I don't know how much time I already wasted clicking away cookie banners. Maybe a minute a day? That's 6 hours a year. That's a day of clicking on cookie banners every 4 years. One week of clicking away cookie banners every 28 years. About two weeks for every adult life.
There are 450 million people in the European Union. Two weeks times 450 million is 900 million weeks of clicking on cookie banners.
Average life expectancy in the European Union is 80 years. 4160 weeks. 900 million weeks of clicking on cookie banners is 216346 times that life expectancy.
The EU will kill 216346 people of my generation with cookie banners.
But that directive is a big success? I know which sites are trying to track me, and which do not. What's more, even less technical people know that and may make an informed choice. Way better than allowing advertisers do whatever they want everywhere.
You know that pretty much all large sites are tracking you and most smaller sites probably are too but they couldn't be bothered with the consent popup because nobody will ever enforce anything against them.
Advertisers still do everything they want everywhere, we just got a bunch of pointless popups on top.
Do you really think most people are making an informed choice, as opposed to clicking the button that gets rid of the pop up fastest? Especially on mobile where the pop up obscures basically the entire site, and the byzantine process of opting out takes several clicks?
I think this was a spectacular failure of the EU to consider legislative effects, and problem solve. But that seems to be their recent MO.
The EU didn’t tell those sites to show cookie banners, they just told them to stop collecting people’s data without their consent. It’s the sites that interpreted that as “annoy people until they consent so we can keep collecting their data”. That’s not really the EU’s fault, although they should have seen it coming.
They could have also started by making the ~4 web browser suppliers implement this consent dialog (remember Netscape cookie dialogs everybody hated 20 years ago?). Then the two W3C/IETF to create a protocol for transmitting consent to the server. Instead of making thousands of companies having to individually spend the money to implement it.
Great for job creation numbers. Crazy mismanaged in all other aspects.
I think the “Do Not Track” HTTP header was inspired by a similar idea…but then people used it for tracking (using a non-default setting is a good way to be unique.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track
Thank you! Actually, they could also take this strategy to protect kids from adult/violent/sensitive content. I suspect their strategy is to replicate, with Internet, what they have done with the Financial industry. So it should not be considered as incompetence... on the contrary. (See my other comment for further details
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37457745#37461669 )
If a policy will predictably backfire, but the EU passes it anyway because the policy has good intentions, I would actually describe that as the EU's fault.
And I basically never give my consent. I'm happy that I have that choice (assuming a site honours it, of course).
This also allows me to decide which sites value my privacy (no cookie banners) and which do not (annoying banner every time I visit), so that's another plus in my opinion.
GDPR isn't about "cookies", it's about how the website operator is allowed to abuse your personal data. Cookies are just a minor implementation detail that's only applicable to a subset of websites that don't require an account (otherwise it's stored in database).
The EU is showning these banners on their own websites. So not even the EU is capable of creating a website without banners (because - even the EU - wants analytics and other bullshit).
The EU parliament website says "We use analytics cookies to offer you a better browsing experience. You have the choice to refuse or accept them." I'd personally rather have the choice than not.
The purpose of these laws is exactly to change people’s behavior through incentives. So if the incentives produced by the law resulted in behaviors with negative social outcomes, that really is the fault of the people who came up with the law.
This stuff is why I've moved over to the idea that governments doing nudges[1] is worse than just outright passing laws and polices to tell people what they have to do. In the case of cookies, pass laws forbidding collecting personal data. Done. Bonus getting to hear tech bro's whine they broke the law and can't go to Europe anymore.
[1] Thaler and Sunstein: any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.
Same here, what triggers me the most is also the « tech laws »: GDPR, cybersecurity resilience act threatening open source, The coming AI act possibly limiting innovation and concentrating them in the hands of existing giants instead of a decentralized ecosystem, as it begins to be the case in the rest of the world. I understand the thinking behind all those laws and they probably are born from good intentions. I feel like, in this case, Europe lacks some big tech lobbying pointing out the technical flaws (and yes I agree that with lobbying you do have to sort out the « pointing out the technical flaws » from the « pushing single interests forward »).
It is not necessary to ask for consent for cookies that are required to provide service.
Unfortunately the barrage of cookie dialogs seems to be working because you‘re blaming the EU now instead of those who decided to collect more data than necessary (or even to ask unnecessarily!)
Cookie banners are not compulsory at all, that’s only needed if the websites want to share your activity on this site with others in order to profile you.
How's it take you a minute to close cookie banners a day? Imagine the damage companies like FAANG are doing with their adverts, if you try the many minutes per day in your calculations!
Also, this is a UX issue with the site, not an issue with the EU. The EU wants companies to outright ask permission to collect your data and sell it. I can't think of another organisation at that level so pro-individual against big tech, can you? If cookie clicking is an issue, use companies that don't collect your data.
I still don't care about cookies works well, and that's not an EU absurd bureaucracy fault...
The main bureaucratic issue is that the institutional stack is not much democratic and it's dominated by economical powers that's have mostly only hurt EU citizens.
government employees being exempt from regular taxation would never be accepted in a normal country so I don't see why it should for something that isn't even a country
can you imagine federal employees in california being immune from california state taxes? me neither
It's not really a comparable situation as the US Federal Government isn't an international organisation. I think the aim is just to avoid having countries that happen to host lots of EU institutions receiving lots of national tax revenue as a result. It's also not an exemption that's entirely unique to EU employees. For example, NATO employees based in Belgium pay no income tax, and neither do employees of the United Nations.
