U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon | Hacker News Reader

U.S. military shoots down suspected Chinese surveillance balloon

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Recent and related:

Chinese surveillance balloon spotted over U.S., Pentagon says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634304 - Feb 2023 (404 comments)

I had seen reports that the balloon was the length of 3-4 school busses but it appears that was misreported and just repeated. The PAYLOAD was the length of 3-4 school busses.

I haven’t been following this much until today/ vaguely aware as an amusing background story.

But, has anyone seen high res photos of the balloon or someone doing back of the envelope math on the size of the balloon portion?

I ask simply because a payload the length of 3-4 school busses (apparently 45 feet) would be quite large and the ballon itself much much larger than I was imagining

Multiple people reported that it was visible to naked eye from the ground, it must have been huge for that.

I saw it from my car today while driving before I knew it was going to be in my area. It was very visible to the naked eye. It was large enough that the perspective made it seem a lot lower altitude than it actually was.

I think it was at 60,000 ft. It’s got to be pretty damn big to be so obvious to casual ground observers.

It will be very interesting to see, to the extent that details are released to the public, the parameters and specs of this thing.

Not sure what the CCP is thinking. Are they simply trying to instigate a response with such a brazen display?

As a data point: previously spotted surveillance blimps in the Asia Pacific theatre use a clear balloon. Either China wanted to see if it would be detected, or is woefully behind the US equivalents.

equivalents such as: the U2 spyplane, the BlackBird and all of the satellites they have. Oh and all the GlobalHawks.

U2: 1955 BlackBird: 1964 GlobalHawk: 1998

I wonder where the cutting edge is today?

Its not like USA have never violated other nations air space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aerial_reconnais... but I guess we quit doing it to China https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/archives/us-spy-flights-o...

Indeed, this kind of thing used to happen half a century ago before the invention of spy satellites and before Gary Powers got shot down over the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident

Even the types of arguments made for this kind of thing are the same.

> Initially, American authorities acknowledged the incident as the loss of a civilian weather research aircraft operated by NASA, but were forced to admit the mission's true purpose a few days later after the Soviet government produced the captured pilot and parts of the U-2's surveillance equipment, including photographs of Soviet military bases.

Claiming "weather research" is basically one of the oldest lies on the books you can make which kind of concretes the fact that it wasn't for weather research.

And until a couple of years ago, we also allowed it.

    >The Treaty on Open Skies establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. The treaty is designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information about military forces and activities of concern to them.
    >[...]
    >On 22 November 2020, United States official sources [...] announced that the six-month period was over and the U.S. was no longer a party to the Treaty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies

Important Note: China was never part of the treaty

To me it seems like it could also be a very cheeky response to the US declassifying all those UFO sightings and going "well, we really don't know what this is. Could be from China."

I am equally puzzled. But the recent aggressive statement by China [1] makes me think they are testing Biden's resolve. If you fly something in a foreign country's airspace, you don't get to complain that it has been shot down, particularly if it's just hardware. It looks like some sort of provocation to see how confrontational the US gets beyond cheap speech on TV. And I can't help suspecting that what made the US wait so long to shoot it is indecisiveness. It flew over huge areas of empty fields, it certainly isn't safety.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chinese-sp...

>It flew over huge areas of empty fields, it certainly isn't safety.

Ok, but having it drop into water should increase the chance to retrieve less damaged parts to investigate then. I'd call this thoughtful, not indecivise.

Water will behave like concrete to an object of the size and weight of a car dropping at high speed (which seems to be the payload minus the solar panels). You can just see what happened to planes that crashed into water head on.

And they are claiming it was for safety purposes.

Pictures from the ground showed structures like solar panels. If anything, the panels would act as sails and slow the fall and impact into the water.

Even if they had the strength, it would rotate to minimize air resistance.

If it was built as a balloon, none of those panels have any structure to support significant wind loading (balloons above 40k feet feel zero appreciable wind). They would come apart like confetti a few seconds into free fall.

Russia frequently has military jets head for the UK, as I understand it just to test reaction time. (E.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/raf-ukraine-... as a search result, I haven't read)

I assume this is something similar, just more to assess what the response is than how quick a known response is.

But to be fair, this sort of game is going on since the cold war in both directions.

Sure, I didn't mean to be 'unfair' or to make too much of it (it hits the news every time, as though it's at all likely it would've been a genuine threat) - just to offer another example of something I assume is similar in motive.

When I first heard of the balloon I thought it was brilliant. I am always amused at relatively cheap ideas that cost your opponent a lot. I figured this would cost the U.S. a lot. Even the President might waste 20 minutes with 15 highly paid experts being briefed on the balloon. It sounds like I was wrong about that. News reports stated the President was receiving regular ballon briefings.

I'm sure resources were diverted to get close video of the payload. Rooms full of people were tasked to analyze whether object 47 was a camera and if so what type of lens it was fitted with and what were its capabilities. Could object 117 be used to inject colored smoke into lower altitude air streams? What effect might that have on our already reduced chicken population?

How much did th U.S. spend to shoot this thing down, or even just to make the decision whether to shoot it down?

If we take the names out of the story, it might look different to U.S. fans. If one country could spend, say, $5000 on a toy project that would cause a $5000000 response, that seems like a great strategy. For instance, Ukraine would love to spend $5000 on the edge of Crimea that would be this distracting to Russia.

I don't know how big this particular one is, but high altitude balloons get really large because of the low pressure.

For example, I could find that this ballon reaches 200ft diameter at 100,000 feet.

https://remus.jpl.nasa.gov/balloon.htm

Here's the image if anyone is curious: https://web.archive.org/web/20020909235156if_/http://remus.j...

But weather balloons are typically much smaller. See e.g. https://www.stratoflights.com/en/shop/weather-balloon-3000/, this is the largest one they sell and it has a bursting diameter of 45ft

I’m pretty sure that they had a budget higher than $700 and wanted it to carry more than 3kg of payload.

This is definitely not one of these balloons. Check out the discontinued Google Loon project to see a closer representation of what the world was looking at.

I have used weather balloons like the one you linked and I can assure you that these will burst after only a few hours in the air.

The ballon was at 60k feet and eye witnesses said it had the same apparent size in the sky as passenger jets flying nearby at 30k feet.

if only i paid attention in trigonometry..

Hmm, do we even need trig? Naively I would imagine that simple proportions would hold — e.g. same visible size @ twice the distance = object is twice as big

4x as big, since we see in two dimensions — you can judge length & height (but not depth).

So if it appears the same size but twice as far away, the the length and height are each 2x. So that would make it the size of ~4 airplanes

Not super relevant but I find this to be true when spotting a 747/757/767 vs say a 737

the area is 4x but the diameter is just 2x here.

Isn’t the object three-dimensional?

It looks like the large size is mostly just solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it) and their scaffolding. From some of the available photos there's two wings, each with eight panels.

There's a tradeoff between the weight of the solar panels vs simply using batteries (though batteries don't like the cold, and solar panels do), so I think maybe they were hoping the thing would stay aloft for a long time?

My guess is that the actual package of equipment - batteries and sensors - is quite small. Maybe a telescope and gyro stabilizer or gimbal was part of the setup. Insulation probably bulked it up quite a bit; it's very, very cold at that altitude.

I'd be curious what sort of uplink they were using, assuming the thing was actually fully functional as a spying device. I'd say there is a decent chance it was largely a dummy, designed to see what our reaction would be.

I don't particularly like the precedent we just set. There's no evidence it was a weapon, its flight path was easily tracked and slow so our military could hardly argue it was a surveillance threat especially compared to satellites, it's well outside commercial aviation flight ranges.

If they want to send balloons over us at 80,000 feet...let them? Who cares? They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery.

We can hardly point fingers. The U2 flew at similar altitudes, we still use them to this day, and they almost certainly contain far more powerful spying equipment.

> solar panels (I'm assuming that's what they were; they could have been 'sails' to help steer it)

Or perhaps both at once. I really hope the details of this craft are published, the machine nerd in me needs to know.

>They can task commercial satellites and get as good or better imagery.

Is that true? Just from quickly poking around, LEO satellites seem to orbit at about triple the height, moving far faster than a balloon lazily floating along the jetstream. Probably can use a larger variety of instruments as well.

> about triple the height

Hundred times the height, to be exact.

LEO (300-1500km) is much higher than the apparent 60,000 ft altitude of this balloon (18km).

I'm mildly embarrassed to say I didn't even notice the discrepancy in units. Obviously, 200,000 ft (or 300k, but 200 was the figure I saw first) isn't really plausibly high enough to constitute orbit.

> they could have been 'sails' to help steer it

Sails are useless in a balloon. The only way to steer a balloon without a propeller is to raise and lower its altitude seeking a wind blowing in the right direction.

Why not?

Add a fin to a baloon and you can steer it.

And once the baloon can hold direction in the wind with the help of the fin, you can add sail to actually get some propulsion in direction other than wind.

The problem at 60k feet is actually you are above the weather and don't have a ton of wind to work with. Moving up and down in the minor wind currents is far more efficient energy wise and practically.

The balloon moves with the wind. You cannot steer it because from the point of view of the balloon it is not moving.

There is no keel on a balloon. Without a keel, one is only going downwind.

I think you should be able to on a wind current boundary

> from the point of view of the balloon it is not moving.

Mind == blown*

*Sincere, but pun intended

Wind is still flowing over the balloon and able to generate a steering force.

No, as Walter said, it's moving with the wind, i.e. it has the same speed as the wind. It's only if there's a sudden gust that you would see anything flowing over the balloon. I took part in a balloon experiment a couple of years back, essentially a weather balloon with several cameras, including one pointing upwards - we could watch (after we retrieved the cameras later) hours with footage of the balloon itself. There were various loose threads etc, and I assure you - there wasn't much movement! Occasionally there would be a little gust, when that happened the payload would swing around a little bit, but for the most part it was very quiet. Particularly at the highest altitudes.

This is interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyQwgBAaBag

Forgot to include: We had microphones up there too! It was literally quiet.

especially compared to satellites

It is a lot easier to take pictures and collect data at 60,000 ft (balloon) than from a satellite in low earth orbit, which is closer to 6,000,000 ft.

They also could have had ground penetrating radar. Note the path of the balloon was over the US missile silos

https://geo-matching.com/content/new-approach-to-use-ground-...

Outside the atmosphere you would not be able to do it

If that thing had a radar strong enough to see through dirt from 50,000ft, it should have also been causing havoc to all sorts of electrical equipment too.

I know nothing of radar, but could the radar be shaped like routers beam forming? Couldn’t the radar also be switched off over the majority of inconsequential areas?

> could the radar be shaped like routers beam forming?

Yes, SAR [1].

[1] https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/backgrounders/what-is-s...

SAR is just a method to virtually increase the aperture of the antenna with a moving platform, it is unrelated to the localisation of the beam

You could.

The Space Shuttle flew missions with an imaging radar that discovered ancient riverbeds beneath deep sand in the Sahara. At the time, some thought it would have worked equally well to disclose buried military infrastructure.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle-imaging-radar-a-si...

Not just silos, going through the Dakotas and Missouri put it fairly close to Ellsworth and Whiteman, as well.

Okay, genius: explain how easy it is to generate as good imagery at 80,000 feet (almost ten times the typical aerial imagery altitude) from a platform being buffeted and spun and tilted by the wind with the weight restrictions of a high altitude balloon.

Now compare that challenge to simply setting up a shell company and purchasing 15-30cm commercial satellite imagery in their choice of bands.

Commercial satellites can generate 15-30cm images good enough to tell what make and model a car is in a parking lot. https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2020/introducing-1...

> explain how easy it is to generate as good imagery at 80,000 feet

Camera gimbals provide image stability regardless of motion in 3D space. Digital post processing is used to clean up images from planes and other moving sources.

> with the weight restrictions of a high altitude balloon.

People seem to really underestimate the size of these balloons. They are hundreds of feet across and capable of lifting massive loads. Using Google's Loon as an example it had a balloon that weighed almost 200 pounds and carried an additional 175 pounds of solar panels before you even added the mission payload.

> compare that challenge to simply setting up a shell company and purchasing 15-30cm commercial satellite imagery

Satellites have predictable passes and military installations schedule sensitive outdoor activities around them. The problem for defenders with balloons is that they can loiter on station for months at a time making scheduling around them impractical.

Try scheduling activities around all those Starlink sats.

It could’ve actually been a “science experiment” just launched at the behest of the military as a test like you say. So they’d have plausible deniability like the “fishing boats” in the South China Sea

Why would there need to be any plausible deniability for flying a spy aircraft over another country?

The U-2 spy plane did just that, as did Project Genetrix (Unmanned surveillance balloons), and then later, the SR-71 Blackbird, and as much as the Soviets complained, complaining and shooting at them was pretty much all they could do.

They shot down/recovered so many Project Genetrix balloons, in fact, that their left-over radiation-hardened film was re-used by the Soviet space program in their Luna 3 Moon probe.

All the sound and fury around this seems to be a serious case of 'the shoe is now on our foot'.

> Why would there need to be any plausible deniability for flying a spy aircraft over another country?

Because they’re denying it. Presumably, they’d want their denial to be plausible.

Is the US supposed to not complain now just because the USSR got to complain first?

If something flies over your country, you get to loudly complain about it and shoot at it.

If you are able to hit it too, good for you.

When an aircraft doesnt have a transponder, doesnt respond to radio calls, no flight plan on file, and seems to be adrift, it is a hazard to navigation irrespective of altitide. Such things get intercepted and, if in any way dangerous, are shot down. Post-9/11, there are even protocols for shooting down unresponsive airliners.

Name one plane that flies at more than 60,000 feet, I'll wait.

If you believe the Chinese officials, they had lost control of the balloon. Things that go up must famously go down, though that's not their department said Wernher Von Braun.

It's a bit strange how they are simultaneously upset that their balloon got shot down and claiming they had lost control of it.

The "upset" part is a defensive attack, they expect to avoid rebuffs of violating airspace by being very upset in the first place.

Well it gives a good excuse to shoot down US spy balloons or planes. The precedence has been set, and the snowball continue to roll downwards.

That precedence was set way back in the late 1950s when the Soviet Union started shooting at US U-2 spy planes, and especially in 1960 when they finally succeeded in shooting down the US U-2 spy plane with pilot Gary Powers.

This overflight was termed by the Soviets as an "Act of aggression". This Chinese incident is no less an act of aggression, and merely continues the precedent.

If the Chinese really wanted it considered otherwise because they had actually lost control of the device, they could have easily warned us of the problem and requested coordinated assistance in recovering their device (which would of course allow us to examine it). The PRC govt did no such thing.

And the critics complaining about not shooting it down sooner are ignoring two key things. First, the payload was 2-4 school-busses in length, and dropping such a thing from 12+ miles up in a random location even in sparsely populated areas is a ridiculous hazard. Second, we can be quite confident that the US military could neutralize any data collection or transmission during the transit, and the shoot-down over our waters eliminated the possibility of PRC recovering any stored data.

The only thing I find strange is that they didn't throw in something about hurting the feelings of the Chinese people[0] for good measure. They like to call this Wolf Warrior diplomacy; but it really comes across more as crying wolf diplomacy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurting_the_feelings_of_the_...

The U-2 can fly at 70,000 typical missions are 60-65,000ft.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2

Are the U-2s still flying in any numbers? The SR-71s? If they were, would a few balloons be a serious risk to their navigation?

Yes. Here is where you apply if you want to fly them.

https://www.beale.af.mil/Library/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article...

Concorde did [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde

An aircraft that last flew decades ago is not relevant here.

The comment you replied to says "no commercial aircraft flies at that altitude" and the concorde hasn't flown in decades.

Well.. November 2003, so only after that can you claim "decades", plural.. it's a while yes, but clearly shows that at least it's in the realm of commercial aircraft, and may happen again, in principle.

Edit: By the way, that comment said, and I quote, "Name one plane that flies at more than 60,000 feet, I'll wait."

No word "commercial" there. So, aside from the Concorde, there were/are several others, some already mentioned.

No Concordes any more I'm afraid. There are no military or civilian planes that fly that high -- unless the CIA dusts off a U-2. There is no navigation risk.

In contrast, every orbital launch has to deal with 10s of thousands of pieces of space debris.

Several military airplanes, including fighters, can and do fly that high and more. I never said anything about navigation risks - that was from other posters. Obviously space debris is a much higher daily risk, for satellites.

Um, the Air Force still uses the U-2. As does NASA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2#Operators

The F-15 and Eurofighter Typhoon have published service ceilings of 65000ft, put them in a vertical climb and they will go a lot higher than that, the Streak Eagle reached 103000ft.

Still can't see any risk. You won't find F-15s flying that high except if they need to shoot a balloon.

U-2 (TR-1), SR-71, WB-57

Don't forget the beautiful XB-70

The original design is something out of Macross: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie#...

All that's missing is it shooting out its missiles in Itano Circus swarms.

Haha yesss! I remember that post from a couple days ago. Really cool. I don't watch anime myself but the Itano missile effect is pretty sweet to behold

No longer in active service.

The U-2 is very much in service. Apply here if you want to fly it.

https://www.beale.af.mil/Library/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article...

Possibly apocryphal SR-71 story ;-)

SR-71: "QQ requesting clearance to flight level 600"

ATC: "QQ, climb and maintain flight level 600... if you can get there."

SR-71: "Roger, descending to flight level 600"

> I don't particularly like the precedent we just set

especially in view of the fact that the upper limit of sovereign airspace is not defined by international law. In fact there are proposals to treat the 18-160km zone as a transitional region of reduced sovereignty akin to EEZs.

https://iaass.space-safety.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2...

> Legally however, it is an indistinct region where it is not clear whether the operations that take place are covered by aviation or space conventions and treaties, in particular with reference to the freedom of overflight that applies to space orbital operations

Also:

> Although outer space is free, if states are allowed to claim vertical sovereignty up to the point where orbital dynamics are possible, other states will be precluded from having free access to space

> John A. Johnson, General Counsel of [NASA] and [of USAF], said in 1964 "there should therefore be no legal basis for protesting, merely on grounds of unpermitted presence, the overflight of national territory by ascending and descending spacecraft, regardless of altitude."

https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1126&con...

Also see:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/43439/is-there-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_sovereignty

While that’s an admirable goal, in practice this is an operation above or in US airspace, which seemed to be unannounced by another nation state. There is little wiggle room for an honest blunder. China could have send out a press release their balloon was out of control or whatever.

I agree the visibility makes it worse, but my sense is that stratospheric balloon overflight is something that happens fairly frequently and most of the time does not cause diplomatic incidents (which explains why we heard nothing about it the 4-5 times it happened in the past several years). Another instance is this Google balloon that recently fell out of the sky in the Congo: https://twitter.com/kambale/status/1621811081206439937

I don't know why you are downvoted but I agree with your point that the shooting down feels a bit like an overreaction.

For instance, the Pentagon has just reported that several Chinese balloons have been crossing US airspace in the recent years [1], also during Trump presidency. These were not shut down, they were not even reported at the time AFAIK.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/conservatives-blame-biden-ch...

> The U2 flew at similar altitudes, we still use them to this day, and they almost certainly contain far more powerful spying equipment.

And if they could, other countries would love to shoot them out of the air and it would be fair. You don't put planes like the U2 in operation without being aware of the risks.

I don't understand what you're trying to achieve by pointing that out.

I can't find the article, but I think it said the balloon was the size of five football fields

Edit: Different balloon https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/when-a-weather-balloon-...

Judging from the videos that pan from the moon to the balloon: the balloon was about 3x smaller in the sky than the moon. Knowing the altitude of the balloon was 68,000 feet, we can fudge the distance from the observer to the balloon as 100,000 feet. Knowing the distance to the moon and the radius of the moon we can use like triangles to estimate that the balloon was ~285 feet across, +/- 20% for estimates.

Edit: updated the estimate. I got radius and diameter mixed up.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100000%2A%28diameter%20...

This is a clever method and I appreciate that you posted the Wolfram alpha link - always happy when people show their work and I did not realize that you could do things like include (diameter of moon) as variables with it. This is a nit, but if you're busting out an AI enhanced calculator there is no need to make a 40% rounding of 70K to 100k. I got ~200 ft across.

I think some of that fudging was because the observer wasn't directly beneath the balloon

Indeed and trying to estimate how much someone panned across a clear blue sky with more than 20 degree precision isn't how I wanted to spend my Saturday. 80% of the answer for 20% of the effort.

60m (200ft) - 85m (285ft) for the rest of the world.

Which, at 40ft (12m) per school bus, is 5-7 school buses.

Just a tip - put natural language variables in parenthesis. Helps disambiguate in a lot of cases and saves time in the long run if you use WA often.

Size of a football field, got it

How many washing machines?

It's just under 73 washing machines laid on their backs end-to-end.

That does assume, though, that you got the tallest possible washing machine, which stands at a whopping 47 inches, compared to the industry average of a puny not-even 41 inches.

(It's honestly mind-blowing to me that I could get this data [1] in a few seconds, when it might've been nearly impossible in a sane amount of time ~10 years ago. But I'm also enjoying just citing it really casually.)

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=washing+machine

Which football? Real football or American football?

What is real football? I've heard of association football (shortened to soccer by the British), rugby football, Australian rules football, American football and Canadian football but I've never heard of real football.

I guess OP means The football that is played or watched by the majority of people in the world. Other football games have order(s) of magnitude less fans fwiw.

And which one of those do you figure "real football" refers to? Can you take a wild guess?

It's like saying "the real Albert Einstein", as opposed to good Albert Einstein the baker, who is a local celebrity because of his amazing Apfelstrudel.

I guess it is confusing for Americans to find themselves as the cultural minority in some environment.

I was wondering if there was perhaps another variant of football that I had not heard of called "real football" since there are so many different types. So if real football simply refers to football then why did the OP ask: "Which football? Real football or American football?" if it's apparently so obvious?

swamp football, sincerely, Finland.

That definitely looks like the most entertaining type of football!

> I guess it is confusing for Americans to find themselves as the cultural minority in some environment.

Confusing, no. Amusing that this is the hill you’re dying on, fucking hilarious. You go on ahead and own that.

>And which one of those do you figure "real football" refers to? Can you take a wild guess?

You no doubt believe that Newton, Henry VIII, Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror, Canute, Arthur and Launcelot, and Boadicia 1) all played association football, 2) called it the one and only "football", and 3) all other "football" sports around the world are bastard versions of it.

The word "Football" dates from the 13th century. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_%28word%29> The sport of association football, no. While people have no doubt been kicking round things for entertainment for thousands of years, association football as a sport is no older than other football codes like American, rugby, Gaelic, and AFL; all date from the mid to late 19th century. That's why English-speaking countries have differing meanings for "football", because it refers to the most local popular football code *no matter what that is*. Let me repeat: Association football has no primacy, seniority, or priority here. It is not the "first sport" or "the elder sport" or the "original sport" among football codes.

>I guess it is confusing for Americans to find themselves as the cultural minority in some environment.

"Cultural minority", eh? Among the major English-speaking peoples <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)#National_usage>, *Brits are outnumbered—whether by population or number of countries—in terms of how they use "football".*

"Soccer" is a British English word c. 1889. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22633980> According to Stephen Szymanski of the University of Michigan, until 1980 "soccer" and "football" were interchangeably used in Britain <https://web.archive.org/web/20140627210952/ns.umich.edu/Rele...>, when "soccer" became less popular because of a mistaken belief that it is an Americanism. The word still is in use in Britain; see TV shows like Soccer Saturday.

Let me repeat: The association and American varieties of football are merely two of several codes that all emerged in the mid-19th century from people in various countries attempting to formalize in some way the informal sport of "running with/kicking the leather-covered thing" that has existed for thousands of years. Not, as the average Briton who thinks the word "soccer" is a product of 1970s American culture vaguely believes, Americans seeing British association football in action and rudely deciding to change the "mother sport" by changing the shape of the ball and letting players carry it.

The one where the "foot" hits the "ball", as opposed to the others where hands and an egg is involved.

Had this discussion in Japanese the other day. One sport is called soccer サッカー and the other is football in both languages, and then you just have to hear about European languages calling it something similar at companies with an international basis. If you really don't care about either you just call it アメフト so nobody is happy.

It's funny because I'm a fan of football -- I'll let you decide which I might be talking about -- and the field is about the same size in either case.

I feared that. I'll check next time before doing the comment ;D

All is forgiven! As the comment thread burns around us

they are about the same btw (~10% difference which is fine for the purpose of showing measures relatable to people)

Then I severely underestimated the size of the thing. This is a gigantic balloon with a gigantic payload.

...and what's the volume in SI Olympic pools?

EDIT how lazy of me, 285ft diameter, and assuming spherical shell, gives 166 Olympic pools.

The big question is why China would send a balloon. My best guess is it carried electronic warfare sensors to try and collect specific information about US radar and missile capabilities. They may have in fact wanted us to shoot it down, ideally first painting it with advanced radar (both air and ground based) and then firing an advanced missile at it. Data could be streamed out until the moment of impact and used to create better ways to jam or avoid US missiles. Sending it over sensitive sites may have been an attempt to force the US to take such action.

I’ve heard rumors that it was shot down by an AIM 9X, which is IR guided, a good choice as its seeker doesn’t use radar and thereby expose the terminal radar guidance information. I’m going to go way out on a limb here and theorize the delay was due to brand new upgrades required to the AIM 9X software to be able to lock on to and hit a balloon, which they probably were not originally capable of.

... why didn't they simply declared it a shooting range target? thousands of volunteers would have tried to shoot it down with bullets and various DIY things! it would have been endless streaming content!

oh, well, maybe the next one. :(

They explicitly asked the public not to do this. It was something like 60k feet in the air. People shooting up would have a laughably low chance of hitting it, plus create a rain of bullets somewhere else far away.

Randomly Firing thousands of round at a target about ten miles up at an angle making the trajectories of misses to be something like 30 mi arcs sounds like a great idea doesn’t it? Does a ground fired bullet even go that high? They’ll obviously know their bullets are landing in safe areas right and no Minneapolis or wherever?

Statistically unlikely to hit someone, but not surprising if it happened.

