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Washington Post losing its mind over the fact that Singapore is not as rabidly anti-China as the US wishes
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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It wasn't a hobbyist balloon to my knowledge. It was an expensive professional one. Unless the hobbyist was a millionaire it was likely launched by a University or their national weather service and they'd likely counted on recovering and re-using it but it was blown off course, this happens to US research balloons too from time to time so they're buying new ones semi-regularly.. They did later shoot down a hobbyist balloon sent up by an American group but that was a later incident.
Perhaps I got the stories mixed up. In any case, we know it wasn't a "spy" balloon so continuing to refer to it as such is disingenuous and reveals that the author's arguments are not being made in good faith.
At least one of the other balloons shot down was the hobbyst.
For some reason like four balloons were shot down by the US that week. The first was from China, but it did not collect data.