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Those spoiled yuppies paying a 50%+ markup on coffee just to have it delivered by drone are the ones subsidising the research and engineering efforts that go to

Those spoiled yuppies paying a 50%+ markup on coffee just to have it delivered by drone are the ones subsidising the research and engineering efforts that go towards delivering medicine to inacessible spots. If the market isn't there then the investment isn't either.

elliekelly 5y ago
> If the market isn't there then the investment isn't either. This is probably news to a lot of VCs who regularly make investments in hope of an eventual market.
IgorPartola 5y ago
This feels like one of those feel good bullshit quips that is probably technically sort of true but only partially or some such. But I haven’t had my coffee delivered so I am not all there yet to figure out what the fallacy is.
- samhw 5y ago
  The response to this is normally the same as the response to trophy hunting subsidising conservation: namely, "yeah, that's true, but reality shouldn't be that way". I don't find that a very compelling argument, but apparently some people do.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  The fallacy is that there are other ways of society to “subsidize” the research, e.g. via taxes. There is no need for the yuppie and the coffee.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Norway tried this with carbon capture. It ended up with a big payday for big oil IIRC. Now that we are getting the socialists back in power (they was the ones behind the last attempt) they've promised to have companies buy into it too instead of just using taxes.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      It would be interesting to know why this is downvoted: I consider myself fluent in Norwegian, did I still miss something? Edit: to be clear, I don't care at all about those stupid point. For that matter dang should be free to reset them every day like he seems to do with his own. I only care about them as an indication of whether what I said came across as wrong or something.
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        It seems to be bringing up an relatively off topic political dispute without doing the work to justify the relevance or the claims being made. This makes it easy for people to see nothing more than anti carbon tax, anti socialist political baiting. This doesn't tend to lead to productive conversations and thus is likely to get downvoted on a political basis. A more productive comment would have talked about how the Norwegian carbon tax was intended to fund research and how exactly it failed to do that and instead just created profits for oil companies.
        skinkestek 5y ago
        Ok, I see, thanks. I don't have time to fix it now, but yes, this is my point: I'm not against taxing pollution or using tax income to fund research, only against the part where we (Norway) literally gave money to companies without demanding results.
  - adventured 5y ago
    > e.g. via taxes ... There is no need for the yuppie and the coffee. The taxes are also paid for by the yuppies at a disproportionate rate to their income share. See: share of income taxes as broken out by income segment, in most every developed nation. One of the central defining characteristics of a yuppie is a well-paying job. That means paying higher, progressive tax rates in most affluent nations, including Australia. https://www.ato.gov.au/rates/individual-income-tax-rates/ https://www.ato.gov.au/rates/individual-income-tax-rates/ See: what happens to California if you remove the tech yuppies pulling down $200,000 - $500,000, as well as their party buckets of equity compensation, the taxes of which the state rolls around in during the good times. California would become a formal second world disaster with no ability to fund anything. Illinois with nicer weather.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I meant no need for yuppies to pay for coffee delivered by done in order to accomplish the goal of researching how to deliver medicines in hard to reach places. They may coincidentally have to do with each other (emphasis on “may”), but not causally.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I can see the ads now. We at .com are delivering medicines to poor people in this unfortunate country that has no infrastructure. (baby crying, dog being kicked away from table with flies on the food, and sad music playing) Disclaimer: This was done one time for advertising purposes, and is not indicative of how our whirlybirds will be used. (Off topic, but here goes. You know those drug commercials that state if you can't afford the medications, we a Whizzerbio will help out with costs because we are there for Everyone. This is how it worked when I looked into it. You, and your doctor have to fill out a bunch of forms. The meds are only sent to the doctors office. So you will need to go there to pick the medication up, and I imagine setting up another appointment. I have no idea why they don't deliver to the patient, or reimburse the pharmacy. I imagine they want it delivered to the office so the pharmaceutical rep can have a real reason to talk with doc? Only one patient per doctor are allowed to participate in this promotion. Doc has 1000 patients, but only one poor guy gets the free med. I looked into this ten years ago, so things might have changed?
- cochne 5y ago
  I think this argument is true and it is easily demonstrated with GPUs. They were able to be financially successful products largely because consumers wanted them to play video games. Now they are necessary for academic research in deep learning and other fields, which would not have gotten GPUs as advanced as they are without the market boost. Of course that’s just a theory and it’s never possible to go back and see what would have happened. But it seems reasonable to me.
  - mirker 5y ago
