Note, this is not a discussion about the relative risk of a 2kg UAV being flown for money.
OK then, talk about that, instead.
Two guys standing right next to each other, each flying their 4-pound micro quad up to the top of the same 25' chimney to see if there's raccoon damage to the metal mesh at the top. They each do the same pre-flight checks, operate according to exactly the same safety standards, control people in the area the same way, handle their identical rigs in the same way, complete their 30' flights in a minute and a half, and land right back at their feet. One of them has been offered $20, and other is doing it out of interest. Can you tell which one it is, and therefore which one should be fined $10,000?
The antidote to dishonest hyperbole is not more dishonest hyperbole.
Which didn't stop you from also carefully avoiding any attempt to point out which of the facts mentioned is wrong or ranty - just another lazy bit of ad hominem, showing you prefer to deliberately avoid talking about the actual matter at hand. Thanks for being predictable, at least.
So I'm a little foggy, here. Are you saying that the roofing guy who wants to send a 4-pound quad with a GoPro a couple dozen feet in the air to inspect some gutters and shingles before he risks his neck climbing a 30 foot ladder... should have a PPL? But that a recreational RC operator who wants to participate in weekend races involving 200mph turbine-powered machines weighing over 100 pounds is fine, because that's much safer? Just trying to understand the rationale here.
Except one rule that sort of prevents aerial photography for movies - the part about "can't fly over people".
You're cherry-picking words. It's can't fly over people unless they are involved in what's going on and under control safety-wise. Exactly like you can't use a 100' construction crane "over people," but you can use a 100' camera crane over people (without hard hats!) when everyone involved is under the care of people who are controlling the set and looking out for the safety of all involved. Flying a 20-pound drone to film a car chase through a controlled set is WAY safer than using a full-scale manned helicopter to do the same thing.
If you think these rules have anything to do with who is in the White House, you have no clue about the FAA and how it operates.
Huerta, a political appointee, is 100% in charge of the agenda here. He's the one that has decided to ignore the congressional requirement on the timing of this, and the one who is tap-dancing around the the issues that people raise when addressing the oddly capricious lines being drawn.
You many think the average farmer who wants to fly a cheap quadcopter over his bean field to look for dry spots is going to be able to start from scratch and get a PPL in 60 hours (never going to happen) and that there is no opportunity cost for him beyond the amount of the check he has to write for the instruction, rentals, fuel, and tests and the time spent sitting in the classroom or the cockpit (you really think there's no time required outside of the instruction room and flight time? really?)... we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm telling you that the entirety of the time, effort, and expense is substantially greater than 60 hours. Farmer Bob isn't going to be able to teleport from his rural kitchen to the classroom and back, either. Life isn't that simple. The FAA's own economic analysis of the proposed rules estimate that the real-life cost to the potential commercial sUAS applicant is, for example, at least double what the federal fee will be.
I know you are bitter and ranting, but really, calm down please.
So, which part is a rant? Specifically?
Am I confused about who Huerta's boss is?
Am I confused about the words written in the proposed rules, and the disparate impact they would have on a scenario exactly like the one I described?
Or are you simply in ad hominem defend-the-administration mode, and carefully avoiding any actual comment on the substance of the matter because you're the one who's bitter and ranty about the reality of it?
Big deal, you can fly a small plane with friends and have no problem. Fly them for $50 and you can get fined if you do t have a commercial transport license.
So out of curiosity, how do you justify that distinction? What is it about the $50 that makes the pilot suddenly less safe? Specifically.
For example, one of its first roles was overriding the privacy concerns of householders when aircraft started flying over their houses, by declaring a height above which the property owner doesn't get a say.
Federal regs and laws surrounding overflight of private property aren't about whether or not someone can use a camera during that flight. You're still confused about the FAA's role relative to privacy. The DoT isn't about privacy either, even though you might very well be using a 1000mm lens on a camera as you sit on the shoulder of a federal highway photographing over someone's fence into their back yard.
