Paddle and FastSpring (I found their support to be more helpful than Paddle's but they charge even higher fees), the two solutions commonly used in that space, act as Merchants of Record. Since you are not selling directly to your users you don't have to file the corresponding taxes, just the ones that correspond to the transactions between Paddle/FastSpring and you. But I'm not an accountant and they may change their operations in the future so don't rely on this comment alone.
While I personally agree with you when it comes to YT advertising which at times could not be more irrelevant, Google search ads and Facebook/Instagram ads seem to be the place where most money is spend. And in case of Google search the whole thing is basically a prisoners dilemma. You and your competitors are probably among the first results for the relevant keywords anyway and could save a lot on advertising if none of you advertised. But once a single competitor starts buying ads the whole sector has to move until the expense on Google ads is equal to the former profit margin. This in turn leads to monopolization as only the competitor with the highest profit margin at baseline will still be making a profit. It’s hard to believe that Google pushing its apps and a single search/navigation bar on users is but an attempt to get businesses to pay for results they would already rank pretty well for, thereby diverting the profit of entire industries to Google and not offering any benefits to users.
> You and your competitors are probably among the first results for the relevant keywords anyway and could save a lot on advertising if none of you advertised. But once a single competitor starts buying ads the whole sector has to move until the expense on Google ads is equal to the former profit margin. This in turn leads to monopolization as only the competitor with the highest profit margin at baseline will still be making a profit.
Granted, incumbents are likely to score high on organic search results. If somebody new comes up with a better product, which can deliver more value at a lower price, the page rank algorithm isn’t going to do much for them. But the newcomer’s superior unit economics mean they can afford to bid higher for an ad, which allows them to get market share from the incumbent. In that sense, ads can make the market more liquid, and speed adoption of improved products and more efficient manufacturing or business processes.
The ad publisher does end up capturing a big chunk of this value, and it’s valid to ask if that’s fair and if we as a society should allow it.
First of all congrats on building a business that focuses on tackling climate change as its probably the most pressing global issue of all right now. However I’ve been struggling with the ethics of carbon removal and carbon offsets a bit myself and would be really interested in your perspective. If the ethical goal is to have the lowest atmospheric CO2 concentration in let’s say 2050, how do you justify funding carbon removal now at a time where the prevention of carbon creation is way cheaper per ton and thus allows people to have a higher impact regarding that goal for the same cost? Is it because you feel that with the right funding now carbon removal could eventually become much cheaper? I’m not trying to criticize you, I’m just really interested in the topic as something about carbon offsets always feels pretty sketchy and I’m always looking for ways to ethically invest or donate (I gave to an anti-deforestation initiative for some years and am financing crowdfunded loans for businesses to install solar panels in developing countries right now while also leading an ethically conscious lifestyle when it comes to travel, diet, activism and general consumption).
That's a great question so I hope I can provide a little insight to my thinking:
* You are right, we do need to also focus on reducing emissions and carbon removal is by no means a replacement for reductions;
* However even if we were to reduce to zero emissions tomorrow, there is still an excess of emissions already present in the atmosphere that needs to be addressed/removed.
* Another large consideration for myself when thinking about this project was to support as many carbon removal projects as possible now, so they can be mature, cheaper and readily available as we also reduce.
It is my firm belief that carbon removal should and will replace the existing carbon credits based system. If I emit a ton of CO₂ then buy credits that have reduced (although this is a little ambiguous) someone elses emissions, my 1 ton still exists in the atmosphere.
Reducing my own footprint (so it becomes 0.5 tons) then actively removing that unavoidable footprint - or more if I would like to live carbon negative - means I can truly say I have no impact.
I hope this helps but please feel free to ask about anything else or email me directly: ewan (at) carbonremoved (dot com)
I feel you. And even if you get everything to run well on a VPS or Netlify, opening it up to a big user base, limiting liability and generating income is another huge battle. I’m working on a side project I want to transform into an entire self-sustaining business at the moment. When I first had the idea, I got a prototype of the key parts up and running in less than a month. Now it’s been like a year and I spent my days optimizing webpack chunk sizes, trying different pwa cache busting techniques, reading Stripe-integration docs, studying international VAT schemes, legal requirements, ...
The step from zero to product is way smaller than the step from product to law-abiding, income-generating service-providing business.
