> “At 8:46am, I opened a Tesla email for flight info. By 11:25am, my internship offer was gone,” wrote Miami University student Joshua Schreiber, who said his start date was three weeks away and that he had already spent “thousands on housing.”
A bit too much to qualify for a small-claims court in the US, I'm afraid?
I wouldn't be surprised if his internship offer came with a long contract full of small print, one line saying that they can withdraw the offer at any time for any reason with no compensation due. You can usually recover "thousands" on small claims, but I find it very unlikely for that to actually happen - Tesla will claim that the intern should have got something temporary (hotel, motel, airbnb) until he was actually working on the internship.
> Tesla will claim that the intern should have got something temporary (hotel, motel, airbnb) until he was actually working on the internship.
Any reasonable court should throw this argument away in an instant. It's one thing to expect temporary accomodation for a 2 week internship, but for anything longer than that, moving and housing expenses should have to be covered by the employer if they renege on the contract in bad faith.
I beg to differ: I've been critical of Musk for a million and one reason and each time I have, my comments have been flagged. Likely this one will be too, time will tell.
Just want to mention that you're not downvoted for liking Musk or providing an opinion that you consider contrary. You are being downvoted because your comment does not contribute to the conversation in a constructive manner.
1. You typically can't leave your country. Hardly anyone offers open immigration, especially not to blue collar workers.
2. Companies don't care about employees and almost never offer raises. It's not 1920. Even if you love your company, it's almost always best to be looking to make sure you're getting the pay that you deserve. At a company you don't even like, I think it's a disservice to your career.
3. Staying promotes bad behavior as corporations will see that they can under pay you, behave poorly, and not suffer the cost of turnover.
I've moved country. Had to learn German as part of that[0].
Jobs… well, other Space companies do exist, but the old space companies have a reputation for being pork barrel operations. Other car companies exist, I don't know enough about them to make a judgement call there.
[0] Fun fact: German is so hard that Germans have a saying which translates as "German is hard".
You are an extremely privileged citizen of a first-world country. Try doing it as a Russian / Lebanon / Afghan, then we'll have something to talk about.
But I suspect the "can code" privilege beats the "passport" privilege.
A previous employer was about 50 people, of whom about 5 were from Germany; from memory, the nationalities of the rest, excluding those from G7 states, included Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, both Israel and Palestine, Iran, both Russia and Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkey, both India and Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and South Korea.
A British ex girlfriend of mine thought I was ridiculously privileged for having had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid; the (also British) boyfriend before her, got into ham radio because he came from a household too poor for a telephone.
> But I suspect the "can code" privilege beats the "passport" privilege.
It doesn't and it's not even close. Millions of Russians have left the country in protest of Putin's little victorious war. Many of them are very adept at coding, and no, almost all of them face severe problems of every kind (banking, visas, residency, air flights, etc) because of the wrong color of their passports. And for people from non-European countries it is even worse.
It would be selection bias to point out that none of the Russians I've worked with mentioned any such problems. Even of the non-Europeans, only the Nigerian mentioned an issue.
Oh, just realised I forgot about the Mexicans, Brazilians, and Argentinian in the previous list.
A completely unrelated Russian has mentioned that his parents had to explain to the Russian conscription department that he wasn't in the country, but that's as close as it gets.
Still, like I said, selection bias. I can only see the ones who could get out.
Looks to be going the other way despite the complaints. I'm pretty sure that money makes all the decisions. Investors don't really care what Musk's political stance is. And they care even less if he's annoying to social media consumers, unless they represent a target market larger than the one they already have.
Complaining in press about CEO is unlikely to make anything better.
Also, said CEO is wildly successful by any sensible business metric, so this boils down to pleasing the crowd of people who are unhappy with CEOs political stance.
So you are a quitter? That's fine, but obviously that's just one choice of the options available: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Albert Hirschman wrote a nice book about it. I can recommend it.
Sorry but that is such a high-school level "just discovered libertarianism" take.
You think Musk cares about liquidity?
That most banks in would not issue him an 8 figure loan in a heartbeat?
Stock is not simply control, it's leverage, potential collateral etc...
It is not about a number in a bank account, billionaires do not even play the same game as you and me.
Dude could personally be in billions of debt, and still get to buy a couple yachts on a whim.
You can't fathom the inordinate amount of wealth and leverage a billionaire has; and it has never been about liquidity.
Yet your entire comment is essentially saying "He can do things I can't do!". So? Who cares? What's your point?
Mine was that he doesn't have billions in cash, and by extension movements such as "tax billionaires until they are millionaires" makes zero sense. I've seen people advocate "tax billionaires to pay for UBI!", which of course is another "makes no sense" approach.
Why?
Well, let's pretend that someone with $50B in worth has $50B in cash. OK. So you take everyone that has >$1B in the US, take everything over that, and apply it to UBI. Guess what? You pay for one year of UBI. One year. Yet.. now.. there are no more billionaires left!
Of course the above doesn't track, as my point about "net worth" is that those $50B aren't cash, they're mostly ownerships in companies. Which means that the government is effectively going to have to seize those stocks, and force sell those stocks, but.. um, to who? Remember, there are now no more billionaires left!
