Seemed a little shallow to me and focused on a small slice of the Chinese population born between 1981 and 1996 (a widely-accepted birth year range for "millenials").
During those years, there was almost no Chinese middle class. All the growth in China's urban middle class happened well after 1996.
Even with that growth, they're still greatly outnumbered by rural and working class families, whose millenial children are likely quite different from what's described in the article.
This felt like an article describing American "hipsters" who are nowhere close to a majority of their birth cohort.
So this is interesting; assuming that this doesn't go to the Supreme Court or is otherwise unchanged by it, it could mean that after some states implement their own laws (and fight off the inevitable lobby/lawsuits attempts to stop from from doing so ), this could go down two ways:
1) The ISPs create two (or mor) versions of their packages that they can offer/operate in different states - this would be quite expensive (and I suspect in some cases quite difficult too), but it would allow them to leech extra profit off the hides of customers not protected by state law; it would generate a bit of outrage when users see their family and friends in other parts of the country are better off, but I doubt that will make the whole system collapse
2) Or they will give in and accept the higher(highest?) standard, similar to what's happening for car emissions. I am maybe too cynical, but I doubt that will happen so easily.
Car emissions are a secondary thing for manufacturers - they can grumble, but at the end of the day it's just a bit of extra cost. The repeal of net neutrality is a matter of life or death for ISPs - it's what will make the difference between them being able to maintain outsized profits and power in their nice little oligopoly, vs becoming dumb pipes.
ISPs tend to be rotten from the inside out. You know when you call them and it's a mess to get any help, and you inevitably get stuck explaining your basic problem 3+ times to someone who thinks wifi is magic? Yeah, it's not any better when you're an employee of those companies.
Only a few months ago did Verizon misconfigure their BGP causing a big outage. Now imagine they need to have different routing for different states. It seems like they're too incompetent to manage to best standards now, so how could we trust them to do any better? We should've considered them dumb pipes from the beginning.
Remember that time.. a few minutes ago when Verizon configured BGP correctly and nothing happened? And yesterday and the day before and the day before that, too? No? I didn’t think so.
If an ISP is indeed too incompetent to manage two configurations, nothing is stopping them from deploying the State B config everywhere, as if there were nationwide net neutrality.
> The ISPs create two (or mor) versions of their packages that they can offer/operate in different states - this would be quite expensive (and I suspect in some cases quite difficult too)
I don't think this is really the case. ISP services are already very geographically fragmented since they involves so much local infrastructure. Users also (mostly) stay within state lines. Lots of ISPs already offer different pricing plans and features based on location. And there are tons of them which only operate within a specific region in the first place.
This is very different from auto manufacturing or something like Facebook which operates from a central source and will have a very hard time segmenting users by state.
This might be a personal impression, but there seems to be a reflexive (negative) response from many posters here regarding any new regulation that the EU produces.
I've been trying to wrap my head about whether that's different than the negative response about any regulation in general (including the US one), and I feel like it is more negative; as for why, I would only be speculating.
I have noticed this as well. Hacker News generally considers itself liberal but actually holds very conservative views (see any thread on gender equality). The EU is being positioned as a liberal organisation (whether it truly is or not) so in every EU related thread the free speech / anti regulation commentators come out in force
Alas when society feels fit to label things one way or another , they overlook the actual action and detail and with that, if it is something good (like this) they are sceptical and focus upon bad aspects and ignore the whole.
But when politics drives and runs with left/right mentality, they end up disenfranchising common sense more often than not and you end up politically with a seesaw effect - you get a controlling party that is one way, then after a while you end up with a party the other way to restore balance.
This is one of those wonderful moments in which the result is common sense on so many levels that we should (sure many do) see it for what it is - something wonderful.
But everybody has a bad day, political things of any form can bring out the worst in all of us, but decorum upon this forum, does a better job than most in regulating those aspects. For that, let us be thankful as I can only imagine the Twitter flavours of this very subject being played out and shudder.
But credit when it is due - thank you EU for this.
>Hacker News generally considers itself liberal but actually holds very conservative views...
I'm not sure that's entirely true. We're(1) a bunch of programmers. We are very sensitive to unintended consequences in complex systems. I think we just tend to be a little more careful with feel-good regulations that might produce these, along with being more evidence based in judging success.
(1) With all of the usual caveats about the monolithic "us".
