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Comment by lalanv | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in Buenos Aires all my life. This is my biased pros/cons list: - It's a beautiful city with a lot of art and beautiful places. - Food is great - Most of the people is nice and open minded (same sex marriage is accepted here) - We have a lot of good IT professionals and great entrepreneurial ecosystem (including cryptocurrencies) - Argentina is a beautiful country to do some tourism - Our timezone is great, we are close to NYC time for example

Cons: - Prices. I've been travelling a lot this past years and I found Buenos Aires might be as expensive as other big cities. - Inflation, it's really hard to deal everyday with it. I've lost sense of prices to be honest - Some places are really insecure. Also, you might have problems on safe areas too. I live in a good neighborhood and someone broke into my apartment when I was out.

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I moved away from Argentina 5 years ago (wow, time flies) and I agree with all the points above.

Many people in the First World assume that Buenos Aires is a cheap place because it is in South America, but many places in South America have actually higher costs of living than Europe/North America, with lower incomes. An apartment in a nice neighborhood with a reasonable size is ~USD1000[1], while local income for a Sr Software Engineer is around ~USD27K[2] (sounds low even for BsAs standards, but not outrageously so) and taxes are outrageously high (over 50%[3] for an individual, 137.4%(!) of the profits for companies[4]).

[1]: http://inmuebles.mercadolibre.com.ar/departamentos/alquiler/...

[2]: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/2003950-cuanto-ganaba-un-programa...

[3]: https://es.panampost.com/antonella-marty/2017/06/21/en-argen...

[4]: http://www.infobae.com/economia/2017/03/07/argentina-continu...

> 137.4%(!) of the profits for companies

How on Earth does that work? Companies have to pay all of their profit + more in taxes? Or is it some misleading figure which compares expenses like employment taxes to the profits?

It's a great question. It seems like at least since 2005[1] the amount taxes owed after deductions have been >100% of profits, which might partly explain the prevalence of off-the-books earnings in the country. It seems to be the second highest tax rate of commercial profits in the world, at 106% for 2016[2].

From the breakdown of that rate[3] it seems the three highest contributors to that rate are

- Turnover tax by City of Buenos Aires of 3% (Total tax rate (% of profit) 53.21%)

- Employer paid - Social security contributions of 23% (Total tax rate (% of profit) 25.94%)

- Tax on financial (check) transactions of 0.6% (Total tax rate (% of profit) 17.25%)

Keep in mind that the last one affects every transaction, so you can _easily_ pay more tax than what you earn just by moving money back and forth.

[1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/total-tax-rate-percen...

[2]: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.TAX.TOTL.CP.ZS?year_h...

[3]: http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/argentina...

For every 10 pesos they make, they pay 14 pesos to the state (thats how to read that %).

Also of note regarding Buenos Aires: the city is quite dirty. Even it air is pretty bad. Most of the non-residential areas are very very noisy.

Regarding the pros, I think they's been properly enumerated.

I looked into moving to Argentina recently but found some complaints on forums about the speed and reliability of the Internet. What are your experiences with the Internet in Argentina?

Well. Sadly I don't have any benchmark (or some serious analysis) to share with you but I can tell you this:

- I pay about 40usd for a non symmetric 12Mbps connection. It works ok - at least for me - I can stream music or watch something on Netflix without any problems.

- My ISP has a max of 50Mbps (non symmetric)

- You can find some corporate symmetric connections (I'm not aware if you can have those at home) but I suspect they are like a regular connection in some other more advanced countries

In some zones you have symmetric fiberoptic lines. To your house too if you want to pay that premium (I do).

Besides Iplan, is there another alternative? Can you share how much does it cost to you?

iPlan perhaps doesn't even use it's own fiber, apparently there are more companies offering it. But it's legal to call your company FiberTel in Argentina and then sell cable not fiber, so the situation is pretty opaque to me.

The full price is 1200 pesos, around 75 bucks. So not cheap. But to have something that works reliably up and down it's peanuts, the cheaper options are not as reliable and have asymmetric speeds. Stable videoconferencing is a must.

One (perhaps non-representative) data point: I have teammates who live in Villa La Angostura and Cordoba and I chat with them using Google hangouts every day. Their bandwidth has never been an issue for video chat.

I have an iPlan fiberoptic line 10/10 and it's a really stable 10/10. I don't need big downloads all of the time just a reliable connection for (video)conference. Other parts have 100/100 or 50/50.

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