    I mean it’s a bit murkier than that: 1. GPUs used to be much less programmable and had fixed-function graphics pipelines. 2. General purpose GPU computing was demonstrated a decade before the 2012 deep learning craze. OpenCL/CUDA was quite mature in 2012 and used by high performance computing. 3. Transistor scaling (Moore’s law) has been speeding everything up exponentially. 4. There are a lot of non-GPU solutions now. If GPUs didn’t exist, someone still could have trained a deep model on a cluster of CPU, and then we’d end up with GPUs (or similar hardware) again. So it’s not necessarily true that gaming->GPU->deep learning implies that GPUs couldn’t be used for deep learning without gaming, because you could have had CPU->deep learning->GPU. I think this was much more of a case of the stars magically aligning than some preset goal by Nvidia/AMD. In fact, there are plenty of cases where you had CPU->research->HW accelerator. One example (on top of gaming/rendering) is compression or parity coding, which was slow initially and then had add-on cards and/or CPU extensions.
matthewmorgan 5y ago
Trickle down coffee, heard it all now
- hef19898 5y ago
  Once raven get more experience, it will no more like splashdown coffee.
path411 5y ago
Except time has shown that companies aren't taking on their real cost to their communities. How are people chuckling about this video when this is clear signs this will have real environmental effects and costs that if we are,"lucky" might be a taking point to politicians/CEOs in a couple of decades after irreversible damage is done
- samhw 5y ago
  What's the environmental effect? It seems like a clear improvement over current delivery mechanisms, since it's lighter and can be powered with electricity. Is your argument based on some assumption of induced demand, i.e. that it will encourage people to get more deliveries?
Loic 5y ago
This "delivering medicine in inaccessible spots" is simply not true. We can already deliver Coca-Cola everywhere on Earth reliably.
- rewq4321 5y ago
  > This "delivering medicine in inaccessible spots" is simply not true. We can already deliver Coca-Cola everywhere on Earth reliably. Your comment is so profoundly wrong, and yet so confidently written. You're comparing Coke, a long-shelf-life mass market product, with (often) emergency/low-latency delivery of products which would be impractical to stockpile in every remote village, even if they could affort it (e.g. certain types of medicine and consumable medical products, blood, etc.) Coke doesn't need low-latency delivery - they can use high-bandwidth + warehousing. This isn't possible/practical for some types of products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivery_drone#Healthcare_delivery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivery_drone#Healthcare_deli...
  - hef19898 5y ago
    And still there is a way to reliably reach even the remotest areas where people live. Getting medicine there can, at least to a degree, piggy bag on that. Unless it is a AI powered blockchain drone, that would be unbeatable!
    - samhw 5y ago
      Like the comment said to which you are replying, there isn't a fast enough supply chain for deliveries which 'go stale' far more quickly than Coca-Cola does. Therefore, no, they can't piggyback on that existing supply chain.
      - hef19898 5y ago
        Given that cooling is a thing, yes they can. Unless stuff goes shale within minutes, in which case even a drone won't help you.
ravendroneguy 5y ago
The coffee is the same price as at a cafe. About $7, which is standard for a large with two extra shots which is about standard here.
mc32 5y ago
Most of it gets funded by BigCos with too much money, VCs looking for the next unicorn or things like DARPA. 50% markups may make it viable if it gets off the ground and becomes and ind operation but that’s not footing R&D.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Are you sure? It doesn't seem believable that drone advancements have been significantly subsidized by coffee delivery, not even right now let alone over the past 10-20 years where huge advancements were made.
- CydeWeys 5y ago
  It's about the service existing going forward. If all these are gonna be used for is remote medicine delivery, then that's hardly any missions, thus hardly any money in it, and thus it wouldn't attract investments. The only reason these autonomous drone delivery companies exist is in anticipation of high demand, being as commonly used as Uber/Amazon/GrubHub.
  - lolc 5y ago
    Well these guys say they've delivered quite a few packages with their drones. To hospitals. https://flyzipline.com/ https://flyzipline.com/ Coffee wasn't on the agenda it seems.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    What is about that? I find it difficult to believe coffee delivery even now or "going forward" significantly subsidizes drone technology development. Even if you expand that to delivery of other frivolities. Do you have any numbers? Or reasoning? Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition. What drone technologies are being subsidized by coffee delivery?
    - BigJono 5y ago
      You've literally stumbled into the answer yourself here. > Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition. If that's the case (which it is, you're right), then why are we not already delivering medicine to remote areas with drones?
cabalamat 5y ago
> Those spoiled yuppies paying a 50%+ markup on coffee just to have it delivered by drone are the ones subsidising the research and engineering efforts that go towards delivering medicine to inacessible spots Really? Are spoiled yuppies ordering coffee a significant fraction of projected drone deliveries? I doubt it.

elliekelly 5y ago

> If the market isn't there then the investment isn't either. This is probably news to a lot of VCs who regularly make investments in hope of an eventual market.

