Alright you’ve been on a roll lately Swifty, but imma call you out; transponders are public information.
Yeah, she's generally a decent person, but she's just in the wrong here.
She's generally good at managing her public persona, except when it comes to her pollute more than a small city machine private jet addiction. When people show you who they really are, believe them.
She also showed who she really was during the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes: someone who agrees to union demands, which was why she was allowed to release the best-selling concert movie of all time during the middle of the strikes.
On top of that, she got thousands of her fans registered to vote.
People are complicated.
I like that she singlehandedly proved the union demands were reasonable.
Not to take away from one of the most powerful people on the planet*, but a decent number of companies did that. I want to say A24 almost immediately agreed and that is why they were able to keep making films during the strike.
*: Jesus christ. How did Taylor Swift become one of the most powerful people on the planet?
*: Jesus christ. How did Taylor Swift become one of the most powerful people on the planet?
You ever tried saying no to a teenage daughter?
"People are complicated."
Very much agree with this sentiment. I feel, too often, this gets lost in discussions. People will do stuff we agree with, and then they'll turn around and do something we disagree with. It's fine to praise and simultaneously lambast 'em.
It's pretty healthy, IMO. Seeing the fuzzy set of actions that people take that you agree with and don't agree with as part of a whole person is a sign of maturity mentally.
She has a very good PR manager to keep her in such a good image. You know there are hundreds of people rooting for her downfall and are waiting for every slip up.
Anything Taylor goes straight to front-page, despite my efforts to block it.
Admittedly I don't know much about her as a person, but how can someone who uses a private jet in 2024 be considered a decent person by any stretch?
Having such a ludicrously unsustainable lifestyle in a climate emergency that will kill millions and displace hundreds of millions in just a few decades is a crime against humanity, change my mind.
The same way a pediatric heart surgeon who also drives a Land Rover can be considered a decent person. People shouldn't be judged on a single data point.
A land rover isn't nearly as polluting and doesn't drive nearly as far. More importantly, the heart surgeon isn't a role model in terms of lifestyle aspirations for literally hundreds of millions of followers.
People shouldn't be judged on a single data point.
It's not like we're talking about stealing some sweets from children or something. Climate change just gets worse and worse and worse until we reach net zero co2 emissions. As long as it's culturally accepted to cause massive amounts of completely unnecessary emissions, we don't have the slightest chance of fixing this.
The only way a decent person could be doing this is if they were completely uneducated about climate change and their impact as a role model.
Do you really think Taylor Swift not having a private plane is going to do anything about climate change when the real problem is major corporations?
Neither the doctor nor Taylor Swift would make the tiniest dent in climate change if they gave those things up and we need to stop blaming individuals when it isn't individuals who are the problem unless those individuals are running one of those 100 companies. Which Taylor Swift is not.
There's always a supplier and a consumer. The pollution of these 100 corporations is caused on behalf of their customers who fund them in exchange for fossil fuels, directly or indirectly. They are both responsible, it's 2 sides of the same coin.
Of course, much of this pollution isn't really avoidable at this point. We can't have 100% renewable power and electric cars tomorrow. Some really polluting industries will take decades to decarbonize, like steel and cement production. But this makes it even more urgent to adress the low hanging fruit asap, i.e. big sources of pollution that can easily be cut. Private jets are a prime example.
You could say just a few private jet flights or chopping down one single forest won't make a dent in global carbon emissions, but that doesn't mean that thousands around the world can keep on doing it indefinitely without consequences for all of us. Especially if they are idols for millions of people, normalizing harm to society that we can't afford.
LOL 15 downvotes at time of this comment for you daring to say that she was wrong.
I think they're downvoting me for saying she's a generally decent person considering some of the replies I've gotten.
There is definitely some brigading going on.
Whatever. If people don't like Taylor Swift it doesn't bother me. To be honest, I've only ever heard one of her songs all the way through. She just has done plenty of good things. This is one of the few things I've heard about her that wasn't her being a decent person.
I have also never knowingly heard her music. It's not that I avoid her, I just have never listened to pop music in lieu of jazz, classical, or world. But she does seem to be an upstanding person for the most part.
Well, we got some overriding scenario blasting away all nuance.
It's hard to be sympathetic toward a fundamental privacy limitation associated with flying in a plane exclusively owned by you. So in this context, it's easy to equate "Leave Taylor alone!" with "it's sad how she can't fly in her private jet without being tracked, there's nothing she can do!'
Now broadly speaking, I get that a lot of unreasonable piling on is coming with it, but the private jet is a symbol of excess and environmental harm and it's inherently a risk to hop into that whole mess. Particularly when she could charter private flights to the same effect without the tracking (still excess and environmental harm, but at least obfuscated from public eye a bit).
I never said she should be left alone or that it's sad that she can't fly without being tracked.
I don't care if she can be tracked when she flies. I said she was in the wrong here. All I said was that she generally comes across as a decent person.
Yeah, unfortunately, it's the internet so we don't take kindly to nuance around here.
Traffic cameras are usually publicly accessible. You are also, generally, allowed to take pictures of people when they are in public spaces where there is not an expectation of privacy.
So at what point of this is the line crossed?
Seb in space's car was spotted driving down Main Street at 4:13 pm on Tuesday
Seb in space was next seen on 1st street at 4:15 pm
...
Seb in space was next seen turning off into the Hairy Palms apartment complex at 9:12 pm on Tuesday
Seb in space was seen leaving the Hairy Palms apartment complex at 06:00 on Wednesday
That is where this gets pretty murky. Because we all more or less acknowledge that parparazzi taking pictures of everyone leaving an airport are assholes (unless it is about figuring out if The Rock is going to come do PR to distract people from the WWE sexual slavery scandal...). But we have no issue with knowing that without even needing to send someone over to see who got off the 1235 LAX->DFW flight.
And while my initial stance is "fuck the super-rich": I am allegedly part of a private chat for "people in tech" to give each other a heads up if we see a CEO getting off a flight. Because if your boss is pretty regularly visiting Facebook HQ and not telling anyone? That is the sign that you need to refresh your CV because you might get layed off after an acquisition/merger. There are definitely business reasons for not making it trivial to track individuals.