Who would by all those stocks, now that there are no more billionaires? Certainly the market would crash completely, by offloading trillions in worth overnight. And we'd have moved into an entirely government run corporate economy, as the government now has majority voting rights on a large number of companies. Yay?
And still next year, no more money for UBI.
You stated that my take is only "high school" level, but it seems to me this communist "take all the money from billionaires" thought process is not even high school level. It's not thought through.
And part of that thought process is "What does the net worth of a billionaire mean"?
And of course, the above is complete nonsense too, as many companies are owned by other companies. Which eventually end back at investors.
So what do you do? If a company is owned by a company, owned by a billionaire, you then .. what, take that company? What if it's a bank investment fund worth billions, but oh no! Some of those investors are rich! Do you take that?
What's the goal here? To prevent individuals from steering large companies? Which of course isn't entirely the case, there are boards of directors (see this specific Musk case!).
And how do you deal with those horrible foreign billionaires? You can't tax them directly, so do you just take their stocks? The lesson being, "If I invest in US companies, they'll just take my money!".
None of this is thought out clearly by anyone I speak to, except "Those dasteredly billionaires have, and I don't, so take take take!".
TSLA down 55% from its all time high in Nov 2021. Performance of other stocks/indices in the same period: QQQ(+6.5%), S&P(+7.4%), Toyota(+28%).
So yeah, Musk is doing poorly these days. It doesn't help his case when people look at his other antics like Twitter and legitimately wonder if he is getting distracted and should be replaced.
This is a bit tangential to the topic, but shareholder voting is interesting enough anyway.
* Musk will vote, for obvious reasons.
* Big institutional funds almost always vote with the board of directors recommendations. They very rarely rock the boat for a lot of mostly good reasons.
* Private shareholders with a sizable stake likely will vote.
* Retail shareholders (i.e. you and I) are notorious for not voting. Case in point: AMC is mostly held by retail investors at this point and had to go through all sorts of shenanigans to be able to increase the maximum number of shares they could issue, because that typically requires a shareholder vote that simply wouldn't ever get enough total votes to pass.
Robinhood is a brokerage, and should be passing proxy ballots through to you for companies you hold shares in.
It's arguable whether Vanguard should allow this, and whether it'd matter at the end. Vanguard is for retail investors who want to invest their money as cheaply as possible without thinking hard about it. Delivering proxy ballots, even electronically, does have a cost, and would likely make such funds slightly but noticeably more expensive. And to what benefit? After all, most retail investors don't care to vote. If you strongly care about your shareholder voice, the better solution is to buy shares in the company directly.
That said, Vanguard now lets you select from some broader voting methodologies (e.g. Vanguard's default, ESG, or "good corporate governance"). But nothing specific like "good corporate governance, except screw Musk over/always favor Musk".
Vanguard supports accounts that holds mutual funds (most of their focus/business) but also has accounts that can hold individual stocks.
In the individual stock case, Vanguard absolutely has to allow those share owners to vote their shares.
In the mutual fund case, Vanguard is the investor in the shares and Vanguard is the one who should cast the vote for those shares. End investors are invested in the mutual fund, and so could vote on mutual fund proxies, but IMO, should not be permitted to vote on the underlying shares that the mutual fund is invested in.
Vanguard lets you vote if you own individual shares. Vanguard owns the underlying shares for my units of VTI, so they get the votes. I absolutely do not want to vote on every individual stock in VTI.
I receive emails from Schwab and it seems very straightforward -- there is a personalized link sent to your email, you click it and start to vote. It shows how many shares your have, what the questions are along with the board's recommendations are. No login. Probably not the most secure process but very easy and smooth
Institutional holders tend to vote along the direction recommended by ISS or Glass-Lewis.
Those recommendations do generally follow Board recommendations on strategic topics, but frequently diverge from the board on matters of employee and executive pay (approving increases to share/option pools, etc.)
Ah, you're right! I'm now remembering that Vanguard mentions something like this for their default voting methodology, among the few choices they now allow investors to choose from.
Sadly these lessons are always re-learned only in economics downturns, since those who only worked in times of economic boom have the feeling they're special and irreplaceable.
Nothing is stopping them, they already have offices there or hire candidates remote and are growing.
The IT market in those areas always booms whenever there's an economic downturn in the west as executives lay people off in the expensive locations and move their jobs to cheaper locations abroad to save costs.
On paper this short term move makes them look like Rockstars to shareholders since they reduced operational costs with the stroke of a pen without decreasing profits.
What happens long term is not their problem since they won't be around if the shit hits the fan, but that's not always the case. A friend of mine leads a team of devs in Vietnam and he's super happy with their output so assuming all offshore work is automatically poor quality is in bad faith.
Quality of education and certifications. At the moment, even if you got someone with a b.sc degree, it's a lottery game if they will be usable for more than following a callcenter script - I've worked with offshorers who were absolutely top-notch, and others where I disconnected from a telco and wondered "WTF did I just witness".
