China’s Cheap Drones: A Threat to Whom?

This article is worried that China’s cheap clones may end up in the wrong hands, or could be owned and used by the adversaries of the US government.

From Technewsdaily.com

Cheap drones made in China could end up arming potential U.S. foes such as North Korea, Iran and terrorist organizations.

China already makes drones that don't quite match up to U.S. military drones, but for a fraction of the cost. The Chinese military envisions such unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) scouting out battlefield targets, guiding missile and artillery strikes, and swarming potential adversaries, such as U.S. carrier battle groups…

China has built a huge military-industrial complex to support its growing drone fleet, which consisted of about 280 military drones as of mid-2011, according to a report released by the Project 2049 Institute on March 11. Chinese manufacturers supplying the military and state agencies also have begun seeking foreign buyers in a global drone market that aerospace and defense market research firm Teal Group estimates to be worth $89 billion over the next 10 years…

The idea of cheap, China-made drones may not tempt countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia or NATO allies that want to buy the best U.S. or Israeli drone hardware. Instead, China is seeking buyers in the Middle East and Africa at glitzy expositions such as China’s biennial Zhuhai Air Show.

While such concern could partially be true, considering the estimated $89 billion market, my guess is that China’s cheap drones will likely threaten politically connected US drone providers/suppliers more than terrorists or US foes having access to them. 

Besides, anti-drone laser weapon system has already been developed. Foes of the governments are likely to use them than use drones.

Yet demand for commercial drones has been estimated to reach 10,000 according to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

Many of such demand come from hobbyists.

A good example of the growing commercial use of drones has been in photography or cinematography particularly in the covering of field events. The Golf Channel used a drone to film a recently held tournament, according to the Business Insider.

The point is commercialization of drones will likely mean more price competition, more innovation, more applications and an increasing use of them by the markets. China's cheap drones may be one factor in driving the commercialization of drones.

Celebrating Capitalism: Travel: From Torture to Joy

One of the benefits of capitalism can be seen through the lens of the transformation of travel.

Writes Jeffrey Tucker at the Laissez Faire Books:

The nature of travel is one of the most changed by the advent of the capitalist economy. For most of the human history, travel was something to dread and even avoid at all cost.

Just look at the term itself. The word travel shares the same Middle English root as the word travail, which means to toil or labor. The word in Middle English was travailen, which meant something deeply unpleasant. Looking even further back in time, we find the Latin slang word travailler, which means… to torture!

Indeed, through human history, traveling has usually been torture. If you see a movie set in the Middle Ages in which one person is traveling on his own and is not being forced to do so, you can pretty much assume it is untrue. No one traveled alone. If you did, you would certainly be robbed, beaten, enslaved, or killed. You always traveled in groups, and these groups had to include people who could protect you. There was no other way. Most people stayed put.

What about modern times? Everything has changed. As usual, we take it for granted.

Michael Graham Richard did some interesting research on travel times in the United States, based on the 1932Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States. What he found is quite revealing. It took people an entire day just to get out of New York. Going from New York to Georgia or Ohio took two weeks. If you wanted to get to Louisiana or Illinois, you had to set aside a full five weeks! That’s just to get from here to there.

But thanks to railways, all this changed half a century later. What used to take two weeks in 1800 took only a day or two by 1857. If you set aside a week, you could get to Texas — the travel time sliced to about 20% of what it was 50 years earlier. In a month, you could get to California, which was rather amazing by historical standards. Also, you wouldn’t typically be beaten, robbed, or killed, which was pretty great.

By 1932, modernity had arrived. You could go coast to coast in four days!

Of course, now you can do all of this in a few hours, thanks to planes and cars. And driving itself became more fun than ever. It’s one of the great changes in the history of the world: Travel went from torture to joy. And it happened because of technological advances working through a market system that serves people in their daily needs. Getting from here to there is one of the strongest needs that we humans have. It is what gets us all the things we rely on for the good life.

Picture of the Day: Thanks to Capitalism, These Gadgets Now Fit in your Pocket

(Hat tip AEI’s Prof Mark Perry)

Capitalism has brought about dematerialization, which has converged the benefits of manifold technologies to fit in a single devise.

Picture of the Day: Capitalism

This picture practically captures the tangible benefits of capitalism to mankind…

…technology convergence, innovation, productivity impelled deflation et.al. Many gadgets of the past have now been bundled into one that serves to the convenience of the consumers.

Simply incredible.

Of course, the picture does not include the intangible benefits—the better quality of life from the services these gizmos have been providing us.

Professor Russ Roberts rightly calls this picture “worth a thousand words”. Indeed

Yet I am fortunate to have witnessed such progression in my lifetime.

And I further believe that the coming generations will see even more of this, in spite of the intense challenges posed by the archaic welfare based industrial age political system.

