I can put up with Amazon's Jeff Bezos assisting in the destruction of my beloved brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Somebody in the digital realm was going to play that role, and at least Bezos' recent purchase of The Washington Post shows he has some leftover affection for businesses that used to subsist exclusively on print.
But fooling poor Charlie Rose into thinking that Amazon's drone delivery fleet might be a few years from reality? Well, that just won't stand.
You might have seen Sunday's episode of CBS' "60 Minutes," which was hyped by promos suggesting a great revelation from Amazon's founder.
"They teed it up: 'This is going to be a surprise.' And so I'm anticipating a surprise," said Rose, still slightly breathless in a behind-the-scenes postgame interview on the CBS website. "And I tried to guess it and they said 'No, no, no, no, no.' So I thought, 'What could it be?'"
And then what happened? There is more of this sort of thing from the producers who worked on the piece, including one who said Bezos wagered half his fortune and a trip to Vegas to anyone who could guess what he was about to reveal.
I've always found that the quality of Rose's interviews varies in inverse proportion to the wealth of his subjects.
Across the table from the merely well-compensated — top-tier journalists, authors, actors and scientists among them — he's one of the best.
But among the superwealthy, a sort of glaze settles over him that recalls the awe that courtiers of yore reported feeling in the presence of the sovereign. If you've ever seen Rose stare at casino mogul Steve Wynn as if he were the second coming of Plato, you'll know what I mean.
But nothing can really prepare a viewer for the look of puppyish glee that lit up the interviewer's face when Bezos led Rose into the room where two Amazon Prime Air eight-rotor drones were arrayed on a table.
Rose was shown a video in which one of the spiderlike thingies picks up a yellow delivery tub from an Amazon distribution center and then flies away, across a coastal field. It lands and gently drops its load on a patio where an expectant father and son wait inside — so as not to be cut to ribbons by the drone's blades, one imagines.
Bezos told Rose the current technology allowed for the delivery of packages up to 5 pounds within a 10-mile radius of an Amazon "fulfillment center." "So in urban areas, it could actually cover a very significant portion of the population," Bezos said.
It was here that I expected Rose to beetle his brows and say something like, "Gosh, Jeff — this is very exciting, but I know of very few 'urban areas' where most people have extra space for a drone landing pad surmounted by a cone of unoccupied airspace."
Or: "Jeff, you're one of the most brilliant minds in retail, but what happens when one of these drones encounters a flock of Canada geese?"
Or: "We talk a lot in this country about tort reform — are you worried that drone-related injury claims could in the near future simply become known as 'Bezos suits'?"
Granted, Bezos allowed that the drones wouldn't be ready to fly until at least 2015, when the Federal Aviation Administration is slated to release new rules regulating unmanned aircraft.
One thing the FAA is not currently contemplating, however, is allowing autonomous unmanned aircraft to take to the skies — everything in the air will have to have its own person at the stick.
This blows a hole in Bezos' plan large enough to accommodate a fly-through by an MQ-9 Reaper drone, the type of hunter-killer craft that last month crashed into Lake Ontario during a routine New York Air National Guard training flight.
Pieces of the vehicle have been recovered, thereby wrecking my initial theory that the drone had faked its own destruction so it could move to Seattle and work for Amazon, maybe start a family.
A one-pilot-one-drone world suddenly gets a lot more expensive for Bezos than a plan in which Amazon's fulfillment centers become almost wholly automated drone hives, with flights leaving every few seconds to deliver 5-pound payloads all over the terrified urban consumerscape.
Feel free to add Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" as soundtrack to this mental movie, if only to cover up the high buzzing of hundreds of rotors.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619