It is difficult to scale across Europe.
Most countries will gladly fall back to "we do how we please in our country, Europe won't tell us what to do!" which is the usual nationalistic rally to which many fall prey not realizing how good it would be to start making small but steady steps into common regulations.
We really need a strong internal market.
It’s going to be difficult to achieve this without the establishment of a single official language. That’s where the US gets most of its advantage: a large population of English speakers means a large single market for products in English.
Sure, lots of products (like food) don’t care about language but software and media (literature, music, video games, movies, TV) definitely do. It’s no coincidence that the US dominates the global market for those cultural and technology products.
Laws and regulations are.
Swiss confederation solved this while having 4 official languages. Language is not the problem, especially nowadays when everything could be translated in a second.
I think there's a strong case to be made that, while the different Swiss linguistic regions strongly prefer to associate together, in reality they draw a lot from the countries they share their languages & borders with when it comes to business and markets, etc. But between linguistic regions, there is additional friction for sure. If anything, the share competency in English has been a major boon.
Source: been living in Switzerland for 10 years and very interested in its system.
I honestly don't get your point.
This isn't about countries losing sovereignty over night, but about creating common frameworks and regulations step by step.
This is already a reality in some sectors, e.g. agriculture.
Agriculture sits under exclusive or near-exclusive EU control in the whole EU and the model works (albeit it's not perfect, like no model is). EU promotes countries to produce what they are good at. Thus, it doesn't incentivize Italy to produce cereals much, because Italy does not have the right land to grow cereals and that would not make much sense in economic terms. Instead Italy is incentivized to grow cheese, meat, grapes, olives, etc, things that Italy is good at and sells well.
There's other things on which all countries delegate to EU: trade (tariffs and custom rules), goods standards, aviation safety rules, competition and state aid regulations, etc, etc.
So I would say that EU has been very successful on multiple fronts in harmonizing and taking responsibility for multiple things.
But I'm gonna give you of a simple blocker at EU level: why gdpr or dma/dsa are very EU centralized, ultimately digital and data regulations are still not really delegated and national law takes precedence: this is a very heavy blocker to scale any company that requires any kind of business involving data. As soon as you cross a border you need to know the ins and outs of every single country. So it's not that trivial to build a software service company and have it scale painlessly across Europe.
Examples include: contract law, consumer protection, liability rules, and all courts remain national. Terms of service, refund rules, dispute handling is always country-specific. Expanding beyond your own borders is very expensive. Then you have tax complexity, payment and banking, labor law, data protection (as mentioned)..
This is like people who will be pointing on weak, indecisive Europe. But when somebody suggests that we should get rid of unanimous voting so one country can't sabotage everybody else, suddenly those people love weak and indecisive Europe and won't give their veto right. Wanting their cake and eating it too...
Allowing veto power to single participants is often crippling for institutions in practice, because you allow every political adversary (internal and external) to freely pick the weakest link whenever he wants to sabotage or paralyze decisionmaking.
This already happens in practice with the EU, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is a textbook example of how such a mechanism essentially doomed the whole thing.
Just one example: I am hearing far too often that France is overly protecting their own interests and as such can't reach important deals with Germany about sharing burdens and profits. So it results in duplicated, incompatible systems. Germany is generally more open to share benefits and intel with other countries.
Such deal-making can drag on for decades, to only fall out. For industries to scale, they need long term planning and a guaranteed pipeline of orders. I am talking about ships, planes, MBT's, air defence, missile tech--not riffles.
It is a shame, because both countries are powerhouses in engineering. Also, this costs EU taxpayers billions of dollars, and perhaps their safety even.
There is no "need" to for a "central authority to lead defence programs", either. That is a political view to justify integration. Integration is the goal, not a tool to an end and justifications are sought afterwards.
This is a long running campaign of disinformation to manufacture consent and convince people that there is no other way, there is no choice, and we're seeing that dissent is less and less tolerated. Not too long ago being against EU integration was simply an opinion among others, usually seen as being patriotic, now people immediately face accusations of extremism, being "far right", being "Russian shills", you name it, basically it is becoming wrongthink.
