anheliotrope-old

[anheliotrope-old]

Gentle reminder that I’ve moved my blog to @anheliotrope, same name, different account, to escape side blog status.

[anheliotrope-old]

I’m moving this blog a new account. I hate how side blogs work and want some distance from my aesthetics/anime/meme blog. I have to sift through 500 anime pictures per day to find people’s text posts, replies and likes appear as from my main blog. The longer I wait to do this the more annoying it gets to do, so why not now.

URL is still @anheliotrope but I’m not sure if tumblr will link the mention properly until 24h pass, so I’ll repeat this announcement a couple of times. Anyway, please follow me there!

[anheliotrope-old]

As I'm randomly picking one relatively obscure game out of 200 currently installed to replay, like clockwork me and sseth's brainwaves connect through the malkavian madness network and he publishes a new review about Pharaoh.

I'm not sure if things like this ignite my desire to continue playing Pharaoh, or totally kill it.

[anheliotrope-old]

I'm not sure if things like this ignite my desire to continue playing Pharaoh, or totally kill it.

[anheliotrope-old]

City building is such a cursed genre. I don't know why it's so hard to make good city builders. There's also so few games in the genre to begin with. Impressions Games made 5 of them!! Well, all 5 are kind of the same game. But it's depressing that it feels like this genre peaked in 1998 with their Caesar III and subsequent spinoffs.

And now I'm cursed to wander the Earth and feel like most city builders are just inferior variants. There's also the ones that try very different things, like Frostpunk, which luckily, succeeded more than it failed, but it's a rarity.

The whole thing is difficult for me to grasp because city builders ala Caesar III are technologically simple and pretty easy to make. Yet they ain'tn't being made.

[anheliotrope-old]

Thoughtfulness is, at least to some extent, neuroticism plus competence.

[anheliotrope-old]

Regarding Facebook’s potential breakup, I see no cause for celebration.

Facebook ranks to me as minor evil? moderate maybe? They play fast and loose with user data and that they manipulate politics and social reality through their platform.

It’s not a sin unique to Facebook and more importantly they’re not even on the chopping block for that. Even if they get broken up, it’s just back to business as usual, with different owners.

Breaking up a company and not materially changing anything about the environment that lead up to their negative behavior is begging to have it happen again and again. You can take a shit on a company on an ad-hoc basis and feel good about it, but it’s really doubtful it’s going to fix anything. Standard Oil being broken up didn’t suddenly raise the ethical standards for the industry.

Challenge Intellectual Property, improve privacy rights, stop passing laws whose primary purpose is to assist the monopolistic tendencies of already dominant companies in their field etc. You know, just stop dumping radioactive waste into markets and then being surprised they’re toxic.

These companies are carefully crafting their own Kingdom of legislative advantages and the vast majority of solutions people come up with are either on the level of violent revolution or on the level of bandaid that doesn’t address any of the causes.

[anheliotrope-old]

This is why if you’re a leftist, even one skeptical of markets, and scoffed at people hoping cryptocurrencies might make the world a bit freer, you should probably stop.

Credit card companies and to a lesser extent payment processing gateways have an insane amount of control over our lives. And most of that control hasn’t been used not to even a tenth of a fraction of it’s full potential.

My wake up call was when online pharmacies that were lifelines for transpeople came under fire. I saw people on forums freaking out whether they’ll still be able to get their HRT.

You can go on inhousepharmacy.vu right now and see this:

Visa and MasterCard: We are unable to accept these cards. Visa and MasterCard regulations prevent their cards from being used for the purchase of pharmaceuticals over the internet. 

Additionally:

Cryptocurrency Payments (Bitcoin & Bitcoin Cash): From August 17, 2018 we have stopped accepting all cryptocurrency payments. Tightening anti-money laundering regulations have forced banks to disallow payments from these sources.

There needs to be much stronger and much more widespread support for freer currency on the whole political spectrum if we don’t want to live in a world where credit card companies can deal a likely lethal blow to any business or kind of business they dislike.

noooo not the heckin pornerinos

[anheliotrope-old]

Coltescu, a Romanian assistant referee did the equivalent of shrek_lord_farquaad_point.jpg "Black!" at Pierre Webo, the second coach of Basakeshir, when trying to point him out to the main referee. As far as I can tell, the assistant referee felt that the second coach’s behavior was out of control in terms of protesting previous referee decisions and was trying to clarify who he was talking about.

