I partly agree with you, but I've had quite a few cavities done without anaesthetic (because I preferred getting out of the dentists' chair quicker...), and these days I definitively prefer the needle...
That's despite the fact that I once had to endure a dentist setting 6 shots in my front gums because the first 5 had no noticeable effect. With an added break halfway through because she had to switch to another type to avoid risk of overdose...
Rather than looking for full sedation, try to find one that offers nitrous oxide. It doesn't put you under, you can typically control the level yourself (breathe in through the nose and get nitrous oxide, or through the mouth to get normal air), and it makes mostly stop caring about what the dentist is doing, while you're still clear enough to be able to follow intructions and answer questions.
I've never had a proper fear of dentists, but it certainly hasn't been high on my lists of things to do. Usually at the dentist I'll tense up, less because of pain than a combination of uncomfortable chairs (I'm 6'1", and I almost always seem to end up in dental chairs that leave me with no support for my lower back) and the expectation of pain. However having dental work done while on nitrous oxide was a revelation - it was almost relaxing.
Note: Don't look for a dentist that uses nitrous oxide as an alternative to local anaesthetic - that takes far higher doses which may get rather unpleasant.
You know, there has been some slight improvements in dentistry over the last few decades. My grandfather used to tell us how he got a couple of teeth drilled with a foot operated drill with no drugs when he was young.
These days there's no excuse for it to hurt or be unpleasant. I used to go to a dentist that would give me nitrous oxide ("happy gas" - expensive, but worth it for more extensive dental work), dark glasses and headphones in addition to painkillers. The nitrous oxide made me care absolutely nothing about what he was doing, apart from a slight irritation that he kept disturbing my music by asking me to open my mouth wider.
And of course the great thing about nitrous oxide is that you're clearheaded again within a minute or two of breathing regular air, and if you get it fed via a tube to your nose you can easily control how gone you get by breathing in through your mouth if it's getting too much. It's not really like a high - it just dulls you to the point where you stop caring about what's going on. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who get stressed out at the dentist (though not as a replacement for novocaine etc. - the dosage of nitrous oxide you need for it to dull the pain enough is large enough to make some people severely nauseous).
First of all, there's been lots of research in genetic markers that have long since given proof that humans from all over the world are closely interrelated. The only question is how closely.
Second, while the level of mobility today is far greater, there's been a high level of mobility for many hundreds of years. But what's more important is that you don't need a high level of mobility, since even a single person transplanted into a foreign culture can quickly cause massive interconnection provided he/she has children.
You mention kings, and that's another important point - families with power have been surprisingly mobile. One of the old royal families of Norway, for instance could trace their ancestry back through Sweden, several of the kingdoms in what is now Germany, what is now Italy all the way back to royalty in the Assyrian empire around 500 BC. Practically all the current royal families of Europe have tightly intervowen family trees going back hundreds of years, and many of them can similarly trace their families back hundreds of years further and often to locations far away.
Add in things like "droit de seigneur" (a king or nobleman in many places had the right to the first night with a woman after her wedding) and royals notorious for fathering children all over the place. It's a standing joke in Norway that every Norwegian has the king Harald Hårfagre (Harald "Hairfair" - so named because he according to tradition told the woman he wanted to marry that he would not cut his hair until he had gathered all of Norway under his rule) in their family tree, because he supposedly had children all over the country.
Add in invasions, slaving expeditions (including within Europe, for instance by the vikings), massive migrations, explorers,travellers etc. through the centuries followed by generations of intermarriage, and it would take a lot for at least people coming from larger population centers to not be related.
For my part, my dads genealogy research resulted in a register of many thousand currently living descendants of his direct ancestors going back just to the early 1800's, and while the family for a long time was stationary in a small area in central Norway, the descendants have spread over at least Canada, USA (at least 5-6 states), Norway, UK over the last 100 years or so.
Other factors play in as well, such as the Black Death. In most of Europe the massive population reduction caused a lot of movement of people resettling and taking land that was suddenly available. Not to mention that the spread of the disease itself is a testament to how much travel happened across the world even at that time. To Norway, for instance, the plague is thought to have first come via a Hanseat trading ship to the city of Bergen, which for a long time was a major Hansa trading port.
