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:
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.
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.
> 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.
Your definition of "bad article" is a single word difference: "And McDonald’s began changing how it [serves] up its coffee."
It's not false that McDonald's was negligent, and it's not false that the lawsuit forced a change. As far as I can tell nothing else is false. You can correct a statement in one bullet point of an article without calling it a "bad article."
It's false that McDonald's coffee was unusually hot, and it's false that McDonald's has reduced the temperature they serve their coffee at since then. They haven't, and their coffee continues to burn people. They now win most of the lawsuits about this.
It's a bad article because the guy who wrote it didn't do any research. He just paraphrased a youtuber's video. Said youtuber also didn't do any research and just repeats stuff he's heard other people claim about the case, probably on reddit, perpetuating this easily debunked misinformation.
> 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"?
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."
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
Do you think that this workplace is the norm or the exception?
Being safe generally speaking requires being proactive - your place seems to be safe. Safetism is - if you follow the rules you can turn your brain off and all will be alright (TSA and the likes). In my experience - the safetism is the predominant attitude in the world.
Gonna go out on a limb here and posit that the same number of incidents are happening at all Tesla facilities, it's just that Germany is more safety conscious and aware to the numbers. The operating climate has gotta be way different in Texas and China.
If you think California has inordinately lower safety standards to Germany, I've got a bridge to sell you.
That being said; yes, this has been an operating modal for Tesla from the beginning. California had to sanction and fine the company multiple times before they started operating lawfully and reasonably.
No, but they will certainly sue Tesla for copious sums of money via civil suits and worker's comp; if the company is operating unlawfully and at cause for their injury.
The perpetual "at will is abusive by design" argument doesn't apply to a) Good Faith covenant states and b) places where the reward for abuse far outweighs a continued employment.
It's only counterintuitive if you assume that Germans are innately more safe than other people.
I've lived and worked in both places, I can assure you that the standards are pretty similar. The main difference being that issues in California are generally handled via civil suit, while Germany handles them through a government board.
And do you think this changes safety standards, which was this the original claim? It may change reporting standards, but whether one workplace is safer than the other probably depends on the perceived risk to the company in either place. Is it costlier to have American lawyers sniffing for blood in your factory, or the German bureaucracy processing reports for paper cuts and lost limbs alike? I’m not making a claim one way or another, just that more info is needed in this conversation.
In Germany many technical jobs entail personal liability, so the lever is against the individuals, not against the company. As such pressuring people into skipping safety standards is a no go. You risk prison time and painful fines the company cant officially help with.
Well, that has no effect on the standards themself, just the onus of execution. So it's a moot point. That being said the government will step in when things are obviously non-conforming, if you'd rather just report them. Which is the case for Tesla.
As to your latter point, labor suits are pretty heavily in favor of the worker and it's not hard to find a lawyer who will take a case on concession. Fees are also capped, delayed to completion and generally on the losing party to cover. So "the barrier" is as low as you want to consider the solidity of the case.
Considering worker's comp and civil suit structuring are the two pieces of legislation that are most heavily attacked by corporations in California, I wouldn't consider them ineffective; it's certainly a matter of perspective, however.
These people don’t know Germans drink beer by lunch time. My father worked at a lumber yard in Baden-Württemberg for a short time, and German coworkers pulled out cases of beer they brought for lunch. From what I can tell this remains a normal occurrence.
Pretty sure that is heavily outdated. My grandfather had such reports from building sites (Tiler / bricklayer pre 2000), those now have to wait till after work if i am not mistaken.
In case you are talking heavy machinery in the lumber yard, alcohol is a no go there now. School friend of mine lost his apprenticeship due to liver problems ~ 15 years ago. It was considered too dangerous to have him work with saws as it couldnt be ruled out that he could pass out and fall into one. Relative of mine also lost his job as a truck driver due to substance abuse despite it not reaching the threshold for loosing his driver license.
This is not to say there arent deadly accidents in Germany. Friend of mine builds electrical substations and the company has regular (deadly) high voltage accidents. Roughly one or two a year since he has been there (not on his site but across all projects of the company). Sadly often unskilled laborers that didnt understand the safety instructions due to language barriers. So falling through grids covering open high voltage or digging up a line.
Since it has been mentioned elsewhere that the threat of lawyers is higher in the US, in Germany you are personally liable in many industries. So those dead workers lead to criminal investigations into the people in charge which can mean years in prison and fines. Technically the company is banned from helping with the fines but there seem to be some bonus payments happening if your company isnt a complete shit. Its still not something you risk as it means you will have a few horrible years in front of you even if you end up being cleared.
Edit: That liability, which also covers shortcomings during the build process discovered later is the reason he is currently looking for another job.
> Since it has been mentioned elsewhere that the threat of lawyers is higher in the US, in Germany you are personally liable in many industries. So those dead workers lead to criminal investigations into the people in charge which can mean years in prison and fines.
