You should find this image of the location of rich people’s planes soothing and reassuring.
It’s part of an Apocalypse Early Warning Tracker. The idea is that if trouble is coming, you should look at what the rich people — you know, the ones who practice insider trading and have tentacles in the government — are doing.
The site isn’t your run-of-the-mill private plane tracker. The system pulls from publicly available aviation data, specifically ADS-B signals, which broadcast an aircraft’s position, speed, and altitude in real time. By tracking around 11,000 private and business jets and comparing the number airborne at any given moment against historical norms, the site assigns an alert level from 1 to 5. A normal day hovers at 1. A sudden spike, five standard deviations above the baseline, suggests some s—t is going down.
The alert level is at 1 right now. Good news: Elon Musk isn’t scrambling to get to his secret, skull-shaped lair right now.
If they know that apocalypse is on the way, wouldn’t they turn off their plane-tracker?
I note the large empty space on West Coast USA.
Hawaii is also empty of private jets.
I’m always amused that Peter Thiel thinks that Skynet will give him enough of a heads up that he can get through L.A traffic in enough time to take off in his private plane.
“There’s that old idea: if you see a bunch of people frantically running in one direction, run with them. They’re probably running from something worth running from — a terrorist attack, Godzilla, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man… you get the point. That same logic has now been adapted for the digital age, courtesy of a project that treats billionaire travel habits like an early warning system for the end of the world.” That’s from The Apocalypse Early Warning Tracker. On the other hand there’s James Thurber’s ‘The Day the Dam Broke’ Check before you panic.
Did you say “rich people”? In the California governor race there is a billionaire running in the opposite direction.
(Courtesy of Mano Singham)
Tom Steyer can make California golden again – Salon.com
“I hate billionaires. But the former hedge fund manager might be a class traitor in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt”
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@1. Snarki, child of Loki : Agreed. If they know we are watching and they know we’ll react to them then they’ll probly have some way of deliberately misleading us.
Maybe not as blatant as just turning their trackers off but maybe decoy planes or false signals or suchlike?
Of course they know that we know that and we know that they know that and they know that so .. yeah. This way paranoia lies.
(Just as they do tho’ different sense of the word.)
gijoel@3 that makes me think of a potential remake of the late ’80s nuclear war film Miracle Mile. Only instead of a group of normal people trying to escape Los Angeles before it gets nuked the lead character would be a Musk/Thiel expy who gets lots of advanced warning North Korea is going to nuke Los Angeles, but still can’t escape.
@4 submoron
… and that’s how I finished my first marathon.
@8 Reginald Selkirk
Were they ALL chasing you?
@3: Eh, I’m sure they’ve all got helicopters on call to take care of that problem for them.
The emptiness of the LA and SF area is suspicious. Makes me wonder how reliable this representation is.
And if this is at all accurate, it might give someone an idea of where to target the bombs.
I don’t think we’ll actually be safe until the number of crosses on that map is zero.
In an old issue of MAD magazine, a sign of immiment nuclear war was headlines saying “all politicians leaving country”.
Checking the tracker now the north american west coast is as busy as anywhere else, I’m guessing the lack of planes in the posted image is just because it was still before morning there.
The magat admin. has destroyed all kinds of government recordkeeping and reporting to hide their CRIMES. So, we don’t have any historical statistics anymore for comparison. But, based on what we are fed by the mainslime media, it seems that aircraft accidents are now increasing in frequency.
The founder of our organization used to work on a 747 assembly line and flew commercial flights often. Now, he says you couldn’t pay him enough to fly.
Maybe all the plutocratic billionaires will stop flying and take to their luxury bunkers a few hours before the nuke holocaust so we can: sit down, loosen our collar, tuck our head between our knees and KISS OUR ASS GOODBYE.
@10 stevewatson: those helos could also take them directly to their local subterranean lair, or land on their superyacht out at sea, if the distance is a few hundred miles or less.
But I foresee trouble for them. For one thing, these apocalypse escape-by-jet plans rely rather heavily on their pilots/crew not knowing the apocalypse is imminent, as they may well prefer to be with their loved ones – or with LITERALLY ANYONE ELSE besides these assholes they normally fly.
But assuming they can get to their jet, AND it’s staffed (and fueled), now they have the problem of… actually taking off. If they’re in NYC, chances are they’re parked at Teterboro. Here, at non-apocalyptic times, it takes approximately FOREVER to get cleared to taxi… to the end of a looooong line of planes burning ridiculous amounts of jet fuel while inching along the taxiway toward the takeoff spot at the end of the runway. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: these fuckers won’t wait their turn, they’ll just cut right across the tarmac and grass and go directly to the front of the line, blocking the plane that was about to take off. They won’t file the required flight plans either, or they’ll mask them (easy-peasy) so no one can track them.
Tl;dr: Picture a MASSIVE pileup of dozens of private jets, large and small, missing parts of wings and/or tails, festooned with fires and random explosions and fireballs that I’ll be able to see from the west side piers in Manhattan. It’ll be even better than the app!