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Comment by lysace | Hacker News Reader

Fox News first reported that the airborne object was intercepted after raising concerns of a potential drone operating near the southern border. Officials later concluded the object was not an unmanned aircraft but a party balloon, a U.S. official told the outlet.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-military-shot-down-party...

US military shot down party balloon near El Paso after drone suspicion, official says

Would be funny if they used some new fancy laser weapon to, let's say, discombobulate this imminent threat, as indicated by other reports.

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Just think about the terrorist potential here. Buy a $10 party balloon, let it go near a major airport and they'll panic and shut down the airport. That's a lot of havoc for a couple of bucks.

It's one balloon, Michael. What could it cost, 10 dollars?

A large Mylar party balloon with helium? Yeah probably about that depending on where you are and the balloon type and size.

Yep. It seems like for this application you'd want a larger one, a few feet across, with a nice shiny metal foil coating for the radar to bounce off. So, not a $1 balloon.

Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?

Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich

Von 99 Luftballons

Auf ihrem Weg zum ... well, El Paso as it turns out.

the English rewrite of course starts:

You and I in a little toyshop

Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got

Set them free at the break of dawn

'til one by one, they were gone...

>Just think about the terrorist potential here. Buy a $10 party balloon, let it go near a major airport and they'll panic and shut down the airport. That's a lot of havoc for a couple of bucks.

And rather than see the government have egg on face people (probably a majority here) will vote for politicians who promise all sorts of licenses and regulations on balloons because of it and then in 20yr when I complain and remind them that once upon a time every store used to sell balloons with no KYC BS they'll act like I'm some sort of barbarian, screech, wring their hands, clutch their pearls, etc.

At least then we’d stop throwing away all our helium away!

When you're done getting up on that cross the rest of the thread will be waiting for you

Schiphol Airport has large No Balloons signs when you go down to the train station. Aluminum balloons can create havoc on the overhead power lines. It recently shut down the train service for the morning.

And they sell them right in the arrivals hall...

Maybe their born with it, maybe it’s…

How have we not blown ourselves up yet?

> How have we not blown ourselves up yet?

It's not that we haven't, it's just that we can only observe from those few realities where we didn't.

Give it some time.

We do on a regular basis, it's just that most of the accidents are relatively small-scale, like one person being mistaken for an explosive-vest wearing terrorist chased onto a subway train and shot, or just one of many reactors being made to go Chernobyl, or just the occasional huge dam here and there failing and damaging a few million homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Most people aren't sadistically malicious, and most security is professional, so random little failures like metalled balloons or reflections off clouds (or the moon) scaring a security system will only blow up to something important (even on the scale of previous paragraph) every decade or so.

The Netherlands did not even blink when unknown actors (read Russians) were flying drones around the country but balloons is too much.

Panic, shut down the airport, and reveal their top secret methods of defense against actual attacks.

And imagine the mayhem with 20 balloons, or 100. Very easy in trigger happy situation, a child is all you need.

But what do we know, maybe it was an evil terrorist party balloon. You see, the wall just needs to be a little higher to protect that beautiful country from all southern evils.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons

> And imagine the mayhem with 20 balloons, or 100. Very easy in trigger happy situation, a child is all you need.

Sounds like a great way for a drug-runner to proceed - release 1000 balloons across a very large area, and have only one of them carry their payload of drugs (or whatever).

They (apparently) have much more efficient ways of doing this.

My guess would be that an actual catapult and an RC car would be enough. It may be necessary to be airborne to cross the land border, but only just enough for the physical barrier, the rest can be on land.

That said, I doubt they even bother with such small-scale trade. The narco-submarines are much higher capacity and now apparently well-built enough to be trans-pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine

I have wondered if this would help Ukraine. Let a thousand balloons float serenely into Russian airspace. Some of them may have drones on them waiting to be cut loose and drop a payload on something important. Or they may be carrying a weighted 3d printed shell of a drone that does nothing, Russia can't afford to take that chance. And likewise in the other direction.

Which way are the prevailing winds at altitude over the Ukrainian-Russian border region, anyway?

Those winds favor Ukraine and this is something they are acutely aware of. Ukrainian drones into russian held territory have a range advantage.

99 Luftballons

The lyrics of the original German version tell a story: 99 balloons are mistaken for UFOs, causing a military general to send pilots to investigate. Finding nothing but balloons, the pilots put on a large show of firepower. The display of force worries the nations along the borders and the defence ministers on each side encourage conflict to grab power for themselves.

In the end, a cataclysmic war results from the otherwise harmless flight of balloons and causes devastation on all sides without a victor, as indicated in the denouement of the song: "99 Jahre Krieg ließen keinen Platz für Sieger," which means "99 years of war left no room for victors." The anti-war song finishes with the singer walking through the devastated ruins of the world and finding a single balloon. The description of what happens in the final line of the piece is the same in German and English: "'Denk' an dich und lass' ihn fliegen," or "Think of you and let it go."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons#Lyrics)

I'm learning to sing in German with Nena.

I especially like the way she rhymes "Captain Kirk" with "Feuerwerk".

https://genius.com/Nena-99-luftballons-lyrics

In other news, Director Gabbard and Secretaries Noem, Hegseth, and Kennedy met with Secretary Leavitt for her big Gender Reveal Party in El Paso...

She does that 'Captain Kirk' rhyme in the English version too though.

The real treat for German listeners is the first verse: ich, mich, dich, and neun-und-neunZIG (zig is pronounced like ich in the main German dialect).

With all of the 'neunundneunzig' (aka 99) repeated throughout the song, the ich/dich/mich/vielleicht rhymes is really a superior start over the English version.

It's a rhyming scheme that cannot be replicated in English at all.

Live performance (2018!) in German with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIO5lfJ9dhs

(I can mostly understand spoken German. Have heard this song in German many times before. Never got the message. It's tricky!)

For me, singing the words myself forces me to understand them.

So just sing along. Every word, and understand as much as you can.

------

Once you know all the words, then the next step is to learn the grammar and learn how the words work together. If you give it a few months, full understanding will come!

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