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Telegram Isn't for Sale

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Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#121

Post by kogepathic »

Xylakant wrote: post #56
pfortuny wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as it is compulsory, it is a tax. Whether it goes to your health problems or your street is irrelevant. If you have no control over the money, it is a tax.

Taxes are free to spend for the government, that is they are levied for whatever action or property the legislators choose to tax. Social security, retirement and health care plans are bound to a purpose and cannot legally be spent on other purposes. They often are compulsory but for example in Germany, health care is mandatory and regulated, but the money does not go to the state but rather to a provider of your cho…

> Social security payments are not taxes.

I agree with you. In my experience most people in Canada, and perhaps the US too, consider any government mandated deductions from your gross salary to be "taxes," regardless of the final destination of the money.

This is why you have people arguing that health care contributions and social security payments are "taxes"

Source: lived in North America and Europe

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#122

Post by _s »

germanier wrote: post #99
_s wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to “renounce” your religion or anything to that affect, it’s a checkbox on your income tax / wage form where you choose whether you wish to pay it or not. From what I remember it amount to taking ~1% or so off your salary.

You actually have go through a formal renunciation process (which is done at a state authority but your church will get notified and will not be pleased). That checkbox doesn't actually do anything, it is just your declaration of the official religion status. Lying on tax forms is, well, not the best idea.

Ah I see - I moved over as a foreigner (no previous religious affiliations) so that’s probably why I didn’t have to do anything beyond the taxation declaration.

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#123

Post by pavlov »

candiodari wrote: post #105
pavlov wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...the reality of taxes increasing everywhere, year after year Can you show data to back this up? To my knowledge, income taxes in all Western countries are lower today than they were in the '50s or '70s.

Do you check the full cycle ? Ie. if your employer gives you $1, and you use that to give it to Apple (for an app, whatever), how much actually ends up with Apple ? Let me do the calculation for Belgium for you: $1 -> First, because yearly the employer has to pay you for 13.92 months, not 12 (end of year bonus thing), we take that out. That's 14% (but you get 20 days 1.5 times paid holidays, and an end of year bonus,…

I won't pretend to know anything about the Belgian tax code or labor laws. But this strikes me as odd way to do the math:

> $1 -> First, because yearly the employer has to pay you for 13.92 months, not 12 (end of year bonus thing), we take that out. That's 14% (but you get 20 days 1.5 times paid holidays, and an end of year bonus, which is taxed at a higher rate, but you do get that)

Why are you subtracting 14% from the employee here? That 1.92 month bonus is money that ends up in the employee's pocket. From the employee's point of view, you should be adding 16% here -- for every $1, the employee actually gets $1.16 when the full year is considered.

If you count bonuses as losses to the employee, that would make for some very unhappy Wall Street bankers (where bonuses can easily exceed yearly pay).

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#124

Post by samat »

slazaro wrote: post #111
samat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have opted for user convinience on this matter. Fully searchable history of all communication synced on all your devices. A nightmare for a dissident attacked by state, but convinience 90% of the population should not be stripped of.

Is it technically impossible to have end to end encryption with full history, even synced? As long as you have the decryption key, you could have synced encrypted history, the best of both worlds, right?

Consider you’ve lost all your devices and logged in to a service. It either can decipher your history or it can’t. And if it can (which is convinient) - why have a e2e in the first place?

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#125

Post by addicted »

pavlov wrote: post #14
IBalic wrote: post #8

> A lot of people in the western world don’t realize how much taxes limit their options. You can end up paying almost half your income in taxes, which basically means you’re working for the government for 180 days a year. I think I can find better ways to use the money I make for the benefit of society. ok, so he's basically suggesting to get of rid government. I respect different stands on the size/role of the gover…

I don’t know where the author grew up, but didn’t he get anything in return for his taxes? I’ve had free healthcare, free college education, free libraries, police and fire departments protecting me, occasional grants, a social security network in case I lost my ability to work... I would never say that “taxes limit my options” because the personal record shows the opposite. Besides, it’s not about just me: the whole…

The whole private charity stuff also creates perverse incentives. The better people who do donate to charity, are the ones who are left worse off, whereas the bad ones who never do, are the people who benefit.

That’s the nice thing about a system of taxation, in that no one is penalized additionally while doing good.

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#126

Post by germanier »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #120
germanier wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not opt-out. Everybody who pays has opted into the system (or in most cases their parents did[0]). Catholic foreigners might be surprised that the Catholic church is considered a single world-wide religious community. If they move to Germany they will be taxed even if they are not religious (because they haven't left – which is in some countries hard or impossible). This is a thing the Catholic church does to t…

You immigrate to Germany as an atheist with no affiliation to any church, but answer questions about your upbringing truthfully. You're then taxed 2% of your gross income unless you pay a fee and visit multiple government departments. The money is distributed to private parties with little oversight on its spending. This is enforced by the same body and with the same penalties and rules as other forms of taxation. I…

It's exactly what I said above: The Roman Catholic church is a single world-wide entity and if you become member in one country your rights and duties carry over to Germany if you move here.

