That’s because it wasn’t a response to that post.
It was a response to this post;
I’d be surprised if the police in major cities didn’t already have that ability.
You’d think the customer Apu is taking a bullet for being labeled Elon Musk would have been a dead giveaway for that.
Yeah, which was referring to me. I presume. I mean, I am petty. It’s served me well over the years, really.
Oh, they absolutely do. Police can cruise through parking lots, scanning every plate they drive past, and any plate that’s flagged somehow will pop up a notification.
That’s bad enough, but we’re probably quickly approaching a point where anyone’s plate can be tracked anywhere in the country, and it’ll all be public information.
That’s pretty much how FilghtAware works already. People set up cheap ADS-B scanners and upload the results to the site. ADS-B is simple to decode and include location information. Pulling license plates from blurry webcam footage is a little harder, but processing power gets cheaper every year, and webcams higher quality. So probably just a matter of time before there’s a “DriveAware” for every vehicle in the country.
Don’t worry, Musk will resume hammering nails into his ballsack soon enough, and the fanboy will run away again until he has an opportunity to reappear a few months later with another lame argument that his tech messiah really is a genius after all.
I dunno about ballsack hammering, but on the metrics of “violated a local noise ordinance,” “frightened my cat,” and “paid a trivial fine to get away scot free”, Swift is in the lead.
I noticed that too. I also found it odd that Galef chose to label her two categories of mindsets as being soldiers and scouts considering the extreme emphasis militaries have always placed on the role of the scout since the beginning of recorded history. I mean famously the Boy Scouts was founded in 1907 by a British Army lieutenant-general whose second published work in 1884 was entitled Reconnaissance and Scouting.
In 1907, Robert Baden-Powell, a lieutenant general in the British Army held a Scouting encampment on Brownsea Island in England. Baden-Powell wrote Scouting for Boys (London, 1908), partly based on his earlier military books.
The trigger for the Scouting movement was the 1908 publication of Scouting for Boys written by Robert Baden-Powell.[1][2] At Charterhouse, one of England’s most famous public schools, Baden-Powell had an interest in the outdoors.[3] Later, as a military officer, Baden-Powell was stationed in British India in the 1880s where he took an interest in military scouting and in 1884 he published Reconnaissance and Scouting .[4]
How about the metric of “added billions of dollars to several national economies” versus “destroyed tens of billions of dollars in market capitalization through sheer petulant dumbassery”?
Dunno. I care more about my cat than Twitter’s market cap. I suppose I probably made some money off the buyout, though, since I probably owned some shares via index funds and they would have been sold at the buyout price. And I know I made a ton of money off TSLA.
Maybe some Saudi Arabians lost money? That actually sounds like a win, all else being equal.
Shit, yeah. Shows up in my transaction history as EXCHANGE FOR CASH, which I haven’t seen before. Sold for $54.20, mostly bought earlier in the year for ~$40. Not bad for a 9-month investment. Thanks, Elon!
My work here is done.
Wasn’t the dream always that some billionaire would go a bit nuts, and start tossing out wads of cash? That’s pretty much what happened! Sorry if you didn’t get to participate.
I agree that Swift is exaggerating the risk. I’m surprised that she’s on the same page as Elmo on the issue of aircraft tracking, but she’s a songwriter and performer, not a technologist as Elmo claims to be. I suspect that she was freaked out by the stalker arrested outside her home, as anyone would be, but it’s hard to see how that had anything to do with tracking her plane as opposed to a nefarious individual being able to use all kinds of other publicly available information.
ADS-B tracking data is public information and the transmitted data is essential for flight safety and required in the designated categories of controlled airspace, and tough shit if billionaires with private jets don’t like it. Tracking data for private planes is omitted from some flight tracking sites but only as a courtesy. It’s possible to apply for an anonymized Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) but that has limited utility if someone links it with the tail number and I’m not sure if it’s even viable for international flights.
I’m unimpressed by the fact that Taylor Swift’s private jet flights for only just the Tokyo leg of her current tour emitted about 200,000 pounds of CO2 and overall her private flights alone produce more than three orders of magnitude more carbon emissions that an active middle-class American family produces in an entire year. I don’t care for Swift’s music but I like her as a person and as a smart, creative, and hard-working entertainer and entrepreneur, but as far as environmental abuses and pointless lawsuits are concerned I put her and Elmo in the same boat – Swift because she’s uninformed and Elmo because he’s an evil piece of shit.
Well, to participate you’d have to have believed that Elmo would go wildly nuts, and subsequently be unable to back out of the purchase. It could have left me holding stock in Twitter, which I would have found a morally disturbing position to be in, kinda like owning stock in Peabody Energy, the coal mining and distribution conglomerate.
Yes, Musk had one of those, at least for a while. But as you say, it’s just a courtesy (reminiscent of the “evil bit” in networking). I don’t know if Swift uses one, but both have fairly obvious routes and so they can be pretty easily tied to the tail number. Swift has her concert schedule, and who the hell else flies into Brownsville all the time?
While their complaints are dumb, though, I do think there’s going to be a reckoning as the same type of thing gets tied to license plates and used against normal people. We’re seeing the beginnings of that with the AirTags fiasco. It’s just going to get worse.
Unfortunately, it takes more time than I’m willing to exert to really avoid investing in distasteful enterprises. Anyone dumping their money into the S&P 500 is in the same boat. I’d have to exclude probably 2/3 of the market if I was really going to make a point of it.
The main difference is that Swift isn’t claiming to be a free speech absolutist. To me it wasn’t so much that Musk was trying to hide his travel that was the problem it was that by banning the guy he was clearly demonstrating that he was in favor of free speech except for what he didn’t like.
Sure, she’s probably overstating the risk but at the same time, she actually has fear with a legitimate basis. And fear, by its nature, is not always entirely rational. She’s actually got stalkers and crazed fanatics after her.
That’s opposed to Musk, whose chief complaint appears to be that people don’t like him and say mean things about him on the internet despite claiming to be for absolute free speech
I’m not really a fan or a hater of Swift’s music. Mostly, I’m now old enough to be out of touch and only vaguely aware of it. So, I guess I wish her vaguely well in her personal and professional life and hope she doesn’t do anything overtly evil?
But in any event, the attempted tu quoque is just plain stupid.
So, yeah, the fanboys are fucking petty, since drawing this sort of asinine equivalence and drive-by attempted claims of hypocrisy are too fucking common among them
This appears to be continuing legal action regarding Elmo’s purchase of Twitter, although I can’t find any discussion about the earlier aspects of this.
Apparently the SEC had some questions about Musk beginning to buy up Twitter stock before his announcement of his intended takeover. Musk cooperated with the investigation a little bit back in July of '22, but then clammed up and refused to honor further subpoenas to answer questions about apparently thousands of documents that came to light.
A federal court rejected all his arguments and ordered him to testify.
I wonder if he ever gets tired of winning all the time.
Looks like the “bulletproof” Cybertrucks rust like crazy if they get rained on.
Well they can’t rust if it’s raining bullets I guess.
Elon Musk: Yeah, but I’m saying that TruCoat. You don’t get it, you get oxidation problems. It’ll cost you a heck of a lot more than $500.
Irate Customer: I sat right here and said I didn’t want a car made out of steel that rusts easily.
Elon Musk: All right. I’ll talk to my boss myself. [gets up and snorts ketamine before leaving] Well, I’ve never done this before. But seeing as it’s special circumstances and all, I can knock a hundred dollars off that Trucoat.