Francesco Mazzoli’s blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html. His blog has topped HN a few times with various low-level/linux topics, some deep dives into algorithms etc.
Worth mentioning that the evidence says that patents don't have an effect on new drug creation/inventions. Evidence is collected here http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht..., pretty neat to know that Italy/Switzerland had a patentless pharma industry until quite recently.
Having said that, I think you're right that under this system, research/capital definitely gets directed in a different way.
A major reason Alzheimer's research hasn't advanced in the last 25 years is that patents aren't long enough to study it. Remember: patents don't kick in after the FDA approved your drug. It's after you develop it. That's why ozempic is going off-patent in a just few years even though it's a new product. They patented it a long time ago.
With Alzheimer's though, the clinical trials are going to take a long time. Probably 10 years at least, because our current understanding of the disease is that it begins in your mid to late 40s, and only manifests as severe memory loss decades later. Our current method of trying to treat it is like putting someone in pallatiave care with stage 12 cancer through chemo. Just doesn't work.
But drug companies have no choice because if they run 10-15 year trials, their drug will be off patent before the FDA/EMA even looks at it.
If I were King for a day, one thing I'd do is a blanket 40 year patent life on Alzheimer's drugs. It's worth the cost. This disease will bankrupt every nation otherwise.
While I understand the narrative you're proposing, what I brought with my source was a collection of evidence where pharmacological innovation happened at an unaltered rate pre and post patents in e.g. Italy and Switzerland. While I understand the hypothesis of "Pharma innovation, due to high costs of entry, only happens (or is greatly improved) when guaranteed a monopoly", it doesn't seem to be backed by the data.
I agree with you in principle though - if all that were stopping us from achieving a cure were a 40 year patent, I would support your 1-day monarchy in a heartbeat.
Chapters 9 and 10 of the book cover this in more detail if you're interested (very self-contained).
This is bullshit. Drug research costs money, A LOT OF MONEY. A new drug right now costs somewhere around $5 billion, mostly because 90% of drugs fail in trials.
mRNA vaccines, semaglutide, mAB therapies, none of these would have happened without patents as an incentive.
Then why is it that when pharma patents were introduced in countries that didn't have them, the rate of innovation, TFP, R&D-as-%-GDP didn't increase? I brought a source to this debate, if you have sources showing that increases in patent scope, length, or introduction of patents increased pharamacological innovation I'd love to see it - I'm going down this rabbit hole now and am collecting info.
Another interesting one is [1] where they asked readers of the BMJ to vote on the top 15 most important medical milestones. Of the 15, only the contraceptive pill and Chlorpromazine had anything to do with patents.
In [2] the "Chemical and Engineering News magazine" collected a list of top pharmaceuticals (46 total). To quote the book I linked:
> Patents had pretty much nothing to do with the development of 20 among the 46 top selling drugs [..] . For the remaining 26 products patents did play an important role [..]. Notice though that of these 26, 4 were discovered completely by chance and then patented (cisplatin, librium, taxol, thorazin), 2 were discovered in university labs before the Bayh-Dole Act was even conceived (cisplatin and taxol). Further, a few were simultaneously discovered by more than one company leading to long and expensive legal battles, however, the details are not relevant to our argument.
Regarding the cost of drug trials, they cover this well in Chapters 9 and 10, I found it quite interesting.
Regarding how else companies make money without being granted temporary govt-backed monopolies, Chapter 6 covers both the theoretical and real-life examples.
Very happy to see someone else thought of this too.
I see the endgame as one in which services just expose documentation to their APIs and the AI figures out, based on your request, what to call and how to present the results to you based on pre-set preferences.
The responsibility of discoverability also would shift from the UI/UX person to the AI.
The potential obstacle here is that a lot of companies make their money from the UI/UX used to deliver their service on top of the service itself e.g by adding dark patterns, visual cues, collecting usage pattern data and showing you ads.
I recently got this phone, and it really sparked joy.
It does everything I need to function in 2024 (messaging people, navigating cities, managing tickets, NFC payments etc), while not tempting me into the dark/addictive side of smartphones.
