This is honestly ridiculous. The security concerns are unwarranted. Any surveillance that these drones could accomplish if hacked can just be bought off of any GIS website.
“But military bases” go fly a drone by one and see what happens. This already isn’t a surveillance concern.
This is going to set the hobbyist and professional drone market back a decade.
Only in the US. The rest of the world buys them. It still is a major market lose, but China still makes Huawei phones.
Good point. Unfortunate that US consumers keep getting screwed by these bans
I have a DJI drone and I agree. I would know if it’s collecting weird telemetry I have a DNS filter which would spot it all. It doesn’t. Just normal shit.
I have pulled mine apart too. I have an old one from before the tracking law and I didn’t find anything nefarious. The one I have from after the tracking law went into effect is transmitting its location and ID but I didn’t find much else even on a network intercept.
Maybe there is some way to open a stream to China buried deep in the firmware, but I don’t see what use China would have for that. They have other methods of surveillance
Sry for the late response but agreed!!
Not hobbyist. There is high chance hobbyists drone makers will benefit from it.
I can assure you that we won’t. There has not been a time in the history of this country that lower competition has resulted in improved products or prices.
There is zero US based competition in the hobbyist and consumer spaces unless you DIY. US companies mostly do products for emergency services, large commerical operations like spraying pesticides, or military. There are a handful of brands making smaller drones, but they’re all a decade behind DJI in features and quality control, or they cost $20,000.
I’d be fine with a ban if there was a legitimate security concern, but there isn’t, this is just part of the trade war and it only stands to harm US consumers and small businesses. The entire aerial photography industry is going to collapse and one’s only option will be large companies with hex rotor drones and Red cameras.
unless you DIY.
I was thinking about DIY.
but there isn’t, this is just part of the trade war
True.
Oh if you’re thinking diy then yeah this won’t affect DIY at all. DIYs are all Frankensteins anyway
Again like the tiktok ban: Rather than passing real privacy laws we’re passing racism laws and pretending this helps privacy and security.
On one hand, the CCP fucking sucks. On the other hand, the US alternatives to some of these banned / tariffed Chinese products also really suck - especially when it comes to bang for your buck. ugh.
That’s because, on one hand, the United States fucking suck. And on the other hand, if America produces anything well, you probably can’t afford it.
Honestly, if there was american branded stuff I would prefer it to made in China stuff. I want to stimulate our own economy not China. For example: computer stuff, small microprocessor stuff like arduinos, circuitry components, rubiks cubes, audio stuff. All of those are dominantly Chinese, if I want to find good American stuff I can’t. Someone needs to take the fucking risk and do it.
*Land of the free!
- ™
©®™
Free to exploit the working class.
Yeah, it’s real nice and all to say you want to combat chinese business interests threatening to swallow american ones whole, but then I can’t buy a house, and my rent is going up because these same business interests are buying houses in every major city by the thousands.
Then, they either renovate them, or let them sit vacant. The renovated ones get rented out at exorbant rates. And since they own such a significant number of these homes, the rents EVERYWHERE rise dramatically. And then you see all these vacant houses. Never rented. Never sold. They become drug havens for the cities homeless. But it doesn’t lower property values, because it’s all artificially high.
So now you’re paying higher city taxes, and living near a house that has regular gunshots out onto the streets. The cops won’t address it, because they know how dangerous those houses are. But you still have to rent an apartment near one.
But it’s ok guys. The government is banning tiktok, and drones.
Those are all legitimate concerns, but I’m not sure the effort required to fix real estate prices, crime, and income equality is comparable to the amount of effort required to ban a social media site and some drones from a country that might not have our best interests in mind.
I’m trying to be optimistic about the ban, I’d love to see the drone industry take off in the us and I’d love to see what we could accomplish. It’s not a huge industry and I honestly can’t name a single US drone manufacturer, but I really hope that won’t be the case in a year or two.
I don’t know about the other states/cities, but in my city it would be real simple. Just ban companies from buying real estate. Maybe an individual can own 6 houses. I’m not saying that people can’t own and rent out houses. I’m saying ban it so that company can’t buy entire neighborhoods, and then monopolize the prices.
How would that work for, say, apartment complexes? Allow co-ops (which are typically corporations)?
I’m specifically talking about houses. Although you do raise a good point that companies shouldn’t be allowed to own out of market apartment buildings. Meaning if your company is based in Chicago (for example) you can only buy apartment buildings in your area. And there should probably also be a limit on what percentage of your market you should be allowed to own. But either way they couldn’t also own buildings in NYC, L.A, Miami, ect.
That’s the problem, you’re only talking about houses (and probably in an expensive part of the country). Apartments are a simple solution to that in expensive places. Also there are lots of houses under $300K , just not where you’re looking.
