15 ms·

A good example of beneficial government regulation, for people who refuse to believe such a thing exists. (Another good example is the Internet itself, but it's

A good example of beneficial government regulation, for people who refuse to believe such a thing exists. (Another good example is the Internet itself, but it's best to start small)

poof131 12y ago
Yes, a good piece of regulation, but who believes in no regulation? To me, no regulation means no law, which means anarchy. And the only people who want anarchy are the same types of people who would be dead the first day it broke out. But much of the regulation in the US is regulatory capture. We need regulation for the people, not for the companies. Moving in the right direction is a challenge and we need to break down the illusion that half the population is for good (those on our voting team) and the other half for bad.
- protonfish 12y ago
  How ironic that the only way to get rid of objectivist libertarians is to give them what they want. Still, it is probably worth it.
- kzrdude 12y ago
  Anarchy doesn't really exist. It's just that people want to go back to a state before the current contracts and laws were passed. What would happen? The same kinds of associations, rules, and laws would form again.
  - coriny 12y ago
    Anarcho-collectivists, which as far as I understand, represents the dominant modern anarchistic philosophy, examine alternative methods to central government for generating laws. So they don't argue for an unregulated society - which is obviously a non-starter under the lens of reality - or a return to pre-government, but rather a complete replacement of the law-making mechanism. Basically, they're all over complexity theory and how to use strong local interactions to develop self-organising non-local societies. Which I personally think makes anarcho-collectivism possibly the most sophisticated and futuristic of current political models. They were two decades ahead of the "localism" and "direct democracy" ideologies, and with a far better understanding of the maths.
    - voronoff 12y ago
      Do you have any links to writings on this (Anarcho-collectivism from a complexity perspective or vice-versa)? Did both a quick journal search and a Google search and didn't find much.
      - coriny 12y ago
        Sorry for the very late reply, I've been hoping I'd get some time to do this properly, but haven't succeeded. It's something I first read ~10 years ago, where it was mostly in the musings of a complexity theorist. Since then odd things have cropped up which have supported that narrative in my mind, but I haven't got a particularly convincing collection to work with. There's some leads in here though: http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/documents/Anarchism%20and%20World%20Politics/CudHob.pdf http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/documents/Anarch....
    - jlangenauer 12y ago
      Yes, as someone who's interested in this, I'd love to read any links or papers about this aspect of it.
      - coriny 12y ago
        Apologies for my poor stab at answering this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273839
  - baddox 12y ago
    All self-proclaimed anarchists I am aware of oppose the state, but do not oppose associations, rules, or laws.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      The point is that "the state" will just come back. You can't get rid of it permanently.
- protonfish 12y ago
  So I commented on your first paragraph just to make a joke, then I read your second. There is no reason to believe that cross-party unity would solve anything, and plenty to make us think it would make things way worse. Two parties that are friendly and cozy with each other are equivalent to a single party. That will leave US voters with no real choice at the ballot box, and remove the only real repercussion to a politician - the fear that their opponent will take them to task during the next election. Partisan politics is the most powerful tool we have to preventing politicians from running rampant with power. Heaven help us if they ever unite against their common enemy - the people.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Not really. Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise which is a prerequisite for progress. Lots of parties have friendly relations without society collapsing. Your belief is very ignorant and US-centric.
    - lutusp 12y ago
      > Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise which is a prerequisite for progress. Ask a professional diplomat whether this idea is true. Israelis and Palestinians achieve compromises all the time -- they're fragile and short-lived, but they're certainly compromises. Unions and management come to compromises regularly, after sometimes bloody demonstrations (in the early days of the organized labor movement). In a now-famous story from 1943 Berlin, a group of wives of Jewish men protested and demonstrated against the regime's plan to round up and exterminate their husbands. Because the demonstration took place in Berlin, because of its size and international visibility, and because the wives were not themselves Jewish, the Nazis reached a compromise -- the men were released. Reference: http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/german-wives-win-release-their-jewish-husbands-rosenstrasse-protest-1943 http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/german-wives-win-re... Quote: "As the women continued to protest at Rosenstrasse into March 6, the German leadership finally gave in, even as 25 of the intermarried Jews were being deported to Auschwitz. The Nazi Propaganda Minister, Goebbels released the remaining intermarried Jews in an attempt to maintain the visage of conformity in Berlin. The protests of Aryan women against the internment of their Jewish husbands had shown open dissent to the Nazi program and for Goebbels (with Hitler’s approval), it was more important to eliminate this dissent by releasing those Jews than to allow such dissent to be visible to other Germans or international bodies. Thirty-five intermarried Jews that had already been sent to Auschwitz were also returned. While twenty-five of the detainees were not released, thirty-five intermarried Jews that had already been sent to Auschwitz were also returned to Berlin." > Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise ... In reality, this is proven false every day. > Your belief is very ignorant and US-centric. Your ignorance of both current events and history is embarrassing.
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  >And the only people who want anarchy are the same types of people who would be dead the first day it broke out. This is an amusing statement. What kind of people are you referring to here? Keyboard-warrior lolbertarians, randroids etc? Surely not the black bloc types and their various dog-on-a-string, squat-dwelling, convoy-travelling chums? I would have thought they'd be better equipped than most for a mad max style dystopia...
- zo1 12y ago
  "But much of the regulation in the US is regulatory capture. We need regulation for the people, not for the companies." I'll just go ahead and leave this here for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
- baddox 12y ago
  Replace "anarchy" with "self-organization" or "decentralized governance" to make it sound a lot less scary. I've just started a pop econ book on this topic (after watching the author's video) that seems interesting so far. http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Unbound-Self-Governance-Cambridge-Economics-ebook/dp/B00JXII4Q2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409074892&sr=8-1&keywords=anarchy+unbound http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Unbound-Self-Governance-Cambri... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7K-0ohtb4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7K-0ohtb4Y
icebraining 12y ago
I disagree. This shouldn't need specific regulations, they should be treated as plain fraud by small claim courts. This just underlines the brokenness of the system.
- blowski 12y ago
  What should happen instead?
- seabee 12y ago
  Unless case law is created in the small claims court, having specific regulations for things which normally end up there is very beneficial for consumers. It gives you a tool to fight the disease - the company committing fraud - rather than treating symptoms by settling in small claims court with anyone who cared enough to bring it there.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    It gives you a tool to fight the disease - the company committing fraud In what way, exactly? And why couldn't that be done if the behavior was simply considered fraud, which is should obviously be?
    - SEMW 12y ago
      For one thing, what is "considered fraud" will be different in each of the 27 member countries of the EU in any area of fraud where national law has not been superseded by a harmonisation directive like this one. Part of the point of the EU is to have a single market for goods and services. That means I should be able to order something from a Danish company with the same confidence (in a basic level of consumer protection) that I would in my home country, knowing that any caselaw will have been at the CJEU level (because it's interpreting an EU directive) and so will apply EU-wide.
- tormeh 12y ago
  Courts writing law. What could possibly go wrong with that?
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> A good example of beneficial government regulation, for people who refuse to believe such a thing exists. I don't get how people can hold that belief. It falls apart the moment you think about game theory for five minutes, or read up a Wikipedia article about externalities and tragedy of commons.
- Kalium 12y ago
  It's amazing what personal greed and arrogance will do to ideology.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I'd say: it's amazing how ideology can shut one's mind down. But then again, isn't that written into definition of ideology?
    - Kalium 12y ago
      I'm not sure I agree that ideology automatically shuts a mind. After all, being open-minded is an ideological position as well. I was just thinking that some ideologies seem to exist for the purpose of allowing people to justify their greedy behavior.