468 Capital raises $400M to back European startups

Graz is an amazing city for quality of life, nature and socializing, and is great if you want to be employed in academia your whole life. On the IT careers side, it's a wasteland of conservative hardware/automotive companies and IT service companies(cost centers) that only deal with the local market, or at best the DACH zone, and is therefore worse on pay than some Eastern European cities that deal with the international scene (Krakow, Warsaw, Bucharest, Cluj). Almost no product based IT companies who deal internationally.

Most tech jobs in Austria are where the money and infrastructure is, Vienna.

>a security hub https://cybersecurity-campus.tugraz.at

Outside of a handful of low-paid TU students and post-docs(basically academia), I think I can count the number of people employed there, on the fingers of my hand. AFAIK they aren't hiring anyone at the moment. Other of massive PR, no job openings, no investments, no tech companies and nothing significant materialized from that, just a few partnerships for PhD/research positions. Hardly a "security hub". A hub would mean you have a cluster of multiple private companies hiring people there to work on commercial solutions alongside research partnerships with universities. That's not what's happened.

Yeah, those days are mostly gone. The real estate market is crazy now in most of the western/northern EU.

The market dipped slightly during the first lockdowns of 2020 but bounced right back up quickly and came back with a vengeance.

That's true in all of the Nordics but I believe specially more in Finland.

I'm a naturalised Swede and had to put a lot of effort into making friends the first couple of years here. Yes, making friends is much harder than in my original culture (Brazil) but there is also the counter-side to it on the quality of friendships you make that I believe it's worth to take into account.

Making friends here is really about bonding and creating deep connections with someone else, not just a cursory acquaintance to go out to bars and do things together. In that sense I do understand completely why people are generally more reserved into expanding their social circles, it takes a lot of effort and a genuine interest in each other to foster a friendship and locals/natives already come with their own social groups from just living here their whole lives.

Cracking into these social circles is definitely hard, you will need to find hobbies and activities where you can meet people around a shared interest and usually expand from there, you won't be making friends by simply going to bars, for example.

And that's also the isolating part of Nordic cultures, you keep social circles smaller because they are more meaningful but getting started into a meaningful relationship takes time and will make you feel lonely.

People are also wary of mixing/mingling social groups as they'll feel responsible for the experience the groups have (at least here in Sweden), it's uncommon for someone to invite their different social circles into the same gathering, except maybe for birthdays.

Overall I've adapted quite well and I'm very happy with the friends I made, it is more demanding but extremely rewarding.

But that was not the only use of AirBnb, tons of properties were bought and used only for driving what essentially is a hotel in those properties, without registering with the proper entity and paying the appropriate amount of taxes. This was not legal, and never was, as hotels need to have a license, yet AirBnb allowed those entities to continue running on the website until the courts got involved. If that's not skirting the law, I don't know what is.

Now of course, AirBnb requires its users to specify their tax ID before they can let out their places on AirBnb, as the law (already existing since before AirBnb) requires.

And I'll give it to you that the Irish are one of the least DIY people around Europe.

(though I can totally understand being enthusiastic about building a house in California weather vs. Irish)