Amazon’s delivery drones are grounded in College Station, Texas | Hacker News Reader

Amazon’s delivery drones are grounded in College Station, Texas

wired.com

114 pointsimpish9208295 comments

> The experience in College Station has highlighted another challenge: NIMBYs—or people who push for developments to be “not in my backyard”—potentially curtailing where Amazon operates.

The term NIMBY seems to have been popularized to refer to people dogmatically refusing any change, doesn't seem to apply here, where the article describes a real nuisance:

> His neighbors began calling the fleet flying chainsaws. Smith, a retired civil engineer, preferred a different comparison: “It was like your neighbor runs their leaf blower all day long,” he says. “It was just incessant.”

> If Amazon had conducted the maximum number of flights outlined in its plans reviewed by the FAA, a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day.

> [After the end of the experiment,] Inside his house, with the double-paned windows shut and TV on, Smith could no longer hear the drones.

Funnily enough, the fact that these drones are being employed to deliver "toothpaste and batteries" is really kind of a perfect microcosm of the kind of American planning and zoning foundational to modern NIMBYism—in a different environment, daily necessities like that would be available at a corner store very close to where people live, but we've found it preferable to make such restrictive residential areas and require businesses to have large parking lots such that corner stores have disappeared in favor of strip malls and big box stores, and now we're trying to replace those with annoying drones.

American zoning prohibiting shops in residential zones but allowing a drone hub just 800ft from residential buildings is a special kind of irony

I grew up in Middle America Suburbia, with big yards, cul-de-sacs and strict zoning laws. I thought it was normal that, for anything you wanted to buy, you had to get in a car and drive to it. I was told it was because of zoning laws, and it was meant to keep the neighborhood "peaceful". Well, in college I dated a girl from East LA, and she once took me to visit her family. The neighborhood had zero zoning enforcement. Every house was basically a residence and a small business - hair salons, taco shops, car repair shops, etc. It totally shocked me, like "How could people live like this?" And then we walked the neighborhood. I was shocked again how everyone knew one another so well, and all the little businesses served one another. It was a full-on bartering system, like, "Here's some fresh tortillas. Tell your Mom I'll be by next week with my daughter to do her hair for her quinceanera."

I lived my entire childhood in the same house in Suburbia, and I still don't know most of my neighbors' names. The neighborhood was "peaceful", because of zoning laws, but it was boring as shit, and most of all, I'm not so sure having to get in a car and drive just to get a box of cereal was a good thing.

To borrow a line from Marvel's Ultron: "I think you're confusing peace with quiet."

Don't get me wrong, I like my quiet suburb too. That said it's become increasingly apparent to me and I feel to society at large how incredibly atomized and alienated our society is with itself. All of us have "community" on the Internet, which is both not as good, and also is insanely catered to your individual desires and wants, and this is, frankly, unhealthy. A little social friction with people you live and work amongst is a good thing, it teaches you how to resolve conflicts, how to express difficult feelings, and how to negotiate your way through the world.

I'm reminded of the book "Life in Code" by Ellen Ullman:

“…the ideal of the internet represents the very opposite of democracy, which is a method for resolving difference in a relatively orderly manner through the mediation of unavoidable civil associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. Here all needs and desires are equally valid and equally powerful. I’ll get mine and you’ll get yours; there is no need for compromise and discussion. I don’t have to tolerate you and you don’t have to tolerate me. No need to care for my neighbour next door when I can stay with my chosen neighbours in the ether, my email friends and the visitors to the sites I visit, people who think as I do, who want what I want. No need for messy debate and the whole rigamarole of government with all its creaky bothersome structures. There’s no need for any of this, because now that we have the World Wide Web the problem of our pursuit of happiness has been solved! We’ll each click for our individual joys, and our only dispute may come if something doesn’t get delivered on time. Would you rather be at home?”

And what is this if not the core essence of Suburbia? Tiny kingdoms for tiny kings, each answerable only unto itself, and utterly beside itself with rage any time that authority is questioned by... anything, from Neighborhood Associations to building codes to the local city.

If that interests you, maybe the question "how did it get to be like this" will too. This video is pushing a point down your throat. If you can ignore that at the end it compares Canada's New London to Holland’s Utrecht: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

Turns out the choice between "Middle America Suburbia" path and the other you describe really is a choice. Some have very deliberately chose one and some equally deliberately have chosen the other.

Like you I've nearly always lived in the "American Suburbia" style. Like you I literally didn't realise (in fact I would have scoffed at the idea) there were other choices. That was despite the fact I was taught by migrant European teachers, who, when I look back, made it very plain what they thought of the "American Suburbia" style of living. Us calmly accepting the extra overheads of longer roads, consequent travel times, power transmission, transport fuel costs, freight and so on just blew them away. It blew me away too once I understood it.

Then, again like you, I got live in one of these high density neighbourhoods for a very short while, and experienced the level of social cohesion and the "big village" feel of it.

Now I think "wtf? I've been had".

My mom is beginning to get old and now has cataracts. I wonder what happens to the Americans who can no longer drive a car due to age, disease or handicap? You're effectively stranded in this suburbia.

Your quaint experience in the barrio isn't justification for having an unlicensed automotive repair business (which process hazardous waste) run out of a personal residence is a good thing.

I'm sure if that guy could move his business he would, if money and personal circumstances dictated otherwise.

Typical straw man argument

When you learn more about the history of zoning - it's allll about keeping neighborhoods wealthy. Not allowing lower classes in. A lot of weird things make sense when you look at them through that lens.

Except when zoning intentionally destroys the value of neighborhoods where undesirables live - how the highways were built, red lining, etc.

Neither of those were zoning. It's easy to conflate a lot of these actions together, but they are very different legal structures.

is there a book that chronicles that history accurately? interested

(I know there's been a lot written about redlining specifically, but I'm talking more broadly of the development and history of zoning.)

"The Color of Law" gets into some details, though it's not explicitly about zoning. Other books about zoning are... strangely supportive.

American zoning in theory: we will keep noise and pollution away from homes.

American zoning in practice: the only place homes are permitted is within 50 meters of freeways.

> American zoning in theory: we will keep noise and pollution away from homes.

I think you misunderstood the parents comment.

The origins of zoning is to prevent the mixing of blacks and whites. It's not about noise pollution; it's about segregation.

this is misinformation -- zoning is complex; basically it appears that "if zoning was ever used to separate minority neighborhoods" then it becomes "zoning is to prevent mixing of races"

Let's be perfectly clear -- racial segregation is illegal in the USA; zoning has many implementations, many uses, many pressures and has baggage from historical situations

Zoning is in the history sweet spot: Recent enough that we have well-preserved records of its origins and use. But old enough that we have had time to study the effects in practice, regardless of original intent. Widespread enough that we can know any effects were not hidden variables from local geography or politics. But not universal, so we can compare the effects over time with and without it.

That's all to say that it is well understood by people who study zoning in the US, of which there are plenty, that american racial dynamics are central in the history and use of zoning. It was not always used intentionally for segregation, but it was used for that very frequently over a long enough period of time that you can't consider it incidental to the practice.

If you look to the early 20th century you can read the discussions people were having at the time about it: letters, and op-eds, and sometimes the ordinances themselves explicitly discuss the racial justifications. At the time racial segregation was well within the national overton window, they did not have a reason to hide to hide this motivation and so they did not. Later on it gets more complicated.

We're discussing the origins. The origin of zoning clearly is racial segregation. It was an explicit response to the supreme court decision that outlawed racial covenants.

The "zoning was done by the racists" along with "white flight was what destroyed the cities" is a dumb just-so narrative that the modern analogues of those people peddle so that they may distance their analogously poor sighted idea, movements, advocacy and politics from the mistakes that the

The fundamental problem is that a large part of the population feels entitled to use government to micromanage things that are better off just not managed at all.

It is none of your business what your neighbor puts on their property whether it's a homeless shelter or luxury apartment or a bodega or a fancy coffee shop. Real estate development is something market solves very well if people mind their own business and not other people's business.

That zoning was invented for racial exclusion is not hypothetical. These guys were on the record with their motivations.

> It is none of your business what your neighbor puts on their property whether it's a homeless shelter or luxury apartment or a bodega or a fancy coffee shop.

I appreciate your maximalist libertarian proposition, it's a fun exercise when you have no skin in the game. But a) housing is an investment as well as a lodging (and for most people their largest investment), and the value of that investment has everything to do with what's around it. 2) community is a real thing, even when it describes a group of people outside the usual members of sympathetic "intersectionalities".

Everyone hates HOAs until they have to live next to my father, who kept three rusting "parts cars" in the driveway, piles of scrapwood in the yard, and let our dogs run all over the neighborhood.

Ha! So true.

It's fascinating, zoning in practice just has nothing to do with any of its stated goals.

I went to Disney World for a long vacation. I stayed in multiple Disney properties, just for the novelty. The cheapest "resort" (really just a large motel complex) was one experience, the most expensive a very different one.

I preferred the expensive one.

I don't hate the poors.

Here in Los Angeles we have honest to God oil derricks on public school grounds and in the middle of our neighborhoods but you can't build an apartment or open up a new corner store because of zoning.

In *some parts of Los Angeles. The city is getting better district by district, if only incrementally.

The east side of Los Angeles (Los Feliz Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Echo Park, Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park) has managed to replace most of its neighborhood councils with YIMBY-sympathetic types that are pushing for mixed use and density along their arterials.

Not that it’s the end-all-be-all solution, but compared to the west side where I have family, it’s a breath of fresh air to see neighbors generally cautiously enthusiastic about new development rather than immediately trying to figure out how to stop it by default

Independent businesses can't pay to kiss the ring in the form of all manner of local permits and hoops that must be jumped through to the benefit of various parties who otherwise have no stake in the matter.

Amazon can.

Chain stuff can.

That's a large part of why every good school district that's inevitably full of bad people winds up looking exactly the same.

While I oppose restrictive zoning, that fixing that isn't going to change the situation. Where people live is a compromise and the single family house in the suburb has some great properties that mean many people will choose that set of compromises. The density of single family houses doesn't support a corner store. It did before the automobile/streetcar, but now that those are common people will prefer to travel to to the much cheaper big-box store (which also has more selection) for most purchases and that doesn't leave enough "I just ran out of one thing" to support a corner store.

Don't get me wrong, there will be more corner stores if they are allowed. However the economics of retail mean that most single family homes cannot not be in walking distance of a corner store. It gets worse when you account for single family houses being so car dependent people will out of habit drive to their neighbors even though the walk from where they park their car is longer than the door to door walk.