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        I was thinking about ideologies that work as a proxy for evaluating facts. It's kind of like saying that scientific method is also an ideology. In some sense, it is, but it's the one thing that's not like others. > I was just thinking that some ideologies seem to exist for the purpose of allowing people to justify their greedy behavior. Maybe. I try to be more charitable, especially that I know many friends that are (by their own admission [0]) borderline libertarian and are definitely neither greedy nor selfish. I think that it's a way how people respond to governments clearly overreaching with their regulations. It's a kind of cultural backlash, but if you treat it as an ideology, thinking that e.g. Free Markets Are The Best And Government Is Always Evil, then you're throwing baby out with the bathwater and trying to replace a bad hell with a worse hell. [0] - I try to avoid using such labels, because I think they shut down the mind. I personally might be more liberal on topic A, and lean more conservative on topic B, just because different methods work for different problems. Labeling things by political ideas make people lose that distinction. I've personally been called Marxist And Therefore Wrong by bringing up in a discussion the topic of tragedy of commons, which was immediately labeled as The Part Of Marxist Economy, Not The Real One. sigh
danielweber 12y ago
If you had stopped at the first comma, this would have been a fine comment. But by taking a swipe at people[1], you start a political discussion. [1] even if they are people that you Know For Sure and can Absolutely Prove are in the Wrong
- orblivion 12y ago
  Unfortunately, what may seem to be obvious and apolitical to you inevitably steps on the toes of other techies on this forum who sees things otherwise. I don't see a way for this story not to be political. (Though that's no excuse for any of to be impolite, if that's what you're getting at. [Which is not to say that the swipe you mentioned was impolite.])
baddox 12y ago
I think most people who tend to oppose regulation do so not because they believe a beneficial government regulation is impossible, but because the net effect of government regulation is negative.
orblivion 12y ago
Actually as one of the people I think you're talking about (though as someone else noted I don't know if your description of radical free-market types is perfectly accurate, it's really about net benefit) this concerns me. In principle it seems to be banning fraud, and if that's all it does then I can't really complain. But to say "you can't structure your site in such a way" I think it's rather heavy handed. I guess it comes down to how it's enforced. Given the way governments generally are, there's going to be some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites, it's going to bog everything down, things will get developed much more slowly. This is a hidden cost. The web is a very agile industry, so this would be particularly painful. So until you can quantify this cost, you can't argue that this is unquestionably a beneficial regulation. I think a better way (though maybe with lesser hidden costs) to deal with it would be to declare that such dark patterns constitute fraud. That way, a customer is free to sue a company for committing it. Then the incentives are placed on the company not to set up these patterns. If there's a grey area, it's not the job of a bureaucrat to prescribe, it's the job of a consumer to decide if they've been defrauded, then judge to agree or not, and also the company to make a risk trade off, and so forth. Much less rigid that way.
- michaelt 12y ago
  Given the way governments generally are, there's going to be some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites With a lot of consumer rights in the UK, the principle is that you don't need prior approval or proactive monitoring, instead relying on complaints from the injured party to identify violations. So assuming 99% of websites comply with the law, 99% of websites have no need for any sort of official review. IMHO your assumptions are far from evident.
  - orblivion 12y ago
    Okay. Well, pending learning anything else about it, I'll assume that it's likely not so bad a law, then.
- tobylane 12y ago
  > In principle it seems to be banning fraud, and if that's all it does then I can't really complain. But to say "you can't structure your site in such a way" I think it's rather heavy handed. What if the only way to ban fraud is to say you can't structure it this way? Pyramid schemes seem like a good example. >some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites My understanding of the article was that customers complain to their local council, get their money back, and the company changes after loosing too much money. >it's the job of a consumer to decide if they've been defrauded The EU doesn't like doing that, there's too many vulnerable people, too much to do in the day for the less vulnerable.
rmc 12y ago
It's also a good example of good EU regulation. There are many in the UK who think the EU does nothing but regulate bendy bananas. The EU brings a lot of good law for the little guy to the UK (and other EU states)
- vidarh 12y ago
  Living in the UK, the thought of the UK potentially withdrawing from the EU is terrifying - so many of the complaints about the EU are about areas where the EU are interfering in absolutely awful attempts by UK politicians to restrict peoples rights. It's even worse when they complain about things that are independent of the EU, but still blame the EU, such as which often happens with decisions from the European Court of Human Rights.
hellodevnull 12y ago
To me this isn't additional regulation to standard contract law. A transaction is a contract between two parties, if the contract is intentionally deceitful you have the right to dispute it. So this it's great that they're putting it in print, because nobody's going to sue over a couple of items being added to your basket.

