nforgerit

It opened up plenty of loopholes to avoid taxes and quit social systems, starting from healthcare, pensions etc. to all those little extras that allow you a tax avoiding setup which is impossible for regular employees. It also incentivizes ridiculous consumption, like the company car tax you mentioned but also to “just buy anything for 100k just to maximize cost”. It also doesn’t really incentivize RND but to wait for the next “RND tax program” any future government might be setting up. No shit that German companies are so bad with innovation (plus they’re usually lead by MBAs and lawyers who frequently have no clue).

German solo-founder here who just gave up this shitshow and moved to Estonia:

> Estimate your revenue at 0€ for now unless you have real reason to believe otherwise (do you have paying customers lined up already? probably not). That way, you only have to pay corporate tax at the end of the year based on your actual profit (vs. having to prepay tax every quarter).

This is funny. I tried to set my revenue to 0 in the beginning and the tax authority simply set it to 60k (they couldn't even tell me where this number came from). After a couple of harsh phone calls (from their end, they were yelling) they simply kept it and told me I could file a "Verwaltungsklage". Of course, they (and IHK) derive the quarterly pre-taxes from that and didn't give a rats ass if I actually made any revenue. I got my money back a year later (which got worse and worse over time). Simply kills you, If you have to pay the bills and try to route your little boat through the stormy seas. Several times I spontaneously had to credit 2-3k EUR to get my customers to shorten the term of payment.

> IHK: Domains are not allowed.

This is funny as well because my company name was a domain name. IHK noticed that and I told them (on phone w/o any proof) that it's mine and they were okay.

The rest, I'd say is batshit crazy bureaucratic but somehow manageable. Germany is just not a good spot for "some SaaS idea" or maybe not even for bigger ideas as well anymore. At least not until they radically streamline their bureaucracy (which depends on radically professionalized politics which is not realistic at this time).

PS: Founding a company made me stop believing in "Social Market Economy" (German self-label) since the taxation system and social systems allow for amazing things once you're out of the employee system.

Edit: Typos and grammatical mistakes.

"Ausweis!"

Here you are: https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/it-open-s...

German here. It's been blowing my mind for 20ys now how incompetent and naive our leadership (nation-wise but also on EU level) is.

The current German gov't silently issued a statement in December 2023 of IT license cost on federal level for the upcoming years which essentially was 6 billion EUR to Microsoft and Oracle.

1. They throw valuable tax-payer money at companies who do tax evasion.

2. They simply ignore the _fact_ that we've been spied on by our allies.

3. They became over-dependent on US tech which trickled down into all fine-granular processes of private and public institutions.

4. They make it additionally hard for local companies to compete with their regulation frenzies.

Don't know what to say anymore but mocking them and mention what might happen if Trump gets re-elected and discovers this dependency. If US is playing hardball, Germany will be back in stone age.

German here. I think this rather shows flaws in metrics than a remarkable productivity of Germany. The stats you see are based on:

- cheap Russian gas imports

- a hidden devaluation of the Euro within the Euro-zone

- a gigantic market for unskilled/cheap labor they've set up 20ys ago

- a great set of "hidden champions" that had a flourishing market in uprising China for the decade between 2010-2020

- the "Made in Germany" seal and

- network effects of all of the above

I doubt the German workers were/are especially efficient and have yet to see one of the local companies to use software as a gain of productivity rather than a byproduct.

No ofc he's not. But it's taught that he introduced social reforms (together with von Metternich) for keeping the (at that time) aspiring social democrats out of power.

German here. If you ask me, Germany has set up the perfect feudal state.

Hm no never heard that as part of the farmers protests. They say it's rather the amount of bureaucracy that skyrocketed in the past decades and the recent (rather naively) cut farmer subsidies made them protest.

German here. I think what we now see is what local nerds always warned about: US Big Tech is strategically making us dependent on them and when they play the end-game, we're fu*ed.

Sure, they will disable the data collection and gladly obey the rules we put in the contracts (how do we know?). But they'll make sure that we're paying extra money for it. They're sucking away our now even more valuable tax money[0] and our idiotic leadership of panic throws more money into this black hole.

