EU the European Union and the technical stupidity

When Sweden joined the European Union a couple of years ago, all the politicians promised that everything would be better. The food would get cheaper and a lot of other stuff.

Well, the food is more expensive than ever. Other than that the only thing I noticed is some stupid things that changed. Let me give you a couple of silly examples. Here are some rulings coming out of Brussels.

Put a cap on loud music!

On the European version of the iPod music player, EU has rules that specify how many decibels the player can output. So the european model has a lower output volume compared to the US model. The first thing you usually do is to get better headphones. So the volume gets even lower because better headphones need more output
power to get the same volume. So now I have spent a couple of hours to be able to change the firmware in my iPod to the US version to get a sound level that is usable. Doing this is not an operation for the faint of heart. Is this the kind of stuff that occupies the brilliant minds of EU? I think that ordinary people are quite capable of adjusting the volume. And is it not up to me if I want to ruin my ears? How to remove the cap on iPods? Check this!
WARNING! If you make a mistake, you’ll lose your iPod, and no warranty applies!

Quickly, tax everything!

When the digital video revolution started, with cheap DV cameras with near broadcast quality appeared, EU quickly put some taxation on DV cameras because they had Firewire input-connector. This meant that they could be regarded as video recorders, which means higher taxation. So all the EU models did not have Firewire input. This was good for me. I quickly learned how to change the firmware in the cameras and made some quick bucks converting video cameras so that people could put back video they edited back on tape.

Here’s another foolish thing from EU.

Here they have a great opportunity to use the power of all the countries of Europe to compete with the US, but instead, they make a copy of the former soviet unions stupid bureaucracy.

You could say that I should have more important things to worry about, with world hunger and all that, but
at least I complain on my spare time, the guys in Brussels get paid for
their stupidity.