The central command is there, but it’s led by America. This means that, if we rely on NATO mechanisms, America effectively controls collective responses by Europe, which is undesirable now that they are not on Europe’s side in the conflict with Russia, and they state over and over again that they intend to annex Greenland.

A European central command and standardisation between countries makes a lot of sense to me. If member states don’t want to give up autonomy, maybe with some kind of opt-out clause. That way the countries that are willing won’t need to coordinate poorly through dozens of bilateral communication channels, but can jointly operate with a common strategy, and at worst, not all member states would contribute to every action. Plenty of possibilities for problems still, but a step up from the current situation.

I would personally still prefer to see a more integrated European military, though. While we will have a bunch of low-population countries all doing all possible tasks poorly, instead of having some specialise to specific strengths and sourcing collectively, the EU will always be weaker militarily than a comparable force that is not split in such a manner.

Very good post, I agree completely! It’s easy to let perfect become the enemy of good.

One thing I’d add is that many social media companies sneakily get their trackers added to random web pages or other services you might use, so doing random things on the internet could be included as extra engagement (and it also doesn’t require you to be signed up to their service in the first place, though it helps them). In this case their business is the data they collect on your behaviour, even outside of their own services, and the ads they can target to you using this on behalf of other entities who outsource their advertisements. It’s quite scary how ubiquitous this is.

I think what OP suggested here is a very good mindset to live by, and it will help a lot. If you wanted to go one step further, you could consider combining this with steps to try and prevent these companies from still harvesting your data when you’re not even aware that you’re using them, e.g., by blocking such trackers as much as possible.

Probably many greedy reasons, but my personal favourite speculation: annexing Greenland surrounds Canada and stops any potential aid by its NATO allies in case of an invasion, since annexing Canada is one of the stated objectives of the US now.

In terms of strategy for actual national security, they already got all the access they wanted, if they wanted more all they had to do was ask. If they’re the ones doing the attacking of a common ally, though, they wouldn’t get that access. So it’s only of added strategic value to annex instead of maintaining the alliance if the goal is to attack members of the alliance.

Ukraine has one of the strongest militaries in Europe. This whole “they couldn’t even beat puny Ukraine” line I keep seeing is entirely too haughty for my liking. Their gear is less state-of-the-art, sure, but many European countries lack vital components of a functional military altogether. Including logistics and coordination of joint efforts which the Americans have until recently been doing.

Sure, no need to panic yet, but certainly a need to get a move on and actually respond proactively to make up for gaps, and respond jointly, to ensure that it’s not going to be a matter of small countries getting steamrolled one by one.

Korean democracy is not dead yet!

Me, checking what the damage is: oh good, my European defence stocks went up 2 to 4 percent today while the American stocks are tanking, happy days!

Me, after thinking on it a bit longer: oh God, my European defence stocks went up while the world economy is taking a hit, better get ready for whatever’s coming

While you are staying, your productivity is fueling the economy, and the taxes you pay go to the government you dislike. If you flee, that’s a big economic difference you’re making over the years. I guess if you fight symbolically but non-pragmatically and get arrested, they have to feed you and house you in a prison which will cost a little extra, but compared to your non-productivity that’s just a small bonus. Fleeing also means you get to proactively contribute to competitors and reward them for being a better place to live, which in a way doubles your economic impact. There’s a reason the Berlin wall was built and North Korea executes 3 generations of the families of defectors. People are valuable, and they can’t afford to lose too many of them.

On the other hand, if your threshold for fleeing is too low, there are no competitors to support, because every country has their issues, and some may be at a risk of the same developments as the country you’re fleeing from, making it a pointless exercise. And your loved ones could be essentially hostages that can be used to make you stay.

So it kind of depends, but at least the cowardice argument seems pointless to me. Pragmatic small-scale effectiveness tends to beat symbolic perfectionism at making an impact.

Slightly off-topic from the intended point, but I’ve heard this more often, that there’s no such thing as a fish, but it’s a useful constructed concept to have.

So why is it so important that we all remember that animals like whales are not fish, they’re mammals? Didn’t stop us from calling animals from other groups fish, why should mammals get a special treatment?

While nice, this seems at odds with the budget cuts to science that are horribly undermining our existing, high-quality scientific institutions. It would be much nicer if luring these US-based scientists were an addition to a larger package to invest in, rather than cut and destroy, science in the country.

We could certainly use the help, so they’d be very welcome, but if we’re still getting rid of hundreds of fully set up scientists while gaining a few new ones from this, that’s still a net loss…

Plus, any US-based scientist who might consider doing this would surely look at these budget cuts, see how countries like France and Germany are actually investing in scientific infrastructure, and take this into account when selecting a destination. If you want to “lure” people over, you do need to have an actual high-quality and functional system to show off.

Though I like the spirit and intended message, so I don’t want to be too negative, I’m not personally too fond of this approach. Like you said, everyone can make their own considerations; I’ll add mine in case you find them interesting.

