A quick Google search will tell you that Mark’s Gulfstream G650 has tail number N68885.
The FAA mandates that the jet broadcast its location over ADS-B,
mostly to avoid being hit by other jets.
There are fortunately many websites that aggregate data from honorable volunteers with ADS-B receivers. So much that it’s easy to determine Mark probably took a trip to Cabos in late September.
I suppose it’s not explicitly public that it’s mark’s jet, the FAA has it registered to A7P TRUST CO INC TRUSTEE in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Another quick Google will lead you to an article that talks about how Mark’s last house was sold by an LLC managed by A7P (real estate transactions and their parties are also public data in most US jurisdictions). It’s not as if these accounts were revealing deep secrets, that were otherwise undiscoverable.
I guess now he knows how the rest of us feel about be tracked?
Bezos stopped owning a jet and instead chartering flights which since the jets are owned by companies the Tail number is registered to them and they use what aircraft is available which can make the Tail number be different.
Probably a smart move. Plus, it might have made sense financially: does the guy really fly around so much to make it financially worthwhile to own a jet, instead of just chartering flights as needed? Chartered planes are in the air as much as the owner can rent them out (minus maintenance time), but private planes frequently sit around unused, missing out on potential revenue.
I would guess no. Maybe when he was younger and more active, but these days I don't believe he's flying somewhere every single day or so. If you have a plane and it isn't flying every single day that it's capable of doing so (i.e. not undergoing maintenance), then you're wasting money on it.
For the times he lived in at his peak, I can see the argument. But I don't know in this day and age if any milllionaire+ that isn't on tour can justify doing that much movement.
Private jets while they can be used for fun are also an extremely fast way to get from point a to point b without many transfers or lines. If you have a bunch of people, resources, or facilities that are hard to get to you are saving hours of time of your day and especially if you could do the meeting in the Air so yes there is a business cost and justification.
Private planes do sit unused but, if you use them frequently enough it starts to make sense to use especially since you can reliably get features that a charter plane doesn't like a tv, many people on the plane, places to sleep.
So buy a chartered plane company. No one will know which airborne plane in your fleet is yours or if you're even in the air and you get the tax write offs plus the profits from the company.
> if you own it, you get to write off its deprecation, maintenance, etc on your taxes!
This is true of any capital asset. Broadly speaking, buying crap you don't need because you think it's a tax deal is a hobbyhorse of the middle class. Not the wealthy.
> Also who wants to sit in a jet seat that someone else has sat in. Gross.
It's a finite world and we all share it. You're going to be drinking water someone else drank and breathing air someone else breathed. Cleaning is cheaper than making something unique to everyone of the eight billion people in the planet.
If everyone lived like spoiled billionaires the world would be a hell scape within a month, just based on air quality.
The way this game is usually played is Bezos, or a related trust or LLC buys the jets and then leases them to management companies that try to fly these jets as much as possible for profit.
> I suppose it’s not explicitly public that it’s mark’s jet, the FAA has it registered to A7P TRUST CO INC TRUSTEE in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Another quick Google will lead you to an article that talks about how Mark’s last house was sold by an LLC managed by A7P (real estate transactions and their parties are also public data in most US jurisdictions). It’s not as if these accounts were revealing deep secrets, that were otherwise undiscoverable.
Similar with Elon's jet:
- was registered to a company with an extremely SpaceX-y name, Falcon Landing...
- the address of that company is 1 Space Drive... (edit: it may be Rocket Road)
- when you search that address, Google reports, "Businesses associated with this address: SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company".
I don't understand what the gotcha is meant to be here. If someone made a Facebook account posting real time updates every time I step on or off a plane, I'm 90% confident they'd ban it citing some kind of stalking policy and 100% confident that they should ban it.
So if I parked outside your house and every day when you left I followed you all day as long as you are on public streets or in public places and posted real time everyplace you went would you be OK with that? It's public information.
Whether you like Facebook or not, what they do at scale (tracking the online metadata of billions of people in order to generate ad revenue) is different in both subtle and obvious ways than following a single individual around in the real world from place to place. These differences are important.
For example, following people around in the real world, aka stalking, is frequently accompanied by threats or acts of physical violence, especially for famous people. Even for normal people, being tracked in the real world frequently leads to theft, burglary, or harrassment. On the other hand, being tracked by social media companies does not commonly result in either of these outcomes. Why? Because our actual physical bodies exist in the real world, making it an arena with much higher stakes.
Imagine if Facebook tracked everyone's physical location, saved it to a log, and then published that log to a public website, while keeping it updated in real time. Do you think people would find that an upsetting addition to what Facebook does now? Would you find that to be an upsetting addition? If so, you must admit there is therefore a difference between doing that and what they do now. If there was no difference, then there would be nothing additional to be upset about.
