It's also not just about WW2, europe had at that point been at major war with itself in some form or another for well over a thousand years with only very brief periods of peace.

Of course by the 1990s it wasn't top of peoples minds because there had been peace for nearly 40 years, which is testament to the success of the original project, it doesn't mean the original goals had disappeared.

Whilst the EU in it's current form did not exist until 1993, it's predecessor the European Coal and Steel Community was formed in 1950 with the Schuman Declaration: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...

The primary goal of this was to prevent another war by joining european economies together economically. It's not 'overthinking it'. It quite literally is the main reason and you can go and read the speeches from the politicians at the time to confirm this.

Heres a direct quote from the declaration itself

> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.

The fact that the european powers (with the exception of russia) are largely at peace with each other and haven't had a major war with each other since the second world war is very unusual given european history.

If you can't tell which one is better then how can you make any assumption about performance?

For all you know performance is the same.

So many people complaining about something they quite literally have zero evidence for.

The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.

If China was split up into 20 countries would that be better because the emissions were divided by 20 for each individual country? I honestly don't know how so many people fail understand this very basic point.

Also talking about breeding continent sized populations, the USA is third with 340+ million and rapidly expanding at millions a year. The median country size is around a population of 9 million so the USA having 340+ million is clearly deeply irresponsible.

> China bringing enormous greenhouse gas burning capacity online

Your knowledge is out of date, Chinas total CO2 emissions have likely already peaked back in 2024: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

> If China and India are going to "make up" for their historic per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

Except China likely peaked their emissions at a much lower per capita rate than even the USA does now. India will probably be the same.

> the worst case scenario is 100% guaranteed and everyone else might as well go wild as well.

It can always be worse.

> 3 billion people cannot continue the mistakes of the past, but a lot of very foolish people seriously make that argument.

Sure and a country of 340 million cannot continue to burn as much as it is doing but continues to do so.

Also how much money is the USA going to send to developing countries to help them develop without burning fossil fuels? Oh yeah they cancelled it and they continue to be the worlds second largest emitter.

> those of us who have had to solve open problems with no solution written somewhere because there is none.

Probably because solving said 'truly hard problem' is niche with little or limited value as few people have tried to solve it (otherwise a solutions will likely have been written).

In the same way children still learn their times tables even though calculators can do the job better.

To me (and most normal people) knowledge pursuit is about inspiring others with discovery and the intellectual joy of doing something yourself.

I disagree, for a lot of people knowledge pursuit is about the knowledge and the results of that knowledge. IE the end result is what matters.

As a simple example, Pythagoras's theorum is useful to lots of people all over the world as in the actual equation. I'm not sure most for most people that the knowledge that Pythagoras himself went through an intellectual journey to discover the theorum is more important than the equation itself.

If we use a thought experiment to say that instead of Pythagoras discovering the theorum it was actually discovered by artificial intelligence do you think most people would care? I would say not.

I think a lot of people like the idea of being at the forefront of their field and their intellectual contributions being able to push the frontier foreward. If AI simply gets good enough to largely absorb the frontier they don't find as much fun in rediscovering what AI has already discovered. People forget however, this has already happened to many fields, chess being one example.

Whether AI gets there with maths is an open question but to say AI has no value in maths whatsoever is to say that the practical implications of a better understanding of maths that AI could potentially give us is worth nothing.

Top comments should be criticising US torture camps in Guantanamo bay or their recent bombing of a girls school in Iran.

Would you ship pointless code?

I do tend to agree though, it could be that AI solves problems with more code than a human would. What you need to measure is the value the code brings and how much of that is done by AI, hard to get an objective measure of that though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

Thats standard for military aid to other countries. Almost all US military aid to Ukraine was spent in the US for equipment purchases. The benefit for Ukraine is getting the weapons to use in the war, although it's worth noting a decent portion of the military aid will be spent by ukraine on domestic manufacturers.

Also €30 billion is financial and humanitarian aid, almost all of which will be spent in ukraine proper.

> Also - I think that EU is going to try to figure out a way to get that Russian money.

It's already sending the interest on the money to Ukraine, that alone is worth billions a year.

Simply seizing the rest is more complicated and additionally probably not preferable. Keeping the rest immobilised gives europe and Ukraine a substantial bargaining chip in negotiations with Russia when the war eventually ends. Either Russia agrees to concessions to get the money back or it doesn't and it agrees the money can be sent to rebuild Ukraine.