Well when you write obviously non factual nonsense like
>The EU is the opposite: One giant thing which does nothing well
You tend to get downvoted. When you write hilarious nonsense like this
>In Denmark, we've had 'cinnamon patrols' go from bakery to bakery to verify that only the allowed amount of cinnamon was sprinkled on buns.
And imply its the EU's fault, you get downvoted.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/12/25/256602581/wh...
> The EU's regulations on a common type of cinnamon called cassia limit how much bakers can use: 50 milligrams per kilogram of dough, if it's a traditional or seasonal pastry, or 15 milligrams per kilogram if it's just a regular old everyday pastry.
But the Denmark decided their traditional seasonal pastry was an everyday one
> This particular kerfuffle comes because the Danish food authority recently classified kanelsnegler, or cinnamon rolls, as an everyday pastry
So really this is the "fault" of the Danish government, isn't it?
Source for quotes: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/eu-worrie...
It kind of sounds like the issue is that outside of safety regulations someone told some petty tyrant that they got to decide how to classify pastry so of course they decided to classify it in such a way as to require action and importance on their own part at the expense of everyone's inconvenience.
I suspect the proper fix is to fire everyone in that department and start over.
Most countries have a body regulating what you can eat that will do it's best to stop you from ingesting dangerous amounts of, well, anything.
1. Spread misinformation and sow discontent against the EU
2. ???
3. Profit
1. Mention an obscure irritant that is superficially not the EU's fault, and blame the EU for it
2. EU supporters pile on and say that this is what all anti-EU arguments are like
3. When examined in more detail, the irritant actually IS the EU's fault
4. People then accept #2 as true, and hate the EU more (since apparently if they examined all the obvious BS about the EU more closely, they'd find it to be true)
That's true, but not all governments do it with the same ratio of genuine benefit to unwanted side-effects and collateral damage.
We don't have cinnamon patrols in my EU country, it sounds like the silliest thing in the world.
Can you name anything the EU has done well?
Removed internal borders, so you can travel from Denmark to Spain without 5 border crossings.
Created a common market, so you can order an item from a German web shop as a Belgium citizen without hurdles.
Made war between European countries economically unattractive because economies are closely intertwined.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/19/europe...
It's from 2012, but the vast majority of what's said there is still true.
Although the creation of the EU was motivated in large part to prevent the recurrence of that sort of badness, the EU does not have the power to restrain the militaries of the individual European countries. Note that the EU was shown not to have the power to compel the Italian government that came to power because of the general election of March 2018 to adhere to EU regulations on deficit spending.
Nowadays war between France and Germany is close to as absurd a thought as a war between Calafornia and Texas is. It's not remotely comparable to 1900-1950.
Russia is the largest threat for European countries, but currently an attack on a NATO member seems unlikely.
Inter-war period was hardly one of economical integration, considered that most of European countries were engaged in economic war with other - eg. Poland had no economic exchange with its neighbours.
Second, the US were not a nice place to live in 1861, while Europe was. Time changes.
Also, throwing it weight around on the geopolitical stage has been proven more then useful for european nations, compared to getting picked off by either china/USA/Russia.
So your government decided to go overboard with enforcement (instead of classifying cinnamon buns as a traditional good and exempt, like the Swedish did, if those are a big issue in Denmark) and that's purely the EU's fault? (Or did they did not go overboard and regular food safety inspections with one more thing to test on the list got styled as "cinnamon patrols"?)
The EU certainly has very far reach and goes into pedantic detail, which isn't always good, but states love to redirect annoyance at their crap implementation on it. That's still partially a problem with it, but still annoys me.
Is this for real? I know it's anecdotal but I find it hilarious
> I could write a list much longer, but in general I think the Unix approach works: Many small things that each do one thing well. The EU is the opposite: One giant thing which does nothing well
Well...I'm sure many could point out somethings that the EU has done well...I guess at the heart of regulating cinnamon buns is the issue of standards...that specific instance is probably an overkill but having a common standard of electrical equipment produced/imported to the EU makes sense...at the very least you could argue that some member states have benefited considerably although that may not necessarily be attributable to EU policy
But sure, example could be dug up of good things the EU have done. But even in those cases the cost is much too great.
For instance, they built a really nice hallway at the Parliament, but when it came time to name it, they assigned 76 diplomats and the president of the EU to work through the name. That alone ended up costing something like 11 million euros.
I can't think of anything they've done, which hasn't resulted in millions of taxpayers money being poured down the drain. Not surprisingly, the EU has the lowest growth rate in the world.
What would be the growth rate without the single market?
Without the EU, the UK is about as big as California.
Citation please? I can't find anything about that online, and I'd expect that to be a scandal that'd be easily found!
Individually European countries are pretty weak. They're only strong as a common entity.
Then that's the next Brexit target, innit? Gin up some "grassroots" support for leaving that Mean Nasty NATO What Is Bad And Mean and just never you mind that the original talking points were translated from the Russian.
We know the Russians are working to dismantle everything on the European continent which could counterbalance their ambitions. NATO isn't any more immune than the EU is.
Divide and conquer, one of the oldest strategies. Yes, I'm sure "countries can defend themselves alone" yup, right
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/eu-worrie...
Sounds like this is more of a "Denmark problem" than an "EU problem", unless you think the EU should simply not legislate the use of products that can cause health issues when present in high quantities in food (in this case cinnamon)
The reaction to a bad regulation being passed shouldn't be "oh, well, the government can just exempt your specific product from that regulation".
In the UK, we now have a debate about regulating portion sizes of ready meals, because some people are overweight. If you have voters and politicians who will even start to think about regulating this sort of thing, you're bound to end up with massive overregulation.
Sometimes the choice we have is between 28 different ridiculously convoluted and completely unnecessary laws or just one ridiculously convoluted and completely unnecessary law.
Your Unix metaphor is flawed. Countries are not special purpose tools. They don't do different things. They all do largely the same things in slightly different ways. So each country on its own already comes with all the issues that we criticise in monolythic software.
Beside legislating the amount of cinnamon bakeries use, the EU handles so many important things that a small country like denmark will never have the resources to handle. This in no way means that they are perfect, but work to improve it instead.
We have this big project, it has been running in production for 15 years, it solves a lot of problems, but there are of course some technical debt that we should find the time to improve and fix. In my head you are the new guy telling everyone that we should rewrite it.
In Denmark, we've had 'cinnamon patrols' go from bakery to bakery to verify that only the allowed amount of cinnamon was sprinkled on buns.
We had what felt like a complete shutdown of IT departments in the months leading up to the GDPR because, again, it was overreaching and too vague. (the idea was good though)
I could write a list much longer, but in general I think the Unix approach works: Many small things that each do one thing well. The EU is the opposite: One giant thing which does nothing well - If for no other reason, than the distance from the Parliament to a wooden cabin on the mountains of norway is just too great for them to regulate that cabin in great detail, but still this is what they attempt to do. And now, down to each word on each and every webpage accesible from the EU.