Atropos

It is a bit different though, because the German exit tax applies to companies and people holding more than a 1% share in a company. So no exit tax if you hold bitcoins as part of your private assets...

Agreed that there is some tension with EU principles, but it is difficult to get it right. Building a company in country A for 20 years, then moving to country B for 184 days to sell it completely without paying taxes also does not seem like a fair system.

If you are planning on VC-like returns by selling your company, you should start with a holding GmbH and an operative GmbH below (or crazier structures like a Holding GmbH & Co. KG). But: This way you have the maximum administrative costs and complexity in the beginning...

I think starting as an Einzelunternehmer makes sense in certain situations. I'm not a tax lawyer, but I'm a lawyer in a firm that advises startups and I have seen a lot of "Starts as Einzelunternehmer -> Does asset sale to own GmbH" type deals... "Normal" lawyers / tax advisors will never recommend this, because it is not a "simple check the box" exercise, and "sophisticated" lawyers are incredibly expensive.

"Replace" is difficult to define. Will there not be a single artist? Obviously wrong.

But possibly we have seen "peak" numbers in some professions? There are some exceptions, but in many modern professions, the numbers of professionals have only been increasing with GDP growth (e.g. quantity of lawyers/accountants/doctors).

I would guess there are more professional human translators today than there were in 1950. However, I think this is one profession that may "peak" at some point: For low-value texts, machine translation will be good enough, leading to a smaller pie of paid translation work, which can only sustain a smaller number of translators. The field will certainly stop growing and may decrease at some point. Anecdotal, but in the European Union institutions (https://www.politico.eu/article/translators-translation-euro...), it appears that we have already hit this "peak" and the future is gradual decline in the number of translators employed.

You should check out how EU state aid laws work. This is exactly the issue they are addressing and it is not true that we have seen a significant "subsidy race" between different EU countries in the recent past.

If I am not mistaken, the £1 would typically be distributed between all of SVB UK's current shareholders. If SVB UK is 100% owned by the SVB parent company, and SVB parent is bankrupt, the £1 will get added to the funds that will make the SVB parent's creditors "whole", who outrank shareholders in bankruptcy.

And yes, the £1 has to get actually transferred, it is important for legal certainty e.g. with regard to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration_under_American_l....

You are correct, the technology for 24/7 SEPA instant transfers is there, but they are just ~ 10% of all SEPA transfers right now and - crucially - are not free yet: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...

Free instant transfers are the direction of travel, but in the EU, that is a question of regulation, not technology. Maybe in 2030 we will be there :)

But for many transactions, I see that instant would be nicer, but I don't see the crucial need. My employer pays all Eurozone salaries from a bank account in Luxembourg, I imagine it is just a script checking "Initiate transfers on 10 AM, 1 day before last working day of month". Being able to do "Initiate transfers on 23.59 PM of last working day of month" would be slightly nicer, but I don't think it really solves a huge pain point?

I agree. In a perfect world, it would not matter who wins the lottery of having conscientious parents etc. and the government would make sure that everyone has the same chance to achieve their potential in school. But in the real world, it is crazy to expect that state resources could ever provide the same benefit as a "tiger mom" willing to go to battle with her puberty-stricken teens over finishing their coursework 24/7.

I am still working in big law and I disagree that the benefits of adopting more advanced version control would be small. However, I work in a field that is a mix of regulatory law and litigation, where almost no work is based on templates and most things are drafted from scratch.

One very large problem that typically comes up in large teams: Only 1 team member can edit the the "live version" of a document (it's locked for editing by the version control system), the other team members need to work "offline" and then reintegrate their changes/drafts into the main document. Everybody has lived through the horror story of a team member in the different time zone still having checked out the live version and going to sleep :)

Sometimes you have to circulate a draft document in parallel to multiple parties (e.g. colleagues with special subject expertise + client's inhouse lawyers + client's technical experts + other party's law firm + other party's inhouse lawyers + other party's technical experts). It can happen that you need to reintegrate comments from different parties to different versions of the drafts, e.g., if your client gives feedback quickly and you re-circulate updated version internally, then you receive other party's comments to the older draft version...

