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Comment by moose_man | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but notice how they did not test them in Chinese airspace.

Didn't they?

No, the Chinese get aggressive if anyone flies in the South China Sea let alone over China proper.

Exactly, China was boasting about it's ability to shoot down high altitude balloons in 2019. You can still find some stuff in Mandarin, but everything in english, has been taken down. They were boasting about their high altitude surveillance balloons a year ago, and again you can still find some original material, but all of the english language articles have been removed. The propaganda machine is spinning on it's head now.

Which is neither here, nor there

What would be the purpose of surveillance balloons if not to use them on your rivals...

When the citizenry has the ability to remove you from power, they become your rivals

It is cost benefit trade off. Sure US could get some benefit but at the expense of the similar scenario that is playing out now here. Using balloons over national territory is highly escalatory. Whatever they're getting intelligence wise it can't be worth the fallout. Building a capability is not the same as employing it. We have nukes and yet we don't regularly bring them out.

To surveil your population, as most "first world" governments seem so keen on?

They use it on rivals. One of the rivals is their own people.

Notice that we have zero evidence that the recent objects were Chinese in origin except the admin has said so. And we know they never lie about anything.

The Chinese said it was their balloon last week. They want it back. If we just go with the prevailing trend, China is the most likely explanation for these by a long shot.

Come to think of it, if the Chinese want this balloon back, does it make it more or less likely that this is a US balloon?

(then again, if it is, presumably the US wouldnt simply hand them back "as is", so not sure what kind of endgame that would serve)

If China lied about its balloons (over Beijing) being from the US, would the US attempt to do the impossible and prove that something never existed or agree and ask for them back?

> Notice that we have zero evidence that the recent objects were Chinese in origin

It's written right there. Made in China. The only thing still made in US is military equipment.

It would be funny if they turned out to be ours. A case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing.

the first one they got had hardware from several Chinese corps and had every sign of being from China, are you denying that? I guarantee if they got even 2% of the hardware they were able to figure out where it came from.

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