I think the distinction is important because that points us in the direction of the type of policy we want to focus on. We shouldn't aim for laws to ban drone delivery. Instead we should have rules to limit the amount of noise you can make in residential areas.
I live on the outskirts of the centre of Canberra (which, as a reminder, is the capital of Australia). The trees are teeming with birds this time of year. We have a family of Australian magpies raising their young in the tree directly opposite us. It's magnificent to watch. They'll often come and say hello and we're hoping they'll introduce the young to us one day.
Regular drone traffic would be an enormous disruption. Magpies swoop anything they see to be a threat. I already see how much effort it is to forage and feed 3 young. Spending extra time trying to ward off a drone because someone can't be arsed going for a walk and getting a coffee (or whatever) ... ridiculous.
I haven't seen a drone here but if they start to become a thing I'll join whatever movement is advocating for their banning.
Maybe on paper silent drone deliveries are a great idea for people who can't get out of their homes but even then what we're doing is removing yet another chance for them to interact directly with another human being.
So I dunno. What actually is a positive use for drone delivery?
Adequate human interaction (modulo the ongoing pandemic) is indeed important (I think, at least for most people), but a wide swath of people probably have an overabundance of it, and wouldn't benefit from the additional interactions involved with physically going get their own coffee from some human in a coffee-vending establishment.
The positive use for drone delivery is the same for any other delivery service. The pros and cons compared to human delivery, animal delivery, wheeled robot delivery, etc. are debatable.
I'd probably use it for times I've run out of something essential I don't have at home though, if its quick enough. Tobacco after a few beers and not wanting to drive, exotic spices I can't find locally assuming the drone can fly far enough to other places, and also assuming its more environmentally friendly than getting in the car and burning petrol.
What is the problem to which this technology is a solution for?
Whose problem is it?
What new problems might be created by solving the original problem?
Which people and what institutions will be most seriously harmed by this new technology?
What sort of people and institutions gain special economic and political power from this new technology?
What changes in language are being forced by these new technologies?
It's perfectly legal to deconstruct scaffolding, with power tools and chucking metal poles in the back of the van at 8am on a Sunday morning for example. Right next to multiple residential block of flats with hundreds of residents.
And the number one issue if you poll residents of almost any large town is usually noise issues.
If you want to see one of the big disconnects between government and the people, it's a big one.
Saying it's already an issue that's under legislated doesn't mean we should allow it to get worse.
Picking one from a quick search: Greenwich, for example, says that "Noisy work is prohibited on Sundays and bank holidays", and explicitly mentions "Erecting and dismantling of scaffolding" in its examples of "noisy work".
(https://www.royalgreenwich.gov.uk/info/200205/pollution_and_...)
Presumably other authorities may have different rules, and they may or may not be effectively enforced. But in principle, at least, it's not a free-for-all.
Don't forget ridiculousness. That raven knows, and we should all be thankful for birds leading the protest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-th...
Spoilers: that's hard to do.
That's one, another is how difficult is it to make a cup of coffee in your kitchen?
I would also be happy banning k cups fwiw.
I'm not sure how the externalities work out in this case, but it might be something to keep an eye on.
That said, part of the fun of coffee is the cafe experience; covid willing, I still go out to cafes as well. Best not to optimize all of the fun out of life.
The Australian-designed/made Breville espresso machine is a gem.
I have no idea how I lived without it.
These leaf blowers also don't have much of a muffler system (due to size / weight) and of course no exhaust gas recirculation or catalytic converter to further reduce emissions by-products.
A two stroke motor is considerably simpler than a four stroke, they often come in at around half the weight for an equivalent power output, and have less moving parts. This is why they are the default engine of choice for hand powered tools - almost no maintenance, very little warmup cycle, high power:weight ratio. The downside is dirty exhaust.
Modern two stroke dirt bikes have actually all started moving to fuel injection to help combat this. No premixed oil/gas, oil is injected at an optimal ratio given the load of the engine. Light cruise / idling, they run at 100:1, at heavy throttle they drop down to 50:1. Much more pleasant than something set to constantly run, via premixing, at 50:1 gas:oil.
