DJI to the rescue? U.S. police want China drones despite Washington clampdown
Lawmakers take aim at devices used by many first responders

(...) The irony is that while police officers, firefighters and rescue workers across the country embrace Chinese drones, Washington is warning that the technology poses a material risk to the U.S. This has opened up a heated debate over local safety versus national security, complicating Washington's efforts to establish a hawkish yet pragmatic China policy.

Lawmakers in Washington introduced the Countering CCP Drones Act in March and the Drones for First Responders (DFR) Act in May to ban DJI and hike tariffs on Chinese drones in general. Revenue from those tariffs would be used to fund purchases of American drones for public safety departments. (...)

DJI denied allegations that the Chinese government has backdoor access to its data or the company is unfairly subsidized.

"The DFR Act's proposal to increase taxes and eventually ban drones manufactured in China is xenophobia wrapped inside a national security cover," the company said in a statement.

Public safety agencies are already barred from using federal grants to buy Chinese drones, but a number of them, including in Kentucky, New Jersey and Connecticut, have made purchases using their own budgets. Many say they would buy them even with higher tariffs. (...)

Luis Figueiredo, a detective with the Elizabeth Police Department in New Jersey, says new tariffs would be "bad news" for users."

DJI is not going to discount the tariff off, (so) the customer is going to pay more money for a DJI drone," said Figueiredo, who flies five or six drones a day. "In the end, who's really funding that? It's going to be public safety."

And price — or more accurately what you get for that price — is one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle.

Several officers and drone dealers told Nikkei Asia that U.S. drones cost three to four times more than Chinese models without offering even the same level of technology.

"Would you rather drive a Cadillac Escalade that has all the comforts and tools you need to make your job a lot easier? Or would you rather pay more money and drive a Ford Escort that has no options at all?" said Cook, the Kentucky sergeant. "It is what it is."

American drone makers, however, strongly support these bills.

The Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), which represents U.S. drone manufacturers, acknowledges the technological gap but blames it on DJI's dominance of the U.S. market and Chinese government subsidies.

"It's hard for a lot of drone manufacturers to raise capital to scale their production (because) the demand signal from so many users is still defaulting to the cheap Chinese drones," said Michael Robbins, president and CEO of AUVSI. "You've got a competitor in the marketplace that is heavily subsidized, it's very hard to compete with that, particularly on cost factors."

According to AUVSI, Chinese drones control 92% of the first responder market in the U.S. (...)

"When the U.S. government identifies the technology that is critical to U.S. national economic security and puts policies in place to put some federal funding, that is a signal to private capital that they too, should invest," Robbins told Nikkei Asia. "And they often invest at a rate significantly higher than the federal government investment."

DJI has denied it has an unfair advantage. "Despite claims of subsidization from our critics, in reality, DJI is able to offer its products in more than 100 countries at competitive prices because we manufacture at scale," it said in its statement.

DJI did not disclose how much revenue it generates in the U.S., but said the country is still one of its largest markets outside China.

Seattle-based BRINC, America's second-largest drone manufacturer, said labor costs, scale of production and the cost of custom chipsets were the main roadblocks to lower prices for U.S. players.

"(Drones) are generally built by hand in the States, whereas in China, they're built in very automated ways," said Blake Resnick, founder and CEO of BRINC.

As a former intern at DJI, Resnick said the Chinese drone giant has the money to invest in developing its own chip for custom radios, which allows video encoding, encryption, transmission and other functions to perform well. BRINC, he said, had to buy more expensive, off-the-shelf chips.

BRINC has 110 staff and has raised $82 million in funding. The company has sold drone programs at prices ranging from five figures to millions of dollars, according to Resnick. (...)

Solar Power’s Giants Are Providing More Energy Than Big Oil
Seven Chinese companies have a bigger stake in the energy of the 21st century than the Seven Sisters of oil that dominated the 20th.

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G7 summit turns to simmering tensions with China

World’s biggest solar farm goes online, big enough to power a country

 Lazy8 wrote:
It's the minimally in minimally reported.  Strong case of "not invented here" syndrome already.

 R_P wrote:
R_P: "plenty of articles (in media abroad) reporting on it"

Syndication of an article does not = "media abroad reporting on it".   Difficult to understand, yes?

another example: If 5000 X-users retweet a post with a link to the original article, does not mean 5000 X-users are reporting on it.  They're merely echoing something they read.

 Lazy8 wrote:

Regular viewers know that R_P's long time bent is anything at all anti-America.  Gotta wonder what caused such a poisoned mind.

 R_P wrote:
You realize you're linking to an American news article breathlessly hyping an experimental procedure to complain that the American press isn't breathlessly hyping an experimental procedure, right?

And surprise: medical research takes place all over the world. Shocking.

 Lazy8 wrote:
Let me help you with the point: there are plenty of articles (in media abroad) reporting on it. Not so in US media (hence minimally reported) which prefer "China Bad" stories.

 R_P wrote:
Minimally reported...must be a conspiracy among all the world's doctors (who all do whatever the US says) to keep China down!

Please note the date on the paper.

Note also the dates and countries of origin of the many many references at the bottom.

A New Chinese Exclusion Act
Demonizing China allows Republicans to unite around an authoritarian agenda at home—and provides a convenient rationale for unfettered Pentagon profiteering.

In Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, fear and hatred of China have replaced the interests of big business and free-market dogma as the motive forces in Republican politics.

The Chinese exclusion agenda has lent new vitality to the Republican policy program. In the wake of Trump’s disorienting triumph over the GOP mainstream, vilification of China is also creating shared ground for the party’s discordant factions. And because animosity to China helps make sense of widespread hardship in the US (which the Biden campaign is simply denying), it helps the otherwise unpopular politics of conservatives gain majority backing.

