Drones

I don’t know much about drones.  I have tried to fly them on a couple of occasions and never got the knack.  They are intriguing to me though.  I see a tremendous amount of use for them.

I am up in the Northwoods for one more day.  I am not hanging around up here because the black flies came out and they are infernally frustrating little buggers.  We put permethrin on a lot of our clothes and they still bug you.   Took this photo with my iPhone of a little male hummingbird that has staked out some territory on our deck.  He fights like heck for it and battles other hummingbirds to defend his turf.  The way hummingbirds move reminds me of a lot of drones.

When we had a house in Geneva, IL in the pre-drone era, there was a kid on another street that had a model plane.  He attached a remote camera to it.  He’d fly it over your house when you were outside and hover.  Talented but creepy.  I think he was trying to snap photos of women sunbathing or something.  I’d be working in the yard minding my own business when I would hear the high pitched whirr of his model plane engine.  Believe me, I thought more than once about showing him what anti-aircraft fire looks like.

Flashforward to today.  Drones are super useful when used properly.  They can be used to scout crops, used in building and maintaining skyscrapers, and deliver stuff.  It’s really amazing and the technology will make us more productive.

There is a privacy danger, however.  Drones can unwittingly pry into private places and pick up data that was unintended.  That part is a bit scary and I will leave it to the lawyers and courts to decide what to do about it.  If you think about some of the things going on with antitrust, the new Brandeisians, and big data it can really unnerve you.  Minority Report meets real life.

Recently, I had an experience with a drone that was a good one.  At my place up north, there is a cult that bought 40 acres of property near me.  They are called the “Jeffs” ironically.  In the media and other places, they refer to them as a religious cult but I don’t think the way they practice has anything to do with anything religious.  They abuse women and children.  They are polygamists.

Of course, when it was discovered that the Jeffs bought land in the country the locals were up in arms.  There isn’t a lot you can do when it comes to buying and selling properties to discriminate.

One thing you have to hand to the Jeffs is they did their homework.  They found a vulnerable place.  Cook County Minnesota is the poorest of all the counties in Minnesota.  For most of the year, it’s cold.  Ice out on our lake was May 15 this year.  We shut our cabin down in September because it starts to frost in October.  Over 80% of the land is in the state or US government hands because it’s protected wilderness.  Populations in many towns are less than 1500 full-time residents.  The nearest town to my cabin is Grand Marais, MN which was “named the coolest small town in America”. There is a high demand for skilled services like carpentry, septic, electric, painting, and general handyman because there just aren’t enough people to do all the jobs that are available.  Right now it’s a two-year wait to get a new septic field dug and installed.

Anecdotally, we heard they were going around and bidding on a lot of the open jobs and undercutting on price in order to get the work.

The town has a lot of local pride and has for a long time.  It has a high gay population.  It’s got a high blue-collar population as well.  Many in the town are very religious and because it’s Minnesota, Lutheran is the dominant religion.  For a town with less than 1200 people, it’s got some pretty neat shops and some pretty good food.  There are some very liberal people here and some conservative people as well.  It’s really a microcosm of the US.

That should give you a flavor of the competing forces.

There is a detective that follows this cult around.  He used a drone to collect information on them.  My guess is that he had a warrant to use the drone.  In their development of the property, they ran afoul of many environmental and building code laws.  So, they were shut down. 

The battle is surely not over.  There are more steps the town should take to entice workers to move to town, even if it’s just for the season. Capitalistic policies can help stop cults.

It’s interesting though to see how technology can play a role in protecting people since we hear a lot about how it invades our privacy and makes us vulnerable.   I wonder if the people that invented drones were sitting on their porch watching hummingbirds fly when they got the idea.  They sure are fun to watch.