The book “against intellectual monopoly” has shaped a lot of my thinking on this topic - economists have looked at the various occasions in which patents were introduced into an industry (or extended in scope), and there is no evidence they actually improve innovation/efficiency/outcomes (including the pharma industry!). I was quite surprised as my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes.
With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.
So I was an intern at Merck MANY years ago and they had this interesting comparison.
Most companies only publish medical research findings on blockbuster drugs once both are true:
1. Production has started
2. A patent has been filed
The reason for this is that they want to maximize the amount of production time under patent b/c that maximizes revenue.
If you are the researcher, that means you have to wait until all of the production setup is ready to go.
Merck took a different stance.
There, the patent was filed as soon as the researcher was ready to publish. This meant that there was less time under patent for production but was much better for the researcher as they got their findings out earlier.
The thinking was that being able to publish earlier would attract better researchers and in turn would lead to better drugs, more revenue, more profits.
This was in the late 1990s so not sure how this plan worked out as I haven't been in pharma since that era.
Would be interesting to hear from other folks more knowledgeable.
2 I recognize, 1 not so much. Patents are usually filed as early as possible, because you risk losing priority to someone else. And you cannot file a claim on inventions that are in the public domain.
But then it takes a decade or so to develop towards approval. You work together with outside researchers who lend their credibility and get attractive publication possibilities in return. Those publications also help to raise awareness with doctors and investors. Since some company researchers are also authors, this does indeed work as an incentive and is helpful for recruitment and ultimately more successful products.
To the core of the article: why would anyone want to file a patent with AI as a (co-)inventor? It's a tool, and it cannot have any ownership rights. And even if it did, it would diminish your share of royalties.
Actor network theory sheds a tear. And more promptly: ownership rights are enacted via tools. Whether agentful or non-agentic, listing them would in the very least be similar to disclosing funding bodies or agencies.
This book gets a lot of airtime in discussions of IP but the authors have a narrative they are trying to push and they don't let inconvenient things like facts or history get in the way.
The book cherry-picks its sources, and even then contains several mischaracterizations and exaggerations of those works. There are many other economists who have shown significant beneficial aspects of patents with empirical data but they conveniently don’t get mentioned at all.
Yep, the very first chapter of the book starts with patents and steam power, and they got called out on it by actual experts on the topic. Note the “still” in the title – this is after the book was already “revised” once. The book was not revised after this last note, so the exaggerations still stand.
The rest of the book had many similar issues. Once I started digging into their sources, I could not get past the first few chapters, but anecdotally others on HN have also pointed out glaring inaccuracies. I remember thinking wryly that it should be called “Against Intellectual Honesty.”
When I read the bit on the steam engine, I remember thinking it wasn’t a great argument as it was hard to know how a patent-less world would have developed. I’m not surprised to see there’s a link which talks about how the claim was exaggerated (though not entirely wrong? I’ll have to read it).
Having said that, the bits I found juicy - i.e on the various shock analyses coming from patent introductions or increasing of scope, the studies on how effective first mover advantages was etc. all seemed pretty solid when I checked the sources - admittedly they were deeper into the book, so you may have already abandoned it by then.
> There are many other economists who have shown significant beneficial aspects of patents with empirical data but they conveniently don’t get mentioned at all.
Any chance you have some to share? When I LLM’d the topic a while ago the best I got was some weak investment effect in Singapore (unaccompanied by TFP/etc).
I last looked into this a decade+ ago so my memory is fuzzy, and there are a lot of economists who looked at a lot of different things, but the authors I recall from the time were Kenneth Sokoloff, Petra Moser, Adam Mossoff, Zorina Khan, Bhaven Sampat, and Bronwyn Hall. Undoubtedly there are dozens more, but I just happen to remember these offhand.
You spend billions to get a drug from concept to approval - and then once you've invested all that money, someone else can just sell it too, free loading on all the studies you ran? Why would anyone invest in drug studies?
I need a bit more depth and detail to believe that this doesn't destroy the pharma industry.
What would the empirical evidence even look like? It's not like the modern pharma industry existed before patents.
The book goes into quite a bit of depth if it is a topic that interests you.
I would flag that we’re getting into “prove a negative” territory here: the goalpost is that we need to prove empirically that patents achieve the desired outcome. If the scenario you describe accounts for all game-theory/incentive/complex-adaptive-system universes, we should see this reflected in the data.
When it comes to pharmaceuticals, they looked into Italy and Switzerland who switched to a patent system in 1978 (and I believe Portugal in the 1990s). They looked at the growth curves of things like # of inventions, total factor productivity, percentage R&D spending, and the conclusion was that there was no statistically significant change in trajectory that would suggest the introduction of the patents had any positive effects. (Edit: they accounted for domestic/international + US filings before/after as well).
I think the "prove a negative" idea is a bit silly, my common sense says that the patent system should work better so if it doesn't, somebody's going to have to extensively prove it to me or show me a clear mechanism as to why it doesn't.
I could read a book on it but Italy/Switzerland (combined ~5-10% of drug discovery) making changes 60 years ago doesn't get me too excited about updating my priors.
My intuition is the opposite. My favorite example is the patent situation around flight in the 1910's, which ensured that the USA entered WWI without its own fighter aircraft industry. The US actually ended up buying french machines.
Thanks for actually giving a great answer to this versus the other knee-jerk comments! I will definitely look into this more.
I think it's important to note that the cost of bringing a drug to market has increased a lot (about threefold) since 1990, so if the case studies are that old they might not generalize.
You’ll have to forgive me if my answer isn’t super satisfying - it’s possible, but I’d want to see patents under these conditions empirically validated.
Some things you might find interesting - the author(s) make various arguments such as:
1) Ranking (by various metrics/criteria) the most impactful medicines and making the case that the ones developed independently from patents are both over represented and more impactful. (There was some stuff around what kind of medicines are incentivised with each regime)
2) I don’t exactly remember what they say about R&D costs increasing with time (aside from (1)-style skepticism), but they did talk how as time went on, logistics/distribution/marketing technology has grown immeasurably, so the window one has before the copycats come in can be exploited with a lot more gusto.
3) Reverse engineering of medicines + especially their industrialisation takes longer (and requires more capital) than people think, and there’s a bit of a conundrum where, because you don’t know which medicines will be commercially successful, you have to wait to see how they perform on the market… but the longer you wait, the more (2) happens (and the more you have to fight first mover advantage, established marketing etc)
The points are more rigorously covered in the book - (2)+(3) had papers that quantified the stated effects in question.
