I have the body and mind of a god. Bacchus.

My smart scale estimates my physical age at 20 years less than my actual age. That just proves the scale is smart enough to know how to keep away from the recycling bin.

Am I the only one who thought this would be a GitLab meme?

Fun fact: when I was doing the Landmark Education courses, loads of people there were working for Lululemon. The company paid for it. Either they are big into mindfullness, or they hire people who need counseling.

From the article:

“We see some irony in the recent outperformance by foreign markets over the U.S. markets. In our view, foreign companies in Europe, Asia, and Latin America are likely to suffer even more from deployment of tariffs than companies in the U.S.”

I think they are overestimating the amount of trade flowing into the US. Tariffs will directly impacg US companies and customers, but they’ll also decrease the demand for foreign products. That will cause a challenge, if not outright recession worldwide, but I still think that foreign companies would be able to mitigate the drop in demand from the US better than US companies coping with supply shortages and higher prices.

Vance is Peter Thiel’s hand puppet, just like Trump is Musk’s. Thiel and Musk first came to serious money when they merged their companies to create PayPal, and since then they’ve been cooperating on various projects. Their current project is to establish corpo-feudalism in the US, and for that they need geopolitical isolation (Thiel’s job) and the dismantling of all social safetynets (Musk’s job). That’s all the context needed to understand Vance’s behaviour.

The one thing that intrigues me is why nobody filled the actual left and far-left political vacuum in the US? The political axis is so skewed that people like AOC and Samders are considered far-left, even though in Europe they’d qualify as left-of-centre. There seems to be a huge empty space left of them, but I don’t see anyone taking advantage of it and dominate a good third of the political spectrum.

SkiFree? TriPeaks? Klotski?

Everyone who wants to sell goods or services in a country with VAT (not just the EU) must be registered with the country’s tax authorities, collect the VAT on behalf of the government, and transfer the collected tax money to the government. Not all VAT is bad, though, when trading across border. Here are two very common examples:

1. Sale of goods from a higher-VAT country to a lower-VAT country. You have a Web site in Sweden where you list a product for €100. You sell the product to a customer in the UK. You ship the item, and charge the customer €96. That’s because the domestic VAT is already baked into the price (in the case of Sweden it’s 25%). Shipping outside the VAT jurisdiction, you don’t collect the local VAT on behalf of the government, and charge the VAT-less price of €80. You then add the UK VAT (20%). The customer is better off. (Of course, it also works the other way. I buy a lot from Amazon UK, but my country has a higher VAT than the UK, so I pay slightly more than the listed price.)

2. VAT return when leaving the country. The reason you need to show your boarding pass when purchasing goods at the airport is that if you fly outside the country (or, if you are within the EU, the EU as a whole), you will be charged only the price without VAT. That’s because these goods are no longer considered to be sold in that country, so VAT cannot be collected on them.

VAT is a little more complex than sales tax, but it affects the entire production chain, not only the final sale, so it allows the governments to collect on domestic economic output, not only on purchasing power. But it’s truly aimed at domestic production. For cross-border commerce, import taxes play a much more important role.

Nope. VAT is a domestic tax on all goods and services.

VAT yes, but import tax no. I buy from Amazon UK, which is outside the EU, and as long as soon as the total creeps over 150 quid, I’m hit with import duties, on top of VAT. I just asked my wife who shops at Temu a lot, and she never had to pay import duties (never even came close to the 150 total).