As someone who lives in and loves the EU: That shi is not “wildly useful” 💔 just a nuisance and pointless since 99% of people already didn’t lose their caps. Definitely one of the worst things they ever implemented
And that's assuming their percentage is even remotely accurate. I suspect far more caps are lost post-consumer, and this measure cuts back of that dramatically.
Because they cant turn it away from their face and get pissy when the cap splashes liquid on their noses, when they chug. It's like watching children get irate lol
German here.
The problem is that it generated significant costs for companies to implement this shit. It also creates tradebarriers with foreign entities. For example, swiss companies still have the normal caps, and they cant participate in the EU market if they dont change. Less competition is unhealthy.
Moreover, this whole story smells like corruption. I would not be surprised if some buddy of an EU parlamentarian earned alot with this utter bs.
I wouldn't be surprised if the eastern guy did actually influence that vote. I didn't do my research on the matter, but that's something I can absolutely believe.
significant costs for companies to implement this shit.
Which they had over 5 years to implement and amortize
Less competition is unhealthy.
As is a race to the bottom, which is why we have regulations, and this is one of them.
this whole story smells like corruption. I would not be surprised
Everything can be a conspiracy when you don't even bother to do a cursory search on a phenomenon's background and just let your fantasies run wild. von der Leyen can be a lizard person that came down from Jupiter to suck the blood of virgin horseshoe crabs. I would not be surprised
The guy is right in that "doing one's own research" is more important than ever. Before you know it, the Suiss are flooding the EU with illegal bottle caps.
It wouldn't be the first time that there's a bad actor infecting bottle caps with a virus grown in a secret lab in Wuhan, China, subsidized by the the Yankee dumocrats, Joe and Hunter Biden, Barak Hussein Obama and Anthony Fauci in particular lol.
The company BERICAP is one of the main beneficiaries of this regulation, and they are lobbying in the deutsche bundestag. They hold patents in process engineering for the bottle caps. I know lobbying is not called corruption in the EU, but srsly, give me a break.
Huh???!!! It might as well have been a conspirancy of the WEF and Soros to weaken EU-unity in favour of a Russian take-over of Middle and Western Europe!!!
Sadly when it's a way for the elite to try and garner more followers (i.e. convert them into yes-men techbros who will keep sucking off Elmo despite multiple of his projects not only bombing but setting back public infrastructure for more than a decade (thank you HyperLoop)) which in turn will lead them to try and do continuously more outrageous cons.
Which one has the most 'followers', and what exactly is a follower?
How did Elon set back public infrastructure exactly, his company manufactures huge battery storage plants and operates a massive series of superchargers that are very reliable and generally cheaper than the competition
What sort of cons are coming up exactly, if it's billionaires paying money to other billionaires what's the problem exactly
See my previous comment on what constitutes a follower.
Elon's HyperLoop project was fundamentally detrimental to public infrastructure as it directly competed with the california high speed rail project between 2013 and 2019. Initially coined as a possible alternative it was brought up multiple times in discussions as a serious option, until Musk in 2019 said that it was "never serious" and that he specifically promoted it due to his distaste for the high speed rail project - essentially a multi-million way to sabotage a high speed rail project that would actively compete with his car company investments which was largely based in California at the time. Clear conflict of interest in my eyes, but let's continue.
Elon, through SpaceX, has also gotten basically sole sponsorship of domestic US cargo and manned rocket production, which has been historically sourced from many international factors. While there are security interests that such a localised production benefits, it has, effectively, more than doubled the cost of delivering cargo into orbit by the kilo while also securing large government subsidies that are being funded by tax dollars. This doesn't mention at all how other public institutions are being defunded (see NASA's budget) in favor of his private sector shenanigans. Effectively this means that not only is he providing a more expensive solution to an existing problem, he is also using subsidies to socialise his losses while privatising his gains. This all while we had the space shuttle before already doing practically everything that his upright landing thrusters are achieving. It also perfectly aligns with his exploration of political alignments that are most beneficial to him, which will later lead to his DOGE involvement which has shown to be ineffective at best and treasonous at worst but let's stay on topic of his private sector.
