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Musings Report #28 7-12-14 Are We Ready for Daily-Life Drones?
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook,the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
New Feature in the Musings Report: Cultcha/Culture
Longtime correspondent Lew G. recommended adding a new feature to the Musings Reports that he suggested titling Ever-Evolving Culture that would showcase a few interesting performances reflecting the enormous cultural diversity of the human populace. I love the recommendation and have tentatively decided to name it Cultcha/Culture, as it includes everything on the high-brow/low-brow spectrum from the traditional to the weird and wonderful. Your suggestions will be most welcome. I may also mention an occasional book that makes a key culture-related point.
Are We Ready for Daily-Life Drones?
On the return leg of our redwoods-and-craft-breweries trip north a few weeks ago, we were stopped for over an hour on Highway 101 by a helicopter that had landed in the middle of the four-lane highway to airlift people injured in an accident.
Since the line of stopped cars extended over a bridge and around a curve for at least a quarter-mile, we couldn't see the cause of the blockage. As a result, I walked all the way to the front of the line to see what was going on. Another passenger from one of the hundreds of waiting vehicles joined me and we questioned people close to the front to learn what had happened. Apparently a car had swerved off the highway down a steep, forested embankment, and several tow trucks were attempting to pull the vehicle up to the roadway while local rescue personnel were attempting to get the injured people up to the helicopter on stretchers.
Our return to our cars was delayed, as we stopped to brief people waiting in vehicles who had not walked to the scene. One local driver told me there was a bypass road, but he suspected it too had been blocked by the California Highway Patrol (CHP).
A radio station news employee happened to be stuck behind us, and in chatting with her we discovered her contact in the news department had been unable to get any information out of the CHP.
When the helicopter finally lifted off and traffic crawled forward, our brother-in-law Fred R. speculated how this scene would be changed by the ubiquity of personal drones.
For those who haven't seen such drones in action yet--they are small enough to fit in the trunk of a car and generally have three rotors, which enable them to move freely in all directions and hover for extended periods.
Here are some of the scenarios we foresaw playing out once having a drone in one's vehicle becomes common:
1. An attorney with a super-fast drone could race ahead of other drones, reach the scene of the accident first, record the rescue operation with an onboard camera and assess the liability issues in real time; if a legal opportunity was present, the attorney could upload the recording to associates and be "firstest with the mostest" in a legal claim.
2. A free-lance stringer with a connection to a news organization would navigate his/her drone to the accident site and record close-ups of the victims, rescue personnel at work, etc., and then upload the recording to a news bureau that would have an exclusive ("if it bleeds, it leads").
3. A techie with a drone equipped with a powerful wi-fi router could hover the drone above the scene and send the video to anyone with a wi-fi-enabled device, eliminating the need for dozens of drones to compete for airspace.
4. The CHP could ban drones from hovering over or near accident sites, except for officially sanctioned drones from government agencies and vetted news agencies.
5. Someone stuck in the traffic blockage could send their drone high enough to scope out alternative routes and zoom in to see if they were blocked, jammed or free of vehicles.
6. One of the mass of circling private drones malfunctions and crashes into another drone, causing it to crash on a rescuer, inflicting injuries. The liability thread runs in various directions: can the manufacturer of the malfunctioning drone be sued, along with its operator?
7. Frustrated by the delay and the lack of official drones/sources of information, someone breaks the law by flying their drone over the accident scene. the CHP wants to issue a citation, but how can they trace the drone to the owner if the operator is clever enough not to return the drone to his vehicle straightaway?
8. A badly injured victim of the wreck finds that graphic close-up recordings of their injuries have been shown on TV, and sues the station and stringer for invasion of privacy. Are there any limits on what private drones can record in public spaces?
This brief list shows how ill-prepared we are, legally and socially, for the multitude of issues and potential conflicts that will inevitably arise as private drones become cheap and ubiquitous.
For example: If ownership of a drone can be obscured, then how can liability be traced back to the owner/operator? Will drones be required to send the equivalent of a mobile-phone ID code or IP address? What if the owner switches this signal off? Will downing a drone invading one's privacy create liability? If so, does this trump the liability for violating privacy? How can regulations about drones possibly be enforced, much less monitored?
