reinar

reinar , 4 months ago

lmao, 60k eur tops. wages in Germany suck ass, earning at least something is possible if you are running independent consulting or climbing corporate ladder, having some unique expertise or going extra mile as an employee is pretty much pointless.

reinar , 4 months ago

35 to 40k (if your spouse is choosing tax class with a higher rate) after taxes or around so, depends on many factors - German tax code is complicated.

Is it enough to live on

Generally - barely above “paycheck to paycheck” level, but highly depends on location. In Munich you’ll be fucked with this type of salary.

or buy a home

lmao no. Houses are mainly for older and retired people or rich, vast majority of active workforce are apartment renters, more fortunate ones were able to save/get help from relatives for mortgage. Total home ownership rate in Germany is 46.7%, lowest of all OECD countries - and that’s including older people who got their homes during better economic times. Neat trick about Germany is that you have to have both stable job at big company and a lot of cash on your hands to cop a mortgage, since 20% downpayment + taxes/fees and other bullshit that run at around 10% of the total price make good barrier.

buy a home and support a family

Not really, adults in the household have to work, 60k is not ‘breadwinner’ type of salary at all. In general, tech workers aren’t special in Germany, if not for US companies branches they’d be earning the same as everyone else and in many industries (like transportation), where pressure from international market is not present that much, they still do.

It was good while it lasted, but Germany is heading into some pretty interesting times in general, younger population is absolutely fucked.

reinar , 4 months ago

ones with floppies are alright, beware modern ones.

reinar , 4 months ago

bruh, feels like gitlab has security update every other day, it’s some bullshit even for a project this size. And who knows how many 0-days are around.

reinar , 5 months ago

Launch msrp for a HD7850, which was the same category as the 6700XT today (upper middle tier) was 250 usd.

There’s much more effort involved to produce modern GPU now. Either way, if NVidia would be truly greedy, they’d close gaming gpu business right away and would produce only AI accelerators. You can take same 4070, add $200 worth of GDDR chips to the layout and sell this for $15k minimum, shit would be on backorder.

reinar , 8 months ago

it’s like this to eliminate competition, any alternative has to fund marketing costs + unsustainable pricing, while Spotify will be running their ponzi scheme, effectively leveraging their market position.

reinar , 8 months ago

Yt makes a series of bad decisions

It’s not like it’s making any bad decisions right now. Pretty calculated, I’d say - they feel safe market-wise, so they can increase amount of ads/fight ad-blockers/push people to buy subscription.

reinar , 8 months ago

I get where you are coming from, however it’s important to remember that big players are not equal - they have really, really different people in the leadership. Elmo is just a too-big-to-fall clown with insane ego, spez is a manchild who took VC money like there’s no tomorrow and in the end had no idea how to provide ROI, but youtube is ran by very competent people with solid track record and deep pockets.

Maybe they are not too innovative business-wise recently… but they are good at catching up (except live streaming - screen layout is dogshit and nobody wants to get hyped in their tiny chatbox from a fucking google account with family photo as an avatar) and at leveraging what they already have, which is quite a lot, tbh.

reinar , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

yes, he bought it, now the question is how he will ruin it. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near my network traffic, Elmo is the type of guy to run Musk-in-the-middle for shits and giggles, even without any other possible incentives.
And before any tls or e2e discussion starts - it’s still possible to learn quite a lot if you are sitting on the channel level if you don’t run vpn on your gateway constantly.

reinar , 8 months ago

why not? it’s not like there is any competition.
Microsoft is making more money off Linux with Azure than several red hats combined.

reinar , 8 months ago

I’m clueless european now living in a country where guns are generally available to trained and vetted to some degree public and I was always puzzled by US self-defense culture, some parts of it simply do not compute to me.

Like how does it work? Are gun owners in America spending reasonable amount of time at the range? Any gun is as good as your training. Safe handling should be muscle memory at the very least to promote an individual from a danger to themselves and people around (not necessarily to an attacker) to someone who is able to hold a gun. Then comes actual shooting practice, which will improve chances of achieving intended things with this gun.

