I found this draconian policy jarring at first (never a drug user, but casual cocaine / pot use was everywhere in both London and NY, and the usual cocktail of whatever was fashionable too).
You get used to these policies pretty quickly, and in exchange there are no (visible) drug users and no (visible) homelessness; I don't think in the West we are willing to sacrifice the freedom to do these things, or impose the death penalty for importing drugs (we have abolished it for nearly every other crime apart from murder in most jurisdictions).
I say that not making a value judgement (I cherish and in some cases miss western freedoms, and believe we do all too little to defend them at home), rather observing from nearly 40 years in western society and <12 months in the East.
It's worth remembering that much of Asia went through terrible drug addiction epidemics in the 20th century [0], and they decided to take drastic action, which probably took 25 years to fully bear fruit.
I also don't believe this policy, in isolation, is the whole answer. Asia (and particularly Singapore) focuses on society, community and other values which attenuate the factors which lead to, and are exacerbated by, drug use (violence, theft, vagrancy, unemployment, under-employment).
You give up a lot of freedom, but you get order in return. For some of us, that is acceptable. For others, this is not (and that is ultimately a matter for voters in each polity).
And of course, peculation means misappropriating or embezzling funds. Again, given crypto (and certain notorious crypto exchanges), even more appropriate.
"Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." (E. B. White)
A quick inspection of the article suggests there's a difference of intent.
<snip>
Datoviz is a relatively low-level visualization library. It focuses on rendering visual primitives like points, lines, images, and meshes — efficiently and interactively.
Unlike libraries such as Matplotlib, Datoviz does not provide high-level plotting functions like plt.plot(), plt.scatter(), or plt.imshow(). Its goal is not to replace plotting libraries, but to serve as a powerful rendering backend for scientific graphics.
</snip>
Yes, although there isn't much to do to go from Datoviz to simple scientific plots like scatter plots or polylines with axes. It's just a few lines of code. I should probably clarify the documentation.
I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder...
There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.
So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?).
That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.
So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.
Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.
If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.
I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.
Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.
Huh, I didn't know that. But it seems incomplete, at least for Baden-Württemberg. Not sure if that's a bug, an outage, or if they didn't submit all the data. On unternehmensregister.de, you can usually view lots and lots of information, including annual reports (with increasing detail, depending on company size).
As far as I understand it, on unternehmensregister.de, you only have to pay for access to files (including annual reports) of small companies that make use of the § 326 Abs. 2 HGB exception: https://www.buzer.de/326_HGB.htm And maybe for formally authenticated copies? Everything else should be free of charge.
Not sure how fiscality works in Germany, but if similar as France, then that would be 64k _super_ gross per employee per year. So you would remove ~25% of that to get employee gross. Meaning, more like 50k gross per year.
When you say “employee gross”, is this analogous to what we Americans colloquially refer to as “take home pay” eg the final amount you get after all taxes and the like have been removed from your pay? I know it is common in Europe to refer to salary this way but in USA it is rare, salary is usually discussed with taxes still included in the States
Super gross = the total cost of the employee paid by the company
Gross = super gross - employer contributions, usually around 20%
Net = gross - employee contributions, usually around 40%
Most employees, Europe included, talk in gross/year. It can happen that people (usually in the lower bracket) talk in net/month.
In the example above, the cost to the company is expressed in super gross, 64k. That would leave ~50k as gross, so around 30k net, or 2.5k net / month.
Enlightening! Sweden (and perhaps some of the other Nordics) seem to use net/month a lot more than gross/yr (anecdotal observation as an American expat). Everywhere I have chatted with Europeans all seem to talk in post tax numbers however by default.
The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.
I think there are two main factors to take into account:
- If you are in a lower tax bracket, the taxes are almost the same for everyone, so talking "net" is okay. If you have a more substantial income though, there starts to be more difference in net amongst people, as it depends on how your compensation is technically paid, and how much it is. So for the same gross, people can end up with different net.
- People tend to think in terms of what is wired to their bank account. For a long time, most (western) European countries did not have "source tax", meaning you would get your gross every month, and are supposed to save up for the income tax coming end of the year. That changed a lot in recent years, and more often now the income tax is directly subtracted from your monthly wages, which may direct people to talk in net.
