Congratulations, Michael, thank you for sharing your story!
A cautionary note on using Paypal as your sole payment system. If this is a considerable source of your income, I would caution against only using Paypal or keeping a large amount of money in that account. There are too many Paypal horror stories out there to mention of people getting their accounts limited or shut down without recourse because their automated checks flagged accounts for suspected fraud or violating their ToS. Best of luck!
Just to share my experience: I had a game server that accepted donations through Paypal. We had nearly $4000 in the account when suddenly it was frozen for "suspicious activity". We never got the money back and Paypal support ghosted us.
I am currently staying in the Philippines, and I am constantly trying (and mostly failing) at getting Filipinos interested in software engineering and programming, especially women. Women here just don't consider technology to be a valid career. The traditional professional career track for Filipinas is usually nursing, physical therapy, medical coding, or other medical careers based in hospitals.
Personally, I would love to start a top notch offshore software dev company here, but the sad fact is that this country doesn't allow 100% ownership for foreign investors.
> failing) at getting Filipinos interested in software engineering and programming, especially women
Don't get people interested, find people that are interested and lack the resources and opportunity - then help those people. There may also be a lack of interest due to cultural relevance, tech that looks cool and interesting to the west might not in SE Asia, finding local help could improve this.
You mentioned women - If you are concerned about countering artificial biases in tech, ensure fair opportunity, but you cannot expect to force people to be interested. There may be inherent statistical differences in the interest and values of technology as a career between cultures and between genders just as there are with other subject that bias in either direction. The goal should be to counter unfair, artificial biases that result from prejudice, including your own... this is an unpopular opinion, but reality is more complex than SJWs like to think, there are multiple causes for the proportions of minorities in a particular area, and this needs to be understood in order to help people effectively do what they want - in short fighting bias with bias can be harmful.
Policies of inclusivity are currently governed by the perception of the mob. Trying to apply thoughtful thinking in this area publicly is dangerous (presuming that's what he did) because it's falsely evaluated as a dichotomy between either discriminating positively or discriminating negatively... conflating all other complex sources of minority proportions, not bothering to understand the source of these differences, and ignoring the potential negative consequences of positive discrimination to the very people they intend to help - the general reaction to this criticism in my experience is that these details are insignificant, whereas I suspect the true reason is that they are uncomfortable to explore.
It's incredibly difficult to broach this subject with anyone publicly in a rational way, let alone widely because the mob has already made up it's mind that if you are not in camp A, then you are evil, since the only alternative in their eyes is camp B. If you can also see the potential harm it can cause, the best you can do is plant seeds with others, and focus on being unbiased yourself, if you want to go deeper then you could even try to explore the sources of the differences (privately) and then enact some informed change - but committing career suicide helps no one.
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This is probably the most public I've been with this subject and I already feel uncomfortable.
I forget the details of the memo, but reading Wikipedia, this criticism resonated with my memory:
“It mischaracterizes some sex differences as universal”
My sister is also on the spectrum like James has said he is. One of her struggles is ironically in understanding spectra in other areas like gender differences.
I didn't argue that more people should be software engineers than nurses. It's simply that engineering isn't considered to be the kind of career that women should pursue. Yet there are women here that are interested in it, but they get almost no support from this culture.
We need more nurses, doctors, and software developers. I admire nurses, doctors. They help all of us a lot during Covid-19. I could not post this port without helping from doctor when i suffered covid-19's complication.
VA (virtual assistant) is a common path for women in the Philippines. They are family oriented and this type of role offers a lot of flexibility for mother's there. And some of their tasks can be fairly technical. I've worked with them before and had a positive experience.
The same issue can happen with Stripe.. They approve accounts before doing underwriting, once you hit a threshold your account is reviewed for underwriting, funds will be withheld, usually a 'rolling reserve of % of last X days of transactions' sometimes it's more. :(
I'm not sure of your situation and I'm not a lawyer, but you could research forming a US corporation as a foreign citizen. Stripe offers such a service called 'atlas'. While I've never used them for that, it may be a good source of information for you.
A cautionary note on using Paypal as your sole payment system. If this is a considerable source of your income, I would caution against only using Paypal or keeping a large amount of money in that account. There are too many Paypal horror stories out there to mention of people getting their accounts limited or shut down without recourse because their automated checks flagged accounts for suspected fraud or violating their ToS. Best of luck!