They take A decade, not decades. You're the one spreading FUD. There are successful new nuclear projects built very quickly in EU.
The only slow thing about nuclear is regulatory approval - hampered by EU that for many years didn't accept nuclear as "green".
Is nuclear more expensive that rebuilding the electrical grid and building enough storage to handle the wind/solar peaks and use the energy later? I don't think it's so clear. The solar/wind power plant itself is not the full cost.
The Hinkley C site was approved in 2010, it is estimated to go live in 2028. It was laready two years late in May 2022, and already overshot the budget by 50% by then. As of February 2023, the delay increased by another 15 months (resulting in the 2028 go live) and costs increased again to now 32.7 billion pounds. And already in 2020, new wind and solar utility scale projects were cheaper per kWh than Hinkley, withbsolar becoming cheaper and cheaper every year (Moore's law is still valid there).
Hinkley C is 3,260 MWe. In 2022 Europe installed a total of 41.4 GW of solar capacity, up from from 28.1 GW in 2021. That means more than 10x Hinkley C in a single year (2022), and cheaper per kWh.
Nuclear is great stop gap until more renewablea are installed, not more not less.
And before ypu start, no, the German nuclear plants couldn't be run any longer (maintenance, fuel, safety), run time has already been extended multiple times, and the last nuclear exit, the badly organized one, was put in place by tze conservative CDU let government (not that you go and blame the Greens for it).
But they are not directly elected to ministerial positions.
In a parliamentary system (ie most countries in the EU) members of parliament are elected. Parliament appoints a premier. Premier appoints ministers with parliamentary approval.
EU commissioners are nominated by the member states subject to their own laws. Typically that means they are chosen by your elected government.
If you want a directly elected commissioner that’s a matter of national politics. Your country is free to change its laws to select a commission nominee via a national vote.
That would actually be a great idea, because then political parties and voting citizens would have a bigger reason to try to win European elections. Probably would make the parliament less liberal-conservative too.
I have been self-employed under a Polish business (działalność gospodarcza) for the last few years. With income tax plus mandatory pension and health contributions, over a third of my income goes to taxes or other mandatory fees (like the requirement to have a licensed accountant keep your books). It really isn’t much different than most other EU countries. And of course one pays a comparable VAT on shopping.
Often in Poland people say “Why are you running your business here? Base it in Czech Republic!” The grass always is greener on the other side.
In Czech Republic as self-employed ("živnostník") your effective tax+insurance rate for income up to 2M CZK (~ 80k EUR) is never more than 15%. I have SW contractor friends paying around 8-12% - including health and social insurance. No need to have any accountant at all for income under 2M CZK, you just keep your invoices and sum your income at the end of a year, the tax return form is online and the sum of income is your only input.
you are not forced to live and do business here. Feel free to move to another country if you don't like the taxes. But you can't just avoid the taxes because you feel like it. I don't care how much you would loose by not avoiding taxes.
Society only functions if everyone contributes. And the rest of society pays their taxes, you know. They can't avoid paying taxes on their car through a foreign holding structure. It's a slap on their face because you feel like you should have more.
>Society only functions if everyone contributes. And the rest of society pays their taxes, you know.
Yes, everyone except German businesses dealing in cash only who don't issue receipts, and the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Airbus, NXP, IKEA, ST etc. and all these conglomerate with complex tax avoidance schemes spread across Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Switzerland and some Caribbean islands who neither fully belonging to the British or Dutch crowns nor are fully independent nations, but some fuzzy situation in between.
You see, once we let so many players legally avoid paying taxes in broad daylight, it's difficult to uphold the social contract that "we should all pay taxes" as then it turns into a crabs in a bucket situation where the veil is lifted and the Average Joe sees through the cash-grab scam that the tax system is on the working class, and will do everything in his power to avoid paying taxes as well.
If you want people to respect the social contract of the welfare state, we need to hold everyone accountable to it with no exceptions, not just the poor suckers who have no means of dodging it or fighting back, while the super wealthy are laughing all the way to the bank.
You have to cleanly separate personal and company taxes. If the managing director makes significant decisions (as in forming the will, not as in executing) while on German soil, the company is taxed like any other German capital company.
Btw. despite the myth, just being 182 days outside of Germany doesn't get you out of German personal taxes. It just stops taxation of foreign-derived income.