The EU is a sort of suis-generis cross between a government and an international organization and is very much unlike the US Federal Government. It’s quite standard for employees of certain international organizations not to pay national taxes in the host country, as my other examples show. The reason behind this is simply to avoid certain conflicts of interest and squabbles between member countries over who gets the tax revenue, not some kind of conspiracy against the ‘little people’.
I don’t think the question makes sense, because we are talking about national taxes here. The EU is not analogous to the US Federal Government. But anyway, my comment already gave other examples (e.g. NATO employees).
I'm trying to question the core assertion you made, that the US federal relationship is not comparable to the EU's relationship to it's member "states" (which is what they are in fact called). Yes one is a federation and one is a confederacy, but what about that relationship makes it relevant to taxation?
So even in the case where the US is a member of these special organizations, the employees are not tax exempt.
The only rationale you provided was:
> I think the aim is just to avoid having countries that happen to host lots of EU institutions receiving lots of national tax revenue as a result.
Why is it unreasonable for a country that hosts lots of EU institution to receive any tax income from that activity? Hosting an international organization's business must cost the host country money, it's not a free lunch.
>I'm trying to question the core assertion you made, that the US federal relationship is not comparable to the EU's relationship to it's member "states"
Honestly that's a weird thing to challenge. There's a long list of differences which you can easily discover by googling. Also, "everything should work the same as it works in the US" is not an argument. Even if the EU were analogous to the US Federal Government, then that could just as well argue that the US ought to follow the same rules on taxation as the EU rather than vice versa.
>Yes one is a federation and one is a confederacy, but what about that relationship makes it relevant to taxation?
How about the fact that the EU doesn't have the power to collect taxes? (There's the special 'tax' paid by EU employees, but citizens of EU countries don't pay taxes to the EU, and the EU has no powers to levy such taxes.)
>Why is it unreasonable for a country that hosts lots of EU institution to receive any tax income from that activity?
It's not inherently unreasonable, it just has a tendency to lead to conflicts of interest and conflicts between member states. One thing to bear in mind is that member states within the EU have much greater powers (as full nation states) than 'states' within the US system, so it's important to avoid this kind of thing. The EU can't just whip member states into line the way that the US Federal Government can usually force a state to do whatever it wants.
The thing is you are many layers away from these people, using your taxes for god knows what. At least local politicians will have to ingratiate themselves a little bit. Starting from the top, zero accountability.
Have you ever met someone who worked at UN, EU? The chasm between those and private industry is huge. People get a ton of benefits for little work. I personally know a few people who gave up their cushy EU job as it ate at their soul to make pretend work. Whoever stays is too dumb or just grifting.
The redesign of the plastic bottle cap was one of the weirdest recent directives in EU.
How did this micro optimization make sense? How can we take people that pushed for it seriously?
They made regulations on separating waste that did not put a requirement on recycling. Many cities, to avoid fines, provide separate containers, but in the end just throw everything on the same pile.
This new bottle cap design requirement must have created a new economy for producing these bottle caps for all of the containers, someone profited. The need for it was created in EU institutions.
There are massive problems around waste that no one there dares to approach, so they make these weird directives that just smell of corruption and incompetence.
Quote: The single-use plastics legislation will address 70 percent of marine litters items, avoiding environmental damage that would otherwise cost €22 billion by 2030.
It may seem weird to you, but we need to develop good regulations to deal with all the negative externalities.
For instance, I think we could have also added a recycling fee per plastic item sold (say 5 cents). This would have made it more economical to sell bigger units and avoid technically unnecessary items such as the tear-off rings on bottles.
Croatia already has that ~7 cent tax on the container. Don’t know how that worked out. I know the capital has no recycling infrastructure. The tourists make no effort to collect that tax.
But the paper straw legislation was botched by allowing forever chemicals.
Virtually all plastic in the oceans comes from Asia. For the rest, there are ways to filter it from river outflows using bubble barriers. There's a demonstration project in Amsterdam that successfully capture floating plastic garbage without inhibiting boat traffic.
"""
The EU states, “beverage containers that are single-use plastic products should only be allowed to be placed on the market if they fulfil specific product design requirements that significantly reduce the dispersal into the environment of beverage container caps and lids made of plastic.” Article 6 of the directive gives a more detailed insight. According to this article, caps and lids made out of plastic may be placed on the market only if the caps and lids remain attached to the containers during the products’ intended use stage. Tethered caps will become mandatory in the EU in July 2024.
"""
Why is this a thing? Because plastic lids are made of a harder plastic that doesn't degrade as quickly and is much less recycled than the bottles themselves. How prevalent is this? In the last 30 years 20 million bottle caps have been found on beaches alone in Europe during clean-up work. They are in the top 5 ocean trash items that ultimately kill wildlife. This is only a small snapshot of the ultimate number of bottle caps not recycled aside their bottles.
To fix this, the EU suggest tethering the lid to the bottle so they're less easily lost and more likely to be recycled properly. 20 companies are responsible for the majority of throwaway plastics in the world, so this change is required in only a few places but could have a large net-benefit. Ultimately this is something that can only come from top-down optimization - why? Because it increases costs for each bottle.
> This new bottle cap design requirement must have created a new economy for producing these bottle caps for all of the containers, someone profited.
Companies lost money from this and tried to lobby to avoid it by trying ideas first, and then tethering if those failed.
> There are massive problems around waste that no one there dares to approach, so they make these weird directives that just smell of corruption and incompetence.
Why can't we tackle the small and the large?
> Many cities, to avoid fines, provide separate containers, but in the end just throw everything on the same pile.
