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Startup Latvia
Why latvia
Significant changes in Startup law gives a boost for startup environment in Latvia
Image provided by Photo by Proxyclick Visitor Management System on Unsplash
Startup law
Year 2020 brought significant changes in the so-called Startup law, finally making the qualification criteria less complicated. Now it has taken a form, which is friendly for all startups. And what's more important – it seems that receiving support from the government has never been easier!
Startup support law came into force in 2017 aiming to strengthen the startup environment in Latvia. However, the excessively strict requirements for qualifying for governmental support became an obstacle, which only a few startups could overcome. In fact, the qualification criteria were so strict, only 7 startups qualified for the state support in 4 years' time.
But now it's polished almost to perfection. One of the most notable changes in the Startup law is regarding bootstrapper startups and startups, which receive a venture capital investment abroad (i.e. registering a "mother" or "daughter" company), as they now are eligible to qualify for one of the two support mechanisms. To give a glimpse of the significant and, apparently, successful changes in the Startup law: in the first 5 months of 2021 already 13 new startups have met the criteria and are now receiving state support.
Olga Barreto Goncalves, the CEO of the Latvian Startup Association, is confident, that startups are all about the people. Therefore, these recent law changes and significant tax reduction schemes will allow startups to focus more on building an excellent team and develop their company, rather than concentrating on expenses.
FIXAR, a developer and manufacturer of autonomous unmanned aerial systems for industrial applications, was one of the companies that qualified for the Startup law support program in 2021. Vasily Lukashov, CEO & Founder of FIXAR, calls it a tremendous support: "First, the amount of preferential tax with these benefits is reduced from 80% to 18%. We use the funds we've saved for new product development and global expansion. Secondly, the application for the startup law is simplified. Now there is no need to have qualified venture capital investors, which helped us in obtaining the said support."
But how does it work? Startup law offers two support mechanisms for early-stage startups – (1) low flat social tax (340.90 EUR per employee per month) and no individual tax for startup employees, and (2) 45% co-financing offered by the government for the highly qualified specialists. We've made two example scenarios to illustrate both scenarios.
An illustrative example of scenario 1 (1 month, without payroll tax booklet, 0 euro non-taxable minimum):
General tax regime Startup law regime
Employee salary (gross) 2450 2450
Employee costs for the company 3028 2686
The employee receives 1681 2200*
*after additional mandatory contributions to the state pension insurance or private voluntary pension scheme.
The employee receives 1681 1680**
**all taxes are paid according to the general tax regime; 45% repayment is made once a quarter.
Are you excited? Because we are! Don't miss your chance to apply for game-changing support! Get acquainted with Startup law and its benefits here
and make sure to learn more about both support mechanisms here
LIAA
startup [at] liaa.gov.lv
Perses street 2, Riga, Latvia
Please enter your email address *
© LIAA, 2022


From the website of the Brooklyn-based "Remedy Quarterly"
Nancy notes that Remedy Quarterly, a magazine, is based in Brooklyn.
I am now convinced that stockist is indeed happening in the U.S. However, it has not yet appeared in the mainstream media, only, apparently, in commercial communication. This puts it in the same category as bespoke: a phony, hype-y word that exists–and one hopes will stay–in the realm of advertising and promotion.
American here….bespoke was pretty commonly used in Boston in the 1960s when I was growing up. Not sure how common it is now, but possibly common enough that I stopped noticting it.


The Shave Crate is the best men's shave club out there. Instead of the monthly subscription boxes for men, our shave crate comes every 3 months. This ensures timely delivery of your shaving essentials perfectly so you're never overwhelmed with product you don't need.


