About ten years ago, Ryanaiar suffered a booking system malfunction. My ticket was wrongly booked to "John Smith" and apparently sent to an email address "joxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxx" due to a flaw in their booking system. I noticed when trying to check in online far in advance.
After many hours spent fruitlessly fighting the Ryanair customer disservice desk, I decided to enlist the help of my local ECC [0]. I paid Ryanair a 120€ name change fee and had the ECC claim it back for me.
Email addressing being recycled is a valid problem and challenge. Many sites use an email address as the main unique ID for customers, yet this email address and the account can expire if not used for a prolonged period, hence being recycled and then re-registered by someone else.
It doesn't sound like this caused your issue. But it is a genuine challenge for large companies like Ryanair and for users who might have registered using an old email they no longer own.
MFA and getting a reset confirmation via your mobile as an example can help people from resetting the password and logging in to see personal information which isn't theirs.
Companies need a way of recycling this accounts and letting people re-register, ideally not having to call a support line.
Any electric gear with the battery as its main wear part. Ebikes. Sit-on mowers. Cars.
This is about so much more than cost. Agency, autonomy, environment, efficiency, geopolitics even.
I refuse to buy drm'ed gear. The exception is second hand where I can reliably avoid the drm with little effort. At its simplest, that means never using specific drm'ed functionality. At its most complicated, that means mitm'ing an encrypted can bus.
There are lots of parts on a car that will likely wear out faster than the battery on a modern liquid cooled large NMC or LFP lithium battery. You should be able to get over 200,000 miles on the battery. You probably won't get near that much from the suspension, etc.
I don't know about the US. The EU limit on cash transactions differs by country, with a legal maximum of 10k€. Belgium and the Netherlands for example are at 3k€.
Patent trolls are nasty. How long will it take for one to get the full support of those shaking the independence of the US judiciary for their own gain? Let's hope the rot stops before that.
Congratulations and hat tip to you sir! You must have executed incredibly well.
I have to admit I'm a little bit jealous of an environment so conductive to starting a small business. I can see many hurdles in this small EU country to something like this succeeding. The burdens of administration and regulation and the fractured market would make this tricky to pull off. The high taxation also makes one question the wisdom of taking this kind of risk. That's not just a direct brake. All of this also creates a very different attitude, a culture less tuned to entrepreneurship.
What hurdles would those be? I'm sure that as long as you do your administration properly, selling electronics from your proverbial bedroom isn't a major issue.
This comments sounds more like generalised anti-EU sentiment than a reply to the article.
I'm very much pro EU, and I don't want to deviate from the OP's excellent original article too much, but here are few Belgium specific examples. Not too many of them hold for all EU member states, but those would still make for significant hurdles:
- You need to formally set up as a company. Where are you going to do so?
- Not allowed from student housing.
- If your parents rent their home, their rental contract usually forbids this. It would cause the landlord significant taxation issues, so almost all rental contracts forbid this.
- Establishing the simplest allowable entity able to send invoices. Just establishing would cost ~115€, or ~134€. The article student author mentions $100 being a lot of money to them.
- Provincial tax. Most Belgian provinces have a yearly tax on the existence of any company, no matter how small or inactive. My native province's rate for example is 140€. That's ~$163 at today's rate.
- Local tax. Many local governments tax business activity separately.
- Social security.
- Registration and exemption documents. No cost, but an added significant administrative burden to prove you are in the exempt bracket for your first ~2000€ earned.
- Work too many hours or earn too much. Your parents risk losing your child benefits. Note that this is separate from dependent deductions. What if money is tight for them?
- Peppol electronic invoicing. If you buy or sell anything b2b, you're required to use the peppol electronic invoicing network. No self made pdf's allowed. Set up software. Pay for a subscription.
- Banking. Better get a separate bank account for your business, or you give fiscal authorities the right to start looking into your private accounts.
- Fiscal uncanny valley. Combine any regular tech job with a sole proprietorship side gig. You pay ~53.5% in income taxes and ~21% in social security contributions on the net side income, keeping about 1/3 of your net taxable income.
- VAT and administration. Have you seriously tried to sell across intra-EU borders as a student and stay compliant?
- Hope you didn't use Amazon FBA or any 3PL partner in a different EU country.
- I just imported a single camera module from China. It cost $49 including shipping. 21% EU import VAT and administrative handling by the national post monopoly combined cost me 35.17€, or $40.93 on top.
- Forget about doing your first year accounts yourself. You'll make costly mistakes. The tax administration doesn't bark. It bites. Do you have the cash to outsource trimonthly VAT declarations and income tax accounting? Good luck finding someone competent under 1k€/~$1163.
- Earn over a relatively low token amount. If you're from a family with 3+ kids, your parents risk losing a 3k€+ net tax advantage. This can in some cases make for a significantly >100% taxation rate between parents and student children. What if your parents can't afford the tax increase?
- Student status. Drop below 27 ECTS points of course load and you're not a student entrepreneur anymore. You're suddenly a full-time entrepreneur, with the full load of responsibilities. Example: 3.6k€/year in social security contributions, even on zero or negative income. Where are you going to get the money?
- Physical product.
- Belgium has some of the highest outgoing shipping rates across any courier or postal services. Good luck competing against similar initiatives, including from other EU member states.
- Electronics specific. CE compliance is expensive. It also requires your product to have accompanying notes in the language of the EU country where you sell.
Some of this just needn't apply, especially from a UK perspective; you can operate as a sole trader with very little paperwork until you make £85,000 and have to register for VAT. You don't need a company shell or a business bank account.
"Social security" equivalent: as a sole trader you do have to pay National Insurance above a minimum threshold.
(one of the massive differences between UK regulatory culture and the EU is that the UK is very good at having "de minimis" thresholds so you don't have to worry about compliance until you've actually made decent money. EU rules tend to apply as soon as you sell a single item, which is ridiculous)
> Electronics specific. CE compliance is expensive.
This on the other hand is a real problem. WEEE as well.
> shipping rates
It is insane that it is cheaper to ship from China than intra-EU.
Every country has hurdles. It's not like the US doesn't have weird worlds of tax exemptions, and 50 sets of state tax regulation to consider [or outsource to your fulfilment platform...] when shipping to consumers, and if I was a US business importing microelectronics from China, 21% import tax that doesn't change every couple of months would sound like a *dream...
Of course every country throws hurdles onto the student entrepreneur's path. Belgium, unlike the Baltics, the US (for now) or many others, just happens to be a world championship contender in this discipline.
> Renting is good advice, but in 5-10 years, we won't be able to afford rent here, let alone buy.
You don't know if you will get priced out. You don't know how housing prices will evolve in your area. They could as well go flat or fall. That uncertainty about local affordability can suffice as an argument for buying. Just don't confuse it with certainty about your future ability to afford the local area.
After many hours spent fruitlessly fighting the Ryanair customer disservice desk, I decided to enlist the help of my local ECC [0]. I paid Ryanair a 120€ name change fee and had the ECC claim it back for me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Consumer_Centres_Netw...
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