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Comment by germanier | Hacker News Reader

It's the same pattern as always: If the EU does something positive, then "your countries government worked really hard for that". If it's something people think critical of, blame the evil EU and deny your involvment.

An often cited example in Germany is Regulation (EC) 244/2009 which bans classical light bulbs. Always blamed on the EU. What nobody tells you, is that it was proposed by then-minister for environment Gabriel and heavily lobbied for by chancellor Merkel. Doesn't stop one of them to use it as an example of over-regulation.

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And all the bullshit that UK's tabloids like to write, than then gets regurgitated by the regular press in the mainland. Things like "straightening bananas", "reclassifying snails as fish", "declaring juice to be a juice" - every time I actually went to check the actual regulations, they made absolute, perfect sense. But the press misrepresents it to mock the EU and thus general population believes EU is just bunch of idiot bureaucrats out to codify everything.

I feel that this is such an important topic. The EU is an easy target for blame shifting, the opponents are so much more vocal and the union itself may be under threat in not too distant future.

I think it needs better marketing and PR, and for us, individual pro-EU citizens to not allow our local politicians to divert attention from their incapabilities.

Of course, the EU is much stronger than its PR suggests because of this: National leaders really like it, although semi-secretly, so when push comes to shove the EU is surprisingly resilient.

It does feed the perception that the EU is undemocratic, though, which may be harmful over time.

And, as a German:

EC 244/2009 led to lots of LED manufacturers trying to push their products and competing, leading to 8W 1200 Lumen warm-white LED light bulbs being available for less than 15€ by now everywhere.

In my family, before the regulation we had several light bulbs and mercury-bulbs from IKEA which were expensive, but now we switched to these LEDs and have better light at lower cost. (At $0.40 per kWh German electricity prices make switching to LED make sense).

Also many fun fair attraction owners switched to LED, and quickly discovered how having a programmable LED array is far better for flashy lights than few larger lights.

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In general, though: Yes. It always happens.

Same as in the refugee crisis, too. For the cost of building fences between all the EU countries that we did, we could have built a fence at the outer borders twice.

The lightbulb situation is a mess. For some reason people insist on buying the banned incandescent ones (things slowly change because LEDs are getting cheaper), which led to them coming back into all shops as "industrial material, not for home use". Of course everyone buys them anyway, but now that producers don't need to conform to norms for home use, they start to fail deadly. My mother bought one recently (she didn't have time to get a proper energy-saving one from a home improvement store where she buys them bulk), and we had it literally explode at home, throwing glass shards all around the kitchen, when my brother tried to turn on the light.

Fences: neatly ignoring that a lot of the countries not building fences don't actually WANT fences around the EU.

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