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Fremont Tesla workers tested positive for coronavirus days after plant reopened
- trhway 6y agosomething wrong with our civilization when some people have to go in for the increased risk to their health for $15+ (and i guess it is even less than that outside of CA) just to feed their families while we comfortably and safely sit at home getting paid multiples of that and ride that great stock market. Anyway, you should have seen packed restaurants' sidewalks this weekend. The life is ready to come roaring back. It is pretty clear by now that nor the inept governments, nor aliens are going to stop the virus. Statistically the 2 cases at Tesla is an order of magnitude less than what you'd expect giving the factory size (10000) and the population size of the Alameda county (1.6M) and the infection rate there (4000).
- gameswithgo 6y agoperhaps you can invent a society where the work needed to live can get done without any humans doing work.
- arcticbull 6y agoWe're quickly approaching that. A few generations from now it'll just be the robots - and us watching.
- heavyset_go 6y agoUnless our descendants own those robots or there is a massive shift in who controls productive property, our lineages will die off once they're made permanently redundant and shut out from what those machines produce.
- arcticbull 6y agoAlmost certainly. Thing is, as countries develop, the birth rate drops off a cliff. Canada's already at 1.5 births per woman. The US is only slightly higher. As we make more robots, we'll make less humans. Society will be forced to become dramatically different.
- heavyset_go 6y agoWe already have an abundance of resources, like food and land, yet we don't efficiently allocate them such that they don't go to waste, leave people hungry or leave people homeless. The only reason people without significant assets can access food or land is because they're able to trade their time for money. People who can't trade their time for money currently go hungry and become homeless. This is why I say that unless there is a significant change in control of productive property, when that productive property deprecates human labor, those who rely on trading their time for money will be in dire situations.
- trhway 6y agoi don't want to scare you man yet you've just basically invented the Das Kapital :)
- catalogia 6y ago> ancestors (Descendants; ancestors are those in the past.)
- heavyset_go 6y agoGood catch, fixed.
- luckylion 6y agoMaybe. A lot can happen in 100 years. Don't hold your breath.
- Guest42 6y agoMany problems have numerous solutions.
- trhway 6y ago>a society where the work needed to live a good start would be to pay well for that work.
- RandomGuyDTB 6y agoExactly. > There's something wrong with our civilization when some people have to go in for the increased risk to their health for $15+ just to feed their families while we comfortably and safely sit at home getting paid multiples of that and ride that great stock market. This isn't a jab at workers needing to go back to work, this is a jab at the fact that we treat retail workers like garbage when in reality our society would crumble without them. The whole "just get a better job if you want to be paid more" argument levied at those who push for a higher minimum wage not only ignores the fact that, when in poverty, it's very hard to get a "better job", but also ignores the fact that these jobs are necessary. Somebody has to do them. Why are sanitation workers getting paid less than stock brokers when sanitation workers are doing objectively harder work and are at far more risk (especially now)? > perhaps you can invent a society where the work needed to live can get done without any humans doing work. No, I'll invent a society where people whose job it is to move money around are paid substantially less than retail workers or janitors, and where those that do labor like this are respected more highly than someone like Warren Buffet or Crissy Teigen.
- sigstoat 6y ago> Somebody has to do them. Why are sanitation workers getting paid less than stock brokers when sanitation workers are doing objectively harder work and are at far more risk (especially now)? do you propose to pay sanitation workers hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece, in which case i can't imagine how city budgets will survive, or forcibly lower the salaries of financial workers to below that of the sanitation workers? in which case we'll have little to no financial services anymore.
- xkjkls 6y agoNo, just one where there isn't a permanent underclass that is exploited.
- xkjkls 6y agoThe 2 cases is only in the days after the factory re-opened. You're comparing apples and oranges here.
- nostromo 6y ago“If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.” This is literally a local TV evening news story.
