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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31810 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Pictured here, the somehow.

Ireland has benefited massively and materially from integration into the EU/Globohomo system. Ireland has gone from a place of poverty that threw off emigrants to the USA to a wealthy nation. If Ukraine can achieve half that advance after EU integration, the majority of Ukrainians won't be sitting around grumbling about Black people.

Hasn't Ireland benefited massively from having lower tax rates than most other EU countries and acting as some kind of tax haven?

Their 2018 law allowing abortion shows which kind of path they're engaged in after welcoming Google and Facebook headquarters in Dublin.

the majority of Ukrainians won't be sitting around grumbling about Black people.

Yes they can become massive movie stars instead!

We previously were kind of a tax haven, yes. That's no longer the case, and what keeps all the tech HQs here is a mixture of inertia, business-friendly climate, etc. These aren't letterbox offices: Google is the largest private employer in Dublin, tech is the largest sector of the Irish economy both in employment numbers and GDP contribution, most US tech companies you could think of (bar Amazon) have their European HQ here. When I worked in the sector it would often surpise visitors from the US that [company's] largest office and official HQ was in Dublin and not London or Paris.

If the boss doesn't come into the office, but instead works from his home, does that mean "the real office" is the boss's house?

Yep, higher-ups often choose to work from their home country. Check out average pay in the Paris office, or Zurich. Also both higher than Dublin. Doesn’t mean they are also headquarters.

Finally, I suspect that Dublin figure excludes equity, due to the ridiculous way it's taxed here.

An average of 140k euros is still a tremendously high salary isn’t it? That would be an extremely good software engineer salary in The Netherlands which is a very expensive country on its own.

Are they Google numbers or Alphabet numbers? DeepMind would drag the London average for Alphabet up quite a bit.

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