I honestly don't get what your point is Like, are you saying that if commercial operators can't fly drones nobody should, or maybe the other way round? Either way it is an absurd false equivalence.
I'm just telling you what the actual situation is. You can decide for yourself if you think that means that a journalist flying a 4-pound plastic quadcopter with a GoPro should be able to do the same things as the hobbyist who's standing right next to him doing exactly the same thing with the same equipment in exactly the same way, or whether you think the enthusiast should be subject to the same limitations as the journalist. Think what you will. I'm pointing out that the Obama administration thinks that the journalist should be currently banned from flying at all while the guy standing next to him can carry on unmolested. And that the proposed rules, once they go into effect in a couple of years, will still make strangely arbitrary distinctions between the two uses (and users).
There's a world of difference between "I can see what you're doing" versus "I can see something that can see what you're doing."
It doesn't matter. That's not what the rule is about. The Line-Of-Site rule is meant to make up for the fact that there is no pilot onboard the aircraft, and thus no way (if you're beyond line of site) to do the duty of seeing and avoiding other air traffic. If your UAS is a couple of kilometers away, invisible beyond something like a big tree line, you've got no idea how to quickly maneuver it if it's entering the path of, say, something like an air ambulance that's descending through 500' to land at an accident site. That's exactly the sort of scenario they're worried about: somebody like a journalist trying to get overhead shots of something like an accident scene, and sending his flying camera robot half a mile away BLOS to the location - and in comes a properly piloted traffic, S&R, or police helicopter. Or two. The journalist might be able to hear them, but if he can't even see, unaided, his own machine in the air, that's a serious hazard. Hence, LOS operations.
They do in practice unless you're being wilfully intellectually dishonest.
What? The FAA's mission has never included privacy concerns. They already regulate all of the ways you can do aerial photography (yes, including kites, if you send them high enough), and none of their rules speak to privacy, because that's not their territory, regulation-wise. You do actually understand that, right? No? Yes?
Prior to these laws, all commercial drone use was prohibited.
And still will be for at least a couple of years while this regulatory wagon rolls slowly down the road. Meanwhile, developed countries around the world are getting their shit together, and seeing immediate economic benefits from work in this area.
Right now, if you want to do sUAS aerial work for pay, you have to do an incredibly onerous federal dance in filing for a 333 exception, and have to have at least a Private Pilot's License. That's right, you're flying a tiny little DJI quadcopter with GoPro on it 8 or 10 meters off the ground to inspect some roofing shingles, and you need to have spent $10,000+ and hundreds of hours (including stick time in rented, fixed-wing, actual real-live airplanes flying in controlled air space!), pass physicals and a DHS background checks But if you're doing exactly the same thing for fun, none of that is necessary and you can fly right now. The guy running the roofing business, though? He'll have to wait a couple of years or become a pilot and an expert on navigating section 333's paperwork mill (and spend thousands, and still wait months for the FAA waiver allowing him to use his DJI Phantom). Thanks, Obama administration.
The operator needing line of sight with the drone is per se much less important than the ability for the drone to be recognised and associated with its operator.
These two things have nothing to do with each other, and the FAA has repeatedly mentioned that privacy concerns are not their turf and won't be part of what they do in rule making or enforcement. That's more a local law enforcement matter, and there are already abundant laws on the books dealing with that.
The FAA's current position is that ALL (with very, very few waivered exceptions) commercial use of UAS is not allowed. Their proposed new rules would reduce their restrictions, not add to them. You can't get more restricted than "completely banned."
But don't get your hopes up. It will take two or three years before these proposed rules, or some variation on them, actually take effect. In the meantime, thousands of small businesses, farmers, etc., will continue to just operate on the down-low and risk large fines.
Especially ridiculous, of course, is that people flying the exact same machines, in exactly the same place, at exactly the same time, with all of the exact same safety precautions and practices, but who are doing it for recreational purposes, will not be beholden to the same rules. Flying after the sun goes down? Just fine if you're an enthusiast. Making exactly the same flight, but getting $50 to do it? Federal fine!
