This is actively preventing me from sending packages to other countries as a maker. No matter how small the risk is, I don't want to risk a 5000 euro fine for sending a small amount of packages to other EU countries.
No matter how small the risk is That's just an excuse then. Register with whatever local authority in your country handles these things and in the unlikely event you get a grumpy letter just send them a copy of your registration documents.
It's clear you didn't read the article. As its not about registration, but rather the absurd costs of doing all this for small businesses.
I don't have a horse in this race, but sources I found claim Brexit was economically detrimental to this day, including but not limited to the wiki page and its citations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit
Give it time
How much time? Doesn't seem like the trend is reversing
Oh come on. Tax evasion by barbers is a classical example of why taxes are so high for the rest of us. The cost of bookkeeping for a very small business is essentially zero. Everywhere that I know of exempts small business from double entry bookkeeping. VAT exemptions exist if revenue is low enough, too. Privacy requirements are even easier: don't ask for, store, or process any personal information you don't absolute…
I am not sure what you are driving at. My understanding of double entry bookkeeping is it's simpler and easier than the so called "single entry" bookkeeping which adds a lot of complexity because of all the special cases.
A simple spreadsheet of income & expense is all that's required for most small businesses. Larger companies require full fledged double entry bookkeeping with requirements about charts of accounts -- which usually necessitates paying an accountant, unless you enjoy that particular kind of pain.
To be honest i have no sympathy for immigra,,, er sorry expats. It is pure location arbitrage: rich pensioners moving to south europe to get a vastly bigger bang for their buck than they would get back home. It would eventually backfire, and i am glad it does. It was idiotic of the touristic countries to invite this kind of thing in the first place.
I am not sure what is wrong about that: they spend their money and that money falls in the hands of locals. I do not mean it should be the priority of a country (it should be other economic sources) but I do not find it harmful.
when there is location arbitrage, then someone is benefiting at the expense of someone else. Practically, expats add to the pensioner population of the country (except for the burden of paying their pensions). European countries are designed to require large working populations to sustain public services (which older people will disproportionaly use more). Add to that the unintended consequences such as high real estate prices. Therefore i believe that overall, it harmful.
Language, payroll-rules and tax-rules alone can be enough to prevent a business from expanding into a market. Even when there is no foul intent, just different set of rules. I am from Brazil and it is not unusual for companies to operate only within certain states because of this. Even though Brazil is a single country with a single language and mostly federal rules about things, there is still enough variance of law…
> Then you hear about Canada which has tariffs between its own provinces, but not to the US. Canada doesn't have, and should not have, the level of ambitions the EU should have. We're talking about EU 450 million people (500+ million if the UK rejoins at some point) vs Canada 35 million. The EU should go toe to toe with the US and China. The EU is utterly dominated by US software companies and by Chinese green tech c…
This is not what I said, I said that Canada has internal tarifs between provinces while being in (albeit limited) free-trade agreements with other countries. Making some types of internal trade _more_ bundersome than foreign trade.
PPWR is not the only one. Don't forget WEEE and the battery regulation. Only for VAT we have a single entrypoint, for all other regulations, businesses have to submit for each country. Its simply impossible. On the other hand I estimate that between 50% and 200% of the taxes collected like this are wasted and not applied to their ultimate goals. The average collected amount per submission is so small that you cannot…
> On the other hand I estimate that between 50% and 200% of the taxes collected like this are wasted and not applied to their ultimate goals. The average collected amount per submission is so small that you cannot pay the bureaucrats managing the complex submissions from these sums. The point of this tax is not to raise revenue bit to disincentivize wate. Since the tax weight based, companies have an incentive to red…
Customers already pay for the disposal. You could achieve the same thing by requiring sellers to list in checkout how much the disposal of their packaging will cost. That's a 10 minute change for Claude Code, but of course then it would not give more money and power to the useless bureaucrats.
Thanks to tomis who posted the EU FAQ on the topic below: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/ad1... None of this applies to companies that are micro-enterprises or use generic rather than branded packaging. There's a helpful diagram on page 13. The author of this article seems to have imagined a worst-case scenario based on either a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the EU rules; the disc…
Even if true, I wonder if it really helps if I basically need to hire a lawyer ($$$) to find out which regulations may or may not apply, and if I'll get myself into trouble. It is not a coincidence that here in Germany there are whole law firms specialized in suing small business owners (Abmahnkanzleien.) I think for a lot of people the tradeoff might not be worth it.
To the person in the comments suggesting asking for forgiveness rather than permission, it's hard to know which of the many laws won't have warnings during their enforcement e.g. "no website imprint, pay us," versus, "your last sale was B2C, you need GARAN labels from now on, fix it or pay us."
I don't have a horse in this race, but sources I found claim Brexit was economically detrimental to this day, including but not limited to the wiki page and its citations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit
It's a bad idea to trust Wikipedia for anything that might have a political or ideological slant that would upset the left, which the non-impact of Brexit definitely did. For instance, there are biographical pages on Wikipedia for people who died years ago but Wiki claims they're still alive, because the only websites that reported the death are anti-woke and thus considered not "reliable sources". So they just ... r…
I don't understand. The 10year view on the site you linked shows a spike in unemployment in 2020 after Brexit took effect, and current rates are still higher than pre-Brexit rates. Is there an explanation for why the 2016 vote would be directly responsible for the temporary dip?
But I'm not convinced you can prove or disprove anything from one graph without context and analysis.
It's a bad idea to trust Wikipedia for anything that might have a political or ideological slant that would upset the left, which the non-impact of Brexit definitely did. For instance, there are biographical pages on Wikipedia for people who died years ago but Wiki claims they're still alive, because the only websites that reported the death are anti-woke and thus considered not "reliable sources". So they just ... r…
I don't understand. The 10year view on the site you linked shows a spike in unemployment in 2020 after Brexit took effect, and current rates are still higher than pre-Brexit rates. Is there an explanation for why the 2016 vote would be directly responsible for the temporary dip? But I'm not convinced you can prove or disprove anything from one graph without context and analysis.
Nobody claimed the 2016 vote lowered unemployment. It was on a steady downward trend that continued for years, uninterrupted by the vote. This wasn't what economists predicted: they claimed the "uncertainty" of a Leave vote would cause a huge recession with 800,000 job losses. That's what the wiki quote is about - note that 2018, when the Stanford guys made their claims, is before 2020.