Isn't there an obvious solution to that: allow only early-screened eggs to be sold in Germany, no matter where they came from?
That violates the rules of a common market which is the core of what the EU is about. This is the logic why Dominic Cummings considered Brexit to be the obvious solution.
Recently, the Trump administration was arguing that some EU rules for things like car safety block US cars to be sold in Europe so as part of his tariff threads he pushed through rules so that now cars that EU rules used to consider to be unsafe to be sold. Trade agreements limits how countries can limit what's sold in them and the common free market is a trade agreement that everything can be sold everywhere in the EU.
French government subsidizing French cinema? Not fair, because it puts German cinema at a disadvantage.
I think when you look at it you will find that French films are not a major source of competition for German cinema. Even with French subsidies, German don't focus on watching French films. If anything the are watching films from Hollywood.
Better housing policies in Poland?
Everyone wants better policies, the key question is what policies are actually better. If Poland for example allows housing to be build with less concern for parking spaces than Germany which results in cheaper housing, the cost of having less parking space is born by the Polish citizens that live near that housing that could be constructed with less parking spaces.
Having people be able to trade off availability of parking spaces vs. cheaper rent in different local jurisdiction makes a lot of sense as the relevant costs are born by the local population.
The same goes for playground construction. If Berlin wants to require people who build a house to construct playgrounds and Warsaw doesn't and that leads to lower rent in Warsaw, that's a matter of local preferences and it doesn't make sense to decide on requirements for playground construction on the EU level.
As citizen of Berlin, I would like lower rents, less parking spaces and less playground construction requirements, but I think it's reasonable to make that decision on the state level (Berlin is both city and a state within Germany).
That's different than many aspects of farming policy, where it's not about benefits that are accrued locally.
But in a federal state, the members should compete on at least something.
In the EU states and lower level institutions compete on plenty, that's not a good argument to make if you want to criticize the status quo.
What I write about egg shredding is of positions hold a few years ago, but it illustrates the principle:
In Germany, we don't really like to throw little baby chickens in the shredder. If Germany would be completely on it's own we would require eggs to screened early to prevent it from happening, even if that means that our eggs are a few cents more expensive. However, we are living next to Poland. If we would require eggs produced in Germany to do more egg screening and then cheaper Polish eggs outcompete the German eggs in our supermarkets we don't want that. A common market means that we can't simply forbid Polish eggs, so there's a need for a shared agricultural policy that somehow brings the different ideas about how eggs should be produced together.
If one country decides to increase subsidies for apples and then outcompetes other European countries for apples or creates pressures for them also to add apple subsidies to protect their apple growers that isn't great either.
If you have a common market common agricultural policy does make some sense.
Can you imagine a similar piece about disagreements between the EPP and ALDE? And have you, by the way, even heard those acronyms?
Yes, they are European political parties, but hardly anyone has heard of them.
They are not political parties, they are political groups. It's like how caucus in the US Congress where an independent can be together Democratic members in one caucus.
The EU executive, on the other hand, where most of the real power lies, is apolitical, and the individual commissioners are appointed by member states, not by political parties.
Calling the decisions of member states apolitical is wrong. They are all political appointments. It's not like for example the British system where you have a private secretary appointed to a minister that's an apolitical appointment.
1The government has also been making improvements like adding fencing, and you could probably fence the whole thing for under $100M [3].
While this would solve the problem of deaths it would also harm people by increasing travel times. The article suggests that some people cross the tracks because otherwise they would have to work 10 minutes more to work. It easy to do a lot of harm with safety interventions as well.
A superintelligence would likely interact with a large part of the world via a browser. Building a browser that works well with their AI, seems to me like it helps developing an AI that can do task in the real world.
It also provides a lot of training data of AI acting as an agent that can be valuable for building superintelligence.
I don't think Elon team says "no" to Elon unless Elon asks for something that's crazy.
Elon spoke about releasing Grokipedia in a open source fashion, which suggests other companies could also train on it instead of it being a competitive advantage in terms of training Grok.
It's a way to make Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT less woke given that Grokipedia is supposed to be non-woke.
I'm not sure they were working on consistency. If you run a lot of Deep Research queries of all sorts of questions, you get a lot of text content that you can feed into your algorithm without needing it to be fully consistent.
We had a pandemic that might have been caused by pandemic preparedness funding. Increasing pandemic preparedness funding isn't the most straightforward lesson to draw from that.
We have some increased technical capacity and knowledge, e.g. on how to manufacture mRNA vaccines, but there's very large swaths of people who have learned the opposite lesson that pandemics aren't real & vaccines don't work, or that the whole thing was orchestrated and governments shouldn't be trusted[4].
The fact that governments failed massively is a key learning from the pandemic. One of my most memorable experiences was when I was wearing my FFP2 mask in public transportation in Berlin which was legally required at the time and the security personal in public transportation was exempt from the requirement of wearing FFP2 masks and was wearing surgical masks.
While hospitals have regular training to make sure that it's staff wear FFP2 masks properly, there was no public education from the government of how to wear FFP2 masks properly no places where you could go to test whether you are wearing your FFP2 mask properly but a legal requirement that everyone wears FFP2 masks.
In the US, the NIH stopped believing in the importance of science and thus didn't fund any trials to see what you need to do to make community masking work successfully. Somehow, the policy position in the US ended to be that everyone should wear a cloth mask and people didn't let non-NIH studies of community masking affect their habits very much.
If you have the government LARPing a pandemic response, the fact that the government shouldn't be trusted is the right learning. The key question you should ask if what you could do so that the next time the government isn't LARPing but actually has a decent pandemic response.
When Elon talked at the All-In-Summit about how they want to train new versions of Grok entirely based on synthethic data David Sachs asked him to create Grokipedia as Wikipedia alternative. To me, Elon sounded at that moment like he didn't really consider the idea before and that it made sense and promised to talk to his team about it.
In practice, it's all a matter of trade negotiations. Trade deals specify on what grounds countries can pass goods from being sold. Plenty of trade agreements then have clauses for Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement to enforce what was negotiated which reduces countries sovereignty to just do what they want.
Trump did get the EU to allow US goods to be sold that were previously blocked form being sold because of regulation like car safety regulation.
EU's rules are quite complex. The general rule is in Article 34 of the TFEU:
Article 36 TFEU than says:
Then there are plenty of more specific EU directives ChatGPT lists Regulation 2019/515 and Directive 1999/74/EC as mattering to the egg question.