22 ms·

I honestly get giggles from how unprepared they are culturally for what becoming America-like will do to them. Does anyone else? American-like but with no neg

I honestly get giggles from how unprepared they are culturally for what becoming America-like will do to them. Does anyone else? American-like but with no negotiating leverage and having burned all the bridges to the other economic unions.

heywherelogingo 6y ago
GDPR is three years old.
andy_ppp 6y ago
They get to asset strip the country before anyone realises right?
lanevorockz 6y ago
The EU as a political union exists a little over a decade, if anything the UK never adapted to it.
- asutekku 6y ago
  But they benefited from the EU in a way which is no more possible.
- HugoDaniel 6y ago
  Mistaking the EU, the political union as an evolved form of the Rome treaty, with Euro, the coin. All that with the tone of absolute certainty and authority. Hacker News has reached new lows :(
  - dataduck 6y ago
    Come on, that's not fair. The EEC was a very different beast to today's EU. The modern form of the EU could certainly be argued as starting with the Treaty of Lisbon.
    - orwin 6y ago
      Maastrich yes, Lisbon? It only set into laws stuff that were already existing and done, as well as provisioning for "unexpected stuff" (brexit art 50 was provisioned in the treaty of lisbon i think). But the treaty of Lisbon changed almost nothing in reality. At least, not enough to warrant the birth of "Modern EU"
      - dataduck 6y ago
        Perhaps Maastricht might be a better place to draw the line. But it's not like the changes at Lisbon were trivial; for example, changing unanimous voting to majority was a qualitative change in the character of the organization. My argument is that the GP by lanevorockz was pretty obviously referring to Lisbon, and that the reply by HugoDaniel seemed quite disingenuous in that light.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    That's one of the issues on the internet nowadays; people use their soapbox to present a thought as fact. Even if they're being called out on it and proven wrong, the statement is made and a seed is planted in someone's brain. It's like newspaper headlines that say X, but (have to) nuance it in the article itself. Except that Twitter doesn't support articles, so it's only headlines.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - junippor 6y ago
    HN has always been bottom of the barrel. Bunch of people repeating memes to each other.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  You should teach history at college.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I hope this is a typo and you mean to write "The EUR as a monetary union". The euro is truly an unremarkable currency and I'm not sure that the EU would be much worse without it. It's equally likely that the EU would have done much better without the euro. I can't blame the UK for avoiding the euro.
reader_mode 6y ago
Yeah we saw the mighty EU negotiation leverage with COVID vaccine... UK market is large enough to stand on it's own and EU has been grossly incompetent in public for a while now. There's going to be downsides for sure but becoming "America like" is not going to be one of them.
- tomelders 6y ago
  You're cherry picking.
  - oytis 6y ago
    It is a huge cherry though, and I believe we're yet to see the full economic effect of EU lagging behind US and UK in vaccinations.
  - acta_non_verba 6y ago
    This is exactly the kind of situation Government is for. Protecting its people from a foe that can only be defeated at a national level. The European Union has categorically failed, and if it survives this, it will need huge amounts of change.
  - inops 6y ago
    Which is exactly what is done with Britain. News item, queue "they get what they deserve". How about the EU gets what it deserves for being a undemocratic, big bungling bureaucracy?
  - reader_mode 6y ago
    No I'm not - EU is the least relevant big player on the global scale, economically and militarily - mostly because it's such a weak union of extremely diverse countries with weak common identity (as demonstrated by squabbles at any crisis - financial, COVID, immigration, etc.) It makes sense for smaller countries like mine (Croatia) because of free travel, easier access to a larger market, lower cost of doing business, and truly being too small to negotiate good terms on a global scale. It probably makes a lot less sense for UK which can negotiate it's own terms with other global powers that fit them much better. I have no doubt there will be many negatives to Brexit, but as demonstrated by COVID situation there's a huge opportunity for UK - for example I suspect they can secure better trade deals with the US without having to worry about the protectionist interests pushed by other EU members.
postingawayonhn 6y ago
Who said they're becoming America-like. More like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc. like.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Not even - we will become a right wing basket case with a brand new nuclear weapons system and a failing economy and zero safeguards about those in power. This lot are bad but there is the possibility of something much much worse.
  - carmen_sandiego 6y ago
    Clearly there are only two possibilities. Being in the EU or being a "a right wing basket case with a brand new nuclear weapons system and a failing economy and zero safeguards about those in power". There are no other types of country.
    - andy_ppp 6y ago
      I wasn't clear in my comment - I think the decision making to avoid compliance with the EU (even when it is sensible) is going to cause big problems for the UK economy and if that get's really bad the public seem determined to vote for more and more right wing governments out of fear. I think it's a reasonable concern with the lack of safeguards in the British system of government.
      - carmen_sandiego 6y ago
        I think you're being a bit sensationalist. E.g. people mock 'Singapore on Thames' but do you really think Singapore is a right-wing hellscape? It has many of the same systems the UK does.
        tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        You could hardly call it a democracy.
boomskats 6y ago
It's unclear whether the 'they' you refer to are the British people, or the class of ruling individuals who know exactly what they're doing and are set to profit immensely. (I'm aware that all sounds quite America-like already)
- CaptainZapp 6y ago
  > or the class of ruling individuals who know exactly what they're doing and are set to profit immensely. I'm really not sure about that. I agree that may be the case with some of those ruling individuals. My impression is that Johnson doesn't believe in anything, except his personal interest and profit. Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.
  - cassianoleal 6y ago
    > Johnson doesn't believe in anything, except his personal interest and profit. > Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers. My impression is that they all have those same beliefs - their personal interest and profit.
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      Which is silly (silly on Bojo's part, I mean) to set the country on a path to economic decline and cultural irrelevance because why be a king of an impoverished country instead of being a citizen in an advanced economy? (Clarification: I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. The UK won't become impoverished or really stop being an advanced-economy, but it's still going to be far poorer (in a total GDP and PPP sense) than it would be had this whole Brexit business never happened.
      - WanderPanda 6y ago
        Why is everyone so sure about your last paragraph? You could say the same for the EU block and even have more historical evidence of supranations falling apart.
jleask 6y ago
48% of us realized this
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  This is the thing that pissed me off the most about the referendum. The result was touted as an overwhelming majority but in fact the percentages are well within the margin for error on a poll that wasn't very well defined from the outset (ie what "leave" meant was different for different people). The only thing the EU referendum conclusively demonstrated was how easily manipulated people are by the media they consume.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    I see angry Europhobes on Twitter being responded to with "you won get over it" quite a bit these days...
  - Hitton 6y ago
    I think it was fitting, considering how UK joined the EU in the first place (look up Maastricht Treaty if you don't remember it).
    - hnlmorg 6y ago
      No it's not fitting. You don't make trillion pound economic, social and political decisions based on the whim of a popular vote. At least not unless you have powerful allies in the media and a personal interest to gain. Which is the real crux of the referendum was about. It was never about us regular folk and entirely about the self interests of those in charge. We were just pawns in a much larger game of power. Let's back that claim up with some examples: Why the referendum was called in the first place? Cameron never wanted a referendum but did so as an attempt to unify the Conservative party because with the right wing opinions fragmenting between multiple parties the Tories were starting to lose dominance (more parties within a set demographic on a first past the post electoral system means fewer votes for any particular party within that demographic). When the Conservatives had a near monopoly in the centre and right wing policies it meant that left wing parties could never catch up due to how fragmented they are (Green, Labour, SNP, local independents, etc) so left wing voters have always had to vote a little more tactically and go for the party most likely to win in their area and hope for a coalition. So the original goal for the referendum wasn't about addressing European issues but instead about monopolising the right wing vote which was getting fragmented by nationalist parties. Cameron assumed it was an easy win and that he could curb the tide of MPs leaving his party for more nationalistic counterparts. He's even gone on record stating this and how it turned into an epic own goal. With regards to whether we would have been better off in or out of the EU -- frankly that's one argument I don't want to get drawn into because, frankly, nobody actually knows. Most of the arguments on both sides of the debate were FUD and the most honest point anyone made was "it's complicated and we don't really know for sure."
aidos 6y ago
Not that I voted for this, but what’s done is done. And now that it is, I’d personally like to take the wins where we can get them. Hoping we see the light, and the blight that is the cookie law goes the way of the dodos.
- Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  The cookie law is like those plaque disclosing tablets you can chew to figure out if you are brushing right. If your teeth turn out blighted all blue/purple, you generally don't blame the tablets. ;-)
  - aidos 6y ago
    Ha! Following your analogy ... then you just discover that everyone’s teeth are purple and you’re struggling to concentrate on what they’re saying because it’s distracting. Meanwhile, nobody’s teeth got any cleaner. It’s really just theatre and on balance it makes the internet a crummier experience.
    - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
      Actually, there's plenty of people with white teeth. Meanwhile, the intent is to avoid the people with purple teeth until they learn to brush responsibly. ;-) (Or if you truly must interact with them: use a lot of ad blockers and privacy tools; because you know what you're getting into)
      - aidos 6y ago
        I'm totally good with there being laws about this as I too want to see less tracking and data sharing. But the implementation is terrible and anybody who thinks that it's fixed anything at all is just kidding themselves. I would rather bad actors were punished and enforced cookie banners were eliminated.
        Kim_Bruning 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
I have many British friends who were absolutely against this, I also know a former boss who was very public about his Brexit vote and like many of those who voted for it, will be too old to have to deal with the consequences of this decision. If anything I think it is rather unfair to hear people from other EU countries treating this process as something along the lines of 'suits them' and 'they've made their bed'. When in reality a large chunk of them have pretty much not agreed to any of this but are still set to suffer the consequences.
- krageon 6y ago
