Look, Up in the Sky! It’s a Can of Soup!

COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Exactly a decade ago, Amazon revealed a program that aimed to revolutionize shopping and shipping. Drones launched from a central hub would waft through the skies delivering just about everything anyone could need. They would be fast, innovative, ubiquitous — all the Amazon hallmarks.

The buzzy announcement, made by Jeff Bezos on “60 Minutes” as part of a Cyber Monday promotional package, drew global attention. “I know this looks like science fiction. It’s not,” said Bezos, Amazon’s founder and the CEO at the time. The drones would be “ready to enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place,” probably in 2015, the company said.

Eight additional years later, drone delivery is a reality — kind of — on the outskirts of College Station, Texas, northwest of Houston. That is a major achievement for a program that has waxed and waned over the years and lost many of its early leaders to newer and more urgent projects.

Yet the venture as it currently exists is so underwhelming that Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away. Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts. If this is science fiction, it’s being played for laughs.

A decade is an eternity in technology, but even so, drone delivery does not approach the scale or simplicity of Amazon’s original promotional videos. This gap between dazzling claims and mundane reality happens all the time in Silicon Valley. Self-driving cars, the metaverse, flying cars, robots, neighborhoods or even cities built from scratch, virtual universities that can compete with Harvard, artificial intelligence — the list of delayed and incomplete promises is long.

“Having ideas is easy,” said Rodney Brooks, a robotics entrepreneur and frequent critic of technology companies’ hype. “Turning them into reality is hard. Turning them into being deployed at scale is even harder.”

Amazon said in October that drone deliveries would expand to Britain, Italy and another, unidentified U.S. city by the end of 2024. Yet even on the threshold of growth, a question lingers: Now that the drones finally exist in at least limited form, why did we think we needed them in the first place?

Dominique Lord and Leah Silverman live in College Station’s drone zone. They are Amazon fans and place regular orders for ground delivery. Drones are another matter, even if the service is free for Amazon Prime members. While it’s cool to have stuff literally land on your driveway, at least the first few times, there are many hurdles to getting stuff this way.

Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.

You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.

Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.

The other active U.S. test site is Lockeford, California, in the Central Valley. On a recent afternoon, the Lockeford site seemed largely moribund, with only three cars in the parking lot. Amazon said it was delivering via drones in Lockeford and arranged for a New York Times reporter to come back to the site. It also arranged an interview with David Carbon, the former Boeing executive who runs the drone program. The company later canceled both without explanation.

A corporate blog post on Oct. 18 said that drones had safely delivered “hundreds” of household items in College Station since December and that customers there could now have some medications delivered. Lockeford wasn’t mentioned.

Full gheyness

https://www.yahoo.com/news/look-sky-soup-155037137.html

A year from today, is the 2024 Election.

This wasn't supposed to be another Four Year Election. Or, are we getting dicked for another year of a shit-show, and full press whining?

Trump claims he won all 50 states in the 2020 election

During a campaign event held in Florida on Saturday, Donald Trump continued with his usual deal of crediting himself for unearned victories, claiming to have won all 50 states during the 2020 election, although Biden took Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia for 74 electoral college votes.

"We won, the last time, 50 states, think of it, 50 states," he told the Freedom Summit, outside Orlando, Florida. "We won every state. We then did great in the election. We got 12 million more votes or so … 12 million more votes than we got the first time."

As ABC News points out, Trump "faces 91 criminal charges across four indictments, two of which are related to election interference," but that doesn't seem to be slowing him down much when it comes to consistently refusing to admit that Biden took the win against him, and will likely do it again in 2024.

"The whole thing is a lie … the whole election is a lie," Trump continued on Saturday.

Earlier in the evening, former state governors Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie did their best to offer alternatives to Trump, with Hutchinson reminding that "There is a significant likelihood that Donald Trump will be found guilty by a jury on a felony offense next year."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-claims-won-50-states-152719454.html

>>19865225

Ignoring your bias here, and pointing out that SBF getting arrested, but a crimp in their money laundering. Who is the Israel version of SBF?

Gotta have a Launderer.

>>19865229

They made promises that they would protect the vote.

Kind of tired of the 3 yr drag out, J6esque get trump theme.

