Hacker News Reader

Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

For starters, I am still waiting for Apple Intelligence to arrive on my phone. Reason given is "EU legislative concerns".

Then there's the nontrivial number of especially local US news sources which now give me a cheerful "451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" error code.

Then there's the outright stupid stuff - like lightbulbs that do not cost 15 euros a piece (to save 'energy'), or drinking straws that do not dissolve in my coke within the first minute (to avoid 'disposable plastics'). There are hundreds of examples like that.

The EU is a regulation juggernaut, and is making the world an actively worse place for everyone globally. See "Cookie Banners".

View on HN

> For starters, I am still waiting for Apple Intelligence to arrive on my phone. Reason given is "EU legislative concerns".

So the EU should not control where your data is processed? You can't claim in one comment to be bummed about data exchanges between the EU and the US (which you do), and then not understand why there are regulations in place that are slowing down the roll-out of things like Apple Intelligence, for your benefit.

There is a qualitative difference between

1. I am giving my data freely and because of my own decision to an organization I trust and

2. The state is taking my data by force of law to share it with an inherently untrustworthy organization.

Those are corporations causing the problems, not the eu.

What are you talking about? Leaving aside your other random complaints that I don’t recognise, but can’t immediately link to, a basic lightbulb is less than €3 for a two-pack: https://www.ikea.com/de/en/p/solhetta-led-bulb-e14-250-lumen...

That's an LED though.

I understood he was referring to incandescent light bulbs, which have been largely regulated out of the market. So you now need to get an "Edison light bulb" which circumvenes regulation but costs significantly more.

Good, that's the point. Price out the products that are bad for the environment. They are still there if you want to contribute to the degradation of the environment

"Bad for the environment" is relative.

The problem here is that they tell you: - We're building renewables which deliver super clean and cheap energy - CO2 is the root of all evil

Then, they force you to use an LED which uses less energy (which is clean and cheap, no?) but contains a lot more chemicals and rare earths, so in a number of ways seems less "environmentally friendly". This seems contradictory and half-assed.

I'm confused. The US also banned incandescent lamps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...

> A ban covering most general service incandescent lamps took effect in the United States in 2023

So you can't even buy them in the US anymore, either. And cheap LEDs are available everywhere, with many color temperatures to choose from.

I wasn't aware of that, interesting, thanks.

Light temperature is one thing, but the spectrum is very different (which is essentially how it saves energy, almost all radiation emitted is a narrow band of visible light whereas an incandescent lamp produces a blackbody spectrum with a lot of radiation emitted in the infrared).

Also I notice a lot of color banding (not sure if that's the right term) with many cheap LEDs. I observe the same or at least a very similar phenomenon when watching DLP cinema projections.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com