> in January 2025, the German state of Baden-Württemberg implemented a new LVT
More exact: On 4 November 2020, a law was enacted in the state of Baden-Württemberg which shall apply for the first time to real estate tax for the calendar year 2025 and constitutes a form of LVT.
A major school of German sociology places this at the core of its theory. According to this theory, modern societies are characterised in particular by the fact that individual subsystems of society reduce the complexity of their own (sub)system to the other systems to enable them to act at all; they fulfil what is called an "Entlastungsfunktion" (relief function). Prominent representatives of this school of thought are Max Weber, Arnold Gehlen and Niklas Luhmann.
In their view, it is modern institutions (public and private) which, as supra-individual entities, have long since become autonomous systems. The fact that the individual office-holders are human beings, meanwhile, is of little significance.
Hannah Arendt, in her theory of totalitarianism, attributed the effectiveness of both Nazi and Stalinist policies of extermination to the largly moral indifference of bureaucracy as a system.
In this sense, the task of controlling AI is a variation on the problem of harnessing a complex society consisting mainly of autonomous subsystems. This is a problem which has increasingly challenged humanity already for quite a long time. And it has been very difficult so far, even without AI ...
That's what makes libertarian AI doomers so strange. "Letting unconstrained machines with human components loose on the world will be okay, but letting unconstrained machines with nonhuman components loose on the world will produce terminators." How can it be both one and the other?
> The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do.
As a purely qualitative description, this does not strike me as anything particularly new. Machines had been doing something like this long before the computer age. For example, as early as the late Middle Ages, mechanical wheel-driven clocks with striking mechanisms were used to call people to prayer.
Any process in which a person reacts to a machine can be characterised in this way. Every till that calculates how much one has to pay, every traffic light, every other machine-generated signal. When a warning light comes on in the car, we are prompted to do something: release the handbrake properly, fasten our seatbelt, visit a garage, ...
We are already so deeply embedded in such cycles that AI seems to be merely a new variation on them than a fundamental change.
The deep sense of unease regarding AI does not stem from a machine telling us what to do, but from the risk of losing control over the situation as a whole.
Germany is currently operating the world biggest permanent storage for dangerous waste UTD Herfa-Neurode. Contains at least 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans, 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Nuclear waste is currently excluded, but I think it would not make a difference, especially because after about 400 years most dangerous fission products (Caesium-137, Strontium-90, and Iodine-131) decay away and only Plutonium and minor actinides stays. Mercury, arsenic, dioxins and furans stay forever.
We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.
"Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater."
I would generalise this a little: The problem with buying a complex item is information inequality. The seller knows more about it than the potential buyer. When inspecting the item, the buyer therefore looks for signs of hidden defects or for evidence that the item is in good condition overall. In this way, cleanliness becomes a proxy for the general condition of the object. Similar mechanisms are at work elsewhere too. Take job applications, for example. A sloppy application is a red flag, even if the applicant’s references are excellent.
"Information inequality" is known as "risk". Risk is inherent in any transaction. That factors into the price: one is willing to pay less the more risk there is, and will pay more for less risk.
Most "risks" have an upside and a downside. In this case, for example, the solar PV system may be working better or worse than the (potential) buyer initially comes to understand.
We have huge industries based on selling "risk, but with a huge potential upside" to people willing to pay for access to the potential upside. Many of those customers are not interested in low risk in that context.
So "more risk, pay less" is not a hard and fast rule, but depends on what is being purchased, the circumstances of the buyer, and more.
The Black-Sholes equation is an attempt to calculate risk. Of course, risk is difficult to pin down to a number, and different people will assess risk differently.
But that's irrelevant to my point, which was that risk is factored into the price.
The authors claim that he spent "9,600 euros to start a company" is misleading. Since he wants to reduce his liabiliy and therefore the risk of his customers as much as possible, he opted for a complex solution that involved founding two joined companies.
In addition, he counted 2,000 € of shared capital as an expense, which it isn't. He did not opt for a "cheap" UG which requires no up-front capital, because of its bad reputation.
He also includes a bill for accounting software of 426.97 € into his calculation. This has nothing to do with founding costs, but are operational expenses.
As the author states that he set up the company through a law firm, I wonder which of the figures includes the cost of this service. To be fair, this should be listed separately, as such costs can vary widely or be omitted entirely if the company is incorporated solely through a notary.
Also the information about the minimum deposit when founding a GmbH is incomplete. He states: "A GmbH wants 25,000 euros sitting in a bank account before it is allowed to exist." Fact is that you need only deposit half of it upfront into the GmbH; you only have to deposit the rest of the money if the company is in trouble. The company can also immediately lend the deposit back to the founder at market rates. If the company’s articles of association permit it to hold shares in other companies, the company may also use the contributions to purchase shares or similar financial investments. His law firm should actually have advised him on this matter.
The main differences between a standard GmbH and a GmbH & Co KG lie in their somewhat different tax arrangements.
So all in all, the author paid 7,227.74 € to found a rather complex company structure. Judging by his reasoning, presumably for the wrong reasons.
When I found a GmbH in 2019 without the help of a law firm, it cost me about 2,000 euros (if I recall it correctly).
I founded a UG in december for 250€ (beglaubigt.de) + 180€ (notary but w/ Mustervertrag) + 150€ (round about, not a 100% sure, Handelsregister) and 35€ Gewerbeanmeldung (which isn't even tied to founding the company itself relly). Still waiting for my UStID tho. supposedly exists since january, but they aren't able to deliver the letter or tell me on the phone ...
The notary system is pure scam and should be abolished. They literally just read your documents, stamp, sign. It’s expansive, outdated and doesn’t bring any value
The pro-nuclear propaganda in this discussion reminds me of the tobacco companies that claimed smoking was harmless, or of Monsanto, which insisted that its pesticides were safe, and so on. It is always the same pattern: obvious facts are denied, doubts are exaggerated, legitimate concerns are downplayed, and blatant lies are spread. I wonder how many undercover lobbyists for the nuclear industry are active here on HN.
Fascinating how ppl mention pro nuclear propaganda when we already know the facts. France and Sweden have among the lowest emissions in EU and got them in 90's by building both ren and nuclear. Germany built only ren, DK built only ren and both have far worse emissions.
> in January 2025, the German state of Baden-Württemberg implemented a new LVT
More exact: On 4 November 2020, a law was enacted in the state of Baden-Württemberg which shall apply for the first time to real estate tax for the calendar year 2025 and constitutes a form of LVT.
The text of the law can be found here (in German): https://www.landesrecht-bw.de/bsbw/document/jlr-NNLBW00007EB...
Some brief information on the Web-site of the State of Baden-Württemberg (in German): https://fm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/service/presse-und-oeffe...
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