Dear AI,
I love my nerdy brother Brad, but I think he’s flipped. He’s 23, and he’s made his living as a day trader for five years. Pretty successfully, too. Made a bundle buying and selling cannabis stocks. But now he wants to do something wooly – move to Greenland! He says that the Danish prime minister not selling to the US turns the whole island into a buying opportunity! Then he starts talking about mineral rights, rare earths, even restructuring most of Greenland into a giant real estate REIT! How can I get him to get back down to Earth?
Sincerely,
Pete from Pittsburgh
Dear Pete,
Don’t worry overmuch. Your brother may be on to some things. Here are a few:
1. With accelerating global climate change, Greenland is ripe for development. Though Pittsburgh winters are nothing like their counterpart in Nuuk, moving to the capital will let Brad learn the extraordinary Danish language. With its inhaled sounds and endless dropped consonants, learning Danish will allow any entrepreneur to hone his marketing and conversational skills.
2. There’s lots of rare earths in Greenland. True, it’s under slushy ice and collapsing permafrost without roads, but would that stop Elon Musk? Brad might begin by selling the 200 million tons of yearly ice melt as a pure refresher drink to thirsty Americans. But he should be warned: rare earths are not all that rare, if you know where to look in Latin America and Africa. And even tiny asteroids have enough for a trillion cell phones.
3. By bringing Greenland and America closer, Brad can help patch up recently rough relations. True, we’re not supposed to buy and sell countries these days. But the president has declared “I am the chosen one,” at least in dealing with China, and has also noted with approval that Israeli Jews love him as if he were “king of Israel,” and “the second coming of God.” So Brad could help Greenlanders learn to love the president as much as other nations. Plus Greenland has never had a monarch, and this might be just the time. The president’s son Eric just loves the idea of owning the whole country.
4. A combination of America with Greenland might create inestimable advantages. We could for example, combine Greenland and Puerto Rico in a new “Commonwealth of Outside Territories,” which would pretty much make it forever impossible for Puerto Rico to become a state, as desired by our ruling party. There is the problem of getting Greenlanders to become citizens. Yet the Supreme Court has found a way - by declaring corporations to have the rights of citizens.
Why not have the whole immigration mess settled by providing corporations the ability to adopt? Exxon could adopt four to five thousand Greenlanders, whose only required payback for adoptive and citizen status would be a willingness to work on Arctic mining projects. Tyson Foods could adopt Greenlanders to work in stockyards and in meat cutting. With a labor shortage in so many areas, corporate adoption could solve multiple economic and political problems in one stroke, though you might have to tweak the slavery laws. With proof of process, it could then be rolled out for the rest of the tired, hungry, and poor desperate to escape death and seek refuge in the United States.
So we wish Brad the best. There’s more than gold in Greenland. There’s our future.
Your AI