I will stress again though that while the “counter-narratives” are interesting and may help build some intuition, I would set the gold standard to some econometric/shock-analysis of patents in action.
To make a shit ton of money. These things are insanely profitable. Generics exist and they're still profitable. You can get 99% of drugs from over seas and they're still profitable. These companies make trillions of dollars over the years. Yes, they might make slightly less money, but they still would be making a shit ton of money.
Generics exist for drugs that usually someone did hold a patent for that has since expired and they're much less profitable than patented drugs.
Not sure how that address the point. Again, the investment to get a drug to market is gigantic and you're saying that someone should pay for that and someone else should get the reward. It really doesn't work that way. Everyone would want to be the one who didn't pay.
How? you would make more money by only manufacturing generic drugs. Investing massive amounts of money to subsidize your competitors would be irrational.
It's not black and white- in pharma there are notable sources for investment that are not private, e.g. for orphan diseases that would otherwise not see enough investment due to lack of profitability.
But here's a mechanism to mobilize private capital for those diseases that are. Again, the investment needed boogles the mind, around 10B currently, for a single drug.
You're asking someone to pay that money and allowing others to reap the rewards. Why wouldn't everyone want to be the one who didn't pay the money?
> Again, the investment needed boogles the mind, around 10B currently, for a single drug.
These are made up numbers though. 99% of that is overheads of a massive corporation.
A tiny fraction of 10B would pay for all the brightest minds in teh world for a decade. Another tiny fraction to pay for a lab and lab techs.
Some will surely exist. We already have public funding for things that are not particularly profitable. The question is if it will net a better system overall.
Even with the current system everything older than X years is public. That means we should have better care options available then anything X years ago. And that keeps increasing.
I'd quibble with that. Capitalism is a choice, market dynamics are not. E.g. The Soviet Union successfully outlawed capitalism, and in response market dynamics made their country collapse.
Unregulated market dynamics also gave us child labor, slave trade, 12h work days, company scrip, companies ruling over governments, etc. A powerful engine without constraints is out of control.
England imposed the institution of slavery on the American colonies by means of their regulation of economic affairs. It didn't occur spontaneously from market dynamics, but was specifically provided for by (their) laws.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The slave trade existed as an institution for economic reasons, and for thousands of years before England was a nation. If it were unprofitable then people would've stopped doing it, regardless of how it started.
It wasn't just some government flex.
You also haven't addressed any of the other negatives that unregulated market dynamics have manifested.
England literally supplied the early American (and later Australian) colonies with slaves "indentured for the term of their natural lives".
The "American colonies" were, of course, not limited to the modern USofA; Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth aka "the Pioneer of the English Slave Trade". formed a slave-trading syndicate in 1554.
He sailed with three ships for the Caribbean via Sierra Leone, hijacked a Portuguese slave ship and sold the 300 slaves from it in Santo Domingo. During a second voyage in 1564, his crew captured 400 Africans and sold them at Rio de la Hacha in present-day Colombia, making a 60% profit for his financiers.
Saying England implies in a way implies that the colonists in the Thirteen Colonies were in any way less complicit for making slavery widespread in the North American colonies. They were mostly autonomous and self regulating and chose to adopt the institution of slavery. They could have just treated the black slaves the same way as white indentured servants.
Caribbean colonies were of course quite different.
The colonists of which we speak were (mostly) English people working for English VC's and they were entirely complicit with the English what with being English.
I don't think there's much meaning in saying the Soviets outlawed capitalism.
Capital continued to exist and there continued to be people who decided what got built and who received them. To me, that's private ownership. I mean, it's not like apple trees suddenly began bearing Ladas. If I wanted to acquire a field to occupy / farm, it was presumably controlled by someone, either an individual person or group of people. I don't see the difference in saying that in one situation my neighbor owns the field as personal real estate, versus whatever terminology the soviets used for why I can't just take it.
> there continued to be people who decided what got built
The distinguishing feature of capitalism is that the people who decide what gets built are private individuals in competition with each other, and incentivised by profit to meet the demands of consumers.
In communism the people who decide what gets built are part of a single central authority with no competitors and no profit motive. That system doesn't work, which is why it collapsed.
Plus, an important aspect of capitalism is that the employer/employee relationship is freely entered into or exited from on both sides. In communism, that typically isn't the case.
I do however like the imagery from the parent of a big collection of people working for a decade to produce one (1) drug and then burning all that infrastructure and training down and then being shocked when someone with no infrastructure or training or history in drugs comes along and somehow produces it but outsells the original.
I agree, but man, getting the money to make the world a better place goes through the capitalists right now so unfortunately that's the game. Can't fix the problem without fixing the system. (I'm not like hardcore marxist or anything, but incentives shape everything; have to fix the incentives)
This may surprise extreme altruists but there are people who genuinely care about profit motives and are only willing to make the world a better place at a price. I don't see software engineers in advertising and finance quitting their jobs en-masse to work for teach for america, doctors without borders, etc.
Also, the bulk of the cost of manufacturing a drug lives in the scientific & engineering exploration space, which we should incentivize.
I'm having a hard time even grappling with how that could be true?
I always assumed that intellectual property was invented in order to protect against a specific use case:
If researching a new product is extremely cost intensive. But once a product is invented, it is easy to reverse engineer how the product works. Then the first firm will need intellectual property to put in the initial cost, otherwise they will not do so, as they know they will not have enough time to recoup their costs in the market before a competitor moves in with a copy-cat product without having to paid the initial costs.
There are two things to tackle here which I’m keen not to mix up as I think their epistemological properties are quite different:
1) [the stronger one] while the scenario/narrative is a compelling one (or maybe it just feels compelling as I’ve heard it so many times), if it doesn’t have experimental/data backing I have to abandon it.
2) [the weaker one, as it replaces a narrative with another narrative within a complex system] I’ll only give the highlights as the arguments are a lot more eloquently laid out in the book; part of it is comparing the force of “many inventor nodes building on top of many invention nodes” vs “inventor nodes (with more investment individually?) building on top of fewer invention nodes”, part of it is the game theory effect of companies collectively investing less (proportionally) in R&D as the ROI from lawyers under this regime has more power, part of it was that actually, the reverse-engineering-simplicity story was too overblown and that actually the friction + domain knowledge has a stronger effect than people think (they published a paper on this). There were others, but it’s been a while now!
