I can't give more specific information about my situation, but I would recommend contacting one of the companies that has a public article on the "Wegzugssteuer", for example the one I linked in the first comment. That way you know you get someone that actually knows how to deal with this.
My first tax advisor barely even knew about the Außensteuergesetz and almost got me into larger trouble because of that. I'd guess since this law only affects a tiny portion of the population you really need someone that specializes in it.
If they specialize in it they'll have done this many times before and you can just use their pre-made constructs. Then the main issue is avoiding getting squeezed by them.
> You are signing paper that claims you never left Germany!!!
No you aren't. You are signing a paper that says a managerial decision about the shares of the company happened in Germany. Where you live does not matter. You just have to do a board meeting, and be physically present in Germany during the meeting.
In fact, you likely want to keep any proof of your travel from a different country, which makes it obvious to the authorities that you don't spend all your time there.
There's multiple variants though, this is just one of them. You can also pay someone to manage the shares (and of course contractually bind them to not do anything without permission).
Edit: Also, to be clear, you don't need to manage the company from Germany. You only need to manage the holding company from Germany, where the only managerial decision is related to the shares themselves.
I was someone who almost got hit by this tax. You don't need any offshore shenanigans to get around it.
If you just want to move out of the country you can also just keep the ownership of the company within the country. You do this by putting your shares into a holding that stays in Germany even when you move out. That holding needs to be managed within Germany, so you need to assign a friend or be in Germany twice a year to sign off on having done the management within Germany.
Of course, if you want to move the company out of the country, you'll need to pay taxes on any value increase the company had. As others have described this is pretty reasonable though - you get taxed exactly as if gains were realized. This is tax you would have had to pay some time in the future anyways, except by moving to a tax-evasion country.
The only unreasonable part of the law is how they can assume your valuation based on earnings, but that only applies if you can't provide a valuation based on German standards.
It will be interesting to see. Just for completeness, Fastly is not requiring us to BYOIP or anything unless it causes them actual problems, which so far it hasn't. I'm sure they also have other similar businesses to ours so they should have some experience.
I guess I'll see in a while if this was also just a sales tactic from Cloudflare or not.
To (1) - if this was the case, it would have been great if they had talked about it openly or in any way really. To (2) - I do agree that $300 is probably cheap. But I also think that $10k is very expensive, and it seems Fastly agrees.
(3) Mh, I don't think this is doxxing and didn't expect having names would be a big problem. I've just updated the screenshots anyways and censored the names of the representatives.
Cloudflare of course chooses who they want to do business with, but they also pride themselves in being neutral.
I would be very happy to hear Cloudflare's actual side of this. (Or - it would have been great if they had given their side to us before getting into this mess). The only critical information from our side that I'm aware of is that we're a casino with multiple domains - which is why I put that right at the top. But most of the info should be relevant to any business interacting with CF.
I do admit that I originally drafted this article as a "customer support of last resort", since that seems to work well for CF specifically. But it's too late for that anyways by now - the problem is "resolved" by fire and we don't plan to move back.
I purely posted it now as a precautionary tale for other people because of all the pain it has caused us. So the audience is tech people in most companies of small size that will hit more traffic at some point in the future.
This is literally all written communication they gave us. The only other thing was calls. Not calls with anyone that had any knowledge about what any issues were, but calls with sales.
I'm not sure. It was on spot one on the first page, then something happened and it got downranked: https://hnrankings.info/40481808/
maybe due to being flagged by people (according to another comment).
I guess it's due to general negative sentiment towards casinos, which may be understandable but doesn't (in my biased opinion) change anything about CF's behaviour in this post. I would have left it out but it's necessary in order to provide the full context.
BYOIP is reasonable, though I doubt anyone actually does legislation blocks by IP. Since like half of companies on the internet use Cloudflare or other multi-tenant infrastructure everyone is aware that you can't block an IP address and hit one target. The only thing I've seen is DNS blocks (both DNS protocol directly and based on TLS SNI).
FYI, we also fully block users from the US (due to regulations).
