It can be but it's an uphill battle the entire way and opponents try to shame crypto supporters with the Four Horsemen of the Crypto Apocalypse: Terrorists, Child Pornographers, Tax Evaders and Those Who Have Something To Hide.
Any objection to government surveillance is met with "Well you must be a member of or support the activities of" one or more members of the aforementioned groups. It's better to never let a bad law in than remove it later because people are irrational and bring these emotional arguments into play.
That's because there's a big amount of people, myself included, who feel like drug prohibition is good, all things considered. Not because "editing" the law is hard. (I am not American).
That doesn't make the situation different. All of these bad laws have supporters. (Largely because charlatans in government, law enforcement, and media constantly exaggerate dangers, but that's beside the point.)
That's not so easy for EU laws. The only body that can propose new EU laws is the European Commission, which ordinary voters have essentially no influence over. (Some of the non-EU Europe-wide bodies are even worse.)
The EU becomes a worse and worse idea every year. It was good while it lasted. This will be the first year I vote for an anti-EU party locally. It pains me, but it's been enough already :/
Then give feedback. The process is open for that reason. If you remove the EU from this you will have the insividual regulators ask for the same. Austria and Switzerland for instance push for this.
//edit: also even the proposed regulation would not prevent custom firmwares. You just meed to lock down the radio.
Stupid ideas coming out of EU are more and more frequent.
I don't want to give feedback. I want accountable and professional political representation that will not dare to come up with such ideas in the first place.
Politicians will always come up with dangerously worded good intentions every once in a while, regardless of which parliament it is — national or European. At least at the European level the number of folk that pick up on the risks of such articles is significantly higher than at the national level — especially for smaller countries.
Asking for feedback on complex legislature proposals is surely preferable to exclusively taking notes from meetings with lobby groups behind closed doors. Besides, national governments often ask for feedback on proposed laws too!
Each body that can introduce legislation represents a possible attack vector against our remaining freedom. Each additional tear of government is more distant from the voter, more difficult to oversee, communicate with and oppose.
I have to ask why should such piece of legislation exist in the first place? What problems of today does it aim to solve? What is the quantified impact of these problems that we need to adopt new regulation? I have read related documents and there is no such reasoning, just vague boilerplate.
The trade-off for delegating some of the national sovereignty to the EU is that as independent nations we cannot trade and deal with other powerful entities such as the US and China nearly as effectively. For example, a country like the Netherlands risks having trade deals dictated to them rather than negotiated as equals.
With the Brexit looming over the United Kingdom, already the effects of leaving the influence of the EU bloc behind are becoming clear, with the US attempting to dictate the terms of their post-EU trade deal.
Regulation such as this is necessary to harmonize the various national laws on this subject so manufacturers can target the single market of the EU without having to certify their gear in each member state. This is mentioned in the documents about this law as well (I've closed my browser tabs after submitting my feedback, but it's there). I'm not too well versed in this matter, but the net-benefit seems to be economic.
The EU and it democratic institutions can be vastly improved, but we are better of with them than without them — especially now.
The only way to achieve that is to regularly give feedback in areas you understand well. The representation that will not dare to come up with such ideas in the first place wont happen out of nothing.
TTIP would have been a good step forward to harmonize US-EU-Japan regulations on a lot of things.
I'm not saying there were no problematic parts of trade agreements (US' strong intellectual protection and sort of lax food safety regulations are always a big worry for example).
>Austria and Switzerland for instance push for this.
This is the kind of law that's only pushed by wealthy countries like Germany or the UK. I live in a shithole which would never get a law like this. Getting rubbish like this, net neutrality, copyright reforms, etc. would never happen here on its own because we have much bigger fish to fry.
The section in question lists different points and then says:
"The Commission shall be empowered to adopt delegated acts in accordance with Article 44 specifying which categories or classes of radio equipment are concerned by each of the requirements set out in points (a) to (i) of the first subparagraph of this paragraph."
