266 karma · joined August 31, 2013
Founded Lexa.nl, largest dating site in The Netherlands, and Kamernet.nl, the de facto way for students to find rentals.
CTO of Physitrack (www.physitrack.com)
I had an argument with a vegetarian cat owner about this the other week….
- range - safety features - audio system - etc - acceleration
Will be more difficult for high-end brands (Range Roger, Porsche) to use as discerning factors if the "heart" of the vehicle is largely identical between a Kia and a Porsche.
Will luxury car makers go to the way of Vertu vs. iPhone, or Omega vs. Apple Watch?
That said, I sorely miss proper i18n support.
Currently, we use Transifex to i18n our marketing website, but this means that our SEO is hurt, as Google does not index strings in JS.
Vlad, if you're reading this, please have a look here for a feature suggestion: https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-2218
This ruling is rather incongruent with the recent Airbnb ruling (1) where Airbnb was ruled to be nothing more than an "information society service". (Rant: you could apply this label to anything from a public library to a sadistic secret service.)
Comparable to Uber, Airbnb makes money per transaction, yet claims it is no more than an information medium.
I used to operate several large classifieds sites in the Netherlands, and am rather certain that as soon as the platform starts collecting per-transaction fees, it becomes part of the transaction, as it is in fact a broker between two parties.
In my (consumer) view: Uber adds value and convenience to a city and threatens an inefficient and monopolistic status quo (at least here in the Netherlands), whereas Airbnb turns housing into business cases, for better of for worse (and in Amsterdam: for worse).
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/19/eu-court-...
Transportation is still only 28%, slightly more than a quarter. Electricity & "industry" account for 50%.
Further, I remember a discussion with the president of Mercedes who was pushed for cleaner cars. He mentioned that one ocean-going freight vessel pollutes more than 450k cars combined (here is an article in that same trend (2).
I love the notion of quiet, electric cars, but the "industry" that pollutes these cars, and the "electricity" that is needed to charge these cars still accounts for 50% of the pollution. So, until ocean freighters are cleaned up, the net effect on pollution will likely be zero.
1) https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... 2) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-...
The issue is that these scooters should not be on pedestrian walkways / sidewalks (and they are in Singapore), because there is too much difference in speed.
Singapore recently came with strict rules about usage, so perhaps there is a middle ground: https://www.mobilityscooters.sg/blogs/blog/are-mobility-scoo...
I'll stick to my bicycle for now, though. In Holland, I like the trend of "Bike roads" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard) as the deeper issue, certainly in London, has nothing to do with electric scooters, but with a reduction in automobile traffic, and giving back space to bicycles (and electric scooters, why not).
Who are the UBOs of these Luxemburg entities? Happy activist investors? Or wealthy family funds who funnel the money to CH and the Caribbean?
A leaking bucket.
The rules around taxation in a global economy where mainly ideas/IP are shuffled around needs to evolve.
The idea of the euro is convenient, but since the crisis of 2007-2009 + various (Greek) scares, it's devolved into a "cake and eat it" situation.
A country cannot devaluate its currency (Sweden still has this freedom if it so wanted).
I'm not sure what the solution is, but to start, I would homogenize corporate tax rates, and discourage tax-shopping inside the EU.
Great that IE is 12%, but this "competition" is BS in the sense that they needed the higher-tax countries to bail them out just a few years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-2008_Irish_banking_crisis
It's a leak in the EU system, and it needs to be plugged.
Just imagine what a unified income tax rate in the EU would do. (Post-Brexit, although if I were a gambling man, I'd wager that the Brexit will never materialize; A Brexit would sort of be like throwing out your existing post-ww2 source code instead of refactoring. Recipe for disaster).
THEN countries would really need to compete on quality of life and infrastructure to attract (US) corporations to establish show. Amsterdam is happy to welcome all the post-Brexit (see comment above) banks and EU-related orgs, as is Frankfurt.
Indeed, there are no ingredients listed on wine either. It's not 100% grape juice. Various types of yeast and sulfur are added, and likely other ingredients.
Given that the whole world has pushed hard on anti-tobacco (rightfully so IMHO), and has shown beyond doubt that (known) additives are carcinogenic, I find it odd that Coca Cola is not more explicit about the exact composition of their drink.