Why Payoneer is best alternative of Paypal for Pakistani freelancers

The biggest hurdle that Pakistani freelancers have faced over the year is that of non-availability of Paypal’s services for Pakistanis. This impediment has caused huge losses to our freelancers. Huge potential clients could not be signed because they could only pay via paypal and paypal didn’t offer its service in Pakistan. The irony continue for years.

All that has changed with Payoneer though. This service has truly been a godsend for Pakistani freelancers, especially in recent couple of years when it started its instant with withdrawal service for Pakistan.

The best thing about Paypal is that it offers a variety of services to freelancers that makes life much easier. A freelancer can create a bank account in various countries and continents thought its Global Payment Service.

If a freelancer is dealing with foreign company, then s/he can easily give out his/her bank account detail of that specific region to that company and get paid easily.

Currently the Global Payment Services allows a freelancer to create accounts in USA, UK, EU, Australia, Canada, and Japan. That is about 95% of the countries where a freelancer can do business.

After receiving money into your account, comes the withdrawal part. A freelancer has the choice to get a Mastercard based debit card which can be used anywhere online or at ATMs in the world where Mastercard is accepted.

The second option is withdrawal directly to one’s bank account. This too is a straight forward option and usually takes a few minutes to an hour for your funds to be deposited into your local bank account.

Payoneer has truly been a life saver of Pakistani freelancers because it came at a time when they needed it the most.

Google makes $27 billion in ad revenue in first quarter of 2018

File photo of Google CEO, Sundar Pichai.

Google put out its financial results last week and it turns out it made a shockingly large amount of money from ads. They made $27 billion in ad revenue in just last three months.

If you do the mate, that’s $300 million of revenue every single day, or around $12.5 million every hour. Quite the money-maker, eh?

What’s more, the number of paid clicks on Google Ads is increasing fast. Paid clicks on Google Ads were 59 per cent higher than the same period last year.

“Our ongoing strong revenue growth reflects our momentum globally, up 26% versus the first quarter of 2017 and 23% on a constant currency basis to $31.1 billion. We have a clear set of exciting opportunities ahead, and our strong growth enables us to invest in them with confidence,” said Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet and Google.

Is Snapchat Sexist?

While around 70% of Snapchat users might be women, many blame the famous messaging app for being sexist due to its heavy focus on filters that promote a specific version of female beauty. Their filters create a false and unnatural image of beauty that could only be achieved through those filters.

Many young girls cope to reconcile with reality outside the pretty world of Snapchat filters because they get conditioned with a false concept of beauty.

The world of Snapchat is full of pretty filters with all the ruffles, glitter, anime eyes, head gears and make up. It completely changes one’s facial outlook.

Psychologists believe such sexist filters can result in depression and lack of confidence among women, especially young girls, and they’ll struggle to face people in real world. They’ll want to project a Snapchat-like filtered image of themselves, and failing to do so will cause them anxiety and depression.

Such pressure to conform to a certain definition of “beautiful” can have drastic psychological effects.

Moreover, almost 90% of the filters are usually about making one look like a pretty little kitty, something which many male users of the app would not prefer for themselves. Even so, many feminists decry the promotion of flawless female skin or big eyelashes as the metric of judging female beauty.

Having less male-filters aside, these female-targeted filters affect men too as they also get conditioned with a specific type of female beauty. They start to expect seeing women with similar features in real-world.

The result is that on one hand, we have women who lack confidence for not looking as pretty as they do on Snapchat filters, and on the other hand, we have desperate and disappointed men who fail meet women who looked the same like they did using those filters.

Robot waiters: how AI to steal human jobs, even in Pakistan

A restaurant in Multan recently became the center of attention not because of its taste but for its use of robotic waitresses, the first of its kind in Pakistan. The business of Syed Aziz Ahmed Jafari, owner of the fast food restaurant, boomed after he introduced this novel idea in his restaurant.

Syed’s son, Osama Aziz, an electrical engineering graduate, originally came up with the idea of employing robotic waitresses. The spectacle of robots serving food has since been stealing all the spotlights in Multan.

“Even people from other cities are coming to take a look at the robot and get served by it”, said the restaurant owner.

While it may be a novel experience in Pakistan, many Chinese and American restaurants started using robotic waiters as early as 2006. Though initially some of them proved quite incompetent, these worker robots however improved in their functionality with the passage of time, which resulted in more restaurants adopting the trend.

With Osama’s introduction of robots as waiters in Pakistan, it is more likely many others in the country will jump on the bandwagon of this technological innovation. The idea of robots serving food to customers is a fascinating one, and one that certainly attracts more customers who want  to experience this technological innovation, especially kids who love getting served by robots.

However, novelty and fun part aside, there is an unintended down side to this idea, something whose effects we might only see in future, just like we have seen in China and many other countries.

Many human waiters have gone jobless after the introduction of robotic waiters by restaurants. The price of a robot is a one-time cost for the restaurant owner which is just a couple of months salary of a waiter.

Moreover, with the advancement in robotic technology and it becoming more affordable by the day, more and more restaurateurs will be tempted to do this one-time investment in robots and cut on the long term huge cost of employing humans as waiters.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting leaps and bounds in its bid to instill human-like intelligence in machines. Each step forward by AI puts many jobs at risk of being taken over by machines.

Kai-Fu Lee, an influential technologist from China who previously headed Google China and is the founder of venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures, recently said Robots were likely to replace 50 percent of all jobs in the next decade.

There are already calls for new laws to protect robots from stealing human jobs. Gerlind Wisskirchen, vice-chair of the global employment institute, said existing laws regulating employment and safety are becoming rapidly outdated and need to be revised to include human job safety from the AI and robotic over-take.

While the pace of robots taking over our jobs might be slow, especially in a third-world country like Pakistan, it is inevitable. It is thus necessary to introduce laws to protect human jobs from getting stolen by AI.