Even here on HN, I have been recently accused of being a socketpuppet account, of being effectively a Russian shill (or is it Chinese?), of being an extremist, an idiot, an "alt right troll", my comments expressing a counter-opinion have been flagged... people are losing their minds.
This can occur even with a more integrated market. The problem is that military suppliers deliberately make as many things 'sole source' as possible so they can be the only supplier and hence charge even higher rates. I'm don't mean the big items like tanks and planes, but the little consumable stuff like lubrication oils, fasteners, gears, etc. that are made to be non-compatible with other systems on purpose. Harder to fix because of the usual corporation-military-lobbying feedback loops and because it requires standards which can be technically intensive to develop.
If there is one body on earth that is able to cut with standards and regulation through enterprises, it is the EU I think, so even that is not hopeless. But large capital flows through the mil.industry comes with risks, yes.
Partly by not importing Germano-French bureaucratic dysfunction (Papiere, Papiere über alles). Which would only grow more prominent with further integration.
Brute force does not matter nearly as much as quality of governance does. Qing China was a big, helpless monster eaten alive by smaller, more agile competitors.
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/poland/germany?...
Poland is growing quickly because it has cheap labour (for the moment).
Surely there must be more factors at play. For example, the general educational level in the country or its perceived reliability when it comes to FDI.
Because in a single market new capacity will grow where costs are cheaper. If (Cost of Good X in PL) + (Transport Cost PL->FR) < ( Cost of Good X in FR) then it is clear where the growth will be.
With France it's pretty clear, in a single market with low cost Eastern Europe it can only be competitive in very high tech industries given how prohibitive its welfare/retirement system is from the business point of view.
True, the French government redistributes the most money in the entire OECD (close to 60 per cent of GDP) and this is mostly driven by heavy welfare and old-age rent spending. They are pushing the ceiling to see what is still possible.
One interesting question is: if this French model spreads across the rest of the EU, will the EU as a whole become more or less competitive on the global stage? I would guess "less".
The problem is that there is no "democratic" way to get rid of them because in most WEU countries retirees/close to retired already make up enough of the population to block any such measure at the ballot box. See for example France.
Moldova and Ukraine were economically comparable to Poland in 1990 per capita. They have fallen far, far behind it.
Always compare comparable countries (or startups for that purpose). It is easy to explain away successes as long as failures in very similar conditions are ignored.
Again, it is not the amount of money you receive as whether you can use them in a productive way. Poland invested heavily into infrastructure and was able to reduce the NIMBY problem that is so prominent in Czechia or Germany and leads to decade-long paper wars over every railway, road and housing project. Of course they now reap the benefits.
As a neighbour, I am a bit frustrated by the difference that is becoming ever more visible. CZ is stuck in a bad vetocracy, hopefully the new government, populist as it may be, will change it a bit. (One reason for my hope is that the Mayor party is in opposition. They were the biggest fans of the vetocracy, because it gave power to regional politicians.)
In general, if you can learn from somebody, adapt the good things and not the bad ones. If you are allowed to choose, of course. But that requires some degree of freedom.
I know Poles quite well. There is a can-do optimistic mentality present there that is long gone from Germany. Young people aren't afraid to start their own businesses etc. There is much, much less "climate depression", ideas like degrowth barely survive on the intellectual fringes.
This, too, makes quite a lot of difference. Strong Green movements seem to be rather dangerous to most industries, not just directly (through regulation and fees), but indirectly, by nudging young people away from industrial professions. For example, the pool of nuclear engineers in many countries of Western Europe has seriously shrunk, which limits the general ability to revive the sector, even though there is some political will now.
Fear of Russia would be my guess.
Polish growth does not correlate with fluctuating levels of Russian menace at all.
How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they?
Sure, federalism produces some overhead and inefficiencies. But it also has many benefits. Especially to avoid too much power in one hand but also others. E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better and adapt the other systems (if you actually do that is another question).
People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states. Just merging all into one is just a recipe to fail epically.
In practice, it's more nuanced and subject to continual back-and-forth arguing. E.g. California and Texas trying to decide their own standards, by virtue of their economic size, then hashing it out with the federal government in court.