IgorPartola 5y ago

This feels like one of those feel good bullshit quips that is probably technically sort of true but only partially or some such. But I haven’t had my coffee delivered so I am not all there yet to figure out what the fallacy is.

samhw 5y ago
The response to this is normally the same as the response to trophy hunting subsidising conservation: namely, "yeah, that's true, but reality shouldn't be that way". I don't find that a very compelling argument, but apparently some people do.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
The fallacy is that there are other ways of society to “subsidize” the research, e.g. via taxes. There is no need for the yuppie and the coffee.
- skinkestek 5y ago
  Norway tried this with carbon capture. It ended up with a big payday for big oil IIRC. Now that we are getting the socialists back in power (they was the ones behind the last attempt) they've promised to have companies buy into it too instead of just using taxes.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    It would be interesting to know why this is downvoted: I consider myself fluent in Norwegian, did I still miss something? Edit: to be clear, I don't care at all about those stupid point. For that matter dang should be free to reset them every day like he seems to do with his own. I only care about them as an indication of whether what I said came across as wrong or something.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      It seems to be bringing up an relatively off topic political dispute without doing the work to justify the relevance or the claims being made. This makes it easy for people to see nothing more than anti carbon tax, anti socialist political baiting. This doesn't tend to lead to productive conversations and thus is likely to get downvoted on a political basis. A more productive comment would have talked about how the Norwegian carbon tax was intended to fund research and how exactly it failed to do that and instead just created profits for oil companies.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        Ok, I see, thanks. I don't have time to fix it now, but yes, this is my point: I'm not against taxing pollution or using tax income to fund research, only against the part where we (Norway) literally gave money to companies without demanding results.
- adventured 5y ago
  > e.g. via taxes ... There is no need for the yuppie and the coffee. The taxes are also paid for by the yuppies at a disproportionate rate to their income share. See: share of income taxes as broken out by income segment, in most every developed nation. One of the central defining characteristics of a yuppie is a well-paying job. That means paying higher, progressive tax rates in most affluent nations, including Australia. https://www.ato.gov.au/rates/individual-income-tax-rates/ https://www.ato.gov.au/rates/individual-income-tax-rates/ See: what happens to California if you remove the tech yuppies pulling down $200,000 - $500,000, as well as their party buckets of equity compensation, the taxes of which the state rolls around in during the good times. California would become a formal second world disaster with no ability to fund anything. Illinois with nicer weather.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I meant no need for yuppies to pay for coffee delivered by done in order to accomplish the goal of researching how to deliver medicines in hard to reach places. They may coincidentally have to do with each other (emphasis on “may”), but not causally.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
I can see the ads now. We at .com are delivering medicines to poor people in this unfortunate country that has no infrastructure. (baby crying, dog being kicked away from table with flies on the food, and sad music playing) Disclaimer: This was done one time for advertising purposes, and is not indicative of how our whirlybirds will be used. (Off topic, but here goes. You know those drug commercials that state if you can't afford the medications, we a Whizzerbio will help out with costs because we are there for Everyone. This is how it worked when I looked into it. You, and your doctor have to fill out a bunch of forms. The meds are only sent to the doctors office. So you will need to go there to pick the medication up, and I imagine setting up another appointment. I have no idea why they don't deliver to the patient, or reimburse the pharmacy. I imagine they want it delivered to the office so the pharmaceutical rep can have a real reason to talk with doc? Only one patient per doctor are allowed to participate in this promotion. Doc has 1000 patients, but only one poor guy gets the free med. I looked into this ten years ago, so things might have changed?
cochne 5y ago
I think this argument is true and it is easily demonstrated with GPUs. They were able to be financially successful products largely because consumers wanted them to play video games. Now they are necessary for academic research in deep learning and other fields, which would not have gotten GPUs as advanced as they are without the market boost. Of course that’s just a theory and it’s never possible to go back and see what would have happened. But it seems reasonable to me.
- mirker 5y ago
  I mean it’s a bit murkier than that: 1. GPUs used to be much less programmable and had fixed-function graphics pipelines. 2. General purpose GPU computing was demonstrated a decade before the 2012 deep learning craze. OpenCL/CUDA was quite mature in 2012 and used by high performance computing. 3. Transistor scaling (Moore’s law) has been speeding everything up exponentially. 4. There are a lot of non-GPU solutions now. If GPUs didn’t exist, someone still could have trained a deep model on a cluster of CPU, and then we’d end up with GPUs (or similar hardware) again. So it’s not necessarily true that gaming->GPU->deep learning implies that GPUs couldn’t be used for deep learning without gaming, because you could have had CPU->deep learning->GPU. I think this was much more of a case of the stars magically aligning than some preset goal by Nvidia/AMD. In fact, there are plenty of cases where you had CPU->research->HW accelerator. One example (on top of gaming/rendering) is compression or parity coding, which was slow initially and then had add-on cards and/or CPU extensions.

