This is a loser’s game US is playing. Historically it used to innovate above the rest, now “we ban them, because their tech better”
Oh no! The USA will fall behind in terms of expensive hobbies unless it can make their own plastic toys for lonely adults! /s
Yea, there is absolutely no reason to have a good drone industry at all. In Ukraine for example they don’t use any drones. /s
According to Sukharevskyi, 99% of Ukrainian military drones are produced domestically.
From Chinese parts
My comment was supposed to be sarcastic
Yes you were sarcastic about Ukraine not using Drones. You were therefor saying Ukraine uses Drones. As if that means fuck all in a discussion of the CCP run company DJI who produces Drones which are not the ones used in Ukraine.
This “lonely adult” uses drones for aerial mapping and survey. This Summer’s huge project is a workflow I developed to map the extent of PacNW bull kelp forests in order to provide year-over-year health metrics. Using sUAS for this is way more automated, economical, repeatable, and granular than using airplanes and satellites, therefore within reach of those communities monitoring kelp health.
DJI hits the sweet spot of capabilities, compatibility, and cost. Skydio (go USA!) has abandoned the consumer/enthusiast market that built their business. And even before they turned their back on the consumer market, Skydio couldn’t come close to DJI’s hardware. Additionally, Skydio, in true capitalist fashion, locked capabilities away behind software licenses, capabilities that are already built into the drone.
It’s important for countries to have domestic drone manufacturing in the current conditions. But the USA’s actions here smack of protecting companies that just can’t hang.
Whats it feel like to be obsoleted by Lidar on planes before you even existed?
Oh, right! I forgot about all of the LIDAR-equipped planes in maritime communities! Those are way more economical to fly than any sUAS. /s in case that wasn’t obvious.
In case you, or anyone else, were vaguely interested in learning:
-kelp extent mapping needs to be done in repeatable fashion, specifically at low tide; we can put up an sUAS any time
-the communities most in need of monitoring absolutely cannot afford to send planes up monthly
-many of the kelp beds in the PacNW are in restricted airspace; it is much easier to get an FAA clearance to perform low-altitude surveys using sUAS
-that restricted airspace I mentioned? Some of these kelp beds are on approach paths for the airspace. Even if a plane were the preferred choice for surveying, the planes are unable to fly in the pattern we need
-(drifting a touch off your point of LIDAR-equipped planes) satellite imagery with the required resolution is prohibitively expensive
-most construction projects wouldn’t use a plane for tasks such as volumetric or area analysis
Consumer drones are quickly becoming the preferred, economical means for kelp health analysis, especially for communities that can’t afford planes or purchasing satellite imagery.
I am in fact not interested in the hobbies of people who defend companies like DJI, TikTok, Kapersky, etc.
Again like the tiktok ban: Rather than passing real privacy laws we’re passing racism laws and pretending this helps privacy and security.
The CCP might be all Chinese and the Chinese Populace might be +91% Han Chinese but that in no way makes laws which target a hostile foreign dictatorship equate to “racism”.
banned
Believe it or not, also Rule 1. Wait, wrong instance.
I can see how this might seem like a hexbear or ml thread from the pro-ccp comments on this post, lol.
the Chinese Populace might be +91% Han Chinese
I’ll never understand how a country with 1.4B people gets labeled “homogenous” by race counters, but a continent with with 800M, like Europe, is able to recognize dozens of cultures and subcultures.
Would you even guess that China has over 300 living languages inside its borders?
You are looking at it from the perspective of a westerner post springtime of nations. As I understand it a lot of Chinese people see it more like the Romans, wherein they may be different but they are all Chinese. Also China has been committing cultural genocide and assimilation against groups within their borders for millenia, this has resulted in what can best be described as a very broad cultural and ethnic identity.
So you think the Chinese are just naturally genocidal? And that’s why the Yao and Zhuang and Bai and Mongolian people don’t count as distinct ethnic groups?
Meanwhile, the Welsh, the English, the Irish, and the Scottish do count because… the English have been historically so peaceful and egalitarian?
Because not many europeans primarily identify as “european first”. This is slowly changing but for the most part, people identify by whatever european nation they inhabit. But i bet most chinese identify as “chinese first” instead of whatever region/city they are from.
In fact, China likes to brag about how “advanced” they are, that they solved this “issue” centuries ago, while the EU is currently trying to “copy them”.
TLDR : If you ask a chinese tourist “where are you from?”, they will answer “China”. If you ask a european the same, noone will say “Europe/EU”.
I assume most race counters on a global would just consider Western European Descent as one, if they even differentiate between Caucasians at all, but if you go to Europe then you meet people with heritages from all over the world pretty regularly and if you go to China you mostly meet people from China whose family is Chinese going back many generations. Maybe it’s a cultural issue or maybe that’s just the result of their previous massive increase in population after industrialization and the legislative failures of the Mao regime meaning the naturally occurring ratio is skewed that far from the norm.
I don’t know, and I don’t really care, tbh.
if you go to China you mostly meet people from China whose family is Chinese
Where as when you go to Europe…
You will meet people with heritages from all over the world. For example, the UK has local heritage demographic around 74%, and of combined total white demographic of around 81%. That’s a much different number than the Chinese 91%.