Another capricious, irrational regulatory stance on the part of the executive branch. The new rules, if and when they ever stick, despite congress requiring them, by law, to have it done by September (it will never happen), will have zero impact on a reckless amateur noob or someone malicious. This is just a fee grab looking to feed the FAA with $150 every 24 months from some guy who does roofing and wants to inspect gutters without putting up a dangerous ladder. Right now he's not allowed. Someday he will be able to, if he pays more money to do so. But his neighbor can do it for fun with no legal risks. Absurd.
Would you enact a law allowing UPS to examine everyones goods and redact any references to other postal/courier services?
Bad analogy. A better analogy would be: UPS decides to run a forum or message system that their users/customers can use to communicate about UPS-related services, or issues that come up when you're running mail-order retail, etc. And then they decide to filter out communication that uses THEIR PLATFORM to talk about how to rip off UPS. Nobody's talking about laws, they're talking about what you can do with your own system when people choose to use it to communicate. The government's not even in this picture, and so all of this "censorship" babble is meaningless at best, and disingenuous at worst, if it's from people who know better.
When you register, your state cancels your old registration, precisely so that you cant vote in two places, student or not.
The groups that recruit students to do this specifically look for students who go to school out of state. It's not exactly mysterious. And no, there's no voter roll reciprocity between states, and that's exactly the angle they look to exploit.
Why don't you come up with plenty of examples of this allegedly common fraud?
No, I think the shoe is on the other foot, here.
There are plenty of examples, year in and year out, of people being caught (and even arrested and convicted) of doing things like stuffing voter registration roles with fake names. In some jurisdictions, dead voters are surprisingly active. There's no trouble at all coming up with examples of fraud, but there's lots of trouble coming up with examples of "young people being disenfranchised," unless you mean things like "making it difficult for them to vote absentee from their home district and also from their college town."
Who is being disenfranchised when they're not allowed to do both? What's the objection? People bother trying to combat those tactics because there are examples of activist groups deliberately recruiting college students to participate in exactly such double-voting and vote-trading schemes.
The most common factor for failure is dictatorship not socialism.
No, the most common factor in central controlled collectivist utopias of every stripe is that the only way the people who are slaves to it (meaning, the ones who actually produce things) will stick around is through compulsion, usually through thread of actual imprisonment or death. So the only way to make a real go of "from each according to their ability" is to use force, which means running collectivist countries as the prisons that they must become - and that generally ends up requiring the services of secret police and the military, which generally has a hierarchical structure that includes a single person or small committee calling all the shots. Hence tyranny and totalitarianism go hand in hand with that system.
Dictators are the natural byproduct of attempts at collectivism, and dictators willing to kill their own people in large numbers are the only thing that temporarily keep those regimes organized until they simply collapse under their own weight. It has happened over, and over again.
So you concede the point that a mixed system of socialist and capitalist policies will work and work damned well.
No, I'm saying it's surprising how well the burden of a confiscatory entitlement state can still be carried by the underlying engine of market economics, even when that source of productivity is being deliberately damaged in order to allow a professional class of redistributionist bureaucrats to preserve their jobs through populist elections where clueless voters voice their desire for free stuff, with no thought to how it's all actually created and sustained, and by whom.
We're not comparing countries, we're comparing market economies to centrally run collectivist economies. It makes more sense to compare the USSR's progress and failure during the 20th century to something more like Canada or the US. One system is unsustainable, killed millions of people, and stooped to threatening the lives of people trying to run away from it, and the other system is where those people were running to.
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No, you didn't make that point hard to find, you just failed to make it relevant to the question.
Note, this is not a discussion about the relative risk of a 2kg UAV being flown for money.
OK then, talk about that, instead.
Two guys standing right next to each other, each flying their 4-pound micro quad up to the top of the same 25' chimney to see if there's raccoon damage to the metal mesh at the top. They each do the same pre-flight checks, operate according to exactly the same safety standards, control people in the area the same way, handle their identical rigs in the same way, complete their 30' flights in a minute and a half, and land right back at their feet. One of them has been offered $20, and other is doing it out of interest. Can you tell which one it is, and therefore which one should be fined $10,000?