I don't think it is about being cautious of unintended consequences in general. It is about being cautious of some unintended consequences and not caring about other unintended consequences.
The choice of which of these matters decides the politics.
If you realize that the null policy is also a policy, then there is no reason to be a priori more critical of active policies compared to the null policy.
The null policy always has more empirical validation because society clearly hasn't collapsed under it. This fact might be the essence of conservatism.
Even if the right to repair were a bad policy, it certainly wouldn't cause society to collapse. Nor would it destroy democracy or cause any other irreparable damage.
Implementing it merely risks a minor decrease in economic efficiency for a few years. The potential reward can last for an unlimited time. And there's a guaranteed reward too: Gaining knowledge on what policies work. We should do it even if we expected it to fail (see also VCs).
I know what you're getting at, and there is something there. However this argument is unfalsifiable.
No society ever collapsed due to policy on repairing washing machines. One could survive indefinitely in a sub-optimal policy regime on a topic of limited importance without collapsing.
If Hitler had not done anything, i.e. implemented the so-called null policy, nothing bad would have happened. Feel free to substitute with any other dictator if you want to avoid Godwin's law.
True, but what about intended consequences my friend. Companies obviously have a vested interest in getting us to buy new products, rather than have us repair the older ones. So, I guess a little regulation will be ok.
Every company wants to manufacture a washing machine once and then keep selling spare parts with 100% margin. No RnD expenses, no assembly line, no demo stands - pure profit!
That's like free printers with expensive ink cartridges.
I think that's generous. Yesterday several people were fervently arguing that discriminating in job advertisements against protected classes should be fine because it may be "more efficient". Talk about unintended consequences...
But maybe that's also what it feels like to become as relevant int he tech world as the US. There is no shortage of US-bashing in international tech discussions. As long as it stays good spirited, I don't mind.
HN seems to be pretty centric to me, but yes, by IT crowd standards it's probably as right as one can get.
"Very conservative views" on gender equality would ask for a niqab, female education ban and a mandatory dowry. I doubt you'll find here a lot of people sharing these views.
HN is generally liberal, with some conservative and libertarian elements. You're confusing liberal with accepting a particular set of theories (critical theory, post-structuralist/post-modernist value structures) that primarily belong to subgroups, one I'll term as "ultra progressive".
ultra progressives tend to believe the Government is the only force who can safeguard workers. Many other forms of liberal believe that while the Government has a role to play in setting boundaries for capitalism and engaging in non-capitalist activity (welfare, public education, etc) that it does not always act in the interest of the people.
This is likely part of what you see as "HN being conservative on gender equality" (paraphrasing). Most HNers seem to hold belief in equality of opportunity (classical liberal) vs equality of outcome (ultra progressive). In other words, the debate can be seen as whether it's necessary to have 50% of a given field be women and 50% be men, or simply for there to be an absence of a gender based discrimination. (And ultra progressives would likely respond that anything can be gender based discrimination, whereas a classic liberal would be looking for intent)
(Leaving my attempts at a neutral point of view and going into my own beliefs) One of the flaws in ultra progressiveism is that it's reductionist (a person is defined as a mix of attributes such as political affiliation, gender or lack thereof, social class, etc) which encourages an "us vs them" mentality. The issue ultra progressives face is that "us" is becoming an ever shrinking circle which now excludes most of their other liberal allies.
> ultra progressives tend to believe the Government is the only force who can safeguard workers.
My impression is that workers are pretty much the only disadvantaged group that ultra progressives do not care about. Apart from that, you're on point.
I think it stems from the fear of this representing a missed opportunity for them to make it, closed by regulators.
I believed that once, but companies show over and over again that the lack of regulation comes at a greater cost than their gains, and the gains for the society - and I, as a tax payer, am not willing to see the shit I help to pay for getting abused.
For example, Peter Thiel idea for the monopoly argument makes sense, but he doesn't account for (or doesn't want to): government pressure and greed.
The idea that the monopoly is the dream for tech development keeps showing it's no dream at all in the end, it's a nightmare with massive costs: mental health, international policy, environment, cultural, etc.
>but there seems to be a reflexive (negative) response from many posters here regarding any new regulation that the EU produces.
it's the audience of the website. Even though most people here seem to fall into the American liberal camp due to the fact that it's a tech site there's a strong "regulation=bad" undercurrent in the posting that's also been prevalent in the industry, in particular in SV for the last few decades.