And at the time of the plague, the population of countries like Norway was so small that the level of interbreeding must have been significant - some sources claim the combined population of the three largest cities of Norway was at around 12.000 people before the plague hit (compared to around 750.000 today of a total population of 4.5 million today).
Bullshit. They keep farms from going under to ensure politicans don't loose votes. If farm subsidies were cut, what would happen is that prices of some products would rice (those where third world farmes can't make up for the shortage) to a level where it would be profitable, while in other parts local farmers would be out of business because third world farms who don't get subsidies would suddenly be able to fairly compete.
However that is NOT the case when talking about state churches, like in Finland, Norway and a number of other European countries. In those countries the church is part of the state.
Getting people to leave the state church IS the most effective way of encouraging the separation of church and state. The most common argument for keeping a state religion is generally that it is the religion favored by the vast majority of people. Encouraging people to explicitly make a point that they do not support the state church makes that argument gradually more and more tenuous.
Apart from your silly assumption that it's somehow automatically bad to get people to abandon religion, your argument is severely flawed: You are assuming that the people who leave the church somehow believed before they left the state church and stopped believing after they left just because they choose not to have the government pick which church they wish their money to go to.
Scandinavia really needs to get rid of the state churches. Most people are members not because they want to, but because they can't be bothered to resign their membership, or don't even know that they are members. In Norway, for instance, a child that is born to a mother that is a member of the Norwegian state church is automatically enrolled as a member, while a child born to a mother belonging to any other religious or secular society must explicitly be added, and similarly a child enrolled in the state church stays a member until he/she decides to resign the membership, while other organizations typically need to get the child to actively "take over" the membership once they reach 15 years.
The result is that the membership of the state churches is in no way an indication of what level of support they enjoy, and is only used as an excuse to justify the differences in government funding. In Norway, for instance, the funding to the state church is decided. Then that amount is divided by the number of "members" of the state church, which is hugely inflated by their membership policy, and the resulting amount is what is granted per member to other registered religious and secular movements.
Getting people to leave the state churches is a way of removing the grossly undeserved preferential treatment they get. Let the people who actually want those churches pay for it.
Buffet already has prestige and political clout - he doesn't need to buy it. As for the article being unclear, I don't see how you can claim that. It is very clear that he is giving away the shares themselves, and leave it to the fund to decide whether or not to sell the shares or hold on to them for dividends etc.
Buffet has made it clear many times that he is planning on giving most of his fortune away, and only leave "small" amounts to his children. The only new thing is that he's decided to give a significant part of it while he's still alive.
Frankly, since the guy is 75 I don't see anything weird about that. He's held the shares so long anyway, it's not like those shares are contributing much to his lifestyle. And this way he does get to enjoy the positive attention.
As for tax exemptions - sure, he may get some write off's, but nothing to make up for giving away 90% of his fortune.
My first name is "Vidar". Looks simple enough doesn't it? Despite that I've yet to come across a single person from an English-speaking country who's tried to repeat my name to me and who got it right even after multiple tries with me repeating it to them.
Håkon Vium Lie is significantly more difficult for non-Scandinavians than most Norwegian names, as well.
At some point you get tired of trying to get people to get it right, and settle for something "close enough".
I'd bet the same is true for your pronounciation of quite a few of the names you "can handle".
HR needs to weed out people who have made these kinds of moves too much in favour of people with long term business relationships with their employers
In that case, given the growth in India at the moment, your HR team will not find suitable staff as people will simply look elsewhere. If you want to keep staff in India, you will have to expect to offer frequent salary reviews, and make very sure you know exactly what your staff is worth in the local economy.
That is where a lot of companies - they have to realise that good employees is an asset that rapidly increases in cost in most market, and particularly in a market where his/her skills are in short supply, and if they don't ensure they adjust the salary accordingly, they will loose staff.
Why should any employee feel loyalty to an employee that undervalues them by paying less than the going rate?
In the end it's a matter of deciding what is most important: To retain staff or to keep salaries low. High turnover has a high cost (recruitment and training is expensive), so it's a matter of striking a balance. If staff can find jobs elsewhere at a significantly higher pay than what you paid them, then you have to ask yourself why, and seriously question if the reason is that you don't know how to properly assess the value of your employees.
