Leaving aside that it was the UN which placed the conditions which Mr. Hussein
agreed to, what's your point? He was allowed to stay in power after the brutal
invasion of Kuwait in return for agreeing to certain terms. He has not lived
up to those terms.
More generally, why don't you make your position clear to the rest of us: Yes, or
no, do you believe that Mr. Hussein should be allowed to develop weapons of mass
destruction?
As far as I've learned, proof is not something you read in the press. Especially not during war in your own country's press.
So in other words, not only do you have no evidence to back up your wild claims, you also want us to believe that of all the thousands
of media outlets in the US, and tens of thousands more around the world, every single one is hiding the evidence that would back up
your conspiracy theories.
And bear in mind that the _only_ country that has used nuclear weapons so far, is the US.
Your point being what? By using two nuclear weapons, we saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides, and
millions of Japanese civilians. Are you claiming that Mr. Hussein would show as much discretion in using nuclear weapons?
Really?
So they call it depleted, therefore it must be depleted? You are even more naive then I thought.
(Regarding your own troops: US veterans of the Gulfwar have severly handicapped children because of some misterious "disease")
Please feel free to provide any evidence backing your claim -- study after study has shown no lasting effects on Gulf War veterans
not consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. More generally, if there were such effects, and they were from use of DU ammunition,
why weren't there similar effects in any of the hundreds of training ranges, and other conflicts (from Grenada to Afghanistan) where
DU ammunition was used? Eh?
Note that the articles you link provide some interesting speculation, but no evidence. Most notably,
they ignore the obvious fact that both the French and the Russians have a vital interest in keeping the
oil deals they have made with Mr. Hussein, and would not have voted for the recent UN resolution if it
would have the result you claim.
Now, if you can provide any evidence to back your claim, you'll be providing more than conspiracy
theories. Instead, you provide speculation which has not stood the test of time (your articles date from
before the President approached the UN at all in one case, and from very early in the debate in the other).
As for Israel, you keep claiming massacres (though I see you've backed down from your earlier claims of numbers
or percentages), but you provide no cites. Why should we take you seriously? You also claim `expulsions',
but who are you claiming has been expelled? There are plenty of
Palestinian citizens of Israel, and they have all the rights of
any other Israeli (indeed there were 17 Palestinian members of
Israel's parliament, the Knesset, the last time I checked).
This makes a marked contrast to the expulsion of all Jews from the West Bank by Jordan when they invaded it in
1948, or from the current Palestinian Authority, which makes it a crime punishable by death to be Jewish in
the West Bank.
So in other words, if a war would result in oil prices going up, then that's proof
that the US is going to war because of oil, and if a war would result in oil prices
going down, then that's proof that the US is going to war because of oil. Damned if
we do, and damned if we don't, eh?
Forgive me if I'm not impressed, particularly as all of these increasingly twisted
and byzantine conspiracy theories can only hold if one willfully ignores the blindingly
obvious -- that the US has a vital interest, under the doctrine of self defense, in
preventing Iraq from attaining weapons of mass destruction, weapons it has already
shown itself to be more than willing to use.
If you want to argue otherwise, you need to provide evidence, not wild ranting
and speculation.
Your sorry attempt to defend Mr. Hussein only confirms that you are way out in
black-helicopter land.
As for depleted uranium, at the risk of pointing out the painfully obvious, it's called
`depleted' uranium for a reason. It's not radioactive, nor would it make sense for
it to be -- our own troops are the ones who spend the most time around it, after all.
So thanks for playing, but please try harder next time.
Do you really think that the US is after Hussein because of his
past or because he has any "weapons of mass destruction"? The US,
as you may know, actually aided Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. You have
to step back from the war propaganda that's currently abound in
the US media. The current administration wants this war simply
because of oil. The fact of whether Iraq has any has weapons what
so ever is really irrelevant to the administration's plans.
Leaving aside that you make these absurd claims without providing any
evidence to back them up, your allegations don't even make sense on
their own terms. If, in fact, Bush's goal is to make money on oil,
the last thing he would want to do is take action against Saddam
Hussein -- you see, regime change in Iraq means an end to the UN sanctions
against Iraq, which means a massive drop in the price of oil.
So I guess you didn't really think your black-helicopter theories through,
now did you?