Could just using aircraft guns be easier? I am probably completely wrong, just curious.

There was a case in the 90s I think of a Canadian weather balloon that they tried to shoot down with (fighter plane) guns and had a pretty tough time of it. Guns at that altitude too could be an issue as you lose control authority in thin air and the gun destabilizes flight controls even more.

One reason I heard is that guns wouldn't have been that effective on a balloon the size of a football field; mere pinpricks, basically. The balloon would leak, but not nearly fast enough to bring it down in a reasonable amount of time.

Unless, of course, they unloaded thousands of rounds into it, which is probably more dangerous and less practical than taking it out of the sky with a missile.

Among other reasons many fighter aircraft have max altitude of 50k to 55k and starts requiring more specialized equipment. And the balloon was at 60k feet. So perhaps they don't want to reveal which aircraft have capabilites beyond their advertised or something like that?

The balloon was at a very high altitude (66,000ft). The F-22 launched its missile at 58,000 feet, probably right at the edge of its loaded service ceiling, and the missile travelled rest of the way up. Given the height, I don't think it would've been easy to shoot it down with a cannon.

I'm not sure it's worth making such advanced guesses about the intentions until it's proven that it could even steer itself and navigate with any accuracy at all.

Your comment is the equivalent of "sit down and shut up" which is contrary to the whole point of having this forum or any sort of intellectual discussion on any topic on HN.

Since nobody has answered your question: I assume that China simply sent a balloon to spy on the US. Why a balloon? Because it's much closer to earth than a satellite and can carry a heavier payload. And why they were not worried if it would be detected? Well, according to the Pentagon, China has sent several balloons over the US in recent years and nobody made a fuss about it until now.

What about using high powered lasers? There weee a lot of research into this by the military.

This is technically the first combat kill by the F-22.

I wonder if the pilot gets to paint a balloon silhouette on his plane.

To say nothing of the nicknames and jokes they'll hear for the rest of their life....

"Balloon Boy No Hoax"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVbV_Sis99o&t=1s

Definitely had a different theme in mind for this event

https://youtu.be/qvfWRGzvP50

I don’t think F-22 pilots get to paint their aircraft. It would destroy the stealth coatings, which are so specialized they are measured to the milligram when removed (to ensure an adversary hasn’t taken some for analysis).

Where do stories like this come from? Simple logic would tell you there is no possible way to weigh an aircraft coating to a milligram and verify that it matches a somehow measured precise amount applied to the aircraft. The concept is ridiculous.

I’m embarrassed to say I got this “fact” from a HN comment.

Weighing the scrap (as one of many controls) to make sure it isn't tampered with during downstream disposal is pretty likely, even if comparing against the original coating weight isn't too practical.

it is in-fact common in the plating industry to predict/assess coating thickness via weight of product before & after the process; if you know the density/weight of the coating material then strong predictions can be made about the coating thickness given the known uniformity of the plating/anodize process.

Whether or not that's done as a forensic measure after the fact, I don't know. It doesn't seem all that out of the possibilities of reality; but I don't know how they would know whether or not the cause was espionage or a particularly hard-headed birdstrike.

I can definitely see how that could make sense as a QA measure in manufacturing, where you can really control the process and everything that happens to it.

But fly the plane once, and you're not going to be able to make any realistic predictions on what the weight of the coating might be after it's been at Mach 2.0 at 50k feet (or what ever the numbers are, I have no idea) for who knows how long. Simply too many variables.

Paint it on the inside

I wonder if the pilot won a stuffed animal?

Edit: ceejayoz: JINX!

How can you know that?

You "can't" know, due to the nature of the secret warfare kill here or there, but generally:

Acknowledged and unacknowledged kills are counted separately, and it's OK to call it the first kill in the sense of acknowledged kills.

(That's my understanding anyway)

Barring some kind of secret engagement that never made the news (which is unlikely, given the F-22's role), it's true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_shootdowns

I can imagine the pilot making “pew pew, ack ack ack!” Noises as he pretends to dog fight something in the world’s top dog fighter for the first time.

Shooting at an unarmed, passively floating baloon can hardly be called a "combat" :)

four more kills and the pilot becomes an ace?

New KPI finally shows data in AF dashboard. Efficiency (cost per kill) = number of kills / cost of program.

Wish it was a drone that shot it down. Then it would be the first unmanned aircraft dog fight.

It wouldn’t be the first. Drone on drone fights happened in Ukraine.

Here's one:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/this-drone-versus-dron...

First one above 10.000 meters, then? Fight, with no fighting back, though? Also, as to no fighting back: destruction between different states, since blowing up your own balloon, rocket or satellites for testing purpose has (probably/surely) happened before.

I feel like the balloon takedown was seriously mishandled. Imo it should have been shot down right after it crossed our borders and before it started move over populated areas. That way there would be no surveillance and you could examine the payload. Now that it’s in the water, you may not even find it.

Do you really believe the USAF and rest of the military and 3 letter agencies had not already intercepted/jammed/hacked the comms link?

By letting it saunter all the way across they also probably got a lot of good info on its capabilities.

I don’t think they jammed it, considering how high it was. Intercepted .. I mean, China can use strong encryption too.

US military aircraft can remotely destroy electronics aboard other aircraft by aiming a highly focused beam precisely onto it, thus disabling it. They do t have to decrypt anything. They just have to fry it.

A great way to study those capabilities then would be to send a trial balloon... We aren't goijg ti necessarily reveal intricate details of our capabilities like that.

maybe but... it seems clear enough they did not do this given that it seems to have been piloted through a very nice high-value course across the US

Weather balloons aren’t piloted. I don’t think it had any control planes at all, beyond just floating along atmospheric currents. At best they can control elevation? Ok, googling a bit:

> Is it possible to steer or otherwise control a typical high-altitude balloon? It can be controlled, but let me be careful about what I mean by that. Balloons go with the wind. And so the only control that a balloon has is: in some balloons, you can control the altitude—you can make it go higher or lower. To the extent that the wind speed and direction varies with altitude, you can change the altitude, within some limits. And that can give you some measure of control—but not anywhere near the level of control that you have [with an airplane]. You can’t turn around and go the other direction; you can never go upwind in the balloon. You’re always going to be moving with the atmosphere that surrounds it.

From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-ballo...

So does that really count as piloting?

Wind directions vary by altitude. This was the whole premise of Loon (google), and aiui that part worked well.

https://aerostar.com/products/balloons-airships/thunderhead-...

IIRC google loon did exactly this and was able to basically go wherever they wanted.

Jamming vs encryption... They are unrelated.

Tangentially related. Spread spectrum signals are jamming resistant, have lower probability of intercept and can be effectively cryptographically secure.

Spread spectrum has little to do with whether or not the signal is truly encrypted.

A cryptographically secure sequence is used to spread the signal or do frequency hopping. The baseband may not even be encrypted but the signal definitely is.

Cool! Thank you @geomark for the enlightening point.

They can use strong encryption, but can they protect their private keys?

Asymmetric encryption. The private key does not have to be stored in the balloon at all (only the public key that can encrypt but NOT decrypt), it can stay safely in a PLA datacenter in China.

Does anyone actually use asymmetric encryption to encrypt data?

I thought asymmetric encryption was just used to encrypt the symmetric key used to encrypt the data…

It's typically too slow for significant amounts of data, but there's of course a trade-off to be made.

This is basically an optimisation — asymmetric encryption is more resource-intensive. But for relatively short, fire-and-forget type messages (e.g. GPG-encrypted email), encrypting directly with the public key is fairly common.

Rsa encrypted content size limit depends on the key size, which does not scale well.

Is GPG not a subject to this limitation?

I was wrong regarding GPG — see my sibling comment to yours!

Direct use of asymmetric encryption is still feasible for short messages where performance is not as much of a concern, though.

The mention of GPG-encrypted email in my above comment is actually wrong: even GPG generates a symmetric key, encrypts that with the public key of each recipient, and encrypts the actual message content with the symmetric key.

As well as improving performance, it makes it possible for each recipient that a message was encrypted to, to be sure that the other recipients received the same message.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/74412/why-is-gp... has a demonstration:

  echo 'foo' | gpg --recipient a4ff2279 --recipient d745722b --encrypt | LANG=C pgpdump
  Old: Public-Key Encrypted Session Key Packet(tag 1)(524 bytes)
      New version(3)
      Key ID - 0xCC73B287A4388025
      Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign(pub 1)
      RSA m^e mod n(4093 bits) - ...
          -> m = sym alg(1 byte) + checksum(2 bytes) + PKCS-1 block type 02
  Old: Public-Key Encrypted Session Key Packet(tag 1)(268 bytes)
      New version(3)
      Key ID - 0xDAA855623A5E68F7
      Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign(pub 1)
      RSA m^e mod n(2046 bits) - ...
          -> m = sym alg(1 byte) + checksum(2 bytes) + PKCS-1 block type 02
  New: Symmetrically Encrypted and MDC Packet(tag 18)(63 bytes)
      Ver 1
      Encrypted data [sym alg is specified in pub-key encrypted session key]
          (plain text + MDC SHA1(20 bytes))

I'm not a crypto geek, but that isn't my understanding. I think that the challenge is key distribution. The balloon will have been loaded with a database of keys. Perhaps they will have relatively few keys and will just rotate them, or even just use one key per mission. Better would be one key to be used for each message, or one to be used for each hour of the mission - but each key that is used will be discarded/deleted properly in the hardware of the balloon so that even if the USA gets the hardware they won't be able to find the keys for old messages.

Using the keys to encrypt/decrypt is easy - no more computationally intensive than using RSA keys for sure. If you don't have the key and the scheme is vaguely sensible.... and the keys are generated in a secure way then I really really doubt that they are at all crackable. The encrypt/decrypt scheme is more or less arbitrary (just a sequence of transforms using the message and the key known to each side), the keys are vast random strings.

In civi life the challenge is distribution. Keys are literally carried from place to place in briefcases to enable high speed super secure exchanges of information, but the bag carriers can be paid off and threatened, the folks at each end of the exchange can be paid off and threatened. If the GRU, CIA, Mossad want to have these keys you will really have to spend big to stop them. If you are the Chinese military you have guns and the death penalty to prevent the CIA from getting your keys.

There is a lot of interest in Quantum Key Distribution where it's possible to tell if the "bag" (a sequence of photons) has been "opened" (read) due to quantum effects (you can tell if it's been measured I think - but my physics is shaky here). This has the advantage of being very very fast and cheap per message - but a special infrastructure is required to do the transmission, which is not cheap. I am out of touch with this now but I think that you need a dedicated loop of fiber and special repeaters at 50km intervals. Most problematic is that the compromise vulnerabilities are still there. If the GRU/MI6/Mossad can interfere with with the folks putting the keys onto the system, or reading them off the system then they still have your keys.

> I'm not a crypto geek, but that isn't my understanding. I think that the challenge is key distribution. The balloon will have been loaded with a database of keys. Perhaps they will have relatively few keys and will just rotate them, or even just use one key per mission. Better would be one key to be used for each message, or one to be used for each hour of the mission - but each key that is used will be discarded/deleted properly in the hardware of the balloon so that even if the USA gets the hardware they won't be able to find the keys for old messages.

If asymmetric encryption is used, it doesn't matter much in this context if the USA gets the keys; they can only use them to encrypt new messages, not to decrypt old messages. This applies whether the keys are used directly to encrypt messages, or if the keys are used to encrypt ephemeral symmetric keys that are themselves used to encrypt messages and then discarded.

yup, you are right.

Although I think getting the keys and understanding the schemes would be interesting and damaging for China - I think they would (at the least) have to review their approaches to be sure that no useful insight had been leaked.

Right, the question is how safe are those datacenters.

FWIW, all comms of that balloon would be satellite. I don't think it is easy to jam, let alone intercept.

I’m sure in 1970s nobody nobody thought GPS would become a reality within a decade. “They will never be able to pinpoint position that way!”

My guy. It’s the United States military. All the shit we use is a by product of their first move.

If it seems impossible today they’ve already figured it out. Not to mention they made a nuclear bomb and the Manhattan project was an insane achievement.

Weird... Most groundbreaking research, and the consumer tech that eventually comes from it, seems to come out of post-secondary and tech/research companies.

Crazy to think it's all a front and it's actually stemming from the US Military. Thank you for your service!

Not that crazy. Public knowledge, even. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Lincoln_Laboratory

Or... hear me out here...

It's obviously a web of private R&D, public institutions like NASA, higher education, and yes, the military too.

But acting like scientific innovation and technical progress is all, or even a majority due to the military is boot-licking weirdness.

You have fun with that.

I just don't know how you can look at the heaps of Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award, etc. or groundbreaking papers in almost and field and think "Oh yeah, must be the American Military is behind this."

> All the shit we use is a by product of their first move.

This is an overstatement.

> A large amount of the technology we find useful was investigated in some capacity by the single most well-funded R&D organization in the world to some extent before we knew about it.

This is more reasonable.

Worth noting the jump you made from G*P's "shit we use" to "Turing awards, Nobel prizes, and Papers" was quite questionable.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted… it’s true. Any seemingly feasible idea has already been tried in secret by DARPA or one of its friends. We only know about the ones they’ve declassified.

Tracking and over saturating the satellite/s receive is trivial, and considered to be very,very,very naughty!

Assuming you know which satellite(s) to target.

Which means, watch and learn;

But it would make the downlink easy to intercept.

Had to lol at this one. Yeah, after they hacked the comms link and they were able to gain access to the master program.

lol. Ok I’ll go along. And it turns out to be a node version 12 app :’D

Its very possible that they could jam the radio frequencies the balloon uses. "Hacking the comms link", not so much, but neutering its ability to phone home... very possible.

Yeah and it’s why hacked was the third option aka least likely. Not my fault people pick one thing out of a range of possibilities and fixate on it lol.

Ya what if it uses cellular on a US sim? Are you going to jam all the cell spectrums?

Oh snap right, a US three letter agency telling a US mobile carrier to disable a US SIM sounds like an impossible feat. Well played, China!

Yes, it is a very high profile debate going on around here.

That means, there are competent people commenting, but they get drown in other comments.

People forget way too often, that you don't need to have an opinion on everything, or worse, share that opinion everywhere.

Does the cellular network even work at that altitude?

I'm sure it would, with a good directional antenna.

I think you're being overly generous in attributing competency/capability. Just thinking about the physics of it, robustly jamming an unknown signal of a transmitter 60KM high seems like a rather impossible task. If the air force were somehow broadcasting several megawatts of broad spectrum noise over a populated area, somebody would have noticed.

The authorities in charge have no real idea what's going on or what the payload is. This whole situation is just weird. Maybe it is just some irresponsible private organization. The Baidu equivalent of Project Loon?

> If the air force were somehow broadcasting several megawatts of broad spectrum noise over a populated area, somebody would have noticed.

Interesting that you think modern jamming works that way. It doesn't.

Can you describe how it works?

Barrage jamming very much is still used. Sometimes there is nothing else you can use.

I mean TikTok / bytedance is just some irresponsible private organization.

That is controlled by the CCP.

It was purposefully taken down once it was on shallow waters to preserve the equipment as much as possible.

electronics is damaged by water likely, it could have more chance to survive if hit the ground.

They would not be concerned about the electronics being damaged so much as recoverable so the components used can be analyzed and the supply chains traced. They want to know whether any export-restricted gear was used and, if so, who is to blame.

Don’t they already manufacture all our export restricted tech? /s

Jokes aside, I think the analysis will be more angled to proving or disproving the purpose, and identifying intelligence it gathered through some forensic analysis. If it dips into salty water, all circuit boards are immediately shorted. Seems a bit counter productive to me.

Most space and aviation type stuff has conformal coating which should essentially make the boards themselves waterproof.

Of course things can still get shorted and damaged at the connectors, but the whole thing wouldn't be destroyed by water.

They may want to analyze the cryptographic comms. Having working electronics might make that easier.

You can always dry things out. Hitting the ground is harder than hitting water, and it really depends on how they took out the balloon (if they were able to hit it with a small puncture, the balloon would come down more softly, but guns don’t really go to 60k, so it was probably a missile right?

Try to make small puncture in pressured baloon and report your findings here, you might be surprised.

An F22 won't make a small puncture (in fact the video shows the balloon exploding). Water becomes very quickly a hard surface at speed.

You can dry things out, but seawater is really corrosive. After several hours or days spent in such environment, I wouldn't bet on any normal electronics working.

SpaceX experimented with catching spent fairings above water precisely because they wanted to avoid any contact between seawater and internal electronics of the fairing. At the end of the day, they reinforced the fairings electronics against water intrusion (AFAIK?) and this proved to be more economical than catching the fairings with a net, but Chinese airborne spying devices are unlikely to be as hardened against seawater intrusion as SpaceX fairings.

You can see video of the impact- it looks like the missile hit the payload, not the balloon, and spattered it. In light of comments about self destruct, this may have been an effort to disrupt mechanisms that would have completely incinerated sensitive material by instead breaking the sensitive material into pieces

Water alone does not damage electronics - the electricity that flows through the water does, causing electrolysis. Most of the time the damage is also concentrated on the power delivery which tends to be trivial to repair. If the a higher voltage line (say 12V, 3.3V, etc) bridges to a dataline (around ~1V), it can fry ICs, though. For analysis even fried chips would be good enough.

If this is a military item I would be very surprised if it doesn't have a lot of self destruct capability. Surely it will have a package that kicks in if it starts an uncontrolled descent without some sort of override signal from its operators. Especially as it's unmanned.

If I was in charge there would be magnesium strips and bars laced all over it and all that anyone would get from it would be ashes. At a minimum there would be stuff rigged to burn it if it suffered a 10G shock or more - I mean why not? It's junk at that point anyway, why risk it being interesting junk?

The US Navy is apparently pretty good at finding missile debris on the ocean floor. Since they know where it hit the water, they can probably find it.

They might not even care that much, if they've seen this model of ballooncraft before.

Yah I believe that. But all the electronics will be shorted and likely damaged by salty water, which is conducive.

It seems like the electronics should be in an enclosure to protect them from the extreme cold, low air pressure, radiation, etc. they would encounter at 60,000 feet. Whether that would survive the fall is a different question.

"from the extreme cold, low air pressure, radiation"

That is a different threat than saltwater and huge pressure (even in relatively shallow waters, the pressure at the bottom will be massively bigger than ambient atmospheric pressure).

If I had to bet, I would expect stratospheric devices to crack like eggs in such conditions, unless they were specially developed to be both stratospheric and underwater.

You can still learn a lot from broken electronics, even if you cannot power them up. Have you seen what utterly destroyed hard drives data recovery specialists can get data from?

NYTimes is reporting that this is actually the fifth balloon to cross into our airspace. First four were seemingly ignored, three times under the Trump administration and once before during Biden’s.

The implication of that being the shootdown was a media-initiated event. After civilians saw the balloon from the ground, and it became lead story on every news site, with the MAGA press calling Biden "weak", something had to be done, whether it makes military sense or not.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-weak-response-chinese-su...

McCarthy like Pelosi looks to visit Taiwan because of playground pride. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-30/china-urg...

USA is being baited into war on multiple fronts.

I mean it's game theory. Once you start allowing such things you simply have to always allow them. If you allow China to bully you into not visiting Taiwan, they will start bullying you into something else. Neither side will actually do war so it makes sense not to fold

Ah yes, but like others have pointed out, China did in fact allow US ballons over their territory.

(googles loon project)

"Neither side will actually do war so it makes sense not to fold"

And neither side wants war with each other, but if either side is pushed more and more into it from internal and external pressure, than I sadly would not rule out that possibility.

Do you think that did not occur to the military? I’m sure that if they blundered, it was not in some way that was so obvious. Either they simply didnt know about it until it was too late, or they had some reason to not shoot it then that you’re not aware of. The idea that they decided not to do so for no good reason is silly.

I'd assume it was politics who delayed the destruction.

Yeah DOD has huge office buildings full of trained analysts, yet random people on the internet still think they’d do better.

You could spend a lot of time on HN just reminding people that everyone else isn’t an idiot.

The US has great radar capabilities, so we obvious knew it was there. I think that raises the question of why we didn't shoot it down. Maybe we were curious where it was going and we wanted to see how capable at navigating it was? Is it too dangerous to shoot down over land? What was the diplomatic communication with the Chinese? There's many questions that may never be answered in public.

It seems more than likely that this had little surveillance abilities that a satellite doesn't already have, so little intelligence risk. Maybe we went as far as to plant a false target for it.

Alternatively, if this had weapons on it, dropping it on land seems pretty dangerous compared to off the coast.

Additionally, out of diplomacy, we should communicate with the Chinese that we're about to blow their stuff up, especially when they politely pretend it's civilian. Civilized nations need to play political games before we can blow up "civilian" equipment.

Beyond all this, some other comments here have claimed that these balloons have been going on for a few presidencies now, without any being shot down. So why is it a concern now? I'd be worried about suddenly war-hawking something that hasn't been a problem. There's enough going on in the world without a degrading US-Chinese relationship. This is probably simply the case that it's a non-issue that got too much attention and needed to be addressed publicly.

Remember that Loon, the USA Google balloon project, sent similar balloons around the world, including over China.

They didn't shoot our balloons down.

Pretty certain they did not. China controls the Internet a little too seriously and has banned Google for many years to allow them to fly Loon balloons beaming free internet to their population.

They didn't give permission for the internet service to launch there. But they did give overflight permission.

If they gave permission, then that's a very different scenario to this one.

As mentioned in the article, so the order was there the moment it crossed the border.

> The high-altitude balloon was initially spotted over Billings, Montana, on Wednesday.

> Biden gave authorization on Wednesday to take down the balloon as soon as it could be done “without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path,” Lloyd said.

None of it makes sense. They shot it down over the US coast where you are similarly likely to hit a boat or a bather than hitting someone in some empty fields of the midwest (and what about the canadian mountains!). They say it doesn't pose any threat to aviation but nevertheless closed the airports on its path. They say that they are confident it is an intelligence gathering operation by the chinese, but that they don't get anything more than they would get from a satellite (why would they use balloons then, are we suggesting the chinese are stupid?).

I have no idea what's the real story here but it is obvious we are being bullshitted.

They didn’t issue a ground stop for nearby airports until it got to the Carolina coast.

At that point they issued a national security no-fly zone, ground stops at three airports, and issued notices to marine traffic to clear the area.

I disagree. The spy balloon was likely inspected shortly before it entered US territory and the military deemed it as something that was not critical and simply moved anything sensitive out of the way of the a balloon. Meanwhile they likely monitored the emissions of the balloon to do intelligence collecting of Chinese capabilities. The DoD said they were aware of the balloon shortly after it left China and were monitoring it even before it flew over Alaska.

The US probably gained more from this than China gained.

Meanwhile the general public and US media got very invigorated about it so helped stock public opinion against China in general which helps prevent more stealing of secrets to China but increasing the cautiousness of the general populace.

Well China gained a very important piece of information and international agreement.

One, that region is considered the countries airspace.

Two, we can distroy and keep spy gear.

Both are useful rules to bring up in the future.

The U-2 and SR-71 both stopped flying due to the risk of being downed and not moral consequences. Similarly the US (probably) stopped spying on allies due to the risk of another whistleblower and not moral reasons.

At the same time, similar events have happened to establish that space spy satillites are okay.

Finally, this is easy to forget esp. if you're a US citizen. Most of the world considers this incident a bit of a joke. Official responses are along standard narrative lines.

But no one really cares, the US reacted like this because it didn't know why China would want to use this balloon to spy and so wants to nip this activity in the bud.

Sidestepping the geopolitical issues with this for a moment ...

What advantage is there to using a high altitude balloon for surveillance? I have to imagine there are some - like longer loiter time over a specific point, maybe better optics because you are still in atmosphere, it's obviously cheaper than launching a satellite - but I don't really know enough about this kind of hardware to say.

Or maybe the point wasn't to actually look at anything, but instead see how the US would respond?

Significantly closer to the ground, so can capture better resolution pictures. If browsing Google Earth, the high-resolution data around cities originates from airplanes, not satellites.

Hey does that mean we can soon buy high-res, balloon-altitude imagery at low-priced China-rates?

We can already do it better with drones, but those don't fly high enough to be used this way

Turnaround/prototyping. Getting a sensor onto a spy sat is a multi-year process of testing and validating. But a new balloon can probably be built and flown in a matter of weeks. So any country trying to learn how to spy from above might want to build up the relevant corporate knowledge using balloons.

Why did they need to test it over the United States though? If the purpose was prototyping you’d think they could have done that locally

Who is to say they already have? And they felt it was time to put the thing to use.

Testing acceptability?

Probably also why such a dramatic response from the US.

Before satillites flew over enemies no one was too sure if they'd be attacked immediately (they weren't).

Chinese doesn't need to learn how to spy or build up knowledge, and they surely have plenty of satellites at this point.

It's 11 miles vs 350+ miles. Certainly you have the ability to get dramatically better imaging than from a satellite.

One of the most technically challenging things about reconnaissance satellites is dealing with the high speed at which the satellite moves over the target. A balloon flies much lower and vastly more slowly. It can loiter over an area, sucking in electronic signals and taking photographs with extremely high fidelity.

I don’t think the Chinese meant for this balloon to cross the United States. I believe they were testing it for use over other countries or perhaps for use during wartime. Their apology was way too quick for this to have been anything other than a genuine accident.

Did they actually apologize? I thought all they said is that it was a weather balloon. Regardless, I'm very interested in what hardware was actually on this thing. Hopefully the public gets a summary of what USN pulls up during recovery.

“… the uncharacteristic speed and contrition of China’s statement as indications that it was probably a genuine error…”

https://www.economist.com/china/2023/02/03/how-a-balloon-bur...

They put out a statement a few hours ago whining that it was shot down so I wouldn't take that "apology" for much.

Can you share a link to the statement?

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202302/t2023020...

The "how we use data" popup, on the article about surveillance, was awkward

The route is almost impossible to be a coincidence though

It has to be along a jet stream, so you would be correct. It isn’t coincidentally along that jet stream, since it’s a balloon, and maneuverability is extreme limited to going up and down to catch different streams.