Don't know where you got the idea it's different in California. What do you think happens if you negligently lead to deaths? It's as criminal in California to negligently kill your employees as it is in Germany. It's not some lawless land of corporate freedom.
The original post specifically mentioned that the government sanctioned and fined the company to curtail their abuses, they just didn't lead to any directly attributable deaths.
>It's as criminal in California to negligently kill your employees as it is in Germany.
I think we might be talking past each other. I am not talking about employers but technical staff. Those are employees themselves with no human resources responsibility.
edit: I think the intention is to keep management strictly out of real world safety critical decisions. To simplify, if you got an MBA your opinion is meaningless when it comes the safe running of the physical site.
„For comparison: Converted to the number of employees, this is three times as many emergencies – in a similar period of time – as occurred, for example, at the Audi factory in Ingolstadt.“
Of course each emergency is one too much, but I wonder what are the sample sizes? Are the counts statistically significantly different from each other? Another thing to consider: Emergencies are rare events and so a small difference in circumstances can make the outcomes vary substantially. Is a well oiled manufacturing pipeline like a Audi factory comparable to a new factory that has not rounded all sharp corners yet?
> Is a well oiled manufacturing pipeline like a Audi factory comparable to a new factory that has not rounded all sharp corners yet?
I wonder about this as well. It would make sense that a brand new factory that is rapidly growing would experience more safety issues. No idea if this is a reasonable increase though.
I would expect fewer safety issues, since learnings from previous years can be taken into account during design, which isn't easy to do in existing factories.
Both effects could be in place at the same time, in which case you would expect a higher rate of workplace accidents initially, and a lower rate in the mid- to long-term.
Until either of us finds studies on this topic it's meaningless speculation, because I honestly can't imagine more accidents, even initially, if things are done as they should be.
Well ... or the owner of the company operates on Zucks quote of "Move fast and break things". When break does not mean software or money, than this is no longer a fun quote.
3x as many emergencies per employee (not total, per employee) would be at least moderately alarming even if the numbers were 0.003 accidents per employee at Tesla and 0.001 accidents per employee at Audi.
I wouldn't get too hung up on statistical significance here. Whenever someone brings up statistical significance, I always like to ask: "significant with respect to what? by what standard?"
However it might be interesting to consider whether 3x is normal for all new production facilities. But that's a separate question.
Even though p-values can be hacked, they are very useful when they aren't. At p = 0.1 I'd ignore the finding because there would be a 10% chance it was explained by random chance. p = 0.01 would pique my interest. p < 0.001 I'd accept it as true, but I'd still watch out for systematic biases such as comparing new to old factories.
Right, if you're at the point of constructing some kind of principled estimate of variation in the data then I think you have a pass to at least talk about "significance". But in that case I'm sure you're aware that this requires a particular hypothesis test in mind, not just an abstract notion of "significance", and that p-values interpreted as "strength of evidence" are problematic.
Tesla don't need to invent safety standards they only need to implement them.
BTW you can't compare the first year of the Audi factory with the first year of Tesla because the Audi factory is much older and back then totally different safety standards existed.
> Tesla don't need to invent safety standards they only need to implement them.
Safety standards aren't some black and white thing where you can meet them by exactly following some rules set down in a rulebook.
If you know something is dangerous (or a reasonable man would have known), you can't do it, even if there isn't a specific rule against it. And often you learn things are dangerous through experience.
And often you learn things are dangerous through experience.
Yes, this is exactly the point people are making. Tesla has had the opportunity to learn from the experiences of other manufacturers and should be applying those lessons as they begin operations.
What's Audi's excuse? 1/3 of a large number is still a pretty big number, and they don't have the excuse of being in their first year of operation. If there are pitchforks out for Tesla there should also be pitchforks out for Audi.
Not necessarily a bad thing. There's often a strong negative correlation between incident rate and fatality rate, a pattern found across many industries (airline, oil and gas, manufacturing etc.)
For example, are more incidents reported by British Airlines or Aeroflot? Now, which would you rather fly on?
I get your point, but the article also states that
"documents from the rescue centers also documented that Tesla boss Elon Musk’s factory requested an ambulance or helicopter 247 times in the first year after opening alone."
So this is not simply about incidents in the sense of some hickup that is worthy of reporting, but incidents where probably people gut hurt.
Hence I'm not sure if the airline comparison really applies here.
247 per year isn't too surprising: assuming 5 day weeks, that's about one per day, and wikipedia says the site has 10k people, so that's better than my record of 5 hospital visits for medically significant reasons in the last 30 years.
(Tripped and fell onto the ashes of a fire aged 10, knocked unconscious by a trampoline aged 11, testicular torsion in 2005, hit by an inattentive driver at low speed in the late 00s, 20mm by 1mm by 1mm gouge along a finger from opening a tin of tomatoes during lockdown being the only one on this list where I went by tram instead of ambulance).
