A fine example of the naiveté of VC's who vicariously play business through unprofitable companies. Someone who's spent too much time in a play pen with children, dollars and matches. Are you mad? Brad?
At the most basic level, I have a checkout on my website where I take actual cash from my customers and unless it's thousands of dollars every day, I'm going to have to close my doors. Yup, that's right. I have expenses that I need to pay: Staff, hosting costs, insurance, office rent. And if that money doesn't keep on coming every day at the rate I projected, I get to fire my staff.
So, Brad. You idiot. You really think I'm going to slow down my website to play your flaccid little game of online pretend activism and put my staff and business at risk to do it?
Interesting to hear the German perspective. If you could share any more anonymous data e.g. tax rates, what you would have done in retrospect, etc I would very much appreciate it. No hard feelings if you can't.
Firstly, fuck you. Secondly, this is based on a specific example of a friend who worked for a Renault dealership and then stopped and received roughly that amount from the state while she didn't work with no time cap.
Don't like the prices in Paris? Fucking move. If you play your cards right, e.g. if you're a member of a minority like the Romanis you can live for free in perpetuity in several areas of southern france - and I don't mean in a caravan. In a large building with many apartments provided and supported by the town mayor - another specific example because I'm friends with the mayors wife in one town.
France is beautiful, but it's economically completely screwed with Hollande in power.
Hey Paul, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The removal of visible comment score and now this? HN was awesome in its original form. Why break that even further?
I just spent a year living in South Western France which is the most socialist part of France. (I'm a US citizen based here most of the time and I'm a CEO).
If you want to see the result of wealth redistribution, go check it out yourself. You'll meet young men and women in the prime of their lives who spend their entire day in a coffee shop and later a bar, sipping a beverage discussing art, culture, poetry, how business - all business exploits the proletariat, and how government owes them even more than the roughly $25K per year they get for doing nothing. Then go talk to the entrepreneurs in the same district and learn where those wages originate and what it costs business both in taxes and their ability to find and retain staff.
I can assure you that the restful classes are alive and well and are waiting for this idea to take root and flower into contempt for innovation, entrepreneurship and hard work with a massive drain on those who do contribute.
Or just regular accounting. Profit is taxed, so every company will always try at the end of financial year to sink profit into something that'll deliver future revenue to defer tax and fuel growth. Unless you have shareholders who expect/demand a dividend like MSFT has, this is usually the best approach. Several very large businesses even thumb their noses at their shareholders demands and reinvest profit for revenue growth, like AMZN, and get very little credit from shareholders for how tax efficient their decision is.