- danso 6y agoThe top story a few days ago – the humming Golden Gate Bridge (by a margin of 500 upvotes) – was heavily covered in the TV news: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-06-06 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-06-06 https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/06/wind-baffles-on-golden-gate-bridge-creates-loud-humming-music-sound-heard-for-miles/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/06/wind-baffles-on... I remember the local Bay Area station having the best coverage of the Mountain View fatal autopilot crash, e.g. they talked to the family and found the victim had reported several problems in the area before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16719736
- luckylion 6y agoProbably. It's probably off-topic. Submitting whatever the evening news releases is usually off-topic. There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes the news does accidentally cover things that are interesting.
- aaron695 6y agoWe complain about the media then upvote this junk. Maybe we are the problem.
- thephyber 6y agoWas there ever a time where you doubted that the demand for junk news was the problem? I don't complain about "the media" because they are just following the incentives their viewers leave for them. "The media" was never exclusive to high brow, balanced journalism. It has always included the tabloid rags, celebrity gossip, useless trivia about sports, outrage inducing politics, etc. Fact: National Enquirer has been A/B testing since the grandparents of the founders of Facebook were in diapers.
- andys627 6y ago> Musk went as far as to dare authorities to arrest him. Is this referring to this tweet (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259945593805221891 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259945593805221891) that said "Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me." ?
- t-writescode 6y agoYou mean where Musk is basically saying “please don’t hold my demands of my workers against them. Punish me instead, please?”
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- admax88q 6y agoAh yes, there's the standard HN mental gymnastics to defend Musk.
- ricardobeat 6y ago> there's the standard HN mental gymnastics to defend Musk. I'm pretty sure that was dry sarcasm, and your comment is the one doing mental gymnastics...
- admax88q 6y agoMaybe, doesn't read like dry sarcasm to me. EDIT: It reads like defense of Musk. Like "he's not so bad, he asked to be the one held accountable" I hope none of his employees or their relations die from Covid, no amount of holding Musk "accountable" can reverse that.
- ricardobeat 6y agoRead it like this: the workers could not be held accountable anyway since re-opening was his own demand as the business owner. He is already responsible, not the workers, so that 'sacrifice' is void of meaning. I don't see any way that can be read as a defense of Musk. But mostly I wanted to point out that your comment is in bad taste, and against HN guidelines. That kind of generalization never lands well.
- heavyset_go 6y agoSomewhere in Musk's calculus, he must have determined just how many people can get sick and die without it being too much of a PR problem.
- xkjkls 6y agoI really don't think he did any more math than "I want this factory open"
- heavyset_go 6y agoMusk is a smart man, are you suggesting that he doesn't think about the obvious consequences of his actions?
- AlexandrB 6y agoYes. Obviously! Why else would he give his child an unpronounceable name or publically call a perfect stranger a pedophile?
- heavyset_go 6y ago> call a perfect stranger a pedophile? Smart people can be assholes, too.
- admax88q 6y agoSmart people can also make stupid decisions. Just because someone is "smart" doesn't mean they are always "thinking"
- AlexandrB 6y agoSmart people don't waste resources defending themselves from libel suits because they couldn't stay off twitter. If he called him a pedophile privately, that's being an asshole. Inviting legal action through public statements is a waste of everyone's time and money. See also the "going private @$420" tweet.
- twblalock 6y agoYou could pick any large company that reopened and find instances of employees who have the virus. Singling out Tesla is good for clickbait, but why should the Tesla factory stay closed when bars and restaurants in California are allowed to open? This is the new normal. We can't stay in lockdown forever. Jobs deemed "non-essential" by white collar professionals comfortably working from home are pretty essential to the workers who have been stuck at home without an income. Until a vaccine is developed, people will get sick even if they are social distancing and wearing masks and their workplaces are doing the right things. We shouldn't be shocked or outraged or self-righteous when that happens. Society needs to accept that or we will never recover from the lockdowns.
