> Of course, it’s worth pointing out that, unlike someone like Musk, Swift actually had a pretty good reason to travel a lot last year: she was on tour.
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 entertainment may be superfluous but the emotional effect it has on her fans is not. I mean compare this to the carbon footprint of people driving to church. Not a fan personally, but a concert it a meaningful experience for her diehard fans.
Going to church which is usually local doesn't compare to the entertainment industry's waste from touring, production nevermind the collective gas usage.
We shouldn't be promoting emotional effects that are massed produced like facebook feeds that trigger real emotional responses to fake simulants
I think churches were a lot like spoken word venues with performers who try to copy the best, occasional traveling stars, and the most usable advice being memes that predate Christianity.
Its frustrating because it buries better points under mud. The effective way to reduce jet emissions is not to publicly rag on the people who have the money to use the service. I would go so far as to say that the author does not actually care about the subject at all, only perhaps being able to deride others to prop themselves up as not as bad as them.
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.
More than that, it ignores the fundamental principle that America is founded on: I paid for it STFU. If there is actual market failure due to externalities then get the votes to raise the cost to cover the externalities (i.e though a carbon tax), but don't think your judgement calls on who should be able to do what should have any bearing on reality. Raise the price until your externality is properly priced or until you lose the political will to implement and then let everyone decide if they are buying or not at the new price. What made America great was recognizing everyone is too stupid to make any of these calls and letting individuals exercise their own judgement (and experience the costs of that judgement). It was a great system that worked wonders and was self regulating and we have drifted far too far from it.
Thats the beauty of a carbon tax. It doesnt care, you emit, you pay. Done right it makes no judgements, it just makes emitting cost more and then lets people decide if they still want to emit or not.
> 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.
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.
Musk was taking 20 minute flights in his jet to go to the beach - insanely wasteful because the fuel overhead of startup/taxi/takeoff and landing/taxiing is extremely high for the distance traveled. It's about the most environmentally damaging, wasteful way you could possibly move yourself from point A to B.
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.
No kidding! Musk adds more and better things to the economy than a pop entertainer, for sure. Young fans would disagree, but household earners with dependents would disagree.
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.
Nobody (apart from the dolt who wrote this anyway) is arguing he or Swift or anyone else doesn't have a reason to travel. You don't need a reason. That said, in times such as ours when we're all being told via our media and legislation passed that we need to be more eco-friendly, it's a slap in the face (and I'll say, it's 2 slaps from Musk who's fortune has been greatly bolstered by AMPLE Federal subsidies for green industry!) that they can't take a regular goddamn airplane like anyone else. Planes are ATROCIOUS for emissions simply by virtue of how a jet engine works and, at least right now, it's pretty clear that public opinion leans towards it's unethical to use such machines so frivolously.
We have irrefutable evidence that Elon was the top executive at companies that did all those things, while you have no evidence that those things would have happened without him.
I don't like Musk very much since he went nuts post breakup with his GF. But he does have meaningful input, technical design is not the only thing - other companies like Boeing, Blue Origin or Ariane have great engineers too, seems like technical design is not the most important part.
Yes, I have the misfortune of being on web meetings and telephone all day, every day. Even the comparatively very simple projects I work on move forward the most during our on-site meetings - and I don't mean the technological side, that's what we do after the on-site, it's exactly the parts where Musk would have most input that feel stuck online and everyone feels like we unblocked our minds and collaboration on-site.
Yes, I do. People working with him in SpaceX have said so. And in the other cases, his leadership, financial, business, product and marketing input is still a necessary part of the project that directly influences the technical decisions.
People belittle his technical ability because it hurts our ego to admit someone could exceed us at all the things we specifically value in our corner of the world: successful products, massive innovation, big brain smarts, money...
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!!
Yeah he’s an idiot on twitter. But he’s still smarter than both of us. Or I guess I shouldn’t include you in that, in case your day job happens to involve conducting high-level business and engineering reviews of manned spacecraft like Elon does.
Do you remember the "code review" debacle after Elon took over Twitter? Of course HN thought it was genius[0] but outside of the Elon hugbox the premise of being told to print out the last 30 days of code you wrote to justify your job is absurd and clueless. It's the sort of thing someone who's trying too hard to appear clever would do.
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.
Don't forget the story said an assistant wrote the memo. It's very possible Musk said "print" in the programmer sense - like "print to console" - and the assistant misunderstood.
That doesn't seem likely given his ego and personality and apparent tendency to micromanage.
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.
You can find the lowest performers in an org pretty easily through a combination of reviewing what they’ve gotten done the last year (via self reviews, manager reviews, a recap writeup etc) and looking at their commit history and docs or other artifacts created.
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
>You can find the lowest performers in an org pretty easily through a combination of reviewing what they’ve gotten done the last year (via self reviews, manager reviews, a recap writeup etc) and looking at their commit history and docs or other artifacts created.
Yes but that isn't what happened. By all accounts no such process took place at Twitter.