The problem is: this can rapidly change, when the Indian government gets its shit together, and actually fights against corruption in education. Add 4-5 years for the changes to become effective, and suddenly the US/EU will be at a serious disadvantage in numbers.
And prevent the capital from moving abroad in the first place. Allowing corporations to play a reverse auction on salaries and work conditions is the main reason why economic inequalities have skyrocketed at the expense of workers.
It does, as the rebuttal to your argument is that corporations will move jobs no matter if there are Unions or not and no matter if the unions are powerful or not, and your example illustrates just that.
Do you have any doubts that unionizing will greatly accelerate this natural process?
The race to big wage can be honestly won with only one method: the company should extract more value from your work than it costs them to pay you, and more than it would extract from a cheaper replacement. If it is so, firing you hurts the company more than paying you a lot, and no sensible business will ever get rid of such an employee.
> Do you have any doubts that unionizing will greatly accelerate this natural process?
Nope, quite the opposite actually: with strong unions a big company cannot move work piecemeal (as the Union would strike back to block that in a way that makes small moves unprofitable for the company) and moving the whole company at once is impractical so they are stuck. Without unions, the company can work at their own pace till the last employee. In a class war, like in all war, you either unite or perish divided.
> The race to big wage can be honestly won with only one method
That's a convoluted way to day it cannot be won.
But the reality is that it can in fact be won, of collective action of citizens put enough pressure (through laws) on companies to prevent them from seeking profit at the expense of the society they live in. That's how it always work, and when there's no organized political action against big corps, the people are always losing.
Unions and state intervention are how the US people (and Europeans too) reached prosperity after WWII, and there's no way around that. Laissez faire only make a handful of winners at the expense of everybody else.
If you view the relationship between the employees and an employers through Marxist class war lens, then, as an employee, you should fully expect reciprocal reaction from employers.
I prefer to view it as mutually beneficial cooperation. If my value to the employer is not as high as I think it should be, it is either a reason to readjust my expectations, improve my productivity or change the employer.
> If you view the relationship between the employees and an employers through Marxist class war lens, then, as an employee, you should fully expect reciprocal reaction from employers.
The employers everywhere, everyday, have shown that it's exactly how they behave. In fact, my reaction is only the reciprocal reaction to theirs.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Warren Buffet
> I prefer to view it as mutually beneficial cooperation.
I can't stop you from believing in Santa Claus for sure, but for sure I'll still hope you grow up one day.
> If my value to the employer is not as high as I think it should be, it is either a reason to readjust my expectations, improve my productivity
You have been well formatted by propaganda, they can be proud of them indeed.
> You have been well formatted by propaganda, they can be proud of them indeed.
I don't think you are here for a productive discourse. It is more likely you are waging a class war here. Please, find another person to preach Marxism to, I come from a country that has suffered greatly from Marxist ideology and the damage was so severe that recovery is still not in sight.
> I don't think you are here for a productive discourse. It is more likely you are waging a class war here.
Hey, you're the one who started preaching ideology in that thread, you cannot complain if I do the same afterwards ;).
> Please, find another person to preach Marxism to,
When you grow up, you'll learn that the world is not black and white, and if you look past the cold war propaganda, there's actually nuance between the two evils that are actual Communism and Liberalism. The only system that actually delivered prosperity anywhere in the world is the Welfare state, and it has nothing to do with Marxism except that it recognizes that unconstrained Capitalism lead to bad outcome (and, in practice, Fascism, more often than not).
> I come from a country that has suffered greatly from Marxist ideology and the damage was so severe that recovery is still not in sight.
What country is it? The damage from Communism were indeed sever when it lasted, but in most former communists countries, one must not confuse what we're seeing now with the aftermath of Communism, when it's in fact the natural consequences of the new Capitalist order that emerged after its demise.
When the owner could do that, they already have, and not having a Union is not going to make you competitive against people working with a fraction of your salary anyway.
If you care about preventing corporations from moving jobs abroad, voting for more capital control is a good addition to unionizing.
I guess it depends on the headlines you're reading. You'll only see it on HN if it's a tech company, and you're probably correct in saying that it was incredibly uncommon over the last decade of incredible growth.
But it's more common if you zoom out a bit and look at other industries that haven't been consistently booming. I went to university during an O&G downturn, and I had several friends who had accepted internship offers at oil companies which were cancelled at the last minute. There were even companies that suspended their co-op programs for students already working there. Students who had an 8 month internship arranged through the university were laid off in the middle of it and were left sitting on their hands since they weren't enrolled in any classes.
But I probably couldn't find any news articles about it, since those same companies were also going through mass layoffs at the time and nobody really cared about some interns having a rough time.
I think to certain extent it comes down to panic and chaos in the HR department. A chunk of people are fired, others quit or move to new positions. Projects are cancelled.
That has consequences for supervision of interns and would probably incur significant rescheduling and organizational overhead. So I see why something not considered "primary business, contributing to the bottom line" is simply cancelled.
It seems almost standard practice really to include recent offers in layoffs.