(Not that this means they're fine or there's no room for improvement; it's just that this feels like a rerun of the memes about Foxconn and suicide nets, as both completely lack a sense of scale for the workplace place and how much everywhere else also fails, and also as an attempt to demonise rather than to be the "rising tide" that is supposed to "lift all boats").
And now I reread that list, I realise I forgot the fire incident had my mum or her friend drive me to the hospital by car, so that's 3 ambulances in 30 years for 5 relevant hospital visits.
In this case, Tesla-Germany-to-Audi-Germany, it would be more like an Aeroflot-to-Orenburzhie comparison, or a BA-to-easyJet comparison, in that reporting rates for any important metric should be assumed to be close enough between them to be valid.
Workplace accidents are legally required to be reported in all of America, per OSHA regulations. There are definitely issues with compliance in some situations, but I guarantee that the OSHA inspectors take this sort of thing seriously.
Having watched a lot of Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board videos* i am a bit doubtful of that statement. Do you have firsthand knowledge here?
OSHA inspectors really do take workplace injuries and safety seriously, regardless of how toothless the enforcement actions sometimes seem.
The real problem is that there are about 2000 OSHA inspectors in the country, working out of about 100 offices, and serving more than 100 million workers.
Does that count the Michigan OSHA inspectors? Do other states have their own inspection staff beyond Michigan? Honestly not sure, but I know Michigan runs that program independently as a history of the organized labor movement, and they have quite a few inspectors.
About half of the states have their own OSHA organizations, but I don't know much about how effective they are. In the northeast where I grew up most of the state-run OSHA orgs only dealt with state/county/city government jobs and left private employers to Federal OSHA.
Well, I have extensive OSHA training and a couple certifications, and I've worked in manufacturing companies (if not directly in the plants, but the awareness trainings were required).
There are tons of managers in the USA who will pressure people who've been injured into not reporting an incident or lying about where/how it happened. Companies can get away with this for years before anything happens to them.
Even paper cuts for office workers, I kid you not. While this, paper cuts, may sound excesive, the system allows forba close, and reliable, monitoring of the more serious accidents. So it is a good thing.
Apparently one incident involved a 100lb box falling over 10 feet (several meters) onto a person's head. I have a hard time believing a person could survive that.
I've been hit on the head by a wrench falling like 20ft (while wearing a hard hat), and it kind of hurt.
Staplerfahrer Klaus is such a clasic stereotype of the avenge German middleclass worker, it's now a meme that Germans love to relax by playing Forklift Simulator after work.
What do you want to bet injuries are high elsewhere and Germany just has better reporting.
> Tesla boss Elon Musk’s factory requested an ambulance or helicopter 247 times in the first year after opening alone
Later goes on to say this is three times as many per capita as Audi.
Tesla: quality is crap, our factory workers are paid poorly and injured, our corporate workers can spy on you while you drive, our boss is insane, but hey our lineup spells SEXY which is hilarious
>“That’s our other rule,” Musk continues. “Safety third. There’s not even a Rule Number Two. But even though there’s nothing in second place, safety is not getting promoted to number two.”
Incredibly dishonest to take a quote about his advice to his children/family in this context.
It's completely fair in that context. If you drill into your children "safety is the number 1 rule at all times", they are going to be socially and developmentally stunted.
If it's dishonest then I challenge you to find a better Elon quote on safety. I first heard "safety third" secondhand from someone who used to work for him. That's not citable, but maybe that's good enough for you.
If it's not good enough then here are a few more recent examples.
I'd say it's far more dishonest to invent a context in which the only alternative to instilling the idea that "safety is so unimportant it's behind priorities that don't even exist" is "safety is the number 1 rule at all times" to the extent of developmental stunting ...
Except it's in the body, so they already clicked on the article and made their money. What's left is continuing the trope that Elon is insensitive and stupid.
> What do you want to bet injuries are high elsewhere and Germany just has better reporting.
Their first plant was California. I know there's some weird need on the internet to conflate the US as a whole, but California is pretty solidly worker-favoring and safety conscious. They have pretty comprehensive reporting and awareness, probably to an equivalent level to Germany.
It's because of that that we know Tesla has always had a modus of terrible workplace environments.
> Later goes on to say this is three times as many per capita as Audi.
I'm curious how the ratio looks if you compute accidents per car produced.
Like does Audi have a lower per-capita rate because they are safer, or because their factory is padded with a bunch of incidental employees who aren't actually on the factory floor.
Because Tesla had 3x the accident rate. This are the numbers we have. Well, that, and decades worth of experience working in German industry. Especially automotive plants are incredibly safe.
Going with Tesla fanboy opinions, Tesla will loose: Tesla factories are supposed to be so much more automated and productive, that employees per cars have to be much lower than Audi's. As a result the per capita accidents increase, unless of course Muskematics are different from normal calculus.
Tesla accelerated the mass adoption of electric cars by at least a decade. Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
How many people's lives do you think would have been ruined by delaying the electrification of something that accounts for ~25% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by a decade or more?