Wouldn't that be much more convenient to just use those passenger planes?

...but a satellite is a stable platform, and a balloon is anything but.

After your "weighing paint" comment I think you should probably stop talking.

But according to some comment in this thread, it has happened several times before.

If true, that's unlikely to be a mistake.

LiDAR, plus it could be a dry run for more advanced balloons with offensive capabilities.

The precursor to a strategic balloon arms race that it chills the blood to contemplate. All it takes is one push of the button and, 14 days later, death comes drifting in from above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4UFQWKjy_I

Radiometrics - being closer than orbit and having a much longer linger time drastically increases the signal count to any gamma spectrum gear that might be on board.

Whether or not that reveals any non usual background signal of interest is an interesting ponder.

It can pick up other strategically useful info than just photographs such as radio comms and relay it back to home via satelite.

The one advantage it really has over satellites is how long it can stay on station and still be relatively near to the target. I'd personally guess it's a signals intelligence platform rather than anything telescopic.

The fact that this became a story at all is purely geopolitical in my opinion. Perhaps to do Blinkens up coming Beijing visit (which has since been canned). As far as I can tell the chinese dislike bad press like this. Having the balloon become a fiasco becomes a reason to cancel the trip. Can't exactly tell the why's but this is my guess.

The cancellation came from the US side, not the Chinese side.

Exactly my point, having the balloon become a fiasco becomes reason to cancel the trip. There's some tit for tat that we don't know about.

100%. If the balloon was a threat, why wasn't it shot down over Alaska? Or earlier on it's trip over the continental US. There was no threat... Here's an opportunity to drum up a lot of FUD and use it as a geopolitical lever.

Also painting China bad is a great method of painting yourselves in better light domestically. Both sides of politics in the US have vested interest in this narrative.

Im pretty impressed that it made it all the way across the continent in a couple days, i had no idea high altitude balloons could move that fast.

Technically the ballon isn't moving itself in anyway at all, it instead is depending on the wind. As the atmospheric pressure lowers the maximum speed of the wind can increase greatly. For example the speed of the jet stream commonly exceeds 275 miles per hour. It looks like the strongest jet winds were closer to canada, had the jet been in the US it could have made it across the country in a day.

There was mention by the Chinese that is had some motive power of its own, or at least strongly implied when their PR said some the thing like “limited maneuvering capability”. That seems to indicate that it had some. It would a bit surprising if a payload the size of 2-3 school buses wasn’t outfitted with a reasonable amount of controllability, at least some control surfaces even if they inexplicably excluded even minimal and limited propulsion.

Probably ballast control to select favorable winds at different altitudes

A reserve of buoyant gas and/or some weights to drop

"Maneuvering capability" probably means that it can affect its course (probably by ascending or descending to find more favorable winds), not speed.

Not much they could do there. Highly likely just up and down: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-ballo...

Unless the Chinese have balloon control tech we’ve never even fathomed before. That would be way scarier than the balloon itself.

"Officials said the balloons are part of a fleet that China uses for surveillance, and they can be maneuvered remotely through small motors and propellers."

https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government...

Imagine the earth is also spinning under the balloon?

That doesn't really matter, but the jetstream does matter. That's why it is going West-to-East to begin with.

It doesn’t matter for the same reason that the earth doesn’t go flying out from under you if you jump into the air. Yes, it’s spinning, but so is everything else, so it nets to 0

Yeah, atmospheric winds and the jet stream are impressive forces. There is a lot of convection going on up there.

Winds are seriously fast at higher altitudes — check out the different wind speeds using the "height" option on this site: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/ort...

I poked at the website a bit and the fastest wind speed I could find in the world was roughly 360 km/h. Over the US there were some 250 km/h winds.

That is interesting!

The jetstream is fast enough that it factors into any flight at altitude when it comes to fuel estimations and path calculations, up to 12% difference or so iirc.

Indeed this is really obvious to anyone who regularly travels to California and back to the somewhere on the eastern half of the US (or vice versa). The time it takes for the east bound leg is way faster than the west bound leg. Going from San Francisco to Detroit for example is about an hour faster on the east bound direction.

I actually think it might just be a stray weather balloon. If they considered it a security threat they would've downed it before it reached continental US. Overall it's a fair resolution. It's a good political move to raise public awareness of tensions with the PRC (you'd be surprised how many people don't know). Downing it is mostly symbollic and completes the safety narrative.

F35 signature probe

Seems unlikely, considering the size of the payload and the presence of propellers to help it navigate.

Were the balloons from China transiting over Guam and Hawaii also blown of course? There are enough of these incidents for it to not seem like a coincidence.

I’m not in the defense industry neither know how the Chinese spy agency works but I guess there are more covert ways to spy than sending a 20ft ballon half way around the world.

One theory is that the Chinese know that. This could be them sending a message: "If you defend Taiwan, we can get over your heads cheaply and easily". The only casualties on the U.S. mainland during WW2 were Japanese balloons dropping bombs on the west coast. I doubt that symbolism was lost on the military or the Biden administration.

That can't be the message. You saw how easy it was to down the balloon.

It was easy to down one balloon during peace-time. You're right.

Please see my comment further below for why that might not work in aggregate during a real military conflict.

Edit: I'll paste it here in case it gets buried:

I really do wonder if this is them testing that they can reliably and cheaply get high-altitude balloons to the U.S. mainland. In the event of a military conflict, I can imagine them swarming us with these. They must cost far, far less than the average American military aircraft. If our air power becomes partly tied up defending Taiwan, dropping bombs from craft like these might be an effective strategy to demoralize the U.S. population. I commented this above but I feel it's worth repeating here: the only casualties in the U.S. mainland during WW2 were Japanese balloons dropping bombs on the west coast[1].

I also wonder if this operation will end up backfiring. Suddenly, lots of people in the U.S. have Chinese aggression on their mind. Knowing Americans pretty well, I would expect this to actually increase public support for the defense of Taiwan. Inshallah.

1. https://amp.smh.com.au/world/north-america/when-japanese-bal...

I thought the whole thing was blown out of proportion and was almost certainly a weather balloon mistake, but I forgot about that WWII anecdote, and you are absolutely right. The odds of it actually being related to military just went up a lot in my calculations.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you just need a single plane with a machine gun on board to take down hundreds of these if you cared to take them down? And you can spot them far, far away and take them down far away from the coast, can't you?

I mean, they can't really do evasive maneuvers, they're not fast, they don't fight back, they're not armored, you wouldn't need super modern missiles.

It appears this particular balloon was traveling at 60000 feet altitude. The flight ceiling of an F-22 is 50000 (according to the internet, although the actual number is very likely classified). If that's correct, then shooting a balloon from 10000 feet below with a machine gun is not easy. Even if you put some holes in it, such a balloon is not going to simply pop like a party balloon. It very likely does not have a pressure differential between the inside and the outside, so the holes will simply allow the air to mix slowly (very slowly) with the lifting gas inside (hydrogen or helium). It will probably take days or weeks before the balloon goes down.

The effective range of the F-22's Vulcan Cannon is 2000 feet - That's where you expect about a quarter of the shots to hit... When you're talking about a fighter-jet sized target. The bullets will easily travel, still at kill velocity, well beyond that. I have no doubts that for a slow moving target such as a balloon, they can spray and pray, and pop it every time.

You might be right. On the other hand, today they used a missile. Such a missile costs about $200k, while a Vulcan round is under $20 (collectors can buy one round for $20, see [1], the military can probably buy in bulk for much less).

Maybe they just wanted to show off. But maybe it's just not that easy to take down a high flying balloon with unguided munitions.

[1] https://www.gunbroker.com/item/968543844

My understanding as a layman is that we cannot shoot objects at altitudes 60,000ft+ with machine guns. We need fighter jets equipped with specialized missiles, or ground-based SAMs, that are very expensive, and have some limitation on their range.

Meh, countermeasures for even lots of balloons are not difficult to imagine.

For lots of balloons way out of reach of fighter aircraft? What is there apart from expensive missiles that can operate at such altitudes?

Balloons carrying EMPs?

This came up my mind too. Have read that a high altitude EMP bomb would cause havoc on modern infrastructure.

Not sure about the details though. Hope someone knowledge can chime in.

“EMP” is mostly a Hollywood thing. Not that is entirely fabricated or anything, but it’s almost entirely popular science articles and action movies, very little real weapons systems, and the movies create a lot of misconceptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_warfare is the closest related thing.

What you would actually do is see if you could jam its comms, hit it with a laser (these exist as actual practical weapons these days), or engineer tiny high altitude anti aircraft missiles, either something that already exists or small mods to existing tech for the use case.

The US has done tons of research on high energy lasers to the point we had weapons that could target ICBMs. Now for anti-missile they weren't terribly practical, but for a large slow ballon its possible they could be. I've not found any research on lazing balloons, but I guess it exists out there somewhere.

How do quickly can those lasers be repositioned and fire? Couldn't China just launch a ton of these from many locations and let those disperse further, and make them extremely reflective in the relevant wavelengths? Also, not sure if a few small-ish holes would actually bring one of these down, they don't have a big pressure differential at altitude.

Then they're going to be shocked when they realize how satellites work

China has ICBMs with nuclear warheads. No one is confused about whether China has the ability to harm Americans on American soil.

No one is confused about the result of the use of nuclear weapons. Has Russia used them yet in their almost year-long war against Ukraine? Has the U.S.? Update your assumptions. All major powers are exploring how they might wage war short of nukes.

>All major powers are exploring how they might wage war short of nukes.

Certainly not with balloons.

The Chinese are a very innovative major power. Underestimate them at your own risk.

Yes but they are a major power because they have a large military and hundreds/thousands of strategic nuclear weapons. Not because they have some balloons.

That's what they want you to believe.

It’s odd to simultaneously say that nuclear weapons are irrelevant to the discussion and yet say that it would be an underestimate to expect that they probably wouldn’t rely on balloons.

Do you think a nuclear power could wage a conventional war against the U.S. on U.S. soil without it escalating very quickly to nuclear war? That would indeed be a significant update to my assumptions. Nothing about Russia and Ukraine has caused a similar update to my assumptions for the incredibly obvious reason that Ukraine is not a nuclear power.

I expected this to be some dude’s project that got blown out of proportion.

Thats why I am waiting in more info to come out and not jumping on the "evil Chinese spies" band wagon. It could be "evil chinese spies," but I also know there are communities like Ham Radio that people around the world have balloons they deploy.

And yea, the DoD said it may be. But I think the DoD is still looking for WMDs in Iraq.

There is report of another one across Costa Rica.

The balloon diameter was more like 40-60 meters.

20ft payload. Making this a very large system as far as high altitude balloons are concerned. The balloon is about the size of a football field

So that is how many desktop computers worth of processing power? Or how many cars worth of sensor equipment? What did they need so much space/weight carrying capacity for?

But not many ways are as cheap and close to the ground if you don't care about being found out.

It would have been hilarious if those turned out to be ADS-B receivers launched by plane tracking enthusiasts but AFAIK it's confirmed that those are with Chinese origin and I find it unlikely being benign because in that case the Chinese would have informed the US about these unlike they seek escalation.

I also find it fascinating that these balloons were not discovered sooner, reminds me of the stray soviet era military drone that flew half of the EU without detection to crash far away from Ukraine.

Maybe the world is not under complete surveillance just yet.

Is there any proof that it wasn't discovered earlier? It's difficult to prove a negative. It could have been discovered earlier but monitored differently and then when it became news, monitored overtly for different reasons.

If it isn't an immediate threat that you have to stop, why let an adversary know your capabilities (that you can detect them).

Well, these were reported by civilians over landlocked states and there's no indication that the balloons were spotted earlier.

The military is unlikely to report their surveillance activities to the media.

There was no overt indication that the balloons were spotted earlier.

Except the statements from Canada that are very suggestive.

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/news/20...

>there's no indication that the balloons were spotted earlier

No, the balloon was tracked when it entered Alaska on Jan 28 https://abc7news.com/where-the-chinese-surveillance-balloon-...

Thanks!

There was a thread on Twitter - which I didn't bookmark - which suggested there was a DoD statement that they'd tracked a number of these back at least as far as Trump's term.

And there were suggestions they might also have been used elsewhere, not just in the US/Canada.

As for what intel they could collect - a payload of that size would be equivalent to an airliner full of ELINT systems, rather like the US Rivet series. So that would include possible decryption of comms, and potentially precision mapping, analysis of traffic patterns, tests of local backdoor access, and so on.

Not all of that is easily done by satellite.

It is common for countries to not reveal that they have noticed something.

Revealing that you've noticed tells the enemy about your surveillance abilities.

I don't know about that, those were spotted by the civilians using not exactly high tech gears.

That doesn't meam that the military didn't spot it first but just didn't tell anyone.

Congrats to the military then for letting the Chinese conduct surveillance in order to conceal the fact that they have employees with eyes.

While being watched by the US military, thus giving it potentially valuable information on how China conducts its surveillance. It's turtles all the way down.

For some reason a lot of people really want to believe that the military was all over it without any indication whatsoever. I guess it feeds from the need of knowing that someone(the correct one I guess?) is watching.

> For some reason a lot of people really want to believe that the military was all over it without any indication whatsoever

Not for me at least. I never claimed the military did anything (discovered it, surveilled it), just that it's possible that they could have done something without others knowing.

I just think it's extremely bad form to assume things that there's no evidence for - both about the balloon and the military, and about why people are commenting.

A lot of things are possible, like maybe the God really put the fossils in the soil and the world is just a few thousand years old. That said, I usually like to have at least a clue about that being the case. Also, Occam's Razor.

I don't think we need to go off-topic and discuss theology here.

Regarding Occam's Razor, it's pretty simple that the military keeps secrets.

How did all the conspiracy theorists collectively forget how many spy satellites are in orbit? Were they flashy-thingied by the spy balloon, or do chem-trails (or the belief therein) cause amnesia?

Unless it flew over a secret research base I don't know what a balloon could gather that I can't already get from google maps or public USGIS datasets.

Signals intelligence

Like what? The radio waves traveling over the US are not a secret.

Think metadata, if you will. Where signals originated, how often and what times of day, etc.

It would be pretty absurd to believe the US military is not tracking every inch of its own air space.

What if its not actually feasible to do that? We have lot's of sensors and cameras everywhere, those would have been redundant if total surveillance was possible.

There are wide swaths of the US airspace that do not have strong radar coverage, certainly not at 80,000 feet.

Most of the ocean is unmonitored, too. Remember MH370? We lost it in the air and we couldn't find it in the ocean. :-)

I mean, it doesn’t mean we couldn’t, just that it was not worth revealing our ability to do so over one airliner crash where no one was likely to survive. They didn’t directly act on intelligence in enigma for the same reason either if memory serves. Tin foil hats are itchy…

If your argument is "MH370", it's a weak one. No one has radar coverage in the southern Indian Ocean because no one needs it.

There was an article about that very topic on HN just recently. It was not even remotely over US airspace, and the pilot had evidently threaded the needle through the radar coverage of several nations.

Umm, NORAD is able to track Santa - this balloon is much easier.

It’s most likely that this was observed and tracked by NORAD from the very beginning. The Pentagon had to publicly address it only when there were multiple reports by the public. There was little to be gained by publicizing it.

There is now a second one over Costa Rica. https://www.crhoy.com/mundo/un-segundo-globo-de-vigilancia-c...

Why is everything a narrative these days? That word comes up with ridiculous frequency.

Do we believe we are part of some kind of Truman show experiment?

As for it being a weather balloon, it seems they must be floating a lot of these balloons lately to check the 'weather'.

Yes, we are part of some kind of Truman show experiment. Every form of media you consume, which in aggregate forms much of your perception of the world at large and reality in general, is engineered to manipulate you with a narrative to serve someone's agenda, be that advertising, propaganda, psychological manipulation, addiction or manufactured consent.

This is true but has got absolutely nothing to do with whether the balloon is being used for spying or not.

Without first hand, primary sources of information, the media and their dissemination of information (or lack thereof) is a form of manipulation to suite someone's agenda, and has a lot of analogs with the truman show.

For example, nobody right now, except may be the US military, knows whether it's a real spy balloon, or really just a weather balloon. But the media reporting of it has framed it as a spy balloon with high probability.

Yes we can ignore the media because all the media is garbage, I agree on that. But I also believe that the the likelihood the balloon is being used for spying is probably pretty high.

>As for it being a weather balloon, it seems they must be floating a lot of these balloons lately to check the 'weather'

I have no idea what this balloon is, but know that thousands of weather balloons are released every day worldwide. That means China is likely releasing several hundred a day.

Weather balloons don't contain payloads the size is school buses. They fly up, pop and come down, the payload being around a kilogram or so.

> I actually think it might just be a stray weather balloon.

Most experts seem to think that is unlikely because its payload was much larger than a weather balloon needs.

It's also got some sort of maneuvering system that you don't find on most weather balloons, or even on most non-weather high altitude balloons.

Generally, balloons either have no maneuverability at all, or they can go up and down. Since the wind often blows in different directions at different altitudes that gives the up and down ones some ability to control their course by going up or down to a layer going the right direction.

But in the winter in the US there isn't that much variation. Right now for example its blowing east from around 4000 ft to something like 70000 ft or more.

In the summer there is a lot more variation, so normally if you were trying to send a spy balloon over the US you'd want to do it in summer. Then you can use altitude changes to guide it or have it stay roughly over a target.

A huge maneuverable balloon in winter in the US is something special.

Surely it's not a very good spy balloon though if it can be observed from the ground with the naked eye ...

> Generally, balloons either have no maneuverability at all, or they can go up and down. Since the wind often blows in different directions at different altitudes that gives the up and down ones some ability to control their course by going up or down to a layer going the right direction.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the balloon was maneuvered by anything more than up and down control. But if you have a link I’d like to take a look? This is the best I could find so far:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-ballo...

Am I the only one with “99 Luftballoons” in my head?

Nena probably got an extra $5 in royalties this month from the large number of people who immediately thought of that song.

And Nina Hagen probably also got an extra $5000 royalties this month from the even larger number of people who immediately confused her with Nena.

(Well deserved royalties, to compensate her for all the confusion!)

https://auntie-anti.livejournal.com/576.html

>y'all look the same to me.

>99 red balloons. Nina vs Nena: the continuing saga.

>Nina Hagen= Nina Hagen.

>Gabriele Susanne Kerner= Nena (nickname band name).

>Yes, they are both german women who's music career heights were in the 80's, and their first "names" are very similar, but that does not make them the same person.

>Nina Hagen= "The Mother of Punk".

>Nena= some sweaty chick in a band that had one fluffy hit single, and yes, please know that i'm talking about "99 red balloons". psst...the german version is better.

>Recently-ish photos of Nina Hagen were posted in a decent and somewhat elitist (in a good way) lj makeup community. She's a good example of outrageous makeup, and "known", or so I thought, for her style...as much as for her voice and music, since hers is not like anyone else's. I was terribly terribly terribly dead wrong. With the many-o-many comments that were being made, each stating a similar; "omfg i LOVE Nina Hagen and i loooove her song 99 red balloons!!! it's my most favourite retro song i love the 80's!" There was no correction in sight amongst the gathering list of commenters declaring their love and 'hoping for cool points' knowledge of Nina.

>This is Nina Hagen... [...follow links for outrageous photos...] doesn't even scratch the surface of all the looks, but i'd be here all year posting photos to almost accomplish that. she's deliciously fucked.

>And now pay close attention. This is Nena, the singer of "99 red/luftballoons"... um...yeah... And i even got a photo of them together. not the same person!

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v732/stabbings/ninanena.j...

>The bigger difference is in their singing voices actually.

>Nena= nice, normal, regular chick singing voice.

>Nina Hagen= is a vocal genius. studied opera and incorporates that in her insane variety of deranged sweetness, down to an extreme that makes all death metal bands sound like a choir of girl scouts with mints thins in their nickers.

https://www.last.fm/music/Nina+Hagen/_/99+Red+Balloons

https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/87616/

https://twitter.com/optiblu2013/status/1466506526831611906

https://songsear.ch/song/Nina-Hagen/99-Luft-Balloon/1481506

https://teenage.cz/texty/nina-hagen/-/99-red-balloons-99-luf...

Herman Brood, Nina Hagen & Lene Lovich - Crocodile (1979)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFIjlxl-DLI

Nina Hagen New York New York

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oiscau0zJKc

The closest she ever came to covering 99 Red Baboons was Auf'm Bahnhof Zoo:

NINA HAGEN - Auf´m Bahnhof Zoo "Live" 1978

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oiscau0zJKc

99 Red Baboons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz-z_JV6wSE

http://www.amiright.com/parody/80s/nana0.shtml

It was supposed to be a warning, not a handbook!

99个红色气球

Ah, who knew that a 1983 pop song was actually a prescient geopolitical analysis of the state of affairs between China & the West 4 decade in the future! Ahead of her time.

Were any american U2 spy planes ever shot down?

How is a novel weather balloon different from a spy balloon, before you shoot it down?

Is shooting at unmanned aircraft legal in international law? Is sending balloons over other states illegal?

Media in germany as usual did nothing to explain anything about the actual facts of what anything means. They just copy and paste the official DPA news and let people without a clue write comments about that, but no actual expert is ever shown in 8 o'clock news for any crisis that takes less than a week.

So they waited until the balloon was over sea.

This raises the question: why didn't the military see it coming and destroy it before it crossed the border?

they claimed they started tracking it over the Pacific even, my guess is we just don’t have the full story, perhaps they didn’t want to fail at shooting it down quickly, succeed at responding the “real” way and give something away, or spring some other “trap card”, or it’s all a lie and was our own thing that got away or just a distraction and everything after that was reactionary and opportunistic, we may never know

Because it wasn't a political kerfuffle then and they weren't gonna be the ones to make it into one.

I wonder...is there any value to:

- IDing components, maybe even using some x-ray tech like US satellites have

- Developing an idea of what this thing vacuums up, informationally

- Switching our monitoring posture to also vacuuming up the same as it travels along, as if we are co-spying on our own stuff

- Using the information product to help harden any sensitive information that was vacuumed, for counter-intel purposes

This would fit the general parameters of what the public saw happening (almost nothing, then bang as soon as the balloon is floating over literally nothing).

If its anything like the cold war where we did this with the Russkies (and prior to that, The Nazis) it makes sense to me it would have significant electronic warfare value.

This isn't the first balloon with equipment on it that has overflown US territory (which should also put to rest the 'rogue weather balloon' theory). China has been doing this ever since Trump started levying import taxes on Chinese goods. This particular balloon was brazen enough to be loitering over military targets for some time. It makes sense to do a shoot down over the ocean so you can have a better chance to recover the payload for analysis.

Since you appear to believe this balloon had a surveillance mission, please explain what data it could conceivably have collected that isn't much easier to collect some other way. The military targets over which you suggest this aircraft intentionally loitered do not even have restricted airspaces. Anyone could get in a plane and fly right over them at whatever altitude they choose and nobody would even notice. You can fly circles over Malmstrom AFB until you run out of fuel, if you want.

I think it would be considered illegal espionage if someone working for the PLA rented a plane and flew it over military bases. Balloons have more plausible deniability and less personal risk.

SIGINT, ELINT, and MASINT. Putting a bunch of radars on a balloon platform is relatively cheap, much cheaper than a satellite. It's also got better plausible deniability than a similarly equipped airplane.

Ground penetrating radar over military bases can yield useful intelligence. So can gauging the response times and radio characteristics of air defense radars. Then there's good ol' photo reconnaissance. Such a huge platform could easily have stabilized mounts for high resolution cameras. Being an order of magnitude closer to the targets makes for better photos.

The most likely scenario is the network surveillance. The defense dept has already confirmed the balloon was carrying surveillance equipment. I think the real point here was to probe the US response.

I posted this link earlier but it was tracked. Here is a flight path of Canadian fighters checking the balloon out as it crossed towards Montana. https://twitter.com/steffanwatkins/status/162136299808111001...

The link was in this longer, and good article: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/chinas-spy-balloon-ove...

Oh wow, that's messed up. Kind of irritating to see the thing was being closely tracked all through BC and just... nothing? Nice...

I mean we only know what we know so far. I admittedly haven't followed this really closely but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a gamble that the public wouldn't notice it. Or maybe it was incompetence or indecision.

It was surprising how this balloon spread through the public consciousnesses, kinda like the balloon boy hoax I suppose.

Yeah, we have no real vision into the actual facts, only what gets told to the public, so it's tough to judge. I can imagine it not even being a surveillance balloon at all (though it probably is). I'm always skeptical around stuff like this, haha

Maybe they weren't sure at that point that it was unmanned? Shooting it down would have been a whole different story then

CF18 seem to have a service ceiling of 15km. This thing was about 20km high. Could they shoot it if they wanted?

Man, I don't know. I'm still effectively a kid who thinks planes are cool but never got too into the specs. There was a a satellite shot down by an F-15 so maybe there was a rough plan if the balloon seemed like a big deal? Or the service ceiling is conservative and downgraded? https://avgeekery.com/that-time-an-f-15-pilot-shot-down-a-sa...

I was reading about the choice of missile used for shooting it down uses lasers for the fuse instead of radar which might have had issues with the balloon depending on the material. Also this seems be the first F22 kill.

Yes, if they had standard medium range missiles like the AMRAAM.

But can missiles hit a balloon? I assumed they were designed to target large hot metallic objects.

Is this the first time that the something was shot down over the continental US (outside of training)?

Apparently not, civil war and WWII (both balloons btw) search for "down" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Army_Balloon_Corps and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb

haha, so the first military aircraft shot down over the US was a case of friendly-fire. The Union shot down it's own reconnaissance balloon, although technically the balloon was a civilian device.

In previous times, the US would ignore these balloons and quietly take them down. Instead they made a big deal out of it and milked it. Brilliant and opposite of what china expected

Given that it was visible to the naked eye and people were talking about it, it's silly to blame this on the government.

>Given that it was visible to the naked eye

But why did this garner so much attention compared to the weather ballons that the US launches on a regular basis?

Probably because it was quite a bit larger than usual, going by initial reports. What do you want the government to do, lie and pretend it's one of theirs?