  > a large chunk of them have pretty much not agreed Yes, but a far larger chunk has. Every country gets the leaders it deserves and the UK is no exception.
  - modo_mario 6y ago
    Tbh simply based on the amount of elderly voters that died since it's likely that majority is gone by now. At least so I've read in some article months ago. All things considered it was relatively close so not exactly a far larger chunk. I don't have any spite towards the British people but I do hope that the EU will act in EU interest which means facilitating the return of financial services that shifted towards London since they joined and not letting the UK and whatever the borderdeal ends up as serve as a loop to ignore single market regulations.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      From 2018: "there are some demographic trends that will influence opinion in future. These changes will tend to pull British public opinion in a pro-European direction, and should be sufficient to produce a majority of 52%-48% for ‘Remain’ in 2021" https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/05/01/demographic-trends-will-pull-british-public-opinion-in-a-pro-european-direction/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/05/01/demographic-trends...
    - blibble 6y ago
      Leave would likely win by a bigger majority if the referendum was repeated today, because the UK didn't collapse on leaving also add the EU's disastrous vaccine procurement scheme, combined with its attempt to obscure its total incompetence with petulant nationalistic flailing
callamdelaney 6y ago
In terms of economy why not? The USA is equal in GDP to the entire EU, and it seems much more efficient to deal with them, an actual country, than 27 odd countries whom all have their own agenda and are masquerading as one country. Of course it's very fashionable on the internet to shit on brexit. "haha brits be dumb cus independent" - I can only imagine what sort of insecurity you're dealing with about your own country that you have to resort to this.
- spiderfarmer 6y ago
  Yes, "In terms of economy" why not. Just ignore every other benefit of the EU to make your case.
  - callamdelaney 6y ago
    I'd suggest that there aren't any other benefits of the EU.
    - SirHound 6y ago
      As a Brit living in it I would tend to disagree. By the way if you're a leaver I've been looking for someone to cover the additional costs you've voted to put on me, DM if interested.
      - callamdelaney 6y ago
        Ah yes, the common myth that before the EU nobody could live in any other country which is now a constituent of the EU.
        SirHound 6y ago
        It isn't a myth, there's a marked difference between having the right to live somewhere and merely the possibility. Before, it was my right to live in the Netherlands. Now, it is just a possibility. Thanks to the Withdrawal Agreement, because I already live here, I was given the "right" to apply for a residency, which like 99% of applicants, I received. I can now enjoy that for 5 years, after which I will need sponsorship from a company. This sponsorship is a key difference, which anyone who has moved to the US can attest to. When your continued existence in a country is contingent on workplace sponsorship the power dynamics between you and your employer are really quite different. In addition, it's one thing for me in a skilled occupation to be able to leave the country. But I have a friend whose boyfriend may be coming here on an art scholarship. She isn't in a skilled occupation. Before, she would have had the right to come here too. Now, I'm pretty doubtful that she'll be able to join him. At 24 and probably unlikely to ever leave the UK I wouldn't expect you to understand any of this. But it is the lived reality, previously of every British person leaving the EU and now every British person who leaves the UK. Edit: But of course, I'm not the first person to explain this to you, and it's not the last time you'll bray to the cheap seats with this mischaracterisation.
bb123 6y ago
Why is it inevitable that the UK will become like America? There are plenty of independent Algo-States that are nothing like it. Australia, New Zealand, Canada for example. This comment seems to be borne out spite more than any kind of logic.
- carmen_sandiego 6y ago
  I have no idea why but the EU/Brexit is one subject where HN comment quality falls apart. I would have assumed most people here are Americans, so not really emotionally invested in their 'side'. But this comment section is full of Twitter hot take type stuff.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    The same thing happened with Trump, and American flashpoint politics more generally. Note that it's morning in Europe, and as such there will be lots of British/European people around, for whom Brexit is a bigger deal.
  - bb123 6y ago
    I think given the timezone difference, most people on here this time of day are probably in the UK/Europe. I guess the emotive nature of the subject is showing through.
  - brmgb 6y ago
    To be honest, there is little emotional investment in Europe regarding Brexit. People wanted to be done with it as the process was wasting valuable union time and there was a feeling it was needlessly draging on but from what I have seen Europeans actually care very little about the UK. Brexit mostly was and remains a domestic issue which is why it's such a touchy subject on HN where there is probably a significant number of Britons commenting.
    - avian 6y ago
      > there is little emotional investment in Europe regarding Brexit As someone from the continental Europe, this is not at all my experience, but I'm sure this depends on the specific social bubble I'm in. There are plenty of people around that had their lives complicated because of it, enough that most people I know have very strong feelings about it.
adflux 6y ago
We'll see. Seems like not being part of a larger "union" has allowed them to start vaccinating at 3 times the pace of its European neighbours. Historically, power removed further from the people does not benefit the people. There are very few "economies of scale" in politics. As the system grows larger, accountability becomes more difficult and decision making is harder and harder. Nice example is Iceland. after the 2008 crash. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-to-iceland-where-bad-bankers-go-to-prison https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-t...