So yeah. I am going to side on the stance of "if you need to travel secretly, wear sunglasses like the rest of us". Or, if you are too famous to even risk that, at least use one of the private jet companies rather than owning your own. But I also think this is something that we need to actually consider from a legal and privacy standpoint and it is a lot more complex than that.
That's fair, but that's a discussion about how accessible the info should be. If it's public, it's public, and the public has equal access to it. If it shouldn't be that easy to access, we fix the system, not punish the users. And suing is punishment/aggression, regardless of the outcome. Self defense isn't free.
How do you get that identifier for Taylor Swift's plane? That part I don't know and maybe that part is where her case lies, but I have a feeling she has no case or Musk would have tried the same thing.
I feel like your example is way more granular than what is going on here. It’s more like ‘so and so has arrived at this city airport now’ and within an hour or two they could be anywhere in a fairly large radius without anyone reporting their location. Also there is the fact that this is ‘punching up’ which is often seen as ok.
I don’t pretend to have an answer here, but it’s hard to feel sorry for celebrities.
I am suspicious as to whether that is a "legit" site at all...
But yeah. Even mentioned below. It is REALLY not an insurmountable problem. But apparently people don't understand why people might not want to give step by step instructions for how to do something that, in my opinion, is fundamentally "bad". Can't imagine what would happen if Mythbusters talked about "adding blah" or Burn Notice did the "and other stuff" short hand for "Yo dog, this shit is not something we should explain the details of"
I'm pretty sure that's a legit site. It's a product being sold by TransUnion which is one of the big credit reporting agencies.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of that info being presented in that way
If you are for Musk being tracked, you should be fine with her being tracked the same way.
I'm for anyone in a private jet being tracked.
I'm for no one having a private jet.
I'm for private jets to be used for target practice
Got cheaper alternatives for that.
A trebuchet can fling a billionaire up to 500m!
I'm for everyone having a private jet!
Aren't all jets tracked?
flightradar24.com
Every civilian aircraft is required by air traffic regulations to broadcast it's flight path and identifier.
So once a plane registration is publicly known to be owned by someone they can of course be tracked. Of course it doesn't mean that the owner is on the plane, but it certainly let's you gather how much they fly around. Turns out that Taylor's jet is used a lot even for private jets, which obviously doesn't make her look good from an environmental point of view. Now she tries to use her wealth to silence people tracking this and pointing it out to the public. Shame on her!
Woman who made over a billion being a public figure upset she is now a public figure.
Sorry, no privacy for private jets. I don’t care about the “danger.” She can fly commercial in business class or first class if she wants privacy.
Her Grammy speech was literally "I love doing this, thank you for giving me the opportunity to do what I love."
Bitch, if you don't want people to track you then fly first class.
She can also rent a private jet.
Renting a jet is just as bad for the environment as owning one
Yes, and that's a problem.
Her complaint about her jet being tracked would be solved by renting as those companies tend to be rather quiet about who is on which plane at any given time.
Be a lot cooler if she had her own train car.
While true, the topic is about tracking, and as a pragmatic option this would bury her travel in obfuscation.
If it were just about tracking environment, then having the popular tracker be just an odometer rather than specific paths would show the point without the scary tracking vibes.
Of course, this suggests the tail number is somehow well known and thus she's got a problem regardless of this specific tracker. Once the tail number is known, all semblance of privacy is out the window.
They can charter jets and travel in greater luxury without having a tail number assigned to them personally. When I become a multibillionaire I will charter jets.
My step father is a private plane pilot.He owns the plane and rich people pay him to fly them places.
You're right, rich people like Swift don't need to own a jet themselves. It's very easy to find jets to charter and likely cheaper because you're not paying to maintain a plane.
So she can stop complaining about her silver spoon not being polished enough.
Track them all. Elon. Other Billionaires. Government using our taxes for private planes.
Didn't the richest person in the world try to do this exact same thing? I'm still convinced it's the reason he bought Twitter. Those flight logs are public information because they prevent mid air collisions, your not going to change that. No one is going to be putting military grade radar equipment on a Boeing 757 if they can't even stop the doors from opening mid flight.
Those flight logs are public information because they prevent mid air collisions, your not going to change that.
One way to prevent being personally identified is to not fly around in your own personal jet and use one of the many other available options that aren't trackable this way.
Trains are cool. Maybe not private trains, but we all need to make sacrifices.
Private trains are still a thing and they can be very luxurious.
Musk is an idiot but that's not why he bought Twitter, especially when he balked at the idea of paying $10k instead of his offered $5k to do the same thing.
No, Musk bought twitter for a much, much more stupid reason.
But flight data is available - this guy just labels her N number and filters the data in a creepy way. I get that it's probably causing her danger to have stalkers waiting at the destination for her - but those stalkers always had access to this flight data.
Seems like a workaround for Taylor would be to not own a plane and charter a different one every time. (Or do something actually environmentally minded :/)
How is it creepy? It’s activism.
This person is a hell of a lot more useful to the world than some billionaire piece of shit.
Just because it's done to a woman it's suddenly "creepy". Don't think anyone ever called that guy creepy when it was done to Elon.
As an activist tool, a simple 'miles flown' counter would do it without the 'creepy' facet of knowing her general whereabouts at all times.
Of course, as a more mundane person without a private plane or cash to fly much, anyone who cares to know what airport I'm closest to just knows the answer is almost always the one nearest my home city... So in a sense I have no more privacy than Swift, since this only lets you know what airport she last left from and presumably is closest to, which is vague enough to describe 99% of my time just by sitting still.
I guess a workaround for the guy posting the data (if he is forced to stop) would be to instead just post the distance traveled and CO2 emissions for every flight. That’s still shaming her for being an environmental asshole while avoiding issues with stalkers or whatever their defense is.
I'm thinking since the super bowl drama she's probably getting more death threats than usual, and this is a reaction to that. It's not going to work. You cant sue someone for publishing publicly available information.
You can sue someone for anything. If it will be successful or not is another matter.