> but answer questions about your upbringing truthfully

Whether or not you answer questions truthfully has no impact on taxation. You might get around paying it if you lie but you are still liable for the tax.

> same penalties and rules as other forms of taxation

It is not, here is a decent publicly available primer: https://www.hrr-strafrecht.de/hrr/archiv/08-08/index.php?sz=... In short: The usual tax offences don't apply to church tax.

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#127

Post by Xylakant »

_s wrote: post #122
germanier wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually have go through a formal renunciation process (which is done at a state authority but your church will get notified and will not be pleased). That checkbox doesn't actually do anything, it is just your declaration of the official religion status. Lying on tax forms is, well, not the best idea.

Ah I see - I moved over as a foreigner (no previous religious affiliations) so that’s probably why I didn’t have to do anything beyond the taxation declaration.

You still have to officially renounce your church membership if you're member of either the catholic or protestant church. Otherwise the church may at some point come and recoup past taxes for up to 10 years.

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#128

Post by Maarten88 »

pavlov wrote: post #123
candiodari wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you check the full cycle ? Ie. if your employer gives you $1, and you use that to give it to Apple (for an app, whatever), how much actually ends up with Apple ? Let me do the calculation for Belgium for you: $1 -> First, because yearly the employer has to pay you for 13.92 months, not 12 (end of year bonus thing), we take that out. That's 14% (but you get 20 days 1.5 times paid holidays, and an end of year bonus,…

I won't pretend to know anything about the Belgian tax code or labor laws. But this strikes me as odd way to do the math: > $1 -> First, because yearly the employer has to pay you for 13.92 months, not 12 (end of year bonus thing), we take that out. That's 14% (but you get 20 days 1.5 times paid holidays, and an end of year bonus, which is taxed at a higher rate, but you do get that) Why are you subtracting 14% from…

Another bug in the calculation is the VAT. Apple will recover most (probably even all) of it on the purchase side of their balance.

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#129

Post by Tomte »

OoooooooO wrote: post #83
Tomte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tax burden in Germany for middleclass is at around 70% Even under a charitable interpretation this is simply wrong. I suppose you have no first-hand experience, but have read that on social media?

If you're self-employed the tax rate is ~70%, at least for lawyers in germany. Source: My self-employed gf. And no, she does not earn 5 figures, 4-6k gross per month with 1 part-time employee for the bureaucracy stuff (bills, phone service, faxing, scanning etc.). With a 60 hour week.

No, she doesn't.

You must be counting all kinds of other expenses. Professional insurance or bar membership, for example.

Re: Telegram Isn't for Sale

#130

Post by reitzensteinm »

germanier wrote: post #126
reitzensteinm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You immigrate to Germany as an atheist with no affiliation to any church, but answer questions about your upbringing truthfully. You're then taxed 2% of your gross income unless you pay a fee and visit multiple government departments. The money is distributed to private parties with little oversight on its spending. This is enforced by the same body and with the same penalties and rules as other forms of taxation. I…

It's exactly what I said above: The Roman Catholic church is a single world-wide entity and if you become member in one country your rights and duties carry over to Germany if you move here. > but answer questions about your upbringing truthfully Whether or not you answer questions truthfully has no impact on taxation. You might get around paying it if you lie but you are still liable for the tax. > same penalties an…

> Mit der Aufnahme der persönlichen Daten bei der Behörde werden die Betreffenden u.a. nach ihrem Religionsstatus gefragt. Die Frage der Verwaltungsbeamten lautet nicht etwa: „Sind Sie Mitglied der „Körperschaft des Öffentlichen Rechts Katholische Kirche Deutschland“? Das wäre korrekt. Auf diese Frage würden sie zutreffend mit Nein antworten, denn sie wurden in ihrem Heimatland getauft und nicht in Deutschland.

> Der Verwaltungsbeamte fragt stattdessen, in Unkenntnis der Sachlage, einfach: „Sind Sie katho-lisch?“, oder „Sind sie getauft?“ Die Betroffenen erkennen nicht die mit der Frage verbundene deutsch-katholische Problematik und antworten mit Ja, wenn sie jemals getauft wurden. Daraufhin wird vom Verwaltungsbeamten das entsprechende Konfessionsmerkmal in den Akten vermerkt. Diese Zuerkennung des Etiketts „kath.“ führt dazu, dass die Betroffenen von diesem Zeitpunkt an von der staatlichen Verwaltung als Mitglieder der „Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts Katholische Kirche Deutschland“ geführt werden – mit allen Konsequenzen.

https://hpd.de/node/14728

They ask if you're baptized, which can be true if you're an atheist. This saddles you with a tax obligation that you must then opt out of even though you're a member of no religion. The tax is collected by the state.

Ich denke, dass Sie nur streiten wollen. Es ist genug für mich.

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