Also strange obsession with high-power calibers, even knowledgeable gun bloggers mentioning things like .357 magnum in self-defense context. Did people really try to shoot them indoors without hearing protection? Do they really mind what’s behind their target, i.e your kid sleeping in the room next door. High-powered round is a responsibility, however a lot of people talk about them like they are toys.

I really hope I’m missing something or maybe gun handling culture is really common knowledge over there not worth mentioning, because looking at the general public pretty much everywhere I’ve been - there’s no way I’d trust them with a gun. It takes some dedication to learn, even if it seems simple.

reinar , 8 months ago

resold oem key is not legal as well.

only legal options are: get windows with your device or purchase retail for a hunnit $.

just accept it and pirate.

reinar , 8 months ago

Just because you’re paid well doesn’t mean others are not being mistreated

FTFY
without unions there could be a huge salary disparity between devs in the same role, in the same company, even in the same project. I’ve personally witnessed more than 2x, heard about even more.

Sometimes it’s more than justified with individual’s performance and impact, sometimes it’s not. Some people are just better skill-wise, some people are better at applying pressure on their employer, holding business-critical knowledge hostage or simply negotiating.

Point here is - while unionizing might make things better on average, there would be a very real pushback from people who are benefitting from current system and this is not necessarily management. For management in some cases it would be even a net benefit, since they don’t have to deal with primadonnas and someone tying things to themselves just for leverage.

reinar , 8 months ago

the funny thing is actual ability to pay is varying from business to business. AAA development with in-house engine is simply inferior as a business compared to mobile gamedev or producing shitty battle royale clones with Unity. If some business can’t compete with big tech or low-effort money grabbers, does it mean it has to go?

reinar , 8 months ago

Dubai is much cheaper

reinar , 8 months ago

safe and sanitary space in Manhattan can cost the same as mansion with a pool somewhere else.

With current global world simply existing in attractive locations could be luxury.

reinar , 8 months ago

zuck’s ego fueled endeavors cost money, actual services upkeep and development is a small fraction of it.

this lizard already has insanely profitable business at hand, but it’s hard to combine steady performance for shareholders and shit like metaverse at the same time, so he needs to milk users for even more money.

reinar , 8 months ago

how do you bump it into something enough to break the latch without messing up bumper, number plate and bonnet? all of it looks intact

reinar , 8 months ago

MAC address

nope

reinar , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

“autonomous vehicle” in the article can’t handle most basic shit like emergency vehicle approaching. I’ve spent enough years in automotive engineering and all of this autonomous drive bullshit is ADAS with a few gimmicks and shouldn’t be nowhere near full control of the car, however this got out of hand and this shit is on public roads somehow.

reinar , 10 months ago

• paid by middle class, which cannot afford tax evasion.
  Wealthy people in Europe don’t pay shit. It’s much easier than in the US, where only ultra-wealthy don’t pay shit.

reinar , 10 months ago

this “overly simplistic comment” has everything you need and more, but I’ll bite.

1. Wealthy people own companies. Companies are perfect tool for accumulating wealth, since you can reinvest profits forever and pay income tax (corporate rate) only on stuff you intend to extract to your own name, which is usually not much compared to total amount of generated income. Private person, on the other hand, is taxed on whole income and may qualify for usually laughable deductions. Got huge bonus from your job at the end of the year and plan to get few months off work to “invest in yourself” and learn a new trade? Tough luck, buddy, you are “rich” now - welcome to higher tax bracket, government will take their cut first and let’s see what you’ll be able to afford with what’s left.
2. VAT is a scam to fuck people who have to spend their income for actual living. If you live paycheck to paycheck you’ll end up paying VAT on your whole income.
3. Wealthy people don’t get their income in salary, salary is for working class. Dividends, capital gains, royalties - in any jurisdiction it’s possible to find something which will be less severe than income tax, which is also often not progressive or capped at something like 20%. Social security contributions are easily bypassed by employing yourself as CEO for minimal salary. Boom - now you have same healthcare as people who have to pay great chunk of their whole paycheck for it.
4. If we restrict ourselves to EU citizens and your particular country is really anal or maybe 20% or something tax is too much for you anyway - you are free to move to Cyprus, Malta or Switzerland, which will have 0% capital gains if you meet not too tough conditions. Or “move”, you just have to get a residence there to declare as your primary one and be present at least sometimes - there’s no border control, it’s really hard to track if you spent there more than half a year for tax residency purposes, this is usually a matter of long legal battles and you won’t even get into that territory if you’re not doing anything too bizarre.
   This is a biggest difference with US citizens, they can’t benefit from tax havens because of their passport, IRS doesn’t care and is good equipped with lots of info, so US guys are left with real shady stuff with nominees and cash or traditional buy-borrow-die, which is sustainable only for ultra-rich.