At one of my old employers, they laid off a guy a few days in who moved across the Atlantic for the job. Moved for the job and I doubt he even earned his airfare.
I think internships are a different case compared to regular employement. Internships are time limited anyway, and the interns are likely less able to compensate the potential financial aspects of a short term cancellation.
Internships can be less impactful. Interns are young and frequently not attached to a place. Full time employees frequently have families, partners with their own jobs, kids in school, mortgages, uprooting them and kicking them out is a huge disaster for most people.
Musk just fired a complete business unit of 500 people (supercharger network), reportedly because the executive in charge didn't want to go along with layoff percentages.
But in Musk's case, doing the heroics won't save you from the pink slip. As one 'hardcore' Twitter loyalist found out, after months of sleeping in the office and criticizing other employees for not grinding hard enough.
The US is special due to the unique absence of a safety net, compared to all other developed countries. Not only will you have almost no income (unemployment benefits are a joke), but you can lose everything once you lose your health insurance and have an accident/illness.
People work extra-hard in order to not be in that bottom 10% that is going to be cut.
I cannot speak for Japan as I know very little about their workaholic culture, but it seems more performative - just toil in the office after hours to look productive.
> The US is special due to the unique absence of a safety net, compared to all other developed countries. Not only will you have almost no income (unemployment benefits are a joke), [...]
My adopted home of Singapore is a lot more developed than the US, and we don't even have unemployment benefits.
I don't know what the US is spending those 18.7% of GDP on, but I find it strange to believe that there would be no safety net at all given the huge level of spending. (Also keep in mind that GDP per capita is higher in the US than in the UK or the Netherlands. France tops Wikipedia's list with 31.2% of GDP spent on social welfare. Given French GDP per capita of ~40k USD that adds up to ~12k USD per person per year. For the US we get ~76k USD * 18.7% = ~14k USD. That's more than the French spent.)
Yet again, I suspect you think the US is more special than it actually is.
(Though the US might be unique in having the highest absolute social welfare spending per capita. Not sure. I guess some of the petro states of the Middle East or perhaps Luxembourg might give God's Own Country a run for her money there?)
Here is a video from a YouTuber who has been historically very pro-Tesla, and very pro-Supercharger.[0] He has a lot contacts in the wider charging industry.
He is simply stunned by the firing of the entire team. Everybody in the entire charging industry is just getting bounces when trying to email their contacts about the hundreds of contracted Supercharger installations in the works. Think about all the external contractors working on maintenance of existing stations, also no way to contact Tesla.
Here is an article claiming that Tesla may be looking to rehire some of the fired team. [1]
Firing the exec who won't listen to the CEO? Sure, that's business. Firing the entire team as some kind of punishment? That's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The cybertruck sure has a shitty reputation, and that was before the recent recalls.
On the more rest of their offer, there is heavy concurrence, both from US actors and chinese.
Teslas don't sell as well as they used to in Europe either, in part due to Musk himself rather than any issue with the product (and of course chinese and european automaker competition).
Not sure how Tesla's labor conflict is going in Sweden, but last I heard it was not going in Tesla's favor.
It's definitely going in Tesla's favour. They've found work-arounds for most of the barriers the unions have thrown up and signed deals with various small non-union shops for a lot of what their union workers used to do. Now it's basically just a war of attrition where it comes down to if Tesla can live with the inconveniences longer than the union can keep their workers on strike, and by all accounts it looks like the union is blinking first. In fact several of the striking workers have apparently left the union and gone back to work, and the union just the other day allowed some of their striking workers to go back to work at Tesla without getting any concessions from Tesla.
It turns out that simply refusing to engage with the union at any level and on any points, and making it clear that you literally never will, is a surprisingly effective strategy.
> It turns out that simply refusing to engage with union at any level and on any points, and making it clear that you literally never will, is a surprisingly effective strategy.
Only because they don't play by the Swedish cooperation model. If they are smart they try to force a change of law and Tesla can go pound sand.
Trouble as in survive as car manufacturer and trouble as massive devaluation of market cap are two separate things... I believe later one will come, but as car company they are unlikely to die.
As a society we are allowed to at least have an opinion on ethical matters, here I don’t see people saying how to organise a car maker, but more focused on the ethics of the thing. you know some people have died for our rights to explain ourselves, maybe you could find a more fitting environment in China or Russia; they would love to have you. Once you are at it maybe take your overlord Musk with you
As per the success statement, is it that only the rich should be allowed to speak, in your opinion? Where did you grow up? In the middle age?
I haven't seen any evidence that Elon musk is a space exploration genius (he hasn't dropped the price to orbit at all despite promising the reusability would drop it by 1/100) or a manufacturing genius (cybertruck).
That SpaceX continues to exist despite now launching approximately half of everything to space by both tonnage and discrete launches — as in, beating not just all the other US launchers combined, but also the combined national/international launches from the EU, India, China, Russia, etc. — says that SpaceX has, in fact, dropped the price to orbit. Likely by more than implied by the price tag on the website, even though the price tag on the website is itself a significant price reduction from most everything else.