Ah yes. It reminds me of the tech libertarians that I’d so often come across in the Bay Area. Those who adopted Lord Farquaad’s philosophy that other people getting screwed over was a sacrifice they were willing to make. It doesn’t surprise me they are one of the blue checkmark people.
Ah yes, because anyone not seeing Elon as the guy who's brought an entire decade's of progress with electric cars and space travel and as the guy who's going to save humanity must be deranged, never mind what he says about things he's clueless about and how he treats his employees, those are media lies of haters and jealous people anyway, all hail the almighty Elon with his beautiful face and muscle and tremendeous sexual energy!
And you have a hard-on for him, you do realize that right?
lol, no I’m just capable of more nuanced thought than “Elon treats employees bad and sometimes says dumb things thus Elon bad and incapable of doing good things”
> Tesla accelerated the mass adoption of electric cars by at least a decade
That is a VERY bold claim given that Tesla sedans only began sales 11 years ago.
> Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
That claim is even more bold. Other car companies are ramping up their electric assembly lines even faster than Tesla did in Germany with even less experience in electric car production. Shouldn't it follow that they should be maiming their workers at an incredible pace?
Is there any reason to believe that design and technology innovation is linked to a higher injury rate in serial production? Shouldn't TSMCs chip factories be veritable slaughterhouses with that logic?
1. That virtually none of the progress made on Electric vehicles in the past decade would have happened without Tesla. This is unfalsifiable, but I can see that Ford, Mitsubishi, Honda, Nissan, Mini/BMW, Fiat and others were already mass-producing electric cars for sale in the US in 2012. Do I think that Tesla accelerated the idea of electric cars being cool? yes. Do I think that Tesla alone are responsible for getting us from the electric Ford Focus, to the Mustang Mach E? No. I'm pretty sure that was Ford.
2. That highly innovative, fast-paced workspaces are necessarily more dangerous to workers. We can point at the numerous innovative, efficient workplaces that are known to 'move fast and break things' where that isn't true. We could use the company that popularized the phrase, Facebook, as an example. Working for Facebook isn't notoriously dangerous. If you prefer hardware we can point to the company that used to own Tesla's Fremont factory, Toyota, who famously innovated higher quality and cheaper assembly at that very factory.
> Perhaps you disagree with the statement that when you move fast that progress happens faster?
When it comes to physical processes, I would push back on that. Moving fast can just mean doing shitty work. Turn the speed of the assembly line up to 11 and see if better cars come out.
Maiming people so rich westerners can have cool cars is indefensible, and judging by the state of other car companies, unnecessary. I've worked in dangerous manufacturing facilities. They weren't faster or more innovative.
1. lol, wow a bunch of failing EV models whose sales were dying. Can you now compare the sales growth of the Leaf or Ford Focus electric to the Model S, or the later Model 3. The 3, S, and Y all signifiacantly raised the stakes for electric cars. The legacy automakers were not even close to mainstream adoption (patently obvious to any independent observer, just look at the sales numbers).
2. Not sure why you would reference a role with 0 occupational hazard to begin with and then data about quality and cost (not safety) here, maybe you are confused about the point?
> Maiming people so rich westerners can have cool cars is indefensible
Do you think Tesla’s only benefit is they are cool? Have you considered the climate impacts?
Maiming all of humanity so you can protect hundreds of factory workers (who knowingly and willingly took a somewhat dangerous job) from injury is indefensible. It’s clear you only can wrestle with salient tradeoffs and more abstract or statistical ones are too difficult for you.
> Tesla accelerated the mass adoption of electric cars by at least a decade. Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
I strongly disagree with that argument.
A related argument with which I disagree is the one that people sometimes invoke to respond to accusations of exploited workers: arguing that the workers' lives were still generally elevated over what they would be, were the factory not there and exploiting them.
> A related argument with which I disagree is the one that people sometimes invoke to respond to accusations of exploited workers: arguing that the workers' lives were still generally elevated over what they would be, were the factory not there and exploiting them.
If you look at what was going on in the electric car industry from 2003-2013 (heavy focus on plug in hybrids, very poor sales of the few existing EVs, etc) and compare the marketing strategy of the Model S and roadster to that of e.g. the Nissan Leaf, it’s a pretty obvious conclusion.
Re: your 2nd point, nobody is forcing the workers to work at the factory. Try coming down from your ivory tower to touch grass sometime, might be good for you.
> Re: your 2nd point, nobody is forcing the workers to work at the factory. Try coming down from your ivory tower to touch grass sometime, might be good for you.
And "nobody is forcing this exploited person into that bad situation" is one of the other common arguments with which I disagree.
> If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
put your money where your mouth is: go work there, taking the risk yourself, but it is at least unethical to talk about other people's health this way.
Letting people take risks is not unethical as long as the risk is disclosed.
