Comment by logicchains
16 days ago
>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.
They copied Lenin’s NEP, which was copied later by the German fascists. As it happens, Sun, Yatsen, on his deathbed, met with Mao one time in Guangzhou and they both agreed a fascist (or state capitalist) system would be best for the Chinese people. That was after NEP but before German fascists rose to power. Of course Stalin put an end to NEP and powered and willed full on communism after Lenin’s death.