I had a better idea that would allow people to buy their own homes that they are currently renting:
- Every home gets appraised to determine what it would sell for. This is done by the county and is used for property taxes too.
- Every renter is allowed to buy a percentage of their primary residence from the owner. The owner has no choice in this. It’s a requirement for being able to rent a property.
- Renters can pay as little as $100 extra per month and the county puts their percentage ownership on the deed. If the home is sold, the renter can’t be kicked out involuntarily. If they do leave, they get the percentage of home value they own.
Pros:
- This would avoid the issue of high interest rates hurting primary homeownership.
- This would blunt the impact of corporate landlords having a monopoly where they refuse to sell. They are forced to sell at a fair price.
- This would create a simple decision between owning their home and spending money on luxuries or eating out.
Cons:
- This would hurt small landlords who would have their property bought out from under them. This is actually a good thing because the benefits of rising property values are now shared.
- The implementation is hard. This is actually a good thing because bad landlords would sell property they didn’t want to manage, lowering prices for renters who want to buy.
- It would cost the county money to hire appraisers. But this could be paid for by increased property taxes due to better appraisals.
- Property taxes would go up for landlords. But this would be good, as it encourages them to sell the property. This appraisal process and increased property taxes wouldn’t affect people who just lived in their home without charging rent.
- If the house is sold and the renter doesn’t have to leave then how is the new owner going to deal with that? In either case how would eviction work?
Passing a law? Yeah it’s pretty much the same workload.
“We can’t work on problem because something unrelated is worse and broken”, then? We can only talk about that when discussing any problem?
I’m viewing it more as “We have problem, and other related problem. We’re only going to do surface level solutions to be able to say at least we tried when elections come up”.
Can’t find it now but there’s a website that lets you search airbnb listings by city. In my city it was quite interesting to sort those listings per owner… the top 5 were mostly corpos.
I’m so glad they are focusing on the things we really need
Software problems require software solutions.
//not affiliated, not endorsing
Thank you friend. I like flying my drone to help me with a lot of anxiety and stress I have I fucking broke my arm eating shit on my bike I can’t do too much physical shit but flying drones I can do it has kept me sane I swear to God almighty I used to be a “fuck politics” blah blah person but I can’t take this anymore
Meanwhile Ukraine: more drones for us
Ukraine isn’t really using DJIs as much (if any at all) as they are custom built FPV drones.
FPV drones are being used as kamikaze weapons. DJI drones are being used as spotters because they can hold position easily and zoom from far away.
Ah makes sense.
Drone maker DJI is based in China and controls over 70% of the world’s drone market share, a combination that threatens U.S. lawmakers. As we first reported in April, 6% of DJI stock lies in the hands of Chinese state-owned businesses, which has led to fears of Chinese government backdoors, national security risks, and other fears of Chinese surveillance using the company’s drones.
Elise Stefanik, the Republican representative from New York who sponsors the anti-DJI legislation, said of the drones, “DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk, and it is past time that drones made by Communist China are removed from America.” Of course, this unacceptable risk h
If we had a real SCOTUS then both this and the TikTok ban would be dead on day one for clearly violating the prohibition on Bills of Attainder in the Constitution.
“The Chinese oligarchs are taking over!” - American oligarchs probably
I’m getting so tired of this red scare, cold war shit.
Did something happen or is this just, “Waaaahhh, China baaaaddd!”? It sounds like they actually had better reason to ban TikTok.
The general idea is that it’s a potential cybersecurity concern, it’s along the same lines as the Huawei ban from a few years back. Not entirely without merit, there have been vulnerabilities found in DJI hardware/software that could be used maliciously and some of them were fairly serious. I don’t think anyone has ever found any proof those vulnerabilities were intentional, but I also think that would be super difficult to prove one way or the other.
For the love of fucking fuck please goddamnit I was just starting to enjoy flying mine fuck everyone in congress who voted for this fuck everyone and everything in general rn fr
I gotta wonder, the more this kind of stuff picks up steam the more risky Chinese companies are going to view investing in American exports. When, if ever, do we reach the tipping point where Chinese companies currently selling things that simply aren’t produced in America anymore stop sending them because the risk is too high?
I will say, had a chuckle when I saw these two posts in succession in your post feed
So to your own point, as long as there is at least one person with a credit card ready to go, probably no tipping point.
Well one is talking about a personal buyer choosing to buy a $200 HDMI cable that cost $0.50 to manufacture and spent $5 on marketing, and the other is talking about Chinese companies investing millions of dollars into shipping goods across the Pacific potentially deciding that the risk of their deliveries not being able to be made is more than the gains of selling them in that particular country, so they’re not related concepts at all.
