That’s the 2026 thinking cap at work!

Starting a war with Canada would just accelerate the collapse

you have to ALSO maintain a strong military presence in BC and Yukon all the while the locals are trying to fuck you up and the rest of Canada is engaged in guerrilla warfare not only there but also against the US presence in Alaska

the US would be militarilly bogged down for DECADES

I agree with you, but I would wager that Canada’s participation in the F-35 program has more to do with not having the land bridge than your points. We’re already doing our version of “little green men” in Greenlands, so it’s hard to use history or what makes fiscal sense as a guide.

I’m on team No Land Bridge, but I also see the US never giving up Alaska.

If anyone proposed cutting off Alaska today, I would call them an idiot.

I agree.

A land bridge wouldn’t really help with the finances. There’s already a few roads that go all the way up to Alaska. Most things going from the lower 48 to Alaska still are shipped by sea or air.

We’re acting like finances are infinite already, and as long as people keep trading in dollars they are. And in this scenario we’re not considering what does/doesn’t make sense; we’re considering the idle thoughts of one person worried about his image.

I was working on an argument to try to justify having a big road all the way up through BC to Prudhoe Bay, and having a railway as well, but I can’t make it make sense with the pipeline already in place unless you just really wanted one or were trying to add a dependency on railway travel to that area. Greenland doesn’t make sense to me, either, and that’s apparently moving ahead.

But in the scenario we were considering, the US simply can’t afford to maintain these “nice to have” territories anymore. It’s like when you lose your job and have to cut back on expenses, sometimes insurance is something that has to get cut.

As long as there’s a market for US dollars the US doesn’t have to drop anything. I know I’ve made a dissatisfying, reductionist argument, but it is what it is. In the event that people still trade in dollars we can keep on as we have, and as long as we don’t go around alienating allies and threatening to not fulfill military treaties there’s no reason that should stop. If that did happen then going to war is a time tested way of giving the economy a boost.

Can Alaska even survive as an independent nation?

I think the US annexes parts of BC and Yukon to make a land bridge to Alaska before it gives it up. I’d see it giving up on rural parts of Pennsylvania, all of WV, and Illinois first. I know there’s no mechanism for a state to secede, but what about splitting into parts and only one part keeps the state name/legal status, and the other part just becomes a landlocked entity that has to pay a protection racket but gets $0.00 in federal funding back?

Alaska with its oil, refineries, and spots to park radars make it too nice of a place to hold onto. If in some misguided attempt to Own the Libs or whatever the US did split off Alaska, then whenever someone got up there from CONUS again they’d find English as a third language, if it all, with Mandarin second and whatever native tongue as the first language.

Debian.

This is the future so Virtual Machines and containers are where most of the stuff will end up anyway. If you need a specific distro it’s minutes away with a VM or container.

If you think there’s a chance you might want some Redhat cert for a job at some point it might be the time to jump to Rocky, and I’ve never used Proxmox so I can’t comment except to say that if I come into two fairly large computers for self hosting, the first one will get Rocky so I can get much more familiar with it, and the second will get Proxmox.

It’s all systemd anyway.