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
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.
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
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Eh… I did add a /s? Read the comment again XD
Ah right right, sorry, I didn’t go back through the thread when you informed me of the sarcasm.
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.
DJI drones are used in ukraine tho. But that was not my point, my point was that a drone industry is nice to have, even though you think it’s an overpriced hobby.
Regulatory capture go brrrrrrrrrrr.
Capitalists hate competition.
Competition for the labor market on the other hand? Hell yeah fucking let’s use slaves in a prison or other country!
How’s all that freedom doing over there?
It’s pretty nice, I do mostly whatever I want every day.
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’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.
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.
Tech espionage is a pretty big problem though, not something anyone should hand-wave away as irrelevant.
Maybe in a particular light, but I’m personally of the opinion that intellectual property and patent law is antithetical to good social policy… so idk. Ideally we’d all benefit from the knowledge and ingenuity of all mankind but in a capitalist economic world-view there’s no place for egalitarianism so…
If they can take the same tech and make it better/produce it cheaper then I think that’s great, go nuts.
But that’s obviously just me.
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.
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.
That’s what diversity in supply is for. If we’re at war with China, we can probably still ship stuff in from LATAM and Africa.
We don’t need to make stuff in the US to be secure, we just need to not rely on one country.
It’s already happening. Alot of manufacturing has moved from China to India already.
And that’s a positive development. The same is happening in Mexico as well, and hopefully more countries step up as well.
Also South Korean companies are divesting out of China. Samsung even produces TVs in Europe nowadays.
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.
Welcome to Marx 101.
“Property is theft”
That’s what tariffs are for. If a country is doing unfair pricing, force the pricing up to account for their subsidies. They can shoot themselves in the foot if they want.
If we can prove they steal trade secrets, we should sue them and block business with them until they pay or prove innocence. But just blocking products isn’t the way, we need clear rules for when and how we do such things.
Retaliatory tariffs are not really allowed by the WTO. They are really destructive for trade and just create scenarios where a third country is used to bypass the tariffs.
China has been proven to steal technology for years, it’s just that the benefits of manufacturing there outweigh the costs on an individual company level. No one company can “sue China” as you suggest. They’re too big and can just ban that country from manufacturing anything there. So most companies put up with it.
Your comment actually illuminates the need for US government action. Since no particular company is actually hurting China, they can’t be individually retaliated against by the Chinese government.
I’m not a fan of retaliatory tariffs, I’m a fan of corrective tariffs. The tariffs should be calculated from transparent facts, or at least good estimates. And they need to be consistent regardless of origin country. If we tariff Chinese EVs and drones due to being subsidized, we should also tariff AirBus airplanes for the same reason.
Tariffs are a problem when they target a country as a punitive measure, I think they can be effective when they correct unfairness in the market. I’m a fan of carbon tariffs, for example, where estimates of carbon emissions are used to calculate a tariff on an imported good so local products with higher regulatory expectations are competing on an even field. Maybe high income areas compete with low labor cost through automation and better QC, but they shouldn’t need to compete with subsidies.
The country that makes ALL your shit has nothing to fear in a trade war. Unless you want to forgo ALL your shit?
Who would have thought that sending all those jobs overseas to increase company profits and depress wages would have a downside?
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hey, don’t invade other countries mkay?
Considering recent history, you’d better say that to US more, don’t you think? or is it that your country is free to invade other countries but others doing the same is where you start considering human rights?
Talk about hypocrisy. fuckin hell, read a history book.
Everybody Sucks Here
Without a foundation, you have no foundation.
Effectively, China has been acquiring a monopoly on manufacturing, which is an absolute necessity for modern life. We have been acquiring the higher-paid, but less numerous and less critical industries.
Sure, but it doesn’t need to happen here. If we get into a WW3 situation, we need to be able to protect our supply lines, and that can happen with friendly countries. We’re unlikely to get into a situation where our navy is outmatched, so I don’t think it’s totally urgent to bring production back here.