It also helps that one side of the political spectrum were able to use it to cast doubt and blame at the other side of the spectrum

There is an enemy balloon flying in your sovereign space and all you could think about is it enables the other side of the politics? Would you say the same thing if its an enemy war plane. And there is no way to to tell which is which just because it looks cute and fluffy floating in the air.

I'm not from the US but at this rate your country doesn't need any external enemies.

Sadly right now social media bubbles seem to be fostering the whole "if you're not with me, then you're my enemy" mentality that used to be only the realm of extremists.

You realize that this isn’t all that novel a situation, right?

Weather balloons are tiny, we’re comparing a cardboard box with a small house here scalewise.

Weather balloons dont hang around, literally. They climb constantly to record data across the altitude bands. This thing was relatively stable, so not a weather balloon.

It has a big equipment platform hanging off it, and it allowed the right wing people to blabber about POTUS being soft on China or whatever for a news cycle.

Not even just weather balloons. Launching balloons using ham radio by amateurs is also pretty popular thing to do by ham radio operators around the world.

Not sure where your info is from, but this balloon was seen by the naked eye and all over social media. As someone who lives in Montana, many many people could see it. The idea that the USG prompted the publicity is unlikely to be accurate (would suggest a calculated social media psyop). Not impossible, but not likely.

How big was it? I don't mean your well thought out estimate, I mean your gut impression.

Smaller than the end of your pinkie at arm's length?

I gather that it gave the impression of being somewhat normal sized and much closer than it actually was, gauging by the number of people who thought they could shoot it down with their firearm.

Not the commenter, but my gut impression was that it looked a lot lower than normal commercial air traffic that I see around here. The circling fighter jets were very hard to see (other than their vapor trails) but the balloon was extremely visible.

there’s a bit of difference between it being spread as a meme online and then quietly fading into the background v.s. the President of the country ordering it to be shot down by a jet and then announcing said order to the public.

just how close/far is this from “business as usual”? if this balloon were no big deal, i wouldn’t expect it to be escalated to the Commander in Chief. which tells me either (a) there’s (suspected to be) some real serious shit aboard that balloon or (b) Whitehouse is making a show of this for political reasons (e.g. to justify upcoming action against China, another surveillance bill, etc) or (c) top officials are clueless and don’t understand the signals they’re giving to the public here.

none of those explanations i find reassuring.

I pick (b)! There was a negotiations meeting with China coming up that was canceled.

(d) The government usually ignores it, but the public caught onto this one and started calling Biden weak on China for ignoring it.

(d) Joe Biden is desperately in need of some crisis. He is facing a Republican Congress which is going to accuse him of working with his son to secure their financial future through shady corrupt deals in China and Ukraine.

Eh, it's been a slow news week for the US.

According to the front pages...New England had some cold weather today.

if there was as you say some real serious shit aboard they would have shot it right away before it got to do its thing, no? I really don't buy "after it could cause damage by falling" because it flew over some pretty deserted spaces.

How did you know it was chinese ?

It seems more likely that the balloon being visible forced the gov to acknowledge the balloon. It's unclear if that had any effect on the decision of when to shoot it down. Apparently they had been tracking it over the Aleutians, so they could have downed it over the Pacific, if they hadn't pussyfooted it.

But would you want to go recover it in the alaskan wilderness, possibly on a mountain, in winter? They waited until it got somewhere more convenient.

I don't think they are really that interested in recovering it- if you look at the photos, they targeted the payload instead of just the balloon. Only going to be litte bits leftover. https://news.usni.org/2023/02/04/3-navy-warships-fbi-now-hun...

They hit it with a sidewinder, which has a warhead more akin to a shotgun blast. Nothing will be totally destroyed. Enough will remain of its various sensors and antennas to tell exactly what it was doing.

Bullshit. Had civilians not seen it the government would never have reported it.

Not even as a purposeful distraction from something more important?

this is interesting that it's downvoted, as in the day since multiple articles are showing up that the hype of this balloon is incongruous with the many ignored over the previous 4 years.

The US state apparatus did not make a big deal of this. The media and the public did, and the US state apparatus answered to the media and the public, as is their duty.

>"The US state apparatus did not make a big deal of this."

Cancelling / postponing (whatever it will be) Blinken's visit to China does seem like a big deal.

Via NPR transcript of a segment today: [1]

> SIMON: This trip was supposed to happen this weekend, right?

> KELEMEN: Yeah. I mean, we were planning to fly out last night. We had our visas in hand and our bags sort of packed. So this was very last minute. Though Blinken had been raising concerns with the Chinese about this balloon since Wednesday, when pictures started appearing on social media of this thing way far up in the sky over Montana.

My interpretation is that this move was likely forced by the public furor, which I posit was organic and driven primarily by the media and the public, rather than driven by the US government as the comment I replied to suggests.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/04/1154473950/u-s-cancels-blinke...

That's the way it seems to me as well. The earlier excuse about not shooting it down over Montana because of falling debris didn't make a ton of sense. I think they didn't want to shoot it down because the threat was long ago characterized and the standard operating procedure is to ignore these balloons. But once the public started making a big deal about it, politicians respond to that.

And I agree this has been largely because of public furor. Now, something that's interesting is 'ufo' videos have been trending on tiktok for some time with lulls and resurgences in their postings. When this large object showed up and people started capturing pictures it is no surprise to me it took off on social media.

> Cancelling / postponing (whatever it will be) Blinken's visit to China does seem like a big deal.

It's all political posturing. Look into the history of if you are allowed to take a photo with a handshake or not in political photographs. It's just part of the game to ensure you still have power or relevance,

I'm not saying it happened here, but the US media has a very, very long history of being happy to take a ball from the white house, military, or cabinet - and run with it.

Fair dinkum! We probably won't know for sure what maybe happened until someone involved maybe writes a book in 5-50 years.

> The US state apparatus did not make a big deal of this.

The majority leadershio of the House are not “state apparatus”? Because they were the main source fanning a big deal out of it.

I mean, no political commentary intended, but I don't really see the present house as like, well represented at the helm of the government? It seems like the state apparatus is keeping them at arms length from power, yes, due to the internal turmoil that has been ongoing for some time. Thus I basically mentally lump them in with "media and public."

The media is the US state apparatus.

> The media and the public did, and the US state apparatus answered to the media and the public, as is their duty.

Their job isn't to respond to every current outrage in the media cycle. That's why we have a representative democracy and not a full direct democracy. They're to be held accountable for their overall performance every few years, and in the interim are supposed to be resilient to the short term ebbs and flows of public sentiment (which are fickle and can be manipulated) and do what's actually good for the people in the long run.

> the US state apparatus answered to the media and the public, as is their duty.

No, the state feeds the media what it wants to see reported. They can share what they want and they can hide what they want from the media.

What did they use to shoot it down?

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/32...

> An F-22 Raptor fighter from the 1st Fighter Wing at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, fired one AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at the balloon.

So it probably cost >$1M to shoot it down?

How much did that balloon cost to make?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34660282

> So it probably cost >$1M to shoot it down?

Basically free, when you consider they were going to fly planes and shoot missiles anyway for practice.

Except the military has lots of different pots of money and lots of red tape about how they're spent. No guarantees the cost of this little escapade came out of a training fund.

> So it probably cost >$1M to shoot it down?

AIM-9X looks to be around $400k, F-22 is $85k per flight hour, so, probably not.

What's your point?

Seems to be implying if it’s cheap enough then they could send 1 million balloons next time, and it’d be impractical to shoot them all down.

Sounds like a job for a c130 at that point. lol

Sure. $1M for the AIM, and $100M for all the other gear and personnel involved.

It went viral in Montana and was not shot down until it left the country in North Carolina.

If this was a planned media push it would have been shot down before it entered the united states.

Have a single source?

That seems counterintuitive to the political flak that Biden and the military took over the days, seeming incompetent and weak to take down a balloon

Narrator:

"A job well done by the US Military"

I'm glad we have sufficient technology and capability to shoot down a balloon.

What happens next?

The trick is to shoot it down in a way it falls slowly so you can retrieve it and see what is in it, although, I suspect our intelligence agencies have a pretty good idea already.

I have no idea of course, but one thing I thought would be a Stingray, at that altitude you could intercept thousands of cell calls. I doubt that's what it is but the other thing is if it has any radio jamming capabilities or other things of offensive nature.

I doubt it was to get a day of cell phone intercepts since it would be far easier and stealthier for China simply send a Stingray-type device to one of their thousands of industrial espionage agents already operating in the U.S. to drive it around in a van in whatever area and time period they are targeting. In fact, I suspect they (and others) already do that.

I think the purpose for sending the balloon was primarily to analyze the radar and RF environment on approach to U.S. airspace. The secondary purpose may have been as a test to see how and how quickly we would respond to the provocation.

We may not learn much from the wreckage as I suspect we'll find a lot of wide-band software defined radio gear which already uploaded its recorded data via satellite and wiped its software.

True, although from up there you can collect a lot more than on the ground of course. The US does the same thing over international waters off China.

The other concern would be if it has jamming capabilities, you can jam an earth station pretty easily from a balloon and effectively blind our satellites.

Even if there is wreckage, you can tell if there is offensive signal equipment like that.

> The US does the same thing over international waters off China.

That's a good observation. Maybe the simplest explanation is China's "force majeure" claim was "true" and this was a wayward airship that was supposed to have transited the US west coast and Mexico or Latin America. Just like U.S. observational activities in international waters, just a little more invasive. Thus, when the military mentions they are tracking a similar balloon over Latin America-- what they mean is they know this balloon was intended to follow a different route too.

I suspect Hanlon's razor is operational here. China uses those things off in international waters all the time, the fact that this one almost perfectly followed the jet stream seems to indicate it may have had a malfunction of its propulsion system and it drifted with the wind. When the US uses them in the China sea they have the advantage that if there is a malfunction it usually would drift safely West away from China.

The radar and RF on approach might make sense. I just don't see how a provocation test makes any sense though. It is hardly like America is not willing to use military force.

Really, a mistake on the part of China feels like the Occam's razor explanation to me.

It is just very hard to see the risk/reward calculation to do this intentionally with spy networks both on the ground and in space.

It would be fairly rudimentary (in context!) to fit such a device with sensors against certain intrusions (e.g. loss of balloon pressure) which would then trigger near-instant self destruction of electronics.

I would be quite surprised if such a high tech spy device did not have such contingencies as part of it's design.

And suspect it's probably one of the reasons why the risk of an overland shootdown wasn't taken - that is, there's no point risking collateral damage from falling debris, when you know the device will be programmed to wipe itself of most useful information upon being physically compromised.

True, although, evidence of offensive transmitters is difficult to completely destroy, heavy heat sinks and so forth. Simply erasing memory does not obliterate such clues.

I’ve seen some unconfirmed claims that they show it with a missile whose warhead fuse was disabled. Normally anti-aircraft missiles are proximity fused and throw out lots of fragments when they explode, kind of like a giant shotgun blast. With the warhead disabled presumably it just punctured the balloon to deflate it and, as you say, hopefully let it come down intact.

F-22s have a 20mm cannon, and they can operate at 65k feet. I don't know why they would need a disarmed missile just to poke a hole in it.

Perhaps the quantity of holes from an aircraft cannon is harder to control and less surgical than a single ground based missile?

Somehow I doubt wasted funds were at the top of the priority list (because intel is valuable, this whole incident has been a huge "WTF?" so far).

The official service ceiling of the F-22 is only 50,000 feet. There’s no doubt that it can fly higher (for example the F-15 set zoom climb records going up to nearly 100,000 ft) but at those altitudes controlling an aircraft gets a lot more difficult due to the thin air. If the F-22 _does_ have good control at those altitudes then using that capability for the shoot down would be revealing previously unknown (presumably classified) info about it. If it doesn’t, attempting a zoom climb close enough for a cannon shot would carry some risk… even if just risk of missing and having to try again while the whole world watches.

> What happens next?

They retrieve the wreckage and analyze it. We hear nothing further.

Didn't they shoot it over the ocean? What's there to retrieve?

Now we need to develop a high altitude needle gun for popping balloons. I knew all those games I played in school would come in handy one day.

It really is a shame that snarky posts that add nothing of value like this seem to be on the rise on HN. This used to be one of the few places on the internet you could go to avoid brain dead commentary from people who think they're clever and really belong with the children on Reddit.

I really hope that the core group here gets a grip on this. In case you haven't read it in a while:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I understand that some comments may not be what you are looking for in a discussion, but I believe it's important to keep an open mind, strive to be inclusive, and consider the purpose of feedback. Your input can be valuable in helping improve the thread, even if it's not directly actionable. Let's also keep in mind that the interpretation of "snark" is somewhat subjective, and if you feel a trailing question has some value despite a perceived "dumb preamble", perhaps consider leaving it un-upvoted (as I believe you have generously done in this case).

Additionally, there are some helpful tools available to manage content that you find uninteresting or mildly offensive. These are the "[-]" collapse and "next" buttons. If you feel a comment strays too far, the staff at hn@ycombinator.com are very responsive and willing to assist.

What do you feel your comment adds to the discussion?

Superbowl is in a week or so.

The F-22 that shot down the Chinese Spy Balloon is going to do a flyby.

If I were more of a go-getter, I would have been hawking "Chinese Spy Balloon World Tour 2023" t-shirts.

The Us military only shot it down because of pr. Usually you ignore spy planes. The are easy to track, and the military and airforce know how to sit around and wait things out.

America should retaliate with its own balloons with no Intel packages, instead the should be very visible, and at the ceiling of most fighters so China has to waste be anti satellite missiles on cheap balloons.

>>> America should retaliate with its own balloons

I can imagine someone playing 99 luftballons in the background during the launch.

Um, it's kinda hard to do that to China especially in the winter. Prevailing winds would come out of Russia and more westerly countries. I don't think any of them are going to allow a launch or a flyover of a balloon to tease the Chinese government.

Actually I wouldn't be so sure. Western Navies are constantly doing freedom of navigation exercises.

China did shoot down some balloons back in the day. This is 2019.

https://weibo.com/tv/show/1034:4865451742920798?from=old_pc_...

Why not capture the device and confirm it was just a weather probe ?

That is against the idea to use this as an evidence of "China threat".

Where will you find the ladder to reach 58,000 feet? Or is idle conspiracism not bothered by physics at all?

we spy on china and they spy on us. it’s a possibility. and they have good reason to lie about it to avoid embarrassment or worse

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything either of us has said?

What could the balloon possibly have seen that was not visible to Chinese tourists and Chinese satellites.

It was a weather balloon.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned: we were already researching these ourselves: https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/07/06/us-military-balloo...

This exact same balloon type was spotted floating over Japan in 2020 and India in 2022, https://twitter.com/BalloonSciDan/status/1479218147098038278

Plenty of companies are working on airships including in China. Companies building airships of similar scale: https://aviationoutlook.com/airship-manufacturers/

The US puts hundreds of balloons over China, https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/radiosondes

Regarding the last point of US putting balloons over China, that page has the following two paragraphs:

"Worldwide, there are about 1,300 upper-air stations. Observations are made by the NWS at 92 stations - 69 in the conterminous United States, 13 in Alaska, nine in the Pacific, and one in Puerto Rico.

NWS supports the operation of 10 other stations in the Caribbean. Through international agreements data are exchanged between countries worldwide."

This seems to suggest that NWS does not operate those over China but the map simply shows all the balloon weather stations that are part of this system.

Why would there be stations there if the balloons aren't flying over China?

Doesn’t regular flights from China fly into US everyday? How hard would it be to hide and survey the path with some equipment?

I understand it won’t cover a lot given restrictions in flight path, but there are a lot of cities into which the international flights make its way into.

Quite apart from commercial flights, stratosphereic balloon overlight itself is something that happens fairly frequently. There's a reason we didn't hear about it the 4-5 times it happened before within the past several years.

This is a Google balloon that recently fell out of the sky in the Congo: https://twitter.com/kambale/status/1621811081206439937

How does a surveillance balloon get the collected data back to where it is analyzed and used? I suspect the data is relayed by satellite (unless there are collection sites within the US). Which Chinese satellites are able to cover the US?

I assume China has global coverage, as the US does?

Almost certainly by satellite. To wit, every iPhone 14 now has an emergency text feature that works via satellite-- you could potentially just use one of those and send everything base64 encoded.

It releases smaller data balloons.

Most of China' communication satellites are in GEO over Asia, but they do have plenty of remote sensing and ELINT birds that fly over the US.

Is this balloon incident something the Space Force is mandated to deal with? The balloon was shot down by an F-22 and is being recovered by the Navy and Coast Guard, but there is no mention of the Space Force.

> Is this balloon incident something the Space Force

Because it wasn't in space.

> shot down by an F-22

Because it was in the air.

> is being recovered by the Navy and Coast Guard

Because now it's in the water.

The video of the shoot-down shows flashes from the detached-and-falling payload, probably explosive self-destruct devices detonating.

(It'd be shocking if the Chinese didn't include a self-destruct capability.)

Isn't it a hydrogen balloon? Wouldn't some level of explosion be expected?

No. This type of balloon uses helium.

You'll probably still get some information from the wreckage even if a self destruct activated.

Then it's not a very good self-destruct!

It's pretty clearly pieces of solar panel tumbling and catching sunlight as they fall.

China would not risk of flying explosives over the continental US given the US was "balloon bombed" by Japan during WW2.

If the thing crashed in some farmer's field and then blew up when he went to poke it with a stick, it wouldn't start WW3, but would result in huge domestic political pressure to "do something".

Even just video of the thing blowing up mid-air would be horrendous optics. "They were flying something really dangerous over us!"

While Americans panic. I think this is the dumbest way to do surveillance. Especially when China already has TicTok doing a great job.

For the cost of a balloon tied to some plastic junk you just make Americans collectively lose their shit.

It was probably decided early on that the decision to down the balloon in question over non-populated area due to:

1. Balloon itself is filled with water vapor full of ABC material.

2. Payload has dispersal mechanism of dubious material

Nonetheless, in spite of political wrangling, I find it disturbing that we haven’t made a retrieval system capable of snatching things at 60,000 feet.

ahem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...

Still have to force the balloon down to its aircraft's ceiling heights just to be able to snag the balloon.

Someone should do a cost analysis of this incident. How much did the balloon cost to build and operate. And how much did it cost to get an F22 in the air and shoot a sidewinder rocket. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a 10x differential. Maybe this is a good DDoS strategy against the US military.

I wish they had:

a) damaged the balloon lightly to cause it to leak and lower slowly,

b) once at low altitude, perhaps drop a net tied to a float atop it to bog it down further, and

c) once in the water, reel it in.

I know the military can bring something like this balloon down in an orderly manner. Shooting it with a rocket seems crude and risky.

Will be pretty funny in 50 years when we find out this was a DARPA project that malfunctioned

Except China already admitted it's theirs so ..

Did they take it to Area 51?

My man is over here asking the real questions.

If it was flying at 80000ft as initially reported, how did they shot it down? No fighter planes can fly that high. Did they wait until it lowered to the operating altitude?

The US has anti-satellite missiles, for example the RIM-161 [1]. That said, I would guess an AIM-120 [2] air-to-air missile wouldn't have any trouble given it can go Mach 4, I'm guessing a few miles up isn't the hardest thing.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-120_AMRAAM

Why didn't they use machine guns? Perhaps one reason was the risk that if they used machine guns, they would hit the balloon and crash the fighter. In that case, it would have provided China with the worst possible performance of shooting down a U.S. fighter with a Chinese balloon. On the other hand, if they used missiles and shot down the Chinese balloon with flair, we could advertise a strong and brave U.S. The U.S. successfully turned the humiliating situation of a Chinese airspace invasion into an opportunity for the best U.S. performance.

They probably wanted to bring the balloon down as quickly as possible once the decision to do so, and using an exploding warhead makes it easier to keep it in sight as it descended to make recovery easier. Projectile holes would likely just slowly leak for a while making descent take too long.

I already see similar comments in other comments and agree with you and them.

Haven't verified it but former congressman Adam kinzinger claimed Canada did just that. It took over 1000 rounds and 4 hours to accomplish.

People don’t seem to realize how high up this thing was

How high can a machine gun shoot?

>"... size of three school busses..."

Size of school bus in the US range anywhere from 20 to 45 feet. I surprised they did not measure it in anacondas.

Converting school buses to feet doesn't do much good for nearly everybody on this planet. Use metric.

I prefer furlongs.

Washing machines is the standard unit there isn't it?

It was half the radius of a football field.

I'm surprised to find no mentions of Alan Eustace, former VP Eng. of Google, and his record-breaking jump from a balloon that was even higher:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WmaZhpd3hI

Imagine how expensive it was to shoot down this balloon. We sent an expensive F22 which burned a ton of fuel and then shot a very expensive missile at the balloon AND several ships had to clean up several miles of debris?? Send China the check.

Pilots burn a ton of fuel while training. The USAF probably welcomed the opportunity to conduct a novel mission with very little risk.

Plus, now the F-22 won’t go down in history as a fighter that had 0 kills.

Part of me thinks that the US reaction to this was a 'trial balloon' to see how receptive the population is to further conflict. Judging from the sounds of it I'd say very receptive, which is worrying.

How incredibly dumb. Imagine all the delicious ELINT that balloon relayed about the APG-81 RADAR and the missile, which assuredly coat much more than the balloon drone.

Have to agree. Seems like we took a big risk using the F22 for this. I was expecting a super hornet or f15 to get the call on this one.

At the same time, maybe we know that the balloon has no capabilities in this regard and decided to flex.

Who knows.

There is no evidence it had any military purpose, and given a balloon of that size has very little control and easily spotted it would be a terrible platform for spying.

No evidence except the logic for it's existence. It is 100% military. It doesn't need precision control, it's been at 80kft and can see a long way.

It isn't easily spotted at all, and launches are much more visible, but that is irrelevant because we already have non covert observation in the form of satellites.

I presume they had the ability to detect which bands this thing was transmitting on, entirely disable it with some sort of electronic warfare thingy, and then get close enough to shoot

Difficult to jam what hasn't be observed before. If it used something spread spectrum you would have to have a very powerful noise jammer to saturate the satellite receiver, which would have to be precisely located.

The short timeline from "we're not going to shoot this down" to "we shot it down" leads me to believe no in depth analysis occurred. But of course previous balloons may have been observed and even interdicted and we wouldn't necessarily know.

This seems like a worse idea than just collecting the thing and putting it in a faraday cage.

How would you collect it?

Trying to remember what it was called but there was a 60/70s era program that was declassified that claimed to capture returning satellites from orbit using massive nets/parachutes carried behind large aircraft for example a c47 that would snap them right out of the air as they are falling.

Corona. They caught film canisters from spy satellites with nets hanging from planes

That’s capturing film reels dropped from Anerican spy satellites during the Cold War. They were tiny compared to this gigantic balloon

https://www.historynet.com/spy-intelligence-from-the-sky/

With our Star Trek level tractor beam. Of course, maybe we wouldn’t want to reveal that kind of capability to the world just yet.

I was thinking more James Bond. High Altitude Jet Pack.

How do you go about collect it from 65,000 feet?

Should have been pierced to start deflating over the Pacific when it entered the U.S. air defense zone north of the Aleutian Islands on Jan. 28: https://apnews.com/article/politics-united-states-government.... See metal hook at the end of a rope from a helicopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C6_pdSedow

It sounds like it wasnt detected until after it was already over the US and they shot it down over ~47ft deep water so it can be recovered pretty easily

Helicopters can’t fly to 65000 ft, due to the low air density.

A ladder perhaps? Or ... another balloon!

With another balloon? You'd just want to cut off and grab the payload, right?

Not gonna lie, I don't know. But I feel like it's probably more useful to gather information on it than to destroy it.

The video of the shoot-down shows flashes from the detached-and-falling payload, probably explosive self-destruct devices detonating.

(It'd be shocking if the Chinese didn't include a self-destruct capability.)

I have been in "no politics, no news" mode for over a month. I try to do this about once a year. I have yet to tell my wife I do it, but when I am on this limited media consumption she always comments how pleasant I am to be around. I think it is a good thing for all of us to do once in a while, until 80 years ago most news was at best three or four days old, go back 120 years and you're getting only last weeks top ten stories.

All that to say, I could not avoid this. Everyone has told me about this and the whole thing is just silly.

I ignore the majority of it myself.

Maybe I'm a pessimist but there is little I can do to make an impact on geopolitics.

I want to spend my energy on the things I can control and little energy on anything else.

I'm much happier being completely unaware of whatever may be happening with the world.

> Maybe I'm a pessimist but there is little I can do to make an impact on geopolitics.

I think quite the opposite — Geopolitics is impacted all the time by your actions. What you buy, what you say on forums like HN (where potentially tens of thousands read your comment), how you educate your kids, how many kids you have, how you influence co-workers.

The reality, is the world is smaller than you think. What’s the phrase, “everyone with 6 connections away from anyone else”. If you can have a major or even minor impact in your local region of the graph, it’ll expand outward.

I’m a cynical person by nature; but my cynicism comes from the lack of action / belief in action around me. You and everyone you know can really change the world in some way, if you push out your ideas and product(s) (like you are here btw, I’m not trying to claim you don’t)

That said, I always focus locally to build the community I want to see. It influences geopolitics, but that starts at the coffee shop, book store, school, home, etc.

Beyond the local level, it seems like you’re conflating the “amount of influence an individual has” with “the amount of influence individuals can have [if they act at scale]”.

Sorry for the short reply, I don’t mean to be dismissive; I hope that this makes sense.

I posit that the primary reason for this is that humans are bad at correlating cause and effect where there is a large delay between cause and effect - or the effect is not what was expected.

Depends on if that "you" is understood to be everyone, or just myself as an individual. If collectively we were to thumb our ears with the same sentiment, then agree. Disagree that an unrelated individual would have such an impact - it's a romantic thought for sure, but a drop in the ocean is still a drop.

So interesting to see this thread. I carefully curate and limit my intake and am intensely aware of the anger economy news organizations have built to drive engagement. Glad to hear others are avoiding being a product and are staying healthy.