While I do agree that, despite all his flaws, the man pioneered electric vehicles with his investment and management of the engineering geniouses at R&D in Tesla, that also has been showing more problems lately. Might be due to him having more companies to manage now, might be populist appeal, but the tesla CyberTruck has been shown to be a complete flop with many people demonstrating the flaws of it all over youtube and other media. Just to name a few: it is completely useless in the areas it tries to sell itself in (often needing other trucks to unstick itself out of situations trucks are meant for), the safety issues the impact compatibility of what is essentially a slab of steel plates at highway speeds, the fact that they use shitty glue to hold said plates in place (notably, a plate on the gas pedals that, with enough slipping, will eventually get stuck with no way to get unstuck mid-drive)...
All of this from the man that claims to be the most knowledgeable production expert alive at the moment, and let's not forget the pr fumble of giving his heart out to the crowd...
His rebranding attempt of Twitter is... well, we see how that's devolving into him just buying it to control online discourse without actually being able to recoup his acquisition. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it was revealed it's being used for stock manipulation.
The flamethrower was a pr stunt I'll give him that, and while the neurolink seems promising, all of his actions so far leave me hesitant to be optimistic about it.
That about sums up all that I've kept up with, I'm sure there's more, like lithium mines and exploiting workers, his influence on the covid 19 sentiment... overall just... cartoonishly greedy stuff, nothing outright evil if you're willing to be sceptic about the salute not being an outright nazi salute or his estranged daughter claiming he's a white supremacist (14-words level) who loves to make kids but not actually support them. Oh, and there's a whole baby-fur thing and a thing about his twitter likes being generally perv/creepy, but that's honestly my least problematic fact about him.
Edit: oh, I also forgot completely about the controversies within his car business, from "full self driving" causing multiple crashes, the tesla semi that will surely eventually come out, and all the AI controversies around Grok and XAI
❌ It did not compete or derail the project, nor did Musk say that it was never serious. Perhaps you can cite your quote of "never serious"?
❌ It was always just an idea, Musk said he didn't have time to work on it, just said this is what should be possible and the price on the rail system was crazy expensive. Massive rail projects often don't work and come in at even higher costs, just look at HS2.
❌ It most likely derailed itself with its insane price tag.
❌ SpaceX doesn't have sole control, it operates around 80%.
❌ SpaceX didn't increase the cost of delivering cargo, that's bonkers, it wouldn't compete if that were true. In fact the cost is up to 20 times cheaper, per kg.
❌ NASA's budget has remained roughly the same, it hasn't been defunded. A large share of that goes on its own projects.
❌ The bulk of the money is fixed-price contracts for delivered services (crew, cargo, launches, lander work), not open-ended subsidies to cover losses. He / spaceX bears more cost + risk than traditional contractors and has built tons of commercial revenue (especially Starlink).
I'm not gonna continue there cos obviously the rest is just as wrong
Right, I'm not your fact-checker, you're just as free to research the facts with chatgpt, which you clearly used to write that response as I refuse to belive someone with self respect uses x emojis for each bulletpoint. You also seemingly refuse to look stuff up yet somehow know that spacex is cheaper per kg than historical alternatives? Please.
You don't have to honestly, it's clear that none of what you wrote is in good faith and you aren't expecting a good faith answer.
Feel free to come back when you're ready to have an actual conversation. No need to shill otherwise.
5 seconds multiplied by the amount of bottles consumed per year is a fuckton of time wasted per year across the EU for zero actual benefit. That's time stolen by politicians.
You don't need to adjust every time you need to drink a bottle. Do you need to look up how to start your dishwasher every time? Realise just once, that all you have to do, is not drink with the cap facing directly up or down, and you're golden. That is a onetime loss of 5 seconds, maybe 10. In other words, 1/8640th of your day gone. Just imagine to how many things you could get used to when not criticising the EU for their actually somewhat good decisions. Fuck them over for the digital surveillance which "protects the kids" instead
That was a shitty way to defend your point (or attack theirs) when you were already logically in the right and they made the first logical leap by calling your observation something that you struggle with.
A'ight I'll bite - You wanna mention the big numbers fallacy or more commonly known as denomineering being used to present this as a remotely correct indicator?
It's not an observation, it's a technique, a poorly constructed one at best.
You might wanna ask the marine wildlife like sea birds, turtles and fish which die miserably en masse from swallowing these thrown away plastic caps. I‘m pretty sure they‘ll find the attached caps quite useful.
That sure is a big problem. But so are the plastic caps, look it up. And loose caps are much more easy to fix, there is literally no disadvantage to that.
