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Dear Europe, please wake up
281–290 of 323 posts
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s vastly cheaper to live in the US, I talk to my Paris coworkers quite a lot and they pay more for just about everything except maybe childcare. My health insurance is free in the US, covered by my employer, my tax rate is 35% whereas I would be taxed at 45% in Paris. Gas costs more in Paris, car registration and taxes cost more, just buying a car in the first place costs way more, not to mention the car I own is…
>Forget taking my truck to the lake with the kayaks and forget hauling materials to build my house. This is totally not how you move to Paris.
It's not just Paris, it's most of Europe. Also Paris has suburbs, and it is reasonable to consider owning a car if living in them. Many of my coworkers commute into the middle of the city from the suburbs on the outskirts.
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is not mentioned in the article is that productivity is much more important than the number of hours worked. By productivity, I mean output per hour worked, which is usually an estimation made from the total output of the country (GDP) and the numbers of hours worked by the working population.
Well, that's a very inadequate productivity metric imho. How can two people with exactly the same output (say two doctors working a shift with similar number of patience) lead one to be 20 times more productive because one bills $400 per hour and the other makes that number in a week (such as in say Turkey). That's a 40x difference in productivity.
You would usually use Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) such that comparison between countries is possible, because as you pointed, comparisons in absolute values between countries are not useful.
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised that most of the comments seem to focus on other comparisons of EU and US, there's very little on those two points. Personally, I think that English as the lingua franca makes sense in many contexts, since that's pretty much the case in IT already. For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the loca…
> For example, trying to translate various terms in any given language from English usually causes inconvenience and confusion (everyone needs to know the localized version and then translate it back into English to find literature etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to teach everyone English. Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better lear…
> Similarly, translating a lot of terms from German or Russian to English often causes inconvenience and confusion. So better learn German and Russian. :-)
If the programming language key words that I needed to know used those languages, as did all of the documentation and forums, conference videos and literature, that's exactly what I'd do. But somehow those aren't the languages that everyone uses, nor is something like Chinese (and its dialects) which has a lot of users, but isn't as geographically widespread. Maybe people have also settled on English because it has a somewhat low barrier to entry as well.
I guess it's the same as needing to know at least some latin in the natural sciences, because otherwise something like naming bones when talking to a foreign colleague would get awkward, fast.
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#285So many things here. Lets talk pay, US tech workers, lets just say Sr SWE and up, and lets look at SF as the author uses this as a focal point. Salary is roughly $300-400k a year(in SF FANGish company), in Europe or England its about half of that, and maybe even less. I know as I have family I married into that points out this fact, the best workers all go over to the US and make large salaries over there at US tech…
> 37% top US tax rate
That's not true either. In California, you will also pay state income tax, most likely at 9.3% marginal rate - but possibly not too different in actual rate because the California thresholds are low. To continue the comparison, you'll need to consider which part of health insurance is or is not included (none in the US.) Etc. In the end, the marginal tax rates are pretty close. Meaning, shockingly high in California.
And if you do come here for work, consider also exit tax. If you are successful, you will fall under exit tax if you ever want to leave.
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#286The problem with the EU wide Inc, is who gets the tax revenue? Is it the country you live in or the country where most of your customers are based in? What if your customers all live outside the EU? France is never going to accept that you live in France but your business pays it's taxes in Germany or vice versa. Also I don't agree with the author's take that Europe is not risk averse. It is risk averse. I tried to o…
> The problem with the EU wide Inc, is who gets the tax revenue? Every country proportional to the profit they generate and the tax rate they set? Companies overall EU profit $100M: - France $30M profit taxed at 20% = $6M - Germany $50M profit taxed at 25% = $12.5M - ... Seems like it "just" needs an accounting system that works across the EU.
You can't have that because each EU country has different incentives. Some countries tax salaries more than capital, other let you reduce your capital gains or offer a flat tax in certain circumstances.
I forgot to mention, but if this EU Inc gets then created who gets the capital gain tax? Should it be divided in 27 or should it prorated to where you lived or where your customers live?
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see this happen but just like most of the things in the EU, it would become a nightmare to manage and add even more bureaucracy.
It's like VAT collection. We have to rely on middle-man companies to do the proper collection because most countries have vastly different rules regarding VAT.
As a business owner every minute I spend on paperwork is a minute less I spend on my business.
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Basically all Europe were in shambles 80 years ago, Communism was destroyed only 30 years ago. We still 4 wars in the last 30 years in Europe. The accumulated wealth is long gone.
And Putin is threatening another major war in Europe with NATO, it's pretty crazy to assume that Europe has not issues happening or has gotten complacent just because they don't want to work 50 hours a week.
It's actually a surprise that Europe is a rich part of the world.
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#288As an EU citizen in middle of Europe (Czechia) I see two major problems. - Free market is crippled by EU economical politics. Basically, EU is trying to implement centrally planned economics and fund many useless things by grants. About half of grants (in my country) going to ideology driven nonprofit segment. Many EU citizens are very angry about wasting our money. Also, our government is not able to provide cheap e…
I am curious what are examples of “ideology driven nonprofit segment”?
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#289I think there's one point the author missed, and that's payment method standardization.
In the US, you put a credit card form on your website and you're done. That's how people pay online, period.
In the EU, this is not the case. You have countries like Germany, where many people use EC, not Visa or Mastercard. You have countries like Poland, where (debit) card adoption and usage is very high, but online card usage is almost nonexistent. Except for the young and tech-savvy, there's a weird phobia here when it comes to anything that can take money from your account without your explicit consent. That complicates subscription payments for one, most major streaming services had to give in and allow bundling with cable and satellite TV plans (Netflix), phone plans (Spotify and Tidal) or payments by SMS (Storytel). There was a Storytel blog post once where they discovered that 90% of Polish people that cancelled at the "payment" step of the subscription flow did so because "credit card" was the only method available.
And that's just two countries, I'm pretty sure the other 26 have their own nuances I'm not aware of.
Re: Dear Europe, please wake up
#290Worth noting that the "EU GDP is stagnating terribly" narrative that motivates this post and quite a few of these comments is not true.
If you look at cost-relative (PPP) & per-capita numbers, the EU economy has been growing at a very similar or faster rate than the US for decades.
https://statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-econ... has a good introduction to the top-line numbers. https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/european-unions-remarkable-... has a more detailed analysis.
The raw GDP differences come in very large part from exchange rate fluctuations and increasing costs & population in the US, not a meaningful increase in what the average American can buy with their earnings. PPP adjusts for these.
In terms of "how much can people buy" numbers, the EU is closer to the US today than it has ever been.
(That said, I fully agree with the post's conclusion regardless: a simple unified way to create an EU business & a universal language base would be a huge boost)