This is not me defending Facebook's tracking. This is simply me refuting the numerous assertions you've made in this thread that Facebook's tracking is "identical" to real-world stalking combined with publication of that information. It's not.
I was responding to salawat's comment which has nothing to do with Facebook. They were implying that if information is public it is always OK for it to be promptly and widely distributed.
Not even close. You voluntarily give your info to Facebook and other websites/apps. Facebook and other meta companies have no idea where I am currently because I don’t use their products.
But you do use websites with their trackers, over time they've collected enough data to have a shadow profile of you. It's not accurate to the meter but they probably know the block you live in, some searches you have done in the past weeks, what news you read, what your taste in food, clothes, etc. are.
Unless you live in some jurisdiction like the EU and diligently refused to accept cookies on every website.
That's the typical reply from someone who doesn't have a life on Facebook, and it's nice for you but you can't extrapolate the lives of literally billions of people just from your own, singular example.
People have all their friends and family on Facebook and still want to talk to them. People have orgs, businesses, support groups, anything on Facebook. They don't accept the garbage conditions because they decided, but because it's their only way to do it.
> Not even close. You voluntarily give your info to Facebook and other websites/apps. Facebook and other meta companies have no idea where I am currently because I don’t use their products.
Congratulations for being in the privileged position where you get to do so and still participate in society and make a living. For millions, that's not the case (hint: Whatsapp).
There are trackers everywhere on the web and websites regularly share the information they get with literally thousands of “partners” to build profiles on you. No matter how much information you avoid giving, it’s naive to believe they have nothing on you. There’s a reason laws like the GDPR exist, and it’s not because you always give info voluntarily.
Tracking a car is illegal. Tracking jets is legal for safety purposes. And this is pretty much a false equivalency unless these jets are now landing on Starbucks like a drop ship.
All we know is Person X landed in Port Y. that doesn't narrow down much on where they are like a car in a parking lot.
It's perfectly legal if you install a device the owners fully agreed to install and signed a 3-days long licensing text explicitly saying it that they didn't bother to read. Which is exactly what Facebook is doing.
Shohei Ohtani bought a house in Los Angeles a while ago, this transaction is public information by law and anyone so inclined can query the applicable public databases for it.
Two of the biggest Japanese media outlets (Fuji TV and Nippon TV) then sent crews out including helicoptors to film his house from all angles, declaring this house at so-and-so address is Ohtani's house on national television.
The result? Ohtani and the Dodgers blacklisted them from the press corp[1][2], and for good reason because it became a physical safety concern. Ohtani subsequently sold the house since he couldn't practically live there anymore.
The moral is, if you aggregate public information to track a specific individual or entity, don't be surprised when you get kicked out for stalking and invasions of privacy.
There's a big difference between this and tracking private jets: Ohtani couldn't use his house due to harassment from the papparazi and the weirdos who kept trying to jump the fence.
Tracking billionaires' jets doesn't stop them from using their jets for their intended purposes.
No, there isn't. As far as what they are, Ohtani, Zuckerberg, Musk, and Joe Average are all just ordinary citizens unless I missed a memo.
There is a difference in that someone like Zuckerberg is a more valuable target than others, but you're just making excuses to justify your snooping. The fact that Zuckerberg snoops doesn't excuse snooping on him, either.
Zuckerberg and Musk are not just ordinary citzens.
Zuckerberg bought an entire island just to have his own private playground. Elon Musk brags about being the world's richest man and randomly ruins thousands of peoples' lives just because someone on the internet made him feel bad that morning. They're not ordinary people; they're people who made money by exploiting others.
I don't think that the richest lawyers deserve my deference just because we're in the same they're also in tech.
> this is an unavoidable part of having public spaces in society.
Maybe, maybe not. It is something new - within the last twenty years or so - to the concept of either "privacy" or "public space". Laws and norms and people's intuitions were formed in a different technological and informational context.
If you have a positive case for why passive surveillance of everyone is harmless (or, indeed, beneficial) to society (as a whole, not only those who engage in it) then please make it. Assuming it must be harmless or good begs the question.
Fair. But I think we score a goal for each of those posts.
The vast majority of the data comes from users who did agree.
The rest of the data, the portion the public didn’t agree to, is gathered in exactly the way that every other business has ever been able to do it when you go in public.
I'm saying that certain kinds of transformations over public information can add up to private information, as they do in this case. There's plenty of other cases not involving billionaires where this is so. For example, property records and restraining orders are generally public information, but it would be grossly irresponsible if not criminal for you to join the two datasets and publish a live feed of everyone protected by a restraining order who buys a house in your city.
I find this generally unacceptable. The FAA doesn’t need to be providing special services to people who want to alter the rules just because they think they’re more important or special than everyone else.
Guess we better pray they don’t alter the deal further. It doesn’t work like this for any other registered government service, from radio licenses to securities brokers; why should it for planes? …and wouldn’t this just be subject to FOIA requests anyway, so that all it does is provide a delay? But again, why should they get special treatment?
