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I’m not sure this is a good thing for Canada. The EU feels like an incomplete experiment. Not strong enough to actually be a single market. But still able to c

I’m not sure this is a good thing for Canada. The EU feels like an incomplete experiment. Not strong enough to actually be a single market. But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones. The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.

lnxg33k1 18d ago
I am not sure, if I see the example of US as federation, it might work well for corporations only, but people have nothing, uniformity doesn't work because not all populations have the same needs/expectations
- softwaredoug 18d ago
  Maybe, but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU. Not because I think regulations are bad. But regulations need to be well designed with clears lines on what the Federal / State are allowed to do.
  - Epa095 18d ago
    Its hard because its 27 different countries, but they are working on making it less hard. Many startups are made in Europe, but then bought up (often by Americans) or moves to USA when its time to expand outside the single countries boarders. Canada has the same problem. Canada has made it pretty clear that they do not want to be part of the big country south of it, so they will have to find a way to create large companies that stays. Doing this together with a market of 450 million people seems like a good idea.
  - _ink_ 18d ago
    > but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU. They are working in it: https://www.eu-inc.org/ https://www.eu-inc.org/ I have no clue whether that will be a success, but at least they have recognised that problem as well.
  - anonzzzies 18d ago
    > but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU Been doing it for decades. Not a billionaire and not interested in becoming one; in the US I would've been one. But never had issues.
  - mitxela 18d ago
    You can't deal with 27 different groups of people without dealing with 27 different groups of people or forcibly unifying them to become 1 group. I'm sure you agree the latter is bad.
    - softwaredoug 18d ago
      That’s obviously reductive. They don’t have to be forced. They could mutually agree to unify more strongly
      - mitxela 18d ago
        Yes, and they have in some ways, and that's called the EU. They have not unified in every way. For example the French people have not agreed to start eating Surströmming, they do not want to start eating Surströmming, I don't know whether it's even legal there to possess it, and that decision should rightfully be up to them. If you want to sell your Surströmming in France you have to take France into account, you can't just assume your business will be the same everywhere in Europe, and that's not just limited to laws, but also all other facets of culture. For another basic example, you have to have a version of your packaging written in French. The EU is not going to mandate that English packaging is accepted in all countries, for very obvious reasons.
  - lnxg33k1 17d ago
    It's easy to do any business in EU, it's hard if you want to do business in EU over multiple countries, but if you are planning to do business over multiple countries then you're already extremely rich so you can afford staff to navigate regulations you don't get it, americans are shallow people with no culture or background whose biggest achievement is saying I am 1/8 irish or something, but countries over here have millennial of culture
- bitcurious 18d ago
  > I am not sure, if I see the example of US as federation, it might work well for corporations only, but people have nothing, What does this mean, concretely? What do the people not have? Who are those people? What would they have in the EU? There is this odd fatalistic attitude about the US in this thread that seems divorced from the reality I’ve experienced in my travels.
  - lnxg33k1 18d ago
    universal healthcare, paid time off just to cite two work/life balance?
cbg0 18d ago
> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive. EU already has uniform regulations, what are you talking about? It's also the third largest economy in the world, as uncompetitive as it is.
- cowboy_henk 18d ago
  The EU is not a fiscal union. It is also not yet a single capital market.
- jcfrei 18d ago
  No it does not. There's a lot of gold plating happening at the national level that goes beyond EU regulations. It's EU regulations + 27 national regulations in reality. The EU economies are still too different and the population too unwilling to have a truly US-style single market.
  - etiennebausson 18d ago
    You seems to be arguing that a U.S. style single-market would be an improvement. But for whom, people or companies?
    - jcfrei 18d ago
      It's an improvement for the economy and that mainly benefits the shareholders. How you redistribute those gains more broadly is an open question. But keeping inefficiencies in place to protect workers at all costs is a losing strategy in the long term - see: Soviet Union.
      - Maskawanian 18d ago
        Unsurprisingly, people in different parts of the world hold different values. Europe is generally more focused on actual people and how their lives live, than simply accumulation of wealth among the few. It is unsurprising that they focus on different things.
luckystarr 18d ago
Consider: the US is a (somewhat) greenfield project, while the EU is a brownfield refactoring. These sorts of refactorings take time, even more so if done by "committee". The good thing is that explicit interfaces have to be created thereby (hopefully) increasing adaptability and resilience over time.
- mcv 18d ago
  The US was greenfield 2 centuries ago. It currently has a lot more technical (political?) debt than the EU. Some reforms are long overdue.
- softwaredoug 18d ago
  I want this one to succeed, but refactors often fail and revert to the original code structure :)
nickslaughter02 18d ago
[flagged]
- akie 18d ago
  We disagree.
- deleted 18d ago
  [deleted]
graemep 18d ago
> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive. I agree, but there are huge barriers to taking this step. You need a common identity to create a nation. Americans have one, so do other large nations. The EU does not.
hilbert42 18d ago
"But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones." It seems to me the EU is overburdened with trivial regulations (like regulating the maximum power consumption of domestic vacuum cleaners) rather than prioritizing core issues of its single market, manufacturing, trade, etc. Trouble is small vested interests hold overly powerful sway over EU-wide policy. The example above is a case in point, individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted. You're correct, annoying regulations are bloating the EU bureaucracy making it lethargic and uncompetitive.
