5 ms·

One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated. EU will pass laws, countries will adopt those laws, but you end up with 20-24 d

• silon42 1mo ago
  Even medium-sized corporations are not willing to send products across borders to consumers (say, outside Germany), further destroying the single market.
• alephnerd 1mo ago
  The bigger issue in OP's case is they are dependent on de minimis. The de minimis crackdown [0] and EPR [1] are both being rolled out because Chinese conglomerates like Pinduoduo (Temu) and SHEIN took undue advantage of that while ignoring European regulators on issues such as environmental regulations on packaging [2], dark patterns [2], breaching the Digital Services Act [3], and gacha/addictive engagement mechanisms [4]. All of OP's proposals directly conflict with the goal of de minimis taxation and the EPR. Seems European HNers are fine with European regulations until it hurts their niche interests or pocketbook. [0] - https://www.ft.com/content/102e18d7-d06b-4405-a347-97bb3c37318b?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/102e18d7-d06b-4405-a347-97bb3c373... [1] - https://www.vereev.com/news/europe-faces-trade-conflict-is-epr-the-key-to-reducing-dependence-on-china/ https://www.vereev.com/news/europe-faces-trade-conflict-is-e... [2] - https://www.ft.com/content/ef72f186-2a02-4c51-927d-2c01ddeced05?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/ef72f186-2a02-4c51-927d-2c01ddece... [3] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-says-temu-breach-rules-prevent-sale-illegal-products-2025-07-28/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-says-temu-breach-r... [4] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-probes-shein-over-sale-illegal-products-addictive-design-2026-02-17/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/eu-probes-shein-over-...
  • rescbr 1mo ago
    The issue is that those marketplaces got too mainstream, and the average consumer is too stupid. 10-15 years ago if you were importing stuff from China you'd know that the trade off for cheaper prices is that you'd lose your consumer laws protection and you'd be on your own. If you wanted those, then you'd go to your local retailer and pay extra.
    • pjc50 1mo ago
      This got downvoted but is basically correct. We had a great "grey" market, but the tradeoff for that is having to stay small enough to not be visible.
    • logseman 1mo ago
      And then everyone started doing it, which meant that your local retailer isn't in business anymore (see local high streets in many countries). The choice you had 10-15 years ago doesn't exist anymore because everyone went for the cheaper price, and now the question is where the extra goes that we used to pay to the local retailer.
      • visarga 1mo ago
        AliExpress and Temu would refund you if you complained about a delivery. Zero risk.
      • iknowstuff 1mo ago
        What’s with those streets? Any examples?
    • whywhywhywhy 1mo ago
      Means nothing though because no European country can produce the goods an impoverished European can afford to pay for the goods so the local store is just the same Chinese goods shipped to that address other than your home address.
      • Aerroon 1mo ago
• Helmut10001 1mo ago
  Living in Europe, I find that with LLMs, it is possible to navigate the federal & law jungle. However, LLMs don't protect you from institutional envy or the resistance of people trying to block progress simply because it is perceived as 'too modern' or disruptive. I find this the hardest challenge. And I have the feeling during times of general decline, like these, it gets worse.
  • barrenko 1mo ago
    And it's like there's a uno card that's "increase taxes for freelancers". And they sure like to use it.
    • arjie 1mo ago
      That makes sense given the structure of the society, no? If you were to build an organization whose purpose was a predictable amount paid out to the senior most members committed ahead of time for an indefinite period, you would prioritize predictable income. In the ideal, your contracts would all be long-term contracts that don’t fluctuate very much. Any entity that seeks to take risks to earn outsize income increases the income variance and makes it hard to organize your committed payouts. So you are forced (by your priorities) to discourage the entrepreneur and freelancer and encourage the 18-60 salaried employee. Fixed fungible production unit can be used as an input to a machine that produces committed output. Then you import guest-workers etc. to improve throughput. You are forced by your priorities. Probably the expansion of the US welfare state will meet similar constraints soon enough. It’s a bit just-so so I think there’s an over-claim in there but I think the seed is there.
      • barrenko 1mo ago
        Appreciate this input.
  • 21asdffdsa12 1mo ago
    I personally hate the "reenact" the old- good times to recreate the prosperity cargo cults. What created those prosperous times, where "characters" that would just do things, and ask for forgiveness by the law later. And that was actually priced into the justice system, by giving the judges a range to verdict from. In a way, the rule of law was much less strict in the 50s and 60s and way more informal.
• troupo 1mo ago
  Because if the EU tried to force countries into single compliance, there would no end of "EU is trampling national interests" and similar screaming. It's an unwinnable situation. Again, EU-level politics keep assuming everyone (corporations and states) are adults. Unfortunately, everyone are just a bunch of screaming, scheming petulant children.