I think that applies to American in a more general sense too. There's a real culture that regulation is bad for business and capitalism should trump all over priorities.
The fact the US is a pretty dysfunctional state by first world standards is also a factor. But you shouldn't oppose EU regulations because you don't trust the US government, that's just silly.
That's fine but I don't think it's a trust issue though (like you originally stated). I think it's usually more a case of freedom. Americans see regulation as oppression even when those regulations are in the consumers best interest. It's not that they don't trust their government (though I'm sure many don't), it's far more symbolic than that.
Take gun control for example, fire arms wouldn't get you far if you're taking on the government (which was the original purpose of America's gun laws). However many individuals will use every excuse under the sun to argue that gun control encroaches their basic freedoms despite all the evidence suggesting gun control would benefit society greatly.
It's a bit like how the UK's referendum was decided on a matter of "sovereignty" with many UK citizens believing leaving the EU gave them their sovereignty back. It makes very little since when you actually break down what "sovereignty" actually means, the actual relationship the UK has with the EU and even the terms of which the UK prospered when it was considered a "great nation" (namely the exploitation of developing countries). Yet many "Brits" still believe independence is the way forward because they don't identify themselves as being European.
I'm a big fan of regulation to maintain good markets / good practices.
I'm very sympathetic to the spirit of a lot of EU policies, but the actual laws seem a lot like "old man who doesn't understand internet writes law" and at best whiff entirely at the point.
Example, I think it is terribly misguided to think people care / read cookie banners and they're not helping / educating anyone.
I don't doubt there are a lot of conservative POVs regarding regulation on HN, but I propose that just as often folks are running into a sort of "narcissism of small differences" where I share a lot of the values those laws have .... but man it irks me to see them swing and miss so badly.
> Example, I think it is terribly misguided to think people care / read cookie banners and they're not helping / educating anyone.
But there have also been other events and developments that did (and do) help / educate people, and now the cookie banners help those people realise how utterly widespread the problem actually is.
It's slow, but awareness is growing, and even the ridiculous cookie banners play some part in it. Also, being ridiculous on the internet is not a failure state, there's quite a tradition of it.
If it was voluntary opt in then then you'd just click away once and that would be the sign that you didn't voluntarily opt in.
Voluntary opt in can work together with targeted ads:
- the customer can opt in to receive more relevant ads (hopefully). A note on the page with an explanation and a way to actively choose targeted would probably be OK with me and I guess some people would choose it.
- or the customer ignores the notice and get general or hopefully contextual ads
The current in-your-face-and-defaults-to-track-if-you-follow -the-defaults system however is not voluntary and not opt in IMO.
My guess is: They are not happy. They accept it because a lot of effort is put in dark patterns to make it seem unavoidable.
Also a lot of effort seems to have been put into making the opt-in alternative the default - to the point where I'm not comfortable calling it opt-in any more.
Recently there has been a backlash against "regulation" and I can only assume it's because people associate it with "over-regulation" or are simply not aware what its purpose is. It seems to be the kind of hot word that triggers mostly negative feelings so people don't care to hear the rest.
But I have yet to see a person demanding less regulation for something who didn't change their mind when faced with a problem with that something which could have been solved by (some) regulation.
There is regulation and there is regulation. I am full in for consumer protection type of regulation, especially the parts that helps the consumer against huge companies that one person cannot influence, but the government can.
In the same time there are lots of weird regulations, for example in some US states you need to have a training and a professional license to be a florist. In my country I had to take a 1.5 year training for something that can be learned in 3 weeks; I also had to take 9 exams every 2 years just to extend my pilot license, something that does not happen in other EU countries. Or taking a training (classroom and flight time) to be allowed to fly with a passenger in a 2 seater plane, and only if you have at least 150 hours a Pilot In Command. There is nothing like this anywhere else, it's just typical stupid regulation.
Another weird regulation is flying in Bulgarian airspace, where the class G (free airspace below flight level 105) is anything but free.
the only real negative is that it restricts who can perform the repair, namely "professionals". Will this lead to manufacturers using a certification system to limit who is a professional and who is not? Who determines who is a professional, how is that defined? Is there a limit on how much parts can cost? Won't do much good as in some appliances single assemblies can cost nearly as much as the new appliance
Excellent points and indeed, may open up an avenue that sure - you get the right to repair but the parts cost more than buying a new with the guarantee/warranty aspect etc etc.
