I was a passenger in a car en route to a funeral. I felt like the post was a little troublesome and I provided what context I could in the limited time I had to reply.
I do wish I had said "deeply misleading" instead of "useless", though. Which-- deeply misleading is even worse than useless, unfortunately.
> walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.
In this case, there's a state actor (China) deliberately conflating weather balloons and surveillance craft. Typical weather balloons drift freely and cannot maneuver; capable balloons that can control their altitude can maneuver far more freely than most people expect. "Narrative" may sound sinister, but we have a deliberate counterfactual being used in the furtherance of surveillance and geopolitical conflict.
In turn, we have this "Spy Balloon Simulator - With real atmospheric data" that makes it pretty much impossible to control a balloon. It may be an accidental misstep, but it's at the very least a somewhat dangerous one.