Essentially she is trying to SLAPP him (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Lawyers are not free in civil cases. She is just making it expensive for him if he wants to defend himself. And i doubt Florida has an anti-slapp law.
If he stops it another person will start doing it, but anonymously
Well, that's what I get for assuming things. Good for them.
Fair enough, I could have phrased that better.
you can have the CIA assassinate them, though 🤔
You mean commit suicide by three shots in the back of the head?
Nah the fall out the window kind.
the most she can really do is waive a check at him
It's more than possible to cripple someone with legal bills
'merica
I'd kick him $10 for his gofundme
If you travel in the same plane all the time, and you own that plane, people will be able to track you. Why not just get a good contract with a private jet company so you can fly anonymously? Even if she wins this case, she will still be trackable until she takes advantage of any of the options she has at her disposal.
Or buy two more private jets and always have two fly randomly across the country while noone knows which one you're using
Checkmate
Ah, the ole Air Force One switcheroo.
Go the extra mile and have body doubles on each flight
Yeah that was what I was thinking. "Just get more jets dummy"
Heck she could spend a tiny amount of her dragon hoard sized wealth to offset the environmental impact of her air travel. For example by buying endangered rain forest land and donating it to a public charity. But no, she rather uses her wealth as a legal club to try to silence people pointing out the harm she does to the planet.
To be fair, she could do that put people would still fixate on the private flight usage.
No, obfuscating her travel in charters is the viable 'solution' to this problem. Still roughly equivalent environmental impact (actually, potentially a bit more since a charter company might have to do extra empty flights for repositioning), but her travel would be harder to discern.
To be fair, she could do that put people would still fixate on the private flight usage.
Some sure would. But with good PR she could definitely come up on top of it. Certainly better than she fares now. And if someone could pull it off, then it's her.
No, obfuscating her travel in charters is the viable ‘solution’ to this problem. Still roughly equivalent environmental impact (actually, potentially a bit more since a charter company might have to do extra empty flights for repositioning), but her travel would be harder to discern.
That would be the "rich way" to avoid such a problem yeah. But it certainly wouldn't make her a better person.
Maybe not the best idea to pattern yourself after Musk.
Put simply, there are no "good billionaires".
The irony of "all billionaires bad" is that Taylor Swift earned that money through album sales and live touring. She wasn't actively exploiting the labor of workers in order to be rich, she is just that popular.
And before everyone jumps down my ass about my opinion sounding too conservative for Lemmy, I invite you to check out my post history.
The thousands of people making those records sell and shows happen:
There is no self made billionaire, a billion is an absurd amount of wealth a singular person cannot actually earn or be worth.
"To make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" ~Carl Sagan
People payed $2,000 a ticket to see Taylor perform... that was their decision.
He's talking about all the people working at the label and concert agency. Do you think the technicians and riggers whot take care of all the audio, light and show effects get more money at her concerts? What about the people doing the security, check-in, cleaning and so on?
Try having a concert without any of these. There is hundreds of people working to make stadion concerts happen.
She wasn't actively exploiting the labor of workers in order to be rich
What a sad state of affairs that you feel the need to "defend" yourself by claiming you're not conservative. What the hell happened that we can't have differing opinions without making blanket disclaimers?
At least here in the US, conservatism is associated with pretty much nothing good. Elimination of trans people (and then da gays after that), more guns, less healthcare, less education, less vaccines, less social responsibility, more taxes for the poor, less taxes for the rich, jailing people for getting abortions, furthering wars that we can feed our soldiers to for money, insurrection and fascism, fox news.
Distancing yourself from that dumpster fire is prudent.
Edit: The social responsibility thing was a dumb one. I was thinking of something else. Disregard that one point.
No, you were right about the social irresponsibility; it's covered by the christofascist element
When you state something that is in line with the statements of terrible people it is prudent to denounce those people or otherwise say you are unaffiliated with their overall platform.
Yes, people shouldn’t assume that you are saying more than you are, but it is still prudent to understand that people will make those assumptions. It shows self awareness.
Normally, I would agree with you. But conservatives have been getting more fascist and have been making more calls for violence over the past decade. It’s a good idea to separate yourself from them if you don’t agree with those points.
Looks like someone doesn't know how transponders work.
Understandable I guess: It's not really something most people know anything about, but you'd think someone working for her would've been like, "Yeah, no, that's not really how aviation works, they are public by design" before it got to the point where a legal threat was made.
They know how it works, but they also know the average person won't go against a billionaire and the army of lawyers they can afford. It's a scare tactic.
Yeah, that seems pretty probable, especially for someone with such a manicured public persona. Still though, they don't really have a legal leg to stand on no matter how many lawyers they throw at it.
Yeah, but if the cat is out of the bag with respect to her tail number, then it's just some rando typing in a random tail number in a flight tracking database. You don't have to be setting up a dedicated service to do this, just using publicly available stuff that would let you track a random delta flight just as easily as some celebs private plane.
Unless you start declaring the public tracking databases must honor requests to filter 'special' tail numbers from queries.
What a friendly billionaire.
I'm expecting her to be revealed as a villain at some point. She was born with a silver spoon, there are skeletons in closets, and she knows it. Time will tell.
Threatening legal action against some kid because she is too much of a rich asshole to travel like a normal person. If being a billionaire wasn't it then this is should be the reveal.
Especially since she's definitely rich enough to offset her global foot print from her jet usage by actively donating to charities trying to protect the planet ten times and she wouldn't feel it one bit.
While true most of the carbon offset stuff is a scam and a way to shuffle your carbon emissions around enough that it just gets lost and not offset at all.
She is a billionaire, isn't that enough villainy?
I don't know anything about her. Was she born wealthy? That could explain a lot of the success.
According to wikipedia:
Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989,[1] in West Reading, Pennsylvania.[2] She is named after singer-songwriter James Taylor.[3] Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch[4] and her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (née Finlay), is a former homemaker who previously worked as a mutual fund marketing executive.[5] Taylor has a younger brother, actor Austin Swift.[6]
Not an emerald mine, but at least upper middle class.
Her father also owns Swift trucking. So every truck you see on the road with a big "Swift" on it? His company.
Way higher than just upper middle.