But let's see how it pans out. A good step in the right direction, not the goal everybody wants, but a good first step at least.
Which is pretty crazy. My experience as someone from the UK is EU regulation has consistently made my life better.
The big thing that sticks out for me is mobile phones: before EU regs, every manufacturer and phone variant had a different charging cable and roaming charges were insane.
Likewise, for all the hate it got here, GDPR has been amazing from my perspective. It was rare before to have a website that actually let you delete anything, it was just "deactivate your account" where they kept all your data. Now most sites offer true deletion.
Meanwhile, the public got sold on Brexit with a consistent diet of rubbish articles from the Mail and friends about bent bananas being banned.
EU regulations cut both ways, but so many are good:
- EU phone roaming makes travel much less stressful, independent of the cost factor, which at $0 is also great.
- EU immigration rules for 3rd country partners means it only requires about 3 or 4 hours work and 51 euros in total and only proof of 6 months co-habitation.
- EU mandated ESC and TPMS in cars means my bottom of the range Kia Rio had two really valuable features while maintaining a really low price.
On the other hand:
- I can't get a mortgage because my income is not denominated in euros because others have been burnt by cross currency loans
> - I can't get a mortgage because my income is not denominated in euros because others have been burnt by cross currency loans
this isn't the correct thread to discuss this but i'll bite - it isn't that others were burnt, it's that the banks were stupid enough to actually loan out as much money in a currency that people hadn't had income in and when the inevitable came, it was the banks that had bigger problems. i don't want the bank to lose my money if you and a few thousand others suddenly default on their mortgage at the same time.
The problem was roaming charges in Europe weren't always cheap, often required separate SIM cards and it was a pain to do. Doubly so when you consider how the different countries in mainland Europe are effectively borderless.
The EU only steps in when corporations have already failed to regulate themselves.
Corporations don't regulate themself. Why would they choose to regulate themself if that means higher cost or less margin or less business opportunities (like selling assault weapons to civilian population) ?
Market can bring prices down if competing corporations in the same sector don't agree to set prices for the same range of services of products. That's it.
Self-regulation _can_ work... if the state is standing there with a big stick willing to use it if the market doesn't regulate itself well.
As a case study, take advertising in the UK.
The Advertising Standards Authority is a Big Deal. It can ban advertising on TV, in print, on billboards and online. Its decisions regularly make the headlines.[0]
It also has no statutory basis, it's a private limited liability company, and they receive no money from government.[1]
In the general sense you're right however I think you're drifting into a philosophical point. Normally it makes more sense to let businesses have a certain amount of freedom to operate and only step in when necessary. The hard part is agreeing where "necessary" is. For example EU tends to have a different perspective to the US on when industries should be regulated.
US telecoms costs are insane though. Paying less than $50 is basically impossible for a decent amount of data (5+GB). Google Fi for example is $70 + tax
In the UK, it's hard to spend more than £20/month (for sim only at least)
Mint [1], is $20/mo for unlimited data (throttled after 8GB), using the T-Mobile network. You get a discount for committing to a time period such as 1 year.
Visible [2] is $40/mo for "unlimited everything" (data, calls, text). This is Verizon's low-cost product on their own network.
Simple [3] is $40/mo for 15 GB, also using T-Mobile. You're throttled to 2G after that, though.
These are MVNOs, which are resellers that don't own their own networks. Traffic is deprioritized compared to the parent network's "native" customers. In practice, you might not notice at all, depending on how you use it. Deprioritization really only happens during congestion. During rush hour on the NYC subway might be a time you'd be affected, for example.
I don't think lower population density explains it fully, for example Australia has extremely reasonable phone plans - you can get 15GB data/unlimited talk/unlimited text for AUD$55/month (USD$37/month) [1], and it gets even cheaper if you get 12 months up front [2].
There’s a huge, well-funded industry pushing skepticism of regulation in most of the English-speaking world. In both the US and UK, those journalists and lobbyists use EU as their default example of excess with all sorts of exaggeration and misrepresentation[1]. We like to tell ourselves that we’re not so easily influenced but, as the comments here regularly demonstrate, those companies pay for these efforts because they are influential.
It's because there is a strong tendency for EU overregulation. This one sounds good to me in principle (I don't know about the implementation).
