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:
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.)
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.
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).
I used Classic Shell to make it look as much as WinXP Classic as possible, so I'm happy with how it looks. As for vulnerabilities, knock on wood, so far I didn't have any issues (but I do run Bitdefender). I use it for gaming (GOG, newest game being older than my PC), photo editing (Gimp with Google Nik Collection), browsing, and office work. Nothing too demanding. But to be honest, I would have switched to Mint a long time ago if I found a Linux alternative for Smart Switch (my phone backup utility) and Garmin Connect for my watch. Those two are the only two pieces of software that keep me with Windows, and at this point I'm actually thinking of a cheap mini PC just for those two as a direct pass-through to my NAS backup.
I work in IT, run Mint on my travel laptop, and yet at home use the desktop I got 10 years ago, still with Win 8.1. And I use my current desktop quite extensively. There's still a lot of perfectly fine hardware with outdated OS floating around, and I'd argue that a significant portion of it is used by people experienced enough that they know what they are doing. Much of that will shift towards Linux. Not most of it, I'll grant you that, but more than people expect.
In fairness, they'd have to pay me to view their article. Not read, mind you, just view. I don't think I could force myself to read their articles even if paid.
I'm personally not sure how it works. But when we were upgrading our bathroom, the tile shop added the VAT to the quoted sale price. I then asked a friend of mine who is VAT-registeted to buy it for us, and he got it from the same warehouse for the non-VAT price.
I agree overall, but VAT is not all that difficult to evade, at least in the service industry. Paying handymen in cash is common in many countries, and that's a means to evade VAT. Hell, even using them to buy the building or landscaping materials for you (being a registered business they purchase for prices without VAT) saves you on most of the tax. Then there's service barter. I did it only once, a long time ago, but it can serve as an example: I did family portraits (photography) for my physio, in exchange for a number of physio sessions. If we charged each other, it would have cost each of us, say, 250 Euros, but we'd only see 200 each, and the state would get 100. So, savings of 50 for each of us.
I'd finance a historical movie about the Soviet invasion of Central Europe in 1944-1945. Similar to The Promise with Oscar Isaac, which introduced loads of people to the Armenian Genocide, my movie would show the reality of the Soviet invasion towards the end of WW2. Too many people, especially in the affected region, still think of the Soviets as liberators, when in fact they were even more ruthless than the Nazis.
Not everyone has smartphones. And speaking of Covid, not having a smartphone bit me in the arse because many businesses only accepted digital vaccination certs. I survived that, though, and I'll survive not giving business to places that require you to have a smartphone.
I have been downvoting every post I came across that has a link to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. If those links are banned, I'll have fewer downvotes to hand out. It ain't much, but it's honest work.
I quit Facebook because it stopped showing updates from my friends and groups I subscribed to. I couldn't care less about Zuck's political leanings as long as his product had any use for me.
It is also a pain in the arse for a normal user. When I search for a local plumber, instead of typing my query into the address bar, I need to go to maps.google.com first, and search there. These days, half of my searches are for businesses (the other half for spelling or correct usage of a difficult word), and all those searches now need to be made directly on the map page.
Heh, the same here, but with the usual green screen. A few years later, I took out my old PC to replay my favourite - F-19 Stealth Fighter. Found, however, that my MS-DOS 5.25" floppy, which needed to be loaded in Drive A, didn't work. Here was my setup.
Bruncvik @ Bruncvik @lemmy.world Posts 1Comments 275Joined 2 yr. ago
SkiFree? TriPeaks? Klotski?