It is illegal for “ride shares” to provide medical transport. The fact that an on-site physician would not call medical transport and put patients with crush hands/severed fingers in a ride share is per se illegal.
Next we will hear the “SV disruption cult” begin making their claim that those regulations only exist because the EMT lobby industry is spending billions for legislation to protect the market incumbent. Well don’t forget your extra $150 Uber cleaning fee for bleeding all over your drivers car.
This is impressive how far the US has normalised the concept that health is primarily a financial decision. Especially in the HN bubble that consists mostly of wealthy individuals.
Now depending on the issue it is faster to drive/be driven from where I work so an ambulance is often not that useful. For example a while back a coworker ate a tamale off the food truck only to find out that it contained peanuts. After noticing the reaction the owner took him to the ER personally (Coworker used his epipen as soon as it was known he needed it.) It is ~8 mins by car and at best an ambulance would have been 6 here and 6 back for an arrival time of 12 minutes. Now had they not been breathing they probably could have gotten a fire truck here in 2-3 mins to administer some epinephrine but they would still have had to wait the same 12 minutes to make it to the hospital because the fire truck EMT's can only do on site treatment.
So unless it is extremely dire taking a coworker to the hospital can be faster than an ambulance. That said a crushed hand or cut off finger? That is one of those where seconds matter and the fire truck/ambulance combo would be used.
I just skipped through the comments, and the fact that hardly anybody points out the fact that an employer should care for his employees and follow all applicable regulations is mind boggling.
But it could also point to a general issue regarding SV and SV-style disruption. Build a business around ignoring existing regulations, because of disruption.
This is in no way a defense of Tesla's on-site medical facility's policy of not calling 911 without authorization, but the location of Tesla (U.S.A) is not somehow responsible for draconian policies, nor is it fair to assume that if Tesla operated in the EU, such policies wouldn't exist.
FYI - from the way the article paints it, Tesla's policies are in clear violation of U.S. law.
My insurance for an ER visit would be roughly $4500 right when I walked in, or they wouldn't cover anything. Every time after that though would be $300 until next year when I'd have to pay $4500 again.
Human life isn't worth anything if the people can't use legal means to protect themselves.
For these US citizens (SV elite), healthcare is akin to a status symbol or a luxury that only rich people or people bestowed by the rich (think: employment) should be able to attain.
And then look at how much hatred there was when Obama tried to implement the Heritage Foundations plan, which was done by Mitt Romney in Massuchusetts. Republican, btw.
These people really don't care about the "rest of us". That's why Trump was elected. He showed he had the similar hatred and focused it. Don't get me wrong- he's done horrible for the US... But that's why.
EDIT: I would love to hear a description why I'm wrong. I've lived through the creation of Obamacare, my diabetes T2 diagnosis under it, and now the structured destruction of it, along with trying to eliminate 'preexisting conditions' exception. In short, if they get their way, I'll be dead sooner. Like 10 years sooner. Lack of health care + diabetes = death sentence.
But in the end, having us "dead weights" dying isn't a bad thing when you boil us down to $$$.
Really? A couple years ago I brought my buddy to the hospital in an Uber and he was pretty close to dying, nobody at the hospital seemed to have any issues with it. I later emailed Uber to praise the driver and they thanked me for the writeup of what happened and said they distributed it on their internal listserv. Definitely did not feel like anything illegal was happening throughout process.
In your role as on-site physician for a corporation?
this might be because they had more important things to attend to, like your dying friend.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/when-should-you-uber-to-the-hospital-and-when-should-you-call-an-ambulance.html
https://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/news/20170515/uber-lyft-er-trips#1
https://www.rewire.org/living/uber-emergency-room/Whether that should have been used in the cases described in the attached article is a reasonable debate. I'm more confident in the people on the ground making this choice than the news reporter.
Medical practitioners, however, cannot send someone in a cab. It's a huge liability issue for them. If someone is injured and needs medical transport, they need to use proper medical transport. This is what Tesla is accused of violating. Their on-site nurses are licensed medical professionals. It's worlds different from random person taking a cab to a hospital.
Tell that to the California Department of Heath Care Services...and the 49 other states who have similar regulations and regulatory agencies in place.
