Tag: drugs

Unions trying to sell weed

the USPS should get into that action too, then we’d have 2 dinosaurs staying relevant.

Unions are shrinking and their members are aging. Their traditional bastions in the construction trades and manufacturing have withered, and they’ve had deep trouble breaking into the service sector — especially at big retailers like Wal-Mart that have had great success fending off the UFCW in particular. In the big scheme of things, they have very little lose by trying to cultivate a new, more labor friendly industry, albeit a highly speculative and technically illegal one.

Drone delivery

Matternet is using drones to leapfrog transportation networks around the world with UAV.

2013-12-01: Weirdly, they had humans in the distribution center, and you have to live within a 30 min flight of the kind of suburban wasteland that would have a amazon distribution center, but still.

2016-12-15: Amazon Prime Air soon expanding to 10s of customers

Amazon Prime Air is a delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using drones. Amazon had their first commercial delivery on December 7, 2016

2019-07-25: UPS drones

If UPS gets its way, it’ll be known for vehicles other than its famous brown vans. The delivery giant is working to become the first commercial entity authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to use autonomous delivery drones without any of the current restrictions that have governed the aerial testing it has done to date.

2020-04-28: While this is not at scale, it probably wouldn’t have happened for years due to inertia.

UPS and CVS are partnering up to deliver medications via drone. Deliveries will take place from a single CVS in Florida to The Villages, a nearby retirement community and the largest in the US, with over 135k residents.

2020-05-08: unclear why they limit speed to 100 km/h.

Getting medicine to remote parts of Africa isn’t easy. Drones change everything. Flying at 100km/h, they can cut a treacherous 4-hour road journey to just 30 minutes. Drones delivered 5500 units of blood to Rwandan regional hospitals over a 12-month period. It led to a reduction in maternal deaths. Fewer cases of malaria-induced anaemia. Rwanda is leading the way.

2022-02-25: Zipline is another drone delivery company. Very unclear if or why they’re further ahead than others. I suspect they’re the company alluded to in the Rwanda piece above. It appears that this is still a very nascent market. It is very telling that it is only being used for medical deliveries in essentially unregulated countries. All of these startups have less than $10m revenue.

2022-03-28: This video goes into some detail why drone delivery hasn’t taken off yet: Difficult terrain, cost advantage has eroded.

2023-03-19: Zipline tries again in the US with a more accurate drone

The new service is based on its P2 Zip drone, an autonomous winged aircraft that has the ability to hover in the sky above its destination. It sends the package down in a self-propelled droid capable of pinpointing its landing to an area as small as a patio table. “This new delivery experience works for a tiny backyard, a small patio, a stoop, or a small courtyard of a building”
Most other projects are in a beta stage, although Wing recently claimed it can now deliver 1000 packages a day in the select areas where it is operating, and has ambitions of increasing that into the millions over the next 18 months.

Drugs Without the Hot Air

In the chapter “Is Ecstasy More Dangerous Than Horse Riding?” David Nutt again raises controversy. In the U.K., there are 5700 cases yearly of traumatic head injury from horseback riding accidents, 1 serious accident per 350 hours of riding. Dr. Nutt compares this rate to the yearly hospitalizations for ecstasy abuse and concludes that accidents from horseback riding and ecstasy abuse are on the same order of magnitude. Using this statistical comparison he wrote a “tongue-in-cheek” article for Lancet, the U.K. medical journal, calling addiction to horseback riding as “equasy:” equine addiction syndrome.

drugs are illegal because they are harmful, and they are harmful because they are illegal, except for alcohol and tobacco.

Hydro-Pharmacology

some of the streams, rivers, and groundwater in Patancheru, India, are really

“a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment.”