text:
FDA chief calls for probe of relationship between agency and Biogen
The decision to greenlight Aduhelm has drawn widespread scrutiny, and came over the objections of independent advisers to the FDA and other experts who said there was little evidence of its effectiveness.
Biogen headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. | AP Photo/Steven Senne
By Katherine Ellen Foley
The Food and Drug Administration's acting commissioner has called for a watchdog probe of her agency's dealings with the drugmaker Biogen prior to last month's accelerated approval of a new Alzheimer's therapy from the company.
The decision to greenlight Aduhelm has drawn widespread scrutiny, and came over the objections of independent advisers to the FDA and other experts who said there was little evidence of its effectiveness. STAT reported that FDA officials worked with Biogen executives to help get the drug, which has an annual cost of $56,000, on the market.
The review by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general will establish "whether any interactions that occurred between Biogen and FDA review staff are inconsistent with FDA policies and procedures," acting commissioner Janet Woodcock wrote in a letter made public Friday. It would also assuage concerns about any kind of inappropriate relationship between the agency and a company it regulates, Woodcock wrote.
Backstory: The decision to approve Aduhelm stirred heated debate among public health experts and private insurers. Critics, including some within FDA, have argued that the late-stage clinical trial data did not demonstrate that the therapy was effective. On Thursday, the FDA reversed its initial decision on how to label Aduhelm. Instead of an approved usage for all patients with Alzheimer's, it is now indicated only for those in the earliest stages of the disease.
What's next: Public Citizen has also called for an independent investigation of the FDA's collaboration with Biogen. Last month, two congressional committees also launched their own investigation into the decision to approve the drug.
FDA,

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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L'aeroporto di Poitiers-Biard è un aeroporto francese situato vicino alla città di Poitiers, nel dipartimento della Vienne.

Voci correlate
 Elenco degli aeroporti francesi

Collegamenti esterni

Poitiers
Poitiers

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Tacopaya es una localidad y municipio de Bolivia, ubicado en la provincia de Arque del departamento de Cochabamba. El municipio tiene una superficie de 684 km² y cuenta con una población de 10.253 habitantes (según el Censo INE 2012). La localidad se encuentra a 136 km al sudoeste de la ciudad de Cochabamba, la capital departamental, y a 138 km de la ciudad de Oruro, conectada con ambas mediante la Ruta 4.

El municipio fue creado el 30 de septiembre de 1941 durante la presidencia de Enrique Peñaranda. En 2015 fue el primer municipio de Bolivia en promulgar su Carta Orgánica, siendo aprobada mediante referéndum municipal.

Geografía
Su topografía es muy accidentada y abrupta con pendientes fuertes. El relieve está determinado por paisajes montañosos con cerros interfluviales y valles profundos con laderas muy escarpadas. Al municipio le corresponden dos zonas agroecológicas (según la clasificación de Holdridge), la zona altoandina o puna y la zona meso andina superior con cabecera de valle. El promedio de precipitación pluvial anual es de 600 mm y su clima es templado, con una temperatura promedio de 9,6 °C. Los meses con mayor precipitación son enero y febrero con más de 80 mm por mes y los de menor precipitación son junio y julio con un poco más de 3 mm.

Sus recursos hídricos comprenden los ríos Arque, Tacopaya y Rocha de la cuenca amazónica. La unión del Rocha y el Arque forman el río Caine que es parte del curso alto del río Grande.

Economía

El municipio se dedica principalmente a la producción agropecuaria. Los cultivos más importantes son los de papa, oca, papaliza, isaño, cebada, trigo, maíz, haba, arveja y tarwi. La papa registra la mayor producción con 51.429,8 quintales, le sigue cebada en grano con 13.414,7 quintales y alfalfa con 4.100,5 quintales. La agricultura se practica en suelos de capa arable poco profunda, con una baja fertilidad. En cuanto a la producción pecuaria, tiene ganado vacuno, camélido, ovino y, en menor cantidad, asnos, cerdos y aves de corral. La actividad pecuaria más importantees la cría de ganado ovino con 38.473 cabezas, seguido del ganado caprino y de llamas con 5.192 y 3.697 cabezas respectivamente. Los tejidos, la elaboración de queso o la molienda de granos, la alfarería artesanal, la elaboración y venta de chicha son actividades secundarias.

En el municipio se encuentran unas aguas termales a 45 minutos en auto desde el pueblo de Tacopaya, que pueden constituirse a futuro en un atractivo turístico natural. Entre otros atractivos están: los Molinos de Ornoni, su arquitectura típica de la colonia con calles angostas de adoquines, el Puente Colgante, el centro arqueológico de Chullpas, el evento tradicional del Toro Tinku y sus tejidos artesanales.

