kandu

In the EU, eIDAS allows companies to use government-issued identification: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eidas-regu...

Non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/ZtfNh

Also: training neural networks by turning connections on and off, or by just flipping the sign of the weights: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16627

If you want to lose weight and you plan to also exercise, going low carb will hamstring you. The difference between running in the morning fasted and running after eating a single banana is the difference between feeling like you are being tortured and being able bounce around like a bunny.

A low carb diet may still contain enough carbs to inhibit the ketone generation mechanism. Was your ketogenesis active at the time? My experience of exercising under ketogenesis was OK.

In principle, the advertisers could buy Google shares and influence the company's policy towards an equilibrium that is more favourable to advertisers. If a natural monopoly is a public company, the entities that depend on this company could buy shares and bend the company's actions towards their interests. Is this happening? If not, why not?

Isn't Vimeo On Demand (https://vimeo.com/ondemand) the indie film equivalent of Bandcamp?

This is typical for many developing countries. I still wonder why, while we have Facebook, Twitter, Kickstarter and so on, we do not have successful online systems that would allow societies to organize and fight corruption and kleptocracy through participative democracy, crowdsourcing legislation, crowdsourcing social innovation, and so on.

It is mind blowing to me that in a world where the internet makes it so easy to aggregate democratically the wishes of the masses, corrupt politicians that neglect the people they represent still thrive. If everybody would spent 10% of the time they spend on Facebook in order to express on a website the problems that they would like to be solved by the state and the solution to these problems that they support, the world we live in would be a much better one. I would guess that the value corruption takes away from the global economy is much higher than the value created by all of the startups that pretend to disrupt economies. Do you want to solve a global problem? Please solve corruption.

Please solve corruption. Corruption is a social issue that could be mitigated by using online media to catalyze critical mass for acting against corruption.

Nice to see this story. I really like having a simple phone that lasts a week before having to be recharged. I do not understand why there is no major cell phone producer having a line of simple, dumb phones that are not low end, but having a decent design, e.g. metal casing as Nokia 6300 or 6303i. I would really like to buy a simple phone having just the basic functions of voice calls and texts, alarms, a battery lasting a week, no camera or other bells and whistles, but a nice design, for around $50. Why nobody produces this? Current Nokia low end products are too plasticky, with no particular care for the design. Maybe someone can start a business for catering to this need.

What kind of radiation does it use for sensing (infrared, ultrasound, visible light, ...)?

I guess that those websites should serve the interests of the voters, not of the current politicians.

Why should a voter use such a website? Because his/her humble click on a Support/Oppose button could aggregate with many others' clicks and make a difference when the number of people expressing an opinion is high enough to get the attention of the politicians and of the media. The random expression of an opinion on the street influences just the few listeners that happen to be arround.

Indeed, the advantage of online political tools is that they reduce significantly the effort required to contribute.

Most developed countries are democracies, and democracy means that governments should obey the will of the people. The exercise of democracy means aggregating social information, and this is so easily done now through the internet. However, the use of internet for exercising democratic rights seems very limited. Why it is so? Why people spend more time on Facebook than on a political social network where the opinions they share could have direct positive impacts on those aspects of their live that depends on government and legislation?

When considering a decision, elected officials may consult existing scientific literature, may commission scientific studies or polls on the issue, or request the public comments on their specific proposal. There are plenty of information sources to inform them. If they rely just on information provided by the richest, and which represents the interest of these richest groups, the politician's decisions will be suboptimal.

I also used Companies Made Simple. Everything was fine with them, except that if you have non-ASCII characters in your name they will look scrambled in some of the official documents. Use an ASCII transliteration for your name instead of using non-ASCII characters.

How hard is to convert to developers adults with training in other areas, but with presumed cognitive skills suitable for programming? I am thinking of people of 35-50 years old, that would be intelligent enough (i.e., there would be just a percentage of this cohort that would be fit for becoming developers), but who, from various historical and personal reasons, work in industries where the prospects are less interesting than in programming.

Are there any studies showing how the potential to learn programming decreases (or not) with age? I have looked on Google Scholar but I found nothing.

It's a great vision, but their website does not disclose how will they implement it better than existing similar projects.

Imagine a world where all goods and services required for a decent life will be provided by AI and robots. Still, there will plenty of jobs for humans - those related to the humanity of humans. Life could become dedicated to enjoying art in various forms, and this art will be conceived mostly by humans. If people will have no work to do, they could hire entertainers. They could do jobs as a hobby - e.g., manually producing stuff that could as well be made by robots, but that other humans will buy just because it was hand made. They could enjoy experimenting with various lifestyles, effectively creating diverse subcultures, and these cultures will trade items that are uniquely developed within the culture.

Imagine a world where people could enjoy the variety of clothing that existed in the world 300 years ago and that has been now elliminated by the hustle of modern life and by a global trade in clothes. Even if they will be produced by robots, designing these clothes will remain mostly a human job. Virtually anyone could wear designer clothes, and many people could become such designers. The same could be applied to food, music, movies, and so on.

