The ruling government coalition of my country officially prohibited ANY pay raises in 2024 and is likely to limit them until 2026, obliterated running tax exemption agreements on Intellectual Property specifically targeting software developers, raised tobacco taxes by 25%, killed fossil fuel-powered company cars while barely investing ANYTHING in electric infrastructure, and severely cut public transport funding.

AM I SUPPOSED TO JUST SIT BACK AND TAKE A YEARLY 5000 EURO LOSS WHILE MY MARKET VALUE INCREASES?? WTF man.

Good job centrists, greens, socialists and liberals. The only thing I can do to punish them is by voting for extreme left or right. Way to go to turn a law-abiding, moderate citizen into a riled-up, disillusioned mofo.

Two options in life: trusting government vs understanding history.

Wtf are you doing on my parking lot?

Why is software tax exempt? It's like the most value dense form of IP you can possibly own.

@aviophille That's such bullshit, if you want to support innovation just fund open source. Software is the only industry I know of with a functioning commons.

Belgium politics are kinda weird. (Not that I know much about it, except the Flanders/Wallonia issues. But that's already a huge mess.)

From having lived there, it always irked me how employers are almost insisting that you take a company car. The whole country is very car-centric. (not sure if I should tag ostream to rant about that, haha)

Prohibiting raises at all seems very weird. So you need to get a new job to get a raise? What if you get promoted to a different level or change your function within the company? Or is it just pausing the usual inflation adjustment..

I also wonder how much the labels (green, socialist, liberal) are true to the party's values or whether it's mostly a marketing trick - like in Germany where e.g. the green party is not really that green and we don't have a (social)liberal party despite a consertive/neoliberal party pretending..

@saucyatom I hope the AFD party holds true to its name/labels, when it comes to power in Germany (which seems like it eventually will)

@lorentz @saucyatom Inflation adjustment does continue through a consumer-price index (this was introduced for job market competitivity vs neighbouring countries, I think it´s even frowned upon by EU), but you still lose purchasing power for an entire year if the inflation started in January (this happened with the Russia-Ukraine war starting)

Fiscal measures cf company cars and intellectual property were introduced to stimulate resp. job growth and attract creative profiles in a country where the tax burden is insane (near 40% for salary and 33% for company gain, + 21% VAT on each service/product sold).

The tax exemption on software IP is only applied to a max. of 25% of your gross wage and was granted on a business-by-business (and even by employee profile) case in court processes that could last up to 2 years. The current government cancelled all running grants (so even if the grant was given by the state until 2026, they just retracted it).

Also, ofc, tobacco is not in the consumer price index, so all smokers take a hit (every year). I take issue with the specific devaluation of creative software work vs for ex a news article. This was also dubiously legally argumented but it is clear software devs were discriminated against simply because it was the biggest group of benefactors that cutting them off would bring a 75million euro to the govt budget.

To give you a more concrete idea about IT: function parameterization would not be qualified as creative work, but creating a new component from scratch would (hence max 25%)

@aviophille completely agree but I believe the chances of that happening are below 0 =/

@ViRaS Alternative für Dumme

It's not at all funny anymore..

@jestdotty I'm literally just operated hours ago and in hospital right now on broken bone 😂

@jestdotty Doctors push drugs in part because they don't know much about your specific situation and don't have the time to learn about it so they give you something that works most of the time. personalized medical advice is IMO one of the best use cases for AI.