Lyft/Uber giving rides to people in no way means or suggests those rides are legal. And there is a differnce between non-emergency transportation and emergency transportation...but it is all highly regulated. Still doctors and drivers should both know these laws that affect them directly. If a doctor is dumb enough to put an employee with a workplace injury in a rideshare, the onus is on the driver to deny the ride and tell the rider they are licensed/insured to take a patient to the ER and they should call 911...that doesn’t happen because ride share drivers are not professional drivers who actually know the laws that regulate them.
I think you mean the "private EMS lobby". Individual EMTs are equally opposed to most of the legislation being pushed by big EMS companies (notably Prop 11, being voted on today, which is an attempt by AMR to avoid having to comply with meal break rules)
Usually, when employees in an industry oppose an initiative, they actually file opposition to it; Prop. 11 was unusual in having no opposing argument filed, which usually only happens with non-controversial proposals.
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/workers-compensatio...
you need to add professional cleaning cost and lost revenue while cleaning to the bill.
and not just professional cleaning... the injured person could've a serious illness (think HIV), so it will probably cost even more
i'd wager you'll need at least twice that amount
I counseled Will on the difference between subjective complaints of pain, which cannot be proven and are often magnified, and objective signs found only on careful clinical examination by an experienced physician. I even mailed Will a copy of a relevant chapter from the American Medical Association Return to Work Guidelines and offered to make myself available for additional questions. Research and evidence-based medicine indicate that deconditioning injuries involving sore muscles should not be treated with inactivity as this only exacerbates the problem, but should instead be treated by proactive conditioning, ergonomic modifications and supportive care. Not all patients in pain should be off work, at home and on opioids. In fact, it is most often in these patients’ best interest to have supportive care that enhances their activity, their function, and their well-being.
As a physician, my foremost obligation is to perform a careful history and physical examination, order additional tests when clinically indicated, make an accurate diagnosis, and deliver the absolute best care possible. If patients are injured and continued work presents safety issues for the patient, myself and my fellow physicians prescribe the appropriate work restrictions. Any suggestion that myself or any of my medical team at AOC allow external factors to influence our medical care in any way is false and inaccurate.
I advised Will on why ambulances should be reserved for life or limb threatening injuries and that every ambulance that is thoughtlessly called for a non-life-threatening injury is one less ambulance that is available to actually save a life rather than be used as a convenience. Most importantly, all members of my team are empowered to call 911 for any limb or life-threatening condition.
Rather than deliver an informative and balanced piece of journalism, Reveal has instead chosen to hitch its wagon to Ms. Anna Watson, a provider with whom we severed ties after less than two weeks at our clinic and about whom I cannot provide any additional comment as she is currently the subject of an investigation by the California Medical Board. Instead of highlighting the tremendous progress being made in both patient safety and patient care at Tesla, this report uses poor sourcing to tell a story consistent with a predetermined agenda.”
26 PM_ME_UR_Definitions • 1h Maybe you don't believe this guy? Maybe you think he's a genius? It doesn't really matter, leaving out this kind of information from someone you interviewed is the definition of bias. The reporter was filtering out information not because it's inaccurate, but because it didn't fit with the narrative they wanted to tell."
I guess in the US the incentive of the hospital is just to bill you as much as possible so it makes things different. In many places the incentives of the hospital are just to keep you in good health and do not overspend their budget ...
then again one time I helped an old lady when she biked home drunk, fell over and got a concussion and they sent an ambulance.
However in my experience the incentive of the hospital in the U.S is to bill you as much as possible.
There are enough ambulances to cover legitimate needs. Why then waste money by using ambulances to transport people who would be just fine in a Lyft? That money could be better spent on actual patient care. No matter how much money you're willing to spend on healthcare, using it efficiently is always better than wasting it.
> what kind of ambulances should be used should be up to medical professionals, not yourself
Having medical professionals decide whether an ambulance is appropriate, instead of patients, is one of the main things the article is slamming Tesla for doing.
No, this is kind of a naive position.
The OP's comment is to a great extent valid.
Ambulances and their staff are extremely expensive.