  • philipallstar 1mo ago
    > there would no end of "EU is trampling national interests" and similar screaming To just call this "screaming" is to completely dismiss a real and huge problem. The EU is the idea that countries should fuse into economic areas, but the countries are also individual still. Of course there's a lot of friction. For example, because Greece was in the Euro, they couldn't inflate their currency to compensate for the fact that they gradually outsourced more and more work to Germany, until they had nothing left and hit a financial crisis because their government couldn't borrow more money. That's not mindless screaming.
    • troupo 1mo ago
      So you've described Greece as a bunch of scheming petulant children. "Our plan to be inaccountable didn't work, so we'll try a different scheme instead". And yes, it's a huge problem. That's why I called the situation unwinnable.
      • graemep 1mo ago
        They could neither fix the problem with the policy tools a country with its own currency would have, nor did they have the automatic support from a central budget a region or state of a country would have.
        • nradov 1mo ago
          Greece could have fixed their problems by cutting spending and collecting more taxes (not necessarily higher taxes, but actually collecting the taxes that were owed). Currency inflation was never necessary.
• greenraven 1mo ago
  > It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part This is by design. It’s the same all over the world. The wealthy are not going to just let you compete
  • bpodgursky 1mo ago
    The US is wealthier, has more billionaires and has fewer of these barriers for small entrepreneurs. So no, this is not the monocausal explanation that applies equally everywhere. (YES, the US has regulatory capture, YES the wealthy attempt to use it, YES we should try to eliminate it here too, but it remains true that it is easier to run a small business in the US, while having more billionaires. There are other explanations to the differential here).
    • 21asdffdsa12 1mo ago
      Agreed, europe has a culture of "stability" first. The fear of disruption and chaos is larger after two WW and it outsourced the risks of disruption to the US. Basically, use the us as a test-mouse for new ideas and innovations, then when proven safe introduce them and ride those coat-tails to infinity.
      • petcat 1mo ago
        > use the us as a test-mouse for new ideas and innovations, then when proven safe introduce them and ride those coat-tails to infinity What actually happened, and continues to happen, is that Europe and the EU became entirely dependent on US tech and other foreign industry. It wasn't just a matter of "see what works and then copy it domestically". It oursourced basically everything.
        • trinix912 1mo ago
          To be fair, it was mostly outsourced to China, at least in Slovenia with our electronics development and manufacturing (Iskra and Gorenje). US stuff has also always been more expensive in every category except software.
• Xelbair 1mo ago
  >One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated I would argue it's even worse, because with properly designed federated system you get checks and balances to some extent. There are parts of EU that have almost zero oversight.
  • dgellow 1mo ago
    Yeah, this in between state is really frustrating. I hope we will see a push towards more federalization, but that’s unlikely
    • trinix912 1mo ago
      It’s unlikely because smaller member states wouldn’t want that as they’d be outvoted by bigger members and thus forced to implement laws that might not even make sense in those (smaller) countries.
      • dgellow 1mo ago
        It’s unlikely for a lot of reasons, but that’s not one of them given we don’t know what a federalized EU would look like.
        • trinix912 1mo ago
          We had a federation around here called Yugoslavia and we saw how it played out. Forcing different nations to agree on everything down to things that are basically cultural preferences never worked well. Regulations, bureaucracy and laws are often based on cultural preferences. The EU tries to find a common baseline but still leaves a lot to each member state to avoid this problem.
          • dgellow 1mo ago
            Lots of federations exists and work perfectly well… including Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Brazil, the US, and more
• chermi 1mo ago
  I think this is a big factor. While I would prefer a more federated US, the US as is is a great market to start in. It's 350M fairly wealthy people under mostly the same tech restrictions. That's a great place to grow. It's important to remember that even without the fact that big companies basically write the regulations, regulations naturally tend to being effectively regressive wrt company stage/size. Every new one is a hurdle that a bigger company has more resources to overcome.
  • ryukoposting 1mo ago
    > It's 350M fairly wealthy people under mostly the same tech restrictions and, on a case-by-case basis, those people are generally happy to adopt other states' standards in the name of convenience and efficiency (California notwithstanding). Look at E-ZPass/I-Pass as a great example of harmonization across states. It's funny. Ask any Illinoisan how they feel about adopting Ohio's policies and they'd bristle. But say "hey we're gonna make your highway transponder work in every state east of the Rockies" and they're all for it. I have to wonder if Europe has the same thing going on.