In many research-intensive products go-to-market costs are bigger than the cost of actual invention. You buy a pharma startup for a few million for their patents, then spend tens of millions on certification, trials and manufacturing pipelines. Your competitors would spend most of that too on the same markets.
Also, true inventions are rare. A lot of stuff that is being patented is just effort spent, that a lot of people could reproduce (and routinely reproduce, then hit the patent and spend more time to find a workaround).
This sounds like it is working as intended. The patent comes early in the process to protect all the commercialization investment. Patents are intended to be filed early in the process, and they gain value as the invention proves its worth. Note also that you can patent a mining claim before pulling a single precious gem or mineral out of the ground.
Well, the way you describe it, they protect investors, not inventors. Investors do not need protection. Money are abundant, market can solve the commercialization part efficiently.
Indeed. Patents incentivize investment in R&D. There is an argument to be made that the scope of patentable inventions should be more limited, in particular preventing trivial patents that didn’t require substantial R&D, and maybe also that patents shouldn’t last as long.
But doing away completely with patents would certainly stifle companies’ willingness to invest in R&D. They’d rather wait for someone else to invent something they can copy.
In real life, although the amount of incentive is different in different industries; and if one's main experience is in an industry where the amount of incentive is low, it's easy to imagine it's the same everywhere
The study could have revealed that industries without patent protection evolve to have better trade secret security, effectively leveling the benefits of patents.
Literally any product you send to the consumer can be reverse-engineered at comparatively low cost. The world doesn’t just revolve around server-side software.
Reverse engineering may be easy for really simple inventions, but quickly becomes so hard you may as well invent the thing from scratch. Look at USSR's domestic chip production. At one point they succeeded in reverse-engineering chips like Intel's 8086, VAX etc., but chip design very quickly became so complex reverse-engineering the entire chip became impossible. I would say if an invention can be easily reverse-engineered, then it is a simple foundational idea that should not be patented, and if it is truly innovative, then it cannot be reverse-engineered easily and doesn't need patent protections.
Then there is the fact that when something is patented, that has a chilling effect on competition, making the market less efficient.
There are also a lot of really silly patents that end up benefitting no-one, not even their inventor, but only result in needless litigation. The recent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair comes to mind.
While there are cases in which patent law can help individual people profit from their invention, once all consequences are tallied, the overall effect of patent law on society appears to be negative.
Patents are an incentive to encourage an inventor to lay out an invention or process in exchange for the state protecting that process, we did this because there have been in the past inventions that have been lost, that were valuable largely because the inventor died without documenting what they did (keep in mind the first patent was issued in 1331[0], this is old law)
The complicating factor is that as time passes our ability to reverse engineer has grown, however I'm not sure that invalidates the need for patents, the question is whether the new patents are being assessed well from a novelty / inventiveness perspective
That's interesting, but I'm a little skeptical about pharma. Right now there are a lot of really potentially-promising molecules that pharma isn't really interested in bringing to market because they can't patent them. I don't know though, maybe the game changes if nobody can patent drugs, but then I think you'd need to make FDA approval a lot cheaper.
I have 3 product ideas that I do nothing with because I'd have to sell on Amazon and if they were successful the upper case alphabet shops would eat my lunch I can't compete with their production. So the options to the world are a little bit smaller because I can't afford the patent process. Spreading that industry wide seems like it would make society poorer, not richer.
Patents make us richer, in the short term with new ideas/products that people can only afford to invest in/bring to market because of patent protections, and in the long term with public access to those things as the patents expire. We have hundreds of years of seeing this model be successful, the same with copyright.
Patents have been mostly a pride checkbox for me, but at the same time being able to get credit for something you could never build is interesting. I’m less supportive of the loose monopoly part though, that seems to be the real issue dampening innovation
Everyone hates patent trolls (non practicing entities who dont implement the idea themselves), but practically its an extremely high burden. I did some patents on financial market plumbing, implementing that requires licensing and infrastructure far beyond any coding or building problem
Thinking of it 10 years before investment banks get around to it I think should still be incentivized someway
>my whole life, it was sold to me as an incentive-boosting measure which in turn would lead to said outcomes
at the time patents were debated, a key part of the proposal was to encourage the transfer "trade secret knowledge" to the public good while still protecting the inventor. this is not an "encourage innovation" argument, it's to stop knowledge from dying with a secretive inventor, knowledge such as glass or metallurgical techniques, formulas, etc.
the inventor also benefited from this patent protection because they could expand their business unlimited by maintaining a small inner circle who knew the secret.
You could probably take a competitor closing in on a patent and destabilize them by taking just enough of their R&D and feeding it though an LLM to reach a motivated conclusion, then publishing that transcript. I wonder if we'll see an increase in corporate espionage as a result of this powerful new tactic evolving.
Do you remember some of the studies this book cites? I always thought the drug development lag times and success rate made patents necessary. Do the authors make exceptions for rare disease or CNS therapies?
Hi thanks for your interest in Retrace. Currently the way Retrace works means that if you change the code, the replay will likely diverge. This extends to logging statements. The ability to adapt code to allow for what-if reasoning is somethign we're looking at but not currently supported. But I would ask why would you want to? Retrace allows full forward/backwards debugging of execution runs. With this capability what would adding log statements to the replay give you? In terms of performance instrumentation, with no breakpoints the replay will ruin at full speed with no IO wait. You could profile the replay and get a really accurate idea of where the CPU bottlenecks are. Hope this helps answer your questions.
Francesco Mazzoli’s blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html. His blog has topped HN a few times with various low-level/linux topics, some deep dives into algorithms etc.
Worth mentioning that the evidence says that patents don't have an effect on new drug creation/inventions. Evidence is collected here http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht..., pretty neat to know that Italy/Switzerland had a patentless pharma industry until quite recently.
Having said that, I think you're right that under this system, research/capital definitely gets directed in a different way.
A major reason Alzheimer's research hasn't advanced in the last 25 years is that patents aren't long enough to study it. Remember: patents don't kick in after the FDA approved your drug. It's after you develop it. That's why ozempic is going off-patent in a just few years even though it's a new product. They patented it a long time ago.
