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"...an ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against

• jcwayne 9y ago
  > Now use Occam's Razor. Somehow I doubt that will result in less disagreement.
• api 9y ago
  They're both likely true. Unions, conventional automobile companies, and the oil industry are all terrified of electric cars. EVs mean less jobs, less parts, longer renewal cycles, and of course removing inflexibility from oil demand. EVs threaten industries collectively totaling trillions of dollars and in some cases even double digit percentages of nations' GDPs. It's absurd and naive to think these industries would do nothing. ... but Tesla is a corporation, and corporations act in their self-interest. Corporations (and governments and other large entities too) routinely omit negative information, cook their numbers, ignore problems, over-reach, and generally push boundaries in their race for profit, power, and status. As good as Tesla's mission is, I don't necessarily expect it to behave better than a standard issue corporation. Conventional auto industries only implemented safety in vehicles and in factories after being repeatedly whacked upside the head. They still don't hesitate to ignore safety overseas when they can get away with it, nor do they hesitate to destroy the economic well being of entire regions of the country to save a bit on short term costs or flout environmental regulations. Tesla is new, so they'll probably need to get whacked around a bit too. But I still hope they are successful because their mission is good for humanity in the long term. Continued reliance on oil is an existential risk to the human race.
  • kitsunesoba 9y ago
    Yes, I’m seeing a lot of assumptions that unions are purely (or at least mostly) forces of good, but that’s not necessarily true. Auto workers’ unions in particular have a reputation of being bullies, extortionists, and sometimes obstructionists. Unionization of Tesla may improve conditions for the workers (though it’s worth noting that many auto union member companies still have serious unaddressed issues) but it’d also likely slow the company to a crawl and rob it of much of its agility. I think that Tesla’s worker treatment problems should absolutely be addressed but I wouldn’t be so sure that unions are the answer.
    • lovich 9y ago
      The company could just improve the situation enough that the workers don't want to unionize. Losing your agility isn't a good enough argument to convince people to not negotiate a better situation for themselves when you are literally destroying their bodies. It's not even like they are acting the same as the rest of the industry. Directly in the article it says that they have much higher injury rates than the rest of the industry. Either make the environment safer or at least give the workers enough equity that they benefit from pushing the company through as well. It's pretty disenguous for a rich guy like Elon to say that this is losing money now, so everyone has to sacrifice, when he's going to reap the benefits of that sacrifice
      • briandear 9y ago
        They are saying Tesla isn’t reporting injuries and then they say Tesla has higher injuries? If they aren’t being reported, then what’s the source of that claim? Do we know for a fact that other companies aren’t also (allegedly) underreporting? Reporting about Ford or GM is far less sexy than Tesla, so there could be less incentive.
        • lovich 9y ago
          Both of those statements can be true. They can have a higher injury rate _and_ be misclassifying injuries to hide the fact that it's even higher than what is known. Regardless though, employees fight for unions in the US only when it's become really bad. There's such a baseline hatred of unions that you can't casually get one going here just by saying you might be able to get more money. Tesla might not have the capital to impeove things directly but they could at least hand out more equity to the employees so that their incentives aligned.
        • danso 9y ago
          Did you read the original investigation (the one referred to in the submitted article)? It says quite clearly that Reveal was given data from Tesla's internal tracking system. https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is-safer-but-it-left-injuries-off-the-books/ https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is... > Reveal compared records from Tesla’s internal tracking system, obtained from a source, with the official logs, which were requested by an employee and provided to Reveal.
• eganist 9y ago
  I'm actually willing to give Tesla credit here precisely for that reason -- not because unions are bad (many industries need it, auto included), but because UAW in my possibly-misinformed mind has been at least indirectly the cause of a decline in build quality in American cars.
  • hangonhn 9y ago
    Why do people think that? A lot of cars are poor quality by design and choice of material. I drive German cars and there are certain choices in design and material don't stand up to time. I understand why those choices were made (70% of luxury cars are leased and aren't expected to be owned past 5 years). From an engineering point of view, the cars were optimized for a certain "fitness function". I imagine American cars were designed to optimize for certain constraints too. I also know that a large number of Japanese brand cars are in fact built in the US by American auto workers. And their quality and reliability are as high as those built in Japan. The view you espoused is fairly common but I don't understand why UAW would lead to poor quality cars when cars are designed and built using standardized procedures with machines that perform the same each time (not a rhetorical question, I really don't understand where this view comes from)
  • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    The journalists refute what Tesla is saying in their ongoing AMA: Hi there, we did this reporting completely independently of the union. This is another instance of deceptive Tesla wording, when Tesla says: working directly with union supporters what they mean is that some of the workers Reveal interviewed were in the union. Of course some of the interviewees weren't tied to the union but those go unmentioned.
    • on_and_off 9y ago
      I have got to say, in the past year I have gotten from "oh I should get a Tesla some day if I need a car" to "nope, never buying anything from these guys". I appreciate what Tesla did to popularize electric cars, but everything else isn't that great.
• soheil 9y ago
  "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." vs. "There is God." Now use Occam's Razor?
  • jonny_eh 9y ago
    Are you trying to point out that Occam's Razor is flawed? Occam's Razor would tell you that evolution (which has over a century of evidence) is more likely than a designer god (which is lacking in evidence).
    • watwut 9y ago
      God is simpler then original theory of evolution which is simple the current evolutionary theory. Occam razor favors simplications over careful analysis.
      • notyourday 9y ago
        Actually it is reverse. Evolution is much simpler as a theory than an idea of God creating everything correctly
        • watwut 9y ago
          By correctly you mean "in present state"?
          • notyourday 9y ago
            Yes, as in the currently observable state because since there's no such thing as evolution, then from the beginning god would have had to create every single relationship that all living and non-living things had, have or will have.
• NickM 9y ago
  Occam's Razor doesn't say that the simplest explanation is automatically true; it just says that if we can't know for sure, and we have to choose between two equally valid hypotheses, then we might as well assume the simpler one. This being a real-world situation, it should be possible to figure out what's really going on, which is what California seems to be doing. No reason to make unwarranted assumptions either way in the mean time.
  • avs733 9y ago
    I would argue that the more tailored, narrow, and fact referenced one is simpler. The Tesla statement reads as far to hysterical to be taken as simple or serious. It is absolutist where the journalists are not.
• rdiddly 9y ago
  I love the bit about "working directly with union supporters" too. Am I supposed to recoil in horror upon reading that? "Oh no, not the dreaded union supporters!! And being worked with directly no less!" ...is what I would say if I were Montgomery Burns. Tesla's PR people must be thinking it's better to win over the tiny Burns demographic and not the millions of Homer Simpsons out there.
  • jpetso 9y ago
    To be fair, Tesla's target audience is wealthy people, many of which are entrepreneurs or high-level managers and may feel the same as Elon Musk, even if a majority of regular people would shake their head about such comments. If/when Tesla's market expands past the luxury segment, I presume that their communications will also change tone by a bit.
• lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  "A set of universal rules by which the moon exerts a force called "gravity" and that pulls at the ocean over the whole planet, which is spherical by the way, so we get a bulge on both sides because on the near side it makes the water go towards the moon because gravity attracts things, but on the other side it makes the water go away from the moon or at least it looks like that, but really it's still gravity causing it, and that is why we get tides twice a day" vs "Neptune is breathing, and so the ocean goes up and down, just like when you are in the tub and take a deep breath" Now use Occam's Razor. If you were unaware of the persistent activities of various organizations then you might think that unions creating false information is an absurd idea, just as you might feel about the tides if you were a simple peasant, ignorant of the work of physicists.