It is a bit different though, because the German exit tax applies to companies and people holding more than a 1% share in a company. So no exit tax if you hold bitcoins as part of your private assets...
Agreed that there is some tension with EU principles, but it is difficult to get it right. Building a company in country A for 20 years, then moving to country B for 184 days to sell it completely without paying taxes also does not seem like a fair system.
This applied to a friend of mine who held copyright on music. Apparently this is non transferable in Germany and it was worth quite a lot. He had to pay a significant amount to move to another EU country.
If you are planning on VC-like returns by selling your company, you should start with a holding GmbH and an operative GmbH below (or crazier structures like a Holding GmbH & Co. KG). But: This way you have the maximum administrative costs and complexity in the beginning...
I think starting as an Einzelunternehmer makes sense in certain situations. I'm not a tax lawyer, but I'm a lawyer in a firm that advises startups and I have seen a lot of "Starts as Einzelunternehmer -> Does asset sale to own GmbH" type deals... "Normal" lawyers / tax advisors will never recommend this, because it is not a "simple check the box" exercise, and "sophisticated" lawyers are incredibly expensive.
"Replace" is difficult to define. Will there not be a single artist? Obviously wrong.
But possibly we have seen "peak" numbers in some professions? There are some exceptions, but in many modern professions, the numbers of professionals have only been increasing with GDP growth (e.g. quantity of lawyers/accountants/doctors).
I would guess there are more professional human translators today than there were in 1950. However, I think this is one profession that may "peak" at some point: For low-value texts, machine translation will be good enough, leading to a smaller pie of paid translation work, which can only sustain a smaller number of translators. The field will certainly stop growing and may decrease at some point. Anecdotal, but in the European Union institutions (https://www.politico.eu/article/translators-translation-euro...), it appears that we have already hit this "peak" and the future is gradual decline in the number of translators employed.
You should check out how EU state aid laws work. This is exactly the issue they are addressing and it is not true that we have seen a significant "subsidy race" between different EU countries in the recent past.
If I am not mistaken, the £1 would typically be distributed between all of SVB UK's current shareholders. If SVB UK is 100% owned by the SVB parent company, and SVB parent is bankrupt, the £1 will get added to the funds that will make the SVB parent's creditors "whole", who outrank shareholders in bankruptcy.
Free instant transfers are the direction of travel, but in the EU, that is a question of regulation, not technology. Maybe in 2030 we will be there :)
But for many transactions, I see that instant would be nicer, but I don't see the crucial need. My employer pays all Eurozone salaries from a bank account in Luxembourg, I imagine it is just a script checking "Initiate transfers on 10 AM, 1 day before last working day of month". Being able to do "Initiate transfers on 23.59 PM of last working day of month" would be slightly nicer, but I don't think it really solves a huge pain point?
I agree. In a perfect world, it would not matter who wins the lottery of having conscientious parents etc. and the government would make sure that everyone has the same chance to achieve their potential in school. But in the real world, it is crazy to expect that state resources could ever provide the same benefit as a "tiger mom" willing to go to battle with her puberty-stricken teens over finishing their coursework 24/7.
I am still working in big law and I disagree that the benefits of adopting more advanced version control would be small. However, I work in a field that is a mix of regulatory law and litigation, where almost no work is based on templates and most things are drafted from scratch.
One very large problem that typically comes up in large teams: Only 1 team member can edit the the "live version" of a document (it's locked for editing by the version control system), the other team members need to work "offline" and then reintegrate their changes/drafts into the main document. Everybody has lived through the horror story of a team member in the different time zone still having checked out the live version and going to sleep :)
Sometimes you have to circulate a draft document in parallel to multiple parties (e.g. colleagues with special subject expertise + client's inhouse lawyers + client's technical experts + other party's law firm + other party's inhouse lawyers + other party's technical experts). It can happen that you need to reintegrate comments from different parties to different versions of the drafts, e.g., if your client gives feedback quickly and you re-circulate updated version internally, then you receive other party's comments to the older draft version...
Besides the mechanical aspects of reintegrating comments, it is also difficult to track if everybody who needs to sign off has actually signed off on the parts of the documents they had to review. Often it gets lost who made which comment/change. It can be quite awkward if a regulator asks you "Isn't the technical statement on page 12 contradicted by fact XYZ" - please explain until tomorrow - and you have to quickly figure out who actually put that in...
The legal system and independent courts etc are an infrastructure it depends on - Google had to leave China due to problems with the local legal system
Google has to leave china for political reasons. The legal system rather is incredibly malleable to the needs of officials (lots of Chinese internet companies are allowed to ignore laws that foreign companies are not).
Agreed that there is some tension with EU principles, but it is difficult to get it right. Building a company in country A for 20 years, then moving to country B for 184 days to sell it completely without paying taxes also does not seem like a fair system.