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

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

#341

Post by erikpukinskis »

starbeast wrote: post #65

Given Tesla's current issues with how they have been reported to treat their workforce, while Larry might be useful in terms of finance and contacts, I'm more interested in discovering what Kathleen is bringing to the table and what her attitudes to things like unions and employee rights in general might be. I suspect that could be at least as make or break as anything Larry might do here.

Yeah, she seems clearly brought in to help with the safety and legal issues with the workforce. Hopefully she can help actually fix the problems and not just manage and price the fallout.

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

#342

Post by dotancohen »

dmode wrote: post #230
dotancohen wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. I've lusted over the Model S for years, and the minute that they become available in my country I'll be the first in line. But, now that means doing business with a company owned by One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison? I wouldn't dare. The way his most well-known company treats its clients is so grotesque that I wouldn't even want to work at a company that uses its products. They are extremely…

Tesla is not “owned” by Larry Ellison. He is just one among many directors in the board, who have a limited set of responsibility to advocate for shareholders and provide corporate governance. They don’t really play major role in execution let alone ownership. Tesla is a public company and is owned by shareholders.

Yes, that was a mistake. Replace "owned" with "partially controlled".

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

#343

Post by obmelvin »

iEchoic wrote: post #293
darkpuma wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.…

> every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree [lidar] is necessary to implement Level 5 self driving cars As someone that doesn't know anything about self-driving cars, how can this be true? Humans can drive cars with only visual input. Why can't AI?

A good way IMO to think about it is by looking at airplanes. Birds fly by flapping their wings to generate thrust, but planes use turbines to generate thrust.

Just because humans use vision to drive, doesn't mean that we should restrict ourselves to vision for cars. Also, as another comment points out, our visual system does a lot more than just 'see' in the literal light/color processing sense that a camera does

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

#344

Post by erikpukinskis »

mbesto wrote: post #74
tsomctl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that this doesn't bode well for Tesla. My biggest complaint with Tesla is that they don't provide service manuals or have an open parts department for their vehicles. For comparison, pretty much every other major auto maker will sell you a book telling you how to fix anything on your vehicle, and will sell you the parts and special tools to do so. Not Tesla, and given what we know about Ellison, I very mu…

> Not Tesla, and given what we know about Ellison, I very much doubt he will encourage this to happen. No, but he might put some board level pressure to get more rigorous about profitability. I know that's a dirty word around here, but Tesla is not exactly well known for it's cashflow prowess. Those are the types of things board members do...not figure out whether service manuals come with the product.

What would you expect a normal timeframe for an automobile startup to exhibit cash flow prowess?

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

#345

Post by erikpukinskis »

Robotbeat wrote: post #337
Robotbeat wrote: post #145

Glad to hear Tesla is adding more women. I truly think women in leadership are a grossly underutilized resource. EDIT: Doubly so women of color. If anyone needs a different perspective, it’s Elon. I hope he listens.

Wow, huh, my comment was down-voted. My theory is that innate talent (if there is such a thing) is probably roughly evenly distributed among the sexes and races, so in fields which are dominated by white men, you're actually at an advantage if you manage to hire women and/or minorities as you are able to hire some of the very best humans effectively at an enormous discount (of course, if everyone did this, the discou…

I share your theory. Which points to a business opportunity creating diversity-friendly companies.

The trouble is, the world is still sexist and racist. So while you’d end up with a more capable workforce, your company would also be disadvantaged at every turn. Your sales people would be looked over by clients, your bizdev reps would be disrespected by partners, etc.

I think to exploit your insight profitably, you need to create an n-sided market of many companies all committed to diversity.

That opens you to other attacks, like how the Black Panthers were infiltrated by the CIA for trying to build a black separatist economy.

N-sided market problems are also really hard. Although I think this one can be solved with some clever software infrastructure. Once we start seeing some really capable “Ubers of Everything” these kinds of people plays become more feasible.

