My reading was that nothing of that applies in Europe. No earning 6 figures, no way to invest pre-tax or in any other tax advantaged way, no way to optimize healthcare costs, early retirement unlikely.
UK has the state pension which comes from NI (National Insurance) contributions which in a way acts like a Defined Benefit pension in that you work for X number of years and get state pension of Y in return(currently adjusted for inflation, wage growth, or 2.5% annually, called the 'triple lock'). Not based on income so you don't get a massive state pension by earning 6+ figures.
Then more recently (as in, as of around 2012 and up to 2018) we got auto-enrollment into private pensions, which are more like Defined Contribution (DC). Employer has to pay a percentage into the pot and so do you. Usually 5% employee and 3% employer by default but many will offer better (or contribution matching) as a perk. I think this is probably the same or similar to the 401k in US terms. The employer chooses the pension provider but you need to proactively switch to a high risk scheme to see any growth from it.
At a certain point the tax rebate from the government doesn't cover your whole income so you have to file a tax return to get the rest of the rebate. You can instead choose to 'salary sacrifice' which means you are lowering your income on paper but the sacrifice is put directly into pension (or otherwise can be used to get a car on lease or a bicycle via another scheme). Salary sacrifice is used by a lot of higher earners to bring their gross income down in order to avoid being cut off on certain benefits like child-care.
After all that you have SIPP (Self-Invested Personal Pension) which gives you more control over what you can invest it. Not just stocks, ETFs, and all that, but can also be commercial property (so the pension itself owns that asset). This gets the same tax treatment for pensions.
Finally there is the ISA and LISA. The first is a savings account where any interest or capital gain is free of tax, the second gets a 25% boost by the government to help buy a house or flat, but you can only use that money for a mortgage deposit.
Most people won't see all that much from their auto-enrollment given they could just opt-out to get the extra cash in their paycheque (especially when a low earner), or might not know to switch to the high risk fund, so the state pension and other benefits for OAPs will be there still. Those with more disposable income or a long term view (e.g. doing FIRE) are likely to max out the various vehicles available to them but at that point you're gonna be earning too much to care.
No need to optimise healthcare costs or any of that unless you want to go private.
Retirement accounts are a thing in Europe though. In Poland for example there's IKE and IKZE. IKE is a bit simpler of the two. If you hold your money on IKE until you're 60 you're not paying taxes on that. Can invest in stocks or bonds.
There are options to save extra for retirement, if you take a private pension or a bank account that you can't withdraw from until retirement for example; in that case, you don't pay wealth tax and only pay taxes when it starts paying out. Sometimes the money you put into it is tax deductible, too. But, that's in NL, I don't know anywhere else. Source: https://www.nibud.nl/onderwerpen/pensioen/pensioen-opbouwen/
6 figures is possible, there are/were some software companies (VC backed, US based, US startup style, FAANG) that pay that much, otherwise there's highly paid jobs like management, doctors/dentists, landlord, public motivational speaker, drug dealer, etc that can earn you that much. But it's not handed to you like it feels like it is in the US / SF, but I realize that's very much a unique bubble.
So yeah, basically none of your comment is true, it's just not talked about as much because our basic systems are alright for most people and few have the extra income to think about doing more with it.
The investment taxation was already discussed in a sibling comment. As always in Europe, it depends on a country. Good for you if that's possible in Netherlands.
Of course some roles can earn six figures or more, hopefully everyone knows there isn't a hard cap on earnings. Should've been obvious that wasn't my claim.
Last summer it was good for certain tasks, but letting it run wild was a recipe for a huge mess where you'd spend more time unraveling it than writing the whole thing by hand. That was my experience, at least.
Looking back, I understood with Windows XP that I wasn't in the target group. Win 95/98 had a simple but functional file search. Being naive, I was expecting some power user features in the future, like regex search.
Win XP replaced the classic file search with one that had an animated dog in it.
The dog search was completely, utterly useless. You would not find anything with it. It was so bad I still vividly remember my bafflement about it.
Just as a data point, depending on a country of course, the European public healthcare systems don't cover some/most/any of these either.
For example the eye exams for glasses are usually done at the store where you buy the glasses and included in the price, dental might be covered only for children, routine physical exams may not exist as a concept, etc.
This is what I used! At some point I managed to block DHCP lease renewals on my computer, and Internet would always stop working after a given timespan. Took a good while to figure out I caused the problem myself.
It is probably easier these days when you have a phone to fall back on for if you break the internet on your computer.
Playing with your router is still a pain though, especially if you don't have a device with an Ethernet port. You learn all sorts of fun things like "If you change your router's IP address you get logged out of its management at the old IP address" and "Oh, that's what subnet mask means, weird."