There is a large segment of media devoted to outrage but if you only follow serious news it's hard not to be outraged at things that unequivocally outrageous. Just watch a live feed of C-SPAN without commentary and there's plenty of insanity. And it's not the media had to tell me Russia invading Ukraine should make me angry.

>> Maybe I'm a pessimist but there is little I can do to make an impact on geopolitics.

Ironically:

>> I want to spend my energy on the things I can control and little energy on anything else.

You'll make a bigger impact on geopolitics by doing this than ten people who incessantly post on social media about Ukraine, #MeToo, and spy balloons ever will.

I would like that privilege as well, but unfortunately the stock market moves based on geopolitical happenings.

My favorite Russian joke of 2012 was this:

— Daddy, which camp they are taking us to? — I don't know, son, I am not interested in politics.

I can't tell if the joke is the man is foolish or wise for not being interested in politics.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

If evil has already triumphed it is better to be the last to know.

Then again, there's a million evil things in my news-feed every day about which I can do precisely nothing, usually because they're in a different country. What does me knowing (in depressing detail!) about The Evil Thing I Have No Power About improve the situation in any way?

I think it's valuable to have some baseline level of political knowledge and engagement, but there are definitely diminishing returns beyond that. Past a certain point, it seems to become a negative influence in most people's lives.

But being completely apathetic about politics is a bit like not getting vaccinated for measles. It might work out ok for you, but it gets really dangerous when a majority of the population has that mindset.

It makes you aware and prepared. Politics is not an island; tactics do not exist in isolation. As soon as one fascist proposes censoring school libraries in one state, others across the country look at the tactic and decide to stop it. It's much easier to proactively stop such things if you are aware of what to watch for.

"they say evil triumphs when good men do nothing, what they should say, is evil triumphs" --from a movie about a guy who just got released from prison im exchange for a sports celebrity.

“The only people absolutely convicted that they are the good guys are the bad guys”

It's one thing to be interested in politics, and a whole different story whether you can make a tiny bit of difference with the knowledge you get from spending time listening to all the politicians out there on a daily basis. Besides, most of the time the system is designed in a way that you have neither a say nor healthy representation of your political views in the elected government.

> the system is designed in a way that you have neither a say nor healthy representation

America is the most powerful civilisation in the history of humanity. In almost every election, nonvoters could swing the outcome. On almost every issue, practically nobody reaches out to their representatives.

Participation is hard. Many of us have more important matters to tend to. That’s fine. But don’t characterise participation as sour grapes.

I think the relevant quote is something like "people get the government they deserve" or "if you want to know who is to blame you have only to look in the mirror"

More accurate would be: "people get the government they deserve" or "if you want to know one person to blame, you can squint really really hard and try to see yourself in that mirror 1/154millionth the size of your bathroom mirror."

Democracy sure is a wonderful magic trick. None of the power but all of the blame.

Both of those quotes seem glib to me. Short of rebellion or revolution, the government we get is simply the government we were born into.

*Nonvoters in a select few swing states could swing the outcome. (At least in regard to presidential elections--for local elections you have a point!)

Edit: for downvoters, please note that I say this not to encourage apathy, but because I would like this problem to be fixed!

> for local elections you have a point

Also for most Congressional and state elections, as well as referenda.

Right, though congressional elections are also a mixed bag due to gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering relies on low turnout. Gerrymandered districts backfire when the opposition wins, because you’ve diluted your supporters in other districts. The line between unfair success and unfair failure is very thin.

It's not that participation is hard, it's that more and more see it as completely ineffective.

Every year more of my friends and family abstain from voting.

The system is broken, many choose not to play a fixed game.

> more and more see it as completely ineffective

Voter participation has almost monotonically increased over our country’s history [1], and presently stands near a historic high [2].

> many choose not to play a fixed game

The fix is how many believe this.

Which is fine. I don’t think everyone must vote, and if someone doesn’t even understand the system, I struggle to see how their vote adds information. That doesn’t change that shockingly trivial organization and deliberateness can yield results.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_Stat...

[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2022:_Analysis_of_...

> Voter participation has almost monotonically increased over our country’s history [1], and presently stands near a historic high [2].

This is an insidious assertion, that is more about population increase than suffrage. Participation is always measured as a % by whomever is eligible, regardless of the political characterization of eligibility. The suffrage element incidental, rather than causal.

Populations have increased to historic highs, so "near historic high" participation is not interesting or relevant. As populations increase, the number of elections increase due to simple population bifurcation. eg City population grows, city splits in City and City-West and despite sharing utilities and proximity, there are now a bunch of new positions to elect for. Same thing happens when counties incorporate into formal cities due to growth. This has also added to "participation".

To limit the discussion from some of these factors, we can look solely at federal elections. That first wiki link displays incorrect totals, which can be verified multiple ways. ie Other wiki citations, the second link, etc

The increase of the total is not sloped upward, by % of the population. It's been roughly 50% with a variation of 10% regularly in the US, for all recorded data afaik.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_elect...

Edit: Had to edit as some of the language was inappropriate and overly broad, which did not add to the conversation.

> first assertion is incorrect (monotonic increase)

Huh, someone should fix that. Do you have a good source?

That said, I was observing over long timelines. Decade over decade, participation goes up.

> second assertion (near a historic high) can be attributed to population increase

That increases the denominator. Participation is measured as a fraction. We’re about flat for the last two decades on the tail of broad increases.

I refuse to play their fixed game by voting third party, even when the third party candidate is terrible.

> refuse to play their fixed game by voting third party

Then don’t. Vote the primaries, specials, referenda and local elections held, deliberately, on a random Tuesday in May.

> many choose not to play a fixed game

Just remember, there are those for whom this is an explicit strategy. When less people vote, they are advantaged, so they try to make you cynical, hoping you won't vote.

If you think about it, this is actually one of the few strategies that can work for a small minority to maintain power over greater numbers against their own interest. It's hard to get you to actively vote against your own interest. So the next best thing is to convince you not to vote at all - so then they still have a chance with their smaller numbers.

Yep. Same way most shareholders don’t vote in annual shareholders’ meetings.

Management has a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of inevitability.

Shareholders have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion of powerlessness.

It works in both parties’ interest, in a way, but only shareholders complain.

Don't you find it strange that nearly every country in the world is pursuing the same currency objective at the same time. You know the one, I just don't want to spell it out to trigger the filter.

How can every supposedly independent CB pursue the exact same goal if they are not under the direction of one nexus?

Elections indeed swing, but do the outcomes matter if the key national politicians are operating under duress? Food for thought.

Today's story is just another day of, "Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania."

This is not convincing because there are a variety of currency regimes in the world today and they seem to be in healthy competition

What's unconvincing is the vagueness of that statement. Lets' get more specific then.

Explain, for example, how both the Fed and ECB implemented Basel III. Why do these two "independent" organizations adhere so closely to the policy recommendations of some unelected NGO?

> Why do these two "independent" organizations adhere so closely to the policy recommendations of some unelected NGO?

Who do you think is on the committee that writes the Basel Accords [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_Committee_on_Banking_Sup...

So you're telling me that a few stuffy bureaucrats earning a salary of few hundred thousand a year are the ones who decide what happens to the money of billions? Think again.

I'll give you a big hint, both the first and second presidents of the ECB previously were part of the same small and obscure NGO concerned with the history of banking.

> a few stuffy bureaucrats earning a salary of few hundred thousand a year are the ones who decide what happens to the money of billions

You’re describing the leaders of the G-10, their central banks’ governors and the world’s most powerful legislatures, who pass the Basel Accords into law, as “stuffy bureaucrats.”

If you’re looking for conspiracy theories, the FOMC is far less elected, and arguably far more powerful, than the committees passing non-binding regulations on capital requirements and leverage limits.

Didn't you see Marc Andreesen's tweet that " 'Conspiracy theory" is code for "will be obvious in a year.' "

You only need a few first principles to see absolutely everything, like seeing the matrix code: 1) The world society is entirely made up of individual people, 8B pairs of feet on the ground. Abstractions like 'the government' or "China" are red herrings. 2) Power is relational. Vito tells Tom what to do, and it behooves Tom to carefully follow orders. 3) There are no regulations and human laws in the state of nature, only in the social reality. You alone on Mars would be free to do whatever you wanted, but here on Earth you must file with the IRS, or else.

> can every supposedly independent CB pursue the exact same goal if they are not under the direction of one nexus?

They don’t. There is correlation because of interdependence; lowering rates when everyone is raising will trash your currency and juice inflation.

> On almost every issue, practically nobody reaches out to their representatives.

the handful of times i’ve been impassioned enough to write or call my rep, i’ve felt ashamed for doing so.

polling and voting is the only system we have deployed that lets near every individual exercise equal influence. to call my rep, and participate in this side channel that’s used by only 1/1000th the population — and far from a uniform sampling of it — is to demonstrate that i don’t value the egalitarian ideals that my nation and most of its citizens espouse: that i think my opinion actually is more important/valid than the other 99.9% of ordinary voters.

i don’t know how you reconcile this. i can see how sharing “unopinionated” factual information — if such a thing can really exist — with your rep could be generally good, but calling to share my opinion seems a blatant contradiction: curious if anyone has an explanation for it that doesn’t feel so icky.

> is to demonstrate that i don’t value the egalitarian ideals that my nation and most of its citizens espouse

No less than voting when not everyone votes.

More pointedly, not everyone is equally knowledgeable on every issue. And not every issue can be brought to a vote.

> No less than voting when not everyone votes.

? it absolutely is less so. roughly 1/2 of eligible citizens vote; the proportion that call their reps is 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 of […]. however you chop it, it’s significantly less.

i can’t but read you as saying that any system that fails to achieve 100% representation is equally flawed: that a system where only 1 person votes is “no less [egalitarian]” than a system where all-but-1 vote. you can’t honestly believe that.

> proportion that call their reps is 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 of…

Some places have a culture of civic service. Many do not. I’ve canvassed for New York City elections with single-digit turnout; the last primary barely scratched double digits [1]. Would you castigate those who exercised their right to vote? Of course not.

More pointedly: democracy doesn’t work with disengaged citizens. This is true for pure democracies; moreso for republics. Shame for civic participation is the opposite of responsible citizenship. If there are folks who lack access, help them. It takes a perverted reading of the history of democracy, of its formation and failures, to conclude engaging one’s representatives is anything but good.

[1] https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/8/24/23320921/turnout-new-york-...

Yip, I just stopped reading news for a year 2 years ago. Then I restarted again last year, and now I've stopped again. Definitely better for my mental health! (and you see enough headlines here and other places that I still feel pretty informed)

Events like this are really destructive to my ability to be critically reflective of my ego.

It’ll be months before I feel normal around the populace again.

Not sure I understand: how does this news story impact your opinion of “the populace”? Also what is your personal definition of “the populace”? Is it everyone you don’t know personally?

This seems like a tough mindset to find yourself in, but I want to make sure I understand what you mean.

The Brain Washing of My Dad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS52QdHNTh8

I highly recommend this. Just stop bothering with Twitter and the news if you suspect it affects you negatively at all.

You don’t really need to be that plugged in. The people commenting on every issue aren’t really helping anything.

I could tell this was a dumb story from the beginning. The US gov deciding to make it super-important by not sending a top official to China was a natural fire-starter for regular people, not just news junkies.

Ultimately, the only interesting conversation I got from it was why it might be hard to shoot down:

A standard 50cal as used circa WW2 to shoot down balloons would be sufficient but too short ranged

A fighter jet with an 20mm autocannon would easily deal with it but they also shoot 2000+ rounds a minute which would result in tons of dangerous rounds going right through then possibly hitting the ground near civillians.

Modern autocannon bullets that will safely auto-destruct in the air but there wasn't an US airforce craft that had them available.

etc, etc, etc.

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1621960968375877632

So even totally wasteful stories can generate interesting thought experiments. Even when the total sum of human attention is a million times out of whack of the IRL value of caring in the first place.

>You don’t really need to be that plugged in. The people commenting on every issue aren’t really helping anything.

I agree, replace the time wasted on feeding various outrage machines with building.

Sputnik 2.0

It's a serious warning that the U.S. is dangerously behind China when it comes to balloon technology. Note also, balloons are one way of colonizing Venus (floating high in the atmosphere without having to approach the dangerously hot surface).

Clearly we need a Venus Balloon Program to show who's the technological leader on this planet, just like with the Apollo Mission. Mars is for wimps, real explorers go to Venus! Now's let's put $50 billion into it. The prototype is already here (2022):

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jpls-venus-aerial-robotic-ball...

[edit: to be clear I am absolutely not joking. Spending huge sums of money on space exploration is a much better use of government funds than getting involved in ground wars in Asia]

Sorry but I find “ that the U.S. is dangerously behind” laughable. A ballon around so your conclusion is to draw conclusions on the advances of nation states.

The Venusian zeppelin mission is awesome; the upper atmosphere there is probably the most earthlike environment in the Solar System. Only the acid clouds prevent the crew from just being able to open the windows and sit around drinking beer in a medical oxygen mask and swimsuit.

> Only the acid clouds prevent the crew from just being able to open the windows and sit around drinking beer in a medical oxygen mask and swimsuit.

You just ruined Venus for me. Thanks.

The US has much better spy tech than balloons, which are really obvious and easily shot down as demonstrated today.

Not being a leader in this tech is not a bad thing IMO. And earth balloons don't translate to venusian ones.

Ps would you really be happy living in zeppelin city knowing a leak would drop you into acid inferno?

"Spending huge sums of money on space exploration is a much better use of government funds than getting involved in ground wars in Asia"

What if you are able to save tens of thousands of human lives by getting involved in that ground war?

It's going to cost hundreds of thousands or millions, won't it?

> the U.S. is dangerously behind China when it comes to balloon technology.

Mr. President, we must not allow a balloon gap!

chipmunk voice

*gentlemen! You can’t fight here! This is the war room!

> when I am on this limited media consumption she always comments how pleasant I am to be around

IMO the news is little more than a sales pitch for antidepressants, life insurance and "retail therapy".

Does reading news really make you unpleasant to be around? That sounds like a fairly major red flag.

I have the complete inverse experience. I rarely care much about news and politics. I maybe spend 10 minutes a week to browse headlines and keep generally aware of current events. However, about once a year I get sucked into some topic or election or whatever and my consumption goes through the roof. My wife doesn’t care for that stuff at all so we don’t even talk about politics or anything, so she’s unaware that I’ve been dialed in to media but it always happens that after a couple weeks she starts saying “everything ok? You’ve been kind of a jerk/short/angry towards everyone lately”

For what it's worth, I'm not sure this is healthy; you should be able to consume news without having it effect your mood so negatively.

Might be time to talk to a therapist about it.

most news and politics are tacit exercises in emotional manipulation. i'll leave it to you to decide which emotional states are most valued.

I disagree and while I think I understand what you're saying I'm surprised by it.

News is often intentionally devicive, misleading, and salacious for a reason. Being affected by propaganda does not come anywhere near a need for therapy. In fact I'd say it is a sign someone has critical thinking and a likely a fair base of information. In the face of the facade of trust clearly lying or engaging in rhetoric, hyperbole, or passive language, the only rational response os to be bothered by it. The contrary runs the risk of being manipulated by whomever for whatever reason. I've switched to a nonpartisian news source and its had a simialar benefit for me.

I think you’re saying you don’t trust yourself to be an adult. Which is a healthy observation if you struggle with that, or an unhealthy one if you can process biased info.

I think it's a key skill for an adult to have, to be aware of one's own emotional state and be able to self regulate based on that awareness.

If someone struggles to apply that to the consumption of news media, I worry about their ability to apply this skill to events in life that are much more impactful, like a speeding ticket or the loss of a job.

I suspect we have different ideas of both consumption and "pleasant". Almost without a doubt no one but my wife would pick up on changes when I do not consume politics, news, media, etc.. I am more pleasant to be around because I listen more and pay more attention.

If, for example, I took the three hours a week I dedicate to news consumption and gave that time to my wife, and if I have fewer worries and distractions, of course I would be more pleasant to be around. You give some more of your time and attention and they'll think you're more pleasant too.

No need to call names or be rude, maybe your media consumption is detrimental to your wellbeing :)

If your mood is improved, to the degree that someone comments on it, by reducing general news media consumption, you’re not in control of your emotions to a degree an adult should be in control of their emotions, and should seek professional help to regain that control.

The fact that you believe I’ve called anyone a name or insulted anyone by saying that is a good example of what I’m talking about, as I did no such thing.

Even in this convo you’re struggling to not get emotional; that’s not great! You don’t have to live like that. Don’t avoid therapy to spite a random person on the Internet… at least consider it.

I'm very surprised that China would take the risk of fueling a political firestorm when these balloons are only marginally more effective than the satellites they already have.

These intrusions are clearly a violation of our airspace and could even be considered an act of war.

What the hell was Xi thinking? Is he trying to communicate that China can do whatever it wants with impunity? Did he even authorize this flight or was this someone else's decision?

> What the hell was Xi thinking?

Pelosi visited Taiwan before last Chinese elections which ensured Xi would win.

If it's meant to be, better for Xi to have USA attempt to fight multiple fronts concurrently.

So are you saying there was a chance someone else would win? I don't understand your priors to be honest. Elections don't really matter all that much in China. And it's not as though he has much opposition inside the party either. Would love to know your thoughts

Does USA benefit from fighting multiple fronts concurrently: Russia, China, maybe Iran.

The Ukraine conflict could be over in a week, but governments thrive on conflicts.

'German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the Minsk agreements had been an attempt to "give Ukraine time" to build up its defences.'

https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-russia-may-have-make-ukr...

World going into more cold war benefits which groups in governments?

> What the hell was Xi thinking?

You are levelling yourself to think someone whose education ends with grade school to be actually thinking. He has done so many stupid things over the last decade.

And in China, all foreign politics are internal politics. Playing strong against the rest of world, at least by how it looks, will bring more power to him within CCP.

True that. Their political system is extremely dangerous if it depends on the mental disposition of one man.

If Xi has a bad day he could start a nuclear confrontation with no one able to reign him in.

Or what if, it's not a spy balloon and a genuine mistake?

I heard U.S. officials say that it's definitely a spy-balloon. They refused to say how they know this, but I assume they have their sources.

But a balloon has to intrude in someone's airspace. Doing so could trip off an international incident, like it has now.

They already said it was a mistake and unintentional.

But hey, they're the enemy to the USA right, so of course you'd believe everything they do is intentional and intended for subversion.

Yes, it is definitely a silly move if it's really a spy balloon.

But I think it's still too early to draw the conclusion, given the strong Bayesian prior that how unlikely it is for China, with advanced spy satellites and a spy network in the US as accused by three-letter-agencies, to fly a huge, visible by naked-eye, balloon for spying and for starting an international incident.

According to the WSJ article I read today, it is indeed a spy balloon.

Well, then this time CPC certainly did a bad job unless they already got some valuable data.

I wonder what the cost to take down the balloon was for the US (including monitoring it) vs. the cost of the balloon for China. If the ratio is something greater than 10:1, then I would say China got a pretty good ROI on a small investment.

It was probably a much higher ratio than that. Wouldn't be surprised if it was actually 1000:1. On the other hand, the military is constantly in need of new drills to keep everyone's skills sharp. This was a pretty good one for them with no negative outcomes beyond whatever data might have been collected and sent back to China.

The thing is gigantic. It's definitely not cheap and most likely more than the unit cost of a missile.

Missles are pretty expensive, the sidewinders they used to shoot out down cost between 200 and 400k

A regular hot air balloon can cost 200-400k and this is substantially larger with more lift capability and had presumably expensive payload and propulsion. Worldview spent millions of dollars on a substantially smaller balloon that granted is capable of a few miles higher flight with less payload.

Not really, a regular hot air balloon usually costs 20-40k, a crazy fancy shaped balloon ised for advertising will maybe push 100.

1. https://amp.smh.com.au/world/north-america/when-japanese-bal...

> This week, with attention on the suspected Chinese spy balloon over the United States, the U.S. Naval Institute posted on Facebook, “When the USS New York was sailing towards Iwo Jima in 1945, the crew spotted a silver sphere flying high overhead that seemed to follow the battleship for hours. Concerned that the shiny orb might be a Japanese balloon weapon, the captain ordered it shot down. After the guns failed to score a hit, a navigator realised that they were attacking Venus.”

That's mildly adorable.

> If our air power becomes partly tied up defending Taiwan, dropping bombs from craft like these might be an effective strategy to demoralize the U.S. population.

No, it would have the opposite effect, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. They'd be starting WW3 and deciding to solo it vs NATO and friends.

> Suddenly, lots of people in the U.S. have Chinese aggression on their mind. Knowing Americans pretty well, I would expect this to actually increase public support for the defense of Taiwan.

Yeah, I think you're right.

People have started catastrophic wars over small miscalculations and misinformation.

Balloon attack is a bad idea. Attacks don’t demoralize unless they are devastating. Devastating isn’t possible since US would threaten nukes. It also risks escalating the conflict and China mainland is more vulnerable. It would also get rid of any American uncertainty about defending Taiwan.

What matters isn’t the cost of fighter but cost of missile. The Sidewinder used was $400k. Unguided rockets might work and are super cheap. The US has a ton of fighter aircraft including Air National Guard that wouldn’t be sent overseas.

I suspect that balloons wouldn’t be that cheap. Similar NASA balloon cost $1 million. Since balloons are hard to steer, to be able to hit anything useful would require using guided glide bombs which are relatively cheap but not like dumb bombs. The cost is comparable to cruise missile.

Another problem is that it takes few days to week for balloons to cross the Pacific. Launch at start of war and it could be over by time arrive. Launch early and risk spoiling attack and maybe even causing war.

No. The US almost definitely got the better end of the deal. Lots of pieces got to test their readiness in a live scenario.

>Lots of pieces got to test their readiness in a live scenario.

Against an extremely slow moving balloon?

F22 shooting this down is definitely a sign of strength. If this were a James bond movie, a predator drone would have just hooked that balloon and brought it back intact.

What prevents China or anyone else to just launch dozens or hundreds of these?

The fact there would be no point ?

Cost differential is an interesting thing to consider if this were done at scale. That single missile cost ~$500K (plus flight time for the F22 isn't cheap). How much would each balloon be, especially if some were decoys without any real payload?

That said, drones vs ships seems like a starker cost differential than this.

On the other hand, I’ll ask again, what’s the point ? We have balloons flying around ? Cool ?

To get better weather info?

It wasn't a weather balloon.

It was most certainly a weather balloon.

DoD has pretty clearly said it's a spy balloon.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/02/16/us/biden-china-ballo...

It was a weather balloon.

A predator drone wouldn't have been able to reach it.

It was really flying really high. FL600 is ~roughly at Armstrong limit, or the altitude where you absolutely need a pressurized space suit if you want to go outside, or the water in your eyeballs will boil off. The very high performance jet that intercepted the balloon didn't climb to the same altitude as the balloon, as it was over the publicly stated ceiling for that plane. Instead, it did a zoom climb and fired a missile from below as it maxed out.

Spy balloon cost : $3k - $50k , you can even buy them on alibaba and some other sites:

    https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/China-hot-sale-surveillance-balloon-with_60454941082.html

    https://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/jennerjiang/product-list/catalog-1.html?view=0

Cost to shoot down balloon with F22 $400k for the AIM-9X, ~$85k for 1 hour of flight time, so ~$400 - $500k to shoot down one balloon that cost < $50k

Quite different if it's a one-off, this was nearly experimental expense for the US on various levels.

I guess China just discovered a strategy how to drain US of some resources. Just let out a lot of scientific baloons and let the dirft away.

I don't think anyone considers the expenditure of 1 AIM-9, probably the most ubiquitous A2A missile platform in history, a drain of resources.

Money is money.

1000s of AIM-9s have probably expired in storage. Money is relative.

I mean if it became enough of an issue it would not be hard to deal with them with some other type of weapon.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA425537.pdf

Laser weapons were not highly effective against fast objects like ICBMs, but a slow moving weak object like a balloon should represent a pretty easy target.

Congrats to China for wasting about 3 seconds worth of US military budget. How will the US recover from this catastrophe?

The balloon that was shot down was visible to the naked eye at 60k feet. It would have had to be far larger than the products you have linked to.

they expand

Not to 200 feet across they don't.

What is the value of

1. The intelligence collected by China 2. Learning more about Chinese intelligence collection methods

Presumably if this becomes common we can think of cheaper ways to do it.

i wonder if we could do it with a SHIELD laser weapon

You've left out the cost of the payload, which is probably substantial.

If I weren't retired, I'd be interested in reverse-engineering it. I'm sure NASIC will be all over it, but we (the general public) will never get the details of what the payload was really doing.

Meh. Complaining about the cost of shooting this down is pretty silly. F22s are already flown on a daily basis. And munitions are spent regularly in training excersises. It would cost far more millions to set up a training excersise even half as valuable. But that is just the cost of maintaining a capable fighter fleet.

There's probably been sports event flyovers that have technically cost many times this.

ahh yea i forget that the amount we budget every year for training is basically the cost of a war

Train hard means fight easy.

The US has always had excellent pilot training, and it paid off handsomely in war after war.

This sort of calculations are slightly silly. F22s take off for training flights all the time, having one training flight switch to operational does not affect the cost.

It’s similar for using missiles. The opportunity to shoot a real one at a real target is good training.

Those things costs this money perhaps, but it’s not a useful way to think of it this way for such a case.

I think the implication is not that the cost in this specific case was very high. I think the point was that there is an assymetry in cost. So, if someone wanted to have balloons over the USA, it would be much cheaper for them to try than it would be for the USA to stop them. By the time someone starts sending 1000's of balloons, the costs to destroy them may add up.

'someone'

I mean it would be pretty easy to figure out who it was, if at nation state level enact things like embargos against them which would cost them quite a bit more. If not at nation state level they'd likely be taken care of much more quietly.

Agreed, but consider wartime.

You could also just be trying to apply logic to someone with a low-cost, nonsensical argument. The irony being that it's the same sort of attack you're describing, but on your brain.