People go on walks or bike in their neighborhood all the time. A suburban neighborhood could absolutely support a corner store with a handful of parking spots. We just don't allow for the experiment to even happen due to zoning regulations.

The zoning also is way too specific. Not far from my house is a busy intersection that has stuff like pawn shops and a run-down 7/11 at it. Very close to the intersection is a lot that's been empty for at least a decade now. A few years ago my wife and I thought we should look up what it costs and see if we can just pave it and put a food cart pot down. Turns out you can't do it. You must build a two-unit building with a specific number of rooms and square footage. WTF?! It's like a planned economy for housing. Needles to say, the lot is still empty because nobody wants to build a home like that in that location.

The magic word is "variance" - the problem is it takes time (not even money, usually just time) to popularize an idea and get it publicly accepted and then pushed through the city council.

I've seen it done; sometimes it takes a few months because it's simple and nobody cares, other times it takes years.

And often the city council is itself playing the long game; waiting for the pawn shop and 7/11 to go out of business or sell, and then they snap it up, bulldoze it, and sell it to a developer who will build what they envision for the plot.

Something that turned me on to these issues in the first place was reading through the P&Z committee minutes for my rural New England hometown, where simply opening a hair salon in an existing, vacant commercial space in the village center has been a multi-year affair because their variance for not having off-street parking expired when the previous business closed.

It's in a 150 year old commercial building and has had a variety of even higher-traffic businesses in it for decades, but now the town has created this artificial barrier to filling the existing space, which clearly functioned just fine before (the town has plenty of parking), and is dragging the process out through meeting after meeting. It's frustrating to watch.

It's surprising how little effort is needed to move the needle on those kinds of things. If you started showing up at meetings and complaining about wanting the hair salon, it could be the difference between tabling for another month and letting it through.

Especially if the number of people complaining keeps growing.

I've seen it happen. The vast majority of these things go so far under the radar that it's no wonder the decision is often the "conservative" one (by which I mean status quo, the activity that requires no activity).

So, as an ignorant foreigner... surely someone already _has_ tried this, right? Like, I gather US zoning is pretty localised; there has to be _some_ local authority who has tried it.

US zoning is complex. While final control is local, the state and federal government puts rules in place. The feds mostly if you do X you get some subsidy (loans for single family houses for example). States often set the rules that locals abide by - the local says some area is R1 (single family), R5 (apartments I think), C1 (retail but I'm not sure what type).... but state law says what those codes mean. The local can choose which of the zones an area is but probably cannot create new ones. The local can give a variance for you to do something not allowed, but everyone who wants it needs to follow state rules.

Remember zoning has been around for around 100 years. The rules change all the time. What I gave as examples were true at some point in history when I looked this up but may not be today. There are 50 states with their own rules. Some states have things like counties that sit between the state and the local. Generally states look at what others are doing and follow that with tweaks, but not always (New York and California are most likely to do their own thing - and they are the most populas states so they matter even if a minority of the total.)

Sure, to greater and lesser degrees! Prominent master-planned examples include Seaside, FL [0]; Celebration, the Disney-designed suburb near Orlando with its “town center”; and, in a less ambitious variant, The Villages, a collection of retirement communities notionally premised on “village”-scale lifestyle (and accessibility by golf cart) [1].

My impression is that people like them just fine when they get built, it’s just not The Way Things Are Done at the (rather local) planning level. Maybe more about inertia than malice—and, like so much of the built environment, planning today is accountable to the accumulated political weight of all the individual families’ and developers’ decisions that led up to this point.

[0] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/new-urbanist-paradis...

[1] https://www.thevillages.com/shopping-dining/

Suburbs used to be built with convenient access to businesses until 1946. They aren't mutually exclusive features of a pleasant neighborhood. Most American's have never experienced a well functioning old suburb and don't realize the scale of the hellscapes they are really living in.

Just because you prefer to live somewhere else doesn't make it a "hellscape." How would you react if someone called a city block like people on this thread are romanticizing a "hellscape?"

What you say is likely true. I've seen even crazier developments though. Not super far from me is a giant development of 3-4 story apartment buildings. It's easily a mile long and 1000ft wide. Just identical mid-rise buildings but not a single store, cafe or restaurant. It's truly the worst of both worlds. No privacy and space and zero walkability. Even by car the next decent grocery store is 5 minutes away.

Entirety of Irvine, California

If suburbs are truly people's preference then we shouldn't need laws to mandate their existence

Right. Given what the laws allow a suburb is often your best compromise. However the laws often force things that make your other options even worse.

That is laws mandating suburbs are not the only evil. There are also laws that mandate bad cities.

> The density of single family houses doesn't support a corner store. It did before the automobile/streetcar, but now that those are common people will prefer to travel to to the much cheaper big-box store (which also has more selection) for most purchases and that doesn't leave enough "I just ran out of one thing" to support a corner store.

Yet somehow, I've seen the exact same kind of suburban structure in a lot of Middle Eastern, car heavy cultures. Lots of single family villas packed together, often around a common area with a park, a medical center, an elementary school and a small shopping area adjacent to the park for small retailers and food outlets. The outlets and retailers often have a loyal customer base of people living nearby, the people enjoy the convenience of not having to take their car through a busy road just to buy groceries, and the food outlets enjoy the guaranteed patronage of visitors to the park. And these are households with multiple cars, not just 1 or 2.

For bigger purchases sure there are bigbox stores, but very few go there and buy - it's all done online with a few clicks and delivered to your home for free.

I can think of multiple “corner stores” that are the only business within a single-family home residential area within a few minutes drive of the house I grew up in in suburban NY. I’m pretty sure they all got grandfathered in and would not be permitted as new construction with the zoning, but they’ve all been in business since before I was born and are still going. These are mostly neighborhoods without sidewalks, and the stores have parking for only a handful of cars.

You’re right that “most” houses can’t be within walking distance of a corner store outside cities, but my anecdata experience is those residential communities can definitely support those businesses. They might require a short drive, but they’re still a lot closer than the shopping center, and a mix of “ran out of one thing”, deli/breakfast sandwiches, and beer keeps them in business.

I suspect many of them are grandfathered in economically too - they are not generating enough income to support starting a new one, but the family has had it for years and never ran the numbers to see just how badly they are doing. (or maybe they only work so long as the equipment doesn't break)

They can only afford to live in those single family houses in the suburbs because they don't have to pay the full cost of the infrastructure to run miles and miles all the way out to their house. It's being subsidized by the taxes paid by folks in the inner cities.

Then why do cities keep annexing suburbs? If they are such a resource sink you would think the opposite would be true - cities would shrink their borders.

The people doing the annexing gain power and influence by extending their reach and base of constituents, but they don't (as individuals) pay the price of supporting those neighborhoods.

In our cities history, it was EXPLICITLY to maintain republican control of local government. The city, it's like 200 years history, has REPEATEDLY split and consumed neighboring locals full of rich white guys to maintain a rich white republican control.

The is a strong towns talking point, but it is completely wrong. The first suburbs were built in the 1880s, 140 years latter they have built and rebuilt all their infrastructure.

Most of a city budget isn't even the infrastructure costs you claim they are not paying. If you expand out to the state where the highways are paid for the cost of infrastructure is even smaller as a percentage of the budget.

Densities have changed quite a bit across American suburbs over time—Brooklyn Heights, considered to be one of the first commuter "suburbs" in the 1800s is like 75k/people per square mile, Levittown, perhaps the first real planned cul-de-sac community in the late 40s: 7.5k, whereas a modern single family subdivision suburb is more like 2.5k.

That is mostly about birthrates. The number of houses is similear.

Either that or your are cherry-picking your examples. Where I live the suburbs from the 1920s are slightly less dense than the developments they are building right now.

This is standard in Australia. Suburb with a block of shops... small block - choose from convenience store, cafe, hairdresser, bakery.. large block will have a supermarket of some sort

usually with parking spots because people drive.

The reality of many countries show that people are not averse to local shopping. They only become so if there are no really good options to use a car and drive a few miles to buy a single toothpaste.

But there's also an efficiency argument there.

If technology now allows us to JIT distribute from a single store / warehouse across a larger area, isn't that better?

Imho, the real problem with American suburban design is (a) the elimination of spaces where community organically happens (read: corner store) without replacement with something else (e.g. a park) & (b) the centralization of corporate power enabled by monopolies (e.g. Amazon logistics).

To (b), I'd much prefer if drone distribution centers like this were city-owned property, with the drone service provided by one or more drone operators, with adjacent warehouse space for any company that wanted to distribute.

Well, it's also possible that delivery drones at scale maybe just have an unavoidable noise pollution factor. Sure, roads do too but those are pretty much a given even in areas with density that supports good public transit--and maybe especially if--see e.g. Manhattan. (And it's not like trains don't cause noise pollution too.)

Aside from the odd military helicopter from a nearby training area, I have pretty much zero audible air traffic at my house. I would very much object to large drones overhead on a regular basis.

Manhattan is pretty far on the other extreme. In the kind of medium density typical of European cities (dense rows of 3-6 story townhouses) you have enough density to support excellent public transit and multiple supermarkets in walking distance while having very moderate road noise outside of arterial roads. Delivery drones would absolutely increase noise pollution in such places

Ironically, there was some griping about the amount of tourist helicopter sightseeing traffic around Manhattan recently.

E.g. https://council.nyc.gov/gale-brewer/helicopters/

That is true most streets are after all only used by the locals who live on that street. It is also quiet in the evening.

It isn’t efficient when you factor in the cost of such small deliveries.

Also having some form of slack in the system goes a very long way in making the system resilient, especially in a system where your provider’s interests are not aligned with yours.

Cost in terms of what? Electric drone delivery is likely more cost-effective (external-accounted) than any of the alternative solutions.

Are toothpaste and batteries really daily necessities though? I buy toothpaste maybe once every two years in bulk, and batteries basically never, due to pretty much everything being rechargable via USB.

It's items in the collective though. (And I still use batteries although they're certainly nothing like daily necessities.) During the pandemic I really amped up my use of Amazon, etc. for deliveries and I found that I ended up getting orders delivered quicker once or twice a week than I would have ended up getting to even fairly nearby stores for.

Check the expiration date on that toothpaste. Fluoride usually loses effectiveness 1-2 years after purchase (depending on production date). I'd get a new tube every 12 months or less.

Your dentist might want to have a talk with you if you're not using toothpaste daily.

They said they buy it in bulk. I also do. Years ago I bought a dozen reels of floss from a dental supply shop. $60 for 2km of floss. I am still using it.

