Since it is a kind of electronic device, it can be equipped with various additional functions like smartphones by utilizing the embedded semiconductor chip.

allowing to see objects far away

Children can still catch the virus in spaces with low CO2 levels and good ventilation.

Air quality testing is done on an as-needed basis

Pressure from around the country led to Delaware’s attorney general finally ending the state’s opposition to such legislation. Unfortunately, trusts and partnerships are exempt from the law, creating a glaring loophole the Wealth Defense Industry will exploit.

ngress made an important first step in December 2020 with the bipartisan passage of the Corporate Transparency Act, legislation requiring corporations and companies to disclose their beneficial owners to an arm of the Treasury Department.

Fixing the system The first step in fixing the global wealth hiding system is for the United States to get its own house in order. No longer can we point our fingers at other countries for their weak oversight and opaque systems.

In another epoch, the mercantilist Rotarians might have led the charge to protect their economy against feudalistic wealth dynasties and instigated the rule against perpetuities. But South Dakotans are new to living in a plutocratic economy and will probably have to learn the lesson the hard way.

Under Janklow, the state was already rewriting its laws for Citibank. In 1980, the state also eliminated its New Deal–era anti-usury laws, passed in the 1930s to prevent loan sharks, predatory lending, and the charging of exorbitant interest rates. This is why most major credit card companies are South Dakota corporations, and why they can charge interest rates of over 20 percent to their customers.

The rule, in the words of journalist Nicholas Shaxson, is “an arcane but powerful democratic curb to stop large concentrations of wealth from passing down family bloodlines from generation to generation inside trus

The Dynasty Trust Industry Trusts are an essential component of the wealth hiding apparatus. There may be some legitimate purposes to trusts, such as holding funds for a person with special needs. The problem begins when the very wealthy—and their wealth defense enablers—deliberately design opaque rules and legal structures that fog up the question of ownership.

e state repealed its “rule against perpetuities,” which the Trust Association described as opening doors “for South Dakota trust companies and banks to provide a significant added benefit to their customers.” That benefit is the elixir of immortality for dynastic wealth.

In 1980, a Wisconsin lawyer representing a wealthy family moved their trusts to South Dakota to take advantage of weak regulation and no state income tax, dodging over $12 million in Wisconsin income taxes. This lawyer lobbied South Dakota governor Bill Janklow to repeal the state’s “rule against perpetuities” to make the state the “top jurisdiction for personal trusts.”

Tobin told the Rotarians a story that was intended to be a folksy story of local entrepreneurship. What I heard was a parable of a state legislature being captured by a tiny financial services sector and turned into a global mecca for wealth hiding.

t’s be clear: They have done this with the sole intention of sequestering and protecting their client’s wealth from tax collectors and other legitimate claimants.

The industry generates $1.3 billion in direct annual revenue for Delaware, about 28 percent of the state’s budget. Add in tax revenue from the wealth defense industry and the 8 to ten percent of Delaware’s revenue—roughly half a billion dollars a year—that comes from recovering abandoned property, and effectively half the state’s tax dollars come from “imported money.” Delaware should be renamed the “First Freeloader State.”

Nearly half of all US corporations are registered in Delaware. There are now more corporations than people, with 1.3 million entities and a state population of 960,000. In 2017 alone, over 198,000 entities were formed, more than half of them as one of Delaware’s famous limited liability companies. One building, located at 1209 Orange Street in Wilmington, is the mail drop for over 285,000 companies.

In the last several years, however, things have gotten embarrassing for President Biden’s home state. A dizzying amount of criminal activity has been traced to Delaware limited liability companies (LLCs) with no requirements to disclose real owners.

From its founding, Delaware built a large corporation registration service industry—and the professionals from the Wealth Defense Industry have labored to protect it. This includes a corporate-friendly judiciary, the Delaware Chancery Court, which rapidly dispatches challenges to corporate rule.

But there is nothing quite like Delaware. Transparency expert Richard Murphy believes Delaware is the largest source of anonymous shell entities in the world. As Leslie Wayne observed in The New York Times, “Big corporations, small-time businesses, rogues, scoundrels and worse—all have turned up at Delaware addresses in hopes of minimizing taxes, skirting regulations, plying friendly courts or, when needed, covering their tracks.”

Delaware and Shell Companies As the premiere secrecy jurisdiction in the country, Delaware is the weakest link in the US effort to institute transparency reforms. Several other states have attempted to mimic Delaware, including Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nevada.

Shell companies incorporated in Delaware and trust companies in South Dakota provide powerful pathways to subvert law enforcement. It is through vehicles like these that billions and probably trillions of global wealth are being funneled into the country.

If you are a Russian oligarch, a Chinese billionaire, or a dictator from a resource-rich nation in the Global South, and you need to get your money out of your home country, the USA is now your destination to park and hide large amounts of wealth. And as a global movement to tax billionaires to pay for pandemic recover emerges, it is now a weak link in the global system of transparency and accountability.

t to be outdone, several US states, such as Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, and Delaware, have joined the low-accountability arms race in attempts to bring the advantages of trust manipulation “onshore.” These wealth defender claim they are “just obeying the law,” but some are actively involved in creating new legal mechanisms and blocking fixes to the current porous system.

