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Comment by stuaxo | Hacker News Reader

The EU is founded on the idea of markets and regulation.

And also to prevent European powers trying to kill each other for the third time in a century, setting the whole world on fire in the process - for the third time in a century.

Arguably that worked. :-)

The EU is founded on the idea of useless bureaucracy.

It's not just IT. Ask any EU farmer.

Contrary to the constant whining, most of them are actually quite wealthy. And thanks to strong right to repair laws, they can keep using John Deere equipment without paying extortionate licensing fees.

They're wealthy because they were paid for not using their agricultural land, so they cropped down all the trees on parts of their land that they couldn't use, to classify it as agricultural, got paid, and as a side effect caused downstream flooding

Just to stay on topic: outside the US there's a general rule of thumb: if Meta is against it, the EU is probably doing something right.

Well, the topic is really whether or not the EU's regulations are effective at producing desired outcomes. The comment you're responding to is making a strong argument that it isn't. I tend to agree.

There's a certain hubris to applying rules and regulations to a system that you fundamentally don't understand.

For those of us outside the US, it's not hard to understand how regulations work. The US acts as a protectionist country, it sets strict rules and pressures other governments to follow them. But at the same time, it promotes free markets, globalisation, and neoliberal values to everyone else.

The moment the EU shows even a small sign of protectionism, the US complains. It's a double standard.

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