Once again you need to remember that the pro-Israel media in the US distorts the facts. The IDF has killed roughly 3 times as many Palestinians, 85% of which are civilians, than Israelis killed by
suicide bombers. As well the IDF has bombed numerous hospitals, schools, and civilian homes. If that's what you call restrained then...
No, once again you are making wile claims without bothering to back them up. Can you
point to any credible source backing up your claims that the Israelis have done
anything like what you claim?
Keep in mind that even Arafat
now admits that the claims of massacres which his people and the European press made this
spring were outright lies, so unless you have some reason to believe that you know more about
the matter than he does, why would we take you seriously?
The rest of your post descends into misrepresentation of history (hint: the West bank has
never in history been a sovereign state -- check any history book) and a pathetic attempt
to justify the slaughter of civilian men, women, and children by murder-suicide bombers. As
you do not even provide cites for the claims above, I won't dignify such tripe with an answer.
Umm, hello? I never denied that the US used nuclear weapons in combat -- indeed, by doing
so, we saved the lives of the hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese soldiers
and millions of civilians who would have died in the invasion of the Japanese home
islands (just read up on the invasion of Okinawa, which killed far more people than Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, if you have any doubt).
Are you suggesting that Mr. Hussein would use nuclear arms, would set such a high threshold on
their use? After what he did to Iran or to the Kurds?
Really?
Your attack on Israel is equally misguided -- Israel has shown incredible restaint in its
own defense, something which cannot be claimed about the murder-suicide bombers.
So, holier than thou? Who knows. Holier than Mr. Hussein? Damn straight...
And I say again -- there is nothing the least bit hypocritical in responding differently to a free, open
democracy which has never used WMD on anyone than to a brutal dictatorship which has used every
WMD it has ever gotten its hands on, including against its own people.
And international perception is not the key at all -- the responsibility of the US President is to do what
protects and serves the US, not what is popular with third-world dictators and European appeasers.
Umm, no, you're the only one who said anything of the sort.
He's suggesting that a nation like Iraq, which has used every WMD it
ever got it's hands on, including against it's own people, should do
what they agreed to do at the end of the Gulf War -- disarm.
If you haven't noticed, we don't publish images of military facilities in any of
our allies. Israel, being one of only two examples of a free, open democracy
in it's part of the world, is very definitely one such ally.
But since you don't see any difference between a nation (like Israel or the US)
which has had nukes for decades and never used them, and a nation like Iraq which
has used every WMD it has ever gotten it's hands on, including against hundreds of
thousands of its own people, I guess expecting you to think logically about the
matter is a little much.
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
Do you see why the statistic you post is deceptive? It's certainly true that `95%' of Singapore or
Monaco is urban, but that's because these nations borders are the borders of their city -- both of
these nations are truly tiny.
More generally, if all the world's population were relocated to the United States, the population
density would be no greater than the current population density of Manhattan -- and the US is a pretty
small portion of the Earth's surface.
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
I suspect it would not be so different. That it re-radiates less of what it absorbs might be offset by the fact that it absorbs more.
That doesn't make any sense actually -- there's a finite amount of solar energy hitting any given point on the earth's surface, which means
if you absorb more you are also changing the local environment. More generally, however, the fact remains that some 20% of the energy
striking a solar panel is converted to electricity and shunted off to a nearby (or distant) city. That's energy which would have been in
the local environemnt which has been removed.
That's nothing compared to what a bunch of office buildings would do.
There's not a city on earth that's more than a fraction of the size of the Mojave desert. Nor is it clear to me that the difference between
pavement and sand is even close to the difference between either and a photovoltaic cell.
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
This is certainly true, but two notes: first off, urban areas are a relatively small percentage of
the total land mass of the world, and secondly, they make crappy sites for wind farms or solar panel
arrays -- most proposals for large farms of solar panels are, like the post above, for conversion
of desert, prairie, or similar environments.
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
Actually, think about what you're saying -- suppose we indeed
cover the desert with photoelectric panels, thus absorbing massive
amounts of energy which would previously have been taken up by the
sand, and shunting that energy off to power a city or two.
Well, night comes, and that power is no longer being reradiated into
the atmosphere. The atmosphere is now substantially cooler in the
region, weather patterns change, and the climate shifts.