Quote of the Day: Consumption Equality

Just about every product or service that makes our lives better requires a mass market or it's not economic to bother offering. Those who invent and produce for the mass market get rich. And the more these innovators better the rest of our lives, the richer they get but the less they can differentiate themselves from the masses whose wants they serve. It's the Pages and Bransons and Zuckerbergs who have made the unequal equal: So, sure, income equality may widen, but consumption equality will become more the norm.

That’s from author and former hedge fund manager Andy Kessler in an op ed at the Wall Street Journal. Most people hardly realize that much of the improved standards of living have been a product of capitalism.

Fruits of Capitalism: Welcoming the Industrial Internet

I have been repeatedly saying that the information age will radically change our lifestyles.

We are getting some signs of confirmation

From the New York Times (bold emphasize mine)

the Internet is growing up and lifting its gaze to the wider world. To be sure, the economy of Internet self-gratification is thriving. Web start-ups for the consumer market still sprout at a torrid pace. And young corporate stars seeking to cash in for billions by selling shares to the public are consumer services — the online game company Zynga last week, and the social network giant Facebook, whose stock offering is scheduled for next year.

As this is happening, though, the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.

The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.

More…

From the same article…

Across many industries, products and practices are being transformed by communicating sensors and computing intelligence. The smart industrial gear includes jet engines, bridges and oil rigs that alert their human minders when they need repairs, before equipment failures occur. Computers track sensor data on operating performance of a jet engine, or slight structural changes in an oil rig, looking for telltale patterns that signal coming trouble.

SENSORS on fruit and vegetable cartons can track location and sniff the produce, warning in advance of spoilage, so shipments can be rerouted or rescheduled. Computers pull GPS data from railway locomotives, taking into account the weight and length of trains, the terrain and turns, to reduce unnecessary braking and curb fuel consumption by up to 10 percent.

Thanks to capitalism, the world has been turning immensely smarter and a far better place to live in.

Fruits of Capitalism: The Arrival of Commercial Space Travel (Fly me to the moon!)

It won’t be far when the moon will just be another tourist destination (and perhaps property rights will also be applied).

Commercial Space travel will soon be accessible to the public.

From the Wall Street Journal,

Fast forward to this October, when Mr. Branson and his children Sam and Holly christened Spaceport America, which advertises itself as "the world's first purpose built commercial spaceport" and is located about 55 miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico. In typical outsize Branson fashion, the 61-year-old rappelled from the ceiling of the hangar—now called the "Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space"—and, while dangling in midair, chugged from a bottle of champagne in front of a large crowd to celebrate.

Mr. Branson is still radiating enthusiasm. "We've got just short of 500 people now signed up to go, which is actually more people than have been up to space in the history of space travel, and we hope to put those up in our first year of operation," he says, predicting the first commercial flight by "about next Christmas," although he acknowledges that there have been many delays.

He hopes "to get the price down so that hundreds of thousands of people out there will have the chance to become astronauts; not just, you know, a very, very few wealthy people." Tickets today cost $200,000, with deposits starting at $20,000. The Virgin Galactic website enjoins interested parties to "contact one of our Accredited Space Agents around the world."

What's so important about an expensive, suborbital joy ride, I ask? "If it was just about the joy ride, that would be exciting enough in itself," Mr. Branson says, leaning forward in his chair. "But the fascinating thing about adventures like that" is that when people "push the limits" and see "what they're capable of, other byproducts come that they hadn't even thought of at the time." He proceeds to tick off an impressive list.

And the prospective space travel industry has shown signs of being driven by competition which will likely drive prices down…

From the same article

Mr. Branson isn't the only businessman exploring private spaceflight. California's XCOR Aerospace, for instance, is building the Lynx rocket plane, which will also carry passengers and payloads. Test flights are scheduled for late 2012. Unlike SpaceShip Two, the Lynx takes off from a runway and doesn't depend on a carrier ship, so it has lower operating costs. Tickets start at $95,000 and the company may even beat Mr. Branson into suborbital space, if Virgin Galactic continues to have delays.

Yet exotic travel in the future might also include deep sea travel…

Space isn't the only frontier Mr. Branson is exploring. Virgin Oceanic plans to launch a one-person submarine in 2012 to "journey to the deepest part of each of Earth's five oceans." And "we hope to be going 10,000 foot further down than Everest is high. So it's going to be quite an eerie, six- to seven-hour trip heading down. But scientists are frothing at the mouth with the possibilities of what we could discover," Mr. Branson says. "In the history of mankind," only two people have ever been below 18,000 feet and the ocean is "twice as deep" as that.

The beauty of capitalism isn’t just because of these wondrous technological innovations, but for these products and services to be made available for a broader spectrum of people.

As Joseph Schumpeter once wrote,

Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

Once space travel goes online, prices one day will get low enough to cater to people like me or the middle class.

Capitalism has made living in this world exciting.