Only problem is mine seems to be defective. After some time of usage everything hangs and I need to restart it, sometimes 4-5 times a day. Other people I know don’t have the issue. Luckily they’re cheap!
A good book on this topic was Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress”.
Lots of illuminating examples of how technological progress immediately made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc.
A few memorable anecdotes off the top of my head:
- In one instance, during the Industrial Revolution, they quoted a letter from a lord (owner of a coal mine) who said mines would stop being profitable if children were banned/restricted from working in them. Some new parts of mines accessible thanks to advances in dredging technology were narrow, very suited to children’s small bodies, and digging the tunnels to the size of an adult cost too much. There was a complaint that some children were suffering brain damage due to chronic sleep deprivation and being forced to push mine carts in tunnels with their heads.
- In the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution, there were proven advances in milling and agricultural technology in England, making grain production cheaper and more efficient. However, analysis of peasant skeletons showed signs of more and more malnutrition, as well as signs of damage from work. The author says the prevalent theory is that because the margin-per-hour-worked of a peasant increased, local lords had more incentive to work them harder (not an economist/historian, so can only take this at face value). Not having anywhere else to go (indeed, in multiple instances even during the industrial revolutions, it was either illegal or difficult to change jobs), they just got worse living conditions. Additionally, peasant access to the ever-more-efficient mills was tightly controlled and expensive, to the point where peasants found it better to just mill grain by hand at home. The lords/priests promptly made this illegal and would perform periodic raids to confiscate their equipment.
- Both during the construction of the Panama Canal and in the major industrial cities of England, dense worker concentrations and poor sanitation caused workers to die in droves and decrease the efficiency of the construction/factories. In the England case, diseases that hadn’t been seen in years had resurfaced. It took a long time for workers to finally convince management/government to invest in sanitation/health/sewage, which not only kept people alive and healthy, but increased productivity and completed the canal.
Of course, a lot of this is mixed with differing hierarchies or political scenarios, and isn’t a comprehensive before->after of every advancement etc. However, it certainly put a heavy dose of nuance on the optimism behind technological advancement, and made me wonder if we could have pre-emptively enacted the necessary social/political changes which allowed for the wide-spread benefitting of technology without first going through the preceding periods of intensified suffering.
> made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc.
The question is thus: how do we ensure that the new gains are shared from the start; not "do those gain exist".
The issue with the "Luddistic" approach isn't that it is concerned by the impact of a new technology, it's that it fights progress instead of accompanying it.
Indeed, “stop all progress” and “accompany progress responsibly” are two different approaches.
This may be tangential - but I’d like to point out, that while the Luddite movement may be painted as espousing the former, my readings have actually suggested the latter. In “Writings of the Luddites” they very much state that they have no problems with the machines, just that they wanted them not to be used in “dishonest” ways. Of course, movements of moderate sizes will include a spectrum of ideas so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the first camp were in the mix, but it’s worth noting!
Taleb in “Antifragile” talks about this as well. However he derives a different conclusion; he speaks of a phenomenon called “hormesis” which refers to a biological response where a low dose of a harmful stressor can have positive benefits on an organism.
Currently living in the Algarve after moving to Lisbon with my partner for her studies years ago.
I know a few non-crypto entrepreneurs who came here for the NHR (non habitual resident scheme - the scheme mentioned in the article which allowed for the 20% tax cap on foreign income).
I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered, not just when dealing with the government, but generally in everyday life. Most people have war stories related to accountants, lawyers, banks, telecom companies or landlords. The real kicker was when they realised that the 20% didn’t include social security payments, bringing most of them (those that didn’t pay hefty fees to set up companies in tax havens, and pay themselves exclusively in dividends) to an effective rate that wasn’t that far off what they’d be paying elsewhere. Needless to say the expat churn has been quite high.
Regarding Airbnbs and rising housing prices - I’m no economist but intuitively, I’ve always thought it made more sense to blame the explosive growth in tourism Portugal has had in the last decade or so (6M tourists visiting Lisbon, a city of 500k people) rather than the 10-20k digital nomads. Would be curious to know if anyone has better numbers or studies.
Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy.
It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.
