38 karma · joined June 29, 2024
Bill Gurly has been crying for years now about how US banks have been bocking/not-participating in equivalent services in US(Fed Now) and for good business reasons for them.
A well functioning market does need regulations. Not everything can be magically fixed by "competition"
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kivatinos_bill-gurley-on-paym...
Now that would be awesome!
EDIT: come to think of it, it would require going through CDC stream, and figuring out if any of the tables affected are a dependency of given materialized view. Maybe with some ast parsing as well to handle tenants/partitions. Sounds like it can work?
Yes, that's exactly what will happen and you can even now see examples of unemployed software engineer building successful one-man gigs with the help of AI(not competing).
I think the concept of stable long term jobs as we knew is gone. Which might not be a bad thing.
- No PIT on dividend income, which is fair since CIT has already been paid on the money earned by the firm(and paid bt by you as a shareholder in that firm)
- CIT payable only on dividend distribution, not yearly so if a firm keeps on re-investing in the firm paying salaries/suppliers and investing in growth they don't pay any CIT.
Another side effect of 1) is that it would cause companies to distribute dividends rather than doing stock buyback since dividend would have a lower tax rate(0%) than the STCG/LTCG tax rate on stock appreciation.
This is how estonia does it, so we already have some data on effectiveness of this.
1) Forums like askanexper(can't remember the exact name) 2) great books like sams teach yourself in 24 hours and a habit to spend time in library 3) most importantly not as much competition as we have today. There were like a 2-3 kids in my schools of 2k who were into programming. Today that would be approaching half.
I would be surprised if that didn't happen in this case.
> Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence.
Ok, but this could be easily solved by having rate limits on api?
> The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.
I would say this is subjective/arguable in general.
In most of my jobs I have had team members based out of eastern Europe, Ex-USSR, India, Israel, nomads from SEA etc.
And still pre-AI most people in our industry did amazingly well despite these cost of living and wage differences since often than not they are also motivated enough to dedicate over 70h+ to our jobs when required(for me this week will end up being a 70h week).
So unfortunately I can't support our inefficient domestic middleman retailers push to block foreign competition so they can bleed us dry by selling 2eur wine opener at outrageous 5x markup.
In my mind this 10 eur markup on this simple cheap good is directly related to lack of competition in retail in europe.
> I don't know what the answer is. Making Temu (et al) liable for goods' compliance —in the way importers are— seems like a sensible start.
Sure! However the way things are moving, it'll end with Temu/Shein being banned in europe in a few months.
> But now I need to warehouse those 1000 items in Germany and re-package them into local parcels for each customer
Yes, it would be infeasible to ship such a low value good. Even on Temu I have to order a minimum of 29€. If you account for that, you should be able to see how a 10€ markup by esselunga/carrefour on imported price of 2.2€ is outrageous and reeks of lack of competition.
> Calculating in that I might have to deal with 10% returns, I need to charge 9€ per piece. And here's the kicker: If Temu would legally pay customs and deal with warranty and returns accoring to German law, they, too, would arrive at a similar price.
Temu now pays customs since the 150€ customs exemption has been gone for years now, and more importantly also the same VAT as your domestic retailer! So the 2€ price for the wine-opener I gave you includes customs and VAT.
For example my order of a few months ago of 38€ included a VAT of 6,09€
I hope you can see my point now that all this outrage against Temu/Shein is based on trumpian style misinformation about VAT and customs and a general "chinese bad, temu bad, we good" attitude which I personally find defeatist and embarrassing.
If we were to spend a fraction of this outrage on how bad our logistics and supply chains are for domestic producers(specially in DE: I used to work in retail dealing with EDI systems of EDEKA/REWE and domestic suppliers) we would be doing some thing productive.
Not to mention things like regulating/fining anti-competitive behaviour by GS1 and others.
Instead of raising doubts about my character, it would be wise to consider my argument intellectually and see how you can justify a 10 eur markup on a 2 eur wine opener.
I'm not against forcing Temu to follow EU regulations. I'm against this trumpian push for protectionism and changing of custom rules or straight-out ban under the guise of health and safety.
> Temu does exactly none of that.
I would say it's arguable since Temu also has returns and often european retailers are selling same exact goods from same factory.
However assuming you are correct, in you mind does it justify a 10 eur markup on a 2 eur wine-opener by esselunga?