- kawsper 6y ago
  If the UK was not leaving the EU, the country may have chosen to follow this “common strategy” and move at the same pace as other members. However, it is not a legal requirement. https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-vaccine-brexit/ https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-vaccine-brexit/
  - adflux 6y ago
    I am not talking about the speed of vaccine approval. The only thing I am seeing is that the UK is vaccinating at an incredible pace compared to even the richest European countries.
seanhandley 6y ago
I live in the UK and, like 49% of the turnout, I did not vote for this. Trade blocs rely on geographical proximity to be most effective but this whole thing is an ideologically motivated change, rather than one rooted in pragmatism. Giggle count: zero.
klingon78 6y ago
The US has a similar privacy law in California they must support, and many companies have presence globally, so they are having to deal with this in the following ways, like many others. GDPR has given a 50M EUR handslap to Google and similar to some other large companies[1] while seriously hurting smaller companies with existing custom web applications for whom they may not even have someone on staff to modify those to be GDPR-compliant. Small businesses like others must determine what PII is, how to anonymize it, and how to remove it when users request their PII to be removed. PII could be in their server logs or other locations that are inaccessible to most employees of the business. Backups might be excluded from PII scrubbing, but so much is unclear. Let’s also talk about what it doesn’t protect. PCI, not GDPR, attempts to provide protection for cardholder data. GDPR doesn’t protect against PII that was previously shared. Nor does it protect from data being stolen, unless the user had their data removed prior. [1]- https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2020/ https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2...
- Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  It's actually fairly easy to be GDPR compliant almost by default, TBQH. It either takes a lot of effort or a lot of laziness to somehow end up non-compliant.
  - klingon78 6y ago
    Removing or anonymizing PII in a large system not already designed for PII removal or one you don’t have resources to manage can be painful. Companies of all sizes can have a lot of PII and code that’s not GDPR compliant, and it’s non-trivial to fix that. When asked by a user to remove PII, the removal is sometimes incomplete at these companies. Even the process of incompletely the removing PII wastes time; the users requesting PII removal often didn’t even do business with the company, in my experience. Companies of all sizes but often small companies hire out development of web apps that keep PII and may not have someone permanently on staff to maintain it to make the changes needed to allow users to remove their PII. I’d go so far as to say that I’d intentionally not work with users if I knew they would be painful to work with, leaving me with nothing but a legal requirement to wipe their asses because they used my old site. I hope that EU didn’t intentionally do this to hurt small businesses and foster new startups within the EU to brunt the cost of this stupid, stupid law. I’m a privacy advocate.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Was it not already? I find that many of the quintessential problems of the U.S.A. were inherited from the British Empire and seem pervasive throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. England too has a district based system, leading to close to a two-party state, and a common law legal system where the judge and juror are often more powerful than the letter of the law. If anything, the U.S.A. remedied some of the unusual quirks of common law legal systems. — I was recently acquainted with knowledge that in both the U.K. and Australia, a criminal defence attorney would, when his client confess to the crime to him, almost certainly recommend that he be released, and that latter seek new counsel, and that the new counsel be kept in the dark, as apparently the system is designed such that a criminal defence attorney is completely handicapped in defending his client, know he of the latter's guilt. — this is less so the case in the U.S.A., which is rather unique for jury trials, and in most civil law jurisdictions there is no reason not to confess to one's attorney.
lanevorockz 6y ago
Nice how uneducated people are over here, it's mostly a bunch of californians thinking that they understand what Europe is.
Barrin92 6y ago
It's more like an 'Asianization' than an Americanization, hence the whole 'Singapore on the Thames' idea. It's adopting the business practices and regulations of the US and a very paternalistic, centralized state. The US for all the lack of controls that citizens have over business at the very least has a very federalised (in the Euro sense of the term), distribution of power, whereas Britain is pretty much governed from London.
machinelabo 6y ago
I am appalled at the level of discussion here. Nationalism, both from EU, US and UK side is tiring, this flame war needs to be shut down. This not what HN is for folks.
physicsguy 6y ago
GDPR only came in two or so years ago, it’s hardly out of living memory that we had standards more like the US
- Aengeuad 6y ago
  The GDPR wasn't written from scratch, we previously had the Data Protection Act which offered many of the same rights as the GDPR like the protection of personal information and prevention of disclosure to third parties, the right to access data a company holds on you (both of which date back to 1984), the right to opt-out of direct marketing, the right to removal of data that may cause distress, etc, which while a little dated is still far ahead of what most of the US has today. The trouble with the DPA was fines capped out at £500k and international enforcement was limited so large international companies like Google and Facebook could treat the law as an optional slap on the wrist while smaller international businesses effectively flew under the radar, the GDPR largely rectified both of these issues while modernising the laws in response to issues that generally didn't exist prior to the mid 2000s.

