91–100 of 742 posts
If DJI is doing nasty things, prohibit the nasty things DJI doing in the law, not the brand. Then condemn DJI if needed. How do this law protect from any DJi competitor doing the same stuff (or even a spinoff company through a complex scheme)?
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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…
>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. Single use drones could exist without subsidizing by the consumer industry. Ukraine is literally doing it with rubberbands. Anything else would simply lead to overdesign and basically the same problem we have now where the enemy is si…
I'm under the impression that the supply-chain for Ukrainian drones basically leads to China in the same way that it does for Russia. For a "small" regional conflict, this isn't a problem to Ukraine because there's no way China could or would restrict supply of their cheap drones. But for a large-scale conflict, it would be a problem for the US to not be able to source drone motors by the 10,000's.
This is so misguided it's breathtaking. Even if one buys into the supposed "harm" it's apparently trying to address, by targeting a specific corporate entity the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends. But it will confuse the market and hurt U.S. hobbyist consumers while being largely unenforceable anyway. It's one of those things that's just so dumb you assume it's only congressional ele…
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.
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?
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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.
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.
We'll what happens after the first public vigilante action against a corrupt cop who got a paid vacation instead of a jail sentence. But I think that the cat is out of the bag and that DRM will be the attempted solution to this kind stuff. It's going to go poorly though. What part can you regulate and control? Not the batteries or the motors, or the off the shelf microcontrollers.
For people wonder how this got there, the blame goes to Rep. Elise Stefanik: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2864 That bill was tacked onto a big "must pass" defense authorization and may not have survived on its own. Here's an article with some speculation on why Stefanik introduced this bill: https://dronexl.co/2024/06/06/drone-industry-outrage-stefani...
She's Dick Cheney to MTG/Boeberts Dubya Bush.
We should ban Creality and Bambu Lab too. Imagine if we also strangled consumer 3D printing for dumb reasons. You should only be allowed to print on $100k+ Stratasys for natsec reasons, of course.
But yes...there very well may be a security concern there too. Bambu sends/receives info from the companies servers. At least once this has allowed a supposed firmware update to cause a large number of printers to start printing uncommanded. This is a major safety and security risk and it was largely ignored by the consumer community due to Bambu "making things easier".
So yeah...perhaps we should start looking into these companies...and exactly where their subsidies do/may come from.