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Laxtonto

Certifiably Surly
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  1. Laxtonto replied to LTtxfan's topic in Football
    Interesting to me is Wingo - Wrist
  2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-22/vanke-leaves-creditors-guessing-on-plans-as-restructuring-looms Vanke, the last major "safe" Chinese real estate developer, is struggling make debt payments and is being heavily subsidized by the Chinese government. These short-term debt repayment issues were restructured from monthly to quarterly this week, covering $10B in debt for 2026, will balloon to $20B in 2027. What is worse, sales continue to slump, and the property valuations have collapsed, so the assets they have are now worth even less than a year ago, with an exploding debt bubble and even less cash flow. Just another potential reason to bail on BLK and time to start worrying about Standard Chartered and HSBA...
  3. Laxtonto replied to Zavala's topic in Daily Texan
    I think that is what will eventually happen. Unless, of course, Denmark decides to actually sell it. We floated the idea before, but we bought the US Virgin Islands instead in a separate deal to keep it out of German hands. The question is always price vs. how much it will now cost the Netherlands to keep it. The problem with a mutual defense pact is that it will cost money, which Denmark has been loath to spend on Greenland. They have spent very little on Greenland as a whole, and in 2024, it was the first time since the 1990's that they met or exceeded the NATO expected 2% GDP spending on defense. The capital investment to house troops there, the equipment costs, and the increased size of the military budget (currently around $10-12B and potentially requiring $3-5B more annually) would probably make people second-guess the idea. Like anything else, money makes the world move, and at what point will this force a budget reshuffle in a system that isn't anywhere near the scale of what the US is playing with? $15B is a rounding error in the DOD budget, yet it is the entirety of Denmark's military expenditures. The question is how much the "cost" of a mutual defense pact would have to be for the Netherlands to be cost-prohibitive from not selling it? What makes this funny to me is that if the Netherlands does enter into a common defense pact, they would then be on track to meet the desired 5% of GDP for core defense for NATO by 2035.
  4. Laxtonto replied to Zavala's topic in Daily Texan
    I have a feeling the Iranian attempts to overwhelm the Israeli missile defense system have much more to do with this increased obsession with its acquisition than rare earth materials or stationing troops themselves on Greenland to limit Russian or Chinese excursions via the Arctic. I blew off the "golden dome" idea when it was floated, but Greenland would be a key piece of real estate for its implementation. Now, I don't know why we don't just put it on our bases already there or build more of them (as we have a treaty that allows this), but it isn't just pure insanity to want it for defense purposes. I have seen this image before (actually many times in my younger years, without the "Greenland" overlaid, when reviewing "Cold War" nuclear proliferation doctrine in grad school), and I viewed it then as a sad ghost of our Cold War past. What makes this more "important" now is if you hold the view that the end of the Russia/Ukraine conflict could fracture Russia into 3 to 10 new "countries", with 2-4 of them with ICBMs under their control, then this image is a scary reminder of what could happen. Right now, Greenland doesn't matter, as any Russian attack would be an all-out doomsday event, but if Russia fractures, then the likelihood of a limited-scale launch (or the threat thereof as a negotiation tactic) is much higher than the current stalemate. These same routes, mainly the ones in Siberia and Mongolia (the left 5 dots on the map), are what the Chinese DF-41 ICBMs would most likely follow to strike the US east coast. Once again, China has a "don't strike first" policy, but if you view the Chinese state as potentially unstable (and their internal numbers have been concerning, and you expect the continued decoupling of the US and EU from the Chinese supply chain to continue), then the same concern about fragmentation would come to play. Love or hate Trump, his absolute dread of nuclear weapons and fear of global nuclear conflict is one of his longest-held public positions. If he sees Greenland as a long-term way to "protect" the US from one of his greatest fears, he will pursue this. It would be a legacy item for him to brag about. Now, people are getting caught up in the carrot-and-stick negotiations (which are becoming increasingly public), but just as with the ugly public trade tariff deal negotiations, things are going on behind the scenes to balance that out. Trump is the flippant "bad cop" in all of these scenarios, a position that he plays well and people eat up, and the staff plays "good cop" and we end up with some solution to a problem that no one was willing to resolve when everyone at the table were all try not to offend everyone. I don't "like" the approach, but I understand the logic criteria. If there is any concern that Russia or China may split, then Greenland is important to the US interest. Even if they don't fracture, it has rare earth mining potential, transshipment port value to potentially bypass both the Suez and Panama canals, and all of those would provide value. This is a hedge bet couched as security that has enough economic potential to have it more than break even.
  5. Funny enough, I think Saban isn't a good coach in the era of NIL, but everything is relative to the world around you
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