Silicon Valley is piling in to the business of snooping | The World’s Broken Food System Costs $12.7 Trillion a Year | Housing affordability is so strained that 1 in 5 couples ask for down payment cash on their wedding registry. Your friends and family would rather give you cash to go to Mexico | The Fine Art Of Interrupting People On Zoom

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Silicon Valley is piling in to the business of snooping - The Economist    In early September New Yorkers may have noticed an unwelcome guest hovering around their parties. In the lead-up to Labour Day weekend the New York Police Department (NYPD) said that it would use drones to look into complaints about festivities, including back-yard gatherings. Snooping police drones are an increasingly common sight in America. According to a recent survey by researchers at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, about a quarter of police departments now use them. Even more surprising is where the technology is coming from. Among the NYPD’s suppliers is Skydio, a Silicon Valley firm that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make drones easy to fly, allowing officers to control them with little training. Skydio is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital (VC) giant, and Accel, one of its peers. The NYPD is also buying from BRINC, another startup, which makes flying machines equipped with night-vision cameras that can smash through window panes. Among BRINC’s investors are Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT; and Index Ventures, another VC stalwart. That Silicon Valley is helping American law enforcement snoop on troublemakers may seem odd. Supporting state surveillance sits awkwardly with the libertarian values espoused by many American tech luminaries who came of age in the early days of the internet. Although Silicon Valley got its start supplying chips for America’s defence industry in the 1950s, its relationship with the state withered as its attention shifted from self-guided missiles to e-commerce and iPhones. Continued here The World's Broken Food System Costs $12.7 Trillion a Year - WIRED    The United Nations has published a major new tally of the impact the world's food system has on our health and the planet. According to a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the total hidden costs of the world's food system add up to $12.7 trillion dollars—roughly 10 percent of global GDP. The report analyzed the costs to health, society, and the environment embedded in the current food system. The biggest impact in monetary terms is on health: Globally, 73 percent of all the hidden costs accounted for by the FAO were associated with diets that led to obesity or non-communicable diseases like diabetes and heart disease. The next biggest impact in monetary terms was to the environment, accounting for more than 20 percent of quantified hidden costs. "We know that the agrifood system faces a number of challenges," says David Laborde, director of the FAO's Agrifood Economics Division. "And with this report, we can put a price tag on these problems." Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Housing affordability is so strained that 1 in 5 couples ask for down payment cash on their wedding registry. Your friends and family would rather give you cash to go to Mexico - Fortune    For millennials and Gen Z, the American Dream milestone of buying a home can feel hopelessly out of reach as mortgage rates hover around 8% and home prices continue to rise.  As a result, one in 5 engaged couples are rejecting the linens and dishes of traditional wedding registries and asking friends and family for down payment cash instead, according to an October report by Zillow and The Knot, a wedding planning site.  With an average of $70,000 needed for a 20% down payment on a starter home, it’s understandable that couples would search for creative ways to get cash.  Continued here The Fine Art Of Interrupting People On Zoom - Forbes    Whether you’re the silent type, an extrovert, an intern or an executive, there are passable ways to interrupt on Zoom. Allison Shapira doesn’t shy away from using her voice: A self-proclaimed extrovert, the founder of a public speaking training firm and a former opera singer, she’s rarely had trouble knowing how to speak up. But even Shapira makes mistakes when it comes to that nuanced yet high-stakes act of virtual etiquette: Interrupting someone else on a Zoom call. “It’s inherently rude [to interrupt], and yet sometimes it’s necessary to protect the conversation—or because the internet is spotty,” says Shapira, who recently had to be reminded to use the “raise hand” button when a colleague said she was interrupting too much. In a virtual setting where people are distracted, she says, technology delays reactions and in-person cues are missing. “It’s a human psychology issue,” she says, not just a tech one. Continued here

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