matthewmorgan 5y ago

Trickle down coffee, heard it all now

hef19898 5y ago
Once raven get more experience, it will no more like splashdown coffee.

path411 5y ago

Except time has shown that companies aren't taking on their real cost to their communities. How are people chuckling about this video when this is clear signs this will have real environmental effects and costs that if we are,"lucky" might be a taking point to politicians/CEOs in a couple of decades after irreversible damage is done

samhw 5y ago
What's the environmental effect? It seems like a clear improvement over current delivery mechanisms, since it's lighter and can be powered with electricity. Is your argument based on some assumption of induced demand, i.e. that it will encourage people to get more deliveries?

Loic 5y ago

This "delivering medicine in inaccessible spots" is simply not true. We can already deliver Coca-Cola everywhere on Earth reliably.

rewq4321 5y ago
> This "delivering medicine in inaccessible spots" is simply not true. We can already deliver Coca-Cola everywhere on Earth reliably. Your comment is so profoundly wrong, and yet so confidently written. You're comparing Coke, a long-shelf-life mass market product, with (often) emergency/low-latency delivery of products which would be impractical to stockpile in every remote village, even if they could affort it (e.g. certain types of medicine and consumable medical products, blood, etc.) Coke doesn't need low-latency delivery - they can use high-bandwidth + warehousing. This isn't possible/practical for some types of products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivery_drone#Healthcare_delivery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivery_drone#Healthcare_deli...
- hef19898 5y ago
  And still there is a way to reliably reach even the remotest areas where people live. Getting medicine there can, at least to a degree, piggy bag on that. Unless it is a AI powered blockchain drone, that would be unbeatable!
  - samhw 5y ago
    Like the comment said to which you are replying, there isn't a fast enough supply chain for deliveries which 'go stale' far more quickly than Coca-Cola does. Therefore, no, they can't piggyback on that existing supply chain.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Given that cooling is a thing, yes they can. Unless stuff goes shale within minutes, in which case even a drone won't help you.

ravendroneguy 5y ago

The coffee is the same price as at a cafe. About $7, which is standard for a large with two extra shots which is about standard here.

mc32 5y ago

Most of it gets funded by BigCos with too much money, VCs looking for the next unicorn or things like DARPA. 50% markups may make it viable if it gets off the ground and becomes and ind operation but that’s not footing R&D.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Are you sure? It doesn't seem believable that drone advancements have been significantly subsidized by coffee delivery, not even right now let alone over the past 10-20 years where huge advancements were made.

CydeWeys 5y ago
It's about the service existing going forward. If all these are gonna be used for is remote medicine delivery, then that's hardly any missions, thus hardly any money in it, and thus it wouldn't attract investments. The only reason these autonomous drone delivery companies exist is in anticipation of high demand, being as commonly used as Uber/Amazon/GrubHub.
- lolc 5y ago
  Well these guys say they've delivered quite a few packages with their drones. To hospitals. https://flyzipline.com/ https://flyzipline.com/ Coffee wasn't on the agenda it seems.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  What is about that? I find it difficult to believe coffee delivery even now or "going forward" significantly subsidizes drone technology development. Even if you expand that to delivery of other frivolities. Do you have any numbers? Or reasoning? Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition. What drone technologies are being subsidized by coffee delivery?
  - BigJono 5y ago
    You've literally stumbled into the answer yourself here. > Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition. If that's the case (which it is, you're right), then why are we not already delivering medicine to remote areas with drones?

cabalamat 5y ago

> Those spoiled yuppies paying a 50%+ markup on coffee just to have it delivered by drone are the ones subsidising the research and engineering efforts that go towards delivering medicine to inacessible spots Really? Are spoiled yuppies ordering coffee a significant fraction of projected drone deliveries? I doubt it.