For example, in the area of “asset protection trusts,” an insidious innovation that allows the rich to mask ownership, offshore jurisdictions such as Nevis, the Cook Islands, the Cayman Islands, and the British Virgin Islands have been competing for decades in manipulating and mutating the trust form.

And driving this process is a growing “aealth Defense Industry,” the subject of my new book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. These professional money managers, tax attorneys, and accountants are essential to aiding the world’s wealthy in a global wealth vanishing act. In the United States, they worked to bring some of common offshore wealth hiding tools back home.

The problem was that the United States didn’t reciprocate. Foreigners shifting funds to this country had no comparable reporting requirements. This was partly made possible by our federalist system of government, which allows states like Delaware and South Dakota to compete in a race to the bottom to lower disclosure standards and create conditions for anonymous shell companies and dynasty trusts favored by the world’s wealthy.

At the same time, member countries of the European Union and OECD agreed to high levels of financial transparency, including “country-by-country” reporting standards on movements of funds and disclosure of corporate beneficial ownership.

Starting in 2009, the Obama administration made it harder for US citizens to hide money in foreign banks, passing laws like the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act and entering into international treaties to require global banks to meet US reporting standards. This discouraged the use of the storied “Swiss Bank account” and other offshore banks for US nationals.

This hiding activity—shell companies, offshore accounts, trust creation—has accelerated as wealth has concentrated in recent decades. An estimated $24 trillion to $36 trillion in wealth, controlled by the planet’s wealthiest 0.1 percent, is now hidden in various mechanisms.

ding to the biennial Financial Secrecy Index 2020, produced by the UK-based Tax Justice Network, it is now the world’s second largest tax haven, moving ahead of Switzerland. Only the Cayman Islands are a more porous secrecy jurisdiction than the United States, which now accounts for over 21 percent of offshore global services.

It’s tempting to believe illicit finance is an “offshore problem,” especially because of the fine investigative reporting focused on leaks in offshore tax havens from Panama to Bermuda. But in the last decade, the United States has become the premiere global destination for hidden wealth and kleptocratic capital.

But if he intends to crack down, he should start with a long look in the mirror. The United States has now become the global center for money hiding and illicit wealth storage. And Delaware, the state Biden represented in the Senate for 36 years, is the go-to destination for plutocratic tax dodgers and criminal money launderers.

As he prepared to take office, President Joe Biden called out corporate corruption as a threat to national security. “I will lead efforts internationally to bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies,” Biden wrote in Foreign Policy.

The US has now become the global center for money hiding and illicit wealth storage.

How Tax Haven States Enable Billionaires to Hide Trillions

Tesla is actually going to make a ‘Tesla Bot’ humanoid robot for general purpose use

SBSP could be the route to ensure Earth’s energy needs are met in the long-term, with the first country to achieve it gaining a geopolitical and commercial advantage. That’s arguably a better story than even a Bond movie!

Currently, the key players in SBSP include the Chinese, US and Japanese governments of China, which are all eager to secure access to a clean, unlimited power sources. China, for example, is planning on sending the first functioning prototype into space as soon as 2022, with intentions of making SBSP commercially viable by 2050.

Despite its many advantages, there is one major drawback to this alternative source of energy: the astronomical cost. While in theory the technologies needed to make SBSP a reality already exist, the cost of production, launch, and assembly (which would most likely have to happen in space), currently make it commercially unviable. The technological advances made in recent years, however, have significantly lowered launch costs, raising hopes for the future.

Secondly, it bypasses the problem of energy storage as the continuous stream of power from the sun would allow the energy to be beamed down directly when needed.

This technology has several advantages over normal solar power. Firstly, it eliminates downtime due to bad weather and nighttime. In an average winter month in Europe, only 3% of sunlight reaches Earth, while satellites in space could gather energy for 99% of the year.

Transitioning to clean sources of energy is perhaps the most pressing item on the agenda to limit global warming to the 1.5 °C target set by the Paris Agreement. The energy sector is the world’s number one pollutant, accounting for over 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to the Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions.

Space-based solar power (SBSP) is edging closer to becoming a reality and, in the long term, could help complete the transition to green energy sources.

Here comes the sun: space-based solar power is on the horizon

“The difficulty is the distribution,” said Mr. Glynn, who co-founded one of metropolitan New York’s largest ice cream trucking networks.

The industry shifted from multiple distribution channels to a “warehouse-driven model” dominated by packaged food corporations, he said. As a result, he added, “artisanal brands have to go to retailers and pay an enormous amount of slotting” — industry speak for fees to get placement on store shelves, which can run as high as $40,000 per flavor.

Going down the acquisition path meant a frantic scramble for exposure as well as access to freezer shelves, an expensive enterprise that, people say, can be more about connections than how good the ice cream is.

Crista Freeman saw few investors interested in ice cream when she opened Phin & Phebes in 2010, but after the Talenti sale, “that changed dramatically.” Suddenly, she said, “angel investors” were everywhere, offering large investments to incubate the transition from small store into juicy acquisition target. Few owners could resist.

Last year, industry darling Van Leeuwen received $18.7 million in investment from San Francisco private equity firm Nextworld Evergreen. It has opened 17 scoop shops in New York and 27 nationwide.