The same goes for a city -- an asphalt roof may absorb and radiate
at different rates than a rock or a stretch of sand, but the difference
is nothing compared to a device which absorbs and does not re-radiate.
A similar pattern occurs with wind power, by the way -- a wind farm of sufficient size
can cause drastic changes in regional wind patterns.
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
Also true.:-)
I'm just amused how many people assume that solar power (or wind power, for that matter) are without
other effects. What seems like `free' power when used to power a single house or a small complex
becomes quite different when used in scale.
After all, the energy being converted to electricity comes from somewhere -- and while the effect
of coverting matter such as oil or uranium to energy is necessarily quite local, the effect of taking
that energy out of the environment is less clear...
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 2
California could spends the $$$ it's getting back from energy companies (that robbed it blind during Enron's heyday) to pave the Mojave Desert with solar cells
Do you have any idea what effect shifting the albedo of that big a chunk of the earth's surface would have on climate patterns?
Neither do I -- but it would almost certainly make the effect of all the carbon-based emissions in human history pale by comparison...
That's not what Mikhail Gorbachev said when he was recently interviewed on MSNBC. He was very specific
that it was the failure of Soviet industry to keep up with the arms race which forced them to back off
on their commitments to sustain the Eastern European governments in early 1989.
What happened later in 1989 with the spectre of a repeat of the events of 1956 or 1968 removed is, of course, history.
Go google for the interview transcript. Then go ahead and explain why we should believe that you know
something which Mr. Gorbachev does not.
That guy thought a lot of things, not least that stagnation could never
occur at the same time as inflation. The seventies showed how wrong
an idea that was...
Well, only on slashdot can one hear someone berate a country for building
industry, employment, and prosperity `instead' of combatting hunger and
illiteracy.
This doesn't necessarily follow -- the factors which make it cheap to operate a company
somewhere (reasonable labor laws, lower corporate taxes, available labor force, etc) are
rather different from the factors which make it cheap to sell a product somewhere (range
of competing media outlets, low advertising rates, ease of getting products on store
shelves).
In other words, Nintendo asked distributors in Germany to bear the cost
of their marketing and other expenses in Germany instead of buying from
distributors in France and the UK and forcing Nintendo to charge higher
prices there to recoup the money spent in Germany.
With your `solution' in place, Nintendo now has to raise prices in France
and the UK, or else stop spending more money in Germany, leaving their distributors
there in the lurch.
To repeat what should be obvious, neither of these options benefits the consumer.
We are discussing the double standard between the lack of regulation of the price at which
a company pays for services and regulation of the price which it charges for its products.
Production is only a small part of this picture. While it is probably true that Nintendo makes
games in one place and ships to both the UK and Germany from there,
are many other prices which cannot be paid anywhere in the EU and shipped -- the
price of advertising on German television stations, the price of getting shelf-space in German stores and so forth.
So again, if you make the only way for Nintendo to recover these costs be raising
prices in the UK, they will either do so or they will abandon their interest in
selling in Germany (as some other companies have done). In the one case, the British
consumer loses, by paying more for the game than he had been paying. In the other case,
the German consumer loses by not being able to buy a game he could have bought before.
In neither case does the law benefit the consumer.
Right -- one of Nintendo's two options is to raise the price at which they sell
to all of their distributors, thus making the product more expensive in the UK and
France.
Their other option is to stop selling to distributors in Germany, on the grounds that
they can't charge those distributors a price which makes it profitable to sell to them.
In niether case does the product get cheaper in Germany -- it either becomes more expensive
in the UK, or it becomes unavailable in Germany.
What strikes me is that there is something of a double standard in play here.
The EU makes no attempts to make sure that it costs the same amount to advertise
a product in different EU markets, or that it costs the same amount to get a
product on the shelves in each, but it does use fines such as this
one to make sure that a producer can't charge different prices for the same item
in different places.
As far as I can tell, this will tend to make profit margins necessarily higher in
some EU markets than in others, with the result that either all markets will get
more expensive, or that producers will stop selling in some markets.
In other words, if it costs Nintendo more to operate in the Germany than in the UK,
and if they are prohibited by law from charging higher prices in Germany than in the
UK, then their only options are a.) to not sell their products in Germany at all, or
b.) to charge higher prices for their products in the UK.
