Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 631 posts

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#611

Post by ben_w »

delaminator wrote: post #403
pjc50 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reactionary accelerationists want a local war of some sort so they can grab war powers and then roll back all the US's post-WW2 social progress (and most of the New Deal too).

My understanding is accelerationists or liberals to go full hog so that they can go "see".

For my entire life, the US's idea of "liberals" is extremely small-c-conservative, Chesterton's fence style.

The Republicans may wave the "Conservative" flag, but they're the only ones I see going full-hog on pretty much anything.

That said, pre-Trump Republicans were milquetoast in comparison to what has happened over the last 13 months. Assuming US democracy doesn't collapse before the next transition of power, I wouldn't want to guess if the next Democrat government will continue this trend or be as full-hog in disregarding all checks-and-balances constraints on executive power to get stuff done.

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#612

Post by m4rtink »

adrr wrote: post #566
stevenwoo wrote: post #536

The military panicked and shot down a balloon with a laser. https://newrepublic.com/post/206483/el-paso-airport-closed-m...

Thats little nerve racking. What happens if a commercial airplane gets confused with a bunch of balloons.

Then potentially people die - like they died when there were reckless helicopter flights in front of a DC area airport, until a helicopter collided with an airliner, killing all on board.

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#613

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #525
duped wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, prohibition works while legalization just makes more people use whatever you legalize and increases the negative externalities of its use. You see that almost universally (alcohol, drugs, sex work). The exception is it gets rid of the black markets and some (but not all) of the violence associated with them. So if the goal is to put cartels out of business then yea, full legalization would help. If the goal i…

Alcohol is legal. We don't have gun battles between gangs of smugglers, or between them and the cops. We also don't have people dying or going blind from trying to drink wood alcohol. But we still have a depressingly large number of alcoholics. The campaign against drunk driving has helped reduce one set of negative side effects, but not others.

The decline in alcohol consumed by Gen Z is interesting though. We’ll see if it holds with Gen Alpha, or if it can just be chalked up to Gen Z dealing with Covid during their formative years when other generations would have been partying quite a bit.

Maybe an unintended positive externality of marijuana legalization?

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#614

Post by lazide »

lelanthran wrote: post #605
kakacik wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#615

Post by RupertSalt »

ben_w wrote: post #610
RupertSalt wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

From what I've seen in the news, and also in history books, and also from anecdotes from the family of a previous (American dual national) partner, I don't agree that Americans as a whole see the international border as "a bright line" nor "a defining point of jurisdictional change". Some Americans may, I don't know how many, but definitely not Americans as a collective.

I tried writing a comment to explain the Chicano perspective, but since I am a non-Chicano American, I was just making things up.

Suffice it to say that the Chicano experience and perspectives on nationalism are different than that of typical Americans. And that Americans cannot understand the political relationships or the border states or the Chicano enclaves without accepting that our perspective is not shared by them, and their worldviews on race, ethnicity, culture, territory, nationalism and legal status has led us to this point in 2026.

Our national motto is "E PLURIBUS UNUM" and our structure is a republic with 50 states. But like the Internet is a network of networks, the United States is a nation of immigrants, where not everyone is playing by the same rules.

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#616

Post by ben_w »

kakacik wrote: post #599
ribosometronome wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#617

Post by ben_w »

lazide wrote: post #614
lelanthran wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#618

Post by ben_w »

reactordev wrote: post #564
jacquesm wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#619

Post by jacquesm »

ben_w wrote: post #616
kakacik wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 ove…

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

Re: Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport

#620

Post by ahhhhnoooo »

cheonn638 wrote: post #503
ahhhhnoooo wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epstein files.

> Epstein files. Nobody cares

Someone asked what an acronym stood for. All I did was expand the acronym.

Are you so tightly wound up that even seeing someone simply answer a direct question about what "e-files" means sets you off?

I think it might be a good time to step back and evaluate your engagement with media, HN, and the internet. Because it seems like you've got a wildly partisan reflex here.

Post reply on HN