Comment by samatman
14 days ago
"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 manufacturing was saving by cheating that way, and charged them that amount of money to sell products in the US. Factories which wanted to avoid those tariffs could pay for, and submit to, an independent audit of their factories.
Instead we decided that it was fine for US manufacturing to compete on an "even" basis with nations who are fine with laborers losing fingers and/or getting paid slave wages, and manufacturers dumping their waste stream into a nearby river. We've paid a severe price for that misguided egalitarianism, and it's time to change course.
> US made a very serious mistake by
Was it a mistake if the goal was to get cheaper products at the expense of foreigners losing fingers?
I agree it is myopic policy for the long term, but certainly many voters are happy to push safety problems somewhere else.
It is bad policy long term, and this policy has been around for a long time. At some point we need to address bad policy.
As duties and trade restrictions were dropped in the late 70s and 80s, the mantra was that by doing so, the West would "uplift" poorer countries such as China. The goals to improve quality of life, transform the third world from agrarian to mass production, with a hope of spreading democratic principles as well.
And yes, over and over this was the desireded goal, I remember the election campaigns, the speeches, the white papers, the think tanks.
This has mostly been a success, looking at many such countries. The standard of living has gone up, for example China now has a "middle class" of sorts.
Environmental concerns were not on the radar at the time, not 50 years ago, not like today.
The intentions were reasonably positive and well founded. Of course, I agree reassessment is necessary, and it really should always be.
It was great for short term profit and stock value and everyone involved in making those choices is either dead or soon to be dead and doesn’t have to deal with the fallout.
>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 alternative the market will just shrink again; consumer drones aren't a necessity.
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.
At this point China is about as communist as FedEx is federal. They are “state capitalist” which pretty much means the government owns or has controlling stakes in a lot of companies. Singapore’s is similar.
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> 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.
the time when the US could actually decide this sort of thing at close to planet scale is long gone. if you ban those devices, there will be countless other nations (including close friends of the US) where you will be able to buy them no problem.