4 ms·

> Another employee broke into a dosing oven with red-hot aluminum with his foot. Now we need a workplace safety video about not dancing on ovens.

diogenes4 3y ago
Yes of course it must be the worker's fault, how convenient for tesla
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  A human foot has no place walking above melted aluminum. Since I don't think that anyone was reckless enough to design such a route, let alone this design pass multiple sign offs, chances that someone found and used some shortcut are not small.
  - sixothree 3y ago
    You're making a lot of assumptions there.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Hm what sorts of incentives and constraints could lead to a worker taking dangerous shortcuts. I wonder if this has ever been an issue before I wonder if anyone has looked into how these things happen.
    - ReptileMan 3y ago
      People are good with chances up until let's say 1/100, anything lower is filed into - it will never happen in their minds. this is usually called normalization of deviance. To make things even worse - if you see someone doing something dangerous and that person knows what he is doing - you may decide to imitate without having the experience or knowledge to see the hidden safety measures that are being taken or the force majeure circumstances that made him do it. Now let's assume that you have to walk a lot into the gigafactories - not at all a small buildings. You are not employee trained or authorized to be near the hot metal, but taking some obscure path saves you 300 meters. You take it, nothing bad happens. It becomes part of your routine - until one day you slip. Not saying that this happened - just an example how people could easily put themselves into danger without realizing the magnitude of it. And throw in the mix that Tesla themselves are not paragons of do things safe, but do it fast as a corporate culture - and it trickles down to the employees.
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    > I don't think that anyone was reckless enough to design such a route Why on earth would you assume that? Regardless, any safety protocol that relies solely on people not doing dumb shit is a failed safety protocol.
badtension 3y ago
We are easily manipulated into thinking how stupid people must be but in reality it is often a bad process, tiredness, mismanagement or cost cutting that are responsible for it. I encourage you to read about the "Hot McDonald's coffee" case which has unfortunately been a meme for a long time: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...
- sixothree 3y ago
  If you weren't around at the time, it's hard to describe just how absolutely pervasive the ridicule of this woman was. It was a daily thing for quite a long time. Looking back at it makes me sick.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    The funny thing is she was just asking for McD's to pay her medical bills and they refused. I believe most of the ridicule was funded by them too. Enjoy your fries.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Bad article. From your link " And McDonald’s began changing how it heats up its coffee." This is contradicted by wikipedia, which says McDonalds continues to heat their coffee that hot, and that Starbucks and other coffee shops do as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants#Coffee_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... > Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[40] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[40][41] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[41] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).[citation needed] This case seems to have myths inside myths. The first order myth is that the lawsuit was bogus. But there's a second order myth, that the temperature of the coffee was unusually hot and they've since changed this. What is true is that the coffee was hot enough to cause severe third degree burns, requiring skin grafts, and that McDonald's coffee cups at that time were prone to spontaneous collapse. But the coffee was not unusually hot; coffee hot enough to cause those kind of burns is the norm. In fact even coffee substantially cooler than that can cause third degree burns, particularly with children and the elderly. Look up scald charts, 140 F / 60 C can cause third degree burns with only 5 seconds of exposure.
krisoft 3y ago
> Now we need a workplace safety video about not dancing on ovens. Hard to judge this without knowing the circumstances. Were they fooling around, or did they had to walk on or around the oven? What is even a "dosing oven"?
- denimnerd42 3y ago
  it's for diecasting. just gooogle dosing furnace diecasting "Dosing furnaces are closed holding furnaces with a spout for direct metal delivery. They are used to dispense an accurate amount of molten metal into the die casting machine. The advantage of dosing furnaces is that because it is closed, it minimizes heat loss and protects the molten metal from excessive oxidation."
- d1sxeyes 3y ago
  Good question. A dosing oven is normally an oven which doses out a particular amount of product to be baked (such as for example bread etc). It could be something automotive (paint/plastic curing, etc.) or it’s not completely beyond the realms of possibility that this is a conventional bread dough dosing oven (see VW part 199 398 500 A), but seems unlikely.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  You wouldn't walk on a dosing oven in the usual course of events. However, it is totally possible that someone was up there doing maintenance or debugging (let me drop a temperature probe in there to test if the ovens built in temperature measurement is accurate!)
ReptileMan 3y ago
>Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning I think that we live in some strange situation where we have some glaring safety issues exist just because people are taught that safety is someone else's job that they care for seriously. Usually that is not the case. So you have accumulation of willful stupidity and normalization on deviance on the floor that eventually hurts someone.
- crdrost 3y ago
  That's not an inevitable property of the universe, that's a culture. I did tech at a mechanical/electrical/plumbing contractor called US Engineering in KC. The union (unions?) and Corporate worked pretty well together, because they had to. Aggressive subcontractor bidding means you only get a few percentage points of profit on each job, the unions fight to get their fair share knowing that if they fight too hard they make the company brittle and they don't want the company to fold, indeed it was kind of shocking to hear people taking some pride (even in jest) at making the CEO and his family some cash. But the biggest thing was, Believe In Zero. Huge push, lots of concerns that all of the new hires in new regions working on data centers did not understand this long-held cultural expectation. It's to believe in zero “unsafe behaviors,” things like turning with one foot when you get off a ladder (instead of planting both feet on the ground and then turning). Even if “Believe In Zero” was the corporate side, the unions were committed to “yeah that's what we do” and typical welders would remind me that they are working with thousand pound plumbing assemblies, cutters that need to slice these massive pipes open, and of course day-in-day-out they are going to be staring at the plasma of a welding torch melting this stuff back together—“all any of us want to do is to have some pride in our work, get a fair paycheck, and get home safe and healthy,” they'd say. Why would Corporate care, why would the unions push so hard for how you step off of a ladder? Because if you roll your ankle or yank the ladder towards you, could create an injury, that requires paperwork for OSHA, then the insurance company will look at that paperwork to try and argue that they should get more money because you are not a five star super-safe workplace, even if they are not paying that much for the actual incidents. And when your margin is only a couple of percentage points, you can't be spending half of it on insurance. So they did. Heck even I got into it. One thing I did to “Believe In Zero” was to cover up all of the exposed nails or splintery plywood in the corner where we stored soda. Sure “no reasonable person is going to run their hand across these surfaces”, but hey, you never know, maybe someone spills a coffee and someone else slips on it, if it's just 10 minutes for me to fix it now, and I can be thinking about how I want to structure a module while I am doing it, why leave it?
londons_explore 3y ago
Many ovens are made of a special high temperature ceramic fire-brick. It's great at resisting heat, and is a decent insulator, but isn't very strong. If you build an oven roof out of it, I could completely imagining some uninformed employee standing on the roof and having a foot fall through. The fix is to redesign the oven to have a stronger roof, or to paint "NO STEP, NO STEP" all over the roof of the oven.

