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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe in a civilized place where there is density and people aren’t wont to commit senseless vandalism. Singapore, urban Finland.

Also it would seem it’s not an energy efficient way to deliver goods to people, but who knows. Paradoxically it would make sense for high value/low mass items like medicines (or narcotics too), but that would make them a more enticing target.

Delivering tacos or sushi on the other hand... maybe years hence.

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Prison phones are a hot emerging market that benefit from drone delivery.

They're not efficient ways to deliver to consumers, but to delivery units like the local post office they're remarkably efficient (especially for rural areas). The biggest cost savings to be had would be to deliver from a local warehouse to the nearby DU, where you would pay the last mile carrier to do the heavy lifting. The issue you run into is that there's no appetite for increasing the load at these units, so no appetite for innovation until the infrastructure improves.

I’ve always felt round things like sushi and burritos could be delivered by putting them into some kind of silicone fairing and firing them from a pneumatic cannon aimed by a computer, no need for autonomous flying robots.

That would definitely work for my burrito place, though I can see it from my front door, so a t-shirt cannon might suffice.

A civilized place would not permit the sort of noise pollution that a large-scale drone deployment would generate.

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