Recent examples: it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters. In the Netherlands, 80% of firefighers are volunteers. The current system works very well, and this is new regulation is likely to cause massive problems. It will be impossible the maintain current quality, because it is impossible to maintain a huge paid workforce just for occasional large incidents. For example, in a recent large fire there were over a hundred firefighters active, most of them volunteers. Moreover many volunteers do it for fun, or to contribute something to society, and do not want to be a paid firefighter, or would not be able to because of their main job. Thanks, EU.
Another one: EU wants to register every single chicken. Not just commercial chicken farms, every single chicken would have to be registered, even for hobbyists having a few chickens running around in their back yard.
A quick Google search tells me that the "new regulation" re firefighters you're talking about is a recent court ruling about the working time directive from 2003. Volunteer firefighters are a huge part of the firefighter workforce in many EU countries including Germany (97%) and France (78%) so I highly doubt what you're insinuating will happen.
I read about it in Dutch news, which also mentioned that other countries also have volunteer firefighting forces, but I didn't look up their numbers. Various officials here said it would have big implications and keeping the system as it is would be impossible. So some law or regulation would have to change. Incidentally this is a good example of why EU regulations can be so problematic: if this example is fixed, it will be because many countries have large volunteer forces so the problem cannot be ignored. But if the regulation happens to affect just one or a few smaller countries you might be out of luck. Not everything can be regulated centrally without unintended consequences.
Read the replies to your original post, there was no new regulation, whatever you read in the news was made up. In the british press there is a constant stream of fabricated stories about EU "regulations" that take a cursory google to disprove.
It's so bad in the UK that some years ago the EU set up a "British Euromyths" blog, to highlight all the Daily Mail type "EU about to ban breathing!" stories. The pieces are mainly from the expected suspects.
It's so bad that the majority of people from deprived areas of the UK, places neglected by their own national government but do receive millions in EU funding still believed they would be better off leaving the EU. It's total madness.
There's plenty of generalizations and simplifications of issues, and in a few newspapers the tone is generally more critical of the EU. But most mainstream newspapers are actually quite pro-EU in general.
2. I was mainly talking about about (the effect of) overregulation in general, I did not say there is a specific regulation re volunteer firefighters. But if the implied problems become reality, it would be because of interpretation of laws and regulations.
Yes, there was a lawsuit in Belgium. And no, that's not the main issue that was reported here. Lawyers conducted a study of the practice of Dutch firefighting on behalve of the Ministry of Justice and Security, and concluded that the way our system is set up contradicts EU law. The main issue is that volunteer firefighters do almost exactly the same work as paid firefighers.
3. That's point 1.
4. This is exactly my more general concern about the EU: unintended consequences are inevitable when you are centralizing laws and regulations to the most detailed levels for over two dozen countries with very different contexts. There are plenty of EU laws and regulations for which I think the intent is very sensible, but where implementation can be problematic, or problematic for specific subsets of the regulation, or specific countries/regions.
5. I never said they happened, I said "will". Perhaps I should have said "may" since the problem might still be addressed somehow. But even if it is adressed, in the case of the Netherlands a massive change would be necessary. According to lawyers and law professors who have studied the problem in the Dutch context.
So no, not misinformation. I just worded it somewhat imprecise.
But there is no issue really, just a case where the states didn't respect EU laws that they themselves wanted.
The EU law states no worker can work more than X hours a week, for the health benefit of the citizens. A court ruled that the volunteer firefighters time counts as working time. So now we need to include that in how we make them work when we need.
Knowing my country (France), I'm sure it will be some sort of "the hours worked as voluntary firefighter are not due to their other employer, but will still be paid probably by the state or by the employer but with according tax deduction", something like this.
So now comes a choice; either we think it's unhealthy for people to work more than 42 hours a week (and we did since we voted this in), and then it makes sense. Or we don't, and then we're free to change the regulation. Or we think some form or work shouldn't count against that limit (such as public work for emergency services) and we can update the regulation.
Saying we shouldn't make regulation because sometime we may have to redefine more precisely some of its details when the situation arise makes very little sense to me.
But that's not quite the problem we appear to have here in NL. There's a law whose basic intent is that you cannot use volunteer workers for what should actually be paid work. Here volunteers do almost exactly the same work as professional firefighters and therefore they should be paid employees under this law. Applying this to volunteer firefighters is an unintended consequence, but it's obligatory.