>I guess now he knows how the rest of us feel about be tracked?
Privacy for me but not for thee.
This is the same asshole who called his users dumb fucks for trusting him, ran a PR campaign with slogans like "privacy is dead", got filthy rich by exploiting our personal data, and used that wealth to buy all the mansions around his, for privacy.
Would need to be a very targeted social program -- Facebook's annual profit would pay for about 2-3 weeks of our medicare costs alone! (But agree w/ should dismantle Meta, although preferably via better privacy policies and alternative less predatory social media apps)
It's the idea that someone arguing against something they think is wrong (on moral, strategic, practical grounds - it doesn't matter) is somehow less valid because it's unlikely that the arguing person will ever be personally affected by it.
It's completely bogus, though; technically, it's an ad hominem. A distraction.
I truly cannot fathom there are people who actually enjoy ultra-targeted ads.
You understand the purpose of advertising is to attempt to manipulate you into spending money you wouldn't otherwise, right? Even if you enjoy the product, I too enjoyed smoking. A lot. I miss it actually.
The point is that it's targeting your brain, and the monkey-brain of humanity in general, with the intention of siphoning money from you to them. Hyper-consumerism isn't a virtue, it's an addiction. Sincerely, I doubt you'd be worse off if you bought less stuff. Or, rather, considered your purchases in a less impulsive manner - buying from an ad is impulsive.
I also struggle to understand how Facebook and Instagram have made anyone "socially richer". From where I'm standing, the proliferation of social media has greatly increased all the bad parts of human social nature. Competitiveness, insecurity, self-hatred. These platforms are designed for maximum engagement and as such they target your most sensitive emotion, particularly fear.
It's gotten to a point where most people cannot even socialize in-person properly due to the fear. Everyone is hyper-aware of how they may be perceived, and everyone is constantly comparing themselves to others. In addition, fear about the state of the world has been on the rise for a while. There's 0 doubt in my mind that social media has been instrumental to this degredation.
I was buying more generic stuff before, now I’m buying products that are tailor made for the very specific demographic I am. Win-win for me and for the entrepreneur targeting me. Who cares if Facebook also benefits? Who cares if that entrepreneur becomes a billionaire? I get a gadget/book/product that solves my specific problem. I just don’t see how I, or anyone, is the victim here.
> socially better
I have vastly more contact with family and old friends now. I’ve had career opportunities from Facebook messages with old pals.
> people are going nuts due to social media
I have no answer to this one, except that we clearly have to mature into this as a culture, the same way we’ve done with phasing out smoking and are currently phasing out alcohol.
People are only getting sucked into social media vortexes because of bad mental habits they had going into it. Banning social media for under-16’s and changing attitudes towards it will certainly help a ton. If you use it as a connection tool, it’s amazingly valuable and helpful.
The inherent problem is that what you want out of social media and what it wants after you are at odds. It's not intended to be a social tool; it's intended to keep your eyes on the platform as much as possible. Their goal is to incite an addiction in you, not unlike gambling.
Naturally we can take measures to try to prevent ourselves from developing an addiction. But ultimately the product itself will always attempt to undo those.
In my view there's two camps of people: those who have to recognize this reality, and those that haven't. I have seen many family members literally destroy their lives and relationships due to the dopamine addiction they've developed with social media. They now only respond to blatant lies, conspiracies, racism, homophobia, and the most extreme of emotions. The trouble is this is a unique addiction, one that does not rely on a substance. I have no doubt I would have an easier time weaning them off of heroin than off of Facebook.
OK but that’s true for literally every relationship between a human and an organization.
But you have to balance what you give and get so it remains mutually beneficial. You can choose the optimal level of your engagement, including none at all.
Just like McDonalds doesn’t make people fat, Facebook doesn’t make people sad.
I’m really sorry about your relatives getting sucked in, but wouldn’t they have fallen for some other thing if not Facebook? There is lots of shit out there on the radio, TV, books, cults.
This is an extraordinarily generous and almost child-like perspective on business.
You're correct that McDonald's doesn't hold a gun to your head and make you fat. That doesn't mean McDonald's plays no role in making you fat.
As with everything, there are many compounding factors that contribute to an outcome. If McDonald's only sold, say, kale salads, would you gain the same amount of weight? No, right? So therefore, McDonald's must have some hand in making people fat.
Again, I circle back to Tobacco because nicotine is plainly addictive, but do you truly believe that the Tobacco industry had nothing to do with societal smoking? That's rhetorical, I know you don't believe that because it's so obviously incorrect.
While social media does not contain nicotine, how confident are you that it is not addictive? For me, I'm not very confident.
