It can be used to keep bad content away from kids. DNS over TLS can be blocked on the network router / firewall and DNS safe search enforced by forwarding lookups to something like Adguard
Having worked in another EU country, I can attest that I paid as much as 56% in taxes, so I believe a guy who says that he works in Germany and pays half in taxes. If you have other data, you are welcome to present it.
If you make 90k in Germany, you pay around 36k to mandatory (varying degrees) insurance/pension plus taxes if you're single. About 19.5k of that are actual taxes. If you're married/have children that total can drop to ~30k and will include health insurance for your entire family unit.
I just gave you the actual numbers. The same numbers you will quickly get by using any of the many available net income calculators for Germany[0].
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.
But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.
What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?
You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
Edit: I was curious what the answer might be and couldn't find much. One source calculates the tax burden to be about 53% of income.
The link you provided is the web page of the interest group I mentioned. They will literally try any trick in the book to get that number up, including adding a bunch of things that aren't even taxes, a boatload of things they call "quasi-taxes" with numbers presumably pulled from their ass, and adding expenses your employer incurs only to subtract them again immediately. Anything to get that percentage number up.
But even they don't even call the resulting number "tax burden" - that'd be transparently stupid. They more generally call it a "burden ratio" (Belastungsquote).
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous their calculations are: If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf). Does this still sound like something you can easily compare one country to the next and draw useful conclusions from? Of course not. In the next country it might come from an interest group with a different goal, a government calculation, or a Fox News writer.
> You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
What you're trying to get at - hopefully because the alternative is a nonsense number with no purpose other than being a fun fact supporting a discussion about degrees of individual autonomy in modern societies - is called discretionary income, and it's only meaningful when adjusted for cost of living and compared across similar living situations.
> If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf).
Aren't you talking about social contributions that your employer is forced by law to pay on your behalf? You realize that if this was not in place, those money would go directly to you since your salary is whole sum your employer is paying towards your employment? Doesn't seem you grok it fully from your words.
I am not claiming if its good or bad (dramatic global financial changes will test viability of all these systems rather well in upcoming years, I'd expect many people will be unhappy when their naive views hit reality of numbers). I am outside of such system, in mostly private social system in Switzerland (aka I save for myself, mostly) and wouldn't want it any other way.
If that's the real wage, it should be used when comparing wages internationally. It's however not used as such, because trying to figure out what should and shouldn't be included in that number for each country will result in an even bigger headache. Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?
In any case, the resulting individual "burden" is meaningless if you don't also quantify individual benefit. As an extreme example, imagine a country in which your income taxes pay for things such as transportation credits usable on gas, public transport and roads, while the neighboring country has mostly private toll roads and low taxes. Another example is health insurance. In Germany it is pretty nearly mandatory with most having some form of insurance, and total spending per citizen is around $9,000. In the US more than 90% are insured and spending is higher, but within the same ballpark.
What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison? Fuck all. It's at best usable as a prompt for a philosophical discussion about autonomy, but often merely used for masturbation or making dishonest arguments designed to go over well in establishments specializing in alcoholic beverages - like those of a certain interest group.
> Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?
Obviously yes, and obviously no. Just as we don't add the price of groceries or rent to wages unless the employer subsidizes those in which case obviously yes we must.
> What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison?
It tells you how expensive it is to live there, relatively speaking. Obviously (as you note) that's only half of the discussion just as an expensive appliance might or might not be worth the premium to any particular individual. But you're wrong to dismiss it out of hand as you do. Just as it's disingenuous to dismiss the benefits of (for example) universal healthcare it is also disingenuous to attempt to derail discussion that focuses directly on total cost or effective tax burden or what have you.
What you are dismissing as a "nonsense number" of an "interest group" I would consider one of the most accurate and easily understood quantifications of total cost.
Imho, parent's point about attempting to quantify costs without balancing them against benefits is valid.
It's meaningless to say "Germans pay X, Americans pay Y" if the two receive completely different benefits in exchange for those rates.
Furthermore, the point that the German system would be paying to individuals if not to the government is somewhat disingenuous. There are a few options.
1. The government doesn't do it, so private options do at some cost
2. There's some government-private hybrid
3. It's not done at all
An example would be parental leave. In the US, it largely doesn't exist to the European extent. Employers don't offer it. You can't buy insurance for it. It just doesn't exist. That's something Germans are getting for existing in the German system.