I moved back to my native Netherlands after several years abroad and encountered significant problems with the bureaucracy, more so than in any foreign country I've lived. I don't think it's an expat problem, rather it's a "if you fall slightly outside of the happy path then you can expect to run in to a lot of trouble"-problem. It's just that expats are a group of people that fairly frequently tend to fall outside of the happy path.
This is it, 100%. Anything non standard and you get the long forms instead!
By the way, I've lived in a few European countries and researched many others. The Netherlands was by far the easiest/most efficient in terms of bureaucracy.
> Anything non standard and you get the long forms instead!
If only. Instead you run in to catch-22s and simply get a shrug and "it's not possible".
The big downside of being the "easiest/most efficient" is that it deals with exceptions poorly; once you fall outside of the "efficient" workflow you're screwed. Lots of people run in to problems with this and people literally become homeless because of this. Ironically, it's easier if you're actually homeless and sleeping on the street – as opposed to being homeless and having enough money to stay at hotels or are temporarily staying with friends – as there are some special exceptions for people registered at the salvation army and such.
This is exactly why I a native Swede had to leave Sweden for Ireland.
Im now back in Sweden and jesus christ the bureaucracy is insanely streamlined and optimised for the upper middle class happy path people. Everyone else is looked upon with confusion and disgust.
My favourite story of this is where "falling out of the happy path" included my parents being self-employed and the sheer surprise that people can have wildly differing income per month :P
This is my main reason for having a BV in the first place: to ensure that even though the business takes in very variable amounts of money my private income stream is extremely regular. It makes taxes a whole lot simpler. The only thing I still have to take care of privately are the occasional dividend payment but that's an easy thing to do.
Anybody with > 100K euros in income from consultancy (which should be most of them!) living in NL should consider doing the same thing. There is some overhead but that's easily farmed out to an administrator.
I'm interested to hear if you ever compared with Sweden, just for the sake of curiosity. As an immigrant here coming originally from a very bureaucratic country (Portuguese + Italian levels of dysfunctional bureaucracy, with a Latin American cherry on top) I found bureaucracy here a complete breeze. I basically only need the internet to do 90%+ of my bureaucratic needs with the odd visit to an agency's office for getting documents expedited (national ID, driver's licence, etc.).
As far as I can compare with some immigrant friends in the Netherlands I feel Swedish bureaucracy is on the same level or even less burdensome than the Dutch one.
I have a Dutch neighbor who married a Turkish woman. They run a couple of successful companies, and their goal is to relocate to Rotterdam where his family is from. He wanted to incorporate a company in NL, and transfer his current business there. Because he lives abroad, despite being a Dutch citizen, he was not able to open a business bank account, so he was not able to open a company on his own. His options were to move home or get everything executed in his brother's name until he's ready to move (which he choose).
Of course, he also complains heavily about the bureaucracy here, which is equally broken but in a different way.
Agreed. Expats don't remember the bureaucracy they had to deal with in their own countries, because they did it:
- over the years
- step by step
- with the help of their parents
or simply their parents took care of most things when they were young/born/growing up.
Then they arrive in a new country and realize what it's like to administratively become a functional resident. You probably got your first bank account in your teenage, your national IDs as a newborn, etc. Then you move elsewhere and you need to create all these things from scratch and discover them also.
First, most "digital nomads" who interact with the public administration and institutions (e.g., banks) are not standard customers. Employees often have no clue how to deal with them and many processes contain manual steps that require someone's validation or approval, and often target a very small group of individuals (those tasked with "dealing with" foreigners). It can slow down things.
Second, Portugal is particularly well known for having great ideas and conferences about digital transformation but completely lacks the ability to deliver within its own ranks. To its defense, most citizens cannot easily purchase services online, either because lack of money, or because lack of computer literacy/equipment, or because they don't even have an online payment mechanism. These factors greatly limit incentives for a rapid digital transformation, which incidentally, is precisely what digital nomads crave for.
The comparison with Switzerland was made earlier, it matches my argument: 1) widespread computer literacy and modern endpoint equipment 2) widespread access to online payment solutions 3) the population is used to pay-as-you-go public service (vs. all-inclusive taxpayer service expected by citizens in most EU countries). These combined greatly encourage the deployment of efficient online interfaces.
