Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

dronedj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 742 posts

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#81

Post by WhackyIdeas »

squarefoot wrote: post #59
Sparkle-san wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DJI arguably makes the best consumer camera drones on the market. Why ban them? Because they're Chinese probably. https://www.dji.com/camera-drones

Probably yes. The industry can fight with quality or price against Chinese bad products and non Chinese good products, but products that are both Chinese and top notch quality are going to dominate the market because of comparatively lower costs. Now, that law can indeed have some basis, in theory, but tailoring it to a single brand won't achieve much as the Chinese industry can rebrand products at a cost and in time…

I agree with your impression.

It reminds me.. when someone is cheating on a partner, they are more likely to think they are being cheated on too. I have experienced this, being accused non-stop when actually they were the one cheating all along.

Just because USA likes tampering with proprietary code and using NDA’s with Silicon Valley to bug just about anything they want (because they can), that paranoia consumes them that other countries are doing the same.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#82

Post by ars »

Zealotux wrote: post #8

Naive question: what prevents Americans from simply buying Dji products in Canada? It's a physical product, so banning it like TikTok or big vehicles is impossible, or am I missing something?

The US doesn't care if Americans buy them from Canada. The point of the law is to encourage US made drone manufacturing, because we'll need it during a war.

They don't care if a drone here or there slips thought, it's irrelevant to the point of the law.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#83

Post by Teever »

hooverd wrote: post #68
kaibee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why. Drones are pretty simple manufacturing wise. The issue at scale is the supply chain of cheap motors, cheap control boards, and cheap batteries.

Sure, but you won't be allowed to buy one for less than the cost of a small car.

which, the factory that builds drones or the drones themselves?

What would stop someone from building their own cargo container sized drone factory that takes parts like motors, pcbs, batteries in one end and spits out finished drones on the other?

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#84

Post by NorwegianDude »

treprinum wrote: post #61
langsoul-com wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked with Huawei. Look at the smartphone market pre and post Huawei ban, immediate crater.

Huawei didn't have the best phones by far. DJI is miles ahead of anything else one can buy.

I agree that Huawei didn't have the best phones, but it was not that far off, and for the price it was arguably a better phone.

Need a phone with a great camera? Then Huawei is much better than anything Samsung, Apple, and Google makes. Huawei market share was taking off at crazy speed before the bans on both the software and hardware side.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#85

Post by sofixa »

mpalmer wrote: post #10
sofixa wrote: post #3

"free market". Unless there's something better than what our own companies can do (Bombardier C-Series jets, DJI drones, BYD Electric Vehicles), then protectionism. Also, I have to say that I find it very weird that random unrelated legislation can be in the same "act".

C-Series is "better" in large part because its favorable pricing was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government. And I'm not sure you want to get into a discussion about China and protectionism, to say nothing of national security concerns.

> C-Series is "better" in large part because its favorable pricing was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government

Just like Boeing gets billions in tax breaks, various aids and in theory extremely profitable if they weren't so damn incompetent military contracts?

And no, it's better because it's more efficient. Over the lifetime of a plane it's purchase price is a tiny part of the total costs.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#86

Post by beacon294 »

ralusek wrote: post #70

A few things to note here. 1.) DJI offers many drones related to infrastructure mapping and maintenance, as well as agricultural tasks. From a national security perspective, it is a non-trivial threat vector for a Chinese company to not only have intimate knowledge of US infrastructure by being their drone supplier, but also by becoming a dependency of US infrastructure. In the event of a war, all of the drones could…

All good points, and it's painful to see you flagged likely by some political operation.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#87

Post by adolph »

kaibee wrote: post #37
mc32 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have Skydio for that. There is no profit in consumer-oriented drones. The money is in lower volume professional & semi-professional use drones. You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones.

This is exactly the problem. The military needs single-use drones in high volume, and the production capacity/scale for that can only exist if it's subsidized by the consumer industry. > You cannot compete with China even if we annexed Mexico for cheap labor in order to manufacture high volume low profit drones. DJI isn't making drones by hand, they have automated factories. But its only worth building an automated f…

> Banning DJI drones in the US lets you build a factory in the US that can eventually get costs down.

1. It is a bad idea to use national defense in this manner. There are more honest tools that can be used, see two.

2. Using tariff or other trade tools can blunt the impact of DJI's market position and allow for US entrants to develop. [0]

A weakness of both nat-sec bans and tariffs is that they don't actually do anything to encourage a company like Anduril to make the pro/sumer stuff needed for volume sales to develop broad acceptance, fast iteration and well founded supply chains.

0. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/03/larger-lesson...

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#88

Post by rozap »

rcpt wrote: post #35
nacs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is a strange one. There is no viable competitor to DJI for consumers when it comes to the software side especially -- DJI software is miles ahead of the other drone producers (on-drone and their mobile apps).

When I try to download DJI fly app from the Play Store it always crashes.

Like they said, the market leader.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#89

Post by beacon294 »

h0l0cube wrote: post #32
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When companies receive outsized state subsidies that allow them to undercut the markets, it's not an apples for apples comparison. As for the unrelated legislation, I agree. Too many things are tacked on / added on. NO ONE is reading these things in complete given that sometimes they receive the full 1k pages hours before the vote. The other issue is the number of things funded that shouldn't be in general but that's…

It does poke a hole through the concept of markets that are free of government intervention lead to cheaper goods. I doubt these subsidies don’t further government revenue in some way, so is the Chinese government a better capital allocator than the free market? They’ve made bets on solar, EVs, battery tech, and pretty much everything related to advanced manufacturing bar the latest CPU lithography, and right now the…

The Chinese government is playing the "kill competitors with price cuts" game on the national level by not floating their currency AND subsidizing their major international tech. Eventually someone will foot this bill. They hope the marbles they gain will be worth the cost.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#90

Post by kuschku »

hooverd wrote: post #71
bluescrn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be thankful that consumer/hobbyist drones haven't been banned entirely already (banning other model aircraft along with them as collateral damage). Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.

Or 3D printers! You can print scary "ghost guns" with them. And they're mostly made in China. Although maybe Stratasys will push for that next now that they're lost their stranglehold on the market.

While the cheaper 3D printers are mostly chinese, Prusa is still a non-chinese option :)
Post reply on HN