Mistaking the EU, the political union as an evolved form of the Rome treaty, with Euro, the coin. All that with the tone of absolute certainty and authority.

Hacker News has reached new lows :(

That's one of the issues on the internet nowadays; people use their soapbox to present a thought as fact. Even if they're being called out on it and proven wrong, the statement is made and a seed is planted in someone's brain.

It's like newspaper headlines that say X, but (have to) nuance it in the article itself. Except that Twitter doesn't support articles, so it's only headlines.

Come on, that's not fair. The EEC was a very different beast to today's EU. The modern form of the EU could certainly be argued as starting with the Treaty of Lisbon.

Maastrich yes, Lisbon? It only set into laws stuff that were already existing and done, as well as provisioning for "unexpected stuff" (brexit art 50 was provisioned in the treaty of lisbon i think).

But the treaty of Lisbon changed almost nothing in reality. At least, not enough to warrant the birth of "Modern EU"

Perhaps Maastricht might be a better place to draw the line. But it's not like the changes at Lisbon were trivial; for example, changing unanimous voting to majority was a qualitative change in the character of the organization. My argument is that the GP by lanevorockz was pretty obviously referring to Lisbon, and that the reply by HugoDaniel seemed quite disingenuous in that light.

HN has always been bottom of the barrel. Bunch of people repeating memes to each other.

But they benefited from the EU in a way which is no more possible.

I hope this is a typo and you mean to write "The EUR as a monetary union".

The euro is truly an unremarkable currency and I'm not sure that the EU would be much worse without it. It's equally likely that the EU would have done much better without the euro. I can't blame the UK for avoiding the euro.

You should teach history at college.