Nobody could have predicted this. I have my doubts even when they call it “spying equipment” or whatever considering Chinese claim it was a meteorological balloon, certainly no doubt they would try to paint those tools as such.
Who would have thought a balloon is not useful for spying. You have little to no control over its direction, it isn’t discrete, and most silly of all, why use that when you have satellites?
I guess the US was outwitted by a balloon after spending billions of dollars on cutting edge spy planes and powerful satellite cameras.
Wow. Okay, so YOU think it’s not a spy balloon? Wow. Just wow. Nations spy on each other, thats normal for nations to do. China is NO different! If they say it’s a SPY balloon, then it fking IS!
If they say it’s a SPY balloon, then it fking IS!
The US Government, famous for never lying to it’s citizens. What’s it like to buy everything at face value?
Reminder that the missile they used to shoot this balloon down cost $400k
The DoD is the world’s largest employer with 2.9 million employees as of June 2022. Besides its direct function of projecting US power, it is also functionally a jobs program. The US is ideologically prohibited from handing out money for free via welfare programs, they must maintain the ideology of capitalism, by creating pointless work by which these people can “earn” the money. It is of zero consequence that each missile costs so many dollars. The whole point of its manufacture was to pay the workers and to allow the military-industrial capitalists to skim excess off the top of this waste. It’s a sham but it is a little more complicated than just lighting $400k on fire. That money was already spent, and they want these missiles used in order to justify their replacement. As an additional benefit, each of these 2.9 million employees is heavily propagandized by the state department every day at work.
Long-term, it benefits the US if the industry and its warfighters are permanently ready to fight a war.
I don’t agree with any of it btw, just adding some context.
And one missed
And in the immense wave of paranoia afterwards they shot down three American weather balloons at the cost of 400k per missile plus fuel and maintenance and man hours.
And one of them was a child’s science project
Oh please do tell more
Not sure which balloon she’s referring to, but I imagine it’s the one from the Illinois bottle cap and balloon club (or whatever it’s actually called, they took the name lovingly from the movie Up). No one ever explicitly confirmed that’s the balloon that got got… but literally every piece of evidence points to one of them being theirs. Hobbyist balloon club, so at least no weather data was destroyed!
Doesn’t an F-35 cost something stupid like 40k an hour to operate?
Fucking liars are STILL saying it was a spy balloon when the military is like no, actually, it wasn’t.
You clearly didn’t read the article. It WAS a spy balloon but it appears the spy equipment wasn’t turned on. So no information was gathered.
the article presents zero evidence that it’s a “spy balloon”, just some dipshit general saying that it is. we know the U.S. military regularly lies about its enemies, so his word is worth nothing
did you ever stop to ask why a supposed “spy balloon” would be so large and easily noticed?
lmao
Your name is Occam’s Razor, but you don’t seem very good at using Occam’s Razor
Somehow we’ve managed to find the first human being to function without a single neuron firing.
A brain exists, but nothing is occuring within. No electrical signals, no neural activity.
And yet they manage to post anyway
I’m still getting used to federation. I saw that comment, didn’t look at the poster’s name, and assumed it was just sarcasm.
I don’t care what it was. Keep your cheap balloons out of my air space.
(⌐■_■)
“Sure I got scared by obvious propaganda, but actually I did it on purpose and it’s patriotic.”
Scared by Chinese junk? Nah, blowing it up with a missle was just cool.
(⌐■_■)
Burning $400k on blowing up a weather bslloon is an extremely not-scared thing to celebrate.