> Saying we shouldn't make regulation because sometime we may have to redefine more precisely some of its details when the situation arise makes very little sense to me.
My concern is both practical and philosophical: our firefighting system will very likely be reorganized; this is going to cost a lot of money and time, volunteers are likely to quit if things are no longer easily combined with their job, quality would almost certainly drop (since it's already high), and then, hopefully, in the end we still have a functioning firefighting service. But all that work will not actually solve any problem, it's just for complying with regulations.
On the philosphical end: the complexity and the number of laws and regulations keeps growing, and so does the scale at which they're applied. I think such unintended consequences will keep coming up at the local level, far from where they originated centrally, and in the long run it will be increasingly difficult to solve these problems.
But the political/legal situation is still the same really.
We have this law to avoid abusing "free" people as volunteer, which eg in France is important against lots of things like illegal immigrant ("I don't pay you but you can sleep there !"), and to ensure egality (in France we have an even stricter law which is basically "for the same work, same salary", to avoid discrimination against various ethnics, gender, age ... difference).
If you / the NL people are saying this cause an issue, and the law should be changed to, for exemple, not include free work done for emergency public services, then it simply means we need to add a precision to the law to cover that specific case.
And if it isn't done, then it means "all those affected countries" either didn't push for it or failed to convince the whole of the EU to change the regulation.
EU regulation are done by EU MPs all coming from their respective EU countries to improve the situation there, they don't implement things randomly in a vacuum. If the regulation needs to be adapted, it's easy, given those who want it can make a case for it.
My fundamental concern is the scale mismatch. If you notice the problem locally, it can be very hard and potentially impossible to address it locally, because EU-wide regulations increasingly take precedence.
That is one of the reasons for the EU being so complicated. To counter the effect there is not only the Parliament which has to approve a new rule, but also the EU Council, the later in some areas even unanimously.
There are different blockers in the system so that a (slim) majority can't simply overrule a minority.
According to [1], what happened was that volunteers were recognised as workers by ECJ and as such their time on call at home can count towards their weekly worked time. An older directive (2003) sets out a maximum working time which I am sure nobody is complaining about, and if anything in many member states people claim to be working to many hours. Individuals can and could previously opt-out of these limits. Nothing new under the sun here.
It is also clear that no "regultation" is being planned.
> it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters
Nope. Not even close. A firefighter in Belgium sued because he said that on-call time is work, and the court decided in his favour. This caused concern that generalising this could cause problems. However, the EU was aware of these concerns and apparently this case cannot be generalised in this way:
I don't know how it works in Belgium, but in Germany, the voluntary firefighters (which is almost all of them), simply continue to be paid by their main employers when active. The employer can then recover this from the responsible government organisation.
For this, the application of the working time directive changes...nothing. Also for standby times during working hours, for which the employee is working for his main employer, so again no change. I am guessing (but not sure) that the issue is on-call time when the employee is not working for his main employer.
People have raised concerns that this might have the potential to negatively affect volunteer firefighting. But as far as I know, nothing has actually happened, and apparently nothing will.
So as so often, almost complete misinformation:
1. The EU will not make it "illegal" to have volunteer firefighters.
2. It was actually a lawsuit, not a regulation.
3. It was about working time, not about making volunteer firefighters illegal.
4. So at most it would have been an unintended consequence of a good and necessary regulation.
5. However, these unintended consequences were only imaginary, they never happened.
6. The EU bodies were fully aware of the importance of volunteer firefighters.
7. Had there been unintended consequences, they would have mostly been of the formal variety that affect local authorities.
> every single chicken [..] registered, even for hobbyists having a few chickens
There is a statement that there should be exceptions for pet animals, but these exceptions did not make it into the regulation for chickens. The Netherlands argued for this but did not find support, and is currently trying to arrange for exceptions. It is not fake news.
