Must be incredibly humbling experience to not realize EU is a union of independent countries and the US is a federation of states until you work for one of the delegations, wasn't it? Most of us pick up on that even without professional experience about it.

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3938848484 an hour ago | parent [-]

See the thing is when we studied law in Europe a long time ago we were sold on this dream that Europe would become like the United States and we'd a abandon our national prejudices kind of like how people sometimes talk about it in these threads.

Then you get there all bright eyed and it's just a bunch of boomers squabbling to fuck each other over to get 0.03% tax advantages on peach liquor exports for their region. Or just completely delusional people living in a kumbaya fantasy world and just throwing money at the wall for vanity projects that will never be implemented because there's five layers of separation between them and the ground.

It really takes the soul out of you. The way people work in the US and China is completely different. They DO things. Europeans just talk about doing things, and then talk behind each others backs.

Sorry if this is not cogent Im hangover

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embedding-shape 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> See the thing is when we studied law in Europe a long time ago we were sold on this dream that Europe would become like the United States

Eeh, what school was this? I think most public schools (at least those me and people near me) attended, it was taught that EU is nothing like the US, as we're all individual countries and everyone wants to remain as such, but we still want to collaborate although we're somewhat different from each other, and been killing each other since forever. I guess that's why second world war and similar things are such a big part of our history lessons, rather than diving deep into the history of US or Australia or whatever.

> It really takes the soul out of you. The way people work in the US and China is completely different. They DO things. Europeans just talk about doing things, and then talk behind each others backs.

For me the difference is between politicians and people actually doing the work. And my personally experience points towards this split existing equally everywhere, in China, in the US, in Europe and everywhere else I've been. The higher up the political ranks you get, the more people like to talk, the less they like doing.

I feel like this is very evident in the US too, looking at how productive and efficient companies are vs research labs living on grants vs federal government vs local governments, the scale is completely different, and same goes in Europe as well, at least from what I can tell.

Evidentially, in the high ranks of the European Parliament, things are exactly the same as higher ranking politicians everywhere, they just like to talk and grandstand and pretend to know what they're talking about. But I think this is true in the US too, or in China, these sort of people just like talking and discussing things forever, for better or worse.

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mike_hearn 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

> it was taught that EU is nothing like the US, as we're all individual countries and everyone wants to remain as such

It's written into the treaties that this will not be so. The goal of the EU is "ever closer union" and the people at the top of it routinely talk about a federal Europe in which the individual states disappear.

	▲	embedding-shape a minute ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	dgellow 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Individual states do not disappear in a more federal Europe. Otherwise that wouldn’t be a confederation… It’s about delegating some authority and decision making to a common entity, but each nation state stays sovereign. I don’t understand how people are confused about that concept, there are lots of federated entities in the world, with various level of delegation to the federal level. And that works well. The distinctions between states aren’t erased, the culture between states isn’t erased.

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2III7 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> Then you get there all bright eyed and it's just a bunch of boomers squabbling to fuck each other over to get 0.03% tax advantages on peach liquor exports for their region.

Congratulations, you summed up how politics work in all regions of the world.