907 karma · joined April 10, 2018
I have no idea if that would work for inter-city transport but for inner-city transport the HVV for example (the public transportation network responsible for hamburg and surrounding areas) sells 30 million tickets a year and I wonder how much it truly costs them to do that with all the relevant factors mentioned above.
Most of my friends graduated from university with either a bachelor or a masters degree and only those who stand to inherit a sizable sum of money or their parents home are going to have houses. A 50k salary simply won't cut it. Most have given up on the dream entirely since 30+ years of debt is not something they can justify.
As a quick back of the envelop calculation:
Let's say you had a household income of 86k for two people (43k+43k) which translates to about 4550 EUR per month after taxes, health insurance and pension fund. Their cost of living on average (not including rent) in the hamburg area would be somewhere around the 1900 EUR mark, leaving about 2650 EUR per month. Since people need to save at least a little money, or go on vacation once in a while or repair their car or maybe they have kids it's probably generous to assume they could use 2000 EUR per month to pay off a house.
Let's say you'd get a house for 600k all inclusive and you had to take on 500k of debt. With a current interest of about 2.76% fixed for 20 years and paying off 2000 EUR per month, then after 20 years you'd still be at about 224k of debt and you'd have paid 203k in interest. Assuming the same interest thereafter it would take a total of 30 years and 10 months to pay the house off entirely. During that time larger repairs or renovations are likely needed which would most likely forbid to pay off more than 2000 EUR per month.
Now one could argue that people could find places for half as much in rural areas but then again, lots of professions won't find any jobs there and those that do often get paid way less. Somehow the situation saddens me. My parents bought a semi-detached house 20 years ago for 200k (which would be 264k today adjusting for inflation). Two identical semis in the same street got sold last year, each for more than 500k, so pretty much double the inflation adjusted prices albeit being 20 years older houses now.
Also xcode in general is such a bizarre IDE compared to the IDEA products or even VSCode which I felt was limiting me severely, even after making quite some effort to adjust and learn shortcuts. I also found that the screen/component preview was just so inconsistent, performance hungry and slow that I stopped using it pretty quickly. I want to like SwiftUI but it feels too rough around the edges for me so I guess I'll check back in a year.
I tried flutter after and it was SO much less painful, more/easier customizable and tooling felt heaps better.
IMHO however, movement and tactile feedback are still lacking so far behind that I don't even know if they can be solved in a non-invasive, average user friendly manner. I mean sure, you can strap yourself to a treadmill contraption and use controllers or gloves to track your hands and maybe even wear some suit which vibrates here and there. But you won't feel real collisions, let alone texture, realistic force and acceleration. And somehow when I tried VR I felt like this was missing so much that it limits my enjoyment big time.
Being the idiot that I am I thought I wouldn't need a swap file and now everytime my ram is full my system freezes entirely.
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Dear battery technology claimant,
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies.
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If anyone more knowledgeable would like to share their insights or favourite ressources on the matter I'd be really interested.
And no they don't most of the time. Investigations about this are rare apparently and also only working for one customer in that capacity at a time is not really an indication of pseudo self-employment or tax fraud.
If the company dictates you your work hours and you suddenly appear in organisational diagrams as if you were employed and you were part of all company meetings and a couple of other things in the same vain then that would be indicative of pseudo self-employment. It's basically mostly about whether you are bound by instructions or not. This is however checked rarely (usually it would need to be initiated by one of the participating parties and we do not want that) and also hard to do rigorously. The laws around that are mainly to protect people from earning too little and being subject to paying all their social insurances/taxes by themselves and not getting any vacation days. For higher paying jobs this is not much of a threat since being paid higher than an average FTE would also count as indicative for being self-employed. Same goes with working from wherever I want (yay homeoffice).
If pseudo-self employment were ascertained during an audit my customer would need to retroactively pay the social insurances for the months I worked for him and if he were to employ me further he could deduct that from my income of the following months but only for the last three or four months. I think there is a chance under very specific circumstances that the customer could try to demand that I would have to pay the difference between what a normal FTE would be paid compared to what I was paid but it's not yet clear whether that is actually lawful and I think it only applies if both parties were not entirely clear that the business relation ship is based on the premise of freelancing.
All in all I am not very concerned that it will actually ever be a real problem. I have talked to at least two dozen freelancers doing what I do. Sometimes for over a decade and never once have they been questioned in their status in any way.
So either it's webdev specific right now or I am just incredibly lucky but even as my current project is near its end I have about 3 options to chose from to continue elsewhere seamlessly after. Other freelancers I met in the field have reported similar situations but that's just anecdotal evidence. Would you have a reference of where that 50% unpaid time comes from?
Employed at 100k Euro, no kids, not married:
- 27.406 Euro income tax
- 1.243 Euro solidarity tax
- 7.923 Euro pension fund
- 1.022 Euro unemployment insurance
- 1.030 Euro statutory nursing care insurance
- 4.440 Euro health insurance
= 56.932 Euros left over.
Health care can be made a bit cheaper with a private insurance company but this is the ballpark most people would be in. All the listed taxes and insurances are mandatory.
Freelance with 100k Euro, no kids, not married:
- 22.290 Euro income tax
- 1.225 Euro solidarity tax
- 10.594 Euro health insurance
- 15.840 Euro pension fund
= 51.310 Euro
However: Paying into the pension fund is not mandatory as a freelancer and you can also choose how much to pay and health insurance can be made cheaper here as well. Health insurance and pension fund will be deducted from your taxable income. Also as others have mentioned you can suddenly deduct a lot of things (phone bills, parts of your electricity bill, buying a new laptop etc.).
The main kicker here however is this: I work as a freelance webdev and so far I have managed to make about 80 Euros/hour which given my current workload will result in about 130k Euros of income this year. I have yet to get an offer from any company willing to pay more than 100k.
It's a great tool for MVP scenarios and especially in business contexts that price tag is entire negligible compared to the hourly rate of most engineers! So a single hour saved will already make up for it.
Btw, I should probably not post this but we share the exact same name and work in the same field. :D
I just had a quick look at google, netflix, twitter and facebook and they don't even offer any SE positions here. Amazon has some in Berlin but they pay around the same salary as stated above.