> but wouldn’t they have fallen for some other thing if not Facebook? There is lots of shit out there on the radio, TV, books, cults
And instead of smoking, could those people have just gotten addicted to sunflower seeds? Well, why didn't they?
Because the nature of the medium and product matters. Social media is always immediately available. It features bright colors. And it's extraordinarily fast-paced. Compare that to a book - and it should be obvious why people are addicted to Facebook and not To Kill a Mockingbird.
We come down on different sides of this - don’t assume people who don’t agree with you are being children.
2. To the extent that FB is addictive, it should be treated the same as alcohol and tobacco as I noted earlier. Restrictions on young people. A cultural movement to regard use/overuse as uncool.
Meta has been a huge positive for me and many others; just because you hate it doesn’t make it fundamentally bad.
Such an innocent and naive view can only be described as child-like. I was under the impression only a small child could legitimately believe businesses don't have the intention of maintaining the addictive practices that keep them profitable. Otherwise, why have we never seen nicotine-free cigarettes?
Consider: if McDonald's had the power, right now, to rid the world of Ozempic - would they? I think absolutely they would.
> Restrictions on young people. A cultural movement to regard use/overuse as uncool
These are rather vague and not really how things have gone historically. Smoking stopped working because every doctor was telling you it would kill you. And then it became very, very hard to smoke. You couldn't smoke just about anywhere in public. And then you couldn't even smoke in your rental car, or apartment, or hotel.
If you could only access Facebook in the confines of a property you own, I imagine it's use would plummet. I don't think a "cultural movement" could do that. Especially when such a cultural movement would need to take place ON Facebook. Because it's a platform.
> Such an innocent and naive view can only be described as child-like. I was under the impression only a small child could legitimately believe businesses don't have the intention of maintaining the addictive practices that keep them profitable.
In my defense, I think just about any adult on Earth would have said exactly what I said. Not sure if that makes you feel better or not.
To clear up why I'm so blunt about these things - there's a large influx of people who knowingly play stupid, and it's exhausting. What you're arguing is so obviously wrong and not even remotely in-tune with reality that I must assume you're either playing stupid or are really just that naive.
Most likely you're a smart person with a brain capable of deducing even simple logic like "make them money = they continue practices". So you're probably just playing stupid, which I don't care for. "Know nothing" types aren't worth arguing with.
I just don't understand that you like to get your product recommendations from a social media platform. So you're basically saying "yeah I'll put my social life on your platform so you can sell better stuff to me".
I mean, when I'm browsing and searching on Amazon, yeah, it is handy that Amazon kind of analyzes what I am looking for and gives suggestions to what I might want from their catalogue. That seems logical to me.
But I'm not gonna just give some company all my life's data and what I'm doing and not, and then let them decide what products I should get.
> We’ve all said some stupid shit and later apologized.
That’s worth nothing if you don’t mean it. It’s not like he apologised and changed his behaviour.
> The healthiest thing is for everyone to move on.
No, the healthiest thing would be for Meta to stop exploiting everyone’s data. Then we can consider moving on.
It’s like a guy is repeatedly punching you in the face, apologises but continues doing it, and you’re saying “well, it’s healthy for us to just move on” while still being punched in the face.
Musk’s private jets, N628TS and N272BG, are even less obscured — registered to Falcon Landing LLC headquartered at 1 Rocket Road in Hawthorne, California.
(If you’re wondering what else might be headquartered there, just take a look at satellite view on Google maps)
Someone tracking a particular other person is stalking and is very different from tracking people en masse for the purposes of advertising. Especially when the later is done typically without human intervention.
I really hope nothing happens to these people and if it does I hope whoever tracks them obsessively would feel guilty.
Do you think Mark felt guilty about Cambridge Analytica? Or feels guilty every time a Meta company is subpoenaed because his intentions were purely for advertising?
If the potential of individuals being stalked as bad as you say, how much stalking do social media companies enable by their existence? A musician was shot dead after the assailants learned of their location from an Instagram picture - do you think Mark shown basic humanity towards the victim since then?
> There are fortunately many websites that aggregate data from honorable volunteers with ADS-B receivers.
I don't see how that's fortunate. I don't feel any particular need to breach these individuals privacy, and the only use case I can think of for these things is to stalk and harass them. This data ought to be better protected, and the flipancy with which people broadcast it is shameful.
I vehemently disagree. Zuckerberg's plane is transmitting its location to anyone who wants to listen. If he doesn't want to be tracked in public, he should try not going out in public.
Yes, that's sarcastic. It's still the exact same thing he's been telling us all these years, so I have a hard time scraping up much sympathy for his plight. Being tracked everywhere sucks, doesn't it? Turns out it's not only the tech giants who can cobble that information together.
Facebook used to post sites you visited. Not even interacted with by liking, it would show that you have read a certain article. They still collect that information, but they no longer publish it on your feed and rather keep the information to profit off of themselves. It's close enough that I'd say it's the same thing.
