Atropos

It is a bit different though, because the German exit tax applies to companies and people holding more than a 1% share in a company. So no exit tax if you hold bitcoins as part of your private assets...

Agreed that there is some tension with EU principles, but it is difficult to get it right. Building a company in country A for 20 years, then moving to country B for 184 days to sell it completely without paying taxes also does not seem like a fair system.

If you are planning on VC-like returns by selling your company, you should start with a holding GmbH and an operative GmbH below (or crazier structures like a Holding GmbH & Co. KG). But: This way you have the maximum administrative costs and complexity in the beginning...

I think starting as an Einzelunternehmer makes sense in certain situations. I'm not a tax lawyer, but I'm a lawyer in a firm that advises startups and I have seen a lot of "Starts as Einzelunternehmer -> Does asset sale to own GmbH" type deals... "Normal" lawyers / tax advisors will never recommend this, because it is not a "simple check the box" exercise, and "sophisticated" lawyers are incredibly expensive.

You should check out how EU state aid laws work. This is exactly the issue they are addressing and it is not true that we have seen a significant "subsidy race" between different EU countries in the recent past.

I agree. In a perfect world, it would not matter who wins the lottery of having conscientious parents etc. and the government would make sure that everyone has the same chance to achieve their potential in school. But in the real world, it is crazy to expect that state resources could ever provide the same benefit as a "tiger mom" willing to go to battle with her puberty-stricken teens over finishing their coursework 24/7.

I am still working in big law and I disagree that the benefits of adopting more advanced version control would be small. However, I work in a field that is a mix of regulatory law and litigation, where almost no work is based on templates and most things are drafted from scratch.

One very large problem that typically comes up in large teams: Only 1 team member can edit the the "live version" of a document (it's locked for editing by the version control system), the other team members need to work "offline" and then reintegrate their changes/drafts into the main document. Everybody has lived through the horror story of a team member in the different time zone still having checked out the live version and going to sleep :)

Sometimes you have to circulate a draft document in parallel to multiple parties (e.g. colleagues with special subject expertise + client's inhouse lawyers + client's technical experts + other party's law firm + other party's inhouse lawyers + other party's technical experts). It can happen that you need to reintegrate comments from different parties to different versions of the drafts, e.g., if your client gives feedback quickly and you re-circulate updated version internally, then you receive other party's comments to the older draft version...

Besides the mechanical aspects of reintegrating comments, it is also difficult to track if everybody who needs to sign off has actually signed off on the parts of the documents they had to review. Often it gets lost who made which comment/change. It can be quite awkward if a regulator asks you "Isn't the technical statement on page 12 contradicted by fact XYZ" - please explain until tomorrow - and you have to quickly figure out who actually put that in...

The legal system and independent courts etc are an infrastructure it depends on - Google had to leave China due to problems with the local legal system

They have 90 days to "stop the abusive practices", basically meaning find a way to redesign their website - this is what they really care about.

Germany's tax system is linked to residence, not citizenship (unlike the US). Therefore if you move to the US and work there for a few years, you will not pay any German taxes during that period.

Therefore the "free rider" effect definitely exists, but I don't think it is a huge problem, because the numbers of people migrating out and in again are not that high.

Could you please refresh my memory: Which of the Soviet Union states was allowed to hold a referendum on whether it should leave?

The Economist's democracy index disagrees, putting Azerbaijan into the "Authoritarian" index. And apprently their President is in power since 2003, which is usually not a good sign.

Iran certainly cannot be called a full democracy, the religious council has to approve candidacies for President - it isn't even clear if the current President Rouhani can pose as a candidate!

But there are some Muslim democracies working better, like Indonesia and Malaysia.

I am not so sure. For me at least, it was much more difficult to be in the unstructured university environment than having a job. Routines make life easier for me, I like having micro-accomplishments every day in working life etc... I know many people are probably different, but still, a life of creative work is not so easy. The tortured writer or the procrastinating PhD student is basically a cultural cliché at this point, as well as the 3rd generation killing all the rich family wealth. If you gave me 100 million dollars right now, I have a real fear I would just waste my life doing nothing but hedonistic pleasure, while telling myself I'm still working on my next novel or political theory of justice or ...