Off course YMMV. But that's not the rule in general.
I have recent experience with Korea which is overall quite efficient in fact, and yet it's still a struggle to figure out what I need to do, how to do it, and language barriers don't help.
If they go to California places like the DMV will provide them a free Korean-English translator service. Under AB 60 an undocumented Korean could get a driver license and a free translator service to obtain it. If I am an undocumented immigrant in Korea will they provide a translator for me to get state ID as an "illegal" immigrant?
Honestly I would be shocked if you could point me anywhere else in the world where a Korean could be illegally staying, go to the motor bureau and not only get a free translator but get an official state ID and driver license.
Swiss bureaucracy is expensive but it’s swift, easy, and very cordial. I’ve never lived anywhere that was so good on paperwork. Exchange my non EEU drivers license? A week flat and about 100.-. Getting a residence permit? 100.- approx and less than two weeks. Questions about your tax return or filing? An email to the cantonal tax office and you’ll get an (encrypted answer) within a few days.
That’s only about the government though, private companies are hilariously terrible at customer service or paperwork especially compared to US/Canada.
You mean, private companies are "streamlining their customer service" or whatever the name of the day is. And it's not only in Switzerland, everywhere it's just incredibly hostile, to the point where you feel like smashing some office windows just because.
It feels more like the general attitude is “you should be glad we’re letting you give us your money. Now shut up and go away.” You’ll never get an apology, never get an easy refund because they goofed up. No. You’ll struggle, waste your time, and get nowhere.
But I guess this is an EU thing compared to what I’m used to in Canada and the US.
No, Portugal is different. To give you perspective: it takes 2-3 years to exchange a foreign driver license (most foreigners I know drive illegally by now), a lot of administrations frequently “lose” applications and ask you to do it again when they have too much backlog (this cost me hundreds of dollars in back and forth, certified documents etc in the past).
It’s also very common for administrations to have no one answering the phone/email. And most administrations are appointments only. So often, you kind of have to drive to different places, maybe different city halls, and hope that someone has a contact with an internal e-mail address and can hook you up. That’s just how it works. It’s the most barbaric administration and closest to a third world country I’ve experienced, and I’m French, so I know something about red tape.
Takes 18 months to get permission for your foreign spouse to move to Sweden. It then takes 12-18 months to get into the social system - you register quickly, but for the bureaucracy to actually add you into the system takes that long. So no, you're wrong. Portugal is not different.
It's not really the delays that make Portugal different, arguably most countries have long delays, it's the lack of reliability, transparency, and responsiveness.
I don't know Sweden. But we're a family of expats with multiple citizenships, so I deal with bureaucracy in 4 countries on 3 continents. Most countries have streamlined procedures, provide tracking numbers, addresses to send things in, phone lines... So it's long, but you know what's going on and what to do.
Here, even lawyers don't even know what to do. For a similar situation to get my partner a visa from within the country, we simply couldn't speak to anyone. Even the lawyer told us "well, you might have to wait a year or two to see if they re-open their ability to take new appointments." We eventually were able to get through after hustling like crazy, me driving to many different city halls to speak to officials there. Someone eventually knew a colleague there, and got us an appointment for 6 months later in a city 3 hours drive away. We showed up, it was a butcher. Their Google Maps pin was not even in the right place. Cherry on the cake. After getting turn-by-turn instructions from the butcher (who apparently does that 10 times a day), we eventually found their office.
Idk, never been to Sweden but I don't think you can compete with that :-D
Now I get it, they're vastly understaffed, Portugal is a small country. They're doing what they can.
You don't understand. It's not about Sweden, Germany, Portugal. As an expat you always deal with this. Indians waiting for green card lottery and then another 100 years? But I'm sure you will come up with a reason why that's different. You need to take a step back and become aware of yourself.
My family moved to Portugal in late 2020. Covid played havoc as they had to find ways to digitalize many things their offices were doing. It took my wife 9 months to get her DL exchanged and me 11 months.
During that time, you are not driving illegally; you are driving from your foreign license. As long as you have the paper with the exchange info and a picture, you will be fine.