Other note: large ocean freighters are two stroke engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA9...
To dig further, you can also differentiate between peak and sustained power; MTBF, maintenance (and dollars of maintenance) per hour of operation, volume, overall environmental effect (due to lifespan and manufacturing), etc etc.
Your point is a good one though, but I think the common use case of the word efficiency, when talking about vehicles, if fuel required to produce a given amount of work (miles, horsepower, etc).
Reading about just a little bit, this may not be the case... depending on what application you are talking about.
I would expect to be some differences between a 10-ton marine two-stroke on a ship vs. a 49cc two-stroke on a moped in terms of efficiency.
They are noisy and smelly as hell, there was some going on just outside my window (not that I'd hired) recently, the operators wearing ear protection of course, but I was barely any further away. Do wish they'd use electric - can do it from a battery even these days. (And mitre saws etc. too, quite incredible.)
They do have electric leaf blowers, but those offer minutes of runtime instead of hours. So those might be suitable for a homeowner, but aren't very practical for professional lawn care use.
This confused me for a second, as the electric leaf blowers that came to my mind have 'infinite' runtime. I then realized you're referring to cordless electric leaf blowers.
Like it or not as wages creep up relative to "things" these sorts of business models will become economically viable.
Now they are necessary for academic research in deep learning and other fields, which would not have gotten GPUs as advanced as they are without the market boost.
Of course that’s just a theory and it’s never possible to go back and see what would have happened. But it seems reasonable to me.
1. GPUs used to be much less programmable and had fixed-function graphics pipelines.
2. General purpose GPU computing was demonstrated a decade before the 2012 deep learning craze. OpenCL/CUDA was quite mature in 2012 and used by high performance computing.
3. Transistor scaling (Moore’s law) has been speeding everything up exponentially.
4. There are a lot of non-GPU solutions now.
If GPUs didn’t exist, someone still could have trained a deep model on a cluster of CPU, and then we’d end up with GPUs (or similar hardware) again. So it’s not necessarily true that gaming->GPU->deep learning implies that GPUs couldn’t be used for deep learning without gaming, because you could have had CPU->deep learning->GPU. I think this was much more of a case of the stars magically aligning than some preset goal by Nvidia/AMD.
In fact, there are plenty of cases where you had CPU->research->HW accelerator. One example (on top of gaming/rendering) is compression or parity coding, which was slow initially and then had add-on cards and/or CPU extensions.
The taxes are also paid for by the yuppies at a disproportionate rate to their income share.
See: share of income taxes as broken out by income segment, in most every developed nation.
One of the central defining characteristics of a yuppie is a well-paying job. That means paying higher, progressive tax rates in most affluent nations, including Australia.
https://www.ato.gov.au/rates/individual-income-tax-rates/
See: what happens to California if you remove the tech yuppies pulling down $200,000 - $500,000, as well as their party buckets of equity compensation, the taxes of which the state rolls around in during the good times. California would become a formal second world disaster with no ability to fund anything. Illinois with nicer weather.
It ended up with a big payday for big oil IIRC.
Now that we are getting the socialists back in power (they was the ones behind the last attempt) they've promised to have companies buy into it too instead of just using taxes.
I consider myself fluent in Norwegian, did I still miss something?
Edit: to be clear, I don't care at all about those stupid point. For that matter dang should be free to reset them every day like he seems to do with his own.
I only care about them as an indication of whether what I said came across as wrong or something.
A more productive comment would have talked about how the Norwegian carbon tax was intended to fund research and how exactly it failed to do that and instead just created profits for oil companies.
I don't have time to fix it now, but yes, this is my point:
I'm not against taxing pollution or using tax income to fund research, only against the part where we (Norway) literally gave money to companies without demanding results.
We at .com are delivering medicines to poor people in this unfortunate country that has no infrastructure. (baby crying, dog being kicked away from table with flies on the food, and sad music playing)
Disclaimer: This was done one time for advertising purposes, and is not indicative of how our whirlybirds will be used.
