Technology

As someone who frequently orders one can of soup, this is excellent news.

Reminds me of an insurance company that wanted to use drones to survey roof damage and in the long run they decided it was overall better to just use a camera on a long ass stick.

Meanwhile in Rwanda:

There have been 13,000 deliveries to date and it has been estimated Zipline drones distribute 65% of blood outside of the capital city, Kigali.

https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/news/zipline-ghana-medical-supplies-drones/?cf-view

Just because Amazon is doing a terrible job of it, doesn't mean it's a job that can't be done.

Ok sure, there's limitations. So what percentage of their current deliveries are actually possible with drones? If it's above 0%, then there's an opportunity.

Beyond that it's a finance/ risk/ reward/ regulation issue.

Imagine a van which drives into a suburban housing estate and instead of parking individually at different houses for 5-10 mins each, spends less than 5 mins prepping a set of drones which take off from the roof of the van and return in minutes.

It saves time and fuel. It doesn't work everywhere, but it doesn't need to.

In fact it could be the same van. Do deliveries exactly as normal, and use a drone for the last half mile when convenient. It's not either/or.

I would like to take this time to thank the slow government FAA for preventing Amazon from clogging up the airspace with crappy drones and preventing a stupid system from taking off.

Aside from all the functional downsides, I'd expect these to go the way of Tesla when hitting a larger scale. Lawsuits and traffic incidents.

I remember people were hyped when they announced on Thanksgiving 2012 that drone delivery service was right around the corner. Brilliant marketing from them because people were hyped.

Another more successful operation in Rwanda and Ghana is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company) delivering 1.8kg over 300km and dropped by parachute.

I feel this could actually work fairly well in smaller rural/suburban communities

And it will keep on being a joke until, suddenly, one day it's not.

Noise is absolutely a concern for flying things. The reasons we don't yet have flying cars is not because they're too expensive, but because they're too loud. And this is specifically why the FAA won't let me commute to work in an ultralight.

The police want Bladerunner spinners so bad they can taste it. And the reason they can't have them — or more helicopters — is the noise.

Great, it drops the package from 2 meters.

Welcome to the future

It's obvious that autonomous drones are more difficult to create than they seem... I think delivery robots that go on the ground are much safer and more feasible. They can carry heavier packages, they are less dangerous and can travel at less dangerous speeds.

I’m just sitting here thinking personal home delivery maybe isn’t the most sustainable thing in the world.

Perhaps we could invest the massive amounts of money that it takes to deliver goods to homes into better transit and post offices that don’t look like crap.

If I'm honest it really is not at all surprising.

Hyperloop 2.0.

Delivering something by air is the least efficient way to do so, unless it's Avdiivka and you deliver a grenade. Yeah, making them now is cheap (and we overproduce these unrecycleable toys), but what the upsides of using them instead of, like, land drones, or human workers, or some rail-system? It's cool and fancy the first time you order it, but what's the reason behind it other than our entertainment? Why not to make a delivery guy shoot fireworks once they are here - as enjoyable, and as chinese as these drones.

Why we want to produce this junk in the first place? And aren't we afraid this shit records close-ups of each property itflies over?

I'm curious why the limit is one item. If the drone can carry 5 pounds, why can't they put 5 pounds of stuff in the box?