It also helps if you hire a relocation expert who knows the system. We paid ~$1,500 to a Portuguese American lady who helped us with everything. She handled setting up all our health care, apartment negotiation and contract review, set up all our utilities and phones, all our residency paperwork, DL exchange, bank account, and more. I highly recommend her and any group like her. They know how to work the system. My mom does similar back in the USA for newly arrived expats for companies.
Covid was a real shock to office-heavy organizations; it has been a mad scramble to change culture, paperwork, operations, etc. I think they are doing decent and hopefully, in 5 years, it is night-and-day difference.
I've lived in Egypt as well... the bureaucracy there worked really well (before revolution). I just had to go to a giant building and spend half a day there, done. Sure I had to taxi to a DSL place to pay, but that was pretty easy as well.
> It also helps if you hire a relocation expert who knows the system. We paid ~$1,500 to a Portuguese American lady who helped us with everything. She handled setting up all our health care, apartment negotiation and contract review, set up all our utilities and phones, all our residency paperwork, DL exchange, bank account, and more. I highly recommend her and any group like her. They know how to work the system.
In the third world, that's called a tout, and they're a symbol of corruption and inefficiency. The only thing missing seems to be bribes paid to move your papers from one desk to the other faster.
Not sure what 3rd world means anymore as the cold war is over :), but I think I know what you mean.
What they are called now is a "relocation expert", and they help set everything up for you. They are in no way a symbol of corruption or inefficiency, but rather a professional who knows the system. IE, to get a DL you go this office, you fill out this form, you fax it to x, etc.
Do I wish everything was 100% online and designed with high UX standards? Sure, I also would love if it rained M&Ms on Fridays at 4.11pm :). Both of these things are not going to happen.
Hey neighbor! So glad it was faster for you. My experience is that these things vary greatly based on where you apply, and pure luck. I know people in the Algarve who have been waiting for 3 years. And people who applied in Lisbon and got it like you within 1 year.
Ah good point, I know our person who helped us had some good tricks like using offices not in Lisbon which were busier. We live up North so it was all very easy.
Most third world countries with such bad/slow bureaucracy solve those issues with bribery. I'd hate to live someplace that both has low corruption and such high bureaucratic burdens.
There is bureaucracy and then there is bureaucracy.
Here is an example: Malaysia and Indonesia. Each country has its own bureaucratic nightmares but you can make useful comparisons.
Malaysia: Easy to get a phone number. Easy to get an internet hotspot to get data. Reliable internet. Internet is fully open (no censorship).
Indonesia: Hard to get a phone number. Confusing choices and prices with Whatsapp/FB mingled in the choices. Have to submit your passport photo to some dodgy dude, who has to get a certain authorization. Took half a day for the Internet to activate. Data is not very reliable. Heavy censorship (not even Reddit works!) so have to get a VPN to do any meaningful browsing.
So sure as an expat you'll face bureaucracy but some countries' issue is beyond bureaucracy, it's that the process is fundamentally broken and no one gives a shit. This makes you lose significant time for relatively simple things (at least in other countries).
> Heavy censorship (not even Reddit works!) so have to get a VPN to do any meaningful browsing.
This depends on your ISP I believe; Telkom blocks Reddit, but I believe others do allow it. You don't need a VPN to bypass it, DNS-over-HTTPS will do as well.
In general things in Indonesia seem to be ... complicated. Just buying something at the local Indomaret sometimes seemed to involve typing an entire essay on a computer.
"some countries' issue is beyond bureaucracy, it's that the process is fundamentally broken and no one gives a shit." Haha. Love it. That sums up a lot of Portuguese administrations sadly.
I'm not sure about Portugal, but a few years ago my wife was studying in Spain on a study abroad program. She is from another EU country, and we'd visited Spain a few times, so figured it would be easy. Pretty much every step of the way we encountered so much more bureaucracy (I am an immigrant to her country) than we could even imagine. She spoke Spanish, but if she didn't it would have been a million times harder.
