It's still hilarious to me how upset people are at this (or at least pretend to be).
I even find myself vaguely annoyed now whenever I drink from glass bottles, that those caps are loose.
> People are upset because it shows Brussels disfunction
Reminds me to that meme where the debated point is what OS is better, and the conclusion is that normal people don't talk about operating systems. The only people I ever hear mention Brussels unprompted are rightwing grifters.
It's similar to free plastic bags or deposit system for bottles. Inconvenience is so tiny that no person genuinely complain about that (not for social karma/attention), but economically when there were millions of bags and half a million bottles sold every day...
To put it into HN-themed metaphor, reducing error log verbosity matters too, when you have millions of lines.
To paraphrase this differently: if I as an investor gave you 100M EUR and 24 months, would you be happy to spend it for changing a frigging cap on the bottle or would you rather invest that money and time+people resources on something else?
Not what I said.
> in the context of the global situation, not really efficient at all in making the quality of life of EU citizens any better?
Why would all decisions have to be this massively efficient slamdunk of an idea? Things can even be downright specifically bad yet still be generally useful in the grand scheme of things. Things can also be just kind of a stinker sometimes. You don't normally skewer something large over a minor issue. Critique is fine, but then "I don't like it" doesn't hold much weight, certainly not more than "well I do".
> would you rather invest that money and time+people resources on something else?
Are the levers I can and am expected to pull on the same as the EU? I don't think so.
It's exactly what you were questioning and which is why I gave you the concrete example why people get attached to this particular non-problem.
As for the rest of your comment, I think it went a little bit over your head.
My remark about most people who bring up Brussels unprompted being rightwing grifters really was just that, and nothing else.
It is not lost on me that like anything, they can and should be critiqued as well.
It's just not really being done, and when it is done, it's usually coming from a place of ulterior motives and ill faith (for now), and so is fairly uncommon. So it's a strange thing to claim that that's what "people think of". No it isn't, not unless you're in the aforementioned circles, which is not the general populace at all.
Are you 80 or something? It takes two tries to adjust and understand that it is much superior to unattached cap.
The whole thing is a big meme to make fun of EU, because there’s barely anything else to complain about.
> To paraphrase this differently: if I as an investor gave you 100M EUR and 24 months, would you be happy to spend it for changing a frigging cap on the bottle or would you rather invest that money and time+people resources on something else?
Grifter 101 – “think about what we’d be able to achieve if you did X instead of Y, comrade!”.
Let me clarify here, cause the editing window for my comment upstream from this has already passed:
> People are upset because it shows Brussels disfunction in a nutshell.
This is what I was reacting to when I said that in my experience people who bring up Brussels like this "are rightwing grifters".
It wasn't in the sense that I was pointing at the person above or anyone else in particular here with this label, but rather, that I was taking an issue with the claim that this kind of thinking (Brussels this, Brussels that) is a people at large thing ("people are upset because"), rather than just something prevalent in those aforementioned circles.
This does sort of imply that I think the person above my comments belongs to those circles, but that really doesn't need to be true, nor was that really my intention to suggest necessarily. I guess this is as good of a lesson for me as any why engaging in labeling (particularly negative one) can be detrimental to discourse, regardless of context. Apologies.
How? Just rotate it by 90 degrees. It's really not that hard, and in return you will never lose a cap again and we reduce litter by quite a bit. It's a pretty good trade-off imo.
But just because you don't drink soft drinks or bottled mineral water much, doesn't mean others don't either.