diogenes4 3y ago

Yes of course it must be the worker's fault, how convenient for tesla

ReptileMan 3y ago
A human foot has no place walking above melted aluminum. Since I don't think that anyone was reckless enough to design such a route, let alone this design pass multiple sign offs, chances that someone found and used some shortcut are not small.
- sixothree 3y ago
  You're making a lot of assumptions there.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Hm what sorts of incentives and constraints could lead to a worker taking dangerous shortcuts. I wonder if this has ever been an issue before I wonder if anyone has looked into how these things happen.
  - ReptileMan 3y ago
    People are good with chances up until let's say 1/100, anything lower is filed into - it will never happen in their minds. this is usually called normalization of deviance. To make things even worse - if you see someone doing something dangerous and that person knows what he is doing - you may decide to imitate without having the experience or knowledge to see the hidden safety measures that are being taken or the force majeure circumstances that made him do it. Now let's assume that you have to walk a lot into the gigafactories - not at all a small buildings. You are not employee trained or authorized to be near the hot metal, but taking some obscure path saves you 300 meters. You take it, nothing bad happens. It becomes part of your routine - until one day you slip. Not saying that this happened - just an example how people could easily put themselves into danger without realizing the magnitude of it. And throw in the mix that Tesla themselves are not paragons of do things safe, but do it fast as a corporate culture - and it trickles down to the employees.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  > I don't think that anyone was reckless enough to design such a route Why on earth would you assume that? Regardless, any safety protocol that relies solely on people not doing dumb shit is a failed safety protocol.

badtension 3y ago

We are easily manipulated into thinking how stupid people must be but in reality it is often a bad process, tiredness, mismanagement or cost cutting that are responsible for it. I encourage you to read about the "Hot McDonald's coffee" case which has unfortunately been a meme for a long time: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/mcdonalds-coffee-lawsuit-stella-liebeck https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...

