SoyViking [he/him]

Trump’s policies have “brought the Danish Viking blood boiling,” said Jens Olsen, an electrician and carpenter. He is now considering replacing $10,000 worth of U.S.-made DeWalt power tools even though it will cost him a lot.

That’ll show the darn Cheeto in the white house. It’s as stupid as back in the 1990’s even people bought French wine to pour out on the streets in protest over French nuclear tests.

The danish national anthem summarized: In ancient times? We wuz Vikings’n shit. Today? Well our trees are really pretty.

One of the most basic rules of projecting authority is that you should never make threats that you’re not willing or able to follow true with. If Denmark told the US to end their military occupation of Greenland, the yanks could very well choose to simply ignore those orders, making it unbearably obvious exactly how paper-thin Danish sovereignty over Greenland actually is.

They are shitting themselves in Copenhagen over the Trump Greenland crisis. The Danish regime is increasingly paranoid that some leak, some unscripted comment could anger their transatlantic overlord. Initially the regime was projecting national unity, giving confidential briefings on the crisis to the leaders of all parties in parliament. However, since the infamous phone call the regime has retreated into its shell, sharing its secrets with only the leaders of a chosen few “government-bearing” centrist and right-wing parties, the ones deemed loyal to atlanticist orthodoxy and who can be trusted to keep their mouths shut.

Leaders of business as well as unions has received confidential briefings as well, so they can brace for the coming storm of Trumpian tariffs. However, the regime has told the public very few details about the Trump phone call and only mentioned the American supreme leader’s tantrum by saying that he “can be very direct”.

On her Facebook page (her preferred line of communication to the public) Danish leader Mette Frederiksen has posted that the regime “can’t tell everything or make statements as quick as other people”, telling the public that they will be kept in the dark until the crisis is resolved.

There has been no official defiance of Trump. Instead, the regime is groveling, their fear palpable as they scramble to prove their loyalty to Washington even as Trump’s boot hovers over their necks. When a fascist Danish MEP told Trump to “fuck off”, voicing the feelings of most people in both Greenland and Denmark, the Danish regime scolded him for being irresponsible, afraid that he might poke the bear.

Meanwhile, it has been hinted that the regime and the “government-bearing” parties has talked behind closed doors of giving Greenland a more equitable relationship to Denmark, of sweetening the deal to keep the colony loyal to Denmark. However, these efforts might end up being a day late and a dollar short as the uncomfortable truth about Trump’s claims that Denmark is being racist to Greenlanders and has failed to develop the island is that they are not exactly false.

Greenlandic elections are coming up and independence is going to be a major issue. Committing to Danish overlordship is not something many Greenlanders desire. Meanwhile, the Danish regime’s attempts to woo Greenland are being further hamstrung by domestic reactionaries raging over economic grants to Greenland and boiling with white supremacist rage at the thought of Greenlanders having the audacity to desire freedom from Danish rule.

Trump’s threats has triggered a profound ideological crisis in Denmark’s political elite. They are completely unprepared to deal with being in the crosshairs of American imperialism. For generations they have been telling themselves that “America is our closest ally!”. They believed America to be their protector, their friend and they turned Denmark into one of Washington’s most obedient puppets, a loyal lapdog by even the most sycophantic Western European standards. But now the protector has become the predator, and the Danish political elite is utterly unprepared to deal with it.

But have you considered that both the Nazis and the Communists had a man with a moustache in uniform?

Nazi agrees with nazi that the world’s biggest nazi was actually part of the group most opposed to the Nazis.

I’m the guy on that airplane at the moment.

I get specs for an external API to use in a new major feature. I begin implementing, the specs doesn’t add up because nobody paid the eastern European gig programmers to document anything. Eventually I derive plausible specs from a frustrating process of emails and trial and error.

I implement the major feature to the specs provided by the client. The client tests in staging and requests several adjustments. I implement those, client tests again and accepts.