Depends on the city/country, but the primary issue with lids is wildlife harm in my opinion so this does fix that issue.
IMO the soft drinks industry in it's present form is pretty lucky that it's allowed to exist at all. There are circumstances where there's a valid case for being able to sell drinks packaged in plastic bottles, but overall, it's very difficult to see how the benefits outweigh the externalities.
Sure, that seems like a reasonable example to look at. The directive[0] isn't long and is pretty readable.
The first thing to note that it was not a "redesign of the bottle cap" directive, that's just how you're spinning it to make it sound ridiculous. Instead it was just a minor part of the Single-Use Plastics Directive.
Second, it doesn't look like the primary purpose of that directive was to increase recycling, but to reduce marine litter. The product groups that were in scope for the directive were chosen based on being the cause of the majority of marine plastic litter.
For a lot of the product groups, they just banned the use of plastics entirely because there were viable sustainable alternatives. Bottle caps aren't being arbitrarily picked on here, it just appears that beverage bottles + caps are the one thing with no good alternative.
The directive did indeed set up goals for separate collection, you're right about that part. But it also set up requirements for the recycling, unlike what you claim.
Does the micro-optimization make sense? Think of how many plastic bottles must be sold in the EU each year. I couldn't find numbers quickly, but I would bet it's on the order of magnitude of 100 billion. Even the tiniest bit of optimization in something so common will pay of really quickly.
None of this seems particularly off. It's legislation addressing a specific concrete problem with solutions that seem pretty proportionate and actually solving the problem they set out to solve.
Fishing nets are 30%+ of waste. Switching to glass solves the problem instantly. It puts pressure on the companies and not the public.
Tourists in Croatia do not bother collecting the 7 cent tax on plastic containers.
Having a different bottle cap won’t improve that.
A small percentage of collected plastic waste is recycled.
All of the infrastructure that will never be built requires public funding and is more expensive than just switching to glass. Do we want to solve the marine waste problem or do we just want to spend money every year to try to avoid it?
The paper straws with forever chemicals is a side effect of this single use plastic directive. How was this not predicted?
Yes, fishing gear is a major contributor to marine plastic litter. It's not a coincidence that this directive then tackled that as well, not just bottle caps like you originally claimed. But obviously the solutions for fishing gear are very different than the solutions for plastic bottles.
The tethered bottle cap is not supposed to solve the problem of making people recycle the bottles, other parts of the directive do that. It solves the problem of the bottle being separated from the cap, such that if the bottle gets recycled so does that cap. Or if the bottle gets thrown in the trash, so does the cap.
I'm not sure why you're reframing my statement. I still consider the bottle cap redesign as the weirdest recent directive, based on no evidence. Just because there's bottle caps on beaches, where are the bottles? Now we won't see bottle caps (if the design works) but where will the bottles with these caps be?
I am aware that bottle cap redesign was part of a bigger directive. I am aware of that directive because we are already in the polluting paper straw world.
Fishing gear proposal shows the same half-assed attempt at waste collection as is separating plastic, paper and rest. But that is less weird to me.
Some stuff the EU does is fantastic and benefits EU citizens as well as the rest of the world, like enforcing a standard charger on phones.
Some stuff is asinine in how ineffective and pointless it was, like enforcing Windows have a browser select screen, or these stupid cookie banners (which yes, are 100% the EUs fault). Or claiming the GDPR has extra-territorial jurisdiction.
Like most governments it's a mix, but they seem better than most.
This is a good argument that we need better representatives who have some appreciation for how their idealistic regulations will be enacted in real life.
No, the banners are solely the EUs doing. Their solution to the problem resulted in the banners, so they get the blame.
> I think that giving a set of options on first install for preferences like browser is a great thing for the EU to enforce personally.
It would have been great in the 90s/2000s. They did it about 10 years too late where everybody downloads whatever browser they want anyway. For most people that would be Chrome.
The whole thing only exists because Opera couldn't compete and made a stink about it.
Given that the world was going to USB-C all on their own, I don't think it's fair to give credit to the EU for this one. Let's talk about it again in a decade when we're all still stuck on USB-C because going to something better would violate the law.
They can only be updated to reference things that exist. But there's no point creating a new thing now, because it'd be automatically illegal.
Escape hatch: the rest of the world isn't as stupid as the EU bureaucracy is, so there will still be innovation in power chargers (hopefully). But the principle is busted. Fixing tech in place via law is anti-progress.
Why would I bother building something new that there’s no guarantee I can ever use, that provides no competitive advantage whatsoever, when I can just use the existing standard, no matter how outdated or inferior it might be? Legislating a specific tech standard is short-sighted and stupid, and you badly overestimate how quickly legislation can be updated, especially if there’s resistance.
> If there is something better, they will build it to sell newer phones.
Why would they incur the expense of building it, lobbying for it, working through a new standard with the entire industry, only to not even be able to market it as a feature enhancement over competitors? There’s literally no profit-benefit to doing any of it.
> I think you underestimate how quickly legislation can be updated when there is a desire to do so.
Ok. We should definitely assume 100% alignment, because that’s definitely the direction governments are currently trending. Good call. There would definitely be zero entrenched interests defending the status quo, so that’s a super smart, reasonable assumption for you to base your argument on.
> Why would they incur the expense of building it, lobbying for it, working through a new standard with the entire industry, only to not even be able to market it as a feature enhancement over competitors? There’s literally no profit-benefit to doing any of it.
Why was USB 3 invented? Or USB4?