Put your money where your mouth is and throw out all your electronics, which are definitely not assembled by workers who on average make more than the median household income in the area they live (as Tesla factory workers do).
(Parent comment was dead, but I vouched for it, even though I disagree with it. It represents some not-unusual beliefs, and I think we'd be better off if those beliefs were talked about.)
An extremely well funded company willing to lose money on every sale thus delaying incumbents' investments by years could actually be blamed for slowing adoption just as easily as praised for speeding it.
I'm just pointing out that the only reason Musk is successful is because of government welfare. It has nothing to do with "moving fast and breaking things".
None of that has anything to do with "moving fast and breaking things". Take away Musk's welfare and SpaceX and Tesla are out of business within a year.
> None of that has anything to do with "moving fast and breaking things". Take away Musk's welfare and SpaceX and Tesla are out of business within a year.
Explain then the reason why SpaceX is more successful than its competitors, which receive even more government funding than SpaceX.
>Converted to the number of employees, this is three times as many emergencies – in a similar period of time – as occurred, for example, at the Audi factory in Ingolstadt.
Per capita the record is fucking awful. Move fast and break things doesn't really work for manufacturing where the things one breaks is employees. At least in civilized countries with functional employment protection laws.
My mistake, I misread your doubtful reply up a level such that you were doubting the safety office's report, not quoting it to the "bruised thumbs" reply. Cheers.
This is how it is supposed to work in the United States as well. Any injury at all reported, then categorized by severity. First aid, lost lost time, etc.
Let's be real; nobody puts a band-aid on a bruise, and even a band-aid for a papercut isn't going to kick off a paperwork process in normal circumstances, even in Germany. The letter of German law may not put any lower bound on injury reporting, but that doesn't mean there isn't one in practice.
Exactly, having such formalities actually prevents people from reporting minor incidents because of all the wasted time with H&S teams.
I made the mistake going to the 1st aid guy at work once when I had a tiny cut, just didn't want to leave blood so I went to ask for a band aid. I'll never make that mistake again because I had to fill out forms, show what happened, discuss improvement plans with my manager etc. Fuck that.
I coupd register on Twitter, buy some followers and posts, and then post those same accident numbers without citing any sources, if that would be more to your liking.
The tagesschau.de article cites a paywalled article by the privately owned magazine "Stern" as source of all of this. Just saying.
Edit: Also, the main source of the reporting is the actual Amt (state office) that keeps track of workspace safety. Not that much wiggle room for truth/lies if you ask me…
I was never disputing any of the validity or where the actual source info. But yeah I guess posting the Stern source would be a little better if they just quoted from them.
My point was just because I find it ridiculous to post "Tagesschau" as a response to a ask for a"reputable" new site. And the idea that "many distracting ads" make a new site not reputable is equally ridiculous. Its 2023 this is a heavy tech related site, and this moron this does not know what a adblocker is.
Yeah go ahead, downvote me flag me, I do not give a fuck, you are as braindead as the people on Reddit or Twitter.
The bureaucratic mess in Germany is in part related to making everything safe and less interfaring in everyday life. This sort of accidents must occur across the globe but it is difficult to cover in Germany (and western Europe).
Elon Musk’s factory requested an
ambulance or helicopter 247 times in the
first year after opening alone
Isn't that an insanely high number? If there are 10k people working there, that means that as a Tesla employee, every year, you have a 2% chance to end up in an ambulance?
It's been very obvious for years now on hacker news that anything critical of Musk, especially something showing how his companies abuse workers, gets immediately buried if it gets close to the top.
I'm not sure if it's a group of power users flagging these articles or if someone with more administrative control does it, but there is no question that someone or multiple people work to suppress anything that shines a negative light on Musk.
Polite & reasonable idea: HN is flying no "Eternal Champion of Truth and Justice" banners on its masthead. Nor is it turning a tidy profit from all the advertising and annual membership fees here. Nor is it under any legal obligation to favor/disfavor people or ideas which many of the users here might like/dislike. Mr. Musk is very wealthy, and has an irrationally nasty side. Our Fair Leader Paul Graham may not care to be our "Pay any Legal Bill, Bear any Anger" meat shield when topics come up that could draw unwelcome attention in his direction.
I don't see any reason to believe that Tesla stories are specifically targeted for suppression by the HN software or mods/admin. The topic is highly polarized, lots of people always get downvoted and flagged in these discussions and this triggers automatic systems for flamewar suppression. Compare the rank trajectory of this discussion to other equally polarized and contentious discussions and you'll see that nothing special is going on here.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 453 ms ] threadNow we need a workplace safety video about not dancing on ovens.
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/...
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_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.
It's not false that McDonald's was negligent, and it's not false that the lawsuit forced a change. As far as I can tell nothing else is false. You can correct a statement in one bullet point of an article without calling it a "bad article."
