alt Hacker NewsThere is pretty common trend of people complaining about X being bad coz EU but most of the time it turns into one of
* It was pretty sensible EU directive implemented badly by national govt * It was pretty sensible EU directive implemented okay but communicated badly * Outright lie about the problem and the scope of it.
One example: The people complained that "EU will force them to pay to scrap solar panels"
The truth: Some countries added price of recycling into price of the solar panels, some didn't. Those that did had free recycling, those that didn't needed owner to pay a fee when scrapping it. So, naturally, buying solar panel from country with no fee was cheaper and scrapping it in country with fee was free. EU noticed that loophole and forced countries into including the fee in panel cost:
The truth: Poland applied it by just applying fee to panels bought before the rule unification
The lie number 1: EU forced that implementation on Poland. Nothing was forced, that way of "fixing it" (vs eating the cost was what Polish govt chose
The lie number 2: (and I have no idea where it came from) "You will have to scrap your panels made before this date AND pay for it".
Sometimes I suspect most of that is just russian propaganda using anything to undermine EU
Replies
I a sure it's Russian propaganda that the EU has basically tried for the last 3 years to ban encryption so that it can access all your personal messages without a warrant?
Or is it also Russia propaganda that it wants to force VPNs to collect data on their users or force everyone to use their real identities online so that it makes it easy to prosecute anyone for wrong speech?
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/the-eu-pr...
Nah, you are right the EU is good for us. No issues there at all.
> Outright lie about the problem and the scope of it.
One of my favorites was “EU is banning juice”, when the definition of juice was being standardized and local producers of fruit-flavored sugar water couldn’t keep selling their beverages as “juice” anymore.