I'm not sure what the EU regulatory cornerstone equivalent of the Commerce Clause would be.
The division is on purpose, to divide power and make it harder for a second Hitler to rise again. And the calculations are no assumption, it's a common topic in Germany how much additional time and money this all costs.
> How does the US do it? They have a fair amount of states too with their own laws, don't they?
Why do you assume they are different? Or better?
> E.g. you can have different school systems in different states and see what works better
You can also have this without federalism, without maintaining a dozen different administrations which are all doing the same in different flavour.
> People are also different in different states. This also applies to Europe and its member states.
Compared to Europe, people in the USA are not that different per state. At least not on the level where individual administration is necessary. The different groups are mainly independent of the state they are living in.
In Germany, we call unsubstantiated calculations like this "Milchmädchenrechnung" (milkmaid calculation).
Why is it, that when you move between states, your tax office needs to print out your records, send them to your new state's office, only for some poor soul to type them into their system because each state uses a different system without any common exchange format? Make it make sense!
And there are hundreds of electrical grid operators with different hardware requirements. In my eyes efficiency looks different.
Yes it is a Milchmädchenrechnung. I do not want to argue whether fusing states makes sense or not. This isn't even a moral condemnation of the original poster. All I say is that the equation `efficiency_gain == federal states before / federal states after` is completely made up.
And the compromise was the Federation of Germany.
Sadly, this centralization of political power has been a disaster for mankind IMO.
Even as we've transitioned from monarchies to democracies over the last few centuries, the trend has largely resulted in the replacement of actual, determinative choices with merely having a millionth of a share of a choice. Not a determinative choice, but a say.
Consider the holy roman empire, for example. [0]
Under this scheme of decentralization, people had an actual choice of their government. Say you were a merchant in Mühlhausen circa 1700, and you found yourself in opposition to your local government. You could simply move a short distance to a different area and be beholdened to an entirely different government. You'd have 50 choices within 100 miles! While it's true that the HRE was all under the administration of one government, but it was extremely weak. It lacked, for example, the ability to levy direct taxes. After unification in 1870, the same merchant would've had to move much further to escape his government, and his options had been diminished by 95%. After European unification, he would have to travel to another continent!
While democracy has given us control of our governments in theory, in practice the "choice" it offers is much less empowering than the determinative choice afforded by decentralization. The larger our political entities grow, the more diluted our "say" and the fewer full choices are available to us. In the United States, we have less than 1/100,000,000th of a share of the choice in our chief executive!
While democracy is obviously preferable to Aristocracy/Monarchy/Tyranny, on it's own it is still only a marginal improvement. At worst, you can still end up with 49.9% of people living under a government they oppose. Decentralization solves this lingering problem, because it allows people to self-sort in and out of countries they don't like, allowing for people who truly despise their governments to choose themselves a new government.
In the absence of such a safety valve, people are forced into a zero-sum struggle for power. It is rule or be ruled. Dominate or be dominated. We're seeing this in the United States right now. We're not at each other's throats because we hate each other. Not even because we hate each other's politics in the abstract. We're at each other's throats because neither side is content to be ruled by the other.
The same reason that centralized entities only arise by force is the same reason they fall apart in the end. People don't want them. They don't want to be dominated.
Centralization of political power forces people into an inescapable struggle for power. It is the enemy of peace and tranquility, and a blight on humanity.
Quite a few countries have more or less successful parlamentary democracies, where winner-takes-all situations are avoided by design. In these, a party rarely has the upper hand and coalitions are the only means of reaching power. The agreements these coalitions forge to govern are a proxy of the compromises all societies have to agree on to function.
Well, then I guess Germany's example is not too bad.
"CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority" ... well, no. That's not how it works at all.
CDU and SPD did not win a majority together, since they were opponents in the election, and fought tooth and nail over, for example, immigration issues. They did not, at all, campaign together.
They both failed to win over half of the parliament seats. In simplified terms, they both lost. Everyone lost, if you will, because the system is not designed for anyone to easily win over half of the parliament seats.