If the goal of this legislation is to stiff the Brits or to reduce the number of products
the Germans have to choose from, it would seem to be working quite well, but if it's goal
is to make the product cheap everywhere, it's hard to see how it could possibly succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Leaving aside that it was the UN which placed the conditions which Mr. Hussein agreed to, what's your point? He was allowed to stay in power after the brutal invasion of Kuwait in return for agreeing to certain terms. He has not lived up to those terms.
More generally, why don't you make your position clear to the rest of us: Yes, or no, do you believe that Mr. Hussein should be allowed to develop weapons of mass destruction?
Godwin aside, what's your point? `Hitler believed he was right, so everyone who believes he's right is wrong?'
That's not even marginally coherent.
As far as I've learned, proof is not something you read in the press. Especially not during war in your own country's press.
So in other words, not only do you have no evidence to back up your wild claims, you also want us to believe that of all the thousands of media outlets in the US, and tens of thousands more around the world, every single one is hiding the evidence that would back up your conspiracy theories.
And bear in mind that the _only_ country that has used nuclear weapons so far, is the US.
Your point being what? By using two nuclear weapons, we saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides, and millions of Japanese civilians. Are you claiming that Mr. Hussein would show as much discretion in using nuclear weapons?
Really?
So they call it depleted, therefore it must be depleted? You are even more naive then I thought. (Regarding your own troops: US veterans of the Gulfwar have severly handicapped children because of some misterious "disease")
Please feel free to provide any evidence backing your claim -- study after study has shown no lasting effects on Gulf War veterans not consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. More generally, if there were such effects, and they were from use of DU ammunition, why weren't there similar effects in any of the hundreds of training ranges, and other conflicts (from Grenada to Afghanistan) where DU ammunition was used? Eh?
Note that the articles you link provide some interesting speculation, but no evidence. Most notably, they ignore the obvious fact that both the French and the Russians have a vital interest in keeping the oil deals they have made with Mr. Hussein, and would not have voted for the recent UN resolution if it would have the result you claim.
Now, if you can provide any evidence to back your claim, you'll be providing more than conspiracy theories. Instead, you provide speculation which has not stood the test of time (your articles date from before the President approached the UN at all in one case, and from very early in the debate in the other).
As for Israel, you keep claiming massacres (though I see you've backed down from your earlier claims of numbers or percentages), but you provide no cites. Why should we take you seriously? You also claim `expulsions', but who are you claiming has been expelled? There are plenty of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and they have all the rights of any other Israeli (indeed there were 17 Palestinian members of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, the last time I checked).
This makes a marked contrast to the expulsion of all Jews from the West Bank by Jordan when they invaded it in 1948, or from the current Palestinian Authority, which makes it a crime punishable by death to be Jewish in the West Bank.
Ha. Hahaha. Hahahaha.
So in other words, if a war would result in oil prices going up, then that's proof that the US is going to war because of oil, and if a war would result in oil prices going down, then that's proof that the US is going to war because of oil. Damned if we do, and damned if we don't, eh?
Forgive me if I'm not impressed, particularly as all of these increasingly twisted and byzantine conspiracy theories can only hold if one willfully ignores the blindingly obvious -- that the US has a vital interest, under the doctrine of self defense, in preventing Iraq from attaining weapons of mass destruction, weapons it has already shown itself to be more than willing to use.
If you want to argue otherwise, you need to provide evidence, not wild ranting and speculation.
Your sorry attempt to defend Mr. Hussein only confirms that you are way out in black-helicopter land.
As for depleted uranium, at the risk of pointing out the painfully obvious, it's called `depleted' uranium for a reason. It's not radioactive, nor would it make sense for it to be -- our own troops are the ones who spend the most time around it, after all.
So thanks for playing, but please try harder next time.
Do you really think that the US is after Hussein because of his past or because he has any "weapons of mass destruction"? The US, as you may know, actually aided Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. You have to step back from the war propaganda that's currently abound in the US media. The current administration wants this war simply because of oil. The fact of whether Iraq has any has weapons what so ever is really irrelevant to the administration's plans.
Leaving aside that you make these absurd claims without providing any evidence to back them up, your allegations don't even make sense on their own terms. If, in fact, Bush's goal is to make money on oil, the last thing he would want to do is take action against Saddam Hussein -- you see, regime change in Iraq means an end to the UN sanctions against Iraq, which means a massive drop in the price of oil.