heywherelogingo 6y ago

GDPR is three years old.

andy_ppp 6y ago

They get to asset strip the country before anyone realises right?

lanevorockz 6y ago

The EU as a political union exists a little over a decade, if anything the UK never adapted to it.

asutekku 6y ago
But they benefited from the EU in a way which is no more possible.
HugoDaniel 6y ago
Mistaking the EU, the political union as an evolved form of the Rome treaty, with Euro, the coin. All that with the tone of absolute certainty and authority. Hacker News has reached new lows :(
- dataduck 6y ago
  Come on, that's not fair. The EEC was a very different beast to today's EU. The modern form of the EU could certainly be argued as starting with the Treaty of Lisbon.
  - orwin 6y ago
    Maastrich yes, Lisbon? It only set into laws stuff that were already existing and done, as well as provisioning for "unexpected stuff" (brexit art 50 was provisioned in the treaty of lisbon i think). But the treaty of Lisbon changed almost nothing in reality. At least, not enough to warrant the birth of "Modern EU"
    - dataduck 6y ago
      Perhaps Maastricht might be a better place to draw the line. But it's not like the changes at Lisbon were trivial; for example, changing unanimous voting to majority was a qualitative change in the character of the organization. My argument is that the GP by lanevorockz was pretty obviously referring to Lisbon, and that the reply by HugoDaniel seemed quite disingenuous in that light.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  That's one of the issues on the internet nowadays; people use their soapbox to present a thought as fact. Even if they're being called out on it and proven wrong, the statement is made and a seed is planted in someone's brain. It's like newspaper headlines that say X, but (have to) nuance it in the article itself. Except that Twitter doesn't support articles, so it's only headlines.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- junippor 6y ago
  HN has always been bottom of the barrel. Bunch of people repeating memes to each other.
arkitaip 6y ago
You should teach history at college.
imtringued 6y ago
I hope this is a typo and you mean to write "The EUR as a monetary union". The euro is truly an unremarkable currency and I'm not sure that the EU would be much worse without it. It's equally likely that the EU would have done much better without the euro. I can't blame the UK for avoiding the euro.

reader_mode 6y ago

Yeah we saw the mighty EU negotiation leverage with COVID vaccine... UK market is large enough to stand on it's own and EU has been grossly incompetent in public for a while now. There's going to be downsides for sure but becoming "America like" is not going to be one of them.

tomelders 6y ago
You're cherry picking.
- oytis 6y ago
  It is a huge cherry though, and I believe we're yet to see the full economic effect of EU lagging behind US and UK in vaccinations.
- acta_non_verba 6y ago
  This is exactly the kind of situation Government is for. Protecting its people from a foe that can only be defeated at a national level. The European Union has categorically failed, and if it survives this, it will need huge amounts of change.
- inops 6y ago
  Which is exactly what is done with Britain. News item, queue "they get what they deserve". How about the EU gets what it deserves for being a undemocratic, big bungling bureaucracy?
- reader_mode 6y ago
  No I'm not - EU is the least relevant big player on the global scale, economically and militarily - mostly because it's such a weak union of extremely diverse countries with weak common identity (as demonstrated by squabbles at any crisis - financial, COVID, immigration, etc.) It makes sense for smaller countries like mine (Croatia) because of free travel, easier access to a larger market, lower cost of doing business, and truly being too small to negotiate good terms on a global scale. It probably makes a lot less sense for UK which can negotiate it's own terms with other global powers that fit them much better. I have no doubt there will be many negatives to Brexit, but as demonstrated by COVID situation there's a huge opportunity for UK - for example I suspect they can secure better trade deals with the US without having to worry about the protectionist interests pushed by other EU members.

postingawayonhn 6y ago

Who said they're becoming America-like. More like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc. like.

andy_ppp 6y ago
Not even - we will become a right wing basket case with a brand new nuclear weapons system and a failing economy and zero safeguards about those in power. This lot are bad but there is the possibility of something much much worse.
- carmen_sandiego 6y ago
  Clearly there are only two possibilities. Being in the EU or being a "a right wing basket case with a brand new nuclear weapons system and a failing economy and zero safeguards about those in power". There are no other types of country.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    I wasn't clear in my comment - I think the decision making to avoid compliance with the EU (even when it is sensible) is going to cause big problems for the UK economy and if that get's really bad the public seem determined to vote for more and more right wing governments out of fear. I think it's a reasonable concern with the lack of safeguards in the British system of government.
    - carmen_sandiego 6y ago
      I think you're being a bit sensationalist. E.g. people mock 'Singapore on Thames' but do you really think Singapore is a right-wing hellscape? It has many of the same systems the UK does.
      - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        You could hardly call it a democracy.