It would serve our interests if we redirect a fraction of this outrage on temu/shein on our domestic inefficient retailers since it would motivate them to improve their own logistics and improve supply chain efficiency.
Most of it is just outrageous markup since there's no competition in europe(save again for 1€ mom and pop chinese shops).
Not to mention european retailers would get huge bulk discounts on the sticker price of 2€.
Answer would be because we shielded our firms from foreign competition by putting in place such anti-competitive policies. Our firms had no incentive to be efficient since they had a captive market for half a billion consumers they could bleed dry.
Concrete example for this would automobiles and VW v/s BYD/Xiomi in particular.
I'm all for forcing Temu and other Chinese retailers following our regulations if they want to sell in Europe.
I'm not aware them labelling business transactions as gifts. As far as I know there has always been 150 euros duty-free threshold and I have been using it to order traditional clothes from India for more than 15 years now.
The packages I get from Temu are clearly marked as commercial.
Also, in my mind it's arguable if local retailers paid for postal infrastructure. However what in arguable in my mind is that esselunga/carrefour sell me a wine opener for 12 EUR that I can buy for 2 EUR on temu. So I think you should also blame our domestic retailers a fraction of what you blame chinese retailers for bleeding us dry of our hard earned money.
However their actions till now have been about shutting down competition(changing custom rules on international packages).
> It's easy to undersell the domestic market if you completely ignore all of the regulation that's applicable to literally any store located within the market.
No credit to Chinese for running a efficient supply chain operation?
This of course ignores the fact that European retailers often sell the same exact goods from the same Chinese factory, but at a 5-10x markup. And as said these goods are often same of better quality that what I would get from domestic retailers. In case of stickers the one from Temu were were of higher quality.
If EU was forcing Temu to abide by EU regulations on health and safety I would be all for it. But they are shutting down competition(change in customs rule on small packages etc) so our domestic retailers can stay inefficient and continue to bleed consumers.
Funny incident our CEO just mentioned to me yesterday: She ordered stickers from a local shop without asking the price, and on delivery had to pay 200 CHF for 20 stickers so 10 CHF/sticker. Next time she ordered from temu and got them at 20 CHF for 200 stickers so 0.1 CHF/sticker.
At least to me it's clear this is plain and simple regulatory capture by inefficient european retailers. In supermarkets I have to pay 12 EUR for a bottle opener that I can get for 2 EUR on temu. Amazon.de for example launched free delivery to estonia and other small european countries only recently post rise of temu.
These actions by EU commision are vehemently anti-consumer and anti-business under the transparent guise of being pro-consumer and pro-business.
Would recommend Bill Gurly's talk about regulatory capture if anyone is interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=F9cO3-MLHOM
That's not true.
Every year you get emails to file IT returns, and they have all records of all foreign flights I took, forex transactions I made on my card etc. Everything is linked to your PAN and Aaadhaar. To be clear this is fine with me.
> For context, income tax raids are common in India. Officials tear down walls and ceilings to find hidden cash, jewels and other undeclared assets. Forcing their way into your phones is a digital equivalent. From a legal perspective, I don't see why digital spaces are anymore private than one's own house.
Fine. However this is an overreach since tax evasion is not as a big problem as it was a decade ago due to digitization.
Tax to GDP is still low at around 11%, but that's because much of the population isn't required to pay tax(no tax till 12k$ which is too generous, they should instead decrease PIT threshold and reduce consumption taxes).
I can tell you in my case it was because I did want to play with emacs and get my hands dirty. But that does shift the blame to me since it's hardly fair to blame emacs for being so extensible and fun.
Why stop those of us who want to buy it?
Enlightening, so you mean this policy isn't for the so called "1%"? Only for middle class folks and their stock portfolios? That's not what the GP was proposing.
> Another point: have you considered that the authorities and people of the Netherlands, a very rich country with several valuable companies, may have possibly thought of this absolutely trivial argument when designing their tax code? Do you really think nobody thought of it?
Yes, because I can point to an even richer country, with even more valuable companies where the left proposed same destructive policy only a few months ago and almost came close to winning.
Lastly, you did make me look it up and it seems Netherlands and other European countries really didn't think it through.
https://www.leideninternationalcentre.nl/get-advice/blogs/su...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasoncalacanis_norways-wealth...
I would love to see some innovation in this space like India's ONDC and more Direct-to-Driver apps.
I see now that most countries do tax worldwide income, just that most of the time they have DTA agreements so you can offset tax paid in other countries against your tax bill.