"""NASA’s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg.""" - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093 (Publication Date, July 8, 2018)
The current price on their website is slightly more for slightly less, $67 million for a 22,000 kg on a Falcon 9[0], and doesn't list the Falcon Heavy; the older archive.org version of the same page says the Heavy costs $97 million for 63,800 kg to LEO, which is $1520/kg, which is (to a rounding error) the number used by other reporters[2][3].
probably Boeing executives are proudly patting on their back, because they taught something to Elon, soon Tesla will trade-off its quality for profits. Of course no one will do it directly, but the result of cost saving too much for the sake of profits will result in lower quality in the long term
The qualities that Tesla prioritise aren't the ones most people expect, given the sticker prices.
I think of them as low-end cars that just happen to require pre-paying for 80% of their lifetime fuel cost because batteries are expensive and electricity is cheap, and by that metric they're not bad.
> I think of them as low-end cars that just happen to require pre-paying for 80% of their lifetime fuel cost
I like this conception. I tell people the 3 is a gokart with an iPad and cup holders (ie. the value is in the drivetrain and handling, not the interior).
If anything, the other way around — substantial layoffs are also what Musk did when he first took over Tesla, back when the "Tesla Death Watch"[0][1] was mocking the company for needing seemingly endless rounds of investments while delivering almost no vehicles.
Is Tesla still actually worth more than the rest of the automotive industry? If not, what changed in their prospects to make the difference? Do Elon's politics really make that much of a difference in the value of his companies?
My understanding is that the competition is quickly catching up to Tesla, while Tesla has made many promises over time and under-delivered on them. Teslas remain expensive and many folks may not want to pay that, though I've also read that most folks that wanted a Tesla have a Tesla, so their client base is shrinking.
Elon himself negatively contributes to this with his words, promises, and actions. He doesn't do himself or his companies any favors there.
I also feel that Elon's handling of Twitter may be used as an idea of what he might do to Tesla with regards to ruthless layoffs and stiffing employees on severance etc. I recall that he also enforced a live-at-work requirement, effectively.
Tesla doesn't have a cheap car. For a lot of the world a car that in practice starts at about $40k is just too expensive. In Europe for example the best sold cars are around $20-25-30k, max.
You can only sell so many cars by selling to the top 20% of the market.
> Is Tesla still actually worth more than the rest of the automotive industry?
Are you comparing market capitalisation? That's a bad metric in this case.
You need to compare enterprise value. Market capitalisation changes when a company moves its financing around between issuing bonds vs issuing stocks, even though the 'real' size and importance of the company doesn't change at all.
Enterprise value adds up all the equity and all the outstanding bonds (but removes all the cash that's just lying around) to give you a number that's relatively independent of capital structure.
The established car manufacturers likely use more debt on their balance sheets.
IMO Tesla's and SpaceX's greatest strength is that they used to be destination #1 and #2 in engineering student surveys. Being able to attract the top employees is a massive advantage.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadA bit too much to qualify for a small-claims court in the US, I'm afraid?
Any reasonable court should throw this argument away in an instant. It's one thing to expect temporary accomodation for a 2 week internship, but for anything longer than that, moving and housing expenses should have to be covered by the employer if they renege on the contract in bad faith.
Why?
So if this isn't based in strong emotion, your opinion on it probably is.
Googling around, it looks like:
- 13% of Tesla is owned by Musk. He will vote I guess?
- The other big shareholders are funds. Do those vote?
- What percentage of private shareholders vote? I guess people who don't live in the US can't vote, even if they wanted?
Musk's time is over.
He's either spread too thin, got too money hungry (despite having nearly all of it!), lost his mind, or just hasn't got it anymore ...
https://electrek.co/2024/04/22/elon-musk-pigeon-ceo-former-t...
Are you supposed to leave your country when you're not happy, or should you vote and try to change it?
Sometimes it's better to leave, sometimes it's better to stay.
2. Companies don't care about employees and almost never offer raises. It's not 1920. Even if you love your company, it's almost always best to be looking to make sure you're getting the pay that you deserve. At a company you don't even like, I think it's a disservice to your career.
3. Staying promotes bad behavior as corporations will see that they can under pay you, behave poorly, and not suffer the cost of turnover.
Overall, staying seems like a loss for everyone.
I've moved country. Had to learn German as part of that[0].
Jobs… well, other Space companies do exist, but the old space companies have a reputation for being pork barrel operations. Other car companies exist, I don't know enough about them to make a judgement call there.
[0] Fun fact: German is so hard that Germans have a saying which translates as "German is hard".
You are an extremely privileged citizen of a first-world country. Try doing it as a Russian / Lebanon / Afghan, then we'll have something to talk about.
But I suspect the "can code" privilege beats the "passport" privilege.
A previous employer was about 50 people, of whom about 5 were from Germany; from memory, the nationalities of the rest, excluding those from G7 states, included Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, both Israel and Palestine, Iran, both Russia and Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkey, both India and Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and South Korea.
A British ex girlfriend of mine thought I was ridiculously privileged for having had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid; the (also British) boyfriend before her, got into ham radio because he came from a household too poor for a telephone.