For example we wanted to get internet in the apartment we were renting. The local ISP (Orange) said that we needed a Spanish bank account, we said that we had a European account so could make an IBAN transfer, but apparently that wasn't an option. So we went to the bank and they said my wife needed a letter from the police. So we went there, and after showing all her university documents and waiting there for half a day, she got that. By that time the bank was closed, so we went back the next day, and after another few hours she had a bank account. We made a transfer of a few hundred euros from our other European account at home, then once it arrived a few days later, went back to the ISP. They took our details and the first payment, and then we figured everything was fine.
A month later the first bill came and we tried to pay but it was declined, tried to log into online banking and that was blocked too. We went back to the bank (BBVA) and they said our account had been closed due to suspicious activity (the only transaction we made was the initial payment for the internet) and there was nothing they could do. So we went to visit the ISP with the intention of paying in store, but they said it wasn't an option. We explained the situation and said there was nothing they could do, we could only pay with a Spanish bank account. In the end we had to get a friend to make the ISP payment for us, every month while we were living there.
Compare this to where we live now. You simply make payments to an IBAN bank account, so it can come from anywhere in Europe. If you need a local bank account, you can easily do so in any bank (I opened an account before I was officially living there, i.e. without any local ID, just my passport) or use something like Revolut. If you need to get a local phone number, you just go to the supermarket and buy a prepaid SIM for €1 - no ID needed.
This is a fairly long story but only one part of this seems like genuine "bureaucracy":
> We went back to the bank (BBVA) and they said our account had been closed due to suspicious activity (the only transaction we made was the initial payment for the internet) and there was nothing they could do.
That's an absolute nightmare (though I don't understand how you weren't notified, or what the recourse typically is for accounts closed due to "suspicious activity".
The rest can be summarized as:
* A business wants billing from a local bank account (not universal, but not unusual)
* Opening a local bank account needs some information confirming your identity, which the police can do.
In the UAE, I downloaded an app, submitted my docs and my details, and got my card the next day (I went to a bank branch - not the branch of my account but just a random branch to get it printed on the spot, even though they offered home delivery, because I wanted to see the process).
In the UK, I visited a nearby Lloyd's branch and got my account open and my stuff in under an hour.
In India and Switzerland, the bank sent a representative to my place, where they did everything from a handheld device, including verification. Done in an hour and got my card by mail in 1-2 days.
The stuff you mentioned in your summary are excuses and not valid ones at all.
When i was was apartment hunting in barcelona 7+ years ago and failed straight for weeks to get a single reply on idealista, and went to the real estate agencies and found they had siestas, still, in barcelona, i quit the country. good to visit, not to live.
ps: when i wanted a bank account, the people there acted like they didn't spoke english, until it was clear they won't give me an account, then suddenly english was not a problem.
No, they don't have "siestas". In Spain usually all retail closes from 2pm to 5pm. I wouldn't expect to go to a UK venue and have a normal dining timetables (for me as Spaniard), because I understand things work different there.
mr nacho trying to justify a Spanish tradition. fair enough. but I'm still bold enough to complain about it. it's super annoying when restaurants close from 2 to 5. also I doubt anybody from the foot soldiers actually takes a siesta. it's most likely just basically a variation on unpaid work or being on call unpaid. so, nobody benefits of it except the owners who just optimize the schedule for their purposes.
Unfortunately cold emails are generally ignored. The general etiquette in Spain is that you have to establish a relationship with someone in the business before they respond to emails, and then it also depends on the individual if they like to use email or not.
Oh, I had lot of negative experiences with BBVA in USA. Those guys has no clue how to do SEPA payments, declining regular debit card payments on e-shops like DigiKey as fraud (according to them I am suppose to train their systems so it will stop doing that) and in general their support sucks.
You moved to another country and did one single banking transaction there in a month? That seems like something you have to actively try in order to do. Right? Why did you try?
I see someone downvoted me. Perhaps because it was just an idle question and quite insubstantial?
Thinking about it now, it seems a little bigger than I realised when I wrote it.
I too moved to another country and got a bank account. When the people at the bank asked what I needed, I said something like "well, I'm here to stay and will need all the things regular people have, an account, a card, probably a house loan someday, can you advise me about what I should get today?". Maybe I hadn't yet decided that I wanted to stay for decades when I said that, but the person behind approved of the answer, I could tell.
