Congress Just Made It Basically Impossible to Track Taylor Swift's Private Jet
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Yes, because the richest man on the planet, heading up multiple billion dollar companies, couldn’t possibly have any legit reason to travel anywhere.
The subject as presented like this leaves little room for talk about alternatives or ways to reduce jet emissions. It poisons the conversation by starting down the wrong direction.
So, who has all the dollars, and therefore all the votes?
If you don’t have any dollars to buy off your entity in Congress, then how are you going to get the laws changed?
Well, it is the wrong direction for reducing jet emissions, because the privacy of the registration of private jets isn't what causes or reduces jet emissions. It is a separate issue.
Unfortunately they can be confused with each other. They should have a way to reduce jet emissions, but it is a separate issue from anonymous registration of airplanes, so should be considered too, but this is something else, anyways.
I bet for many travels of Musk this would be true:
"This Meeting Could Have Been an Email"
Taylor Swift could have livestreamed on YouTube.
Nietzsche: "The vanity of others offends most, when it offends our own vanity."
No one here is threatened when Dave Grohl pumps out his 30th hit album, or when Steph and Lebron wipe the court with all the other players. But the idea that this Elon guy is not only richer, but also smarter and more ambitious and more innovative than any of us? That's unfair, it can't be so!!
Smarter?
Have you seen his Twitter timeline? He falls for nearly every fake news and conspiracy theory.
We aren't threatened by Dave Grohl because he doesn't use his social media outreach to promote right wing conspiracy BS.
You shouldn't mistake his Twitter feed for straight and full approval... He often trolls or merely thinks there might be some basis of truth in something, and sometimes he blurts out in anger. Again, in his case you just see it publicly.
Not defending him, it's weird and terrible and took a sharp decline after his breakup. But it's not so unusual.
Do you really think Elon is like that with Twitter - not just an idiot on it but according to all evidence also while running it - yet somehow doing in depth high-level technical reviews of his own spacecraft like he's Geordi LaForge? Looking at the blueprints while sipping coffee and telling the engineers that if they only invert the polarity of the neutron flow, the engines could get another 10% efficiency by harnessing negative energy from the Casimir Effect or some nonsense?
He's smart but it should be obvious he's not nearly the world class polymath billionaire playboy inventor he's been hyped up to be. His companies work because he surrounds himself with people smarter than he is, and because those people create cultures that route around his tendencies (which culture doesn't appear to exist at Twitter.) The man brought a fucking sink to Twitter for the sake of a pun like it was the funniest thing ever.
The problem is the premise that one can effectively decide the value of an employee's work by counting LOC or reading their output in that manner at all. It's dumb whether it's done with a REPL or a stack of paper.
High performers challenge this notion because they say “I have very difficult bug fixes that required little code.” But high performing engineers just don’t realize how little (shockingly little) output actually comes out of low performers. Like, a slow trickle of trivial code, and tasks that stretch for weeks for no good reason besides their inability to overcome obstacles
Yes but that isn't what happened. By all accounts no such process took place at Twitter.
Many understand Einstein's theory of relativity but few would have came up with.
He isn't some kind of Tony Stark who builds things himself.
Ever heard of web meetings or even telephone?
They already design new rockets, robots and chip without him being on site because he's busy with Twitter.
And I guess it's pretty easy for him to do a remote session if he needs to. He has his own Internet company.
Otherwise it's like driving a combustion car if you own a electric car company.
Doesn't mean he designed a rocket, robot or chip.
For clarification email is a metaphor for anything that could be done remotely, like designing rockets, robots and brain chips.
The Swift fans on the other hand pay to see her live, that's the USP of a concert.
You really think any of that would have been possible without him? What EV company is as successful as Tesla? How many rockets does the second most successful company launch every year?
Where did I wrote that?
My point is not everything needed him being on site making some travels unnecessary.
We shouldn't be promoting emotional effects that are massed produced like facebook feeds that trigger real emotional responses to fake simulants
The article literally says that Musk did not have a "pretty good reason to travel a lot last year":
> unlike someone like Musk, Swift actually had a pretty good reason to travel a lot last year
How much does Tesla add, how much does SpaceX add? Twttr is in some ways in the same category (entertainment) as Swift, but it's also a good dissemination platform. Billions vs Millions, but whatever... truth is a cruel mistress.
At least Swift's flights are often very long distance, and she has several major reasons for using the private jet; because of how large and obsessive her fan base is, it would be beyond difficult for her to travel via non-private commercial travel and a huge annoyance to anyone else on the plane. There'd even be fans and paparazzi trying to predict what flight she'd be on and booking tickets themselves.
There are also security safety concerns, although they have to be weighed against the much higher crash rate for bizjet travel than commercial passenger aviation flights.
She also has to physically travel for a tour. There's no other option.
Musk can do 90% of what he does via videoconferencing or phone calls - and from stories that have come out in the press from former executives who worked for him, he incessantly calls his subordinates, even in the middle of the night.
