As an Australian normally subject to two upper houses (the current state I happen to live in is the only unicameral state) that seems very counter intuitive
The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards
And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down
It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform
A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)
Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them
I think this is your "intuition" because it is what you are used to, I see no reason why this would be the objectively correct way to do things. The legislative procedure in the EU is a bit more complex than laws simply flowing "up" or "down". There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.
> There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
Also EU can't actually make any laws it makes directives that are then up to each member state to implement on their own. It also has no police/military/force to actually enforce that the member states implement the directives. Basically everything is very much about cooperation or finding a compromise everyone can agree on as there is no way to force anyone to do anything really (outside of cutting away EU funding but then the member state can also stop paying their dues which does not work for most of the big states as they pay more then they get back)
The thing where EU has power and actual means to enforce things is the reason it was originally created for. Trade.
Well, it can make regulations, which are directly effective. And some directives are actually directly effective - there is a whole line of case law on this (starting with a case called Van Gend en Loos).
But yes, the whole thing is of course based on cooperation between states. EU law applies in EU member states (whether directly or indirectly) because those member states say so.
I think it's less to make it hard to make laws and more to ensure the primacy of the member states governments over the parliament, but for the same reason you gave. To not become a federation.
In theory, if parliament had the power to propose legislation, the council would still be able to shoot those bills down, assuming no other changes to the EU structure.
there will be always inequalities and "blind spots", just look at the US, more homogeneous in many ways, yet still there's no single market for many things (healthcare for example)
education seems similarly harmonized in both unions (the Bologna system works pretty well)
but just as in the US border issues are always affecting members differently (migration flows North, right? so southern borders are affected more; at the same time migrants went to NYC and Berlin because they are rich cities with opportunities and very migration-friendly policies)
and of course federalism in the US is also suffering from vetocracy (aka. tragedy of the anticommons), see housing, which very directly leads to "blue states" losing seats in the House (and similarly housing issues are catalyzing radicalization in the EU too)
(and the solution to the housing challenges are not obvious, and even if there are success stories - like Vienna - city-state politics is stuck in the usual local minimas)
Agreed, no big changes imminent. I was thinking more about the longer term. I would expect change in 20 or 30 years, and a lot of things could happen to change things even in the next decade (another financial crisis like 2008, another pandemic, wars, etc.).
The goal behind the EU is to represent Europe as a single unified economic bloc capable of being a world power. It's not meant to make the European Union into a superstate.
You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do.
Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American".
Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don't even own what's done with your private data. Passing it through the EU changes this; now it has the full backing of all 27 EU countries, and collectively, this makes the EU the second largest customer market in the world. Now the EU is impossible to ignore as an economic bloc.
This is why the EU democratic process is so fractured and can at times feel undemocratic/disconnected. It's not a regular country making laws; it's more international geopolitics playing their course in real time. EU laws aren't really laws either, they have more in common with diplomatic agreements than anything else, which is why the Commission works the way it does[1]. (EU regulations and directives are turned into local country laws that are legally required to do the same thing that those regulations mandate.) The EU parliament (which is a more typical elected body) primarily exists as a check on the Commission to prevent it from rubber-stamping things[2] that people don't want.
[0]: Watch any online discourse around Eurovision, and you'll quickly realize that Europe still has some pretty harsh population divides.
[1]: The Commission is made up of representatives from the member states, which are in turn locally picked by the member states through their governments. If you think this means the Commissions representatives are equal and work as one body; they don't. All the petty inter-country geopolitics you see on a global scale very much apply to the Commission. (There's a Yes Minister skit about this part: https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE , which is oddly funny given Brexit happened.)
[2]: Which it generally tends to do - the parliament is much more subject to activist calls to action to avoid passing bad legislation than people usually expect.
I think you are right about the aims but I do not think you can be a world power without being unified to the extent that would be a federation.
The EU is a large market but it is shrinking as a share of the global economy (despite expansion) so how long does that lower last.
On the other hand the big EU economies are big enough to make pulling out of them a significant loss.I do not think any global business would be happy to just give up doing business with Germany.
I don't have any special industry experience. I went on a tear a few weeks ago and watched a bunch of Rick Beato's videos on YouTube. I didn't know the guy before running across his work, but he has 5 million subscribers and he sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about. He's been a music producer for 30 years.
Anyway, he was the one that made the point that we don't sign rock bands anymore in the sense that they're not moving the industry. All you gotta do is look at the top songs that folks are listening to on Spotify or the radio and you'll immediately see what I'm talking about.
He was also the one that walked through the process of setting up mics for a drum kit and pointed out that it's just very expensive to get the studio time and the expertise to do all that correctly. He actually walks you through a studio where he's set up mics for a drum kit and explains why it's so difficult to do well. He then contrasts that with simply using samples that are professionally provided and that the cost difference is just immense.
Anyway, I don't need to die on this hill. My point was the music industry is going downhill regardless and AI is just one of many tools paving the way.
I agree 100% that mic-ing live drums is by far the hardest and most expensive element in rock recording
But in the 1970s-2000s it was complete black magic and without dedicating years to the craft - you were up to the whims of studios for how much you pay
Compare that today, for instance have a look at the Jazz-Rock Fusion band Vulfpeck’s first album. If you exclude the cost of instruments - they often only need three (rather cheap) mics. Everything else DI. Recorded in a basement for less than a couple grand - with effectively infinite recording time
Live drums are expensive compared to samples, but they’re not the reason an entire genre disappeared
Rick Beato is fine but he’s entirely disconnected from contemporary guitar-based music. I agree entirely with the OP, the quality-expense ratio has never been better for this type of music.
Like with software, I'm thinking there's two different discussions: what powers the industry vs. what is possible for hobbyists.
While the industry in software is obsessed with React and K8s, hackers still like self-hosting PHP apps. Same with music. The industry is powered by highly efficient teams that write, produce, and perform music at scale for a global audience, and that's totally different from contemporary guitar-based music (I suspect!) What's possible is very different from what makes money.
Not sure about this year but either two or three years ago over 90% of the University of New England’s grant money (over $20MM) was from the School of Agriculture
I hate many aspects of the Australian economy (especially our lack of economic diversity) but having world-best tech for farming isn’t one of them. America is still leaps and bounds behind us in many different subdomains of Agriculture and Mining
Australia is weak for only really having primary industries, but we sure are very optimised for it
You can buy and sell x-year leases from the crown. Any with a commercially viable site sell for just below or even more than freehold land (depending on supply)
Farming logistics also works radically differently than in America: the reason our farms are orders of magnitude higher larger than American ranches spatially is because it’s only somewhat profitable at the largest possible scales
The valley I’m from originally (The Tweed) is cane country, and not a single company is viable independently. Hell we only have one mill left nationally that’s not-megacorp owned (note we have no land leases though, it’s all freehold where I’m from)
I have to often explain to customers after a certain price point (for me ~$200+ AUD) you have to turn the speed trim pot down for it to be enjoyable at all
Similar to what Gran Turismo 7 players have realised with EV “Vision” Cars - car enjoyment greatly diminishes with speed after a certain point - instead of plateauing
No-name Chinese build quality is actually a lot higher than I’d’ve anticipated though - brushed thick aluminium and even steel chassis are pretty common now
Is they are the ones who need to be at the bleeding edge of statistics but often aren’t
They absolutely need Bayesian competitive hypothesis testing but are often the least likely to use it
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