Flying cars of the future might have to dodge flying warehouses

Stocks were skittish in the face of political volatility, with Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May giving a much-anticipated speech about Brexit and President-elect Donald Trump attempting to tamp down the strong U.S. dollar. Financials were especially hard hit, with the S&P 500 financials sector sinking 2.28%.

The Dow dropped 58 points, with 16 of its 30 components retreating; the S&P 500 Index declined 6; and the Nasdaq slipped 35, dragged down by biotech stocks. Decliners led advancers by five to four on the NYSE and five to two on the Nasdaq. The prices of Treasuries strengthened. Gold futures rose $16.70 to close at $ an ounce, and the price of crude oil gained 11 cents to settle at $52.48 a barrel.

In earnings news:

  • Morgan Stanley’s fourth-quarter profit nearly doubled on lower expenses and rising revenue. Beating expectations, the investment bank reported profit of $1.67 billion, up from $908 million in the year-ago quarter, on revenue of $9.02 billion, up 17%. Its shares (MS) dropped 3.70%, partly due to a big downturn in the financials sector in today’s trading.
  • UnitedHealth Group reported higher-than-expected fourth-quarter profit and revenue, with earnings of $2.11 a share, up 56%, on revenue of $47.5 billion, up 9%. Gains came from higher revenue, increasing membership, and strong results from the firm’s prescription benefit service and its Optum health management division. As the first of the big health insurers to report, much attention was paid to UnitedHealth’s earnings in light of the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act. The insurer’s shares (UNH) lost 0.71%.

In other business news:

  • The U.S. dollar tumbled partly in response to President-elect Trump’s statements to The Wall Street Journal that the dollar was too strong and could hurt U.S. competitiveness.
  • The British pound surged nearly 3% against the U.S. dollar and the British stock index FTSE 100 sank 1.46%, the biggest one-day loss since June, after British Prime Minister Theresa May gave a speech saying the country would seek a so-called “hard Brexit” from the European Union, giving up membership in the EU’s single market. However, May indicated that Britain might seek to retain benefits of the single market in certain areas important to the British economy, such as the financial and auto industries

*****

Today in patents:

–There’s no greater synergy than a company that provides search engine results also getting into the transportation business, assuming the word “synergy” is meaningless jargon. To that end, industry watchers have been waiting for Google and its fleet of self-driving cars to make a move onto Uber and Lyft’s turf, and a recent patent application shows Google is almost there.

The ultimate goal is to replace human ride-hailing-service drivers with self-driving cars. A rider would make a request for a ride on an app, and a self-driving car would receive the request and swoop in to pick them up. The challenge, though, is that not all locations are suitable for self-driving cars. Google’s patent involves technology to determine appropriate pick-up and drop-off points nearest any person hailing a ride. The patent is notable mainly because it confirms a major player like Google is seriously considering getting into the self-driving ride-hailing business, not because it’s a completely fantastical idea like, for instance, launching a flying warehouse that would hover over cities. That would be ridiculous.

–Amazon has filed a patent for a flying warehouse that would hover over cities. Amazon has been building warehouses at a staggering rate, and it must be running out of room on the ground. The e-commerce giant’s patent calls it an “airborne fulfillment center,” and it would hypothetically serve as the launching pad for a fleet of drones that would swoop down on an unsuspecting populace and deliver them packages. It’s sort of like if Santa’s North Pole Workshop were mobile, and if Santa sorted children into “Prime members” and “Non-Prime members” instead of good and bad.

Patents are often wishful thinking, so it’s likely Amazon is just spitballing here and seeing what sticks. According to the patent’s sketches, the concept is basically a massive blimp with a warehouse dangling beneath it. For what it’s worth, the wires holding the warehouse underneath the blimp look really thick, so that should take care of any safety concerns people might have about flying warehouses that blot out the sun.

–Airbus expects to help future Amazon workers get to their new workplace in the sky. Last year the aerospace company formed an Urban Air Mobility division. On Monday, Airbus’ CEO told Reuters that the division was set to launch its first prototype flying car by the end of this year. The car would be a helicopter-like contraption that could carry at least one passenger, and it would function similar to how Google and Uber imagine the ride-hailing future. Call up the flying car via an app, the car swoops down, scares every person in the immediate area out of their wits, and picks up the passenger, who then shouts, “Fly faster, faster!” as the scattered pedestrians below start chasing after the vehicle.

Technology futurists get frustrated that tech companies focus on useless apps and gadgets instead of big inventions. Soon, though, they’ll have to stop protesting, “But we were supposed to have flying cars by now.” Perhaps the new protest will be, “But we were supposed to have invincibility suits to protect us from all these flying vehicles and warehouses falling out of the sky by now.”

Total
0
Shares
Previous Article

Where is the dollar going?

Next Article

Just How Boring Have Things Been? (Part 1)

Related Posts
Subscribe to AdvisorAnalyst.com notifications
Watch. Listen. Read. Raise your average.