A big obstacle that often comes up with joint European plans is that every country wants their own local companies to benefit. This has long been a problem with defence (though hopefully a bit less so now), everyone wants to do a little bit of everything, which often ends up with them doing it poorly, while the EU also misses out on the benefits of scaling up. Or from the perspective of consumers, it’s why we don’t have a proper European alternative for Netflix, but instead dozens of “meh” national subscription services. For food, it can be complex; on the one hand it’s good for the environment to reduce transportation emissions, on the other hand, transport is often a negligible part of the emission cost of produce compared to other factors (but not always). So it’s often better to import produce from countries where it grows well, than buying locally from producers who use costly (financially or environmentally) methods.

It can get quite complex quite quickly. I’d say let’s consider local products as good options with potential advantages and disadvantages, but don’t necessarily view them as superior to other EU products. And let’s avoid falling into the trap of expecting direct national benefit from every individual EU initiative (not saying you specifically OP, just a general point).

One caused by counting on internal division in the EU, the probability of which increases when we fail to have a unified response right now. Basically just gambling that countries like the Netherlands won’t be willing to defend, e.g., a Baltic country. Russia could certainly beat the militaries of small Baltic states one by one, if it is breaking even with Ukraine. No joint response would mean selling out member states and effectively disabling the whole concept of the EU. Joint response would mean war for everyone.

I would prefer a future that minimises the probability of this gamble being made, and nobody gets invaded.

I suppose this is karma for me getting too excited about European unity getting a massive boost as a silver lining to the state of the world. My own country is joining Hungary in attempting to sabotage it.

This is not the time to make an ideological show to your populist national electorate. If this doesn’t get implemented properly and the newfound unity is not credible, the continent and the EU will be faced with war. Which, if that on its own is not convincing enough, also tends to be somewhat suboptimal for fiscal stability and the economy.

I sometimes wonder now if the plan is to stop having allies, and instead just make an American version of Wagner. Privatised American military fights for the highest bidder, buys lots of material from the American MIC, makes the world a worse place but makes a lot of money of it. I doubt it would be more profitable than a permanent inflow of 2% of the yearly GDP from several of the richest countries in the world, but I wouldn’t put it past them to think that it would be.

I remember a few weeks ago Dutch pension funds sold all their Tesla stock because they felt it wasn’t a safe investment anymore. The decision was laughed at on reddit because Tesla still went up a little bit after that, clearly it was a political choice and the uncertainty was just an excuse, surely the Dutch people would be annoyed that politics cost them big gains on their pensions, etc etc.

I feel vindicated. Let’s see how low it can go!

I’ve spent years now trying not to consume products from companies I consider immoral. There are a lot of them and, realistically, you won’t make a big dent or bring the company down. The average person is, by definition, average, so a boycott based on people doing the good thing at the expense of some personal discomfort will always fail.

But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Companies like Amazon are almost impossible to compete with because of their size. The most important impact you can have as a consumer is not that the lack of your personal revenue is going to keep the likes of Jeff Bezos up at night. It’s that you’re providing revenue and a user base to alternative businesses that are struggling to exist in a world where most people just use Amazon.

You can make a real difference this way! Focus on growing competitors rather than hoping the bad company will go away because of your abstention. Kind of like using Lemmy instead of Reddit.

This question changes a lot depending on if the non-EU partner in question is the US or a country like South Korea

Of course you’re right morally, but it’s still an interesting change in tone. This whole thing started when Russia threw a fit about Ukraine wanting closer ties to the EU instead of Russia. Now their official position is that even EU membership is totally fine. Seems like their position weakened quite a bit since 2014.

On the other hand, maybe this means Russia wants to fight the entire EU with their mutual defence pact when they attack again after recovering for a few years through a ceasefire. Or maybe they’re gambling that the EU’s requirements are too strict for Ukraine to join.

Or maybe it’s just all lies again, of course. But still, an interesting weaker flavour of lies, in that case.

Incredible news! We’ve been needing this for a long time; the research community has been calling for a “CERN for AI” for years at this point.

As a publicly funded researcher working in this field it’s very frustrating to see so many of our excellent, well-educated students in Europe end up contributing to the performance of American tech giants (who then use that power to undermine our democratic society). It is also hard to overstate how dependent we are on American compute infrastructure, for example, Google colab, AWS or Google Earth Engine. This last one is especially frustrating because basically the entire European research community relies on access to a service by an American tech giant to access our own globally leading high-quality public access satellite data.

I’ve seen a lot of negativity on this news as a waste of money. Personally I’m not too sold on the usefulness of LLMs either, their hype is very much overblown. But investing in AI is not the same as investing in LLMs, and Europe absolutely needs this. AI is being used, and has been for decades, in nearly everything we do. This includes not just LLMs and deep learning, but optimisation, formal logic, all sorts of probabilistic inference, forecasting, robotics, simulation, surrogate modelling, satisfiability, and much more. The correctness of the chips your phone uses has been verified using AI techniques. Weather forecasts and disaster warnings use AI methods. The food you eat has been monitored as it grew using AI. Air travel and general infrastructure needs AI to function, much of manufacturing and design needs it, etc etc. These are not just the chat bot “assistants” that tech companies try to push so hard on the public, but computational methods that answer vital questions we cannot otherwise answer.

Being dependent on a country like the US (or China) for something this pervasive and important is a terrible idea. Compute infrastructure, central hubs of expertise, and continental instead of national scale investment opportunities all contribute strongly to European sovereignty in this regard, for all the fields mentioned above (not just the over-hyped ones).