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DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

dronedj.com

481–490 of 742 posts

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

#481

As someone who has a DJI Mini what are the options for a consumer drone made by a US company? Everything on https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list is either widely different, 15x as expensive, not purchasable by civilians at all, or all of the above. Parret appears to have stopped selling their consumer model entirely. Skydio 2+ seems like the closest thing but it also no longer appears to be for sale either. All…

Autel Nano or Lite+. Some Autel drone are made in the USA, but not all. Edit: added the Lite and fixed formatting

> Some Autel drone are made in the USA

You mean are assembled in USA. Most soft and hardware is still made in China.

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

#482
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ot…

> 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. Which Europe? All of those can be done online with minimal effort or upfront investment in many EU countries. Do you mean Belarus? > Combine that with the multiple languages and regulators which inhibits scale and you get the present si…

> All of those can be done online with minimal effort or upfront investment in many EU countries. Do you mean Belarus?

Each of them can be done online in most countries. All, very few. I think only Estonia comes to mind. (At least one form in that process requires visiting a notary in most of Western Europe.)

The cost of terminating an employee is also a unique risk that European firms have to capitalise for which American start-ups do not. Again, I understand why one would choose this stability. But it comes with a cost.

> It's impossible to remove that boundary

It's absolutely possible by mandating a lingua franca. But it would cause irreparable damage to those cultures, which is why the EU--sensibly, in my opinoin--has chosen to preserve them. But this is a choice and it comes with costs.

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

#483

As someone who has a DJI Mini what are the options for a consumer drone made by a US company? Everything on https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list is either widely different, 15x as expensive, not purchasable by civilians at all, or all of the above. Parret appears to have stopped selling their consumer model entirely. Skydio 2+ seems like the closest thing but it also no longer appears to be for sale either. All…

I'll build a drone for you with open source components if you are shopping for one, it will cost more than a DJI but less than these other options.

Will it be as good. I mean control, video recording and signal. Compatible with some HD goggles? I really doubt, but if you can explain...

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

#484
post #366
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, those pesky consumers getting in the way of the innovation of the free market with their protections. If only they could be fully exploited for maximum value extraction without interference.

This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.

And the above attitude is why the US is a joke with people who can't afford education, healthcare, or a home, 70+ yo still working their ass off in McJobs, crumbling public infrastructure, homeless and billionaires laughing all the way to the bank...

Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP or the presence of billionaires and unicorns, as if between you, Zuck, and Musk you have an average wealth of $500B. There are much poorer GDP-wise countries where people live better and are happier than the US :)

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

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the US the weaker partner here?

Struggling to understand in which context the US is the weaker partner. - GDP [0] - Total wealth [1] - Military - Demographics (US - growing, China - aging and shrinking) - Soft power [0] https://tradingeconomics.com/ [1] [ https://www.ubs.com/global/en/family-office-uhnw/reports/glo... ]

GDP and wealth are hard to compare because China does so much stuff for cheaper. They can build massive infrastructure projects like high speed trains, huge bridges and dams all for way cheaper than we do, so their money actually goes farther. That means even for the same GDP they have more productive capability.

Military is not the only way to exercise power - look at the Belt and Road initiative.

Demographics - how many PhDs are coming out of each country.

And obviously we’re banning DJI because they are the dominant player - we couldn’t compete economically so we’re using legal power instead. If the US was just better at building consumer drones this never would have happened.

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

#486

I'm not going to miss drones. Too many drone operators abused them to violate peoples expectation of quiet or privacy, or to harass animals, and were ignored or outright supported by other users. Laws restricting specific areas or behavior are extremely hard to enforce compared to an outright ban. The most common defense was violating your privacy wasn't technically illegal. Well, now that it is going to become illeg…

I just had some drone photos taken of damage on the roof of my house, and it's way easier than trying to get up 4 storeys with a ladder

No doubt.

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

#487
post #464

So I guess the new viable business strategy in the US is: 1. Find a sector which a foreign companies dominates 2. Enter this sector even with a bad product 3. Go to congress and get the other ones banned because they are "insert reason here".

Has there been any evidence this was pushed by lobbyists? If you look at what's happening in Ukraine It's pretty much a given that the US defense sector is looking at ways to improve the US small drone manufacturing capabilites, and have less potentially hostile drones flying over their own territory.

There are a lot of coincidences[1] and since congress can legally insider trade it would not surprise me if some involved have stock in some of these companies.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cb-Zv783yQ

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

#488

DJI's response (a bit dated) https://dronedj.com/2024/03/02/dji-response-drone-ban-us/ The allegations are so subjective that they sound like some middle schooler complaining to their mom. “DJI drones are collecting vast amounts of sensitive data – everything from high-resolution images of critical U.S. infrastructure to facial recognition technology and remote sensors that can measure an individual’s body temperatur…

[flagged]

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

#489
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to also be fair, I just recently returned from Europe and I was shocked at how maddeningly frustrating it was to simply use the Web. Between shockingly obtrusive GDPR consent forms and outright blocks on Websites from EU consumers, it was a wild look at what Europeans have to go through under the guise of consumer protections. Like, the pendulum swung WAY too far in the other direction.

Not under the guise. They are consumer protections. As a European, I like them very much. It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs. There are even many websites that don’t need the notices as they don’t use cookies for tracking a natural person (their cookies are not associated with personally identifiable information). So we can choose what we use becau…

It surfaces which websites use stronger tactics to track you, and which allow consumer friendly opt-outs.

The problem is I didn't see a single web site that I visited where this was apparent. It was a mess of opt-in pop-ups and settings and whatnot that completely overwhelmed me with actionable things I had to do before I could interact with a site, and often many companies clearly just said F it and blocked anyone from Europe.

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

#490
post #308
post #28

DJI is, by far, the best drone equipment brand for photography, industrial usage, etc. It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech. If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...

Most hardware has no reason to require direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work. If some device requires internet access, then it cannot be trusted to not transmit personal data, therefore it should be possible to replace the software on that device, so that something that is trusted by the consumer can be installed. While DJI here might create good hardware, their internet and account requi…

I would like to see a requirement that any drone sold in (or imported to) the US (or EU) has to be flashable - without having to desolder components, or any other such nonsense. Press some buttons and load new software.

An accompanying requirement would be to document interfaces to hardware subsystems (chip spec sheets would suffice).

With drones, the potential for mischief is too great to let malware be smuggled in.

Is this a politically and technically realistic goal ? Or am I talkin' thru my hat ?

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