That's why they had compromise and form a coalition. Thus no-one rules completely over the other and, in theory, the compromises of coalitions have a better societal outcome than the extreme views one party or the other might hold on a certain issue.
I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here. Every democracy has a system for aggregating votes to parliament seats and the transmission is never 1:1.
In this case: Votes for parties that don’t enter the Bundestag (e.g., those below the 5 % threshold) are not counted in seat allocation, making the share of seats for CDU + SPD higher than their raw vote share. Seats are redistributed proportionally among the parties that did enter parliament.
I don't see much of a problem. The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream. This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it. This is a scenario for winner-takes-all situations between nations, which is a much much worse outcome than even a winner-takes-all situation between political parties.
> I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here.
It's not about the vote, it's about the human beings who are ruled by a government they don't want.
We can all look at a country like North Korea, where the ruler is oppressing the hell out of his people, and feel for them. We understand implicitly that it is wrong for one man (or a ruling clique) to dominate the other 99% of people who don't want to be dominated by him. We can also look at a country like apartheid South Africa, where a relatively small majority dominated the majority, and say that is wrong. As people who've been raised and indoctrinated as (small-d) democrats, it's easy to look at our systems, where a paltry 49% (or, in Germany, 54%) of the people are being dominated by the other 51% (45%), but this is merely the result of habit. There is no reason that they should be forced to live and work and be taxed by a system they dislike or even abhor. And, of course, the sense that the evolution of the state has somehow "peaked" with democracy is an expression of the most common bias of all, which is our "presentism" bias--that past progress is obvious in retrospect but future progress is impossible, undesirable, or, at best, inscrutible.
> I don't see much of a problem.
Neither did Europe in the 20s, to their great discredit.
> The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream.
Because you say so?
> This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it.
Nine of the ten countries with the highest GDP per capita have a population under ~7 million: Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Singapore, Norway and Denmark. Perhaps you should inform them how "frankly absurd" they've been to forego the benefits of economies of scale?
It's true that centralization of political power can bring economic benefits, but the economic benefits stem from the elimination of economic/trade friction, not directly from the centralization of power per se. Which is to say that (most of) these economic benefits can be had without incurring the non-economic costs of political centralization.
Consequently, industry in 1 of those 100 units is always going to be outcompeted, at scale, by industry in the 100x as big entity.
Given more or less global free trade, that leaves the smaller entities economically competitive at... what? Why wouldn't business inherently flow to larger entities?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
I was told that this decentralisation of power was a deliberate effort after Nazism, but as far as I know such issues were endemic in the Nazi government and military. Germany really is a union of small states, and perhaps never fully changed that.
This is slowly changing though. There is a visible effort to build software and processes at the federal level.
Whose fault is that? Who is constantly forcing regulations which hurt EU industries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Deal#Job_losses...
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/12/16/eu-carmakers-t...
Instead of fixing the problems they have created they are now placing taxes on imported heavy goods.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/01/01/eus-carbon-bor...
Lol european security strategy? We switched from Russian dependence, to a more expensive US dependence. While also being strongly dependent on middle eastern gas and oil. What the hell kind of strategy is that?
To be fair, most of us believed the US to be a reliable partner, based on previous track record, but things like that change quickly. So we thought we were changing something cheaper from a hostile entity, to something more expensive from an ally, but turns it we got it wrong, so new direction now.
If the EU (specifically Germany) had more presciently modeled out Russian foreign policy with a shift to increased EU reliance on Russian natural gas, there were steps it could have taken.
E.g. building in a tripwire for territorial invasion with the express responses of cutting Russian gas purchases on day 1, freezing Russian assets and access to European banking, and building storage / LNG terminals
Had the EU done this, loudly, Ukraine likely wouldn't have been invaded.
The EU's biggest mistake was presuming that everyone took the international order as inviolate as it did. (China, Russia, the US)
edit: Since I can no longer repy I will edit in place:
Just the kind of regulation that drives out investment and growth. Now we have no money printing tech giants and our best and brightest work for US companies. But we do have bragging rights with the desktop linux crowd, so that is something.
edit: I cant reply so I will edit.