The antidote to dishonest hyperbole is not more dishonest hyperbole.
Which didn't stop you from also carefully avoiding any attempt to point out which of the facts mentioned is wrong or ranty - just another lazy bit of ad hominem, showing you prefer to deliberately avoid talking about the actual matter at hand. Thanks for being predictable, at least.
So I'm a little foggy, here. Are you saying that the roofing guy who wants to send a 4-pound quad with a GoPro a couple dozen feet in the air to inspect some gutters and shingles before he risks his neck climbing a 30 foot ladder ... should have a PPL? But that a recreational RC operator who wants to participate in weekend races involving 200mph turbine-powered machines weighing over 100 pounds is fine, because that's much safer? Just trying to understand the rationale here.
Except one rule that sort of prevents aerial photography for movies - the part about "can't fly over people".
You're cherry-picking words. It's can't fly over people unless they are involved in what's going on and under control safety-wise. Exactly like you can't use a 100' construction crane "over people," but you can use a 100' camera crane over people (without hard hats!) when everyone involved is under the care of people who are controlling the set and looking out for the safety of all involved. Flying a 20-pound drone to film a car chase through a controlled set is WAY safer than using a full-scale manned helicopter to do the same thing.
If you think these rules have anything to do with who is in the White House, you have no clue about the FAA and how it operates.
Huerta, a political appointee, is 100% in charge of the agenda here. He's the one that has decided to ignore the congressional requirement on the timing of this, and the one who is tap-dancing around the the issues that people raise when addressing the oddly capricious lines being drawn.
... we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm telling you that the entirety of the time, effort, and expense is substantially greater than 60 hours. Farmer Bob isn't going to be able to teleport from his rural kitchen to the classroom and back, either. Life isn't that simple. The FAA's own economic analysis of the proposed rules estimate that the real-life cost to the potential commercial sUAS applicant is, for example, at least double what the federal fee will be.
You many think the average farmer who wants to fly a cheap quadcopter over his bean field to look for dry spots is going to be able to start from scratch and get a PPL in 60 hours (never going to happen) and that there is no opportunity cost for him beyond the amount of the check he has to write for the instruction, rentals, fuel, and tests and the time spent sitting in the classroom or the cockpit (you really think there's no time required outside of the instruction room and flight time? really?)
I know you are bitter and ranting, but really, calm down please.
So, which part is a rant? Specifically?
Am I confused about who Huerta's boss is?
Am I confused about the words written in the proposed rules, and the disparate impact they would have on a scenario exactly like the one I described?
Or are you simply in ad hominem defend-the-administration mode, and carefully avoiding any actual comment on the substance of the matter because you're the one who's bitter and ranty about the reality of it?
Big deal, you can fly a small plane with friends and have no problem. Fly them for $50 and you can get fined if you do t have a commercial transport license.
So out of curiosity, how do you justify that distinction? What is it about the $50 that makes the pilot suddenly less safe? Specifically.
For example, one of its first roles was overriding the privacy concerns of householders when aircraft started flying over their houses, by declaring a height above which the property owner doesn't get a say.
Federal regs and laws surrounding overflight of private property aren't about whether or not someone can use a camera during that flight. You're still confused about the FAA's role relative to privacy. The DoT isn't about privacy either, even though you might very well be using a 1000mm lens on a camera as you sit on the shoulder of a federal highway photographing over someone's fence into their back yard.
I honestly don't get what your point is Like, are you saying that if commercial operators can't fly drones nobody should, or maybe the other way round? Either way it is an absurd false equivalence.