With Alzheimer's though, the clinical trials are going to take a long time. Probably 10 years at least, because our current understanding of the disease is that it begins in your mid to late 40s, and only manifests as severe memory loss decades later. Our current method of trying to treat it is like putting someone in pallatiave care with stage 12 cancer through chemo. Just doesn't work.
But drug companies have no choice because if they run 10-15 year trials, their drug will be off patent before the FDA/EMA even looks at it.
If I were King for a day, one thing I'd do is a blanket 40 year patent life on Alzheimer's drugs. It's worth the cost. This disease will bankrupt every nation otherwise.
While I understand the narrative you're proposing, what I brought with my source was a collection of evidence where pharmacological innovation happened at an unaltered rate pre and post patents in e.g. Italy and Switzerland. While I understand the hypothesis of "Pharma innovation, due to high costs of entry, only happens (or is greatly improved) when guaranteed a monopoly", it doesn't seem to be backed by the data.
I agree with you in principle though - if all that were stopping us from achieving a cure were a 40 year patent, I would support your 1-day monarchy in a heartbeat.
Chapters 9 and 10 of the book cover this in more detail if you're interested (very self-contained).
This is bullshit. Drug research costs money, A LOT OF MONEY. A new drug right now costs somewhere around $5 billion, mostly because 90% of drugs fail in trials.
mRNA vaccines, semaglutide, mAB therapies, none of these would have happened without patents as an incentive.
Then why is it that when pharma patents were introduced in countries that didn't have them, the rate of innovation, TFP, R&D-as-%-GDP didn't increase? I brought a source to this debate, if you have sources showing that increases in patent scope, length, or introduction of patents increased pharamacological innovation I'd love to see it - I'm going down this rabbit hole now and am collecting info.
Another interesting one is [1] where they asked readers of the BMJ to vote on the top 15 most important medical milestones. Of the 15, only the contraceptive pill and Chlorpromazine had anything to do with patents.
In [2] the "Chemical and Engineering News magazine" collected a list of top pharmaceuticals (46 total). To quote the book I linked:
> Patents had pretty much nothing to do with the development of 20 among the 46 top selling drugs [..] . For the remaining 26 products patents did play an important role [..]. Notice though that of these 26, 4 were discovered completely by chance and then patented (cisplatin, librium, taxol, thorazin), 2 were discovered in university labs before the Bayh-Dole Act was even conceived (cisplatin and taxol). Further, a few were simultaneously discovered by more than one company leading to long and expensive legal battles, however, the details are not relevant to our argument.
Regarding the cost of drug trials, they cover this well in Chapters 9 and 10, I found it quite interesting.
Regarding how else companies make money without being granted temporary govt-backed monopolies, Chapter 6 covers both the theoretical and real-life examples.
Very happy to see someone else thought of this too.
I see the endgame as one in which services just expose documentation to their APIs and the AI figures out, based on your request, what to call and how to present the results to you based on pre-set preferences.
The responsibility of discoverability also would shift from the UI/UX person to the AI.
The potential obstacle here is that a lot of companies make their money from the UI/UX used to deliver their service on top of the service itself e.g by adding dark patterns, visual cues, collecting usage pattern data and showing you ads.
I recently got this phone, and it really sparked joy.
It does everything I need to function in 2024 (messaging people, navigating cities, managing tickets, NFC payments etc), while not tempting me into the dark/addictive side of smartphones.
Only problem is mine seems to be defective. After some time of usage everything hangs and I need to restart it, sometimes 4-5 times a day. Other people I know don’t have the issue. Luckily they’re cheap!
A good book on this topic was Acemoglu’s “Power and Progress”.
Lots of illuminating examples of how technological progress immediately made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc.
A few memorable anecdotes off the top of my head:
- In one instance, during the Industrial Revolution, they quoted a letter from a lord (owner of a coal mine) who said mines would stop being profitable if children were banned/restricted from working in them. Some new parts of mines accessible thanks to advances in dredging technology were narrow, very suited to children’s small bodies, and digging the tunnels to the size of an adult cost too much. There was a complaint that some children were suffering brain damage due to chronic sleep deprivation and being forced to push mine carts in tunnels with their heads.
- In the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution, there were proven advances in milling and agricultural technology in England, making grain production cheaper and more efficient. However, analysis of peasant skeletons showed signs of more and more malnutrition, as well as signs of damage from work. The author says the prevalent theory is that because the margin-per-hour-worked of a peasant increased, local lords had more incentive to work them harder (not an economist/historian, so can only take this at face value). Not having anywhere else to go (indeed, in multiple instances even during the industrial revolutions, it was either illegal or difficult to change jobs), they just got worse living conditions. Additionally, peasant access to the ever-more-efficient mills was tightly controlled and expensive, to the point where peasants found it better to just mill grain by hand at home. The lords/priests promptly made this illegal and would perform periodic raids to confiscate their equipment.
- Both during the construction of the Panama Canal and in the major industrial cities of England, dense worker concentrations and poor sanitation caused workers to die in droves and decrease the efficiency of the construction/factories. In the England case, diseases that hadn’t been seen in years had resurfaced. It took a long time for workers to finally convince management/government to invest in sanitation/health/sewage, which not only kept people alive and healthy, but increased productivity and completed the canal.
Of course, a lot of this is mixed with differing hierarchies or political scenarios, and isn’t a comprehensive before->after of every advancement etc. However, it certainly put a heavy dose of nuance on the optimism behind technological advancement, and made me wonder if we could have pre-emptively enacted the necessary social/political changes which allowed for the wide-spread benefitting of technology without first going through the preceding periods of intensified suffering.
> made life worse for many people, until a revolt/change came about to prevent exploitation/share the newfound efficiency gains etc.
The question is thus: how do we ensure that the new gains are shared from the start; not "do those gain exist".
The issue with the "Luddistic" approach isn't that it is concerned by the impact of a new technology, it's that it fights progress instead of accompanying it.
Indeed, “stop all progress” and “accompany progress responsibly” are two different approaches.
This may be tangential - but I’d like to point out, that while the Luddite movement may be painted as espousing the former, my readings have actually suggested the latter. In “Writings of the Luddites” they very much state that they have no problems with the machines, just that they wanted them not to be used in “dishonest” ways. Of course, movements of moderate sizes will include a spectrum of ideas so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the first camp were in the mix, but it’s worth noting!