You can't think of a reason because you don't work in a field that benefits from real time access to aircraft locations. Not because it isn't useful. I however find it very useful.
The data is impossible to protect since the very underlying basis is that it can be received by anyone within range. That basis being very very very important to planes not hitting eachother and being found by ATC.
I don't know much about aircraft, but unless I'm missing something big, I don't see how the importance of planes not hitting each other makes it impossible for us to protect that personal data if we wanted to. Who says that a plane's transponder ID has to be the same for every flight? Just pick a random one from a pool (so you know it's not being used by any other plane during that time) and then release it back into the pool when you land. No need to make the correspondence between the planes's transponder code and the tail number (or plane owner).
> I don't see how the importance of planes not hitting each other makes it impossible for us to protect that personal data if we wanted to.
Accountability if something does happen. We can't just randomly assign ID's to do that without finding some way to trace who took what ID (ruining the point). These are private jets so they have no reason to keep record of flights like public airlines.
Oh, come on. I'm not saying that nobody should know which random ID corresponds to which plane. That would be ridiculous. Just keep that index on an FAA (or whoever) computer system networked to the control towers at various airports, or wherever it needs to go.
All I'm saying is that there's no technical reason why that info has to be broadcast over the air, unencrypted, for anyone with a radio to hear. If we wanted to fix that, we could. This just seems like an obviously correct statement to me. I'm not saying that we should or shouldn't want to. Maybe we shouldn't. But we could. It is within our power.
I guess people just seem to find the "privacy for me but not for thee" angle too delicious to give up and feel the need to justify it to themselves? That's the only reason I can think that someone would say something like "the data is impossible to protect" with a straight face. Politics brainworms in action.
You don't get rights unless you respect the rights of others. Reciprocity is the only way to make a society work. Zuckerberg built his fortune on the destruction of our personal privacy, let him lie in the bed he made.
You are being downvoted but I think it’s because people disagree with your stance.
I agree in principle because I think everyone should have privacy. I disagree in this case because of the massive loss in privacy that these individuals have effected… which means I’m probably just vindictive.
Also for someone who is pushing the metaverse to replace face to face communication, he is surely travelling to meet other people face to face quite a lot!
Remember to pay your carbon tax guys. Meanwhile celebrities are generating 1000x the emissions of the average person. They won’t even blink at the tax. Middle class gets squeezed even more.
They'll whine about commercial flight schedules and claim their private jet travel is carbon neutral while providing scant details. Bill Gates has turned it into an art.
What are you talking about? Would facebook allow an account that posted some else's realtime location? No, probably not. Does facebook claim to adhere to free speech absolutism? No. What principle are they applying inconsistently here?
This fails to respond to the point made in the reply you're responding to. Posting someone's location for potential stalkers is different from having their location. Posting it is consistently against Facebook's rules.
The person you're responding to is asserting that the privacy of the jet owners apparently matters, but the privacy of Meta users doesn't (presumably due to the way they do business etc.)
Think about this next time your paper straw falls apart and Zuck is talking about climate change.
>Zuckerberg, a very vocal advocate for climate change action, has added a $300 million mega-yacht to his collection, which includes a Gulfstream G650 jet.
They're not fighting anything. Your straw from a bar in a first-world country reliably ends up in a landfill, among heaps of other plastics. Far away from any turtles.
The Pacific garbage patch is mostly from fishing nets, and the other sources of plastic pollution are mainly from riverside cities too poor to have good waste management.
The whole plastic straw scare is so obviously attacking a minor non-issue at significant personal inconvenience, that I wouldn't be surprised if it was planted by climate deniers to make people angry at or cynical about actual environmentalism.
These endeavors virtually never make sense. Their intention is to single out consumers and make them feel bad for their habits.
In actuality, consumers have little to no choice in the products they use. I couldn't live a plastic-free life even if I tried, and I'm somewhat well off. When you have to shop at Walmart to make it, your influence is even less.
It's a strategy in responsibility shifting. Rationally, the source of pollution does not lie in the single mother eating with her family at Waffle House and using a plastic straw.
Me as a person, or me as in a community where mostly the businesses consume 90+% of resources but my city still wants to try and limit how much water I use in the shower?
I agree with the latter, and I suppose I indirectly contribute to it as a society.
If carbon emissions were taxed I would have no issue with this. Ostensibly, the rich have earned their greater share of the national wealth/output (including CO2 emission budget), as long as they are paying fairly for it.
So when FB stock tanked and he lost a ton of money does it mean he was making minus whatever number of millions per hour. Maybe converting asset valuation to hourly earnings is not that great of an idea. Anyone can buy FB shares and get same upside Zuck gets.
> Do you think the "greater share" he "earned" is really 10,000x the average tech worker?
