Hacker news: the place where Americans find out about current and future EU legislation through the lens of propaganda from American corporations.
There were rumors that because UK is leaving many banks from London City will move to Germany or Belgium or the Netherlands.
They did not because they actually did not want to be regulated by EU and UK can serve rich people better while poor people got it worse.
Under the guise that poor less educated people wanted brexit… where they were brainwashed.
It makes me think that the academic left should be a bit more careful with their regular calls to "burn down the evil capitalist system". It turns out a mob with torches might also set fire to the parts you like.
They are the most obvious example of "saw off the branch you're sitting on" I can think of.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/18/business/uk-millionaires-...
https://www.ft.com/content/383587ee-5b31-4549-9392-2f0b4612e...
That's not how banking regulation works though. If a bank wants to do business in the EU, and all the big banks do, then they have to have entities regulated by the relevant EU regulators. Prior to Brexit, it was ok for a bank to be regulated by the PRA or FCA to trade in the EU. Post Brexit, they need to have entities with banking licenses that are subject to EU regulators.
And that's what they did: they set up banking entities in Germany, France, Ireland etc. And they moved/hired staff into those countries to support that activity (if they weren't there already).
They didn't wholesale move out of London for 2 reasons: The UK is a big market and there is a large pool of skilled people in London that it wouldn't make sense to ignore.
> Real Brexiteers were bankers
Right. Bankers famously want their ill gotten gains to go to taxation, duty and red tape rather than into their own pockets. They lobby hard for extra regulation, multiple, diverse, enforcement regimes and multiple, diverse taxation regimes. They also want their customers' money to be going to taxation, duty and red tape so that they can't spend it on banking services. Because bankers are famously altruistic like that.
To paraphrase Pauli, the idea that the finance sector, esp in the UK, wanted Brexit is not even wrong.
Brexit was a democratic vote. Maybe some banks invested some money to push Brexit. But its pretty clear that overwhelmingly immigration was what the Brexit voting base actually cared about.
Overwhelming most people in banking are conventional liberals. They live in big cities and are internationalists.
Maybe the very elite of the richest banks thought that way, but not bankers broadly.
Even before the EU existed, certain American states ended up as de-facto national standard setters for certain products.
If that phenomenon was destined to become a popular term with broad awareness and acceptance, I think it would have happened already.
I'll expand, then. The EU demands USB charging for mobile devices, Apple didn't suddenly become good. The EU demands longer software updates for mobile devices, Samsung nor Google didn't become angels all of a sudden. Similar situation here.
Everything needs to be dragged away from them, one painful law at a time.
And then corporations turn it around as their "largesse".
But the anarcho-capitalists told me that market will fix it all on its own if only we let corporations do whatever they want and not burden them with regulations!
It's honestly shocking to me how many anarcho-capitalists there are, especially here on HN. I get the aversion to taxation on a primal level, but surely nobody with any work and life experience can believe in that, right?
Because HN is full of 'temporarily embarrassed billionaires'[1]. A lot of people here are either vested in big tech or see themselves creating the next big-tech in the future hoping to become the next Steve Jobs.
They saw how the likes of Meta, Apple, Google and Microsoft got super rich through exploiting various legal and market loopholes, so they see these upcoming regulations as a threat to their own enrichment. Kind of like technological NIMBYism.
It's difficult to have unbiased discussions on big-tech regulations when many here have built their wealth or careers on big-tech being deregulated and exploiting every trick in the book, and now suddenly get to watch as the ladder is pulled from under them shuddering at the though that SW engineering will be paid like other professions (like in Europe) instead of being a professional get-rich quick ticket it was/still is for now.
[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/temporarily_embarrassed_mil...
All that anarcho-capitalism hubris faltered when SVB went under, and suddenly libertarians were begging daddy government to make them whole.
"Free market"? You can find it in the dictionary, somewhere in between "Bullshit" and "Hypocrisy".
A tiny amount of people who claim to have some libertarian conservative leanings maybe changed their minds, but overwhelmingly those were just politicians who talked libertarianism to get some gun fans to vote for them.
All I can say is that in most online forums that I saw, the overwhelming majority libertarians are against such bank rescue operations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_Arab_Emi...
All good, just burning the planet, nothing to see here, move along.
https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...
Also, LOL:
> As of 2020, foreigners represent 88.1% of the population.
