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Yeah this isn't terribly exciting. People have been demoing self driving tractors and farm machinery for decades. Ford had one in the 1950s. Most of the hard wo
by Houshalter 9y ago
Yeah this isn't terribly exciting. People have been demoing self driving tractors and farm machinery for decades. Ford had one in the 1950s. Most of the hard work like actually picking the crop has already been solved, and making the tractor self driving just saves a few hours of work at most.
What would be really cool is automating crops that still require lots of manual labor. Like vegetables. That's the reason they are still so expensive. An automated greenhouse would be enormous news.
Whats also cool is stuff like this (https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/bosch-deepfield-robotics-weed-control https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...) which eliminates the need for pesticides.
- chiefofgxbxl 9y ago> What would be really cool is automating crops that still require lots of manual labor. Like vegetables. That's the reason they are still so expensive. Same deal with coffee beans, which contributes to their higher price. The coffee beans do not ripen at the same time, so they must be hand-picked so the worker can identify which ones are ready. Lots of manual labor. And with coffee being so widely consumed, savings here would easily be felt by a lot of people, although I doubt Starbucks would like it...
- setr 9y agoWhy would starbucks be against lowered supply prices? Either the whole market drops in price and starbucks keeps the same profit margin but lowers actual price, or starbucks just sells the same price but now with higher margins than before
- kuschku 9y agoBecause Starbucks has found a carefully balanced point between being affordable enough that it has mainstream appeal, and expensive enough that it seems premium. Any change, absolute or relative, would reduce their margin.
- philh 9y agoDo you claim that the current price of coffee beans is the price that happens to maximise Starbucks' profits? (This seems implausible to me, unless Starbucks has fairly strong control over the price of coffee beans.) Or is your claim more narrow than that?
- kuschku 9y agoMy claim is that the current price of coffee beans happens by coincidence to be close to the optimum for Starbucks’ profits, and any major change would be a disadvantage.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bamboozled 9y agoThat's the reason they are still so expensive. My observations have been that vegetables are so inexpensive they're often thrown away? Obviously these cheap crops are often grown in a monetarily cheap but environmentally destructive way but I've no idea where you're seeing these expensive vegetables for sale?
- Houshalter 9y agoI meant expensive in a relative sense. A pound of corn is a few cents, a pound of vegetables is a few dollars (it's far worse when you compare price per calorie.) Maybe expensive is the wrong word to use, but the economic impact of automating this would be quite enormous. And I have seen people complain that eating healthier is more expensive.