Ireland Caves to Pressure and Signs on to Normalized Tax Rates for Multinationals

After intense debate, Ireland has signed on for the plan to make technology companies pay 15 per cent tax everywhere. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is ready to finalize an implementation plan hoped to secure a share of revenue from digital multinationals. Irish tax rules have allowed Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and others to use an arrangement to considerably reduce their tax bills. Ireland did so as part of an investment attraction strategy, and it worked well, with Ireland hosting lots of European offices and garnering many jobs.

Others around the world did not appreciate this, and, often, little tax was paid in jurisdictions where consumers actually consume technology companies' products. Governments naturally felt they were being deprived of tax revenue. The Republic of Ireland has an attractive rate for corporations at 12.5% and had, until now, refused to join the plan. Different Irish governments had fiercely defended the low rate, arguing such a rate attracted businesses to the country's small economy. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/07/ireland-corporate-tax-rate-.html

The core goal of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project is to create a global minimum effective corporation tax rate of 15 per cent for multinationals with revenues in excess of €750 million. As of August 2021, 140 nations had signed up to that plan. Finally, in October, Ireland has signed on, as well.

Read about the OECD project here...

The Future of 1976 is ... Now!

 

Without a crystal ball, Sir Arthur C. Clarke came up with predictions of the future. The British science fiction writer (he wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey after the film, actually), was able with astonishing accuracy, to envision a future of remote work in 1964. In a segment from the BBC Horizon program, Sir Arthur Clarke leads the video with the sentence, “Trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation … ” But the science fiction writer, inventor, and undersea explorer did just that. Here are some of his predictions regarding the world—and in particular, the future of the workplace. Here's the program...

In 1976, he reiterated his views. Watch it!

Cat Eyes for Humans

The advent of night vision radically changed warfare. Now materials science has delivered another breakthrough -- a transparent metallic film allowing a viewer to see in the dark could one day turn regular spectacles into night vision googles.

The ultra-thin film, made of a semiconductor called gallium arsenide, could also be used to develop compact and flexible infrared sensors, scientists say. The film was developed by a team of Australian and European researchers, with details published in the magazine. Advanced photonics. It works by converting infrared light, which is normally invisible to humans, into light visible to the human eye.

The study’s first author, Dr. Rocío Camacho Morales of the Australian National University, said the material was hundreds of times thinner than a strand of human hair. Gallium arsenide is arranged in a crystalline structure only several hundred nanometers thick, allowing visible light to pass through.

“The way these night vision goggles work [is] they also capture infrared light, ”said Camacho Morales. “This infrared light turns into electrons and shows [digitally]. In our case, we are not doing this. “

Read more over at The Guardian

Green Screen Technology Gets Improved with LEDs

Green Screen is a cool way to composition in the background for motion graphics in films. But LED panels -- that use the same technology as video game engines -- place a realistic-looking world behind the actors, in a giant leap forward in special effects tech.

The result is a huge improvement, as green screens actually have drawbacks. Removing the green screen is never as quick as VFX artists would hope, and it also casts green light over the set and the actors. Even green-screen substitutes, like projecting an image onto a screen behind the actor, fail to dynamically respond to camera movements the way they would in the real world. ILM's solution fixes a lot of those problems. 

It also led to creative breakthroughs in which the old Hollywood order of making a TV show or movie -- wherein VFX came last -- was suddenly reversed. Now, artists such Charmaine Chan work alongside actors, set designers, and other crew members during filming. That collaboration means this technology doesn't just eliminate a screen -- it eliminates a creative barrier. As a compositor for venerable visual-effects house Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), Charmaine Chan has worked on films like The Last Jedi, assembling various digital elements into a beautiful, seamless image. While working on The Mandalorian, one of the first shows to use ILM's upgrade for the green screen, she saw some huge advances.

Here's a video to see how the improved approach works...

Skynet is on its way - AI wins against human fighter pilot in DARPA dogfight

As we read over at some military news site,

DARPA's AlphaDogfight trials have officially come to a close with Heron Systems' incredible artificial intelligence pilot system defeating not only its industry competitors, but going on to secure 5 straight victories against a highly trained U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot, without the human pilot scoring a single hit.

