Not far enough in my book. In addition to the fines, he should get a couple hundred hours of community service building trails or repairing riparian zones…and maybe a course on ecosystem management with a minimum required passing score. For a self-described “outdoorsy guy” he seems woefully ignorant.
Edit: tyop
In my experience, these folks are usually the worst when it comes to actually respecting the outdoors. Heck, most of them have no idea what the rules or regulations might be in an areas they’ve lived in their entire lives.
You can see it in action if you post a picture of a fish in a fishing Facebook group. A significant number of people will be flat out wrong and will argue with the ones who are right all day if they have to. I don’t recommend actually doing that, mind you. It gets ugly and racist pretty fast (at least around here).
I hear some people and don’t wonder at all.
No worries there! You had me at “Facebook,” lol.
But I know what you mean. I’m really into wildflowers/weeds/foraging and sometimes people in sessions or forums will be SO confident in their totally incorrect identifications…
No racism, though, so far.
18 counts, eh? Sounds pretty serious…
So, basically a year probation. For 18 criminal counts. Gotcha.
So, after trashing a $90k+ truck, he also has no problem paying a $53k fine.
Somehow, I don’t think that fine is much of a deterrent.
_
From the linked article:
…Hyssong is friends with the owner of the farm, and for the past few years, he said, the property owner has invited him and others to the farm to tear it up with their pickup trucks…
Shouldn’t the property owner share some culpability in this?
Let’s hope so.
I don’t get it. How does this punk afford all these toys? Is YouTube that lucrative or is he selling drugs or something? I make $80k a year and currently in $270k debt (house and a used car) and I’m tight with my spending.
Sigh… being financially prudent is boring though.
Around here any young contractor with a lifted pickup has baby seats and thinks their backs/knees will last forever so why save for a pension when you can buy meth.
There’s one species of fish out here that used to have a slur in the name. It’s been changed, but people don’t respect the change because it’s politically correct and none of the native people they know have a problem with it, so it’s fine if they say. It happens Every. Single. Time. One group eventually put up a blanket policy where if you use the racist name, you’re gone.
But as to the arguing, I’ve seen people fight with biologists who spent their entire careers working in the area.
Fines and restitution are legally distinct.
Fines are constrained by the Excessive fines clause, while restitution is open ended, provided that actual damages can be calculated.
Theoretically, if the youtuber had set a wildfire, the restitution could have been tens of millions of dollars, a crippling fate for all but a handful of people.
I missed the action. Must have been good.
I was just looking over his youtube channel (being careful not to give him any actual views), and it’s all about giant trucks and gas-guzzling luxury sports cars and driving them real fast/dangerously. His channel is peppered with videos along the lines of, “this ‘Karen’ called the cops on me [because I was being an asshole doing burn-outs in her neighborhood],” “this guy in a prius called the cops on me [because I was being an asshole doing some other illegal shit],” “I got kicked off the racetrack [for being an asshole],” “the cops pulled me over again [because I illegally modified my giant, gas-guzzling truck],” and “ha ha, I trashed another super-expensive vehicle for funsies.”
Yeah, he’s real concerned about natural resources.
You are a brave person to do that - but you might need to take a shower after being in close proximity to so much shit.
…or a very long soak in an epsom salts-y bath, followed by a jolly good scrubbing with a sisal scrubby thing.
He’s an outdoors guy in the same why that Charles Manson was a family man.
Reporting him for “harmful or dangerous acts” makes sense as well.
YouTube ad rates were average $3-4/1000 views last I checked. But that can vary a lot by content type and a car channel probably commands well above average. A good channel gets a few million views per video and 1-2 videos per week. That ranges from good money to a shitload of money although that is before expenses and it’s hard to produce 1 high quality video a week without hiring staff let alone two. In any case it isn’t really “destroy a $90000 truck for the lulz” money. Its also hard to keep content fresh. Maybe one year you make $300k, but if you think you “have a winning formula” and keep doing the same thing chances are you won’t keep it up for long. The flip side is that if you build up a catalog of popular videos they will continue to get views and provide income on an ongoing basis.
Like sports, the real money is in paid promotion, either in cash or in-kind payments such as cars. You can get paid to read a 30 second ad copy for nordvpn or meal kit service, or a lot more of the topic of your video is the sponsors product. Obviously this can come up with things like cars a lot.
Edit: you can get an idea of any YouTubers direct income via social blade although the bands are huge because ad rates are variable. https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UCa9MHqAoA-8KeNm8pgShRaw
The Courts have already decided. Youtube should remove the video. Its a shame the judge didn’t instruct the idiot to remove his video. Also he posted videos where he attacks the EPA and jokes about his criminal charges when going out again to tear up the countryside and sneers at the destruction of habitats but there is no reference to this.
This Michael Hyssong / Street Speed 717… what does he do? Guy has 6-car garages full of high performance vehicles and trucks, his youtube is just him driving those vehicles. Where is the money coming from?
I’m a professional YouTuber and most of what you said is correct. I’ll only add that, while the business model you describe is correct for douchebros and “influencers”, it’s only one of several models. In the niche I am in (which I will decline to comment further on in the interest of my anonymity), revenue sources are much more varied than ad revenue and sponsors. I make a good living, have no sponsors, and my ad revenue is only about 10% of my business. A healthy YouTube business is a lot more complex than most people realize.
For that and other reasons, you have to take sites like SocialBlade with a grain of salt. It may be sorta vaguely correct for some channels, but can’t know anything about what’s going on with a business outside YouTube. A healthy business uses YouTube only as “marketing” effectively. It’s the freemium business model. You give away tastes of content but the revenue comes from several other places.