Taleb in “Antifragile” talks about this as well. However he derives a different conclusion; he speaks of a phenomenon called “hormesis” which refers to a biological response where a low dose of a harmful stressor can have positive benefits on an organism.
Currently living in the Algarve after moving to Lisbon with my partner for her studies years ago.
I know a few non-crypto entrepreneurs who came here for the NHR (non habitual resident scheme - the scheme mentioned in the article which allowed for the 20% tax cap on foreign income).
I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered, not just when dealing with the government, but generally in everyday life. Most people have war stories related to accountants, lawyers, banks, telecom companies or landlords. The real kicker was when they realised that the 20% didn’t include social security payments, bringing most of them (those that didn’t pay hefty fees to set up companies in tax havens, and pay themselves exclusively in dividends) to an effective rate that wasn’t that far off what they’d be paying elsewhere. Needless to say the expat churn has been quite high.
Regarding Airbnbs and rising housing prices - I’m no economist but intuitively, I’ve always thought it made more sense to blame the explosive growth in tourism Portugal has had in the last decade or so (6M tourists visiting Lisbon, a city of 500k people) rather than the 10-20k digital nomads. Would be curious to know if anyone has better numbers or studies.
Expats complain about bureaucracy everywhere. A German expat in Sweden will complain about Swedish bureaucracy. A Swedish expat in Germany will complain about German bureaucracy.
It does not mean anything. Expats complain about everything.
I moved back to my native Netherlands after several years abroad and encountered significant problems with the bureaucracy, more so than in any foreign country I've lived. I don't think it's an expat problem, rather it's a "if you fall slightly outside of the happy path then you can expect to run in to a lot of trouble"-problem. It's just that expats are a group of people that fairly frequently tend to fall outside of the happy path.
This is it, 100%. Anything non standard and you get the long forms instead!
By the way, I've lived in a few European countries and researched many others. The Netherlands was by far the easiest/most efficient in terms of bureaucracy.
> Anything non standard and you get the long forms instead!
If only. Instead you run in to catch-22s and simply get a shrug and "it's not possible".
The big downside of being the "easiest/most efficient" is that it deals with exceptions poorly; once you fall outside of the "efficient" workflow you're screwed. Lots of people run in to problems with this and people literally become homeless because of this. Ironically, it's easier if you're actually homeless and sleeping on the street – as opposed to being homeless and having enough money to stay at hotels or are temporarily staying with friends – as there are some special exceptions for people registered at the salvation army and such.
This is exactly why I a native Swede had to leave Sweden for Ireland.
Im now back in Sweden and jesus christ the bureaucracy is insanely streamlined and optimised for the upper middle class happy path people. Everyone else is looked upon with confusion and disgust.
My favourite story of this is where "falling out of the happy path" included my parents being self-employed and the sheer surprise that people can have wildly differing income per month :P
This is my main reason for having a BV in the first place: to ensure that even though the business takes in very variable amounts of money my private income stream is extremely regular. It makes taxes a whole lot simpler. The only thing I still have to take care of privately are the occasional dividend payment but that's an easy thing to do.
Anybody with > 100K euros in income from consultancy (which should be most of them!) living in NL should consider doing the same thing. There is some overhead but that's easily farmed out to an administrator.
I'm interested to hear if you ever compared with Sweden, just for the sake of curiosity. As an immigrant here coming originally from a very bureaucratic country (Portuguese + Italian levels of dysfunctional bureaucracy, with a Latin American cherry on top) I found bureaucracy here a complete breeze. I basically only need the internet to do 90%+ of my bureaucratic needs with the odd visit to an agency's office for getting documents expedited (national ID, driver's licence, etc.).
As far as I can compare with some immigrant friends in the Netherlands I feel Swedish bureaucracy is on the same level or even less burdensome than the Dutch one.
I have a Dutch neighbor who married a Turkish woman. They run a couple of successful companies, and their goal is to relocate to Rotterdam where his family is from. He wanted to incorporate a company in NL, and transfer his current business there. Because he lives abroad, despite being a Dutch citizen, he was not able to open a business bank account, so he was not able to open a company on his own. His options were to move home or get everything executed in his brother's name until he's ready to move (which he choose).
Of course, he also complains heavily about the bureaucracy here, which is equally broken but in a different way.
Agreed. Expats don't remember the bureaucracy they had to deal with in their own countries, because they did it:
- over the years
- step by step
- with the help of their parents
or simply their parents took care of most things when they were young/born/growing up.
Then they arrive in a new country and realize what it's like to administratively become a functional resident. You probably got your first bank account in your teenage, your national IDs as a newborn, etc. Then you move elsewhere and you need to create all these things from scratch and discover them also.
First, most "digital nomads" who interact with the public administration and institutions (e.g., banks) are not standard customers. Employees often have no clue how to deal with them and many processes contain manual steps that require someone's validation or approval, and often target a very small group of individuals (those tasked with "dealing with" foreigners). It can slow down things.
Second, Portugal is particularly well known for having great ideas and conferences about digital transformation but completely lacks the ability to deliver within its own ranks. To its defense, most citizens cannot easily purchase services online, either because lack of money, or because lack of computer literacy/equipment, or because they don't even have an online payment mechanism. These factors greatly limit incentives for a rapid digital transformation, which incidentally, is precisely what digital nomads crave for.
The comparison with Switzerland was made earlier, it matches my argument: 1) widespread computer literacy and modern endpoint equipment 2) widespread access to online payment solutions 3) the population is used to pay-as-you-go public service (vs. all-inclusive taxpayer service expected by citizens in most EU countries). These combined greatly encourage the deployment of efficient online interfaces.
Off course YMMV. But that's not the rule in general.
I have recent experience with Korea which is overall quite efficient in fact, and yet it's still a struggle to figure out what I need to do, how to do it, and language barriers don't help.
If they go to California places like the DMV will provide them a free Korean-English translator service. Under AB 60 an undocumented Korean could get a driver license and a free translator service to obtain it. If I am an undocumented immigrant in Korea will they provide a translator for me to get state ID as an "illegal" immigrant?
Honestly I would be shocked if you could point me anywhere else in the world where a Korean could be illegally staying, go to the motor bureau and not only get a free translator but get an official state ID and driver license.