Edit: For those of you looking for a way to get simple prototypes working without having to use opinionated frameworks like Laravel or going down the JS rabbit hole, try Flask (in combination with SQLAlchemy and Marshmellow if you also need a simple ORM). Full flexibility, can be learned in minutes and you have the whole freedom of Python to do what you want.
Nice to hear I'm not alone, I am starting a similar journey myself. Any tips on minimizing the legal exposure?
As for the VAT, I am leaning towards paddle instead of stripe, because they take care of everything tax related (for a bit bigger piece of pie of course). Any thoughts on this?
I’m EU-based and my business is going to be B2C SaaS so these tips might not help you a lot. To minimize legal exposure the safest bet is to form a limited liability company wether that be a Spanish SL, a Dutch BV ir a German GmbH. Usually these also have a smaller counterpart which doesn’t require as much capital but still provides you with limited liability. If you need an US based corporation Stripe Atlas might also be of interest to you or if you need an EU-based one Estonia offers something called an eResidency and lets you create an EU business from abroad. Apart from that having an account take care of your taxes or at least proof-read your yearly filings seems like another step to limit you personal responsibility, even if a bit expensive.
As for VAT, I’m focusing on the EU market at the moment. EU law is that all SaaS B2C sales have to pay VAT in the country where the client resides, luckily there’s a process called mini one stop shop which allows you to file your VAT taxes in one EU country (while still indicating the country of every sale) which will then take care of the redistribution of the VAT taxes (a similar procedure exists for non-EU businesses who have EU customers, searching for EU VAT on e-Services should help you get started). With Stripe that means creating a taxId for every country and matching that with the country of residence my users have to provide on checkout when I create their session in the backend. Sadly I haven’t found any good applications that then take care of everything so it’s probably going to have to be a mix of csv importing everything into accounting software and handing everything to an account. It’s a bit frustrating tbh because it looks like accounting will be the single biggest expense in the initial phase of the business. So if anybody knows of a good solution for EU-wide SaaS B2C sales with Stripe I would be happy if they shared them. Even Quaderno and the like are not really feasible if you’re product costs less than 5$/month since they base their pricing on the number of sales.
Thank you for a detailed answer! Yes, I'm based in EU, but the customers could be from USA, AUS, India,... I am hoping to address all (well, most) of the markets from the start.
Btw, it might make sense to contact Quaderno (/others) and describe your pain point, they might be able to offer some solution.
In a society which doesn't care enough and a legal system that doesn't punish unethical behaviour any company tapping unethical revenue streams in addition to the ethical ones will have a competitive advantage and given otherwise similar conditions eventually outperform ethical companies. Once a sole actor goes down that path it puts a lot of pressure on all other actors to throw ethics overboard as well as otherwise their company's survival and in extension their livelihood will be threatened. This is why we can't just rely on market forces sorting everything out, consumers making decision, etc. but have to actively legislate to protect our privacy and personal rights.
While it may not completely change your life, a book that definitely opens your eyes (probably more so if you're white and male) when it comes to mondern-day racism and just how biased our thinking really is is "Biased" by Jennifer L. Eberhardt. You ask how many of the authors listed here a women but one could just as easily ask how many of the authors listed here are black and I think the answer would be just as shocking.
It's really difficult to draw a line between being our "selves" and the alternatives though.
We are not the individual cells of our body because most of them will be replaced in the next weeks/months/years. We also don't think of any body with a knee replacement as any less human. Even altering the genetic code of a huge part of your body, like after stem cell transplantation, is not commonly seen as making us less us.
Also suppose it was possible to build a synthentic neuron that behaved just like the ones inside your brain. If you started replacing your neurons with the synthetic ones, no individual neuron would "change" you. So were would you draw the line? At 10% synthetic neurons? At 20%? At 100%?
If we see ourselves as biological beings another interesting point is how you would view a 1:1 copy of yourself. If we constructed a synthetic human that had the exact same number of molecules in the exact same place as you, would that human be you? (Leaving aside that that's basically impossible, just as a thought experiment)
If you answered the last question with "no", that would also mean that not even the way we process information and think makes us us, since the 1:1 molecular clone would behave exactly the same as you in the same environment (in a purely deterministic universe at least, leaving aside probability and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).