My problem here is mainly the unprofessional communication and huge mess of mixing "compliance" with sales, without giving any clear information or options. And then the removal of our account without warning while we were still talking to them.
I did mention the multiple-domains issue in the post. It would not have been amazing for us to remove our secondary domains, but we would have been very happy to do it if it had resolved the issue. We asked them again and again but they would not give us any detail or options apart from their 120k/year package. Note that BYOIP (which I guess they could reasonably have required to isolate us even if we only use a single domain) is available for a fraction of the cost elswhere (e.g. fastly).
Since we already left Cloudflare the only reason I finished writing this article is to warn others. I think it's still relevant to many companies regardless of what you think of casinos, since very unprofessional sales tactics (unprofessional as in business threatening) seem common place with them. Do look at the linked other posts and comments here from other people affected that don't have anything to do with casinos.
Over 90% of our traffic is cached, since it is static assets. I can look up how much traffic reaches our origin, but the main factor is the number of static files hit. We used Cloudflare Analytics (part of the business plan) to track this, and since it didn't really impact our tech much until now I don't have an exact overview. I mainly know which (uncached) endpoints are hit how much. Fastly is currently saying 15TB per week which seems roughly the same range as Cloudflare's 80TB / month number.
I do encourage you to read the whole article cause there is some fine details in there. The main point is that we were happy to remove any domains apart from our main domain (which gets > 95% of our traffic) but Cloudflare did not give us that option or any other detail on the supposed issue.
Yes, but now give out the statistics on how much of the calories fed to cows in total in the US or worldwide is actually grazing and how much is from crops that need extra area apart from where the animals graze. Even cattle that grazes is often supplemented with grain, and the grain is of course much more calorie-dense.
So the answer to "what would we do with all that land we can't put crops on" is "whatever we want". For example, we could just leave it be nature, since we don't need it for farming.
I guess you're assuming this is about the weight of food they are eating. Why?
What they're actually doing is measuring the isotopes in the carbon of the bodies of the human remains. You don't get any carbon in your body from the water or from the fiber in plants.
So your estimate correction needs to go the other way - the study says that > 80% of carbon in the bodies of early human foragers comes from plants. That means that also > 80% of the caloric intake comes from plants. Or alternatively, it would mean that > 95% of what they ate (by weight) was plants.
I kind of regret reading this article. It's very long and doesn't have all that much interesting information.
It starts with the author discovering that some charities are not effective, especially when rich people go to poor countries and try to do direct actions. Then it somehow uses this as an argument that trying to measure the effectiveness of charities is bad and that giving money to charities in general is bad because sometimes charities are mismanaged.
Half of the article is basically complaining that charities in general are sometimes ineffective or have unintended negative side effects (for example malaria bed nets being used for fishing).
Guess what - the fact that it's a difficult problem to tell how to do good is exactly why EA exists - to at least try and bring order into chaos. What's the alternative? The article just keeps complaining about collecting data and statistics and trying to estimate good by saying "but sometimes the estimates are wrong!", but it presents zero alternatives. It's basically just advocating against charity in general, saying that it should be the job of the governments. Or it's arguing that you people need to only support things they are emotionally invested in, because "unsentimental calculations" are evil.
The other half of the article is citing random billionaire's opinions on the world and complaining that they are self-important and weaving in lots of random things about the SBF trial for some reason.
There's some valid criticisms of effective altruism in the article, specifically: criticizing how they try to put a value on everything (even when it is a hard problem or not exact) and criticizing longtermism (because it's difficult to say whether to weigh the present or the future more). It also mentions the common discussion about doing direct action yourself versus spending more time working and donating more money. But I think those are already the obvious discussions about EA that everyone knows about.
My first tax advisor barely even knew about the Außensteuergesetz and almost got me into larger trouble because of that. I'd guess since this law only affects a tiny portion of the population you really need someone that specializes in it.
If they specialize in it they'll have done this many times before and you can just use their pre-made constructs. Then the main issue is avoiding getting squeezed by them.