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Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

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321–330 of 358 posts

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Valuing people more or less depending on what chromosomes they have or how the flesh they have under their clothes is formed is wrong and dehumanizing. People should be valued by what they do and make, not by how they are born and raised. This depends on context though, right? We all have our blind spots and our areas of unusual insight, and these are shaped partly by our life experience, which is shaped partly by…

No, you got things in reverse order. First, you make the determination that people should be assessed based on objective metrics. Second, you then try to correct (unconscious) bias with necessary metric-correcting, like gender balance. If you put gender balance as the underlying truth, and then to optimize your process to make it work, you will see various issues that eventually sabotage your goals.

I'm happy to reconsider my views, but from this comment alone I can't really tell how or why you disagree with me. I'll read a more detailed reply if you feel like leaving one.

edit: I see you wrote elsewhere in this thread that

> I see gender balance of a mechanism for approximating selecting the best talents.

My argument is that gender balance (and other kinds of demographic balance) can be valuable independently of its use as a proxy for unbiased hiring. I'm suggesting that, even if an unbiased hiring process would produce a skewed gender balance,[1] this might not be a good outcome, because a heavily male/heavily female group might suffer from shared biases or blind spots that would be smoothed out in a more balanced group.

[1] I hope treating this as a possibility isn't too controversial; I think there are plenty of ways it could happen, regardless of the existence of any innate differences. For example, even when sexism is the problem, it might be acting mostly at an earlier stage inaccessible to the company doing the hiring (e.g. social pressures on kids to do 'masculine'/'feminine' subjects).

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#322
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd still want to know his opinions. With great knowledge comes great power, and thus responsibility.

I think that Larry was so far only in Iron Man ( http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/mp/G9UGuzVE1g-l.jpg ), not in Spider-Man movies => so, sorry, he's most probably not carrying such a huge ethical burden :) Edit: I would be absolutely interested in hearing Larry's wished next steps, but I don't think that board members usually release statements (I think that they only "steer" the CEO, help "facilitating" whenever issu…

They do whatever the bylaws of the corp allow/require them to do, but yes, in general they are steering thr CxOs. And if we hear anything about what he says/does it'll be through Elon, I guess.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry Ellison is a visionary. Seems like all visionaries have been called liars by some. Steve Jobs is said to have had a “reality distortion field”. Elon Musk is a visionary. Are they all “liars” or do “visions” seem like stretching of the truth to us? Are visions simply extensions of the “truth”?

What did Larry envision, exactly?

He wanted to buy Apple just to be able to put Steve Jobs back in charge. He did not/could not buy it, but was given a board seat when Jobs was back. I remember him speaking very clearly at MacWorld about what Apple should do next.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#324
post #191

Fascinating. Kathleen Wilson-Thompson is a senior manager at a huge American company, still there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article about her.

Maybe use this opportunity to write one then, instead of passively-aggressively complaining? From your profile it looks like you could write both English and German language articles on her.

Maybe use this opportunity to not attack me?

My involvement with Wikipedia will be limited to the occasional spelling fix, for unfortunate experiences with the "community" there.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter which way you slice it, Tesla should not be claiming the hardware required is present if the hardware requirements are, at best, theoretical.

If it turns out the hardware is not good enough I would expect them to replace it with something that is once hardware requirements are known.

True. Tesla also claims to not really advertise.

Well, spinning hyperbole that fires up the clickbait is definitely effective advertising.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're absolute assholes during license audits and negotiations. They're one of only two companies to earn a spot on my "Never voluntarily do business with" list.

And the other?

The other is Verisign, but I am far less passionate and communicative about that one as it was a result of a singular (albeit terrifically bungled) incident, not an on-going and top-down strategy to be a dickish company.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#327
post #88

Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember Larry very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.” [0] Elon stretches the truth constantly. Should be a good fit. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-e…

> "Elon stretches the truth constantly." That's putting it gently. Putting aside his twitter spats, Tesla is still prominently advertising "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars" [0] even though their cars do not contain LIDAR, which essentially every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree is necessary to implement Level 5 self driving cars[1][2]. [0] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot [1] https://www.…

Isn't lidar super cheap now? Couldn't they retrofit it.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#328
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple started the path to normalizing this, and I believe it's core to being responsible for the entire user experience. Personally, I'm not a fan of this, but I understand the motives aside from profit. If a Tesla gets poor maintenance by an unskilled shop, when the vehicle crashes and kills the driver, Tesla gets the black eye and has to defend itself in the media and in front of the NHTSA. Tesla's stock takes the…

> Apple started the path to normalizing this [citation needed]. As a consumer, I wasn't able to buy detailed service manuals for cars or TVs for long before I couldn't get one from Apple.

Not sure about TVs, but car manuals have been around for ages. This link (not previously known to me) looks to have ones from early and mid last century:

http://oldcarmanualproject.com

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#329
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, modern vehicles require a subscription to a website. Hypothetically, you could pay for the 2 day access and scrape the site for your vehicle. For older vehicles, you can normally find the fsm/workshop manual with some creative googling.

ok found it. https://techinfo.subaru.com I had no idea this existed. thanks.

> This site is optimized for Internet Explorer; we highly recommend using Internet Explorer version 11 or above for the best experience.

Ugh.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#330
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange…

The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem. There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear…

> Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented.

A more recent one, for future reference:

https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h...

;)

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