Titus_1_16
26d ago
Not quite, we actually do attract a lot of real foreign business to Ireland, but our high personal taxes certainly shape the profile of this unfavourably.
For example - Google is the largest private employer in Dublin, with (from memory) about 6500 direct Google employees here and the same amount again in TVCs. All other large US tech companies bar Amazon also have their EU HQ here, and employ thousands of staff each. Ireland is also a major manufacturing hub for pharma, with genuinely world-class infrastructure and facilities (side note, for about 20 years the entire global supply of Viagra was produced in Cork). In aggregate, about 25% of workers in Ireland are employed directly by a foreign multinational - so the state earns far, far more in income taxes from these multinational employees than it does in corporate taxes on their employers' profits.
However, our steep personal taxes mean that mid- and senior- career employees often look to another jurisdiction after a few years, once they're earning serious money (and have got an Irish passport). We lose a lot of talent this way, and it keeps some activities here lower down the value chain. Not great.
Additionally, the Irish govt did a couple of dodgy deals in the 1990s and 2000s to give extremely favourable tax treatment to a handful of individual companies, which earned us a lot of ire and bad press, and also has muddied the water about where our competitive tax regime (legitimate, and less generous than many EU and US states) ends and where actual uncompetitive and unethical shenanigans begin
Titus_1_16
26d ago
Yeah, you definitely should speak to an Irish tax planner that works with expats if you're interested in living here. The move might not necessarily cost you anything extra if you plan correctly and are only here for a fixed number of years - a relatively large number of Americans move to Ireland, so there certainly are experienced people who can help you arrange your affairs correctly.
Titus_1_16
28d ago
I actually participated in the department submissions they're talking about!
Yeah it's very much a maybe, maybe proposition. The egregious taxation of ETFs is just not high on the govt's priorities, though it's been talked about for years. Complex question that resonates with very few voters; Irish people with cash to invest tend disproportionately to put in property, precisely because of the complexity and crap taxation of normal investment in equities. Easy for the opposition to spin into "tax cuts for the wealthy", because it kind of would be.
I wouldn't hold my breath, basically
Titus_1_16
28d ago
There's no distinction in taxation of ETFs based on their location for people currently living in Ireland. There ARE distinctions between Irish, UK, EU and global individual shares which I can't recall off-hand - something about reporting cadences though I might well be wrong on that. In practice it has made very little difference for me. There are no specific incentives to hold Irish shares, for example - though there are some "investment schemes" that amount to an incentive for Irish investment in practice. Not an expert and they get kind of complicated
Titus_1_16
28d ago
Yeah, I think given Ireland's reputation as a low-tax jurisdiction it's often surprising to those abroad to learn how selectively this low-tax regime applies.
Income tax is genuinely super low for low earners, but the technical "higher band" of income tax (42%) kicks in at just €35k, and increases incrementally up to 52% at €70k - ie every euro over that is taxed at 52% for most workers. Most people working in the tech sector are paying quite high income tax in Ireland, and very high (by European standards) tax on financial products and investments. Even though the corporate tax rate is one of the lowest in Europe, that's just to get companies in the door - we are certainly NOT Dubai on like a personal scale, contrary to what some of our peer countries imagine.
Also the weather is shit and there are too many foreigners (25% approx foreign-born), in a sort of Canadian social-anomie sense.
Titus_1_16
28d ago
Degiro is a pretty standard choice if you're based in Europe - low transaction fees, good interface, reputable, and decent KYC (identity verification) process. I'd think they're fine for small retail investing, ie <€1m, beyond that point you might find a better experience elsewhere (not a concern for me lol)
Also, from your username you're based in Ireland right? Bear in mind that the taxation process on shares in Ireland is DREADFUL - it's both much dearer than a normal EU country and more cumbersome. An ETF specifically is taxed differently to ordinary single-share investment - for some ludicrous reason ETFs are taxed identically to ordinary income, not like a normal capital gain. This means if you're already at the highest rate (52% cumulative) all of your gains will be taxed at this rate. You're also hit with deemed disposal every seven years.