A good example of beneficial government regulation, for people who refuse to believe such a thing exists. (Another good example is the Internet itself, but it's best to start small)

poof131 12y ago

Yes, a good piece of regulation, but who believes in no regulation? To me, no regulation means no law, which means anarchy. And the only people who want anarchy are the same types of people who would be dead the first day it broke out. But much of the regulation in the US is regulatory capture. We need regulation for the people, not for the companies. Moving in the right direction is a challenge and we need to break down the illusion that half the population is for good (those on our voting team) and the other half for bad.

protonfish 12y ago
How ironic that the only way to get rid of objectivist libertarians is to give them what they want. Still, it is probably worth it.
kzrdude 12y ago
Anarchy doesn't really exist. It's just that people want to go back to a state before the current contracts and laws were passed. What would happen? The same kinds of associations, rules, and laws would form again.
- coriny 12y ago
  Anarcho-collectivists, which as far as I understand, represents the dominant modern anarchistic philosophy, examine alternative methods to central government for generating laws. So they don't argue for an unregulated society - which is obviously a non-starter under the lens of reality - or a return to pre-government, but rather a complete replacement of the law-making mechanism. Basically, they're all over complexity theory and how to use strong local interactions to develop self-organising non-local societies. Which I personally think makes anarcho-collectivism possibly the most sophisticated and futuristic of current political models. They were two decades ahead of the "localism" and "direct democracy" ideologies, and with a far better understanding of the maths.
  - voronoff 12y ago
    Do you have any links to writings on this (Anarcho-collectivism from a complexity perspective or vice-versa)? Did both a quick journal search and a Google search and didn't find much.
    - coriny 12y ago
      Sorry for the very late reply, I've been hoping I'd get some time to do this properly, but haven't succeeded. It's something I first read ~10 years ago, where it was mostly in the musings of a complexity theorist. Since then odd things have cropped up which have supported that narrative in my mind, but I haven't got a particularly convincing collection to work with. There's some leads in here though: http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/documents/Anarchism%20and%20World%20Politics/CudHob.pdf http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/documents/Anarch....
  - jlangenauer 12y ago
    Yes, as someone who's interested in this, I'd love to read any links or papers about this aspect of it.
    - coriny 12y ago
      Apologies for my poor stab at answering this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273839
- baddox 12y ago
  All self-proclaimed anarchists I am aware of oppose the state, but do not oppose associations, rules, or laws.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    The point is that "the state" will just come back. You can't get rid of it permanently.
protonfish 12y ago
So I commented on your first paragraph just to make a joke, then I read your second. There is no reason to believe that cross-party unity would solve anything, and plenty to make us think it would make things way worse. Two parties that are friendly and cozy with each other are equivalent to a single party. That will leave US voters with no real choice at the ballot box, and remove the only real repercussion to a politician - the fear that their opponent will take them to task during the next election. Partisan politics is the most powerful tool we have to preventing politicians from running rampant with power. Heaven help us if they ever unite against their common enemy - the people.
- tormeh 12y ago
  Not really. Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise which is a prerequisite for progress. Lots of parties have friendly relations without society collapsing. Your belief is very ignorant and US-centric.
  - lutusp 12y ago
    > Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise which is a prerequisite for progress. Ask a professional diplomat whether this idea is true. Israelis and Palestinians achieve compromises all the time -- they're fragile and short-lived, but they're certainly compromises. Unions and management come to compromises regularly, after sometimes bloody demonstrations (in the early days of the organized labor movement). In a now-famous story from 1943 Berlin, a group of wives of Jewish men protested and demonstrated against the regime's plan to round up and exterminate their husbands. Because the demonstration took place in Berlin, because of its size and international visibility, and because the wives were not themselves Jewish, the Nazis reached a compromise -- the men were released. Reference: http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/german-wives-win-release-their-jewish-husbands-rosenstrasse-protest-1943 http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/german-wives-win-re... Quote: "As the women continued to protest at Rosenstrasse into March 6, the German leadership finally gave in, even as 25 of the intermarried Jews were being deported to Auschwitz. The Nazi Propaganda Minister, Goebbels released the remaining intermarried Jews in an attempt to maintain the visage of conformity in Berlin. The protests of Aryan women against the internment of their Jewish husbands had shown open dissent to the Nazi program and for Goebbels (with Hitler’s approval), it was more important to eliminate this dissent by releasing those Jews than to allow such dissent to be visible to other Germans or international bodies. Thirty-five intermarried Jews that had already been sent to Auschwitz were also returned. While twenty-five of the detainees were not released, thirty-five intermarried Jews that had already been sent to Auschwitz were also returned to Berlin." > Friendly relations is a prerequisite for compromise ... In reality, this is proven false every day. > Your belief is very ignorant and US-centric. Your ignorance of both current events and history is embarrassing.
JonnieCache 12y ago
>And the only people who want anarchy are the same types of people who would be dead the first day it broke out. This is an amusing statement. What kind of people are you referring to here? Keyboard-warrior lolbertarians, randroids etc? Surely not the black bloc types and their various dog-on-a-string, squat-dwelling, convoy-travelling chums? I would have thought they'd be better equipped than most for a mad max style dystopia...
zo1 12y ago
"But much of the regulation in the US is regulatory capture. We need regulation for the people, not for the companies." I'll just go ahead and leave this here for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
baddox 12y ago
Replace "anarchy" with "self-organization" or "decentralized governance" to make it sound a lot less scary. I've just started a pop econ book on this topic (after watching the author's video) that seems interesting so far. http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Unbound-Self-Governance-Cambridge-Economics-ebook/dp/B00JXII4Q2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409074892&sr=8-1&keywords=anarchy+unbound http://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Unbound-Self-Governance-Cambri... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7K-0ohtb4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7K-0ohtb4Y