    • chermi 1mo ago
      Your example of adoption is interesting. I think California has actually influenced other states on efficiency. I wanted to say disproportionately, but perhaps in exact accordance with their economic and political power. I don't know the details well enough, but I do know that there is an effective anti-fedaralist force in the US wherever federal funding is concerned, as it comes with rules conditions (rules) attached. I would be interested to what extent this acts as a bias toward cooperation in the case of ez pass, given the interstate system.
      • ryukoposting 1mo ago
        > I think California has actually influenced other states on efficiency. California has a frustrating tendency invent its own systems that are neither better nor worse, but nonetheless incompatible with more widely accepted standards. The highway transponder example actually applies again - Fastrak. CA has some great ideas too, don't get me wrong (ubiquitous painted curbs: great!) but a lot of the time it's just different for the sake of being different.
• n4r9 1mo ago
  > It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part There's truth to this but it's an overstatement as it stands. For example, GDPR rules are less strict for small companies.
  • mnau 1mo ago
    Please elaborate on less strict rules for Gdpr? There is Record of Processing Activities exemption for <250, but if you have to comply with Gdpr (and you do), you need essentially same info as Ropa and of course it has to be up to date. How else can you ensure you are in compliance?
• tjwebbnorfolk 1mo ago
  > old ideas just drags it down. Are these old ideas? The broad regulatory apparatus in the EU appears very modern and intentional.
• cloudie78 1mo ago
  Ah yes, let’s give the EU and its undemocratic system in which policy formation is heavily filtered through a relatively narrow professional political class, ordinary voters have weak or almost no direct control over major policy choices, dissent encounters administrative/economic punishment, and central institutions possess and use powerful financial means to discipline peripheral governments should have even more centralised power? And no, just because voting for MEPs is bolted on there as a pressure valve doesn’t suddenly make it all okay when most of the real decisions happen behind closed doors and adherence to the passed laws, no matter how damaging is ensured through financial coercion. Not a single person voted or agreed to this law, and yet here we are.
  • PeterHolzwarth 1mo ago
    Yeah, that's always been my concern with the EU (I'm American, for context): the long worrying practice where the legal concept of the EU is assembled by a small group who very much want EU citizens to go back to sleep and only wake up once all the laws and regulation has been created. A federation makes sense to me: I live in one. But how the EU has assembled itself in a way that seems to unrepresentative has been worrying to watch over the last couple decades.
  • tchalla 1mo ago
    It seems you have an issue with representative democracy.
    • cloudie78 1mo ago
      Quite the contrary actually. I take issue with systems LARPing democracy.
    • psychoslave 1mo ago
      There is no such a thing as "representative democracy", that’s antinomic bullshit throw at people to lower it down to powerless populace. Either citizens have the power, exercise it continuously in practice and are supplied with everything it takes to assume that role properly with all the duties it implies, or there is no democracy beyond empty words.
• pjc50 1mo ago
  > It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part This was traditionally something that the UK was better than the rest of Europe, having carve-outs for small businesses.
• bambax 1mo ago
  Yes. I used to sell objects on Amazon in Europe. You can sell from just one country, but then each sale outside of that country is an "export" that triggers high fees. For sales to be "local", products need to be stored in warehouses in each country. But that in turn means the owner of said products (the seller) has to be registered for VAT in that country, and submitting annual reports in each country's language. I went to the trouble of registering in 6 different countries; in some countries, Amazon more or less helps sellers submit reports; in others, they offer to partner with local lawyers. The result is a mess of reports, injunctions, penalties for late filing, etc. coming to you in Polish, German, Spanish, Hungarian. I eventually gave up. Europe is not actually a "single market". It's a federated bureaucracy entirely indifferent (or hostile) to small businesses.
  • radicalbyte 1mo ago
    Having worked on the inside: this is by design. You know for 100% that Pepsico and Coca Cola unleashed an army of lobbyists to make sure the laws were written in a way where the single market only worked for large business.
    • philipallstar 1mo ago
      Lobbyists don't do this. Regulators/lawmakers need to be corrupt and/or incompetent for lobbying to do this.
      • contravariant 1mo ago
        So lobbyists did do it then?
      • teiferer 1mo ago
        You need lobbyists to pull on one side and the general population to be too uninformed or too non-caring to not pull enough in the other direction.
        • philipallstar 1mo ago
• PinguTS 1mo ago
  In the EU you have to distinguish between "Directives" and "Regulations". A "Regulation" becomes "law" in any member state without modification. No member state has to adopt anything. Examples are the GDPR and the new Machine Regulation. A "Directive" does not become "law" in any member state. A member state has to enact their own national laws to implement the directive until a given date. It does not have to be single law. It could spread many laws. An example is the Machine Directive before it was re-released as Machine Regulation. More on the different types can be found here from the EU itself: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/types-eu-law_en https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/types-eu...