boomskats 6y ago

It's unclear whether the 'they' you refer to are the British people, or the class of ruling individuals who know exactly what they're doing and are set to profit immensely. (I'm aware that all sounds quite America-like already)

CaptainZapp 6y ago
> or the class of ruling individuals who know exactly what they're doing and are set to profit immensely. I'm really not sure about that. I agree that may be the case with some of those ruling individuals. My impression is that Johnson doesn't believe in anything, except his personal interest and profit. Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers.
- cassianoleal 6y ago
  > Johnson doesn't believe in anything, except his personal interest and profit. > Others in that cabinet, however, really appear to be true believers. My impression is that they all have those same beliefs - their personal interest and profit.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    Which is silly (silly on Bojo's part, I mean) to set the country on a path to economic decline and cultural irrelevance because why be a king of an impoverished country instead of being a citizen in an advanced economy? (Clarification: I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect. The UK won't become impoverished or really stop being an advanced-economy, but it's still going to be far poorer (in a total GDP and PPP sense) than it would be had this whole Brexit business never happened.
    - WanderPanda 6y ago
      Why is everyone so sure about your last paragraph? You could say the same for the EU block and even have more historical evidence of supranations falling apart.

jleask 6y ago

48% of us realized this

hnlmorg 6y ago
This is the thing that pissed me off the most about the referendum. The result was touted as an overwhelming majority but in fact the percentages are well within the margin for error on a poll that wasn't very well defined from the outset (ie what "leave" meant was different for different people). The only thing the EU referendum conclusively demonstrated was how easily manipulated people are by the media they consume.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  I see angry Europhobes on Twitter being responded to with "you won get over it" quite a bit these days...
- Hitton 6y ago
  I think it was fitting, considering how UK joined the EU in the first place (look up Maastricht Treaty if you don't remember it).
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    No it's not fitting. You don't make trillion pound economic, social and political decisions based on the whim of a popular vote. At least not unless you have powerful allies in the media and a personal interest to gain. Which is the real crux of the referendum was about. It was never about us regular folk and entirely about the self interests of those in charge. We were just pawns in a much larger game of power. Let's back that claim up with some examples: Why the referendum was called in the first place? Cameron never wanted a referendum but did so as an attempt to unify the Conservative party because with the right wing opinions fragmenting between multiple parties the Tories were starting to lose dominance (more parties within a set demographic on a first past the post electoral system means fewer votes for any particular party within that demographic). When the Conservatives had a near monopoly in the centre and right wing policies it meant that left wing parties could never catch up due to how fragmented they are (Green, Labour, SNP, local independents, etc) so left wing voters have always had to vote a little more tactically and go for the party most likely to win in their area and hope for a coalition. So the original goal for the referendum wasn't about addressing European issues but instead about monopolising the right wing vote which was getting fragmented by nationalist parties. Cameron assumed it was an easy win and that he could curb the tide of MPs leaving his party for more nationalistic counterparts. He's even gone on record stating this and how it turned into an epic own goal. With regards to whether we would have been better off in or out of the EU -- frankly that's one argument I don't want to get drawn into because, frankly, nobody actually knows. Most of the arguments on both sides of the debate were FUD and the most honest point anyone made was "it's complicated and we don't really know for sure."

aidos 6y ago

Not that I voted for this, but what’s done is done. And now that it is, I’d personally like to take the wins where we can get them. Hoping we see the light, and the blight that is the cookie law goes the way of the dodos.

Kim_Bruning 6y ago
The cookie law is like those plaque disclosing tablets you can chew to figure out if you are brushing right. If your teeth turn out blighted all blue/purple, you generally don't blame the tablets. ;-)
- aidos 6y ago
  Ha! Following your analogy ... then you just discover that everyone’s teeth are purple and you’re struggling to concentrate on what they’re saying because it’s distracting. Meanwhile, nobody’s teeth got any cleaner. It’s really just theatre and on balance it makes the internet a crummier experience.
  - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
    Actually, there's plenty of people with white teeth. Meanwhile, the intent is to avoid the people with purple teeth until they learn to brush responsibly. ;-) (Or if you truly must interact with them: use a lot of ad blockers and privacy tools; because you know what you're getting into)
    - aidos 6y ago
      I'm totally good with there being laws about this as I too want to see less tracking and data sharing. But the implementation is terrible and anybody who thinks that it's fixed anything at all is just kidding themselves. I would rather bad actors were punished and enforced cookie banners were eliminated.
      - Kim_Bruning 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

I have many British friends who were absolutely against this, I also know a former boss who was very public about his Brexit vote and like many of those who voted for it, will be too old to have to deal with the consequences of this decision. If anything I think it is rather unfair to hear people from other EU countries treating this process as something along the lines of 'suits them' and 'they've made their bed'. When in reality a large chunk of them have pretty much not agreed to any of this but are still set to suffer the consequences.