Swiss bureaucracy is expensive but it’s swift, easy, and very cordial. I’ve never lived anywhere that was so good on paperwork. Exchange my non EEU drivers license? A week flat and about 100.-. Getting a residence permit? 100.- approx and less than two weeks. Questions about your tax return or filing? An email to the cantonal tax office and you’ll get an (encrypted answer) within a few days.
That’s only about the government though, private companies are hilariously terrible at customer service or paperwork especially compared to US/Canada.
You mean, private companies are "streamlining their customer service" or whatever the name of the day is. And it's not only in Switzerland, everywhere it's just incredibly hostile, to the point where you feel like smashing some office windows just because.
It feels more like the general attitude is “you should be glad we’re letting you give us your money. Now shut up and go away.” You’ll never get an apology, never get an easy refund because they goofed up. No. You’ll struggle, waste your time, and get nowhere.
But I guess this is an EU thing compared to what I’m used to in Canada and the US.
No, Portugal is different. To give you perspective: it takes 2-3 years to exchange a foreign driver license (most foreigners I know drive illegally by now), a lot of administrations frequently “lose” applications and ask you to do it again when they have too much backlog (this cost me hundreds of dollars in back and forth, certified documents etc in the past).
It’s also very common for administrations to have no one answering the phone/email. And most administrations are appointments only. So often, you kind of have to drive to different places, maybe different city halls, and hope that someone has a contact with an internal e-mail address and can hook you up. That’s just how it works. It’s the most barbaric administration and closest to a third world country I’ve experienced, and I’m French, so I know something about red tape.
Takes 18 months to get permission for your foreign spouse to move to Sweden. It then takes 12-18 months to get into the social system - you register quickly, but for the bureaucracy to actually add you into the system takes that long. So no, you're wrong. Portugal is not different.
It's not really the delays that make Portugal different, arguably most countries have long delays, it's the lack of reliability, transparency, and responsiveness.
I don't know Sweden. But we're a family of expats with multiple citizenships, so I deal with bureaucracy in 4 countries on 3 continents. Most countries have streamlined procedures, provide tracking numbers, addresses to send things in, phone lines... So it's long, but you know what's going on and what to do.
Here, even lawyers don't even know what to do. For a similar situation to get my partner a visa from within the country, we simply couldn't speak to anyone. Even the lawyer told us "well, you might have to wait a year or two to see if they re-open their ability to take new appointments." We eventually were able to get through after hustling like crazy, me driving to many different city halls to speak to officials there. Someone eventually knew a colleague there, and got us an appointment for 6 months later in a city 3 hours drive away. We showed up, it was a butcher. Their Google Maps pin was not even in the right place. Cherry on the cake. After getting turn-by-turn instructions from the butcher (who apparently does that 10 times a day), we eventually found their office.
Idk, never been to Sweden but I don't think you can compete with that :-D
Now I get it, they're vastly understaffed, Portugal is a small country. They're doing what they can.
You don't understand. It's not about Sweden, Germany, Portugal. As an expat you always deal with this. Indians waiting for green card lottery and then another 100 years? But I'm sure you will come up with a reason why that's different. You need to take a step back and become aware of yourself.
My family moved to Portugal in late 2020. Covid played havoc as they had to find ways to digitalize many things their offices were doing. It took my wife 9 months to get her DL exchanged and me 11 months.
During that time, you are not driving illegally; you are driving from your foreign license. As long as you have the paper with the exchange info and a picture, you will be fine.
It also helps if you hire a relocation expert who knows the system. We paid ~$1,500 to a Portuguese American lady who helped us with everything. She handled setting up all our health care, apartment negotiation and contract review, set up all our utilities and phones, all our residency paperwork, DL exchange, bank account, and more. I highly recommend her and any group like her. They know how to work the system. My mom does similar back in the USA for newly arrived expats for companies.
Covid was a real shock to office-heavy organizations; it has been a mad scramble to change culture, paperwork, operations, etc. I think they are doing decent and hopefully, in 5 years, it is night-and-day difference.
I've lived in Egypt as well... the bureaucracy there worked really well (before revolution). I just had to go to a giant building and spend half a day there, done. Sure I had to taxi to a DSL place to pay, but that was pretty easy as well.
> It also helps if you hire a relocation expert who knows the system. We paid ~$1,500 to a Portuguese American lady who helped us with everything. She handled setting up all our health care, apartment negotiation and contract review, set up all our utilities and phones, all our residency paperwork, DL exchange, bank account, and more. I highly recommend her and any group like her. They know how to work the system.
In the third world, that's called a tout, and they're a symbol of corruption and inefficiency. The only thing missing seems to be bribes paid to move your papers from one desk to the other faster.
Not sure what 3rd world means anymore as the cold war is over :), but I think I know what you mean.
What they are called now is a "relocation expert", and they help set everything up for you. They are in no way a symbol of corruption or inefficiency, but rather a professional who knows the system. IE, to get a DL you go this office, you fill out this form, you fax it to x, etc.
Do I wish everything was 100% online and designed with high UX standards? Sure, I also would love if it rained M&Ms on Fridays at 4.11pm :). Both of these things are not going to happen.
Hey neighbor! So glad it was faster for you. My experience is that these things vary greatly based on where you apply, and pure luck. I know people in the Algarve who have been waiting for 3 years. And people who applied in Lisbon and got it like you within 1 year.
Ah good point, I know our person who helped us had some good tricks like using offices not in Lisbon which were busier. We live up North so it was all very easy.
Most third world countries with such bad/slow bureaucracy solve those issues with bribery. I'd hate to live someplace that both has low corruption and such high bureaucratic burdens.
There is bureaucracy and then there is bureaucracy.
Here is an example: Malaysia and Indonesia. Each country has its own bureaucratic nightmares but you can make useful comparisons.
Malaysia: Easy to get a phone number. Easy to get an internet hotspot to get data. Reliable internet. Internet is fully open (no censorship).
Indonesia: Hard to get a phone number. Confusing choices and prices with Whatsapp/FB mingled in the choices. Have to submit your passport photo to some dodgy dude, who has to get a certain authorization. Took half a day for the Internet to activate. Data is not very reliable. Heavy censorship (not even Reddit works!) so have to get a VPN to do any meaningful browsing.
So sure as an expat you'll face bureaucracy but some countries' issue is beyond bureaucracy, it's that the process is fundamentally broken and no one gives a shit. This makes you lose significant time for relatively simple things (at least in other countries).
> Heavy censorship (not even Reddit works!) so have to get a VPN to do any meaningful browsing.