The policies are clearly insanity because EU industrial self immolation does nothing for the rest of the world. Does China, Indonesia, Africa, South America, India give a crap about saving the environment? They sure as hell do not. Most of them throw their trash directly into the ocean. All we do in europe is self harm while the broad problem goes entirely unsolved. How the hell are you going to develop and sell new technology, while destroying our economies at the same time. Complete pipe dream insanity.
That's precisely what the border carbon tax is about. They have to now, or their products will be noncompetitive in the worlds largest market.
That's not true, but ok...
> Does China, Indonesia, Africa, South America, India give a crap about saving the environment?
Actually, they do. China is the biggest spender on investing in renewable energy-sources and moving away from fossil fuels. Africa and South America are continents, not Countries. And not sure why India or Indonesia are related here?
Other than that, I'm not sure if you are a troll, victim of poor sources or paid actor, but your quality of data really sucks.
That's actually a bit disputed. But ok, it wasn't just really obvious from your writing what you meant here.
> China is mostly powered by coal and they are still building new coal plants.
Yes, and no. China is moving away from coal, they reduced their share by 20% in the last decades. It's now around 57% of their total usage. The number of new coal plants is also a bit disputed. First, they modernize many coal plants by building new, more efficient ones, and shutting down the old plants. Second, they are building many backup-plants, which are not really used outside of emergencies, which does happen from time to time it seems. And third, they are master of overplanning. Around 80% of their planned coal-plants were actually cancelled in the last years before the building started for real. This seems related to how their local and federal levels are handling budgets.
The only real problem is that their absolute coal consumption is still growing, because their consumption as a whole is growing. But long-term, there is likely a point where it's reaching its peak, and start shrinking. And speculation is here, that we are talking about ~10 years, not 50. So at that point, China, which is already producing for the whole world, will have acquired another good selling point which European countries have to beat.
As of last year I don't even think this is true. Do you have sources?
China's coal usage is dropping every year. They build new coal plants to replace older ones, or leave them idle. Almost 90% of their new energy comes from solar power.
Please stop spreading fossil fuel industry lies here.
If we don't then we'll either go extinct or regress to a level where we use less. Sure, it's gonna really really suck for the next while but there isn't really any other options.
As a benefit, if we do this then we can sell the technology to the rest of the world.
Ahh, thats why the EU is moving to LNG, now I get it!
Is it? News for this resident of the EU. What exactly are you referencing?
Most states in the EU are focusing on renewables one way or another, are you talking about a specific country here or?
And no, renewables aren't for the upper class, the sun is free for everyone with panels, and panels can be bought relatively cheap today.
Never owned a place, had solar panels installed in the last three places I lived in, the first two were apartments, currently renting a house. None of the owners had problems with us installing solar panels.
https://www.dw.com/en/boom-small-solar-devices-plugged-into-...
Owning a house does not require belonging to the "upper class" in Europe.
At least for Germany, this statement is directly contradicted by visible evidence. I'm surrounded by middle class families owning single homes.
So, no coal has no future in Germany
Renewables are the future and the EU is amongst the leaders. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/22/wind-and...
Unfortunately, with the recent geopolitical shenanigans it doesn't any more.
Heck, we'll start burning oil like mad to fuel the re-armament.
Maybe after the next large war, there won't be many humans left and at least it will be good for the environment I guess ?
Apart from the part where you don't get to choose when they generate. Hopefully less of an issue in a continent–sized interconnected grid.
Drones are the hot new thing in warfare. They run on electricity.
The joke here is, China is a master of long-term-planning and execution, which is why they are on the rise now. Yet many complain, take china as a threat and demand brain-dead short-term-solutions, leading to even more long-term-problems.
Will Europe still exist when they are done making it better?
Bad things can always happen, of course, we just had multiple of them in the last 5+ years. But we did survive it and adapted, so the probability is much higher that nothing catastrophical world-shattering will be happening again in the next decades. We are moving back to the "normal" trouble and EU so far has shown a very good survivability in those years. Heck, in 2008-2012 there was far more trouble for EU than today.
For a business, the language is whatever you agree with your customers. You are free to choose. If you communicate with the EU itself, any EU country language is accepted.
