Except I don’t stand down track of oncoming trains so I shouldn’t need to worry about the debris from the truck parked on the tracks.
High winds, squirrelly winds around a highrise, a winter delivery (dark early & no leaves on the trees) into a thin branch, or a wire, let alone the spring/summer kids playing ball in the yard & I just don’t see these things being safe in a lot of areas. Yeah, their testing is to a farmhouse, with a huuugggee yard & no obstructions makes it easy. That’s like learning to drive in an empty parking lot vs. a construction cattle shoot merge at rush hour.
I’m dead set against small drones doing random deliveries for all the reasons you say. It’s a novelty being thrown against a real world wall to see which parts might possibly stick. With zero regard for consequences.
I think that maybe human carrying e-vtols can be made safe enough for widespread deployment. I have no such faith for overgrown toys the size of coffee tables with no weight bearing capacity for redundancy. They’ll be falling out of the sky everywhere, and that’s before people take to skeet-shooting them.
Does anyone know how close this military laser beam, that they used to shoot down a misidentified party balloon, was to Mexican airspace? Should the saner U.S. authorities have also advised the nearby Ciudad Juárez airport to shut down?
I remember reading a report about 9 months ago how the DOD was training ICE to use mortars, which is an absurd thing to do. The fuck do they need air defense lasers for? We’re gonna have ICE tanks and artillery on the streets within a year.
Am I reading this correctly? The airport was closed because a party balloon, like you can buy at many grocery stores, soared away? Seems like a lot of shenanigans against the US government are soon to come if that is the case.
If antifa is truly as organized as Fox News leads me to believe, I think we can expect coordinated balloon attacks across the US. Soros must be cackling in glee! Party balloons for all!!!
Any guesses how many hundreds of thousands of dollars (rough order of magnitude) has been spent to shoot down a presumably $10 party balloon? Just the drone (I doubt a laser equipped drone was cheap) time, hours for operators and trackers, lost business out of El Paso, and the interception as a teaser, plus all the money now blown on denials, spin, second spin, clean underwear, hamberders, ketchup cleanup, bus undercarriage repair… you know, the usual.
Of course, we could be reaching millions, but that would be even more depressing.
The party balloon was a different test. This incident was the Customs and Border Patrol " borrowing" an air defense laser from the DoD for testing and the FAA panicking about civil aircraft getting zapped by trainees.
When they get their story(s) straight, then I’ll try to keep track, though given the credibility (zero) of this administration, I’ll generally assume the worst no matter what the “official” version ends up being.
Sadly for the state of the nation and my mind, the reality of the endless “fake news” spewed by MAGA means that even given my best efforts to verify facts and try not to become a slave to assumptions has fallen by the wayside.
I saw a landscaper slow roll a stop sign; how else do you suppose they should be stopped for such a heinous crime? Wouldn’t ICE be safer if they just crushed the vehicle with the tank…& then shoot the driver with not complying with orders to exit the vehicle because the crushed doors won’t open?
I’m just spitballing here, but can’t we give them paper-wrapped straws?
There have been, from long before trump, ongoing efforts to figure out how to defend things like commercial airports, military installations, stadiums, and nuclear power plants, from drone disruption and concentrated drone attacks. With the assumption some federal agency would be tasked with owning & operating the counter-drone defense equipment, whatever those turn out to be.
Decent bet that in a legit competent administration, which we decidedly do not now have, it would be some division of DHS. Perhaps even a new one created just for that purpose.
ISTM if they really were shooting at drug-mule drones of whatever nature, it ought to have been the DEA who was doing the shooting. They already have an army and an air force. Why not an air defense branch too? Assuming again a sane conventional US administration, not the current criminal regime.
