On paper, I mostly think the EU is a great idea. The Euro currency too. It fits well with one of the most loudly broadcasted purposes of EU; to strengthen and easen trade between member countries. Well, it’s not officially phrased that way, but you’d be hard pressed not to interpret the Treaty on European Union that way:

DETERMINED to promote economic and social progress for their peoples, taking into account the principle of sustainable development and within the context of the accomplishment of the internal market and of reinforced cohesion and environmental protection, and to implement policies ensuring that advances in economic integration are accompanied by parallel progress in other fields,

Anyone who runs anything but a local — as in brick and mortar style — business should think this is a great idea. Essentially, it should widen the adressable market for a business with little to no overhead, give or take your sales channels. For Internet companies, this is awesome. Gone are the odd trade agreements between neighbouring European countries, replaced with a simple, consistent model, which everyone agrees on.

For Iconfinder, this has been especially great; we only need to deal with the distinction between EU and non-EU customers, and in the case of EU customers, whether they’re valid legal entities or simply consumers. Based on this information, it’s pretty simple to figure out what to do about VAT. That part about “valid legal entity” is actually not that simple, though, as you are actually required to verify the validity of a legal entity. For this, the EU has a mostly unstable Web service (SOAP, of course), VIES, which is woefully underdocumented, but if you do a bit of work, like we have with our pyvat Python module, you can pretty easily automate this process. It sure as hell still beats dealing with whatever trade agreements existed before the EU.

It’s all down hill from here

But, all these good things are going to come to a screeching halt on January 1st, 2015, at least if you’re in the broadcasting, telecommunications, or, in our case, “electronic services” category of businesses. If you’re so lucky as to be one of these businesses, you now no longer have to pay your local VAT rate to the country in which you operate, when you sell to a consumer in the EU. Instead, you now have to pay VAT in the consumer’s country of residence at the rate applicable to the good, you’re selling, in that country.

In other words, until January 1st, when Iconfinder sells an icon to a consumer in Malta, we have to pay 25 % VAT to the Danish government on the sale. From January 1st, we have to pay 18 % VAT to the Maltesian government instead. This alone, in my opinion, is unnecessarily complex. Think about it; we now have to keep track of VAT rates in all individual EU countries. Sure, the EU published a set of instructions containing a table of these rates, on their 1995 style VAT insanity page, but there’s no obvious way of being subscribed to notifications on changes. Pray that your accountant will keep an eye on that for you, or hope that you remember to visit that site every so often.

But, wait, it gets better. Some countries have varying VAT rates depending on where in the country the consumer lives. Some Greek islands have a discounted VAT rate of 16 % instead of the normal 23 %, so you’re now stuck with having to figure out if that’s the case. As anyone who’s ever tried to parse or validate adresses knows, doing this consistently from user input is going to be borderline impossible. And, then, of course, there’s the varying VAT rates depending on the good you’re selling. In France, e-books are sold at a 5.5 % VAT rate as opposed to the standard 20 % rate, and e-newspapers (whatever they are, exactly) are sold at an even lower rate of 2.1 %. Then, lastly, there are little details like the “use and enjoyment” VAT levying rule, which is of course only applicable in certain countries.

None of this is exposed in any useful manner. It’s 2014 and the EU did not think to make it easy for businesses to comply with these rules by, say, exposing this information through a Web service. Instead, your get a PDF summary and a bunch of documents to read, understand and implement. Have fun.

As for the question of actually paying the VAT owed to ther countries, the EU did actually decide to use some new fangled technology in offering a consolidated platform for payment, the “MOSS,” or “Mini One Stop Shop” (who names these things!?) Knowing how well these things usually work, it’ll probably be utterly useless and a huge headache for the next couple of years, but at least they tried.

Now, as if all of this wasn’t ridiculous enough, the EU laments its self-image of being an economic super power by maintaing the ridiculous rule of countries outside the EU selling to consumers in the EU technically being required to pay VAT in the country where the consumer lives. This is of course in spite of the fact that the rules state, that businesses in the EU doing selling to consumers outside the EU are no longer required to deal with any kind of VAT payments. Fat chance that American companies will start charging me Danish VAT from January 1st, especially when this is now a one-way street.

It’s a treaty breach

The only real upside I can see, is that we’ll improve our margins slightly as only few other countries in the EU have as ridiculous a VAT rate as Denmark. I’m just not sure it’s worth it in time and complexity, not to mention development, bookkeeping and accounting costs.

