Is it legal in US to use electricity at home for business purposes? In some countries that's against contract with electricity provider, as they have different tariffs for business.
Yes, you can't register a company at your home address, but no one will ever deny you coverage if you do clerical work at home. At least every single insurance and rental I had in UK had a special provision for this - if you need to stay at home and work remotely, that's 100% covered. It just can't be your principal place of work.
Plenty of people register businesses at their home address. It entirely depends on the nature of the work as to whether it requires a change of use from the planners or invalidate insurance etc
You can easily get cover for working at home. But usually work is excluded from domestic policies; particularly third party liability.
Obviously the liabilities vary, if you're doing prototyping of fireworks in your garage then it's a little more risky than coding!
Insurance isn't always priced solely by risk; work-from-home insurance probably reduces claims for many people but that doesn't mean you can't charge more for it.
It would be interesting to know how occupier presence varies with claims made.
Contents & Home insurance - and I guess yes and no. Probably lowers the chance of theft claims, but increases slightly the chance of fire damage and accidental damage to contents. Don't have the actual data to back this up though.
Even if so, I doubt electric company would ever call anyone on that -- that would just be inviting black PR: "you burn coal, and prohibit charging our eco-friendly scooters", "go fix ingesting my solar power into your system first", etc. -- possibly not completely correct, but painful still.
Plus, an electric company might love this: more customers, with demand at off-peak hours that might even slightly reduce the need for energy storage.
the lack of strict regulations is one of the reasons start-up businesses flourish in the US.
Although I am pro-regulation in some issues, I think that European style pain-in-the-ass regulations only hinder technological advancement.
Would UBER ever be successful in Europe? Nope.
...uber is successful in Europe. There are cities that banned it, but there are as many that didn't.
Conversely, Uber is not very successful in South-East Asia, but not for the abundance of regulation but for the lack of it - Grab, a local copy-paste of Uber, has become so dominant that Uber had to leave most of the markets there
And indeed Uber has been a catalyst in several EU countries for taxi deregulation. They had to leave Finland because it was illegal to be an Uber driver without having a ”traditional” taxi license; a legislation change will come into effect this summer that greatly deregulates the taxi industry. So I guess they succeeded in being disruptive, but I agree with the other commenter that Uber is probably not the best example from corporate ethics point of view.
But Europe was an expansion market for them, after they spent a while working out early kinks in the US. I think the post you are commenting on meant success as a startup, which is very different from successfully expanding there.
yeap, the ones who didn't ban are the ones who didn't apply all these useless strict regulations.
In Germany, it is still not possible to take an Uber ride, for example. Besides, if it started in Europe as a small start-up it would be killed right away with tons of regulations anyways. So the only reason that you have Uber in Europe is that it has become a giant company in the US, due fertile environment, and thus could afford all these legal battles to enter the market.
South-East Asia is a different story. It has nothing to do with regulations at all. It is just a completely different mindset there. The fact is though, businesses in those countries can easily flourish as well.
I'm not really convinced by his arguments, a lot of European countries have a higher free market index than the US and US taxes are more complex than a good half of European countries.
I think he overestimates the impact of regulation & "culture" (what does that even mean in a place as diverse as Europe?) and underestimates the effect of having a large market in the US where everyone speaks the same language and have more or less the same culture.
I don't think that Uber was a good example of a good company hindered by regulations...
The pain-in-the-ass regulations also save a lot of people's time and money (Theranos-style startups are much less likely to pop-up over this side of the Atlantic also).
Gray area I'm sure, in this case, the electrical company wouldn't know.
Is it legal in the US to use regular cars for taxi purposes? Operating a taxi without a taxi license? Operating a hotel without a hotel license? It's companies like these, and uber, and airb&b, etc that skirt around the laws.
And fyi, something being against the contract is not automatically illegal.