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Comment by loudmax | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, the issue here is noise pollution, right? If the deliveries were silent, we generally wouldn't care how our neighbors were getting their coffee.

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.

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Noise pollution is one issue, but the loss of privacy is another. These must have cameras on board, and I'd prefer Alphabet/Amazon/whoever not be flying cameras over my yard all the time.

This is it right here. The 'no expectation of privacy in public' mantra is increasingly extending into places that I absolutely have an expectation of privacy.

Time to breed some pet ravens in the yard.

A Conspiracy, eh?

Crowspiracy?

So... Murder?

Natural disassembler.

It'd be continued progression of the services that are already on offer[1]. And I don't see aus enacting any legislation to curb this sort off cooperate surveillance without a massive shift in voters general apathy towards their privacy.

[1] https://www.nearmap.com/au/en

Not necessarily. Unless you live somewhere with a thriving wild bird population – like Canberra – you wouldn't understand the impact that these things might have on birds.

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 the issue is people getting off their butts and making some coffee. We're turning into a species that's so fat and lazy that we don't even want to go to the store anymore to get our empty calories.

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?

Why don’t you trust people to do other “important” things with the time they saved making food or coffee?

Because we all very well know it's overwhelmingly not the case.

You know that, I dont

Personally, it's because I know other people. Having gone through artificial panics and unreasonable demand-based shortages based entirely on fear I know that my fellow human being is often irrational, selfish and short-sighted when left to their own devices. The _only_ solution to resolving those periods of irrationality I experienced were limits placed on their behavior like rationing of gasoline or toilet-paper or water or etc.

Another solution is to not worry about it. Rational people will have enough toilet paper to survive the shortages caused by panic buying of irrational people. You did have enough toilet paper, didn't you? Or were you short-sightedly assuming the shops would always have what you wanted when you wanted it?

If you don't have time to make coffee or go grab one, you're overspecializing and not working for the same humanity as I am. Your work output is never worth _that_ much. Go out, breathe in, take the time to accept time constraints of the physical world.

No doubt some fat and lazy people appreciate coffee delivery, but I think probably a lot of slim, highly motivated and productive people do as well. (Also, surely, a few serial killers and pedophiles.)

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 can think of a few, but that was my first thought as well, how hard is it to make a nice cup of coffee at home? A semi-decent espresso machine and it'll be better than a tepid drone-delivered one any time, long as you have the coffee grounds/beans.

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.

Noise pollution, disturbing the wildlife, light pollution at night, inevitable accidents.

All legitimate concerns, but presumably delivery trucks / lorries are guilty of all of those right now? I would be unhappy if drone delivery made things worse, but there's also the possibility it could make them better (I'd rather be hit by a drone than a truck, for example).

Yes, but I'm thinking about what happens if a single UPS truck delivering 500 packages is replaced with 500 individual drone trips. One drone is probably better than one truck, but that's not the right tradeoff to consider.

The laws around noise pollution are surprisingly pathetic here in the UK, I imagine almost all countries are too.

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.

That sounds like a failure on the part of whatever authority licensed the scaffolding work.

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.

My neighbor mows the lawn really early every Sunday. I don't think I can do anything about it.

In Germany, they are not that pathetic. You can theoretically be fined upto 50.000€ for mowing on Sundays. The two days before Easter, even dancing is forbidden in many federal states.

Delivery trucks aren't flying over back yards.

As a reminder, 6 questions about technology outlined by Neil Postman:

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?

> Noise pollution, disturbing the wildlife, light pollution at night, inevitable accidents.

Don't forget ridiculousness. That raven knows, and we should all be thankful for birds leading the protest.

Also: how much power do they consume? Probably more than a truck if you amortize over multiple packages, since the poor thing has to fight gravity all the time.

A truck weighs three tonnes; a quadcopter weighs 3 kg. You can't amortize coffee delivery over very many packages because you have to deliver the coffee within a few minutes after it's ready; otherwise it gets cold.

You can brew coffee in the back of a truck.

Driving an entire coffee shop around to the house of whoever wants a coffee seems guaranteed to use much more energy than airlifting just the coffee itself.

There was a startup called Zume whose pitch was trucks that would bake pizza while driving to the customer for the absolutely maximally fresh pie.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-th...

Spoilers: that's hard to do.

It works okay if you cook while parked. But coffee might be more forgiving.

Yes or just general disorder. If drones are delivering coffee, then we can expect to see 100s of drones in the sky at any time, at least further down the road. Is that progress of the better kind, or would we not at least want to discuss the pros and cons before we are there?

Yeah, I think noise pollution is the most egregious aspect. In my neighbourhood, there is one main thoroughfare that you can drive 50kph/35mph on, and all the remaining roads are intentionally narrow and uncontrolled, so traffic is naturally limited to around ~30kph/20mph. If you move into a place on the main road, you are implicitly accepting the noise that comes with faster moving traffic. Otherwise you have a reasonable expectation of quiet, especially because at 30kph road noise is quite low, so quiet vehicles like EVs/hybrids are almost silent. Drones that make noise everywhere will break those expectations.

> To be clear, the issue here is noise pollution, right?

That's one, another is how difficult is it to make a cup of coffee in your kitchen?

Shall we start policing exactly what you're allowed to order through Uber Eats? No sandwiches, but a croissant is OK? What if I get a coffee with my croissant, is that allowed?

Coffee is mostly water and we already have far more efficient ways of delivering water to the home, so yes, it seems incredibly wasteful to me to switch from plumbing to drones.

I would also be happy banning k cups fwiw.

2% anti-spillage fee! 3% thermal imballance fee!

Policing? Nah. Mocking? Sure!

Yes absolutely. Personal food delivery is a scourge. Perhaps we should be policing "no one-off personal meal delivery".

Care should probably be taken when externalizing the costs. For example, the noise of drones (something new) versus the noise of roads (something that already exists). The people who didn't order the coffee have to listen to the noise. One could argue that this is unfair.

I'm not sure how the externalities work out in this case, but it might be something to keep an eye on.

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