I honestly think that, if you squint your eyes a little, these new VAT rules are counter to the stated purpose of the EU, and in essense, a breach of the stated goal in the aformentioned treaty. Sure, getting VAT to the country, where a good is consumed makes theoretical sense, as VAT is essentially a consumption based income tax. As so-called electronic services are becoming an ever increasing economic force, this of course skews the balance. However, it’s at the expense of the businesses providing these services. The overhead is substantial, and in that regard raises the barrier to entry for any business wanting to do business with consumers in EU countries — albeit most notably for EU businesses, as the rules can actually be legally enforced here. Sustainable? Maybe — those with skin in the game will manage and adapt. Does it promote economic progress? Definitely not.

The next weeks of my life will be spent implementing a good way to handle these new rules and testing to make sure everything works according to plan. What a royal waste of time, energy and money.

For some reason, I wound up reading about compilers’ use of vectorization in optimizing code yesterday, and I came across Felix von Leitner‘s pretty interesting presentation from 2009, “Source Code Optimization”.

While I knew that compilers are generally good at optimizing these days, I had no clue just how good they’ve become. This basically also means that a lot of the “general wisdom” I came up with when writing C and C++ no longer really applies, and even more so, that more readable code often seems to produce equally good or even more optimized code than most attempts at being clever. For C(++) code then, this means that we not only can but almost have to mentally shift from being “clever” to being concise when writing code – a development that’s been helped greatly by C11 and C++11.

If you write any C or C++ on a regular basis, I strongly suggest you add this presentation to your list of annual reminders.

Startup culture is awash with the heroisation of burning the mythical midnight oil with the 60 or 70 hour work week being a badge of honor — the road to success. Slowly, however, that trend is changing — at least among people who’ve actually done those stupid hours — and while I’m embarrassingly still working way too many hours than is any kind of good, evidence keeps indicating that I really need to stop. Not only evidence in terms of feeling unproductive at times, but actual sort of scientific evidence.

I came across one such piece of evidence today in CamMi Pham‘s post “7 Things You Need To Stop Doing To Be More Productive, Backed By Science”. For the post, she has done a couple of very tangible charts (which seem to correlate well with other data I’ve found) showing the effective productivity of weeks of working 50 and 60 hours respectively. Truth be told, the numbers are scary — if the charts are to be taken at face value, the productivity gain from a 50 or 60 hour work week evaporate after only 9 and 8 weeks respectively:

I probably need to be smart and go home “early.”

As a kid, very few things fascinated me more than space flight (I clearly remember yapping my dad’s ears off about the different stages of the Saturn V launch vehicle’s flight cycle.) To this date, that fascination has stayed with me, and possibly only grown greater as I’ve started to grasp the true extent of the space programmes. Maybe young me would have loved it, but videos like this one by Spacecraft Films from the launch umbilical tower of the Apollo 11 flight from 5 seconds before liftoff at 500 frames per seconds leave me in absolute awe:

It’s with great sadness that I have learned, that a personal hero of mine, Douglas Carl Engelbart has passed await, albeit at a respectable age of 88. However, I’m even more saddened by the way general media is presenting him in obituaries. Lacking rudimentary understanding of Engelbart’s approach and goals, they reduce his intellect, achievements and work to that of a simple inventor of the early personal computing era scoping him as merely “the inventor of the mouse.”

But, as I tried to sit down and figure out how to describe who Engelbart really was, I realized, that the general media is probably well excused. Hell, even as a kid who’s been heads down in computers since he was 8, it wasn’t until a few years ago, where I started to look beyond modern computing as a mere tool, that the seminal nature of Engelbart started to dawn on me. Worse still, it wasn’t until I read Bret Victor’s wonderful piece that the concept of Engelbart became clear (despite the somewhat fuzzy conclusion):

The least important question you can ask about Engelbart is, “What did he build?” By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to admire him, to stand in awe of his achievements, to worship him as a hero. But worship isn’t useful to anyone. Not you, not him.

The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, “What world was he trying to create?” By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself.

Engelbart wasn’t just another gold rush inventor. He doesn’t fit inside the same boxes as even people as great as Steve Jobs. No, he was nothing less than an amazingly intellectual being who, as one of the first, saw the mainstream availability of computing not as the amazing achievement in itself but rather a means to augment the capabilities of humans. There is no denying that computers truly have transformed the lives of humans and our abilities to collectively solve problems — and probably far more than even young Engelbart could ever have imagined. But, the popular, naive deduction that this is a natural result of the technological development that endured, is nothing short of wrong.

As Bret Victor so concisely puts it; “Engelbart devoted his life to a human problem, with technology falling out as part of a solution.” But, it wasn’t just Engelbart’s technology that “fell off.” A pioneering thought leader as a natural effect of the beautiful purity of the intent of his work, he was and remains both aspirational and inspirational to the technology world as a whole.

His legacy isn’t hypertext, the mouse or any other single piece of work — rather, it’s the total permeation of the technology world with the intent that lead to these almost insignificant pieces. He truly was one of the very few pioneers of augmentation, history has ever known.