The producers strove to promote community and craft above profit, but beneath the it’s-all-good vibes the emerging market echoed the competition of global ice cream, a trade dominated by Nestlé and Unilever.

The deal signaled the mainstreaming of artisanal ice cream and ignited a frenzy to create the next blockbuster.

It didn’t take long for Nestlé and Unilever to notice. “The truth of the matter is that you have two world giants that will spend a fortune to protect what they have,” Mr. Glynn said. In 2014, Unilever bought Talenti, a former Dallas gelateria whose product had been meticulously reconstructed into an irresistible addition to the multinational corporation’s massive portfolio of packaged foods. Now the brand’s screw-top clear containers are available at Walmart.

Soon, not just in Brooklyn but around the country, true believers in the glory of America’s favorite dessert thrived by offering alternatives to ice cream made with chemical stabilizers.

“They tried to wipe everybody else out” and divide the market between them, Leo Glynn, one of the industry’s most sought-after consultants, explained early this spring, as Blue Marble was planning an expansion. (Mr. Glynn passed away in April.) But it didn’t work. “They became so profit-motivated, it gave all these small artisanal guys an opportunity,” he said.

r the previous two decades, the dueling behemoths, one Swiss and one Anglo-Dutch, had gone on acquisition tears, buying up mainstream brands like Häagen-Dazs (Nestlé), Ben & Jerry’s (Unilever), Dreyer’s (Nestle) and Klondike (Unilever).

“It’s really hard in a place like New York to not start compromising, because things are expensive and they eat into your margins,” Ms. Gallivan said. Blue Marble refused to cut corners, she said, in the belief that “ultimately quality ingredients and the best ice cream will prevail.”

Compromises beckoned, however, as Blue Marble began racking up successes in its early years, including partnerships with JetBlue and Facebook.

To get that texture, Mr. Bucci said, “you can spend $20-30,000 a week on milk and cream alone.” He added — emphatically — that there were no shortcuts.

“It’s in the chew,” said Thomas Bucci Jr., a fourth-generation ice cream maker whose Rhode Island factory “co-packs” pints for Blue Marble and other brands. Good ice cream, he said, “has a certain bite, as opposed to the big guys, where it’s just air — it doesn’t even melt.”

Blue Marble’s overarching concept, like that of so many Brooklyn brands, was lofty and vaguely European, featuring “elemental” flavors sourced from upstate farms with unimpeachable organic pedigrees and no candy or breakfast cereal.

Ms. Gallivan said there was a “eureka moment” when the women started craving the kind of ice cream that existed in Boston, “where there’s this amazing ice cream tradition.” In New York, “there was like Tasti D-Lite and Baskin-Robbins — nothing worth the calories, as my mom would say.”

For Ms. Dundas, who opened her first scoop shop back when an after-dinner ice cream run usually meant a plunge into a bodega freezer or a trip to a dreary chain, the artisan ice cream boom has been the vindication of a vision. But it has not yielded riches. On the contrary, it has triggered thoughts of exiting the business, as it has for other artisan producers.

“We were like, ‘Why is there no great artisan ice cream in New York City?’” Ms. Dundas said.

At the time, the upstarts of the borough’s anti-industrial food revolution were looking for any category they could disrupt through local ingredients or handmade production. Brooklynified beer, chocolate and pizza were gathering hype as well as space on store shelves. Yet frozen dessert remained a maltodextrin wasteland.

‘It’s in the chew’Ms. Dundas founded Blue Marble with Alexis Gallivan, a nonprofit specialist who had been working in international development. Ms. Gallivan had never run a business, either, but it didn’t matter. The timing for an ice cream shop in Brooklyn was right.

Now Ms. Dundas is part of the ice cream old guard. I remember watching her open her shop on Atlantic with puzzlement, knowing that she had essentially no business experience (a not uncommon origin story in the ice cream industry, it turned out).

When Blue Marble opened in 2008, it turned its back on Manhattan. Brooklyn was where the energy was, and the passion behind the growing farm-to-table movement. It was also a cheaper place to operate a business. The first Blue Marble debuted on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill, and expansion soon followed with a pair of shops in Prospect Heights.

“I just want to stay in the game,” Ms. Dundas told me then.

e plan was something of a gamble: a modest expansion while remaining true to Blue Marble’s indie roots and hopefully sidestepping the financial risks and loss of control that come with outside funding.

Last winter, after watching several rivals go the private equity route and others quietly fold, Ms. Dundas decided on a middle path. Using the brand’s own money, Blue Marble would add a single shop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in time for what Ms. Dundas hoped would be the city’s pandemic reawakening.

“Nobody is profitable,” Ms. Freeman said. “It’s just a game. You have to constantly raise money to compete.”

“People are increasingly seeing sugar as the bad element, and fat they’re less worried about,” Ms. Mapes-Christ said.

Even before Covid-19, the industry had been pinning its hopes on “adult” ice cream, a relatively new category known for subdued sugar and noble flavors such as Earl Grey tea.

“Everyone’s like: ‘I’m going to be the next Talenti. I’m going to be the next Halo Top.’ But it’s one in 1,000, right?” said Crista Freeman, an industry veteran.