sixothree 3y ago
If you weren't around at the time, it's hard to describe just how absolutely pervasive the ridicule of this woman was. It was a daily thing for quite a long time. Looking back at it makes me sick.
- Clubber 3y ago
  The funny thing is she was just asking for McD's to pay her medical bills and they refused. I believe most of the ridicule was funded by them too. Enjoy your fries.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Bad article. From your link " And McDonald’s began changing how it heats up its coffee." This is contradicted by wikipedia, which says McDonalds continues to heat their coffee that hot, and that Starbucks and other coffee shops do as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants#Coffee_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... > Since Liebeck, McDonald's has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee. McDonald's current policy is to serve coffee at 176–194 °F (80–90 °C),[40] relying on more sternly worded warnings on cups made of rigid foam to avoid future liability, though it continues to face lawsuits over hot coffee.[40][41] The Specialty Coffee Association of America supports improved packaging methods rather than lowering the temperature at which coffee is served. The association has successfully aided the defense of subsequent coffee burn cases.[41] Similarly, as of 2004, Starbucks sells coffee at 175–185 °F (79–85 °C), and the executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America reported that the standard serving temperature is 160–185 °F (71–85 °C).[citation needed] This case seems to have myths inside myths. The first order myth is that the lawsuit was bogus. But there's a second order myth, that the temperature of the coffee was unusually hot and they've since changed this. What is true is that the coffee was hot enough to cause severe third degree burns, requiring skin grafts, and that McDonald's coffee cups at that time were prone to spontaneous collapse. But the coffee was not unusually hot; coffee hot enough to cause those kind of burns is the norm. In fact even coffee substantially cooler than that can cause third degree burns, particularly with children and the elderly. Look up scald charts, 140 F / 60 C can cause third degree burns with only 5 seconds of exposure.

krisoft 3y ago

> Now we need a workplace safety video about not dancing on ovens. Hard to judge this without knowing the circumstances. Were they fooling around, or did they had to walk on or around the oven? What is even a "dosing oven"?

denimnerd42 3y ago
it's for diecasting. just gooogle dosing furnace diecasting "Dosing furnaces are closed holding furnaces with a spout for direct metal delivery. They are used to dispense an accurate amount of molten metal into the die casting machine. The advantage of dosing furnaces is that because it is closed, it minimizes heat loss and protects the molten metal from excessive oxidation."
d1sxeyes 3y ago
Good question. A dosing oven is normally an oven which doses out a particular amount of product to be baked (such as for example bread etc). It could be something automotive (paint/plastic curing, etc.) or it’s not completely beyond the realms of possibility that this is a conventional bread dough dosing oven (see VW part 199 398 500 A), but seems unlikely.
londons_explore 3y ago
You wouldn't walk on a dosing oven in the usual course of events. However, it is totally possible that someone was up there doing maintenance or debugging (let me drop a temperature probe in there to test if the ovens built in temperature measurement is accurate!)

ReptileMan 3y ago

>Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning I think that we live in some strange situation where we have some glaring safety issues exist just because people are taught that safety is someone else's job that they care for seriously. Usually that is not the case. So you have accumulation of willful stupidity and normalization on deviance on the floor that eventually hurts someone.

crdrost 3y ago
That's not an inevitable property of the universe, that's a culture. I did tech at a mechanical/electrical/plumbing contractor called US Engineering in KC. The union (unions?) and Corporate worked pretty well together, because they had to. Aggressive subcontractor bidding means you only get a few percentage points of profit on each job, the unions fight to get their fair share knowing that if they fight too hard they make the company brittle and they don't want the company to fold, indeed it was kind of shocking to hear people taking some pride (even in jest) at making the CEO and his family some cash. But the biggest thing was, Believe In Zero. Huge push, lots of concerns that all of the new hires in new regions working on data centers did not understand this long-held cultural expectation. It's to believe in zero “unsafe behaviors,” things like turning with one foot when you get off a ladder (instead of planting both feet on the ground and then turning). Even if “Believe In Zero” was the corporate side, the unions were committed to “yeah that's what we do” and typical welders would remind me that they are working with thousand pound plumbing assemblies, cutters that need to slice these massive pipes open, and of course day-in-day-out they are going to be staring at the plasma of a welding torch melting this stuff back together—“all any of us want to do is to have some pride in our work, get a fair paycheck, and get home safe and healthy,” they'd say. Why would Corporate care, why would the unions push so hard for how you step off of a ladder? Because if you roll your ankle or yank the ladder towards you, could create an injury, that requires paperwork for OSHA, then the insurance company will look at that paperwork to try and argue that they should get more money because you are not a five star super-safe workplace, even if they are not paying that much for the actual incidents. And when your margin is only a couple of percentage points, you can't be spending half of it on insurance. So they did. Heck even I got into it. One thing I did to “Believe In Zero” was to cover up all of the exposed nails or splintery plywood in the corner where we stored soda. Sure “no reasonable person is going to run their hand across these surfaces”, but hey, you never know, maybe someone spills a coffee and someone else slips on it, if it's just 10 minutes for me to fix it now, and I can be thinking about how I want to structure a module while I am doing it, why leave it?

londons_explore 3y ago

Many ovens are made of a special high temperature ceramic fire-brick. It's great at resisting heat, and is a decent insulator, but isn't very strong. If you build an oven roof out of it, I could completely imagining some uninformed employee standing on the roof and having a foot fall through. The fix is to redesign the oven to have a stronger roof, or to paint "NO STEP, NO STEP" all over the roof of the oven.