So it says that the Commission has a way to decide which categories/classes of radios fall under e.g. point (i). This does not mean ALL radio devices would automatically be subject to the point (i).
>Sovereign countries are free to set their tax rate to 0 in order to attract companies there.
Then those companies should only sell products and services in those countries. Otherwise, something should be done about it. I'm not saying it's easy, but it can be improved.
Doing business with tax havens should be illegal. A tax Haven creates an agreement between companies and a country to steal another country tax reveneu.
Tax havens produce close to nothing, so they have very small exports. It's just a legal arrangement that has nothing to do with production.
You are assuming that somehow that tax revenue is theirs in the first place.
What if that tax rate makes a business non-profitable in France but a money-making machine in Ireland?
Also, too much focus is centered around taxes when spurious regulations are generally more damning for a lot of companies. For example some friends of mine have attempted to start escape rooms, they have all abandoned their pursuits because here in Spain the legal framework is unclear. All escape rooms in this country are in a legal greyish area.
> You are assuming that somehow that tax revenue is theirs in the first place.
The big corporations that evade taxes are using the economic power, infrastructure and legal systems of countries without contributing to any of them. That is money that the corporations owe to the citizens of those countries.
> What if that tax rate makes a business non-profitable in France but a money-making machine in Ireland?
I see your point, they are centred about maximizing profit. But, there are other goals as well. The goal of improving the taxation system is related to broad social issues like wealth redistribution. It has nothing to do with the only goal is to maximize short term profits for companies.
> Also, too much focus is centered around taxes when spurious regulations are generally more damning for a lot of companies. For example some friends of mine have attempted to start escape rooms, they have all abandoned their pursuits because here in Spain the legal framework is unclear. All escape rooms in this country are in a legal greyish area.
I hope that your friends find a good way to start escape rooms in the end. If it is their passion they will succeed. Regulations may be slow, but regulations get set and then people can do business safely for everyone involved.
Escape rooms and haunted houses are a nightmare in local fire code in the states as well. Ends up putting a lot of smaller productions out of business.
If it were that, I’d understand. The main issue my friends had was with declaring their “official activity”. In spain you need to declare what activity your bussiness is into, and the categories available are so restrictive and ill defined that a lot of people end up just making up something and going with it.
I’ve seen contractors with numbers in their paperwork that was obviously made up by putting a completely random number (they even admitted to that privately).
It’s important? No, is a risk that could destroy your bussiness? Certainly.
Wow that's pretty lame then. We have something similar but it's not really something you're held to, mostly just for them to have an idea what your deductions should be (or something like that, not a tax expert). Wondering, could they classify themselves as theater or similar? That's what's commonly used at least in the circles Im part of.
Tax havens are often highly desirable tourist destinations. Making it illegal to do business with them would anger a lot of tourists and is, frankly, a violation of freedom of movement.
I assume you mean acknowledging the different credibility of different sources, instead of just not believing anything at all.
It's just as with the academia thing. I don't think the solution is to dismiss formal research and consider it unscientific, but to acknowledge it's weaknesses, specially in specific fields.
To tell you the truth I don't have time, energy or knowledge to find the sources of all news and research I see and investigate and assess the credibility of them, so I simply don't believe anything.
This problem has existed since forever, and back in the day I believed something like reddit would work because real humans would do the curation for me and call out bad news/research/etc, but we all know how that turned out.
>To tell you the truth I don't have time, energy or knowledge to find the sources of all news and research I see and investigate and assess the credibility of them, so I simply don't believe anything.
So you don't even believe Donald Trump is the President of the United States, because you refuse to believe the media when it covered the campaign and election?
I'm going to guess you either don't actually hold this point of view, otherwise you could barely function in society.
I think you're taking it too literally. What I mean is that, as an example, if they say $POLITICAL_FIGURE has said this or that, I will suspect they're taking the words out of context, but I am not going to find and watch the entire video, because I don't have the necessary time and energy to do that.
The law is not a blockchain ledger. If bad law gets in, it can also get removed later.