This should not be confused with the Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS), a next-generation flight control system designed to provide increased safety for the crew and passengers of aircraft as well as to optimize the aircraft performance under normal conditions. What is most valuable to 99% of the rest of the world -- outside of military applications -- is regarding passenger planes which fly autonomously. Software would have to be capable of handling emergency situations. At present, modern airliners do a good job of flying automatically until something unexpected happens. At that point, a pilot takes control and typically resolves the problem. Very rarely, though, a pilot must act to save the aircraft from catastrophe. 

There's more details about autonomous flight over at the I-triple-E, Application of AI Methods to Aircraft Guidance and Control.

 

Pandemic - This is Just What the Internet was Developed For

As more countries enforce social distancing (and even quarantine), the internet will stay online during the Coronavirus pandemic. It was designed for just this type of situation (well, nuclear war, but a catastrophe is a catastrophe). The internet got its start in the US more than 50 years ago as a government solution to problems likely in the Cold War -- Arpanet was designed to resist destruction of nodes. For years, scientists and researchers used it to communicate and share data with one another.

The work-from-home model is set to strain the internet’s underlying infrastructure, with a burden likely to be particularly felt in the home networks that people have set up, and internet service providers such as Comcast, Charter and Verizon who connect those home networks.

During the Cold War there was constant fear of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.  A communications system for computers was envisioned, and universities took the lead. Today's Internet emerged from military technology. ARPANET, developed by the American military as a network of communication across the country on servers that were decentralized, as a way to safeguard against the possibility of a nuclear attack.

By decentralizing the network, if one server of computers went down, the others would still be able to function because they would be able to simply pick up the same information from another server. A communications system for computers was envisioned, and universities took the lead. Only a few computers were the first connected in the original ARPANET, located in the respective computer research labs of UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET protected the flow of information between military installations by creating a network of geographically separated computers that could exchange information via a newly developed protocol (rule for how computers interact) called NCP (Network Control Protocol).

Another area of concern: response to the Coronavirus exposes Internet inequality among U.S. students as schools close their doors, as millions of Americans lack web access. This digital divide causes problems for educators’ efforts to continue instruction during this health crisis.

Read more here....

Robots Taking Jobs... Again

The robot future started years ago...

The adoption of industrial robots in France makes manufacturing businesses more productive and profitable but at the expense of jobs, according to a recent paper presented by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization in America. 

In a paper titled "Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France," economics professors Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Claire LeLarge (University of Paris Saclay), and Pascual Restrepo (Boston University) analyzed 55,390 French manufacturing firms to study the economic impact of robot adoption.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w26738

Giant-Sized Drone for Cargo

From Engaget:

While Volocopter's been busy working on its air taxis, it's also preparing to enter the utility drone market using a similar design. Much like the company's experimental 2X and upcoming VoloCity, the aptly-named VoloDrone announced today is yet another 18-rotor electric aircraft, which can be remote-controlled or set to a pre-planned route in autonomous mode. But instead of carrying passengers, the VoloDrone is designed to fit various types of cargo and equipment under its belly -- be it a box, an agricultural sprayer, a sling or disaster relief tools.

Watch the video for more... 

UPS First out of the Gate in the US for Drone Delivery

The FAA has settled on UPS to be the first nationwide drone delivery service. The company’s drone subsidiary just got the official nod to take its delivery service nationwide.

UPS announced today that it is the first to receive the official nod from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate a full “drone airline,” which will allow it to expand its current small drone delivery service pilots into a country-wide network. In its announcement of the news, UPS said that it will start by building out its drone delivery solutions specific to hospital campuses nationwide in the U.S., and then to other industries outside of healthcare

With the FAA’s approval, the company appears ready to ramp up its drone operation to go head-to-head with competitors like Alphabet's (formerly Google) Wing, DHL, and Amazon.

Read more here ...

Mars Colony Progress Report - Not Good

Will we ever get to live on Mars? The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun’s harmful rays.

