4 ms·

What's the logic here? Do you somehow think that taxes will encourage innovation ? Anybody can compete, but apparently most of us choose not to. Who forces a y

• ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >Do you somehow think that taxes will encourage innovation ? That's what some EU members think. Ask us how that's going :) That's why most of the big and wealthy companies hare are around 100 years old or more, vs about 30 years old in the US. Here in Austria you can get various government and EU grants for your startup and tax waivers on social security, and if by some miracle, you don't crash and burn like 95% of startups and manage to produce a semi-profitable company in the end, then you have to pay to the government retroactively all the social security contributions and taxes that have been previously waived over the past years, which is the final nail in the coffin for most companies here never growing or scaling beyond a couple of guys from uni in an apartment kind of company. Therefore most of the innovation happens nearly exclusively within academia, as "outside" it's a pretty hostile tax environment that mostly favors those 100 year old companies that already have solid revenue streams.
  • wowokay 5y ago
    I must be misunderstanding your comment. You are saying that younger companies in the US are becoming more wealthy and innovating more or at the same level as a few entrench EU companies that have successfully stifled the EU market ensuring they never lose there market share or have a need to innovate to complete in a free market, is that correct?
    • Dracophoenix 5y ago
      He's saying that the various EU governments has stifled startups by offering "subsidies" (that operate more like loans) only to demand repayment for them at rate much faster than these startups are capable of building value/marketability/profit, resulting in many of them being DOA or remain limited in size until they are swallowed up by a bigger company.
• fartcannon 5y ago
  The money being required to live a normal life is the problem. A Star Trek style cashless society would allow people to live their life as they see fit, and would undoubtedly unlock a huge jump in human ingenuity. But I don't think we are evolved enough to deal yet. We'd just end up in a communist prison life or something as people selfishly try to get more for themselves. Roddenberry thought an event like finding extraterrestrial life would be the push humans need, but I'm not so sure anymore.
  • hiptobecubic 5y ago
    One thing I never understood is that star fleet and the federation are somehow post-scarcity utopias, but you still have "gold-plated latinum" driving a huge underground criminal counter-culture. What's the point? The ferenghi should be having a cultural existential crisis, but instead they are happy just charging people for drinks that can be replicated freely.
    • at_compile_time 5y ago
      You don't understand because it doesn't make sense. It's just fun sci-fi storytelling.
    • grogenaut 5y ago
      my understanding is that the space the ferrengi operate in doesnt operate much with federation space. ds9 is in deep space. and you cant make gold pressed latinum in a replicator. so it is a good trade item for working on a frontier and as a currency as the federation cant just print it. but dont quote me. its also a plot device to let them talk about economics.
    • emteycz 5y ago
      I don't remember gold-plated latinum being used within the Federation itself, all their worlds were blissful utopias. DS9 was outside the Federation, and at a place and time where the major civilizations were at war for decades. And even in DS9, the Starfleet officers never had any interest whatsoever in latinum.
• nicoburns 5y ago
  > Do you somehow think that taxes will encourage innovation ? I think that taxing large companies more than small ones might. The bedrock of capitalism is competition, and that is significantly stifled if big players with large amounts of capital can simply buy out anything innovative.