In his framing essay, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts rehearses familiar conservative themes of cultural decay and government interference, but the pivot on which Project 2025 turns marks a new direction for the right. The many challenges facing the American people, Roberts writes, can in fact be traced to a Chinese conspiracy against America and the US elite’s treason in joining it.Roberts claims that the “woke Left”—which supposedly includes big business, public institutions, and popular culture—wants to foist open borders and free trade on the American people in order to hoard power, expand profits, flaunt its own virtue, and secure cheap “housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.”

According to Roberts, the US elite has carried out this betrayal hand in glove with the “totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing”: “For a generation, politicians of both parties promised that engagement with Beijing would grow our economy while injecting American values into China. The opposite has happened. American factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialized.” Roberts singles out Wall Street and Big Tech in particular, describing the latter as “operatives in the lucrative employ of America’s most dangerous international enemy.”

But, Roberts continues, China’s reach into American society goes beyond the corruption of the elite and laying waste to the economy. Through TikTok, China corrupts teenage girls; through its Confucius Institutes, it corrupts American universities. Other chapters in Mandate expand on the indictment. (...)

This zeal to punish China—and its resonance with GOP traditions of militarism and nativism—also eases the way toward repudiating the party’s previous commitments to free markets, free trade, and concentrated wealth. Billionaires looking to avoid populist wrath, like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, have learned that you can still crush workers, shirk taxes, and get rich—as long as you cover yourself in belligerent patriotism. Yet precisely because Sinophobia allows Republicans to connect with popular animosity against a rigged system run by unaccountable and condescending elites, it opens a path to reviving the popularity of conservative politics.

Far from attacking this Sinophobic worldview, the Biden administration has largely adopted it. Biden officials say that China—not transnational threats like climate change, global inequality, and the collapse of the global system into warring great-power blocs—is the primary threat America faces. Which only affirms the basic Republican narrative. As the more aggressive party, the GOP will always have a clear advantage when both parties encourage the idea of shadowy foreign threats. At the same time, the Biden campaign is having a hard time speaking to the widespread sense of national decline and injustice, leaving the field open to reactionary explanations. (...)

 miamizsun wrote:

Well there's a weaponization of the judicial system and a religious sect called "Christianity."
If you label yourself thus, you get free forgiveness miles.

 Lazy8 wrote:
That would be your job. I prefer pointing out the hypocrisy and myths:

But, then, the idea of America as a bastion of the free market, whose corporations achieved global success simply by relying on the animal spirits of capitalism and the sheer ingenuity of garage inventors à la Steve Jobs, is largely a myth. Everyone knows that Silicon Valley’s transformation into a hotbed of innovation, and the subsequent rise of the US tech industry, was made possible thanks to massive funding from the US government and military during the Cold War. Elon Musk is only the latest in a line of supposedly self-made garage inventors who have actually built their tech empire with the help of billions of dollars in US government subsidies. Just last year Tesla received $7.5 billion from the US government.

China, then, isn’t really doing anything different from what the US has always done. But America is riled because China is winning. And having taken up the role of “free trade” defender — accusing the Biden administration of “imped the normal functioning of global industrial and supply chains” — Beijing is forcing the US to take an increasingly protectionist stance.

This peculiar reversal of roles is paradigmatic of the significant global economic and geopolitical power shift underway. “Free trade” generally tends to benefit the dominant economic power, at the expense of weaker economies. It is no coincidence that the US began preaching “free trade” only after it achieved economic dominance, in the mid-20th century, after resorting to heavily protectionist measures to support its manufacturing sectors, just as Britain had done before it.

 Lazy8 wrote:

because "dictators and double standards"

 R_P wrote:
Did you just argue for free trade? Because I think you just argued for free trade.

Biden won’t win his war with China
America's gamble could up end the global status quo

When Donald Trump introduced a series of tariffs on Chinese goods, just over five years ago, Joe Biden was among his fiercest critics. Trump, he said, was “crushing” American farmers, workers and consumers by sparking an “irresponsible trade war”, and he vowed to reverse his “senseless policies”. But once in power, Biden did the exact opposite: he actually strengthened Trump’s protectionist policies, launching “a full-blown economic war on China”.

Last week, that war escalated to near-nuclear level as the White House announced massive tariff hikes on a raft of Chinese imports — including 25% on steel and aluminum, 50% on semiconductors and solar panels, and a staggering 100% on electric vehicles (EVs). The move, they say, is in response to “China’s unfair trade practices”. The US accuses Beijing of using hefty government subsidies to flood global markets with artificially low-priced exports. By imposing its swingeing tariffs, the US hopes to create “a level playing-field in industries that are vital to our future”, and “ensure America leads the world” in these sectors.

It’s pretty ironic that Biden is attempting to level the playing-field by embracing similar tactics to Beijing. His administration’s much-vaunted Inflation Reduction Act includes almost $400 billion in subsidies (through grants, loans and tax credits) aimed at boosting the US cleantech sector. So Biden’s attempts to paint China as a rogue nation using “non-market practices” to “game the system” seem driven by fear that the Chinese subsidies risk nullifying the effect of America’s own subsidies. (...)

The climate gamble behind Biden’s China tariffs

MAGA!
Biden set to levy 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs this week
Both the US and EU are deeply concerned about heavily subsidized Chinese OEMs.

Echoes of the 80s' Japan bashing.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

social media as a cyber-weapon?