Well, and a lot of people don't want to pay the premium usually associated with a bodega/corner store if they don't need to. I frequented some local camera stores over the years when they were more of a thing and, however rose-colored glasses I want to view them through, they weren't that great relative to today's options.

In Europe there's a good chance the 'corner shop' is run by a national business or franchise, benefitting from their supply and logistics systems.

That means prices are usually the same as in their larger stores, although the cheapest (low margin) brands might not be stocked in the smaller ones.

I would never consider buying toothpaste or normal batteries online. What a hassle! Just take the packet off the shelf in the small supermarket that's at the end of my street, or the one by the station, or the one near the station by work, on the one just the other side of work.

This is one supermarket chain in Denmark, and you'll note I haven't centred the map on the middle of Copenhagen but the suburbs: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Netto/@55.736038,12.46374...

I think this conversation has gotten a little exaggerated or maybe just over-specific to the bay area, the US is full of corner shops operated by famous brands like 7-11. They're usually combined with gas stations. The American phrase is "convenience store." You have to leave your suburban housing development to go to them, but if you live in the city they're probably within walking distance. They don't exist in the sphere of highly paid professionals, though, because they're eminently practical from a commercial standpoint and sell inexpensive junk food, novelty knives, figurines, cigarettes, and whatever you'd imagine being there just to move off the shelves. I've only seen useful goods in a handful of them, and it's always sold in tiny quantities (imagine buying a single roll of toilet paper) because their clientele might not have the capital to invest in bulk purchases.

If you want to put this in a sort of social context, it's that laborers actually have quite a bit of money in America because having a lot of cash relative to the price of goods is the one part of the promise that comes true, and as a result they're catered to by a lot of retail. Those inexpensive retail outlets are the subject of endless complaints from people who you could call the conscious middle class and make up most of what you would think of as cheap American consumerism. The quintessential duo of Walmart and McDonalds is exceeded by convenience stores along this dimension and for most HN users, they don't exist in that they never think about them, and post things like "I don't have a corner shop."

> They don't exist in the sphere of highly paid professionals, though, because they're eminently practical from a commercial standpoint and sell inexpensive junk food, novelty knives, figurines, cigarettes, and whatever you'd imagine being there just to move off the shelves.

That's a different thing. What they're talking about is, effectively, just a very small supermarket, usually run by national chains. I have in walking distance of me about six instances of Tesco; one big one, one medium one, three small ones (single storefront) and one tiny one (convenience store sized). They all have basically the same core stock, at _mostly_ the same prices (I think the really tiny one is a little more expensive).

I wasn't clear.

7-11 exists in Denmark more-or-less as you describe (bit more food, less junk).

The Netto shops I linked to are small supermarkets, selling a full range of groceries — fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, bread, cheese, milk, eggs, pasta, rice, toiletries, cleaning products, light bulbs, ... I need hardly describe a grocery store. Toilet paper comes in a pack of 8 or 10 or so. Meat is probably in 250g and 500g packs, with a couple of options at 1kg. There are 6 kinds of toothpaste, 6 types of rice etc.

In much of the city, there are multiple shops like this within 5 minutes' walk.

I do the majority of my grocery shopping in a shop like this, which is why I'd never consider buying toothpaste online.

I'm not sure of all the reasons but you absolutely do have a lot of smaller supermarkets in Europe with chains like Sainsbury, Tesco, Waitrose, and so forth (most familiar with UK) which are certainly smaller than most US supermarkets but pretty price competitive with decent products. As you say, in the US you have convenience stores which are pretty crappy for anything other than junk food or buying a coke. Even in NYC, I'm not sure bodegas are much better.

What a hassle! I click a button and 6 months supply of the exact toothpaste I like arrives at my doorstep as early as same day.

Here in Dubai, I have 2 or 3 corner stores within maybe a hundred meters of my residential tower and 9/10 purchases for groceries are through a delivery app.

You're not wrong, but it will take decades to fix American urban development, if ever at all. Today, Amazon could use the US postal service for last mile delivery, which delivers six days a week and has systems in place for large scale shippers to deliver parcels to the closest hub. The choose not to, in the same way they squeeze their fulfillment workers as hard as they can. They want to make a logistics robot that does not require humans.

Amazon will use the postal service when it's the "best" option available (decided by some supercomputer AI somewhere, probably).

What Amazon is deathly afraid of, and is a reality, is Walmart dropping stuff off at people's houses. The local Walmart provides next-day (sometimes same day if ordered early enough) free delivery of most anything non-perishabale they have in stock. Walmart already has the neighborhood warehouse, they just had to add a delivery driver or two. 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart.

That could eat Amazon up and spit it out almost overnight. They know it, too.

And the batteries and toothpaste from Walmart are almost certainly not counterfeit.

“Some of the College Station residents who have complained about the noise say they still largely support the testing of drones. But many believe Amazon miscalculated by locating its depot close to so many residences.”

I agree that it seems improper to characterise these complaints as NIMBYism. The criticism is thoughtful, targeted and rises as much from Amazon’s lack of communication as from its drones’ noise.

That quote shows that "NIMBY" is especially proper and fitting! They support the idea in theory, but don't want it to be close to them. Like it should be in someone else's backyard.

The real question is if Amazon developers low noise drones will the people than allow them, or are they completely anti-drone.

The prospect of having drones flying over my backyard for any reason is undesirable even if they are completely silent.

For me it depends on altitude. If they're at the height of the average Cessna, then I'm cool with it. I don't want drones buzzing 100ft above my head though.

The numbers I saw were about 400 feet. The bigger issue is that they aren't manned and are presumably flying at a greater frequency than conventional planes. My concern would be that they fail and fly into the side of my house at full speed. I also don't trust Amazon not to be using these drones for surveillance.

Can either one of you elaborate why? Supposed they were absolutely silent, why would it bother you if they fly 100 feet over your backyard?

None of these things will ever be 100% safe, so a steady stream of one per minute as described in the article poses an actual safety risk.

I'm also not a fan of corporations having what amounts to realtime surveillance video of me any time I'm outside of my house.

I don't like seeing them in general as an aesthetic matter. I would be disappointed if I was under a drone highway.

Same reason why I oppose mass billboards in the sky.

This is one of those things where knowledge makes it bad. As a personal example, having coyotes in my literal backyard on a daily basis is not something I would want. That it happens pretty much every day without me realizing it, though, shows it really shouldn't be a concern of mine. Other than making sure I have protection for any backyard chickens...

I'd be fine with Amazon drones flying over my house, as long as Amazon pays a fair usage fee. Usually it'd be pay-per-use, but for companies of their size I'm thinking of introducing monthly enterprise subscriptions. Contact my sales team for further information!

Oh, and SSO is obviously enterprise only.

> real question is if Amazon developers low noise drones will the people than allow them, or are they completely anti-drone

Who in the article seems anti-drone? They all seemed to go out of their way to hedge complaints.

Amazon shouldn’t have located a depot, which necessitates low flying and presumably lots of noisy acceleration, in a residential neighbourhood. They ought to have done what they did in the other examples: base out of residential-adjacent industrial areas.

> Who in the article seems anti-drone? They all seemed to go out of their way to hedge complaints.

Dunno about them being completely anti-drone, but at least one person was worried about the drones camera:-

> A parent said their teenage daughter feared using the swimming pool because of the drone’s camera. (Amazon says it faces forward, not down).

But Amazon (and to be "fair" to Amazon, pretty much every large tech company) has had issues with data processed by their devices which the users of those devices wouldn't want handled by humans. Pretty much every smart speaker has had incidents with their reviewers being given access to voice recordings not intended for the speaker, in some cases it being recordings of kids. Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars.

So yeah, I too would be wary of what imagery drones flying over my private space would be taking. Sure Amazon says the camera(s) only point forward, but at this point I'm not surprised people trust tech companies as far as they can throw them.

EDIT: My follow up question to Amazon about the camera(s) on the drone would have been "If the camera only points forward, how does the drone determine that the drop off spot for any delivery is safe at the time of drop off without "looking" down?"

Ring (an amazon-owned company) had to pay a fine for allowing employees unfettered access to people's footage. [1] No need to "be fair" to Amazon here by pointing out other tech companies.

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...

"Fair" did fell like the wrong wording, but it was the best I could articulate at the time. But yeah your right. It doesn't make Amazon any less of a scumbag just because everyone else is being just as scummy too.

> how does the drone determine that the drop off spot for any delivery is safe at the time of drop off without "looking" down?

I couldn't get the question out of my head, so I went digging, and thought I would reply to myself with the answer in case anyone was wondering.

It seems to be that the drone changes orientation by 90 degrees during travel then the orientation it uses for take off and landing. there are not only forward facing cameras, but camera mounted on the left and right sides of the drone and a camera facing backwards.

So during its "travel phase" of flight no camera is pointing at the ground, but when the drone plans to drop off a package, it rotates its orientation 90 degrees so the camera that would be facing the rear during travel would now be looking at the ground.

There's a reason that so many airports are outside of cities, or in areas where not-so-rich people live.

Intermodals are similar. We had one that tried to set up in an area where the residents aren't so well-off, but they were able to shoot it down, anyway. People are getting better at organizing.

Almost all airports start out outside the city, even the smaller ones.

Cities grow around them.

NIMBY is a reality that has to be taken into account; but often the problems associated with it are "small enough" that money solves it - who would complain about the Amazon drone-depot behind them if Amazon was paying their property tax to have it there?

Generally NIMBYs consider whatever they're opposing to be a real nuisance. If they don't find it a real nuisance, they don't bother. You're describing a caricature, not an actual group of people.

> You're describing a caricature, not an actual group of people.

It's a term used to describe people who find everything a "real nuisance". There are NIMBYs in my town who spent months protesting sidewalks being built in a new residential subdivision.

It's kind of inherently a caricature.

The sorts of people you're describing do certainly exist, but that isn't how unemployed urban planners on YouTube have historically used the term, which is instead used to browbeat people who (quite reasonably) don't want their neighborhoods transformed by the construction of detox facilities, halfway houses, and mass transit infrastructure.

The first two, I’m sympathetic about. You’ve gotta put them somewhere, but I get not wanting them next door.

Transit? It’s a city. Don’t live there if you don’t want people moving around nearby.

And the ones protesting every single bit of housing development on grounds it mighty change their neighborhood? Yeah, you don’t have the eternal right to keep things exactly as they were the day you moved in.