+
> UAE law does not allow trade unions to exist. The right to collective bargaining and the right to strike are not recognised, and the Ministry of Labour has the power to force workers to go back to work. Migrant workers who participate in a strike can have their work permits cancelled and be deported. Consequently, there are very few anti-discrimination laws in relation to labour issues, with Emiratis – and other GCC Arabs – getting preference in public sector jobs despite lesser credentials than competitors and lower motivation. In fact, just over eighty per cent of Emirati workers hold government posts, with many of the rest taking part in state-owned enterprises such as Emirates airlines and Dubai Properties. Western states, including the United Kingdom, were also warned by the Emirati Trade Minister, Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi to keep politics separate from trade and the economy, as it dilutes the agreements' main objectives. In 2023, Al Zeyoudi indicated that these countries should "tone down" the human and workers' rights provisions in the trade deals, in order to gain greater market access and business opportunities.
So, yeah...
When your workforce is disposable and cash squirts out of the ground, yeah, yay capitalism!!! if you're the right category of person, I guess.
Is the government giving extremely generous allowances to its citizens based on profits from finite natural resources "capitalism" now?
https://u.ae/en/information-and-services/social-affairs/soci...
Allow me to be surprised by your surprise - take a look at this site's domain name!
This is a web site that originated from (and which still has deep roots in) the American tech startup scene - so of course many users are of the "move fast and break things" mindset. Regulation is anathema to this culture as it slows down tech progress / profits.
I read a lot of these discussion and I almost never come across any anarcho-capitalists. Are maybe mixing this up with people who like markets in general? In terms of this debate about charging points and software updates it hardly makes a difference.
Also, its totally disingenuous to only talk about one side of this from an actual market perspective. These big companies make massive use of the legal system to protect themselves, protection that they wouldn't have.
ARM couldn't protect its ISA, any company could make chips. You could reverse engineer the specific Apple chip and build it exactly the same. You could make the device and sell it with Apple software on it. Apple couldn't project its proprietary charger with patent and copyright law for example.
Apple depends on a global system of agree on laws and enforced copy right and patent protection along with many other such aspects legal systems and the modern world. Apple would require and extremely complex arrangement of trade secrets to get even close to what they have now.
Look at how much the Soviets simply took over and copied, or China during its rise. Its a fundamentally different game if you are not required to follow the law of the place where the cooperation is from.
You would but 100% of the burden on the devices protecting themselves, something that is only recently becoming routine and still isn't a thing for chargers for example.
You can't just look at the current world, imagine it as fundamentally the same and then change one thing. The whole way modern cooperation's are design simply wouldn't be possible in the same way.
Such system are therefore fundamentally theoretical, so arguing about such system is quite difficult. Legal and economic systems can't just be pulled from nothing, there needs to be some historical and institutional development that backs it up. Different visions of how such a system would work and would be structured have been considered.
A more interesting question is in the current system we actually have. The government should get involved in these things. You can just make that argument for that specifically instead of saying 'checkmate anarcho-capitalists and patting yourself on the back'. Just like its idiotic for people to say 'checkmate communist' anytime any publicly owned train company makes some insanely idiotic decision.
> I get the aversion to taxation on a primal level, but surely nobody with any work and life experience can believe in that, right?
The US government in the last 25 years got involved in many wars killing millions of people. Its also using a lot of its power to prevent housing construction that leads a massive housing shortage. And uses its power to systematically deprive the people of Iran from basic goods.
I think its unfair to paint anybody who thinks about these ideas as 'simply doesn't like taxes' as if that is the only reason why anybody would consider forms of anarchism.
But I grant you that most people are less interested in a fundamental argument and its intellectual underpinnings, if you try to have broad libertarian movement just screaming 'no guns laws, legal weed and no taxes' seems more effective. And why such movements end up not being intellectually 'pure'. Communist history know a thing or to about easy slogans and trying to build a 'pure' political base.
Don't even get me started how they started using one individual incident about privacy to instantly say "well you know Apple with their garbage excuses might be right since this one individual incident showed the EU is evil!"
It's really ridiculous, imagine being Apple and knowing that all it takes is to pay off one politician to propose a really dumb and intrusive law to discourage an entire movement pro user control and choice.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2024-0303...
Why not use one of the many EU mastodon instances, with Maemo and exclusively open source and EU tech?
