This is what I thought at the time. It just goes to show that guys like this project their own stupidity onto their audiences (this is not always an unsuccessful strategy)
Many jurisdictions have ways to seize profits of crime, and just about all have ways to punish crime including paying fines and restitution.
Don't you think it would be better to go through a system which has (at least a semblance of) due process, fairness, and transparency about the rules? Yes yes I know I know, "they're a private company they can do what they want". I'm not wondering what they can do, more flabbergasted about the apparent sudden and large support for corporations acting to censor and punish people like this.
This guy crashed a plane for profit. The fact that US law doesn't seem to have any meaningful sanction for him is not a reason for it to stay up.
They should delete the video. And I really don't understand the argument that they shouldn't stop him using their platform; my goodness if Youtube was mine he'd be gone and I wouldn't for a second wonder if there was any meaningful free speech implication for removing it.
He is dangerous, and the allure of more views on youtube made him do a dangerous thing. I'd be like: "OK, you're not my customer anymore".
So did the Discovery channel. The only difference is that they had asked the FAA permission to do so.
This guy crashed a plane for profit without permission. This may have just been stupidity, not understanding the consequences. Loads of people also crash other vehicles for fun and profit, so why should YT distinguish between someone crashing a car vs a plane. Where should YT draw the line? They don't make the laws.
The discovery channel didn’t try to pretend it was an engine fire. They set out to plan a plane crash with the full involvement of relevant authorities.
Yes, but now the FAA has stated what we all knew already — it was dangerous stunt undertaken entirely for self-promotion. YouTube don’t have to be experts?
It may be a huge difference, but the problem with asking Youtube to take that kind of decision without a court order is that you're expecting them to have expertise in aviation law. What next? Should they remove house flipping videos because of realtor regulations in various jurisdictions? Remove DIY videos because some jurisdictions require electrical repairs to be performed by certified technicians? The list is endless, and the precedent is so very bad.
> It may be a huge difference, but the problem with asking Youtube to take that kind of decision without a court order is that you're expecting them to have expertise in aviation law.
This is a bit of a silly way to look at it, I'm sorry to say.
What if they just remove the video on the balance of probability that it involved, in the FAA's judgement, a deliberate dangerous plane crash without permission?
This is not a challenging precedent. House-flipping is not smashing a plane into the ground without planning and without regard for safety, is it?
What about infringement on the regulation on the handling of unsafe chemicals?
Regulations on performing archælogical excavations?
Food safety violations?
Alcohol production?
Blasphemy laws in any country Youtube might be accessed from?
Animal cruelty laws? (Are hamster wheels cruel?)
Religious laws on the consumption of cattle / pork?
Privacy laws in Germany? (Dashcams are heavily regulated there)
Is it legal to show a Nazi swastika everywhere? A non Nazi swastika? A communist symbol? What about an imperial Japanese ensign?
Is it legal to say the Armenian suffered a genocide, or to claim they didn't?
Is it legal to cast doubt on any one finding of the Nuremberg trials?
What about mentioning a crime committed by a living person more than 20 years go? (Hint: it may not be legal in some European countries. Which ones? You tell me.)
Do you think youtube should systematically go through all videos for perceived dangerous people or people who look like views might "make" them do dangerous things, or just the ones that are brought to their attention by angry mobs / report volume?
And would "dangerous" include technically legal but dangerous actions like speaking up for gay rights in Yemen or criticizing cartels in Mexico? Or would they be more limited to the youtube wrong-think-corrections officer judging the video to demonstrate outright illegal actions like protesting Putin's special operation while in Russia, or publishing documents containing evidence of western war crimes?
One of the things I was most impressed by was how he managed to aim for some camera worthy bushes to land in when there were SO many better options for safety.
I wasted an inordinate amount of time analysing the whole thing myself, including but not limited to finding the location based on geographic features - and then testing in Flight Simulator.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one.
I'm disappointed he's not thrown in jail for reckless endangerment.
There was for a time a micro-industry of people taking flights to this location on Youtube -- it's one of the most fun examples of this that I've seen.
And yeah; really quickly people discovered that he genuinely had options.
There is a question I've not seen answered yet. Did the wallet guys know he was doing this in advance?
Unlikely. What most YouTubers call "sponsors" they have instead signed up to be an affiliate for using an online form. He likely broke the conditions for which the affiliate link/code could be used, which could have been the reason he removed that section from the video.
He also removed the ending, and both the beginning and ending were the pretext for the flight – bringing his friends ashes in a used sandwich bag to be scattered in the mountains, so could have instead been removed to reduce the cheese factor.
I’ve seen speculation that he shot those “plane spiraling below me” money shots separately. Sadly I don’t have the time to find the YouTuber’s videos who made the claim.
…suffice to say lots of people have gone through his video frame by frame to find weird stuff.
All of its backers, all of its investors, imagine an Uber world where no individual matters except themselves.
They wilfully break laws expecting to be able to overturn them before they are punished; they destroy markets knowing that the regulation will have to adapt to allow them to continue.
The Uberisation of everything is the tech sector's most disgraceful product.
I wonder how strong of a signal that is for a good engineer. There have always been people who've stood out as wanting to teach, wanting to mentor. Is it too much of my own bias to say that good engineers are good teachers?
I think that for example good designers are usually good teachers, so maybe.
Good design and good engineering explains itself; especially engineering that interfaces with other stuff. Well-designed things need less documentation.
Both, I think, require the same focus on clarity of intention as a good teacher.
You can't hide the detail with a wave of the hand, you can definitely overcommunicate detail that is unnecessary, but the art of it is finding a way to explain the bit that matters in a way that makes it clear to the users that you're eliding detail that isn't important, without misleading them.
There is a very fine example of this in cinema -- the senior partners meeting in Margin Call, where Zachary Quinto's character has to explain why the firm needs to sell all of a particular asset class:
That’s a great scene. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, I might recommend skipping the clip and watching the full film! If you’re on HN, odds are you would enjoy it, and it has an impressive cast.
