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It is a similar mechanism, but there were major differences:

1. It was usable for small-medium companies, because the amount you avoided taxes on was 400k euro times number of people you involved in the scheme as board members.

2. It avoided taxation entirely and not just shifted tax burden to the country with lower rates.

3. It allowed the money to immediately return to the country where the profit originated in without any tax consequences. There is a reason why tech giants are sitting on a lot of cash.

It definitely is no longer possible, which is why I used past tense.

This scheme was unique, because it was available to small fish allowing nullify taxes on the first 400k euro of income (or multiple if you got more people to help you).

Similar ones, available to large corporations, are very much still possible, but they are getting more and more pushback.

A while back there was a simple scheme available that allowed you to avoid taxes on the first few hundred thousand / million of taxes.

- You created an LLC in Cyprus and transferred some IP (usually a trademark) to it

- You licensed that IP to your LLC in an EU country for the amount that basically erased any profit that LLC made

- Cypriot LLCs were not taxed on non-Cyprus income

- Each of non-resident director (or board member, I don't remember) of a Cypriot LLC was not taxed on first 400k euro of income from those LLCs. Double taxation deals Cyprus had protected you from being taxed on that income back home.

I know this is no longer possible with Cyprus, but a variation of that is now happening with e.g. many EU clothing brands having their brand ownership transferred to Egyptian LLCs.

Courts have also ruled that sharing in P2P network is enough to get hit with 150k in statutory damages per shared work.

AI companies did quite a bit of uploading while e.g. getting Anna's archive over BitTorrent.

> What does the security officer at your company say?

I'm the one making those decisions for the company and I don't believe us immigration officials to be competent and trustworthy enough to have access to what is on my work laptop, so I come through immigration with devices with data I have no problem granting access to - a fresh OS install.

> Either you shouldn't be leaving with devices with the data from your job on them, or you don't trust them, but your job is fine with it.

When visiting US (and I only visit US for work-related reasons) I leave personal devices home and only carry either wiped work-issued laptop (for on-sites) or an old Lenovo laptop with a fresh OS install (for conferences) + a wiped phone.

I always enter US with all of my devices wiped and restore them from backup once I'm past immigration, simply because I don't trust government to maintain the security level my job requires.

Now I'm worried that this will be held against me..

I did witness ai output advantage dwindle as codebase grew in a team of experienced devs who switched to 99% ai generated changes.

The last time I've checked ai still had an edge adding new features, but the team collectively lost the project knowledge and any problem discovered that llm could not fix took significantly longer to correct - they were effectively working on a new to them codebase.

I think that question hinges on the second part of your comment and should be answered as:

Does anyone know any company that went back to hand-written code because it decided drawbacks of ai generated code or some other concerns outweight the output benefits?

My dedicated server comes with 2TB/month data included. Humans use up about 2% of that. If I didn't block bots I'd run out mid-month.

No.

The risk of being denied entry to US and my lack of interest in visiting US share a reason. That's the only change vs 5 years ago as far as governments are concerned.

As for corporate I've always assumed no internal communication was private.

I've got a fairly new Toyota and I when I found myself needing a 2nd car for my family I ended up buying a 20 year old Honda and I have to say I enjoy driving it much more.

I might also be safer in it - oversensitive security systems nagging me with false positives almost constantly don't pair well with my ADD

People are selling those older cars at a significant discount compared to previous years, because they got banned from low emission zones - you need euro 5 for diesel and euro 4 for petrol to be allowed in centers of many of large EU cities.

Property managers handling municipal property in mid+ cities will want one.

Any company dealing with construction waste disposal will want one.

Both will have no problem shelling out 1000 euro per unit.

Cynic in me thinks it's some or all of the following:

- extract monetary contributions for their side of political spectrum from ai companies

- extract money for personal gain

- grokify ai answers on political / worldview topics, because polls are showing people trust ai answers more than wikipedia

This is already the case in most (all?) EU countries. Government-issued photo ID is required to activate a SIM card.

If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country