Mass transit is a non-issue in a functional society which incarcerates criminals and institutionalizes the insane. This does not describe the vast majority of major cities in North America. This is why people move to the suburbs in the first place - the inaccessibility of every service except by car is a moat that keeps undesirables from settling there. In an ideal world I would prefer mass transit to driving a car, but not in a world where every train station has an addict using drugs in it, which describes the vast majority of mass transit systems in North America today.

> And the ones protesting every single bit of housing development on grounds it mighty change their neighborhood?

If they constitute an actual majority of residents, it's their right to dictate the development of the neighborhood as they see fit.

> Yeah, you don’t have the eternal right to keep things exactly as they were the day you moved in.

This is exactly the kind of hyperbolic dismissiveness that characterizes all of these arguments.

NIMBY is characterized by wanting or being ok with something, just not too local to themselves. So they may be in favor of affordable housing in the city, just not in their part of the city where low income students will be going to theire kids' schools.

San Francisco is the classic example of wanting more housing, but nobody is ok with it being built near them.

To be fair to the NIMBYs, if San Francisco was completely replaced with midrise apartment buildings, or 5 over 1s or even rowhouses, it wouldn't be San Francisco anymore. It'd be something different in the same place, with the same name.

Except that everything changes all the time, because time marches on. Instead of changing the buildings, we've changed the cost of living. We can no longer be a "come as you are" city, because nobody can afford it anymore, which is why all the hippies have become millionaires who cosplay being middle class, and Haight street sells overpriced tie dye instead of housing people who make tie dye in their apartments as a way to save money.

We've changed the city alright, just in exactly the way that the long-time residents were protesting against in the 1970's, except now they're receiving the rents instead of paying them.

It would still be the same place and that place is called San Francisco California

When people go to Nextdoor to drum up opposition to a development on the basis that they have enjoyed driving by that disused refinery for a decade, maybe we shouldn't care whether they think "anything other than a disused refinery on that particular lot" is a nuisance.

The term NIMBY seems to have been popularized to refer to people dogmatically refusing any change, doesn't seem to apply here, where the article describes a real nuisance:

This is textbook No True Scotsman.

They're all NIMBYs to varying degrees. I'd rather have delivery drones overhead than government surveyors looking to fine people because their sheds aren't setback far enough or insurers looking to misclassify shadows on roofs as overhanging limbs and whatnot. At least I potentially get something out of it that way.

So because people oppose some specific change that is causing documented problems for them, they're automatically anti-progress? It should be incumbent on Amazon to resolve the problems their neighbors are having with their drones.

Also I don't understand what "government surveyors" have to do with anything. Do you realize that satellite images of your roofline and property are detailed enough and cheap enough that people use them for roofing estimates?

> Also I don't understand what "government surveyors" have to do with anything.

There have been a few published examples of overzealous code enforcement bureaus using drones to identify otherwise out of sight violations.

Which... I hate codes and ordinances as much as anyone, but if you're in violation you're in violation.

Better to address the overzealous part of that by forcing a more relaxed policy on the bureau through their leadership (e.g. the mayor).

Which would be fine if that's how it was but usually when this subject comes up it's because the government is being sloppy, fining first and asking questions later and rake in untold sums before they accidentally fine the guy who meticulously complied, knows he can prove it and has the time/resources to fight them and then makes the news.

There's a reason I lumped them in with insurance mis-identifying shadows and whatnot.

If the violations were truly meaningful or detrimental then the abutters would have narc'd.

That's where tying elected representation to the issue is useful.

Relatively few folks vote in local elections: blanketing the city/county with "X is responsible for Y" can sway an election.

Everyone's in violation. A society where everyone obeys every law is a society of robots.

Or a society in which only just laws are on the books.

Perfectly spherical cows.

There is nothing wrong with expressing one's concerns. Problems arise when governments allow the concerns of NIMBYs to override the greater social good, allow NIMBYs to stall the decision making process, or fail to cerify the legitimacy of the claims being made.

In a case like this, yes it is NIMBYism. On the other hand, having high frequency flights over an existing residential are, for the primary benefit of one party (i.e. Amazon) would seem to support the groundings.

> In a case like this, yes it is NIMBYism

College Station’s residents appear to fail your own test. They are prohibited by Texas law from being “allow[ed]…to override” or stall anything, and seem to have made a good case for why a drone buzzing by “every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day” is at least a legitimate grievance.

I’d also add a necessary condition to NIMBYism: it’s not in my backyard. NIMBYs want the thing. Just not near them; implicitly: near someone else. The hypocrisy animates the exasperation inherent to the term. The complaints in this article seem to be closer to not in anyone’s backyard.

I don't think this is NIMBYism. The complaints are kind of reasonable and also, allowing a private company like Amazon do this most certainly is not something for the greater good. It's just good for Amazon.

YIMBY orgs are almost entirely bankrolled by tech interests. It's absolutely in their interest to portray any opposition to any development as indistinguishable from the affluent people who don't want to improve anything (aka nimbys).

EDIT: softened wording a bit

Definition of NIMBY does not involve dogmas or opposing any change - it's just opposing a change while supporting it to happen elsewhere. It has nothing to do with the change having real or perceived negative impact on the individual. In this specific case, yes there is a real nuisance to the people - but they are happy for the testing to commence elsewhere. This is textbook definition of NIMBYism. The examples here in UK are, "Oh I love renewable energy, but I don't want to see these ugly wind turbines from my window" or "Yes please more bicycle paths, but, no they can't pass through my street".

Yeah, NIMBY means "Not In My Backyard" implying that we want that thing, just elsewhere. I don't think anyone in this situation actually wants the drones whizzing around when there is little actual benefit in the first place, and a lot of noise.

If Amazon had bothered to engage with the Texas legislature during the process, they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by having it declared an essential business function and exempt from a large number of regulations. Our legislators are remarkably business-friendly.

The term NIMBY doesn't have a "reasonable" requirement.

It's a complaint that something should not exist close to me, though I think it should exist somewhere.

Prison, power plant, waste facility, low-income housing, paper mill, railroad, etc.

The term has definitely been weaponised to a degree. Similar to "Karen" to shame people into not complaining about bad products/service

The term "NIMBY" is usually used for projects that the NIMBY supports, or at least acknowledges the need for, but just doesn't want in their back yard: power plants, halfway houses, low income housing, etc.

Using NIMBY for people that don't want the equivalent of a privately owned airport dropped into their neighbourhood seems an abuse of the word.

In fairness, a lot of people here and elsewhere do use NIMBY broadly to mean anyone opposed to things they personally want to exist--at least in principle.

Agreed, I think that the term has become highly abused in a lot of political discussions. Many folks, even ones that I generally respect, will disdainfully dismiss any reasonable concerns to their preferred policy as selfish NIMBYISM.

> or at least acknowledges the need for, but just doesn't want in their back yard: power plants, halfway houses, low income housing, etc.

Or an airport, yes?

Just speaking for myself, I don't want a drone delivery center located in other people's neighborhoods either.

Yes. And?

Are you implying an Amazon Warehouse suddenly using drones and filling the air with noise for their corporate enrichment is the same as a public airport built by elected officials after due consultation?

Most airports are private.

Your other examples are power plants, halfway houses, low income housing are (often) private as well.

There is of course a value judgement. But this is a matter of degree not kind.

> public airport built by elected officials after due consultation

That's optimistic.

I think many of these folks like the idea of drone delivery as long as it's not THEIR house next to the droneport

Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner? If I could get my packages today, instead of two days later, and there's just this humming noise outside because of it? Some people would prefer the package sooner.

NIMBYs are anti-progress because of impacts to their lives and their neighborhood. The power plant needs to exist, but arguably does it? What's wrong with the old one? Why do they need to build a new one? Halfway houses and low income housing doesn't need to exist any more than a warehouse does. This one happens to be owned by Amazon, but where you want the distribution center for goods to exist, and who do you want to have own it? That this Amazon warehouse makes more noise than other warehouses and they don't want it there is definition NIMBYism.

I dont want my Amazon packages sooner, if it means creating more noise polution, air traffic, energy use, broken plastic waste etc..

> Halfway houses and low income housing doesn't need to exist any more than an Amazon warehouse does.

This must be a joke, right?

EDIT: I guess this is what the opinions of Amazon execs must be. We all question how people can be so blind that they make decisions which lead to huge amounts of suffering and mass destruction of the earths resources, well here it is in black and white.

Take that specific corporation's name off of it and yes it does. People need their things. Those things come from somewhere. How do those things get distributed? Some sort of packaging distribution warehouse center thing. It'll have trucks and vans and other industry, but other than the Amazon label on it, in what world does low income housing need to exist but warehouses can't?

> People need their things

Sorry but I completely disagree, People lived for thousands of years before warehouses. People dont need 'stuff' - that is a fabrication by capitalism to make you buy more stuff.

Housing, and specifically affordable housing for lower income people, is infinitely more required than more commercial warehouses built to ship people more Chinese rubbish.

People lived poorly for thousands of years. The large majority didn't live to see 5 years old (those who did had the heartbreak of seeing their own children not living that long). Many women died in childbirth. Many people starved to death in a drought year. Specific to this article, many of those who survived lost their teeth because they didn't have toothpaste.

Yes the world does need to do something about lower income people. However because of the above low income people today have a higher standard of living than the richest of 200 year ago. (though the rich then did have some luxuries that even the richest today consider only a dream).

Apologies, but I fail to see how your post has anything to so with Amazon warehouses using drones to deliver stuff.

> Many women died in childbirth. Many people starved to death in a drought year. Specific to this article, many of those who survived lost their teeth because they didn't have toothpaste.

Personally I would say that advances in science and healthcare has helped these things, not capitalist corporations with big warehouses unnecesarily shipping consumer products around the world.

did those advances in science and health care happen in a vacuum? In some system outside of capitalism where the doctors and scientists weren't supported by being able to buy consumer products in a store? Did the doctoring not happen with the benefit of, say scaples and medication getting put onto trucks and shipped to a warehouse and then distributed to hospitals and clinics?

> Did the doctoring not happen with the benefit of, say, scaples and medication getting put onto trucks and shipped to a warehouse and then distributed to hospitals and clinics

Umm no?

In 1600BC when the Egyptians were first performing autopsies and writing about the human anatomy, they were not ordering scalpels off Amazon.

When Aristotle first identified the difference between arteries and veins in 4th Century BC, I doubt he got his magnifying lenses shipped next day from a warehouse.

When Leonardo da Vinci made his incredible drawings of the human skeleton and mapped out the human anatomy for the first time in 1510, I dont think he needed to sign a drivers delivery note for his pencils and paper.

