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Comment by whiplash451 | Hacker News Reader

Europe suffers from another kind of "corruption", more akin to a corrupted file system: absurd, rigid and unpredictable regulation makes life very hard for businesses, which drives large private capital away.

I am European, and every time I open one of those stupid locked-on bottle caps, I feel pain for my country, for Europe (and for my face).

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Then send a message to the producer. The law requires for caps to be attached but doesn't describe how. I have a water bottle next to me that has a cap connected by one long piece after opening that doesn't touch my face at all when drinking.

Sure, Europe has some red tape that should be removed but don't paint it as some kind of Kafka's universe because it's not that bad. I'm from east side of Iron Curtain and I remember how bad that was.

Also, most of the businesses will do what's needed to be done because the market is big.

Personally, I prefer to live a life in a slightly over regulated place that at least keeps common people in mind than whatever is US turning into.

Same answer as GDPR: when the majority/all of the companies implement it in a way that hurts everyone (businesses and end users alike), then the problem is with the regulator, not the regulated.

Not exactly. First, a lot of bottles don't have that problem. Sure "most" bottles do but most is produced by few companies that made a bad design. So we only need few companies to fix design for the problem to go away.

Cookies stuff is indeed badly made and should be fixed. The should just mandate websites to accept a http header with relevant option (no-cookies, no-advertisment, no-tracking etc.).

Still, it's not the problem of regulator in itself. Rather, companies are taking advantage of the current version of the law because it's favorable to them - they know most people with quickly accept whatever to close the popup.

Yes, I 100% agree they should just mandate compliance with a specific HTTP header — and prohibit any popup or other smarmy trick or dark pattern of different behaviour if the header is present — but why haven't they?

I am honestly curious. If you are willing to go as far as they have, why not go that relatively tiny extra step?

I think it is a problem with the regulator. The cookie agreement mandate has legitimately fucked up the web for everybody. It's also done it in a way that mostly neutralizes the intended benefit of the law (because everybody just clicks the "fine! stuff your cookies up my arse or whatever, just get on with it!" button).

But a competent regulator must both measure the impacts of their regulations, and take action based on that data. It seems a weird place to stop.

The conclusion isn't deducible from the premise (I can just as well say the opposite). Can you elaborate with some example?

In other words, personal responsibility doesn't apply to business owners.

GDPR does not hurt me and majority of its implementations don't hurt me. That there is a ton of nonsensical propaganda against it from entrepreneurs can't just do what they want is another matter.

GDPR is really not that complex. It's as simple as "if you don't need the data, don't collect them".

The problem is that every other company thinks they are Google or Meta. So they start overcollecting user data, in hope that one day they will be able to generate revenue from them. So they end up with overcomplicated compliance solutions and GDPR consulting fees, but without any actual use for the data they collect.

So you think the GDPR isn't very complex. Let's put that to the test.

I need to record names and address across the European Union. What character encodings are illegal for such fields in a database?

> I am European, and every time I open one of those stupid locked-on bottle caps, I feel pain for my country, for Europe (and for my face).

Is life so bad in Europe that’s what you have to complain about? Sounds truly like a nightmare - caps attached to bottles? Barbaric.

They're pointing out a surface-level symptom of a much deeper bureaucratic sickness in parts of Europe. There's a reason British comedy is what it is.

What's wrong with recycling the bottle caps and not having them all over the place because they're small and otherwise fall onto the streets, sewers, and trails?? It's really not a problem to have the lid attached to the bottle - works totally fine for me whether it's milk, soda, or apple juice.

I'm not OP, but to me, the bureaucratic issue is that plastic bottles should be wholesale banned instead of this halfass attempt at regulation or heavily purchase-controlled.

This is a political and economic issue though, there is no support for this.

It’s very easy to start a business in the UK and the regulatory environment isn’t particularly hostile to it. It depends a lot on what line of business you’re in, of course (as it does anywhere else).

Unless my business is providing secure end-to-end communication to users in accordance with their basic human right to privacy and presumed innocence.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/whatsapp-signal-eu-chat-contr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

This feels like an attempt to derail the conversation rather than contribute to it. The arrest of Pavel Durov has nothing to do with the UK.

