i mean they don’t take a cut directly, but the membership fees are proportional to GDP. some countries get back more money than they pay.

the electricity thing is different, and annoying. electricity doesn’t care about markets, it just goes wherever. the nordics still have europe’s cheapest electricity by far, but as long as the grids are connected together it’s all just one big machine and trying to treat it as a segmented market just leads to problems. it’s an abstraction.