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Showing posts from April, 2012

Estonian IT companies and immigration

I acknowledge that with this topic I might wander to an area of strong emotions. Nevertheless I think this is a topic that should be discussed and there is a lot win-win opportunities here. I will start by a few background facts: In 2006 a population analysis of Estonia was made that you can read here  According to the analysis by the time I will retire somewhere in the 2040's the Dependency rate will increase from the current 47% to 70% in Estonia. This means that 30% of the population will be working age and all the rest will be either children or retired. Instead of 614 000 persons working we will have approximately 300 000 people in the working age, but approximately the same number (700 000) people depending on them. So if we would like to keep the current level of pensions (a pathetic 300 euros/m), social support, education, roads, military etc we would have to double the taxes. In 2045 you will pay 66% social tax, 40% VAT, 42% income tax. So if your employer would pay ou

Gmail down...

For an hour now it seems that Gmail has been down for many users according to the Twitter feed . You can also follow the status here . All Telia, Sonera and Elion e-mail services are up and running.

The disaster of Google Picasa

I have been a fan of Google's products for many years and have been using Picasa as a wonderful web gallery service. I am a paying customer buying storage from Google. But well ... not anymore. I just did a radical change and deleted all my albums from Picasa because it turns out Google has done some nasty changes in the service. Done them without any respect to privacy and without giving any choice to the customers. Here is how the thing now works: - If you tag a photo with a person in Picasa and the person is in your Google+ circles then the whole album is opened to that person automatically. - The person tagged can then share the whole album to his circles. Maybe even make it public. - According to the new Privacy terms Google gets to keep all the photos with name tags and location tags, essentially saving the information of millions of people's life's, their whereabouts, friends.... - Picasa web albums is probably soon to be end-of-life and Google+ photos (web galle