I hate to be the that OpenBSD guy, but "the people who do the work are the ones to decide how it's done". Yes, people are paid to maintain OpenZFS, but so far nobody is ready to pay for (or volunteer to) meet your bar.
Side note: OpenZFS already has an extensive test suite. Merely hitting a code branch wouldn't have caught this one.
This is corresponds to Chapter 1.4 of SICM (Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics).
Although SICM doesn't expose the underlying optimization method in the library interfaces. The path is represented as polynomial. I'd have to check if they also do gradient descent.
Come to Europe.
PhD candidates are not treated as students.
They are treated as adults, and get the salary of an (entry-level) engineer with a master degree.
You get paid a living wage to do a PhD in most countries actually.
If this is about (your) kids?
Send them to Europe for higher education. Many universities with great international ranking have virtually no tuition. But they can be quite competitive in terms of getting a passing grade.
Thanks for the encouragement and sorry for my late reply!
Indeed. Chemical Engineer that has always loved programming + InfoSec to include it in some way, shape, or form on what I do...
I took a chance during Covid and was fortunate to land DevSecOps-y roles. Not a 10x engineer by any means, but I have been working my way through Knuth's TAoCP and slowly learning to love lower level.
Living now in the Netherlands, but didn't know that there were such types of benefits to studying a PhD.
I'll definitely need to have a good think (and budgetary assessments as well) ... having to pay rent in the Netherlands due to the (probably artificial) housing crisis feels like a seriously limiting factor to afford studying.
Of course not.
But you might get paid only a 50% salary for a PhD in the natural sciences (or liberal arts).
Different fields have different cultures in that regard.
1) India. Lots of conflicting laws. Lots of conflicting paperwork. And as a foreign company you'll probably pay more in bribes ("voluntary non-disclosed payments to ensure success") than you would in taxes, because the alternative is that they send the police after your local employees and maybe try to have the local court seize your property.
2) EU. The VATOSS is straightforward, but the income tax systems are not. Within the EU, France is the worst, followed by Belgium, Denmark, and Germany. Portugal and Ireland are very chill about tax returns. For the bad countries, there is lots of paperwork. Literally every transaction must be documented. On both sides. And they will ask for the documents when they audit. And they will challenge any cross-border transaction that results in reduced local income.
3) Africa. I've only dealt with South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt. South Africa was the easiest to deal with, and Nigeria was surprisingly business friendly other than the constant requests for bribes. Egypt should have been straightforward (and there is a bit of language barrier), but the bribes were not optional, even to file basic tax returns.
4) South America. There's a lot of it. So much of it. In Brazil, you need certified letters just to send and receive money...including tax payments. And there's a lot of requests for bribes in other countries. But once you get past the language barrier and the logistical hassle, it's actually quite straightforward and logical. If not for the military dictatorships and drug gangs, South America would be a good place to do business (from a compliance perspective).
5) USA. Lots of laws. Lots of jurisdictions. But all relatively straightforward. It only gets complicated if you choose to minimize your tax burden (or maximize your refund) by taking advantage of the many, many complications. If your only source of income is W2 income, you could finish your tax return in 15 minutes.
6) Canada. Even Quebec, which insists on doing everything in French.
7) Australia. It's the least complicated tax system I've dealt with, and the easiest to work with as a taxpayer. The ATO is also quite easy to reach...I'm almost always able to get a human on the phone within 5 minutes.
Huge +1 to Australia, speaking from a salary worker PoV. So many of the Australian digital services are absolutely fantastic. As an American who was working there, there were often situations where I thought I did something incorrectly because my mentality was, "if it was this easy, I did something wrong and there are more steps".
> Canada. Even Quebec, which insists on doing everything in French.
Quebec would be the one place in Canada where you’re expected to do business in French. Maybe New Brunswick? Even right across the river in Ottawa you’d have no reason to use French in any official capacity.
Sure, you might want a FR/EN selector at the top of your site since Quebec is a big market (within Canada).
Having formed multiple companies in India - my experience was that I did not pay any bribes and it was relatively easy (not as easy as USA - where too I have formed multiple companies)
"If your only source of income is W2 income, you could finish your tax return in 15 minutes."
Also free on H&R Block now. They can scan your W2's with your phone camera, too, if they can't pull it. Then, direct deposit it into your bank account. It was great.
It does if you're actually incorporating (C or S corp). You'll need to at least file both federal and state returns. And in many cases you'll need to pay money even if your business earned $0.