So I guess you didn't really think your black-helicopter theories through, now did you?
Once again you need to remember that the pro-Israel media in the US distorts the facts. The IDF has killed roughly 3 times as many Palestinians, 85% of which are civilians, than Israelis killed by suicide bombers. As well the IDF has bombed numerous hospitals, schools, and civilian homes. If that's what you call restrained then...
No, once again you are making wile claims without bothering to back them up. Can you point to any credible source backing up your claims that the Israelis have done anything like what you claim?
Keep in mind that even Arafat now admits that the claims of massacres which his people and the European press made this spring were outright lies, so unless you have some reason to believe that you know more about the matter than he does, why would we take you seriously?
The rest of your post descends into misrepresentation of history (hint: the West bank has never in history been a sovereign state -- check any history book) and a pathetic attempt to justify the slaughter of civilian men, women, and children by murder-suicide bombers. As you do not even provide cites for the claims above, I won't dignify such tripe with an answer.
Umm, hello? I never denied that the US used nuclear weapons in combat -- indeed, by doing so, we saved the lives of the hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese soldiers and millions of civilians who would have died in the invasion of the Japanese home islands (just read up on the invasion of Okinawa, which killed far more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if you have any doubt).
Are you suggesting that Mr. Hussein would use nuclear arms, would set such a high threshold on their use? After what he did to Iran or to the Kurds?
Really?
Your attack on Israel is equally misguided -- Israel has shown incredible restaint in its own defense, something which cannot be claimed about the murder-suicide bombers.
So, holier than thou? Who knows. Holier than Mr. Hussein? Damn straight...
And I say again -- there is nothing the least bit hypocritical in responding differently to a free, open democracy which has never used WMD on anyone than to a brutal dictatorship which has used every WMD it has ever gotten its hands on, including against its own people.
And international perception is not the key at all -- the responsibility of the US President is to do what protects and serves the US, not what is popular with third-world dictators and European appeasers.
Umm, no, you're the only one who said anything of the sort.
He's suggesting that a nation like Iraq, which has used every WMD it ever got it's hands on, including against it's own people, should do what they agreed to do at the end of the Gulf War -- disarm.
Umm, hello?
If you haven't noticed, we don't publish images of military facilities in any of our allies. Israel, being one of only two examples of a free, open democracy in it's part of the world, is very definitely one such ally.
But since you don't see any difference between a nation (like Israel or the US) which has had nukes for decades and never used them, and a nation like Iraq which has used every WMD it has ever gotten it's hands on, including against hundreds of thousands of its own people, I guess expecting you to think logically about the matter is a little much.
Do you see why the statistic you post is deceptive? It's certainly true that `95%' of Singapore or Monaco is urban, but that's because these nations borders are the borders of their city -- both of these nations are truly tiny.
More generally, if all the world's population were relocated to the United States, the population density would be no greater than the current population density of Manhattan -- and the US is a pretty small portion of the Earth's surface.
I suspect it would not be so different. That it re-radiates less of what it absorbs might be offset by the fact that it absorbs more.
That doesn't make any sense actually -- there's a finite amount of solar energy hitting any given point on the earth's surface, which means if you absorb more you are also changing the local environment. More generally, however, the fact remains that some 20% of the energy striking a solar panel is converted to electricity and shunted off to a nearby (or distant) city. That's energy which would have been in the local environemnt which has been removed.
That's nothing compared to what a bunch of office buildings would do.
There's not a city on earth that's more than a fraction of the size of the Mojave desert. Nor is it clear to me that the difference between pavement and sand is even close to the difference between either and a photovoltaic cell.
This is certainly true, but two notes: first off, urban areas are a relatively small percentage of the total land mass of the world, and secondly, they make crappy sites for wind farms or solar panel arrays -- most proposals for large farms of solar panels are, like the post above, for conversion of desert, prairie, or similar environments.
Actually, think about what you're saying -- suppose we indeed cover the desert with photoelectric panels, thus absorbing massive amounts of energy which would previously have been taken up by the sand, and shunting that energy off to power a city or two.
Well, night comes, and that power is no longer being reradiated into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is now substantially cooler in the region, weather patterns change, and the climate shifts.
