It's all good. I put my ideas into a really cool and ground breaking piece of software. We never truly made it as we got beaten in the market by another company but I have put the packages head to head and still know I made the best software for what I do that available. Satisfaction there and when you've been stacking sats a while, the financial side is meh!
I went to 3 accountants prior to all of this and none of them knew about these regulations. That included PWC. I don't know what one is supposed to do in Spain to be honest. I once heard my wife talking to the tax man there (she's spanish) asking what to write for a particularly obscurely written question after they put in the regs a few years ago that one gets fined per error on a return. The lady on the phone said she had no idea, got her boss and she had no idea. The tax office literally had no idea how to fill out tax forms
Sorry, was multi tasking which is never a good idea. I'll make it as hypothetical example of what happened to me. Say myself and the programmer I worked with got a million bucks each and took 50% cash/share split.
My tax was 48% of 1m = 480k and I got to take 20k. When I come round to sell the shares, am not sure (neither was my accountant) whether just the 20% capital gains or again as income it would have been sell for 500k (assuming no gains) and pay 100k or 240k tax. Total tax of 580k or 720k.
He paid 10% entrepeneurs tax so 50k and then would have had to pay capital gains at 20% on the sale of shares or 100k. Total tax 120k.
Whilst I understand it was a very strange situation that I had not known about as it's very obscure, it still shows how bad it can get. In this case, I lived in Spain which was party to a tax agreement made within europe on taxes on sales of companies registered in USA. Spain pulled out of the agreement a few months after signing and that's where it sits right now.
My partners were not in Spain. They were in UK so totally different. Personally I don't understand anything when it comes to taxes. In spain it just seems to be go work, give everything to someone else and be grateful for good food. They were in UK and paid entrepeneurs tax of only 10% and only on cash portion. I stopped caring when I started stacking sats and left europe.
If something cannot be sold, I personally don't see how you value. However main point is my pertners were only taxed on the cash portion. They were taxed on actual realised cash portion. Rather a massive difference from me giving pretty much everything to tax man and them going off and buying second houses. All good fun!
I've seen a little discussion on the tax on unrealised gains. It sounds like a horror show for sure but I can attest to the fact that it's MUCH worse when it actually happens to you.
Set up company with some friends, get my ideas coded into a piece of software. Launch, not quite success but eventually sell. Deal is part shares, part cash and the purchaser wanted us truly vested in. I went 60% cash / 40% shares. Shares are in a private company and cannot be sold.
When I came round to tax time, my accountant informs me I have to pay tax on the full amount (i.e unrealised gains) and it was in Spain so top rate 45%. Should take too much to figure out I wasted years of my life setting up a tech company only for the government to take everything off me. I still have those shares I suppose and one day, maybe I'll be able to sell them, who knows? At least am not in Spain any more cause guess what? If I could sell them, and I lived in Spain, I'd pay tax again on that.
If they tax unrealised gains, 1929 market crash will look like a sunday picnic. In the mean time, if you are an entrepeneur, make sure to take a little time to check all the fine details in local tax code or you might be working ONLY to pay the salary of some public sector thief!
#tax #economics
What body exactly are you proposing should do this?
I think economists have not priced in the valuation of lofts
Sounds very familiar. I carted around a stack of vinyl that weighed around 50kg for years. Some of the records were all the way back from early 20th century in thick bakerlite. Spent years trying to get family members who were more settled to take them and offered to pay for shipping. Sad to end up giving them all to a charity shop but way to much for a vagabond to cart around. Hope someone is enjoying them now!
One thing am grateful for. My grandfather always sat down for an hour or two listening to his classical music looking out of the conservatory. Whenever I visited, I just sat at his feet and he'd tell me stories. I was far to young unfortunately so don't remember enough but still time well spent!
Wow! Digging into the past can be quite interesting. My great uncle passed a long time ago. He personal claim to fame was being the first flying doctor in Oz with a mate of his. To be honest, he found the whole family crest thing bloody stupid!