Yes. It doesn't seem unreasonable to the point of dismissal to consider that he's changed the world to within many orders of magnitude of that which the avererage person, particularly the average minimum-wage earner, does. That doesn't mean he has. But the number being four or five orders of magnitude doesn't strike me as damning.
The key here is "changed the world". In a capitalist economy, there's no rule anywhere saying the change has to be good or productive. Often, the best way to make money is to do purposefully destructive things.
For example, consider the Tobacco industry. While yes they did, and somewhat still do, make a lot of money, they did not create any value. They siphoned it - they exchanged the purchase of tobacco for the cost of healthcare. I'm speculating, but if you were calculating the communal cost, that is the profits of tobacco minus the healthcare costs, I'm positive it would be negative.
Therefore, tobacco has a negative value onto the world, but it is profitable. The profit is a facade, that money is really stolen. This demostrates one of the core flaws with current economic systems - you can create profit without creating value. You can simply move money around and get some profit, and you can even destroy money and yet make money.
Keep in mind Facebook gets it's profit via advertising. The money they make is due to manipulating people to spend their money on things they wouldn't otherwise buy. The analysis is difficult, and I'm not saying what they're doing is bad per se, but the actual value they create is certainly debatable.
All that is to say, simply changing the world is a meaningless metric. Certainly, I can change the world for the worse, if I want, and profit in-between. In such a scenario not only am I not equivalent to a janitor, I actually create less value. While making orders of magnitude more money.
The news title is such wrong. They meant billioniares who have share in greenhouse gas emitting companies have million times more than average shareholder. It's not related to emitting greenhouse gas.
The problem with carbon tax is the opposite. It would disproportionately tax poor higher. The carbon usage doesn't go up by 100x if the income increases by 100x.
IIRC carbon tax would be at point of use? So biggest "hard to transition" polluters like metal, concrete, electricity would pay most?
IIRC 2, most carbon tax advocates are also huge into investing in public transit, EVs, weatherization, heat pumps. In fact, BIL and IRA stipulate 40% apportionment. So doesn't that mitigate the regressiveness of a carbon tax?
Well, he's not proposing letting Zuck buy anything, he's saying we should be taxing Zuck so that his buying of stuff isn't also destroying the planet. Being able to buy stuff that negatively affects the planet isn't really in question by most people.
It's not like money can meaningfully reduce carbon in the atmosphere at this point in time, so it's pretty much impossible to "earn" the "right" to this type of destructive externality.
This is a pretty misleading figure. it includes the emissions of their companies. For musk it would be every spaceX launch and tesla built, as if there is no value being provided to consumers.
> based on a detailed analysis of the investments of 125 of the richest billionaires in some of the world's biggest corporates and the carbon emissions of these investments. These billionaires have a collective $2.4 trillion stake in 183 companies.
Oh, come on. Counting the carbon emissions of the companies in their stock portfolio is completely absurd.
Why's that? The companies broadly exist to make money for their shareholders, and the shareholders decide what the company does. Couldn't Exxon's shareholders agree to immediately cease Exxon's oil production, for example?
Are we going to be angry that billionaires exist, which might be one thing (whether I agree with it or not), or are we going to be selectively angry at them only when some of them actually try to do something for the environment?
It's always a Yacht. Who are they trying to impress that so many billionaires fascinate over a yacht? Awful cost sinks into maintenance regardless of if you never use it.
The methodology used for that headline is questionable. Most of that comes from their investments rather than flying private jets or whatever. That's questionable because it's not entirely obvious who the emissions of a company should be allocated to. Why should BP's shareholders be on the hook for the emissions from the oil it sells, rather than its customers who are actually burning the oil?
Even if you take that principle at face value you wouldn't author a report claiming "billionaires consume a million (or whatever) times more opioids than the average person, just because they own shares in pharmaceutical companies.
> The company who made the breakfast of a rapist should be charged with the crime?
The company is not literally investing in the endeavor of the rapist, the teacher is not literally investing in the outcome of the killer, investors/funders literally expect the outcome of the thing they invest in to continue without ambiguity. These are much less fitting than the drug-dealer analogy.
You still supported PM's activities, provided them a greater ability to sell more cigarettes with your investment, and reap profit from that activity. I don't see any insulation from support or culpability here.
I literally own tobacco company stock and accept that I am complicit in the sale of cigarettes, it's not much of a leap.
Because the shareholders invariably have more control in the oil output than consumers. Consumers have zero choice here - it's typically a gun to your head type scenario.
Either they consume the oil, or they can't drive, and therefore can't get a job, and will therefore die. So, they must consume the oil. Some have enough money to buy electric or hybrid - them, I would say, you can attribute SOME of the effects of the oil they use.
These people are the greatest hypocrites of our time. They want all the financial benefits of free speech and none of the negatives for themselves personally.
