"I'm really enjoying this discussion! Quite often when replies get this deep on HN people assume a level of ill-will which I hope I'm not conveying."

I hope I am not conveying that either, and no, you are not. You are taking the time to write long responses, that doesn't seem like ill-will :-)

"Europol" - sure, OK. Although there used to be interpol. There doesn't seem to be a mandatory reason for not cooperating as much. But I know what you are going to say, EU makes it easier. How, though? By what special power? Don't the departments still have to work it out individually?

"My point throughout has been that the quantitative aspects of the situation are not in dispute. What is in dispute is the interpretation of the facts."

I'm not sure - the EU seems like a very complicated construct. Who really knows everything it does?

"Can you give me some examples? The EU is remarkable insofar as it has high, well-documented standards for goods and services which once satisfied mean it is trivial to export and import with minimal overheads or regulation."

I'm not really trading in the EU, so what sometimes surfaces are some extreme cases. Bottles have to have a certain shape, that sort of thing. I think it really can be quite complicated at times - meat being shipped around through different countries. I don't really know details - but who does?

Wasn't there just the other day an article about the GDPR, one year in, saying it cost companies Billions of dollars to comply?

Yes, we had that example before - but it is an example of EU regulations having a high price.

"Are the contracts complicated?"

If they are not, why are they saying it wold take decades to create new contracts for trade with the UK? And why so much bureaucracy to begin with?

"If one assumes that being a benefit claimant is a net loss to the country (it isn't, but let's suspend our disbelief for a moment), preventing migration from China, India, Pakistan, and Africa would be smarter than the EU."

Here in Germany I had the impression campaigning for the EU was more on the lines of "paragon of the free world". And that includes effectively free immigration for everybody from all over the world (asylum and so on) - at least everybody who is worse off than Europeans, which is a lot of people. And these people then are also free to enter the UK. I don't want to debate if that is good or bad, but I think that is a concern many people have.

"whether they can happen as efficiently as they do within the EU"

There certainly seems to be a lot of bureaucracy involved with the EU. That doesn't necessarily seem so effective. At least I think it can be argued.

"Because in general I agree with the European Union's monoculture. I don't think it's a monoculture that people have human rights. Or that we ban extremism. Or that we don't believe in capital punishment. I believe that some things are empirically better than others. I believe that the emancipation of women is better than subjugation. I believe that freedom of press is better than censorship. I believe that gender and sexual equality are better than not."

To me, EU has started to become the opposite of many of those things. Upload filters and privacy rights bring censorship. So do the bans on "extremism", which often seems to mean just things the people in power dislike. And leaving the EU does not equate abandoning human rights and reintroducing capital punishment. Didn't early human rights laws actually originate in the UK? And emancipation of women - I am for equality, but EU is falling in line with socialism and virtue signalling, which means sexist discrimination against men (my opinion - you may disagree). I just don't trust the EU anymore, as a white middle age male.

I will give you, though, that in many of those aspects the UK is actually worse than the EU. Still, as a single country, the odds may be better to change things for the better. Very difficult to move things in the EU, as one vote counts so little.

" in the past it's always had ease of access to Europe too. This advantage is gone."

Again, I don't think that is true. And if the EU really would shut out the UK, then shame on the EU.

"But in that analogy you have never been able to simply migrate to the US. In the case of the UK/EU, you once were able to."

I'm old enough to remember the days before the open borders within the EU. It was still possible to travel. And I suppose, also to migrate.

"The European Union exists because, post WW2, many nations were predisposed towards cooperation in different areas (trade in particular, but also atomic energy and other things) and that broad feeling of connectedness the author of the article alludes to was present in voters. They don't necessarily want to be paragons of freedom in the Western world"

I think people still feel like Europeans and want a connected Europe in principle. Just not the Europe that the EU has become now.

And the paragon of freedom is the big argument here in Germany, especially since the migration crisis of 2015. Other countries may have different angles.