It doesn't and it's not even close. Millions of Russians have left the country in protest of Putin's little victorious war. Many of them are very adept at coding, and no, almost all of them face severe problems of every kind (banking, visas, residency, air flights, etc) because of the wrong color of their passports. And for people from non-European countries it is even worse.
Oh, just realised I forgot about the Mexicans, Brazilians, and Argentinian in the previous list.
A completely unrelated Russian has mentioned that his parents had to explain to the Russian conscription department that he wasn't in the country, but that's as close as it gets.
Still, like I said, selection bias. I can only see the ones who could get out.
Also, said CEO is wildly successful by any sensible business metric, so this boils down to pleasing the crowd of people who are unhappy with CEOs political stance.
Mine was that he doesn't have billions in cash, and by extension movements such as "tax billionaires until they are millionaires" makes zero sense. I've seen people advocate "tax billionaires to pay for UBI!", which of course is another "makes no sense" approach.
Why?
Well, let's pretend that someone with $50B in worth has $50B in cash. OK. So you take everyone that has >$1B in the US, take everything over that, and apply it to UBI. Guess what? You pay for one year of UBI. One year. Yet.. now.. there are no more billionaires left!
Of course the above doesn't track, as my point about "net worth" is that those $50B aren't cash, they're mostly ownerships in companies. Which means that the government is effectively going to have to seize those stocks, and force sell those stocks, but.. um, to who? Remember, there are now no more billionaires left!
Who would by all those stocks, now that there are no more billionaires? Certainly the market would crash completely, by offloading trillions in worth overnight. And we'd have moved into an entirely government run corporate economy, as the government now has majority voting rights on a large number of companies. Yay?
And still next year, no more money for UBI.
You stated that my take is only "high school" level, but it seems to me this communist "take all the money from billionaires" thought process is not even high school level. It's not thought through.
And part of that thought process is "What does the net worth of a billionaire mean"?
And of course, the above is complete nonsense too, as many companies are owned by other companies. Which eventually end back at investors.
So what do you do? If a company is owned by a company, owned by a billionaire, you then .. what, take that company? What if it's a bank investment fund worth billions, but oh no! Some of those investors are rich! Do you take that?
What's the goal here? To prevent individuals from steering large companies? Which of course isn't entirely the case, there are boards of directors (see this specific Musk case!).
And how do you deal with those horrible foreign billionaires? You can't tax them directly, so do you just take their stocks? The lesson being, "If I invest in US companies, they'll just take my money!".
None of this is thought out clearly by anyone I speak to, except "Those dasteredly billionaires have, and I don't, so take take take!".
Hacker news: Elon is doing poorly and his time is over
I saw a Mustang Mach-E with the license plate "ELON WHO" or something like that.
A friend of mine saw our new Model 3 and said something snarky about supporting Musk. He is definitely not on this site.
Anti-Musk sentiment is huge on the socials. Even my wife, who is definitely definitely not on this site, thinks Musk is a huge shithead.
So yeah, Musk is doing poorly these days. It doesn't help his case when people look at his other antics like Twitter and legitimately wonder if he is getting distracted and should be replaced.
* Musk will vote, for obvious reasons.
* Big institutional funds almost always vote with the board of directors recommendations. They very rarely rock the boat for a lot of mostly good reasons.
* Private shareholders with a sizable stake likely will vote.
* Retail shareholders (i.e. you and I) are notorious for not voting. Case in point: AMC is mostly held by retail investors at this point and had to go through all sorts of shenanigans to be able to increase the maximum number of shares they could issue, because that typically requires a shareholder vote that simply wouldn't ever get enough total votes to pass.
It's arguable whether Vanguard should allow this, and whether it'd matter at the end. Vanguard is for retail investors who want to invest their money as cheaply as possible without thinking hard about it. Delivering proxy ballots, even electronically, does have a cost, and would likely make such funds slightly but noticeably more expensive. And to what benefit? After all, most retail investors don't care to vote. If you strongly care about your shareholder voice, the better solution is to buy shares in the company directly.
That said, Vanguard now lets you select from some broader voting methodologies (e.g. Vanguard's default, ESG, or "good corporate governance"). But nothing specific like "good corporate governance, except screw Musk over/always favor Musk".
In the individual stock case, Vanguard absolutely has to allow those share owners to vote their shares.
In the mutual fund case, Vanguard is the investor in the shares and Vanguard is the one who should cast the vote for those shares. End investors are invested in the mutual fund, and so could vote on mutual fund proxies, but IMO, should not be permitted to vote on the underlying shares that the mutual fund is invested in.
Those recommendations do generally follow Board recommendations on strategic topics, but frequently diverge from the board on matters of employee and executive pay (approving increases to share/option pools, etc.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_Shareholder_Se...
See https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
It's a vote amongst 'disinterested' shareholders or something like that.
See https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
Almost nobody ever irreplaceable.
What’s stopping them?
The IT market in those areas always booms whenever there's an economic downturn in the west as executives lay people off in the expensive locations and move their jobs to cheaper locations abroad to save costs.
