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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
by jacquesm 9mo ago
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.
- w0de0 9mo agoIt's one balloon, Michael. What could it cost, 10 dollars?
- phil21 9mo agoA large Mylar party balloon with helium? Yeah probably about that depending on where you are and the balloon type and size.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- SideburnsOfDoom 9mo agoYep. 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.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo agoHast 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...
- cucumber3732842 9mo ago>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.
- altairprime 9mo agoAt least then we’d stop throwing away all our helium away!
- idiotsecant 9mo agoWhen you're done getting up on that cross the rest of the thread will be waiting for you
- retired 9mo agoSchiphol 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.
- jacquesm 9mo agoAnd they sell them right in the arrivals hall...
- reactordev 9mo agoMaybe their born with it, maybe it’s… How have we not blown ourselves up yet?
- tbrownaw 9mo ago> 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.
- jacquesm 9mo agoGive it some time.
- ben_w 9mo agoWe 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 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.
- PearlRiver 9mo ago
- ribosometronome 9mo agoPanic, shut down the airport, and reveal their top secret methods of defense against actual attacks.
- kakacik 9mo agoAnd 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.
- edwcross 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons
- lelanthran 9mo ago> 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).
- lazide 9mo agoThey (apparently) have much more efficient ways of doing this.
- ben_w 9mo agoMy 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine