klunger

American in Norway here. The amount excluded depends on the tax treaty and is different for each country. Right now, if you make above around 100k USD in Norway (adjusted each year for inflation), that amount above is taxed by the US. But, that is only for regular employment.

If, for example, you decide to start freelancing, you still have to pay all of your self-employment taxes to the US, on top of the similar taxes here, even if your income is well below 100k.

Also, if you decided to start a company or start-up (i.e., anything that is not a sole proprietorship), you get into a hell hole of other compliance regulations that makes it VERY expensive. It effectively mean no one wants to cofound with you or invest in you. Having US citizenship while abroad is terrible for entrepreneurs. (source: conversations with other Americans who have tried and failed to launch startups here for these reasons)

Nope if you open an investment account in the US and make a bunch of money, that will not be reported to your home country (Unless you do it yourself.)

In Norway, if you are on a knowledge worker visa, your salary needs to be competitive. This amount increases each year with inflation.

As an American working in Norway, I have to say that this is how it should be done in the US . My Norwegian coworkers do not resent me because I was not hired because I am any cheaper than they are. And, I get a salary that allows me to meet the high cost of living here. If companies were allowed to pay foreigners significantly below industry standard, it would be a disaster. I don't understand why this is still standard practice in the US.

Oh wait, I do understand: it allows companies to pay less for labor and pad their profit margins. But it is bogus, and this is one Trump initiative I can get behind.

>But the laws of physics are not only symmetrical in space but also in time.

Can someone explain what this means? It makes sense that physical laws are symmetrical in space. But in time? I thought that would not be the case because of entropy/irreversible processes etc. What am I missing? The whole article rests on this premise.

Hmm, I agree that much of the higher level math is not required for engineering work that has extended math requirements for the engineering degree. However, at least for aerospace, it goes a bit beyond 8th grade algebra and excel.

I used to work as an aerospace engineer, doing trajectory analysis. We used high school trig and algebra, as well as first semester calculus pretty much all the time. But, I don't think any of the other required math classes for my aerospace degree were ever used (3 semesters calc, 2 semesters linear algebra, diff. eq, IIRC). I did end up using a fair amount of stats, which was not required for my degree, but really should have been.

Why is China and India the exception here? They keep getting mentioned as an exception in this discussion.

For those who prefer audio/podcasts, the Planet Money companion piece covers a lot of the same material: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/06/29/484029238/episo...

Did you miss the part where I do not have a way to save for retirement? And why on earth do you assume that I am rich? Because I live in Norway? I barely qualify as middle class. Thanks to student loans and zero support from my family, I still have a significant negative net worth, despite the fact that I live as thriftily as possible and have been working as an engineer since 2010.

If you are a US resident and mess up on your taxes, you do not get fined into bankruptcy. You just have to pay what you owed. The fee structure is the insane part of FATCA, not the taxes themselves.

As soon as I get Norwegian citizenship, if FATCA has not been repealed by that point, I will seriously consider renouncing. Because of the above reasons, not because I am some rich fat-cat wanting to evade taxes. If I wanted to evade taxes, I would move back to the US, which is a fantastic tax haven, instead of living my life here in Norway.

What the heck is "expat welfare"? The only relationship I have with the US government at this point is stress and expense from these forms every year, along with my inability to save for retirement. Literally no other developed country imposes this stress and compliance cost on their residents abroad. It is not welfare to expect to be treated like everyone else. And, if it was just filing regular taxes, and then getting it excluded with the FEIE, that would still be annoying, but fine. However, there is a whole extra set of insanely confusing forms to navigate, where you get fined into non-dischargeable bankruptcy if you mess them up, even non-willfully. People develop mental health issues and have even had their marriages destroyed from the stress of this prospect. It is not "just some extra forms" or "expat welfare" to want this onerous burden to be removed.

Sometimes I walk past the US embassy because it is in downtown Oslo (it looks like a prison and is a total blight on an otherwise charming neighborhood, btw), but I do not get any kind of "expat welfare" from it. I suppose I will visit there when my passport needs renewing in a few years, but that is it. If I wanted to contact them or voice my concerns about the pension issue (which could be resolved if they updated the tax treaty, like Germany has done), I have no way of doing so.

Why are you trolling this thread with support for FATCA when it is clearly a terrible thing for millions of people? You have no idea what you are talking about. Ugh!

This is a duplicate of a submission I made 2 weeks ago.

Anyway, as an American abroad, I think about this periodically. Like the author, I never owe anything in taxes, but the stress and expense from making sure paperwork is correctly filed each year is really awful. If I mess something up on my FBARs, non-willfully, I would be fined enough to completely bankrupt me, the fines being way above the value of the accounts I might somehow misreport. How can you misreport an account? Well, you could use the wrong currency exchange rate, or you might not have access to information required on the form so you have o guess, or you could think that accounts with a balance of 0 all year do not need to be reported (turns out they do). Or maybe you think that an account with money for a loan does not need to be reported because it is not really your money (you do). And so on. Every mistake costs you 10k/account/year. It is true insanity.

