harha

Just makes the rest that can avoid it more powerful.

KYC doesn’t protect you from much, all sorts of scams still send money to bank accounts and you wont get your money back from the bank it was sent to even though they should have systems in place to know what is happening and where money is going.

And as you mention it doesn’t dissuade the powerful. So what’s the purpose other than control and bullying the ones who didn’t commit a crime?

It’s funny how regular software now seems fishy now that everyone is calling home. I’m close to getting a VM or a raspberry pi to run Citrix and zoom because they have all this junk that runs at startup and removing it causes strange error messages.

it's too bad so much goes missing from the original DVD / Blu-ray - not even sure if the streaming releases are cut further or not.

Probably there's also less effort in collecting and making this content available.

Right, but the letters are typically directed towards employees.

That’s why in most situations it would make sense to think about how to do and take less

Misaligned incentives do their part too, from fixed rent for older buildings to energy efficiency standards not considering the energy used in rebuilding

Curious how we got here, given that so much effort is being made in UI research, product management, etc.

There’s the obvious dark patterns when you want to nudge users, but what about all the rest where a product is supposed to sell by being more productive for the user?

Truffle oil is the devil, even worse than overloading food with garlic or Sichuan pepper because on top of making all other tastes disappear for the rest of the meal, it also tastes like a high school chemistry project.

Where I live it’s in everything (what is perceived as western that is), especially vegetarian, mushroom pasta, Parmesan French fries, salad, you name it. And most of the time the meals are either premade or they’re too inflexible to deviate just a tiny bit from what they offer.

Well to me it’s quite unfriendly to small businesses to (without telling you in advance - UG is always advertised as the simplification that it isn’t) require so much money for essentially nothing. I think it should be much cheaper and easier to shut down a business. Yes, there are alternatives, but nothing is really great to start a business there, especially if you want to bootstrap and not get a massive apparatus running before you have a good market fit.

My impression of Germany was that they try to force you to keep things going on forever - health insurance, pension, etc. as soon as you want to change something you lose a ton of money. Also: don’t ever criticize anything because they obviously really know what they’re doing.

Well in theory that is. Who actually reads the notice and if the company hasn’t paid yet, how do you know they still have money?

It’s a bureaucratic exercise that most countries manage to avoid.

Agree that bribes should be part of the analysis, but I would do the comparison with the time and cost to accomplish a goal, without judging the method.

If you look at the outrageously high fees and lack of competition (notaries and tax accounts - yes there’s a bunch out there but it’s not the market dictating the fee and no guarantees that they won’t work towards a suboptimal outcome) I don’t really see how bribes are worse. In Germany corruption has just moved up the chain making everything expensive.

Overall it’s a lost opportunity to create wealth, jobs and a competitive advantage, both in India and Germany.

Then there’s the bit about personal preference. I didn’t see anything good in Germany, but happy for you if you do and live there.

> That's bankruptcy.

So you're saying for a small UG you should always spare 1-2 years (most likely more than 1) in case you decide not to pursue the business anymore? I'd rather spend 2-5k on other things.

Apart from being an absurdly high amount for something that can be read out easily from any sane accounting system (thanks Germany for basically forcing everyone to use Datev, which they obviously only sell to professionals, so that's how a simple task becomes 2k+ per year [0]).

> Maybe they do want to make sure that the process stays legitimate

That doesn't really solve the problem, I've had clients with GmBHs who ended up not paying what they owed me - just because they pay a lot to accountants, notary, the state etc. doesn't make the business more sound. Conversely, you can handle a legitimate business (e.g. selling expertise in form of consulting projects) much cheaper and with less time invested elsewhere.

Maybe if everyone weren't wasting so much manpower on inefficient systems, things would actually work.

The added burden of dealing with personal tax, the high price tag for it along with social welfare (which only helps in highly rare circumstances, e.g. when I literally don't have anything anymore - which I don't need because of what I've invested) and the time lost just don't add up.

I've lived in many countries, small, large, rich, poor, and I think Germany is the worst among them to start a business (and also to live, but everyone has their preferences) unless you have a really good reason to be there.

To start something you need flexibility, low overhead, and not to waste time you could be using to talk to customers and build something, rather than deal with bureaucracy. Germany offers neither.

[0]: one quick note on the side, I've used Collmex to do my own accounting back then after I had to fire my tax accountant for absurd things I was being charged and to wrap up the business that I wasn't working on anymore. For me it worked out - in principle what is accounting: you want to track receipts and transform them into a balance sheet and P&L statement + a few of the extras you need in Germany, like VAT reporting. Still a massive pain to transform it into what the tax agency wants and get the info what that actually is, I think it's hard on purpose to waste people's time and direct them to tax accountants that overcharge.