Edit: Sorry, I was lied to by a friend. He owns Swift Group, a financial advisory group. Net worth of $5 mil.
Carl Moyes was a truck driver hauling produce for C.R. England in the 1940s out of northern Utah.[4] In the late 1950s Betty and Carl Moyes started a small trucking company in Plain City, Utah, B & C Truck Leasing. After their son, Jerry, graduated from Weber State University in 1966, they moved the small company to Phoenix, Arizona. Carl and his two sons, Ronald and Jerry (vice-president), formed the company Common Market in Arizona, that would become Swift.
Also
The name Swift Transportation was purchased from a descendant of the Swift Meat Packing family, when the Moyes family bought the trucking assets of Swift & Company. The three Moyes family members and a fourth partner, Randy Knight, grew the business to $25 million in annual revenues by 1984. Jerry Moyes became president, chairman, and CEO that same year, and when Carl died in 1985, Jerry bought out the other two partners, his brother Ronald and Randy Knight. Ronald would continue to hold shares in Swift while Randy would become a co-founder of Knight Transportation.[6]
I think I need to stop trusting them with factual tidbits.
She was. She basically bought her way into the music industry. In her early years, a lot of her hype was manufactured and astroturfed. Notably she did write her early songs herself, (the vast majority of pop songs are ghostwritten,) but didn’t have enough appeal to actually break into the industry. So her rich parents basically bought her a record label contract.
She has managed to turn the original millions into over a billion. So that is absolutely notable. But she wasn’t born poor, and it’s not a rags-to-riches story. Even without music, she never would’ve had to worry about rent or groceries.
Turning a thousand dollars into a million is infintely harder than turning a million dollars into a billion.
Looks as if she grew up in a comfortably upper class family. Maybe not mega rich, but they had money, a giant house, and land, and seem to have been able to use money to get her seen in the right places.
Regardless, she clearly has talent far beyond simply coming from an affluent childhood.
We have different definitions of mega rich. Stockbroker money, giant house and land... what other boxes need to be ticked?
CO2 with her jet flea jumps may be
a giant house, and land
She has huuuge... tracks of land!
Wow people are sensitive about your comment.
Because it's quite ignorant. In no world is an upper class daughter of a stockbroker not filthy rich.
Sure she has some songwriting talent, but would she be as big as she is without that generational wealth backing her from birth?
would she be as big as she is without that generational wealth backing her from birth?
Maybe? Dolly Parton had relatively humble beginnings. My wife's school had a random band that made a decent splash in the industry with radio play time and record sales. Not Parton or Swift level, but still; they seemed decent enough but didn't see anything to know why a label went for them over a bunch of other similarly decent acts.
Celebrity can be weird sometimes. Sometimes you see someone pour all sorts of resources in trying to be 'popular' and fail, and sometimes you see someone come randomly out of nowhere.
Well to do with parents who were shockingly willing to bend over backwards to give her a chance at success. She's still remarkably wealthy given where she started but it's no rags to riches story.
I kinda hope so. It'd be pretty boring if it turns out she's just a mostly milquetoast white girl from Pennsylvania with a penchant for writing pop songs who stumbled into a billion dollars...
ADS-B data is public. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy. I grew to respect her recently, but in this matter, she is full of shit.
Doubtful she is the one filing the lawsuit and may not even know about it.. Her dad/manager is really protective and likely initiated.
Sure Ms. Swift, act like Muskrat.
If you don't want people to know where your going just throw on a medical mask and buy a Greyhound ticket in cash like every other undercover federal agent
/s
Where you're* going.
Looking forward to her new, highly-relatable single, "Why you gotta track my jet?"
If you think her fans will care, you are very wrong. I'm sure the vast majority of her fans want that Florida student to stop "harassing" and "stalking" her.
Same with Elon Musk's fans, but he's definitely gone downhill among non-fans. Not just from that, but it was one piece of the puzzle.
Her fans will always be her fans. But she was gaining momentum and just like that, it put it to a stop. I was sort of sympathizing with her up until this piece of news came out. Back to cynicism.
I disagree with the use of "Florida Student" when "Florida Man" would have been a better title
lol it looks as if her hands are chopped off
Venus de Swift
Are you saying... TAYLOR SWIFT'S ARMS AREN'T REAL??!
How Can Gloves Be Real If Our Arms Aren't Real
Nay nay TayTay. I support her, but she lost the plot on that one.
Power corrupts.
Precedent states that the only legal remedy is to buy whatever social media platform the dependent uses, ban them, and run the rest of the site into the ground.
it's literally delayed by 24 hours so that it's not a security risk for her. The only reason they're sharing it is to raise awareness about insane fuel consumption for example when she flies from one side of St. Louis to the other (and back), burning hundreds of gallons of jet fuel for what should have been a 30 minute drive
Couldn't he dodge this by publishing the data on a delay? Say, new flight info only shows up on the website 72 hours after it happened?
It's just publicly-available flight data. Anyone can get this information, there's nothing hidden or secret here.
Didn't she go on the record saying she doesn't own her jet and it gets leased out to other people? Ya know because pollution...
She does own the jet, but charters it out for most of the flights. Because when you own a jet but only fly two or three times a week, your crew needs something to do for the other two or three workdays each week.
Swallowed the hook
Didn’t she just have an issue with a stalker that was arrested?
I'm just posting sources to back up my claims while everyone else just says stuff because they want it to be true. No need for sources when you can just say stuff... it's like Republicans.
Alright you’ve been on a roll lately Swifty, but imma call you out; transponders are public information.
Yeah, she's generally a decent person, but she's just in the wrong here.
She's generally good at managing her public persona, except when it comes to her
pollute more than a small city machineprivate jet addiction. When people show you who they really are, believe them.She also showed who she really was during the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes: someone who agrees to union demands, which was why she was allowed to release the best-selling concert movie of all time during the middle of the strikes.
On top of that, she got thousands of her fans registered to vote.
People are complicated.
I like that she singlehandedly proved the union demands were reasonable.
Not to take away from one of the most powerful people on the planet*, but a decent number of companies did that. I want to say A24 almost immediately agreed and that is why they were able to keep making films during the strike.