The same goes for a city -- an asphalt roof may absorb and radiate at different rates than a rock or a stretch of sand, but the difference is nothing compared to a device which absorbs and does not re-radiate.
A similar pattern occurs with wind power, by the way -- a wind farm of sufficient size can cause drastic changes in regional wind patterns.
Also true. :-)
I'm just amused how many people assume that solar power (or wind power, for that matter) are without other effects. What seems like `free' power when used to power a single house or a small complex becomes quite different when used in scale.
After all, the energy being converted to electricity comes from somewhere -- and while the effect of coverting matter such as oil or uranium to energy is necessarily quite local, the effect of taking that energy out of the environment is less clear...
California could spends the $$$ it's getting back from energy companies (that robbed it blind during Enron's heyday) to pave the Mojave Desert with solar cells
Do you have any idea what effect shifting the albedo of that big a chunk of the earth's surface would have on climate patterns?
Neither do I -- but it would almost certainly make the effect of all the carbon-based emissions in human history pale by comparison...
Umm, yeah, sure.
That's not what Mikhail Gorbachev said when he was recently interviewed on MSNBC. He was very specific that it was the failure of Soviet industry to keep up with the arms race which forced them to back off on their commitments to sustain the Eastern European governments in early 1989.
What happened later in 1989 with the spectre of a repeat of the events of 1956 or 1968 removed is, of course, history.
Go google for the interview transcript. Then go ahead and explain why we should believe that you know something which Mr. Gorbachev does not.
That guy thought a lot of things, not least that stagnation could never occur at the same time as inflation. The seventies showed how wrong an idea that was...
Go figure.
Where `fair' prices in the UK means `charging British citizens for the cost of doing business in Germany'? This doesn't seem to make much sense.
In other words, the EU rules work to punish citizens of all EU nations for poor market policies of any EU nation.
This doesn't necessarily follow -- the factors which make it cheap to operate a company somewhere (reasonable labor laws, lower corporate taxes, available labor force, etc) are rather different from the factors which make it cheap to sell a product somewhere (range of competing media outlets, low advertising rates, ease of getting products on store shelves).
With your `solution' in place, Nintendo now has to raise prices in France and the UK, or else stop spending more money in Germany, leaving their distributors there in the lurch.
To repeat what should be obvious, neither of these options benefits the consumer.
We are discussing the double standard between the lack of regulation of the price at which a company pays for services and regulation of the price which it charges for its products.
Production is only a small part of this picture. While it is probably true that Nintendo makes games in one place and ships to both the UK and Germany from there, are many other prices which cannot be paid anywhere in the EU and shipped -- the price of advertising on German television stations, the price of getting shelf-space in German stores and so forth.
So again, if you make the only way for Nintendo to recover these costs be raising prices in the UK, they will either do so or they will abandon their interest in selling in Germany (as some other companies have done). In the one case, the British consumer loses, by paying more for the game than he had been paying. In the other case, the German consumer loses by not being able to buy a game he could have bought before.
In neither case does the law benefit the consumer.
Right -- one of Nintendo's two options is to raise the price at which they sell to all of their distributors, thus making the product more expensive in the UK and France.
Their other option is to stop selling to distributors in Germany, on the grounds that they can't charge those distributors a price which makes it profitable to sell to them.
In niether case does the product get cheaper in Germany -- it either becomes more expensive in the UK, or it becomes unavailable in Germany.
What strikes me is that there is something of a double standard in play here. The EU makes no attempts to make sure that it costs the same amount to advertise a product in different EU markets, or that it costs the same amount to get a product on the shelves in each, but it does use fines such as this one to make sure that a producer can't charge different prices for the same item in different places.
As far as I can tell, this will tend to make profit margins necessarily higher in some EU markets than in others, with the result that either all markets will get more expensive, or that producers will stop selling in some markets.
In other words, if it costs Nintendo more to operate in the Germany than in the UK, and if they are prohibited by law from charging higher prices in Germany than in the UK, then their only options are a.) to not sell their products in Germany at all, or b.) to charge higher prices for their products in the UK.
If the goal of this legislation is to stiff the Brits or to reduce the number of products the Germans have to choose from, it would seem to be working quite well, but if it's goal is to make the product cheap everywhere, it's hard to see how it could possibly succeed.