The spoils of success — tens of millions of dollars in incubation deals, plus the potential for hundreds of millions more if a label is bought by a giant like Unilever — have heightened competition in the $10-a-pint world. Now the business of gourmet ice cream is go big or melt.

Small, indie producers like Jennifer Dundas, the co-founder of Blue Marble in Brooklyn, have driven the innovation in the past decade. Ms. Dundas has been in the field for 14 years, but I’ve known her even longer — we grew up in the same Boston suburb — and through her have seen how ruthless selling organic banana cream pie ice cream in biodegradable bowls can be.

Artisan ice cream — a “squishy” term, she said, that usually refers to product with less air and more fat but “mostly just means ‘fancy’” — is growing even faster than mainstream ice cream and is considered the industry’s future.

Fueled by pandemic trends of “at-home comfort” and “anytime eating,” the $7 billion industry grew 17 percent in 2020, after roughly 2.4 percent annual growth over the previous decade, said Jennifer Mapes-Christ of the market research firm Packaged Facts

The Cutthroat World of $10 Ice Cream

It has never been a better time to eat ice cream or a more cutthroat time to try to sell it.

For shoppers worn down by the journey through a hangar-size Whole Foods, it’s also a reward: an ultradecadent bounty in an ever-multiplying variety of daring and imaginative flavors.

That is traditional grocery store wisdom, mainly so the product won’t melt in the cart as it winds through the aisles.

Flying cars may seem futuristic – but from commercial jetpacks to personal air taxis, they are already here. Here’s how they could transform the way we commute, work and live.

2. Encourage activities that reduce anxiety Playing outside, playing with friends or even just “hanging out” can be powerful ways to reduce negative feelings. Outdoors, people often feel more relaxed – the antithesis of anxiety. Playing in an unstructured way – that is, without someone else telling them what or how to play – allows kids to work through their feelings successfully and reduce anxiety.

To whatever extent the delta variant affects in-person instruction in the fall of 2021, back-to-school this year will be different from pre-pandemic years. Anxiety may be a challenge for many more children than usual, and it can be intertwined with other feelings, such as excitement and shyness.

As a child, I had a great deal of anxiety. If you’ve ever seen me speak in public, that might surprise you. But anxiety among children is extremely common and affects almost all children, to varying degrees.

6. Get professional help when needed If your child’s anxiety is interfering with sleep, eating, socializing or school attendance, and it persists beyond a few days, it’s a good idea to call your pediatrician or family doctor and report what’s going on. Medical professionals who work with children are seeing anxiety skyrocket among kids, and they know how to get your child the necessary help.

5. Embrace distraction Distraction isn’t a cure for anxiety, but it can diminish its intensity and help sufferers think more clearly about the source of their worries. When children are feeling very anxious, it’s fine to talk to them about how watching an engaging program, or reading a funny book, can help them feel calmer.

4. Focus on family activities The emotional connection that children have with their families is their psychological anchor during difficult times. At a time when so much of everyday life has changed, spending time with family can be an antidote for uncertainty. Take a walk or a hike together, eat dinner together, play board games.

n example of this might be worrying that there has been no progress in fighting the pandemic, despite widespread information about the development of effective vaccines and better treatments.

Ask your kids how they’re feeling about going back to school, and keep an eye out for headaches, stomachaches, sleeping troubles, persistent “what if” questions, crankiness, excessive concern about very distant events, problems focusing on schoolwork and persistent concerns that aren’t alleviated by logical explanations.

A to-be-published study I conducted on 238 teens between January and May 2021 at the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center found that an astonishing 64% reported increased anxiety over the course of the pandemic.

Given children’s fondness for sameness and predictability, it should be no surprise that a global pandemic that halted school as kids know it, slammed the brakes on seeing friends, stopped extracurricular activities and banished all but immediate family members would have a profound impact on children’s anxiety

n Louise Fitzhugh’s children’s novel “Harriet the Spy,” Harriet’s mother can’t believe that her daughter always takes a tomato sandwich to school. Always. Harriet has no interest in variety. She’s perfectly happy with the same sandwich, year after year.

As a researcher who’s studied children’s mental health for decades, I know that predictability helps prevent anxiety in children. Predictability means things going along as they’ve always gone: sleep at night, up in the morning, cornflakes for breakfast, off to school, activities in the afternoon, dinner with the family.

During pre-pandemic times, researchers noted that as many as 7% of children had a diagnosable anxiety disorder that disrupted their everyday functioning. In addition, 20% had a tendency to feel anxious that didn’t rise to the level of a clinical disorder. And all children feel anxious at some time or another.

“The alpha,” he said, referring to an investor’s ability to beat the broader market, “just continues to grow.”

In the recent Angel Squad class, one participant asked if investors should be concerned about valuations. Mr. Bahn said it was up to each investor, but he added that there was an upside to the skyrocketing prices. Some tech companies were becoming huge, worth $10 billion or more on paper, creating bigger returns for investors who got in early. That was the exciting thing about investing in young start-ups, he said.

But that isn’t always an option in today’s frenzied market. Mr. Houghton said he had recently been given little more than a pitch presentation, a high price tag and a few hours to decide whether he was in or out of an investment.