Good point, it's important as a society that we don't spend time fixing any issue unless it's the biggest issue possible (and then do nothing still) \s
It's important we don't waste resources pretending we're doing something when the real problem goes ignored. Eg. someone posts a video of a turtle with a straw in its nose and suddenly the entire world switches to paper straws, but keeps the plastic lids and plastic coated cardboard they slot into.
the caps are trash, this reduces them being scattered in the environment. It's not a pretend issue, and we didn't "waste resources" doing it. It's made a real, measurable change and took a minimum of effort - it's the exact same manufacturing process, they just needed new injection molds. Personally, i find it more convenient anyway - i don't have to hold on to the cap while drinking. But i guess you find it slightly weird or something, so go ahead and crash out about a good thing as if it's the most important thing in your life ... glad to know your life is going so well that caps attached to a bottle (that you can still remove with a slight tug if you really care) is worth your stress and anger.
All the European turtles?
Are we going back millions of years?
Seriously. This cap idea is one of the weirdest and most useless garbage protection deals and so many more actually useful things could have been implemented instead of this joke.
Yes, the ones in the south from France and Portugal through the Mediterranean into the Aegean and up into the Balkans. There are several species native to Europe but pretty much all of them are endangered at this point.
EU makes a very small part of the overall Ocean pollution. Countries in a nearby region push tons of plastic garbage per hour into their rivers, but what has the "civilized humanity" done to stop it? These shitty strapped caps... only in the small EU! Success?? Bullshit!
Such a great point! We shouldn't try to fix anything unless other countries try to fix it first, why should we have clean water and reduce trash and improve our environment if those other people in other countries aren't doing it?
I say the money and effort should be spent on a real reason. I don't like such hypocrisy when people are proud of achieving 1-2% of something while the huge piece (80%) is "untouchable".
Ah just because others are polluting the oceans more, means we shouldn‘t take measures to minimize our impact on marine wildlife. Great logic. And by the way, even monkeys have been proven to be able to handle the new attached caps. I‘m sure you can do it, too!
you every been so groggy in the morning you loose the milk cap and put it back inn the fridge without the cap rather than use up the last few brain cells trying to find it?
Also they are being adopted in Asia too, although I suspect it's to cut on the manufacturing costs, so there's only one version produced, the one mandated on one of the world's biggest market. Either way, I'd say that makes the cup pretty successful and influential industrial design.
Was that a problem before? I've never seen anyone in my life unscrew the cap and throw it on the ground before throwing the bottle in the recycling bin.
People didn't unscrew the bottles and then just throw away the cap - most likely you would have a person just litter with the entire bottle.
Then, with an unscrewed cap, it is much easier to miss it when the actual bottle gets picked up.
Additionally birds would often try to eat the caps and either succeed and kill themselves or discard them somewhere, leading to more littering (and possibly another animal trying to eat it). This is much harder now when there's an entire bottle attached to one.
All in all, was this a huge problem? Probably no, but this is also an extremely mild inconvenience to help fixing some issues.
Even though that it's not its purpose, you don't have to hold the cap, which is really useful to me. I have never had an issue with drinking with the cap attached.
Functionally, it's shit, worse than normal cap, but people are even shittier, throwing caps away on beaches. It's for seagulls and sea animals. That's the sole purpose of attached caps, according to official EU documents.
Hey, I'm slightly hand-disabled & when visiting the EU was pleasantly surprised that I did not once have to ask for help opening a water bottle because of these things. Now I'm back in the US and having to find a drink cap helper is extra infuriating
I'm ngl, "wildly useful" maybe not, but I do think it's a plus, even not considering the environmental reason. I don't have to hold the cap or smth and the only downside is... turning the bottle 45°, at most 60°. Wow.
Eh, some were pretty bad earlier, but most designs nowadays are actually pretty good, easy to turn to side in a way that doesn't get into way when drinking. Actually prefer having them now, as it makes it hard to misplace the cap and easier to remember to screw it back on.
Hey, just because you don't know how to use it doesn't mean it's "one of the worst things" implemented. I think it's a massive improvement over detachable caps. No risk of losing a cap into the bowels of a moving vehicle on long car journeys. No need to use an extra hand while drinking something out of a bottle. And there's the obvious environmental benefits, of course.
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u/LuchsG 6h ago
As someone who lives in and loves the EU: That shi is not “wildly useful” 💔 just a nuisance and pointless since 99% of people already didn’t lose their caps. Definitely one of the worst things they ever implemented