- xkjkls 6y agoRestaurants and bars in specific areas with specific precautions are allowed to re-open. Musk re-opened his factory against the advice of local officials.
- twblalock 6y agoAnd yet the local officials decided not to forcibly close the factory. They could have looked good on TV taking Musk away in handcuffs, and it certainly would have made a lot of people happy, but they didn't. There is a reason for that. Ultimately, local authorities couldn't make a compelling case that opening the Tesla factory was risky enough to justify intervening. They had already allowed a number of other businesses to open that were more dangerous in terms of covid transmission than the Tesla factory and could also be called "non-essential". Tesla was taking the same precautions that local authorities recommended for other businesses they allowed to open.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- axxxxxe0909 6y agoI could not agree more. I do not understand why this is not more widely understood.
- stellar678 6y agoIt would be great if people writing articles like this (I hesitate to call them journalists these days) could take the time to provide more context. According to the county dashboard, Alameda County had 2,564 cases on May 20, 2 days after Tesla reopened: https://ac-hcsa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/1e0ac4385cbe4cc1bffe2cf7f8e7f0d9 https://ac-hcsa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html... With a population of 1,671,000, that means about 0.15% of Alameda County residents had been diagnosed with covid-19 at that point. So we could reasonably expect 15 cases out of the 10,000 employees at Tesla's factory. Why the breathless article about 2 cases?
- pathseeker 6y ago>Why the breathless article about 2 cases? Because articles are now written to confirm people's preconceived notions. Articles that confirm your biases are more likely to be shared than articles which don't.
- mistermann 6y agoI honestly wonder if this writing style is conscious and intentional though, or rather un(sub)conscious and accidental. Look at comments in forums...in that case, people have no profit motive, although they do have a "get upvotes" motive (so, virtue signalling is a legit motive, to some degree, but one notion to consider is that people very often no longer discriminate between that which is concrete factual and that which is inferred (imagined) "factual". If you look for it, you'll see that this behaviour is everywhere.
- pathseeker 6y agoOh, it's likely not conscious by the author. The most convincing of these one-sided views are the ones written by people who are "true believers" in their agendas. Don't tell authors to take extreme stances, just ensure that stories get assigned to the ones that have strong views about the topic. Even better, let the authors themselves decide what to cover. They will pretty quickly focus on their pet political propaganda and produce the click bait needed to drive eyes.
- KKKKkkkk1 6y agoHere's an example of how workers were pressured to come into work: The state approved Tesla to work. It's the county that is concerned. But if you decline to come to work, just know you will not receive benefits and you will be unable to apply for unemployment since we have work available. We can't force you to come in if you don't feel comfortable. https://twitter.com/PlainSite/status/1270110558071566337 https://twitter.com/PlainSite/status/1270110558071566337
- WetBurd 6y agoIt should probably be pointed out that the original article came from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/09/tesla-factory-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/09/tesla-f... Furthermore it is a extremely strong coincidence that this article comes out five days after Musk seemingly randomly attacks Amazon: https://nationalpost.com/technology/elon-musk-amazon-feud-jeff-bezos/wcm/18d36783-0b9d-485a-b077-f02450e9b269 https://nationalpost.com/technology/elon-musk-amazon-feud-je... It certainly matches Musk's regular habit of lashing out at his critiques...
- camjohnson26 6y agoIt was completely predictable, one of the biggest TSLAQ voices on twitter called this a few days ago in a high profile way. Whenever a news outlet reaches out to Musk for comment on a negative story he goes on the attack.
- yegle 6y agoWashington Post actually have more details as to where this seat assembly facility is: The Washington Post: Tesla defied county orders so it could restart production. Days later, workers tested positive for the coronavirus.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/09/tesla-factory-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/09/tesla-f...
- dang 6y agoWe've changed the URL from https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/fremont-tesla-workers-tested-positive-for-coronavirus-days-after-plant-reopened-report/ https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/fremont-tesla-workers-te..., which points to this. Thanks!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]