normalnorm

> I doubt the EU will survive in its current state.

A lot of people desire this to be true, but that does not mean that it is. It is a particularly weird opinion to hold in the wake of the most recent challenge to its continuity -- the Brexit fiasco, with the EU having maintained a united front for more than 4 years, while the UK emerges out of it in a terrible state -- and the worst is yet to come.

The EU is not perfect by any means (what is?), but it is a terribly ambitious project that has been painstakingly built over decades. Every step of the way, someone like you was claiming that it was impossible, that it was surely about to collapse. Well, we are 27 member states strong and we are dealing with the economic challenged posed by COVID better than most of the rest of the world.

If we look at objective measures, such as economic inequality, political polarization or civil unrest, we are perhaps forced to conclude that the US are closer to collapse than the EU. To be clear, I do not desire the collapse of the US. I think that that US and the EU are natural friends, in a world where they have much more in common than what separates them.

You are looking for meaning. That is a normal human instinct. I am talking about power structures. They should be examined. Most people here are not willing to do that, because they figure they will soon be the top dogs. They are wrong, and this expectation is being exploiting by less naive actors.

I agree, but avoided the term precisely for the reason you cite.

Big corporations like Amazon are part of the dominating class. Me (and probably you, since you need to ask the question -- no offense intended) are part of the dominated class. Two different sets of rules apply here, it's not a matter of the products themselves being different.

Pointing out that it is becoming a common mistake to confuse the verb "to have" with the preposition "of" -> pedantic!

Failing to capitalize "Nazi" according to what the Oxford dictionary thinks is best for a contraction of two German words -> HAHAHAH! You were being a grammar nazi, but ironically you failed to capitalize Nazi correctly.

Ok. You win. I should of known better!

Yes, but this means that you don't understand the meaning of simple words. Doesn't that bother you?

> could of

I am not a grammar nazi. I am not even a fucking native English speaker, but what the fuck??? Why is this mistake so prevalent these days?

I've been noticing this "meme" recently on HN: that since company X (any one of the FAANGs) is American, it is not subject to European law. If it operated in Europe, it absolutely is. Believe it or not, the EU is also a sovereign territory with its own laws.

Can you imagine arguing that American law does not apply to some company operating in the US, because said company was founded in some other country?

> and get an authentic

Man, the "silicon valley" writers are crushing it today!

> The barriers are (1) tech stack, (2) use case, and (3) ethics, in that order.

This sounds like a line that some good writer trying to make fun of silicon valley would come up with. If that's the case, good job!

What? How on earth would you conclude this from that I wrote?

I was replying to the idea that it is the "naturalist fallacy" to say that it is better to be develop good habits (in this case, eat better), than to just take some drugs and maintain the bad habits. Obese people should take the drugs, I don't wish for anyone to die. Even better for them would be to lose the weight.

The US has a huge (pun intended) obesity problem, and it seems related to worse health outcomes across several dimensions. This is just a fact.

Normalizing obesity because you can take some drugs to stay alive (artificially lowering your cholesterol, blood pressure, etc) might not be the smartest idea ever. But yeah, maybe it's the naturalist fallacy. To each their own.

The European Council is made of the democratically elected Heads of State of each Member State. The European Council nominates the president of the European Comission, which again has one member per Member State. The European Parliament, which is composed of MEPs directly elected by the citizens of each member state, must ratify all nominations. The directly elected European Parliament has veto power on European Comission decisions, and so has every Member State.

A state can only join the EU by virtue of a democratic decision according to the constitution of the Member State itself, and there are strong requirements on prospective Member States to be themselves proper democracies with separation of powers in order to be allowed to join.

Granted, these requirements have been slightly overlooked when it came to the UK: the House of Lords is undemocratic, one could say outdated, and would almost certainly not be tolerated in any other candidate state.

So, the EU might be complex, but in what sense exactly is it undemocratic?