Also, I currently have no tax deferred way to save for retirement because my employer funded pension account here (it is essentially a 401k, just based in Norway) is treated as a regular investment account by the IRS. So, I have to pay taxes on any gains each year on my pension. Luckily, this has always been below the standard deduction, but in some years, it will (hopefully) not be. I also cannot make any contributions myself to the account or else it turns into a PFIC (which is a Very Bad Thing).

That being said, I am hopeful that FATCA will be repealed, or at least revised so that it does not threaten to bankrupt middle class Americans with the ridiculous fee structure and recognizes foreign pension accounts. I do not want to give up my US citizenship, but will be forced to if something does not change in the next few years.

> What culture do Germans, Greeks, Latvians, Bulgarians, Fins, and Spaniards share?

Eurovision?

The US likely also rates low because, unless you are also a resident of the US, it opens you up to a lot of tax compliance nightmares, re: FATCA. See https://medium.com/@RachelHeller/https-medium-com-rachelhell...

The Java page is basically a list of links to tutorialspoint.com, which seems like an odd choice.

Thanks for the suggestion, I will look into swagger.

This should have (2013).

Also: I love how Terminator 2 made 1991 red.

It was interesting that they used dogs as an example of a population that had its work taken away by technological progress, yet did not provide the obvious counter example (horses).

> I see women writing about these meta-topics of "being a female programmer" far, far more often than any actual technical aspect.

I used to wonder about this myself. But, then I met some ladies that write technical blogs anonymously, or under male or gender neutral pseudonyms. This was because of the harassment they experienced themselves, or witnessed in others, when they originally set out to write as a woman in tech.

So, I suspect that women writing about getting women into tech is one of the few ways that they feel comfortable publicly contributing to their field (even if not from angle they may have originally preferred).

>Professional writers aren’t ad-financed.

Wrong.

While some outlets enjoy full state support or sufficient subscription revenue to not need advertisements, the VAST majority of publications get a significant portion of their revenue (which is the used to pay their staff writers and freelance contributors) from ads. Better known examples of such publications include: The New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic.

In Norway, where I live, Aftenposten was given access to the Panama Papers for analysis and publication. Aftenposten is partially subsidized by the Norwegian government, but also dependent on ad revenue to survive.

No. You are basically saying that people should work for free if they are passionate about it. Professional writers cannot pay their bills with passion. Same with artists, musicians etc, and every other underpaid profession. Just because they (hopefully) like what they do, does not mean it is not work or does not have value.

Well, they could not have known in 2012. But, they did just re-air those episodes in the last few weeks as re-runs. So, that was either a big coincidence, or they knew it was coming.

> Then why hide it?

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to use these kinds of services. Releasing all the data is a huge privacy violation for all the customers who have done nothing wrong. Would you like much of your perfectly legal business and/or personal finance dealings suddenly made public?

Meanwhile, did anyone else find it hilarious that folders were pointed out as one of the great new feature upgrades for Apple TV?

Would YC consider subsidising child care costs for participating founders? At present, the infamously high cost of child care in the Bay Area makes YC out of reach for most founders with young children.

Thanks to the paywall, I cannot read this article.

But, it seems like VC's have rediscovered that cutting edge Victorian technology, the boarding house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house

This was quite low, even for a ransomware attack. What's next, daycare centers?

Oh, you are right. I was mixing up FATCA and FBAR.

I am an American in Norway...

I thought you only had to file FATCA for bank accounts that had more than $10,000 USD in them at some point in the past year. Not a few hundred. Are you sure about that? (if so, oh sh*t)

I actually think this is a reasonable move for them. They have to pay their staff and keep the lights on while producing their content. It is kind of entitled and ridiculous for readers to think the party of well-researched, well-written and insightful content for free could go on forever. You either should have to pay for it explicitly with a subscription fee, or consent to ads and tracking. Yes, there is a lot of mediocre fluff/stuff there, but there is easily $1/week worth of high quality content imho.

And, if you do not want to partake, then don't. No one is making you read Wired. But, I strongly suspect that publishers that want to keep producing high quality content without running themselves into the ground, as ad blockers become more prevalent, are going to go down this road. The folks here that saying "Ad blockers or bust!" are going to be left with increasingly fringe and lower quality content in the future.

So... good time to buy?

This is neat. I wish there was a way to zoom in/out of the canvas area, so I could go deeper with my fractals.

Create a LinkedIn profile, with links to any projects she may have done. Use the right keywords. Recruiters use this to find and contact people with specific skills.

Maybe also take a 2-3 sentences to explain the gap, with a positive spin. "For a brief period, I was unable to work, due to visa issues. I therefore spent my time on the following independent projects: ... The visa issues have resolved and I am now actively looking for work in ... ." Or something.