The chase scene where Excelsior tries to stop the Enterprise from escaping Spacedock has more drama, tension, and excitement than maybe any scene in the Kelvin movies (with everything racing around so fast all gravitas is lost).
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!
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.
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.
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?
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
You will still be able to track jets by their transponder. Planes are required to broadcast their location at all times.
What has changed is if there is a name attached to that transponder. This lets the owners of private planes have the FAA remove their name from the public record.
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.
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.
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