The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius), with temperatures dropping as low as -195 degrees F (-126 degrees C). By contrast, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica, at -128 degrees F (-89 degrees C) on June 23, 1982.

But interest in living on Mars persists. Evil Bond Villain Elon Musk and his SpaceX are anticipating colonies on Mars as early as the 2050s. Astrobiologist Lewis Darnell, a professor at the University of Westminster, makes a more modest estimate: about 50-100 years before “substantial numbers of people have moved to Mars to live in self-sustaining towns.” Crazily enough. the United Arab Emirates is aiming to build a Martian city of 600,000 occupants by 2117, in one of the more ambitious visions of the future.

November 2015 saw Administrator Bolden of NASA reaffirm the goal of sending humans to Mars. He laid out 2030 as the date of a crewed surface landing and noted that planned 2020 Mars rover would support the human mission.

Humans have made giant strides over recent years with robot rovers and space probes. But there is much to learn about getting people to Mars safely -- and within reasonable cost.

Read more here...

New Rules for On-Line Platforms in Europe

We learn that...

The European Union approved new regulations promoting fairness and transparency of online platforms, coming into effect in summer 2020. 

This regulation is based on two key areas. First, several online platforms have superior bargaining power, enabling them to behave unfairly towards the many business users that need those platforms for selling their products and services. Second, many online businesses rely on their website ranking by search engines, which justifies transparency requirements for those search engines. The new Regulation aims to ensure a fair, predictable and trusted online business environment for the benefit of all consumers in the EU.

The main instrument in achieving these goals is the terms and conditions, which must clearly set out the rules for operating the platform. The platform operator can only amend its terms and conditions with 15 days’ prior notice and must give the platform’s business users a further 15 days to terminate the contract if they do not accept the proposed amendments. To ensure that all these principles are complied with, the new Regulation contains a full range of remedies. Platform operators must provide for an internal complaint-handling system that is easily accessible and free of charge. Complaints that are not resolved may be submitted to impartial and independent mediators.

Read more here.

Will Robo-Cars be Unaffordable?

Many are eagerly awaiting self-driving cars -- but we should recall that all of Silicon Valley’s big bets don’t always pay off.

Silicon Valley is pouring billions into robot cars. Soon – although the time scale keeps shifting – tech manufacturers say driverless cars will replace their traditional counterparts, car parks will become parks again and road fatalities will plummet. People have argued over ethical concerns surrounding the technology, the ensuing job losses and the public’s antipathy to this robot revolution. But the biggest obstacle may well be money.

The article continues, "Driver wages are a key part of taxi fares today. The average cab ride in San Francisco, for example, will cost you around $13. The driver keeps most of that. There is one caveat, however. Taxis are inefficient – so inefficient in fact that cabbies only spend about half their time earning fares."

Read more here....

Passengers are using Self-Driving Cars in California

Self-driving car startup Zoox won permission Friday to start offering rides to passengers in California. Zoox will submit information to the commission on the number of passenger miles traveled in the test cars and any incidents that occur, along with pollution and safety data.

It's a milestone in the race to make autonomous vehicles safe and comfortable enough to be trusted by lawmakers and the public at large.

Read more...

Having Trouble Finding Cloud Talent?

Talent capable of navigating the intricacies of cloud computing is in short supply in  the Washington, D.C., New York, Austin, Boston, Miami, and other areas; ares that are notnot traditionally thought to have a Tier 1 technology aspirations. Training in-house IT staff can take months or even years, at no small investment.

The objective then becomes to hire outside of the company or to use consultants—or both. This means that the consulting firms are also seeking the same people you are, making the demand go up everywhere at the same time.

How to manage? Many believe a combination of building in-house capabilities balanced with outside consultants can fill the gap.

This Read more here...