• labcomputer 1mo ago
  > And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed that small entrepreneurs may also want to take part. I'm not convinced that's an accident. I think politicians in Europe are just better than those in the US at hiding who they really work for. There are numerous examples of regulations in many European countries that create a glass ceiling for anyone who strives to be more than just middle-middle-class, while creating effective loopholes for the wealthy to continue multiplying their wealth. For example, the total (State + Federal) top tax rate for someone living in California or New York is not too different (maybe 2-3%) from someone living in France or Sweden. But the difference is that in California the top rate does not kick in until you earn north of $1M per year, while in Sweden or France the middle class is already paying those rates. Likewise, in the US you cannot (legally) shelter your income by declaring it to be foreign income, as you can in most European countries. That is a tax dodge not applicable to the middle class. And then we have the present discussion: The compliance costs are of course too high for any small business, so these regulations are just another form of regulatory capture to prevent anyone new from breaking into the upper class, while allowing those already there to have it easy.
  • teiferer 1mo ago
    It's a success of the upper class to pit the middle class against the lower class and the immigrants. As long as people on one "side" complain that there is too much foreign culture and they'll all be replaced and/raped and the other "side" sees the racists as their main enemy, the rich have an easy time.
    • spwa4 1mo ago
      That sounds like a good argument, but if you look at government budgets and where come from and where they go that is not at all what is happening. I mean, there is a core of truth in that the rules allow the upper class to go less-taxed (generally not untaxed). But let's be honest here. If the upper class paid 60% on their income instead of 10%, it would improve government budgets by less than 1% (disregarding things like royal families that own oil company profits or rent out incredible amounts of terrible housing (UK) at essentially 0% tax as a specific exemption in the law) Which means taxing the rich can make the rich poorer than they currently are and bring more equality. Which is a goal in itself. But it cannot fund EU governments. It cannot fund pensions. Not even a little bit. Everyone knows what the big problem is: right now close to 35% of working people in the EU work, one way or another (usually in bureaucracies, granted), to take care of children, sick, unemployed or elderly non-working people. Of those groups, the elderly group is going up by about 3% every year, and that will keep going until 2050 or later. In the group of working people there is extreme resistance to actually work with the elderly (meaning physically helping elderly people, those jobs are low-status, low-paid, and generally hated with a passion), even against teaching jobs there is quite a bit of resistance (dropout rates are double digit percentages). So how do we take care of the elderly? Hell: how do we take care of kids? This problem alone makes me say "we don't just want AI to take our jobs, we NEED AI to take our jobs". Because "we" are sure as hell not going to take them. That doesn't preclude that this needs to be regulated, but obviously just saying no to AI is not what we want. And that's putting it politely.
• jabart 1mo ago
  US Sales tax is the exact same way. Each state has a different rate, Texas has multiple rates inside a zip code you have to manage. Each state also has a nexus requirement that is either money, or number of transactions based. Then the filings you have to do and have a Foreign LLC registration, a registered agent in that state, and a yearly annual report to file to tell them you are still in business and here is my $40-200.
  • HWR_14 1mo ago
    Except you can sell through Amazon (or other online store) and they will manage all that for you as a single fee. Exactly the solution that the article proposed for the EU rules.
    • rcxdude 1mo ago
      There are already places that will take an annual fee for dealing with this bureaucracy for you, as well.
      • HWR_14 1mo ago
        This article is claiming that his online platform wants to offer that service but they are legally forbidden from doing so. In fact, they suggest allowing services to perform this is a reasonable solution to the whole problem.
        • rcxdude 1mo ago
          It is harder to offer fulfilment as a service, but there are companies that will give you a registered agent in all the relevant countries and help you with the paperwork. It does still look like it's quite expensive though.
          • HWR_14 1mo ago
            The article states that the registered agent needs to fill out paperwork for each country and pay a registration fee. That's the issue, the fixed costs per country making it cost prohibitive to sell just 2 units shipped to France.
• deepsun 1mo ago
  In US laws are also different between states, for example some products are compostable in Arkansas but are not compostable in California.
• W3zzy 1mo ago
  There is a EU company registration in the maling. You register your business on that platform and it will be recognized as a EU company wich should make it easier to comply.
• victorbjorklund 1mo ago
  EU also have regulations where it applies directly without need for implementation in national laws.
• inigyou 1mo ago
  I think the idea is that you follow the law of the country you're in.