> 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?
Yes, because the richest man on the planet, heading up multiple billion dollar companies, couldn’t possibly have any legit reason to travel anywhere.