It's a bad article because the guy who wrote it didn't do any research. He just paraphrased a youtuber's video. Said youtuber also didn't do any research and just repeats stuff he's heard other people claim about the case, probably on reddit, perpetuating this easily debunked misinformation.
There's a CTO here who used to seal McD's grease drums at night by jumping on them. Son of store owner.
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"?
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
Being safe generally speaking requires being proactive - your place seems to be safe. Safetism is - if you follow the rules you can turn your brain off and all will be alright (TSA and the likes). In my experience - the safetism is the predominant attitude in the world.
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.
That being said; yes, this has been an operating modal for Tesla from the beginning. California had to sanction and fine the company multiple times before they started operating lawfully and reasonably.
The perpetual "at will is abusive by design" argument doesn't apply to a) Good Faith covenant states and b) places where the reward for abuse far outweighs a continued employment.
I've lived and worked in both places, I can assure you that the standards are pretty similar. The main difference being that issues in California are generally handled via civil suit, while Germany handles them through a government board.
You're welcome to compare Cal/OSHA regulations:
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/dosh_publications/trainingreq.ht...
To BMAS regulations (and Bundesländer extensions) and try to find something they do to an amazingly higher standard, however.
That sounds like a pretty big difference, and not one that favours california. Having to lawyer up is a big barrier?
As to your latter point, labor suits are pretty heavily in favor of the worker and it's not hard to find a lawyer who will take a case on concession. Fees are also capped, delayed to completion and generally on the losing party to cover. So "the barrier" is as low as you want to consider the solidity of the case.
Considering worker's comp and civil suit structuring are the two pieces of legislation that are most heavily attacked by corporations in California, I wouldn't consider them ineffective; it's certainly a matter of perspective, however.
Not sure why you limit the issue this way, given the strong cultural differences in rule following.
In case you are talking heavy machinery in the lumber yard, alcohol is a no go there now. School friend of mine lost his apprenticeship due to liver problems ~ 15 years ago. It was considered too dangerous to have him work with saws as it couldnt be ruled out that he could pass out and fall into one. Relative of mine also lost his job as a truck driver due to substance abuse despite it not reaching the threshold for loosing his driver license.
This is not to say there arent deadly accidents in Germany. Friend of mine builds electrical substations and the company has regular (deadly) high voltage accidents. Roughly one or two a year since he has been there (not on his site but across all projects of the company). Sadly often unskilled laborers that didnt understand the safety instructions due to language barriers. So falling through grids covering open high voltage or digging up a line.
Since it has been mentioned elsewhere that the threat of lawyers is higher in the US, in Germany you are personally liable in many industries. So those dead workers lead to criminal investigations into the people in charge which can mean years in prison and fines. Technically the company is banned from helping with the fines but there seem to be some bonus payments happening if your company isnt a complete shit. Its still not something you risk as it means you will have a few horrible years in front of you even if you end up being cleared.
Edit: That liability, which also covers shortcomings during the build process discovered later is the reason he is currently looking for another job.
Don't know where you got the idea it's different in California. What do you think happens if you negligently lead to deaths? It's as criminal in California to negligently kill your employees as it is in Germany. It's not some lawless land of corporate freedom.
The original post specifically mentioned that the government sanctioned and fined the company to curtail their abuses, they just didn't lead to any directly attributable deaths.
I think we might be talking past each other. I am not talking about employers but technical staff. Those are employees themselves with no human resources responsibility.
edit: I think the intention is to keep management strictly out of real world safety critical decisions. To simplify, if you got an MBA your opinion is meaningless when it comes the safe running of the physical site.
„For comparison: Converted to the number of employees, this is three times as many emergencies – in a similar period of time – as occurred, for example, at the Audi factory in Ingolstadt.“
I wonder about this as well. It would make sense that a brand new factory that is rapidly growing would experience more safety issues. No idea if this is a reasonable increase though.
I wouldn't get too hung up on statistical significance here. Whenever someone brings up statistical significance, I always like to ask: "significant with respect to what? by what standard?"
However it might be interesting to consider whether 3x is normal for all new production facilities. But that's a separate question.
But importantly, did it? Did you look into and compare audi's first year safety record before making this suggestion?
Even the article is cashing in on Musk's controversial image. Instead of saying it's a Tesla factory they awkwardly write:
> Tesla boss Elon Musk’s factory
Elon only owns 13% of Tesla so that framing is quite wrong, it's not his factory, why do you think they write like that?
Tesla don't need to invent safety standards they only need to implement them.
BTW you can't compare the first year of the Audi factory with the first year of Tesla because the Audi factory is much older and back then totally different safety standards existed.
Safety standards aren't some black and white thing where you can meet them by exactly following some rules set down in a rulebook.
If you know something is dangerous (or a reasonable man would have known), you can't do it, even if there isn't a specific rule against it. And often you learn things are dangerous through experience.
Yes, this is exactly the point people are making. Tesla has had the opportunity to learn from the experiences of other manufacturers and should be applying those lessons as they begin operations.
