OK, here’s my take on it:
In late November, Elon Musk tweeted admiration at swarms of drones flying in intricate patterns, and later said that conventional manned jet fighters like the F-35 are stupid and just an expensive way to get a pilot killed. Lockheed stock lost 3% that day.
What if this drone invasion were just a practical demonstration of how inefficient the FAA and Air Force are? They can keep the suspense going until after the Trump inauguration, then announce that it was all a Musk-financed DOGE project, with Musk and the pilots being guaranteed immunity. And Musk’s new drone company (XAir?) becoming the main supplier to the Air Force.
Sure, it could be an elaborate psyop carried out by the man who was forced into buying Twitter for twice its value because of a weed joke and got cheating at a non-competitive video game and thinks he’s the only real person in the world and that he created a woman with his mind and that the true nature of the universe was accurately described by an action movie starring Keanu Reeves and that a “woke mind virus” killed his daughter who is alive and well and hates him.
Or it could be people who never look at the sky and think they’re smarter than they are freaking out over the same lights that have been in the sky for their entire lives.
Larry Hogan, former Republican Governor of Maryland who was defeated in his run for the US Senate gazes into the sky, apparently for the first time. Already posted above, but here’s his tweet in its full inane glory.
Noah Smith offers some interesting thoughts about drones:
The fact that lots of people panicked — mistaking planes for drones, sending up their own drones to add to the confusion, and so on — should not obscure the fundamental reasonability of the panic. Drones have changed our physical world in important ways, and regular people are just waking up to how big of a change it is.
That awakening is long overdue. I’ve been yelling for over a decade that drones are going to change everything. I often talk about how they’ll change the battlefield, but in a post in February 2023 I talked about how they’ll change life behind the front lines, and life during peacetime as well
#2 of 5 interesting things:
Contains a nice short sci-fi film called Slaugterbots.
I live not too far from the headquarters of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). There’s a couple of large open fields adjacent to their building, and a few years ago, they posted “No Drone Zone” signs all around them. So, yeah, this is an issue in a lot of places.
Within the sociology of knowledge, agnotology (formerly agnatology ) is the study of deliberate, culturally induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product, influence opinion, or win favour, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data (disinformation).
Tobacco companies sowing doubt about the health effects of their products is a classic for-profit example. Similar to fossil fuel companies and climate change nowadays.
If I was up to no good, I’d make sure that the drone I was using had an option to fly without its lights on. But if that drone was perfect otherwise, I’d tape over the lights. Bottom line, I think flying without lights would be better for most nefarious purposes.
A good idea that John Carmack posted: drones should blink an ID number at about 15 baud. That’s slow enough that you could determine the ID from a 30 fps video clip over the course of several seconds. Could be faster with clever encoding and/or use of multiple lights.
Wouldn’t stop the truly nefarious, but most people flying drones illegally aren’t that clever. Probably most wouldn’t even be aware if it, like most people aren’t aware that most color printers/copiers embed ID codes in all printed output.
Drones already require an electronic remoteID that gives much more information than that, including the registered owner and where the person with the controls are physically located in space. You don’t even need specialized equipment - I’m pretty sure you can see it with a cell phone app. And if whatever these things aren’t compliant with that, then it’s unlikely they’d be compliant with lights that blink out its identity.
You can’t determine any of that stuff from a clip someone posted to YouTube. But that’s likely all someone in law enforcement has to go on.
ETA: No reason you couldn’t also include physical location or other things in the blink code. There’s some tradeoff between how how much you include vs. ensuring it works with short clips, but a GPS position isn’t unreasonable.
Watch the latest Seth Meyers to see a clip of an expert in drones that says the obvious: If these are nefarious, why don’t they turn the lights off. Is China and Iran too stupid to figure out how to be covert?
The stupid is taking over. I fear for our country and our future.
Much like conspiracy theorists who think the evil cabal running the world routinely leaves clues in plain sight for “smart” people like them to find, I assume that the assumption is that these drones are in fact being operated by the Riddler.
I think of UFO Over Cairo, a song from an Egyptian band named NASA. I happened across a CD if theirs in a stack of used CDs and bought it out of curiosity.
When has a US President contributed to the mass hysteria in any of those events recently? When have governors and other elected officials? This is a tad different when the incoming US Pres is saying we need to start shooting them down. Saying stupid has taken over is not “over the top”.
OK, that was a dumbshit thing to do, but if that is what you call “MASS” hysteria compared to rogue drone sightings across the US…don’t know what to say. Did Biden suggest they start shooting things to curb it? Apples and oranges.
I’m not saying there aren’t degrees of dumbness here. This one is notably dumb, though on the other hand drones actually do exist and there are undoubtedly some cases of actual enemy surveillance.
In a way it’s past due; just about any new technology or social development gets mixed up with some kind of hysteria, and drones are a perfect fit for the UFO template.