You miss the key difference between IBM and Apple:
IBM is largely a services company, always has been, and even more so now after the sale of their PC division. The vast majority of their staff are consultants for hire. For IBM it makes sense to invest in India because the Indian market for consultants is booming both because of the outsourcing craze, but also because the Indian economy is booming and homegrown IT companies are getting to the size where they're becoming a large potential market for IBM. To service that market, IBM needs local resources. Establishing research centers is vital, because it allows IBM to grow and retain staff that would be hard to keep in a pure consultancy play.
For Apple, on the other hand, there are few benefits to hiring people in India, as their primary revenue source is hardware/software and consumer products/services (like iTunes), none of which require a large presence on the ground in the local markets.
The difference is that in China it's the government doing the abuse, while in India the government has been fighting actively to get rid of the caste system.
The disadvantage of Germany is that taxes are pretty high
That's only really an issue if you've got revenue coming in there - the cost of employing workers in Europe vs. US isn't that different unless your company doesn't have any good benefits package for their US employees. Benefits packages in Europe tends to be much cheaper, as private medical insurance etc. tend to be extremely cheap (since most of them are for a small set of additional services on top of the public health services, not for full coverage) and that difference generally make up for all or most of any tax differences.
The "our population is too spread out for that" argument that people tend to throw around about the US whenever something like this (or the lack of public transport) is brought up is bullshit.
According to the US Census Bureau, about 222 million people in the US lived in urbanized areas, meaning more than 2/3's of the population, and a market 2.5 times larger than any single European country (Germany is at about 80 million people).
The US' 50 largest cities alone make up a larger market than most European countries.
People who want to stock up on large amounts of the non-perishable stuff once a month or so and buy only the perishables whenever they drop by the store. I could see this doing much better in Europe where lots of people don't drive/don't want to drive/use public transport and drop by the store on foot on the way too/from work without a car for instance. I do almost all my shopping on foot, and ordering non-perishables in bulk might be tempting. I already have the option, though, as all the major chains in the UK offers delivery.
True, but getting protection against dilution is a non-starter in part because it will make it impossible for the company to get funding. No investor is going to be willing to buy into a company where some employees won't get diluted while they do get diluted, because any chunk of the shares that are "protected" that way will mean they will take a larger chunk of the dilution.
Instead, you should account for it when you negotiate. Assume the shares will be diluted around 60%-80% (i.e. the original shares make up between 20% and 40% in the end) before an IPO or reasonably priced aquisition and you should be reasonably protected.
Bullshit. If you go into a startup as the first paid employee in a reasonably high responsibility situation (such as taking the app from a prototype to functioning system) and don't get options for at least a couple of percent of the company with a decent vesting schedule, you're being shafted.
Yes, the investors take risks. Yes, the founders do too. That's why this guy couldn't have expected an equal share of the company with the founders. But he certainly could and should have expected a significant stake.
And no, I'm not talking out of my ass. I'm talking based on experience from multiple tech startups, both as founder (and yes, I've put my cash in too to get a company off the ground) and early stage employee. The lowest amount of shares or options I've taken when joining a company with less than 5 employees (which means most of the companies I've worked in) was 4%. In that case it was 4% straight equity with no vesting (yes, some people are that crazy)
Even if he had negotiated for equity instead of options (the difference is minor)
Depends on which country, and at what stage you get in. First of all, with options there's the issue of the strike price (and your local tax authorities WILL care if it's set artificially low) which may be insignificant or not depending in particular on whether the company has gotten any funding (which would typically have pushed the price up as your tax authorities will have a hard time swallowing a strike price below the price the investors got...).
Secondly there's the issue of taxation. In the UK for example something called taper relief means that any shares you get outright will be taxes as income at the value they had when you got them + 10% of any capital gains from selling them if you keep them at least 4 or 5 years (don't remember the exact limit). Compare that to options, which are taxed as income based on exercise price minus strike price, meaning that not only do you only get the gain from any increase over the strike price, but if you're a well paid tech exec you're likely in the 40% tax bracket and pay 40% of any gains.
- he left in six months, and nobody in their right mind is going to vest equity, options or anything in such a short time period.