I'm just telling you what the actual situation is. You can decide for yourself if you think that means that a journalist flying a 4-pound plastic quadcopter with a GoPro should be able to do the same things as the hobbyist who's standing right next to him doing exactly the same thing with the same equipment in exactly the same way, or whether you think the enthusiast should be subject to the same limitations as the journalist. Think what you will. I'm pointing out that the Obama administration thinks that the journalist should be currently banned from flying at all while the guy standing next to him can carry on unmolested. And that the proposed rules, once they go into effect in a couple of years, will still make strangely arbitrary distinctions between the two uses (and users).
There's a world of difference between "I can see what you're doing" versus "I can see something that can see what you're doing."
It doesn't matter. That's not what the rule is about. The Line-Of-Site rule is meant to make up for the fact that there is no pilot onboard the aircraft, and thus no way (if you're beyond line of site) to do the duty of seeing and avoiding other air traffic. If your UAS is a couple of kilometers away, invisible beyond something like a big tree line, you've got no idea how to quickly maneuver it if it's entering the path of, say, something like an air ambulance that's descending through 500' to land at an accident site. That's exactly the sort of scenario they're worried about: somebody like a journalist trying to get overhead shots of something like an accident scene, and sending his flying camera robot half a mile away BLOS to the location - and in comes a properly piloted traffic, S&R, or police helicopter. Or two. The journalist might be able to hear them, but if he can't even see, unaided, his own machine in the air, that's a serious hazard. Hence, LOS operations.
They do in practice unless you're being wilfully intellectually dishonest.
What? The FAA's mission has never included privacy concerns. They already regulate all of the ways you can do aerial photography (yes, including kites, if you send them high enough), and none of their rules speak to privacy, because that's not their territory, regulation-wise. You do actually understand that, right? No? Yes?
Prior to these laws, all commercial drone use was prohibited.
And still will be for at least a couple of years while this regulatory wagon rolls slowly down the road. Meanwhile, developed countries around the world are getting their shit together, and seeing immediate economic benefits from work in this area.
Right now, if you want to do sUAS aerial work for pay, you have to do an incredibly onerous federal dance in filing for a 333 exception, and have to have at least a Private Pilot's License. That's right, you're flying a tiny little DJI quadcopter with GoPro on it 8 or 10 meters off the ground to inspect some roofing shingles, and you need to have spent $10,000+ and hundreds of hours (including stick time in rented, fixed-wing, actual real-live airplanes flying in controlled air space!), pass physicals and a DHS background checks But if you're doing exactly the same thing for fun, none of that is necessary and you can fly right now. The guy running the roofing business, though? He'll have to wait a couple of years or become a pilot and an expert on navigating section 333's paperwork mill (and spend thousands, and still wait months for the FAA waiver allowing him to use his DJI Phantom). Thanks, Obama administration.
The operator needing line of sight with the drone is per se much less important than the ability for the drone to be recognised and associated with its operator.
These two things have nothing to do with each other, and the FAA has repeatedly mentioned that privacy concerns are not their turf and won't be part of what they do in rule making or enforcement. That's more a local law enforcement matter, and there are already abundant laws on the books dealing with that.
The FAA's current position is that ALL (with very, very few waivered exceptions) commercial use of UAS is not allowed. Their proposed new rules would reduce their restrictions, not add to them. You can't get more restricted than "completely banned." But don't get your hopes up. It will take two or three years before these proposed rules, or some variation on them, actually take effect. In the meantime, thousands of small businesses, farmers, etc., will continue to just operate on the down-low and risk large fines.
Especially ridiculous, of course, is that people flying the exact same machines, in exactly the same place, at exactly the same time, with all of the exact same safety precautions and practices, but who are doing it for recreational purposes, will not be beholden to the same rules. Flying after the sun goes down? Just fine if you're an enthusiast. Making exactly the same flight, but getting $50 to do it? Federal fine!
Another capricious, irrational regulatory stance on the part of the executive branch. The new rules, if and when they ever stick, despite congress requiring them, by law, to have it done by September (it will never happen), will have zero impact on a reckless amateur noob or someone malicious. This is just a fee grab looking to feed the FAA with $150 every 24 months from some guy who does roofing and wants to inspect gutters without putting up a dangerous ladder. Right now he's not allowed. Someday he will be able to, if he pays more money to do so. But his neighbor can do it for fun with no legal risks. Absurd.