That said, we do have a lot of critical manufacturing capacity. Intel has chip fabs, we produce lots of oil, we build cars, etc. We import a lot more than we used to, but we could probably make it through a major war with only domestic production, provided it doesn’t drag on too long until we can reestablish supply lines.
I’ll only get worried when China catches up in tech. That’s certainly happening faster than I’d like, but I don’t think China is ready to compete head to head on tech just yet. If they’re at parity, that’s when we need to worry about domestic production. Ideally we can improve diplomatic ties by then.
China has a bunch of the world by the balls thanks to the world using Chinese manufacturing for everything from chips to medication. That alone is a national security problem. Sure, it maintains some stability due to economic ties, but the flip side is that we can only exert so much pressure on China before it will bite us in the ass, and we’re fucked if all-out war started and we got cut off.
Sure, and that’s why we should diversify to other countries, not why we should bring manufacturing back to US soil.
Honestly. This is why fair trade cert or taa compliant or just know trusted country is ok with me when I buy things.
I just don’t want to be complict in known slavery. I don’t want to support oppressive regimes. Etc, etc, etc.
There is no ethical consumption while living a capitalist way of life.
I mean sure, but supporting explicit slavery is bad, so I’m gonna do my best to not.
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.
I have a really old one sitting in the closet. Am I going to have to get rid of it if this passes?
No, this is only for new sales.
Thanks.
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’m with you there. I opt into OSS and open hardware whenever possible
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?
Cold war politics is more important than the surveillance state.
I am confused then what is Congress’ problem here?
The data is also available to DJI, and through them the CCP.
So they’ll be able to see that I recorded some footage of some boats near San Francisco?
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.
How realistic is this though?
I thought most people slap a GoPro on their drone (admittedly know very little about the hobby) and how would China secretly be transmitting so much data (4k video) without anyone noticing?
Plus if they want surveillance video, they can just have someone fly their own drone here and capture exactly what they want without having to wade through tons of junk that isn’t important to them.
At least that was consentual. The UK government basically said "Hey guys, the nazis are bad. So help us plan an attack by sending us your family vacation photos of some beaches on Frances beaches.
And everyone was like “yeah, alright. That sounds good”
China is basically like “lets set up spying EVERYWHERE! Even in countries we don’t have claim to.”
They definitely do not send video though. That would be super obvious.
If they wanted to, they could just send a few Chinese “tourists” over with their DJI (or American) drones and record specific footage instead of metadata about general footage. Or use their satellites. It’s not the 1940s any more.
When I fly my drone it’s not connected to WiFi, and doesn’t even need to be connected to my phone. What network are they sending gigabytes and gigabytes of video data over when I’m recording people fishing on a lake in the middle of nowhere?
I have to inform you that that US has some of the best spy satellite networks on the planet.
People shocked that other countries play the spook game too is amazing.
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
And who is this independant source? How did they get their info? Did that independant source ALSO just call DJI?
Every drone does that, since RemoteID got implemented.
Oh no, not the location data that has to be shared publicly for safety reasons anyways! God forbid!
Literally all of the alternatives are open and much more capable for it. You can go buy a pixhawk and basically any frame and have something much more powerful for much less money, you just have to be willing to bolt two or three parts together.
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”.
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
Sry for the late response but agreed!!
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
Not hobbyist. There is high chance hobbyists drone makers will benefit from it.
makers maybe, but what about users?
Maybe they will learn drone making at least from off-the-shelf parts. Making own drone gives greater freedom than buying prebuilt.
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
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” ??
I’m getting so tired of this red scare, cold war shit.
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.
On the other hand, with more money going to the US alternatives, there’s more potential for a US company to step into that niche once it’s open.
Not that it’ll necessarily happen obviously, but it does make it a bit easier at least.
