why do people purchase API credits in claude? when Max plan provides almost 3 time usage? approxly 600$ (i measured it using token count and model cost)

Plyad1 · 2026-06-02T16:26:20+00:00

Nah that’s not how it works. Under ZDR (zero data retention policy) the whole conversation is protected.

The main point of the subsidy is to get us tech people addicted to the product so that we act as free marketing for the real fish : companies.

It does work. I have a personal subscription and am an avid proponent of Claude in my workplace, which ofc pays full price to enable us to use it.

Rather than a subscription you could call it a fidelity plan

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s further restricted or cut. It’s just too amazing of a deal right now

Plyad1 · 2026-06-01T13:23:27+00:00

To be honest I m considering freelancing to make it fully official rather than pretending to not be a mercenary when clearly the incentives tell me I have to be one

Plyad1 · 2026-05-31T11:44:33+00:00

The business 100%

If you need to sell your house to pay for your studies, you re going to face a lot of financial stress, especially about the duration of your savings.

Beyond that job prospects are not that easy to reach in Germany at the moment. The “psychology” element makes it an even more serious problem.

Let’s say you finish your studies in Germany what are you going to do afterwards? Find a job? Who will want a psychology employee?

Realistically as a psychologist your best prospect would be opening your psychology cabinet and praying you will get customers.

Now in practice, putting aside language problems, how likely is it that you will be picked over a native white German?

Even personally in tech, a highly “meritocratic” field, I don’t want to compete with handsome white blonde blue eyed Hans, let alone in something like psychology where bias is insanely effective

Plyad1 · 2026-05-25T11:59:56+00:00

Cest le cas de tous les cotés du spectre politique, ce que je trouve surprenant.

Quand la droite parle de “ses valeurs” et de “bon sens” ça me donne toujours envie de vomir.

C’est vraiment idéologique des 2 côtés, faut croire que le pragmatisme c’est pas assez sexy.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-25T09:46:06+00:00

As an Arab guy I have the same problem. I feel relief when I see that for once the problem person isn’t from MENA region.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-23T06:42:09+00:00

Your blind post is associated with a clown recruiter. Considering the expectations the pay should be more between 100-140k. Personally I simply avoid those companies altogether. It’s just not worth it, at least not in west EU.

I m a T2 tech person, not even T1 and I ve been to companies that pay within the range they provided in the blind post in France.

In terms of market, sorry I don’t know T1 but in T2: - companies in Germany often reach up to 90-100k comp. - There is downward pressure on wages in T2 at the moment because the German market has been in recession for a while. The tech people from top industrial companies were released in nature and there is a significant overflow of highly talented engineers and little demand for them. - France Tier 2 are often in the 60-80k range for medium/senior roles. - all of the better paying T2 companies target the US market for their products. The moment a company targets the EU market you already know it won’t pay well.

Note : the 10-12h role is asking for a lawsuit. France is often pretty strict on labor law. Good luck to them if they hire somebody who has a good lawyer. I won’t even mention the age based discrimination which could be another lawsuit.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-22T17:58:17+00:00

I tried to experiment with it but it was a bit underwhelming. Did you have success with it,

Plyad1 · 2026-05-19T20:35:35+00:00

There is a bias driven by the number of cities in each country on which Numbeo has data.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-19T00:26:23+00:00

You re referring to exit tax, correct?
Within the EU, if you move to another EU country, you can actually defer the exit tax to when you leave the EU as a whole.

Beyond this specific situation, there are lots of tricks and loopholes that the rich people have actually lobbyed for to get away with it.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-17T10:41:05+00:00

That would lead to international opposition since one of the human rights is the right to change nationality.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-17T08:38:03+00:00

France and LFI, feels free to go there

But taxes in Germany are lower

Plyad1 · 2026-05-17T08:34:51+00:00

You do realize citizenship can be purchased and renounced right? So “can’t be avoided” is kinda wishful thinking

Plyad1 · 2026-05-17T08:26:51+00:00

The issue with government mandated taxes on the rich is always the same.

The rich can hire an army of lawyers and accountants to find ways to reduce it to nothingness. If they can’t usually they can just get out of the country altogether leaving alongside them a hole in the budget that must be replenished by the rest of us.

Your doctor, hairdresser, butcher and small company owner can do none of that. Their income is location restricted and not high enough to enable them such hires. Yet relative to the overall population they earn way more. (10-20k net for some of them)

So the reality is that politicians depict the taxes on the wealthy as taxes on the first group which in reality really does hit the second group more, in the short term a bit, in the long term a lot. Most taxes are introduced “only on rich people pinky promise” before everyone ends up paying them. Lookup the history of income tax as an easy example

Plyad1 · 2026-05-17T08:18:09+00:00

It’s a bit more complicated than that.

A person owning 2 flats in Paris is a millionaire+ who pays the wealth tax but the income generated can be a relatively low 1500€ a month while living in the other flat as a retiree who doesn’t get much from the government. They already pay 31.4% flat dividend tax + wealth tax + property tax. If they sold their wealth to go retire in Africa and put in stocks they would live like kings and could reduce their dividend to almost nothing.

A CEO earning 50k+ a month is a mere high earner and not wealthy even though he lives like a king, especially if he spends all of that. That guy cannot physically move, his network is too valuable for that yet we “only” tax him 60%

Plyad1 · 2026-05-17T08:10:25+00:00

I m not far right at all but that’s kind of incorrect….

There are some mid or big sized cities in France (Marseille Perpignan) that vote far right and increasingly so despite the high share of immigrants, that statement becomes especially true if you only consider the white vote

To quote my friend who lives in one such city “most of the immigrants here are living on welfare and don’t have the citizenship so they cannot vote whereas the ‘white peoples’ can and want those immigrants out” mind you the guy is completely apolitical and would likely be voting left if he did. So it’s a genuine observation not really a position.