Still, people are missing the true motivator behind this legislation. It's not just about the rich 0.01%'ers. It's also about all the FBI, DEA, and CBP planes that are registered through shell companies to somewhat hide their purpose...but ownership and purpose becomes obvious when you see the model of plane (the agencies have their favorites), photos of it by plane spotters (showing obvious surveillance equipment pods), and the flight paths available online (usually endless loops over an area, or loops that follow a track from one point to another, obviously following someone.) This makes it somewhat harder to track them.
It took all of about 30 seconds to figure out this was Steve Jobs' plane; it had already been removed from all public tracking databases. (aircraft owners can request their aircraft be removed from datasets like flightaware, etc.)
I don't think this new legislation has any practical effect on the ability to track a specific aircraft. Once you figure out which one you want to track and have sufficient ADSB coverage, you will be able to track it. It's not as if the tail numbers are changing between flights.
Hard to imagine this will actually make jet tracking sites/accounts/etc disappear.
If it's an empty registration number, well, to quote The Simpsons, "We'll look for the house with no numbers."
Unlike cars, you could just see who owned a plane based on its tail number without any sort of special access. People DO try to hide that by using shell companies, but you can still track those shell companies.
AKA... people will just have to spread the word what people use what planes with what N-numbers. It's not like we don't already know the tail number of these people's jets or their transponder codes in the sky, no matter what they do.
Guessing FAA is just committing to anonymize their public part 135 operators list.
Airspace above the US is nationalized. It's managed by the government, which is funded by taxpayers. So they have a right to know who is doing what using that airspace.
Flying secretly (or at all) is not a Constitutionally protected activity so there's nothing inherently wrong with regulating it and denying something like this.
Either one of these is a good enough reason not to allow this type of thing in my opinion.
You can use this reasoning to disclose almost anything, including online real-id schemes, public license plate info, etc.
That seems like an absolute argument against any kind of right to privacy.
So you'd equally have no concern at all if there was a publicly searchable registry of every flight that every passenger was taking on a commercial carrier?
The roads are managed by government and funded by taxpayers: should there be a publicly searchable record of every vehicle movement on the roads as well?
> So you'd equally have no concern at all if there was a publicly searchable registry of every flight that every passenger was taking on a commercial carrier?
There is a searchable registry of every flight already. The passenger thing is something you added that I never brought up.
> The roads are managed by government and funded by taxpayers: should there be a publicly searchable record of every vehicle movement on the roads as well?
Well the closest thing to an aircraft transponder is a license plate, and it's pretty well established case law that you have no right to obscure your license plate and that you have no right to privacy with regard to that license plate being recorded, being run by the police without cause or suspicion, etc. The fact that there isn't a publicly searchable record of automobile movements is simply because automobile movement isn't as strictly controlled as aircraft movement. If cars needed transponders in them and you needed a controller to give you permission to take an exit we'd have basically the same system for cars.
I suspect it's the second part -- and the very powerful, rich people who fly their private jets to global climate conferences -- who had more to do with this legislation than the blond cover-girl with which it's being associated.
Wake me up when the FCC is required to anonymize personally identifying information in the amateur radio registration database as well... I never give out my callsign because it would be too easy for people to figure out where I live. But then I'm just a private, normal, tax payer and not a celebrity or billionaire who is already a public figure.
Bill Gates had something like 23 or more visits there.
If so, time for some traditional intelligence work: someone at the airport with a telephoto lens to document just who disembarked from the plane.
Isn't that illegal? (... withdraws into ignorance cave)
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/the-differe...
That being said, off the books "I really want this" probably carries some weight when it comes from large donors I'd imagine. Is that bribery?
Or: Bob "gold bars" Menendez, Rudy Giuliani selling pardons for $2M USD, or almost every form of paid lobbying and campaign fundraising.
(Cooome baaack. Thhhhe caaaave issss tooo darrrk.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...
Ppl repeat this like a truism. Hundreds of millions of dollars of donations by a certain crypto exchange CEO did nothing to keep him from seeing a 25 year sentence.
Yeah, I mean I doubt this would do a damn bit of good for a celebrity like Swift, because some fan is probably paying attention enough to figure out the tail numbers of the jets she's flying in.
It's the billionaires who aren't celebrities who will benefit from this.
She wants privacy, as is amply demonstrated by her actions on this topic. There is zero evidence that she cares about people monitoring her fuel use.
The article goes even further off the deep end, suggesting Swift is trying to game search engines to bury jet fuel stories, with zero evidence.
Tabloid nonsense.
Edit: I'm being too harsh. To rephrase: No, I don't think they will. I think that history will sooner put the blame on society and government as a whole. The people flying private jets do not do so in a vaccuum.
A win for privacy should be celebrated even if the avg person wont (yet) benefit.
Privacy isn't some monolithic good. There are, frequently, very good reasons to restrict privacy. Things like the finances of politicians, court proceedings, and the ultra-wealthy flying around in private jets disproportionally dumping C02 into the atmosphere all seem to be worth sacrificing a little privacy.
Full transparency for public officials, all types.
If you are on the public dole, you forego your right to privacy.
Its not that difficult.
I don't consider a jet, of any ownership, to be fair game. If you want to go after pollution, then do it. Removing privacy is not an acceptable substitute.
Hiding who owns or operates the airplanes isn't what causes fuel exhaust, I think.