Education and corporal care would also become a large part of the economy that would hire humans and not robots. There will be plenty of niches, and people will have the time to invest in developing specialized skills, rediscovering skills long forgotten.

Eliberated by the stress of modern life, life will simply become more enjoyable.

It is probably pointless for Google to use humans to read mails, especially the mails of regular people. And it is certain that they use automated processing of the information in the mails.

A most relevant question would be: Does Google match the profiles of its mail users to high profile people, such as company managers or other rich people who can be easily found on, for example, Linkedin? If so, does Google automatically filter their email in order to predict, for example, the stock market?

I am currently using toggl (http://www.toggl.com). I am not using it for billing nor for monitoring employees, but for monitoring how I spend time. The purpose is to balance work between my several projects on which I work concurrently, and also to avoid procrastination and wasting time on distractions.

I spent a lot of time (pun intended), i.e. about half a day, on searching a time tracker that would fit my needs. I was not interested in features related to billing clients, and thus I found too expensive the services that seem to be most popular, like Harvest, whose pricing starts at $12 per month if one works on more than 2 projects. I would not pay more than $1 per month for a simple time tracking service. I needed a web application / service, as opposed to client software, since I work on multiple computers. Also, the ideal service that I was looking for would have an Android app such that I could track time when I'm not using a computer.

Toggl does all of these within the free plan, however it is somehow buggy - the Android app, the desktop app and the web service do not synchronize well and I am kind of forced to use just the web service through a browser.

I would be interested to find out about other apps that would do the job.

The right response is that science doesn't know yet.

Thank you very much for the answers.

companiesmadesimple.com was one of the options I was looking into. Let's keep in touch.

Here are some pointers to regulations in the UK:

PAYE (Pay As You Earn) is the system that HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) uses to collect Income Tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) from employees' pay as they earn it. The term 'employee' in this guide includes directors of limited companies.

As an employer, you'll have to deduct tax and NICs from your employees' pay each pay period and pay Employer's Class 1 NICs if they earn above a certain threshold. You pay these amounts to HMRC monthly or quarterly. If you don't send the correct amount, or if you send it in late, you may have to pay interest. After the end of the tax year you must send HMRC an Employer Annual Return (form P35 and forms P14). Almost all employers are required to send this online. http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/paye/intro/basics.htm

Employed or self-employed?

A worker's employment status, that is whether they are employed or self-employed, is not a matter of choice. Whether someone is employed or self-employed depends upon the terms and conditions of the relevant engagement. The tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) rules do, however, contain some special rules that apply to certain categories of worker in certain circumstances. See section on special cases. http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/employment-status/index.htm http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/leaflets/es-fs2.pdf

And here is the info for Ireland:

Employer's Guide to PAYE http://www.revenue.ie/en/business/paye/guide/index.html

Code of practice for determining employment or self-employment status of Individuals http://www.revenue.ie/en/tax/it/leaflets/code-of-practice-on...

I assume that every country has some laws to prevent: 1) That actual employees are declared as independent contractors for the purpose of evading the payment of social security and medical taxes. 2) That the individual that gets paid also declares the revenues and pays the corresponding income taxes. 3) Money laundering and financing terrorist activity.

In the case of my country in Eastern Europe these laws are so tight that they require either: - the independent contractor to be officially registered with the governmental authorities and authorized as such, or - to be considered as an employee, which has to sign with the business a paper contract that also has to be registered with the authorities, and for which social security and medical taxes must be paid.

This makes impossible running in my country a business based on the model that you are also interested in.

Could you discuss what the law allows in UK, Ireland, Cyprus or other European country?

For example, in the USA, "You generally must withhold federal income tax from your employees' wages. You withhold part of Social Security and Medicare taxes from your employees' wages and you pay a matching amount yourself." - http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=172179,00....

"If you classify an employee as an independent contractor and you have no reasonable basis for doing so, you may be held liable for employment taxes for that worker" - http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.h...

I assume that the US law allows "contracts" that are "signed" or agreed with one click on the "I agree with the terms and conditions" checkbox, and this contract would establish the paid individual as an independent contractor, and then the paying business has no burden of tax payment on behalf of the individual.

Do you have any information about the legal framework for similar issues in UK or Ireland?

I am interested in the same issue.

There seem to be various service providers for doing the actual payment, i.e. https://www.x.com/community/ppx/mass_pay or http://www.arvatodigitalservices.com/fileadmin/case_studies/... .

However, I would like to know in which countries a business could be legally do something as mass paying thousands of individuals without going into the hassle of signing contracts with each of them.

Are you based in the USA or elsewhere?

If you pay an individual, aren't you supposed to pay to the fiscal authorities any tax for the wage you pay?

Which are the startup-friendly countries where this kind of mass payments are possible without bureaucratic hassles?

If you keep your passwords in the browsers, you expose yourself to trojans that once they get access to your computer will harvest all your passwords from the browser and send them to some overseas hacker.

A mass disbursement solution for international payments is offered by Paypal, https://www.x.com/community/ppx/mass_pay ; another one is http://www.arvatodigitalservices.com/fileadmin/case_studies/...