Cultcha/Culture
Oscar's Cirque du Soleil (via U. Doran) (3:47)
Comedian's Galop - Performance by the St. Luke's Bottle Band (via Lew G.) (3:26)
Berlin based Theatre Company FAMILIE FLÖZ (via Lew G.) (4:41)
The Bobs - Pounded On a Rock (via Lew G.) (5:13) a capella performance
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
A Reader Asks: How to Find Shelter from the Coming Storms? 7/11/14
Neofeudalism's Tax Donkeys (Yes, You) and the Battle for Control of Resources 7/10/14
Why Housing Will Crash Again--But For Different Reasons Than Last Time 7/9/14
How Recession-Proof Is Your Job Sector? 7/8/14
What's Lurking Beneath the Glossy Veneer of the Jobs Report? 7/7/14
The advice entry (shelter from the storms) received well over 100,000 views on four sites--and those are the few I know of. This suggests people are interested in protecting what they have and are well aware of the rising odds that a financial storm will hit soon.
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Saw the documentary China Blue about young women working inhuman hours (up to 17 hours a day) in a denim clothing factory in China for $80 to $120/month--if they get paid at all.
If you want to understand the realities of trade with China, and who's making the big profits, rent or borrow this 2005 documentary, which unfortunately appears to be unavailable on Amazon.com.
Market Musings: Volatility and Declines
Sometimes it's useful to look at ratios in addition to price. Here are two charts of the S&P 500 (SPX), one with price and the 50/200-week moving averages and MACD, and another of the SPX/VIX (volatility) ratio.
Notice that the one significant downdraft of the past 4 years--in 2011, when the Fed ended QE 2--barely dipped below the 200-week MA on the price chart but tumbled well below it on the ratio chart.
The MACD on the price chart is flattening out, suggestive of a pause in the uptrend, if not a potential downturn. Compare this to the ratio chart MACD, which has clearly rolled over, indicating the top is in and a decline increasingly likely.
I interpret this as yet another indicator suggesting that the odds of a significant downdraft in equities is rising.
From Left Field
Wasted Cash in the US Fishing Industry (via Chad D.)
"Oceana's new report, 'Wasted Cash,' shows that bycatch costs fishermen time, gear, and access to healthy fish stocks, which adds up to a significant amount of lost money and jobs."
The Art of Water Recovery (via Joel M.)
“It isn’t the main leaks that cause the most loss of water,” he said. “It’s the long-running leaks that go on for months or years that aren’t detected. One leaking toilet will lose as much water in two years as a burst in a four-inch main for a full day.”
Why the New Caliphate is Irrelevant (via U. Doran) -- a brief history lesson....
In Japan, Idled Electronics Factories Find New Life in Farming
Struggling to Compete with Rivals in South Korea or China, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Others Try Selling Vegetables, Too -- more evidence that food is more profitable than commodity electronics...
'Human props' stay in luxury homes but live like ghosts -- a striking metaphor for what we've become as a society....
Debt: Eight Reasons This Time is Different -- meaning "worse than all previous bubbles"...
Bled dry by the New Class -- what I call the Upper Caste of functionaries/apparatchiks.... public employees and unions seem to have little awareness of the anger building as a consequence of their Upper Caste status...
Is Local Food Better?
In the United States, the most frequently cited statistic is that food travels 1,500 miles on average from farm to consumer. That figure comes from work led by Rich Pirog, the associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University (he is also behind the strawberry-yogurt calculations referenced above). In 2001, in some of the country's first food-miles research, Pirog and a group of researchers analyzed the transport of 28 fruits and vegetables to Iowa markets via local, regional, and conventional food distribution systems. The team calculated that produce in the conventional system-a national network using semitrailer trucks to haul food to large grocery stores-traveled an average of 1,518 miles (about 2,400 kilometers). By contrast, locally sourced food traveled an average of just 44.6 miles (72 kilometers) to Iowa markets.
The best of capitalism is over for rich countries – and for the poor ones it will be over by 2060
Smartphone dependency fuels other addictions, say rehab clinics -- what it doesn't fuel, it enables...
The age of entitlement: how wealth breeds narcissism -- wealth certainly breeds entitlement...
10 companies that put nearly all the food on supermarket shelves -- no surprise here--just more evidence of cartels. Can you get by without buying any of these products?
"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." John Kenneth Galbraith
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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