It's OLD. And the only way to fix this, is to GET FUCKING LOUD so they UNDERSTAND that WE'RE TIRED OF IT ALL!!!

(Q told us to get loud, not complacent)

>>19865237

Ok, so where will Trump build his America?

WWG1WGA, right? Did he buy Greenland?

Where they go one, they go all. (to hell)

Let them all die off.

We will all live, prosper and be happy.

>>19865406

>romp

er room

>>19865418

> baneberries

>>19865506

444 is that eastern?

If so here's the time stamp

>>19865556

Probably not even him.

Actor?

CGI?

Both?

Ever since I saw the CGI shitshow with Oprah and him, it made it more apparent that most of these scumbags are not where they say they are.

Why Banks Are Suddenly Closing Down Customer Accounts

The reasons vary, but the scene that plays out is almost always the same.

Bank customers get a letter in the mail saying their institution is closing all of their checking and savings accounts. Their debit and credit cards are shuttered, too. The explanation, if there is one, usually lacks any useful detail.

Or maybe the customers don’t see the letter, or never get one at all. Instead, they discover that their accounts no longer work while they’re at the grocery store, rental car counter or ATM. When they call their bank, frantic, representatives show concern at first. “Oh, no, so sorry,” they say. “We’ll do whatever we can to fix this.”

But then comes the telltale pause and shift in tone. “Per your account agreement, we can close your account for any reason at any time,” the script often goes.

These situations are what banks refer to as “exiting” or “de-risking.” This isn’t your standard boot for people who have bounced too many checks. Instead, a vast security apparatus has kicked into gear, starting with regulators in Washington and trickling down to bank security managers and branch employees eyeballing customers. The goal is to crack down on fraud, terrorism, money laundering, human trafficking and other crimes.

In the process, banks are evicting what appear to be an increasing number of individuals, families and small-business owners. Often, they don’t have the faintest idea why their banks turned against them.

But there are almost always red flags — transactions that appear out of character, for example — that lead to the eviction. The algorithmically generated alerts are reviewed every day by human employees.

Banks generally won’t say how often they are closing accounts this way, and they’re not tracking how often they get it wrong. But federal data offer clues.

By law, banks must file a “suspicious activity report,” known as an SAR, when they see transactions or behavior that might violate the law, such as unexpectedly large cash transactions or wire transfers with banks in high-risk countries. According to Thomson Reuters, banks filed more than 1.8 million SARs in 2022, a 50% increase in just two years. This year the figure is on track to hit nearly 2 million.

Multiple SARs often — although not always — lead to a customer’s eviction. Federal laws have little to say about the trigger for account cancellations.

But a New York Times examination of over 500 cases of this dropping of customers by their banks — and interviews with more than a dozen current and former bank industry insiders — illustrates the chaos and confusion that ensue when banks decide on their own to cut off customers.

Individuals can’t pay their bills on time. Banks often take weeks to send them their balances. When the institutions close their credit cards, their credit scores can suffer. Upon cancellation, small businesses often struggle to make payroll — and must explain to vendors and partners that they suddenly don’t have a bank account.

As if the lack of explanation and recourse were not enough, once customers have moved on, they don’t know whether there is a black mark somewhere on their permanent records that will cause a repeat episode at another bank. If the bank has filed an SAR, it isn’t legally allowed to tell you, and the federal government prosecutes only a small fraction of the people whom the banks document in their SARs.

As a result, you don’t know what you’re under suspicion for. “You feel like you’re walking around wearing this scarlet letter,” said Caroline Potter, whose Citibank accounts were shut down abruptly last year.

The banks, facing ever more aggressive regulators and examiners, offer a modicum of sympathy.

“We want to build long-term relationships with our clients, which is why accounts are closed only after appropriate review and consideration of the facts,” said Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank with 80 million retail customers and 6 million small-business ones. Former Chase account holders sent nearly 200 complaints to the Times.

“We act in accordance with our compliance program, consistent with our regulatory obligations,” Dubrowski continued. “We know that can be frustrating to clients, but we must follow those obligations.”

He added that “the vast majority of closures are correct, consistent with the regulatory obligations we are required to follow,” and that the number of closed accounts was a fraction of the bank’s overall business.

moar bullshit

https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-banks-suddenly-closing-down-155511987.html