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Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

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Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I dislike Tesla because I think Autopilot causes preventable deaths.

Do you dislike drunk-drivers and phone-drivers with the same passion and focus? Do you expect them to gradually become better and better at driving through natural evolution?

I hate drunk drivers way more than I hate Tesla. That stuff never shows up on HN though, whereas Tesla is on the front page all the time.

Autopilot (and by extension Tesla) is also a lot more controversial than drunk driving, and by extension more interesting to discuss.

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans driving cars cause preventable deaths.

It’s not a monetised feature, though.

Driving a car is indeed a monetized feature of cars.

He's saying even if a self driving car is more dangerous than a human, a human driven car is still dangerous and we all accept that. So its not about whether the deaths were preventable. We accept human driven cars therefore we accept preventable death.

We're now forced to consider the fact that this is an argument about the fuzzy math of risk vs reward as we have crossed the threshold of preventable deaths long ago.

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#33
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I dislike Tesla because I think Autopilot causes preventable deaths.

Do you dislike drunk-drivers and phone-drivers with the same passion and focus? Do you expect them to gradually become better and better at driving through natural evolution?

No car company implies that drunk driver would be safer than myself behind the wheel, and I should let her drive instead.

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#34

Why do some many people hate Tesla and want them to fail? Do they also want SpaceX to fail? Elon can be an asshat sometimes, and he oversells and is over-optimistic. But even if the short sellers are right and Tesla will go bankrupt (which, btw, does not equal failure in many ways), why are so many people excited about that? Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a m…

Because they are involved in other car companies and they would lose something if Tesla beats the car companies they are involved with. For instance if you are a supplier and have super good relationships with Ford then you don't want Tesla to beat Ford. Who knows if you can have a similarly profitable and trustable relationship at Tesla.

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#35

Why do some many people hate Tesla and want them to fail? Do they also want SpaceX to fail? Elon can be an asshat sometimes, and he oversells and is over-optimistic. But even if the short sellers are right and Tesla will go bankrupt (which, btw, does not equal failure in many ways), why are so many people excited about that? Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a m…

Personally I dislike Tesla because I think Autopilot causes preventable deaths.

If we arrive at a working solution faster (i.e. something that prevents more deaths than it causes), it makes sense to speed up its development to get to that state faster.

The question remains if we accept a death by software bug (i.e. human software developer error) in the same way we accept a death by human driving error.

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#36

Why do some many people hate Tesla and want them to fail? Do they also want SpaceX to fail? Elon can be an asshat sometimes, and he oversells and is over-optimistic. But even if the short sellers are right and Tesla will go bankrupt (which, btw, does not equal failure in many ways), why are so many people excited about that? Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a m…

>Why do some many people hate Tesla and want them to fail?

It is nothing personal, it is business.

There is an entire financial industry that live out of making bubbles the general public can buy(and they can sell to, expensive) and out of popping bubbles through sorting(buying cheap).

When they pop bubbles, it means they can buy extremely cheap things that in normal circumstances their owners will never sell.

The same happens with war, George Soros, himself a jew, helped the natzis against the jews in WWII as an adolescent. It was a wonderful time for Soros, the best in his entire life, in his own words.

If you have a good house, you and your family live well you don't sell it undervalued. If they come after your family to kill them, you will be forced to seel it when lots of people sell(undervalued).

It also helps that the owners of newspapers like the Washington Post or the NYT are actually the financial elite. Those guys can actually create the public opinion they can profit from.

Today, having a free press is a luxury, probably has always been. Good information is not cheap. Like with Facebook, when you access cheap info most of the time it is subsidized by someone against the interest of the general public that consumes it.

If those guys can make a profit destroying Tesla they will. Nothing personal. They will move on to their next target.

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#37

Why do some many people hate Tesla and want them to fail? Do they also want SpaceX to fail? Elon can be an asshat sometimes, and he oversells and is over-optimistic. But even if the short sellers are right and Tesla will go bankrupt (which, btw, does not equal failure in many ways), why are so many people excited about that? Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a m…

>Why do some many people hate Tesla and want them to fail? It is nothing personal, it is business. There is an entire financial industry that live out of making bubbles the general public can buy(and they can sell to, expensive) and out of popping bubbles through sorting(buying cheap). When they pop bubbles, it means they can buy extremely cheap things that in normal circumstances their owners will never sell. The sa…

Can you provide a source on your comments about Soros? I've seen this mentioned a few times over the years but I had also heard that it was taken out of context or that he had misspoken and later retracted. Would like to see the primary source if you have it

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#38
You can't really blame people for looking out for themselves in the short run, but still I think it's a little weak to leave one of the biggest tech endeavours to do something else. Honestly, if I would work in a key role in Tesla I would rather take a demotion to non-C-level before I accept to leave that company.

And if you don't think just short term, it's also the biggest financial opportunity, even if Tesla loses. All the knowledge, connections etc that you can build in that time will pay off in the end. There is not a single company in that size where losing for the company necessarily also means a loss for its ambitious talent.

Think about how America and the Arabs hired the biggest Nazi talent after second world war. Even losing and being clearly labelled as the devil is not enough to stop talent from being successful. Always keep fighting!

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk’s hubris is annoying, but how many lives did he save by not waiting until the autopilot was “ready”? It is probably in the dozens at this point.

I'm not sure why you think that. While this is a very dense document, it details a lot about the fatality statistics around Teslas and Autopilot. The short version is that Teslas are actually not very safe cars (relatively speaking), and Autopilot is probably much more dangerous than manual driving (although Tesla won't release the data, so we don't know for sure). https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ESnyJ4b7m96O…

That's a list of all fatalities involving Teslas reported in the media, including ones caused by human Tesla drivers or the drivers of other vehicles involved in the collision, and speculation trying to associate that with a number of miles driven.

Then they have "miles per death" numbers in the 150M-240M range, but the US average is less than 100M per death (typically stated as the inverse, deaths per 100M miles[1]), so according to your data they're apparently better than average, though collecting it through media reports this way is questionable anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

I see a column for deaths attributed to autopilot, but it sums to 4 in the US, which is too small to be a good statistical sample even if we knew how many miles per death that was, but I don't see any data for miles driven on autopilot regardless.

Re: Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel stepping down

#40

Why do some many people hate Tesla and want them to fail? Do they also want SpaceX to fail? Elon can be an asshat sometimes, and he oversells and is over-optimistic. But even if the short sellers are right and Tesla will go bankrupt (which, btw, does not equal failure in many ways), why are so many people excited about that? Most tech giants of recent times have done things I would consider to have made the world a m…

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