Who said it had to do with the UK? The UK is part of Europe, and both the EU and UK have been introducing backdoor bills, the Online Safety Act and Chat Control respectively, and thus Europe as a whole has a political climate that is anti-freedom. So does the US, but Europe does, too.

My post that you responded to was specifically about the UK. You’re talking about someone being arrested in France. Your complaints about various pieces of legislation may be justified, but they’re not pertinent.

Did you forget that my first message, which you replied to, was specifically about Europe?

So you replied about the UK specifically. I catered to that, and then reconnected it back to Europe as a whole, which I was originally discussing.

If someone here is derailing the conversation, it isn't me. Especially now that we're discussing the meta and not even the original subject.

Stop buying disposable bottles then. They are part of a solution to a waste problem, but by continuing to buy disposablle bottles you're contributing to the issue.

"every time I open one of those stupid locked-on bottle caps, I feel pain for my country, for Europe (and for my face)."

You know that it is easy to remove the plastic locking the caps on? (Just twist them) And to me it is also easy to drink with them locked on, just have it side ways.

So I also do have lots of complaints about the EU, but this ain't it.

This is what you complain about in Europe? Every day when I drop my children off at school I wonder if today’s the day. That’s not hyperbole, it’s my reality in the US.

European law is a patchwork of suboptimal solutions to hard (but often self-imposed) problems. The US meanwhile doesn't try to solve them at all.

Yes, the bottle caps annoy me, but if the beverage companies stuck to the much more recyclable glass bottles we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.

Yes, the GDPR popups annoy me, but the law also punishes companies for being creepy exploitative bastards. If they had any morals, we wouldn't have the popups either.

So yes, Europe is sometimes frustrating, but at least it does some government. The US simply doesn't. It's a free-for-all hellscape and I'd much rather be lightly scraped on the face by a little plastic cap that one time a month I need to drink from a disposable plastic bottle than live in...that...

The bottle caps certainly don't annoy me, I find them very useful.

The popups are there for companies that ignore basic data sovereignty of "don't use my personal data until I say you can"

I don't dismiss the problem, I dismiss the solution.

Yes, plastic bottles (and caps) are likely a major environmental disaster.

The alternative to regulation is innovation: force bottle makers to invest x% of their profit or revenue into actual research on plastic recycling or capture.

>The alternative to regulation is innovation

That's a very easy but hand-wavy thing to say.

How exactly would your suggestion work? Are the companies supposed to share their findings from this forced research with the world? What happens if they happen to discover something that doesn't help with the plastic problem but does improve their bottom line somehow? I can't see this functioning in any way whatsoever.

You don’t need to impose R&D to them. You can tax them and funnel that money into R&D labs/companies tackling recycling.

Another alternative is anticonsumption; stop or reduce use of disposable packaging if possible.

GDPR and Cookie acceptance popups are separate regulations.

For the cookie popups this is a great add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

It will click no no no no no to all cookie prompts for you, and hide the popup. It's sad that we need to do this, the companies could just not track you at all. But I haven't had a need to manually click these popups for quite a some time now.

One EU AI startup even named itself after these bottle caps:) https://www.bottlecapai.com/

With Tomas Mikolov in it? Holy cow! :)

Nevermind the bottle caps.

The internet is borderline unusable without extensions like "I don't care about cookies". And in situations where you care about them, you can not, because something has to record that I've seen the GDPR consent form. Recently, in the name of... who knows what, it's become a pain in the ass to access Google maps from Google search.

The idea that Europe can become a safe haven for entrepreneurs is beyond laughable. The vaunted "rule of law" has degraded into nothing more than fetishizing arbitrary and irrational rules.

why blame the rule and not the people adding tracking and cookies without reason? You don't need those dumb banners if you don't try to cram cookies in everything

Somehow, someway, I suspect basically every that operates in the EU has thought more about the requirements of EU regulations than the internet know it all's that insist the consent forms are unnecessary.

it's not about being a know it all, it's a regulation you can look up.

Look here: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ > Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies

If you don't use cookies or they're stricly necessary, no need for a banner.

Many websites work perfectly fine without a banner, for example, Hacker News.

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