Threats that are few in number and great in number are handled by different sorts of countermeasures. If China really did flood the west in balloons, then alternate measures would be used to handle it, perhaps measures that aren't public.

High altitude balloons are very fragile (you need to wear gloves to avoid getting oils on them because those can dissolve the balloon material causing them to prematurely burst). I'm sure there's many counter measures that could be used if needed.

China already does something similar to Japan. They fly hundreds of flights a year around Japanese airspace, forcing Japan to constantly scramble jets just in case. This tires their pilots, puts wear on their planes, and costs a ton of money.

I wonder why they didn't just use 20mm.

> I wonder why they didn't just use 20mm.

Canada tried that once, with poor results.

https://news.yahoo.com/weather-balloon-went-rogue-almost-161...

Real footage of the interception: https://youtu.be/Zb03buggCcw?t=1596

F22 service ceiling 50k ft, M61A2 vulcan 20mm effective range 2000ft, balloon was at 60k ft

Those 20mm will land… somewhere

Ceiling for F-22 is 'above 50k' feet. I think the balloon was at 60k.

Are you serious? This is like looking at a F1 car and going "oh yeah, that's super cheap. Go carts only cost a couple thousand dollars". DoD says that the payload of the balloon is as long as three buses lined up end to end. The balloon itself is likely bigger than many office buildings. A state of the art sensor suite is going to run in the millions. Claiming you can get all that for sub 50k is laughable.

What's your point? We should make military decisions based on how much the target costs? You don't understand why that's ridiculous?

> We should make military decisions based on how much the target costs

Yes?..

> You don't understand why that's ridiculous?

No?.. Don't you understand how the cost of action is the base of military economy?

This is hardly a military decision, it's purely a PR decision.

In a war of attrition, yes, but this is a one-off.

It’s not purely PR, I am sure the primary motivation is actually counterintelligence, which is why they are recovering it over shallow water.

> which is why they are recovering it over shallow water.

They shot the payload with a missile over the sea. What's there to recover?

It's you who doesn't understand. We don't care how much the target costs. We care about how much not taking it down can cost us.

We stand to learn a lot from capturing the surveillance platform. This alone is priceless. We send a message that Chinese aircraft that violate our airspace and leave in tact. If data was stored onboard, it's possible that we prevented a large cache of surveillance data from making it back to China.

So that $400,000 missile had a benefit that is hard to quantify, but is easily in the multiple millions of dollars.

Your argument makes no sense. Let's say a sniper is in a building and is about to fire on a high value target. Before he can fire, we hit that building with a missile to take him out. According to you, we paid $400,000 to take out a sniper and his $1 bullet. The truth is that we spent $400,000 to protect a high value asset that may have been worth far more.

> We don't care how much the target costs.

Except with military you actually have to, which is perfectly demonstrated right now in Ukraine.

> We stand to learn a lot from capturing the surveillance platform. This alone is priceless.

Well since it was shot down over the sea, by a missile targeting the payload, it definitely won't be the case.

Sorry, I don't see the point of this conversation, when you base your reasoning on a fantasy, instead of a factual chain of events.

Why would they use an AIM-9X? This is the kind of thing guns are for.

It was the size of 195 Goodyear blimps, and bigger than a football field. I imagine bullets would do nothing to it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/02/03/bustin...

This is dumb.

Same airship design has been seen around the world for years, https://twitter.com/BalloonSciDan/status/1479218147098038278

There are many companies building and launching balloon airships of similar size.

The US weather service alone puts hundreds of balloons over China, https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/radiosondes

I probably agree. Allowing the rival to surveil you to an extent is not a bad thing. You want to reduce informational asymmetries because rival leadership often fills in the fog of war with assumptions of malevolence which then leads to escalation risk. It's a tale as old as time in the history of geopolitics and cold war rivalries.

The fact they shot down the balloon after it left airspace rather than just as it entered suggests it was a response to the jingoistic media circus and domestic politicking, ie not wanting to look weak compared to hawkish Republicans, rather than anything with a real calculated military purpose.

Shooting a balloon down over land risks having it come down on someone. Though there really isn’t a lot in Kansas/Nebraska/South Dakota, they would probably not have gotten unlucky, but if they did the Republicans would have pounced also.

Why couldn't they shoot it down before it flew over land but after if flew into airspace? What is the national security benefit of waiting for it to fly over the country first?

My guess is they hoped it would pass over mostly unnoticed but then they saw people picking up on it and decided they had to get in front of the news story so as to not look incompetent. Then once the news story picked up steam their hand was forced by the jingoistic media circus and domestic political reality to take action.

We didn’t notice it first, Canada did. And the Canadians would definitely not let us shoot it down over BC.

China is quite obviously lying about this being a weather balloon.

You can see in the video about the NOAA weather balloons how small they are.

The balloon that was just shot down was huge and was being actively maneuvered.

There are so many companies building airship prototypes of similar scale, Occam's Razor suggests its benign. It's like seeing your first satellite and being convinced it must be military.. This isn't the Sputnik era of ballooning by any stretch.

https://aviationoutlook.com/airship-manufacturers/

So you think that a private company produced a high altitude airship prototype that just happened to go on a journey thousands of miles across the world and over a number of us military installations?

I genuinely cannot understand how you think that's a simpler explanation than it being a surveillance platform.

(btw the chinese press tried to claim that it's a weather balloon, an obvious lie)

It didn't go "hover over" military installations. It went over the Rocky Mountains. Pretty much any balloon that crosses the US would go over "military installations" especially when USG can't confirm where these installations are even located (they therefore must suggested that it did, game theoretically).

Wouldn't any legitimate airship have some sort of required transponder or tracking beacon? If that had failed, wouldn't a responsible company step forward and identify themselves once it became an national security incident?

This is dumb because other balloons exist? Please elaborate. What is dumb, and what do these other balloons signify?

The government and DoD said it is a Chinese surveillance balloon. Do you disagree with that? Or with the decision to shoot it down? Or what?

Fake Orwellian wars....just like fake conpetiton via price fixing that typical people won't admit to because they need to do a 2-minute hate on someone/something.

Should a country shoot down an airplane if it enters its airspace by mistake?

ChatGPT: It is generally not considered appropriate for a country to shoot down an airplane that has entered its airspace by mistake. In such cases, the standard protocol is for the country to contact the aircraft and instruct it to leave its airspace. The use of military force should only be considered as a last resort in extreme circumstances, such as if the aircraft poses a clear and imminent threat to national security. International law and norms also dictate that aircraft should not be subjected to the use of force unless they are engaged in hostile acts or are carrying weapons of mass destruction.

Why didn't they just down it safely harpooning it from a helicopter or something? Didn't they want to investigate the payload in detail rather than mangled remains?

Was it really just a scientific baloon but US found it more useful to accuse Chinese of sending grotesquely large and not stealthy at all spy balloon?

Otherwise why destroy it?

EDIT:

I stand corrected that USA just didn't have the technological capacity to do anything other than firing a missile at it from a fighter jet.

It was about 20km in the air. Helicopters don't fly that high

Helicopters can't fly up to 60k feet or so where the balloon was floating.

60,000 feet up.

How much experience do you think people have harpooning a spy balloon from a helicopter? and landing it safely.... I...can't believe there's many people who have experience in that...

The balloon was traveling at an altitude of 60,000 ft., well above the 40,000 ft height a commercial aircraft or the highest experimental helicopter can fly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_China_balloon_incident

"Why didn't they just"

If you ever start a sentence this way, please, just do 30 seconds of Googling instead of posting the comment.

Harpooning from a helicopter was one option, but it would be better to harpoon it from the ground or use a bigger balloon to capture this smaller balloon. Yet another possibility was to drop a sharp object on it from a satellite.

I am so tired of China being used to stoke American jingoism, of politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China' and, most horrifyingly, of seeing other USians online practically salivate as they fantasize about a war with China.

It's some cold war boogieman horseshit. And it's depressing to watch here on Hacker News, too, any comments that question the beating of those war drums go dead.

Yesterday I heard someone bemoan the supposed lack of patriotism today, and wish we could be 'united' like we were after 9/11. You know, that time we rushed headlong into two useless forever wars that ended hundreds of thousands of human lives and brutally disrupted millions more. The time we saw Sikhs assaulted in the streets for daring to sort of look like Muslims in the eyes of uncultured hicks. And when the entire media apparatus, 'left' and 'right' rallied to pump out war propaganda for years and years.

Disgusting and depressing. And it's where I fear we're headed every time I see China in US headlines anymore.

While I agree that using China as our 21st century boogieman is very tiresome, the fact of the matter is China is not a friend of the west.

So? The west is not a friend of China as well. And US has downright militant rethoric agains China.

> US has downright militant rethoric in defense of the independent nation of Taiwan*

Fixed that for you.

Remind me which independent nations US unilaterally defended with militant rhetoric and to what effect?

> Remind me which independent nations US unilaterally defended with militant rhetoric and to what effect?

Sure. Taiwan, anyone in NATO, South Korea, etc.

The effect thus far has been that none of these nations have been invaded.

---

Scotty79, I'm already checked out of this conversation; it's unlikely to be productive for anyone.

Yeah. Me too. It never was productive.

The US and Europe brought China into the WTO, gave it most favored nations trading status, transferred trillions in technology, and financed the modernization of the country. Pretty good friends, IMO. But it is not been reciprocated, and is now going bad. The crushing of the democracy movement in Hong Kong was a wake up call as to the intentions of China going forward.

> But it is not been reciprocated,

How was it not reciprocated? Whole western world benefited from the cheap Chinese labor for more than a decade.

I'd say we helped them economically and they helped us economically. When it comes to politics we don't see eye to eye. As for Hong-Kong they are introducing their politics there. Nothing we can do about it. And we are doing exactly nothing about it.

US openly calls China an enemy in their politics. US sees China like North Korea sees US. China just wants to have their own politics without western interference. It's nasty and bad politics but it's theirs.

Agree 100%. It’s amazing people actually believe this. They’ve built unlimited shit for us for next to nothing whine innovating ways to make it cheaper and we knowingly buy more while complaining they aren’t liberal enough. Meanwhile a far greater percentage of their citizens are happy with the country compared to anywhere in the West.

I know this is a couple days ago, but they haven't reciprocated by opening their markets to our products. If they are going to take over manufacturing, and largely block US software, tech, and services, then all we get is a depleted manufacturing base and temporary cheap goods stimulus.

You said as if it was out of the goodness of their hearts and not because they wanted to access the cheap labor market of China. The west would not have their living standard as high as today if it wasn't for China.

If it hadn't gone to China it would have gone elsewhere. China wasn't the only country with poor people at the time.

The reason China got picked was because we wanted to reduce the power of the Soviet Union. The US policy during that time was all about stopping Soviet/Communist expansion and the thought was that we could bring China into the western world through monetary means. It was never about cheap labor. The US actively traded away it's own monetary assets for national security in that era. It wasn't about making money.

China didn't get into WTO until 2001 while USSR ended a decade before that.

The American geopolitical plan for China in the 20th century was not unlike what happened with Japan, South Korea, Germany and most of SEA post-WW2: Invest in their economies and bring them to modernity based upon free and democratic western societies, therefore creating friends and allies.

And to America's credit, it mostly worked. Japan, South Korea, and Germany are now friends of the US and the west and are irreplacable economical powerhouses. SEA didn't get quite as advanced, but they at least aren't hostile to western ideals.

China, on the other hand, saw the game being played and outplayed us. They took all the resources we "invested" in them to further their own ambitions, and cared not for cooperation or mutual friendships. They saw free real estate and fucking took the entire bank and stole the rest.

It's long past due we, the west, reassessed our approach because China is not going to become our friend no matter how much we invest in their prosperity (and consequently due to their nature our demise).

> Japan, South Korea, Germany

You listed countries that were dominated by US military what in at least two cases led to destruction of pre-existing setup there.

If anyone thought they'll be able to repeat it in China without invading it first was silly. So noone thought that.

US "helped" China to get access to their cheap labor. While maintaining a fasade of being hopeful it will bring in democratic peaceful transformation. I think Germany was more honestly hopeful that trading with Russia will democratize it than US was with China. US needs an enemy to excuse its military spending. Smart people in US knew that US basically grooms China so it becomes one. After all "terrorists" can only be made into a boogymen for a very limited time given their inaptitude.

Do you think China would have hesitated to shoot down an American "weather" balloon, the size of three school buses, if it entered China's airspace? I doubt it would have been allowed to float for thousands of miles before being downed.

That's because China does not value human life as much as the US. The reasons for not engaging it sooner were stated publicly.

We were aware of it when it was over Montana, which is a very sparsely-populated state. Is it really that hard to shoot something like this down over such a territory? I have no way of knowing, but I'd think they could bring it down without risk to human life. The main thing I'd worry about is that it might have some sort of unannounced payload that would be spread widely if it were exploded mid-air. But I didn't hear anyone talking about the risk of biological/chemical weapon possibilities as the reason to not bring it down sooner.

It’s not only the balloon you have to worry about, it’s the missles you shoot at it.

Look at it this way:

The US launches rockets primarily from Kennedy Space Center and Vandenberg AFB so they spend minimal time flying overland as they fly out to sea. This is so failures or aborts pose as little risk as possible to people on the ground.

China launches rockets from inland and have dropped failed and aborted rockets on its citizens on the ground numerous times.

So yes, it is "really that hard" to shoot something down without causing collateral harm on the ground. And yes, China gives less fucks about human life than the US does.

How would you know what’s on the balloon before you shot it down.

You're wasting your time trying to explain this to somebody who uses the derogatory "USian" to describe his supposed fellow countrymen.

What? It's not derogatory. It's just shorter and in some ways better specified than 'American'. I also used the word 'American' in the same post! Just didn't feel like writing the whole thing out the second time. -_-

I assume 'USian' is not a commonly use term and could be interpreted as "American of Asian decent" or similar.

But from your clarification it seem you simply meant American without any further qualifications.

It is derogatory. Virtually no Americans call themselves "USians". It's nigh unpronounceable (it sounds like "US Asians") and only seen on the internet in the context of somebody with an axe to grind against America (as above.)

The last time people tried to use a derogatory term for Americans - Yankees - the Americans adopted it as their own.

Some people you just can't insult.

That's our... superpower.

Yup. Oddly enough, it's anyone's superpower should they choose to wield it. The next time someone calls you a bad name, give it a try.

It's impossible to insult someone who refuses to be insulted.

The American spirit burns awful bright.

USAmerican is what I use to make it clear I don’t mean Canada or Mexico or Latin America. Some people don’t like it, because they think it’s unnecessary as most people assume you mean the USA, others don’t like it because they think the US is the center of everything so how dare you attempt to be inclusive of other non US American countries.

pleeeeease don’t do this. i was born here, i’ve lived here my whole life: i’m an American, or a USian, or any other label you want to use that marks me as a US subject/citizen. i really don’t want to be burdened in keeping up with which identifiers people use for me are supposed to be offensive v.s. neutral, especially when it doesn’t impact the meaning of the post. online communication is hard enough as is — don’t make it even more complicated.

And then you have people who suddenly must say Ukraine instead of The Ukraine, or must say Turkiye instead of Turkey and definitely don't even try to use any of the blue demonyms for any other country, but for Americans, yeah call "them" whatever... such hypocrites.

> or must say Turkiye instead of Turkey

That's not going to make anyone happy. It's Türkiye.

Because the country is called Ukraine not The Ukraine. You wouldn’t say The Germany, would you?

I don't care either way, but generally the term is used in specific context where the writer feels "American" would be too imperialistic as it excludes all others that live in the Americas. It devolves into debates about whether the US "stole" the demonym. Right or wrong, it's going to trigger some people.

Seems short sighted given Mexico is officially the United States of Mexico.

So we need the A in there.

USAian.

Sounds cooler too because https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Saiyan

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

China isn't even a friend to the east. At least that's the impression I get from my Korean, Thai, Viet, and Japanese friends.

As a Japanese (specifically Japanese-American, but details), I will affirm that China is not a friend to the east.

> You know, that time we rushed headlong into two useless forever wars

Don't say it like that. Say it like as it is: "... rushed headlong into murdering 1 million people to rob their oil".

Because that's what it was. And until people start calling it as it is, this kind of thing will keep repeating.

...

And yeah, recently the US Congress arranged $500 million to anti-China propaganda, so you will see a LOT more of such smear/fear stories and a LOT of people going along with those even as they claim to have opposed the Iraq War back in the day...

https://prospect.org/politics/congress-proposes-500-million-...

(I love how such criticism still gets downvoted merely 20 years after Iraq War - its almost as if the Americans !like! to get deceived into murdering people for their oil and stuff)

The US didn't get any of the Iraqi Oil. Ironically, it was Europe and China who benefitted in that regard.

Also notably, the US 5th fleet defends freedom of navigation in the Gulf, which is mostly about Oil, and China is the #1 recipient of Oil! Funny, that.

I'm sure those million dead people in iraq are glad the fifth fleet is protecting trade or that America didn't actually directly steal their oil. The same goes for the countless lives and futures ruined for the people still living with the consequences of the Gulf War.

This is absurd and sounds exactly like a chinese nationalist rhetoric about what Mao did in the great leap forward. Hey, millions died, but think of how stable/prosperous everything was after that! Plus, our side had good intentions*. Two sides of the same coin.

(By the way, the US profits immensly from a stable gulf trade. Oil doesn't have to be exported to the US for america to profit from trade in the area. It's a commodity, and stable trade means stable prices internationally, which is extremely important to american interests. China might profit, too, but it's even more essential to American hegemony, which I agree can have its upsides)

Yes, it's unfortute that Saddam invaded Kuwait.

Thankfully Iraq has some semblance of governance and has valuable Oil assets that it can export, courtesy of US taxpayers.

Iraq benefits far more from it's exports than the US gains from protecting them.

You should tell kuwait that they were invaded in 2003.

? Kuwaitis are absolutely the most grateful people of the American re-constitution of the war that started in 1993. They would have been the first to tell you that the 'war never ended' and that Saddam, then even nuttier than before, remained a threat, with ongoing military operations in the 'no fly zone' for years - were you willing to listen. The 'mistake' was less the invasion as much as it was the handling of the aftermath.

We are talking about two different wars. And no, being "a threat" isn't a reason to invade a country. Iraq in 2003 had no means, and no intentions to invade Kuwait.

The first gulf war was iraq's fault for sure, but that's obviously not the war I was talking about.

> protecting trade or that America didn't actually directly steal their oil

"Protecting the trade of Iraqi oil in dollars to prevent them from moving to euro and other currencies" - thats 'protecting' alright. And apparently its ok if the theft is not 'direct'. Just printing dollars like a banana republic by forcing Iraq to sell their oil for dollars is ok. Of course its ok - its much better than actually robbing it since it allows printing an unspecified amount of dollars in return.

> This is absurd and sounds exactly like a chinese nationalist rhetoric about what Mao did in the great leap forward

If there is nothing wrong with the American nationalism that you blatantly exhibit, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Chinese nationalism or the nationalism of every other country.

> By the way, the US profits immensly from a stable gulf trade...

...in dollars. Too bad that its not happening anymore, as countries move to trade in Yuan, Ruble and other currencies and the inflation skyrockets in the US as unused dollars flow back to the US. Which is precisely why the us attacked Iraq to prevent them from moving off of dollar...

> it's even more essential to American hegemony, which I agree can have its upsides

What an unrepentant display of jingoist imperialism. This is not even mere 'nationalism'. So, the US bashing the heads of small countries in and forcing them to trade their commodities for dollars so it can print unlimited dollars is 'having upsides'. Im sure 1 million dead iraqis will rest in peace, knowing that how they died to make that 'upside' happen.

...

Its amazing how the comments objecting to my original criticism just 'disappear' the 1 million people that have been murdered but talk about delirious things like 'upsides'. Amazing social study opportunity on the topic of how people avoid cognitive dissonance.

Because 1 million people were not 'murdered' it's a fabrication on your part.

Exxon got the most profitable oil deal in Iraq, with BP getting the second. And though China does get the most oil, it's also far closer to Iraq and presumably got even more oil from them before the war. I believe India also receives more oil from Iraq than the US, despite seemingly not having any oil companies there.

> The US didn't get any of the Iraqi Oil

This is the funniest escape from cognitive dissonance that is used in the US in this topic.

The US did rob Iraqi oil: Forcing Iraq to continue selling its oil for dollars is directly monetizing Iraqi oil. Its worse than robbing it, because in a robbery you get the actual quantity. By forcing it to be traded for dollars, the US was able to print an unspecified and unquantifiable amount of dollars, even over what the actual quantity of Iraqi oil that was sold for dollars would support - the uncontested dominance of dollar as foreign exchange currency forced everyone to stash more dollars than they needed 'just in case' they needed to buy oil and other commodities.

It was literally a money-printing operation. Over someone else's oil.

That's some QAnon Economics right there.

The suggestion that the US benefits more on a dollar basis than a nation selling a commodity in that currency is very false.

Iraq is the primary beneficiary of it's Oil exports irrespective of the currency it uses, and those exports are protected by the US.

If the US did not enable open commerce in the region, there would be no Iraq. Or Saudi Arabia for that matter.

If collectively those nations want to switch currencies, they can absolutely do it, but it means they are on their own in terms of security and they don't want that.

The US does gain a bit of an advantage from seigneurage, but it actually has benefits for everyone else as well. It's no some existential thing.

Since China is the major rival as a global superpower in the medium to long term, it has to be taken seriously as a threat.

Of course jingoistic idiots will do what they do. But there is a kernel of unavoidable truth there.

It is unavoidable in that we have a world order where 5% of the world population maintains a dominance which can only wither away if the rest of the world is allowed to develop.

You think the rest of the world has not developed? Have you been out in the world?

My point is the world will develop whether or not that is in the interest of those in power.

I'm just going to assume you're not trying to say the world is evenly developed.

If the world was ever evenly developed, it was when it was completely developed.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you're both trying to make.

Sorry, I meant un-developed the second time.

> My point is the world will develop whether or not that is in the interest of those in power.

I didn’t get that from “if the rest of the world is allowed to develop.” But yes, parts of the world have been developing much faster than the U.S., for instance, and in many cases now surpass the U.S. by many metrics.

I don’t believe the U.S. has actually done much to prevent this. In the case of China, actually just the opposite: the U.S. government and U.S. industry have repeatedly traded away its long-term advantages for short-term political and financial wins in a series of unforced errors over the last 30+ years. But who knows, maybe this is a good thing for the world.

As a taiwanese who lurks on hacker news for many years but when I saw this post I had to make an account.

You are dead wrong, China is an enemy of the free world, pure and simple. South Koreans and Ukrainians would agree with me here. Especially since China has declared no limit friendship with russia

From your point of view, I can see how China is bad and the USA is good. But ask someone whose country got invaded by the USA or whose bloody dictator got supported by the USA. Over here in Latinamerica we still remember the horrible things that the USA did. It seems to me (but I could have a false perception) that China is a horrible bully in their corner of the world (nine dash line and, of course their will to invade Taiwan), but their foreign policy is order of magnitude less intrusive (i.e. they don't invade or topple countries on the other side of the world).

Every major country has their faults, but the US definitely has a larger surface area for these faults as the only superpower left. On the other hand, as the only superpower left, we're fortunate the US exists as a stabilizing factor for world peace, rather than colonizing the rest of the world like every superpower before it.

> rather than colonizing the rest of the world like every superpower before it.

I guess the colonialism has eased up in the last half-century or so. But the US definitely did our fair share.

EDIT maybe my fellow USians don't see them that way but they definitely were colonized - Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii.

I'm given to understand that the Marshall Islands, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico are all free to choose to end their association with the USA anytime they like. What "colonies" does the USA have exactly?

The Compact of Free Association[1] in a nutshell mandates US financial, military, and geopolitical assistance and protections upon the sovereign countries of Palau, Micronesia, and Marshall Islands. These countries are independent of the USA and can end their association with the USA as they deem fit.

Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands are an unincorporated territory[2] of the USA and are sovereign American territory.

Simply put: Puerto Rico, et al. cannot unilaterally end their association with the USA because they are part of the USA.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_of_Free_Association

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_Stat...

Colonialism still exists in a sense, but explicit force became unnecessary with the creation of the IMF and loan terms that allow for American and European firms to both extract resources and keep all the profits.

No one is forcing any country to take an IMF loan.

And if you think the IMF loans are so onerous, consider why Pakistan, which has allies in both China and Saudi Arabia, both of whom have lent it money in recent years, is going begging to the IMF instead.

And if the IMF is a tool of colonialism, why it is refusing to give money to Pakistan unless it agrees to measures such as the current administration not immediately using that money to fund a subsidy in oil prices right before an election. As opposed to the Saudis and Chinese who impose interest rates in the low 30%s, and acquire ownership of land and infrastructure when those payments are inevitably not made.

Countries usually take these loans in times of crisis. Not sure I'd blame them.

Where did you get 30% interest from?

Countries like the one I come from are developing at a rapid pace thanks to the IMF, World Bank, and American/European financial influence. There’s fair criticisms of the system, but asserting that america and Europe “extract resources and keep all the profits” is just lazy and ignorant rhetoric.

Lol, yeah, those aren't just faults. Destabilizing the entire middle east isn't just an oopsie you can write off, it's what you call "stabilizing" usually looks like. Your discourse is basically what everyone thinks of their own superpower, as long as they aren't on the receiving end of those "faults".

I'm not sure the Middle East would ever be stable on its own, unless you're saying the US was responsible for most of the conflicts on this list?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_th...

That's what they did to Tibet for example and they absolutely are an extreme ongoing threat to Taiwan

What did they do to Tibet? The CIA tried to establish an independent Tibet so the US could have bases there, and later engaged in “Free Tibet” rhetoric meaning US weapons in Tibet, and China went to great expense to build a railroad to Lhasa to keep American weapons out of Tibet.

China doesn’t want US military bases on their side of the Himalayas. It remained an autonomous region until a bunch of clowns proposed putting US military assets there.

Tibet was independent from 1913 to 1950 invasion. You are talking about stuff that happened after the invasion. Tibet was part of Qing dynasty, rebelled when it collapsed, and was never part of ROC. It wasn’t recognized as independent but was definitely invaded by China.

