Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12 Having spent the first half of the month blasting anything that moved out of the sky following the destruction of a Chinese spy balloon, it has emerged that the US could have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars disintegrating a hobbyist's $12 project. In its postmortem of Pico Balloon K9YO, the Northern Illinois Bottlecap …
@Yet Another Anonymous coward
Well said, but lets not forget that the USA is a two party country with too many voters who believe "that Jewish space lasers caused forest fires, Italian satellites control voting machines and trickle down economics works".
Stuck in the shit whatever way you turn it.
A situation old Socrates was worried about for good reasons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJBzhcSWTk&t=3s
They weren't TDE because TDE doesn't exist.
They were pro-growth policies. They were also pro-"I believe in the science behind the Laffer Curve rather than the wishful thinking of the left" policies.
They were "a rising tide lifts all boats" policies. That's not the same as TDE because TDE doesn't exist and is a slur designed to trick people into thinking that your opponents policies are both evil and stupid. It's a strawman argument and it's pathetic.
When you mischaracterise them as TDE, it means that you have made no attempt to understand them - just that you know they must be bad because [mumble].
The "science behind the laffer curve" is putting things a bit strongly, it's a theory, but not a theory in the scientific sense - there is limited empirical evidence - I look forward to a day where we evidence based economics enters the mainstream, but we are not there yet.
Accusing the other side of "wishful thinking" and presenting an unproven theory does not make for a strong argument.
Of course, her policies were mischaracterised by the "left-wing economic establishment". Every economist who ridiculed her plans is clearly a communist, and the cataclysmic fall in the GBP was clearly a perfidious foreign plot. If only more people would read Ayn Rand, they'd understand!
As we know, economists are great at telling you that the status quo is fine or not fine, or identifying individual theories. Ask them to predict macroeconomic outcomes of a new framework ( such as deviating from the New Labour policies we've had since 1997 ) means they don't have a clue.
See the 341 prominent economists who wrote a letter to Thatcher telling her that she was going to cause disaster. They were proven completely wrong, without argument. Every single one of them. Economics is known as the dismal science for a reason. As the joke goes, economists exist in order to make astrologists look good.
Establishment economists are stuck in the centre-left consensus which is taking us down the plughole. But don't worry, better managerialism and we'll circle the drain slightly slower...
Are you really going to pretend that the civil service is a willing harbinger of change?
>>Nobody has ever claimed that "trickle down economics" work.<<
Patently false.
"Trickle down has been very successful. I know thats not a popular opinion but has given us all great benefits from top to bottom."
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2020/12/21/thinktank_report/#c_4167777
No. You've been caught in the false statement, "Nobody has ever claimed that "trickle down economics" work."
They clearly do. Right here on the comment pages of this auguste organ. Own it, and move on. Unless you're one of those RWNJs we see regularly who cannot ever admit to being wrong?
Of course it is political point scoring but the puppet president Sleepy Joe Beijing Biden waited until it had done what China required before doing anything. And he was very careful to ensure it didn't fall on someones property and thus allowing the general public access to it.
And then the claims that 'it happened lots under Trump but he didn't do anything' all while they claimed Trump was too aggressive (contradiction much?)
And then admission that they can't in fact track these balloons and that if it wasn't for some meddling photographer this all would have been kept nice and quiet.
A bit like how they were refusing any help after turning East Palestine into a toxic wasteland until Trump decided to visit, then suddenly they leap into action.
"sleepy joe beijing biden"?
Grow up, for fucks sake. this ain't bloody 4chan.
Still, if you want to play that game: ( https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-china-business-connections-tax-returns-2024-1772648)
"Former President Donald Trump, whose policies on China hardened in his final year in office despite the inking of a historic trade agreement with Beijing, has had extensive commercial interests in the world's most populous nation going back years, his tax records have revealed.Trump's Chinese business connections, which didn't stop his administration's hawkish turn after the COVID pandemic exploded in the United States in early 2020"
As for East Palestine, no doubt you know that Trump scrapped the requirement for those trains to have ECP brakes, which would have likely stopped the disaster.
Granted, Biden said at the beginning that he'd reverse that stupid relaxation, and never did, but it was Trumps baby.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-blame-ohio-train-derailment-1781163
"Speaking to investigative news outlet The Lever, Steven Ditmeyer, a former top official at the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said the "severity" of the accident was likely increased by the lack of Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes.A rule was passed under President Barack Obama that made it a requirement for trains carrying hazardous flammable materials to have ECP brakes, but this was rescinded in 2017 by the Trump administration.
