Thanks, this is a nice presentation of the facts with good diagrams.
player2
joined 1 year ago
"The balloon formerly known as unidentified"
Yeah, Texas was the only place that I've actually witnessed casual open carry on a regular basis but to their credit I never saw any crime with a gun. However, I know people all over the country who conceal carry and you'd never know it.
I realize this is anecdotal but I witnessed the 2022 Las Vegas mass stabbing outside my hotel that killed 2 and injured 6 people. No one even knew what was happening because it was such a quick and silent attack.
My point is not that guns and knives are comparable, but that it's silly to feel afraid in the US simply because of guns, generally I'm more scared because of the mental health and wealth inequality crisis causing an increase in apparently crazy people wandering the streets.
It was intercepted by a fighter jet.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/small-nonthreatening-balloon-intercepted-over-utah-by-norad/
"We need to convert all cars to electric ASAP to save the planet!"
"-Wait, not like that!"
Seriously though, when I visited China recently, I was blown away by how many cool cars are there. In the US we have like 3 companies that own the entire market of similar vehicles.
Agreed, guns in public are not as common as this post implies. Additionally, I'm just as scared of a mugger with a knife. Seeing that video of someone drop dead within 3 seconds of being stabbed in the neck is pretty freaky...
That is a common misconception and not true. You probably hear about some large state-run enterprises but >84% of businesses in China are private. Today there are several times more private businesses in China than in the US. I work closely with someone who owns their own business in Shenzhen and it doesn't sound that different than in America.
https://bigdatachina.csis.org/can-chinese-firms-be-truly-private/
Turns out it belongs to an amateur hobbyist:
Maybe I got the previous balloons mixed up. The article on this post states:
Though the Pentagon eventually concluded the balloon did not transmit information back to China, its presence put the U.S. military on high alert for other objects in U.S. airspace. Fighter jets shot down several unidentified objects over the U.S. and Canada over the following weeks.
The military couldn't find any debris from those objects, and the search was called off due to dangerous weather conditions. Mr. Biden said the unidentified objects were not believed to be connected to China's spy balloon program.
"The intelligence community's current assessment is that these three objects were mostly balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research," the president said. .
Turns out to belong to an amateur hobbyist:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-monitoring-high-altitude-balloon-west-rcna140275
When did weather balloons become national news? Aren't there always weather balloons floating around the world? Is it just that this one isn't registered or something?
The article even states that the infamous "Chinese spy balloon" from last year turned out to have no ability to send information back to China and it wasn't even from the Chinese government, but from a private company, institution, or individual.
Source: The Pentagon and Biden quoted in this post's article.
I cap my bandwidth at 50% of my max upload and download speed during the day and 80% of max during night when I'm usually asleep using qBittorrent's schedule feature.
Thank you for creating and maintaining this space for us, I'm grateful for you and all of the other people working to keep things running and improving on lemmy. It is becoming harder and harder to find spaces for discussions that aren't corporate owned.