Yes, as I acknowledged it is only half of the story. Certainly you need more information to make an informed decision about anything. But that doesn't make it meaningless. And generally where people level such dismissals there is conversational context being conveniently ignored (such as happened earlier in this thread).
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with parental leave as an example. I completely agree with what you wrote but don't see it being at odds with anything said previously.
I think we all know that Germans enjoy substantially more free at point of service public services than those in the US let alone those living in a developing country. Obviously that costs something. Yet when someone brings up the price tag you get a bunch of partisan screeching about how prices are meaningless.
Prices _aren't_ meaningless. The US military (for example) is absurdly expensive. There are lots of things received as a result of that expenditure. Regardless, the relative cost is high and that's not meaningless to point out given that everyone involved in the discussion has at least some conception that there are important differences in the downstream impact.
I can spend that in whichever tax jurisdiction I want and the VAT rate might be whatever depending on what one buys. If you want to go that route you'd then also have to adjust for cost/quality of living to stay intellectually honest, which means you'd then have to come up with some statistical consumer basket. It's a stupid idea to even start down that route in what fits into HN comments.
It's called PPP and yes, it makes Europe look sightly better but it's still behind the US and that's for median household income not tech income.
I've managed staff all over the US and in Europe and have had access to large corporate pay scales across zones. The difference is so significant that CoL is a total rounding error for software developers.
You always have to cost/quality of living if you go that route. Because that's literally what taxes are for. Anyway I don't think it's fair to not include VAT. For every euro you want to utilize(modulo some exceptions) you have to pay it.
3€ fee on every line item for imports says no you cant'.
Yes the exact cost will differ depending on what you buy but that doesn't remove the cost, it just obscures it - which is the point of having so many different taxes.
Maybe fully read the comment I'm responding to? The implication is that European countries (and especially Germany) spend an extraordinary amount of tax money on health care and that's why taxes are so high. This is basically wrong from start to finish. You also don't pay half of your wage in taxes in Germany. The chunk that's removed from your gross wage before pay out includes your mandatory employee insurances (health-, pension- and unemployment-insurances), and that's how you end up "losing" about 30% to 45% of your gross salary before pay out (the actual "tax part" is somewhere between 10 and 25% depending on income, marriage status etc...)
Not arguing for not reading test code. A lot can be achieved by instructing agents to balance out the testing pyramid with the right amount of fast end to end tests, property based tests for the right things, parametrized example based tests. Ensuring the local and CI has the right mix of tests running at right time. On projects where I have less time to review AI generated code I channel my anxiety into setting up guardrails and processes for the agents and then force them to bump up against them. In the end I view it as creating frameworks which allow me to outsource some of my attention to the agents, so that I can claw back some of that time to go set up more guardrails for more agents who are working on something else.
I am responding negatively to parent, which claims they are self-pacing, when the simplest explanation is that they just have nothing substantial to show.
Effective use of frontier models involves "driving the build". They can't really do it themselves, human is still involved to tie break complicated tradeoffs and take on deployment, security, financial and other risks. The innovators are not becoming useless, they are offered a choice to 10x their output and speed and quality of execution. Execution still matters, it just became different.
Not centauring for your AI or training dataset. Sorry. What the current AI industry comes down to is a tollbooth on " interesting" research work, where the people hosting the infra are just waiting for monetizable opportunities to float in to be scooped. The absolute same business model as Amazon Basics as applied to intellectual work.
Let it rot, and the bubble pop from distrust. The people running this shit have absolutely no one's best interests in mind, and I'm not about to sacrifice my expertise to keep your ledgers looking promising.
Good point. The other corollary is: why would you want to, if you can solve your problem by more easily finding and reusing existing building blocks with a bit of glue code.
Humans will evolve. Some will keep trying to think more. Many others won't. I'm not sure this is that different from previous disruptive tech in that regard.
It could be that AI is the tool the world needs to solve problems the world governments have been deadlocked to solve in the past 50 years.
But does it make sense to think when you're competing with a think-tank of hundreds of agents who all are more intelligent than you AND have way more stamina.
I'd like to think too that the person who can sit quietly in a room and think has an evolutionary advantage over, say, an influencer on tiktok doing silly dances, but the reality seems to be more and more that this is wishful thinking. Nerds have made themselves irrelevant.
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