This depends on your ISP I believe; Telkom blocks Reddit, but I believe others do allow it. You don't need a VPN to bypass it, DNS-over-HTTPS will do as well.
In general things in Indonesia seem to be ... complicated. Just buying something at the local Indomaret sometimes seemed to involve typing an entire essay on a computer.
"some countries' issue is beyond bureaucracy, it's that the process is fundamentally broken and no one gives a shit." Haha. Love it. That sums up a lot of Portuguese administrations sadly.
I'm not sure about Portugal, but a few years ago my wife was studying in Spain on a study abroad program. She is from another EU country, and we'd visited Spain a few times, so figured it would be easy. Pretty much every step of the way we encountered so much more bureaucracy (I am an immigrant to her country) than we could even imagine. She spoke Spanish, but if she didn't it would have been a million times harder.
For example we wanted to get internet in the apartment we were renting. The local ISP (Orange) said that we needed a Spanish bank account, we said that we had a European account so could make an IBAN transfer, but apparently that wasn't an option. So we went to the bank and they said my wife needed a letter from the police. So we went there, and after showing all her university documents and waiting there for half a day, she got that. By that time the bank was closed, so we went back the next day, and after another few hours she had a bank account. We made a transfer of a few hundred euros from our other European account at home, then once it arrived a few days later, went back to the ISP. They took our details and the first payment, and then we figured everything was fine.
A month later the first bill came and we tried to pay but it was declined, tried to log into online banking and that was blocked too. We went back to the bank (BBVA) and they said our account had been closed due to suspicious activity (the only transaction we made was the initial payment for the internet) and there was nothing they could do. So we went to visit the ISP with the intention of paying in store, but they said it wasn't an option. We explained the situation and said there was nothing they could do, we could only pay with a Spanish bank account. In the end we had to get a friend to make the ISP payment for us, every month while we were living there.
Compare this to where we live now. You simply make payments to an IBAN bank account, so it can come from anywhere in Europe. If you need a local bank account, you can easily do so in any bank (I opened an account before I was officially living there, i.e. without any local ID, just my passport) or use something like Revolut. If you need to get a local phone number, you just go to the supermarket and buy a prepaid SIM for €1 - no ID needed.
This is a fairly long story but only one part of this seems like genuine "bureaucracy":
> We went back to the bank (BBVA) and they said our account had been closed due to suspicious activity (the only transaction we made was the initial payment for the internet) and there was nothing they could do.
That's an absolute nightmare (though I don't understand how you weren't notified, or what the recourse typically is for accounts closed due to "suspicious activity".
The rest can be summarized as:
* A business wants billing from a local bank account (not universal, but not unusual)
* Opening a local bank account needs some information confirming your identity, which the police can do.
In the UAE, I downloaded an app, submitted my docs and my details, and got my card the next day (I went to a bank branch - not the branch of my account but just a random branch to get it printed on the spot, even though they offered home delivery, because I wanted to see the process).
In the UK, I visited a nearby Lloyd's branch and got my account open and my stuff in under an hour.
In India and Switzerland, the bank sent a representative to my place, where they did everything from a handheld device, including verification. Done in an hour and got my card by mail in 1-2 days.
The stuff you mentioned in your summary are excuses and not valid ones at all.
When i was was apartment hunting in barcelona 7+ years ago and failed straight for weeks to get a single reply on idealista, and went to the real estate agencies and found they had siestas, still, in barcelona, i quit the country. good to visit, not to live.
ps: when i wanted a bank account, the people there acted like they didn't spoke english, until it was clear they won't give me an account, then suddenly english was not a problem.
No, they don't have "siestas". In Spain usually all retail closes from 2pm to 5pm. I wouldn't expect to go to a UK venue and have a normal dining timetables (for me as Spaniard), because I understand things work different there.
mr nacho trying to justify a Spanish tradition. fair enough. but I'm still bold enough to complain about it. it's super annoying when restaurants close from 2 to 5. also I doubt anybody from the foot soldiers actually takes a siesta. it's most likely just basically a variation on unpaid work or being on call unpaid. so, nobody benefits of it except the owners who just optimize the schedule for their purposes.
Unfortunately cold emails are generally ignored. The general etiquette in Spain is that you have to establish a relationship with someone in the business before they respond to emails, and then it also depends on the individual if they like to use email or not.
Oh, I had lot of negative experiences with BBVA in USA. Those guys has no clue how to do SEPA payments, declining regular debit card payments on e-shops like DigiKey as fraud (according to them I am suppose to train their systems so it will stop doing that) and in general their support sucks.
You moved to another country and did one single banking transaction there in a month? That seems like something you have to actively try in order to do. Right? Why did you try?
I see someone downvoted me. Perhaps because it was just an idle question and quite insubstantial?
Thinking about it now, it seems a little bigger than I realised when I wrote it.
I too moved to another country and got a bank account. When the people at the bank asked what I needed, I said something like "well, I'm here to stay and will need all the things regular people have, an account, a card, probably a house loan someday, can you advise me about what I should get today?". Maybe I hadn't yet decided that I wanted to stay for decades when I said that, but the person behind approved of the answer, I could tell.
Saying something vaguely like "I'll do the minimum necessary here and whatever possible in my old country" simply isn't a great way to talk to the people at the bank, at the immigration authority, at the waterworks, all the people who can make your move simple or less so.
Well, that's not exactly always true. I've had zero problems with bureaucracy since moving to Australia. My case has been that everything just works - minimal human involvement, and when it's present - it's pretty optimized.
I think that due to the high cost of labour (highest minimal pay in the world) and lack of labour due to higher speed of development - whatever that can be automated has been automated.
Same experience in NZ - you only start to see how hopeless europe is when you come back. I had 0 interaction with gov clark in nearly a decade in NZ, while in europe any sort of errand would require in face meetings. Even some digital forms would just email the form to a person in ivory tower for validation, who’ll tell you to visit office anyway…
Counterpoint, in France the vast majority of bureacratic things can be done fully online. Last time i had to go in person was for a passport/ID card, so there are multiple good reasons (photo, biometric info, confirm your identity) for that. Some of the websites are not great, and sometimes they send you a confirmations by mail, but otherwise a pretty painless experience.
Except when you're an expat in a country that actually knows what it's doing, like Singapore. Bureaucracy here is A+, and is the yardstick we should measure every country against.