I think you need to step back a little bit and take a good look at what you are arguing. I am no longer going to reply to this nonsense. Thanks for the fun!

Look at the state of health care in Cuba for a different perspective.

Cuba benefits from a lot of the advances done elsewhere. They are not standing alone, but standing on the shoulders of giants (just like everyone else). They don't have everything we have elsewhere, but they have a lot of it and so there are only a few gaps to attempt to fill in.

Most of those advances are a result of government funding.

Absolutely! Not sure where I said corporations deserve all the credit for modern society.

The government only had enough surplus to extract from the population because of capitalism.

Capitalism provided the necessary wealth to enable those advancements. Sure there were a few in history, but a few people doing investigation doesn't advance nearly as fast as we have been for the last several hundred years. Without capitalism we wouldn't even be able to support the world population and thus would have less surplus to put into science.

Yes we did have science before, but capitalism was what provided it in more than tiny amounts.

Are these low income people completely naked and bereft of any physical objects? Are they going to eat air? Ignoring the Amazon warehouse, where do you want the food packinghouse to exist? Do these low income people need jobs?

You seem to have the opinion that every person on the planet should be working in corporate warehouses and be very happy for that fact, otherwise they would effectively be dead.

Where I live people have jobs like forester, woodcutter, blacksmith, teacher, doctor, farmer, builders, painters etc. People often do work for somebody else, in return for their services back. Lots of service is provided on a trade basis instead on via money.

People working in commercial warehouses for big companies is a relatively new thing, and it causes most people who do it great unhappiness.

Do you genuinely believe that only the possibility of a world exists where people have to slave all day for big corporations in factories and warehouses?

Sure, we can frame all of humanity since the 1760's, when the first industrial revolution happened as a relatively recent phenomenom.

> You seem to have the opinion that every person on the planet should be working in corporate warehouses and be very happy for that fact, otherwise they would effectively be dead.

I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote.

Current evidence shows humans have been around on Earth for about 300,000 years.

Corporate companies with warehouses have been around for about 200 years.

So yes, warehouses are a relatively recent thing. The majority of human societal development happened before then.

The meat packing house nearby isn't sending chainsaws over my head every 58 seconds.

Neither are all the other manufacturing plants within a few miles of my home.

Neither are all the commercial office buildings with lots of office jobs.

Seems there's a lot of places for people to work that aren't involved in massive noise pollution over my home every minute.

I'm surprised that you would compare drones loudly delivering cookies and toothpaste, which are arguably "convenient," with halfway houses and power plants. These people sound entirely reasonable in their opposition to the former, and I don't think you would find many of them opposing the latter in their neighborhood provided the new neighbor followed the norms of the community. That's really what this is about. Amazon installed a bunch of equipment that was so loud in operation that it scared wildlife away and ruined peoples' quiet enjoyment of their property.

I could see the community having the same reaction if the halfway house decided to have loud parties in the evening or the power plant was constantly emitting exhaust noise into the neighborhood. But it also strikes me that they're entirely reasonable people who just want some peace and quiet.

It's also completely reasonable that I don't want a halfway house, with the felons and drug addicts it'll bring even if they aren't throwing loud parties, in my neighborhood. I also don't want trains full of coal to rumble past my house at 1am on their way to the power plant.

Yea in my neighborhood I also don't want drones buzzing around and clouding up my views or disturbing my nice day at the park just to deliver drop-shipped plastic crap from slave factories. I'd rather instead of Amazon continue to gain market share that* we have more local stores so we can rebuild our middle class. Yes in my backyard for more local businesses, sidewalks and walkable neighborhoods, fresh, local produce, and parks, and development, and clear skies without noise disturbances.

If you want your packages delivered sooner why not set up your own small communities next to Amazon distribution centers and work out a deal with Amazon to pick up your own packages? Maybe they can even give you a Prime discount for self-pickup??

Technology is just a tool - it's neither progressive nor regressive except in the results of its application usage. I'm not sure where we got this idea that more efficient deliveries == "progress". Progress toward what? Even more efficient deliveries?

* Nothing in particular against Amazon versus Wal-Mart or other generic retailers, Amazon is just the topic of the OP.

> If you want your packages delivered sooner why not set up your own small communities next to Amazon distribution centers and work out a deal with Amazon to pick up your own packages? Maybe they can even give you a Prime discount for self-pickup??

In fact, we could build a large warehouse, with adequate parking and even transit, and the warehouse could be brightly lit, and it could not only allow you to pickup what you ordered, but you could see what was available for sale, and even have self-checkout machines that would take card or cash.

We could call it something like "Wall of Markets" or "Walmark" perhaps.

> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner? If I could get my packages today, instead of two days later

What if you could, but it was 10x more expensive? Obviously you wouldn't want it. Now take a step back and realise that for many people, having drones flying over the city all day long is enough of a reason to not want it.

Ironically Amazon charges less to deliver it in one day rather than two, which is what leads to this kind of madness in the first place.

Without drones I can still get Amazon packages delivered same day. And I don't see how drones would improve delivery speed regardless as they're at best last mile so you have all of the logistics to get to the drone location.

It seems like a gimmick. At best to reduce labour costs of delivery drivers.

>NIMBYs are anti-progress because of impacts to their lives and their neighborhood

Improved lives and neighborhoods is the greatest progress possible. Like...isn't this the goal? Suddenly having endless droning of drones is not "progress" in any way at all. It's a regression. People move away from that sort of nuisance, not towards it.

gotta believe you're playing devil's advocate and not in genuine belief that an amazon warehouse > low income housing

I didn't say that amazon warehouses > low income housing, but I've edited my comment to make it more clear. Warehouses and distribution centers need to exist, even if they don't use drones.

This is your opinion, not fact. Local communities can disallow them through zoning and planning, regardless of what consumers want. YIMBY for housing, NIMBY for whatever the Amazon paperclip maximizer wants.

Sure, it's an opinion that goods need to go to warehouses before being distributed to supermarkets. what industries are permitted in your utopia?

Industries local citizens want in their area. If you don't have the votes, you don't get the industrial zoning, warehouses, data centers, etc. Go elsewhere.

Right. Some else's back yard.

Right, not in my backyard. If they want to defend theirs, that is their choice. If they don't, and they want the noise, the traffic, and the air pollutants, I encourage them to seek these projects for their backyard.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50000-0

> Regulators, environmental advocates, and community groups in the United States (U.S.) are concerned about air pollution associated with the proliferating e-commerce and warehousing industries. Nationwide datasets of warehouse locations, traffic, and satellite observations of the traffic-related pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) provide a unique capability to evaluate the air quality and environmental equity impacts of these geographically-dispersed emission sources. Here, we show that the nearly 150,000 warehouses in the U.S. worsen local traffic-related air pollution with an average near-warehouse NO2 enhancement of nearly 20% and are disproportionately located in marginalized and minoritized communities. Near-warehouse truck traffic and NO2 significantly increase as warehouse density and the number of warehouse loading docks and parking spaces increase. Increased satellite-observed NO2 near warehouses underscores the need for indirect source rules, incentives for replacing old trucks, and corporate commitments towards electrification. Future ground-based monitoring campaigns may help track impacts of individual or small clusters of facilities.

https://scitechdaily.com/toxic-toll-where-warehouses-rise-so...

> Toxic Toll: Where Warehouses Rise, So Does Air Pollution

(recently assisted in scuttling an industrial park project in Northern IL [someone else's backyard, not mine], it can be done)

> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner?

Scanning through my recent orders, 90+% of them could take a week to arrive and I wouldn't have noticed, much less minded.

> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner?

Me, at least enough that I cancelled Prime, and took advantage of that "Amazon day" thing they had whenever I could.

I'd love for someone like Amazon or Walmart to offer weekly delivery to my neighborhood, and I could just order things as I remembered them, all delivered every Wednesday or whatever. Save time, save gas, save having to think about it.

Pretty much everything I want from Amazon is delivered on the same day that I ordered it, free of extra charge, because I live in a real city where one van can serve thousands of customers in a single trip. Needing aircraft for same-day delivery is a problem that suburban development patterns caused for themselves.

>Needing aircraft for same-day delivery is a problem that suburban development patterns caused for themselves.

I live in the suburbs of an exurb. Many deliveries are same day. The rest are next day.

"Suburbs" aren't what this is about, and I doubt it has much to do with speed either. Amazon is trying to automate more of the "last mile" to reduce delivery costs.

> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner?

I don't order from Amazon, and whenever I get things delivered, I'm usually fine walking 5 minutes to the store where I have it delivered.

And honestly, for the kind of items quoted in the article (toothpaste and batteries), I simply plan ahead to have stock.

> And honestly, for the kind of items quoted in the article (toothpaste and batteries), I simply plan ahead to have stock.

Or as it happens in most urban areas of the developed world: I can just walk 5-10 min to buy it from a nearby store.

How does the toothpaste get to that store for you to buy?

A truck delivers to them once every few days/weeks, the ones doing the last mile to my nearby store are quite often electric. Since it's a truck they can deliver a literal truckload of it instead of relying on some individual deliver point-to-point, economies of scale and all.

And also the shop receives the toothpaste as a carton of 48 or 96 tubes or whatever it is, with little space wasted.

With an individual delivery you get several times the volume of wasted space, plus at least one wasted layer of corrugated cardboard — which must then be taken away using a different truck.

However, the shop does use better climate control and lighting than the warehouse.

Not by noisy drone, if that’s what you’re asking.

If you have such a desperate need for products, why don't you live right across from a super store? That would fix your issue.

In this economy? I could be jobless and living out of my car in a Walmart parking lot if we wanted to get closer to the source.

I'm not sure what what you see my issue as.

Drone delivery is a fundamentally bad idea. That is, except for the exceptional cases where it matters (like a medical emergency).

Drones won't replace trucks; they are aiming at the last mile. There is already a perfect way to deliver a small payload over a mile: take a bike. That's healthy, that's economical, that's ecological, that's quiet. Why isn't Amazon working on that? Because it doesn't bring them profit.

They are working on that, well... kind of. They somehow convinced the NYC government to allow them to legally operate little trucks in bike lanes. They claim that they are "bikes" (bikes have two wheels, that's what "bi" means, these have four)

https://www.reddit.com/r/NYCbike/comments/1gw1wlj/amazon_box...

I like those vehicles, honestly -- delivery trucks are going to park in the bike lane regardless and these are much smaller and safer to maneuver around. I want to see more of them and hope it leads to more bike lanes being built in NYC.

Amsterdam lets little vehicles like this operate in its bike lanes. They can't be capable of going over ~30 mph. I imagine a similar policy is being followed here.