You can cross the straight in from France or take a thirty minute flight from Spain and be counted as “non-local”. Meanwhile, traveling from Shenyang to Shenzhen means nothing.
The islanders of Hainan are no different than the mountain men of Inner Mongolia.
Lol you brought EU into the conversation but didn’t state the statistics for them. The large majority of Immigrants to an EU member state are classified as “Non-EU Nationals” meaning they come from outside of the EU. About 5.3% of all EU population are first generation Non-EU immigrants.
TBH I can’t even tell you what the race, ethnicity, and heritage stats are for the EU because they’ve got the worst demographics tracking imaginable.
European countries aren’t totalitarian states. This isn’t a question of culture, it’s an issue regarding the one and only state power that’s making decisions.
This is the danger of being lulled into thinking China is a normal country. Yes, there are long histories in China and are (vanishing) diverse cultures in China but that’s irrelevant when talking about the actions of the state, which is all encompassing and overrules culture and diversity every time.
It’s the state that owns and controls these companies, it’s the state that dictates their policy and usage, and since the state is fascist and actively seeking to undermine democracy across the global, it is wise to treat the products of that state as a threat.
European countries aren’t totalitarian states.
I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia
Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.
This is the danger of being lulled into thinking China is a normal country
I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.
It’s the state that owns and controls these companies
Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.
I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia
Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.
Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships that approach anywhere near the all-encompassing control of the CCP. Hungary maybe I guess, which isn’t a country I’d recommend taking tech from either.
Ireland is not comparable to China though, that’s an extreme reach. We’re not talking about right-wing groups seeking power within democracies, we’re talking about uni-party state control.
I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.
Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation already. I got banned from lemmy.ml for discussing Tiananmen and Hong Kong. Pointing out that the Great Leap Forward resulted in millions of deaths was labeled “cia misinformation” by the mods. It’s a throughly compromised instance.
Lemmy users are not immune to tankie and Rusdian trolls, and thinking that they are is actually a weakness that gets exploited by those bad actors.
Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.
Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business and using that control as part of a coercive campaign to suppress human rights, dissent and individual freedoms.
Whatever authoritarianism is festering in other countries, China is still on an entirely different level, it’s not really a question.
Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships
Totalitarianism is always when the other guy does it. Never question the modem day police/surveillance state at home. Certainly don’t ask about our colonies abroad, or their paramilitary death squads and torture prisons financed with domestic capital.
Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation
It’s got an anti-war infestation that’s regularly accused of being tankies for failing to clap for the correct set of tanks.
Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business
Calmly explaining this to my US Postal Service and my Tennessee Valley Authority
Totalitarianism is always when the other guy does it
No…totalitarianism is an actual distinct system of governance when the state controls every aspect of daily life, communication and economic activity. It’s an actual word with meaning.
It’s got an anti-war infestation that’s regularly accused of being tankies for failing to clap for the correct set of tanks.
Ok, I’m not sure if we’re talking through a translator app or something, but I didn’t get banned from lemmy.ml for being “pro-war” I got banned for mentioning a historical fact about the Great Leap Forward and acknowledging other atrocities like the genocide occurring in Xinjiang.
If someone is anti-war they would be against those types of things as well. Tankies instead deny that those events occurred/are occurring, that’s why they’re so easy to spot and how people know they’re on Lemmy – they literally can’t condemn the CCP for any of the things they purport to be against when it comes to other countries, since it’s counter-productive to their true goals to criticize the CCP.
By contrast an honestly anti-war progressive type of person would be just as clear-eyed about their own government as they are the CCP. That’s being anti-war, you can’t be selective or try to ignore degrees of difference just because it’s politically uncomfortable, that’s just being a mouth-piece for a specific flavor of authoritarianism.
Calmly explaining this to my US Postal Service and my Tennessee Valley Authority
Again, running public services is not the same as the state owning and controlling all businness and industry. If the Post Office was used to control speech, that would be totalitarian use of a public service.
I think you’re just being obtuse at this point. You might be down for totalitarianism and the abolishment of individual freedoms, most people are not. Since, you know, having no rights kind of suck ass.
I’m adjacent to the industry. This is dumb but I understand the reasoning. We’re getting left behind in the electronics world. Nobody is creating hardware startups because every few months there’s a viral blog post with a “hardware is hard” title on HN and none of the VC assholes want to fund anything but web based surveillance capitalism ad tech because it’s a surefire way to make money. Even if you do get funded and you’re US based you’re absolutely doing all your manufacturing in China if you’re remotely consumer facing (b2big-b has different rules). That means Chinese companies get all the benefits of all the labor from your highly trained engineers when they get the design files. If you try to build anything at volume in the US you have strikingly few options for boards and parts. Everything is whole number multiples of fucking PCBway and half the time it’s lower quality unless you’re paying aero-defense prices which is the only business anyone wants.