Yes they will. I've vested on a monthly schedule since month one at my current company. It's not common, but it certainly does happen if you get in early enough and are considered valuable and trustworthy enough by the founders, or if they need you badly enough. I'm not vain enough to think that I'm unique in having gotten a deal like that... In my case I made it very clear that I preferred options to cash until I joined full time, which of course made a difference.
Note, of course, that you are right that nobody in their right mind is going to vest the entire promised grant in that short time period, unless you are brought in for a specific, limited task and the grant was set accordingly. More likely you'd get a grant that fully vests over 3 or 4 years. But negotiating away any cliff at the start, and getting the vesting periods down to a month shouldn't be too hard if you're worth it.
Negotiating various events that will accelerate vesting (such as vesting a chunk instantly on completion of a beta on schedule for example) is also something that shouldn't be a problem as long as you're not grabbing for far more than your work is worth.
As 1/4 of the business at the time, you should have demanded at least 1/4 of the business.
At the stage where a company has a prototype and a business plan that is just not a realistic prospect in most cases unless you're very heavyweight or well known in your industry, are bringing in funding, or the founders are very close friends of yours.
arming crazy religious fundamentalists who eventually took over the government. Iran fell into repression
You've got your history a bit backwards.
The Shah, who was certainly not a fundamentalist, got into power thanks to a CIA and British intelligence funded coup when the parliament voted to nationalise the oil industry. The fundamentalists gained power decades later, after the shah banned multi party rule and got more and more dictatorial in order to preserve his dominance of Iranian politics. This was despite the economic growth during his rule - the economic decline didn't start until after the shah was overthrown.
At best it's an example of "blowback" - if CIA hadn't given the Shah power it's possible that more moderate forces would have kept control, never giving the fundamentalists a chance to build their power base. However, we'll never know if it would've made a difference.
If you don't talk about it as a serious goal now, it will never become realistic.
What is our goal with the space research?
Is it to gather data for astronomers, geologists etc? Is it to use space for mining, which could possibly be done using only robots? Is it for tourism? To settle?
All of those have vastly different requirements. If one wants space colonisation to start a few decades from now, it needs to get on the agenda NOW in order to get research focused in the right direction for it, or all the advances in space flight might come primarily in areas that don't really help it much.
Of course it can, but likely not at the same time.
If an extinction type event happens on earth and we're all here, then the human race is gone. If there are colonies, then there's a huge number of possible extinction type events that would not wipe out even a moon colony if it's self sufficient enough. Take nuclear war for instance.
No colonisation approach will be foolproof protection against extinction, but every extra colony will reduce the chance of an event that wipes out everyone.
Now, whether we really care is another thing. I'm very much for space exploration and colonisation, but not so much for practical reasons (if we all die, we're not around to lament our death afterwards, so why should I care?) as for the romanticism.
#1 reason: Government is an obstacle rather than help or even better: JUST DON'T MESSING TOO MUCH. Bussinesses in Europe has to comply with municipal, state, country and european community regulation. Municipal laws are often vary a lot whithin even the same province. The local government has to give permission and get taxes (not cheap) just to open the company's door. Also the nation's government. And guess what? They are not exactly very fast nor cheap. The high costs of starting a bussiness make it very difficult for people who is not already rich or other bussiness who have already a lot of money! Paradox of social-democracy? Government as reverse Robin-Hood?
I don't know what weird alternate dimension you live in, but setting up a company in Europe can be done over the web in a few hours, for a couple of hundred dollars. There are various restrictions on the types of companies you can set up at a reasonable cost.
- the "progressive" taxes system doesnt award personal effort and risk. The taxes for businesses are as high as 30% or 35% of profits, even higher for wealthy individuals (Social Security not included). Where does this force capital to go? Easy question: any other place.
Tax planning in Europe is trivially easy once you get to the kind of company size where it makes a difference.
- Public workers are impossible to fire. Once they pass their exams they can even just not go to work and they will keep their salary and benefits forever. Not the best to stimulate efficiency and speed. They also have higher salaries than private companies employees. Young people here dream about working for the government.
In some European countries that might be true, but in many European countries public workers are underpaid and the positions are considered low status - hardly the kind of thing that attracts youth that would otherwise have been likely to form successfull startups.
- Trade unions degenerated to political parties. Their leaders and representants are too busy doing nothing and helping #1 in their labor to increase regulation.