On paper this short term move makes them look like Rockstars to shareholders since they reduced operational costs with the stroke of a pen without decreasing profits.
What happens long term is not their problem since they won't be around if the shit hits the fan, but that's not always the case. A friend of mine leads a team of devs in Vietnam and he's super happy with their output so assuming all offshore work is automatically poor quality is in bad faith.
Quality of education and certifications. At the moment, even if you got someone with a b.sc degree, it's a lottery game if they will be usable for more than following a callcenter script - I've worked with offshorers who were absolutely top-notch, and others where I disconnected from a telco and wondered "WTF did I just witness".
The problem is: this can rapidly change, when the Indian government gets its shit together, and actually fights against corruption in education. Add 4-5 years for the changes to become effective, and suddenly the US/EU will be at a serious disadvantage in numbers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40202281
Do you realize this example is actually hurting your argument a lot?
You can't win the rat race to lower wages.
The race to big wage can be honestly won with only one method: the company should extract more value from your work than it costs them to pay you, and more than it would extract from a cheaper replacement. If it is so, firing you hurts the company more than paying you a lot, and no sensible business will ever get rid of such an employee.
Nope, quite the opposite actually: with strong unions a big company cannot move work piecemeal (as the Union would strike back to block that in a way that makes small moves unprofitable for the company) and moving the whole company at once is impractical so they are stuck. Without unions, the company can work at their own pace till the last employee. In a class war, like in all war, you either unite or perish divided.
> The race to big wage can be honestly won with only one method
That's a convoluted way to day it cannot be won.
But the reality is that it can in fact be won, of collective action of citizens put enough pressure (through laws) on companies to prevent them from seeking profit at the expense of the society they live in. That's how it always work, and when there's no organized political action against big corps, the people are always losing.
Unions and state intervention are how the US people (and Europeans too) reached prosperity after WWII, and there's no way around that. Laissez faire only make a handful of winners at the expense of everybody else.
I prefer to view it as mutually beneficial cooperation. If my value to the employer is not as high as I think it should be, it is either a reason to readjust my expectations, improve my productivity or change the employer.
The employers everywhere, everyday, have shown that it's exactly how they behave. In fact, my reaction is only the reciprocal reaction to theirs.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Warren Buffet
> I prefer to view it as mutually beneficial cooperation.
I can't stop you from believing in Santa Claus for sure, but for sure I'll still hope you grow up one day.
> If my value to the employer is not as high as I think it should be, it is either a reason to readjust my expectations, improve my productivity
You have been well formatted by propaganda, they can be proud of them indeed.
I don't think you are here for a productive discourse. It is more likely you are waging a class war here. Please, find another person to preach Marxism to, I come from a country that has suffered greatly from Marxist ideology and the damage was so severe that recovery is still not in sight.
Hey, you're the one who started preaching ideology in that thread, you cannot complain if I do the same afterwards ;).
> Please, find another person to preach Marxism to,
When you grow up, you'll learn that the world is not black and white, and if you look past the cold war propaganda, there's actually nuance between the two evils that are actual Communism and Liberalism. The only system that actually delivered prosperity anywhere in the world is the Welfare state, and it has nothing to do with Marxism except that it recognizes that unconstrained Capitalism lead to bad outcome (and, in practice, Fascism, more often than not).
> I come from a country that has suffered greatly from Marxist ideology and the damage was so severe that recovery is still not in sight.
What country is it? The damage from Communism were indeed sever when it lasted, but in most former communists countries, one must not confuse what we're seeing now with the aftermath of Communism, when it's in fact the natural consequences of the new Capitalist order that emerged after its demise.
If you care about preventing corporations from moving jobs abroad, voting for more capital control is a good addition to unionizing.
It seems short-sighted though, in my company the best employees we've had started as interns.
It's certainly not unheard of, but saying it's common is severely overstating it
But it's more common if you zoom out a bit and look at other industries that haven't been consistently booming. I went to university during an O&G downturn, and I had several friends who had accepted internship offers at oil companies which were cancelled at the last minute. There were even companies that suspended their co-op programs for students already working there. Students who had an 8 month internship arranged through the university were laid off in the middle of it and were left sitting on their hands since they weren't enrolled in any classes.
But I probably couldn't find any news articles about it, since those same companies were also going through mass layoffs at the time and nobody really cared about some interns having a rough time.
That has consequences for supervision of interns and would probably incur significant rescheduling and organizational overhead. So I see why something not considered "primary business, contributing to the bottom line" is simply cancelled.
Not great, though.
At one of my old employers, they laid off a guy a few days in who moved across the Atlantic for the job. Moved for the job and I doubt he even earned his airfare.
So...
What makes you think so? I don't think the US is that special.
Japan has lots of 'office heroics'. And eg Hong Kong is very business friendly in terms of hiring and firing.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/esther-crawford-twitter-exec-w...
People work extra-hard in order to not be in that bottom 10% that is going to be cut.
I cannot speak for Japan as I know very little about their workaholic culture, but it seems more performative - just toil in the office after hours to look productive.