If you're talking about income taxation of individuals and would otherwise be dual resident in Germany and another country with which Germany has a typical set of tax treaty residency tiebreakers, then the top criterion in the list is where you have a permanent home available to you. If you have a permanent home available to you in the other country but not in Germany, you are by treaty a tax non-resident of Germany regardless of days in Germany or center of life.
That does raise the question of what does it mean to have a permanent home available to you. And that's a much harder conversation as applied to the edge cases. But one can certainly construct viable enough scenarios where it would not be a close call even if one spends more than half the year in Germany, and then arrange one's reality to genuinely match the constructed scenario. Explaining to the Finanzamt (tax office) might need a Steuerberater (tax advisor) to argue with them, of course.
Yes, most EU countries directly elect the parliament and the government is formed from the parliament members - usually the winning party/coalition, but not always. In some it's a tradition that the winning party leader gets the first shot at getting their cabinet approved by the parliament, then a second shot, and if they can't do it the president appoints somebody else.
Who cares? I don't live in UK or USA. They can have whatever disfunctional system they want, doesn't mean I will tolerate it at my home because of that.
There are dictators elsewhere, should I have one at home too?
No. If I use services of a foreign company, I am the one who should follow the foreign law. I am the one who went out and used a foreign service, they didn't come to me.
That’s the tricky part about an internet company. Where are they located? If a US company ships you a physical product they need to follow local laws otherwise you can’t import it. But you think in the case of a digital product then the logic is reversed?
No, they don't need to follow the local law. I can buy whatever I want from anywhere in the world and the company doesn't need to follow anything other than the law of their home.
These are very significantly different cases:
1) a foreign customer buying
2) a foreign company selling
In the first case, the company follows their home law only. On the second case they would have to follow the local law of the customer's country too
That is definitely not how the world works. Import/Export laws do exist for a reason.
Your edit makes even less sense.
1) a foreign customer buying
2) a foreign company selling
Those two happen at the same time. If I’m in Australia and I’m buying something from the US I am a foreign customer (relative to the company) and the company is also a foreign company (relative to the customer)
If you want to export anything you have to follow the laws of the country you’re exporting to.
That is definitely how the world works. Import/export laws largely do not apply when it's the customer self-importing it for their own personal use. And that can include the seller sending it to them using FedEx or whatever, still self-import.
Import/export laws mostly affect stuff that's going to be resold again, and involve local subsidiaries or contracted distributors.
The two cases I listed do not happen at the same time. Try some other, more charitable interpretation.
If I went out and bought something out of my country, the seller never tried to sell in my country and it makes no sense they would have to follow my local law.
If the seller went out and started selling (doing marketing etc) in my country, that's a different story.
If I'm in Australia and I buy a new alarm clock from an online store in Japan, the alarm clock does not need to meet Australian standards. It's the customer's risk to take.
One obvious reason is that different countries have wildly incompatible laws.
Another reason is that it is not the job of a company (or random blogger!) to worry about all laws everywhere on the planet. If it were, it would be very difficult to even discuss regionally sensitive issues around religion, territorial disputes or even ongoing pandemics.
How is it not a company’s job to worry about the laws of the countries they operate in?
If it’s not its job, then whose job is it then?
I’m not going to argue that it’s an easy problem to solve. Far from it. But I also think there has to be some balance otherwise a company can simply set headquarters in a country with as fewer restrictions as possible and run wild.
It is the company’s job to comply with the laws of the country they operate in and I never implied otherwise. This does not mean complying the laws of all other countries where people use the internet.
For example, if you produce online maps and you’re based in China, you’d better be rendering maps that reflect their territorial claims. If you’re based in a neighboring country with competing claims, then those same maps that comply with Chinese regulations could get you into trouble.
> ”… otherwise a company can simply set headquarters in a country with as fewer restrictions as possible”
Yes. That’s how it works. Countries compete in terms of regulatory regime and less onerous ones do indeed attract more business.
The only slow thing about nuclear is regulatory approval - hampered by EU that for many years didn't accept nuclear as "green".
Is nuclear more expensive that rebuilding the electrical grid and building enough storage to handle the wind/solar peaks and use the energy later? I don't think it's so clear. The solar/wind power plant itself is not the full cost.