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Comment by thefourthchime | Hacker News Reader

The EU is doing everything it can to fail. The only thing that seems to be coming out of the EU in the last 20 years is regulation. It seems to be its only invention and contribution to itself. They have no upper bounds on creativity when it comes to creating rules that disrupt business.

I can't tell if this is coming from jealousy or incompetence—or perhaps a combination of both. They see the rest of the world, especially the United States and China, getting richer and more advanced, and their response seems to be to shield themselves from it instead of competing.

Volkswagen in Germany is going to lay off 100,000 jobs and shutter plants. Half of the EU is recklessly in debt. And Germany is supposed to be the good country with the good economy.

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You're arguing in favor of destroying unworn clothes instead of donating to charity or discounting them as somehow being good for business? The point of this is to control against wasteful business practices, not a ban on producing or selling clothes.

The EU is a $23 trillion economy, hardly a slouch even though it is underperforming.

The VW example is actually something you probably don't understand - they're failing because they're an inefficient business, not because of EU regulations or Germany not having a "good economy". Toyota produces almost twice as many vehicles per employee.

Neat info. I would guess that Toyota produces twice as many vehicles per employee at least in part because the regulatory and social environment where Toyota operates is better.

There is often an underlying sensible economic reason for doing things like destroying perfectly wearable shoes or burning edible crops. Understanding involves admitting things people don't want to admit to themselves.

Nike destroying shoes: the shoes they make are just cheap synthetics and foam, and the per-pair materials and manufacturing cost is a small part of the cost of the shoes. Nike is a marketing company that sorta does shoes. The shoes themselves aren't a very important part of the value they provide to people who buy their shoes. People who buy their shoes are buying a social signal about who they are and how much money they have that doesn't work if the shoes are too cheap.

I agree that VW is mostly responsible for its own demise, they got too comfortable with their success and soon would be the blackberry of car manufacturers.

I wouldn't even say that VW is a failing company: They sold the largest number of EVs in the EU in 2025 (https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-domi...) and that is before you consider that e.g. Audi, Cupra and Skoda are _also_ VW brands (and some of the ford cars are built on top of VW's EV platform).

The main problem they have is that you just need a fraction of the number of people to build an electric car than what you need for a combustion car. You no longer need complex transmission, exhaust filtering, turbos, highly complex combustion engines,... all of which are marvels of engineering but no longer necessary for EVs. VW "main" (i.e. excluding sub-brands like audi) was already rather highly staffed (though part of this is due to them taking over some duties for their sub-brands), so the employee impact is higher than what you would expect, but even for a reasonably staffed car company this would imply huge layoffs and changes in the structure of the company.

thank you! These are the comments I drive on HN. Not the lazy take, EU economy is failling because of fashion regulation.

the quote: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" is something that the regulators have never heard.

What they see is people burning clothes and they say "we can't do that". The result won't be that these clothes will somehow be put back on people, clearly that's not economical or this wouldn't be a problem.

Instead, they'll be put on ships and burned elsewhere, or buried, or something even worse.

In the last 20 years, the EU has grown about %1.5. In 2005, the EU accounted for 25% of the global GDP. Now it's about 17%.

GDP per capita in the United States is about twice of Europeans. 85k per capital in the US, vs 43k in the EU.

The only tech companies I can think of in Europe are Spotify and Umm.. sure there are others..

One brightside is Sweden who has decided to embrace capitalism and has turned themselves around.

This is some top-tier bait

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