It has similarities to Taiwan which is de facto independent but claimed by PRC.

Unrecognized independence during a civil war and world war isn’t much of a claim. Chiang Kai Shek was adamant it was part of China.

Tibet has 3 million people, most of who are subsistence farmers or nomadic herders. Comparisons with Taiwan are a bit much.

I get that the Dali Lama is a really nice guy, but even he admits no one in Tibet gives a shit about him and becoming a feudal lord via picking objects as a child is a bit nuts.

so if China invaded Tibet (which they did) for "strategic reasons", somehow implying "they had no choice" and therefore "it's not really an invasion", then all of the invasions and interventions the US has done in Central / South America, Middle East etc. all fall under that same rationale. There's always a "reason"

Life isn't a marvel movie. There are no good guys and bad guys. The USA doesn't have to be "good" for China to be "bad".

You say that there are no "good" and "bad" guys, but then go on stating that there are "bad" guys. Careful, almost committed a thoughtcrime here.

You people are impossible.

> their foreign policy is order of magnitude less intrusive

that's because they can't do it, not because they don't want to do it.

Let's see what happens when the investments made with the belt and road initiative gets nationalized.

The US has been around as a modern country longer than China - we have more than a century on them; China started the 20th century divided with several parts of itself colonized. China fought a civil war between the dominant Republic abd the communists, and might have been able to win if not for the Japanese invasion; post war, they didn't have the ability anymore to fight off Mao's revolution.

In other words the current Chinese government can trace it's power back about 70 years. For the US it's about 240. So it shouldn't be a surprise the US has done more bad things since it's in general had more time, especially as a major power in the world.

And US Cold war policy definitely had some serious missteps due to extreme paranoia about communism... US intervention in Iran (overthrew a democracy, paving the way for the revolution) and various Latin American countries definitely worked out poorly in hindsight, in addition to unethical methods (eg supporting the Contras). Honestly I'm shaky on most of the details, and I want to acknowledge these things happened. Most Americans have very limited knowledge of these past misdeeds - it's not something that's emphasized in schools, and happened before most of our lifetimes, and we don't see most of the consequences day to day... so the average American is content to be ignorant of it, and of course doesn't want to apologize or pay for it in any way.

I unfortunately don't see this changing. But I also don't trust China given their terrible human rights record; they just haven't had as much ability to operate around the world as the US has, in the past.

Also note that China's killed way more people in it's short history than the US did through it's entire 240 year history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine Tens of millions of dead in a short few years.

This is interesting, but my quick read: that was not the intent, but rather a combination of agricultural mismanagement and poor food distribution.

What about the great depression in the US? The dust bowl? Various bank runs in the 19th century? Hell, African-American deaths due to slavery? Civil war deaths? Deaths of native Americans in our various undeclared wars against them?

Probably China still has a higher number either way, but if we're going to do a fair comparison, we probably should compare percentages of the population. The US civil war killed a single digit percentage of US population at the time, so perhaps not as extreme as the great Chinese famine but still huge (it was the bloodiest war for US lives ever, by a huge margin)

I think you're making an unfair argument. It was rarely (if ever) the intent of the US to kill civilians in it's various wars it's done. You're making the "collateral damage" argument that is often used as a point to attack the US on. Be consistent.

As to all your examples, we could have a large discussion about each, but most are from the independent actions of the populace rather than government policy forcing deaths upon the populace at effective gun point. And none of them killed anywhere near the number that the great famine did. Most of them in fact killed zero people and just caused economic hardship. (Also while the American civil war killed 1%, the Chinese great famine killed over 10% in many areas.)

When farmers are dying of starvation and aren't allowed to eat the food that they're growing, you've gone seriously off the rails.

>rather a combination of agricultural mismanagement and poor food distribution.

And western countries embargoing/blockading Chinese food imports during an emerging food crisis.

American educators tend to gloss over inconvenient truths like America's role in that famine.

The U.S. hasn’t done anything to any country even close to being the equivalent of what China did in Tibet. Or is doing to the Uighurs in its own country.

And that’s a China that has had economic and military power at an international level for less than 2 decades.

All that being said, there’s no real point in comparing which one has been historically worse to determine who is destabilizing the world more in any given situation.

And while the political rhetoric in the US could be better, Chinese actions worldwide, are far more destabilizing than anything the US has been doing, especially since it got out of Iraq.

Interestingly, what’s happening in Pakistan (and Afghanistan) since the U.S. left Afghanistan shows that even what one could reasonably saw were clear negative actions by the U.S., such as its occupation of Afghanistan, may not have been as clear in hindsight.

Well arguably what America / Europe did to the native Americans was worse. And it's a shame in these current times when America could do with being the stand up ethical superpower there hasn't been a nationwide recognition of that.

This is a partial and partly formed view of mine. I don't have great knowledge of the history.

Native American Indians today enjoy sovereignty within their tribal lands as a consequence of the US doing horrible acts upon them, they are countries unto themselves in modern terms with the US representing them internationally in their stead for brevity's sake. Culturally they are revered as courageous natives of the land who deserve our respect (see: AH-64 Apache, et al.).

So please, educate yourself before making a fool of yourself.

> So please, educate yourself before making a fool of yourself.

As I finished my comment, it was a partly formed view and I don't have good knowledge of history. I was hoping for some more informed replies. I was hoping they'd come without insults too, so cheers for the disappointment.

Making a bold and uninformed claim and following it with an admission of ignorance doesn't absolve you of having made a bold and uninformed claim.

> I was hoping for some more informed replies.

You didn't ask for any.

It's not a bold claim to point to the treatment of indeginous people as bad and similar to what is happening in China. Nor is it ignorant to say it's something America or the rest of the new world is absolved of. Do I think that makes it ok for China or they shouldn't be called out and more about it? No, I don't think that at all. But it makes it a harder argument.

Another way to consider this is that America admits that Native American Indians were once wronged, made amends, and now pays respects to their storied histories and cultures and helps them find and secure their own places within the country and the world.

China, on the other hand, gives precisely zero fucks what wrongs happen to the peoples within its borders. All must serve the state and only the state, at the point of a gun.

I once again ask that you educate yourself before you make a fool of yourself. Basic knowledge and understanding are prerequisites to participating in worthwhile discussions. If you took that request as an insult, then that is your loss and certainly not my problem.

Native American Communities themselves do not seem to recognise the benefits of the US naming a helicopter after them as recompense for taking lands and breaking treaties.

https://www.powwows.com/issues-and-problems-facing-native-am...

They're not seeing the benefits of having "their lands" when those lands are still being exploited for resources by outsiders.

https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/culture-war-looms-for-r...

I'm not seeing much education or awreness in your comment.

US states actively ban history surrounding these topics to avoid hurting the feelings of the dominant society's offspring. You have to forgive some of the ignorance of centuries long domestic issues.

The world should also be very concerned about the current leader in China, who is currently re-writing the democratic traditions of China to remain in power indefinitely, which echoes the moves certain other leaders have made. This is, time and time again, a precursor to using military adventurism to justify and consolidate their grip on power.

If anything, people aren't worried enough. Being overly sensitive about a egregious spy balloon is not the problem that should be called out right now.

Uh, what democratic traditions of China?

They have some, possibly with Deng Xiaoping and that sort of era. Obviously Taiwan is democratic, but I'm not sure how much of that goes back to when the ROC controlled more of mainland China.

> I'm not sure how much of that goes back to when the ROC controlled more of mainland China.

Basically not at all. There was initially gonna be democracy, but then it was just warlords/generals controlling everything.

I mean ffs chiang kai shek stayed as president until 1975 when he died.

Taiwan didn't really become democratic until maybe 25-ish years ago.

Such as, term limits for those in power:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/11/592694991...

Not sure how democratic that is. It’s not like there were elections.

I agree, it's more akin to saying a King is elected by nobles...

Power sharing agreements between the powerful who are not accountable to the people isn't something I'd classify as "democratic".

I'd consider term limits to be anti-democratic anyway. A functioning democracy has the ability to boot politicians out, and the people within the democracy, not the law should be trusted to make that decision.

>> King is elected by nobles

As how the US president is selected by the electoral college. The system used today is a far cry from the original scheme. Look closely and the original doesn't look very democratic, even by the standards of the time. Democracy is an idea, a collection of principals. How it is actually implemented varies considerably.

The Electoral College is ultimately rooted in the American people. The number of electors is a direct copy of the number of Representatives and Senators in Congress, and the electors individually are determined by each state's government who are in turn elected directly by the people in those states.

The Electoral College itself exists as a way to help keep the Executive Branch separated from the Legislative Branch. Congress (aka the Legislative Branch) can step in in place of the Electoral College if the electors deadlock to a point of no recovery, but this is considered highly unusual and an undemocratic act because it violates the Separation of Powers safeguard.

I was thinking about various Kings during the War of the Roses when I wrote that.

But a better comparison would be the "election" of a Pope. It's only among Cardinals, who tend to vote for a Cardinal to become Pope. Even though a vote is taking place, we are not talking about a democracy.

As to which is closest to an ideal democracy in practice: America, Vatican City, or China, the contest in my mind is who is in second and third place, not first.

There are varying degrees of democratic systems possible within the context of a government. In the United States for example, Federal Senators used to be appointed by State legislators instead of being directly voted on by the people - in this case, a political body (State legislators) operated within a democratic framework to appoint Federal leaders.

There is a body of representation in China which votes on the next leader, which has rules to limit power within that system.

In the usage of the term "democracy" meaning "a group of people voting on outcomes" - China has democratic traditions within it's political system involving voting and consensus and limits of power. Part of these traditions included term limits on leadership which has been removed by the current leader (again, not unlike the way Putin removed term limits in the precursor to military adventurism).

The National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party has a history of just over 100 years and resembles other modern democratic structures like the Democratic/Republican National Conventions in the US. Voting is used to various degrees by party members and committee members. Many of the recent anti-democratic trends have limited who votes, and what information voters have access to. It is a shame that China is trending less democratic. It appears that one party systems is more susceptible to consolidation of power and cult of personality than western political systems.

You can have bits and pieces of democracy without actually fully having it, I think is the intent of the above post.

Like having armed forces with an allegiance to the ruling political party in a one party system instead of the country.

Well, at least the term limits in the top spot. It's not much, but in terms of a limit on the power of one person, it was about all they had. And now it's gone.

>re-writing the democratic traditions of China

Ha! "Democracy" (only approved ideologies need apply).

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yohanshi,

Thank you for leaving your comment here. You have many friends in the U.S. We are more resolved than ever to ensure your freedom.

I hope we have more who are resolved to not treat an entire country as an enemy based on no evidence at all

You have to be blind to modern geopolitics to say there’s no evidence at all

Evidence:

1. One balloon with something attached to it

2. In American airspace

3. The US government, that has a long, rich history of lying, said some things

We have nothing else to go off of. We have no reason to trust statements by the US government of these situations.

Look what we have here. US admitted it has zero link to Chinese espionage at all:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-14/us-says-m...

Thank god we had two weeks of deranged, rabid reporting about China being evil

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

https://youtu.be/xN0vUlljX0I?t=133

As a South Korean, well, I don't like the Chinese government either, but these aggressive rhetorics don't help. My own country was under decades of pro-American dictators, all the while conveniently enjoying the membership of the Free World(TM): at that point, what does "free" even mean?

I'm not saying America is the force of evil; it has done some nice things, and some other pretty horrible things. What I'm trying to say is: if you have a sitting superpower and a rising wannabe, and you view it as a fight between good and evil, then you are practically inviting horrible things to happen, "because otherwise the bad guys will win."

Think of all the horrible things that happened during the cold war.

It’s ironic to see a South Korean say this when all you need to do is look across the border to see what a Chinese supported alternative looks like.

The United States carpet bombed North Korea, destroying 90% of all structures in the country, killing 300,000 in the immediate bombing run, then sanctioned them into the stone age. The relative poverty of North Korea is not a consequence of Chinese support.

The relative poverty of North Korea is far from the only problem with North Korea, though.

The US did worse to Japan. Also South Korea was similarly carpet bombed in the process of re-taking it from the north as almost all territory was lost and the north almost won.

It's a consequence of the political system in North Korea and Chinese support. The industry of the north grew faster and was larger than the south after the war. Eventually the economy of South Korea overtook and then greatly surpassed the north. China support = not wanting the Americans to win but wanting to keep North Korea a poor subservient state. Is America as bad? Sometimes, but I think plurality of leadership thought in the West always tempers the worst instincts of their nation states.

Are you being serious right now? The sorry looks of North Korea has nothing to do with China's support and everything to do with the fact that America has been beating and sanctioning the shit out of it since the day of it's inception.

This kind of behavior followed by this kind of rhetorics is exactly why half-the-world hates you so much. Disgusting, I can't believe you aren't trolling right now.

North Korea's communist dictatorship would have been overthrown decades ago if not for China's support of it.

Your talk of China in relation to North Korea betrays your lack of historic and political knowledge. While China is it's only ally now, it wasn't always the case.

North Korea would relatively peacefully evolve from dictatorship if it wasn't for America's pressure. This is purely Newton's third law of geopolitics. Do you really think people would go like "yeah, please fuck us harder so we can topple our government" instead of consolidating around it against a much larger evil, that fucks with their livelihood much harder (you)?

Look at Afghanistan for example. Why do you think it reverted back to its baseline and why Taliban was able to assume control over the country so fast with almost no resistance just as soon as the US had withdrawn its troops?

Or take a look at practically the whole history of young Russian Federation, from supporting ISIS-like radical islamists during the second Chechen war, to most-recent achievement of turning so many hardcore anti-war people into pro-war just by letting them have a good look at your actions.

Cuba has little to none practical international support, and yet it is still "a communist dictatorship".

Or even a better example, that would probably be easier for you to process: take a look at WWII-period Great Britain. It was a total strict dictatorship shithole. And people were FINE with that, as long as it was an effective protection against Nazis.

To North Koreans (and so many other nations around the world) the US (and by extent, its allies) are the Nazis. Simply because you can't possibly dial your chauvinism down and ask yourselves some hard questions, like how come you feel like you have the right to fuck around on the other side of the globe.

Sadly, I don't even see a realistic scenario how things could change without triggering a WWIII: America + allies (15-20% world population) vs the rest of the world.

It's 100% fair to question the geopolitical morality of any nation, especially the US, that's fine - but - as a South Korean, maybe you should consider for half a second the 50 000 Americans that died so that you would not be living as a slave under Kim Jong-un at this very moment.

Aside from that more 'humanist' element, there is the geopolitical reality that your sovereignty is still depends on the US.

After a war - nations usually have autocratic leaders who oversee a couple of decades of reconstruction, that is normal, and for them to be 'pro American' in the contex that America literally saved your entire nation from being slaves, is understandable.

It's a bit hard to read what you have written, imagine what would happen if the US/West dropped support for literally you, either now or decades ago? Where would you be? Happy unification under democracy? My gosh.

If you can't see that Xi is operating on a different moral level than most of the free world including S. Korea, then I have bad news for you.

Putin invaded Ukraine because he thought it wold be a cake walk.

The best thing we can do to 'avoid war' is to project strength, not ambiguity. Xi is not irrational, and if Taiwan is extremely well defended he won't invade.

In fact, it's relatively easy to deter China if other nations just have some basic political courage and a basic coherent strategy, then we can mostly live happily together.

(FYI I'm not American)

> so that you would not be living as a slave under Kim Jong-un at this very moment.

Leaving politics aside, that's some very flawed alternative history thinking there.

The alternative world in which (say) Korean War era "Domino Theory" wasn't so aggresively pursued with military action and so many former Western colonies in Asia (Vietnam, Indonesia, etc) weren't defended from finding their own path post WWII is a world where factors that created an extreme North Korea, and Pol Pot in Cambodia, etc. are absent.

Who's to say where the world would be had Kissinger and friends not been so hawkish.

In Korea at least:

   Nearly 5 million people died. More than half of these–about 10 percent of Korea's prewar population–were civilians. (This rate of civilian casualties was higher than World War II's and the Vietnam War's.) Almost 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea, and more than 100,000 were wounded.

Five million would still be alive, fewer families would have been torn asunder, and the < %1 of the deceased that were US service personal would not have died.

Not being in the Freeworld might look something like North Korea and not having a forum like this ?

To my knowledge, Taiwan had a similar situation before the end of White Terror in early 90s. The US apparently had no problem with pro-American dictators.

The cold war against the Soviet Union was an attempt to manage a communist power insistent on expanding its borders through coups, annexations, and puppet states. The whole point of a cold war is to stop a country from committing territorial aggression, while preventing an escalation to a hot war. It's a deeply moral thing to do.

In this sense, the cold war against the Soviet Union was profoundly successful. Let's hope this will be the same for the ongoing cold war with China to contain its territorial ambitions in east asia, like for Taiwan (which it is actively threatening with force[1]) and all of the other countries which China is expanding its territory into (illegally, through the use of artificial islands)[2].

1. https://www.voanews.com/a/china-reaffirms-threat-of-military... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/21/china-has-full...

Has anyone noticed that the three dictators are named Putin Kim Xi? The dark overlord behind them all loves spicy food.

Poutine isn't spicy.

This is what Israelis were saying about Iraq. It may be true, but also not a compelling reason for war or escalating tension.

Taiwanese is Nazi

It is possible to believe both "China bad" and "we should not go to war with them". That's the key part I think OP has noticed with (mostly US) western media coverage of China lately: It's not just "China bad" but it this preparatory drumbeat of war that is written between the lines.

There are a lot of countries Americans might consider bad. But the news media isn't subtly and constantly hinting that we might want to go to war with them. The China rhetoric is starting to sound like the WMD justification and prep drumbeat that they used to hype up the American public about the inevitability of war with Iraq.

Please point out some American media claiming we should go to war with China. That's just a ridiculous statement. There is no amping up for offensive war with China. There is plenty of amping up of concern that China will invade Taiwan and that we'll likely need to defend them. However the US is actively trying to prevent that from happening by being loud on the global stage and actively trying to show that the US doesn't respect China's territorial claims to prevent that type of thinking from rooting in China's psyche.

Ironically I think the Ukraine war has shown the best demonstration for China on why they shouldn't attempt a Taiwan invasion. Their rhetoric about Taiwan I feel has gone down since that war started.

The US is trying to avoid war, not start one.

That's why I said "subtly" and "written between the lines". War propaganda doesn't work by overtly saying "Hey, guess what, we should go to war". It builds up little by little, starting with plausibly innocent imagery (for example, picture of Country X's leader, then picture of Country X's military, then picture of Our Country's military--just that silent video montage gets into people's subconscious and starts doing its nasty work). Then it works its way up to insinuation and innuendo, then little "facts" come out here and there, then the hypotheticals. This is exactly how the US public was slowly marinated in preparation for the Iraq war.

War propaganda is in fact generally overt. It's some of the most overt propaganda there is usually.

And no, informing the populace that a country is a potential aggressor is not "war propaganda".

No, it really isn't overt usually. Not at first at least. You don't start by beating the war drums openly, it just doesn't work. It's a more subtle, gradual work of normalization before the more overt stuff.

Moreover it's not like China is going around overturning democracies and freedom in Chile, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Bangladesh etc. How much worse can China be than "the leader of the free world".

"No limit friendship" was declared before the current full-fledged war in Ukraine. Since then Chinese rethoric became much more cautious.

Making a new account just to post about politics tells me you are lurking HN for entirely wrong reasons.

Have you considered perhaps there is a valid stance to oppose both PRC aggression on Taiwan & other neighbouring countries, while also opposing direct escalation between the PRC and the US?

How is urging caution against U.S. domestic jingoism contradictory to not allowing the PRC to start wars?

Taiwan, South Korea, and Ukraine are all de facto western tributary states. I think you should investigate the actual reasons why China was founded, and maybe read up on the 100 years of humiliation. Why do you think western nations are functionally different as they were 100 years ago? Ultimately capitalism will serve to exploit and destroy Taiwanese people, save a few rich business owners

From the first part of your comment it's clear that you have a special perspective on this topic, but please don't post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN. We're trying for something different here. I know it's difficult when the topics are provocative, but that makes it more important to stick to the rules.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Assuming this is all due to America is, with apologies, typical American jingoism, that assumes the world revolves around Washington. Read some material from the Chinese side. The CPC sees itself in a life and death struggle with liberal capitalism as (allegedly) championed by the EU and USA. One or the other will triumph. The two orders are fundamentally incompatible. A new cold war is here, whether the Americans want it or not.

> Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!

This excerpt is from a speech by Xi Jinping given at his inauguration as General Secretary in 2013. What would you say it implies about how he sees the USA?

Except that china and Russia are now the capitalism champions. Money can buy anything there, specifically military and political power. America's constant fallback to elections and the will of the people in a way makes it the more socialist society. The masses still matter in America. The will of the masses means nothing in china and russia.

> The CPC sees itself in a life and death struggle with liberal capitalism as (allegedly) championed by the EU and USA. One or the other will triumph. The two orders are fundamentally incompatible. A new cold war is here, whether the Americans want it or not.

I'm pretty sure the CPC has one enemy: losing control of China. That is the ultimate bogeyman, and when you view China (or Russia) from that point of view, you can understand them much better.

> What would you say it implies about how he sees the USA?

A potential cause of losing control.

It is only boogieman talk, until that boogieman is real. Sending balloons i to the airspace of other countries makes china's intention undeniable: they do not care for any rules-based international system. They believe simply that might makes right. They are a bully. The US just made its counterpoint very clear in the only manner that a bully understands. That balloon will no doubt be cut up and put on display, airing any secrets it might contain, to expose the lie that this was anything other than a surveillance device.

Are you saying that the US does believe in a rules-based international system? Let's count the number of countries the USA has invaded vs China...and the government topples with the help of the USA vs China

Yes. Most every one of those invasions was preceded by international diplomacy and coalition building. China/Russia dont care for the UN or building consensus with allies. They are willing to just go on the word of a supreme leader. We might not like the outcomes, but the US does accept that the international stage is governed by rules. That is why a country like canada feels no threat from the US wheras every country bordering China/Russia lives under threat.

I don’t think people in central and South America, Vietnam, the Middle East, and so on were happy when diplomacy and coalitions were built against them to instate dictatorships and/or kill millions.

America satisfies its allies. Those Allies are happy to be the enemies of China and Russia for financial benefits and some border protection . Who, despite your comment, do build consensus with their allies and they’re content with being enemies of the US also in exchange for financial benefits and border protection. All 3 countries have their own spheres of influence and all 3 project themselves to be heroes while one of the others is a villain at all times.

The OP is right here—jingoism on HN because of a balloon is something beyond what is normal here.

You didn't respond to their post in any way. The comment was about rules-based international orders.

Rules being what their allies agree on. Each of those countries get a bunch of allies who readily say what they’re doing is just while their opposing country isn’t following any sort of international protocol.

>China/Russia dont care for the UN or building consensus with allies.

The US has made the same unilateral invasions that Russia has, and without approval of the UN. Almost everything you've said here is false.

In the last 100 years, Which US invasions were unilateral? Even panama is a stretch given the diplomatic history prior re the cannal. There has been nothing like crimea/ukraine.

100 years ago the Philippines was an American colony.

So? Three hundred years ago the US was a British colony. Canada was technically a UK colony until the 1980s. The history of colonies and empires is interesting but not particularly relevant to international relations today. Countries don't buy and sell other counties anymore. Hong Kong was perhaps the last.

> Three hundred years ago the US was a British colony.

Strictly, parts of the modern US were separate British colonies (colonies of the Kingdom of Great Britain, not the UK, which is newer.)

> Canada was technically a UK colony until the 1980s

Largely, it should be noted, because the Canadian provinces couldn’t agree on a method for amending the Constitution domestically to replace British Parliamentary authority.

> Countries don't buy and sell other counties anymore

I mean, Trump wanted to buy Greenland, but generally overt sale of inhabited territory is somewhat passé. Less direct means of buyingn coubtries are still, at least, actively pursued, if not always successful.

Isn't this what you asked rhetorically a little while ago: "In the last 100 years, Which US invasions were unilateral?"

The US went ahead with the Iraq War after failing to gain approval with the UN. That was when they made up their "Coalition of the willing" as a weak justification. You might say, "At least they sought approval in the first place, unlike Russia," but the fact that they ignored the UN decision shows that they weren't actually seeking international approval, or any sort of coalition.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq

And which flag now flies over Iraq? Like or hate the war, but it is clear that the US never intended on taking Iraq as a colony or US territory. Russia wants to literally own bits of Ukraine forever. China intends to literally own Taiwan. And I wouldn't describe the UK involvement lightly. 40k+ troops, roughly one-in-four, and a greater percentage of front line troops, was a solid partnership.

Why would one spend resources on providing someone with benefits of citizenship, when a neocolonial practice of establishing a puppet government is enough for one's goals?

>the US never intended on taking Iraq as a colony or US territory.

That's not how it works. And we can discuss this, but it's a change of subject. The topic was whether "the US does accept that the international stage is governed by rules", which is false. If you want to acknowledge that, then we can move on to the topic of puppet states and sovereignty.

Whatever flag now flies over Iraq, or whether the US and UK had a "solid partnership" (whatever that means), has no bearing on whether or not the US invasion of Iraq violated international rules. It was still an illegal invasion. Moving the goalposts won't work here.

>Sending balloons i to the airspace of other countries makes china's intention undeniable: they do not care for any rules-based international system

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/american-u-2-spy...

60+ years ago, almost beyond living memory. Comparing the military/intelligence realities of the early cold war to now is tenuous at best. If anything, such historical incidents made everyone realize then the need for rules-based international order.

I think it's very idealistic to assume that the us has moved to accept rule of law or limitations when it comes ones to foreign policy and spying. We've had a sufficient examples (prism, renditionS, etc)

Weeeeellll, US recon flights are basically continuously skirting the edge of China's airspace. Though there doesn't appear to be evidence of them straight up flying over Chinese airspace (at least by international definitions), this is also only what we know of publicly. U2s were flying over Soviet and Israeli airspace for something like four of five years until they were publicly revealed by the 1960 shootdown of one (read the history of the plane on the wikipedia page[0]).