Besides the mechanical aspects of reintegrating comments, it is also difficult to track if everybody who needs to sign off has actually signed off on the parts of the documents they had to review. Often it gets lost who made which comment/change. It can be quite awkward if a regulator asks you "Isn't the technical statement on page 12 contradicted by fact XYZ" - please explain until tomorrow - and you have to quickly figure out who actually put that in...

The legal system and independent courts etc are an infrastructure it depends on - Google had to leave China due to problems with the local legal system

They have 90 days to "stop the abusive practices", basically meaning find a way to redesign their website - this is what they really care about.

Germany's tax system is linked to residence, not citizenship (unlike the US). Therefore if you move to the US and work there for a few years, you will not pay any German taxes during that period.

Therefore the "free rider" effect definitely exists, but I don't think it is a huge problem, because the numbers of people migrating out and in again are not that high.

Could you please refresh my memory: Which of the Soviet Union states was allowed to hold a referendum on whether it should leave?

The Economist's democracy index disagrees, putting Azerbaijan into the "Authoritarian" index. And apprently their President is in power since 2003, which is usually not a good sign.

Iran certainly cannot be called a full democracy, the religious council has to approve candidacies for President - it isn't even clear if the current President Rouhani can pose as a candidate!

But there are some Muslim democracies working better, like Indonesia and Malaysia.

I am not so sure. For me at least, it was much more difficult to be in the unstructured university environment than having a job. Routines make life easier for me, I like having micro-accomplishments every day in working life etc... I know many people are probably different, but still, a life of creative work is not so easy. The tortured writer or the procrastinating PhD student is basically a cultural cliché at this point, as well as the 3rd generation killing all the rich family wealth. If you gave me 100 million dollars right now, I have a real fear I would just waste my life doing nothing but hedonistic pleasure, while telling myself I'm still working on my next novel or political theory of justice or ...

That concept is actually not that unusual or nonsensical - imagine if we had the opposite: As long as you and your servers are outside the US, you can not be charged under US criminal law. This would basically mean that the US would need to rely exclusively on the goodwill of foreign prosecutors to shut down things like e.g. securities fraud exclusively targetting US citizens or hackers attacking US companies etc. Obviously, in many cases foreign prosecutors would not care too much. Does this seem like justice?

You need to differentiate between where your company has its "real seat" (= place of business activity) and your "legal seat" (=incorporated as GmbH or LLC or ...). If your office building is in Berlin and you employ a local team (your "real seat"), it does not matter if your company is a GmbH, a UK Limited or an Estonian e-company - you are still under German tax, employment, insolvency, consumer protection law...

If you have your "real seat" in Germany, in my view, it makes sense to go for GmbH, instead of registering in UK/Estonia, because the corporate law differences are not that big.

The question if you should decide to build a company in Germany is another discussion.

Regarding the abortion point: I agree that science cannot answer the question regarding morality of abortion, but can philosophy answer it? In my view, philosophy can at best provide certainty of the kind "If you hold these moral values as correct, then option Y is not compatible with these values", but how can you "prove" scientifically that a certain value is correct?

I agree. Things like having the weekends free and getting enough sleep are really important for having a sustainable working life. But that does not mean working 35 hours per week is a must or 40 hours is a natural limit, for example 9 AM to 8 PM from Monday-Friday is a 50 hour workweek and easily sustainable. The norm in industries like banking, big law firms or management consulting is more like a 60-70 hour work week and while it is obviously not desirable, there are many people who can do it for many years.

Totally the opposite experience - normal 40 hour week means working 9 AM to 6 PM, due to 1 hour lunch break. This is even the case in most public administrations (Germany, France, EU Commission), I'm quite curious where a 9 AM to 5 PM day is normal...

