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Elon plays fast and loose with his opinions in public discourse, but generally when Tesla makes an official move like this it seems to be more thoroughly consid

Elon plays fast and loose with his opinions in public discourse, but generally when Tesla makes an official move like this it seems to be more thoroughly considered by a larger group of people than just Elon. I have the same gut feeling that you seem to have when I first hear these stories, but the associated press releases seem to consistently have concrete foundations that I don't initially expect. In this case, they point to their experience dealing with exactly this process in Shanghai, and running the Gigafactory over there for 3 months successfully since reboot. That gave me pause - they've seen this and dealt with it firsthand already, which isn't something nearly anyone commenting on this can say. Maybe they're lying, but that feels like a pretty serious unearned accusation. I think everyone agrees that we should restart businesses if it's reasonable to, but it doesn't seem like anyone is evaluating what "reasonable" means outside of "what the local government is saying". And then you have to wonder why we're suddenly assuming the state/city government is competent in this case. I don't know where I stand, but I know that I'm not assuming Tesla is in the wrong here. I know far less than they do and it would take a miracle to convince me that the local government is properly thoroughly evaluating the situation and making nuanced, reasonable decisions (as opposed to simply reacting to the political environment). It's increasingly difficult to figure out how to proceed, but at some point we have to decide that we're able to open businesses back up (with safety measures that we decide are adequate). It's scary, but we can't just wait around for a vaccine forever - it could be years out. It's just a fundamentally hard problem.

bboygravity 6y ago
This really is the best comment I read on here. I'd like to add that in the Joe Rogan interview, Elon's main point is not "let's open Tesla factories, I don't care that many people will die" like some seem to imply here on Hacker News. His main point was that the data is we have on covid epidemiology doesn't say much and we "need to cleanup the data", which seams totally reasonable to me. Decisions are being taken by government (through epidemiologists) with extremely poor data. The data simply does not hold the information needed to take a proper decisions about the lock down. And when it comes to pandemics & politics this lack of information means that the only option available is to go for overly cautious. Decisions about the economy that can (prematurely) make or break the economy permanently. As in: the end of the US/Western empire forever. It's very easy for the media and people to jump onto the "omg, you only care about money" bandwagon whenever someone argues that maybe we should think this lockdown thru. It's also unoriginal, unsubstantiated and unproductive.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  The data is getting getting buried in communal graves in some parts of the world, like Italy. It's not like there is an option to quietly gather more data until we take a decision, decisions must be made today.
- cmendel 6y ago
  As of this writing, 281,057 people have died from COVID 19. 2 months ago that number was < 8,000. Forgive me if I don't advocate for massively increasing the transmission rate during an active, uncontained, global pandemic.
  - throwbigdata 6y ago
    Please consider more critical thinking. What we know is that certain outlets report that 281,147 deaths in the world were attributed in part due to symptoms potentially related to Covid19. This is a sad terrible time, but the likelihood that those numbers mean what you think or say they mean is low in my opinion.

bboygravity 6y ago

This really is the best comment I read on here. I'd like to add that in the Joe Rogan interview, Elon's main point is not "let's open Tesla factories, I don't care that many people will die" like some seem to imply here on Hacker News. His main point was that the data is we have on covid epidemiology doesn't say much and we "need to cleanup the data", which seams totally reasonable to me. Decisions are being taken by government (through epidemiologists) with extremely poor data. The data simply does not hold the information needed to take a proper decisions about the lock down. And when it comes to pandemics & politics this lack of information means that the only option available is to go for overly cautious. Decisions about the economy that can (prematurely) make or break the economy permanently. As in: the end of the US/Western empire forever. It's very easy for the media and people to jump onto the "omg, you only care about money" bandwagon whenever someone argues that maybe we should think this lockdown thru. It's also unoriginal, unsubstantiated and unproductive.

tsimionescu 6y ago
The data is getting getting buried in communal graves in some parts of the world, like Italy. It's not like there is an option to quietly gather more data until we take a decision, decisions must be made today.
cmendel 6y ago
As of this writing, 281,057 people have died from COVID 19. 2 months ago that number was < 8,000. Forgive me if I don't advocate for massively increasing the transmission rate during an active, uncontained, global pandemic.
- throwbigdata 6y ago
  Please consider more critical thinking. What we know is that certain outlets report that 281,147 deaths in the world were attributed in part due to symptoms potentially related to Covid19. This is a sad terrible time, but the likelihood that those numbers mean what you think or say they mean is low in my opinion.