"Would ECP brakes have reduced the severity of this accident? Yes," Ditmeyer said.
Referring to opposition from within the rail industry to fitting ECP brakes, he added: "The railroads will test new features. But once they are told they have to do it ... they don't want to spend the money.""
"As for East Palestine, no doubt you know that Trump scrapped the requirement for those trains to have ECP brakes, which would have likely stopped the disaster."
False.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment
"As it had only three such placarded train cars, the derailed train did not meet the qualifications of a "high-hazard flammable" train and therefore was not affected by the 2014 legislation or its 2017 repeal"
As for East Palestine, no doubt you know that Trump scrapped the requirement for those trains to have ECP brakes, which would have likely stopped the disaster.
Granted, Biden said at the beginning that he'd reverse that stupid relaxation, and never did, but it was Trumps baby.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-blame-ohio-train-derailment-1781163
"Speaking to investigative news outlet The Lever, Steven Ditmeyer, a former top official at the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), said the "severity" of the accident was likely increased by the lack of Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes.
A rule was passed under President Barack Obama that made it a requirement for trains carrying hazardous flammable materials to have ECP brakes, but this was rescinded in 2017 by the Trump administration.
"Would ECP brakes have reduced the severity of this accident? Yes," Ditmeyer said.
Referring to opposition from within the rail industry to fitting ECP brakes, he added: "The railroads will test new features. But once they are told they have to do it ... they don't want to spend the money.""
Actually the original law wouldn’t have made much of a difference in this case. Only three of the rail carriages would have qualified as dangerous enough to and it would have needed to be a hell of a lot more. So that train wouldn’t have required ECPB even if the law hadn’t been changed. Probably was a lot cheaper to donate millions to political campaigns and lobby against ECPB both under the Obama and the Orange One’s regimes than fit it on their trains. Hopefully the train company can’t weasel out of the cleanup and can’t just hide behind the insurers.
Obama should have drafted a better law and the Orange One not weakened the existing legislation.
Fair enough. Thanks and apologies to you and the previous anon.coward for correcting me. I'll learn to take "newsweek" with a pinch of salt in future.
You're right - Obama should have drafted a better law, Trump not weakened it, and Biden should have reinstated/fixed it.
What pissed me off was the childish conspiracy laden antics from the anon. I was replying to. I'm fed up of people (in the USA and whilst lesser in the UK, it's increasing) treating politics as a sport, in that they pick a team, and from that point on, that team, whether it's a party or a movement, or a particular policy can do no wrong in their eyes, and the other side is therefore evil.
It's ignorant, it's divisive, and it allows for people to have an "opinion" when it's something they are entirely ignorant about ("My guy did this, it must be brilliant")
Many politicians in America and Britain are corrupt. Money flows freely from big pharma, health insurance, other business interests, and in the UK, Russians! They ALL expect something for their cash.
It's by people not critically assessing their "favourite" politician on every decision they make, that allows them to pull the bullshit that they do.
Most politicians are mainly in it for what's best for them -- witness that one of the rare bipartisan agreements recently in the House was to delay/mothball any attempts to ban congress from insider trading(!) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/us/politics/stock-trading-vote-congress.html
Still, for someone to think that Trump has ever cared for anyone other than himself is deluded in the extreme. Those fanatical views hurt everyone, including the people who think it.
>As for East Palestine, no doubt you know that Trump scrapped the requirement for those trains to have ECP brakes, which would have likely stopped the disaster...
>...Biden said at the beginning that he'd reverse that stupid relaxation, and never did...
>...Obama should have drafted a better law and the Orange One not weakened the existing legislation...
There was no law, only a series of Executive Orders; not one of which carries the weight of law.
President Biden worked very hard his first 100 days in office reversing nearly all of Trump's EOs, but not that one.
If ECP brakes were that important, Biden should have reinstated the EO.
Since he did not, this disaster rests st his feet, not Trump's.
“There was no law, only a series of Executive Orders; not one of which carries the weight of law.”
So the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (aka FAST Act) wasn’t passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama in December 2015? You might want to tell Congress that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_America%27s_Surface_Transportation_Act
https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/news/phmsa-rescinds-ecp-brake-mandate-after-ria-finds-costs-outweigh-benefits
https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rules-before-ohio-derailment/
Even fox news doesn't agree with you, Trumptard Video clip: Fox News blaiming Trump
I see Fox news is as fake as ever. Puts them in the same bracket as CNN and MSNPC.
Read the Obama law, it did not mandate the 'better' brakes, just that the cost/benefit was researched and reported on. Also there is a lower limit of 20 hazardous cars in a train before they take special precautions and this train had 3.