(Off topic, but here goes. You know those drug commercials that state if you can't afford the medications, we a Whizzerbio will help out with costs because we are there for Everyone.
This is how it worked when I looked into it. You, and your doctor have to fill out a bunch of forms.
The meds are only sent to the doctors office. So you will need to go there to pick the medication up, and I imagine setting up another appointment. I have no idea why they don't deliver to the patient, or reimburse the pharmacy. I imagine they want it delivered to the office so the pharmaceutical rep can have a real reason to talk with doc?
Only one patient per doctor are allowed to participate in this promotion. Doc has 1000 patients, but only one poor guy gets the free med.
I looked into this ten years ago, so things might have changed?
How are people chuckling about this video when this is clear signs this will have real environmental effects and costs that if we are,"lucky" might be a taking point to politicians/CEOs in a couple of decades after irreversible damage is done
Coffee wasn't on the agenda it seems.
I find it difficult to believe coffee delivery even now or "going forward" significantly subsidizes drone technology development. Even if you expand that to delivery of other frivolities.
Do you have any numbers? Or reasoning?
Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition.
What drone technologies are being subsidized by coffee delivery?
> Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition.
If that's the case (which it is, you're right), then why are we not already delivering medicine to remote areas with drones?
Also coffee is not being delivered to remote areas so I don't know what that has to do with anything.
Really? Are spoiled yuppies ordering coffee a significant fraction of projected drone deliveries? I doubt it.
50% markups may make it viable if it gets off the ground and becomes and ind operation but that’s not footing R&D.
This is probably news to a lot of VCs who regularly make investments in hope of an eventual market.
Your comment is so profoundly wrong, and yet so confidently written. You're comparing Coke, a long-shelf-life mass market product, with (often) emergency/low-latency delivery of products which would be impractical to stockpile in every remote village, even if they could affort it (e.g. certain types of medicine and consumable medical products, blood, etc.)
Coke doesn't need low-latency delivery - they can use high-bandwidth + warehousing. This isn't possible/practical for some types of products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivery_drone#Healthcare_deli...
Unless it is a AI powered blockchain drone, that would be unbeatable!
Drones are much faster than cars at getting to remote places. There are many, many villages throughout the African continent that can take several hours to get to due to lack of paved roads (you need a 4WD, and it'll be a bumpy, slow ride). Sometimes the territory is dangerous to drive though. Drones can also be used even in more developed areas when roads have been completely washed away by a flood/hurricane/landslide/etc. The industry certainly has been hyped, and it's still early days, but your claim that they're not useful is absurd.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/in-the-air-with-ziplines-medical-d...
Consider a rarely needed but life-saving antivenom that is expensive to produce, requires careful+chilled storage and is just not that abundant outright due to difficult production. A snake bite could happen anywhere, but its infeasible and potentially wasteful to have it stocked at every local facility. If a drone could be used to deploy it from a central facility to where its needed in a timely manner on-demand, that could save lives. In the developed world, roads make ground transportation a more suitable approach for this problem (in addition to everything else that makes the problem itself less frequent), but in many parts of the world the ground infrastructure is simply not there.
drones are quieter than cars
> delivering coffee is not one of them
perfect item to master the skill tho
"If a fine costs less than the crime pays, then it's not a penalty, it's a cost of doing business"
We'll get an aerial lawnmower to you real quick, just sign up on our page.
Pizza delivery / grocery motorbikes used to annoy the hell out of us. But the switch to electric mopeds has been a blessing.
Credit to Getir in London for standardising electric bikes across their fleet (at least where we are).
My ear-devices-pro+ record decent data and I submit that data as verifiable evidence in this matter.
In terms of noise pollution, yes. But it has meant some less spatially aware delivery riders flying silently around corners on pavements which is an annoying problem.
Children are quieter than cars and yet I hear them from the 3rd floor because sound travels in a direct line with nothing obstructing it. You don't hear cars 3 blocks away because of all the buildings between you and the cars. You'll hear a drone 3 blocks away because the air doesn't block sound as much.
People get coffee delivered by car? If that is so it is rather depressing.