They are busy increasing regulation to safeguard employees, yes, because that is what most European employees want. I was shocked at the low degree of protection here in the UK when I first moved here, and it's still far better than in the US.
- We spend about 40% of the E.U budget subsidizing the low-margin, low-innovation, low-tech agricultural sector. This money should be better in their legitimate propietaries' pockets thus lowering the high tax pressure on business and individuals. As a side effect we screw up emerging economies with our protectionism (OK, maybe also the USA)
I do agree the agriculture subsidies are a bad thing. However the US is nearly as bad in that respect...
- We have literally dozens of different languages. I dont think this is necessarily wrong, it's just a consecuence of our history. But the really stupid thing is the politicians are very busy trying to revitalize dead or semi-dead languages and dialects like galician, basque and catalan to have another more justification to fight with other regions, get local privileges, and keeping their positions. Of course these languages are studied in schools, diminishing the time young people should rather use studying maths, literature, economics, english or whatever. Mix this with governmet regulation and you get a lot more overhead for business.
This is a problem, but also an opportunity. Any emerging European business knows from early on how to deal with internationalisation, multiple languages and multiple cultures. Most American companies don't.
- We dont fight strong enough against terrorism, instead we let the terrorists (convicted killers included) form political parties and negotiate with our governmets as equals. Shame on us. Insecurity scares the capital who tends to go away.
This is the weakest of your arguments. Despite the IRA and ETA bombing campaigns, I've never ever heard either being even considered as an issue, mainly because they never were a big deal compared to other risks.
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That's despite the fact that I once had to endure a dentist setting 6 shots in my front gums because the first 5 had no noticeable effect. With an added break halfway through because she had to switch to another type to avoid risk of overdose...
I've never had a proper fear of dentists, but it certainly hasn't been high on my lists of things to do. Usually at the dentist I'll tense up, less because of pain than a combination of uncomfortable chairs (I'm 6'1", and I almost always seem to end up in dental chairs that leave me with no support for my lower back) and the expectation of pain. However having dental work done while on nitrous oxide was a revelation - it was almost relaxing.
Note: Don't look for a dentist that uses nitrous oxide as an alternative to local anaesthetic - that takes far higher doses which may get rather unpleasant.
These days there's no excuse for it to hurt or be unpleasant. I used to go to a dentist that would give me nitrous oxide ("happy gas" - expensive, but worth it for more extensive dental work), dark glasses and headphones in addition to painkillers. The nitrous oxide made me care absolutely nothing about what he was doing, apart from a slight irritation that he kept disturbing my music by asking me to open my mouth wider.
And of course the great thing about nitrous oxide is that you're clearheaded again within a minute or two of breathing regular air, and if you get it fed via a tube to your nose you can easily control how gone you get by breathing in through your mouth if it's getting too much. It's not really like a high - it just dulls you to the point where you stop caring about what's going on. I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who get stressed out at the dentist (though not as a replacement for novocaine etc. - the dosage of nitrous oxide you need for it to dull the pain enough is large enough to make some people severely nauseous).
Second, while the level of mobility today is far greater, there's been a high level of mobility for many hundreds of years. But what's more important is that you don't need a high level of mobility, since even a single person transplanted into a foreign culture can quickly cause massive interconnection provided he/she has children.
You mention kings, and that's another important point - families with power have been surprisingly mobile. One of the old royal families of Norway, for instance could trace their ancestry back through Sweden, several of the kingdoms in what is now Germany, what is now Italy all the way back to royalty in the Assyrian empire around 500 BC. Practically all the current royal families of Europe have tightly intervowen family trees going back hundreds of years, and many of them can similarly trace their families back hundreds of years further and often to locations far away.
Add in things like "droit de seigneur" (a king or nobleman in many places had the right to the first night with a woman after her wedding) and royals notorious for fathering children all over the place. It's a standing joke in Norway that every Norwegian has the king Harald Hårfagre (Harald "Hairfair" - so named because he according to tradition told the woman he wanted to marry that he would not cut his hair until he had gathered all of Norway under his rule) in their family tree, because he supposedly had children all over the country.
Add in invasions, slaving expeditions (including within Europe, for instance by the vikings), massive migrations, explorers,travellers etc. through the centuries followed by generations of intermarriage, and it would take a lot for at least people coming from larger population centers to not be related.