Some longtime angels have cautionary words for those just beginning their start-up investments. Aaron Houghton, 40, an entrepreneur, said he lost $50,000 that he had invested in a friend’s start-up in 2014, along with a $10,000 deal that went belly-up. He sarcastically called the losses a “really nice, somewhat inexpensive wake-up call” that showed he needed to spend more than a few hours researching companies before investing.

Now, Ms. Flucas said, she is getting asked to join venture firms or raise her own fund. “The seeds I planted at the beginning of the journey are bearing fruit,” she said.

But it took cold emails, research, building her reputation on AngelList and participating in three angel investing fellowships to get access to deals and construct a portfolio of more than 200 companies, she said. Things especially took off this spring after she invested in several companies that had just graduated from Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator. Some of her investments have appreciated enough on paper to return more than she has put in.

Ashley Flucas, 35, a real estate lawyer in Palm Beach County, Fla., began investing in start-ups three years ago. She said it was a chance to create generational wealth, something underrepresented people did not typically get access to.

AngelList, which has enabled such deals for over a decade, has steadily expanded its menu of options, including rolling funds (for people to subscribe to an angel investor’s deals) and roll-up vehicles (for start-ups to consolidate lots of small checks). Mr. Kohli said his company runs a “fund factory” that compresses a month of legal paperwork and wire transfers into the push of a button.

The angel boom has, in turn, created a miniboom of companies that aim to streamline the investing process. Allocations, the start-up run by Mr. Advani, offers group deal making. Assure, another start-up, helps with the administrative work. Others, including Party Round and Sign and Wire, help angels with money transfers or work with start-ups to raise money from large groups of investors.

“More competition brings about better behavior,” Ms. Yin said. (In addition to investing in start-ups, Hustle Fund sells mugs that say “Be Nice, Make Billions.”)

Many new angel investors have some connection to the tech industry but are not the V.I.P.s who are normally invited into deals. Some are complete outsiders. Many are broadcasting their activity on social media and turning the investing into a branding opportunity, a hobby, a networking play, a social status or a way to give back.

“If we happen to make our money back, that’s good enough for us,” Mr. Shukla said.

In London, Ivy Mukherjee, 28, a product designer, and Shashwat Shukla, 30, a private equity investor, also started putting money into start-ups together this year to learn new skills and network with others in the industry. They said they were proceeding cautiously, with checks of $2,000 to $5,000, knowing they could lose it all.

Ms. Dillie has since joined several informal investing groups, listened to podcasts and set up news alerts for terms like “preseed funding” (the earliest money a start-up usually raises from outside investors). She said she was motivated to support female founders, who raise less than 2 percent of all venture funding.

“I probably needed someone to give me permission to play the game because investing always seemed so elusive,” she said.Editors’ PicksHow to Unlock the Equity in Your HomeWhy Do American Grocery Stores Still Have an Ethnic Aisle?My Sister Won’t Accept My Same-Sex Partner. What Should I Do?AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyImage

Karin Dillie, 33, an executive at an e-commerce company in New York, said she hadn’t realized that she could be an angel investor. But in June, when a business school classmate emailed asking her to help fund a calendar app called Arrange, Ms. Dillie decided to go for it. She invested $5,000.

“Overnight, the entire world just woke up and went, ‘Oh, wow, we want to go invest in technology,’” said Avlok Kohli, chief executive of AngelList Venture, a company that provides tools for start-up fund-raising.

The boom is part of a rush into ever-riskier forms of investment, driven by low interest rates, stimulus money and a little bit of “why not?” chutzpah. Nowhere is that sentiment stronger than in the tech industry, where start-ups are flush with cash, initial public stock offerings have been plentiful and Big Tech is delivering blockbuster profits.

But over the last year, many of those roadblocks have dissipated. Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission loosened restrictions and began allowing people to become accredited investors — those allowed to back private start-ups — after passing a test. New tech tools are making the process of raising funds from many small investors cheaper and faster. And start-ups have become eager to add potentially helpful angels to their rosters of backers.

Until recently, such investing was off-limits to most people. Securities rules restricted it to the wealthy because of the level of risk involved, since most start-ups fail. Even those who qualified often lacked the connections to find deals. And start-ups preferred to raise big slugs of cash from a handful of investors, rather than deal with the costs and headaches of processing dozens of tiny checks.

More than 3,000 new angel investors are projected to make their first deal this year, up from 2,725 last year, according to the research firm PitchBook. And the amount of money that angels are pouring into start-ups has swelled, reaching $2.1 billion in the first six months of this year, compared with $2.6 billion for all of 2020, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook.

“It is absolutely going mainstream,” said Kingsley Advani, founder of Allocations, a tech platform for angel investors. “It’s accelerating and it’s getting faster and faster.” He said even his mother, a retired schoolteacher in Australia, has invested in 41 start-ups over the last few years.

Founded in January, Angel Squad is one of several ways that people from outside Silicon Valley’s investing elite are now joining the ranks of angel investors. The influx — which includes art curators, dentists, influencers and retirees — is transforming the way that start-ups raise money, upending the pecking order in venture capital and pushing a niche corner of the investing world toward mass adoption.

