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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

Well the problem is that the EU has a legal structure and if you want to do business in IE then you have to abide by EU's rules.

So it is AAPL's lawyers' fault, in the end. Hence, AAPL's.

This is another issue why I am strongly against the EU. You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS...

So you cannot even be sure to be abiding by the law if you obey a country's laws.

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This is false. EU rules have to be transposed into members states' national law to be binding.

http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/scoreboard/performance_b...

1) This rule is part of the treaty in which Ireland joined the EU - which was the very first thing added to Irish law.

2) That treaty (which is part of Irish law) allows for certain kind of EU laws (called "regulations") to be directly binding without the Irish lawmakers needing to do something actively. Your link covers another kind of EU laws (called "directives") which in fact have to be transposed before becoming directly enforcecable. However that treaty (which, remember, is part of Irish law) forces the Irish lawmakers to actually transpose them. If they fail they open the country up for litigiation which makes directives indirectly binding.

You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS... So you cannot even be sure to be abiding by the law if you obey a country's laws.

That can happen in every country which has a constitution.

And every federal country where you have different bodies that set law.

> This is another issue why I am strongly against the EU. You can find out that a country is behaving illegally when WRITING ITS OWN LAWS...

That's true whenever you have international treaties. The WTO has plenty of clauses that go very close to disallowing this type of stuff in slightly different contexts. Same applies to the states within the US. They are bound by federal law in many ways.

Yeah, which is why I'm so surprised people are surprised about Brexit. It wasn't some full-on racist rant. Many people just wanted sovereignty for real, including a large number of Labor voters who voted quietly, fearing retaliation.

When you can't write your own laws, and you don't get to elect who does, you're not really sovereign.

http://www.newsweek.com/brexit-eu-leave-democracy-immigratio...

Did I say Apple didn't share the blame with Ireland ?

I just fully disagree with using the term fraud to describe what happened.

What is in the interest of the German economy seems to be what determines EU and ECB actions, whether it's setting interest rates, applying rules or deciding what 'deals' to investigate.

The EU, did it go hard after VW? But when it comes to the small fry, rules is rules.

The US, which went hard after VW, is not particularly known for going hard after the environmental footprint of it's domestic brands. Yes, VW cheated, but exposing VW as the sole bad guy considering US gas prices and mileages is quite an impressive trick to pull off.

I don't understand the moral equivalency that you are implying there exists between US gas prices etc and VW providing fabricated statistics. My point is that the EU and Germany failed to uncover this. Also Germany and France have both in the past chosen to ignore the rules of the EU/Euro club without sanction. That it is far easier for the EU regulators to pick on one of the small fry countries and make negative findings is my argument.

VW cheated, but the bigger moral problem and the underlying topic is not the cheating but the pollution that was hidden by it. And suggesting that VW is polluting more than US brands is just nuts.

Edit: Just wanted to make clear, that of course the cheating should have totally been caught in Europe earlier. The thought that the US is not biased with its domestic brands just made me chuckle.

>The thought that the US is not biased with its domestic brands just made me chuckle.

Who suggested that, or for that matter who suggested that "VW is polluting more than US brands"?

I know I didn't.

> Who suggested that, or for that matter who suggested that "VW is polluting more than US brands"?

So we can all agree, that governments favouring their big domestic companies is not just an EU thing. You criticized the EU for going after Apple and not VW, I made clear that the US is going after VW and not GM.

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