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Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

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Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#231
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Independence is a mirage, as is control. No individual nor country in the world is independent. We are all interdependent on one another, and ever more so as the movement of data, goods and people accelerates. The EU is a framework is facilitate that interdependence, and while it has many faults, it was created to prevent another world war and in that it has succeeded. Great Britain's future is very dependent on the…

Rather 1 day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.

[deleted]

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Everyone in the EU is ruled by their own elected government. The unelected bureaucrats in Brussels don't rule anybody. Their ability to make decisions for member states is limited by treaties. In any case, the UK was significantly more independent than other EU states in terms of currency and economic issues." The agenda of the EU is controlled by the EU Commission, as they're the only group that can propose laws.…

The Lisbon treaty was approved by the democratically elected governments of the EU member states, who represent their people. What's wrong with that? How can you possibly construe it as a non-democratic imposition by the commission?

The Lisbon Treaty was an attempt to push through changes that had already been put to the public vote and rejected. The proposal that was rejected was the European Constitution Treaty...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Consti...

If it was important enough to be put to the public vote the first time, why was it not important enough to be put to the public vote the second time?

Note that...

"[The Constitutional Treaty] was later ratified by 18 member states, which included referendums endorsing it in Spain and Luxembourg. However the rejection of the document by French and Dutch voters in May and June 2005 brought the ratification process to an end.

Following a period of reflection, the Treaty of Lisbon was created to replace the Constitutional Treaty. This contained many of the changes that were originally placed in the Constitutional Treaty but was formulated as amendments to the existing treaties. Signed on 13 December 2007, the Lisbon Treaty entered into force on 1 December 2009."

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#233
post #164
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think the full on collapse of the UK banking system, and the mass exodus of financial jobs isn't going to instantly dry up any startup funding in the UK, you're kidding yourself. Large companies in the UK are already announcing their intention to move thousands of jobs to Germany or Ireland.

To some extent, I think this is what Brexit supporters want. With fewer jobs in London and rest of UK, and more border controls, the attraction of the UK for migrants decreases significantly. The ultra heated real estate market can finally cool down a bit.

Yeah, look at Detroit, that's a great example of what a cooled down economy and real estate market looks like...

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like one spouse saying "I'm leaving you, please don't hurt the children". (By analogy, the citizens of Britain/France/etc are the children, who'd like to continue to play with one another, but perhaps one of their abusive parents will use violence to prevent this.)

But its the citizens of Britain that decided that they were leaving, so who is supposed to be the "parent" that's leaving if the citizens of Britain are "the children"?

The citizens who didn't want to leave. Who will now be forbidden to walk across what was once an open border, etc.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. I'll bite on this one. Why are you opposed to mass immigration?

Now to the specific. The country in question is Russia and mass immigrants mostly come from Ukraine, Caucasus and Central Asia. People from Ukraine, and fellow Russians coming home, I have no reservations against. They're as good cultural fit as anybody already in the country. I'll make the process smoother if I could. People from Caucasus, they're often poor cultural fit. They're first to bend laws, they're sometime…

Rather than talking about "culture fit" it's more helpful to be specific about what behaviors are causing problems. The complaints you made sound like a good reason to improve enforcement of various laws and tax collection. If a person commits a crime, the criminal should be punished; the criminal's neighbor need not be exiled.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#236

As a brit, it's strange to see how it's being spun here. The majority of people voted to leave the EU and to regain independence. There will be a little volatility until some facts about how that divorce happens, emerge. Long term, we now have control of our future. In terms of startups though, the EU is there to serve big businesses and powerful establishment. It's there to hinder startups and small businesses. If y…

> The majority of people voted to leave the EU and to regain independence.