Huge access to two oceans (basically can't ever be blockaded - not reproducible by say, Germany), massive amount of raw resources (probably only outdone by Russia - not reproducible by, for example, Japan), huge population (#3 in the world - not reproducible by, for example, Switzerland).
The US has a large well educated middle class, which is probably it's greatest independent achievement, but let's not forget that other countries just couldn't do what the US did, due to factors outside their control.
Germany could become hyper capitalistic tomorrow and it still couldn't frack its way to oil and gas independence. Or produce food for 300 million people if it integrated that many immigrants.
I wouldn't just pat myself on the back as an American. Not everything is a factor of what Americans themselves did.
On top of that, to put it in neutral terms, not everything given by the US is a net plus. The US invented the transistor but it also invented spam and selling private data.
> huge population (#3 in the world - not reproducible by, for example, Switzerland)
We are getting immigration, just give us time, we will catch up anytime now.
> Germany could become hyper capitalistic tomorrow and it still couldn't frack its way to oil and gas independence. Or produce food for 300 million people if it integrated that many immigrants.
Actually they could. Because there is plenty of Thorium. And if you have good nuclear and chemical engineering in Thorium there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't be 100% energy independent. Its not even that difficult I would argue, all the necessary technology has existed for 40+ years. It just requires long term sustained investment.
France made itself independent of carbon based energy in its electricity sector within less then 20 years. And if they had just continued to push on that, 20 more years could have replaced all other uses of carbon power. They just didn't.
Replace heat production with electric heaters and heat pumps.
Electric cars wouldn't have been ready, but using high-temperature nuclear reactors to create chemical fuel is totally possible and pretty efficient when operating on large scale. Regulation to require cars to be able to operate with 80% methanol isn't that hard and most engines can handle that.
Like not as cheap as Saudi oil. But with lots of follow on benefits from local investment. Being the most advanced country terms of nuclear engineering and green fuel production. Like well position for other chemical and nuclear advances.
Fracking isn't the only way to energy independence.
> Or produce food for 300 million people if it integrated that many immigrants.
Food is something you can import, and Germany can import if from many different areas. Its hard to blockade Germany. It basically needs two other Great powers to be against them, and that only happens if they are trying to be expansionist.
> also invented spam and selling private data.
That is certainty not true.
You mean the colonies? That wasn't really sustainable, notice how everyone decolonized regardless of their status after WW2, except for Russia, whose colonies were adjacent to the heartland and much more sparsely populated.
The German heartland was much smaller than the continental US is: 540k sqm versus 8 million sqkm for the continental US.
Population wise, similar situation: 70 million people Imperial Germany versus 100 million for the US. And due to their much smaller size, Imperial Germany for sure couldn't have scaled to 350 million people, which is where the US is in 2024.
For the rest of the comment, you're focusing just on energy. Oil and gas are used for everything. Materials, medicine, etc.
Also, relying on food imports for potentially hundreds of millions of people is stupid. That's how you end up with people starving at the first major catastrophe.
Germany didn't have colonies worth mentioning.
Germany had a population going on 68 million while the US had a population of 92 million. That is pretty close. Much, much, much closer then the US is to current China.
Germany didn't have as much growth opportunity as the US but they would be one of the most densely populated most urban countries in the world.
> The German heartland was much smaller than the continental US is: 540k sqm versus 8 million sqkm for the continental US.
Lets be real here, this doesn't matter. The waste amount of economic power does not come from the empty land in the middle.
Yes producing a lot of corn is nice, but its not actually that important.
Germany had a much more important thing, developed trade power near by. I rather have Nordics close then Iowa.
And being denser actually helps in many way, better for trains and transportation. Its much easier to turn the country into a tightly integrated economic unit, specially before mass air travel.
> Imperial Germany for sure couldn't have scaled to 350 million people, which is where the US is in 2024.
Population isn't the end all be all of global power projection. It matters of course. But Germany with say 150-200 million people and non of the world wars would be a very powerful.
Additionally it was already pretty clear around 1914 that Germany would start to lead some sort of European block. Austria-Hungary was basically a German satellite already, this would have just become tighter. Together they have more population then the US.
Sweden and Denmark were strongly in the German economic orbit to. Forming some sort of economic central European block would have been inevitable.
> For the rest of the comment, you're focusing just on energy. Oil and gas are used for everything. Materials, medicine, etc.