*: Jesus christ. How did Taylor Swift become one of the most powerful people on the planet?
You ever tried saying no to a teenage daughter?
"People are complicated."
Very much agree with this sentiment. I feel, too often, this gets lost in discussions. People will do stuff we agree with, and then they'll turn around and do something we disagree with. It's fine to praise and simultaneously lambast 'em.
It's pretty healthy, IMO. Seeing the fuzzy set of actions that people take that you agree with and don't agree with as part of a whole person is a sign of maturity mentally.
Having to cleave people into "the Madonna" and "the whore" or the "good object" and the "bad object" is in the mix for a variety of mental problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
Also pulled her catalog from Spotify to protest their scummy royalty payouts. They changed the payouts for everyone as a result.
When you put it like that, it doesn't really sound like she was doing it out of the goodness of her heart.
I mean, just because she benefited doesn't mean hundreds of others also didn't.
Sure, I'm not saying it's wrong what she did, just that it's not a good way to judge her character.
She has a very good PR manager to keep her in such a good image. You know there are hundreds of people rooting for her downfall and are waiting for every slip up.
Anything Taylor goes straight to front-page, despite my efforts to block it.
Admittedly I don't know much about her as a person, but how can someone who uses a private jet in 2024 be considered a decent person by any stretch?
Having such a ludicrously unsustainable lifestyle in a climate emergency that will kill millions and displace hundreds of millions in just a few decades is a crime against humanity, change my mind.
The same way a pediatric heart surgeon who also drives a Land Rover can be considered a decent person. People shouldn't be judged on a single data point.
A land rover isn't nearly as polluting and doesn't drive nearly as far. More importantly, the heart surgeon isn't a role model in terms of lifestyle aspirations for literally hundreds of millions of followers.
It's not like we're talking about stealing some sweets from children or something. Climate change just gets worse and worse and worse until we reach net zero co2 emissions. As long as it's culturally accepted to cause massive amounts of completely unnecessary emissions, we don't have the slightest chance of fixing this.
The only way a decent person could be doing this is if they were completely uneducated about climate change and their impact as a role model.
Do you really think Taylor Swift not having a private plane is going to do anything about climate change when the real problem is major corporations?
When 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions, why is Taylor Swift to be treated as a pariah because she has a private plane?
Neither the doctor nor Taylor Swift would make the tiniest dent in climate change if they gave those things up and we need to stop blaming individuals when it isn't individuals who are the problem unless those individuals are running one of those 100 companies. Which Taylor Swift is not.
There's always a supplier and a consumer. The pollution of these 100 corporations is caused on behalf of their customers who fund them in exchange for fossil fuels, directly or indirectly. They are both responsible, it's 2 sides of the same coin.
Of course, much of this pollution isn't really avoidable at this point. We can't have 100% renewable power and electric cars tomorrow. Some really polluting industries will take decades to decarbonize, like steel and cement production. But this makes it even more urgent to adress the low hanging fruit asap, i.e. big sources of pollution that can easily be cut. Private jets are a prime example.
You could say just a few private jet flights or chopping down one single forest won't make a dent in global carbon emissions, but that doesn't mean that thousands around the world can keep on doing it indefinitely without consequences for all of us. Especially if they are idols for millions of people, normalizing harm to society that we can't afford.
LOL 15 downvotes at time of this comment for you daring to say that she was wrong.
I think they're downvoting me for saying she's a generally decent person considering some of the replies I've gotten.
There is definitely some brigading going on.
Whatever. If people don't like Taylor Swift it doesn't bother me. To be honest, I've only ever heard one of her songs all the way through. She just has done plenty of good things. This is one of the few things I've heard about her that wasn't her being a decent person.
I have also never knowingly heard her music. It's not that I avoid her, I just have never listened to pop music in lieu of jazz, classical, or world. But she does seem to be an upstanding person for the most part.
Well, we got some overriding scenario blasting away all nuance.
It's hard to be sympathetic toward a fundamental privacy limitation associated with flying in a plane exclusively owned by you. So in this context, it's easy to equate "Leave Taylor alone!" with "it's sad how she can't fly in her private jet without being tracked, there's nothing she can do!'
Now broadly speaking, I get that a lot of unreasonable piling on is coming with it, but the private jet is a symbol of excess and environmental harm and it's inherently a risk to hop into that whole mess. Particularly when she could charter private flights to the same effect without the tracking (still excess and environmental harm, but at least obfuscated from public eye a bit).
I never said she should be left alone or that it's sad that she can't fly without being tracked.
I don't care if she can be tracked when she flies. I said she was in the wrong here. All I said was that she generally comes across as a decent person.
Yeah, unfortunately, it's the internet so we don't take kindly to nuance around here.
Its a bit more complicated than that.
Traffic cameras are usually publicly accessible. You are also, generally, allowed to take pictures of people when they are in public spaces where there is not an expectation of privacy.
So at what point of this is the line crossed?
That is where this gets pretty murky. Because we all more or less acknowledge that parparazzi taking pictures of everyone leaving an airport are assholes (unless it is about figuring out if The Rock is going to come do PR to distract people from the WWE sexual slavery scandal...). But we have no issue with knowing that without even needing to send someone over to see who got off the 1235 LAX->DFW flight.
And while my initial stance is "fuck the super-rich": I am allegedly part of a private chat for "people in tech" to give each other a heads up if we see a CEO getting off a flight. Because if your boss is pretty regularly visiting Facebook HQ and not telling anyone? That is the sign that you need to refresh your CV because you might get layed off after an acquisition/merger. There are definitely business reasons for not making it trivial to track individuals.
So yeah. I am going to side on the stance of "if you need to travel secretly, wear sunglasses like the rest of us". Or, if you are too famous to even risk that, at least use one of the private jet companies rather than owning your own. But I also think this is something that we need to actually consider from a legal and privacy standpoint and it is a lot more complex than that.
That's fair, but that's a discussion about how accessible the info should be. If it's public, it's public, and the public has equal access to it. If it shouldn't be that easy to access, we fix the system, not punish the users. And suing is punishment/aggression, regardless of the outcome. Self defense isn't free.