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

#346

Post by pdxww »

ethn wrote: post #316
pdxww wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple abstraction here: we put two high-quality monitors before our eyes and get all the data from them. Can we continue driving this way? Absolutely. This means that no matter how our eyes actually work, an array of RGB pixels is enough. I'd go further and say that a 64 x 64 grayscale camera at 10 fps is enough to drive a car. The real magic happens in the brain that reconstructs the 3D model and predicts what ha…

That is an analogy not an abstraction but if you had read the paper or the single quote I provided, you would know that even relatively simple eyes (such as those of the frogs which cannot see still objects) don't only process a distribution of light intensity and frequency. The eye measures other information that is lost by the camera including photon phase, arrival time, polarization, orbital angular momentum, line…

It's great that eyes can detect polarization and orbital momentum. My point is that none of that info is needed to drive a car.

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

#347

Post by Sniffnoy »

justinclift wrote: post #313
Sniffnoy wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, these are related. If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them. If they're not safe for others, lawsuits will follow. Bad for these are bad for shareholders too. But certain people will ignore this to their own detriment, and I expect Ellison to be one of them.

> If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them. The theory is good, but in practise it doesn't always work out that way. As an example, take IBM. In IT circles they're very well known - for ~10+ years now - as an incompetent organisation, with an aggressive sales force targeting high level (non-technical) execs. Their only real interest in being scoring short term sales wins, but their abili…

That argument seems to rely on the existence of a principal-agent problem that isn't present in the case of consumers buying cars, though.

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

#348

Post by Sniffnoy »

darkpuma wrote: post #273
Sniffnoy wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, these are related. If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them. If they're not safe for others, lawsuits will follow. Bad for these are bad for shareholders too. But certain people will ignore this to their own detriment, and I expect Ellison to be one of them.

That's assuming car buyers are rational actors, and assuming the courts are fair. I think both are poor assumptions. What if the car itself isn't faulty if operated according to the fine print, but the marketing material for the car suggests to drivers the car has capabilities that exceed reality? Could Tesla theoretically be sued into compliance? Sure, maybe. But would it actually happen? Would Tesla defend their re…

I'm not sure how much the fine print matters if it fails basic fit-for-purpose standards.

Regarding irrationality -- see e.g. this[0] Shamus Young post about the video game industry. IMO, this general sort of irrationality is everywhere. Businesses in general tend to be irrational because they're run by suits, whose primary motivation is not actually accumulating money for the business but rather prestige for themselves, which you get by doing business-y things, regardless of whether those actually make money. For all his reputed greed, that's how I actually expect Larry Ellison to act.

[0] https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=41924

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

#349

Post by belorn »

Robotbeat wrote: post #337
Robotbeat wrote: post #145

Glad to hear Tesla is adding more women. I truly think women in leadership are a grossly underutilized resource. EDIT: Doubly so women of color. If anyone needs a different perspective, it’s Elon. I hope he listens.

Wow, huh, my comment was down-voted. My theory is that innate talent (if there is such a thing) is probably roughly evenly distributed among the sexes and races, so in fields which are dominated by white men, you're actually at an advantage if you manage to hire women and/or minorities as you are able to hire some of the very best humans effectively at an enormous discount (of course, if everyone did this, the discou…

> probably roughly evenly distributed among the sexes and races

While some studies disagree, we can assume its true for the sake for discussion.

> so in fields which are dominated by white men, you're actually at an advantage if you manage to hire women and/or minorities as you are able to hire some of the very best humans effectively at an enormous discount

There is a logical error here. The assumption is that the missing non-white men in the evenly distributed population would not be working. Instead what we see in countries like Sweden is that people segregate, so you got the non-white men dominating some fields, and white men dominating other fields, and so forth. A field which is dominated by white men that want non-white men has to compete with fields that are dominated by non-white men. Similar, there is no discount to get white men into fields that are dominated by non-white men because they have to compete with fields that are dominated by white men.

> if everyone did this, the discount would disappear and we'd have meritocratic equality

Logical error #2. If everything was equal we would not see every field being exactly 50% men and women, with exact race distribution as proportional to the population. Randomness would still apply. Unless the population is infinitive you will get random variation.

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

#350

Post by [deleted] »

FireBeyond wrote: post #175
Retric wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devils advocate. RAM is the #1 cause if computers crashes largely because people think cheap or overclocked RAM is fine. Windows would have a vastly better reputation if it was always paired up with good hardware.

Most RAM in the world is produced by the same three(?) manufacturers. I'm not sure what Mac allows you to overclock RAM either... No. This is the same Apple who one year ago was charging $1200 for 48GB of memory.

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