Do you think in Brazil, France or Japan money just grows on trees and you can just magically buy more stuff?
Medical systems the world over are failing under understaffing and over demand - and a considerable amount of the demand is small stuff.
There are many people in socialized systems who go to the clinic/hospital with great frequency - any old thing: see the doctor. It's hugely, hugely expensive. In some cases it's merited, and I understand it's a moral dilemma because often you don't know if something is serious ...
But Emergency care in particular is bonkers expensive, even by cost not profit ... and there's no getting around it.
If people need to call an Ambulance, then get one.
But if you don't need one, get in a car and go or have someone drive you.
It doesn't matter what 'system' it's in because everything associated with 'Emerg' is very costly to the system, and it will always be a very scarce resource.
I wouldn't let anyone at my company decide for me though - if I needed one I would call.
Tesla might need a union.
Horrible cost on the first glance, but if you actually talk to doctors (my fiancee is one), you realize most of the system is under constant overload. If they have emergency call, it can be (and often is) something trivial, when taking a cab for 5% of the costs would be more appropriate. But you have tons of crazy people (not crazy enough to be in asylum, but enough to wreak havoc on everything and everybody around them) and hypochondriacs. Polytoxicomans that effectively can't be helped.
We're not talking about a drive by a specific vehicle, but locking of 2 highly trained professionals that can't be used for any other emergency, with vehicle full of life-saving equipment. Which can easily mean another ambulance has to come from afar if needed, which can be fatal/debilitating in number of cases.
So its not about US as much, its about making system effective, because resources (people, equipment, ambulances) are scarce and you need to prioritize, or people will die. These things can and should be improved, but until they are, doctors and everybody else need to work with what they have.
The US has no problem with ambulance quantities, but why take an expensive taxi ride?
Even if it was 'free', its not really free.
I completely agree that the US medical system is corrupt, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s
But you have seemingly no understanding of how insurance works or how deductibles work.
There’s a lot of downsides to that when a true emergency isn’t happening.
But then we'd have to (melodramatic pause) raise taxes!
(Audience faints en masse)
Amazing.
And in the wealthiest country in human history, that staffing cost is also the highest in human history.
I’m not totally sure why it’s created such a huge disagreement. Obviously there are some injuries which totally don’t need an ambulance, and some which do, and then a big grey space in the middle where it’s harder to tell. Unfortunately, in some places (like here in the UK), there aren’t the resources to err on the side of caution as much as in other places (by the sounds of some commenters). Being able to have an ambulance arrive within 10 minutes for any situation sounds like a wonderful luxury if you have infinite resources to burn. I personally was impressed they dispatched an ambulance when we delivered our baby at home (on the bedroom floor!). But I also felt a bit like it was a resource that might have been wasted.
There is only one claim, ie. "Ambulance when required". The point of contention is who decides what required means.
Tesla has a perverse cost saving incentive to recommend the cheaper option. The person in shock is no position to make a rational decision. It is medical practitioner's responsibility to put his practice before his employer and decide what is a medically appropriate response. The emergency service has an incentive to be deployed regardless of severity.
The comments section in general, agrees that a severed finger and crushed hand are sufficiently severe injuries to warrant an ambulance.
It seems pretty.obvious to me that lay-managers and CEOs should not be the ones deciding emergency policy. That is what trained practitioners are for and the expectation is that they will hold the org to a certain regulatory safety standard.
I remember the “funny” story of the guy who accidentaly stabbed himself in the chest with a nail gun and drove to the hospital thinking “that’s a pretty f*cked up day”
It makes for a nice tale, but those people are real, and for every drama queen going to ER for a papercut there is people in serious condition waiting for a Lyft that decides to drive a better client first or stays stuck in the trafic.
Ambulance drivers are customed to drive fast and ignore any red light; they have accidents also. To expose yourself to an increase in the probability of having a car crash because you had a minor injury, or one that is stable and can not really benefit of the specialised services provided by the ambulance, is stupid. Each case is different and must be treated individually.
Lol what? It's the job of the state to provide adequate resources (for example, the law in Germany requires that emergency personnel be at your location in 10min tops, on average). Telling people to use an Uber/Lyft/cab due to cost concerns or not enough ambulances being available is bad. Demand proper emergency services funding from your politicians!
