the EU's goals is to serve the collective best interests of all and every single member-state
That's clearly not what it's trying to do right now. For one the UK is still a member state and still paying its dues, but the EU is acting in an extremely hostile way. Unless you reflexively define the best interests of the EU Commission and related institutions as "the best interests of all and every single member state", it is certainly not the case.
Consider: The EU is setting things up such that in just over a year trucks will start to pile up at ports, costs will rise across Europe and the UK, many European firms will be cut off from the financing they receive from London, airplanes will be grounded, Irish politics will destabilise due to the introduction of a hard border and that's really just the beginning. None of this is in the interests of any person in any EU member state at all. And it can all be easily avoided.
Your spa analogy is very badly off by the way. Trade isn't something countries sell like a product itself, despite the EU's attempts to package it that way. Countries that strike free trade deals do not "buy" them, they negotiate and agree to them. Think about neighbours cooperating more than a consumer buying a product.
I think he means that there's a lot of debate when you peel back the covers on how much modern trade deals really impact economic growth. And quite a lot of evidence that they have surprisingly little impact.
If you go read press releases made about trade deals they always have apparently huge numbers but spread over a very large number of years. Modulo what's said elsewhere about the uselessness of economic predictions, the predicted impact is usually very low. Probably because tariffs are already quite low and falling globally, most trade barriers are now regulatory in nature and those tend to be relatively unaffected by trade deals.
A lot of people derive enormous comfort and security from the belief that there's a social class who can predict the future. In the past they were shamans and oracles reading goose entrails, nowadays they're analysts and economists reading Excel entrails. In the Foundation trilogy they were psychohistorians, basically economists on steroids.
I think it takes a certain amount of bravery to accept that there are no "experts" when it comes to predicting the future.
More or less any numbers you see about the predicted economic impact of Brexit come from exactly the same sets of economists who have been proven 100% wrong so far about everything, so have no credibility. They predicted a massive recession in the wake of simply voting to leave, not actually leaving, which never materialised. Then there were claims it would be triggered by the formal notification of leaving - that didn't happen either. They also liked to claim that immigration had no impact on wages, but there have been quite a few stories since about industry leaders complaining about having to increase wages (suspect in and of themselves because immigration hasn't really fallen).
There simply aren't any economic projections of a trustworthy nature right now.
Are you arguing there has been no impact at all? My understanding is that there has been a significant increase in prices since the Brexit vote, generally ascribed to the falling pound (both actual and anticipated). This is obvious in electrical goods but is also affecting the weekly shopping basket, which in turn is impacting people on low pay, or whose pay hasn’t been rising in line with inflation since the banking crash.
That said, not all price hikes are attributable to Brexit. The significant hike in butter prices is apparently more due to a supply shortage across Europe.
Anti-immigration sentiment in the UK is to a large extent driven by lagging infrastructure.
As just a single example the housebuilding industry has been consistently able to build fewer houses than there are people arriving by a large number, and the statistics over how many people are arriving are themselves deeply suspect - they don't correlate with any other population related statistics, and are based on airport surveys that ask a subset of people whether they plan to stay for a long period.
If politicians allow immigration at levels significantly above the speed at which infrastructure can be built out to support the new people then infrastructure reliability and availability will decline. It is reasonable to be concerned about that if you rely on that infrastructure.
The idea of Brexit voters as incorrigible racists isn't supportable, no datasets of any integrity show that and the brief spike of "omg britain is so racist" died down very quickly after the referendum, simply because the UK is and remains by far the most racially diverse nation in Europe.
Lasseter's crime is apparently hugging people. That's not a "bad actor". This is far beyond witchhunt territory. Damn I'm glad I don't work in Hollywood. The entire industry appears to be disappearing up its own backside.
Sources say some women at Pixar knew to turn their heads quickly when encountering him to avoid his kisses. Some used a move they called “the Lasseter” to prevent their boss from putting his hands on their legs. A longtime insider says he saw a woman seated next to Lasseter in a meeting that occurred more than 15 years ago.
“She was bent over and [had her arm] across her thigh,” he says. “The best I can describe it is as a defensive posture ... John had his hand on her knee, though, moving around.” After that encounter, this person asked the woman about what he had seen. “She said it was unfortunate for her to wear a skirt that day and if she didn’t have her hand on her own right leg, his hand would have travelled.”
So a hand that might have travelled but didn't 15 years ago and the fact that he likes hugging is proof of what, exactly? Only the insanity of our era. Don't research how the Queen of England met her husband or your head might explode.
CPI is fairly useless anyway. It ignores where the huge money displacements are actually going: hint, not bread and circuses. The money the ECB is displacing is institutional investors money and causes inflation in things like housing, stock markets, VC funds, and yeah, probably cryptocurrency.
Rent is included in the CPI, and it usually co-moves with housing prices .. and yet .. it means no difference: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/mb201008_focus06.en.... (it's much more drastic in the US CPI - probably because more people own their homes in the EU and gentrification and other effects are a lot slower too? who knows..)
It's only crypto that uses the term "market cap" to mean "outstanding crypto-tokens * price". That isn't what the term means in conventional finance. It's normally applied to shares.
Surely all news publications filter? That's a large component of their bias, if not the largest: what information they choose to highlight and which to suppress.
Note that the Intercept meets most of your criteria when it can, and Breitbart meets all but the "no ads" criteria. Both cite and link to sources at least sometimes, when those sources are citable.
