As a Spaniard who was about to take a well-deserved siesta, I found these points so blatantly inaccurate that I had to get up and address them.
>>3% tax on my global wealth every year (in effect it's more like 4.5% because there is also significant capital gain tax)
This only affects multi-millionaires, and even then, your numbers are wrong. The national wealth tax only applies to net worth over €3M. The top rate of 3.5% is only for assets over €10.7M. And some regions like Madrid and Andalusia offer a 100% exemption from the regional tax.
>>60% tax on a semi-decent tech salary
False. The top income tax bracket is ~47% on earnings over €300K, which is far beyond a "semi-decent" salary here. More importantly, as a foreigner, you can use the "Beckham Law" to pay a flat tax of 24% on your first €600K of income for six years.
>>25%+ capital gain tax for my investors (if I find any)
You're cherry-picking the highest rate again. It's a progressive tax starting at 19%. It only exceeds 25% on gains over €200K. Besides, if your investors are not in Spain, they are taxed in their country of residence under its tax treaties with Spain.
>>people don't speak English, many of them are proud of it
We are not French, we won't scold you for trying to speak English. While not everyone is fluent in rural areas, people will genuinely try their best to help you, even if it's through Google Translate.
>>scheduling anything with anybody is impossible, the concept of being on time doesn't exist
You're confusing social life with professional life. Yes, we might be 15 minutes late for a beer, but in a business context, being late is just as unprofessional here as it is in London or New York.
>>Bureaucracy is slow, full of paperwork, can't be done online, can't be done in English, the result depends on clerk's mood on a given day
Spanish bureaucracy is as slow as in anywhere else, but it is indeed digitized. You are required to file your tax forms (available in English btw) digitally, and you can register a business, get your SSN, etc., with a digital certificate from your computer. I've only had to show up in person once in the last five years to register my address after moving to a new city.
>>if someone comes to my house when I am away I can't kick them out, need to find another house and keep paying bills for the new occupa(s)nts
This is just rage bait. What you are describing, someone entering your primary home, is trespassing, a criminal offense. The police will have them evicted within 48 hours. The infamous "okupa" issue applies to properties that are clearly abandoned or second homes left empty for years, not your actual residence.
>>This only affects multi-millionaires, and even then, your numbers are wrong. The national wealth tax only applies to net worth over €3M. The top rate of 3.5% is only for assets over €10.7M. And some regions like Madrid and Andalusia offer a 100% exemption from the regional tax.
Who do you think is going to build/finance businesses if not people with significant NW?
Also central government removed Andalucia's and Madrid's exemptions lately.
>>False. The top income tax bracket is ~47% on earnings over €300K, which is far beyond a "semi-decent" salary here. More importantly, as a foreigner, you can use the "Beckham Law" to pay a flat tax of 24% on your first €600K of income for six years.
Add health care and employer contributions.
>>You're cherry-picking the highest rate again. It's a progressive tax starting at 19%. It only exceeds 25% on gains over €200K. Besides, if your investors are not in Spain, they are taxed in their country of residence under its tax treaties with Spain.
I am "cherry picking" the case that applies to me. If I live in Spain they would take around 4% of my net worth every year just for me being there. That's an expensive proposition.
>>We are not French, we won't scold you for trying to speak English. While not everyone is fluent in rural areas, people will genuinely try their best to help you, even if it's through Google Translate.
Major problem in EU is that we don't have a common language. Teaching English and making it 2nd official language everywhere should be a top priority. Otherwise we will never have the start American companies have. You will not built a big company if you can't hire and work in English. Tech sector won't happen if tech people don't speak a common language. It will not be Spanish/French/German or Polish (my own).
>>You're confusing social life with professional life. Yes, we might be 15 minutes late for a beer, but in a business context, being late is just as unprofessional here as it is in London or New York.
Not my experience sadly.
>>This is just rage bait. What you are describing, someone entering your primary home, is trespassing, a criminal offense. The police will have them evicted within 48 hours. The infamous "okupa" issue applies to properties that are clearly abandoned or second homes left empty for years, not your actual residence.
There are multiple reports of foreigners living in Spain living for vacation and having their house taken away by ocupas.
> The main problem with the non-Apple laptop market is that there is a mind-boggling number of confusing models, SKUs, processor/gpu variants, etc., and wildly variable physical quality control that confuse consumers and leave them unhappy. This is the flip side of choice in prioritizing, say, gaming performance over battery life while optimizing price or vice-versa.