Caroline Howard, 29, one of the founders of Walker Brothers Beverage, a kombucha company in Nashville, said the class taught her how to better evaluate deals. “I think it’s so fun to see companies when they’re so young and have a germ of an idea and back them,” she said.

The group listened as Eric Bahn, the instructor, rattled off anecdotes and advice from the front lines of start-up investing. “The most important question when you are an early stage investor is: What happens if things go right?” he said, stepping back from his desk and raising his hands for emphasis.

SAN FRANCISCO — On a recent Wednesday evening, 60 people gathered in a virtual conference room to discuss start-up investments. Among them were a professional poker player from Arizona, an allergist in California and a kombucha maker from Tennessee. All were members of Angel Squad, a six-month $2,500 program that aims to help people break into the clubby world of venture capital as individual investors, known as “angels.”

The once-clubby world of start-up deal making known as “angel investing” has had an influx of new participants. It’s part of a wider boom in ever-riskier investments.

Even Your Allergist Is Now Investing in Start-Ups

Interactive Light is perfect for highways that are less-travelled or not always packed with cars. You can’ afford to play dice with the safety of road users, for the sake of saving a penny or two, and Interactive Lights help kill two birds with one stone, providing night visibility as and when required. <IMG src="https://assets.hongkiat.com/uploads/smart-road-technologies/interactive-light.jpg" alt="Interactive Light" srcset="" sizes="">

This will ensure that electric cars do not require to look for charging stations, and can even keep their cars charged on long journeys.

4. Electric Priority Lane Another interesting idea by the same studio is the Electric Priority Lane where electric vehicles (EV) user can charge up their vehicle on the go. And they can do this just by driving on the right lane. The Induction Priority Lane will have embedded magnetic fields that can charge the vehicle while it is on the go. This is especially useful in countries like Netherland, where there there are a lot of EVs on the road.

Since it requires wind to power up, these wind-powered lights will only light up as cars pass by the area. For this to work, these pinwheel generators will be set up along the car’s path at the roadside, to continuously light up paths as cars drive through.

Wind-Powered Lights Unlike interactive lights, wind-powered lights will power up itself using pinwheels to generate electricity. It works by harnessing wind drafts from passing cars into electric. The electricity will use to light up the lights on the pinwheels, basically lighting up the road path.

2. Interactive Light Aside from glow in the dark paint, there is also the idea to use motion-sensor lights. Interactive Light works in this sense: when a car approaches a particular stretch of a road, the motion sensors will light up only that section of the road. The lights will grow brighter as the car comes closer and will slowly dim away as it passes.

For another, firms organized around deceit may be just as likely to turn those energies toward their clients, bloating budgets and billing for work that never gets done.

But governments may find that outsourcing such shadowy work also carries risks, Mr. Brookie said. For one, the firms are harder to control and might veer into undesired messages or tactics.

A separate pro-Beijing network, uncovered by a Taiwanese investigative outlet called The Reporter, operated hundreds of Chinese-language websites and social media accounts.

The network pushes strident criticism of Hong Kong democracy activists and American foreign policy. By coordinating without seeming to, it created an appearance of organic shifts in public opinion — and often won attention.

He specified only that it incorrectly identified his firm as Canada-based. Asked why the company lists a Toronto address, a Canadian tax registration and identifies as “part of Toronto’s thriving tech ecosystem,” or why he had been reached on a Toronto phone number, he said that he had business in many countries. He did not respond to an email asking for clarification.

A representative of Press Monitor, who would identify himself only as Abhay, called the report completely false.

Nearly all the posts seek to discredit or muddy reports unfavorable to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, including on the country’s severe Covid-19 toll. An associated site promotes pro-Modi narratives under the guise of news articles.

India Vs Disinformation is, in reality, the product of a Canadian communications firm called Press Monitor.

In India, dozens of government-run Twitter accounts have shared posts from India Vs Disinformation, a website and set of social media feeds that purport to fact-check news stories on India.

Political norms have also shifted. A generation of populist leaders, like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, has risen in part through social media manipulation. Once in office, many institutionalize those methods as tools of governance and foreign relations.

Still, some argue that social media companies also play a role in worsening the threat. Engagement-boosting algorithms and design elements, research finds, often privilege divisive and conspiratorial content.

The layer of deniability frees governments to sow disinformation more aggressively, at home and abroad, than might otherwise be worth the risk. Some contractors, when caught, have claimed they acted without their client’s knowledge or only to win future business.

Last summer, Facebook removed a network of Bolivian citizen groups and journalistic fact-checking organizations. It said the pages, which had promoted falsehoods supporting the country’s right-wing government, were fake.

Commercial firms conducted for-hire disinformation in at least 48 countries last year — nearly double from the year before, according to an Oxford University study. The researchers identified 65 companies offering such services.

“There is, unfortunately, a huge market demand for disinformation,” Mr. Brookie said, “and a lot of places across the ecosystem that are more than willing to fill that demand.”

At the same time, backlash to Russia’s influence-peddling appeared to have left governments wary of being caught — while also demonstrating the power of such operations.

The episode taught a generation of consultants and opportunists that there was big money in social media marketing for political causes, all disguised as organic activity.

