But only a thin section is impacted by EV issues. I'm not knocking them BTW. I'm saying that we have interconnected the two coasts (and by extension everything in-between) and they don't have the same issue as us. It changes the dynamics as the earlier post was saying.
I was looking at Shiftphone but haven't been able to identify a single advantage over Fairphone. More vendors isn't bad, but it's so niche, I think more people actively use F-Droid (and that's already niche) than know the name Shiftphone! They'd stand stronger and be a more realistic option if they collaborated on some level
I'm curious if you know of any reason to buy Shift besides specifically supporting German economy instead of the Dutch one
And would you know why they don't work together? At least on the software side that's easy to do remotely. I know Fairphone has been struggling to catch up with the machine learning and other services other vendors are adding on top of e.g. the camera sensor to get good photos. They seem to be doing better now but Shift seems to still have a lot of software bugs, eyeing their forums
Shift has more products to offer. They also have a slightly different concept. For example, the batteries are compatible across device categories (put the phone battery in the tablet keyboard) and the make sure that only ONE type of screw is needed for the complete phone. They also have hardware kill switches on their devices
Shift is more or less a non-profit (their type of LLC/Gmbh has a special status) and they have a broader opinion on what „fair“ means.
Thanks for the info! They do look nice and the prices are very affordable.
I'm a bit worried by their lack of focus, though - looks like they are spreading themselves a bit thin, they are trying to build a lot of different gadgets all at once (keyboards, speakers, laptops, headphones, etc). Building a phone is hard enough, trying to build all other things might dilute the valuable development resources.
Book trips from European websites in the future. Prices here need to include everything upfront. Which might lead to situations where you reserve a hotel room in the USA for 1500, but then only pay 1200 at checkout because the remaining 300 are the "resort fee" that will be paid at the hotel. Or take car rental: the cheaper, more complete packages for the USA are often booked in the EU at at better price.
+1 for hotels, but I'd be careful with car rentals. Often, these bookings are tied to the country of residence of the driver, which could at least theoretically have insurance implications.
Can you give an example? I just checked a random rental website for France and I got a very clear `From $xx` price and I could — in one step — go to checkout with that exact price by simply not selecting any other options.
Sure you will have upsells but if a price for a service is presented, that should be a final price. You can't tack on "resort fees", the price presented must be inclusive of all the required charges. For example as much as I dislike Booking.com, the price they show for a room includes everything — tax, mandatory cleaning fee and city tax if applicable.
I was trying to ascertain if we're discussing just taxes etc, or from the article "fees (like baggage, seat assignments, and service charges)" and whether you /need/ to select extras to have a decent standard of a service
Also, so much is unbundled these days, you have to be really careful what that initial price really includes. For example, with Sixt, they often don't include the basic CDW + Theft coverage which for a long time was always included in the base price. I assumed it was law in most of Europe. Luckily Avis, Hertz, Europcar don't stoop that low
You're right - you can book a car, and if you don't inadvertently agree to extras either verbally or on the ipads at the rental desk, and don't incur any extra charges/fees during the rental, the price you pay should be what you initially reserved :-)
And you're right about booking.com - they seem to do a fairly good at at incorporating tourist taxes etc into the final price.
I did that — picked a booking, it redirected me to Expedia and showed a $0 rental! But then when I changed my region on the top bar from US to "Rest of Europe", that booking no longer worked. When I then search (on Expedia) for the same location and dates, I get very believable prices (200-300 EUR). When I change the region back to the US and search again directly on Expedia, I
see the same scam $0 offer as previously.
I think this supports precisely my point — in EU all the fees are presented such that you can get the service without any hidden costs
The crazy thing is that as a business owner (GmbH/AG) you can’t even move to another EU country any more since 2022. As the owner of such a company it feels like I have become a slave of the government.
The ruling has been changed again in 2024. You can delay the tax when moving to the EU until you really sell the company. Because the EU ruled that the German tax rule violated the free travel concept part of the EU contract.
- enjoy owning and managing a business
- do think that owning and managing a business should come with the same compensation as any other dayjob (hairdresser or whatever)
While managing a large amount of money naturally lead people to have enough to buy luxury items, IMO, this is just a sad fact of our world, and we should fight against it.
Because it shouldn't come with the same compensation as any other day job.
