> As somebody from Germany, establishing a company is a bit tedious and bureaucratic.
I'm fairly sure the German tax authority will claim that you have a local German branch office since you live and work there.
That might be OK tax wise?
But I'd recommend starting with the tax situation in Germany.
Having limited liability through some kind of corporation can be nice.
But on the other hand, it becomes harder in Germany to pay out a varying salary as profits fluctuates throughout the year since the German tax authorities will see that as an illegal dividend payment from your company.
From this perspective it can be easier to set up some kind of sole proprietorship. Easier accounting etc and can pay out profits easier. But you get the personal liability.
This is not hard advice, just some things to point out that it gets complicated fast. So I'd recommend spending a few hundred euros on getting advice from a tax professional to begin with.
> I'm fairly sure the German tax authority will claim that you have a local German branch office since you live and work there. That might be OK tax wise?
If you work from home, your office at home usually does not qualify as a company office unless you make it one. In particular, that alone would not force you to pay Gewerbesteuer to the city, which is the tax specifically addressing local presence.
However, you're touching upon a very important point: If you live in Germany and your Estonian company pays you a salary (as opposed to dividends), you will be a proper employee and your company will also have to pay social security for you, and this might complicate matters significantly. In fact, this will likely (in the German tax authorities' eyes) establish that your Estonian company partially operates in Germany (which is a much broader thing than having an actual physical branch office). This then brings you back to square 1 – your company having to file taxes in Germany, too. Someone below linked https://eidel.io/posts/estonias-e-residency-is-awesome-and-s... which seems to confirm this.
> German tax authorities will see that as an illegal dividend payment from your company.
Could you elaborate? How is this illegal if you declare taxes?
Not illegal, but the incorrect amount of taxes will be paid. Also, the financial statements will not be entirely correct. So, not illegal in the sense of "not allowed", but in the sense of "legal requirements and obligations not fulfilled".
> Could you elaborate? How is this illegal if you declare taxes?
As someone else mentioned, the taxes are different.
Namely: Salary is taxed lower than dividends. So the German tax authorities checks very carefully that you don't pay salary instead of dividends. If they determine that you paid out dividends as a salary, then you'll be charged with tax fraud.
Now you might say, "I don't care about paying a bit extra in taxes, so I'll pay it as dividends as they wish"
The problem is that you can only pay dividends the year after you earn the money.
If you can set a fixed salary which you can keep paying throughout, and then wait for the dividend payments next year, that's fine.
But what if you want to pay yourself wildly different amounts of money each month based on how much you managed to charge your customers? You can't just keep adjusting your salary up and down every month with a corporation.
So here's where something like a sole proprietorship may be simpler from that aspect?
Another thing you want to look at is "how easy will it be to dissolve the operations?" With a GmbH/UG it takes several years and potentially many thousands of euros in accounting fees. Not sure about the foreign corps. I think German sole proprietorships are simpler in either case?
Also, Germany has a "Moving away tax" where you get taxed on the fictious value of your company if you move away from Germany. This fictious value can be quite a lot more than what you'd actually get if selling the company.
Yet another thing: Depending on your setup, you may be covered by different rules regarding health insurance and pensions. If you don't make a lot of money in the beginning, it may be best to stay in the government insurance. But if you think you'll make a lot of money, it can be better to be able to do private insurance instead? There are rules on how you can move back and forth between government/private, so this is another area to consider carefully.
This is my understanding as a layman, please check this with a competent local tax expert before acting on any advice here.
That very much depends on your tax bracket but at high income levels salaries are usually taxed quite a bit higher (42% vs. ~27%). 42% being the highest tax bracket of course; the first ~69k€ of your salary are taxed at a lower rate.
> If they determine that you paid out dividends as a salary, then you'll be charged with tax fraud.
This might be the case if the company were in Germany, and then it might not even be the taxman that'd complain but social security since you don't pay social security fees on capital gains. However, I doubt German authorities can do much about an Estonian entity paying dividends.
> You can't just keep adjusting your salary up and down every month with a corporation.
Yes, you can. Many companies do that – it's called fixed vs. variable salary (bonuses).
> The problem is that you can only pay dividends the year after you earn the money.
You're right in general (and I assume also in the case of an Estonian entity). Though at least in Germany – surprisingly – this is not correct, look up "Gewinnvorabausschüttung".
Either way, this is not a huge obstacle if you're pursuing this long-term: You only have to make it through the first year without any income. Afterwards you can live off of last year's dividends.
In some countries, it's common to register a sole proprietorship in addition to a limited liability company and bill the company from the sole proprietorship to avoid double taxation. However, I suppose this would not be allowed in Germany.