Quantum Teleportation

From SlashDot... A  team of researchers from Austria, Italy and Sweden has successfully demonstrated teleportation using on-demand photons from quantum dots. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group explains how they accomplished this feat and how it applies to future quantum communications networks. Scientists and many others are very interested in developing truly quantum communications networks -- it is believed that such networks will be safe from hacking or eavesdropping due to their very nature. But, as the researchers with this new effort point out, there are still some problems standing in the way. One of these is the difficulty in amplifying quantum signals. One way to get around this problem, they note, is to generate photons on-demand as part of a quantum repeater -- this helps to effectively handle the high clock rates. In this new effort, they have done just that, using semiconductor quantum dots. 

Starting a Small Business - My Short List of "To Do's"

Tom’s General Entrepreneur / Start Up Advice -- because I seem to say the same thing, over and over, here’s a quick summary:

I’ve always stuck with C-corp as my structure — in Maryland, you can do a non-stock version of a corporation for a nominal fee. You specify initial ownership in the Articles of Incorporation. When the time comes, you can amend your articles and issue shares as you add investors. Note that I had a “board of advisors,” not a board of directors, which you might consider. I’d get an EIN (federal tax id) and get a corporate bank account established, and set up initial financial accounts showing paid-in capital. Do you have a business plan? Always good practice to prep for investors, and that would help you and your partner understand where you are aiming to go.

I recommend organizing a company in the country you want to sell into (the states?). Do your accounting right, and you won't pay tax, or will only pay a minimum once you start making lots of money. You can't (and shouldn't) skirt the anti-money laundering rules. Even if you succeed in the short term, you will eventually get kicked off of Amazon, PayPal, eBay, or wherever.

First, get excited about the challenges (and rewards) ahead! First, some thoughts, then items to consider: 

• Cash-flow is the most important aspect of your business. You can be making all the money in the world but if it's not in the right place at the right time, you will have problems. Accounting is #1 for understanding when (and if) you are profitable. 
• You need constant exposure to the right market, having the best widget means very little if no one sees it, or worse, you show it to the wrong person. Marketing and sales using a direct sell method (as I am focused on a service business for purposes of this discussion). 
• Understand the difference between an expense-generating activity and a revenue-generating activity. Maximize revenue, minimize expense. Write your Business plan using this: http://lifehacker.com/5913086/fill-out-a-one-page-business-plan-and-get-your-business-started-already 

Basics -- organize your practice (choose your name, see item below) as an LLC or s-corp. Make spouse and offspring 33% owners to achieve minority- and woman-ownership qualification (if possible) for government work, which you WILL be doing, eventually. Right? 

Once you get your EiN/TIN from irs.gov in your company name, you can organize as an LLC or s-corp. You need some organizing document to get your bank account. CapitalOne is the least expensive, most flexible for small business in the DC area (where I used to live). Get a business VISA debit card. Get your accountant on board now! You'll want a simple business liability policy at some point - for $1mil - expect to pay $1000 per year for that (but wait until later to shop for that). 

Work on retirement planning, health savings account, etc., in the future. company name, URL, website, email, telephone number. 

Look for a domain name that matches your company name (at a registrar such as Godaddy.com). You can use GoDaddy for the basics (web, email) and the accounting system they have is, IMHO, awesome. Get an iPhone and a dedicated number - AT&T has plans with a big bucket of minutes and a data plan (you will be on the phone often, don't cheap out). Get a family plan so spouse and offspring can have their numbers on your plan and get high-speed internet at home. (companies pays all; see how that works? Company spending = expense). If your house has a crappy mobile phone service, get a femtocell from AT&T. Business cards vistaprint.com. If you need a logo, find a talented friend to design one for you. a journal to write EVERYTHING down - your planner, task list, calendar, meeting notes, etc. should correspond to your shared contacts/calendar/notes in iCloud so all that syncs across your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. You never want to lose that data, which is an audit trail and the sum total of your business "knowledge". 

Consider using (cheap self-promotion) my product, http://www.workbench.net buy a MacBook Pro 13" with 8 gigs of ram. Buy an external multi-terabyte hard drive to back it up to with time machine. But an iPad mini to take notes on, show presentations, etc. website: find a friend to help you assemble a web presence. 

