591–600 of 761 posts
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> ... and a business plan? Why would the government need a business plan? It's none of their business what you want to do with your company besides a general description as "software development" or "consulting services" or whatever.
Several sectors of economic activities have the potential for atrocious externalities and it's absolutely the government's business to know about these and make sure that you're following regulation to minimize these externalities. When you make your employees the neighbours sick (or straight up kill them) it's an enormous failure on the part of government. It's easy to be oblivious to that when you only think about…
"Following regulation" sounds great until it's revealed that corporate lobbyists have been helping (co-)write regulations to make sure that fair competition is quashed.
As a Dutch person I never understood this push until someone told me (and this is true in 2026!!!) that if you open a LLC (Gmbh?) in Germany you have to physically go to the notary and have a person READ OUT all the statutes to you. The whole process including banks accounts etc... can apparently take months in total. Personally I would not create "EU-INC" but just make all local entities legal in every country. Then…
I've recently managed to get everything done in Progress!
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They did. This can be done online since August 2022.
Interesting, thanks! Apparently it requires a German eID-enabled ID card (or compatible EU ID) and doesn't include transactions involving real estate, but still it's progress.
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My point is rather than almost anything can be made smooth if you have enough $$ pointed at making it so. One of the biggest issues with small economies is that they don’t have the capital spent to make it easy to do things yet; which is friction that helps keep them small.
This is so ridiculously contrary to a Northern European existence that it's just funny. US is ridiculously more bureaucratic with lots of back office papers shuffled around by humans. US tax filing is hard to even describe to someone who never lived there. Official procedures can be made smooth by valuing them being smooth.
That’s my point.
It doesn’t have to be nice or clean or smooth, if there is a known solution which someone can just throw money at, at scale.
The harder problem with these smaller countries and economies, is people haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So you end up having to track down x or y random lawyer, then hope they don’t screw you, etc.
As a Dutch person I never understood this push until someone told me (and this is true in 2026!!!) that if you open a LLC (Gmbh?) in Germany you have to physically go to the notary and have a person READ OUT all the statutes to you. The whole process including banks accounts etc... can apparently take months in total. Personally I would not create "EU-INC" but just make all local entities legal in every country. Then…
If only it were that. You have to put up 25000€ in capital and pay absurd amount of fees to the notary for essentially being a text to speech translator.
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That is beyond hilarious lol. Finally found something the UK does better than the Netherlands ;)
I never understood why people focus on this "reading aloud" so much. It's not so much about the reading out loud, it's about making sure you understand (so that you cannot later claim "but I didn't know about this, nobody explained it to me properly")
The whole point of a contract is you sign your name to the words on the paper, and you are attesting that the words therein are correct and what you agree to.
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At will employment is something we'll never accept here. We don't need the threat of having nothing from one day to the next. It's good for billionaires but not for actual people that matter. Running a business is not something everyone should have to do anyway. It's good if it's hard. That keeps the cowboys at bay. I would never ever want to own a business. I don't need that uncertainty. I just want a stable wage. T…
Various places in Europe already have what amounts to at-will employment. There are exemptions for companies under a certain number of employees (e.g. 25 in Italy). There's a wide use of fixed-term contracts (6/12 months). Many work through agencies, which means they can be "fired" with a few weeks' notice.
I'm just talking about holland here but all over europe the conditions are similar.
All the exceptions you mention were just sly ways the companies have tried to circumvent their responsibilities and the law has caught up with regulations to make those impossible or at least impractical.
And there are some exceptions yes. But those are mostly for in-between gig jobs. Not for stuff people make a career out of.
Of course there are also exceptions with easy firing for things like gross negligence. Though the employee always has the ability to countersue.
As a Dutch person I never understood this push until someone told me (and this is true in 2026!!!) that if you open a LLC (Gmbh?) in Germany you have to physically go to the notary and have a person READ OUT all the statutes to you. The whole process including banks accounts etc... can apparently take months in total. Personally I would not create "EU-INC" but just make all local entities legal in every country. Then…
> you have to physically go to the notary and have a person READ OUT all the statutes to you. I guess, you've never bought a house in the Netherlands then, because it's the same exact process
They just confirmed I was buying a house for X.
They did not read the whole thing.
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This is so ridiculously contrary to a Northern European existence that it's just funny. US is ridiculously more bureaucratic with lots of back office papers shuffled around by humans. US tax filing is hard to even describe to someone who never lived there. Official procedures can be made smooth by valuing them being smooth.
You just pay. All the problems are known and have workarounds, it just involves money. That’s my point. It doesn’t have to be nice or clean or smooth, if there is a known solution which someone can just throw money at, at scale. The harder problem with these smaller countries and economies, is people haven’t figured out how to do that yet. So you end up having to track down x or y random lawyer, then hope they don’t…