Their platforms are basically foreign interference and misinformation backdoors into our society, they've done an insane amount of damage and this move by them, proves how problematic and invasive their own products actually are. However, for these people, they can just "turn off the problem" because they literally own the platform.
Meta consistently and aggressively censors on almost anyone's behalf. "X" will do it for anyone with any legal order, although they made a statement recently about Brazil that they ultimately backed down from once it was clear it was going to cost them a lot of money.
> greatest hypocrites of our time. They want all the financial benefits of free speech and none of the negatives for themselves personally
How? They're acting like typical plutocrats. Only nuance is they are hedging in case America does succumb to revolution and ensconce them (or their rivals) as the new aristocracy.
Look at how Russia's oligarchs behaved when the Soviet Union fell and Moscow was trying democracy. Or hell, how politicians in the late Roman Republic and early Empire behaved. Lots of this sort of posturing and deflection, full in the knowledge that when democracies collapse--even flawed ones--you have elite-on-elite violence (as violence becomes a valid political tactic) amidst a massive rush of wealth upwards.
In some cases, there might by a public interest angle (e.g., some billionaire backing a particular political candidate, with oversized influence in what's supposed to be a democracy), however, even if that were the case, the tracking of various other famous people suggests that the motivation isn't legitimate public interest.
It's more like creepy stalking, voyeurism, and abuse of power.
And, in the case of some celebrities, who as a category have been known to have mentally-ill, homicidal stalkers, it's even more tasteless, IMHO.
I don’t see any hypocrisy here - it would be hypocritical if he allowed tracking of other people’s jets while protecting his own, but as far as I can tell, this rule protects everyone. If someone made an account that announced the location of your car, minute by minute, I’m sure he would not allow that either.
The argument that it’s really about CO2 emissions is not persuasive – you could track each billionaire’s total CO2 output without also broadcasting their location in real time.
You can absolutely have a free speech position that supports a broad variety of political speech while disallowing the real time tracking of citizens – I see no hypocrisy there either.
Some people are also saying that he’s a hypocrite for tracking others while not wanting to be tracked himself. If he was broadcasting other people’s real time location while protecting his own, then that would make sense. He’s not doing anything like that, though.
The argument is that this is public data for safety reasons (so planes don't crash into each other). What others do with that info is about as relevant as any other public data. Which these sites give little care of.
They barely care about harassment/stalking on their own platform that is objectively illegal. So i don't feel sympathy here.
>If he was broadcasting other people’s real time location while protecting his own, then that would make sense.
It's a bit frustrating how many people here don't understand the difference of precision in knowing plane data and car/foot data. What use is "Person is in City" to the point where they make an argument of "risk of physical harm?".
I don't know how flexing their power is wimpy. It is pretty aggressive imho, "I can do what I want and you can't do a damn thing about it". That doesn't sound weak to me. I am not saying I agree with it or like it but it appears to be a complete power move.
Why did you post that comic? Is anybody confusing first amendment rights for what happened here? The point is that Zuckerberg has made a killing collecting data on people at a scale never seen before, and he dresses it up as "connecting people". But when someone collects HIS data, then needs to be removed the the extent he can.
Musk is an even more obvious case of hypocrisy. The "free speech absolutist" is very selective about when it applies.
The question is about Zuckerberg's purpose. Does he need to collect all the data he does to connect people? No, he collects the data because he can monetize it. Connecting people is incidental. Does Facebook really need to know that you spent money buying adult diapers in order to help you see pictures of your niece across country or locate the old high school classmate that popped into your mind?
That is why I said "dressing it up" - is is a pretext for his primary goal.
Musk and Zuckerberg have both allowed vile content to thrive and spread on their platforms under the guise of allowing free speech.
Banning people from sharing links to public tracking data demonstrates that their commitment to speech is extremely shallow. This suggests that despite their claims, supporting free speech was never a priority on their platforms, and was simply cover for allowing content which helped metrics or aligned with their political goals.
If I took public pictures of someone in NYC from the myriad of public cameras, made a social media feed of their actions and locations, how would this not be cyber-bullying?
Why do people care about this? For what legitimate purpose does anyone need to be able to track the location of another person? Every platform has rules against posting people's addresses and nobody has anything against that, but as soon as this comes up people are worried about censorship.
The stuff is gathered from public flight records, it's just the easiest way to present the data. Just like it's getting pushed back from you now it would get pushed back from climate change deniers saying we don't know how you computed it if they computed instead of just presenting a distance and accepting that the number is going to be a huge amount of CO2
I recall an article comparing CO2 emissions of private jets verses commercial airlines a couple of years back. A bunch of assumptions were made, but the rough figure was five times higher per passenger mile. When you consider that people who use private jets are likely flying more than those who use commercial airlines, and that individuals are being asked to make sacrifices for the sake of reducing CO2 emissions, then yes it is consequential.
