411–420 of 423 posts
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Monopoly
So Temu/Aliexpress fixes the rules not breaks them. OP shouldn't be upset.
We have rules that should prevent companies from selling broken and dangerous crap. Should I not be upset that Temu ignores those rules deliberately and floods the EU with exactly that?
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Jail the executives and engineers cutting corners. For some reason, you can spend years in jail for cannabis possession or an online post criticizing Macron or the police, but people who actually commit murder and ecocide by cutting costs in engineering products, or who import such bad-quality products face exactly zero consequences. Then we can't drink our water, can't eat anything from our soil, sometimes can't eve…
The engineers are in China and thereby outside your jurisdiction. Likewise the executives of the company that actually makes the thing. The only people in your jurisdiction are tangentially related intermediaries with no real knowledge or control over the product. It's essentially proposing to punish FedEx for shipping a package or PayPal for doing a funds transfer if unbeknownst to them the vendor's product is of lo…
To be clear, i'm not against foreign products. But a french exec deciding to employ quasi-slave labor and destroy the environment on the other side of the world to maximize profits should 100% be jailed. That's already technically a crime.
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> Customers expect some products to be dangerous and rely on product reviews to determine which ones. .. which are of course the easiest thing to fake. > then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them…
> .. which are of course the easiest thing to fake. How do you get Consumer Reports to publish a fake product review? Can you point to even one instance of that actually happening? > This is not an accurate description of new market entry for .. well, anything? Huawei is a pretty conspicuous example of it actually happening. They were starting to establish a brand and then regulatory destruction was imposed. Meanwhil…
No need. Just have dozens of companies produce hundreds of new junk products every year. Then there's no way all products can be reviewed, and no way they can be properly reviewed: what's interesting about a review is the failure mode of the products, which you have no idea about when you have 10 new Samsung smartphones coming out every year.
> [Huawei] were starting to establish a brand and then regulatory destruction was imposed. selective enforcement gets imposed when someone undesirable is starting to look like a real challenger.
Yes, selective enforcement is the problem. Not regulations. Regulations are not strong enough. But they need to be applied evenly. Why is it legal for Apple and Samsung to produce junk, but not Huawei? (rhetorical question, please don't answer) We need proper consumer protection. Any company producing a product should have 10 years or 20 years warranty, and should be legally mandated to produce/sell spare parts for 20+ years (as in, real spare parts, not "replacement motherboard" which costs the entire smartphone).
Suddenly, the junk makers would produce less junk. Maybe there'd only be a new Samsung/iPhone every 5 years, but it would probably be as solid and repairable as older Nokias.
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> Nobody was ever stopping individual member states from prosecuting Temu As a general principle, the EU commission handles all international trade and member states are not allowed to impose tariffs or rules on what has been imported into other member states. I say general principle because in many cases pre-existing legislation was allowed to continue, however anything new and any changes went through the EU commis…
> So no, the EU commission was stopping member states from doing this. No it wasn't. I wrote 'prosecuting', that is a term from criminal law, and that still is in the agenda of the member states. If Temu is breaking law, which it probably is when they were fined for selling "illegal products", then the states should have acted, but they didn't. > If you think the EU commission will help anyone against big business Th…
Both of your arguments are "but it's this slightly different part of government that's responsible: see it was X, not Y".
Ok fine, you're right but that doesn't refute what I said. Obviously people look at the effect of what government does as a whole. The net effect of what the entire government did was letting a LOT of companies get away with a lot of crimes, to the point of bankrupting a great deal of European businesses.
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> So no, the EU commission was stopping member states from doing this. No it wasn't. I wrote 'prosecuting', that is a term from criminal law, and that still is in the agenda of the member states. If Temu is breaking law, which it probably is when they were fined for selling "illegal products", then the states should have acted, but they didn't. > If you think the EU commission will help anyone against big business Th…
My argument is that the government lets certain companies get away with large scale law violations, to the point that it killed local companies. Both of your arguments are "but it's this slightly different part of government that's responsible: see it was X, not Y". Ok fine, you're right but that doesn't refute what I said. Obviously people look at the effect of what government does as a whole . The net effect of wha…
your argument is besides the topic of foreign companies violating the law and the member states doing nothing about it.
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My argument is that the government lets certain companies get away with large scale law violations, to the point that it killed local companies. Both of your arguments are "but it's this slightly different part of government that's responsible: see it was X, not Y". Ok fine, you're right but that doesn't refute what I said. Obviously people look at the effect of what government does as a whole . The net effect of wha…
> My argument is that the government lets certain companies get away with large scale law violations your argument is besides the topic of foreign companies violating the law and the member states doing nothing about it.
Makes no sense.
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> My argument is that the government lets certain companies get away with large scale law violations your argument is besides the topic of foreign companies violating the law and the member states doing nothing about it.
I don't understand. The EU purposefully advantaged Chinese companies for decades to the detriment of EU companies. I don't understand how anyone can either believe this was an accident or say it really was someone else. Makes no sense.
But all of this is still very much off topic in this discussion about the illegality of some imports (because that's a completely different issue than trade barriers and tariffs). And since you seem to claim (hard to tell really since we are veering offtopic all time) that the members states were powerless to act against those imports, I remember that even back in 2014 in our paltry Slovakia I had to personally visit our "Regional Public Health Office" and sign a form that the tea I imported from Yunnansourcing (less than 2kg in total) really is just for my personal consumption, otherwise they wouldn't let me have it or I would have to pay for maximum residue limits testing. And of course that was after I already paid the import duties. So when this much attention was possible in Slovakia for a small amount of tea, why wasn't it possible for any random package from China everywhere else? Because many countries simply decided they don't care although health and security is still their responsibility.
Interesting - I've been testing a few free tier tools lately. How does SerpSpur's backlink freshness compare to something like Ubersuggest or the free version of Ahrefs?
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Industries dump toxic waste into waterways if they can get away with it in the US today (literally today [0]). I agree that I might not be specifically worried about borax milk if FDA was reversed, but I would absolutely expect risky shortcuts in food offerings. The incentives in the market has never changed. That's what regulation is for, shifting market incentives/forces to favor consumers/society. [0] https://www.…
Please try to distinguish these separate things. Pollution is an externality . If Alice hires a company to do "Hydro Excavation" and they pollute Bob's water, even if Bob knows all about it and is entirely opposed, he can't prevent it by not patronizing them because he isn't a party to the transaction. So the solution to this has to be to prohibit pollution. Product safety is about information . When Bob knows that a…
This is regulation, and it's only as good as enforcement. Meaning it requires government inspections and labs. Again, we've already proven this in history.
> sue them if your house burns down
Sure, if you only care about compensation and not prevention. Also I don't think you've considered the practicalities of your example, in that no regular person will 1. determine the battery cause. 2. prove it. 3. bring a successful suit against a corporation.
> Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.
Well... they do seize millions of products yearly. It's generally sub-$800 packages getting through. Your original point of incumbents targetting upstarts and thus forcing "burner" companies is the wrong causality. Burner companies are incentivized to specifically skirt liability and reputation. Regulating the frontend incentivizes self-policing against sub-companies designed to be dissolved.