- prof-dr-ir 18d ago
  > individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted. People proclaim this with such confidence, especially in the UK before the Brexit years I must say, and yet there are so many arguments against it. First, accepting this goes against a core tenet of the single market, since the single market for vacuum cleaners is now split into 27 little markets. We thus need 27 regulatory bodies to each investigate, and then make a political decision, on the maximum power setting of domestic vacuum cleaners. Then, producers in China will have to make (up to) 27 different models of vacuum cleaners. This is certainly not going to be cheaper, completely destroys the famous Brussels effect [0], all for some token amount of "sovereignty". Nations states can sovereignly decide to delegate this process of rule making to Brussels, and domestic vacuum cleaners are a perfectly mundane "case in point" to showcase the benefits of this process. The EU is far from a perfect union, but throwing these frankly naive arguments around will not help it much. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
  - mitxela 18d ago
    Nation states are also free, in practice, to ignore any regulation they don't like and implement their own. Hungary did this for a decade. They usually don't, because there is no benefit to ignoring the more widespread setting on maximum vacuum cleaner power.
rich_sasha 18d ago
The EU is an ongoing experiment as well. Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo. There’s plenty of good ingredients, plenty of challenges too. It can still go either way. Hell, at this rate it might outperform simply because US and China blow up due to domestic problems. The thing about mojo is that it’s super hard to predict. It might stay where it is and Europe’s share of global GDP might decline to nothing. Or it might rekindle out of nowhere due to some impulse. Either way, middle democracies are a somewhat threatened species now, and from their individual PoV an imperfect union might be much better than efficiently staying on their own.
- amelius 18d ago
  > Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo. Europe's biggest problem is that every decision can be vetoed by one of the member states. Which in practice means that the EU has very little power.
  - mitxela 18d ago
    No, not every decision made in Europe can be vetoed by any EU member state. Only EU decisions can be vetoed by EU member states.
    - amelius 18d ago
      This was implicit :(
      - mitxela 18d ago
        Not really! People think everything is about the EU, but that's like an American thinking everything is a UN decision.
  - rich_sasha 18d ago
    It’s effectively the same as what I mean - or a part of it. You fix this with either better "alignment” (ugh!) ie conviction of going in a particular direction, leading to a consensus. Or in turn, a conviction that the veto is bad and needs to be curbed for the overall benefit of everyone.
mitxela 18d ago
The EU shouldn't become the US. EU countries are sovereign, with the practical right to completely ignore what the EU tells them to do, and this is a good thing for now. If an EU country legalizes weed, federal troopers do not march in, arrest all the weed dispensary owners and march them to federal prison because those things don't exist.
- softwaredoug 18d ago
  Ok but you have to accept that means an EU country works with a hand tied behind its back. In the US I can start a company and instantly have a market of 350M. Start a company in an EU country, then try to expand to another country, it’s a nightmare. That company will have a lower upper bound on market size. The EU might be a success in coordinating on regional issues, but I don’t think it’s yet an asset to the European economy.
  - mitxela 18d ago
    Do you propose forcing 27 groups of people to become 1 group just so it's easier to sell them things? Culture in Europe is more on sustainable business rather than hypergrowth, but you can expand to other countries too. You just have to have a business strategy catering to all the groups you want to cater to. I think it's good the supermarket chains in France and in Germany are mostly disjoint sets, it keeps competition around. Pan-EU Supermarket Inc would be bad.
    - softwaredoug 18d ago
      I’m just telling you the tradeoffs you’ve chosen. You can’t be an economic superpower in the current regime. Without your own “hypergrowth” you’ll always be dominated by the hypergrowth of competitors like the US and China. You’ll be in orbit of other powers instead of creating your own gravity. Where am I wrong?
      - Waterluvian 18d ago
        To pivot a bit from the point above: I'm not sold on the core premise of the need for "hypergrowth." I think the American economy has been an incredible engine for productivity and I mostly agree that there's a lot of things that get in the way of the same in the EU and other countries. But I look around the U.S. and wonder what exactly the goal is if it's not actually giving everyone safer, more comfortable lives.
tokai 18d ago
You guys are clueless. Just because you don't understand the org and why it isn't exactly like the US doesn't make your vague misplaced opinions valid.
Waterluvian 18d ago
What alternative is there? The Americans are not an option anymore. It seems sensible to me that we want to get very close to one major power, and more close to everything else. Diversification.
usernametaken29 18d ago
> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive. But also: > The European Union has a nominal GDP of roughly $20 trillion, placing it closely on par with or slightly ahead of China ($19 trillion), but smaller than the United States ($30–$31 trillion) I don't know about you but the same GDP as China sounds economically successful... or not?
- goalieca 18d ago
  It is and it isn't. Around 15-20 years ago, the EU economy was actually bigger than the US economy in total terms (not per capita). The issue is that the EU has stagnated, as has canada while the USA has been pulling away. Growth has been pretty terrible for both for a long time.
bryanlarsen 17d ago
It might not be a good thing, but it's likely the best thing. Canada does not have a lot of good options. Doing nothing is a far worse option.
gdilla 17d ago
ok, but Carney has always said it's better than being continually threatened and betrayed by Americans. He's right. I agree that it'll be hard to be beneficial to the EU and Canada, will take decades, but the cost of doing nothing is higher. And people are forgetting this isn't just economic but there's security aspects as well.