For my part, my dads genealogy research resulted in a register of many thousand currently living descendants of his direct ancestors going back just to the early 1800's, and while the family for a long time was stationary in a small area in central Norway, the descendants have spread over at least Canada, USA (at least 5-6 states), Norway, UK over the last 100 years or so.
Other factors play in as well, such as the Black Death. In most of Europe the massive population reduction caused a lot of movement of people resettling and taking land that was suddenly available. Not to mention that the spread of the disease itself is a testament to how much travel happened across the world even at that time. To Norway, for instance, the plague is thought to have first come via a Hanseat trading ship to the city of Bergen, which for a long time was a major Hansa trading port.
And at the time of the plague, the population of countries like Norway was so small that the level of interbreeding must have been significant - some sources claim the combined population of the three largest cities of Norway was at around 12.000 people before the plague hit (compared to around 750.000 today of a total population of 4.5 million today).
Because you reap the benefits of having an educated workforce that ensures the economy keeps going.
Bullshit. They keep farms from going under to ensure politicans don't loose votes. If farm subsidies were cut, what would happen is that prices of some products would rice (those where third world farmes can't make up for the shortage) to a level where it would be profitable, while in other parts local farmers would be out of business because third world farms who don't get subsidies would suddenly be able to fairly compete.
However that is NOT the case when talking about state churches, like in Finland, Norway and a number of other European countries. In those countries the church is part of the state.
Apart from your silly assumption that it's somehow automatically bad to get people to abandon religion, your argument is severely flawed: You are assuming that the people who leave the church somehow believed before they left the state church and stopped believing after they left just because they choose not to have the government pick which church they wish their money to go to.
Scandinavia really needs to get rid of the state churches. Most people are members not because they want to, but because they can't be bothered to resign their membership, or don't even know that they are members. In Norway, for instance, a child that is born to a mother that is a member of the Norwegian state church is automatically enrolled as a member, while a child born to a mother belonging to any other religious or secular society must explicitly be added, and similarly a child enrolled in the state church stays a member until he/she decides to resign the membership, while other organizations typically need to get the child to actively "take over" the membership once they reach 15 years.
The result is that the membership of the state churches is in no way an indication of what level of support they enjoy, and is only used as an excuse to justify the differences in government funding. In Norway, for instance, the funding to the state church is decided. Then that amount is divided by the number of "members" of the state church, which is hugely inflated by their membership policy, and the resulting amount is what is granted per member to other registered religious and secular movements.
Getting people to leave the state churches is a way of removing the grossly undeserved preferential treatment they get. Let the people who actually want those churches pay for it.
Buffet has made it clear many times that he is planning on giving most of his fortune away, and only leave "small" amounts to his children. The only new thing is that he's decided to give a significant part of it while he's still alive.
Frankly, since the guy is 75 I don't see anything weird about that. He's held the shares so long anyway, it's not like those shares are contributing much to his lifestyle. And this way he does get to enjoy the positive attention.
As for tax exemptions - sure, he may get some write off's, but nothing to make up for giving away 90% of his fortune.
Håkon Vium Lie is significantly more difficult for non-Scandinavians than most Norwegian names, as well.
At some point you get tired of trying to get people to get it right, and settle for something "close enough".
I'd bet the same is true for your pronounciation of quite a few of the names you "can handle".
Foot fetishism is "podophilia".
In that case, given the growth in India at the moment, your HR team will not find suitable staff as people will simply look elsewhere. If you want to keep staff in India, you will have to expect to offer frequent salary reviews, and make very sure you know exactly what your staff is worth in the local economy.
That is where a lot of companies - they have to realise that good employees is an asset that rapidly increases in cost in most market, and particularly in a market where his/her skills are in short supply, and if they don't ensure they adjust the salary accordingly, they will loose staff.
Why should any employee feel loyalty to an employee that undervalues them by paying less than the going rate?
In the end it's a matter of deciding what is most important: To retain staff or to keep salaries low. High turnover has a high cost (recruitment and training is expensive), so it's a matter of striking a balance. If staff can find jobs elsewhere at a significantly higher pay than what you paid them, then you have to ask yourself why, and seriously question if the reason is that you don't know how to properly assess the value of your employees.