krageon 6y ago
> a large chunk of them have pretty much not agreed Yes, but a far larger chunk has. Every country gets the leaders it deserves and the UK is no exception.
- modo_mario 6y ago
  Tbh simply based on the amount of elderly voters that died since it's likely that majority is gone by now. At least so I've read in some article months ago. All things considered it was relatively close so not exactly a far larger chunk. I don't have any spite towards the British people but I do hope that the EU will act in EU interest which means facilitating the return of financial services that shifted towards London since they joined and not letting the UK and whatever the borderdeal ends up as serve as a loop to ignore single market regulations.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    From 2018: "there are some demographic trends that will influence opinion in future. These changes will tend to pull British public opinion in a pro-European direction, and should be sufficient to produce a majority of 52%-48% for ‘Remain’ in 2021" https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/05/01/demographic-trends-will-pull-british-public-opinion-in-a-pro-european-direction/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2018/05/01/demographic-trends...
  - blibble 6y ago
    Leave would likely win by a bigger majority if the referendum was repeated today, because the UK didn't collapse on leaving also add the EU's disastrous vaccine procurement scheme, combined with its attempt to obscure its total incompetence with petulant nationalistic flailing

callamdelaney 6y ago

In terms of economy why not? The USA is equal in GDP to the entire EU, and it seems much more efficient to deal with them, an actual country, than 27 odd countries whom all have their own agenda and are masquerading as one country. Of course it's very fashionable on the internet to shit on brexit. "haha brits be dumb cus independent" - I can only imagine what sort of insecurity you're dealing with about your own country that you have to resort to this.

spiderfarmer 6y ago
Yes, "In terms of economy" why not. Just ignore every other benefit of the EU to make your case.
- callamdelaney 6y ago
  I'd suggest that there aren't any other benefits of the EU.
  - SirHound 6y ago
    As a Brit living in it I would tend to disagree. By the way if you're a leaver I've been looking for someone to cover the additional costs you've voted to put on me, DM if interested.
    - callamdelaney 6y ago
      Ah yes, the common myth that before the EU nobody could live in any other country which is now a constituent of the EU.
      - SirHound 6y ago
        It isn't a myth, there's a marked difference between having the right to live somewhere and merely the possibility. Before, it was my right to live in the Netherlands. Now, it is just a possibility. Thanks to the Withdrawal Agreement, because I already live here, I was given the "right" to apply for a residency, which like 99% of applicants, I received. I can now enjoy that for 5 years, after which I will need sponsorship from a company. This sponsorship is a key difference, which anyone who has moved to the US can attest to. When your continued existence in a country is contingent on workplace sponsorship the power dynamics between you and your employer are really quite different. In addition, it's one thing for me in a skilled occupation to be able to leave the country. But I have a friend whose boyfriend may be coming here on an art scholarship. She isn't in a skilled occupation. Before, she would have had the right to come here too. Now, I'm pretty doubtful that she'll be able to join him. At 24 and probably unlikely to ever leave the UK I wouldn't expect you to understand any of this. But it is the lived reality, previously of every British person leaving the EU and now every British person who leaves the UK. Edit: But of course, I'm not the first person to explain this to you, and it's not the last time you'll bray to the cheap seats with this mischaracterisation.

bb123 6y ago

Why is it inevitable that the UK will become like America? There are plenty of independent Algo-States that are nothing like it. Australia, New Zealand, Canada for example. This comment seems to be borne out spite more than any kind of logic.

carmen_sandiego 6y ago
I have no idea why but the EU/Brexit is one subject where HN comment quality falls apart. I would have assumed most people here are Americans, so not really emotionally invested in their 'side'. But this comment section is full of Twitter hot take type stuff.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  The same thing happened with Trump, and American flashpoint politics more generally. Note that it's morning in Europe, and as such there will be lots of British/European people around, for whom Brexit is a bigger deal.
- bb123 6y ago
  I think given the timezone difference, most people on here this time of day are probably in the UK/Europe. I guess the emotive nature of the subject is showing through.
- brmgb 6y ago
  To be honest, there is little emotional investment in Europe regarding Brexit. People wanted to be done with it as the process was wasting valuable union time and there was a feeling it was needlessly draging on but from what I have seen Europeans actually care very little about the UK. Brexit mostly was and remains a domestic issue which is why it's such a touchy subject on HN where there is probably a significant number of Britons commenting.
  - avian 6y ago
    > there is little emotional investment in Europe regarding Brexit As someone from the continental Europe, this is not at all my experience, but I'm sure this depends on the specific social bubble I'm in. There are plenty of people around that had their lives complicated because of it, enough that most people I know have very strong feelings about it.

adflux 6y ago

We'll see. Seems like not being part of a larger "union" has allowed them to start vaccinating at 3 times the pace of its European neighbours. Historically, power removed further from the people does not benefit the people. There are very few "economies of scale" in politics. As the system grows larger, accountability becomes more difficult and decision making is harder and harder. Nice example is Iceland. after the 2008 crash. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-to-iceland-where-bad-bankers-go-to-prison https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-t...

