That’s got to win the click bait title of the day award! Despite the alarming title, it’s refreshing to read a neutral article about China. Neither good nor bad, just interesting.
Chinese drone attack with 98% kill rate [screaming face emoji]
China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
81–90 of 111 posts
Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#82Why not mention the startup name instead of saying China, which just makes it sound like if the Chinese government is behind it ? Do Chineses newspapers say US phone instead of iPhone ?
In this specific case I think it is clickbait. "China Drone Attack" is a hook, and the drone seems to play almost no significant role in this story (it is essentially about spraying Bayer Chemical insect poison onto the crops).
Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article said nothing about selective dispersal. For all we know these drones are just fancy crop dusters.
From what I can read of the press release, they are claiming a reduction of 30% in the amount of pesticide used. So, a significant incremental improvement, but certainly not something truly smart like using a camera to identify individual pests and targeting those pests with directed blasts of insecticide. Still a few years from that version of this tech.
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Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#84Why not mention the startup name instead of saying China, which just makes it sound like if the Chinese government is behind it ? Do Chineses newspapers say US phone instead of iPhone ?
This is a really common thing with articles about Chinese companies. People seem to collectively equate them to the government. Perhaps it’s a holdover from communism? For example, people will say things like “Reddit is controlled by China” when in reality Reddit has an investment from Tencent, not China.
Some percentage are mixed in with the government pretty tightly, though, and the ones who aren't can effectively be assumed to pass any kind of data to them, or be forced to do their bidding if the occasion ever arises. That's true in the US, too, of course, but at least in the US the companies can (secretly) fight it out in court, and actually sometimes win.
Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#85An army of small toy drones or large army drones? (ie: localized poison spraying VS large area)
Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#86Why not mention the startup name instead of saying China, which just makes it sound like if the Chinese government is behind it ? Do Chineses newspapers say US phone instead of iPhone ?
Because any business in china is much more an extension of the Chinese government. There's a perception of Chinese people and companies doing things for the reward they'll get in treatment by the government.
Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#87Drones have very short flight times and can't carry that much weight. Can this really be cheaper than driving a tractor around?
The challenge is getting the tractors into the right locations and keeping their operators out of the spray. It would be harder to get precise application so they are more likely to use more and higher concentrations of pesticide. The most cost-effective response using traditional application of pesticides is probably bigger drones (aka a flying tractor)
Look up Blue River Technology. Proof of concept for this tech already exists, John Deere will have this tech out in the coming years.
Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really common thing with articles about Chinese companies. People seem to collectively equate them to the government. Perhaps it’s a holdover from communism? For example, people will say things like “Reddit is controlled by China” when in reality Reddit has an investment from Tencent, not China.
Some percentage are mixed in with the government pretty tightly, though, and the ones who aren't can effectively be assumed to pass any kind of data to them, or be forced to do their bidding if the occasion ever arises. That's true in the US, too, of course, but at least in the US the companies can (secretly) fight it out in court, and actually sometimes win.
> That's true in the US, too, of course,
Do people really believe still this, or is this something everyone says reflexively to avoid committing the faux pas of coming across as believing that the U.S. is better than a communist country? Trump should have exploded this idea. He can't even get his own executive bureaucracy, which he is theoretically in charge of, to do his bidding, much less random U.S. companies.
Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#89Why not mention the startup name instead of saying China, which just makes it sound like if the Chinese government is behind it ? Do Chineses newspapers say US phone instead of iPhone ?
In this specific case I think it is clickbait. "China Drone Attack" is a hook, and the drone seems to play almost no significant role in this story (it is essentially about spraying Bayer Chemical insect poison onto the crops).
Absolutely clickbait, but this is what I've come to expect from Bloomberg.
But as the article mentioned, the role of the drone(s) are to spray the insecticide after dark when the worms are most active.
Re: China Drone Attack on Crop-Eating ‘Monster’ Shows 98% Kill Rate
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's due to the concerns that a genetically modified species may return to the native ecosystem and decimating their natural habitat.
It would be simple to solve that with a breeding population kept isolated. If the genetic modification wipes out the wild population, you reintroduce it. For species that reproduce quickly, such as insects, this is reasonable. That said the mosquito trick is that we can produce drones whose babies are also only drones with the same genetic malfunction. The number of drone-only mosquitoes expands exponentially until t…
This is also balanced by the fact that as far as we know, most any mosquito can fill most of the same roles in the food chains. We're mostly concerned with wiping out the few species that feed on humans and our pets/livestock. We could eradicate two or three species which carry West Nile, Malaria, Zika, Chickungunya, and a few other really bad diseases of humans, dogs, cats, songbirds, horses, and cattle that are spread by mosquitoes. Other species would still lay eggs, hatch, and get eaten or reproduce normally without threat to us.