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DJI drone ban passes in U.S. House — 'Countering CCP Drones Act' would ban all DJI sales in U.S. if passed in Senate (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How would that work for, say, apartment complexes? Allow co-ops (which are typically corporations)?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Passing a law? Yeah it's pretty much the same workload.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

"We can't work on problem because something unrelated is worse and broken", then? We can only talk about that when discussing any problem?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

"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."