> Ok. We should definitely assume 100% alignment, because that’s definitely the direction governments are currently trending. Good call. There would definitely be zero entrenched interests defending the status quo, so that’s a super smart, reasonable assumption for you to base your argument on.
lol. If newer standard are developed, and they certainly will be, it will be in the manufacturers interests to get them approved so they can sell newer devices, to get people to replace their older devices.
That's not the only reason, not even a reason actually, but let's say it is. Once made, you don't think they would lobby to have it recognized in the EU legislation?
But there will be no desire to do so. Nobody in the EU power hierarchy actually cares about technology or phones, they're mostly quasi-geriatric retirees from national politics. They enjoy whacking tech companies because they're soft targets and it lets them strut around claiming to care about the environment, not because they care about the right way to charge phones.
Come up with a better way to charge devices via cables and you'll discover that they mysteriously are always busy adding new regulations elsewhere.
> like enforcing Windows have a browser select screen,
As opposed to what Windows 11 is doing right now, where certain internal Windows programs (such as the Start menu) purposefully ignore the default browser setting and open links in Edge?
Windows 11 is changing this in an upcoming release - for EU users only.
Ignoring the default browser setting is shitty behavior, but it's a different problem to solve and it doesn't warrant requiring a browser select screen.
It's apparently not that the people actually dislike the bureaucracy. Very few people actually have any real experience with it. If they have negative opinions it's because they read tabloids and are somehow unaware that their personal views have already been fully debunked by the ivory tower.
No.. the reason people _seem_ to dislike it is because the bureaucracy just hasn't produced enough propaganda telling the people they should like it more.
It feels like comparing 60K EU employees with 2M USG employees is apples to oranges. It's entirely possible that the actual equivalents in the USG are less than 60K, and criticisms of EU bureaucracy justified.
Yeah the comparison doesn't make sense to me. # of people governed is about the same, but without the EU, each of the member states still has a full national government that does a lot of the legwork of administrating their country.
USG does more because US state governments are not equipped like EU member national governments.
But that's the point, right? The EU is a much lighter touch than the US Federal Government, so it's weird that people fixate on the comparably insignificant bureaucracy of the EU rather than the much larger bureaucracies of their national governments.
What the writer is missing is that the local bureaucracy is the EU bureaucracy with extra steps.
Unlike Congress, the European parliament does not enforce it's legislation trough EU agencies, it dumps it to the local agencies working in that particular sphere and lets them figure it out.
Fairly often the particular activities imposed on local agencies get funded trough an Operational Programme. Rather than the EU parliament just allocating the funds for the activities it wants carried out, this involves the local agency writing a grant application for the funds, which is quite a silly bureaucratic exercise.
If it enforces EU law, while being funded by the EU, it's not really member state bureaucracy, is it?
Moreover EU legislation usually imposes a particular process to local administration, so member governments can't streamline or improve EU-related administrative process unless the Commission decides to look the other way. (Which is not common, but not exactly unheard of either.)
On the other hand, if you do international trade outside of the EU you get the effect of lots of different bureaucratic systems that mean you have a lot to learn. It is much easier inside the EU.
The state choose how to implement the law, if it want to implement it at all. If EU is mad at the local implementation, it stop subventions, then sue. I think the last case was Ireland for giving tax breaks to companies, and it was weird. The previous one was France that had to pay millions because water quality in Brittany's rivers was a lot lower than it should have been. I think there's also a case wis asylums laws in Hungary, but tbh, it's very rare that it comes to litigation.
And most of the time, it's citizens of the country being litigated that called the EJC/CJE in the first place (Ireland and Hungary being two exceptions).
I believe this research is hugely flawed since it seems to focus solely on bureaucracy coming directly from the European institutions, while it might be true that we as citizens don’t get actually really in touch directly with EU bureaucracy we certainly experience a lot of bureaucracy in our daily lives.
This comes from countries policy and law making who are obliged to implement EU regulations but also are adding their own local bureaucracy on top of it.
While it’s here different in different countries within the EU it certainly feels more often overburden, restrictive and senseless (speaking from my own individual experience in Germany and Netherlands).
Yes but the level of bureaucracy varies quite a lot between countries to countries.
What you are experiencing is poor or good local implementation of a streamlined architecture.
That’s why bureaucracy in UK didn’t go down but increased with brexit. What British previously experienced was just UK civil service, now they keep experiencing that but on top of it they have added bureaucracy at any time they want to interact with an EU country.
Errm, one huge reason why the EU bureaucracy can be so comparatively small is precisely because it relies on the domestic bureaucracies of its constituent states to translate its decisions into actual actions that impact the actual people living there. That is, the actions of the domestic bureaucracies that people actually interact with aren't merely some unrelated thing that people are basing their view of EU bureaucracy on, they effectively act as the public face of that bureaucracy and the rules it creates.
This will be the tragedy of Brexit for future UK governments. For decades they could blame their own bureaucratic failings on the EU, now they have to own them!
Nonsense, they are already blaming internal enemies, such as lawyers, civil servants, people who live in North London, and "the blob" (i.e. everyone who doesn't agree with them).
They're blaming lawyers for the deportation fiascos, which are technically due to the European Court of Human Rights and not the EU. That bit will have to be left separately. However, what they're dealing with is ultimately all the same culture of managerialism:
Civil servants went into meltdowns over Brexit because for the first time they might actually have to follow orders instead of telling ministers they can't do what they were elected to do because of the EU. We've seen how many of them claim to be neutral and then go straight into the Labor Party/Amnesty International/etc. The head of the Border Force even stated he'd never believed in borders at all.