> The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.
I get you, and that's not just because of gros/net, but also just the general cost of living that changes. I lived in a baltic country for a number of years with half the gross I had in western Europe, and felt substantially wealthier.
This is a really fun app. I took a painting class for a few years in an effort to exercise the other side of the brain - and this does what I failed to do with tens of hours of effort with GIMP, and no amount of prompt magic could do with $LLM.
I trust your tip jar gets and stays full - bringing this back to life is a wonderful contribution!
I liked the idea of tako - a slightly slimmed down, less clunky, version of Xonsh. However, it requires significant patching in order to work with modern python (I tried with 3.12, but I believe some of the breaking changes occur in 3.9+).
Specifically, there are a number of imports from collections which appear to no longer work, and I had to install a fairly old version of collections to get Set and MutableSequence (which `tako/takoshell/tools.py` subclasses).
`hz.mit.edu` is not a git forge, so I don't think I can submit a PR without e-mailing the author.
Brit / American checking in and agreeing. My first startup was a B2B SaaS and hiring in the UK was fantastic - the arbitrage was just silly. Experienced software developers (10+ years) @ GBP 70k / year - and that was close to non-finance full-market pay. The same people were averaging $250k in NYC / SF.
And yet, the UK hires were often better off after all expenses than the US hires.
Largely due to housing being slightly cheaper (other posters have pointed out, London is on par with SF / NY - the big difference being London expands, NYC and SF are both "islands" - yes SF is a peninsula, but commuting up 280 or 101 is not a pleasant experienced).
Also, even offering private healthcare (BUPA) - the UK hires were cheaper. I'm in my late 30s and reasonably healthy - my all-in, gold-plated UK policy was GBP 2k / year - I was at $2,000 / month in the US.
*However* - salaries in the UK are unsustainably low.
Three reasons:
[1] BOMAD - The Bank of Mom and Dad (parents paying / lending the deposit for a house so the mortgage is at a low rate) is effectively exhausted. This means that current entrants into the housing market are either renting (which is nearly as expensive as NYC, especially after the inflationary / interest rate jump), or saving to "buy" a house (I enclose in quotes because at a 95% mortgage you don't own much of your house).
[2]
Professional salaries outside of finance are way too low. My fiancee works in a highly skilled, professional field and her salary in 2024 was, in nominal terms the same as my starting salary in NYC 17 years ago working for a large investment bank IN THE BACK OFFICE - where salaries were decidedly blue-collar. My unproven hypothesis is that the UK professional world is still largely geared towards those with alternative assets, private incomes (especially high-prestige non-professional jobs, especially around politics). This makes it impossible to compete with US venture backed startups, even post-ZIRP, because the offer is always going to be better. And yet that private-income driven base has largely been eroded through capital gains, inheritance tax and general downward social mobility (or, perhaps, less doom-and-gloom - averaging towards the center. The difference in wealth and income between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class has narrowed significantly).
[3] There has been over the last 5-7 years significant negative messaging and tax policy against economic success. A confiscatory top-tax band, an erosion of a "job perks" friendly tax regime and a political climate that is very anti-success, even prior to the labour govt (largely started at the same time, though perhaps not by, Theresa May's 2015 speech and focus on "Just about managing").
VC in the UK is hard, largely because the majority (though by no means all) VCs are focused on aping mid-market pension managers. Their ambition is limited to businesses that already work (and yet anything transformative by definition does not work yet) - and are interested mostly in post-revenue companies with linear or lightly superlinear growth.
This, IMNSHO, is largely caused by the fact that, given state expenditure and the corp and personal tax burden, there simply isn't enough capital for US style VC - the portfolio approach requires capital to absorb failures. Most VCs here cannot afford failure.
The closest we get is the EIS / SEIS tax policy, which allows the offsetting of losses in failed businesses (by the equivalent of Accredited Investors) - as well as a friendly Cap Gains treatment of successes. But these are largely made as common stock investments by individuals - and limited to a very small scale.