IBM is largely a services company, always has been, and even more so now after the sale of their PC division. The vast majority of their staff are consultants for hire. For IBM it makes sense to invest in India because the Indian market for consultants is booming both because of the outsourcing craze, but also because the Indian economy is booming and homegrown IT companies are getting to the size where they're becoming a large potential market for IBM. To service that market, IBM needs local resources. Establishing research centers is vital, because it allows IBM to grow and retain staff that would be hard to keep in a pure consultancy play.
For Apple, on the other hand, there are few benefits to hiring people in India, as their primary revenue source is hardware/software and consumer products/services (like iTunes), none of which require a large presence on the ground in the local markets.
The difference is that in China it's the government doing the abuse, while in India the government has been fighting actively to get rid of the caste system.
That's only really an issue if you've got revenue coming in there - the cost of employing workers in Europe vs. US isn't that different unless your company doesn't have any good benefits package for their US employees. Benefits packages in Europe tends to be much cheaper, as private medical insurance etc. tend to be extremely cheap (since most of them are for a small set of additional services on top of the public health services, not for full coverage) and that difference generally make up for all or most of any tax differences.
According to the US Census Bureau, about 222 million people in the US lived in urbanized areas, meaning more than 2/3's of the population, and a market 2.5 times larger than any single European country (Germany is at about 80 million people).
The US' 50 largest cities alone make up a larger market than most European countries.
People who want to stock up on large amounts of the non-perishable stuff once a month or so and buy only the perishables whenever they drop by the store. I could see this doing much better in Europe where lots of people don't drive/don't want to drive/use public transport and drop by the store on foot on the way too/from work without a car for instance. I do almost all my shopping on foot, and ordering non-perishables in bulk might be tempting. I already have the option, though, as all the major chains in the UK offers delivery.
Instead, you should account for it when you negotiate. Assume the shares will be diluted around 60%-80% (i.e. the original shares make up between 20% and 40% in the end) before an IPO or reasonably priced aquisition and you should be reasonably protected.
Yes, the investors take risks. Yes, the founders do too. That's why this guy couldn't have expected an equal share of the company with the founders. But he certainly could and should have expected a significant stake.
And no, I'm not talking out of my ass. I'm talking based on experience from multiple tech startups, both as founder (and yes, I've put my cash in too to get a company off the ground) and early stage employee. The lowest amount of shares or options I've taken when joining a company with less than 5 employees (which means most of the companies I've worked in) was 4%. In that case it was 4% straight equity with no vesting (yes, some people are that crazy)
Depends on which country, and at what stage you get in. First of all, with options there's the issue of the strike price (and your local tax authorities WILL care if it's set artificially low) which may be insignificant or not depending in particular on whether the company has gotten any funding (which would typically have pushed the price up as your tax authorities will have a hard time swallowing a strike price below the price the investors got...).
Secondly there's the issue of taxation. In the UK for example something called taper relief means that any shares you get outright will be taxes as income at the value they had when you got them + 10% of any capital gains from selling them if you keep them at least 4 or 5 years (don't remember the exact limit). Compare that to options, which are taxed as income based on exercise price minus strike price, meaning that not only do you only get the gain from any increase over the strike price, but if you're a well paid tech exec you're likely in the 40% tax bracket and pay 40% of any gains.
- he left in six months, and nobody in their right mind is going to vest equity, options or anything in such a short time period.
Yes they will. I've vested on a monthly schedule since month one at my current company. It's not common, but it certainly does happen if you get in early enough and are considered valuable and trustworthy enough by the founders, or if they need you badly enough. I'm not vain enough to think that I'm unique in having gotten a deal like that... In my case I made it very clear that I preferred options to cash until I joined full time, which of course made a difference.
Note, of course, that you are right that nobody in their right mind is going to vest the entire promised grant in that short time period, unless you are brought in for a specific, limited task and the grant was set accordingly. More likely you'd get a grant that fully vests over 3 or 4 years. But negotiating away any cliff at the start, and getting the vesting periods down to a month shouldn't be too hard if you're worth it.
Negotiating various events that will accelerate vesting (such as vesting a chunk instantly on completion of a beta on schedule for example) is also something that shouldn't be a problem as long as you're not grabbing for far more than your work is worth.
