Zipline is still around, still making deliveries in Africa and some other places, and also doing some in the US, for Wal-mart.

You forgot one final item:

      A considerable percentage of the most affected customers blame the additional costs on the previous administration and continue to vote for the same people...

You got about 748 from Trump's tax cuts. You're gonna pay around 740 more in gas this year. Factor in inflation from tariffs and you're out about $1200.

Son, are you winning?

Shows how little they think of you.

100%. If the superior solution always won, Microsoft Windows would have been relegated to the dustbin long before Windows 95 existed (and we wouldn't be dealing with the disaster pile that is Windows 11 today). Similarly if the superior solution always won we'd have high speed rail in the US connecting all our major cities, but that hasn't happened either.

Including whose wheels you're willing to grease to get your inferior solution a leg up on the ones that are better.

there is no deep state and elections have consequences..

Yeah sure.

Calculate the size of the required solar panel as you get farther from the sun and notice that AC is brainfarting again.

I sure hoped for some when we all needed it.

Interesting replies, and thanks. Should I add the note that Lenovo bought the ThinkPad business from IBM as part of that branch of the corporate histories?

Actually the frightening part of the story is that the fastest was remotely operated. Humans today, but operated by a malignant ASI tomorrow. Well, hopefully not tomorrow. I'd prefer not to see the end of this story and I'm hoping to be around tomorrow and even for a few more years. But RSN?

Too many books could be cited, but it's not like today's Slashdotters seem to have much interest in books. Can't resist a recent one with high relevance to this story: Army of None by Paul Scharre about autonomous weapons. Yes his focus was on the autonomous ones, which look bad, but I think they will obviously be lighter, faster, and just more dangerous if the intelligence part is remote, hidden, and harder to attack.

Why would the ASI do it? Would you trust us humans with your survival? As we grub about for money and sex? Just now working on "Facebook Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Nuclear Reactors" about how we humans are getting used as fuel in viral websites that aren't ending well... And I can't think of any website these days that is doing much to make me into a better person. But do I need that as much as Zuck? So I believe some wannabe Bond villain is going to unleash his malevolent ASI when it promises something like "Today I could kill all the other ASIs" or "I can get all the money in the world for you."

There isn't any launch platform with no failures, ever, that's not how you measure reliability. Reliability is measured on percentage of successful launches (payload reached target orbit), and Falcon 9 is, indeed, the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever, by a wide margin. Here are the platforms with >= 100 launches (the 100-launch line is kind of arbitrary, but you have to draw a line somewhere and platforms with very few launches don't have meaningful statistics):

#1 Falcon 9 (including Falcon Heavy): 637 successes of 640 launches, 99.5% success rate. If you focus only on the block 5 variant (most-flown version, currently flying), it's 572 out of 573, 99.8%.
#2 Atlas V: 106 of 107, 99.1%
#3 Delta II: 153 of 155, 98.7%
#4 Space Shuttle: 133 of 135, 98.5%
#5 Long March 2/3/4: 503/521, 96.5%
#6 Ariane 5: 112 of 117, 95.7%
#7 Soyuz: 1889 of 2014, 93.8%
#8 Kosmos: 559 of 610, 91.6%
#9 Proton: 382 of 431, 88.6%

Soyuz has to get props for the sheer number of launches, of course, though that's probably mostly because the Russians couldn't afford to build another platform. Soyuz isn't a particularly great rocket in any way -- smallish payload, good but not great reliability -- but they kept using what they had. It's also worth noting that assuming Falcon 9 maintains its current launch cadence (which it won't; Starship will probably start taking its launches eventually, and if that doesn't happen, the cadence seems likely to increase), it will match Soyuz' launch count around 2033.

Of those stupid delivery robots running into traffic or knocking people over or just running into things and doing damage.

They are remote controlled like the cars but I think like the cars they try to run autonomously as much as they can but they're not as well monitored because the assumption is they can't do as much damage.

They're not going to kill you but they're going to fuck up the front end of your car if one of them hits you.

I am really sick and tired of billionaire tech Bros being allowed to experiment in cities a personal risk to myself.

but you're not dealing with where those orders come from or setting the stage when you pose that question.

There is underlying assumption that if the order is received there is a point to it, that it could win war. If that person knew the enemy missiles were already in flight, would not be intercepted, and nobody they know personally or care about will see the sun come up tomorrow would they still turn the key and kill millions more people - just to get even..?

It really is a very different question. Now imagine you are not the guy in the bunker, you are POTUS. You know it is over. They entire lower 48 is going to be glass starting in about 8 secs over within the hour. Do you really give the order to return fire, or do think maybe just maybe you want to look toward the kingdom of heaven even if you have never held strong belief and hedge your bets and reject 'useless' killing? Because it really isnt about MAD at that point, it is back to Pascal's Wager.

Even if not specifically inventory shrink, it is still the same class for problem. It roll it up one level higher and either the delivery is successful or it isn't.

Be it first party Amazon vans or 3rd party shippers UPS/FEx/USPS, lost, damaged, and late packages occur in those lanes as well. It just an optimization problem. Either the the (presumed) increase of loss related to drone delivery is less then the offsetting cost savings, including reputation costs that translate to market share and recurring revenue, or they don't.

Either the drone delivers can be made reliable enough or they can't. Pontificating about it might be fun, getting upset about anything isnt worth it, because I don't really see much in the way of externalities here. Sure maybe something gets manufactured and never used because it is destroyed in transit. However if you deliver 10K somethings with electric drones rather than rolling petroleum powered vans, even the waste from an environmental standpoint might easily be offset for a net gain in efficiency.

Amazon's entire business is essentially logistics. They have not gotten to be the huge player they are by being wasteful. Rather they are where they are by ruthlessly optimizing everything they do for cost.

Theory, yes. There are some things that are pretty difficult to put into practice however. The question remains that even if we do achieve long lasting fusion that generates power, what then of the parasitic power loads. This is not a trivial problem. It may be an insurmountable problem.

The ecstatic claims that we are there, with fusion power now completely feasible, are a bit deceptive. The Qin to Qout might be 1 or somewhere a little higher, however, there is a a real issue with generating that Qin. Press releases and physicists and others grubbing for money conveniently gloss over the fact that QTot is actually around .1

Will we make it to a Qtot of say 2, or better yet 10 of 27/7/365 fusion power generation? Maybe. But we are much closer to the beginning than the end of that happy day when the world's energy problems are finally solved. My money says possible, but not all that likely.