Many famous scientists, engineers or industrialists who moved the world forward in the past were racist or total Nazis. Today, many otherwise extremely smart people exhibit the same behavior as Musk, you just see it publicly in his case. I see it a lot in high level academia circles. The antivax and other conspiracies during Covid got a lot of help from very intelligent people, in my state the leader of the highest rated university got involved in that, for example.
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.
> You really think Musk himself designed the rockets, robots and brain chips?
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?
Anonymizing aircraft registration was, for the most part, already possible. I first figured this out when I started playing with ADSB reception many years ago before it became the trivial effort it is today. The first plane that I happened to receive just happened to be a learjet registered to "Bank of Utah" or something similarly obtuse.
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.
This isn't to do with aircraft registration: it's to do with the fixed airframe identifier in the Mode-S data. By default, a single airframe (plane) will also squawk the same identifier on Mode-S, which can be picked up by passive receivers owned by the general public.
Yes; I know. But similar to tracking a wireless client by MAC address, it could be possible to enhance the system to assign single-use identifiers to flight plans such that it would be radically more difficult to casually associate tracking data to specific aircraft in realtime. I'm not advocating for any change necessarily; just pointing out that RF emissions of a modern aircraft do nothing to belie its identity. The registration information itself is irrelevant to tracking the aircraft movements.
Am I wrong in thinking that if the same person uses the same plane for multiple, documentable trips, or if they are spotted entering or exiting their plane, it should be possible to de-anonymize their flight data?
In case of some celebrity wouldn't it be pretty simple to analyse flights and compare them to known appearances. Like say concerts. If same plane appears to visit a city where same person make appearances very close, it seems pretty reasonable they are one using it.
No you are entirely correct; the registration data is already effectively anonymous for any entity that has chosen to care about it. To be honest with you, anyone I know who is wealthy enough to own a plane is already set up with a mountain of LLCs to own shit anonymously. This legislation is a NoOp
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.
A couple spring to mind, none of which is specific to private jets.
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.
"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."
You can use this reasoning to disclose almost anything, including online real-id schemes, public license plate info, etc.
>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.
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?
I was arguing against the right to fly a plane secretly or obscure its transponder code from public consumption, yes.
> 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.
This isn't directed at swift as much as at the wealthy in general. What you might call social shaming, many people simply call transparency. Or, if you're going to tax my SUV more I'd like to find out if it impacts your corporate jet proportionally.
Is someone tracking your CO2 emissions when you drive or travel by commercial jet? There's no database I'm aware of where I can search for your name and see all your vehicular movement.
"Celebrities and billionaires have long complained that it’s just way too easy for random people on the internet to monitor how much fuel exhaust they waste as they flit through the skies via their private jets."
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.
Wealthy people have enough sway to get the laws written they want. It's nothing new. Our politicians are legally bought and paid servants.
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.
Currently, with the latest SCOTUS decisions, only explicit quip pro quo (i.e., I give you money, you vote for a law) is illegal. If I give you money, and then complain publicly that we need a law about something and you vote for it, that's not illegal.
Flight plans still have to be filed, right? And are any of those details public, as in would a flight tracker show the destination of a plane in flight?
If so, time for some traditional intelligence work: someone at the airport with a telephoto lens to document just who disembarked from the plane.
The flight plan might include the registration number of a plane but if the ownership database is anonymized then it would require a fleet of "aviation enthusiasts" to determine on their own who owns which planes and then cross-reference filed flight plans with such a private database in order to dox the movements of celebrities. Would probably be an interesting business opportunity if it wasn't a giant "sue me!" target for people who have lots of money and are willing to drop $100k in lawfare on someone to make them go away.
> 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.
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.
Right. Or the celebrities who are photographed landing with a date which isn't their spouse? There have been some high-profile divorces that started from evidence like that. The larger point is that this is for the benefit of "The League of the Very Special" and not out of an actual interest in privacy of PII.
Dunno why you were downvoted. This is exactly it. Taylor and Musk would be okay if there was just an annual report saying "Taylor's jetsetting caused X tons of CO2 emissions". What is NOT OK is someone effectively able to put a tracker on her movements.
billionaires love tracking our every move and whim for profit, but when it’s turned around on them, they don’t like it so much, and congress immediately goes to action. Should probably tell even an uninformed observer a few things about the state of affairs.
No they won't. If you care so much, why do you not care more about the laws that give them full permission to do this?
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.
Indeed, now I know that when I get my private plane (I'm temporarily not a billionaire) I will also 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.
Why not? The rich, the police and government track our every movement, word and deed through our technology. Why shouldn't we be able to track them back? If we can't dismantle the pantopticon let's at least make it equitable. Everyone suffers.
I have no way to know that unless I have direct access to her itinerary and flight plans. It's just a matter of public safety. If she has nothing to hide, she has nothing to fear.
That jet fuel wasn't going to stay in the ground or anything if these people don't fly. Sure - they contribute to to burning it up slightly faster than if there were no private planes, but rest assured people are going to burn everything that burns, until there are no more people.
Yes, because the richest man on the planet, heading up multiple billion dollar companies, couldn’t possibly have any legit reason to travel anywhere.