As I pointed out, energy can be converted to chemical energy and with high temperature nuclear the process could be quite efficient and cheap as well. Nuclear becomes quite efficient when you mass produce reactors, as the fuel cost is basically zero. You have higher investment cost for a reactor and chemical plant then for a derrick and a refinery to be sure. But that is an investment worth making.
Germany today has a powerful chemical industry even without having their own supply. Doing this would give you very powerful chemical processing industry. And it would make you the globally best power in nuclear innovations (things like medical isotopes, nuclear batteries, nuclear satellites and so on).
Not to mention going the nuclear and electric route would be a major benefit for the health of the population. Going away from oil and coal quite would be a major economic benefit.
The initial investment is bigger, but the long term payoff is way better. And Germany certainty would have had the ability to do that level of investment (again, even Post-WW2 France managed about 1/3 of it and they stopped for political reasons).
> Also, relying on food imports for potentially hundreds of millions of people is stupid. That's how you end up with people starving at the first major catastrophe.
Imperial Germany had a lot of further potential in terms of food production if they really wanted to push it. But in my opinion its not actually that big a deal. The claim that people will starve the first major catastrophe simply doesn't line up with reality.
Unless you are in a war, with multiple super powers at the same time (really only Russia and Britain/US), there is essentially 0 scenarios where a rich developed country can run out of food. Specially one like Germany that has excellent access to Atlanic and Eurasian trade networks.
Germany in the absence of being an really dumb political actor would have been a major global power. Maybe not quite on the US level but certainty the US could never have influenced Europe in the same way they did after WW2. And Germany would have been strong enough to continually counter balance Russia. Imperial Russia had a much, much worse long term growth perspective.
You cannot be a long term world power without abundant natural resources of almost every type. Having lots of smart and rich people obviously puts you in a good position, but we're arguing about being #1-2 in the world, not #20.
The US has been playing on easy mode since 1820.
> I rather have Nordics close then Iowa.
Iowa GDP per capita: 78k.
Nordics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_countries) combined and averaged: 66k.
Also for the hypothetical German-led union, the EU, after 70 years of efforts, is still a weak confederation. It's weaker than even the original US based on the Articles of Confederation.
[1]
Based on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_countries_by_mineral_...
Coal: US #4, Germany #8.
Gas: US #1, Germany #50.
Oil: US #1, Germany, #54.
Uranium: US #15, Germany N/A.
Thorium: US #5, Germany N/A.
Aluminium: US #9, Germany #17.
Copper: US #5, Germany N/A.
Gold: US #5, Germany N/A.
Iron ore: US #9, Germany N/A.
Nickel: US #9, Germany N/A.
Lithium: US #5, Germany N/A.
Palladium: US #4, Germany N/A.
Platinum: US #4, Germany N/A.
Rinse and repeat for most resources out there: US usually top 5-10, Germany nowhere to be found.
Claiming that natural resources are fundamental limiter to growth just isn't accurate. Market access and innovation is far more important.
Thorium is unlimited in both countries so energy isn't a resource problem.
The reality is, housing policy is far more important for success then aluminum deposits.
> You cannot be a long term world power without abundant natural resources of almost every type.
That is just false. The growth of most of the western world is not based on its own mining. Japan also wasn't very mining heavy. China growth hasn't come from its own energy resources.
That a completely regressive idea. Having access to a broad reliable supply is what actually matters matters.
Modern Germany doesn't need to mine its own stuff to be rich and have reliable inputs. Having reliable access to Sweden is more important then having Iron ore deposits.
The reality is when world power were replaced, it was almost always by countries with larger populations. Germany overtook Britain because Germany had more population. US overtook Germany because of population. China is gone overtake the US because of population.
If Britain wasn't replaced by Germany because Germany had more resources. Arguably Germany had less then the British Empire.
Having a large population economically integrated as close to the peak of technological progress with reliable market access has always been how great power replaced each other. By that metric Imperial Germany would be smaller then the US (depending on its immigration policy) but not by a huge margin.
> Coal: US #4, Germany #8.
That's not a good thing. Coal is literally bad for your society by any objective matter. At least in the last 60 years.
> Gas: US #1, Germany #50.
Focusing on gas over nuclear is making your society worse, its basically the coal of the last 50 years.
> Uranium: US #15, Germany N/A.
> Thorium: US #5, Germany N/A.
Plenty is available.