6 ms·

The idea that the EU imposes massive amounts of red tape when no other instition I know of has done more to reduce it in the last century is just absolutely min

• thaway2839 5y ago
  Exactly this. The EU may be the greatest red tape destroyer ever created. The single market has led to many many landfills not being filled due to the paper that trade before the single market would have generated.
  • blibble 5y ago
    just ignore the 200 cookie warnings every citizen sees per day
    • dijit 5y ago
      Those cookie warnings are intentionally annoying, it's malicious compliance in the hopes that people get bored of them and click ok. If an annoying cookie pop-up does not close (with an opt out) in 2 clicks, it's illegal; that's part of GDPR because of this malicious compliance. (making people click each option individually).
    • throw0101a 5y ago
      > just ignore the 200 cookie warnings every citizen sees per day Would you rather be ignorant of the fact that you're being tracked with 200 cookies? Why is it the EU's fault that companies have so much tracking? Perhaps you should complain to the companies that are sending you the cookies and not the EU that's simply bringing to light a shady business practice.
      • Markoff 5y ago
        >Would you rather be ignorant of the fact that you're being tracked with 200 cookies? Yes? I know I'm tracked and I know I can do nothing about it besides accepting the annoying cookie warning, so it's pretty much meaningless unless there is option Reject All. If you must always allow at least "essential" cookies them it's while warning meaningless. Either show me no warning or give me Reject all button, nothing in between, otherwise it just shows your incompetence to solve the problem. It's as meaningful as permanent sign "There is traffic jam on this road", though that sign one would be less annoying. I always loved in some subway system in Asia regular PSA "There were pickpocketers detected in subway system", really helpful... Dunno whether it was India or HK or somewhere.
        • rlpb 5y ago
          It is illegal to make it difficult to "Reject All" and those who do not comply are being fined. For example Google and Facebook: "The CNIL found that Google and Facebook's failures to make non-essential cookies as easy to reject as to accept invalidated the consent on which the businesses relied. Whereas cookies could be accepted by a single 'click', a number of steps were needed to reject them." ... "The CNIL stressed that consent must be freely given which implies that it must be as easy for a user to accept non-essential cookies as to reject them." https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6001cd19-ecbf-4d77-93eb-f5ff8453064a https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=6001cd19-ecbf... The gears are turning slowly but they are turning.
    • f1refly 5y ago
      That's not the EUs fault, it's on the website providers. Blame them instead.
    • rawTruthHurts 4y ago
      Clearly you don't know what a landfill is.
• mrtksn 5y ago
  Yes, I never got the logic behind red-tape argument. EU literally enabled bureaucracy free trade and travel and UK got out and red tape and bureaucracy was introduced. I think they might have eased something about environment and US chicken but I don't recall the details. After Brexit, you need paperwork to prove that your stuff that you would like to import or export meets the trade agreement criteria(for example, to prevent people from buying from, let's say China, then import it tarif free into EU, you need to have proper documentation proving that most of the value of your product comes from UK). You can no longer hire whoever you think is the best for your business, you need to go through the government bureaucracy first. It's weird, it's like Texas leaving the USA to get rid of the federal government then doing everything according to the federal government requirements to be able to sell stuff to the USA and hot having a say on it. Why would you do that? Honestly, I think UK leaving the EU was a loss for EU(the institution) mostly due to the loss of UK input in the governance. The rest is a tragedy for the young, losing the ability to live and work in EU or UK and chase their dreams. Can you imagine people from different states in the US not being able to move wherever they want?
  • woleium 4y ago
    The EU was coming after the tax havens and the money laundering. The rich wanted to stop that. They succeeded.
    • belter 4y ago
      This is the best and real explanation of Brexit.
• dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  A good example of this is getting your unofficial non-EU partner residency in an EU country as a family member. For EU citizens applying in an EU country other than their own, it's a fixed 50 euro fee plus the basics of proving a relationship with some simple documentation: cohabitation and mixed finances. If you're doing it your own country, the process is much, much more expensive and complicated.
  • Markoff 5y ago
    What is difference between unofficial non-EU partner residency and official non-EU partner residency?
    • pchangr 5y ago
      Not sure, but he/she might be referring to the residency through {work/refugee/student status} other than family reunion.
    • dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
      I mean marriage or other documented union versus living together. I should have used the word "informal".
      • Markoff 5y ago
        OK, I thought that word is related to residency, not to the partner
• vidanay 5y ago
  A couple of weeks ago, my company shipped a piece of equipment from Germany to UK for a trade show. The equipment wasn't sold, and it wasn't an asset transfer. Now that the show is done, literally nobody in the UK division knows how to ship the equipment back to Germany. It's not that the paperwork is complex, the paperwork simply doesn't exist.