2018: https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/politics/south-china-sea-flyo...

2020: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/26/asia/china-us-u-2-spy-plane-i...

2021: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39890/did-an-rc-135-sp...

2022: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/air-force-rc-135u-elec...

2022: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/29/politics/chinese-fighter-jet-...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2

> politicians making a contest of who is really 'tough on China'

I know you're deliberately wording this to avoid a partisan angle, but I genuinely think that it's hurting your point here. There is no "contest" at play here. There are no "both sides". All this rhetoric is coming from one side of the aisle.

And I agree it's bad, and hurtful, and quite frankly probably doing more to help the Chinese position on the world stage than hurt it. But it's also not something that's going to be fixed by stopping a "contest". Either the republicans decide to be grownups or they don't. The democrats can't fix that.

Edit, because two responses have misunderstood this. This isn't about "being" tough on China, or about reasonably considering China as a threat to be countered. That is bipartisan, and despite the rhetoric something close to a default position among US elites. It's the partisan nonsense that ignores this clear consensus and tries to claim the Biden response is "soft" or whatever that's harmful. Again, if I were Xi and wanted to throw a bomb into US politics for my own benefit, I might very well provoke something like this.

On the contrary, Biden has been very tough on China, and what about Pelosi's Taiwan visit, maybe the most significant provocation in the bilateral relationship in the past decade

I know a few died in the wool democrats who absolutely think China is a threat to be taken seriously. This is a bipartisan issue. Republicans are more boisterous in their approach, but if a Democrat is in power when China moves on Taiwan, the US response will be nearly identical to that of a Republican administration. I’d put a heavy bet on that.

I recall very similar comments a year ago talking about how there was no way that Putin would attempt to invade Ukraine and it was just American jingoism.

While that's true, i think crimea and the associated warm water port (sevastopol) is of strategic value. After the crimean invasion, the mainland of ukraine has cut off the water canal, which meant that the peninsular needs to be constantly supported by the russian mainland. It's not quite sustainable in the long term for russia to do that.

The land bridge is their "solution".

I don't see taiwan as similarly strategic to china. It's more politically motivated - that taiwan has turned into a democracy that is pro-west, right on their door step, instead of "returning".

On the other hand, an invasion of taiwan is something that can be used to quell domestic problems...

The Russians could have (and indeed should have) just taken Donetsk and Luhansk and protected the waterway if that was their goal.

Their goal was (and is) not that. Their goal was the destruction of Ukraine as a country, and it's forced reunification with Russia as a foundational step in the re-emergence of a Russian empire.

If you read Chinese defense arguments about Taiwan, they basically make the same hypothesis. Control of Taiwan forces the strategic sublimation of Japan and Korea, and re-establishes a Chinese empire.

Dictators don't come up with new ideas.

The "solution" was to not invade Crimea in the first place, forcing Ukraine's hand followed by a second invasion of Ukrainian territory in the west. You're conveniently forgetting that Crimea was not the only territory invaded by Russia.

> While that's true, i think crimea and the associated warm water port (sevastopol) is of strategic value.

Russia already had naval basing rights is Sevastopol, before the invasion of Crimea. I don’t think the strategic explanations hold up.

They had it on a lease from Ukraine until 2017. Renegotiation of the lease barely passed Ukraine's parliament back in 2010.

they prolonged it for another 30 years I think thanks to pro-Russian president.

Yes, and then 2014 happened and Russia withdrew from the agreement entirely, since they didn’t really need it anymore.

russia wants permanent, irrevocable access, not just rights granted by an uncontrollable gov't.

The writing was on the wall at the time - ukraine was leaning towards the west.

Not saying this was the only reason for the invasion, but it is a factor.

jeez, all they did was blow up a balloon near myrtle beach. is that really comparable to invading iraq and afghanistan?

Accusations of jingoism on HN are detached from reality.

I think a group of people kind of ruins the outward image of every country. Is there validity to the Chinese gov doing nefarious things? Are they running concentration camps, infiltrating American companies, and expanding their sea borders to expand their territory? Yes. There's absolutely something to be feared and apply steady opposition to. However, it's all far and away from our shores, and to the public at large it feels very disconnected from our day-to-day reality. Dismissing it is a way to relieve the stress that a persistent threat exists, but it will still be there.

I think the best thing the gov could do is give us awareness of these things, in an objective way, so we can stay informed. I do not see the fearmongering you see, but I'm sure I could find it on Facebook and Twitter if I looked.

And then.. the things our gov does to other countries to spy and maintain intelligence is a bogeyman for others. We are a threat, as China is a threat. I wonder if we have any stray weather balloons floating over China that we don't hear about in our media.

I think you're only examining one side of the story. Live in China for some time and see how they look at the rest of the world and people. And look at how we treat other current threats on the world stage at the moment. We do not make a special case for China --if anything the US has wishfully thought that if we treat them like a democracy they'll become a democracy and that has proven incorrect.

US foreign policy is not about spreading democracy. That's a bedtime story told to young Americans who don't know any better. The US is fine working with dictators; it's when those dictators stop playing ball or are ousted that we suddenly want to spread democracy. Noriega, Hussein and the Shah are easy examples.

And the idea that america props up dictators or topples regimes because “it wants their oil” is a bedtime story for jaded American teenagers who don’t know any better. If that was true American foreign policy would look a lot different (and wouldn’t be such a money sink). Where’s all that Iraqi oil money again?

U.S. foreign policy is aimed at maintaining stability and facilitating liberal capitalist democracy. We don’t regard popular movements that are communist or theocratic as “democracy” so we’re willing to support dictators to forestall that. But at the same time our foreign policy is fundamentally ideological in nature.

>And the idea that america props up dictators or topples regimes because “it wants their oil”

It would be more productive if you addressed my comment, and not some comment you just made up.

As for this:

>U.S. foreign policy is aimed at maintaining stability and facilitating liberal capitalist democracy

I believe that you believe this. But I'm not treating it as an axiom, so you'll have to give evidence for it.

Stability is a euphemism for a government supporting economic arrangements favoring western corporations.

https://chomsky.info/fateful02/

"Liberal capitalist democracy" - this is obvious nonsense when you list out all of the regime changes forced on the countries by the United States.

Like the economic arrangements that allowed Japan, then Korea and China to displace entire American industries?

Like the coups that USA conducts to remove democracy to install dictatorships.

Most Americans have absurd views of American foreign policy because of ignorance. But, given your Bangladeshi origin, in your case it is not ignorance. You are just volunteering as an unpaid American propagandist or random social media forums, even though you are well aware of all the CIA coups all over the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

> And the idea that america props up dictators or topples regimes because “it wants their oil” is a bedtime story

This is true, sometimes all they want to do is shore up some bananas. Or just help out West Pakistan to impress China.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

Ok, to use American parlance, we expected them to play ball on an even field. Of course pols/biz were blinded by the big $$ in their eyes and could not see beyond that, but the expectation with was that the legacy of Deng and Hu would continue to soften the CCP and eventually become (economic) "partners" of some sort. Maybe not completely an open democracy but also definitely not the more authoritarian swerve it's taken over the last 10 years or so.

> eventually become (economic) "partners" of some sort

Is China not an economic partner of the USA? I thought the huge amount of trade between the two countries made it a foregone conclusion.

How long did you live in China for?

I'm so tired of Chinese appologists defending their terrible abuses and downplaying the fact that the West is only just beginning to wake up to the ugly Orwellian system that Xi has created.

"It's some cold war boogieman horseshit. "

Xi is literally preparing his armies to invade Taiwan, he is literally putting 100's of thousand of Uyghurs into pyschological torture / re-eduacation camp and subjecting the Western Provices to Police State apparatus that is literally more onerous that anything we have seen in history.

The worst dictators in history didn't fuss about local idiots because said idiots didn't generally have the power to disrupt, but now that authoritarians have the technological means for 'Total Surveillance and Enforcement' - they do it.

In most Wastern cities there are police blocks every few hundred meters, hotels have police checks, there are minders, total surveillance aka 'total control'.

China has refused to allow the UN WHO to investigate the origins of pandemic that has thrown the entire world into chaos, wherein there is at least some possibility that they are culpable.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, I could go on.

The 'failure' of the West is not jingoism, it's the assumption that China would progress to have at least some semblance of basic human rights as they moved forward and therefore the West turned a blind eye to all the terrible actions of China for the last 25 years, which in the last 10 years have taken a horrible upturn.

There are problems everywhere, but there's a differenc between systemic failures among well meaning people, and totalitarian states.

The collective West should have dealt with this a long, long time ago:

1) Taiwan should have been recognized as an independent state 50 years ago.

2) Hong Kong should have been allowed to have a referendum in 1997 and their rights should have been defended by regional powers.

3) The rights of navigation in S. China Sea should have been strongly enforced by local parties (aka Vietnam, Singapore) and others the moment China declared it's policy and military installation should have been thwarted.

4) West should not allow 'forced tech transer' in return for access to Chinese market.

5) Economic penalties should be in place for blatant and obvious transgressinos.

6) Issues regarding Tibet and Uyghurs should be front and center in any discussions of anything. It's within China's right to have policy there obviously, but the situation does require focus.

7) Trade tarriffs in place to mitigate all of the 'externalizations' that take place in China, because we have to account for all of that indirect stuff somehow, and if we don't it will 'come home to roost' as it is now.

If China were to have retaliated with economic measures over the decades - so be it - we'd be in a better place.

Then - we could talk about 'jingoism' etc.

None of this justifies stupid fake patriotism of some people, inclding Americans, but if you want to do a comparison of deluded anti-foreigner preferenes, I double-dare you to consider what popular views in China are of anything that is not 'Han'. China is de facto a 'Han Supremacist' state, it is what it is and to some extent their choice obviously, but it'd be absurd to accost Americans too harshly in that context.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As an American who has worked in tech for the last two decades, including interacting with Chinese subcontractors numerous times I say you are 100% wrong.

#1. THEY'RE STEALING FROM US. Constantly.

#2. Look at how they treat their own people.

#3. Look at how they treat their neighbors.

While you're correct that 9/11 caused issues I think you're conflating things incorrectly here.

I don't see anti-China policies being used to justify crack downs on freedoms like was done after 9/11. Perhaps that's coming, but we should be concerned about that when it happens. We absolutely however need to be careful about what China is trying to do by basically bifricating the world into authoritarian and democratic world orders. It's absolutely their stated goal to create a bi-polar world and thus re-create cold war conditions.

“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

So do you have any hard evidence one way or another about what happened in this incident? FWIW, I personally haven't noticed any jingoism at all. Also your use of a racial slur here with unrelated reference is probably not appropriate.

China just very successfully overflew the continental us with a military payload, and now knows, unequivocally that F-22's can operate at 60k feet. Both have significant propaganda and military value. There is a reason we learned in the cold war that overflights have to be governed by treaty. It led to the near destruction of the world. China, apparently, just deliberately American Airspace.

In the above post, you could substitute the word China with Germany and Cold War with World War I, and this quote could have been written verbatim by the American First coalition - who had good points going into World War II, but missed the big picture. At some point you have to defend independent countries, stand up for human rights, etc.

China's actions show no respect for any of its neighbors. Their government persecutes people based on ethnic and religious beliefs. They feel that the entire world is out to get them, but they refuse to respect democratic norms that they agreed to with the United Nations. They refuse the most basic levels of transparency. Leaving critics to fill in the gaps on questions such as genocide and the pandemic. Anyone who points out that fact is immediately branded a sinophile.

Meanwhile China is propping up Russia by buying it's exports at a time the Russians are committing genocide in Ukraine.

Even what few democratic norms that existed have been wiped away and is being replaced by a cult of personality.

May I humbly submit that you are concerned about tensions coming from the wrong country?

If china agrees to respect its neighbors, follow human rights standards, and respect toleration of people who do not worship at the church of the Party, the friction will disappear. Ironically, America was strongly pro-china going into World War II shortly after that. It's not a stretch to see that resume.

However, their literate makes it very clear that they view China as the one true civilized state and that Europe and America must be humiliated and destroyed for china to regain its rightful place at the center of the world.

> China just very successfully overflew the continental us with a military payload, and now knows, unequivocally that F-22's can operate at 60k feet.

This is something they already knew, even if their sole intelligence gathering exercise was opening Wikipedia, which lists the service ceiling at 65k feet. Since they reportedly got the plans for several advanced aircraft via espionage, I’m quite skeptical that this got them any significant new intelligence.

(I should note that I consider the Chinese government reprehensible from a civil rights perspective - perhaps this could be a PR stunt or trying to test U.S. response times, but I highly doubt it got them any useful technical data.)

China is not simply rolled out as a boogeyman. Apart from any of their ambitions, at minimum the worlds reliance on them for various resources and manufacturing capacity almost exclusively has, in the last 2.5 years, been revealed as an extreme flaw and risk to global economic stability when that resource and manufacturing pipeline is disrupted.

That is, at a bare minimum, a serious problem that will take years to solve.

Now, bringing geopolitics back into things, China as a government does not have geopolitical goals that aligne with those of the western world. Without even placing value judgements on those goals, this fact alone is serious enough to warrant extreme caution in dealing with the Chinese government. Whether Western powers do bad things or China does bad things or both do or who is worse— those things are irrelevant on this point. The goals of each are incompatible and this will unavoidably cause each side(s) to come into conflict with each other.

These all leave aside any value judgements on government styles, human rights, etc. The issues above are all basic and fundamental problems and differences that should cause the west to be extremely cautious and skeptical of the surface appearance of any actions taken by the Chinese government. They are similarly wise to be cautious and skeptical on their side. This is simply the basic state of geopolitics, and acting in accordance with this state of affairs is not jingoism.

What we should hope for is to continue to work toward finding common ground at least in so far as the conflicts remain political, economic, etc. and not violent or militaristic. But you can’t engage in that sort of relationship if you keep your eyes closed to the true nature of, and differences between, the goals and values of the various players involved here.

It would be very interesting to see the Ukraine situation replicate in Xinjiang in a few decades.

History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

Which exactly China geopolitical goals not aligned with the West do you mean? Where are they declared?

Are you asking for more information out of curiousity or are you also trying to imply that my assessment is incorrect? It is difficult to approach an answer to your question without knowing more about your expectations and intentions in asking it.

I am asking for more information and, preferably, sources. I am not an Asia politics expert, so the only thing came to my mind is the Chinese take on Taiwan.

People spend their entire careers understanding this topic and so I necessarily cannot answer it here except in it’s most fundamental form. Toward that end:

At its most basic level, China’s geopolitical goals are to increase its influence, status, and power in the world. This is not a controversial claim. As one small piece of support for this I’ll offer up this quote from one of the Chinese ambassadors during their negotiations to enter the WTO: "We know we have to play the game your way now, but in ten years we will set the rules"

If you google that quote verbatim you will find many sources that deal with China’s short and long term goals in much more detail.

This basic goal is not, necessarily, completely zero sum, but neither can it be accomplished to any significant degree without displacing some of the power & influence that the Western powers have in the world. This unavoidably brings the various sides & interests powers into conflict.

It is all much, much more complicated than this but this is a significant pillar in the foundations of China’s goals that put it at odds with the West. This alone is a strong influence on the economic conflicts and spats that arise.

That’s about the best I can do in a forum like HN without simplifying the details more than I think may be useful for this conversation. For further sources, that quote really is the key to a lot of foreign policy analysis and well-sourced research on the topic. You may also want to do a few quick searches on China’s 2049 plan along with the 100 Years of Humiliation and its social/cultural influence on Chinas view towards the western world and its economical and technological goals to enable greater self sufficiency.

I’d link to more direct sources but it’s late and I’m tired, and honestly searching on the specific terms and topics I mentioned will give you more and better information than is easily conveyed here.

Why are you worried about the world relying on China? The global economy was actually stabilized by China's zero-covid policy for the past few years because although lockdowns were disruptive, the death and disability of workers is an even greater threat. We now live in an even more unstable time now that China has abandoned this policy since the international community has decided to embrace living with covid.

And God forbid a country outside the west hasn't been completely subjugated by it. Why exactly do you think China's goals aren't aligned with the West? Have you read anything about what imperialism was doing to China (and literally everywhere else on Earth not being settled by Europeans with few exceptions) during the 100 years of humiliation? Do you honestly expect a nation to take that in stride without retribution? I think a lot of younger folks like myself forget that colonialism was alive and well until around 50 years ago, which is the blink of an eye in the long-run.

Sure, you can point to Tibet and Xinjiang as signs of hypocrisy, but I counter: where did all the native americans go in the USA and canada? What was done by the Belgians in the Congo? What was done by the French in Indochina? At least the Uyghurs and Tibetans are actually still alive in large numbers of healthy individuals. Even in China, minorities get special treatment. For example, they were exempt from the One-Child Policy. I don't think there's any example of that in western nations. In the US, black people get the privilege of seeing their children murdered at the hands of the police for minor offenses and disobedience! :)

The war drums are beating and it's fascinating to see otherwise brilliant people fall victim to what is very clearly the propaganda being turned up to manufacture popular support for the genocide of billions under the name of "freedom", "democracy" and a "rules-based system". Let's do an exercise: which nuclear states have the weakest policies preventing the use of nuclear weapons? It's the United States, France, the UK, and Pakistan. Even Putin has stated multiple times on the record (even in late 2022) that Russia will not be the first to use nuclear weapons. India and China are strictly under a policy of no first-use.

Let's remember history: the United States is the only state to ever have used nuclear weapons to deliberately kill people. And remember doubly: those bombs were dropped for demonstration purposes, not out of necessity, even a USA general said so.

Clearly, greed and arrogance will be the downfall of Western imperialism. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, etc. are all de facto USA asian tributary states under USA hegemony, but nobody wants to acknowledge that.

I hope that in the coming 5 - 10 years once you have the luxury to bear witness to western militaries indiscriminately genociding billions of civilians in the name of "maintaining a rules based order" that you realize you cannot wash the blood from your hands.

It sounds like you are falling victim to propaganda from the other side.

Profiling and racism by police in America is obviously a problem. Unfortunately, we don't have a nuanced view of policing in China because any criticism of laws and policing by Chinese press is illegal because no freedom of press. The stories we do hear don't paint a rosy picture. A couple of examples are death sentences for drug crimes and organ harvesting.

To your point about "USA asian tributary states under USA hegemony". First, this sounds like Chinese propaganda. Let's assume you're right for the sake of argument. All of those countries you list have free or low-cost healthcare while American society pours money into weapons and military research. They don't pay the USA any kind of tax tribute that I'm aware of. Their economies have flourished and they have kept their own culture. They set their own laws and manage their own governments. It's not clear to me what we get out of the arrangement.

From my point of view, we are gearing up to defend Taiwan if necessary. That is all. I haven't heard anyone mention anything else in the press. Can you explain to me why defending a sovereign country that has existed as long as China would make us guilty of genocide?

I am, without complicating things with moral judgements of the different powers involved, simply making the claim that China’s goals are at odds with the West.

You seem to question this claim and yet go on to provide significant support for why China has historical reasons for this. If you are interested, Read further down in the thread of another comment to my post that I responded to and you’ll see that I cover this a little more, but to reiterate a bit of it:

The Opium Wars and Ensuing 100 Years of Humiliation, despite any change to the governmental structure post-revolution, is still very much in the zeitgeist of China’s perception of the West. And China has taken that lesson to heart, in particular the lesson that: just a little technological superiority by an adversary can nonetheless allow a massive nation with significantly more resources but a lower industrial/technological base to be decisively subjugated to the will of a much smaller opponent.

This very much informs Chinas desire to increase it’s power and sphere of influence, along with advancing to the point that it is, at minimum, significantly more self sufficient at a similar level of technological advancement to the west, and preferably more so.

This unavoidably puts its geopolitical goals at odds with the West because this cannot be accomplished to a significant degree without disrupting at least a little bit the power and influence that the west (particularly USA) has in the world.

I am deliberately not bringing anything like forms of government, realpolitik games, moral judgements and human rights issues etc into my claim because those are all extremely complicated topics and muddy the water in addressing the very narrow and simple claim that China’s goals are not the same as the goals of western powers, and this necessarily results in conflicts and disagreements between these powers.

You and I probably disagree and other aspects of these issues, but from what you wrote I don’t thing we disagree on the claim that goals differ, and that is the source of many conflicts, and that this is true before bringing in any value judgements of which side is right/wrong/has the moral high ground/etc, which are separate (thought certainly intertwined) claims.

Finally, to address the dependency issue: a significant reason that countries are worried about over reliance on China is for the same reason people should be worried about having a single point of failure in any critical system.

Americans is the plural term for citizens of the USA. not USians

On the flipside, I’m tired that we can’t get two comments into these threads without someone implying that anyone concerned about the threat of China under Xi is a simpleton under the influence of US politicians and media.

You can both be sceptical of the bullshit and also concerned about what’s happened to China under Xi. These aren’t mutually exclusive beliefs.

If you’ve spent any time watching China over the past two decades you’ve seen a hugely troubling transformation. Ask any resident of a state with an interest in the South China Sea.

I cringe at the thought of war with anyone as well. How else though would you deal with an authoritarian non democratic country who wants nothing more than world domination? It started with Hong Kong and next in their sights is Taiwan. People like Xi Jinping only understand strength and view diplomacy as a tool to bide time until the are militarily strong enough to ensure victory. I feel for the citizens that pay the price of war. My non expert opinion only.

Did you come to this view after watching a lot of TikTok?

(for the literal net = a joke!)

Who else feels the lonely anguish of being simultaneously anti-Chinese dictatorship AND very sympathetic of the parent post and thus saddened and alienated by posters of either extreme?

The two Indian engineers who were murdered in Kansas in 2017, as Donald Trump's populist rhetoric began to climb after the election, was a damning proof that stoking jingoism harms innocent people first. Those gleefully cheering for extremely divisive rhetoric, based on misinfo and hyperbole, will be directly complicit in future tragedies caused by this.

The world has enjoyed a Pax Americana, and if the continuance of that means being 'tough on China', then that is a price that must be paid.

What is this American Jingoism you are talking about? America has thrown open its doors to international trade with China, welcomes their students, visitors, businesspeople and immigrants in the hundreds of thousands, even millions, every year, and places very few restrictions on Chinese ownership of American firms. No nation has extended such favorable terms to another, particularly one with a diametrically opposed political system, for so long. All this while China brazenly steals intellectual property, builds and militarizes the South China Sea in open defiance of the UNCLOS, indulges in chicanery and deception to hide its handling of a deadly pandemic that has killed more Americans than all wars that America has fought in combined, rapidly builds up its navy and its fishing fleet to intimidate and coerce American allies and openly collaborates with America's geopolitical rivals, including dangerous megalomaniacs threatening the annihilation of America, such as Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin, and the Ayatollahs of Iran, even to the extent of practically funding and otherwise propping them up.

It's a miracle Americans have shown such forbearance for so long, really. Jingoism indeed!

Based on how many replies are directly attacking you or repeating propagandic lines, the jingoism mind virus is already here and the infection is deep. I salute you for the courage to speak out against the overwhelming pro-conflict campaign, but I am afraid we are past the point to reverse course.

Can you please make your substantive points without going into fulmination or flamewar? Of course these are provocative topics and strong feelings are both natural and inevitable, but that makes it more important, not less, to stick to the rules. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

Missile was way overkill - your tax dollars at work! It had been observed for days: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinese-spy-ballo... A balloon's surface is not rigid. Clipping it with a wing would have been enough to deflate it as there is minimal to no risk of damaging a metal wing. Let alone the week or so they had to prepare a M61 Vulcan Gatling gun on an F15 that can fly at 65k ft above the 60k ft flight altitude of the balloon. Lack of air retrieval was also very disappointing. Imagine if it had a secondary payload that dispersed in the water or near the ground.

Directed energy would be better. But then missles are something the general public can understand. It also falls in line with the US making a big drama about this

While these are all great points, I guess this has changed people’s perception of risks and we are now more open to spending billions of USD to close these perceived and real gaps.

It won’t be surprising if there is a huge defense spending bill in congress with carve out for war in Ukraine and this time it will go through as the Republicans won’t hold back.

It's a practical training exercise and a worthwhile experiment to confirm the inventory can be used against a novel threat. You realize millions of dollars get spent shooting missiles into target drones every year. One extra on a real target isn't an issue.

Are you sure it was at an altitude they could safely fly a craft to carry out your plan?

How else would you aim to shoot it down? The published flight ceiling for most fighter jets is somewhere around 60,000 feet (I’m sure they can go higher if they want to, but exactly how high is probably valuable intelligence).

Weather balloons on the other hand fly much higher. This would have been likely (I don’t know) between 60,000 and 120,000 feet. You certainly couldn’t just do a gun run at that altitude. Clipping it with a wing is a great way of killing your pilot, as you’ve basically asked them to crash directly into an unknown object.

I was actually surprised there wasn't some energy-based laser that could be shot at it, even if from an aircraft, but I agree with your assessment.

Which brings up an interesting question: would launching thousands of balloons at the US be a good strategy to completely drain the A2A missile stockpile? It seems like a balloon would also be absurdly cheaper than the missile, not to mention having to get a plane out to intercept the balloon, therefore this is likely to be an incredibly effective war strategy.

There quite possibly are energy weapons that could shoot it down, perhaps some kind of spooky ship based anti missile systems (edit: I’ve looked into this and there’s definitely not anything public that can shoot that far). I suspect that if this were really a Chinese spy balloon, getting detailed data on such a weapon would be an amazing added bonus (think wavelength, energy output, etc). An AAMRAM is pretty well known tech at this point. On the other hand, it might have been a fun show of force to use something spooky. It’s hard to speculate.

As far as swamping air defences with balloons, yeah that’s a thing that’s pretty concerning. If you add swarm drones into the equation, it gets very scary.

Do we really want to be shooting classified energy weapons at surveillance devices!?

Clipping it with a wing would damage and/or destroy a multi-million dollar fighter, and put the pilot's life in undue danger.

This isn't like the pylons at an air race, which are designed to separate.

You’re neither expert in military nor taxes.

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