Amazon drones: not coming to your neighbourhood any time soon

US Outlook

Last week, the American regulator of the skies, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), finally got its act together and issued new regulations regarding the domestic use of commercial drones.

Mostly the rules are fairly common sense – no flying at more than 100 miles per hour, flight only permissible within the line of sight of the operator, that sort of thing. It’s a good deal for serious users of drone technology, like maintenance or rescue services and film-makers. For unserious loudmouths, it’s not such a good deal. By which I mean Amazon.

Apparently, it has been working on drone package delivery for some time. The online retailer announced its intentions in December 2013, mysteriously getting it into the papers just hours before the biggest cyber-shopping day of the year. Funny that.

The company wasn’t happy with the FAA’s regulations and, by way of response, released perhaps the most arrogant statement in corporate history. “The FAA needs to begin and to expeditiously complete the formal process to address the needs of our business,” wrote Amazon’s Paul Misener, someone who obviously hasn’t bothered finding out what the FAA does. For the record, it does not work for Jeff Bezos.

Maybe the FAA bothered talking to people who actually know something about drones before issuing its new regulations. Because talk to anyone who knows about drones and they will tell you that Amazon’s plans, in the short term anyway, are about as likely as a Sinclair C5 revival. Yes, in theory it is possible to load up a drone with the latest instalment of Game of Thrones and deliver it to a home. But in reality it’s practically impossible, and we live in a practical world not a theoretical one.

I don’t have enough space to really get stuck into why this isn’t going to happen any time soon, but I will give it a crack. First, a drone smaller than a car isn’t very strong; once it has picked up its battery, which it sort of has to, most of its load-bearing capacity is gone. There isn’t much capacity to carry much else. Delivering anything remotely heavier than a book or two is going to require an unmanned Sea King helicopter.

Second, presumably Amazon is working on drones that do not require a human pilot – using remote control, as most drones do. Fine, but using autopilot at altitude works because there are no man-made obstacles at 40,000ft. At ground level, not so much. Just punching an address into the sat nav isn’t going to work.

Third, if drones are to be capable of delivering your “must have now” item within half an hour, as Amazon claims, there would have to be a drone port in every neighbourhood. Even if a drone is flying at 50mph, which is just about possible, the furthest it could get in half an hour is 25 miles. Thankfully most of us don’t live within 25 miles of an Amazon fulfilment centre.

Finally, does Amazon have any idea how dangerous these things are? Until Mr Bezos is willing to demonstrate their safety by having one fly into his head, I don’t want them flying around my street, thank you very much. My street is tree-lined and power-lined by the way, so good luck landing it on my front porch, where someone will likely pinch it or it will get savaged by the dog. I could go on and I haven’t even mentioned costs, but you get the idea. Not going to happen.

There is a more serious point to this. Through its continued hogging of headlines (yes, I get the irony) and ridiculous demands on regulators, Amazon is doing a disservice to the serious and very real commercial and civil possibilities that drones offer. Amazon’s continued droning on about it is an embarrassment, sort of like Lance Armstrong’s years of denial. It might be fun to hang on to the balloon for a minute, but it’s long past time to let go.

Why the only thing I’ll ever buy at Walmart is... worms

I have lived in the States for seven years, and I’ve made it a point of principle not to set foot in Walmart unless there really is no alternative. Thankfully, most of the time there is, but when my son and I decide to go fishing it’s the only place nearby that sells bait. So I buy worms at Walmart, and nothing else.

No company has done more damage to the United States over the past 40 years than Walmart, although Amazon is now giving it a good run for its money. Cut-throat demands on suppliers pushing margins lower, in turn forcing suppliers to either take their jobs out of the country or go out of business. Good for Walmart and Sam’s heirs, but not for anyone else.

So the company’s decision this week to give half a million employees a pay rise to $10 an hour by next February is being hailed as something of a triumph for organised labour and for minimum-wage workers. Well, it is and it isn’t.

It sounds like a decent amount but the cost of living here is every bit as high as it is in most of Europe. Walmart doesn’t even give its staff a discount on groceries.

Of course, anyone making $8 an hour is going to notice a small increase in their take-home pay. But, for most, life will remain a perpetual struggle and it’s unlikely that Walmart employees’ reliance on food stamps and other forms of government assistance is going to come to a halt. Almost every Walmart employee who is currently on assistance will remain on assistance.

As for organised labour, maybe there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Peaceful protests at the homes of several of Sam’s heirs, most of whom do next to nothing in return for their billions, might have had some influence on the decision, but it’s not going to mean that Walmart is suddenly going to become labour friendly. It doesn’t need to be – for the most part there is a remarkable degree of hostility towards organised labour here, even among people who work a full week in return for below poverty-level wages.

The whole point of it, as chief executive Doug McMillon explained in a television interview yesterday, is to make staff more friendly, to make stores more welcoming and, of course, to ultimately sell more cheap stuff.

Nothing really changes except the perception that Walmart maybe isn’t quite as horrible as most people thought it was. I’m not buying it.

Snapchat and Uber bring us closer to a dystopian vision

The New York-based Salon magazine reran a 2013 interview with the dreadlocked “technology visionary” Jaron Lanier earlier this week – 18 months or so after his book, Who Owns the Future?, was published. Mr Lanier’s vision is pretty dystopian in terms of his assessment of how technology has affected our lives for the worse, but it is also an incredibly prescient work that has been largely overlooked. In general we are a pretty optimistic bunch, which might explain why the book failed to set the fire it should have.

But this week’s fundraising at Snapchat, valuing a company with fewer than 50 employees at about $19bn (£12bn) – plus the continued frenzy over the prospects for Uber, another company with very few real employees but a seemingly limitless ability to raise cash – reinforces the book’s general abstract: technology is destroying the middle classes. Meanwhile, companies with thousands of real employees and real benefits, like RadioShack, Sears and Caesars, are unlikely to see next Christmas.

Not all change is good change, and just because something is cheaper does not mean that it is good for society. Like new technology, the sharing economy through which Uber and Snapchat make their money sounds good on paper but in reality can destroy more than create. We might not have liked Mr Lanier’s message enough to buy his book, but the more time passes, the more he appears to have been correct.