lnxg33k1 18d ago

I am not sure, if I see the example of US as federation, it might work well for corporations only, but people have nothing, uniformity doesn't work because not all populations have the same needs/expectations

softwaredoug 18d ago
Maybe, but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU. Not because I think regulations are bad. But regulations need to be well designed with clears lines on what the Federal / State are allowed to do.
- Epa095 18d ago
  Its hard because its 27 different countries, but they are working on making it less hard. Many startups are made in Europe, but then bought up (often by Americans) or moves to USA when its time to expand outside the single countries boarders. Canada has the same problem. Canada has made it pretty clear that they do not want to be part of the big country south of it, so they will have to find a way to create large companies that stays. Doing this together with a market of 450 million people seems like a good idea.
- _ink_ 18d ago
  > but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU. They are working in it: https://www.eu-inc.org/ https://www.eu-inc.org/ I have no clue whether that will be a success, but at least they have recognised that problem as well.
- anonzzzies 18d ago
  > but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU Been doing it for decades. Not a billionaire and not interested in becoming one; in the US I would've been one. But never had issues.
- mitxela 18d ago
  You can't deal with 27 different groups of people without dealing with 27 different groups of people or forcibly unifying them to become 1 group. I'm sure you agree the latter is bad.
  - softwaredoug 18d ago
    That’s obviously reductive. They don’t have to be forced. They could mutually agree to unify more strongly
    - mitxela 18d ago
      Yes, and they have in some ways, and that's called the EU. They have not unified in every way. For example the French people have not agreed to start eating Surströmming, they do not want to start eating Surströmming, I don't know whether it's even legal there to possess it, and that decision should rightfully be up to them. If you want to sell your Surströmming in France you have to take France into account, you can't just assume your business will be the same everywhere in Europe, and that's not just limited to laws, but also all other facets of culture. For another basic example, you have to have a version of your packaging written in French. The EU is not going to mandate that English packaging is accepted in all countries, for very obvious reasons.
- lnxg33k1 17d ago
  It's easy to do any business in EU, it's hard if you want to do business in EU over multiple countries, but if you are planning to do business over multiple countries then you're already extremely rich so you can afford staff to navigate regulations you don't get it, americans are shallow people with no culture or background whose biggest achievement is saying I am 1/8 irish or something, but countries over here have millennial of culture
bitcurious 18d ago
> I am not sure, if I see the example of US as federation, it might work well for corporations only, but people have nothing, What does this mean, concretely? What do the people not have? Who are those people? What would they have in the EU? There is this odd fatalistic attitude about the US in this thread that seems divorced from the reality I’ve experienced in my travels.
- lnxg33k1 18d ago
  universal healthcare, paid time off just to cite two work/life balance?

