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How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

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Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#341

Post by tchalla »

cloudie78 wrote: post #198
yardie wrote: post #29

One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated. EU will pass laws, countries will adopt those laws, but you end up with 20-24 different versions of those laws. With some countries being strict or lenient about the law that everyone agreed to. And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed…

Ah yes, let’s give the EU and its undemocratic system in which policy formation is heavily filtered through a relatively narrow professional political class, ordinary voters have weak or almost no direct control over major policy choices, dissent encounters administrative/economic punishment, and central institutions possess and use powerful financial means to discipline peripheral governments should have even more c…

It seems you have an issue with representative democracy.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#342

Post by deno »

akie wrote: post #294
formerly_proven wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's yet another EU regulation that requires a rep for each EU country or you're not allowed to do business. EU single market is a bad joke at this point.

[flagged]

I mean that's what the PPWR directive is already? It's a single set of laws that applies to all member states. They just didn't write any interop so every country has its own system and registration.

If it was just single registration for EU and paying for each kg of plastic or electronics to member states (like you do with VAT already via VAT-OSS) then it wouldn't be such a big deal.

Even if you didn't have any agreement with recycling companies in each member state and you had to pay the highest per-kg fees it would still be manageable for small sellers.

Meanwhile if you want to sell a single circuit board you're looking at several thousand euro in registration fees and several months for processing just to sell legally to 4-5 countries in EU.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#343

Post by easytiger »

Jskewel wrote: post #111

PPWR is an EU catastrophe. Firstly for the reasons outlined in the article: it essentially makes being a micro/small business in the EU impossible, if your market is other EU countries. Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level. The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they ju…

> Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level.

- resentment that bad policy damages the institution’s reputation - annoyed it proves people i hate like correct

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#344

Post by antiloper »

mrtksn wrote: post #266
mpweiher wrote: post #199

A couple of things to note: 1. The EU commission wanted a single central registry 2. It was the member states, via the Council of Ministers, that torpedoed this. 3. The EU now advises its member states to not implement/enforce this 4. Until the correction, which is on its way, can be fully enacted. So the same old same old: member states do shitty stuff and blame the EU.

It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only. It shows up in the stats, citizens almost always trust EU more than their governments and want EU to have more power but all this means those local governments becoming less important and therefore no one is really pushing for it. Fingers crossed Trump invades Greenland so things can start m…

> It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.

The lesson is the opposite: The EU needs LESS power, not more. If the member states didn't have a cartel to tyrannize their collective population, this regulation could never have happened. Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#345

Post by potatoking »

The EU still believes in fair markets so I don't really see a valid suggestion in the article.. Every US or Chinese seller to the EU can be de minimus, etc, so the EU lowering its standards for consumers and the environment helps mostly foreign vendors who have lower standards to meet in employment, etc.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#346

Post by jabart »

yardie wrote: post #29

One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated. EU will pass laws, countries will adopt those laws, but you end up with 20-24 different versions of those laws. With some countries being strict or lenient about the law that everyone agreed to. And a lot it is written from the perspective that large corporations are the only ones who do business throughout the EU. It's completely missed…

US Sales tax is the exact same way. Each state has a different rate, Texas has multiple rates inside a zip code you have to manage. Each state also has a nexus requirement that is either money, or number of transactions based. Then the filings you have to do and have a Foreign LLC registration, a registered agent in that state, and a yearly annual report to file to tell them you are still in business and here is my $40-200.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#347

Post by niceguy1827 »

fidotron wrote: post #324

You really have to wonder what Xi Jinpeng thinks of all this. The extent to which China can appear to do nothing while the west kills itself is just unbelievable. How could you possibly respect people that can't get out of their own way so repeatedly?

I think it popped up maybe a year or two ago on youtube/reddit but there was this meme that goes: "China: do nothing, profit".

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#348

Post by arjie »

akie wrote: post #294
formerly_proven wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's yet another EU regulation that requires a rep for each EU country or you're not allowed to do business. EU single market is a bad joke at this point.

[flagged]

“It’s hard to do X under conditions C” is a good explanation for why “X is crappy” but it seems like a poor reason to re-evaluate “X is crappy”. For a small business owner, larger markets with lower barriers to entry are better than smaller markets with fragmented standards.

An explanation for why some markets are smaller and fragmented is interesting academically but it doesn’t change that it’s not worth participating in.

Re: How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

#349

Post by alerighi »

Jskewel wrote: post #111

PPWR is an EU catastrophe. Firstly for the reasons outlined in the article: it essentially makes being a micro/small business in the EU impossible, if your market is other EU countries. Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level. The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they ju…

Really the chances that someone will ask a small company to be compliant are just very low. Of course if you sell something in an envelope nobody will ask you anything, the deal and the reason for this law (that I consider correct) is to address packaging waste from big companies.

Of course this law it's complex for nothing, to me, they could have just added the cost of the recycling of the packaging material into the cost of the packaging material itself, making it that only the companies producing the packaging would need to comply (so that if you buy a box to ship something the cost of recycling of the box is already embedded in the cost of the box, like they did with plastic bags at the supermarket).

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