econgeeker

The nice thing for europeans is that if you're part of the eurozone, you can live and work wherever you like. A business doesn't have to be domiciled in the same location as its headquarters or employees. In the US, many businesses are domiciled in Deleware with no employees in that state.

But I think the question for Hacker News, or at least for the Hackers who are interested in doing startups outside the USA is-- what's the international Delaware?

What's the place to domicile your business, with reasonable laws and taxes?

Some possibilities I can think of: Hong Kong, Singapore, Cyprus and some of the UK islands like the Isle of Mann might be good.

I love Berlin. It is a happening city, and I'm very happy to spend time there. It has a very nice mix of cutting edge modernism and the former east german sections which are still relatively inexpensive. And I just like germans.

I think startups can group employees wherever makes sense for their workforce. If its all EU people then berlin might be ideal. But the business doesn't have to be a german business. (Or does it?)

Edit to add: Obviously I'm writing this from the perspective of a self-started or bootstrapped business. This perspective isn't likely to be appropriate for people who plan to take outside investment.

I'm dubious that Haskell is better for writing distributed concurrent systems, but I don't know much about haskell.

Rather than bashing erlang like this, I'd have gotten a lot more out of an article that described how Haskell approached the problem, possibly with contrasts to erlang.

But when you start off with at best nonsense "erlang's parallelism is not parallelism" you're going to lose people who do know something about erlang.

Here's the deal with erlang: The syntax throws some people off. If you will spend a couple hours learning the language (maybe a couple days) you'll start to appreciate the syntax and it will no longer be a problem.

Erlang is not as fast as bare metal languages like, say, C, but Erlang is fantastic for making programs in parallel and executing them on multiple cores or nodes or clusters of nodes with multiple cores.

I guess I should take the occurrence of these kinds of articles as a sign that Erlang is getting wider acceptance. That's great!

But please, cheer your language, don't bash the competition.

I'd be interested in hearing some thoughts on backing up. Would rsync to S3 happening regularly be an adequate solution? Figure if it is on a cron and it fires every other minute, the deltas would be pretty small, and not much would be lost if a datacenter or cluster goes down.

In fact, since repatriated capital will be deployed inside the US, likely to produce more profits which can then be taxed... taxing repatriated money is a drag on the economy and reduces future tax income. (I don't know if the effect is large or small, but I think it is large.)

Was able to find the "Dutch American Friendship Treaty". This means it is relatively straightforward for americans to set up a business in the netherlands.

But not cheap. For a three person business, it looks like it would cost $15,000 in "capital" and around $7,500 in lawyers and other services to prepare the necessary paperwork (based on Mike Lee's estimates and the fact that our business has more than one person, so would need to incorporate.)

It seems wrong to me to put about $15k in the bank to do nothing when there's far more than that already invested in the business (Which is existing already) and the value of the business is more than that.

Will wait for the appsterdamers to get more details out. Maybe the situation is different for relocating an existing business.

I don't really disagree with anything you said, but I have to laugh at the idea of moving to germany to escape some future police state in the Netherlands. I am part german, love germany and germans, but that idea is funny. Maybe you were making a joke.

When last in berlin, I remember reading something that said "If germans were going to storm a subway station in protest, they'd all be sure to buy tickets first."

I invested a lot of time on this site in the past, only to have my account unceremoniously hellbanned, without warning or cause. I've no expectation that this won't happen again, so I'm not planning to stick around.

I never wanted to retire at 60, I wanted to retire young. I picked a date in the 1990s by which I wanted to travel full time.

We missed the date by a year-- exactly the year it took us to get ready for this.

Takes a lot of time to get rid of a couple decades of accumulated junk. That's one of the bigger inhibitions. We didn't put anything but a couple small boxes in storage with friends, we got rid of everything.

Sort of our "burning the ships" moment, but also, the thing is, it was mostly unnecessary.

Like in fight club - we thought we had the sofa thing covered. Forget that. There will be more sofas in the future.

We're not living like tourists, we're working, a normal life. It is essentially the same as if we'd remained in the USA and done a startup. Yes, it is true, we do take longer and more frequent "vacations" than others (but that's in part possible because we live like raman lovers the rest of the time.) I think that's just part of a good work-life balance. The thing is, if we were in the states it would still be good to take such breaks, but it is much harder.

Whenever you decide to start a company with your partner, you're making a big commitment. You're taking risk of future reward in exchange for giving up immediate high salary (but horribly no-fun corporate jobs.) Previously we'd done the corporate jobs and the startup thing, and it was time for us to do our own startup.

For anyone out there considering doing what we're doing, the budget is what matters. If you can do this for the same cost of living, or less, than living in the USA, then why not do it?

What I didn't talk about is how much income we're currently making. And I didn't mention whether we were profitable or not, or whether we've passed the income we would have been making if we'd stayed in our corporate jobs. I don't want to go into that, because it isn't really useful for anyone considering this, as you have to make your own determination, but I feel safe in saying that I expect to live more comfortably in "retirement" than I would have if I hadn't done this startup.