No - they think there's a palpable disconnect between the public environmental statements made by men like Zuck, and the way that they themselves behave.
Give me a break. For every person that actually truly cares about this, there are a hundred people here that pretend to care because it gives them a high horse excuse to dunk on people they hate. I’d bet good money that almost every person here pretending the reason they care is the carbon emissions only thought of the carbon emissions after already being happy about the trackers and then seeing the parent comment giving them a proper moral high ground reason to fuel their hatred.
Conversely why does anyone care to keep their address private? There used to be a book that almost everyone had, updated every year, that listed the name, address, and phone number of almost everyone in town.
Yes, you could be "unlisted" (for a fee) but that was not really considered normal.
City directories often carried more information than that, such as people's occupations, etc.
And, newspapers of all sizes carried personal information in blurbs, such as "John Smith is in town for 3 days, visiting with relatives here."
However, when the Sexual Revolution kicked in, it became customary for women in the 1970s and later to conceal their identities in White Pages listings, and request listings of simply "J. Smith", if they were listed at all. Because otherwise, the White Pages were a good "shopping list" for obscene/prank phone callers.
Personally it feels weirder to have my address public today because it's too freely available across the world. Sure, someone back in the days of the yellow pages would still be able to get to me, but it would probably involve a bit more work of tracking what city I'm in then getting their hands on the book.
Now with it being digital it's too easy to casually find and abuse. The barrier to access is a lot lower.
Oddly enough, the information is just as available to businesses today yet it is less available to individuals. The digital databases have existed for decades. Certainly longer than the Internet as a publicly accessible network. Yet the phone books, that were accessible to anyone, no longer exist. (I also believe that cost of phone books were included in the price of telephone service, which meant that they were "free" for most households.)
(And, for the sake of accuracy, the yellow pages were a business directory that companies paid for higher profile ads. The white pages were the directory of individuals.)
Internet ruined that idea. As well as a few high profile stalking cases. It's sad, but I'm sure it wasn't a surprise to various Sci-fi authors at the time.
Good thing people don't live on a plane, and ports (private or public) aren't just places you get to walk up to with a gun. That's all the information we get.
Likewise, property records is a public resource (at least where I'm from), but it would still be considered doxxing to post someones address you found via public records.
I'm not aware of any statutes in the United States that codify or prohibit "doxxing." Europe might have something to say on this matter, but in the United States, "doxxing" is just a colloquialism: it's not a crime.
Private companies are welcome to prohibit this behavior from areas under their dominion if that's desirable, but no civil nor criminal action may be levied against someone disclosing truthful, publicly-available information.
>but it would still be considered doxxing to post someones address you found via public records.
"doxxing" doesn't have a clear definition. It could mean anywhere between "posting personal information, however obtained" and "posting non-public personal information", which makes this statement questionable.
The motivation for these accounts is usually a rift on the "ultra-wealth is bad" train.
Setting aside any possible agreements/disagreements with that, the flight tracking information is freely public, available to anyone who wants to look- go on flightaware. Flight information has never been private, nobody treats it as private, so why would social media* companies pretend it is? I don't think home addresses are that comparable in this situation.
Is the ownership information as public? Possibly it is, but the implication that specific people are on a given flight seems NOT public information. Or maybe the problem here is that these ultra wealthy people are wealthy enough to one a couple of planes but not enough to own so many that it would be hard to tell if they are flying at all.
I don't know. To me this feels the equivalent of having paparazzo permanently on your tail. I know, it's just a ultrarich person, they don't need our defending. Just feels like like a overkill method of accountability to make a tail visible and available for all to see all the time
Aircraft are (in general) required to transmit ADS-B information in the clear over RF that contains information identifying the aircraft.
Aircraft registrations are public. You can go to the FAA[1] and look up who owns what airplane and what their address is. Some aircraft owners choose to obfuscate their ownership through shell companies or LLCs.
Passenger manifests are collected by the FAA for airlines and charter flights, but they are not made available to the public.
So you can know who owns the plane that's flying over your antenna, but not who's on it.
As far as I can tell the level of analysis being applied here is "Zuck is bad, therefore tracking his plane is good, therefore banning anyone who tracks his plane is bad."
The FAA mandates that the jet broadcast its location over ADS-B, mostly to avoid being hit by other jets.
There are fortunately many websites that aggregate data from honorable volunteers with ADS-B receivers. So much that it’s easy to determine Mark probably took a trip to Cabos in late September.
I suppose it’s not explicitly public that it’s mark’s jet, the FAA has it registered to A7P TRUST CO INC TRUSTEE in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Another quick Google will lead you to an article that talks about how Mark’s last house was sold by an LLC managed by A7P (real estate transactions and their parties are also public data in most US jurisdictions). It’s not as if these accounts were revealing deep secrets, that were otherwise undiscoverable.
I guess now he knows how the rest of us feel about be tracked?