So the idea that they're merely blaming "people who don't agree with them" is right in some ultra-pedantic technical sense. The problem is, those people aren't supposed to have political opinions to begin with.
Do you have any evidence that civil servants refused to follow orders en masse after Brexit? Except in cases where those orders were illegal, of course.
I used to work in the civil service. They were very clear that our job was to carry out the policies of the government, regardless of our personal political beliefs.
> one often hears that EU governance is equal to governance through “unelected bureaucrats”. Although this notion has been debunked many times
Good old academics, boldly stating that a trivial matter of fact has been debunked many times.
EU law can only be made by the EU Commission. Employees report to EU Commissioners. Here's an FAQ on how the process works.
Q: How are Commissioners elected?
A: They aren't. Each country gets to choose one.
Q: How do the countries choose their commissioners?
A: Political appointments, like being an ambassador.
Q: So they represent their country?
A: No, they are given specific policy areas and told that their main loyalty must be to the EU.
Q: But countries can send anyone, so their loyalties could remain at home anyway.
A: By treaty, yes. In practice, the President of the Commission can exercise a veto over Commissioners who they feel are not pro-EU enough. This is illegal, but the EU frequently ignores its own laws.
Q: OK, but they could just lie and still be loyal to their country.
A: The EU pays Commissioners vast bribes. They call these "pensions" but they can be received before retirement, are much larger than any normal pension and can be forfeited if the Commissioner is considered to be disloyal both during and after their employment [1]. For example, criticizing the EU in public counts. They also get many other perks such as not having to pay taxes, which would be illegal in their origin countries.
Q: Who elects the President and how?
A: The heads of each member state decide. The mechanism used is unknown, as the appointment process is secret and they refuse to discuss it.
Q: From where are the candidates drawn?
A: Unknown.
Q: On what platforms do they campaign?
A: They don't.
Q: What about the European Parliament?
A: It's not a Parliament as it can't change the law by itself, nor choose who runs the civil service. They're allowed in theory to vote on the President, but last time they were given a list of candidates with only one name on it.
-------
This, according to people like the LSE, is "democracy", by which they mean the exercise of power by those as far removed from accountability as possible. Because at some point, someone was chosen by someone else who formed a coalition with some other people who won some votes by not talking about anything EU related, and then told to be loyal to the EU institutions.
Commission really is not that different from ministers or cabinet in general. In most countries these are not elected positions, but selected by government currently in power.
In most countries ministers are indeed elected. They had to win an election to get into the Parliament in the first place. And then they had to be selected by someone who won the party leadership contest.
I don't think there are any European countries where nobody can explain where the President came from or how they got into power. But in the EU, that's the case. Nobody can explain how someone as manifestly unsuited as von der Leyen ended up President, except via reductive arguments like "some people went into a room, and when they came out, it had been decided".
Additionally, cabinet ministers usually come from a party with a coherent agenda, and that agenda is at least somewhat connected to what a people in a specific locality wanted. The Commissioners come from all over the place, from a mix of political backgrounds and cultures, and they literally aren't allowed to advocate for their country.
So the Commission is very much not like ministers or a cabinet in general.
I see them doing with the Internet industry what they have done with the Financial industry.
- What are they doing: force smaller companies to die or be bought by bigger ones.
- How are they doing that: They keep adding regulation so that fix costs and complexity to manage a company increase.
- Why are they doing that: having a lot of smaller companies is difficult and expensive to control. Usually it is impossible. Having a few big companies is easier and cheaper to control (you only need to book a room and invite a few ceos to regulate everything).
The fun part is that companies like Google, Apple, etc fake a fight against the regulators, but are actually the 2nd beneficiaries (1st being the regulators).
If you speak with seniors in the financial industry, they will talk about it with passion and anger because they can provide countless practical examples which killed their industry and the "joy" to wake up in the morning.
As an exemple, you can see how JP Morgan seems to fight regulation and make it appear to be a victim of regulation, but finally is always the winner.
As always, I see a lot of outright misinformation, a lot of information taken out of context, and mostly - as is usual on HN - "Why they do X, if Y is better?" "Well, read the legislation, they actually do Z and they had reasons."
I wonder how would George of Poděbrady (who thought of something like EU in 15th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_of_Pod%C4%9Bbrady#Messa...). I don't think he would be worried about bureaucracy, I'm sure he would be in awe we can actually solve things this way.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadI don't know how much time I already wasted clicking away cookie banners. Maybe a minute a day? That's 6 hours a year. That's a day of clicking on cookie banners every 4 years. One week of clicking away cookie banners every 28 years. About two weeks for every adult life.
There are 450 million people in the European Union. Two weeks times 450 million is 900 million weeks of clicking on cookie banners.
Average life expectancy in the European Union is 80 years. 4160 weeks. 900 million weeks of clicking on cookie banners is 216346 times that life expectancy.
The EU will kill 216346 people of my generation with cookie banners.
Those are good people.
And you ask why I hate that?
Just install consent-omatic
Advertisers still do everything they want everywhere, we just got a bunch of pointless popups on top.
I think this was a spectacular failure of the EU to consider legislative effects, and problem solve. But that seems to be their recent MO.
Great for job creation numbers. Crazy mismanaged in all other aspects.
This also allows me to decide which sites value my privacy (no cookie banners) and which do not (annoying banner every time I visit), so that's another plus in my opinion.
There are browser settings since the invention of cookies to control which sites are allowed to set cookies.
[1] Thaler and Sunstein: any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.