Mr. Brookie’s organization tracked one operating amid a mayoral race in Serra, a small city in Brazil. An ideologically promiscuous Ukrainian firm boosted several competing political parties.

The controversy drew attention to methods common among social media marketers. Cambridge used its data to target hyper-specific audiences with tailored messages. It tested what resonated by tracking likes and shares.

The trend emerged after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, experts say. Cambridge, a political consulting firm linked to members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, was found to have harvested data on millions of Facebook users.

The result is an accelerating rise in polarizing conspiracies, phony citizen groups and fabricated public sentiment, deteriorating our shared reality beyond even the depths of recent years.

European officials say they are investigating who hired Adnow. Sections of Fazze’s anti-Pfizer talking points resemble promotional materials for Russia’s Sputnik-V vaccine.

Job postings and employee LinkedIn profiles associated with Fazze describe it as a subsidiary of a Moscow-based company called Adnow. Some Fazze web domains are registered as owned by Adnow, as first reported by the German outlets Netzpolitik and ARD Kontraste. Third-party reviews portray Adnow as a struggling ad service provider.

Most trace to back-alley firms whose legitimate services resemble those of a bottom-rate marketer or email spammer.

In the Central African Republic, two separate operations flooded social media with dueling pro-French and pro-Russian disinformation. Both powers are vying for influence in the country.

They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability.

Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies.

Some recipients posted screenshots of the offer. Exposed, Fazze scrubbed its social media accounts. That same week, Brazilian and Indian influencers posted videos echoing Fazze’s script to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

But it asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists.

A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it.

Back-alley firms meddle in elections and promote falsehoods on behalf of clients who can claim deniability, escalating our era of unreality.

Disinformation for Hire, a Shadow Industry, Is Quietly Booming

To me, the exciting part is looking at everything around me as potential feedstock to make new stuff, and that mindset and that paradigm shift has huge implications," Niki Werkheiser, NASA's in-space manufacturing manager, told Space.com. "Whether it be in situ resources, our food, foam, plastic bags, whatever's around us, I'll look at that as, how can I reuse or recycle? And it does require combining and understanding not only the machine's capabilities, but the materials' qualities and properties for what you need to make." 

Another source of excitement for in-space manufacturing is building things for space that will never be constrained by the pull of Earth's gravity — or the crushing push of a rocket launch.

It's hard to imagine routinely growing organs in space, but that's one of many possible money-making avenues as it becomes less expensive to put things in orbit.

Humans don't fare well in space over time, but it might be an ideal place to grow parts of them — organs, that is. Cells can grow into larger networks without gravity pulling them down into their container as would happen on Earth.

"Also, by removing the convection, buoyancy and sedimentation, materials that you bring back can be like your gold standard to which you compare and determine how feasible it is to get a certain desired property," he added.

Space provides this strange, double-edged construction zone: It lets researchers test out materials to see how they withstand a harsh environment with powerful radiation and extreme temperature changes, but it also provides a particularly calm locale, gravity-wise, compared with Earth.

"Because you don't have stratification as a result of density differences — heavy stuff doesn't sink to the bottom, and light stuff [doesn't] go up to the top — you can create alloys that are a homogenous blend of metals or minerals that would not ordinarily be able to be manufactured in as large a size on the ground," Harper said. "And, in fact, you may have some unique ones that wouldn't produce an alloy under any conditions on the ground."

The same holds true for metals. While metals made from a single element, like iron, can be useful, they can gain strength, flexibility or other special features when they incorporate other elements. For example, integrating carbon, and small amounts of other metals, with iron creates the much stronger and harder steel. Metals that are a combination of elements are called alloys, and some can form only in a low-gravity environment.

Growing other crystals, like those used to manufacture drugs or those that can detect gamma-rays and neutrons, in space so that they're bigger and purer can make the resulting material higher-quality.

Microgravity offers a promising environment for manufacturing, as it's free from the stirring of convection that sinks heavier material down through a solution. In microgravity, crystals can grow larger; in one experiment, crystals made from proteins grew to be 6 cubic millimeters, on average, compared with 0.5 cubic millimeters here on Earth. Once grown, those crystals can be analyzed to determine the proteins' 3D structures, which can help inform new strategies for drug discovery.

Experiments performed years ago using NASA's now-retired space shuttle orbiters also have provided reasons for optimism. Researchers pulled a stainless-steel disk called the Wake Shield Facility behind the shuttle, creating a vacuum in its wake that's 1,000 to 10,000 times emptier than what is possible on Earth. Experimenters used this cleaner vacuum of outer space to make thinner, purer samples of materials like semiconductors. (A large proportion of semiconductor components made on the ground end up being rejected because of impurities interrupting the matrix of atoms.)

The Electrostatic Levitation Furnace, a device that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency operates on the space station, is an example of the kind of setup that could avoid a container altogether, Giles said. The furnace can melt and solidify materials while levitating them in place using electrodes.

As the cost of sending things to space continues to decrease, experimenters can envision a number of other scenarios in which the space station environment could be key to manufacturing. 

"The reason they're doing this is the huge payout, which would be in billions of dollars if you can actually draw the fiber at least an order of magnitude better than silica," Dennis Tucker, a materials scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama who has researched ZBLAN glass for decades, told Space.com. "There's a lot of potential applications if we can do this. Fiber amplifiers, there's lasers for cutting, drilling and surgery … infrared imaging, remote IR."

