And how fast is this drone ship? I bet slower than the helicopter. And how do you get people onboard? A drone with a robotic arm? Will it be like the claw game, but with wounded people being clawed up?
Even the longest ranged helicopters are WELL short of "middle of the ocean" range. The longest top out around 600 miles, and that's straight line, not out and back, and certainly not with any loiter time in the middle.
The Navy has helicopters that can do in-flight refueling. If an aircraft carrier is close enough it might be called upon (1).
But if not, this is what they do:
> the plane’s crew dropping a bundle of medical gear into the water near the ship, and then four pararescuemen from the 131st Rescue Squadron jumping out themselves. Once in the water, they swam to the Franz, boarding it and treating the fisherman.
Ya, there are way more options. A few helos can refuel in-air, but more common is refueling from ships (landing or hovering) and oil rigs. Then there are a whole bunch of helicopters on navy ships that will rescue people if asked.
There are also parachute SAR techs. They will jump out of fixed-wing aircraft with ranges of 1000s of miles. They cannot get you home, but might keep you alive. (Brave people, jumping into situations where they know rescue could be days away.)
Helos on navy ships are the drop-dead last resort because, after them, there is nobody else to call. If they go down, the next wave of help will be days away.
In 1934 the airship USS Macon could carry five Sparrowhawk biplanes, and its commander wanted to convince the navy that it was a capable search and scouting vehicle because it had so much longer flying range than any aircraft of the time, it could float over the ocean and refuel and dispatch the biplanes to spread out and cover lots of area quickly.
USS Houston was carrying President Roosevelt from Panama to Hawaii on a secret route, and the airship commander launched an unauthorised scouting mission to search for his ship, found it, and dropped a bundle of current newspapers and magazines for him.
Claw "game" (scam) machines have deliberately-weak grasps, designed to drop the item they've grabbed whenever the arm is jolted — and then it's jolted at least once, usually twice, in the process of bringing it to the output bin. They are designed to drop their packages, so that people will feed in more money.
I'm not saying a drone with a claw arm would be the right design. But if it turned out that that was the right design, it would be designed not to drop its "packages", as opposed to the claw machines where dropping the package is the intended result.
For rescuing small numbers of people from a helicopter, yes. If you have a large number of people in the water, and you are rescuing from a surface vessel, you would likely deploy netting (at the very least as backup)
Deportations are down from my understanding. Most people think deportations are up due to the “shock and awe” ice operations. The current administration, as with prior administrations, has no intentions of actually reducing the amount of cheap labor whether they are undocumented or not.
The main impact is from fewer workers entering the country clandestinely from Mexico due to the current administration’s enforcement of the border and the general impression of immigrants being treated poorly by administration. Illegal border crossings are now at a 50 year low.
> You have to actually do the hard part of interacting with people and understanding their needs and so on within the context of work.
How many human managers actually do that, though? How many websites performed satisfactorily before AI arrived? How well has technology matched what consumers really need or want? Maybe, as a society we have underperformed and nescient AI performs well enough (or even better) in comparison.
Most companies only need a subset of the features that these mega-platforms offer, as they operate within single industry, targeting specific customers many times in a single country with a simpler legal landscape.
I have no idea for sure, but odds are 80% of the revenue of these current saas providers is generated from 20% of the features they offer. Lightweight newcomers can just focus on that 20% and ignore the other 80%.