You'll also want FB, Twitter and PayPal accounts for the business, using your business email address. set aside office space at home. Get a simple filing system, with a dozen hanging folders so you can stash receipts, project tracking, etc. You need to close the door and focus once in a while. 

Implement SugarCRM or some other open source CRM tool to manage your sales process.

You need to keep your paperwork organized, consider job jackets for each project that correspond to the file system on your laptop (/Work > Clients > ABCNonProfit > etc.). when you are ready, tackle (a) direct email marketing with MailChimp, (b) customer relationship management to track leads and clients with SugarCRM, (c) a 12-month marketing/sales plan. 

IMHO, life is about... starting over. Continually. We grow older, we learn new things, we experience events we could never envision. Eventually, I came to believe I could always take care of myself, so I stopped worrying so much about... life... and started to focus on my relationships, appreciating what I have, and setting reasonable goals for the near term (1-2 years).

Play to your strengths -- build 'em and flip 'em, perhaps? I would suggest you save money, continually, so you always have a cushion for yourself, no matter what the outcome (or random events -- people can get sick or have an accident so unpredictably). Learn new stuff, so you can always seed ideas and appreciate new opportunities.

Personally, I got a house early, had a base of operations, and something I could leverage (needed a HELOC to fund payroll when a large contract fell into my lap, years ago, for example). Unfortunately lost all that in the last go-around, but I always feel most creative when I am secure in my living situation.

Whew! Seems like a lot? Don't worry - checklists and "one day at a time" are the best ways to get through this to "launch", which, in the end, is the most critical part of YOUR PATH TO INDEPENDENCE because you will be in charge of your own financial destiny.

Create Diverse Workplaces Using Artificial Intelligence Ethically

Companies should be aware of and recognize that artificial intelligence algorithms are created by humans with biases and beliefs -- and make every effort to eliminate those biases.

A.I. takes input data and races off to make inference and decision making about the world at lightening pace,” --Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School

Read more...

Microsoft is getting into the lumber business

To help offset carbon, Microsoft plans to plant hundreds of acres of native trees in Ireland over the next few years -- the largest corporate investment in Irish forestry in a decade. The plan by Microsoft will focus on native trees, such as Pedunculate Oak, Downy Birch, Common Alder, and Scots Pine. This will help to offset Irish greenhouse gas emissions.

Read more here...

Blockchain is More Signifcant than Bitcoin

Tha math bitcoin solved a paradoxical problem: a currency with no regulator, that nonetheless can’t be counterfeited. Now a similar mix of math and code promises to pull off another seemingly magical feat by allowing anyone to share their data with the cloud and nonetheless keep it entirely private. At MIT, “homomorphic” encryption is a way to encrypt data such that it can be shared with a third party and used in computations without it ever being decrypted. That mathematical trick—which would allow untrusted computers to accurately run computations on sensitive data without putting the data at risk of hacker breaches or surveillance—has only become more urgent in an age when millions of users constantly share their secrets with cloud services ranging from Amazon and Dropbox to Google and Facebook. Now, with bitcoin's tricks in their arsenal, Enigma's creators say they can now pull off computations on encrypted data more efficiently than ever.

Bitcoin itself Is the vanguard of a predecessor technology to the real, lasting innovation: the blockchain — the peer-to-peer ledger system that records cryptocurrency transactions and allows them to operate without a central authority. A German nonprofit, the IOTA Foundation announced that it was teaming up with several major technology firms to develop a “decentralized data marketplace” utilizing its own cryptocurrency, which works without blockchain technology. Though IOTA tokens can be used like any other cryptocurrency, the protocol was designed specifically for use on connected devices.

Meteoric Iron was the Source of Bronze Age Weapons and More

It appears iron from meteorites was used widely to make knives and other artifacts. Previous studies had found specific Bronze Age objects to be made from meteoric metal – such as a dagger buried with King Tutankhamun. This research addresses the question of just how widespread the practice was.

Bronze was the metal of choice for tools, weapons, and jewelry during the Bronze Age – hence the era's name – which began around 3300 BCE. The alloy was durable and easily available, made by smelting copper and mixing it with tin and other metals.

Read more...