So are we instead an uninterrupted instance of a thinking process? That would allow us to differentiate us from the exact clone. However in that case, would you be another person after being unconsciousness? What about general anesthesia? This really keeps me up at night.
It's next to impossible to define what we are and that we think of us as independent, unique beings might just be an illusion.
> are we instead an uninterrupted instance of a thinking process?
No, for the reasons you described. What we are is thinking-processes with a coherent series of more-or-less-uninterrupted links to the past. When you undergo general anesthesia you wake up as the same person because you can remember who you were before anesthesia, and you feel and act like that person.
The interesting case is not anesthesia (or sleep) but amnesia and traumatic brain injury or mental illness that changes your personality.
I understand where you're coming from, however I think that remembering the past is not a very helpful criterium since memories correspond to physical changes in the brain. In the thought experiment, the 1:1 molecular clone would have the same memories and think that he had lived through the same things as the original human for what it's worth. I'm not yet convinced that it is possible to define one self even though our (physiological) human experience definitely makes us feel like we were this clearly defined, independent, conscious thing.
But of course the conditions you mention are also very interesting and make it non-trivial to define the "true" essence of the person. Another interesting one would be dementia.
> In the thought experiment, the 1:1 molecular clone would have the same memories and think that he had lived through the same things as the original human for what it's worth.
That's right. Why is that a problem?
Imagine you had this done to you, and imagine that in order to clone your brain you have to be put under anesthesia (because the process takes time and you need to capture a coherent snapshot). When you wake up, how are you going to tell whether you are the clone or the original?
I don’t see it as a problem per-se, it just defies the notion of having a somehow unique, identifiable self which I understood as a condition for OP’s question and which I suppose is how most people view themselves.
As far as I’m concerned we might very well be just processes that can in theory be copied and recreated. In that case the person in the thought experiment would exist twice at a single point in time and then diverge into to different persons due to different environments and probabilistic processes in the body.
> As far as I’m concerned we might very well be just processes that can in theory be copied and recreated. In that case the person in the thought experiment would exist twice at a single point in time and then diverge into to different persons due to different environments and probabilistic processes in the body.
This already happens, though before the formation of any memories. We call them identical twins.
The divergence is more limited than you might imagine. One striking experiment found that if you separate identical twins and give them the instructions "just draw whatever comes into your head", they are likely to draw the same things.
> If we remove our "selves" from our bodies, are we still us?
But answering this is now a straightforward thought experiment. You just approach it incrementally.
If you replace your limbs with prosthetics, are you still you?
If you get a heart-lung transplant, are you still you?
If you get an artificial heart, are you still you?
etc.
> a somehow unique, identifiable self which ... is how most people view themselves
Well, yeah, but that's a limit of our present technology, not necessarily a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. Technology redefines the answer to that question all the time.
For what it’s worth, I think that in the process of gradual replacement of human organs with their “mechanical” equivalents, the brain will not be the last one to be replaced.
If you are searching for privacy-focused Google seaarch alternatives and are not happy with DDG, you may want to give Qwant (https://www.qwant.com, best one regarding privacy I've found so far but since the quarantine began it's been a bit slow) or Startpage (https://startpage.com, they actually show you google results) a try as well.
Not the person you asked, but I think so. Some fonts also convert “fi” into a character where the letter-spacing is very small and the i loses its point, so there’s definitely a mechanism for letter combination / adaptive spacing.
I thought the rule was that ligatures shouldn't cross syllable boundaries. Like the fi in "fine" can be replaced but not the fi in "barfing", so it would need to be a bit more than a lookup table. Or maybe a dictionary-sized lookup table isn't a problem anymore.
Are fonts Turing-complete now? I have a feeling they'll become such if not already there; a little programs, complete with configuration switches so that you can control if and how a combination of characters get converted into a ligature depending on surrounding context.
As someone with your exact background, I agree with you on almost all points. However I think that the common notion is less that AI will/should replace physicians but rather that AI could help physician to free time that they could then spend with patients. So the ongoing human involvement is an almost explicit goal (outside of radiology and pathology at least).
On another note and speaking from personal experience, NLP as well as patient information and note processing is something that might be less glorious than AI analysis of MRIs for example but which would have a far greater impact on physicians’ day to day life. Most residents spend like 50% of their time fighting applications with some of the worst UX I have ever seen just to get some basic information, log something or schedule a simple procedure.