Finally, I'm not sure what retirement is, really. I took a long break before, and travelled, and within a week of being on the road I was exploring ideas for starting a company. I had set aside 6 months for myself, didn't have to do anything (and when I came back, I got a job quickly, with the interviewers seeing my "employment gap" as something to be jealous of.) I don't expect I will ever stop working.

But, in my "later years" I do plan to travel more luxuriously.

We kept the insurance we had in the states before. Due to obamacare our previous plan was shut down (as it became illegal to sell lower cost plans like it) and we were put onto a more expensive plan. We're researching our options. But we may end up buying insurance in the USA and then supplementing it with World Nomads coverage. They charge around $50 a month and provide $500k emergency transport back to the US (where your insurance will cover you) plus a variety of other benefits. WorldNomads.com

Some of the other companies we've heard about are mentioned in this article, but we don't have experience with them: http://www.nomadtopia.com/faq-what-do-you-do-for-health-insu...

Sorry, I can't give a definitive answer on the solution, but this is an area where we're still learning.

We've been doing this for three years now. This couple seemed to focus on having a year abroad, we've made it our lifestyle, and we're doing a startup (rather than consulting).

I started this as a response to the "how to keep productive" question, but I'll try to address the other questions people have been asking in the thread later on.

We also have the issue of taking some period of time to get back into the productive zone. What we do is spend the visa limit time in each country. For americans in the UK that is 6 months, for instance. So we rented an apartment for 6 months. In the Shengen zone (most of europe) it is 3 months, and last year we spent 2.5 months in berlin.

In both cases we spent most of the time working a normal lifestyle %90 of the time. After our 2.5 months in berlin we spent a couple weeks traveling as tourists (that's where the other 0.5 months went.)

I figure 2 weeks on either side of a relocation are not going to be productive, so might as well spend half of that time, or so, doing tourist stuff. By having such great breaks regularly, we are recharged and I think more productive when we are working.

The weird thing is, indoors, the only thing foreign really is the outlets... so it feels like we're still in the USA, but then you step outdoors and the language, accents and architecture are completely different. So you can "travel" across the globe every day. It is really hard to explain that feeling but it is pretty powerful.

-- Taxes & Visas-- As far as governments are concerned we're tourists. We present ourselves this way and we get tourist visas. However, for most visas "tourist" and "business" visas are essentially the same. We don't work in any country in the sense that we don't have a job, we don't participate in their employment schemes. We're taxed like americans (the US taxes your income no matter where it is earned).

-- As I mentioned we're doing a startup. (We did one and we're just in the process of pivoting so what the new one is at this point is a little vague.) I don't feel out of the technology scene at all-- I have all the same connections I did before we left, except that I can't go to local unconferneces, but I didn't really get much out of them.

There is one conference that I miss that is done in the USA only, but we started buying the videos for it. Spending hundreds of dollars on conference videos sounds expensive, but it is cheap compared to actually going there (Even from within the USA). I don't really miss the networking opportunities-- and we're now networking with a real international network. EG: we network with the locals wherever we are.

The technology scene really is global.

-- Budget:

This is a big one. This inhibits a lot of people. However, if you've got an income from your work, and savings to get by in the USA, you can get buy longer when you're traveling. Even traveling in expensive first world places like europe, right now, we're able to live on the budget we were living on in the USA. Overall, we're actually spending a bit less, and we spend a lot less when we are living in lower cost places (even places in eastern europe, which are "expensive" compared to southeast asia, are cheep.)

So, we could have remained in the USA, and spent the same amount of money. I don't think we would have gotten any more work done, and we would have had a lot less fun. Plus, as our product is global, better understanding of other countries helps.

--

Health insurance: We have the health insurance we had in the USA. It covers us globally. There are specific health insurance plans that cover long term travelers and we might switch, we just haven't done so yet.

Neither of us are under 30, nor are we over 50.

--

Crazy? You hear a lot of people who knock this idea. Lots of people say "I'd love to do that but I've got responsibilities" or the equivalent.

That's fine... just don't presume we're not doing serious work, we aren't doing a "real" startup or anything lie that. These days startups often have employees spread around the globe... we don't have to carry the whole company with us.

I think people thinks this is harder than it is. Or maybe for some people the idea of living out of a backpack is tough.

Personally, I relish the challenge!

Between my laptop, camera, and assorted stuff, I've got about 7 pounds of clothes etc, and 10 pounds of electronics gear. Every time we-repack, we actually shed some unnecessary stuff. It is a process... but I love it.

Do my coworkers need to know that I'm a fan of internet memes and exceedingly cute cat pictures? The presumption often seems to be that people are anonymous because they want to hide something, or be jerks. I want to be anonymous because my interests are esoteric and I know my co-workers wouldn't understand, or would tease me.

HN is sorta anonymous, but the core purpose of anonymity is undermined. The purpose of anonymity is that it shouldn't matter if I'm a dog, my arguments should be what matters. Anonymity prevents punishing people with discrimination.

