Posted by l-one-lone 11 hours ago
There are several comments suggesting the EU did everything right and member states tanked it but this just feels like the EU operating as intended. The EU is comprised of sovereign nations. This is a normal outcome of what is essentially a P2P network. The central authority is illusory because the EU is not sovereign.
https://www.verpact.nl/nl/nieuw-bij-verpakkings-epr-zo-regel...
Feedback for this utterly deranged regulation can be seen below, over 5k entries by many businesses in EU:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
- Americans are usually willing to skirt the rules and figure it out later. This comes with risk but is ideal when you're early stage, low stakes, and you couldn't follow the rules anyway.
- Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book and will be shocked if you suggest otherwise. Being process oriented is great for high stakes industries where lives and safety are on the line but destroys startups, likely slowing or even killing innovation.
There is no floor to the level of "petty" that can happen here: the UK - granted, not the EU - goes after individuals who don't pay their TV license and determine the who by triangulating unlicensed TVs via radio trucks and inspectors looking in your windows.
> Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book
Again on HN, I don't think conflating Europe and all Europeans into a uniform culture works. This might be true of Germany but as you get further from Berlin it is .. less so.
(Famous story from the Greek debt crisis of using satellite photos to find swimming pools and therefore people who were probably underpaying income tax, which was at such poor compliance levels the state was struggling)
Even more fun, in the lead up to Greece joining the EU, they had to get their government pay under control so they were given monthly caps on what they could pay people. No problem, they created a 13th month.
* As detailed in Michael Lewis' Boomerang: https://amzn.to/4cXJnjE - He's the same guy who wrote The Big Short and Moneyball
Quite common to view Europe as all the same, but Europe varies much more than what US does.
But unfortunately, I may be wrong and bought into an urban legend/bit of propoganda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
That's not to say that there aren't extremely nice people all other Europe... there are. But I'm still caught off guard when hearing them say some things nonchalantly that would get them fired in the US.
I'm intruiged, can you give an example?
I was fine with the mindset but never expected to get those questions in an interview, as it'd be illegal in the States.
In places that don't have such a history, there's no reason for it to be taboo.
Whenever I call out things like this to European friends they just think I am being an overly-sensitive American. But saying that to a colleague can absolutely get you fired in the US.
1.It will dissuade some people from starting in the first place because it's one more hurdle. Even if in practice people don't comply, the existence of that complexity will dissuade some people.
2.Even if nobody is being prosecuted for mailing 10 anti-static bags, what is the number at which you do comply? And once you do, will you be held accountable for everything that came before?
But regardless, kinda OT. I was just trying to make a point that ignoring a law isn't without consequences.
In the end, it's mail being sent.
The extent to which China can appear to do nothing while the west kills itself is just unbelievable. How could you possibly respect people that can't get out of their own way so repeatedly?
The EU isn't perfect, but the catastrophising I read feels mostly like astro-turfing attempts at destabilisation.
It's probably more easily noticed from inside the EU.
Germany is the third largest economy in the world. The EU as a bloc is the second largest economy in the world.
While lagging considerably behind the US and China in services, it still is among the leaders in energy and manufacturing.
It’s in decline, but it’s really not anything that can’t be fixed.
Certainly not anywhere HN/Twitter like to make it out to be.
The EU is facing a two-front information war. A strong EU doesn’t benefit the US, Russia or China. Having said that, a lot of US criticisms that are propagandised against the EU are mostly fair criticisms, the EU makes it easy for its adversaries to propagandise low hanging fruit (such as the bureaucracy on display here)
What really is happening is budget constraint - european 3-letter agencies don't get as much funding as US/UK ones and, due to failed geopolitic strategies, are spread over all sorts of vectors of internal sentiment defence - migrants, Turkey, ARTOS separation, etc
it isn't noticeable due to all the accumulated wealth, but european economies are being bled dry, but pretty much all geopolitical players. They stopped balancing between multiple centers of power - and now painfully pay the price of misaligned dependence.
Well it is certainly the perfect conditions for it, the EU is surrounded by friends and enemies alike who openly seek to break it up and the biggest companies in the world are doing everything they can to defy and undermine regulation efforts.
But maybe this is it. Maybe good times, made via surplus bribery by innovation and innovators will not come around for a while. So what do you call a strategy that relies on something hopefully to come, that you are unable to produce or even articulate you need.
And you are calling this astroturfing LLM based on what? It's really no different from calling tariffs so much winning and laughing at seething liberals.
There really isn't much of astro-turfing in non-EU parts of the world that would make little sense, your narrative might make more sense if there were any actual evidence or credibility behind the claims that non-EU states are engaged in anti-EU discourse that doesn't apply to them.
The complaints against EU is a lagging effect and what you see today is cumulative, one that all federated organization eventually face. LLMs have little to do with it and its just more visible as it is quite literally in global discourse
The uptick I'm talking about is in the last 2 years.
At least one Israeli Minister has bragged about them doing it.
I don't think you need specific evidence of Russia doing it, it's widely believed to be happening by security professionals. They famously had troll farms of people employed to spread disinformation and that can only have been accelerated by LLMs.
I don't doubt the existence of troll farms either its just that the idea that you can influence online discourse in the manner claimed by both Democrats and Republicans and beyond in a left vs right rivalry is greatly exaggerated and carry their biases.
At the end of the day, you really can't change whatever beliefs that the crowd has had for ages. You can't astroturf Palestinians into changing their view against Israelis and you can't astroturf Israelis into changing their position towards Palestinians.
It just so happens that the same is true for a lot of EU technical regulation.
At what point are we allowed to say "the EU is failing to regulate its members effectively"?
Or are we not allowed to say that because it would create some kind of catastrophe where the EU Commission loses its power over the EU27 and Russia invades (or somesuch catastrophising...?)
Unfortunately the EU does not at all understand how the internet works, maybe even how the global economy works today. Their goals are very reasonable and I fully support them, but the legislation around it (DMA, AI Act, GDPR, this new packaging stuff, don’t get me started with whatever everyone calls the cookie law) is just out of touch with how the modern world works. Again, I don’t think this is out of bad intention (not even to give an advantage to EU companies, but that is up to discussion) but mostly just out of a complete lack of understanding of what would really benefit the common EU citizen. The just seem to listen to activist groups and lobbyists aiming for regulatory capture and when trying to find a compromise in between they chose the worst of both worlds.
So many entrepreneurs (who can because software businesses) are leaving EU
How about the law doesn’t exist if it doesn’t actually make sense?