We let almost all manufacturing jobs go overseas just to cut labor costs and now we’re suffering the consequences and our government completely incapable of doing what’s necessary to bring that manufacturing capability back to the US. At this point basic Keynesians economic policy is tantamount to heresy for anyone but the far left. Its like we’ve adopted the economic policies we forced on third world nations, and found ourselves with a third world economy.
Being able to produce cheap drones as good as DJIs is far more important for national security than whatever espionage risk they pose. Cheap, easy to use, drones like the dji phantom are omnipresent in current wars. Banning them prevents us from learning via competition or basic reverse engineering.
Its like we’ve adopted the economic policies we forced on third world nations, and found ourselves with a third world economy
Foucault’s boomerang at work, just like US counter insurgency tactics now being employed by US police.
People shit on China all the goddamn time here but they’ve done a prolific job becoming the tech and manufacturing leader in a handful of decades.
Blame it on tech espionage if you want but there’s a reason the US is deadset on targeting Chinese imports, and it’s hardly for any of the security reasons they might be tempted to claim it to be. The US is about to be left behind and it’s noones fault but our own.
But why do we need to build stuff here? If it’s cheaper elsewhere, let them build it and we’ll do the higher paying work.
I guess there are national security concerns, but that sounds like we just need to make more friends and fewer enemies, as well as have redundancy in our supply chain (i.e. invest in other inexpensive labor markets, like LATAM, Africa, and India). The issue isn’t that the US isn’t making it, it’s that China is making most of it. Diversify and the problem mostly goes away.
Because it leaves the industry vulnerable in case China decides to start withholding sales to the US. Especially if they invade Taiwan and trigger a chain reaction of treaties that launches into a huge US vs China slugging match. One which China would likely lose painfully to, but would inflict crippling damage to our military. Anything coming out of China will be stopped for as long as the war goes on, and then even longer depending on how much of what I’m China actually got destroyed.
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.
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
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.
Idk if you vastly overestimate the available data on GIS or underestimate the data which can be obtained by drones.
Also, DJI has 70% of the global drone market share, so banning this company might actually help innovation.
DJI has 70% of the global drone market share, so banning this company might actually help innovation.
That’s… Not how innovation works. Why would other companies want or need to innovate if their main competitor disappears? If anything, the opposite will happen - they won’t have to try as hard to make a great product, since they no longer need to be better than the market leader.
Lmao you think destroying a global monopoly will decrease competition?
You heard it here, folks, drone production is over forever. Nobody will ever make drones again without the Chinese and their superior cheap plastic and tiny electric motors. It’s all joever. /s
Show us one example where shutting down a company increased competition among the remaining companies. That’s just not something that happens.
Smaller companies compete by building products that are better than the current market leaders. If the market leader disappears, they no longer have that incentive, as people are going to buy their products even if they don’t improve them in any way, since the customers don’t have a choice.
I’m not saying there won’t be drones any more. I’m saying that they won’t be competitive with DJI in terms of quality or value of money because they don’t need to be.
Show me one example of shutting down a company who held a monopoly? Generally they just get broken up into smaller companies which directly increases competition but that is in no way analogous to our current situation.
We know that in every single example so far that Monopoly and Competition inversely correlate by definitions.
We know that in every single example so far that Monopoly and Competition inversely correlate by definitions
A direct (not inverse) correlation between them happens all the time in tech. Smaller companies get sick of the market leader or monopoly for some reason, produce a better product, and people switch over.
For example, Internet Explorer had a web browser monopoly. Around 98% of web users used it. It lost that monopoly not because it was shut down, but because other, better browsers were released and people organically switched over. Increasing the competition reduced its monopoly.
The same could be said about Teamspeak users moving to Discord. Teamspeak had a monopoly on real-time gamer chat, but people moved to Discord because it was better.
So you’re saying it stopped being a monopoly when competition was created, and you somehow construe that as “monopoly equals competition” ??
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.
I’m getting so tired of this red scare, cold war shit.
How’s all that freedom doing over there?
Would be nice if there were some actual alternatives about the same price range and not using proprietary softwares…
Unfortunately anything open will cost extra, just because of the nature of it. Not to mention the colossal scale of how much product DJI ship, to cut costs somewhere
The reduction of monitoring is worth it. DJI calls home with your location and even provides tools for police to view the location of drones and drone operators in real time.
I am confused then what is Congress’ problem here?
Aint this where they are taking us anyway? Or they are worried commie police also getting the same info?
https://www.theverge.com/22985101/dji-aeroscope-ukraine-russia-drone-tracking
Something that stuck out to me:
The AeroScope signals are not encrypted, despite what we wrote in a previous version of this post — even though DJI and an independent source both told us they were encrypted, and DJI insisted they were when we did a fact-check, DJI now admits that they aren’t encrypted at all. So they could be picked up by other kinds of receivers.
So the verge just took a foreign for profit company at their word, and called it “fact checking”???
Modern investigative journalism everybody!
DJI and an independent source both told us
The US is so inept at manufacturing, yet wants to fight China. We can pretend to punish them, but 98% of all products bought and sold in the USA are “Made In China”.
*Land of the free!
- ™
©®™
Copyright and Trademark symbols basically mean the same thing, the R symbol means Registered Trademark and is much more enforced.
Good.