I’m living and doing business in EU and it took me quite a lot of time to get from nothing into the position where I can utilize at least some of the benefits of the above - but you have to be completely fucking blind to not see that it’s rigged and tax burden on people who don’t try to game the system is completely disproportional.

reinar , 10 months ago

Right… to get at that wealth through taxes you would need a wealth tax or a tax on corporate profits along with outlawing stock buy backs.

No, you just need to prohibit forming 1-man holding companies. Want to have shares? Write them to your own name, not to a shell company’s name. That’s a first step to get this income at least tied to individual. Or get a hedge fund license, which ultra-rich will do, but they will find a way in any system other than full commie madness.

That’s not how a progressive taxes work.

I know perfectly well how progressive taxes work. In majority of cases bonus from employer will be taxed at source at higher tax rate regardless what you plan to spend it to. Even if your plans for these money would be fully deductible, you will still need to have spare cash to cover planned expenses until you get a refund. In case of wealthy person, there’s a privilege to optimize your spending first and report/pay taxes later simply because there’s no taxation at source involved.

Well, yes which is why I said I support sovereign wealth funds. That is the state owns portions of companies directly in the same way other shareholders do. This cuts out the wealthy people entirely.

No, it doesn’t unless you propose nationalization. Even if shares in publicly-listed companies will be bought in some way said fund it’s still possible to have billions in privately-held company. You can’t get something that is not for sale unless you decide to rob.

So you support lowering incoming taxes and raising taxes on dividends, capital gains, royalties?

What I’m proposing is irrelevant, the topic was who is paying for European social security. And my point is that it’s paid by poor and middle class, since they have no freedom in optimizing and planning their income. You can have tax brackets up to 99%, it’s absolutely irrelevant before a discussion what is subject to this tax. However, works well for populism reasons.

Uhh… yeah we should close that loopholes, right? Even if we didn’t close that loophole I still think its a much better system for healthcare than in the US

It’s not a loophole, it’s perfectly normal to have a paying job along with your other income sources. If these other income sources would’ve been subject for same tax brackets as job income, there wouldn’t be a problem.
US healthcare is a scam which siphons insane amount of money simultaneously from government and people, I don’t think there’s any valid argument in favor of it.

Not all that familiar with these kinds of tax dodging schemes within in the EU. But US corporations do similar things with the Cayman Islands.

Corporations could be established everywhere, corporate tax rate is another topic. In EU it’s possible to dodge taxes on your personal income, not corporate, which is not the case for US citizens.

Perhaps that is how things are but how should things be?

Again, how things should be is another topic, my original point is that high income taxes and tax brackets with what currently considered as income is cheap populism to shaft middle class. When applied to wealthy people this will catch a few exceptional individual performers like sports players which have no case in declaring their individual ability as company activity (ironically, only on “salary” part of their income - brand deals and royalties will be optimized into oblivion).

As of what would be fair… Removing VAT, eliminating 1-man holding companies to get assets to individual’s name then doing same tax rate and get any income to be subject for same tax brackets and social security contributions as everyday man’s salary. Regarding taxation at source and deductions for individuals… well, that would be also fair, but it is operational nightmare.

reinar , 10 months ago

Turns out many middle eastern toilets can’t handle toilet paper.

It’s more about toilet paper than plumbing. Toilet paper has to easily dissolve in water, otherwise you can clog any toilet, be it western or eastern.

reinar , 10 months ago

with arch it’s relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that’s it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there’s nothing to break.

every time I’ve tried “out of the box” desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it’s been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.

reinar , 10 months ago

I run flood together with qbittorrent, looks great everywhere.

reinar , 11 months ago

good way to accidentally lose the data.

in case of any forensics your drive will be copied first and master will be not touched, any decryption attempts will be executed on copies - so kill switch is effectively useless.