[0] A "Kleine Anfrage" in the German parliament to the Bundesregierung in December 2023 made it public (but mostly ignored) that the German Bundesregierung will pay 6bn EUR to Microsoft and Oracle in the upcoming years. Source (in German): https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/deutschland/it-open-s...

> When the network breaks, most software devs are stomped and can't even do the most basic troubleshooting.

Not that I'm an expert myself, but I've seen the same patterns and concluded that to be a symptom of a set of technologies whose abstractions are leaking much less than others. It e.g. rarely happens that you have to run Wireshark and the likes to debug why an image doesn't show up in your app.

So if I understand correctly, we're (economically) back at the classic model of continuously running a db in a process, right?

Not sure what web 3.0 will be fought with but web 4.0 will definitely be sticks and stones

Well you can lie down the phone on the grill without the camera lenses getting covered. Then you build some kinds of pillars (anything; I just used 2 stacks of books on each side) and put the grill with the phone on top. Then with one hand I released the trigger and with the other hand I turned the pages. It worked surprisingly well.

With Covid lockdowns I got a bit depressed and decided to give up my flat to travel around. When I looked at my bookshelf it broke my heart to give away/sell all my books, so I remembered the old story about Brin/Mayer (afair) at Google trying out how long it takes to photograph a book.

I did the same just with my bare hands and my smartphone with a rather short book and calculated it would take me ~2 weeks to create an imperfect (thumbs included) digitized copy of all my books. So that's what I did, eventually improving upon things:

- took a grill from the oven which stabilized the phone and relieved my arm

- created a couple of bash scripts to automate slicing and image compression

- run tesseract-ocr (fulltext search)

- ghostscript for making it a pdf All automated and improved over time. No big bang, just trial and error and tiny steps.

Meanwhile I have hundreds of books. They're not perfect but perfectly readable/searchable. Why I am telling you this? Keep it simple. Unless you're more interested in engineering the "machine" than the actual product it's supposed to create.

German here. German middle class considers the current political situation (across all federal layers) the least trustworthy in at least 30-50 years. The majority of the people is frustrated AF because of government paralysis for no real reasons but political gambling.

It's that bad that >90% of my friends and acquaintances chose to not read the news anymore and go with ignorance and escapism. Germany seems to be going through some kind of identity crisis right now (we lack most competencies for 21st century and used to cover all problems with money and arrogance) and chances are not that low we'll end up with far right leadership.

(The only good thing is that the German army is that much underfunded and bureaucratic that a military coup is impossible. /s)

captain obvious here: put a pedestrian next to an SUV and you see the heights nicely match the most vulnerable parts of the pedestrian's body. add emotions (due to cultural wars) and significantly worse oversight and you get what we have. shame on everyone who was part in this kind of "progress".

> They really shouldn't mention the weather until they fix that app.

After your edit: What a pity! I thought to have just read a great one-liner about the climate crisis and how tech people want to solve everything applying tech.

I think there's more fruitful discussions to be had, e.g. which editor is to be preferred or which programming language is best.

I highly respect your idealism. I really do. I used to think like that around 15 years ago. I'm still some kind of social democrat by heart (not the party but rather the concept).

But what I learned in recent couple of years is that German leadership (rich people, old industries, bureaucrats, managers, politicians et al) set up a system that is actively squeezing out the middle-class. Doesn't really matter which subystem you're looking at (healthcare, public transport, education, taxation, civil services, childcare, housing, pensions, energy, and more) you'll see that all things have been set up to make rich people richer and let the other 99% struggle with pretty much everything.

I'm not avoiding any taxes and strongly believe in social systems with solidarity and help for the weaker people, but I learned that (a) change is not welcome (rather actively prohibited) in Germany and (b) fighting windmills just lets you burn out.

German here. Congrats to your success. Now run away from Germany as fast as possible. It's not for evading taxes but for evading the crumbling German bureaucracy.

I recommend having a look at Estonia's e-residency.

Ha, that's a very typical answer my compatriots would give. What Germans lack in competence they make up with arrogance. That just seems to be our thing.