There's nothing in this that requires pet keepers to register their animals. There's no specific mention of chickens (a few mention of "chicks or hatchlings of other species")
If for some reason you believe "obligation of operators to register establishments" would apply to individual pet owners (I don't believe it does, as earlier in the document "pet keepers" are separate from "operators") - there's a clause to allow exceptions: "Member States may exempt from the registration requirement certain categories of establishments posing an insignificant risk"
The only thing in the entire document that applies to "pet keepers" is ... [to] be responsible for:
(i) the health of kept animals;
(ii) prudent and responsible use of veterinary medicines, without prejudice to the role and responsibility of veterinarians,
(iii) minimising the risk of the spread of diseases;
(iv) good animal husbandry;
There are some further restrictions to do with moving pet animals between member states
"For example, holders who only have a few pieces of poultry must also comply with requirements for I&R and there will also be obligations for holders of animal species for which no requirements currently exist, such as bees, bumble bees and camel-like animals. The Netherlands has argued against these requirements when drafting these new regulations, but received little support from other member states and the EC. The EC indicated that it can allow Member States to grant exceptions to these obligations."
So it's up to member states if they want to require owners of pet chickens to register them
That's exactly what I was saying with "and is currently trying to arrange for exceptions." The EC could allow exceptions, but they haven't yet actually allowed for them.
OK, so what's the problem? After all, this won't come into effect until about a year and a half from now and it seems that there is agreement that there should be exceptions.
Given that, what makes you certain that there won't be exceptions?
> is currently trying to arrange for exceptions
You seem to be certain that this will not succeed. Why?
> It is not fake news.
Hmm...it's not in effect, there seems to be some agreement that there should be exceptions and exceptions are being worked on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The problem is that this exception is not currently in place, and that it is still uncertain if it will be possible to implement. The fact that the European Commission has previously disregarded this specific concern despite attempts to have it addressed does not inspire confidence.
I don't know what will happen, but this situation is concerning to many people. Also consider that the news plays a role in policy making (for better or worse), i.e. some added pressure from advocates may help to get the needed exceptions in place.
2. I was mainly talking about about (the effect of) overregulation in general, I did not say there is a specific regulation re volunteer firefighters. But if the implied problems become reality, it would be because of interpretation of laws and regulations.
Yes, there was a lawsuit in Belgium. And no, that's not the main issue that was reported here. Lawyers conducted a study of the practice of Dutch firefighting on behalve of the Ministry of Justice and Security, and concluded that the way our system is set up contradicts EU law. The main issue is that volunteer firefighters do almost exactly the same work as paid firefighers.
3. That's point 1.
4. This is exactly my more general concern about the EU: unintended consequences are inevitable when you are centralizing laws and regulations to the most detailed levels for over two dozen countries with very different contexts. There are plenty of EU laws and regulations for which I think the intent is very sensible, but where implementation can be problematic, or problematic for specific subsets of the regulation, or specific countries/regions.
5. I never said they happened, I said "will". Perhaps I should have said "may" since the problem might still be addressed somehow. But even if it is adressed, in the case of the Netherlands a massive change would be necessary. According to lawyers and law professors who have studied the problem in the Dutch context.
So no, not misinformation. I just worded it somewhat imprecise.
> I should have said "impossible" rather than illegal
And that would have been still wrong, though with less hyperbole.
> So no, not misinformation. I just worded it somewhat imprecise.
From: there was an isolated case that, had it been generalisable, had the potential for making some aspects of voluntary fire brigades trickier if not addressed, but that actually wasn't generalisable and there was actually no problem at all to "it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters" is not "somewhat imprecise", it is complete misinformation.
Pretty much the definition of misinformation, in fact.
Because this is exactly how a lot of the misinformation regarding the EU works: you take something highly technical, localised and actually benign, then take 2nd hand reports of people who misunderstood the implications/consequences, take those misunderstandings as fact, extrapolate from them and then ratchet up the hyperbole to 11.
And no, the fact that lawyers did a study doesn't really change any of this. The EU is a political body, and the largest member states have large or almost exclusively voluntary fire-departments. So even if the interpretation were correct, which from all I have seen it is absolutely not, it would simply (a) not be applied and/or (b) changed.
In particular: the working time directive is, as the name says, a directive. This means it just specifies some goal(s) to accomplish, and it is up to the member states to implement national legislation to accomplish those goals. So if they need to carve out exceptions for volunteer fire departments, they can do that.
So yes: "it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters" is just wrong and not just a slight imprecision, but pure misinformation.
> From: there was an isolated case that, had it been generalisable [...]
I reiterate that the isolated case you're referring to was not the motivation of experts saying the Dutch system will have to be reorganized. Why don't you acknowledge that maybe there is an actual problem here, which perhaps doesn't apply in other contexts? I.e. maybe the German and French volunteer firefighters are organized in such a way that there is no problem?
