Silicon Valley is piling into the business of snooping - The Economist | How to get the lying out of hiring - The Economist | Lessons from frugal businesses minting money in India - The Economist | Can America’s weapons-makers adapt to 21st-century warfare?

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click).
For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

?

?

?

?

?

?

You Might Like

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Silicon Valley is piling into the business of snooping - The Economist

In early September New Yorkers may have noticed an unwelcome guest hovering round 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 forces 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 windows. Sam Altman of OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, is among BRINC’s investors.

It may seem odd that Silicon Valley is helping American law enforcement snoop on troublemakers. 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 relations with the state withered as its attention shifted from self-guided missiles to e-commerce and iPhones.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

You Might Like

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

How to get the lying out of hiring - The Economist

Hiring processes can be thought of as a battle between candour and dishonesty. You might imagine this is a simple fight between truth-seeking firms and self-promoting candidates, and to a certain extent it is. But companies themselves are prone to bend reality out of shape in ways that are self-defeating.

Start with the obvious culprits: job applicants. The point of a CV or a LinkedIn profile is to massage reality into the most appealing shape possible. Everyone beyond a certain level of experience is a transformational leader personally responsible for generating millions in revenue; the world economy would be about 15 times bigger than it actually is if all such claims were true. The average Briton spends four and a half hours a day watching TV and online videos. But the average job candidate uses their spare time only for worthy purposes, like volunteering in soup kitchens or teaching orphans to code.

The cover letter is so open in its insincerity (“When I saw the advertisement for this job, I almost fainted with excitement”) that people are starting not to bother with it. At the interview stage one task facing the firm’s recruiters is to winkle out the truth of what a person actually contributed to a project. Those hoary questions about a candidate’s weaknesses and failures are there for a reason; no one will bring them up unprompted. Cognitive and behavioural tests are useful in part because they are harder for applicants to game.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

You Might Like

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Lessons from frugal businesses minting money in India - The Economist

For foreign investors, India is a puzzle. On the plus side, it is a potentially huge market, recently passing China as the world’s most populous. The IMF predicts that India will be the fastest-growing of the world’s 20 biggest economies this year. By 2028 its GDP is expected to be the third-largest, moving past Japan and Germany. The stockmarket is pricing in heady growth. Over the past five years Indian stocks have beaten those elsewhere in the world, including America’s.

The minuses can seem equally formidable. Just 8% of Indian households own a car. Last year the number of individual investors in Indian public markets was a paltry 35m. The smartphone revolution unleashed 850m netizens, but most scroll free apps like WhatsApp (500m users) and YouTube (460m). Blume, a venture-capital (VC) firm, estimates that only 45m Indians are responsible for over half of all online spending. Netflix, the video-streaming giant, which entered India in 2016 and charges Indians less than almost anyone else, has attracted just 6m subscribers.

The tension between tomorrow’s promise and today’s reality is reflected in India’s tech scene. Over the past decade giddy projections of spending by hundreds of millions of consumers led investors to pour money into young tech firms. According to Bain, a consultancy, between 2013 and 2021 total annual VC funding ballooned from $3bn to $38.5bn. Now the easy money is running out. In 2022 startups received $25.7bn. In the first half of this year they got a measly $5.5bn.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

You Might Like

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Can America’s weapons-makers adapt to 21st-century warfare? - The Economist

ARMING UNCLE SAM is a great business. America’s latest defence budget earmarks $170bn for procurement and $145bn for research and development (R&D), most of which ends up with the handful of “prime” contractors, which deal directly with the Department of Defence (DoD). So will some of the $44bn in American military aid to Ukraine and a chunk of the extra defence spending by America’s European allies, which account for 5-10% of the primes’ sales. Although those sums do not increase at the same rate as, say, corporate IT expenditure, leaving less room for spectacular gains, arms manufacturers are also shielded from eye-watering losses by huge, decades-long contracts.

Thanks to a big shake-up at the end of the cold war, the industry is also highly concentrated. At a meeting in 1993, dubbed the “last supper”, William Perry, then President Bill Clinton’s deputy defence secretary, told industry bosses that excess capacity was no longer appropriate and that consolidation was in order. As a result, the ranks of the primes have thinned from more than 50 in 1950s America to six. The number of suppliers of satellites has declined from eight to four, of fixed-wing aircraft from eight to three and of tactical missiles from 13 to three.

Guaranteed custom and weak competition have helped American armsmakers’ shares comfortably outperform the broader stockmarket over the past 50 years. A paper published by the DoD in April found that between 2000 and 2019 defence contractors did better than civilian ones in terms of shareholder returns, return on assets and return on equity, among other financial measures. An increasingly unstable world means more money going to the armed forces—and to their suppliers. Total shareholder returns, including dividends, at primes such as General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman rose when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th (see chart 1).

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

You Might Like

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber.
We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials.
Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month
If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here
Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 93544947