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?
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.
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".
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?
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".
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
And that's why only Chinese stuff is banned, not all ex-US drones / electric cars.
China only has themselves to blame. They intentionally break WTO rules regarding unfair subsidies for their domestic companies. Plus they steal technology and ideas from every company manufacturing there. It doesn't matter for toasters or t-shirts, but high tech stuff is more important.
No other country does this, especially not with government support.
Plus they steal technology and ideas from every company manufacturing there.
Stealing is the norm for every developed nation. They didn't just spin out of nowhere and became a super-power. Heard anything about hiring literal Nazis for space program? Does that count as unethical or stealing for you?
No?
I mean Nazis are bad, right? They were supposed to pay for what they did. But not these ones, these were the "good ones", so it's fine?
What about tech and knowledge stolen from colonial eras? Too old? it was the norm, not relevant anymore, it's okay when we did it or any other bs reason you come up with. However, doing the same now is unethical because the colonials created the "WTO" to protect their interests, but others arent playing your game, you're losing, and it's just not fair?
It's fine when you steal tech and talent (even if they were helped cause genocide) and US isn't shy supporting Israel do genocide again.
But as soon as other country uses what's made made available to them, use spies, and steals, It's unethical. The IPs that few countries arbitrarily created after looting through the whole world? How fucking convenient, eh?
Suck it!
I don't particularly like China but it's hilarious to think they'd be western puppet and do as they were told forever. Every other nation would do the same if roles were reversed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This could be a severe national security problem if the drones sent back the video to DJI as well, then a foreign power would get geotagged high detail video of areas of the part of SF you flew over, VERY useful to a foreign intelligence service.
And I am not just talking about your drone and your flight, all other people who own and fly drones in the area would also supply data to sutch a system.
I am not saying that this is what they are doing, but please remember that the Brittish government asked the public to send in their holliday photos of the coast of France to help them plan the D-Day invasions. This kind of information is useful.