Meanwhile, on Hacker News the tying of all comments to an account leads to easy censorship. A previous account of mine had accumulated 1200 karma over the course of 6 months. One day I reset cookies and came here and looked at a thread I'd been participating in, only to notice that none of my comments appeared! Turns out I'd been silenced by the censors of HN. I wasn't trolling, I wasn't engaging in personal attacks, and I got no warning... in fact, they made it appear to me like I was still participating, wasting a significant amount of my time.

The community liked my comments over all. My average score per comment was just a bit under 6. Clearly I was a contributing member of the community.

My best guess is that one of the mods at HN didn't like an opinion of mine and so they silenced me... rather than rebutting me.

After investing all that time in a community, to be so unceremoniously censored, I will not make that mistake again.

I will only make comments places where I can be anonymous, and don't have to create an account. I only created this account because of a moment of weakness where I saw people missing a piece of history that was painfully obvious to me (and that thread has since, itself, been censored. The entire discussion removed from the index of HN for no apparent reason. It was actually a pretty good discussion before it got censored.

I know that revealing the censorship on HN will result in this account being destroyed as well. But like a soviet citizen being hauled off to the gulag, I just hope that a few who think this is a just society will hear my story and be wary, lest they invest time in the community and have it taken away as well.

Now, please excuse me as I log off to see if this account really appears in the discussion, or if I've just wasted 15 minutes writing and editing it.

You're right about the anarchy, but I don't see the burning world. I don't see hackers and cheaters "taking over" bitcoin.

An account was compromised, and despite there being no government regulation, the exchange stepped in, protected their customer, rolled back the trades and protected the market.

That is anarchy exactly! But no burning world. And it is yet another realworld test that has been successfully met by the bitcoin idea.

I'm not sold on bitcoins viability, due to questions about the larger marketability and having not done an audit of the software. But from an economic perspective, bitcoin is a viable currency, or as close to meeting all the requirements that any non-physical currency can.

"Actually commonly accepted by modern economists"

This phrase is the anti-science. No science operates based on "commonly accepted". Consider how absurd it would be for any modern economist to claim that a form of money, which was banned in 1933, was the cause of prolonging the great depression.

How could the use of gold as money cause anything when it was banned by executive order, and the citizens were required to turn it in? Are you going to argue there was a massive underground black market. You don't make that argument, and from my studies no such market existed because people feared the repercussions of being caught with this banned substance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

"The circumstances of the case were that a New York attorney, Frederick Barber Campbell, had on deposit at Chase National over 5,000 troy ounces (160 kg) of gold. When Campbell attempted to withdraw the gold Chase refused and Campbell sued Chase. A federal prosecutor then indicted Campbell on the following day (September 27, 1933) for failing to surrender his gold.[4] Ultimately the prosecution of Campbell failed but the authority of federal government to seize gold was upheld."

I think I have a better way of making the point you're trying to make. You're rebutting the claim that reliance on the gold standard made the depression worse.

However, in the early 1930s, the monetary use of gold was criminalized in the USA. In fact, possession of gold itself was illegal for individuals (with the exception of jewelry) until sometime in the 1970s!

while many people refused to turn the gold in as the government demanded in the 1930s, they instead shipped it overseas, and at any rate you couldn't do contracts in gold or make payments in gold without risk of getting in trouble.

This action effectively invalidated much (maybe most?) of the countries wealth, and so it is no surprise that the result was a great depression, or a prolonged depression.

Further, rather than adhering to a hard money position, as is popular for political economists to posit today, the actual position was inflationary. This position is well argued by Rothbard in his book "America's Great Depression".

The reason the myth of "hard money" prolonging the great depression persists, is because governments want an inflationary monetary policy to allow them to spend without the fiscal restraint that would be imposed by having to raise via taxes and fees, all the money they want to spend.

Your position is absolutely right, and you've been attacked by others for citing someone with the "fallacy of appeal to old foggies". Rothbard's analysis was done in the 1970s, I believe, and is effectively contemporary. (Or at least I'm not aware of any serious attempts to refute it.)

Unfortunately, in popular culture the science of economics does not get much respect, going against the popular political perception of inflation being "good" and I've gotten banned from hacker news for making economic arguments like the one I've just made. Which is why this is the first post from a new account. (It is unfortunate that Hacker News does not tolerate differing opinions. But as anyone can see from this post, the salient fact-- that gold was banned-- is undisputed historical fact that blows the operating theory out of the water... and thus I have contributed to this discussion historical facts that are relevant to it. Should I be praised for that? Or banned for disagreeing with the party line? (or for pointing out that I've been banned in the past? I think the censorious nature of this site is employed to keep hidden its intolerance... so I might get the ban for that... but you never know because there is no warning, you just suddenly get the ax. My last account's karma was about 1,200 acquired over 6 months of contributions.) Consider this warning about the nature of this site the payment I require for going thru the effort of making a new account to contribute this critical historical fact to the discussion.