They were speaking in Romanian and the color black in Romanian is "negru". Coltescu used a word that’s perfectly equivalent to calling a black person “black” in English. But what the second coach heard was "negro" and started going on repeatedly that they can't be called a negro, this is racism. He could not be assuaged and his outrage spread to his team very shortly.

Basakeshir went back to the locker room and refused to play in protest. It’s unclear to me if PSG had solidarity with them or didn’t know what was going on but they went back to the locker room too.

Erdogan himself basically said that UEFA must take action against this extremely racist referee. Mehmet Muharrem Kasapoglu, the Turkish minister of sport said that racism is a crime against humanity in response to this event.

It's incredible how US politics regarding race relationships have ended up shaping the aesthetics of the political outrage of an, at least semi-fascist, nationalistic turkish president. A president of a country that of course has none of its own historic or present issues with massively violent racism, definitely none of which are being actively fanned by the aforementioned president.

Dozens of Turkish news outlets want Coltescu fired and turkish hackers replaced Coltescu’s avatar on Instagram with a picture of Webo and wrote their names and “No to racism” in his description. The non-Turkish pundits that are outraged don’t seem to actually care that Coltescu, in fact, never used a slur. It’s useless to point out that this mattered even less to the Turkish news outlets.

Even more incredible than what I mentioned earlier is that, due to how the discourse about racism evolved, it seems that nobody is willing to call Erdogan and his dogs out for being massive hypocrites lest they themselves appear to be racist. Erdogan, why are you even wasting time with football, don’t you guys have minorities to oppress?

What I’ve learned over time is that modern western civilization (whatever that is) is very ready to call out minor acts of racism in its own population, especially among people that don’t really matter. But when it comes to calling out the racism of other global powers, when there might be some semblance of a cost to their action, then they’re not even willing to condemn wholesale genocide, such as in the case of PRC and the Uyghurs.

I guess we can at least rest assured that Coltescu is very unlikely to ever act as a referee in an international game again. Racism defeated, thank you Erdogan.

[anheliotrope-old]

If the average Korean manhwa artist was in charge of naming the Harry Potter series then they would have probably unironically titled it as The Magical Prodigy Survived The Dark Lord's Attack.

[anheliotrope-old]

[anheliotrope-old]

ur posts are good and i admire u

*stamps your forehead with the mark of good taste*

[anheliotrope-old]

Tax Problems. =>"Maybe I should post more on Tumblr." I mean, extremely "welcome back" but psychological self harm isn't the answer fam

It's okay, I promise I won't form a perfect 16 man Roman tortoise formation

[anheliotrope-old]

What if I actually posted more often instead of an effortpost once every 3-6 months

[anheliotrope-old]

No, that’s not it. The tl;dr is that employees have the highest tax burden, while being a contractor or paying yourself dividends has low tax burden. So being reclassified as an employee just massively screws you over. And their tentative plan is for people to become employees via a global remote platform that specializes in dealing with the legislation of each country in part.

For the longer version, I’ll explain the three options you have when working for a foreign company while being a resident in Romania.

The first is to be that company’s employee. This is hard on the foreign company because they have to be registered in Romania and ensure they are compliant with some amount of local legislation. The tax burden is very high. It’s 10% income tax, 10% healthcare, 25% social security, 2.25% work security tax. These percentages don’t just get summed up and applied, rather they apply in a certain order, so you get a total tax burden of 42.79%.

Please note that this is in a country where almost every sale is already VAT taxed at 19%.

The second option is to be a PFA (Persona Fizica Autorizata), “Authorized Physical Person” which means contractor basically. There’s a snag here. You can only be PFA if the work you do is “independent”. There are 7 legal criteria for independence. You need to meet at least 4 of them in order for your work to be independent. Except if the government comes after you, it can stop mattering what the letter of the law is very quickly. The criteria will suddenly become way more subjective and you find yourself in a terrible situation where you get reclassified as an employee and have to, at minimum, pay all the taxes you would have owed if you had been an employee for the entire duration.

The most common rule of thumb is that if you’ve worked for the same company for over a year and received regular payment from them, even if you fulfill the letter of the law perfectly, you’re still at risk. Despite this risk many people chose the PFA route even in situations where their relationship is obviously dependent, including actual employees turning PFA just for tax optimization. The Romanian authorities enforce the law very selectively, possibly partly because they don’t want to encourage brain drain.