Notice the wording used. 'Apparently' was used several times.
Sleepy Joe and Booty-gig could have reversed the Trump decision (not that it would have made any difference), also they could have supported the railroad staff in their battle with the operators over safety. This train was huge and didn't have enough crew to check it properly.
This post has been deleted by its author
Retired now, but used to commute the 25 miles into Boston (MA) by rail. It was convenient, reasonably priced and low stress. The rails, of course, are shared with commercial freight trains, and I remember passing some on a siding with somewhat worrying labels on the tanker cars. Acids, Chlorine, plastics precursors and several other chemicals I don't remember. Not hundreds of tank cars, but more than 10.
I did think about what might happen if their contents were released, and it wasn't pleasant. As I retired, they were in the process of implementing Positive Train Control (PTC) on the line I travelled. This was in 2020. Railroading is not as technically advanced as we would like it to be, mostly for political and economic (business) reasons. And this is not a comforting thought. One might think "oh, well, we'll keep doing it until something really terrible forces us to consider doing things differently" is the attitude...I couldn't possible comment.
First created in Ireland, whiskey if it is produced in Ireland, whisky if produced anywhere else.
(although the Yanks may spell their stuff whiskey, as they aren't too concerned about naming conventions - see their use of the word champagne for the sparkly wine they produce)
if you just need something that floats (and no radio) I could probably do it with hydrogen and a trash bag. I used to make hydrogen balloons back in the day with simple household ingredients (like aluminum foil and drain cleaner) and since it is highly exothermic you use plastic soda bottle immersed and weighted down in cooling water (like a big bucket). If you do not melt the bottle you just need to snap a balloon over the hole and inflate it. But something bigger like a trashbag might need a hose of some kind.
Still for higher altitude balloons you fill it with JUST enough gas to float it. As altitude increases it will continue to expand. At some point it either bursts or has enough pressure to expand fully but NOT burst, and it reaches max altitude.
But then with no tracker you cannot tell how high up it went...
Can't help thinking this is one big propaganda exercise to soften somebody up for something or other.
Balloons, rogue or otherwise, have been crossing the Pacific routinely for decades. You know, send it up, don't give a shit where or when it comes down...
Why suddenly make a political thing of them?
This $10 fuck-up carries the fine irony that the whole propaganda scheme just blew up, not just the hobby balloon.
People spot trains. They can be proud of having visited every service station on the M25[1] as a hobby. Tracking balloons on a website sounds highly advanced!
[1] For those that don't know, the M25 is London's largest car park, masquerading as a ring road.
To some extent yes: the pilots need their air hours, and no matter how good the simulators are fire a missile every now and then.
Same thing was someone here in EU-land complaining about the taxes spent on running surveillance flights just outside the Ukrainian border when the war started: almost a free service, since that basically was repurposed training flights.
They still have guns for close in work, but hitting a near stationary target while travelling at over two hundred knots could be tricky. Also, punching a few holes in a balloon may not drop it. A sidewinder has a WDU-17/B blast fragmentation warhead. It will explode near the target and shred it with thousands of metal fragments.
>Wonder how much the cost of keeping the pilot and F22 or what ever flying per hour is
For an F22, the DoD say $70K/hour. That's why they want to replace it with the bargain F35 which will only cast $45K/hour
>I'd imagine the missile cost is minimal by comparison
Price of the missile is $430K
"...even allowing for inflation."
Oh well done...very well done. :-)
Hopefully, you will not get "flamed" for making this joke...
I'd been thinking of making a similar comment, but you beat me to it ! (I was thinking of a line, from the end of ST VI:TUC, where Uhura mentions about cataloguing equipment realted to "gaseous anomalies"...and even though at the start of the film, the Excelsior under Capt Sulu had these ).
Canada geese are basically the council estate yobbos of the bird world. "All mouth and no trousers" as the local expression goes. We have a big resident colony of them here, they have become too lazy for any of that 'migration' malarkey. They earn their keep by bullying the Happy Valley tourists into handing over food.
Swans, OTOH, are genuinely scary, especially during mating/nesting season.
I'm looking for a retired mechanical engineer to help me build the ultimate solution to the Canada Goose problem.
I envision an truck-mounted device with a large suction hose. Canada Geese in one end, and out the other end come goose-down insulated parkas on one side and pate de foie gras on the other side. I figure we could sell a few.
Wouldn't a bullet or two have done the job ?