Saying something vaguely like "I'll do the minimum necessary here and whatever possible in my old country" simply isn't a great way to talk to the people at the bank, at the immigration authority, at the waterworks, all the people who can make your move simple or less so.
Well, that's not exactly always true. I've had zero problems with bureaucracy since moving to Australia. My case has been that everything just works - minimal human involvement, and when it's present - it's pretty optimized.
I think that due to the high cost of labour (highest minimal pay in the world) and lack of labour due to higher speed of development - whatever that can be automated has been automated.
Same experience in NZ - you only start to see how hopeless europe is when you come back. I had 0 interaction with gov clark in nearly a decade in NZ, while in europe any sort of errand would require in face meetings. Even some digital forms would just email the form to a person in ivory tower for validation, who’ll tell you to visit office anyway…
Counterpoint, in France the vast majority of bureacratic things can be done fully online. Last time i had to go in person was for a passport/ID card, so there are multiple good reasons (photo, biometric info, confirm your identity) for that. Some of the websites are not great, and sometimes they send you a confirmations by mail, but otherwise a pretty painless experience.
Except when you're an expat in a country that actually knows what it's doing, like Singapore. Bureaucracy here is A+, and is the yardstick we should measure every country against.
What's wrong with complaining about sprawling bureaucracy? I can only see downsides and no upsides. Don't you want it to be eliminated? I think people are not yet complaining enough.
Unless you can complain with actionable complaints (It'd be great if i could fill this form on a website instead of on paper and mailing/faxing it), it literally serves no purpose.
I'm an English immgrant in France - lots of my compatriots complain about French bureaucracy but in all honesty it's far more efficient and accessible than it is in the UK.
Slightly off topic but I see this often enough and I’m curious to know, when do you call someone moving to another to work an expat instead of an immigrant.
You immigrate (verb) into a country. That makes you an immigrant (noun) of your new country.
You emigrate (verb) out of a country. That makes you an emigrant (noun) of your old country.
You expatriate (verb) to a country, from your homeland. You are an expatriate (noun) (aka expat) if you live in a country other than your native one.
For example, an American-born man who moved to Germany for part of their career and is living in Vietnam for retirement would be an American expat, who immigrated to Vietnam and emigrated from Germany.
You are often all 3 of them at once, depending on perspective. Colloquially, expats usually emigrate out of their homeland for specific reasons, usually either climate, culture, taxes. Eg. someone would expatriate to Portugal to take advantage of the tax scheme (this article), or maybe expatriate to Mexico for 'better' weather, or maybe expatriates to Paris for the cultural experience.
It is often assumed or implied that an expat has no intention of "integrating" in the culture of their host nation. Eg. an American in Mexico that moved for the weather wouldn't raise children there or apply for citizenship, but simply enjoy retiring on the beach and taking advantage of the cheaper CoL. They may still primarily speak English and seek out fellow Americans-in-mexico to socialize with instead of the locals. Conversely, a full Mexican family (parents+kids) that moved to America "for a better life" may not be considered an expat, since they intend to become citizens of America and raise their family as Americans. That is why expats sometimes have a poor reputation in their host nation, compared to other "immigrants".
I moved abroad on a work assignment. As soon as I decided to stay in the country long term, I stopped calling myself expat and labeled myself an immigrant instead.
When a person in the first category moves to another country, they are an expat; people from the other 2 categories are immigrants or migrants, as they prefer to say nowadays.
For instance I’d have to take a significant pay cut if I wanted to be the British prime minister but, belonging to the second category, I am an economic migrant. An American or Swedish teenager working in a Starbucks in Berlin is an expat.
immigrant is a person legally or illegally coming over here and stealing all our jobs and taking all our benefits and not even working or speaking the language.
expat is a person moving to another country and getting paid a high salary.
> those that didn’t pay hefty fees to set up companies in tax havens
I suppose it depends on your definition of "hefty" but a couple of thousand USD is usually sufficient, depending on jurisdiction, and obviously is expected to pay for itself many (, many, many) times over.