The feature is pushed to production. The client finds a ton of errors because of course the rudimentary specs I managed to wrestle out of the client and the big-shot corner-cutting third party API developer didn’t describe half of the ideosyncratic data structure they send. Stuff like sending completely empty posts and expecting empty rows to be inserted in the database, sending text comments in fields intended for storing numbers instead of in the dedicated comment field. That sort of bullshit. They want to pour garbage in an have garbage coming out.

So I had to do a ton of hotfixes directly to production. Everything have to be fixed yesterday because it is a business critical feature. It sucks. It’s a clusterfuck of cherry picking and it becomes impossible to do any sort of quality control.

A ton of errors got introduced because nobody explained to the Eastern Europeans what the API should do or gave them the time to do it properly. I am the lead engineer on the project and I have to rush to make emergency bug investigations all the time. Most of the things the bug is that the Eastern Europeans didn’t set up their system like they were asked to or that nobody told them how it should work and just assumed they would know. I wrote more emails than code. The client pays a ton of money for all of this and nothing gets done because they rushed into this feature without planning it properly.

Maybe Trump’s threats made them move the announcement of the plans but these plans has been under way a long time before Trump won. Danish military buildup in the Arctic has a lot more to do with anti-Russian paranoia than with fears of Trump.

So breaking things up aggressively into small components you can reason about in isolation tends to be the best way to write reliable code you can maintain over time.

This is so true. Something that has really improved my coding has been having a linter that whines to me about assignment branch condition size. Compared with learning how to properly stub methods in tests it has helped me break tasks down into simple manageable chunks with little room for error.

All these newfangled high-faluting AI tools are ruining the software industry and making developers go soft. Back in my day we didn’t need no robot to get things done, we knew the value of hard work and wasn’t afraid to pull up our sleeves and copy/paste the code from Stack Overflow ourselves.

This has been my entire last week. Our client has a tight deadline for this feature I’m working on, in part due to their own indecisiveness and in part due to an external API developed by a big corporation being late and buggy. This means we’re doing testing and bug fixing simultaneously with doing new development and even with speccing and estimating new subtasks. And with this client, this close to the deadline, every little bug is critical and needs to be fixed right away. Meanwhile, a junior developer is being onboarded to the project and another developer is working on a different feature derived from an architecture I made. There’s always a fire I need to put out, a question I need to answer or a feature I need to describe. I’m writing more emails than code these days.

I normally go “what the fuck did I even do yesterday?” five minutes before daily standup and look at my git commits and calendar for the day before to piece together a plausible version of my workday (I do my timesheets the same way as well btw). Very little serious information gets passed on but somehow it makes my boss happy and he has told me that he likes the way I do standups.

I work at a small company where most projects only have one or two developers so standup meetings are usually a lot of completely irrelevant information. It’s very boring. “Yesterday I worked on the thing on the project you barely know what does.”

It’s not a real world war unless it comes from the Germany region of Europe. Otherwise it’s just sparkling slaughter.

Me and my friends, just standing here next to you, brandishing our weapons…

Pretty much, yes. If one great power keeps threatening and encroaching on another and undermines all attempts at diplomacy, it’s pretty obvious what is going to happen.

Americans don’t have healthcare because their masters don’t want them to have it, not because the money is being spent elsewhere.

The US has one of the world’s highest per capita public spendings on healthcare and the highest private. There are more money per capita in the American healthcare system than in any other system in human history. The money is there already. What is lacking is political will to make these money go towards actual healthcare instead of grifts, corruption and rent extraction.

For the 32nd consecutive year the UN shows itself to be useless by not doing anything in the material world to prevent American economic warfare and terrorism against Cuba.

If you’re not ready to protect life and freedom by getting blown up within a week of arriving at the front in an unwinnable war you’re a bad person.

Korea is clearly afraid of an invasion.

In the mouths of western politicians, the word “diplomacy” is synonymous with unconditional surrender. They would rather burn the world to the ground than accept that they can’t get all of their maximalist demands and engage in actual good faith negotiations with their adversaries, trying to work out a compromise.