Would you enact a law allowing UPS to examine everyones goods and redact any references to other postal/courier services?
Bad analogy. A better analogy would be: UPS decides to run a forum or message system that their users/customers can use to communicate about UPS-related services, or issues that come up when you're running mail-order retail, etc. And then they decide to filter out communication that uses THEIR PLATFORM to talk about how to rip off UPS. Nobody's talking about laws, they're talking about what you can do with your own system when people choose to use it to communicate. The government's not even in this picture, and so all of this "censorship" babble is meaningless at best, and disingenuous at worst, if it's from people who know better.
Children have a greater chance of getting stuck by lightning [noaa.gov] than catching measles [cdc.gov].
Right. Because of vaccinations. Otherwise the numbers would be wildly different - just as they were all through history until the vaccine came along.
Especially when the majority of polio cases in the united states are caused by vaccinations
Because without the vaccinations ... polio would run rampant just like it used to.
Is this whole critical thinking thing new to you, or are you just trolling?
When you register, your state cancels your old registration, precisely so that you cant vote in two places, student or not.
The groups that recruit students to do this specifically look for students who go to school out of state. It's not exactly mysterious. And no, there's no voter roll reciprocity between states, and that's exactly the angle they look to exploit.
Why don't you come up with plenty of examples of this allegedly common fraud?
No, I think the shoe is on the other foot, here.
There are plenty of examples, year in and year out, of people being caught (and even arrested and convicted) of doing things like stuffing voter registration roles with fake names. In some jurisdictions, dead voters are surprisingly active. There's no trouble at all coming up with examples of fraud, but there's lots of trouble coming up with examples of "young people being disenfranchised," unless you mean things like "making it difficult for them to vote absentee from their home district and also from their college town."
Who is being disenfranchised when they're not allowed to do both? What's the objection? People bother trying to combat those tactics because there are examples of activist groups deliberately recruiting college students to participate in exactly such double-voting and vote-trading schemes.
Which is why they keep trying to make it harder for them to vote.
Oh, please. You mean "harder for them to vote twice" - like, once from their college dorm address, and once from the home address.
Used different standards in evaluating the subjective decision making in grading the "show your work" part of the test.
How do you explain the research that certainly strongly suggests there is such a bias?
Easy. Those are studies performed by people with a vested interest in getting the grants that are looking for those results.
The most common factor for failure is dictatorship not socialism.
No, the most common factor in central controlled collectivist utopias of every stripe is that the only way the people who are slaves to it (meaning, the ones who actually produce things) will stick around is through compulsion, usually through thread of actual imprisonment or death. So the only way to make a real go of "from each according to their ability" is to use force, which means running collectivist countries as the prisons that they must become - and that generally ends up requiring the services of secret police and the military, which generally has a hierarchical structure that includes a single person or small committee calling all the shots. Hence tyranny and totalitarianism go hand in hand with that system. Dictators are the natural byproduct of attempts at collectivism, and dictators willing to kill their own people in large numbers are the only thing that temporarily keep those regimes organized until they simply collapse under their own weight. It has happened over, and over again.
So you concede the point that a mixed system of socialist and capitalist policies will work and work damned well.
No, I'm saying it's surprising how well the burden of a confiscatory entitlement state can still be carried by the underlying engine of market economics, even when that source of productivity is being deliberately damaged in order to allow a professional class of redistributionist bureaucrats to preserve their jobs through populist elections where clueless voters voice their desire for free stuff, with no thought to how it's all actually created and sustained, and by whom.
We're not comparing countries, we're comparing market economies to centrally run collectivist economies. It makes more sense to compare the USSR's progress and failure during the 20th century to something more like Canada or the US. One system is unsustainable, killed millions of people, and stooped to threatening the lives of people trying to run away from it, and the other system is where those people were running to.