To bypass this there are a few UK products (eg Scottish Widows' Trust, can't recall the ticker) that basically mirror an ETF investment basket but are assessed as individual ordinary shares (ie 33% capital gains).
It's worth highlighting that you're unlikely to be audited any individual year, but if you're investing for the long haul the likelihood of you being hit at some point over eg a 20-year investing span is pretty unfavourable.
Bonne chance!
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
Not a final solution until you master your cummy innards perhaps.
Semen has potent energy, and there are reliable reports from eg several West African nations of semen autonomously teleporting itself to places it's not supposed to be. Much mischief is created this way. So for this reason alone I wouldn't recommend superglue on one's member.
Titus_1_16
1mo ago
Everything else aside, on the semen retention: what stops you having nocturnal ejaculation? Is there an equivalent mode for non-semen-makers? Are women constantly enjoying the fruits of semen retention?
Titus_1_16
2mo ago
Sorry for your loss, firstly.
Second: yes, you're overthinking it. But here's a reassuring (under-compressed) metaphor - recreational drugs differ in how fucked up you actually are versus how fucked up you feel. Some match closely (eg booze), others don't.
The first and only time I ever used a strong opioid off-label, I was surprised by how sober I felt internally versus how intoxicated those around me perceived me to be. I thought I had been essentially fine, until my wife helpfully explained in mortifying detail after how completely out of it I'd been.
This is pretty much how my experience of close bereavement went. In the days and weeks immediately afterward, I thought guiltily that I was feeling less bad than I ought to. I felt bad about indecent flashes of feeling okay.
And the funny thing is of course, with the benefit of almost a decade's hindsight, I had been a mess. I really was impacted well over the minimum decent bereavement threshold. I was by no means at all some indifferent icicle, though a diary I kept at the time is (almost) funny in how much I kept returning to that question "I'm not grieving enough, am I, why not, what's this thorn in the flesh, etc".
My experience was that it took at least 6 months before I could do my job competently and about 2 years to where I was generally at baseline. And still a decade on I think of that family member no less than 4ish times a day, often more.
And importantly, I really just had no insight into how affected I was at the time
Titus_1_16
2mo ago
There's an interesting question about what "fundamental science" research (is not practical or applied research) really is in social science, and how/why any country might fund it.
$NZ 75M presumably would fund a lot of work in social science, since research is less reliant on equipment than in harder sciences.
Titus_1_16
3mo ago
It depends whether you're modelling the increased demand for doctors as coming from pure population growth, in which case the point by @Quantumfreakonomics stands, or having greater demand for doctoring from the same total population in area, in which case your point stands and there's a natural cap
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
Is there any merit to this far-left group's position?
This is challengingly broad. Let's hypothetically grant that they're correct on the historical proposition that women's suffrage was enmeshed somehow with white supremacy, and also grant that white supremacy was necessarily a bad thing.
Then we're left with an interesting question whose shape crops up everywhere - "this good thing is all tangled up with a bad thing. Can we still endorse or celebrate the good thing?"
To which the answer is, in real life, normally "it depends on the balance of good things to bad things". But objects of thought and discussion in daily practical life are kind of naturally bounded in extent - if we're assessing whether a day at the park was a good thing, we're likely only to assess the day in question, and won't trace back the park-day's genesis to several years beforehand.
But in academia or serious thinking, we're unbounded. A thoroughly partisan advocate of American indigenous peoples can rue the Mongols' failure to do to Europe what they did to Baghdad as A Bad Thing - since a powerful Europe was able to come and wipe out indigenous peoples in the Americas a short time later. For such a partisan, the Roman empire is probably on net a dreadful thing.
"Is there any merit to this far-left group's position" then hinges on whether you think the project of de-Europeanising and specifically de-Anglicising the US is a good or bad thing.