Also, I feel like I should add the disclaimer of “I’m not American.” I wish I could show my country next to my username or something lol.
I wish I could show my country next to my username or something lol.
You could use a vanity username with a flag emoji in it, if you really wanted to.
Not sure if I’m able to change my username (and too lazy to check right now), but that’s honestly not a bad plan.
You can’t change the username, but you can change the display name.
That only works if you have competition. We don’t really have free markets. The consolidation is so extreme that auto makers for example really don’t care if consumers want a high value budget EV. Why should they? They can make you collectively buy something else when you need a car to get to work.
You could register to your local Lemmy server, if there is one.
sh.itjust.works is Canadian last I checked, though it isn’t readily apparent.
I thought the technical Canadian based instance was Lemmy.ca even if yours is also Canadian lol
I mean, there isn’t really one singular instance for Canada lol.
And there are plenty of non-Canadians on it too, like me from America. It’s a pretty big instance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more non-Canadians than Canadians.
Oh absolutely, I just meant to say that technically I am on a “local instance”.
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Yeah they aren’t going to invest in their product. They don’t have any reason to now. They’re now the best product you can buy and they raised the price to reflect that.
Problem is that, especially with the automakers, is that a lack of competition becomes an excuse to not invest in innovation. For example, General Motors is throwing billions into stock buy-backs, when they probably should be throwing that into EVs.
Competition doesn’t really exist anymore. Instead, via regulatory capture, the big players simply change the rules to exclude competition.
Yeah, that’s the stuff that makes this difficult. I can talk all day about what “makes sense”, but you throw one corporate executive into the mix and everything falls apart.
I have yet to see that happen. If anything they’ll just raise their prices because they no longer have any competitors.
😂
Freedumb!
Require licensing, registration, live gps tracking, and geofencing with a proprietary app because Freedumb people ruled that’s what the free market needs.
They then rule, nah. Actually just ban em all.
And now even if you bought them, buy them elsewhere, or just try to use them on a US device you won’t be able to. Selling them is illegal both from a company and on third party resale if it passes. Even police departments that are using them as spies and have the DJI alerting system installed all over town to track and log everybody in the sky, will need to get rid of it. But I doubt they will, of course it will be exempted for the pigs in blue.
If you can’t beat em, or even match their capabilities, ban em or implement 100%+ tarrifs. New American motto of the “free” market.
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.
Similar reason to why they banned Dahua and Hikvision cameras from US government facilities. No intentional backdoor have been found in those either, just some security vulnerabilities that have been patched. They’re still very widely used, and you should always have security cameras on a separate VLAN with no internet access, regardless of which country they’re manufactured in.
Does that include dji clones? I have a look alike that has gps and full gymbal cam onboard but its aee not dji
This is a sales ban
Meaning, if you have it, you can do what you want other than (re)selling it?
Im not going to sell it because i use it to inspect my roof after a strong storm front coming over it
Yet another case showing how useful drones are.
I use mine to check if my solar panels are dirty or if leaves/branches have fallen on them, and I used it to take photos of the roofers’ work when I had my house reroofed.
Lot safer than climbing a ladder and stomping around up there potentially creating more damage
You can even sell it on second hand market I believr. This is more of a “don’t inport it because you won’t be able to sell it” and is important to companies.
Right. Because after you buy it, it is your drone made by DJI and not DJI’s drone.
Guess some of the laws still have their premises correct.
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.
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.
“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”.
“We have a hole in the side of the ship, but I, your elected leader, have liberally sprayed a can of flex seal on the hole.”
No, in this case it’s the same problem.
We’re talking about banning DJI because the Chinese government subsidizes manufacturing useful things, whereas the US’ approach to corporate policy is to ban anything that prevents a billionaire from getting richer, and now the US is mad that China mysteriously got a better drone industry.
Either the US should reform itself until it prioritizes building useful shit cheaply instead of enriching finance industry assholes or it should shut. the. fuck. up.