cbg0 18d ago

> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive. EU already has uniform regulations, what are you talking about? It's also the third largest economy in the world, as uncompetitive as it is.

cowboy_henk 18d ago
The EU is not a fiscal union. It is also not yet a single capital market.
jcfrei 18d ago
No it does not. There's a lot of gold plating happening at the national level that goes beyond EU regulations. It's EU regulations + 27 national regulations in reality. The EU economies are still too different and the population too unwilling to have a truly US-style single market.
- etiennebausson 18d ago
  You seems to be arguing that a U.S. style single-market would be an improvement. But for whom, people or companies?
  - jcfrei 18d ago
    It's an improvement for the economy and that mainly benefits the shareholders. How you redistribute those gains more broadly is an open question. But keeping inefficiencies in place to protect workers at all costs is a losing strategy in the long term - see: Soviet Union.
    - Maskawanian 18d ago
      Unsurprisingly, people in different parts of the world hold different values. Europe is generally more focused on actual people and how their lives live, than simply accumulation of wealth among the few. It is unsurprising that they focus on different things.

luckystarr 18d ago

Consider: the US is a (somewhat) greenfield project, while the EU is a brownfield refactoring. These sorts of refactorings take time, even more so if done by "committee". The good thing is that explicit interfaces have to be created thereby (hopefully) increasing adaptability and resilience over time.

mcv 18d ago
The US was greenfield 2 centuries ago. It currently has a lot more technical (political?) debt than the EU. Some reforms are long overdue.
softwaredoug 18d ago
I want this one to succeed, but refactors often fail and revert to the original code structure :)

nickslaughter02 18d ago

[flagged]

akie 18d ago
We disagree.
deleted 18d ago
[deleted]

graemep 18d ago

> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive. I agree, but there are huge barriers to taking this step. You need a common identity to create a nation. Americans have one, so do other large nations. The EU does not.

hilbert42 18d ago

"But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones." It seems to me the EU is overburdened with trivial regulations (like regulating the maximum power consumption of domestic vacuum cleaners) rather than prioritizing core issues of its single market, manufacturing, trade, etc. Trouble is small vested interests hold overly powerful sway over EU-wide policy. The example above is a case in point, individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted. You're correct, annoying regulations are bloating the EU bureaucracy making it lethargic and uncompetitive.

prof-dr-ir 18d ago
> individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted. People proclaim this with such confidence, especially in the UK before the Brexit years I must say, and yet there are so many arguments against it. First, accepting this goes against a core tenet of the single market, since the single market for vacuum cleaners is now split into 27 little markets. We thus need 27 regulatory bodies to each investigate, and then make a political decision, on the maximum power setting of domestic vacuum cleaners. Then, producers in China will have to make (up to) 27 different models of vacuum cleaners. This is certainly not going to be cheaper, completely destroys the famous Brussels effect [0], all for some token amount of "sovereignty". Nations states can sovereignly decide to delegate this process of rule making to Brussels, and domestic vacuum cleaners are a perfectly mundane "case in point" to showcase the benefits of this process. The EU is far from a perfect union, but throwing these frankly naive arguments around will not help it much. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
- mitxela 18d ago
  Nation states are also free, in practice, to ignore any regulation they don't like and implement their own. Hungary did this for a decade. They usually don't, because there is no benefit to ignoring the more widespread setting on maximum vacuum cleaner power.