My adopted home of Singapore is a lot more developed than the US, and we don't even have unemployment benefits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we... tells me that in 2019 the US spent 18.7% of GDP on social welfare. That's behind the UK at 20.6%, and ahead of the Netherlands at 16.7% of GDP.
I don't know what the US is spending those 18.7% of GDP on, but I find it strange to believe that there would be no safety net at all given the huge level of spending. (Also keep in mind that GDP per capita is higher in the US than in the UK or the Netherlands. France tops Wikipedia's list with 31.2% of GDP spent on social welfare. Given French GDP per capita of ~40k USD that adds up to ~12k USD per person per year. For the US we get ~76k USD * 18.7% = ~14k USD. That's more than the French spent.)
Yet again, I suspect you think the US is more special than it actually is.
(Though the US might be unique in having the highest absolute social welfare spending per capita. Not sure. I guess some of the petro states of the Middle East or perhaps Luxembourg might give God's Own Country a run for her money there?)
He is simply stunned by the firing of the entire team. Everybody in the entire charging industry is just getting bounces when trying to email their contacts about the hundreds of contracted Supercharger installations in the works. Think about all the external contractors working on maintenance of existing stations, also no way to contact Tesla.
Here is an article claiming that Tesla may be looking to rehire some of the fired team. [1]
Firing the exec who won't listen to the CEO? Sure, that's business. Firing the entire team as some kind of punishment? That's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
[0] https://youtu.be/iVaViiX0xZY
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-may-rehire-some-laid-o...
On the more rest of their offer, there is heavy concurrence, both from US actors and chinese.
Teslas don't sell as well as they used to in Europe either, in part due to Musk himself rather than any issue with the product (and of course chinese and european automaker competition).
Not sure how Tesla's labor conflict is going in Sweden, but last I heard it was not going in Tesla's favor.
I thought the consensus was that it only has a shitty reputation amongst non-owners.
I don't get the appeal myself but owners seem to love them pretty genuinely
Unfortunately for Tesla non-owners are the potential buyers.
It's definitely going in Tesla's favour. They've found work-arounds for most of the barriers the unions have thrown up and signed deals with various small non-union shops for a lot of what their union workers used to do. Now it's basically just a war of attrition where it comes down to if Tesla can live with the inconveniences longer than the union can keep their workers on strike, and by all accounts it looks like the union is blinking first. In fact several of the striking workers have apparently left the union and gone back to work, and the union just the other day allowed some of their striking workers to go back to work at Tesla without getting any concessions from Tesla.
It turns out that simply refusing to engage with the union at any level and on any points, and making it clear that you literally never will, is a surprisingly effective strategy.
Only because they don't play by the Swedish cooperation model. If they are smart they try to force a change of law and Tesla can go pound sand.
Their competitors all have between $100B and $250B worth of debt.
As per the success statement, is it that only the rich should be allowed to speak, in your opinion? Where did you grow up? In the middle age?
"""NASA’s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg.""" - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093 (Publication Date, July 8, 2018)
The current price on their website is slightly more for slightly less, $67 million for a 22,000 kg on a Falcon 9[0], and doesn't list the Falcon Heavy; the older archive.org version of the same page says the Heavy costs $97 million for 63,800 kg to LEO, which is $1520/kg, which is (to a rounding error) the number used by other reporters[2][3].
[0] https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220322170331/https://www.space...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/aerospace-and-defense/ou...
I think of them as low-end cars that just happen to require pre-paying for 80% of their lifetime fuel cost because batteries are expensive and electricity is cheap, and by that metric they're not bad.
Not premium either, but not bad-bad.
I like this conception. I tell people the 3 is a gokart with an iPad and cup holders (ie. the value is in the drivetrain and handling, not the interior).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19361712
[1] https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2008/12/tesla-death-watch-...
Elon himself negatively contributes to this with his words, promises, and actions. He doesn't do himself or his companies any favors there.
I also feel that Elon's handling of Twitter may be used as an idea of what he might do to Tesla with regards to ruthless layoffs and stiffing employees on severance etc. I recall that he also enforced a live-at-work requirement, effectively.
He models everyone after his image of himself. Maybe he should include the deliriums as well.
Tesla firing 10k factory workers and now the charging unit tells me they might be making a major retreat away from manufacturing.
Tesla (being forced in) opening their Supercharging network will resolve the second problem.
Tesla is, unfortunately, still the market leader for partial autonomous driving. But I see that changing within the next five years.
I've driven many EVs. With the way things are going, our next vehicles will not be Teslas.
You can only sell so many cars by selling to the top 20% of the market.
Are you comparing market capitalisation? That's a bad metric in this case.
You need to compare enterprise value. Market capitalisation changes when a company moves its financing around between issuing bonds vs issuing stocks, even though the 'real' size and importance of the company doesn't change at all.
Enterprise value adds up all the equity and all the outstanding bonds (but removes all the cash that's just lying around) to give you a number that's relatively independent of capital structure.
The established car manufacturers likely use more debt on their balance sheets.
I wonder where they are at now?