icebraining 12y ago

I disagree. This shouldn't need specific regulations, they should be treated as plain fraud by small claim courts. This just underlines the brokenness of the system.

blowski 12y ago
What should happen instead?
seabee 12y ago
Unless case law is created in the small claims court, having specific regulations for things which normally end up there is very beneficial for consumers. It gives you a tool to fight the disease - the company committing fraud - rather than treating symptoms by settling in small claims court with anyone who cared enough to bring it there.
- icebraining 12y ago
  It gives you a tool to fight the disease - the company committing fraud In what way, exactly? And why couldn't that be done if the behavior was simply considered fraud, which is should obviously be?
  - SEMW 12y ago
    For one thing, what is "considered fraud" will be different in each of the 27 member countries of the EU in any area of fraud where national law has not been superseded by a harmonisation directive like this one. Part of the point of the EU is to have a single market for goods and services. That means I should be able to order something from a Danish company with the same confidence (in a basic level of consumer protection) that I would in my home country, knowing that any caselaw will have been at the CJEU level (because it's interpreting an EU directive) and so will apply EU-wide.
tormeh 12y ago
Courts writing law. What could possibly go wrong with that?

TeMPOraL 12y ago

> A good example of beneficial government regulation, for people who refuse to believe such a thing exists. I don't get how people can hold that belief. It falls apart the moment you think about game theory for five minutes, or read up a Wikipedia article about externalities and tragedy of commons.

Kalium 12y ago
It's amazing what personal greed and arrogance will do to ideology.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I'd say: it's amazing how ideology can shut one's mind down. But then again, isn't that written into definition of ideology?
  - Kalium 12y ago
    I'm not sure I agree that ideology automatically shuts a mind. After all, being open-minded is an ideological position as well. I was just thinking that some ideologies seem to exist for the purpose of allowing people to justify their greedy behavior.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      I was thinking about ideologies that work as a proxy for evaluating facts. It's kind of like saying that scientific method is also an ideology. In some sense, it is, but it's the one thing that's not like others. > I was just thinking that some ideologies seem to exist for the purpose of allowing people to justify their greedy behavior. Maybe. I try to be more charitable, especially that I know many friends that are (by their own admission [0]) borderline libertarian and are definitely neither greedy nor selfish. I think that it's a way how people respond to governments clearly overreaching with their regulations. It's a kind of cultural backlash, but if you treat it as an ideology, thinking that e.g. Free Markets Are The Best And Government Is Always Evil, then you're throwing baby out with the bathwater and trying to replace a bad hell with a worse hell. [0] - I try to avoid using such labels, because I think they shut down the mind. I personally might be more liberal on topic A, and lean more conservative on topic B, just because different methods work for different problems. Labeling things by political ideas make people lose that distinction. I've personally been called Marxist And Therefore Wrong by bringing up in a discussion the topic of tragedy of commons, which was immediately labeled as The Part Of Marxist Economy, Not The Real One. sigh

