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The FAA can't stop you from being a business, since that's not their charter. They can stop you from conducting air flights in the USA. As an extreme thought

The FAA can't stop you from being a business, since that's not their charter. They can stop you from conducting air flights in the USA. As an extreme thought experiment, the FAA could revoke Delta Airlines' authorization to fly, but Delta would continue to be a company- just without any way to make money.

JohnTHaller 9y ago
Except that tapjets seems to work like Uber and Airbnb now, so they don't fly anything.
- olympus 9y ago
  Sure, that's basically what they laid out in their response. It's up to the owner/operators of each individual jet to make sure that they are flying legally. TapJets can continue to match up passengers with jets. On a separate issue, but one I hope TapJets has considered, is helping jet owners maintain rules compliance. TapJets is going to start catching heat if they match up flights with private jets that don't meet part 135 charter requirements. The number of charter flights that TapJets matches is small enough that if the FAA wants to, they can send a representative to every single flight and ramp check the pilots and planes for compliance. If they start doing that the supply of flights on TapJets will go down because jet owners don't want to be grounded.
- sidlls 9y ago
  This seems like the kind of defense a guy caught at a massage parlor would use. "That tip is for the massage, not the sex."
  - acct1771 9y ago
    Or "this is the fee to join our pot club, the weed comes free"? (If I'm not mistaken, this is how many of the first jurisdictions handled it). If the law is broken, fix it? The whole "spirit of the law" thing is what leads us to political attacks being made with laws. Either it's illegal, or it's not, and if we as a society should decide we want it to be, then it will be.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      > If the law is broken, fix it? The whole "spirit of the law" thing is what leads us to political attacks being made with laws. Reality doesn't work that way. In fact, the whole reason for the ballooning of regulations everywhere is an attempt to make things more about "the letter" than "the spirit". Reality is fucking complicated, as every programmer who ever tried to model or simulate anything from real life should know (and if one didn't have that experience, I recommend reading [0], recently discussed on HN). "Letter of law" is like code - in attempt to capture all the relevant details, it gets fractal in handling corner cases to corner cases. But, the best thing about humans is that our intelligence allows us to comprehend the intent behind something even without understanding all the relevant details and corner cases. This is what "spirit of law" exploits, and why it's a great tool at reducing complexity. Having everything run on "letter of law" is practically impossible today, and would definitely not be practically usable with laws in textual form. (This is, incidentally, why "smart contracts as laws" are stupid - computers can't understand intent, so you're enshrining some hard rules that will always be buggy and full of loopholes.) -- [0] - http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

JohnTHaller 9y ago

Except that tapjets seems to work like Uber and Airbnb now, so they don't fly anything.

olympus 9y ago
Sure, that's basically what they laid out in their response. It's up to the owner/operators of each individual jet to make sure that they are flying legally. TapJets can continue to match up passengers with jets. On a separate issue, but one I hope TapJets has considered, is helping jet owners maintain rules compliance. TapJets is going to start catching heat if they match up flights with private jets that don't meet part 135 charter requirements. The number of charter flights that TapJets matches is small enough that if the FAA wants to, they can send a representative to every single flight and ramp check the pilots and planes for compliance. If they start doing that the supply of flights on TapJets will go down because jet owners don't want to be grounded.
sidlls 9y ago
This seems like the kind of defense a guy caught at a massage parlor would use. "That tip is for the massage, not the sex."
- acct1771 9y ago
  Or "this is the fee to join our pot club, the weed comes free"? (If I'm not mistaken, this is how many of the first jurisdictions handled it). If the law is broken, fix it? The whole "spirit of the law" thing is what leads us to political attacks being made with laws. Either it's illegal, or it's not, and if we as a society should decide we want it to be, then it will be.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > If the law is broken, fix it? The whole "spirit of the law" thing is what leads us to political attacks being made with laws. Reality doesn't work that way. In fact, the whole reason for the ballooning of regulations everywhere is an attempt to make things more about "the letter" than "the spirit". Reality is fucking complicated, as every programmer who ever tried to model or simulate anything from real life should know (and if one didn't have that experience, I recommend reading [0], recently discussed on HN). "Letter of law" is like code - in attempt to capture all the relevant details, it gets fractal in handling corner cases to corner cases. But, the best thing about humans is that our intelligence allows us to comprehend the intent behind something even without understanding all the relevant details and corner cases. This is what "spirit of law" exploits, and why it's a great tool at reducing complexity. Having everything run on "letter of law" is practically impossible today, and would definitely not be practically usable with laws in textual form. (This is, incidentally, why "smart contracts as laws" are stupid - computers can't understand intent, so you're enshrining some hard rules that will always be buggy and full of loopholes.) -- [0] - http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...