Unfortunately the barrage of cookie dialogs seems to be working because you‘re blaming the EU now instead of those who decided to collect more data than necessary (or even to ask unnecessarily!)
Those are good people
Also, this is a UX issue with the site, not an issue with the EU. The EU wants companies to outright ask permission to collect your data and sell it. I can't think of another organisation at that level so pro-individual against big tech, can you? If cookie clicking is an issue, use companies that don't collect your data.
Edit: Look at the US is doing on another HN front-page article https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bge3/dhs-uses-ai-tool-babe...
The main bureaucratic issue is that the institutional stack is not much democratic and it's dominated by economical powers that's have mostly only hurt EU citizens.
I don't know, maybe they are libertarians
They have their own Cartier/LV/etc... in Brusels HQ?
it's like something out of brave new world
can you imagine federal employees in california being immune from california state taxes? me neither
Similar response here: https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/4968
and they're exempt from tax the little people have to pay
Apparently employees of NATO don't have to pay taxes in any member state except the US. (https://www.taxesforexpats.com/articles/expat-tax-rules/nato...)
So even in the case where the US is a member of these special organizations, the employees are not tax exempt.
The only rationale you provided was:
> I think the aim is just to avoid having countries that happen to host lots of EU institutions receiving lots of national tax revenue as a result.
Why is it unreasonable for a country that hosts lots of EU institution to receive any tax income from that activity? Hosting an international organization's business must cost the host country money, it's not a free lunch.
Honestly that's a weird thing to challenge. There's a long list of differences which you can easily discover by googling. Also, "everything should work the same as it works in the US" is not an argument. Even if the EU were analogous to the US Federal Government, then that could just as well argue that the US ought to follow the same rules on taxation as the EU rather than vice versa.
>Yes one is a federation and one is a confederacy, but what about that relationship makes it relevant to taxation?
How about the fact that the EU doesn't have the power to collect taxes? (There's the special 'tax' paid by EU employees, but citizens of EU countries don't pay taxes to the EU, and the EU has no powers to levy such taxes.)
>Why is it unreasonable for a country that hosts lots of EU institution to receive any tax income from that activity?
It's not inherently unreasonable, it just has a tendency to lead to conflicts of interest and conflicts between member states. One thing to bear in mind is that member states within the EU have much greater powers (as full nation states) than 'states' within the US system, so it's important to avoid this kind of thing. The EU can't just whip member states into line the way that the US Federal Government can usually force a state to do whatever it wants.
There's a more thorough explanation in the comment I linked earlier: https://politics.stackexchange.com/a/4968
Also, I don't think most pull six figures.
You want to elect 60,000 bureaucrats?
Is it supposed to mean that they have no mandate to do what they do?
Have you ever met someone who worked at UN, EU? The chasm between those and private industry is huge. People get a ton of benefits for little work. I personally know a few people who gave up their cushy EU job as it ate at their soul to make pretend work. Whoever stays is too dumb or just grifting.
How did this micro optimization make sense? How can we take people that pushed for it seriously?
They made regulations on separating waste that did not put a requirement on recycling. Many cities, to avoid fines, provide separate containers, but in the end just throw everything on the same pile.
This new bottle cap design requirement must have created a new economy for producing these bottle caps for all of the containers, someone profited. The need for it was created in EU institutions.
There are massive problems around waste that no one there dares to approach, so they make these weird directives that just smell of corruption and incompetence.
It may seem weird to you, but we need to develop good regulations to deal with all the negative externalities.
For instance, I think we could have also added a recycling fee per plastic item sold (say 5 cents). This would have made it more economical to sell bigger units and avoid technically unnecessary items such as the tear-off rings on bottles.
But the paper straw legislation was botched by allowing forever chemicals.
Aren't they a tamper-proofing mechanism?
Is just a minor adjustments for the industry, isn't like your mom and pop store is making handmade plastic bottles
Really , i fail to see the problem behind just "ahaha, stupid eu regulations"
""" The EU states, “beverage containers that are single-use plastic products should only be allowed to be placed on the market if they fulfil specific product design requirements that significantly reduce the dispersal into the environment of beverage container caps and lids made of plastic.” Article 6 of the directive gives a more detailed insight. According to this article, caps and lids made out of plastic may be placed on the market only if the caps and lids remain attached to the containers during the products’ intended use stage. Tethered caps will become mandatory in the EU in July 2024. """
Why is this a thing? Because plastic lids are made of a harder plastic that doesn't degrade as quickly and is much less recycled than the bottles themselves. How prevalent is this? In the last 30 years 20 million bottle caps have been found on beaches alone in Europe during clean-up work. They are in the top 5 ocean trash items that ultimately kill wildlife. This is only a small snapshot of the ultimate number of bottle caps not recycled aside their bottles.
To fix this, the EU suggest tethering the lid to the bottle so they're less easily lost and more likely to be recycled properly. 20 companies are responsible for the majority of throwaway plastics in the world, so this change is required in only a few places but could have a large net-benefit. Ultimately this is something that can only come from top-down optimization - why? Because it increases costs for each bottle.
> This new bottle cap design requirement must have created a new economy for producing these bottle caps for all of the containers, someone profited.
Companies lost money from this and tried to lobby to avoid it by trying ideas first, and then tethering if those failed.
> There are massive problems around waste that no one there dares to approach, so they make these weird directives that just smell of corruption and incompetence.
Why can't we tackle the small and the large?
> Many cities, to avoid fines, provide separate containers, but in the end just throw everything on the same pile.
Depends on the city/country, but the primary issue with lids is wildlife harm in my opinion so this does fix that issue.
