markvdb

Not necessarily. At least in Flanders (northern ~half of Belgium), this was shifted onto consumers by making them pay for peak quarter consumption. Using more than 2.5kW for 15 minutes in a row on average means you pay a lot more for your fixed grid cost.

The core of the EU system is much more elegant. It sets a day-ahead production price per 15 minutes at auction. In EU countries with reasonable distribution cost, dynamic rates are a quite popular way to shift consumption to when cheap electricity is abundant.

Conserving energy makes sense regardless of nearby data center electricity consumption.

Same here.

This holds for Belgium too. The notary class here are overpaid self-dealing monopolists selling you mediocre service at best. We were just required to pay 801€ for a bog standard piece of paper. A web form would have served us better and more quickly. At least they've recently become a bit less hereditary than the last 200 years.

Of my many many acquaintances with Belgian CIT liable companies, exactly one used to do their own taxes. They still outsourced salary payment though. That is even trickier than taxes. There's an entire sector specialising in wage administration...

Substance would be real activity happening in Estonia: - Where are the decisions made? - Where is the work being done?

Why would I otherwise pay 66% in taxes in Belgium when I could just set up an Estonian ltd, get limited liability and pay 0 until I take anything out?

You mean German CIT and German PIT I assume. How happy would the US IRS be with that?

Belgium mandates peppol for b2b transactions since January 1st.

This at least carries the potential of simplifying things for honest businesses.

OECD CFC rules have become much stricter in this regard...

...and move to Ireland.

If you think about starting a company, spend some time to think through what it would mean for you to be a Delaware C Corp or an Estoinian one. It will increase your chances of success as you can focus on what matters.

Moving to Estonia or - even bigger hurdles- the US is not without its distractions either....

Substance in Estonia is usually required. A rented address does not suffice for that.

Not incorporating would be very fiscally suboptimal here (.be) for anything tech related. Your marginal tax+ social security contributions rate would be ~66% starting from 50k€ gross...

If you can file all of the taxes and other legally required paperwork yourself, you can be set up in a week or two.

Is realistic in the Netherlands to try and fulfill all formal paperwork requirements?

In my native Belgian city, outsourcing that be from ~3k€ excluding VAT/year for the very simplest CIT liable structure. That's excluding 409.3€ corporate social security contribution and 148€ provincial tax. That makes for about 300€ ex. VAT before you can start to earn anything at all. Unless you can fulfill all accounting yourself.

Of course not. They'll just claim your llc needs to pay local corporate income taxe, VAT, pay local social security, dividend withholding tax, ... on top of whatever needs to happen to keep US authorities happy.

You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products.

That's at least one and probably more like five wars over the reactor territory.

I'm mildly optimistic about fusion's potential...

If I set up a US llc as a Belgian while residing in Belgium, Belgian tax authorities will claim the center of control is in Belgium and claim it is a Belgian company.

He mentioned German exit tax is keeping him from doing that.

Yes. Can't just emigrate. No substance in the US meaning your llc would be liable for tax as if it were an llc in the country where you reside. You'd basicly double the liabilities and administration for no good reason.

3 to 4 months is standard procedure in Belgium.

The real problem becomes substance in Estonia? Residence, local director, office, ...

Especially as a solo entrepreneur, your llc would have to have substance in the Netherlands. Otherwise, it risks getting requalified as a country-where-you-reside llc.

Why would you otherwise voluntarily subject yourself to the extreme complexity of countries like Belgium or Germany if you could just set up a simple Bulgarian or Estonian llc?

That could work _if_ your company has actual substance in the US. Otherwise you just expose yourself to much bigger problems.

The following one-liner works for (exactly) 8 pages:

pdfjam in.pdf '1,8,7,6' --angle 180 --outfile /dev/stdout | pdfjam /dev/stdin '1-4' test.pdf '2,3,4,5' --nup 4x2 --landscape --frame false --outfile out.pdf

I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.

I'd rather see this simplified and improved than stopped.

I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.

Ground mounted solar is clearly superior in terms of safety.

Compact, mass produced nuclear energy projects with no nuclear proliferation risk and radioactive waste management time limited to less than one human generation's professional career span. That seems like a decent baseline to me.

Not sure if fission will ever be able to reach that. Fusion perhaps? I'd certainly like to see that researched with high priority.

In the short to medium term at the very least, I see more economic potential in simple, modular tech. Cheap generation using solar, wind and water. Matching supply and demand better through storage and interconnects.

I'd also be very interested in actual research on how to actually lower demand, in beating the Jevons paradox.

Not convinced. The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.

Nuclear could become less unsafe once humanity has found ways not to go commity horrble violence every other generation.

Hetzner is actually somewhat reliable, and OVH is not.

About ten years ago, Ryanaiar suffered a booking system malfunction. My ticket was wrongly booked to "John Smith" and apparently sent to an email address "joxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx" due to a flaw in their booking system. I noticed when trying to check in online far in advance.

After many hours spent fruitlessly fighting the Ryanair customer disservice desk, I decided to enlist the help of my local ECC [0]. I paid Ryanair a 120€ name change fee and had the ECC claim it back for me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Consumer_Centres_Netw...