At the stage where a company has a prototype and a business plan that is just not a realistic prospect in most cases unless you're very heavyweight or well known in your industry, are bringing in funding, or the founders are very close friends of yours.
You've got your history a bit backwards.
The Shah, who was certainly not a fundamentalist, got into power thanks to a CIA and British intelligence funded coup when the parliament voted to nationalise the oil industry. The fundamentalists gained power decades later, after the shah banned multi party rule and got more and more dictatorial in order to preserve his dominance of Iranian politics. This was despite the economic growth during his rule - the economic decline didn't start until after the shah was overthrown.
At best it's an example of "blowback" - if CIA hadn't given the Shah power it's possible that more moderate forces would have kept control, never giving the fundamentalists a chance to build their power base. However, we'll never know if it would've made a difference.
What is our goal with the space research?
Is it to gather data for astronomers, geologists etc? Is it to use space for mining, which could possibly be done using only robots? Is it for tourism? To settle?
All of those have vastly different requirements. If one wants space colonisation to start a few decades from now, it needs to get on the agenda NOW in order to get research focused in the right direction for it, or all the advances in space flight might come primarily in areas that don't really help it much.
If an extinction type event happens on earth and we're all here, then the human race is gone. If there are colonies, then there's a huge number of possible extinction type events that would not wipe out even a moon colony if it's self sufficient enough. Take nuclear war for instance.
No colonisation approach will be foolproof protection against extinction, but every extra colony will reduce the chance of an event that wipes out everyone.
Now, whether we really care is another thing. I'm very much for space exploration and colonisation, but not so much for practical reasons (if we all die, we're not around to lament our death afterwards, so why should I care?) as for the romanticism.
I don't know what weird alternate dimension you live in, but setting up a company in Europe can be done over the web in a few hours, for a couple of hundred dollars. There are various restrictions on the types of companies you can set up at a reasonable cost.
- the "progressive" taxes system doesnt award personal effort and risk. The taxes for businesses are as high as 30% or 35% of profits, even higher for wealthy individuals (Social Security not included). Where does this force capital to go? Easy question: any other place.
Tax planning in Europe is trivially easy once you get to the kind of company size where it makes a difference.
- Public workers are impossible to fire. Once they pass their exams they can even just not go to work and they will keep their salary and benefits forever. Not the best to stimulate efficiency and speed. They also have higher salaries than private companies employees. Young people here dream about working for the government.
In some European countries that might be true, but in many European countries public workers are underpaid and the positions are considered low status - hardly the kind of thing that attracts youth that would otherwise have been likely to form successfull startups.
- Trade unions degenerated to political parties. Their leaders and representants are too busy doing nothing and helping #1 in their labor to increase regulation.
They are busy increasing regulation to safeguard employees, yes, because that is what most European employees want. I was shocked at the low degree of protection here in the UK when I first moved here, and it's still far better than in the US.
- We spend about 40% of the E.U budget subsidizing the low-margin, low-innovation, low-tech agricultural sector. This money should be better in their legitimate propietaries' pockets thus lowering the high tax pressure on business and individuals. As a side effect we screw up emerging economies with our protectionism (OK, maybe also the USA)
I do agree the agriculture subsidies are a bad thing. However the US is nearly as bad in that respect...
- We have literally dozens of different languages. I dont think this is necessarily wrong, it's just a consecuence of our history. But the really stupid thing is the politicians are very busy trying to revitalize dead or semi-dead languages and dialects like galician, basque and catalan to have another more justification to fight with other regions, get local privileges, and keeping their positions. Of course these languages are studied in schools, diminishing the time young people should rather use studying maths, literature, economics, english or whatever. Mix this with governmet regulation and you get a lot more overhead for business.
This is a problem, but also an opportunity. Any emerging European business knows from early on how to deal with internationalisation, multiple languages and multiple cultures. Most American companies don't.
- We dont fight strong enough against terrorism, instead we let the terrorists (convicted killers included) form political parties and negotiate with our governmets as equals. Shame on us. Insecurity scares the capital who tends to go away.
This is the weakest of your arguments. Despite the IRA and ETA bombing campaigns, I've never ever heard either being even considered as an issue, mainly because they never were a big deal compared to other risks.