This is also relevant in debt-brake discussions. Many who want a smaller government support limits on debts, but a smaller budget leaves passing laws as the only way for politicians to assert themselves. Often, spending money is a less harmful way for a politician to get a headline then passing a law.

As a Belgian, it does frustrate me that this is what we’re getting known for.

It seems that this innovative process eliminates a lot of "gridlock" and is too efficient for the liking of the author, a strange complaint.

That the legislation which emerges from this is sometimes flawed, or contradicts other legislation, is not a reason to introduce less efficient processes, but to allow greater scrutiny of that legislation which does emerge from the "trilogues". The normal parliamentary mechanism for this is to have several "Readings" where the legislation is scrutinized by different groups of legislators, e.g. an Upper and Lower House.

Otherwise, perhaps Brussels has found something useful with the "trilogues", and other national parliaments should adopt a similar process?

Economics @ University of Chicago Professor @ LSE

Various memberships at pro American institutions

Expect deregulation narratives, freemarketeering dogmas and how lobbying is actually good for democracy.

Wasn't collaboration at scale the reason Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web at CERN? :)

And I’m sure the 32,000 EU Commission employees are being fairly and responsibly advised by the 30,000 paid lobbyists from those 15,000 lobbyist organisations registered in Brussels.

plus Brussels is a boring place, not much else to do other than LARPing as law makers

What I mean to say is that the whole EU political system is an epitome of citizen alienation, and it is like that by design. It is the purest faceless Kafkian bureaucratic machine. And, by the way, I think it works pretty well for what it is. I don't know how to measure it, but I suppose the overall quality of legislation is higher than what, say, Russia or USA produce. But the fact it is completely opaque by design, that no one is ever truly accountable for anything, I think, just isn't what anyone would willingly accept, and it's only a matter of time when the critical mass of people truly "notice" the fact.

You can often hear how some guy on the internet calls POTUS "the most powerful man in the world", which is always somewhat funny, because, of course, anyone sane understands how far from truth that is. It's laughable, how little he can really do as a president, how powerless he is to change something he truly wants to change. He is more of a glorified clown, than a ruler or a politic. But I come to believe it's really important to have a role like that in the government, somebody who ignorant people believe to be responsible for everything, somebody they can hate and blame for all that is wrong around them. It is important for the silliest psychological reasons, just by human nature.

Anyway, the comment is too long as it is, so I know I won't be able to properly explain myself, but the thing is I don't imagine things like the meaningless cookie-notification, or that idiotic bottlecap thing being possible almost anywhere but Brussels, certainly not that often. It is both ironic and very characteristic of the system, that both are only some very minor footnotes in an Appendix to some enormous legal package that is "mostly obviously good", and are about the only thing from the whole package that most people notice (and obviously are very costly in the end).