The older generation voted for it, the youth voted against, and it barely passed, so the old people just created a future the younger generation doesn't want; this is a terrible outcome. The Brexit just eliminated the right of free travel and work across all of the EU for the upcoming generation, they aren't happy about that. You've just shot yourselves in the foot as a nation.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "As the European commission, it's a civil service as there is in all the European countries." That's a common misconception. Why? In other countries, the civil service aren't the only ones that can propose legislation. In the EU, the European Parliament can't propose legislation, the European Council can't propose legislation, only the European Commission can propose legislation. You may be electing people to repre…

It should be noted that the president of the European Commission is proposed by the [democratically elected] heads of state of the member states, and that their proposed candidate has to be accepted by the [democratically elected] members of the European Parliament, and that each member state nominates a commissioner, and that this group of people as a whole have to be accepted, again, by the the European Parliament.…

That's not what a representative democracy looks like. In a representative democracy, every citizen has equal power to have a say in how the country runs, but they loan that power to people that they believe will represent their interests. To illustrate what's wrong with the EU model of representative democracy, let's use an analogy... imagine you're a football manager and you choose 11 players to play a game of football. If those players then chose other players to play on their behalf, you'd have something to say about it, right? It's the same thing with a democracy, the loan of power is only designed to be shared with the person or group you pick to do the job, they shouldn't have the right to give up that power to let someone else run the show. If the role of the Commissioners was merely that of assistants then I could accept that, but these unelected people are at the centre of how the EU functions, and have greater control of the direction of the EU than the elected officials. Do you not see any problems with that?

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#238
post #97
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Independence is a mirage, as is control. No individual nor country in the world is independent. We are all interdependent on one another, and ever more so as the movement of data, goods and people accelerates. The EU is a framework is facilitate that interdependence, and while it has many faults, it was created to prevent another world war and in that it has succeeded. Great Britain's future is very dependent on the…

> The EU will make the UK pay a price for Brexit, and rightly so, otherwise all member states would leave and still enjoy the free movement of goods and people. I really hate this sentiment. This is just about the worst EU can do, it would damage its legitimacy in the eyes of us, EU citizens, even more than the handling of the Greek crisis already did. I don't see any reason to punish a country for voting to leave th…

It's not going to be a matter of punishment. This almost sets negotiation back to square one. There are A LOT of effects in this that needs to be taken into account. Anything that's reciprocal currently (e.g. access to healthcare for Britons in Spain and for Spaniards in UK) is going to evaporate and will need to be reevaluated.

Now, the UK has clearly stated they don't like some things like free movement of people. The point of getting out of the EU is not to do a copy/paste of the current agreements and sign them in a week. The UK (not the EU) has decided to cancel everything and start from scratch because they don't feel like they could get to a comfortable situation inside the EU.

Even with the best of intentions, negotiating this kind of complex inter-state treaties take years. And, understandably, there will be extra care and friction because the UK has already got out once. Meanwhile, all the benefits are not going to be present.

I, sincerely, don't think we should think this in terms of "punishment", but if someone gets out of an agreement and immediately starts to renegotiate (more favourable) terms, it's reasonable to expect the negotiation to be hard...

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#239
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics is not always rational. It is also in the interest of the survival of the EU to deal with the UK in a heavy-handed manner. If a precedent is set that shows leaving the union is all upsides with no downsides, why would other countries remain? IMO, France has the greatest risk of leaving next, and without France, the whole EU might collapse. The kid gloves are definitely going to come off in the negotiations:…

People keep saying this, but punishing the UK for leaving could easily give further fuel to the French leave campaign. And of course an exited Britain could extend an olive branch to France.

After a 10% reduction in real income for the Brits just one day after the referendum? Fat chance.

Re: Doom, Gloom and Unease: London's Tech Scene Reacts to Brexit

#240
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not even that the EU really wants to make the UK pay. It's just that the UK had so many advantages that it negotiated before. Now they basically reset themselves back to 1972, but the problem is the EU is much bigger at 27 members today then in 72. Making it extremely unlikely that the re-negotiation is going to end up as well today. Also the UK will want a super fast negotation, the rest of the EU are not so muc…

If I'm not mistaken UK is one of the larger economies, and therefore should have more influence over the negotiations than there smaller, and less significant countries. As for free movement of things, I believe it is in the best interest of the EU to allow lenient trade with UK, insofar as it doesn't damage its reputation as a legitimate institution. However if reputation does take precedence over economic sense, th…

It was one of the larger economies; as it will now be an isolated island with no automatic access to the European market, it's value will be lost to a lot of businesses.
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