The tax burden in the PFA route has two branches. One for being taxed in the “real” and “nominal” system. Both pay 10% income tax, but the nominal system you only pay 10% of an arbitrarily established sum instead of your actual income. That sum differs per profession and iirc even per geographic location. Isn’t that weird??

Anyway, once you pass a certain amount of income you have to also pay ~1550 USD to social security and ~620 USD to healthcare per year. These are fixed values derived from the minimum yearly wage. For example the healthcare value is derived as 10% of 12 minimum yearly wages.

Either way you look at it, PFA is a huge upgrade over being an employee.

Then there’s the third rarer option and the one I chose. Which is make your own limited liability company. If you pay yourself a salary, you get ALL the downsides of being an employee, but if you take the money out as dividends you instead only get to pay 3% income tax, 5% dividend tax and the ~620 USD to healthcare per year. The services you sell are not VAT taxed provided the buyer is also in the EU, provided you get a special VAT code, which I did.

Of course, you also have to probably pay rent for company headquarters hosting, pay an accountant and still do part of the paperwork yourself. The other downside is that you can only distribute dividends once every 3 months. In exchange for all that, you’re tax optimal.

Oh also, you don’t have to pay social security at all. Of course, you don’t benefit from having a pension, but who cares. This is huge for me because I perceive the social security system in Romania to be very poorly managed and corrupt. I also don’t plan to stay here, so all money that goes to the pension fund is money I won’t ever see that isn’t even helping someone else. I would literally rather set fire to my money than send it the government managed pension fund.

The biggest upside of LLC for me wasn’t that it was less taxed than PFA, but that I could work without the constant dread that I might get reclassified and have my life suddenly become centered around a legal conflict with the government.

Well, turns out that from the legal perspective of the company hiring me, I’m still a contractor, purely because of the contract we signed. Whether the contract is signed with a person or with a company doesn’t matter. So they face the same compliance issues as if I was a PFA. What I do in Romania doesn’t even matter.

I’m not sure if they’re actually correct on this (at least for Romania), but they have claimed to be at risk of being taxed in the country they are hiring the contractor in, if that relationship is reclassified as being an employee relationship.

Since the contract type is the issue, I proposed the idea of changing it to a B2B contract. Basically a contract where my company sells them a service. But I’m not sure if they’ll go with that.

So far they’ve been very reassuring and saying that they’re trying to find some way to accommodate all of this without all of their contractors losing a sizable chunk of their income. They’ve at least been transparent, as this is a pretty early moment in the whole process to bring all of this up.

At the moment, the most likely kind of scenario I feel would be them raise people’s salaries by 20% or something, which won’t really cover the whole amount for me, and then be more reticent to give any further raises that would have normally happened had this event not taken place.

The company has been quite good to me and really all its employees so far, so I’m hoping for a decent resolution, but there are many easily possible bad scenarios.

I can’t speak for the average company, but I can easily imagine other people who have faced worse situations where the company just said there’s nothing they can do about it. So overall I’m still fortunate, but man, I just want to be left alone to sell my programming services to this company without having to pay half of it to a corrupt government I have little other than disdain for.

The company I work at is considering moving me from a contractor type relationship to an employee relationship in order to comply with their country’s laws better.

This would increase my tax burden from roughly 14% to roughly 42%, which under covid situation with my parents not working would be quite awful.

I am not anywhere near close to being the only contractor that would be very negatively affected by this.

I just hope that the worker’s rights warriors that keep pushing for contractors to be extended employee status are happy with giving me existential dread and very possibly a worse economic future.

You’re all lovely, keep up to good work.

[anheliotrope-old]

The company I work at is considering moving me from a contractor type relationship to an employee relationship in order to comply with their country’s laws better.

This would increase my tax burden from roughly 14% to roughly 42%, which under covid situation with my parents not working would be quite awful.

I am not anywhere near close to being the only contractor that would be very negatively affected by this.

I just hope that the worker’s rights warriors that keep pushing for contractors to be extended employee status are happy with giving me existential dread and very possibly a worse economic future.

You’re all lovely, keep up to good work.

[anheliotrope-old]

custom silicon you can’t even buy but can only access remotely, that costs a billion dollars and up to create so everybody else gets left behind, what a world.