Which brings me to my final point - the SAFE note is not only not ubiquitous here, it's rare. Even pre-seed investments are either common stock or (more rarely) convertible notes. This requires a level of diligence (even on small tickets) that make capital formation incredibly burdensome.
There's absolutely a path to resolving this - but the UK first has to make a political and cultural decision to embrace startup-led GDP growth, which is has not yet made.
A lot of discussion focuses on the supply side (not unexpected given the article).
The demand side is where we can take individual / small group action. On the one hand, you have CA (and most of the US) phasing out incandescent light bulbs (great - lowers baseline demand) - but you also have an order of magnitude increase in compute (model training anyone?) as well as a push towards electrification of cars, household appliances, heating etc. All fine - but that energy has to be moved (unless you're generating locally with Solar Panels).
Grid scale batteries and similar ancillary services do a pretty good job of levelling this out - making the market more "liquid" (to borrow a stock market term) - but they take 3-7y to bring up depending on the usual infra variables.
<shill>
We think batteries to absorb household demand are part of the solution. [www.energyapplied.com]
If you can control when these batteries act in unison (and, as with anything, the devil is in the details) - and deploy them densely enough to absorb forecasted demand spikes (another comment ITT mentioned LMP markets - astute) - then you complement grid scale storage with something you can roll out in weeks to cover a high stress area, not years
</shill>
Another comment mentioned "differently regulated" - and that's right - in order to participate in any of the supply and demand programs on the grid, you need to do a lot of things a certain way. The more you can encapsulate that for the user (don't have a household participate in Demand Response, do it through Nest or something similar and have 1mm households participate) - gets a lot more achievable.
In a funny way, power markets are probably the US's last real free-trade market. My first few years deep in the back office of an investment bank, there were 31 NYSE floor traders, when I left 13 years later in 2020, there were 2, and most volume is program trading / etfs / electronic trading. Ditto fixed income (bonds and bond like instruments), foreign exchange (though these latter two are slower).
Financial Markets inherently move towards being vanilla and scalable because it's cheaper - and this has been one area where the race to the bottom hasn't entirely harmed the consumer (there once was a time when you had to pay a broker a commission on each stock trade. Etrade / Robinhood anyone?).
Power still has a long way to go before it's there - but it will _probably_ be a good thing when it does, and given that it touches hard infrastructure and nobody's forgetting Enron any time soon - it _probably_ will end up better off for the consumer.
It has historically been used to allow for bonds to have uniform repayments across maturities (when the principal of a bond becomes due) - useful in the context of a bank wanting to hedge risks such as interest rate risk, repayment risk (if the bond is callable it can be paid back early, which means the bondholders have cash yielding ~0% instead of whatever the bond yield was)
Mortgages, though not traditional bonds (in that it's not a sophisticated company borrowing) are, depending on the jurisdiction, treated as bonds because they get packaged up and sold as bonds - the underlying bit of financial engineering that, after serious perversion, gave us the 2008 credit crisis
I found this draconian policy jarring at first (never a drug user, but casual cocaine / pot use was everywhere in both London and NY, and the usual cocktail of whatever was fashionable too).
You get used to these policies pretty quickly, and in exchange there are no (visible) drug users and no (visible) homelessness; I don't think in the West we are willing to sacrifice the freedom to do these things, or impose the death penalty for importing drugs (we have abolished it for nearly every other crime apart from murder in most jurisdictions).
I say that not making a value judgement (I cherish and in some cases miss western freedoms, and believe we do all too little to defend them at home), rather observing from nearly 40 years in western society and <12 months in the East.
It's worth remembering that much of Asia went through terrible drug addiction epidemics in the 20th century [0], and they decided to take drastic action, which probably took 25 years to fully bear fruit.
I also don't believe this policy, in isolation, is the whole answer. Asia (and particularly Singapore) focuses on society, community and other values which attenuate the factors which lead to, and are exacerbated by, drug use (violence, theft, vagrancy, unemployment, under-employment).
You give up a lot of freedom, but you get order in return. For some of us, that is acceptable. For others, this is not (and that is ultimately a matter for voters in each polity).
[0] https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bu...