It's often mere fiscal arbitrage. Look at the Belgians in Sofia for example. Euro zone, simpler and more stable administration, much cheaper, better climate, good food. Ridiculously lower taxes. Work remotely for Belgian customers. Pay 10% tax instead of 53.5% + 25+% employer social security contributions + 13.07% employee side. Even in a junior position, working for a Belgian client, you are so much cheaper to them while your net income is so much higher.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Trump administration actively shrinking the economic cake worldwide. Its active economic and cultural warfare against Europe. Nothing to sneeze at.

Germany and by extension the EU have shown remarkable resilience for now. The question what will happen next should an actual crisis follow. Don't be surprised should Europe further integrate its capital markets and defense to some extent.

Not sure how to parse that. Perhaps it's a cultural thing? This seems to be conflating value, meaning and worth in a confusing-to-me way.

- "Grandma's heirloom" would have sentimental value, regardless of brand name, production process or monetary value. Grandma's candy box or her modest music box would have similar sentimental value. Depending on what this grandmother meant to you as a person, this could be positive or negative sentimental value.

-"Tiffany's" versus "no name, ordered online" might for equal quality jewelry make for a slight higher resale value. All other things being equal, that is.

- Lab grown versus mined could make a slight difference in resale value. This is very often very much overestimated because of how the diamond retail market works.

- Lab grown versus mined really depends when it comes to emotional value.

  - For example, if someone were to offer my wife or me a mined diamond with no history, we'd assign it negative emotional value because of the suffering attached. Unless it were to have come from a historical source with no money having changed hands, not even in the second hand trade. In which case no extra harm would have been done even by trading in the secondary market.

  - Others might attach positive emotional value to the rarity of the mined diamond.

  - Some sociopaths, psychopaths or sadists no doubt attach positive emotional value to the knowledge people had to suffer for the ring on their finger.

How do you get accountable people in charge of healthcare policy?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Initiative

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Payments_Alliance

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lund_Fisker [1] https://archive.org/details/earlyretiremente0000fisk

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyclingMikey

So many airports direct passenger flow through a shopping zone drenched in perfume fumes. Disgusting as far as I'm concerned.

Not to mention the screaming visual pollution of course.

I'm not holding my breath.

For some perspective, look at how something with a much smaller scope is being "revolutionised". I'm speaking of intra-EU dividend taxation, as regulated in EU directive 2025/50 ("FASTER"). A slightly less complicated dividend double taxation regime between EU member states. Applies to dividends on shares in public companies only. If the shares in question have not been traded within 5 days from the ex-dividend date. If the gross dividend is below 100k€. If the member state is not very small. From 2030. Using EU standardised forms. In some cases, resulting in direct reduction of the double taxation at source. In other cases, refund of excess double dividend tax within 60 days.

The clean solution would be to tax dividends in the tax residency member state of the receiving individual only. That would require a rather large leap of trust from very financialised EU member states like .ie, .lu or .nl. Perhaps possible with a long transition period and compensations. Only there's also bad faith state actors like .hu randomly torpedoing EU legislation to extract concessions. This discourages other member states from even trying to implement the clean solution.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47211259

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

Short-term negative-sum transactionalists are governing the US. Even if November stabilises things somewhat, the cat is probably out of the bag.

Trust comes on foot, but leaves on horseback. _That_ is why a well-integrated EU-based payment system is needed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Guillou

Pro musician here.

There's piles upon piles of human-generated music soullessly regurgitating stock patterns with inane lyrics since long before Alan Turing was even flown in by the stork. Most recent popular music by far is bland sausage factory production.

Why not allow yourself to be moved by beautiful music, wheter it's machine generated or not?