danielweber 12y ago

If you had stopped at the first comma, this would have been a fine comment. But by taking a swipe at people[1], you start a political discussion. [1] even if they are people that you Know For Sure and can Absolutely Prove are in the Wrong

orblivion 12y ago
Unfortunately, what may seem to be obvious and apolitical to you inevitably steps on the toes of other techies on this forum who sees things otherwise. I don't see a way for this story not to be political. (Though that's no excuse for any of to be impolite, if that's what you're getting at. [Which is not to say that the swipe you mentioned was impolite.])

baddox 12y ago

I think most people who tend to oppose regulation do so not because they believe a beneficial government regulation is impossible, but because the net effect of government regulation is negative.

orblivion 12y ago

Actually as one of the people I think you're talking about (though as someone else noted I don't know if your description of radical free-market types is perfectly accurate, it's really about net benefit) this concerns me. In principle it seems to be banning fraud, and if that's all it does then I can't really complain. But to say "you can't structure your site in such a way" I think it's rather heavy handed. I guess it comes down to how it's enforced. Given the way governments generally are, there's going to be some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites, it's going to bog everything down, things will get developed much more slowly. This is a hidden cost. The web is a very agile industry, so this would be particularly painful. So until you can quantify this cost, you can't argue that this is unquestionably a beneficial regulation. I think a better way (though maybe with lesser hidden costs) to deal with it would be to declare that such dark patterns constitute fraud. That way, a customer is free to sue a company for committing it. Then the incentives are placed on the company not to set up these patterns. If there's a grey area, it's not the job of a bureaucrat to prescribe, it's the job of a consumer to decide if they've been defrauded, then judge to agree or not, and also the company to make a risk trade off, and so forth. Much less rigid that way.

michaelt 12y ago
Given the way governments generally are, there's going to be some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites With a lot of consumer rights in the UK, the principle is that you don't need prior approval or proactive monitoring, instead relying on complaints from the injured party to identify violations. So assuming 99% of websites comply with the law, 99% of websites have no need for any sort of official review. IMHO your assumptions are far from evident.
- orblivion 12y ago
  Okay. Well, pending learning anything else about it, I'll assume that it's likely not so bad a law, then.
tobylane 12y ago
> In principle it seems to be banning fraud, and if that's all it does then I can't really complain. But to say "you can't structure your site in such a way" I think it's rather heavy handed. What if the only way to ban fraud is to say you can't structure it this way? Pyramid schemes seem like a good example. >some sort of government agency with an official review process for websites My understanding of the article was that customers complain to their local council, get their money back, and the company changes after loosing too much money. >it's the job of a consumer to decide if they've been defrauded The EU doesn't like doing that, there's too many vulnerable people, too much to do in the day for the less vulnerable.

rmc 12y ago

It's also a good example of good EU regulation. There are many in the UK who think the EU does nothing but regulate bendy bananas. The EU brings a lot of good law for the little guy to the UK (and other EU states)

vidarh 12y ago
Living in the UK, the thought of the UK potentially withdrawing from the EU is terrifying - so many of the complaints about the EU are about areas where the EU are interfering in absolutely awful attempts by UK politicians to restrict peoples rights. It's even worse when they complain about things that are independent of the EU, but still blame the EU, such as which often happens with decisions from the European Court of Human Rights.

hellodevnull 12y ago

To me this isn't additional regulation to standard contract law. A transaction is a contract between two parties, if the contract is intentionally deceitful you have the right to dispute it. So this it's great that they're putting it in print, because nobody's going to sue over a couple of items being added to your basket.