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Comment by matlock | Hacker News Reader

You should really do your research before saying things like "stop passing silly laws regulating the form of cucumbers"

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/straight-cucumbers/

This was to make it clearer across all Markets what products you buy to make a single market easier on everyone. This is just FUD that really shouldn't be part of this conversation.

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It's not FUD, its not a myth, its real: Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88 of 15 June 1988 laying down quality standards for cucumbers [1]

Yes i know this regulation is no longer in place, thats not the point. The point is that the EU is a overblown bureaucracy that should not be in charge of regulating every silly little aspect of life across the various member states.

And yes, they are STILL passing laws like this. Recently they passend regulation that limits the power consumption over regular vacuum cleaners.

[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:319...

All that law does is standardize various classes. It's a extremely common measure for facilitating trade, e.g.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/cucumber-grades-an...

https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/trade/agr/standard/fresh...

I guess the Facebook post he got his info from didn't mention that.

I'm guessing the Daily Mail.

> Recently they passed regulation that limits the power consumption over regular vacuum cleaners.

So why do you think laws like this are irrelevant?

Classifying produce only helps the consumer. You'd be a little annoyed if every week you went to the supermarket and they had a varying quality/size of produce but the price remained the same.

While I agree with quality standards, if the produce is priced by the kilo, it might certainly be more beneficial to have different sizes of it.

It's _better_ for the EU to define these things. If the EU hasn't done it centrally, member states would be doing it individually. This way:

1) You get a single definition of cucumber class 2C for every country, rather than a bunch of definitions that make trade more complex 2) It's (num_countries_in_EU) times cheaper to do it once than to do it seperately for every single country.

It has become quite clear to me that anyone who brings up the shape of bananas or cucumbers in the EU is either just spreading FUD because they've decided they're against the EU for other reasons, or believes anything the papers tell them without applying critical thinking to the matter.

Other people already pointed out the mistakes in your argument as this is necessary to build a common market across dozens of countries and hundreds of millions of people. Please read up on what the EU is trying to do, you really don't seem to have a grasp on it.

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