E.U: Leave or Stay? Your thoughts.

I stand very corrected.

 

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Who's Sean O'Leary? How depressing must it be to know you're the only person who voted for yourself, not even his family or friends voted for him.

 

AFAIR EN 1621-1/2 and EN 13595-1 (and Level 1/2 and class C-AAA respective) have not changed, the recent amendment was to close the 'garment loophole' whereby a manufacturer could go "here's a biking jacket, it's CE Approved!" where they only got a protective insert tested and the actual outer garment is just ant old crap that has no protective qualities against abrasion. Now, if they want to sell it as anything related to biking, they actually need to test the garment as a whole (if they want to claim 'CE Approved' or 'CE Certified') or claim 'CE Tested' (self-tested, no independent testing) and be prepared to face prosecution if it fails an abrasion test to the class on the label. The test regime switched from a test-to-fail machine (test time determines pass or fail, all test samples tested until destruction) to a test-to-pass (either the test ends with the material intact or it ends with it failed, the test duration is preset) but it's much of a muchness in terms of actual material performance.

A bit of confusion there: member states implement ECE 22.05 via their own standards body (BSI here) to comply with the EU standards (which are the adopted ECE). If it meets or exceeds ECE 22.05 it's acceptable for sale in the EU, whether it's BS 6658:1985 or not. Like much EU regulation, the broad strokes are applied at the EU level and the actual legislation is written at the member state level.

 

Could be worse:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/i-know-voted-me-angry-5703584

 

Meanwhile Michael Gove has joined Project Fear:

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...-goods-inevitable-gove-tells-business-leaders

 

At what point do we get to re-christen it Project Foresight?

 

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Funny, I can't find anything on the BBC site about Gove's comments.

Just the flu, Oscars, HS2, the weather and other distractions.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51453189

 

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The full title of ECE 22.05 is UNECE 22.05.

I was responding to the specific point

Which they do not, otherwise they'd be CE marked, It may all be semantics, but the devil is in the detail.

 

1621 and 13595 haven't changed in a while.
The issue will be when they are replaced by the EN 17092 series of standards, one of which would allow a fashion jean to pass the abrasion testing with a A rating.

I totes agree the old CE marked jacket when only the armour inserts were approved was very misleading and needed addressing, but in doing so the bar will be lowered.

 

Nah, man. Nah. This post was exactly the sort of thing the Serious forum was made for and it was good reading.

Ditto everyone else who's pitching in with walls of text, it's a joy to see, I'm just at work and haven't had time to read them all yet.

Re: the entrepeneur claim, though (that leaving the EU would help small start-ups), I always found that weird. Brexit may well kill my entire business, because I mostly rely on parts and technologies imported through the EU. Without that, competition will decrease and the prices from direct-from-China dropshippers will probably increase, making my business less able to compete.

One thing I rather do like the sound of, as a side-effect of all this, though, is that it'll probably squeeze imports and exports generally. It's a generally accepted climatological fact we have way too much freight and it's the main contributor to emissions, and we need to cut down on the number of boats and planes hauling pointless plastic **** that nobody really needs that badly all over the world to be resold for incremental profits. Leaving the EU may, at least, put a tiny, tiny dent in all that mess - fewer boats shipping products back and forth, in the long run. Environmentally, as fossil fuels run out, we're going to have to start ramping up local production of goods here anyway, so this might make that happen sooner.

Might.

Or we might just end up leaning more heavily than ever on Chinese and Hong Kong imports, creating even more emissions as the long-distance imports out-compete the nearer ones.

 

Or manufacturing will be split from a small number of very large (and very efficient) manufacturing centres for any given good, back down to a myriad of local manufacturing centres. Total system efficiency drops due to a combination of the economy-of-scale reduction at each centre plus the duplication of overheads. Even with (extremely efficient per-ton and per-mile) sea-freight removed, it will very likely be a net loss on a global scale.
On a global scale it also means a net drop in productivity, as more people and resources are required to produce the same amount of end product.

There are a LOT of gotchas when it comes to eco-friendly policies that are not looked at from a global systemic scale. Take palm-oil as an example: responsible for massive swathes of deforestation, habitat destruction, and water use to grow oil palms for the oil, moreso than any other oil crop. Therefore, buying 'no palm-oil!' products is a net ecological good, right?
Wrong. Because you're still buying a product, and that product needs to contain oil, then that oil needs to come from somewhere else. Oil palms are the crop of choice because they produce the most end product (the oil) per unit land area and per unit water, with those two being the main drivers of price (produced in countries with near-slave wages or outright slave labour, so labour costs are not the driver) so the economic optimum and ecological optimum happen to align here. Common palm-oil substitutes (e.g. Coconut oil) end up requiring more land area and water usage per unit end product. If oil production requirements remain constant, and the crop requires more habitat destruction per unit product, then switching to a non-palm-oil substitute is a net loss ecologically.
So why does it happen? Think back to that initial statement: "palm-oil [...] responsible for massive swathes of deforestation, habitat destruction, and water use to grow oil palms for the oil, moreso than any other oil crop". That fact is true, when taken as a measure of total area habitat destroyed. But until you look into why that is happening as part of a total system overview, you miss that area destroyed per unit product (the driver for the destruction) is lower than alternatives. Solving the problem then becomes less about "X is bad, buy our new low-X product!" but looking at systemic solutions like total oil requirement reduction (e.g. chemical formulations that do not require an oil carrier), demand reduction (public campaigns in offering alternative end products and/or methods to make more effective use), etc.

 

“The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want.” – Michael Gove, April 2016

“Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy – the UK holds most of the cards.” -- John Redwood, July 2016

"The EU is being too tough on us!" --the UK, February 2020

 

They wanted to be like Norway... til they didn't...

...now they want to be like Canada... until they don't...

 

Some people have asked me over the last three years why, given that I have lived in the UK for 27 years and have married a Brit, I didn't simply apply for British citizenship.

Well, apart from the fact that the Netherlands does not recognise dual citizenship and I would therefore lose my Dutch passport and therewith my EU citizenship rights, this is why.

I would never put my life in the hands of such a bunch of sociopathic incompetents as the British Home Office. And things are about to get worse...