My family has one of those crest things they were really proud of. Great unkle did the whole digging into history and found out they’d just been given right to buy one cause ancestor was mayor who welcomed a royal visit. He presented this nugget at a large family gathering. They were all crest fallen (ahem)
Ha! Oil barron? Vagrant trying to set a company up is not exactly a barron, although I think baron is actually the lowest rank of nobility and I live in a spanish speaking country so simply means male!
Bitrefil seems to have best pricing but appears to need email. I might try just getting one and using disposable email to see how that goes
Going to test Esim for my graphene phone. Costa rica is ridiculous. Silent.link is out of the question. Bitrefil is also really expensive but then one can choose LATAM and it's a fraction of the price. Gotta love the pay the cell providers work in terms of roaming.
Wondering if Bitrefil does the lower cost by getting a SIM for a country where roaming charges for the rest are lower. If that's the case, maybe silent.link should try doing the same maybe?
#esim
Energy and Fracking
Last night, I went to a little bitcoin event and got into a conversation with someone who's involved in regenerative agriculture projects and obviously very keen on environmental conservation etc. Was interesting when I mentioned I work in the oil field and then went on to a conversation about energy. He seemed genuinely surprised by a few comments I made so thought I would post in case anyone interested.
1: Fracking
It is not new, we've been doing it since first half of 20th century. What's new is large scale, higher pressure staged fracking in horizontal wells. The modern form of fracking got a bad reputation due to contamination of water sources more than anything else. The second element is a lack of transparency on the chemicals being injected during the fracking process. On that second note, I agree, we should know what's being put down there. On the first point though, this contamination is caused by a breakdown of barriers. A well comprises decreasingly sized holes being drilled and then isolated from the rocks. What this means for example is one might drill a 17.5" hole to 300ft and then run a 15" steel casing tube and pump cement around the annulus. This means we have the rocks isolated by the casing and the cement. Maybe one would then drill a 12.25" hole a few thousand feet and put 9 5/8" casing and then cement that. Maybe one would then drill and 8.5" hole to the desired zone of hydrocarbons for production, run another string of casing and then use shaped charges to perforate the casing and cement in the desired zone.
In this scenario, should there be a water aquifer present at 200ft, there should be a series of barriers in place to stop any fluids from deeper in the hole contaminating the water. When casing is run, one can perform a cement bond log to verify that the cement is good and barriers are in place. This is the key component commonly not carried out by some of the less conscious companies that resulted in contamination.
My point here is that with correct techniques being applied, fracking should be a relatively low environmental risk energy source.
2: Earthquakes
A common misconception is that fracking is causing earthquakes. Whilst there is a minor seismic event evident during the fracking process, all areas (to my knowledge) seeing small but significant earthquakes taking place in hydrocarbon producing areas are actually due to injection wells. These injection wells are used to inject contaminated water into produced reservoirs. Again, this should be managed properly. If injection is causing seismic events then one should simply stop and use another porous formation in another location for disposal.
3: Desert solar
Another topic we discussed was solar. I kinda like solar energy from a distributed systems perspective and plan to be installing solar on my next property. However, this gentleman made a comment about harnessing solar energy in deserts and had never considered the phenomenal loss of output due to dust. I know of one very large scale project that lost over 50% of output in the first 6 months and became a bit of a white elephant.
Considering how much copy is given to energy related themes and all the changes desired to our energy production technology, I think it's pretty sad that people who are obviously very fascinated and interested in the topic are not able to find easy access to such simple bits of information to enable more informed ideas.
Indeed. I just think that the digital age may permit a much more rapid movement paradigm which may cause change. In much the same way as bank runs don't include long queues now. Interesting times!
Yeah they're slightly different categories. I have far greater faith in myself to correctly design a 10-20,000ft well than getting a 5mm straight hole in a wall!
GM nostr ☀️
Drill baby drill!