Normally I have no problem with "bicycles" having more than two wheels operating in bike lanes (for example: recumbent trikes, trailers), but I agree - those vehicles seem more like golf carts than cargo bikes. I'd be interested to know how much they weigh empty and what proportion of their power comes from the rider rather than the "assist." Probably better for the city overall than a full size truck but I wouldn't be stoked to share the bike lane with one...

Also those are definitely going to be parked blocking the lane lol.

I'm pretty sure you also do not need a driver's license to operate them since they are bikes.

The reason Amazon likes the drones is there's nobody they have to pay riding them. The bikes (for now) require a rider.

And autonomous ground-delivery vehicles have and are being tried. There are tons of issues with those, too.

The drones were an interesting if obvious idea to try, but I think they aren't quite practical.

Now hydrogen drone blimps might solve many of the problems, but introduce new ones. And helium is too expensive.

Drone delivery is a bad idea especially in exceptional cases like a medical emergency because it is much less robust to inclement weather.

emergency systems need to _just work_.

Your "take a bike" solution is far superior. Thanks for your post.

The niche for drone delivery is the one that Zipline found - delivering medical supplies in remote areas with poor road access.

For the majority of cases, it's a stupid idea. If you really want to automate away delivery drivers, self-driving vans probably make more sense, when self-driving tech gets good enough.

> it is much less robust to inclement weather.

So are helicopters, but we use them for air ambulances as and when conditions dictate it is safe.

I agree with your point, and I think that there are a few exceptional cases (some of which I believe Zipline addresses) where the alternative to the drone delivery is nothing. But to my knowledge, those are very rare use-cases.

Amazon isn't working on that because they have a bunch of software developers and they need to justify their existence with something other than making AWS better or fixing the bugs with their shopping website. Drone delivery is probably a "sexy" project some EVP or C-level is pushing because they want to add it to their resume.

No, this is all wrong.

Amazon are piling money into this because being able to deliver a small package over the last mile with zero people involved is a massive win to them. People are lazy, unreliable, hard to manage, and demand luxuries like toilets and water. The sooner they can get rid of them the better.

It adds a very low cost per-package low-package no person required option to their delivery options. A truck with a human will almost always be cheaper, but if you have a single package that will take a 10 minute detour for a driver due to a fluke of purchasing patterns, being able to drone deliver it could reduce the cost of that specific package delivery significantly, thus reducing overall system costs especially if that truck can now spend more time delivering goods in denser areas.

You are forgetting about the fact that the truck, and the industry behind it, already exist.

How many new factories, mining operations, flights and ships will be required to start providing Amazon with the millions of new drones per year it will need to achieve this?

This is not just a quick and easy way to replace a 10 minute detour. It is a new multi billion dollar industry which uses countless tons of materials and more energy to create millions more new plastic 'things' which will cost lots in energy and materials whilst simultaneously causing lots more waste on the planet.

I don't think these drones are for places that can be traversed safely or reasonably on bicycle. They're great for suburban sprawl where cycling isn't really viable and road trips take 10x as long to reach the places a drone can go.

Then solve the underlying problem, I would say: why is it not viable to cycle one mile in those areas?

I don't blame residents at all. FIFTEEN hours a day is incredibly long. That would be from 6am to 9pm. Imagine having a drone buzzing by your house 930 times a day during all waking hours. Want to sleep in? Go to bed early? Best of luck. I lived across from a neighbor who blasted their music. I could never crack a window and had to blast the TV. Even on the back side of the house, I had to use headphones to drown out the noise. Maybe I am overly sensitive to noise pollution due to this experience, but I'd absolutely throw a fit if I had to live like that because of Amazon.

Even half of that time is unacceptable in my opinion. I use my backyard as a sanctuary from all the chaos going on in life. It's a place where I want to sit, relax, and listen to the wind or birds. I find leaf blowers and the noise of power tools somewhat annoying too (tbf, I also use them from time to time), but if it were happening for hours and every single day, I might actually snap.

> “Inside his house, with the double-paned windows shut and TV on, Smith could no longer hear the drones.”

Well! That’s… a relief, I guess.

> If Amazon had conducted the maximum number of flights outlined in its plans reviewed by the FAA, a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day.

I guess we said the same thing when Amazon was normalizing next-day (and then same-day) delivery, but… why? When could cookies-on-demand, as Amazon’s marketing promotes, possibly be that important?

Zipline’s blood deliveries in Rwanda I get [0]. But chintzy consumer conveniences? It’s like putting lights and sirens on Prime delivery vans…

[0] https://time.com/rwanda-drones-zipline/

I'm not really a supporter of drone deliveries but, to me, the benefits also include fewer delivery trucks on the roads. And, I don't know how many last-mile trucks are EVs but the drones don't run on gasoline, right?

There are benefits other than the immediacy of delivery, but the noise pollution is too much for me, too.

I am curious how the math works out with respect to the delivery trucks. It seems like, ounce for ounce, it’s cheaper to move matter across the ground than to yeet it through the sky. Each delivery truck with 100 orders inside represents some number of passenger cars that are avoiding a trip to the store—and those fleets lend themselves well to electrification (cf. Rivian’s fleet for Prime [0])

But as you point out, there’s certainly a crossover point as the delivery cadence shortens, where you can’t collect 100 orders and aggregate them into a single route: if we’re really dispatching a whole vehicle per order per household, maybe drones are the realistic way. Why couldn’t they be drone bike-messengers or something, though?

[0] > In 2024, Amazon’s [electric] vans from Rivian delivered more than 1 billion packages to customers in the U.S. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/everything-y... - boy that would be a lot of flying chainsaws.

Road-based delivery requires less energy than air-based delivery, under the assumption that the roads exist (which they do, because of other reasons). This is simple physics.

I see no advantage to drones in areas with a road network. Vanity, yes, and cool sci-fi memes, but physics isn't just a good idea, it is the law.

I dont think that is necessarily the case. There are lots of practical logistics considerations that affect each around routing an capacity.

By way of example, rolling is more efficient than flying, but I would be shocked if flying an 80lb drone 1 mile over houses if it wasnt more efficient than driving a 10,000 lb van 2 miles on a grid, with dozens of stops.

Independent from Physics, there is financial efficiency, which has its own set of arbitrary variables.

> physics isn't just a good idea, it is the law.

That is awesome.

Trucks running on gasoline is a very small fraction of the climate crisis. Manufacture, maintenance, and scrappage of trucks/drones/whatever delivery device you choose (along with generating the power needed to run them) dwarfs tailpipe emissions.

I'm just pointing out the additional benefits besides the immediacy of delivery. Add to that list reducing the amount of tire chemicals emitted. Add reducing the congestion on the roads for commuters and emergency response vehicles. If the noise pollution had extremely low impact, these benefits would be worth mentioning whether or not it solves the climate crisis on its own (and I understand it wouldn't come close).

But, admittedly, I'm taking a rather naïve view here, assuming drones would displace trucks, but in reality they would likely add to the deployment, not replace it. Some packages are likely too big, or need a signature, or exceed drone delivery capacity, etc. There is a forcing function on the business (not logistics) view, the automation of the drones mean there might be fewer trucks but there might be more deliveries ordered as a result, too.

Fair enough, but I feel there are more issues which are not being talked about here. How many drones will fail mid flight and become unrecovereable? How many drones will crash mid flight? Will there be teams of people dispatched to clear up this waste or will we just start getting used to big piles of plastic and metal lying on the ground wherever we go?

What about the new industry and all the factories that will need to spring up to build these drones, maintain them, and replace them?

Everyone here is just focussing on the noise, but behind this is a massive industry using loads of power and materials and causing loads more waste, just so people can get cookies on the same day.

Oh, we don't have the space for all the tangential issues this touches on. Here's food for thought, what about the capacity and expertise developed by tackling the issues you mentioned?

The software refinement and supporting industry would be indispensable for any war-involved nation wishing to deploy a drone battalion -- as a conscientious objector I wouldn't personally want to work on drones to that end, but I have to acknowledge the potential there.

> what about the capacity and expertise developed by tackling the issues you mentioned? The software refinement and supporting industry would be indispensable for any war-involved nation wishing to deploy a drone battalion.

I would say that considering there have been plenty of military supply companies who have been researching, building and providing drones and UAVs to the military for decades, that Amazons effort for last mile grocery delivery will never feed into a drone battalion invasion in a war.

Look at Anduril, or Evolve Dynamics for examples of this.

I read the comments and see an overuse of "NIMBY".

It’s become a catch-all label that can oversimplify complex debates. People slap it on anyone opposing local projects, and it shuts down discussion implying selfishness without digging into the actual concerns.

What is wrong with residents concerned about noise, privacy, and safety? Those are real issues worth wrestling with, not just knee-jerk "not here" whining.

Maybe folks repeat it because it’s a quick way to sound clever online without saying much.

It’s funny to see my home town mentioned here in this context after over a decade of quipping online that the noise will always be an issue for drone delivery. I live in a more noisy urban area now and yet, I still can’t fathom the noise of drones buzzing over my house every day all day, or as often as I see Amazon trucks passing by. It would be awful. I think people like the idea of this, but have never actually witnessed what the sound of these devices is like. It’s loud.

And fwiw, college station is no quiet place. We have trains and they can be heard for miles. My house was a couple miles away from the tracks and I could hear the vibrations and horns all throughout the night as a kid. I still remember the cadence exactly even a few decades later.

I live in College Station. Drones did not fly over my house, but the people who lived in neighborhoods with Amazon drone service were out of their minds. First off, it is illogical to deliver little itty bitty items to one person, while profoundly disturbing all the neighbors and everyone on the flying chainsaw's rout: a very unbalanced social interaction. Great – now they are moving to Austin to try this, moving from a conservative town to a liberal one. I don't think they will do any better. Is it OK to lasso them? Shoot them out of the air? btw it is legal in Texas to shoot bothersome wild pigs anytime....

    > A parent said their teenage daughter
    > feared using the swimming pool because
    > of the drone’s camera.

A clear failure of parenting in the modern world. They should be encouraging their daughter to bathe topless whenever a drone flies overhead. Just imagine the size of the settlement if the photos ever leaked.

"Amazon’s Stephenson says that the demonstrations weren’t possible, because the FAA didn’t approve the drones to take flight until the end of the year when commercial operations began."

Lie detected. It would've only required a pilot be onsite who is licensed for that class of UAV. As long as the demo flight adhered to published FAA rules, no FAA exemption or approval is needed. The permission is needed when you do things like fly without maintaining line of sight or fly over people.