I don't think your analogy works, because, as long as you know the plane's identifier, you can just type it into a website and see where it is.
https://planefinder.net/
That's all you have to do.
How do you get that identifier for Taylor Swift's plane? That part I don't know and maybe that part is where her case lies, but I have a feeling she has no case or Musk would have tried the same thing.
I feel like your example is way more granular than what is going on here. It’s more like ‘so and so has arrived at this city airport now’ and within an hour or two they could be anywhere in a fairly large radius without anyone reporting their location. Also there is the fact that this is ‘punching up’ which is often seen as ok.
I don’t pretend to have an answer here, but it’s hard to feel sorry for celebrities.
Don't worry, it's happening to you even if you're not super rich. And it's being sold.
I am suspicious as to whether that is a "legit" site at all...
But yeah. Even mentioned below. It is REALLY not an insurmountable problem. But apparently people don't understand why people might not want to give step by step instructions for how to do something that, in my opinion, is fundamentally "bad". Can't imagine what would happen if Mythbusters talked about "adding blah" or Burn Notice did the "and other stuff" short hand for "Yo dog, this shit is not something we should explain the details of"
I'm pretty sure that's a legit site. It's a product being sold by TransUnion which is one of the big credit reporting agencies.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of that info being presented in that way
Never meet your heroes.
I don’t listen to her music, I’d hardly call her my hero.
our hero.
Okay
And transponders transmit. With a significant amount of power in fact.
Weird, it’s almost like they have to to have any usefulness.
At all.
You can't stop the signal, Mal.
LOL 6 downvotes as of this comment. Fans are gonna fan I guess.
Im seeing ~300 up
It was positive even when I commented, I was just surprised at the number of downvotes.
If you are for Musk being tracked, you should be fine with her being tracked the same way.
I'm for anyone in a private jet being tracked.
I'm for no one having a private jet.
I'm for private jets to be used for target practice
Got cheaper alternatives for that.
A trebuchet can fling a billionaire up to 500m!
I'm for everyone having a private jet!
Aren't all jets tracked?
flightradar24.com
Every civilian aircraft is required by air traffic regulations to broadcast it's flight path and identifier.
So once a plane registration is publicly known to be owned by someone they can of course be tracked. Of course it doesn't mean that the owner is on the plane, but it certainly let's you gather how much they fly around. Turns out that Taylor's jet is used a lot even for private jets, which obviously doesn't make her look good from an environmental point of view. Now she tries to use her wealth to silence people tracking this and pointing it out to the public. Shame on her!
Woman who made over a billion being a public figure upset she is now a public figure.
Sorry, no privacy for private jets. I don’t care about the “danger.” She can fly commercial in business class or first class if she wants privacy.
Her Grammy speech was literally "I love doing this, thank you for giving me the opportunity to do what I love."
Bitch, if you don't want people to track you then fly first class.
She can also rent a private jet.
Renting a jet is just as bad for the environment as owning one
Yes, and that's a problem.
Her complaint about her jet being tracked would be solved by renting as those companies tend to be rather quiet about who is on which plane at any given time.
Be a lot cooler if she had her own train car.
While true, the topic is about tracking, and as a pragmatic option this would bury her travel in obfuscation.
If it were just about tracking environment, then having the popular tracker be just an odometer rather than specific paths would show the point without the scary tracking vibes.
Of course, this suggests the tail number is somehow well known and thus she's got a problem regardless of this specific tracker. Once the tail number is known, all semblance of privacy is out the window.
They can charter jets and travel in greater luxury without having a tail number assigned to them personally. When I become a multibillionaire I will charter jets.
My step father is a private plane pilot.He owns the plane and rich people pay him to fly them places.
You're right, rich people like Swift don't need to own a jet themselves. It's very easy to find jets to charter and likely cheaper because you're not paying to maintain a plane.
So she can stop complaining about her silver spoon not being polished enough.
I'm on team Florida student.
Same.
Track them all. Elon. Other Billionaires. Government using our taxes for private planes.
Didn't the richest person in the world try to do this exact same thing? I'm still convinced it's the reason he bought Twitter. Those flight logs are public information because they prevent mid air collisions, your not going to change that. No one is going to be putting military grade radar equipment on a Boeing 757 if they can't even stop the doors from opening mid flight.
One way to prevent being personally identified is to not fly around in your own personal jet and use one of the many other available options that aren't trackable this way.
Trains are cool. Maybe not private trains, but we all need to make sacrifices.
Private trains are still a thing and they can be very luxurious.
Like Kim Jong Un's train: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTe4El6zOPI
Musk is an idiot but that's not why he bought Twitter, especially when he balked at the idea of paying $10k instead of his offered $5k to do the same thing.
No, Musk bought twitter for a much, much more stupid reason.
You're* not going to change that.
But flight data is available - this guy just labels her N number and filters the data in a creepy way. I get that it's probably causing her danger to have stalkers waiting at the destination for her - but those stalkers always had access to this flight data.
Seems like a workaround for Taylor would be to not own a plane and charter a different one every time. (Or do something actually environmentally minded :/)
How is it creepy? It’s activism.
This person is a hell of a lot more useful to the world than some billionaire piece of shit.
Just because it's done to a woman it's suddenly "creepy". Don't think anyone ever called that guy creepy when it was done to Elon.
As an activist tool, a simple 'miles flown' counter would do it without the 'creepy' facet of knowing her general whereabouts at all times.
Of course, as a more mundane person without a private plane or cash to fly much, anyone who cares to know what airport I'm closest to just knows the answer is almost always the one nearest my home city... So in a sense I have no more privacy than Swift, since this only lets you know what airport she last left from and presumably is closest to, which is vague enough to describe 99% of my time just by sitting still.
I guess a workaround for the guy posting the data (if he is forced to stop) would be to instead just post the distance traveled and CO2 emissions for every flight. That’s still shaming her for being an environmental asshole while avoiding issues with stalkers or whatever their defense is.
The solution is obvious.
Stop owning private jets.
Billionaires threatening, harassing, and intimidating normal people with their army of lawyers and sycophant fans is never okay.