rich_sasha 18d ago

The EU is an ongoing experiment as well. Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo. There’s plenty of good ingredients, plenty of challenges too. It can still go either way. Hell, at this rate it might outperform simply because US and China blow up due to domestic problems. The thing about mojo is that it’s super hard to predict. It might stay where it is and Europe’s share of global GDP might decline to nothing. Or it might rekindle out of nowhere due to some impulse. Either way, middle democracies are a somewhat threatened species now, and from their individual PoV an imperfect union might be much better than efficiently staying on their own.

amelius 18d ago
> Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo. Europe's biggest problem is that every decision can be vetoed by one of the member states. Which in practice means that the EU has very little power.
- mitxela 18d ago
  No, not every decision made in Europe can be vetoed by any EU member state. Only EU decisions can be vetoed by EU member states.
  - amelius 18d ago
    This was implicit :(
    - mitxela 18d ago
      Not really! People think everything is about the EU, but that's like an American thinking everything is a UN decision.
- rich_sasha 18d ago
  It’s effectively the same as what I mean - or a part of it. You fix this with either better "alignment” (ugh!) ie conviction of going in a particular direction, leading to a consensus. Or in turn, a conviction that the veto is bad and needs to be curbed for the overall benefit of everyone.

mitxela 18d ago

The EU shouldn't become the US. EU countries are sovereign, with the practical right to completely ignore what the EU tells them to do, and this is a good thing for now. If an EU country legalizes weed, federal troopers do not march in, arrest all the weed dispensary owners and march them to federal prison because those things don't exist.

softwaredoug 18d ago
Ok but you have to accept that means an EU country works with a hand tied behind its back. In the US I can start a company and instantly have a market of 350M. Start a company in an EU country, then try to expand to another country, it’s a nightmare. That company will have a lower upper bound on market size. The EU might be a success in coordinating on regional issues, but I don’t think it’s yet an asset to the European economy.
- mitxela 18d ago
  Do you propose forcing 27 groups of people to become 1 group just so it's easier to sell them things? Culture in Europe is more on sustainable business rather than hypergrowth, but you can expand to other countries too. You just have to have a business strategy catering to all the groups you want to cater to. I think it's good the supermarket chains in France and in Germany are mostly disjoint sets, it keeps competition around. Pan-EU Supermarket Inc would be bad.
  - softwaredoug 18d ago
    I’m just telling you the tradeoffs you’ve chosen. You can’t be an economic superpower in the current regime. Without your own “hypergrowth” you’ll always be dominated by the hypergrowth of competitors like the US and China. You’ll be in orbit of other powers instead of creating your own gravity. Where am I wrong?
    - Waterluvian 18d ago
      To pivot a bit from the point above: I'm not sold on the core premise of the need for "hypergrowth." I think the American economy has been an incredible engine for productivity and I mostly agree that there's a lot of things that get in the way of the same in the EU and other countries. But I look around the U.S. and wonder what exactly the goal is if it's not actually giving everyone safer, more comfortable lives.

tokai 18d ago

You guys are clueless. Just because you don't understand the org and why it isn't exactly like the US doesn't make your vague misplaced opinions valid.

Waterluvian 18d ago

What alternative is there? The Americans are not an option anymore. It seems sensible to me that we want to get very close to one major power, and more close to everything else. Diversification.

usernametaken29 18d ago

> The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive. But also: > The European Union has a nominal GDP of roughly $20 trillion, placing it closely on par with or slightly ahead of China ($19 trillion), but smaller than the United States ($30–$31 trillion) I don't know about you but the same GDP as China sounds economically successful... or not?

goalieca 18d ago
It is and it isn't. Around 15-20 years ago, the EU economy was actually bigger than the US economy in total terms (not per capita). The issue is that the EU has stagnated, as has canada while the USA has been pulling away. Growth has been pretty terrible for both for a long time.

bryanlarsen 17d ago

It might not be a good thing, but it's likely the best thing. Canada does not have a lot of good options. Doing nothing is a far worse option.

gdilla 17d ago

ok, but Carney has always said it's better than being continually threatened and betrayed by Americans. He's right. I agree that it'll be hard to be beneficial to the EU and Canada, will take decades, but the cost of doing nothing is higher. And people are forgetting this isn't just economic but there's security aspects as well.