German here. You mean the German education system that has been going down the last 2-3 decades? Are you even aware that the German tax system is redirecting tax income from smaller companies to richer ones (e.g. if they soon introduce "reduced electricity prices" for some heavy industry companies)? Are you aware that the system taxes employees relatively high and companies and capital income pretty low with thousands of tax exempts? Are you aware that government service cost are skyrocketing because they didn't reform anything in the recent 2 decades? Are you aware they poured ~4bn EUR into "digitization" of government services and nothing's working?

The whole system has been broken by corporate lobbies and unethical politicians who just wanted to be voted for. Now tell me about the great social system in Germany that is worth all the tax money.

German here. Germany's economy is mainly based on

- 100y old inventions (automobile, chemistry).

- Then some more diverse set of so-called "hidden champions" (German name for world-leaders of some very special physical engineering products) which will sooner or later be fed to some US or Chinese companies.

- Some heavy industry which is currently leaving the country because of shenanigans in energy politics over the last two decades.

- Some of the dinosaurs the sibling comment already stated

- and finally lots of service businesses driven by MBAs and Legals who profit from the jungle German tax and law system is. They have zero interest in change and have been squeezing out the middle class in last 2-3 decades.

Germany is in recession right now as the only of the G7 countries. This is because the cheap Russian energy cannot cover the structural problems anymore but business, taxation and bureaucratic mentality is putting the whole country down. Can't recommend anymore.

Keep in mind that the EU is doing other funny things like providing a publicly-paid "DNS4EU" which is (for now) totally voluntary and free-to-use but surely will be enforced eventually on any digital product.

It drives them crazy that law enforcement is that incompetent to enforce law so the solution is to criminalize everyone instead of developing operational excellence in law-enforcement.

[0] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/ict-standards-procure...

That's all I can give you right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc-elFcs96Y

It's the 1,5min speech where Sonneborn enumerated some cases, unfortunately in German. AFAIR when he held it, I researched a couple of names and issues he mentioned that didn't look too polemic. In general, he (and his team) is doing what I'd call "trustworthy research" packed up into satire.

That's another absurd point about our public debates: No one cares to share some facts. It feels like it's all based on gut feeling and emotions.

As far as I know, we don't have official numbers (at least not shared as part of the discussion). But what we know is, those scanners have a significantly high error rate and will overwhelm law enforcement with false-positives. What we also know is that law enforcement is simply not competent enough, there was a case in Germany where they just removed links in a Forum forgetting to sweep the according link targets to file hosters.

Still flabbergasted how effective the lobbying circles around Thorn have been in recent years. I wish no less than this law getting sent to Spam and Ylva Johansson, the accountable EU commissioner, to be forced to step back.

The EU legislator Martin Sonneborn, member of the German satirist party "Die Partei", is proven he was right when in beginning of the legislature he just enumerated all the criminal and semi-criminal acts of several members of the current EU commission. Led by von der Leyen who also has a horrible track record in German politics. "Europa nicht den Laien überlassen"

It's actually not funny anymore because those people are destroying everything.

Because the bureaucrats (mostly suits and legal professionals) being afraid of making compliance mistakes in their projects, they will only hire certified people who went through all the German (mostly) BS university education. So the overall system is optimized for hiring rather subservient people and sorts out potentially talented "troublemakers".

In addition, e.g. CCC is one of those groups with well-educated tech talent but they have kind of a history getting criminalized by the German governments (starting from the 80s). As a result, they (to me) seem to be rather anti-government and focus on very valuable tech workshops and tech education for interested civilians.

German here. I'll have to dissent on the buddy-business part. That's not how Germany works. It's the opposite, which turns out to be even worse:

As a bureaucrat that wants to solve a specific problem, you form a project and are required to make a public submission. Those submissions have to adhere to very formal predefined legal standards (in order to omit corruption) which make them incredibly time-consuming paperwork. For some projects you'll be even legally required to make a EU submission which is even worse. Some German smart-asses "solved" that by creating a skeleton agreement with a handful of BS consulting companies (McKinsey et al.) which therefore win projects in a round robin fashion whilst adhering to some random requirements, e.g. "cheapest wins".

So what we get after all is 20 years of all federal states and municipalities being bullish of their own solutions, hundreds of failed digitization attempts for minor features as well as major services, ~3.5B EUR poured into BS consulting shops and nothing that remotely works end-to-end.