Just wanted to share some hopefully good news:
May all bees be healthy, may all bees be peaceful, may all bees’ good purposes be fulfilled
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It is great that the European Union is caring about bees, but sometimes I wish that banning anything by the European Union would be banned. Regulating how bent a banana may be is one of the most infamous examples of absurd E.U. legislation, having to repeal this regulation is another great examples of bureaucratic non-sense. What about forbidding producers of bottled water from claiming that drinking water can help prevent dehydration? While the myth about the super-long cabbage-size regulations is not true, these regulations did really exist. Think about it: people who are paid 9,500 Euros per month (roughly equal to 11,500 U.S. dollars, i.e. 138,000 U.S. dollars per year) spent weeks figuring out how large your cabbage can be. Last December they were planning for ban döner kebab meat in Germany because it contains too much phosphates or whatnot, and banning döner kebab in Germany is pretty close to banning fish and chips in the U.K.
It’s great the E.U. is finally doing some great job. Most of the time I get an impression they are a bunch of well-paid bureaucrats constantly coming up with reasons for their existence, and the figures for the E.U. election turnout prove I am not the only one.
There’s something to be said for the positive intention behind this move, (I hope). Knowing how defilements work, I’ll take what I can get from positive news in this defilement driven world!
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Hello @Vstakan,
Beware to not throw the baby with the bath-water.
This page from the EU site for example is filled with good stuff:
https://cordis.europa.eu/home_en.html
It may not be all that you want, but I’m pretty sure the EU is not the ugly monster we often get depicted… if only because the EU allowed me and many people I know to travel around and meet their spouses etc.
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Not the EU, but rather the Schengen agreement. The EU emerged only in 1993, eight years after the agreement was signed. Norway, for example, is part of the Schengen area but is not part of the European Union. Romania is not part of the Schengen area, while being an EU state, so while the Romanians are enjoying complete freedom of movement in the EU, the legal status still has some economic ramifications. Besides, I as a non-EU citizen can’t visit the UK and Ireland, so there’s that.
I am glad they have their own research centre producing tangible results. It would be even better if the European institutions would communicate their positive achievements in any other form than dryer-than-sand bureaucratic gobbledygook (have a look at the start page of the European Commission to see a prime example of it). So far, they were not especially successful in explaining to me how they made my life better. What we get instead is that 30 out of 751 members of the European parliament present at debates, all 751 earning 9,500 Euros per month. In other words, sure, it is perfectly possible they are doing lots of great work, but they are not very good at getting it across to other people.
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