531–540 of 1001 posts
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No
Any reason why not? I'm genuinely curious about your previous comment.
If I told you the only way to deal with the Canadian government is bribes, would you believe me? Then why do you believe it when talking about equally advanced countries?
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No it's not. With UG's limited liability is only extended to the collateral put in, meaning that as soon as someone sues you for 2€, suddenly you're liable with your private wealth. A GmbH is a true shield against that, you can be sued for millions and are shielded behind the 25k collateral.
That sounds unlike anything I've ever read about it? Where have you seen this? Here is the law that regulates GmbHs, with the paragraph specific to UGs: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gmbhg/__5a.html Where in the GmbH-law do you find anything to support your claim?
Though I have to admit this was 10 years ago when I looked into it. I remember there being a lot of fearmongering around starting an UG back then.
Apparently if you want to contact the pension insurance (Rentenversicherung) and you don't want to call them (Maybe because you don't speak german), or send a paper letter you'll have to sign up for this "secure email, but not really email" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Mail) service. It costs a small fee to set up (10 Euros), or a bit cheaper if you are listed in the "public de-mail phone book" (6 Euros) and you have to verify yourself through a government ID.
If you are not a german citizen you of course don't have this ID card and can't do the verification online, that means that you now have to go to one of the few places in the city where you can verify yourself for the service. Some of them are just small corner stores that usually also do postal services.
Very bizarre experience, just to get some simple answers related to your pension.
I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…
I currently have to change our address. Need to go to the notary. ~500€ for that. WTF...
Thanks for the great blog post. I'm very happy to be living and building business in Estonia instead. Establishing the company is easy and everything else except KYC meeting in bank can be done online. Also in Estonia companies don't pay any taxes on yearly profits. Almost all of the government officials speak fluent English except in the case where I wanted to have company owned car. Would highly recommend this opti…
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Folks, you can travel outside of Germany for sure, as long as you stay inside Schengen.
Please add a link for people relying on this info.
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The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend" and end up running more efficiently, rather than having a knock on effect and decr…
I often see comments like this, but what's a good solution to the ever expanding cost of public services (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)? You do need to cut back if you're starting to run a significant deficit or more and more of your budget will go on interest payments. Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't ge…
Perhaps that's fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. West-European governments in the post WW2 era have had higher relative spendings then that, without every financial expert and their dog declaiming that doomsday is near and services need to be cut.
We've been able to finance better healthcare before, we've able to finance better education before, we've been able to finance better infrastructure before, etc. So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today.
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The hacker subculture there is incredible; closest thing to late-1990s bay area (before the flood of money killed everything) that's still alive today. But yeah, there are a lot of negatives counterbalancing that.
Is Chaos Communication Congress worth a visit for an American who speaks crappy German?
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My comment meant to trigger thoughts, not your echo. Do your own thinking. Just last week a Turkish family was set on fire. They will claim the victims are not Turkish and then won’t reveal the identities or photos of them. So you won’t know it’s still happening. Just talk to any Turkish person. Speaking of startups; Nazis here still attack Turkish small business owners. Ordinary people also face racist attacks if th…
I don’t disagree with you that nobody should have that happen to them and it’s horrible, but you’ve yet again disingenuously implied that Germany is some Nazi utopia where people are set alight on the street. Bad things happen everywhere. DE is not unique in this regard but they do their best to prevent it, especially considering their history which weighs heavily on their culture. (I’m not german btw)
Where’re you from?