Fuck Taylor Swift and every other rich piece of shit.
Fuck billionaires
nope. sorry taylor. if your plane's tracking information is public knowledge it's allowed. if it's good for elon it's good for you too.
You figure she's savvy enough to know about the Streisand Effect. I guess not.
Way to kill the goodwill you've been gaining Taylor
I'm thinking since the super bowl drama she's probably getting more death threats than usual, and this is a reaction to that. It's not going to work. You cant sue someone for publishing publicly available information.
You can sue someone for anything. If it will be successful or not is another matter.
Essentially she is trying to SLAPP him (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Lawyers are not free in civil cases. She is just making it expensive for him if he wants to defend himself. And i doubt Florida has an anti-slapp law.
If he stops it another person will start doing it, but anonymously
They have 2: https://www.rcfp.org/anti-slapp-guide/florida/#:~:text=Florida's%20general%20anti%2DSLAPP%20provision,government%2C%20or%20to%20petition%20the
Well, that's what I get for assuming things. Good for them.
Fair enough, I could have phrased that better.
you can have the CIA assassinate them, though 🤔
You mean commit suicide by three shots in the back of the head?
Nah the fall out the window kind.
the most she can really do is waive a check at him
It's more than possible to cripple someone with legal bills
'merica
I'd kick him $10 for his gofundme
If you travel in the same plane all the time, and you own that plane, people will be able to track you. Why not just get a good contract with a private jet company so you can fly anonymously? Even if she wins this case, she will still be trackable until she takes advantage of any of the options she has at her disposal.
Or buy two more private jets and always have two fly randomly across the country while noone knows which one you're using
Checkmate
Ah, the ole Air Force One switcheroo.
Go the extra mile and have body doubles on each flight
Yeah that was what I was thinking. "Just get more jets dummy"
Heck she could spend a tiny amount of her dragon hoard sized wealth to offset the environmental impact of her air travel. For example by buying endangered rain forest land and donating it to a public charity. But no, she rather uses her wealth as a legal club to try to silence people pointing out the harm she does to the planet.
To be fair, she could do that put people would still fixate on the private flight usage.
No, obfuscating her travel in charters is the viable 'solution' to this problem. Still roughly equivalent environmental impact (actually, potentially a bit more since a charter company might have to do extra empty flights for repositioning), but her travel would be harder to discern.
Some sure would. But with good PR she could definitely come up on top of it. Certainly better than she fares now. And if someone could pull it off, then it's her.
That would be the "rich way" to avoid such a problem yeah. But it certainly wouldn't make her a better person.
Maybe not the best idea to pattern yourself after Musk.
Put simply, there are no "good billionaires".
The irony of "all billionaires bad" is that Taylor Swift earned that money through album sales and live touring. She wasn't actively exploiting the labor of workers in order to be rich, she is just that popular.
And before everyone jumps down my ass about my opinion sounding too conservative for Lemmy, I invite you to check out my post history.
The thousands of people making those records sell and shows happen:
There is no self made billionaire, a billion is an absurd amount of wealth a singular person cannot actually earn or be worth.
"To make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" ~Carl Sagan
People payed $2,000 a ticket to see Taylor perform... that was their decision.
He's talking about all the people working at the label and concert agency. Do you think the technicians and riggers whot take care of all the audio, light and show effects get more money at her concerts? What about the people doing the security, check-in, cleaning and so on?
Try having a concert without any of these. There is hundreds of people working to make stadion concerts happen.
What a sad state of affairs that you feel the need to "defend" yourself by claiming you're not conservative. What the hell happened that we can't have differing opinions without making blanket disclaimers?
At least here in the US, conservatism is associated with pretty much nothing good. Elimination of trans people (and then da gays after that), more guns, less healthcare, less education, less vaccines, less social responsibility, more taxes for the poor, less taxes for the rich, jailing people for getting abortions, furthering wars that we can feed our soldiers to for money, insurrection and fascism, fox news.
Distancing yourself from that dumpster fire is prudent.
Edit: The social responsibility thing was a dumb one. I was thinking of something else. Disregard that one point.
No, you were right about the social irresponsibility; it's covered by the christofascist element
When you state something that is in line with the statements of terrible people it is prudent to denounce those people or otherwise say you are unaffiliated with their overall platform.
Yes, people shouldn’t assume that you are saying more than you are, but it is still prudent to understand that people will make those assumptions. It shows self awareness.
Normally, I would agree with you. But conservatives have been getting more fascist and have been making more calls for violence over the past decade. It’s a good idea to separate yourself from them if you don’t agree with those points.
It’s public information. If you have a problem then stop flying around in your fancy fucking jet.
God damn rich people. Fuck em all.
Looks like someone doesn't know how transponders work.
Understandable I guess: It's not really something most people know anything about, but you'd think someone working for her would've been like, "Yeah, no, that's not really how aviation works, they are public by design" before it got to the point where a legal threat was made.
They know how it works, but they also know the average person won't go against a billionaire and the army of lawyers they can afford. It's a scare tactic.
Yeah, that seems pretty probable, especially for someone with such a manicured public persona. Still though, they don't really have a legal leg to stand on no matter how many lawyers they throw at it.
Yeah, but if the cat is out of the bag with respect to her tail number, then it's just some rando typing in a random tail number in a flight tracking database. You don't have to be setting up a dedicated service to do this, just using publicly available stuff that would let you track a random delta flight just as easily as some celebs private plane.
Unless you start declaring the public tracking databases must honor requests to filter 'special' tail numbers from queries.
What a friendly billionaire.
I'm expecting her to be revealed as a villain at some point. She was born with a silver spoon, there are skeletons in closets, and she knows it. Time will tell.
Threatening legal action against some kid because she is too much of a rich asshole to travel like a normal person. If being a billionaire wasn't it then this is should be the reveal.
Especially since she's definitely rich enough to offset her global foot print from her jet usage by actively donating to charities trying to protect the planet ten times and she wouldn't feel it one bit.
While true most of the carbon offset stuff is a scam and a way to shuffle your carbon emissions around enough that it just gets lost and not offset at all.
