There must be SaaS services offering managed databases on different providers, like you buy the servers they put the software and host backups for you. Anyone got any tips?
In Sweden everyone gets around 110 euro per month as a child subsidy, you don't even need to apply. It just shows up in your bank account. At age 16 the benefit goes directly to the child.
The main difference is that in Sweden you don't need to do any paperwork to claim it, it is automatic.
The thing with these kind of benefits is that the bureucracy involved in dispensing them often costs close (or more) than the money dispensed. The system is more efficient if you just let everyone have it. It is one of the core arguments of UBI vs Welfare.
In this case the benefit still counts as welfare, not UBI obviously. However since the dispensing of the benefit is so simple (registered with tax agency, which is required to have an ID) it carries the same argument. If UBI was a thing in Sweden it would work the exact same way sans a check for parent-child relationship.
Also the amount per child grows slightly with every child up to 4 I think.
How is it checked that you're eligible? Asking because the system in the Netherlands could be defrauded, people registering to be living in the country, registering X amount of children, then going back to live in a cheaper country. Not sure if their children were actually real either.
(this was a relatively isolated incident but as these things go, they overreacted, set up software that over-eagerly identified families as defrauding the system and taking their benefits away, causing widespread chaos and a still-running compensation program that's costing the government years tens of billions to set right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...)).
If the child are registered with the tax authority and have a personnummer (ID number) then the parents get it at their tax-authority registered bank account.
About that kind of fraud I never heard anything like that in Sweden, but I would assume social services checks if children are attending school and if they are not, they investigate the parents. So this kind of fraud shouldn't be possible long-term. Social services would get called if a child doesn't show up for school or is not registered in any schools pretty quickly.
I also think that home-schooling is illegal, but not sure on the specifics.
Everyone with a child. Or half of them anyway, since it goes to one parent only (at least for parents that live together).
It's not really transferred to the child at age 16. What typically happens at that age is that the child has completed all mandatory years in school and move on to optional education and then they get paid for studying.
Yes, sorry I mis-explained the 16-year thing. I think one highlight of that is that the benefit shifts to being paid by the CSN (Sweden board of student finance, they are the ones who provide subsidized student loans as well) and it is tied to you being a student. So if you drop out of high school you stop getting this benefit.
Managing database backups myself is something that gives me nightmares. I would refuse to use bare-metal dbs unless I have a dedicated team just to manage the database (or data that is okay to lose, like caching layers).
Managing database backups is fairly straightforward. Postgres + a base backup + long term wal archiving in a blob store is very easy to set up and monitor. It could be easier, and if you don't want to manage that using RDS is certainly a valid choice, but it's a tradeoff - I often have customers that help addressing performance issues with RDS they simply wouldn't have if they sized a bare metal setup with enough RAM and NVMe and configured it even halfway decently instead, and the end result is often that they end up paying more for devops help to figure out performance bottlenecks than they'd spend putting the same devops consultant on retainer ensuring they have a solid backup setup.
I dunno, it does sound like significant work and way outside my (and most devs) area of expertise. I can definitely supervise a managed RDBMS (like RDS) by myself without help on the side even though I am no dba.
A mismanaged VPS is downtime and churn, a mismanaged DB will insta-kill your business if you have unrecoverable data loss. I would definitely use a managed solution until I can get a dedicated person to babysit the DB, but I would consider managing a VPS myself.
There's no need for a dedicated person. A single operator can easily manage dozens of DB instances unless your needs are extremely complex. Managing these kinds of things are serviced trivially available on retainer.
I have been advocating similar setups to this for years, no one wants to hear it. I get downright puzzled looks from people who think you need moon-landing monitorability of every little service and database...
We have 100k paying users and most of them don't actively use our service, yet we have microservice slop with k8 and load balancers galore running in big tech cloud provider and document databases.
From our whole setup I can only think of _maybe_ one thing that should be split into a separate dedicated service, everything else could happily live in a monolith backed by a relational database and a caching layer and a storage solution.
I remember installing Oracle in my desktop computer to be able to do my programming classes...
If the installation crashed (which was quite common, happened to me once) it was easier to just format the computer completely and start again. Effed up the database? Probably easier to format everything and install from scratch
I remember hearing about all the support from Intel for "0-cost" virtualization at the hardware level way before I heard about containers. From what I remember it was mostly to speed up virtual machines (VMWare stuff). It was a massive market differentiator for Intel in the server space.
I vaguely remember having to turn on some features in VirtualBox at the time to speed up my VMs, it was a massive uplift in performance if you had a CPU that supported it.
> For international travel, small kids having a different name is surprisingly painful and can get you stuck in an office for hours until it's somewhat clear you're not kidnapping them
Passports have your parents name, this might cause the clerk to do a double check to make sure but unless losing you or your children documents you will never run into this. Or if you are travelling without passports (which is okay between some countries) and using documents (like birth certificates) in different languages
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