Titus_1_16
10mo ago
Listening and very much enjoying, nice job
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
Well look, you used it naturally enough that I couldn't have told the difference
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens
Really nice turn of phrase
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
It's really interesting to me that someone could post regularly on this board and yet still enjoy cannabis. I'm envious of your mental robustness tbh.
A strong plurality of people posting here could fairly be called "anxious overthinkers" - the board is a bilge pump for excess thought, and eg expressing any worry whatsoever about AI risk (whether the worry is grounded in real things or not) ought to be a criterion for anxiety diagnoses.
I smoked a fair amount of weed in my teens/early 20s, took plenty of other recreational drugs, and a near-universal thing I've heard from peers with a similar profile is that around age 25, they started to find weed disagreed with them. Specifically, it makes them/me really unpleasantly anxious. Weed to me now is solely a tool I would use if for some reason I wanted to give myself a panic attack. Maybe I'm a little more dramatic in my dislike than normal, but it's very normal to find weed unenjoyable from mid-20s onward.
So what's your secret? Youthful brain? No prior history of smoking? Iron resolve?
I actually would quite like to like weed again, and agree with the demerits of drink that you outlined - so if there's One Weird Trick you can share, please do so.
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
A couple of points: first, in terms of English proficiency being a cultural solvent - English already is the lingua franca of Europe, as it is in many other parts of the world. When an Italian meets a German, 9 times out of 10 they will speak English. When a Finn meets a Spaniard - English (although the Spanish are generally pretty bad at English). And so on.
If Europe is to achieve some manner of proper confederation and thereby preserve itself as anything other than a relic over the next century or two, it needs a language with which to do this. English in Europe (and remember it is after all a European language) doesn't just mean Americanisation, it also means the coalescing of pan-European consciousness.
So English proficiency is not purely a malus, or purely a tool of globohomogenisation.
Secondly - I know you're talking about Latvia as a long shot in terms of migration and integration, but actually its neighbour just to the north, Estonia, explicitly is pursuing a strategy of welcoming ambitious foreigners from the likes of America. They've set up an E-residency scheme that's kind of notoriously open to abuse, but it's meant a lot of foreign tech setting up shop there. Estonia is a more reasonable shot for someone of your profile to move to and integrate into, if you're interested
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
Russia looks pretty white to me, just saying.
Russia is only about 70% ethnically Russian, from memory. Eyeballing it, at least half of the countries in Europe would have a higher % of their primary ethnicity.
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
A 50% raise is serious business, well done
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
As a European, "hot ethnic cleansing in Europe" would be top of my wishlist. I have a few candidates in mind.
However it's very, very, very unlikely to happen within a 12-month time horizon. There is no party near power in any western/central European country with the will and means to do this.
The likeliest scenario (and it's not very likely) would be that we have another crazy year of illegal migration north across the Med like 2016 - except voters and politicians know what this spells now, and "Wir Schaffen Das" sentiment is supplanted by "No Fuckin Way" sentiment. I could then imagine a pushback of current wannabe migrants, and perhaps expulsions from some of the particularly god-forsaken tent cities - but not deportations of people who'd been here longer than a few months.
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
That's not a sensible or fair criticism. The point of the post was to illustrate that effective policy solutions are certainly conceivable, they're just outside the Overton window.
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
Would you say a majority of people find the linked image amusing, or sad?
I gotta say the cat at the end really bummed me out. Poor little chap
Titus_1_16
11mo ago
Is the Motte supposed to be funny?
This is the funniest shit I've read all morning
Titus_1_16
1yr ago
And are you referring to Irish colonisation by the Viking kingdom based in Dublin in the late first millennium, or are you referring to an Irish colonization that happened much earlier?
The latter. There were Gaelic polities that preceded the big Viking one - this is how Scotland came to speak Gaelic, and how the Picts were pushed east prior to Viking invasion
From my point of view, the prequels are well-written!
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