Google/Alphabet's Wing operates in Texas too, but I haven't read about any noise complaints there.

There were some complaints years ago in Texas: https://evtolinsights.com/2022/09/wing-drone-delivery-noise-...

I've been subject to Wing flyovers, when they first started it was bad, really bad. Like giant mosquitos you could hear clearly from half a mile away. On one particularly bad afternoon we got 6 (highly invasive) flyovers directly over us in less than 30 minutes while working in the garden. I would get "drone tinnitus" , the high pitch noise was very noticeable but would fade out to the border of perception on each flight such that after so much exposure I would begin to hear drones when there were none. It was awful. We considered selling the house and wondered if there would even be anywhere safe to move to.

It's better now for 3 reasons:

1) I think they have newer models that are quieter so more distant deliveries can't be heard.

2) they altered delivery path such that they don't fly directly back over a house reducing the double tap you would get being on the flight path.

And most importantly:

3) I don't think they do much business anymore, they reduced their offerings and I think they hardly do any deliveries. good riddance.

The Wing team did some optimization passes on the blade design to reduce the noise and direct the sound away from the ground, some time after their initial experiments.

> The Wing team did some optimization passes on the blade design to reduce the noise

i was about to say, just make the drones quieter. That tech exists and surely a company like Amazon can spend some effort on reducing noise. Now how much to reduce has to be defined by a regulatory agency like the city/county/state government or whatever. Seems like a pretty standard noise issue that can be solved

I was pretty pro-drone till experiencing it. After that I realized even if they could make them completely silent (which is impossible) if you extrapolate out to how many drones would be flying around pretty much continuously were drone delivery to really take off it would still be a solid "Do Not Want".

https://archive.is/qaFhc

I live in College Station. Drones did not fly over my house, but the people who lived in neighborhoods with Amazon drone service were out of their minds.

First off, it is illogical to deliver little itty bitty items to one person, while profoundly disturbing all the neighbors and everyone on the flying chainsaw's route: a very unbalanced social interaction.

Great – now they are moving to Austin to try this, moving from a more conservative town to a more liberal one. I don't think they will do any better.

Is it OK to lasso them? Shoot them out of the air? btw it is legal in Texas to shoot bothersome wild pigs anytime....

> a drone might have buzzed by Smith’s house about every 58 seconds for 15 hours a day

that's like living near an airport; property values are definitely affected by the presence of airports and you'll find that in most cities large residential neighborhoods do not spring up around airports for that reason. It's also why new airports are usually built quite a ways outside of urban areas.

I guess I just don't understand the insane degree to which business will go to deliver "toothpaste and batteries" — communities be damned.

I suppose if I am being charitable to Big Corp I should instead blame the people of these various communities for placing orders for toothpaste by way of Amazon.

Like a lot for things these days, a lot of the crap is in fact just what you see on the surface. You start digging at it and there are just layers and layers of it. And I know I am being a little dramatic here, but as a society I feel like we are increasingly losing (and I use that word loosely and broadly) and we're going to ultimately be the losers.

I didn't mean to rant or put so fine a point on the thing, but it kind of is these little things that just boggle my mind — why they exist at all. And so often "we" seem to be without agency to forestall them. And does it seem like the public is in general gaining more or less agency with regard to billion-dollar corporations in the current climate we find ourselves in? (That was I think rhetorical.)

And then of course even though small, these things just keep piling on....

Have been having the same thoughts lately, and always find myself asking that am I turning into a sour conservative who doesn't like progress.

But no, there's lots of progress I like, just increasing traffic (here traffic in airspace increases from zero to non-zero) is never something I like. Plus those drones are really loud, I wouldn't want to bother my neighbors by ordering with those.

The thing is, somehow we all got convinced that "progress" means "profitable stuff".

BigTech was not working on AR headsets because they wanted to improve our quality of life, but precisely because they want to make profit. They were aiming at "the next smartphone".

SpaceX is not trying to improve our quality of life; they want to make profit by commercialising space. "Saving the species by going to mars" is completely absurd. There is a lot of progress to be done to save the species, but SpaceX is rather a negative in that sense.

There is a lot of progress that can be done to improve our life (mostly to minimise the problems coming from climate change and the current mass extinction we're already observing). It's just that this progress doesn't make money.

I love progress. I hate profit hidden in fake progress claims.

> Have been having the same thoughts lately, and always find myself asking that am I turning into a sour conservative who doesn't like progress.

Unless progress involves some positive change for all parties involved, is it really progress?

Change oftentimes isn't progress.

By this metric, the abolition of slavery wasn't really progress.

Global GDP is way up since the Europeans started abolition so everybody is ahead.

> always find myself asking that am I turning into a sour conservative who doesn't like progress

You have every reason in the world to be critical of the version9s) of "progress" we're being served by a few billionaires who control medias and dip in politics more and more. Something being new doesn't automatically means "progress", and in case of workers or social progress it often means the opposite.

Businesses just rise to meet demands. Texas is the ideal place for the highly individualistic, neighbors an environmental issues be damned attitude. It's not like the cities there are designed so you can take a leisurely walk from your house to get some victuals.

Consume less, grow your people and community. It's a quiet, purposeful kind of rebellion. Just do anything that doesn't involve a corporation. It feels amazing and it has an immediate obvious impact.

Yes! Build meaningful connections which last even if you were broke. Money won't buy everything.

Delivering toothpaste and batteries is just a means to an end.

Businesses will go to any length to make money. “Community”? Does that make money? If not, don’t care. Bulldoze a nursery with the babies still inside? They’ll do it if it makes $1 more than the alternative.

AI safety people talk about a hypothetical “paperclip maximizer”: a powerful AI programmed to make as many paperclips as possible. Left unchecked, it converts the universe into paperclips.

But we already have them! They’re just called giant corporations, and instead of maximizing paperclips, they maximize money.

Amazon does this to deliver toothpaste and batteries because people want toothpaste and batteries as soon as possible after they have placed an order. So if a new technology appears that enables faster deliveries then businesses will at least experiment with it.

It's as simple as that, no greedy capitalist conspiracy needed.

It’s not a conspiracy, more like a force of nature.

There’s a way to make a buck? Somebody will do it.

It hurts other people? Doesn’t matter, still going to do it.

It’s overall a net harm to society, but the costs aren’t borne by the business making the profit? Still going to do it.

> no greedy capitalist conspiracy needed

No, because capitalism itself IS the greedy conspiracy.

This is such a strange take. We’re literally on the cusp of living in a Jetson’s style future where robots deliver stuff to our doors and that’s upsetting? To me this is literally the coolest thing ever. I’d much rather this than some delivery driver peeing in a Gatorade bottle to meet quotas. Automation drives prices down and makes all of our lives better.

I don’t recall this “Jetson’s style future” being not able to open the window because it sounds like chainsaws outside.

Maybe it’s more of a Futurama-style future.

Futurama delivery drones seem to be pretty quiet, at least. Even in the recent episode mocking Amazon. I guess we need to invent whatever gently humming propulsion hovering sci-fi stuff uses.

Yeah well I don't agree that everything needs to be available to be delivered instantly. As much as it's useful, I don't like the "traditional" delivery driver industry either, just feels like going in the wrong direction to get more hours into your day doing something "productive".

> Automation drives prices down and makes all of our lives better.

As I said in other comment, this increases traffic (especially airtraffic which goes from 0 to non-zero) and it doesn't make my life better that my neighbors can order toothpaste via a drone, causing average noise levels to rise as said in the article.

I wonder what the convenience does to our strategic planning skills. I spend a decent amount of effort building up kids’ impulse control, and they’ll need it in a world of marshmallow tests.

We're literally on the verge of collapsing because of climate change and mass extinction, and that is if WW3 doesn't come first.

Robots are not solving any of those problems.

Also the Jetson's seem to live in a world without any nature left, I don't see how that is desirable.

    > We're literally on the verge of collapsing
    > because of climate change and mass extinction

We're really not, and that's not me being a climate change denier, but deferring to the UN's IPCC reports on the topic. I encourage you to read the reports. Yes, we're in some trouble, but even their bleakest predictions are nowhere near "collapse".

    > Robots are not solving any of those problems.

How many of these people getting toothpaste or whatever delivered by electrically powered drone would alternatively be firing up their dinosaur-powered F-150 to drive to the local supermarket instead? It's solving that problem.

> How many of these people getting toothpaste or whatever delivered by electrically powered drone would alternatively be firing up their dinosaur-powered F-150 to drive to the local supermarket instead?

Why do you want to solve the last symptom in the long chain of failure upon failure, by adding on more atrocity in the mix ?

If I want toothpaste I walk 250 meters to my closest shop and buy some damn toothpaste

Fixing that "long chain" requires rebuilding a majority of American cities, and relocating a large portion of American citizens.

Sure, maybe it can be done incrementally. But it isn't being done very quickly or well, even in Seattle where I know folks are trying.

Does solving those systemic, political, societal and human issues seem easier than building a quiet drone?

We can be outraged about both.

How do you suggest toothpaste should occur in the real world? I can only go to the store with my electric vehicle which uses organically mined lithium in its batteries, charged by free trade manufacturered solar panels? To get toothpaste which hasn't been tested on animals (only humans) made up of chemicals that don't use any "bad" chemicals?

I hope no one is driving to a grocery store just to pick up one tube of toothpaste.

Electric vehicle? Damn, that's unimaginative... Use your legs: walk or bike.

You seem to think that everything you do requires buying a commercial product, with no alternatives. That is the success of the capitalist advertising industry.

It really isnt as hard as you think to live a low impact life without buying more stuff to help you do it.

Personally I walk or cycle to the store, and buy toothpaste that is made from zero chemicals and is packaged in 100% recycled materials.

If you want to go further than that, then before companies started convincing people that they needed to buy toothpaste, people used crushed charcoal from their fires alonog with mint leaves for freshness. Free, no transportation required, and just as effective, if not more so.

I am very happy to subscribe to this kind of lifestyle in order to reduce human impact on a global scale. Are you?

I try and live a low impact lifestyle. I reuse, drive an old ICE car sparingly, I buy more expensive stuff that lasts instead of cheaper disposable stuff when I can, I recycle, I compost.

I'm just not pretentious about it, and have no illusions about where my food comes from.

You live a low impact lifestyle, but the idea of walking to a shop didn't occur?

did it not occur, or is it not how other people live? yes I'm guilty of projecting that other people drive to the store despite living somewhere that I can take the public electric trolley and walk to places in my life.