An LLC setup as a passthrough can get away with filing personal returns, but that only works for small freelance operations. Once you've got payroll or investors it's constant paperwork hassle.
Having payroll is always a tax hassle, but I've been at passthrough-structured LLCs with employees and mid-high 7 figure revenue (at some point, you start filing as an S for your LLC).
But can we get back to the original thing here? Creating an LLC in the US is trivial and does not require accounting.
Payroll is relatively simple for a basic LLC. You can use a service like Rippling or a local CPA to do it for you. Usually costs around $40 per month per employee.
S Corp filings are drop dead simple. The tax return may take a CPA’s help if your structure is complicated or you want to get the absolute best tax breaks possible.
Yes it could be simpler - jurisdictions like Estonia figured this out.
I've had a couple of LLCs in the US (now and in the past) and they've been pretty hands-off as far as paperwork/tax stuff go. More or less, just keep good books and file/pay quarterly taxes and that's about it. I'm curious about what you've run into?
Mine is almost certainly almost the minimal case, except for someone running in Delaware. Federally, I file quarterly 941s (employee tax withholding), annual 940 (unemployment) and 1020 (tax return). In Delaware I final annually (stamp tax). I then file locally for Washington (excise tax) and Seattle (licensing tax).
I believe a freelancers wouldn't file employee tax forms. They frequently roll their filings into their personal taxes.
There are already services that do that, e.g. firma.de[0]
But in general, not really. I also just founded a GmbH in Germany, and the paperwork really isn't that crazy, and for the more complicated parts you'll generally will want to have a tax advisor you are going to have a long-term relationship with (rather than a one-off founding service). I considered using a founding service, but ultimately, most of the "hard parts" about the process is in understanding what agency you have to talk to for what parts, which you'll have to learn anyways if you want to run a business in a way that doesn't land you in jail, so the benefits of such a service are marginal.
The only real way to streamline it would be to deregulate the process (e.g. getting rid of notary requirement).
Having gone through the process of incorporation myself, I agree with everything you said: Yes, there is some paperwork you'll have to take care of and a bit of a learning curve to everything but not outrageously so. It can all be done within ~2 weeks (including roundtrip times for mail). Yes, that's still a lot more than it'll take you in e.g. Estonia (where you can do everything online in a few minutes from what I've been told) but it really would be the least of my worries, compared to actually running the company.
That being said, I do think the process could be simplified drastically. Not necessarily by getting rid of the notary requirement but 1) through digitalization and 2) by streamlining (possibly centralizing) the whole back and forth between notary (official incorporation & signing of articles of incorporation), bank (getting a business account + obtaining proof you actually put the money in that account that you're claiming to have during incorporation), local court (registering the company, including articles of incorporation), tax authorities (getting a tax ID and sales tax ID), local authorities (getting a business permit), local chamber of commerce (paying dues for mandatory membership), Federal Gazette / federal company register (submitting your initial balance sheet).
This is my general opinion with regards to bureaucracy in Germany. All the data is most likely already there and all the technical challenges have been solved in the meantime. Why do I have to do the runaround from office to office, when they are physically connected by a piece if wire (aka the internet).
There is a reason why we have so much bureaucracy in Germany (1. because we like it) and second because it is supposed to provide trust, trust that every company I deal with is legit, trust that the system knows who is participating. Without trust nobody would make business or business would be very hard, because you would have to price in the risk of not having trust.
There is something to be said for trust here. I like that I can go straight to the imprint ("Impressum") to know with whom I'm dealing with online, where the company is located and who the CEO is. This is not always easy to decipher from the "Terms" pages companies in the US and elsewhere provide.
The downside for founders is that you have to divulge your address, unless you take additional steps to give yourself a mailbox address, but this can also be illegal if you're not careful. You can also rent an office of course, but for indie devs and freelancers, this is usually not financially viable.
Yes, there are ways to buy up existing “empty” companies with a bank account, commercial registration, etc.
If you want to found a new one, there are also services that will prepare all paperwork and set up appointments with notaries, etc. for you for affordable prices
Day to day operations do generally not require much else than bookkeeping and accounting which you can almost fully outsource (though accountant fees are not cheap, however, doing it yourself is also not to hard if you have the right software and do not sell thousands of different products) unless you are in specific industries
There are a few unnecessary fees and it takes longer than it should to get started but for most businesses it does not really matter and is limited in scope when it comes to time and money needed
https://mopsa.lip6.fr/#features
It also has more abstraction domains than „just“ the type of objects.