Language diversity is just a fact of life in Europe and not going away soon, that's like asking the US to give up the idea of states and become a single country.
It's still going to be English, although not by a huge margin if you include non-Mandarin Chinese.
"Where are you from?"
This makes me quite uncomfortable, because I'm immediately getting stereotyped based on my parents DNA. (In the US, the question is often "What do you do for work? What do you do for fun?")
I have strong doubts that Europe can actually become a single nation of states. If France doesn't screw it up by demanding to be first among equals, Germany or Poland will probably side with the US who will be against this from happening.
It has the obvious problem that it doesn't work at night and in winter. That's a big problem. I don't know how to fix that.
In other words, they count on non-solar backup... which not only makes solar more expensive, but basically redundant.
Until Solar+storage is the cheapest form of energy while delivering its promised output at 4AM after a cloudy day in freezing temperatures, the "solar is cheap" stuff is simply dishonest.
> [chemicals sector] investments fell from 1.9 megatonnes of capacity in 2024 to 0.3 megatonnes last year, as the sector struggled with high energy prices, suffocating bureaucracy and an expansion of Chinese imports
https://www.ft.com/content/6d7dee96-4d6f-431c-a229-b78f9298f...
From 2019 to 2023, the EU recorded over 853,000 manufacturing job losses, with the largest losses in automotive sectors in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Germany.
The European Green Deal was forecast to put up to 11 million jobs “at risk” in various sectors if adjustments weren’t made:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Green_Deal#Job_losses...
We seem to think that if we destroy our own industry, ship emissions abroad, and marginally reduce global CO2 emissions, we will inspire the rest of the world (i.e. China and India) to follow suit. That's self-evidently ridiculous.
EU national leaders need to stop peacocking in Davos and Brussels, and start listening to their own people, and their own businesses, who are crying out for sensible energy costs, and for red tape and bureaucracy to get out the way of business.
It would be super easy for the EU to charm the European populations into EU loyalty instead of national loyalty. All it would take is to offer good deals to the individual person. To start, a minimum €10 000 per month salary for any citizen taking up military duty. Home ownership to young people who contribute to the federation. And such things, the possibilities are endless.
But we all know that the disdain that the EU leaders and national European leaders have against their own population is bottomless, and that they would rather do anything except building loyalty among their population.
Lol, I suggest you start forming an EU soccer team :)
Wow, I fear people would hate that with a burning passion.
Creating national unity is hard. It doesn't happen overnight -- maybe if you are attacked by an external force.
- Let banks operate and merge across borders, especially neobanks/fintechs. European banks are easily 10+ yrs ahead of the US in terms of tech and customer service but they lack scale and capital, especially in the credit side of things.
- Credit, again: we need the equivalent of D&B/Fico for Europe: a single credit bureau that can judge creditworthiness of people and organizations. Even the US has solved this through private companies, why can't Europe? Fellow Euros are shocked when I tell them that a 0-day LLC in the US can get $20k in credit card limits almost immediately.
The rest are easy, especially for web/internet companies. But if we have to raise credit/money based on the rules of the biggest (and slowest!) economies, then the EU is fucked.
I'm not sure more centralisation of banking is a good idea. Too big to fail and all that. The UK has never really recovered from the banking crisis thanks to its oversized financial activities.
Hell no, please! If recent years have shown anything, it's that the US shouldn't serve as a blueprint for the EU, or any other aspiring federation.
Credit scores are probably illegal in the EU due to the laws against mass surveillance.
I have a feeling FICO would be more destructive than beneficial for Europe. Look what it's done to America. Borrowing $20k for a startup is not worth that.
FICO doesn't just do aggregation, they also do integration: as an American, running away from credit card debt to a small credit union (a community bank in the States) is as bad as stiffing Citi or JPMorgan.
The American credit market is far more liquid than Europe, partly because it's much larger (one market as opposed to 27) but also because its graded and stratified: as a bank/fund you can choose the risk you want to take and take it accordingly. We're definitely missing that down to individual/SME scale.
You can't hoover up every other piece of personal data to build it, but you could definitely get consent to access this information for other loans.