Let's say you can make $80,000 as a hairdresser. You are seriously proposing that someone who takes all of the risk of
* Renting their own hair salon,
* Building up their own clientele,
* Taking out loans to purchase hair dressing equipment, and
* The thousand other things the business owner has to do in addition to actually dress hair themselves,
should walk away with the same amount we the person who just gets hired to dress hair.
No one would ever start a legal business under such a regime. It's all downside! Which is why you never see people actually owning and running businesses (successful ones at least, and most unsuccessful ones too) with the mindset you describe.
Do they actually walk out with more, though? Looking at the 'businesses for sale' listings here in the UK, I can see most of the hairdressing salons have an asking price of between 2x and 10x the statutory minimum wage. So even if the hairdresser built the business by themselves in only a few years, has never sold any stock, and has no outstanding loans, they'd probably get no more than twice what they'd have earnt as a non-entrepreneurial hairdresser over the same period. Then that will also be taxed at a higher rate.
I'm not saying that being an entrepreneur isn't a good way of making money in certain circumstances, but I think that starting any brick-and-mortar business is barely viable compared to persuing a white-collar career where one's final salary would dwarf the value of even the most successful hairdressing enterprise.
TLDR; the promise of money alone cannot motivate someone to become an entrepreneur.
This is different to OP's question. OP is specifically asking why it can't be so that the entrepreneurial hairdresser is guaranteed, in some moral sense at least, to get no more than once what they'd have earned as a non-entrepreneurial hairdresser.
They can and frequently such people are; but they aren't very obvious because they stop while the business is still small. If we don't harness greed into doing something productive then there isn't enough motivation in the world to power a modern industrial society. People like Bezos would just sit around running a local bakery or something instead.
The way the system works is people who create unfathomable amounts of wealth get to keep unreasonable amounts of it. If that link is broken, they'll stop at creating a reasonable amount of wealth and then everything grinds to a halt. If someone is in a situation where they are doing a good thing they should have every incentive to keep going and not stop.
> People like Bezos would just sit around running a local bakery or something instead.
And we may be better off as a society? The problem with greed is that it can be very destructive and has high costs for the society and environment. Thus, how much greed is constrained is in the end kind of a social contract.
Risk. There is nothing to fight against, but "we" might consider educating ourselves so that we understand why the calculation that happens through the price mechanism benefits all, and moreso than any alternative.
This has been tried in mother Russia and several other countries and it didn’t work because of math. You need to compensate the risk with an upside otherwise nobody will play the game.
It’s like rolling a 50/50 coin where your payout is 0 or 100%. Why would you play if there is only downside?
>While managing a large amount of money naturally lead people to have enough to buy luxury items, IMO, this is just a sad fact of our world, and we should fight against it.
Ironically some of the biggest european companies are related to luxury items.
The thing you're describing is an underpaid CEO position without equity. If you're competent enough to get the job in competition with people who want to get paid, I'm sure you can.
Why is that? It has been the case for a very long time for taxation; the decision gravity has to be in the where the company is. But curious if this is something else as 2022 is too recent for this.
Aside problems with Musk it has to be said that the model lineup of Tesla is poor by today’s Euopean standards. We have lots of models and brands available in all sizes, luxurious and expensive to small and fun. Tesla was a great choice in 2019, but now it is just one among many and it doesn’t boast a great design or interesting imterior.
Even in the US, Tesla has problems with lack of variety.
In my case, almost nothing they sell fits in my garage. Even their shortest (Model 3) just barely fits, and there’s no hatch variant like I’d prefer, so I’m leasing a Nissan Ariya and will probably switch to one of those next-gen Leafs afterwards.
I have 2 or 3 neighbors that solved that problem by parking in the driveway. I think the car would fit in the garage but ~75% of my neighbors use their garage as an extra room to store shit.
Yeah that’s what my neighbors do too, but I live in a dense suburb and it makes getting in/out difficult if everybody’s driveways (including mine) are full, and the size of my car exacerbates that. Even as it is it’s a pain when the one neighbor has their truck in their driveway instead of their usual smaller Forester — in that case my small-by-SUV-standards Ariya suddenly feels like a whale trying to slip through.
My needs also just aren’t that great. I don’t commute and I don’t drive much, so a small, highly maneuverable city car fits the bill perfectly.
If you don’t commute and don’t drive much a Tesla doesn’t make sense anyway. Other than next-gen Leaf, your next-best option might be a used Chevy Bolt (or Bolt EUV).
What an absolutely lovely webapp! I have loved listening to far away stations since early childhood, when I built antennas in the garden to catch far away waves....