> Who doesn't want their Amazon packages delivered sooner? If I could get my packages today, instead of two days later, and there's just this humming noise outside because of it?

> I try and live a low impact lifestyle

Personally I would say that these 2 statements contradict each other.

I'm not the one who can't handle the fact that advancements in medicine that have happened since Aristotle come hand in hand with the industrial revolution and capitalism.

> but deferring to the UN's IPCC reports on the topic. I encourage you to read the reports.

Did you actually read them? They say that in order to keep the temperature raise below 1.5/2deg, we essentially have to reduce the global economy by 1 covid crisis every year and find a miracle way to capture CO2 massively. So they really say "it's pretty bad".

But that's not all! The IPCC reports require some kind of consensus and are notoriously optimistic! Every single year, what we observe (as in, we measure) is that the IPCC models were optimistic. Every. Single. Year. So the IPCC reports say "it's pretty bad", and this is optimistic!

Finally, we are living a mass extinction right now. It's not a prediction, it's a measurable fact. Life on Earth is collapsing, already. Remember the dinosaurs? What got them extinct is the climate change that followed the asteroid, right? It was a lot slower than what we are measuring right now.

So yeah... the only thing I can imagine could keep us alive where the dinosaurs (and most big animals) got extinct is technology. But you know what? Technology is globally adding to the problem! Again, not predictions but facts: every year with emit more CO2 thanks to the "progress" in technology. A lot of technology is getting better and requires less energy, but rebound effects completely cancel that progress.

We are on the verge of collapsing, and at a time in history where we would need to be extremely smart and work together, the geopolitical instability is increasing by the day.

Are we doomed? Probably. But if there is a chance we survive, what we need is to do less with less, but in a much more clever way. Lots of work for engineers and scientists, but not on AR headset or LLMs. For some reason nobody is interested in saving our arse, they'd rather try to get rich.

Jetson's style future is a 1960s fantasy of futurism that hasn't held at all to the "cool" factor. Robots doing deliveries while creating noise pollution isn't cool at all, the new cool future is one where we are more intertwined with and respectful of nature, where we can live in calm places with green and convenience comes from smart solutions not a brute force fleet of Wall-E robots beeping around us all the time, instead one where the smart solutions are almost invisible so we can enjoy the environment around us. I much prefer seeing more trees in cities rather than metal, glass, and motors.

Unfortunately the urban design of most of the USA is not prepared to embrace the new cool future; current American urban fabric cannot support small shops dotted around neighbourhoods where you can shop for some basic items while fetching your newly delivered packages with a 10-15 minute walk taken going through community gardens, parks, and other amenities to calm your mind. It's all stroads with cars zipping by at 60 km/h or taking a walk passing by never-ending rows of gaudy suburban detached homes with no sense of uniqueness to the space like quirky parks, patches of woods with trails, and other features that can be interesting and calming to the mind at the same time.

That's what I think is cool, coming from growing up in a megacity like São Paulo and moving to Stockholm, Sweden, I'm fucking tired of machines, noise, pollution, the machines should be more invisible as we venture into the future on this Earth, not more prominent and disturbing.

Maybe try and get the noise level down to ambient traffic first, then?

> delivery driver peeing in a Gatorade bottle to meet quotas

I agree that that is fucked up too. But that's kind of my point about the layers of crap once you start digging.

But you're giving a false dichotomy — like we have to choose between flying chainsaws and drivers peeing in bottles. I'm pretty sure that most people thinking about it for a bit can come up with a few more alternatives.

> Automation drives prices down and makes all of our lives better.

The problem is, automation drives prices down so hard that Amazon and maaaaaybe one other large player will be the only game left in town.

We'll end up being back in the era of corporate towns that were abolished barely a century ago.

The book Hired by James Bloodworth, a British journalist, describes what happens to a town when Amazon graces it with a warehouse. Sadly, some communities are already there.

If your entire life revolves around buying and consuming I guess that world view can be explained.

As for the gatorade bottle problem, it's been solved in pretty much the entire western world via worker's right and regulations. No amount of tech and drone will fix the American system as long as it runs this flavor of the capitalism software.

are you missing a /s here, doctor pangloss?

The modern version of "The horses are no longer frightened by the uncivilized attempts to introduce motorized vehicles to the roadways".

I guess the difference is horses and cars travel on roads. You can choose to stay away from roads if you wish , meaning you are not subject to the noise.

Unfortunately drones can fly anywhere, and so there is no choice in having to hear the noise pollution.

Surely, given that drones can nowadays deliver heavy ordnance into distant trenches undetected, an amazon drone should be able to perform a similat feat?

"Undetected" in that context means "undetected until they're nearby". They're far from quiet.

They've deployed surprisingly long-range acoustic sensor nets, for tracking them by their noise:

- "Zvook’s detection ranges, though much shorter than radar, are nothing to sniff at. Drones, for example, can be detected up to 5km away. For cruise missiles, the range is about 7km. To pull this off, Zvook designed curved “acoustic mirrors” half a metre in diameter. These dishes concentrate sound waves on the microphones they cup. Most listening stations have two, for a coverage arc of about 200°. Processing takes place on an adjacent computer."

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/07/24/... (2024)

https://archive.is/sQcFO

> given that drones can nowadays deliver heavy ordnance into distant trenches undetected

You’re baselining the noise levels in a residential neighbourhood to a literal war zone.

It's about altitude and mass.

A very small drone (call it 500g AUW) can deliver a pill bottle at maybe 30 meters altitude without you hearing them. Delivering a can of soda (5kg AUW), we're talking a bigger, heavier drone and maybe a hundred meters. Delivering a bag of dogfood (50kg AUW), you need to keep the rotors maybe 300m in the air. If you want to keep this quiet in closely space residences you'll need to dangle the package on a wire down from a hover, like a Mars Rover skycrane.

In trench warfare, you don't need the wire, you can just drop munitions from altitude, limited only by accuracy.

Every domestic drone program is operating under imposed limits on altitude and airspace.

A suburban neighborhood has a significant tolerance for noise; We operate leafblowers, lawnmowers, cars and trucks. But only intermittently. If it's right next door to a droneport, the skycrane strategy doesn't help and your house is going to hear that nonstop. It seems like if they were operating from a better more remote facility, and the noise was only intermittent, people in the article might have tolerated even these ~100 pound class drones which have no skycrane and employ full descent almost to the ground (where they unceremoniously drop their contents the last ten feet).

Example landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcxfcMmdRCM

We can make drones quieter. However that involved compromises in efficiency.

Try dropping groceries from 200 meters, or hitting the front door full speed with an fpv drone.

They're undetected because they're flying way too high, or way too fast for the human senses to react.

Pretty sure an amazon drone could crash on your doorstep with your ordered toothpaste before you manage to stop it, yes.

Not sure that this is what you want :).

Not so much the Walmart ones...

https://local12.com/news/offbeat/drone-shoot-walmart-deliver...

And they say California is anti-business. (which it is.) If the birds and the dogs want to start paying rent and voting, they'd be called NIMBYs.

Still, the answer to the problem is to redesign the drone blades so they make a different sound. Copy the wing design from barn owls. Which has been patented, so Amazon will just have to pay a licensing fee.

> And they say California is anti-business. (which it is.)

If you break up the US states as countries, California is the world's 4th largest economy.

source: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/16/california-remains-the-wor...

That's despite how hard it is to start a business there, not because of it. Try and start a factory and see how far you get before regulations and environmental studies bankrupt you.

Try building anything and die on the permitting table, or skip the permits and try and bribe the regulatory commision. Either way that's overhead. The Bay Area's housing crisis is a problem of its own making. NIMBYs everywhere. They even tried to develop Solano county and got shit all over. It could be a global industrial epicenter like Shenzhen, except for that one tree frog.

Businesses are moving to Austin and elsewhere because of how hard it is to do business in California. Whatever you think of Elon, he moved a shitton of Tesla jobs out of state because of the obstacles in creating them.

Is it possible that "speed of opening a factory" is not equivalent to "best conditions for businesses in general"

Speed of opening a factory is one of many conditions required for business. There are many factors and different businesses have different needs, so anyone who claims one is most important is wrong. For a lot of them speed of opening a factory is important, for others it doesn't matter.

businesses operate on money, and time is money, so speed of opening a factory is very much about the best condition for business. It's not the only one, mind you, but if it costs an extra million dollars in lost revenue to start a business because the permitting process took an extra year, then why would you not start the business somewhere else that didn't cost you that extra million?

Woah now Mr. Europe. That sounds dangerously close to favoring human dignity over maximizing shareholder value.

We don't do that here in these parts.

What are they waiting for? They can unilaterally leave the union, right?

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

> In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court ruled unilateral secession unconstitutional, while commenting that revolution or consent of the states could lead to a successful secession.

How does it work? Doesn't it mean that if a state seceded now, the Supreme Court may still decide that it is constitutional? Genuinely interested.

The full quote:

When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.

- Texas v. White, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 700

A state cannot itself just decide to leave. It has to be allowed to go or successfully fight its way out of it. The secessionists' revolution failed; thus they were never not a part of the US.

So, I guess they could unilaterally leave, assuming they win their revolutionary war. But otherwise no, they can't unilaterally leave without the rest of the union agreeing to it somehow. The governor can't just sign a piece of paper and say California is now its own country separate from the United States and have that take effect from the perspective of the federal government. California would still be legally considered a State in the United States.

I find it very interesting that the Constitution doesn't say that a state cannot leave, which suggests that when the state joined the union, it did not explicitly accept this condition.

Then later, when a state wants to leave, it is the Supreme Court (representing all the states) that says "hmm so it was not written, but we now decide that we don't want you to leave".

By [the Articles of Confederation], the Union was solemnly declared to "be perpetual." And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained "to form a more perfect Union." It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?. . . When, therefore, [a state] became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final.

— U.S. Supreme Court, Texas v. White (1869).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_Union

Further, "the union will be preserved at any cost". There's a bloody and destructive precedent set for that.

This seems like primarily an indictment of zoning in Texas, which famously, doesn't exist and allows storage depots to be right next to residential areas.

They are getting what they voted for in other words.

Texas doesn't have statewide zoning but cities in Texas may. College Station has typically restrictive American zoning where virtually the entire city consists of either "rural", "restricted suburban", or "general suburban" designations. These permit, at most, 1-8 dwellings per acre, which is an order of magnitude below what anyone would consider a city.

https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/north-texas-community-say... is another example, even if it might not exactly the fault of state-wide laws.

Do yourself a favor and type "zoning in Texas" into your favorite search engine before repeating this nonsense again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com