[mschuster91]

> Well, West should stop dumping their garbage to the rest of the world.

Actually the export of ships to be wrecked in Asia already is banned under EU law and international treaties - and sometimes, even company owners can and do land in jail for violating them, as it happened to Georg Eide [1].

The difficulty lies in the fact that many ships aren't registered in the EU countries, but in small countries like Antigua who don't have any incentive to help out European countries enforce their laws, and by many ships being legally hidden between layers of shell companies. It can go as far as there being a dedicated LLC in yet another tax haven per ship, and once the ship is to be wrecked, it isn't the ship itself that's being sold for wrecking (because that would be openly illegal and easy to catch and prove for authorities), but the LLC is being sold, and the lax attitude towards audit and public records requirements in the tax havens makes it very difficult to prove illegal intent.

[1] https://www.freitag.de/autoren/julia-lauter/reedereien-lasse...

[withinboredom]

Reminds me of when I lived on a sailboat. I just bought the LLC that owned it, which always operated at a loss just to keep the ship in working order, which was a tax write off. It even came with accountants who knew how to keep everything in the books “correct.”

[jopsen]

We could require that ships they dock in EU harbours are owned by countries that are party to some international anti-ship breaking agreement.

But it's a lot of paperwork :)

[ethbr1]

Like the Jones Act [0], it's easy to create unintended consequences.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#...

[jopsen]

That's a good point, or you could make a new cookie law.

Or kill all the logistics companies in the EU.

[mschuster91]

Still would not prevent just selling the LLC at the end of the ship's useful life.

And I'm not sure how to effectively police that.

[Teever]

Find the names of the people involved, get a warrant and use the full power of that impressive global surveillance system that we've created to fight the global war on terror to surveil them and find evidence of other crimes that they've surely committed and prosecute the fuck out of them for that.

[scarby2]

We do live in a world where it's basically impossible to live without violating one law at one time or another (often unknowingly and without malice)

[s1artibartfast]

Seems like a lot of work to prevent India from breaking ships it wants to break.

[Teever]

Meaningless statement. You can say the exact same thing about any law.

[s1artibartfast]

Not every law tries to regulate the behavior of people in other jurisdictions.

[Cthulhu_]

But that might put the EU at an economic disadvantage; it's hubris to believe the rest of the world will bend backwards to meet EU's rules.

I mean they do, see cookie banners/GDPR, Apple, etc, but still. I'm of the unsubstantiated opinion that all the laws make the EU a less desireable market. But that's a policy based on morals instead of economics / relentless capitalism.

[mschuster91]

> But that might put the EU at an economic disadvantage; it's hubris to believe the rest of the world will bend backwards to meet EU's rules.

Actually, it will. RoHS and the push for standardizing phone connectors ended up influencing the whole world and making it a better place for everyone.

The EU is a sizable market, and unlike the US with its constant elections and government shutdowns, it's politically relatively stable. No one, as said not even Apple, can ignore the demands of the European Union.

[eru]

> [...] the push for standardizing phone connectors ended up [...] making it a better place for everyone.

What's your evidence for that?

By default, we should assume that the engineers building phones and the consumers buying phones are the best placed to evaluate what connectors they want. And it would take considerable evidence to convince us that some unrelated third party bureaucrats know better.

Especially since even the best case benefits are so minuscule: it's already very easy to get charging cables that have multiple heads, for that people that own multiple phones with different connectors, but only want a single cable. (And everyone else can just buy one cable or the other.)

[mschuster91]

> What's your evidence for that?

Living in a world where I don't have a host of different power bricks in my travel bag any more, where one single Anker dual-port charger is enough to bring with me on vacation and get my stuff charged, and where when I lose my cable I can just walk into any random store and buy one for cheap.

> it's already very easy to get charging cables that have multiple heads, for that people that own multiple phones with different connectors

These multi-head cables almost all don't pass through the D+/D- pins of USB which means no way to get more than 500 mA charging current from them.

[eru]

> Living in a world where I don't have a host of different power bricks in my travel bag any more, [...]

Huh? I don't have to do that, either. I only have different cables, but the power brick is the same.

[scarby2]

The EU has consent elections, it's just a proportional representation forces people to work together to get anything done, so you end up with a lot of relatively uncontroversial work happening. There's also little point in trying to score points as you will never have a majority

[mschuster91]

> The EU has consent elections

The EU parliament is elected every five years, and while most of the member countries elect during the EU parliament term and so it's election year somewhere in the EU every year, national elections usually have negligible impact on the European level (outside of dramatic swings like in Poland or Slovakia between dedicated notorious pro-EU and anti-EU parties).

In contrast, the US re-elects the whole House and 1/3rd of the Senate every two years which means that the House is basically only at peace to work for a year at a time (first half year is spent on getting the newbies up to speed, last half year is filled with campaigning), and if changing control over the Senate is even possible depends on if the states whose seats are up for reelection are considered swing states or not. The entire way the US Congress works is not incentivizing bipartisan legislation, and it's outright hostile to the idea that there could be more than two political parties.

[jopsen]

It's certainly not without risk.

And like I said, it's a lot of paperwork.

Maybe, one day, or maybe in small increments.

[gosub100]

To make matters worse, when these ships come under attack or get hijacked, suddenly they want the full backing of Western military forces. Strange they don't call on Panema or Antigua's military forces, since that's where they are registered.

[eru]

> [...], suddenly they want the full backing of Western military forces.

Who is 'they'? Do you have records of the 'ships' (I assume their owners?), asking for that full backing directly?

[gosub100]

Yes, I do.