• danuker 5y ago
  Some of my impressions from when Romania joined EU: - Old communist mines have closed due to environmental regulation. This is good, but it is regulation. - Food must now be strictly labeled. Again good, but more regulation. For instance, milk has strict packaging regulations and can no longer be sold easily in farmer's markets. This drove the price up. - Public infrastructure must meet certain standards in order to access EU funds. These regulations are again good. But certain local corrupt politicians fail to get their buddies' company to respect them, so they just use local funds. - GDPR and EU copyright acts: these are more regulation, which I think is not so good. See my opinions here: https://danuker.go.ro/tag/eu.html https://danuker.go.ro/tag/eu.html
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • vanderZwan 5y ago
    Sorry that people downvoted you - you shared a nuanced opinion based on your experiences, and your comment did not deserve that just because it went against how people feel about the issue. I might not fully agree with the conclusions but that is no reason for the downvotes. I think where we differ in conclusions is whether or not we think a change in regulations means more regulations. It more likely is fewer but more restrictive regulations instead. This is a bit of a semantic argument however, I admit, but on top of that I happen to mostly agree with the more restrictive regulation in most cases. Again, thank you for your thoughtful counter-opinion
    • danuker 5y ago
      It's not just change, it's a larger volume of regulation to read and understand. In the past there were fewer words/pages in the law, and a lighter burden of compliance. But some processes have become more streamlined, such as paying taxes.
• danaris 5y ago
  As an outside observer (in the US), my impression has been that this is largely due to the idea that adding another level in the bureaucratic hierarchy (local > regional > national > now also EU) fundamentally means adding more red tape. Also that a lot of the complaining is coming from the same kinds of people who want government, in general, to be "so small you can drown it in a bathtub", which viewpoint I never really have a lot of time for.
  • blibble 5y ago
    yes, the EU does add red tape, but it's standardised between member states it's still there (and increases every year), just you don't see it when buying/selling between member states
  • throw0101a 5y ago
    > (local > regional > national > now also EU) As opposed to the US, where you can have: local/municipal > county > (non-nation) state > federal.
    • danaris 5y ago
      Oh, sure; not in any way attempting to draw a comparison between the two. If it wasn't clear, this is the impression I have of why people (from wherever) complain about EU red tape, not my personal impression of EU red tape.
  • native_samples 5y ago
    No, that's not it. The EU has a reputation for red tape and bureaucracy within Europe too, that's not a UK thing. It's a running gag in the game Tropico for example, which is made by a German company. And there are good reasons for that. The EU likes to "reduce" red tape by replacing country-specific systems with its own. This can be seen as a reduction if you believe everyone in Europe had to handle every other countries systems simultaneously, and there are (mostly business) cases where that was sometimes actually true. But the vast majority of the time it wasn't. Most people, most of the time, were handling only their own countries bureaucracy and trading with firms in their own country, or one or two others at most. If your country has a relatively lightweight process which is tailored for local needs and well understood by local people, which is then "harmonized" by the EU, it's both possible and common that the amount of red tape in your life increases. The fact that there are now fewer systems across Europe than before doesn't make any difference because you weren't interacting with them anyway. In the UK there are several reasons why the EU got a really bad reputation for regulation: 1. Many EU regulations are newly created and regulate aspects of daily life where there is no obvious trade benefit and nobody was asking for it. Example: around the time of the referendum the Commission was trying to introduce regulations that would "harmonize" the power of kettles, which would mean they'd take far longer to boil than before. Guess which country boils kettles way more than any other? They quietly delayed the introduction of these rules, because they knew it'd piss off Brits and make them more likely to vote Leave. 2. There have been many cases where something was happening that both voters and politicians thought was obviously stupid, yet, politicians couldn't fix it because EU rules prevented it. An example of this is the deportation of terrorists, which EU rules routinely blocked on grounds many voters thought weren't very good (e.g. right to family life). Again this has nothing to do with reducing bureaucracy or making trade easier, it's just about controlling local decisions. 3. Many EU regulations that annoy people on a daily basis, e.g. cookie banners and voters never cared about any of this. Their priorities have never been internet related things. 4. From the British viewpoint EU rules are often seen as vague and arbitrarily or unfairly enforced. There are many examples that could be used to illustrate that. Since Brexit there have been a steady stream of situations that fit this template: media/voters get upset about government doing something that looks stupid, government comes under pressure and fixes it, then says "Oh and actually, it turns out the ability to do this is another Brexit freedom that wouldn't have been possible in the EU". Invariably whatever they're doing seems obvious and nothing special, without any obvious reason why EU bureaucracy would have stopped it. This reinforces the impression that there must have been far more EU rules on stuff than anyone realized. It raises the obvious question - how many obvious things weren't getting done for decades, because they violated some rule and so politicians or bureaucrats just ignored them completely? Remember, the iron law of the EU is nobody can fix anything.