What's wrong with complaining about sprawling bureaucracy? I can only see downsides and no upsides. Don't you want it to be eliminated? I think people are not yet complaining enough.
Unless you can complain with actionable complaints (It'd be great if i could fill this form on a website instead of on paper and mailing/faxing it), it literally serves no purpose.
I'm an English immgrant in France - lots of my compatriots complain about French bureaucracy but in all honesty it's far more efficient and accessible than it is in the UK.
Slightly off topic but I see this often enough and I’m curious to know, when do you call someone moving to another to work an expat instead of an immigrant.
You immigrate (verb) into a country. That makes you an immigrant (noun) of your new country.
You emigrate (verb) out of a country. That makes you an emigrant (noun) of your old country.
You expatriate (verb) to a country, from your homeland. You are an expatriate (noun) (aka expat) if you live in a country other than your native one.
For example, an American-born man who moved to Germany for part of their career and is living in Vietnam for retirement would be an American expat, who immigrated to Vietnam and emigrated from Germany.
You are often all 3 of them at once, depending on perspective. Colloquially, expats usually emigrate out of their homeland for specific reasons, usually either climate, culture, taxes. Eg. someone would expatriate to Portugal to take advantage of the tax scheme (this article), or maybe expatriate to Mexico for 'better' weather, or maybe expatriates to Paris for the cultural experience.
It is often assumed or implied that an expat has no intention of "integrating" in the culture of their host nation. Eg. an American in Mexico that moved for the weather wouldn't raise children there or apply for citizenship, but simply enjoy retiring on the beach and taking advantage of the cheaper CoL. They may still primarily speak English and seek out fellow Americans-in-mexico to socialize with instead of the locals. Conversely, a full Mexican family (parents+kids) that moved to America "for a better life" may not be considered an expat, since they intend to become citizens of America and raise their family as Americans. That is why expats sometimes have a poor reputation in their host nation, compared to other "immigrants".
I moved abroad on a work assignment. As soon as I decided to stay in the country long term, I stopped calling myself expat and labeled myself an immigrant instead.
When a person in the first category moves to another country, they are an expat; people from the other 2 categories are immigrants or migrants, as they prefer to say nowadays.
For instance I’d have to take a significant pay cut if I wanted to be the British prime minister but, belonging to the second category, I am an economic migrant. An American or Swedish teenager working in a Starbucks in Berlin is an expat.
immigrant is a person legally or illegally coming over here and stealing all our jobs and taking all our benefits and not even working or speaking the language.
expat is a person moving to another country and getting paid a high salary.
> those that didn’t pay hefty fees to set up companies in tax havens
I suppose it depends on your definition of "hefty" but a couple of thousand USD is usually sufficient, depending on jurisdiction, and obviously is expected to pay for itself many (, many, many) times over.
It's not that hard and it's not just for the 1%. Especially if you're anything approaching a "digital nomad" I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't establish a consulting company somewhere offshore, bill from that, pay yourself a quarterly dividend and then import only the money you actually need.
I’ve not looked into it personally, but I’ll relay what I’ve heard from various people who have looked into this or successfully done this.
In one case one person, as you say, did everything on their own and pays a couple thousand every year to keep the entity in the favourable jurisdiction. When asked if it was all above-board, they said it was one of those grey areas where they hoped the govt didn’t look too deeply into it, but so long as they weren’t making millions they weren’t worried about an audit.
The other cases asked various accounting companies to set this scenario up for them (one to establish a software engineering consulting company, others to set up other companies). The responses ranged from “yes we can do this, it’ll cost you 15-20k upfront, then 5k in annual upkeep” to “no this isn’t looked upon too well by the Portuguese govt”.
Well, your first example is a good "what not to do". Doesn't sound like much of a "grey area" if they're living in fear of being found out. I don't understand this kind of setup - financial information is permanent and once governments get their shit together there will be no safe havens, and this will apply retroactively. People playing such games are going to feel a lot of pain some coming day, I suspect.
I have to admit I don't know anything about Portugal but with a little research it is very possible to find a territorial tax-based country to live, where one does not owe any money on overseas income, and live completely legally there as a tax resident, taxed only only your minimal local salary - if that. Now I suppose that's not for everyone but if people were moving to Portugal specifically for tax reasons then I'm surprised they didn't, you know, check it out a bit first.
If you live in Portugal for longer than 6 months every 12 months you are considered a resident and taxed accordingly. I suppose you could go in and out every few months to escape that.
Just to note, it is a little bit more complicated, as there are other aspects of a tax residency test as well. IE, if it is your "home" as dictated by some other rules it can be a tax residency even with less time spent there.
If you're living offshore and paying taxes to the place you live, there's no particularly good justification (except might makes right) for the US to force you to pay taxes. AFAIK it's the only country, both now and in history, to claim taxation rights over its citizens perpetually no matter where they are.
the comment chain was to which you are responding was not about trying to pay taxes only to the country you're living in (which basically everyone in the world can do minus US citizens), it was about setting up a company in a tax haven (think Cayman Islands) to avoid paying taxes at all because they decided they are too high, which of course raises questions about the morality, legality, and practical details of such a process
> I can confirm that a lot of them were incredibly frustrated with the bureaucracy they encountered
You need someone (in Spain it's called gestor) who does all of that for you. I live in Portugal, by now I speak the language but I don't get the rules etc. I have a guy who does everything, never had any issues. It's very cheap.
Didn't they recently crack down on Airbnb's, adding requirements that should theoretically lower the drive to turn unoccupied housing into Airbnb's (essentially limiting people purchasing flats with this intention)?
The digital nomads are going to soak up a good 3 to 5% of the total housing on a permanent basis, that's a pretty good dent in the reservoir. Tourists predominantly stay in hotels or other short-stay places. Though AirBNB and so on also result in the conversion of some of that available housing into short stay 'hotels' which will put more pressure on that reservoir. Typically in any city the vast bulk of the housing is spoken for, and only a relatively small part is available for newcomers or people that move out of their parents place when they come of age.
So I would not underestimate the impact even if it is only 10 to 20K individuals. Finally: tourists spend a lot, typical budgets are many 100's of euros / day for a family. Digital nomads comparatively little.
With that lens, I welcome gradually phasing this stuff out, especially as we navigate into the unknown game-theory landscape AI-as-inventors brings.