The original claim was "it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters."
> maybe the German and French volunteer firefighters are organized in such a way that there is no problem?
I sincerely doubt it. Particularly because those concerns apparently were raised in both France and Germany. Anyway, if you can find some evidence that this is the case, please feel free to share.
The chicken thing sounds like over-regulation, but it's already reality for ungulates, and I suspect it's tied into disease control. We really don't want a situation where the national chicken industry is wrecked by an outbreak of bird flu that can't be controlled because we don't know where the chickens are.
On the other hand, one thing the EU is genuinely bad at is the "small operator" exemptions which UK law is generally good at. They very rarely exist in EU law.
The chicken thing can be a large human health issue. It might not seem like they are a heath hazard, but many extremely deadly flu viruses make the chicken human jump.
Those criticisms are really only informative if you'd also give the purported reasons for implementing those regulations, otherwise we can't weigh them.
That's 100% been the case - I am familiar with the industry and they have been more than willing to not make any margin in order to get the clients they want (big names, or poach from the competition)
That strategy works great, so long as you have unlimited funding.
A bit cynical, but not unfair. Many people in the US persistently cling to the idea that solution implemented and working (albeit imperfectly) in other parts of the world will not work in the US due to XYZ.
Which in a way, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Solutions implemented in the rest of the world will not work in the US because most people don't believe they will, or that the US is not capable of radical change (that is, radical change not driven by an individual or a corporate desire for profit)
Well I mean comparing US to individual European countries usually ignores the fact that most of the countries quoted have homogenous population with numbers closer to large US cities like New York than the entire US. If you compare US to EU you see that EU is less rosy with it's own underdeveloped regions that and the difference between richest and poorest country in EU is probably worse than the difference between states in US, relocating between states in US is simpler, etc. etc. Also decision making at EU level Europe is waay harder than the US. So instead of talking US in aggregate why not do those changes state level where it makes sense - just like they are done in the Europe.
Indeed. This is completely unrelated to the details of the case - it is simply unacceptable that a higher court can effectively gag a lower court from referring to the EU court.
The brazen contempt for the spirit of the law that Facebook (among many other companies) display never ceases to amaze me.
It is unsurprising, given the spirit of capitalism, that companies behave in a cut-throat manner - it's a race to the bottom. Whoever doesn't 'go there' will be surpassed by whatever narcissistic corp is willing to go there. This is simply the way everything is wired up to work.
Corporations, and the people that run them, will test the limits of acceptability all the time just to get the edge on the competition - it's how they survive.
Unsurprising given not the nature of Capitalism, but of humankind. Capitalism was conceptualized as the most effective method of containing these impulses. But don’t assume this “race to the bottom” doesn’t exist outside of capitalism, especially considering the rich history showing the opposite. Is there a socialist government where the powerful aren’t rich in a much more inequitable distribution of wealth (for what little they create)?
>Capitalism was conceptualized as the most effective method of containing these impulses.
This is terribly incorrect. It only increases these impulses, competition is at its heart. Everything becomes gamified, a competition, a race to the top while simultaneously pushing everyone else to the bottom.
I'm really interested to watch some of the markets pop up in Cuba because I think there needs to be a healthy balance between Capitalism and Socialism for innovation, and care for the workers who produce literally everything.
Ironic that you picked Cuba when just a few weeks ago Castro’s grandson made the news for displaying his inordinate amount of wealth. In a country so our hospitals outside of the capital are indistinguishable from abandoned buildings, how does someone like that become filthy rich? It’s not like socialist countries don’t have greed and theft of national wealth, it’s just the people doing it are literally the government and hide it better - also note their greed and theft goes mostly unchecked.
I don't see what other social structures have to do with my point. You can't just say 'hey other stuff is shit too' as an argument against me saying 'this thing here is broken sometimes'.
My point was we should look deeply at the society we are invested in and understand that the things we endorse and benefit from daily have intrinsic side-effects.
Nothing is perfect, of course object to what you don't like, but be grown up enough to understand your part in it and humble enough to understand no system is perfect.
There's a bit of longer-term reputation damage which is significant in an industry dominated by companies who tend to think over the span of decades rather than quarters.
One fairly big serviced offices company pulled the "separate entities" trick in one of the previous recessions, and some of the major landlords in that country still to this day, more than a decade later, refuse to do business with them.