The first thing to note that it was not a "redesign of the bottle cap" directive, that's just how you're spinning it to make it sound ridiculous. Instead it was just a minor part of the Single-Use Plastics Directive.
Second, it doesn't look like the primary purpose of that directive was to increase recycling, but to reduce marine litter. The product groups that were in scope for the directive were chosen based on being the cause of the majority of marine plastic litter.
For a lot of the product groups, they just banned the use of plastics entirely because there were viable sustainable alternatives. Bottle caps aren't being arbitrarily picked on here, it just appears that beverage bottles + caps are the one thing with no good alternative.
The directive did indeed set up goals for separate collection, you're right about that part. But it also set up requirements for the recycling, unlike what you claim.
Does the micro-optimization make sense? Think of how many plastic bottles must be sold in the EU each year. I couldn't find numbers quickly, but I would bet it's on the order of magnitude of 100 billion. Even the tiniest bit of optimization in something so common will pay of really quickly.
None of this seems particularly off. It's legislation addressing a specific concrete problem with solutions that seem pretty proportionate and actually solving the problem they set out to solve.
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/904/oj
Tourists in Croatia do not bother collecting the 7 cent tax on plastic containers. Having a different bottle cap won’t improve that.
A small percentage of collected plastic waste is recycled.
All of the infrastructure that will never be built requires public funding and is more expensive than just switching to glass. Do we want to solve the marine waste problem or do we just want to spend money every year to try to avoid it?
The paper straws with forever chemicals is a side effect of this single use plastic directive. How was this not predicted?
The tethered bottle cap is not supposed to solve the problem of making people recycle the bottles, other parts of the directive do that. It solves the problem of the bottle being separated from the cap, such that if the bottle gets recycled so does that cap. Or if the bottle gets thrown in the trash, so does the cap.
I am aware that bottle cap redesign was part of a bigger directive. I am aware of that directive because we are already in the polluting paper straw world.
Fishing gear proposal shows the same half-assed attempt at waste collection as is separating plastic, paper and rest. But that is less weird to me.
Some stuff is asinine in how ineffective and pointless it was, like enforcing Windows have a browser select screen, or these stupid cookie banners (which yes, are 100% the EUs fault). Or claiming the GDPR has extra-territorial jurisdiction.
Like most governments it's a mix, but they seem better than most.
You can be compliant without a cookie banner - don't collect the data or give a choice when you start collecting the data.
> enforcing Windows have a browser select screen
I think that giving a set of options on first install for preferences like browser is a great thing for the EU to enforce personally.
No, the banners are solely the EUs doing. Their solution to the problem resulted in the banners, so they get the blame.
> I think that giving a set of options on first install for preferences like browser is a great thing for the EU to enforce personally.
It would have been great in the 90s/2000s. They did it about 10 years too late where everybody downloads whatever browser they want anyway. For most people that would be Chrome.
The whole thing only exists because Opera couldn't compete and made a stink about it.
Given that the world was going to USB-C all on their own, I don't think it's fair to give credit to the EU for this one. Let's talk about it again in a decade when we're all still stuck on USB-C because going to something better would violate the law.
> Let's talk about it again in a decade when we're all still stuck on USB-C because going to something better would violate the law.
Laws can be updated, quite quickly sometimes.
Escape hatch: the rest of the world isn't as stupid as the EU bureaucracy is, so there will still be innovation in power chargers (hopefully). But the principle is busted. Fixing tech in place via law is anti-progress.
Come on. That's just silly. Nothing stopping manufacturers working together on a new standard and hiring lobbyists to amend whatever bill is needed.
The EU bill doesn't stifle innovation at all. It stifles vendor lock-in and a bunch of other negative bullshit.
If there is something better, they will build it to sell newer phones.
> you badly overestimate how quickly legislation can be updated, especially if there’s resistance.
I think you underestimate how quickly legislation can be updated when there is a desire to do so.
Why would they incur the expense of building it, lobbying for it, working through a new standard with the entire industry, only to not even be able to market it as a feature enhancement over competitors? There’s literally no profit-benefit to doing any of it.
> I think you underestimate how quickly legislation can be updated when there is a desire to do so.
Ok. We should definitely assume 100% alignment, because that’s definitely the direction governments are currently trending. Good call. There would definitely be zero entrenched interests defending the status quo, so that’s a super smart, reasonable assumption for you to base your argument on.
Why was USB 3 invented? Or USB4?
> Ok. We should definitely assume 100% alignment, because that’s definitely the direction governments are currently trending. Good call. There would definitely be zero entrenched interests defending the status quo, so that’s a super smart, reasonable assumption for you to base your argument on.
lol. If newer standard are developed, and they certainly will be, it will be in the manufacturers interests to get them approved so they can sell newer devices, to get people to replace their older devices.
To compete with Thunderbolt and Lightning?
And we are talking about phones, in the EU all phones will be USB3, so Thunderbolt and Lightning won't be competition in this context.
Come up with a better way to charge devices via cables and you'll discover that they mysteriously are always busy adding new regulations elsewhere.
So why will USB5 be worked on?
As opposed to what Windows 11 is doing right now, where certain internal Windows programs (such as the Start menu) purposefully ignore the default browser setting and open links in Edge?
Windows 11 is changing this in an upcoming release - for EU users only.
No.. the reason people _seem_ to dislike it is because the bureaucracy just hasn't produced enough propaganda telling the people they should like it more.
I find this entire article insanely out of touch.
I think, at its core, the negative attitudes stem from it being a “one size fits all” approach.