Véase también
 Tinku

Referencias

Municipios del departamento de Cochabamba


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Q: Does it make sense to run Spark job for its side effects? I want to run a Spark job, where each RDD is responsible for sending certain traffic over a network connection. The return value from each RDD is not very important, but I could perhaps ask them to return the number of messages sent. The important part is the network traffic, which is basically a side effect for running a function over each RDD.
Is it a good idea to perform the above task in Spark?
I'm trying to simulate network traffic from multiple sources to test the data collection infrastructure on the receiving end. I could instead manually setup multiple machines to run the sender, but I thought it'd be nice if I could take advantage of Spark's existing distributed framework.
However, it seems like Spark is designed for programs to "compute" and then "return" something, not for programs to run for their side effects. I'm not sure if this is a good idea, and would appreciate input from others.
To be clear, I'm thinking of something like the following
IDs = sc.parallelize(range(0, n))

def f(x):
    for i in range(0,100):
        message = make_message(x, i)
        SEND_OVER_NETWORK(message)
    return (x, 100)

IDsOne = IDs.map(f)
counts = IDsOne.reduceByKey(add)

for (ID, count) in counts.collect():
    print ("%i ran %i times" % (ID, count))

A: Generally speaking it doesn't make sense:

*

*Spark is a heavyweight framework. At its core there is this huge machinery which ensures that data is properly distributed, collected, recovery is possible and so on. It has a significant impact on overall performance and latency but doesn't provide any benefits in case of side-effects-only tasks

*Spark concurrency has a relatively low granularity with partition being the main unit of concurrency. At this level processing becomes synchronous. You cannot move on to the next partition before you finish the current one.
Lets say in your case there is a single slow SEND_OVER_NETWORK. If you use map you pretty much block processing on a whole partition. You can go at the lower level with mapPartitions, make SEND_OVER_NETWORK asynchronous, and return only when a whole partition has been processed. It is better but still suboptimal.
You can increase number of partitions, but it means higher bookkeeping overhead so at the end of the day you can make situation worse not better.

*Spark API is designed mostly for side effects free operations. It makes it hard to express operations which doesn't fit into this model.
What is arguably more important is that Spark guarantees only that each operation is executed at-least-once (lets ignore zero-times if rdd is never materialized). If application requires for example exactly-once semantics things become tricky especially when you consider point 2.
It is possible to keep track of local state for each partition outside the main Spark logic but if you get there it is a really good sign that Spark is not the right tool.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Matt Johnson, a graduate student at Duke, just identified an interesting problem with the phytools function phylosig. Basically, he was finding that phylosig(...,method="lambda",se=se) was giving discrepant results when he rescaled the branch lengths of the tree to be very short (say, scaling all edge lengths by 1/1000). This was a problem unique to the optimization of λ with sampling error in the estimation of species means. This immediately pointed towards the R base package multidimensional optimizer, optim, because no other methods in phylosig use optim aside from λ with sampling error.
Ok, so far so good. Now let's try and rescale the tree to have really short branches. In theory this should not affect our estimate of phylogenetic signal.
Obviously, there's some kind of problem here. What I've been able to figure out is that it is a convergence issue - for some reason, convergence is more difficult for the larger value of σ2 that results from rescaling the branch lengths to have very short lengths. [Note that for any change to the branch lengths of the tree by factor 1/k, the fitted evolutionary rate should increase by factor k.] I've made some headway towards resolving this issue and will post more, along with an updated version of phylosig shortly.


Beautiful sanctuary seats up to 1200. Great for concerts, weddings, lectures, or other ceremonies.
Social Hall and commercial kitchen can accommodate banquets, auctions, receptions. Many other rooms of various sizes for meetings of many types.