> Having limited liability through some kind of corporation can be nice.
I think this is the main point and benefit of the whole thing. It can be difficult and/or expensive to set up a limited liabilty company in many countries; as an e-Stonian, it's apparently cheap and simple.
You've never seen project managers basically propose the equivalent of getting a baby delivered in 1 month instead of 9 months by adding more people to the project?
But yeah, if the recruiters start asking for "10 years experience with Claude Code", then I guess a tongue-in-cheek answer would be "sure, I did 10 projects in parallel in one year".
> I think the older AI users are even held back because they might be doing things that are not neccessary any more
As the same age as Linus Torvalds, I'd say that it can be the opposite.
We are so used to "leaky abstractions", that we have just accepted this as another imperfect new tech stack.
Unlike less experienced developers, we know that you have to learn a bit about the underlying layers to use the high level abstraction layer effectively.
What is going on under the hood? What was the sequence of events which caused my inputs to give these outputs / error messages?
Once you learn enough of how the underlying layers work, you'll get far fewer errors because you'll subconciously avoid them. Meanwhile, people with a "I only work at the high-level"-mindset keeps trying to feed the high-level layer different inputs more or less at random.
For LLMs, it's certainly a challenge.
The basic low level LLM architecture is very simple. You can write a naive LLM core inference engine in a few hundred lines of code.
But that is like writing a logic gate simulator and feeding it a huge CPU gate list + many GBs of kernel+rootfs disk images. It doesn't tell you how the thing actually behaves.
So you move up the layers. Often you can't get hard data on how they really work. Instead you rely on empirical and anecdotal data.
But you still form a mental image of what the rough layers are, and what you can expect in their behavior given different inputs.
For LLMs, a critical piece is the context window. It has to be understood and managed to get good results. Make sure it's fed with the right amount of the right data, and you get much better results.
> Nowadays I just paste a test, build, or linter error message into the chat and the clanker knows immediately what to do
That's exactly the right thing to do given the right circumstances.
But if you're doing a big refactoring across a huge code base, you won't get the same good results. You'll need to understand the context window and how your tools/framework feeds it with data for your subagents.
I think GP meant 'longer time users of AI', not 'older aged users of AI'.
Their point being that it's not really an advantage to have learnt the tricks and ways to deal with it a year, two years ago when it's so much better now, and that's not necessary or there's different tricks.
Yeah I meant it in the context of the comment I was replying to, to be precise in the context of the comment that one was replying to, i.e. "10 years of certified Claude Code experience required".
The technology is moving so fast that the tricks you learned a year ago might not be relevant any more.
Long term it probably even is better if the US just leave, especially if the next president is aligned with the current government, we might as well cut our losses early and restructure before they bully the rest of their allies.
> If I wanted to convince NATO to take arctic security seriously without having to deploy troops and resources of my own, this is how I'd do it.
Sure, you can convince a close friend of yours to take his home security much more seriously by telling him that you'll come by later and rob him at gunpoint.
But do you think he'll be even remotely friendly to you after that?
Depends what you mean by large areas. Most of it is an kce sheet, the interior is uninhabitable and the habitable sections are hundreds of miles apart.
Depends what I mean with large areas? Ever been to Greenland?
Greenland is about 25% of the US excluding Alaska, the ice sheet covers 80% of that.
This means that the ice free area of Greenland is a bit larger than California. Thats the third largest state in the US. I would say that is a large area.
I think what I mean by colonial remnant is "administration and control from afar", not "subjugation of indigenous peoples", and it's concerned with what's happening now, rather than what happened 1000 or more years ago and it's no longer particularly relevant. By remnant, I mean that it's administered by Denmark as a byproduct of a colonial gold rush, not because they are the best entity for that job.
USA had its own legislative assemblies too before the declaration of Independence, look what happened.
The vikings landed there, not Denmark, who were Norse, Erik the Red was from Norway (But was considered by then an Icelander exile?). Before Danish control Greenland was a Norwegian colony, this was the colony that died out.
Norse colonisation tended to reflect their origin e.g. the Norwegians colonised the north west of Scotland and Iceland, which were more similar to Norway; Danes went to England and Normandy which were more southerly, flatter and more fertile, much like Denmark; the Swedes with their long Baltic coastline turned their attentions eastward.
Denmark got the North Atlantic islands through the union with Norway, and retained them after Norway became independent.
I know, but that was much later and had a very different dynamic, due to climatic changes etc.
The earlier Norse colonisation of Greenland seemed to consist of farmers and independent settlers, mostly via Iceland. In some areas, they never interacted with Inuit, or rarely.
The later effort seems more focussed on Christian missions to the natives, and commercial whaling and sealing.
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