"One of the challenges for making money from space manufacturing is, it's still quite expensive to launch things to space," Alex MacDonald, senior economic adviser within NASA Headquarters' Office of the Administrator, told Space.com. "You're still dealing with thousands of dollars per kilogram. So, whatever you are going to be making in space that you're going to be sending down to Earth has to be incredibly valuable but also available per unit of mass."

"Demand for high-tech solutions requiring higher resolutions, faster processors, more bandwidth, greater precision, novel materials, unique alloys, innovative processes, higher energy efficiency, more processes in a smaller volume and more sophisticated tools in general are pushing materials and processes for manufacturing to the point that defects at the atomic- and molecular-level matter," said Lynn Harper, the lead of integrative studies for the Space Portal partnerships office at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. 

Microgravity is of particular interest to people who create materials for miniaturized devices and computers, researchers told Space.com. 

The International Space Station is falling at a constant rate around the Earth, which everyone on board experiences as a lack of gravity; on the station, you're always in free fall. That environment, called microgravity, comes in handy for growing things that need to expand evenly in every direction or avoid the contamination of touching an enclosure's walls.

In space, microgravity lets materials grow without encountering walls, and it allows them to mix evenly and hold together without traditional supports. And a nearby ultrahigh vacuum helps things form without impurities.

"We generally make things by subjecting them to a different environment," said Andrew Rush, president and CEO of Made In Space, an in-space manufacturing company. "We make food by cooking it in fire, heating it up and causing chemical reactions. We make steel by heating things up at high temperature and maybe, depending on the steel, [in a] high-pressure environment. We can quench things; we can make things cold to make different materials or improve on those materials.

As the cost of spaceflight goes down, more of these materials may become cost-effective to make or study in space. And soon, more and more people might be carrying around objects built off the planet. [

But for materials that show incredible strength, transmit information with barely any loss, form enormous crystals or even grow into organs, the harshness of space can be the perfect construction zone.

Space is a dangerous place for humans: Microgravity sets our fluids wandering and weakens muscles, radiation tears through DNA and the harsh vacuum outside is an ever-present threat. 

Making Stuff in Space: Off-Earth Manufacturing Is Just Getting Started

The next day McFerrin arrived for the open house with their offer already in hand — all cash, with an escalation clause to pay over asking price if necessary. “This puts us in great shape, and we’re just getting started,” McFerrin told the sellers, and then she walked through each room of the house to make final preparations.

“How will it cash flow for us as a rental?” Carl asked, and the agent said they would be able to rent it easily for about $2,300 a month. So many families had been priced out of buying a house that the rental market in the Boise area had also become competitive, and rents had increased 18 percent since the pandemic began.

ring the pandemic, they’d seen their equity grow each month, and they’d used some of that new wealth to buy more homes. They’d sold a house in Arizona and then used the proceeds to purchase two more houses. They’d sold another and bought two more, sold and bought more, until finally they’d accumulated 21 houses across six states.

“Please, no more love letters,” one agent had written in her listing. “All offers will be considered. This is strictly a financial transaction.”

“This is our 23rd offer, but now we’re convinced that God is at work, because seeing your home convinced us that the other 22 were not right for us.”

McFerrin posted the listing online and went back to her office to watch the traffic grow: 34 views in the first 10 minutes, 238 within an hour, more than 1,000 by the end of the afternoon. The Boise area had an average of 25 active buyers for each available house, many of whom were investors who offered to pay above asking price with all cash, which meant hundreds of first-time buyers had spent months trying and failing to find a home. Their standard offers now typically included a personal note written to the seller.

“It’s where the market has taken us,” McFerrin said, because in just the past year the median home price in the Boise area had risen from $360,000 to $523,000. “It seems crazy, but this is basically our new average.”

“A half-million dollars,” Descisciolo said. “It’s wild. It’s more than twice what we paid.”

McFerrin had worked to maximize the value of the house by hiring a deep cleaner, a landscaper to trim the tree out front, and a stager to redecorate. She’d also brought in a drone photographer to take aerial pictures of the foothills in the distant background, and now she showed Descisciolo a glossy brochure with a picture of his home above a list price of $485,000.

e question was no longer whether one of her homes would sell but for exactly how much and how quickly, and she told Descisciolo that she expected the entire process to unfold over the course of the weekend: a day or two of showings, an open house Saturday, and then offers due by the end of Sunday night.

en, early in the pandemic, he’d begun to receive form letters from investors offering to buy his home. “We can pay now. We can pay cash,” one read. Descisciolo started checking the estimated value of his house on Zillow, watching in disbelief as it continued to rise by $30,000 each month, until it felt to him like the only sensible thing to do was to sell and then use the proceeds to build a bigger home for his family farther from the city.

Homeowners on average are now reported to have as much as 80 times greater net worth than renters, who continue to suffer disproportionately from some of the pandemic’s worst effects: high rates of unemployment, eviction and a historic increase in the cost of living.

ny of them have used that money to buy investment properties and second homes, further driving up prices while first-time buyers increasingly struggle to afford anything at all.