If your job does not require you to be aware of 24/7 news, weekly journals can be a good alternative.

I disagree. I once worked for a services company that basically had a "6 month notice" policy, meaning if they let someone know July 23th 2016, he still has a job until January 31 2017. This gives people the opportunity to start looking for work elsewhere, without even having to reveal that they "got fired". And it's just not as much of a psychological shock for the employees. Plus, if the firing was not performance related, but due to the company not being hired for enough projects, this was something that could change after 4+ months if the company had a lucky streak, and it sometimes did happen.

Cameron announced the referendum as policy choice in 2013 and at least after the May 2015 election it was clear it would happen. Therefore this was a long time coming. Has any other European country started with a referendum process in the meantime? Do you think just because the UK voted out, suddenly a stampede of referendums will begin, even though it would be much smarter to wait and see how things turn out in the UK? "Fantasists" hoping the other side will crumble exist in both camps... (Let's not forget that Cameron was campaigning for IN. In the future, the only government who would call a referendum must be campaigning for OUT - nobody else would take the risk after what happened in the UK)

What about the UK? Their prime minister has resigned, the lead of the opposition party is battling a motion of no confidence, the British pound crashed 10% against the US-Dollar and Scotland wants to stay in the European Union...

It does not matter much if it is shared by most Germans - what matters is if it is shared by a small elite of German, French, and EU Commission/Parliament leaders. Do you really think the German population will rise up if you tell them "Hold up, discriminating against the UK in derivatives clearing rules will cost you 0.0x% of your GDP!" And to most people (outside of the UK), it is quite obvious anyway that contracts negotiated between friends cannot be transposed 1:1 into a relationship between entities who are not friends.

Yes. I am German and pro-European and I would happily take a deal that our GDP will be cut 20% if UK's GP is cut even 10% in return. Not to punish the UK, but to firmly establish the principle that leaving the EU is painful. While this might not be the optimum from an economics point of view, it serves to keep the European Union alive - which is much more important in the long run (no more war etc...).

I'm a lawyer in a civil-law system and I would not agree with this description. Maybe one can say that in theory civil law systems have more legislation and are less comfortable with "judge made law", leaving the filling of gaps to the legislative powers. But it would be impossible to write laws that cover all cases, therefore every civil law system relies on general principles.

For example, the whole German tort law is basically: "A person who, intentionally or negligently, unlawfully injures the life, body, health, freedom, property or another right of another person is liable to make compensation to the other party for the damage arising from this."

When is a behavior negligent? What falls under the "another right of another person" (your reputation, your privacy?)? Does the owner of a highway-restaurant get damages if a negligent chemicals transport company does not secure its load properly, leading to dangerous chemicals spilled on the highway, leading to closure of the highway for a week = meaning no customers for a week? [damage to property???] These are all questions that are totally up for a judge to decide.

Classifying if a work is a scientific or a non-scientific publication - or at least if somebody might have classified it as scientific in good faith - is nothing that a civil law jurisdiction can't deal with. Other areas of law have much harder conceptual distinctions. (E.G. Are parent and subsidiary company having an "at arms length" relationship as required in transfer pricing tax law?)

The legal system is not applied by computers, but by humans. That's why laws don't have to be written in a way that pre-defines every possible edge case - you can let judges make a common sense judgment call about it later.

For example you could have a rule that anybody who makes a work available "in good faith" in the belief that it is a scientific paper out of copyright is not liable to damages. Then all edge cases would be cleared in the context of take-down requests, which is not very high stakes...

This "cost of litigation" argument is probably bogus. Even some of the epic patent battles like Apple v. Samsung or other decade long arbitrations like Yukos vs. Russia were like 50-60 Million USD in legal fees.

Fact is, it hasn't happened in Germany so far, even in the big financial crisis 2008, all the banks could easily be bailed out by Germany's own public funds. In addition, Deutsche Bank hasn't failed yet, so save your gloating until something actually happeny...