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DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

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

#391

Post by samatman »

logicchains wrote: post #209
samatman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"automated factory" is somewhat redundant, no? The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get. I am of the opinion that the US made a very serious mistake by opening up tariff-free trade with countries which do not have comparable labor and environmental safety laws. The Feds should have come up with reasonable estimates of what foreign manufacturi…

>The point is that most people who will buy a $700 Chinese drone will buy a $1000 US drone if that's all they can get. In the consumer market, if the $1000 drone has a significantly worse user experience then people just won't buy it. Before DJI the consumer drone market was much smaller; by creating a cheap, high-quality product DJI caused more people to purchase drones, growing the market. If there's no competitive…

By all reports, Skydio drones offer an excellent user experience.

The DJI Mini 3 Prop is currently $899, and Skydio can't manufacture something like that in the US, and sell it for that amount of money. But I bet they could make something comparable at a sale price of $1100-1300.

Allowing Communists to dump goods in our market is optional. I don't know that I support a ban on DJI products, I have a Mini 2: I like drones, but not enough to drop a couple grand on a Skydio 2 (and note that they exited the consumer market, presumably because of the aforementioned price dumping making it infeasible to compete). I would be pissed off if it was permanently grounded. But at minimum I support tariffs which are heavy enough to give domestic industry a chance to compete on an even footing.

And given the evident relationship between drone technology and national security, I could be persuaded that a full ban is in the national interest. Perhaps (this is only sort of a joke) the NSA could release a full open-source jailbreak of every DJI product, and publish an API for the cloud components which any American compute provider could then offer.

Then block their servers. Let 'em know that we'll let them back in the country when Facebook can operate in China, and not before.

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

#392

Post by EgregiousCube »

danaris wrote: post #375
EgregiousCube wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way. The two commonly held arguments against socialized healthcare in America are: First, a distrust that the government will create a system that is good and a belief that quality will decrease under such a system, and; Second, that such a system would be funded by a large tax increase and that Americans are in…

> You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way. I'm afraid your experiences are not universal. There is a very strong streak of this in the US, significantly (though probably not wholly) traceable to the Calvinist roots of the Puritans who were a profound influence on the early culture of the country. When you believe that people's position on Earth is…

There is a wide gap between not wanting to be responsible for helping the poor and actively wanting the poor to fail. You're confusing the two.

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

#393

Post by Turing_Machine »

kaibee wrote: post #66
mc32 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single-use means $20K - $50K, not $2K. What militaries are competing against with the Houthis and in Ukraine, is 20 - 50K drones and right now taking them down with $2MM missiles or a 50K drone taking out a 2MM tank. Dial those numbers up and you can see how the imbalance in cost is unsustainable. They don't need drones to be 2K.

I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points. Those 20-50k drones, I assume you mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZALA_Lancet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136 ? The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smart…

> I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points.

I think you're 100% right here.

It may seem absurd, but something that can take out a main battle tank would be well worth $20,000. An M1A2 Abrams costs $24 million. The latest model Russian T-90 is around $4 million. A Chinese Type 99 is around $2.5 million. The asymmetry is clear.

Some of that $20,000 is making sure it works reliably under any conceivable weather conditions, after it's been stuck in a storage container at +50 C/-30C for weeks or months, etc.

On the other hand, if you're just doing reconnaissance, maybe you'd rather send a swarm of 20 $1,000 drones instead (in an attempt to overwhelm the enemy's countermeasures).

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

#394

Post by moduspol »

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…

> imagine if you were a filmmaker, tree trimmer, real estate agent, etc, who had bought many drones for your business.

Unfortunately I suspect this group is already quite small due to the existing heavy-handed regulation of drones for anything other than recreational use. Or they're at least "under the table."

You need a drone pilot's license to legally fly a drone for anything other than recreational use. This has already decimated a lot of the most direct and interesting use cases for us.

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

#395

Post by Retric »

dylan604 wrote: post #205
Retric wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes minimal skills or effort to grow pot. This is closer to banning moonshine which was arguably fairly effective.

Whoa there big fella. Let's not denigrate weed growers with your broad brush trying to a make a point. Anyone that believes growing pot takes minimal effort clearly does not know what they are talking about. Maybe you can just drop some seeds in the ground somewhere, and maybe a pot plant will grow, but good weed will not be a plant of any value what so ever.

Low effort doesn’t mean zero effort. 19 states legalized home cultivation and many people are perfectly happy with what they get with minimal effort. Even in states where they can legally buy a higher quality product.

> not be a plant of any value what so ever

It’s long been a perfectly viable strategy to plant pot on public lands and then come back for harvest. That doesn’t mean people are tossing seeds randomly, but lower rewards are balanced by lower risks. Some customers are always interested in savings cash even for a terrible product.

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

#396

Post by mrguyorama »

freedomben wrote: post #347
beloch wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a Canadian, U.S. trade protectionism is nothing new. It happens all the time and frequently targets allies like Canada rather than rivals like China. What U.S. citizens should watch out for is when U.S. protectionism winds up hurting the U.S.'s own economy. e.g. Tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber may have helped out a few U.S. softwood lumber producers with good lobbyists (and Jimmy Carter), but the incr…

Indeed, and we never seem to learn. Lumber prices in the US during Covid were eye-watering and wreaked havoc through the whole economy that is still being felt today, and it was almost entirely due to US protectionism of lumber.

Yes, Trump's tariffs were exceptionally bad, stupid, poorly thought out, and poorly implemented, like the vast majority of the things he did.

But the fact that goofus fails at doing X doesn't make doing X always the wrong choice.

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

#397

Post by plandis »

Once again the US government dances around the broader issue of data privacy.

I understand it’s easier to get people to vote against Chinese products in the US on data privacy concerns but it’s irritating that Congress isn’t working on legislating rules for products that are not Chinese as well.

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

#398

Post by mrguyorama »

SSLy wrote: post #307
chme wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any concrete examples you are referring to?

The bi annual push for chat control (key „escrow”)

The US had an entire decade of war on cryptography that was literally required to safely transact on the internet, and yet the 90s had plenty of online store startups.

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

#399

Post by satvikpendem »

mrtksn wrote: post #287
gruez wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Obsession with pricing the stock is not healthy. I'm not claiming it is, just that it's far more objective and far less fudgeable than the alternatives. >According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh ... >Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc. Arguably all of those is more due to go…

Right, China achieve all this thanks to its libertarian low touch low regulation small government and only if the stock prices of the American companies go a bit higher and the government is a tad less regulated they will do even better than the Chinese.

Not all regulation is bad, but also, not all regulation is good. Regulation is meaningless in a vacuum. I support more consumer protection regulation, but also, I support YIMBYism [0] which is a deregulatory model that wants to remove restrictions on housing, which were largely made by corporations and NIMBYs who don't want their property values to go down if new housing is built. YIMBYism is actually very similar to how Europe builds their housing, via mixed zone development.

It is the same with your comment, saying that it's only libertarians or those who want low regulation is a strawman, it depends on exactly which type of regulation. China can achieve some things with its big government ways, but it can't achieve everything. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY_movement

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

#400

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chme wrote: post #251
henvic wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about drone legislation here in Europe, but state overreach in tech in general + bad scene for startups compared to the US (for now...) due to politics.

Any concrete examples you are referring to?

> Any concrete examples you are referring to?

Entity formation time; time and capital required to hire the first N employees; number, cost and time of licensing required before first sale can be made. Each are higher in Europe. Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present situation.

Which, I will note, is fine. It’s optimised for stability, not wealth. On the other hand, it naturally means having to choose between American and Chinese tech giants.

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