Plus also a sense of detachment since state and local governments are what people interact with 99% of the time.
USG does more because US state governments are not equipped like EU member national governments.
Unlike Congress, the European parliament does not enforce it's legislation trough EU agencies, it dumps it to the local agencies working in that particular sphere and lets them figure it out.
Fairly often the particular activities imposed on local agencies get funded trough an Operational Programme. Rather than the EU parliament just allocating the funds for the activities it wants carried out, this involves the local agency writing a grant application for the funds, which is quite a silly bureaucratic exercise.
If it enforces EU law, while being funded by the EU, it's not really member state bureaucracy, is it?
Moreover EU legislation usually imposes a particular process to local administration, so member governments can't streamline or improve EU-related administrative process unless the Commission decides to look the other way. (Which is not common, but not exactly unheard of either.)
And most of the time, it's citizens of the country being litigated that called the EJC/CJE in the first place (Ireland and Hungary being two exceptions).
This comes from countries policy and law making who are obliged to implement EU regulations but also are adding their own local bureaucracy on top of it.
While it’s here different in different countries within the EU it certainly feels more often overburden, restrictive and senseless (speaking from my own individual experience in Germany and Netherlands).
What you are experiencing is poor or good local implementation of a streamlined architecture.
That’s why bureaucracy in UK didn’t go down but increased with brexit. What British previously experienced was just UK civil service, now they keep experiencing that but on top of it they have added bureaucracy at any time they want to interact with an EU country.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence
Civil servants went into meltdowns over Brexit because for the first time they might actually have to follow orders instead of telling ministers they can't do what they were elected to do because of the EU. We've seen how many of them claim to be neutral and then go straight into the Labor Party/Amnesty International/etc. The head of the Border Force even stated he'd never believed in borders at all.
So the idea that they're merely blaming "people who don't agree with them" is right in some ultra-pedantic technical sense. The problem is, those people aren't supposed to have political opinions to begin with.
I used to work in the civil service. They were very clear that our job was to carry out the policies of the government, regardless of our personal political beliefs.
Good old academics, boldly stating that a trivial matter of fact has been debunked many times. EU law can only be made by the EU Commission. Employees report to EU Commissioners. Here's an FAQ on how the process works.
Q: How are Commissioners elected?
A: They aren't. Each country gets to choose one.
Q: How do the countries choose their commissioners?
A: Political appointments, like being an ambassador.
Q: So they represent their country?
A: No, they are given specific policy areas and told that their main loyalty must be to the EU.
Q: But countries can send anyone, so their loyalties could remain at home anyway.
A: By treaty, yes. In practice, the President of the Commission can exercise a veto over Commissioners who they feel are not pro-EU enough. This is illegal, but the EU frequently ignores its own laws.
Q: OK, but they could just lie and still be loyal to their country.
A: The EU pays Commissioners vast bribes. They call these "pensions" but they can be received before retirement, are much larger than any normal pension and can be forfeited if the Commissioner is considered to be disloyal both during and after their employment [1]. For example, criticizing the EU in public counts. They also get many other perks such as not having to pay taxes, which would be illegal in their origin countries.
Q: Who elects the President and how?
A: The heads of each member state decide. The mechanism used is unknown, as the appointment process is secret and they refuse to discuss it.
Q: From where are the candidates drawn?
A: Unknown.
Q: On what platforms do they campaign?
A: They don't.
Q: What about the European Parliament?
A: It's not a Parliament as it can't change the law by itself, nor choose who runs the civil service. They're allowed in theory to vote on the President, but last time they were given a list of candidates with only one name on it.
-------
This, according to people like the LSE, is "democracy", by which they mean the exercise of power by those as far removed from accountability as possible. Because at some point, someone was chosen by someone else who formed a coalition with some other people who won some votes by not talking about anything EU related, and then told to be loyal to the EU institutions.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/4996440/Lor...
I don't think there are any European countries where nobody can explain where the President came from or how they got into power. But in the EU, that's the case. Nobody can explain how someone as manifestly unsuited as von der Leyen ended up President, except via reductive arguments like "some people went into a room, and when they came out, it had been decided".
Additionally, cabinet ministers usually come from a party with a coherent agenda, and that agenda is at least somewhat connected to what a people in a specific locality wanted. The Commissioners come from all over the place, from a mix of political backgrounds and cultures, and they literally aren't allowed to advocate for their country.
So the Commission is very much not like ministers or a cabinet in general.
By having Brexit, we now have the chance to have two Bonfire nights!
- What are they doing: force smaller companies to die or be bought by bigger ones.
- How are they doing that: They keep adding regulation so that fix costs and complexity to manage a company increase.
- Why are they doing that: having a lot of smaller companies is difficult and expensive to control. Usually it is impossible. Having a few big companies is easier and cheaper to control (you only need to book a room and invite a few ceos to regulate everything).
The fun part is that companies like Google, Apple, etc fake a fight against the regulators, but are actually the 2nd beneficiaries (1st being the regulators).
If you speak with seniors in the financial industry, they will talk about it with passion and anger because they can provide countless practical examples which killed their industry and the "joy" to wake up in the morning.
As an exemple, you can see how JP Morgan seems to fight regulation and make it appear to be a victim of regulation, but finally is always the winner.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-10/bankin... https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/california-financia...
I wonder how would George of Poděbrady (who thought of something like EU in 15th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_of_Pod%C4%9Bbrady#Messa...). I don't think he would be worried about bureaucracy, I'm sure he would be in awe we can actually solve things this way.