Nope. Overkill is best kill. Plus we've been there, done this and discovered the answer was 'nope'. So observation and barrage balloons were used during WW1 & 2, and pilots shot them down. Eventually. In which it was discovered that bullets would just zip right through, creating slow leaks. They were shot down though, hence the callsigns of the F-22 pilots being named after a WW1 Ace who did manage to shoot down a bunch. There's also probably the issue of modern aircraft not carrying many rounds for their guns, if guns are fitted at all. And gravity, like where the rounds fired would end up landing. Hence US LEO's telling rednecks not to try defending America themselves, because a) their bullets won't reach, and b) they will land somewhere downrange with quite a lot of energy.
Surely a missile would go right through it without noticing and not explode until it hit something else ?
That's something I was curious about. A lot of missiles are proximity fuzed rather than impact, so detonate once they're close enough to sense a target. The first balloon was apparently big and carried a large payload, the PICO ones are smaller. So this suggests that the proximity sensors are probably good enough to detect Canadian Geese, should Trudeau decide to weaponise them further. US airspace will continue to be defended against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
(bonus conspiracy: Weather balloons have been returning results that strongly indicate atmospheric warming isn't happening. After climate prediction supercomputers became self-aware, they determined that missiles must be yeeted, and balloons deleted to prevent misinformation.)
I was surprised the missile could get a positive lock in the first place. Sidewinders (mostly) have passive IR seekers, surely these balloons - especially the hobby ones - have tiny heat signatures? They are obviously better than I imagined... The proximity fusing will depend on the size of the target, again I have no idea how big these balloons are.
My son and his family used to live on the approach to Honolulu airport. It's a joint use facility, and every day you'd see the F-22s returning from training, landing at PHNL. Right over his house. His kids absolutely loved it. And the house was very well insulated, so the noise wasn't really bad, unless they were coming in hot and loud, which did occasionally happen...to the kids' delight.
// The occasional tanker, C-5, C-17 and Blackhawk, as well as all the airliners.
"And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, there's a dog having sex with a woman!"
Helium is the gas with the smallest molecules, as they're merely atomic He.
Hydrogen on the other hand only comes around naturally as dihydrogen, same number of protons, but split in two separate atoms instead of one. So, small, but less so than He, and easier to keep bottled.
Helium is the gas with the smallest molecules, as they're merely atomic He.
Yep. One of those fascinating supply-chain challenges for policy makers. We can produce H2 if we have to, in reasonable quantities. Helium... Not so easy. Especially when people are demanding we ban oil & gas extraction, which is where (AFAIK) most of our helium comes from. And helium is a rather important industrial gas that often can't easily be substituted. I remember some debate around the time the US decided to flog off it's helium reserves around banning party balloons to prevent helium waste.
Nobody has mentioned this disturbing nugget. Since the NIBBB pico-balloon has not been officially linked to releases of Sidewinder missiles, why is Team Register not investigating the disappearance of an entire website?
A DiG query returns nameservers for that domain, but no A record at all, as if the DNS record has been nerfed (If I Understand Correctly). Does anyone know what the IP address is/was?
I imagine that, as a small hobbyist site, the owners black holed the DNS to stump the inevitable hate mail, DDoS and hack attempts. Who wants to deal with that?
They “...tried contacting [the US] military and the FBI - and just got the runaround...", seems responsible, all else being even. So, screw all that. Go dark and perhaps wait then rebrand.
> NIBBB appears to enjoy tracking its balloons as they circumnavigate the globe. Pour one out for KY9O, which was on its seventh such journey after 123 days and 18 hours of flight
Seventh circumnavigation? How many times did it cross into Chinese airspace doing that?
All the Great Powers are chasing down hobbyist balloons and blowing them (up) out of all proportion.[1]
99 red balloons is looking scarily prescient now.
[1] Oops, only saw the post above that used the same joke after pressing "submit", but I claim it is a good enough play on words, or pune, to be suffered twice.
I fully admit I know nothing about this subject, but aircraft usually have transponders to identify themselves, couldn't hobbyist balloons emit some kind of signal to say what it is, so air traffic control or the airforce could just say "ahh forget it, it's another hobbyist balloon"?
That article says that hobbyists track their own balloons, so clearly superior powers could too: From https://www.picoballoons.net/:
Tracker - Custom-built computer which has a GPS and radio transmitter to relay its location over long distances.
So it already exists. However, a genuine spy balloon if fitted with this would be camouflaged somewhat, so it's not going to be trusted by those that want to make things explode.
They (TPTB) could have taken the hobbyists word for it ("I tried contacting our military and the FBI – and just got the runaround"), or at least followed that up.
There are many things TPTB could do, but then they wouldn't be able to create a shit storm.
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