She is a billionaire, isn't that enough villainy?
I don't know anything about her. Was she born wealthy? That could explain a lot of the success.
According to wikipedia:
Not an emerald mine, but at least upper middle class.
Her father also owns Swift trucking. So every truck you see on the road with a big "Swift" on it? His company.Way higher than just upper middle.
Edit: Sorry, I was lied to by a friend. He owns Swift Group, a financial advisory group. Net worth of $5 mil.
https://zacjohnson.com/scott-kingsley-swift-net-worth/
Hum, that is not what wikipedia says:
Also
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Transportation
Yep, you're right. I was lied to by a friend.
I think I need to stop trusting them with factual tidbits.
She was. She basically bought her way into the music industry. In her early years, a lot of her hype was manufactured and astroturfed. Notably she did write her early songs herself, (the vast majority of pop songs are ghostwritten,) but didn’t have enough appeal to actually break into the industry. So her rich parents basically bought her a record label contract.
She has managed to turn the original millions into over a billion. So that is absolutely notable. But she wasn’t born poor, and it’s not a rags-to-riches story. Even without music, she never would’ve had to worry about rent or groceries.
Turning a thousand dollars into a million is infintely harder than turning a million dollars into a billion.
Looks as if she grew up in a comfortably upper class family. Maybe not mega rich, but they had money, a giant house, and land, and seem to have been able to use money to get her seen in the right places.
Regardless, she clearly has talent far beyond simply coming from an affluent childhood.
We have different definitions of mega rich. Stockbroker money, giant house and land... what other boxes need to be ticked?
CO2 with her jet flea jumps may be
She has huuuge... tracks of land!
Wow people are sensitive about your comment.
Because it's quite ignorant. In no world is an upper class daughter of a stockbroker not filthy rich.
Sure she has some songwriting talent, but would she be as big as she is without that generational wealth backing her from birth?
Maybe? Dolly Parton had relatively humble beginnings. My wife's school had a random band that made a decent splash in the industry with radio play time and record sales. Not Parton or Swift level, but still; they seemed decent enough but didn't see anything to know why a label went for them over a bunch of other similarly decent acts.
Celebrity can be weird sometimes. Sometimes you see someone pour all sorts of resources in trying to be 'popular' and fail, and sometimes you see someone come randomly out of nowhere.
Well to do with parents who were shockingly willing to bend over backwards to give her a chance at success. She's still remarkably wealthy given where she started but it's no rags to riches story.
I kinda hope so. It'd be pretty boring if it turns out she's just a mostly milquetoast white girl from Pennsylvania with a penchant for writing pop songs who stumbled into a billion dollars...
ADS-B data is public. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy. I grew to respect her recently, but in this matter, she is full of shit.
Doubtful she is the one filing the lawsuit and may not even know about it.. Her dad/manager is really protective and likely initiated.
Sure Ms. Swift, act like Muskrat.
If you don't want people to know where your going just throw on a medical mask and buy a Greyhound ticket in cash like every other undercover federal agent
/s
Where you're* going.
Looking forward to her new, highly-relatable single, "Why you gotta track my jet?"
Link to his accounts:
https://grndcntrl.net/links/
Elon Part II
Elon Swift
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the Elon.
If she had simply not said anything, no one would be talking about it
Way to go, Barb!
She could take a train.
she can get a very cool, private train!
Well, if trains existed.
Stop using the jet and this won't be an issue lol
Is everyone else sick of hearing about T Swift? I don't have anything against her, just don't want to see or hear her any more.
Filter out her name. I filter out certain keywords, like musk, tesla and kanye.
Sadly, having "X" as a filter filters out more than what "Twitter" used to. It's really a dumb fucking name.
It's a good name for the right kind of product. But yeah, for Twitter, it's stuuuupid!
What kind of product might that be?
One with absolutely no presence on the internet maybe?
Like a porn site, or a porn magazine, or a porn studio, or a porn agency. Where else do you wanna watch your XVideos.
Maybe. It works for programming languages like R. But yeah, searching for it would be a nightmare.
Something something Steisand effect...
That image almost looks like she has no arms
She's going for that Def Leopard aesthetic
Too soon
Paul Wittgenstein?
Haha funny optical illusion. Could you imagine if she had no arms on top of no spine?
Publicity implosion speedrun (any%)
If you think her fans will care, you are very wrong. I'm sure the vast majority of her fans want that Florida student to stop "harassing" and "stalking" her.
Same with Elon Musk's fans, but he's definitely gone downhill among non-fans. Not just from that, but it was one piece of the puzzle.
Her fans will always be her fans. But she was gaining momentum and just like that, it put it to a stop. I was sort of sympathizing with her up until this piece of news came out. Back to cynicism.
I disagree with the use of "Florida Student" when "Florida Man" would have been a better title
lol it looks as if her hands are chopped off
Venus de Swift
Are you saying... TAYLOR SWIFT'S ARMS AREN'T REAL??!
How Can Gloves Be Real If Our Arms Aren't Real
Nay nay TayTay. I support her, but she lost the plot on that one.
Power corrupts.
Precedent states that the only legal remedy is to buy whatever social media platform the dependent uses, ban them, and run the rest of the site into the ground.
it's literally delayed by 24 hours so that it's not a security risk for her. The only reason they're sharing it is to raise awareness about insane fuel consumption for example when she flies from one side of St. Louis to the other (and back), burning hundreds of gallons of jet fuel for what should have been a 30 minute drive
Couldn't he dodge this by publishing the data on a delay? Say, new flight info only shows up on the website 72 hours after it happened?
It's just publicly-available flight data. Anyone can get this information, there's nothing hidden or secret here.
Didn't she go on the record saying she doesn't own her jet and it gets leased out to other people? Ya know because pollution...
She does own the jet, but charters it out for most of the flights. Because when you own a jet but only fly two or three times a week, your crew needs something to do for the other two or three workdays each week.
Swallowed the hook
Didn’t she just have an issue with a stalker that was arrested?
I'm just posting sources to back up my claims while everyone else just says stuff because they want it to be true. No need for sources when you can just say stuff... it's like Republicans.