kawsper 6y ago
If the UK was not leaving the EU, the country may have chosen to follow this “common strategy” and move at the same pace as other members. However, it is not a legal requirement. https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-vaccine-brexit/ https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-vaccine-brexit/
- adflux 6y ago
  I am not talking about the speed of vaccine approval. The only thing I am seeing is that the UK is vaccinating at an incredible pace compared to even the richest European countries.

seanhandley 6y ago

I live in the UK and, like 49% of the turnout, I did not vote for this. Trade blocs rely on geographical proximity to be most effective but this whole thing is an ideologically motivated change, rather than one rooted in pragmatism. Giggle count: zero.

klingon78 6y ago

The US has a similar privacy law in California they must support, and many companies have presence globally, so they are having to deal with this in the following ways, like many others. GDPR has given a 50M EUR handslap to Google and similar to some other large companies[1] while seriously hurting smaller companies with existing custom web applications for whom they may not even have someone on staff to modify those to be GDPR-compliant. Small businesses like others must determine what PII is, how to anonymize it, and how to remove it when users request their PII to be removed. PII could be in their server logs or other locations that are inaccessible to most employees of the business. Backups might be excluded from PII scrubbing, but so much is unclear. Let’s also talk about what it doesn’t protect. PCI, not GDPR, attempts to provide protection for cardholder data. GDPR doesn’t protect against PII that was previously shared. Nor does it protect from data being stolen, unless the user had their data removed prior. [1]- https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2020/ https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2...

Kim_Bruning 6y ago
It's actually fairly easy to be GDPR compliant almost by default, TBQH. It either takes a lot of effort or a lot of laziness to somehow end up non-compliant.
- klingon78 6y ago
  Removing or anonymizing PII in a large system not already designed for PII removal or one you don’t have resources to manage can be painful. Companies of all sizes can have a lot of PII and code that’s not GDPR compliant, and it’s non-trivial to fix that. When asked by a user to remove PII, the removal is sometimes incomplete at these companies. Even the process of incompletely the removing PII wastes time; the users requesting PII removal often didn’t even do business with the company, in my experience. Companies of all sizes but often small companies hire out development of web apps that keep PII and may not have someone permanently on staff to maintain it to make the changes needed to allow users to remove their PII. I’d go so far as to say that I’d intentionally not work with users if I knew they would be painful to work with, leaving me with nothing but a legal requirement to wipe their asses because they used my old site. I hope that EU didn’t intentionally do this to hurt small businesses and foster new startups within the EU to brunt the cost of this stupid, stupid law. I’m a privacy advocate.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

Was it not already? I find that many of the quintessential problems of the U.S.A. were inherited from the British Empire and seem pervasive throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. England too has a district based system, leading to close to a two-party state, and a common law legal system where the judge and juror are often more powerful than the letter of the law. If anything, the U.S.A. remedied some of the unusual quirks of common law legal systems. — I was recently acquainted with knowledge that in both the U.K. and Australia, a criminal defence attorney would, when his client confess to the crime to him, almost certainly recommend that he be released, and that latter seek new counsel, and that the new counsel be kept in the dark, as apparently the system is designed such that a criminal defence attorney is completely handicapped in defending his client, know he of the latter's guilt. — this is less so the case in the U.S.A., which is rather unique for jury trials, and in most civil law jurisdictions there is no reason not to confess to one's attorney.

lanevorockz 6y ago

Nice how uneducated people are over here, it's mostly a bunch of californians thinking that they understand what Europe is.

Barrin92 6y ago

It's more like an 'Asianization' than an Americanization, hence the whole 'Singapore on the Thames' idea. It's adopting the business practices and regulations of the US and a very paternalistic, centralized state. The US for all the lack of controls that citizens have over business at the very least has a very federalised (in the Euro sense of the term), distribution of power, whereas Britain is pretty much governed from London.

machinelabo 6y ago

I am appalled at the level of discussion here. Nationalism, both from EU, US and UK side is tiring, this flame war needs to be shut down. This not what HN is for folks.

physicsguy 6y ago

GDPR only came in two or so years ago, it’s hardly out of living memory that we had standards more like the US

Aengeuad 6y ago
The GDPR wasn't written from scratch, we previously had the Data Protection Act which offered many of the same rights as the GDPR like the protection of personal information and prevention of disclosure to third parties, the right to access data a company holds on you (both of which date back to 1984), the right to opt-out of direct marketing, the right to removal of data that may cause distress, etc, which while a little dated is still far ahead of what most of the US has today. The trouble with the DPA was fines capped out at £500k and international enforcement was limited so large international companies like Google and Facebook could treat the law as an optional slap on the wrist while smaller international businesses effectively flew under the radar, the GDPR largely rectified both of these issues while modernising the laws in response to issues that generally didn't exist prior to the mid 2000s.