Legislation just signed into law has made it exceedingly to difficult to track private jet activity.

  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Congress is working on issues that matter to the American people.

    Like making sure the wealthy are even less accountable.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Its the Tragedy of the Commons. No single individual really has an incentive to stop flying, outside of the marginal impact on PR. So everyone just says its someone else’s problem.

      The FAA is toothless. The EPA is toothless. The individual industry leaders are more legally beholden to shareholders than any regulatory body. Even in aggregate, the emission volume of flights pale beside the emissions caused by coal stacks and automotive emissions and bunker fuel from bulk cargo shipping, so its the billionaire equivalent of saying “At least I’m recycling” when pushed about what you’re doing to curb greenhouse gases.

      At the end of the day, what we need is a comprehensive investment in high speed mass transit. But fossil fuel companies hate that. Aeronautics companies hate that. Politicians fixated on quarterly budget figures hate that. And the folks that would actually build rail in this country no longer exist.

      So whatchagonna do? Shrug, blame “the system”, and go with the flow because everyone else is doing it.

  • Nobody@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    bill that was passed last week will allow private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information

    Private planes fly anonymously? Even if order and justice was restored to the world, we couldn’t find the next Epstein’s island.

    And how will this affect drug trafficking? If you can’t trace private planes, it becomes the Wild West.

  • TH1NKTHRICE@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    It’s about Swift and not one of the richest people in the world who lives in the kleptocracy that passed this legislation and historically has made a big fuss over this issue?

    • Optional@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      As with the ticketmaster story, if you put Taylor Swift’s picture on the headline it gets more clicks.

      It’s just that simple.

    • trollbearpig@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Not that you are wrong, but I think we should keep using Taylor Swift as the face of this because:

      1. She is the worst offender in this case, even if not the only.
      2. She is on the “left” (what passes for left in the us, a leftist billionare is obviously a contradiction). So this is a clear signal from us that this is not about us vs them. This is an issue even when done by someone on our “side” (like Taylor Swift is in our side lol, but for MAGAs and similar extremists she is).
      3. At the end of the day, any meassure stoping Taylor Swift from contaminating with her stupid jet will also help us stop all the other assholes.
      4. We don’t owe shit to Taylor Swift or any other celebrity, fuck her. We can talk after she stops being a deca millionare, in the mean time fuck her lol.

      So get mad at her, use her bad image in this issue to push for change, and seriously, fuck her almost as hard as any other rich assholes. The fact that she is sligthly better than people pushing for a return to feudalism doesn’t make her a good person lol.

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Neo feudalism just checked another box against democracy.

    • DogPeePoo@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      It definitely had nothing to do with Elon Musk or Ken Griffin. Definitely not.

      • Naboo_calls_for_aid
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        7 months ago

        Just at a glance I’d say it had absolutely nothing to do with swift, just a false flag operation to announce the change and ignore the reason. Now we just need a hero to find a workaround.

        • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I honestly believe that people are tracking Swift’s jet just to make the Elon trackers seem ridiculous. Like, who gives a shit where she’s going? Swifties and… literally nobody else is affected.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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        7 months ago

        I’m glad for people like you, because I’ve spent a good chunk of my life desperately wishing to be in that club, and then another chunk being sad that I wouldn’t be able to be. I was miserable and latched onto something that I believed would alleviate it, but I nowadays definitely think I’m happier not being in that club.

        • Fosheze@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I’ve never really wanted to be in the private jet billionare club but I have always wanted to be in the “have a nice paid off house and enough money to safely start a small business” club. Sure, being a billionare would get me that but what would I do with the other 99.999% of the money?

          • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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            7 months ago

            I think I mostly just wanted to be in the "so rich I never have to think about money again. Growing up super poor left its marks on me and now even though I am relatively secure and comfortable, I still have a background anxiety about whether I’ll have enough.

            There’s an instinct within me that screams that I shouldn’t share resources with other people unless I’m sure I have more than enough for myself. If I indulged that instinct, that would mean that in a situation where there’s enough for everyone, I’d feel most comfortable with 3 or more shares, because then even if I gave away one of my shares to someone else, I’d still have what I need, plus some buffer. There’s a reason I work very hard to not indulge that instinct though, because I don’t want to hoard at the expense of other people like me.

            Like I say, it’s just part of a wish of not having to think about money at all. I had some very rich friends in uni, and sometimes they’d shop in places where the clothes didn’t have price tags, the kinds of places where if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it. I envied the fact that they didn’t have to think about money more than I did the material luxuries they could afford

  • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Dammit, I guess we can’t complain anymore about how much fuel they waste every day, so we are fine. Oh wait, no they are still pieces of shit.

  • DancingBear@midwest.social
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    7 months ago

    So if the only thing hidden is the airplanes ID seems like it would still be relatively easy to have a program sift through the data.2

      • Dayroom7485@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Probably the oligarchs, based in this law, can use their lawyers to sue the person who dares to do so publicly.

        • TheFriar@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Depends on how the law is written. If there is language against deanonymizing the now anonymous data? Yeah, they’ll get Jacks ass. But if not, there’s really not much they can do.

      • DancingBear@midwest.social
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        7 months ago

        Personally I don’t care where celebrities are at any given time. But I do think it’s interesting, for example to see how international climate summits are some of the biggest environmental impacts as far as carbon footprint etc for example, or seeing how celebrities take personal jets to go to the convenience store

  • MrEff@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    As much as I say fuck the billionaires, they have actually already had methods of doing this for about 50 years. Only the dumb billionaires who registered the planes in their name were annoyed about the rules. They could have always registered it under a trust, like almost every other rich person private jet out there. People can still figure out the plane tail registration and track you through that, and that will never change. So the billionaires that are happy about this regulation change still have their tail numbers known by the public to be associated with them and can still be tracked. Now they just have to change their tail numbers (giant pain) and wait for people to do slightly more difficult digging to figure out what plane is theirs.

  • BigMacHole@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    This is going to help bring down everyday prices, stop Genocide and will ensure another Epstein type billionaire who privately flies people to his pedophile island will receive swift Justice!

  • ParabolicMotion@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    So when her plane goes missing, we’ll all treat her like Amelia Earhart. She doesn’t fly her own plane though; not quite Amelia.

  • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Yeah well figuring out who owns what jet will mearginally harder. Like with metadata if you have a few data points it will be easy to figure out who owns what plane. And it is not like these people don’t travel much so the data points will Stack up fast.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    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.

    An amendment in the Federal Aviation Administration re-authorization bill that was passed last week will allow private aircraft owners to anonymize their registration information.

    Jet tracking has been made possible up until this point because private plane owners were forced to register aircraft ownership information with the FAA civil registry.

    The Warzone originally reported that the new FAA reauthorization bill, which was introduced last June, will effectively make it impossible (or, at the very least, very, very hard) to track the jet activity of the well-to-do.

    That’s a bummer, since in an age of environmental concerns, it’s been helpful to know which members of America’s gilded class are spewing jet fuel into the atmosphere.

    Elon Musk famously threatened to sue Jack Sweeney, an undergraduate at the University of Florida, after the student made a Twitter account that tracked the billionaire’s private jet activity, ElonJet, in 2020.


    The original article contains 598 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!