Anyway, time invested vs. paying someone to do it probably doesn't fully add up but I learned a bit more about accounting which is nice to have in any business context.

Getting to a notary when not in Germany, all the agencies, getting to the notary a second time when it’s done, all the things you need to file (3 tax filings, 2 different accounting statements, etc), getting the letters from the agencies - all when the company is essentially dead and doesn’t have any extra 2500€ per year left for filing.

Could all be done with a small number of forms and online or for a small fee in many other countries.

What’s the benefit of doing all that?

Setting up is still the easy part, managing (the bureaucracy part, not the actual business) and getting rid of it is much more involved.

I don’t see any positive factors to being in Germany as an entrepreneur, only reason to be there is if the business can’t do otherwise (eg serving something physical to a German customer) or you already inherited something and the cost of moving would massively outweigh the benefits.

Edit: note on the inheriting part, afaik if it’s a company they tax you for the sale if you move your tax residency away (in the EU you have a few years to pay, otherwise right away). That’s also another risk when setting something up in Germany.

Don’t think this is related to capitalism though, more about attitude to risk.

If you always do the obvious things, you’ll end up as a mediocre company that might not survive. If you say yes to any project that comes to mind, you’ll end up burning all your money and end up with endless projects. It’s important to strike a balance and try to find the right investments others don’t see to create a competitive advantage.

It helps if the culture allows for that. The questions still are relevant, you just don’t always need precise answers, Probe 100 instances and see if it surfaces more than once. Set up a list of things you think you’ll need to be doing and an initial proposition what you think might change. It’s the PMs job to then convince others that it’s worth taking the risk.

PM here: I actually also got pretty excited reading this. The challenge is selling analyses with unknown outcomes to the bean counters who end up deciding. Blog posts like this help.

Then they shouldn't sell at all, only rent out.

Thanks for the explanation. Just discovered: Shortcuts actually has a gallery with a lot of examples. Also I can let it run shell scripts (at least on the Mac), so it looks like I'll be able to get inputs from other programs to another script easily (using pbpaste)

Agree to all points, haven’t been using one yet, even though it sounds quite powerful:

Automator. Do you have any good examples?

Yeah and at least in tech you get to play with: technology.

So it’s fun, but I have this constant feeling that I could actually create value and also earn more.

All the paths seem to be closed though whenever I dig a bit deeper. I was optimistic with decentralization for a while because that would let you operate outside of established firms that all seem to have the issues a sibling poster describes [1], unfortunately it didn’t take off for many notable non-financial use-cases.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33214646

Edit: added link

No, but let’s not overestimate what the rest of us are doing. I studied engineering at a prestigious school, I don’t think any of my jobs was particularly useful and this applies to most people I’ve met in my professional life. Something’s severely broken but I can’t really point to what it is.

Sounds to me like they’re operating as usual.

There’s an easy solution: the airline automatically owes the maximum amount. This would save everyone much time and put some burden back with the airliner (by potentially paying more than the customer had, though at around USD 1800 it should be quite even, especially once you consider the time spent to get your money back)

You already need to insure higher values anyway if you want to be entitled to a reimbursement, so this would set a nice minimum that encourages customer friendly behavior.

Also at least in Germany you risk the costs with no compensation for taking that risk.

They won't compensate you unless the luggage hasn't been delivered within three weeks. Even then they'll put up a battle and make you go through a bunch of forms and hotlines, request receipts that you might not have anymore etc.

For a baby car seat, probably not worth it. For other things it might be but the receipt is missing etc.

At the end it's a damage you have to face for them not doing their job right.

In theory yes, but in practice it could easily cost you more to deal with the airline and it might well be that you don’t have the receipts anymore.

With another European airline I recently waited exactly one day less than the three weeks required for them to deliver a child seat. That’s almost three weeks of not having one to safely transport my child, no support or compensation. Since I was returning to my country of residence the credit card company also didn’t refund.

This is exactly why I’m so opposed to government bail outs - even though it was repaid in most countries (famously Austria chose the worst way to save them, give them free money to not repay).

It would have been nice to see this massive company (with monopoly on many routes in Germany) broken up and under new ownership competing for customers, rather than treating them as a massive burden.

I was going to comment when the Citrix Workspace updater popped up even though I explicitly asked not to be notified about updates, a setting that is hidden by the worst settings menu I've ever seen on a Mac app (there seem to be ways to stop the app to run in the background, but why does it even need to? It's not like 2 seconds of startup time will make any difference with the latency I experience working with the product)

Anyhow, I was so happy Sharepoint was dropped for OneDrive, a slightly less bad product (and same with Teams/Skype)

The two worst things about going to work are Citrix and the coffee. WFH only fixes one of them.

What the world really needs right now is the dial-in sound of a 56k modem.