> It is probably easier these days when you have a phone to fall back on
Most definitely. The old lessons were hard learned, and they stayed with you. Going through everything, trying all the combinations, and reading obscure materials for any hints.
I don't want to glorify the old hard way of spending perhaps days on problems that ended up being trivial, but it's obviously different now when one can get all the answers and helpful scripts directly from LLMs. Much less is retained.
In effect they are, even if not directly. There are requirements to stay aware of your surroundings. If you cause an accident by blocking all sounds, I totally can see insurance companies claiming this is your own responsibility and refusing to cover.
I wonder how heat pumps would work for apartment building central heating systems. The circulated water has to be a lot hotter than heat pumps are capable of, as far as I've understood. Is there already a system that could viably replace gas in the existing building stock?
Another problem is that most people in Berlin/Germany are renting, so the incentives do not align. The building owner doesn't pay for the heating, so they are unlikely to do any investments where the upside is for the tenants only.
Heat pump hot water is very common in Europe. Just as it's possible for the pump to make a box so cold that food stays frozen despite the hot summer's day in Florida, it's also possible to heat up a tank of water this way, it just costs more energy.
Unlike modern natural gas boilers which have only a very small tank of water kept hot and use a fire to make more on demand with only a few seconds of delay (you might not even realise this is happening, but of course it isn't actually instant and so there is a small tank of very hot water) the heat pump will need a large tank because you're going to put about a day's supply of hot water in the tank and gradually, over a whole day, re-heat it as needed.
The problem is the old building stock (say, large apartment buildings from early 1900s) which isn't energy efficient at all, and on cold winter days require very hot water to keep warm. The radiators were designed with assumption that the water can be boiling hot (coal/gas).
It doesn't seem feasible to renovate everything, so I'm wondering what are the practical options. A hybrid system where a gas boiler is kept for the peak demand?
There's no chance at all that you're using boiling hot water (373K) because that stuff is both dangerous and unreasonably expensive to make at volume.
My guess is that what you're thinking of is the water being say 320 to 340K, which is obviously far warmer than you'd heat a home, but isn't boiling water. Heat pumps will be more efficient at lower temperatures, so maybe it's keeping that tank of water at 320K while your gas boiler was 330 or even 340K -- but the gas boiler is more efficient for lower temperatures too, ask any manufacturer or installer, the way to get lower costs is to turn down the local thermostat, it's just that people are used to "instant" heat from a gas boiler and won't tolerate answers like "Run it for a whole day" whereas that is what your heat pump needs.
It is true that because of this "Run it all day" approach an uninsulated home is so expensive to heat that it's impractical, when I grew up there was ice inside my bedroom window when I woke on a winter's morning, it had been under 270K at night, and a gas boiler would heat it in an hour or so -- but that's not because it's literally impossible with heat pumps it's just far too expensive.
No, 47°C to 67°C is way too low. The buildings are not actually circulating boiling water, but not too far either:
> Typically, heating systems in Europe use water flowing through pipes and emitters (radiators) heated to high temperatures (70-90°C). [0]
The radiators are often designed for these temperatures. Supplying with lower heat will not work without replacing the radiators and/or renovating for better energy efficiency.
And heat pumps, AFAIK, can't supply 70-90°C. Thus my original question of what is the current plan to solve this problem.
So, firstly yes, exactly, even in the 19th century they aren't using boiling water, it's just needlessly expensive to make. 90°C seems unnecessarily hot to me (as you can see, by the time I was born it wasn't being used to heat homes) but it isn't boiling.
And yes, some older buildings will need refurbishment, these building often pre-date electric light so that's happened before. The 1970s house example starts with a 70°C flow, but with a combination of insulation and replacing radiators they get to 41°C flow which is a much cheaper 318K in real numbers.
The thing is making 90°C water was expensive and unnecessary even when gas boilers start being commonplace, the manufacturer will tell you that you should turn it down until it's heating the home as slow as you can tolerate. That got more true as the boilers got more efficient, because the efficiency is from recovering more heat energy from burning methane and you do that at lower flow temperatures, the heat pumps are just more of the same. Notice how those diagrams show gradually reducing flow temperatures over the years, in the 1930s recovered heat from an industrial district at 90°C is plausible, but the gas boiler manufacturer fifty years ago will go white when you say you need 90°C -- he's going to suggest 70°C, and his successors will keep bargaining you down because the efficiency numbers are better as flow temperature reduces and while "instant heat" feels good in the moment, the bills for the gas you're burning will not.
We can pump these temperatures but they don't make economic sense. Unlike low outside air temperatures this is just economics. The low outside air temperatures mean you need to defrost the pump, which if it got cold enough might literally become impossible, but if you want to pay far, far more money to heat water to 90°C that would be technically possible, it's just silly, like burning $50 bills to keep warm - use singles they're 50x cheaper.
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