Almost all Quadcopters have a short flight time. According to DroneLifeStyle.com, it’s usually between 10-20 minutes. It is advised to carry an extra battery, or even several. Unfortunately, the recharging times range from 45-90 minutes. Looks like doing tricks and flips or changing altitude drains the battery because of the increase in power used on the motors.
http://dronelifestyle.com/drone-buying-guide/
Perhaps this new technology will give a new life to drones (quadcopters) by making them self-sustainable in terms of energy consumption and production.
I've googled around but can't find any details about how the power generation works. Perhaps because it is in the process of being patented and they want to keep it quiet for the time being. Where does the energy come from? The only explanation I could find: "harvest energy from blade oscillations present in the rotor blades of the aerial vehicles" makes it seem like they misunderstand thermodynamics.
Sustainability takes 3 aspects into consideration: Economical, Social, and Environmental. Inventing a glue and making the garment last 1000 washes makes sense environmentally, but think about the negative impact it has on the economies. Potentially, it will increase the unemployment related problems in many developing nations.
You would need to balance this sentiment with the fact that poor people wear clothing and would appreciate the cost savings with longer lasting garments.
I wouldn't wish employment in the garment industry on anyone, besides; we've already destroyed the local garment/craft economies in many impoverished countries by sending our old clothes to them for free.
Garment companies can make the working situations better by implementing sustainable work practices.
Sustainable Apparel Coalition is an organization working on this approach. Not working is not any better than working in a potentially dangerous place, which could turn better in the near future.
http://apparelcoalition.org/
While I appreciate the advances in technology to sew garments, I wonder how this will negatively impact the economies, which are thriving because of the garment business.
The fatal problem with any universal basic income scheme is that people will always vote for whatever politicians promise to augment their basic income, irrespective of any other factors, leading to ever higher strain on the economy and eventually bankrupting the country.
Basic income is actually pretty rare, even among democracies. So it would seem you are empirically wrong. Not only will people not vote to augment basic income, they won't even vote for a modest basic income.
Few politicians have seriously proposed it so far. If and when they do, the votes will follow (a testable prediction.)
This process has indeed happened already. It was a large part of the downfall of ancient Rome. Glossing over the many details, when slaves were doing most of the work, people supported those politicians who offered them ever increasing grain doles, until the state could no longer afford them and collapsed.
Socialism in general is a variant of the basic income scheme, and hugely popular: a state guarantee of a certain basic income and level of material security, no matter what happens to you in life. It has done well in elections for a long time and remains popular today, as well as driving various popular Communist revolutions on a non-democratic basis.
India has 1.23 Billion[0] people in it, and that wikipedia article is quite short, with only 4 sources. They don't cite any of the sources for the figure which stated 6460 people are in the program.
The program serves %0.000005 of India, or in much more familiar terms, if implemented at the same scale in America it would help slightly less people than there were killed by lions in Tanzania over the trailing 20 years[1].
Sure, to be clear I would like basic income. My point was that it is really easy to raise capital and test it on a scale like this. While I was making a joke, the implications are real. Inflation can rise if people are all still buying things at the same economic level and region. Where does the money come from?
The problem with basic income is that when the conditions exist to make it possible, it wont matter anymore. We need large transition to solar, automated farming, automated transportation and distribution networks, etc. Then the marginal cost of food, transportation, energy will be $0 so we can afford to give it away.
Economics is not always the zero sum game it is made out to be. Microlending could work, and getting these people access to conputers and internet will too.
To be fair, that seems to be much of how it functions in richer countries as well. It's not as bad if you're well educated, have other strengths and a bit of money laid up. But if you're a minimum wage factory operative or warehouse worker or one of the other relatively unskilled low-paid jobs, then the thing that you're good at vanishing can leave you in a very hard place; very limited funding to retrain and limited options for doing so even where such funding can be managed.
If they are desperate enough to steal or riot, they might not be forgotten. Is imprisoning a significant portion of the population cheaper than a basic income or at least free provision of basic services?
I think we will boil as frogs too slowly for there to be a dramatic escalation of violence, but things obviously need to change.
If we take away the `thing` that defines garment works (despite how unfulfilling we see the work), I hope that society does not leave these people behind to fend for themselves (and use the new efficiencies for earning money to re-train & re-tool these individuals.
Unfortunately, the more automation, fewer and more skilled workers are needed. That's always been the case and will only continue to happen. People will be able to specialize and diversify more.
You mean these workers need to be trained to handle machines? Perhaps thats going to be a huge challenge for the middle-age workers, who would have lived all their lives doing the craft work. Survival of the fittest!
What alternative do you propose that doesn't either impose nonsensical costs on businesses or persist dangerous, backbreaking, and unnecessary practices for workers?
Thanks for sharing this article. Looks like mgafrica.com is a source that most of us don't refer to.
The following details are pretty impressive - "Drones could account for 10% -15% of Africa’s transport sector in the next decade. The initial plan for Rwanda is to build three buildings that will enable the network to send supplies to nearly half of the country by 2020, the droneport proposal shows. Subsequent phases of the project could involve more than 40 droneports, rolled out like a network of petrol stations"
Thanks, that's very helpful. I've heard that the GPS system has a second function to detect nuke tests, now I see how. It can be considered a lightweight global surveillance system that gives a useful benefit when things aren't blowing up.
Sorry for the late reply. As I said I am in the same boat as you so just worried about how I could get prevent myself from being "hacked". Email verification for user signups is something I am doing. Apart from that just looking at every piece of code and not relying just on the client side stuff(javascript) :)
