shouldn’t a few rounds from a mig 29 be able to bring a balloon down without any effort? Sounds like a skill issue.

So firstly at 5-7km you shoot a balloon it doesn’t just deflate and drop. It’ll keep floating (slowly returning to earth over days).

You’ve been vectored in by ground controllers. You have to spend a heap of time waiting for orders and directions. You can’t even see it properly. Its mylar. The FLIR, if its working, isn’t showing shit when it comes to mylar.

Secondly imagine you’re doing 800kph in a mig-29. Your radar won’t lock onto the balloon.

So you somehow line up and setup guns for the shot. Bam, your past it before you have time to even think.

So you line up for another pass. You slow your MIG down to 350kph. This time you have maybe 5-8 seconds before you’re pass the target.

You have no idea if you’ve hit it. You’ve probably missed it.

A couple more passes and now you’re running out of fuel and or ammo (tactical fighters usually have enough ammo for a 1-3 second total firing time) and have to return to base.

Plus all the running cost stuff the other posters have pointed out makes using tactical fighters to shoot down balloons a completely losing proposition.

When the Americans shot down those Chinese balloons it was a near miracle they were able to do it.

Of interesting to note is one of the core applications for the Soviet / Russian A-60 airborne was to shoot down American “weather” balloons.

Really fascinating video (that goes into trainspotting levels of detail) by Not a Pound for Air to Ground

https://youtu.be/tO2Jk5jjzdE

Fixed: 8 feral cats letting me live on their property

The real truth is he probably talked about getting high (or got really high/drunk), complained about his wife, life, work, talked money (and lack thereof), shit jobs and probably of either sports or gaming.

I’ve got privit, onion weed, rust weed and bamboo all fighting it out in gladiatoral combat

And winners reward will be acid ans fire followed by a salting of the earth after which the soil will be evacuated to the clay level before it is dumped in my neighbours yard (where all of these fuckers came from

I have a grey tux that was scared as shit.

There is a way

Find the most delicious food out there for a cat. Not kibble or anything. Like cook some steak. Throw that steak at her till she realises its good. Then hold it out. Get her eating out of your hand.

Continue for a good week. Dont ask anything of her. Then start doing training work. Watch cat training youtube videos.

And apply said learnings.

My feral gray tux is the smartest cat I’ve ever had. He knows multiple commands and is so friendly now he sits on the very large dog that used to scare the absolute bejebbus out of him.

There are 9 critical straits: Strait of Hormuz, Strait of Malacca, Suez Canal, Bab el-Mandeb, Panama Canal, Strait of Gibraltar, English Channel, Turkish Straits, Danish Straits.

I read a shit ton of books. I don’t care if they’re on a screen or in my hands.

And if you take acid before work be warned miniature dragons will show themselves in your computer screen.

Holy shit. I just realised something from that day.

I was in a call centre on the phones.

Fuck what did i say to people???

Mind bogglingly how hard it was getting taxed. Although the ass fucking will return in June when the government goes back to taxing it

Who the fuck reads magazines in a waiting room when you have the entire internet in that small device in your hand

Shit I have a huge library of books I’ve pirated (I’ve already got them in hardcover at home) that I read.

It does my head in how we ignore the shit answers language models give (I refuse to call them intelligent).

I swear unless it’s baby shit, like where is the syntax error in this script, it almost always gets it wrong.

Making fresh scripts, even with padentic level prompting and detail just ends up with a script with multiple errors.

I’ve realised I would have written it just as quickly (after all the iteration work) if I had just done it myself.

The only I find LLMS are good for are glorified search engines. And even then it’s horrifying how inefficient chatgpt is for search compared to say Google.

Not to mention it’s run by a sociopath.

Lol, indeed.

My old username in MIRC was verbose

Now OP you just gotta do a classified advert like this.

I’ll join you…

I’d rather live in a small, no frills apartment with only the most basic of rent prices to help cover repairs in a socialist economy over being homeless in a capitalist one.

I guess. Although I know heaps of beggers who make a killing.

Easy 2 grand a week.

If you know how to game, by God you can make a killing.

Now that said to live with yourself you do need to have a bit of a habit, so they are paying a good 50% of that into the smack tax.

I’ll say it again and again heroin addicts are the hardest working people in a capitalist society. Never stop workin it…

Omg

Trumps whole “Allah is great” line is now starting to make sense.

A reverse crusade!

Would you like an animal that requires constant care and attendance… Well have I got one for you, the hairless cat

think that they will be flattered by it. i’m not surprised

In my experience all the gay guys I knew loved getting handsy with me.

They thought they could make go gay presumably with their “incredible” technique.

Didn’t work…but jeebus the amount of having to fend them off. Not to mention the never ending commentary about how I’d be better off gay.

But I don’t consign every gay man to this behaviour in the same way I don’t consign hetros who rape women as if somehow all men are rapists.

If you watch the video the dog actually ignores her.

Twice, goes to the bloke behind her.

Feedin’ the poor and helping out wit’ they bills

I know everyone is joking but this is my number two biggest reason I don’t move to Linux, the nonsensical abbreviations and syntaxs of Linux command lines.

I hate them so much. And it’s not like I haven’t been using it since the late 90s.

This meme is so true in that Windows/dos commands just made better linguistic sense.