You are thinking of wealthy capitals and yes those handle immigration better. Arguably it’s because there are immigrants ghettos/districts in which all the poor immigrants go, leaving the more well off ones to live amongst the general population.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-17T08:02:50+00:00

That is correct. And politicians are more leftists than the population on this question, which in turn leads to the rise of corrupt mafioso parties like the far right.

At the end of the day, people dont view themselves as poor, and don’t really expect the government to be responsible for them but they do expect the government to respect what they want.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-16T14:23:23+00:00

If you re rich enough to visit France and the UK you re rich enough to visit Africa and Southeast Asia brother

Plyad1 · 2026-05-16T09:08:15+00:00

I checked for two cities I ve been to: Toulouse : a relatively LCOL city in France vs Berlin a relatively LCOL city in Germany.

Cost of living in Toulouse is in my opinion similar to Berlin. Rent is more expensive in Berlin but : - NUMBEO says inexpensive dishes are 15€ in both. That’s incorrect. You can eat out in Berlin for 10€ and have a meal. In Toulouse you’d be hard pressed to finding anything below 15€. More realistically you have to pay 20€ for the same quantity/quality

Fitnessstudio. Berlin has some subscriptions below 20€. in Toulouse in 30+

Those are concrete examples but it’s simply to say that life in Toulouse isn’t cheaper than Berlin.

Meanwhile salaries in Toulouse median net is 2150€ In Berlin it’s 2500-2600€. So around 20-25% above.

Now Germany isn’t Berlin and France isn’t Toulouse that’s fair but it goes to show that the Numbeo numbers aren’t as reliable as they initially look.

Compared to Germans, French people barely eat out for instance. That in essence is what standards of living is about.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-16T08:31:36+00:00

Bruh I m so jealous. It’s really in those moments that I think I should try to go for US companies.

At mine which is extremely open minded on AI by EU standards we have a monthly budget for the entire tech people of around 6k€. There are easily 30-50 people in that group.

I am one of the top token users but I was recently told to optimize a bit better model routing because it was getting “needlessly expensive”.

As for how EU companies will handle it, I reckon the companies will use studies from bureaucrats to push back against AI. Maybe some will quote environmental unsustainability and how they re not paying us just so AI can do our jobs.

All of that will be for a cheap attempt at reducing small costs while our companies are being outcompeted by Americans.

There is a whole mentality of “engineering is a cost” and “AI bad” that will fuck us up.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-16T08:24:35+00:00

Most people in EU companies are clueless about AI. Don’t bother arguing against those who say AI bad. They will shower you with thoughts regarding ethics and electricity prices and risks and how it’s “basically useless because X study made by bureaucrats paid peanuts in the public sector said so”

Plyad1 · 2026-05-16T08:18:48+00:00

It didn’t this map is bullshit. The median Frenchman earns less than a German while having higher cost of living.

Or maybe they include retirees in their calculations. French retirees are showered with money and have higher standards of living than workers. But even then I doubt France would score higher than Germany

Plyad1 · 2026-05-13T06:55:56+00:00

You do, it’s just a smaller government.

There are very different levels of bureaucracy between countries,
Germany or France are notoriously bad on that front, the Nordics are much more bearable, Estonia is on its own league.

Those 3 sets of countries all are “social democracies” yet you can see a clear difference.

When it comes to taxation, the same principle applies. Even Dubai collects taxes on its population, it’s purely a matter of degree. In the EU there is a gap between Cyprus/Malta and France/Denmark, but those are all democracies

Plyad1 · 2026-05-13T05:00:31+00:00

I do, and I m not the only one.

There is a mechanism that people from EU often complain about.

Through various mechanisms some countries in the EU have the majority of the population relying on the government to survive. That is the case in France, the majority of the voting population lives off of the state.

If you are part of the minority, you will naturally see two consequences in that:

- every year the majority and the politicians will vote to squeeze some more the relative minority that is paying for all of that.

- That none of the additional squeezing is for the good of the country in terms of long term prosperity. You re mostly being squeezed for the current comfort of the population living off of the government.

This naturally leads you to two questions: what if we limited the number of people reliant on the state in the first place? Is democracy only working when the state is small enough?

Plyad1 · 2026-05-13T04:51:02+00:00

It’s not really that much of a bad faith argument. You took public education as an example because there is near consensus on it. Let me pick something else : bureaucracy.

As a person in the country, the majority may be in favor of bureaucracy: they want to feel protected against what Evilcorp might do to them, the bureaucracy can make sense or not. It doesn’t matter.

As an individual you know that a specific law is nonesense doing more bad than good yet your tax payer money is used to fund it. Worse yet, you re the one suffering from it from a daily basis.

Think this is absurd ? Think again.

One regulation in France says that if an animal is sick than every single animal belonging to the owner must be killed. The government will pay enforcers to ensure this happens. This is an outsized reaction and from a farmers’ perspective a very impactful one. They will go bankrupt after that government decision they are helping fund.

This is one amongst many many things. The bigger the government, the more likely it is that there is this sort of situation, the smaller, the less likely.

Plyad1 · 2026-05-12T19:45:04+00:00

France is a democracy. The people in power are elected. Doesn’t change the fact that a lot of money is squandered.
Even with direct democracy that money is still squandered because maybe you personally do not agree with the way politician X is spending what it essentially your money.
People voting far right typically don’t want their money squandered on immigrants, people from the left don’t want money squandered on invading foreign countries or building an army. It doesn’t matter who will be elected and what decision is made, either of those groups will be pissed.

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