impossible to amend their state's constitution!
https://missouriindependent.com/2025/09/08/missouri-house-ad...
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I read this two or three times and have no idea what you are trying to convey.
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It's funny that these guys found a way to exploit the war to get free marketing from probably a warehouse expansion / warehouse-store hybrid they'd do anyway, and people think they are some prescient preppers. If war starts, 3 days supplies helps with effectively nothing and people will go to supermarkets to hoard anyway.
This is quite a fun app to play with: This link has some presets https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=55.675313...
You do understand that the first country to use nukes offensively will become pariah for 100 years?
*second country.
(Not to detract from your otherwise correct post).