US style credit scores are mass surveillance, because they incorporate all of your bank transactions. The actual use-case for credit scores doesn't require that, it merely needs a prediction of whether or not you'll repay a particular loan.
That is totally doable using public data, and one could also offer a service where your bank details get ingested to provide further information (using consent as a basis for the processing). All of this is possible in the EU, under current legislation.
You'd also include public data and area based data based on address, which again is entirely legal.
Source: worked in the insurance version of credit scoring in Europe for a few years.
This vital rotation is expected to continue in the future albeit with slower speed. The recent collaborations with South America and India aim to help this flow go on.
The current US policy is making a great favor to Europe as they cause a uniting instinct against a common danger. There is no need for same language and same most common surname 'Smith' to span 5000km.
Even the Dutch Nazi party split over it.
Manufacturing? Energy is way too expensive.
Tech? Admirable attempts using relatively little financial resources to keep up with the US and China haven't worked out. An issue of scale, not talent.
The complex regulatory body and risk-averse politics slows everything down (except the process of creating new regulations)
Germany is a prime example of all of the above.
Oh, and let's also make our energy supplies dependent on an adversary after shutting down perfectly fine nuclear power plants while fantasizing about a green hydrogen future while operating coal plants into the 2040s. (Also Germany)
As a european I have exited the continent, sold all my properties and will never return to this place ever again.
Where did you move to?
At no point in time were Led Zeppelin, the Bee Gees, Cliff Richard, Kitarō or other long haired men transiting Singapore during that period (1960-1990) executed.
Legally, justice wise, it's still rooted in English common law from it's time as a colony prior to the British getting over run by Japanese on bicycles.
Even its class bigotry is rooted in colonial British attitudes.
When "authoritarianism" used to secure economic freedom, "authoritarianism" bad. When authoritarianism used to stop the majority from executing drug traffickers, authoritarianism ... good?
> This is high enough that i.e. in USA it would definitely be popular enough to pass an amendment to civil rights to guarantee execution even if the freedom from jeopardy to death penalty had been prior enshrined.
And legal system in Singapore works like USA? This seems like a strange claim.
All the above. Political elections of people that are pro death penalty, professional polls commissioned by the MHA (and done continually in separate years), and also you can hear them from people on the streets if that's your preferred way.
>People also answer very different depending on the prospected outcome, thus the "seriousness" of their answer.
It's not simply a "prospected" outcome, the people in the polls literally are living in a country actively doing it and has been doing it for quite awhile. The information is out there to see what they're getting.
>And legal system in Singapore works like USA? This seems like a strange claim.
This is your fifth consecutive interrogative cross-examination question which is clearly aimed at presenting a counter-narrative without having to use the courage of making any assertions of your own, I only note here that your "question" implies a straw man that I've presented they work the same. But if you insist, the requirement of amending Singapore constitution is easily met in the context of the death penalty for drugs (2/3 MP + possibly 2/3 national referendum), were it that their civil rights were prior codified there to prohibit it.
A system like this cannot remain stable, and because it's unstable, it is not good.
The point is they're well used to variable electricity supply. Cloud comes past? No problem, the furnaces run slower for a moment. I think they need a certain base load to keep them hot as they can't restart them if the aluminium solidifies inside.
Aluminium smelting is an electrochemical process. Running electricity through the ore turns it into the metal and that's why they need so much. It's not just electric heating. They use direct current, so that's a good match for solar panels too. Two and a half volts per cell.
Fertilizer is something similar, as far as I know. They use electrochemical arc reactors to make nitrogen compounds from air. These can also scale up and down instantly.
AI training is pretty good too. If a cloud comes past you can pause the training run for a moment or underclock. The firmware for that might not be there yet, but the laws of physics quite like the idea.
Why do you think these particular things require natural gas?
We all knew this would eventually be the proposed path. The EU politicians and staffers obviously have a vested interest in saying yes. It means the EU will stop having to fight for ratification. It also means centralized planning and less fine-grained adjustments for local needs. As always.
This is not more power to the people or "we're stronger together." This is a simple attempt at an opportunistic power grab. Please don't let it happen here too.
