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Comment by sveme | Hacker News Reader

What brings you to this assessment? Your gut feeling? Just came across this: https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1087425506931294209 today, that would be pretty serious indeed for a country that relies on so much imported food.

Edit: Ah, sneak edit. Carry on.

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The fact that other countries manage to be outside the EU and do just fine.

This kind of catastrophist thinking is exactly the wrong way to think about things.

Yes it has conequences some negative and some positive. The world will go on.

> The fact that other countries manage to be outside the EU and do just fine.

1991: "Russia needn't worry, lots of countries have market economies and do just fine."

As though the structure of the British economy and trade activity hasn't been shaped by decades of EU membership.

Things won't be as they were in 90s Russia, but living standards will drop once exports are priced with WTO tariffs, and ditto for imports.

I agree, the world will carry on. It's just a very heavy systemic shock switching your economic system from one set of conditions to a completely different set of conditions, from one day to another. So the question is: is the benefit greater than the cost? I'm pretty sure that the voters have not received the necessary information to really assess this question.

So? There's plenty of money to be lost for the people who depended too much on the specific conditions of the old system and plenty of money to be gained by people who are in a position to exploit the conditions of the new system. It might not be a net wash but the net effect will probably not be as extreme (positive or negative) as either side is saying.

The UK have had several years to adjust.

I am unconvinced it's going to be a major issue and I have yet to see any evidence of the contrary.

> The fact that other countries manage to be outside the EU and do just fine.

This is the wrong way of thinking about things. Yes, other countries manage to be outside the EU, and do fine (albeit, at least in Europe, most of those doing fine have close links to the EU). But, those countries don't start from a position of being tightly integrated into the European economic system.

Indeed. You can have computers running Linux and computers running Windows. What you can't do is just come into work one day, reformat the Active Directory server and boot into RedHat, and declare all the problems to have been solved. Which is the problem we're facing: no transition planning, because there's no realistic discussion of even what the objectives are, let alone the consequential tradeoffs.

Neither is the UK.

I grew up in Denmark who also aren't fully members of the EU either. Every time we voted it was claimed to be the end of the world. It turned out to be just fine in fact mostly better than had we joined.

So I am pretty immune to these the sky is falling claims. The UK is an important country in the world, they will do just fine.

> Denmark who also aren't fully members of the EU either

False since 1973. http://um.dk/en/foreign-policy/denmark-in-the-eu/

It's complicated. See the Edinburgh Agreement of 1992:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Agreement_(1992)

Given that it's not unreasonable to see Denmark as an "active" but not "full" EU member.

By those metrics the UK isn't a full member either, since we have derivations - and Denmark is in Schengen!

That's the point.

If we were full members we would have the EURO and no derivations.

The fact that the UK has kept their own currency is itself making it less of a headache to untangle from the EU.

> The fact that other countries manage to be outside the EU and do just fine.

True, but in the immediate the UK seems to be in a somewhat alarming position. None of these other countries have ever needed to re-organize over half of their food supply chain overnight.

Other countries outside the EU had lots and lots of time to develop their supply lines.

Brexit is pretty much an "immediate change". That makes a huge difference.

>>The world will go on.

Not with the same configuration. And not with the players remaining in the same positions they are.

The sun always rises tomorrow, just not on the same world that was yesterday.

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