It's not that hard and it's not just for the 1%. Especially if you're anything approaching a "digital nomad" I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't establish a consulting company somewhere offshore, bill from that, pay yourself a quarterly dividend and then import only the money you actually need.
I’ve not looked into it personally, but I’ll relay what I’ve heard from various people who have looked into this or successfully done this.
In one case one person, as you say, did everything on their own and pays a couple thousand every year to keep the entity in the favourable jurisdiction. When asked if it was all above-board, they said it was one of those grey areas where they hoped the govt didn’t look too deeply into it, but so long as they weren’t making millions they weren’t worried about an audit.
The other cases asked various accounting companies to set this scenario up for them (one to establish a software engineering consulting company, others to set up other companies). The responses ranged from “yes we can do this, it’ll cost you 15-20k upfront, then 5k in annual upkeep” to “no this isn’t looked upon too well by the Portuguese govt”.
Well, your first example is a good "what not to do". Doesn't sound like much of a "grey area" if they're living in fear of being found out. I don't understand this kind of setup - financial information is permanent and once governments get their shit together there will be no safe havens, and this will apply retroactively. People playing such games are going to feel a lot of pain some coming day, I suspect.
I have to admit I don't know anything about Portugal but with a little research it is very possible to find a territorial tax-based country to live, where one does not owe any money on overseas income, and live completely legally there as a tax resident, taxed only only your minimal local salary - if that. Now I suppose that's not for everyone but if people were moving to Portugal specifically for tax reasons then I'm surprised they didn't, you know, check it out a bit first.
If you live in Portugal for longer than 6 months every 12 months you are considered a resident and taxed accordingly. I suppose you could go in and out every few months to escape that.
Just to note, it is a little bit more complicated, as there are other aspects of a tax residency test as well. IE, if it is your "home" as dictated by some other rules it can be a tax residency even with less time spent there.
If you're living offshore and paying taxes to the place you live, there's no particularly good justification (except might makes right) for the US to force you to pay taxes. AFAIK it's the only country, both now and in history, to claim taxation rights over its citizens perpetually no matter where they are.
the comment chain was to which you are responding was not about trying to pay taxes only to the country you're living in (which basically everyone in the world can do minus US citizens), it was about setting up a company in a tax haven (think Cayman Islands) to avoid paying taxes at all because they decided they are too high, which of course raises questions about the morality, legality, and practical details of such a process
> I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered
You need someone (in Spain it's called gestor) who does all of that for you. I live in Portugal, by now I speak the language but I don't get the rules etc. I have a guy who does everything, never had any issues. It's very cheap.
Didn't they recently crack down on Airbnb's, adding requirements that should theoretically lower the drive to turn unoccupied housing into Airbnb's (essentially limiting people purchasing flats with this intention)?
The digital nomads are going to soak up a good 3 to 5% of the total housing on a permanent basis, that's a pretty good dent in the reservoir. Tourists predominantly stay in hotels or other short-stay places. Though AirBNB and so on also result in the conversion of some of that available housing into short stay 'hotels' which will put more pressure on that reservoir. Typically in any city the vast bulk of the housing is spoken for, and only a relatively small part is available for newcomers or people that move out of their parents place when they come of age.
So I would not underestimate the impact even if it is only 10 to 20K individuals. Finally: tourists spend a lot, typical budgets are many 100's of euros / day for a family. Digital nomads comparatively little.
I’ve been curious about the dynamics around the often-cited statement “rent control doesn’t work”.
It seems that with rent control, you’d have higher demand and lower supply resulting in excess demand (both theoretically and it seems in practice). Does anyone know of any studies that:
- Analyse the effects of rent control in the presence of “vacancy-busting” measures like heavy vacancy tax/fines? (i.e forcing supply to stay high?)
- Analyse the price elasticity of the demand and supply respectively? (i.e is the excess demand mostly demand driven or supply driven?)
No links, but Berlin's rent control policy was practically an RCT because it only applied to half the city. Many papers were written on the situation and I'm sure one answers your questions.
I grew up in Tokyo as a child and used the subway twice every day to commute to and from school. I randomly sampled a few of these and the memories and feelings it evoked are incredible. Amazing what a difference a small jingle can make to the psyche. Thank you for posting this.