This is 100% it, Lenovo has been killing it lately with their Yoga/Slim series, but for every laptop they have that competes with a MacBook, they also have a myriad of other options that are just e-waste. At the end of the day, the average consumer is not going to do the same kind of research that a tech enthusiast might do, and Apple has a somewhat simple catalog (although incredibly overpriced once you step out of the entry configs).
I see this (and other ublue images) as an alternative to Ansible, rather than just an image. I could fork this repo, automate PRs from upstream with a GH action while making my own changes to it and keep an automated CI/CD pipeline. This painless extensibility is a big advantage imo over traditional distributions.
The issue is not AI, nor browser extensions per se, the issue is the lackluster permission system that Chrome extensions have, it's pretty similar to what Android had 7 (?) years ago, which should not be acceptable in 2023.
Note that the FLAN-T5 variant in 10th place is 3B parameters large, there is another FLAN-T5 variant that has 11B parameters that should perform better (and the fact that a 3B model is able to compete with Alpaca-13B is impressive by itself).
Fun story, I had a professor in university that tried to force us to buy his own book for his course, refusing to provide notes or any other free alternatives, and for the final exam he allowed anyone to bring in his book.
We complained to the school board as this was unfair and there was a conflict of interests, the exam was redone by a committee and a new professor replaced him the next year.
Damn. Early in my college years I took a course from a lecturer who made us buy not one but two useless books of his (each on its fifth edition or so). The bookstore was owned and operated by the college, so I didn't even bother to complain.
I ran into a situation where a graded component of a course required buying the textbook by the lecturer. It involved an online testing service through a company owned by the lecturer. I raised a complaint with the university pointing out it was against policy along with the conflict of interest, was forced to transfer to a section led by another lecturer (same course, different textbook, considerably worse lecturer), and the university never bothered doing anything about it.
Spaniard here, on my last bill I paid 0.120268 €/kWh, admittedly I'm on the free market but even on the regulated market the average price for March was 0.158719 €/kWh.
I have no clue where the data for Spain comes from, in June 2022 the average price for the regulated market was 0.291347 €/kWh[0], that's ignoring the free market rates which are what 70% of Spaniards use (and they are cheaper when the market is volatile, like last year).
US electricity pricing varies a lot, it’s ~$0.14/kWh in Maryland, we were paying something like ~$0.34/kWh in California, I’ve heard of <$0.10/kWh in hydro heavy areas like Washington state.
>>3% tax on my global wealth every year (in effect it's more like 4.5% because there is also significant capital gain tax)
This only affects multi-millionaires, and even then, your numbers are wrong. The national wealth tax only applies to net worth over €3M. The top rate of 3.5% is only for assets over €10.7M. And some regions like Madrid and Andalusia offer a 100% exemption from the regional tax.
>>60% tax on a semi-decent tech salary
False. The top income tax bracket is ~47% on earnings over €300K, which is far beyond a "semi-decent" salary here. More importantly, as a foreigner, you can use the "Beckham Law" to pay a flat tax of 24% on your first €600K of income for six years.
>>25%+ capital gain tax for my investors (if I find any)
You're cherry-picking the highest rate again. It's a progressive tax starting at 19%. It only exceeds 25% on gains over €200K. Besides, if your investors are not in Spain, they are taxed in their country of residence under its tax treaties with Spain.
>>people don't speak English, many of them are proud of it
We are not French, we won't scold you for trying to speak English. While not everyone is fluent in rural areas, people will genuinely try their best to help you, even if it's through Google Translate.
>>scheduling anything with anybody is impossible, the concept of being on time doesn't exist
You're confusing social life with professional life. Yes, we might be 15 minutes late for a beer, but in a business context, being late is just as unprofessional here as it is in London or New York.
>>Bureaucracy is slow, full of paperwork, can't be done online, can't be done in English, the result depends on clerk's mood on a given day
Spanish bureaucracy is as slow as in anywhere else, but it is indeed digitized. You are required to file your tax forms (available in English btw) digitally, and you can register a business, get your SSN, etc., with a digital certificate from your computer. I've only had to show up in person once in the last five years to register my address after moving to a new city.
>>if someone comes to my house when I am away I can't kick them out, need to find another house and keep paying bills for the new occupa(s)nts
This is just rage bait. What you are describing, someone entering your primary home, is trespassing, a criminal offense. The police will have them evicted within 48 hours. The infamous "okupa" issue applies to properties that are clearly abandoned or second homes left empty for years, not your actual residence.