We are having an interesting adventure with local eating. First of all, our Florida Prince peach tree is bearing ripe fruit.
Our first picking of ripe peaches this year.
Oh, good, peaches! I'll make a cobbler.
I used a recipe from All Recipes online, and didn't change a thing. It was fabulous.
I went from "Oh good," to "Oh God" in three days.
This was the second picking, over 18 lbs of peaches. I ran out of bowls to put them in.
I made a second cobbler and put rest of the peaches into a cooler with ice until I can process them. I plan to make peach preserves today, and freeze the rest. But this is only part of the crop! There are still more peaches on the tree. They are tiny and take forever to peel, pit, and slice. I see my future stretching endlessly ahead of me….
Some research showed that Pearson's Port on Newport Bay is a fish shop that carries live Spot Prawns. Apparently, the prawns are best cooked as soon as possible (i.e., cooked while live), because the heads produce an enzyme that will spoil the meat within a couple of hours after the prawns die. This is not something that you want to buy dead on ice.
I figured it would be best to buy the prawns around noon at Pearson's Port rather than 6 am at the dory fleet, and have them for lunch. So we resolved to have Spot Prawns as part of our meatless Friday, as well as a local food.
Live Spot Prawns in a tank.
Live Yellow Rock Crabs in a tank. I plan to try some of these in the next week or so.
We learned that Spot Prawns are sustainably fished, which is important to us. They are all born male, but by two years, they all turn into females. So the large prawns that we bought were all female, having been males last year. Weird.
The man at the fish shop offered to take their heads off for us, but he recommended cooking the heads as well. And that is what I did.
Spot Prawns cooking in a skillet with olive oil and rock salt.
The prawns were pretty big. I sautéed the prawns for two minutes per side in olive oil and coarsely grated Himalayan pink salt. The idea is that you get the oil and salt on your fingers as you peel and eat the shrimp. I melted butter with lemon juice for one dip, and made a second dip of sesame oil, lime juice, cilantro, and a hint of mirin (sweet Japanese rice wine). Both were great. The tails were sweet and succulent, more like lobster than shrimp. The taste was divine, and I am definitely going to make them again. But not too often because the four prawns cost $15. Two were OK for lunch, but I could have easily eaten three. Or four. Or…. They were SOOOO good.
The table set for two.
Spot Prawns and home-grown artichokes for lunch. That is about as local as one can get.
The heads with thoraxes had a few drops of tasty liquid in them, but not much else except eggs. As an experiment, I decided to simmer the heads and the discarded shells from the tail in a quart of water to make a stock for Spot Prawn Bisque. I added a half onion, a carrot, a couple of stalks of celery, and half a cup of white wine. I also dumped in the rest of the lemon – butter that we had dipped our artichokes into.
I thickened the stock with 1/4 C flour, and added a pint of half and half, and a goodly dollop of sherry. That was our spot prawn bisque that we had for dinner. But it was too much for one meal. The next night, I diced two gold potatoes, a half onion, and 3 ounces of bacon and fried that up until done. I added the leftover bisque to that and made a hearty chowder for the next night's dinner. And there was enough of THAT left for lunch today. So we got four meals out of those four prawns. Not too shabby.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged artichokes, bisque, cobbler, dory fleet, local food, Newport Beach, peaches, Pearson's Port, spot prawns. Bookmark the permalink.
6 Responses to Peaches and Spot Prawns–but not together!
Yum peaches. Mine are just starting to bloom right now.
Daphne, wish I could leave comments on your blog too, but my attempts usually fail. Thanks for stopping by.
Two big yums! I buy spot prawns at the wharf in Monterey, get them home ASAP and quickly saute them with garlic, fennel, mild pepper flakes, and a splash of wine. They are so sweet and tender.
Michelle, the fennel and pepper flakes aren't to my taste, but the splash of wine sure sounds good.
I love the peaches! I know you said that they are starting to overwhelm, but when you get your preserves made you'll be glad for the haul. 🙂 We have a place where we can buy from the fishermen in Mobile, Alabama and there is another one further down the coast in Grand Bay, Alabama. It is a really neat experience, but I haven't been down there for a long time.
Crafty Cristy, I'm glad to know that you too have access to locally caught seafood.


remove from marinade and cook over medium high heat on a greased grill for no more than 15 minutes or until done.
Cooking time for second side is shorter by 1-2 minutes.
3/4 inch or thicker: 6-7 minutes maximum per side.
Do NOT Over-Grill, chops with become too tough.
After 2 minutes of grilling on a side, rotate chops 45 degrees for even cooking. Turn over when juice pool on upper surface and meat appears to be cooked half-way through.