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Comment by decebalus1 | Hacker News Reader

Ambitiously solving such a hard problem: the convenience of having food brought up to your house. Hot dang! Next up, the drone will drop the food right into your mouth. Premium customers will have the drone chew the food on its way to your house.

I wonder how far we will go in the interest of convenience. There are such hard and pressing problems right now in the world and a company wasting money trying to fill the sky with buzzing drones delivering food to fat lazy assholes is being labeled as ambitious. Is this the near future we want? Do we really _need_ a beehive of buzzing drones because we're so busy we can't just go out and fucking buy food?

Give me a break...

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Time not spent going out and buying food is more time I can spend with my friends, family and hobbies. If you spend 30 minutes per day on logistics of going out, buying, traveling, and coming back, then that's a full week per year.

I have a breakthrough idea. Hold on, because it's especially disruptive. You can go out and get food... with your friends and family. Also, one very lucrative hobby is cooking. And seriously, that's not the market for shit like food delivery drones. Let's not beat around the bush, this will be mostly used by people who get high and play league of legends.

Anyway you put it, the time savings does not provide a good ROI for the rest of the crap which follows a company like Uber flying a fleet of buzzing drones in an urban environment.

> Anyway you put it, the time savings does not provide a good ROI for the rest of the crap which follows a company like Uber flying a fleet of buzzing drones in an urban environment.

compared to a fleet of '95 civics in questionable repair roaming the streets all day, a bunch of small drones doesn't actually sound that bad. drones aren't actually that loud once they're ~100 ft in the air and DJI is making them quieter every year.

The real innovation here isn’t more time for family and friends (perhaps more time for scrolling social media?) but rather to eliminate a layer of the economy often filled by immigrants and people of color.

The real convince is to not need interact with people who aren’t of your social class.

"for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

- Socrates on writing/reading

The existence of hard and pressing problems does not mean all resources should be diverted to them - capitalism.

I feel you're exaggerating a bit much, though I get what you're trying to say.

re-reading my post and I agree with you, I think I'm exaggerating. Perhaps I'm having a depressing “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” moment. I feel like all this money and energy is being thrown at crap that will eventually work against our best interests as a society.

To put this in context [1], Socrates is repeating a story about an Egyptian king responding to an Egyptian god who invented writing. Socrates does mostly agree with the king. I disagree with Socrates that wise teachers would only put their thoughts down in writing for amusement, but his general point is that you can't ask books questions and they can't defend themselves, and that they aren't the best way of transferring knowledge from person to person. If you ever read a book critically, or if you appreciate a lecture or a live teacher to understand material instead of a textbook, you agree with him in ways. Also, the entire world has had oral traditions outside of writing for the millennia since Socrates that have only been recently stamped down by radio and TV.

[1] http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.h...

edit: There was more time between the invention of Egyptian writing (which the Greek alphabet was ultimately derived from) and Socrates than between the death of Socrates and today, so it's not like he didn't understand the use of writing, or thought it was some new-fangled thing.

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