This isn't Tesla's first try so the excuse isn't valid
For example, are more incidents reported by British Airlines or Aeroflot? Now, which would you rather fly on?
"documents from the rescue centers also documented that Tesla boss Elon Musk’s factory requested an ambulance or helicopter 247 times in the first year after opening alone."
So this is not simply about incidents in the sense of some hickup that is worthy of reporting, but incidents where probably people gut hurt.
Hence I'm not sure if the airline comparison really applies here.
(Tripped and fell onto the ashes of a fire aged 10, knocked unconscious by a trampoline aged 11, testicular torsion in 2005, hit by an inattentive driver at low speed in the late 00s, 20mm by 1mm by 1mm gouge along a finger from opening a tin of tomatoes during lockdown being the only one on this list where I went by tram instead of ambulance).
(Not that this means they're fine or there's no room for improvement; it's just that this feels like a rerun of the memes about Foxconn and suicide nets, as both completely lack a sense of scale for the workplace place and how much everywhere else also fails, and also as an attempt to demonise rather than to be the "rising tide" that is supposed to "lift all boats").
> In Germany, all work accidents must be reported.
*Amazing videos, can really recommend them. https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB/videos
The real problem is that there are about 2000 OSHA inspectors in the country, working out of about 100 offices, and serving more than 100 million workers.
About half of the states have their own OSHA organizations, but I don't know much about how effective they are. In the northeast where I grew up most of the state-run OSHA orgs only dealt with state/county/city government jobs and left private employers to Federal OSHA.
There are tons of managers in the USA who will pressure people who've been injured into not reporting an incident or lying about where/how it happened. Companies can get away with this for years before anything happens to them.
I think I read that somewhere, but not certain!
All accidents, no matter how minor, have to be documented and the documentation kept for 5 years though.
However no
"factory requested an ambulance or helicopter 247 times in the first year after opening alone"
That's crazy, 5 times a week
I've been hit on the head by a wrench falling like 20ft (while wearing a hard hat), and it kind of hurt.
Forklift Driver Klaus – The First Day on the Job
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80%9...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-lc70Mjp-U
Gore and funny !
https://imgur.com/a/AkkLzVE
What do you want to bet injuries are high elsewhere and Germany just has better reporting.
> Tesla boss Elon Musk’s factory requested an ambulance or helicopter 247 times in the first year after opening alone
Later goes on to say this is three times as many per capita as Audi.
Tesla: quality is crap, our factory workers are paid poorly and injured, our corporate workers can spy on you while you drive, our boss is insane, but hey our lineup spells SEXY which is hilarious
What a strange approach to go out of your way to ensure that Musk's name is mentioned.
>“That’s our other rule,” Musk continues. “Safety third. There’s not even a Rule Number Two. But even though there’s nothing in second place, safety is not getting promoted to number two.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...
It's completely fair in that context. If you drill into your children "safety is the number 1 rule at all times", they are going to be socially and developmentally stunted.
If it's not good enough then here are a few more recent examples.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/08/31/elon-mode-fsd-se...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/26/podcasts/the-daily/elon-m...
Their first plant was California. I know there's some weird need on the internet to conflate the US as a whole, but California is pretty solidly worker-favoring and safety conscious. They have pretty comprehensive reporting and awareness, probably to an equivalent level to Germany.
It's because of that that we know Tesla has always had a modus of terrible workplace environments.
I'm curious how the ratio looks if you compute accidents per car produced.
Like does Audi have a lower per-capita rate because they are safer, or because their factory is padded with a bunch of incidental employees who aren't actually on the factory floor.
https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/audi-in-ingolstadt-5543
Tesla posted a tweet regarding 5000 vehicles in one week in Gruenheide on March 25, 2023. That pace would be 260,000 vehicles over 52 weeks.
https://insideevs.com/news/659190/tesla-giga-berlin-producti...
I will say that the Audi Ingolstadt campus does have more than just line manufacturing.
I guess Musk could walk down Holiwood Boulevard and kill someone without loosing a single fan at this point...
Also you pay for a blue tick on Twitter. Yuck.
And you have a hard-on for him, you do realize that right?
Why do you believe its impossible they could achieve just as much with fewer accidents?
Is it possible that God Emperor Musk has permitted some degree of negligence in his operation?
That is a VERY bold claim given that Tesla sedans only began sales 11 years ago.
> Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
That claim is even more bold. Other car companies are ramping up their electric assembly lines even faster than Tesla did in Germany with even less experience in electric car production. Shouldn't it follow that they should be maiming their workers at an incredible pace?
Is there any reason to believe that design and technology innovation is linked to a higher injury rate in serial production? Shouldn't TSMCs chip factories be veritable slaughterhouses with that logic?
Would you please stop attacking commenters on a personal level.
It's against the guidelines[0] of this board and is counterproductive to the quality of the discussion.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How about if people don’t want to get called stupid they don’t say wildly stupid things instead.
