It's also important to remember that a ton of things we take for granted now simply didn't exist (source code control was in its infancy, merging was shit, syntax highlighting was minimal at best, compiling took time, etc).
I've always dreamed of a house plan that took this into account - imagine all the wall studs being uncut and used as delivered from the truck, each wall length designed to not need drywall cuts ...
This and great backward compatibility. I still can make app targeting Win2000 and it will run on Win2000 onwards (Win10 and Win11 included.) Unfortunately, its starts to fall apart...
I guess they finally think they captured enough "value" with Windows so there is no need to keep every subsystem maintained. It must be very expensive to keep a 20+ year developer to sit in a basement room writing code for some feature that does not generate much revenue. Sad truth. TBH I'd love to learn those subsystems and do it for free.
If you live in a VLCOL country, and have access to free tooling (via various means) you only need a very small return to make it entirely worth your while.
In the NL the one who provides the loan is supposed to do that against a normal interest rate, which is a capital gain subject to tax. So this trick would not work here afaik, because now there is still a party paying taxes.
What about the "default on the loan" backdoor? Would that work?
Let's say I sell you my business for $1 million. You give me a loan for $1,2 million. The money is transferred into my account. I pay 2% interest for 10 years and then I default on the loan. You do nothing to recover the money.
I had a few colleagues in the UK that tried this to avoid taxes. The tax services generally don't look too kindly on that sort of arrangements. Searching for "Loan charge" should surface quite a few distressed stories.
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