Did they vote for the bureaucrats in Brussels that wrote the regulation?
Irrelevant. If you want to put it that way, USians don't vote for their president either.
Readit Newsragall commented on EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear environment.ec.europa.eu/... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
Just send them money, then, rather than breaking windows to provide fake jobs.
You can start if you wish.
Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
Edit to clarify: things can't be put on sale, except for a few times during the year? I guess this is not every country, although I'm not sure which and when.
> Compared to the USA, is a contributing factor because things can't be put on discount sale in the EU?
Nonsense. They can.
> In american many things are always on a discount, and there are so many channels through which this discounted merchandise is funneled. Which has to be a major way retails manage excess stock.
Major fashion brands refuse to do any discount at all to avoid damaging the brand. No second hand, no outlets, no rebranding, nothing at all except burning the excess.
> A lot of people don't realize that european retailers are legally disallowed from selling at a discount.
False. They aren't allowed to *falsely* claim that an item is discounted, which happens all the time in the US.
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
Whether or not is a net loss for the planet as a whole is irrelevant. Africa countries need jobs to sustain a middle class so they no longer accept donations of clothes.
It’s shocking to see this legislated.
As if companies are just out here wantonly destroying otherwise valuable goods that could have been easily sold at a profit instead.
I guarantee this problem is far more complex and troublesome than the bureaucrats would ever understand, much less believe, yet they have no problem piling on yet another needless regulatory burden.
They quite clearly are. Burberry was caught a while ago https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983, but it's well known that every major upmarket brand was doing it to avoid the loss of prestige of sending the items to outlets.
In my experience in other physical goods industries (not textiles specifically) there is a big difference between products that are good but aren’t ever sold for some reason and products that are deemed not sellable for some reason.
For example, if a custom returns a product that was opened but they claim was never used (worn in this case) you can’t sell it to someone else as a new item. With physical products these go through refurbishing channels if there are enough units to warrant it.
What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems? You can’t sell it as new, so it has to go somewhere. One challenge we discovered the hard way is that there are a lot of companies who will claim to recycle your products or donate them to good causes in other countries, but actually they’ll just end up on eBay or even in some cases being injected back in to retail channels through some process we could never figure out. At least with hardware products we could track serial numbers to discover when this was happening.
It gets weirder when you have a warranty policy. You start getting warranty requests for serial numbers that were marked as destroyed or that never made it to the retail system. Returned serial numbers are somehow re-appearing as units sold as new. This is less of a problem now that Amazon has mechanisms to avoid inventory co-mingling (if you use them) but for a while we found ourselves honoring warranty claims for items that, ironically enough, had already been warrantied once and then “recycled” by our recycling service.
So whenever I see “unsold” I think the situation is probably more complicated than this overview suggests. It’s generally a good thing to avoid destroying perfectly good inventory for no good reason, but inventory that gets disposed isn’t always perfectly good either. I assume companies will be doing something obvious to mark the units as not for normal sale like punching holes in tags or marking them somewhere]
> What if a batch of products is determined to have some QA problems?
If you had bothered to read TFA, you'd have understood that the rules only apply to products that have fully passed QA, were being kept as stock but ended up not selling. They don't apply to experimental batches, to defective or damaged items, etc...
ragall commented on Breaking the spell of vibe coding fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-... · Posted by u/arjunbanker
It’s shocking to me that people even ask this type of question. How do you not see the difference between a machine that will hallucinate something random if it doesn’t know the answer vs a human that will logic through things and find the correct answer.
Almost all current software engineering practices and projects rely on humans doing ongoing "informal" verification. The engineers' knowledge is integral part of it and using LLMs exposes this "vulnerability" (if you want to call it that). Making LLMs usable would require such a degree of formalization (of which integration and end-to-end tests are a part), that entire software categories would become unviable. Nobody would pay for an accounting suite that cost 10-20x more.
"how incredibly good their google workspace suite of tools is" - is that a common sentiment on HN?
To me, Google Sheets is 10% of Excel on desktop (Mac), Slides are 5% of PowerPoint on desktop (Mac), and the integration between the two (copying and pasting linked charts from Excel to Powerpoint with formatting) makes it a completely non-starter to consider the Google alternatives as primary drivers.
I'm probably a power-user of both, granted, but I took for granted Sheets/Slides are still just toys compared to the real stuff, so curious if I'm missing something.
Most of the time what you call "the real stuff" is unnecessary.