1. That virtually none of the progress made on Electric vehicles in the past decade would have happened without Tesla. This is unfalsifiable, but I can see that Ford, Mitsubishi, Honda, Nissan, Mini/BMW, Fiat and others were already mass-producing electric cars for sale in the US in 2012. Do I think that Tesla accelerated the idea of electric cars being cool? yes. Do I think that Tesla alone are responsible for getting us from the electric Ford Focus, to the Mustang Mach E? No. I'm pretty sure that was Ford.
2. That highly innovative, fast-paced workspaces are necessarily more dangerous to workers. We can point at the numerous innovative, efficient workplaces that are known to 'move fast and break things' where that isn't true. We could use the company that popularized the phrase, Facebook, as an example. Working for Facebook isn't notoriously dangerous. If you prefer hardware we can point to the company that used to own Tesla's Fremont factory, Toyota, who famously innovated higher quality and cheaper assembly at that very factory.
> Perhaps you disagree with the statement that when you move fast that progress happens faster?
When it comes to physical processes, I would push back on that. Moving fast can just mean doing shitty work. Turn the speed of the assembly line up to 11 and see if better cars come out.
Maiming people so rich westerners can have cool cars is indefensible, and judging by the state of other car companies, unnecessary. I've worked in dangerous manufacturing facilities. They weren't faster or more innovative.
2. Not sure why you would reference a role with 0 occupational hazard to begin with and then data about quality and cost (not safety) here, maybe you are confused about the point?
> Maiming people so rich westerners can have cool cars is indefensible
Do you think Tesla’s only benefit is they are cool? Have you considered the climate impacts?
Maiming all of humanity so you can protect hundreds of factory workers (who knowingly and willingly took a somewhat dangerous job) from injury is indefensible. It’s clear you only can wrestle with salient tradeoffs and more abstract or statistical ones are too difficult for you.
I strongly disagree with that argument.
A related argument with which I disagree is the one that people sometimes invoke to respond to accusations of exploited workers: arguing that the workers' lives were still generally elevated over what they would be, were the factory not there and exploiting them.
Could you elaborate on why you disagree with it?
Re: your 2nd point, nobody is forcing the workers to work at the factory. Try coming down from your ivory tower to touch grass sometime, might be good for you.
And "nobody is forcing this exploited person into that bad situation" is one of the other common arguments with which I disagree.
put your money where your mouth is: go work there, taking the risk yourself, but it is at least unethical to talk about other people's health this way.
Put your money where your mouth is and buy no brand new clothes or electronics for the rest of your life.
The virtue signaling is really poisoning this decades.
Written from my second hand computer.
Put your money where your mouth is and throw out all your electronics, which are definitely not assembled by workers who on average make more than the median household income in the area they live (as Tesla factory workers do).
All you do is advocating for exploiting people in the name of profit by finding some bogus excuses.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/08/tech/spacex-starlink-subsidie...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...
So clearly you won't succeed "just" because of government welfare.
Explain then the reason why SpaceX is more successful than its competitors, which receive even more government funding than SpaceX.
Just because the govt pays for something doesn't mean it's govt welfare. Do you accuse builders of govt buildings as being on govt welfare?
Per capita the record is fucking awful. Move fast and break things doesn't really work for manufacturing where the things one breaks is employees. At least in civilized countries with functional employment protection laws.
Kinda doubt it
This supports the idea that not just reported injuries were high but so were injuries which required ambulance calls.
If you have data to suggest those were all for bruised thumbs you should add that yourself.
I made the mistake going to the 1st aid guy at work once when I had a tiny cut, just didn't want to leave blood so I went to ask for a band aid. I'll never make that mistake again because I had to fill out forms, show what happened, discuss improvement plans with my manager etc. Fuck that.
> In Germany, work accidents need to be reported if the person injured died in the process or cannot work for more than three days.
(https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/tesla-gruen...)
So nope, not band-aid accidents. Actual people being injured in such a way that they need at least three days off.
Edit: Also, the main source of the reporting is the actual Amt (state office) that keeps track of workspace safety. Not that much wiggle room for truth/lies if you ask me…
My point was just because I find it ridiculous to post "Tagesschau" as a response to a ask for a"reputable" new site. And the idea that "many distracting ads" make a new site not reputable is equally ridiculous. Its 2023 this is a heavy tech related site, and this moron this does not know what a adblocker is.
Yeah go ahead, downvote me flag me, I do not give a fuck, you are as braindead as the people on Reddit or Twitter.
isn't this normal practice? I don't think I've ever seen a fire crew take back the fire extinguishing water they use...
I'm not sure if it's a group of power users flagging these articles or if someone with more administrative control does it, but there is no question that someone or multiple people work to suppress anything that shines a negative light on Musk.
Which makes sense if people don't want to read flamebate, but with a company like Telsa with both a sea of issues and fan boys, it gives them a pass.