Obviously: when all you got is a small cut on your finger, fine, take public transport or whatever. But for a back injury?! No way in hell I'd risk my chance in public transport or taxi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_medical_services_in_...
Isn't it the same with ER? People are severely discouraged from using ER for any concern that doesn't require an immediate action. ERs, like ambulances, are services whose time and resources need to be highly available for those who really need them.
If you as a patient drive yourself to an outpatient cardiology office to get some diagnostics and feel perfectly found but severe blockage is found, the staff will call an ambulance and have you transported to the nearest ED. Even if you are asymptomatic. Fun fact: this will also happen if the ED is within walking distance. There have been cases where an MA was wheeling a seeminly OK patient from a cardiology office to the ED and the patient collapsed in the hallway. That's why it's against protocol.
Yes ambulances are insanely expensive (that's another problem). But availability issues are handled by the 911 dispatcher.
Actually the Lyft is the stupidest idea here, you combine the disadvantages of ambulances with those of personal transport, with none of the pluses
“I spent nearly one hour with Reveal detailing Tesla’s decision earlier this year to bring me and my medical team on site at Fremont, providing its employees with state-of-the-art occupational and musculoskeletal health care. I detailed our vision for exemplary patient care and I gave specific examples of protocol improvements and subsequent successes in outcomes in only four short months, including accurate diagnoses and reducing needless delays for advanced testing and treatment. I patiently educated Will Evans on how Tesla allowed me to give the same care to Tesla employees that I do to my private patients including ones who are professional athletes, with the ability to get necessary testing and treatment in a timely manner without being hindered by an often cumbersome California Worker’s Compensation System that sometimes negatively effects injured workers.
I counseled Will on the difference between subjective complaints of pain, which cannot be proven and are often magnified, and objective signs found only on careful clinical examination by an experienced physician. I even mailed Will a copy of a relevant chapter from the American Medical Association Return to Work Guidelines and offered to make myself available for additional questions. Research and evidence-based medicine indicate that deconditioning injuries involving sore muscles should not be treated with inactivity as this only exacerbates the problem, but should instead be treated by proactive conditioning, ergonomic modifications and supportive care. Not all patients in pain should be off work, at home and on opioids. In fact, it is most often in these patients’ best interest to have supportive care that enhances their activity, their function, and their well-being.
As a physician, my foremost obligation is to perform a careful history and physical examination, order additional tests when clinically indicated, make an accurate diagnosis, and deliver the absolute best care possible. If patients are injured and continued work presents safety issues for the patient, myself and my fellow physicians prescribe the appropriate work restrictions. Any suggestion that myself or any of my medical team at AOC allow external factors to influence our medical care in any way is false and inaccurate.
I advised Will on why ambulances should be reserved for life or limb threatening injuries and that every ambulance that is thoughtlessly called for a non-life-threatening injury is one less ambulance that is available to actually save a life rather than be used as a convenience. Most importantly, all members of my team are empowered to call 911 for any limb or life-threatening condition.
Rather than deliver an informative and balanced piece of journalism, Reveal has instead chosen to hitch its wagon to Ms. Anna Watson, a provider with whom we severed ties after less than two weeks at our clinic and about whom I cannot provide any additional comment as she is currently the subject of an investigation by the California Medical Board. Instead of highlighting the tremendous progress being made in both patient safety and patient care at Tesla, this report uses poor sourcing to tell a story consistent with a predetermined agenda.”
On the other hand we have Anna Watson, a medical professional which was fired by said owner after raising concerns about their disregard for the patients' well-being. She's making very serious allegations and is risking a lot by blowing the whistle...
We have several (ex)-employees coming forward and claiming that their injuries were allegedly downplayed. There's no fucking way that one should take a Lyft to the hospital if they can't walk, sit or stand straight -> this indicates a potential spinal injury. Same goes for mangled hands. And yeah, even for amputated fingertips, the person is probably under shock!
And as always temps are getting screwed. They were allegedly turned away when requesting medical care.
There's even more criticism from anonymous employees, including medical assistants.
This smells to me like typical corporate bullshit, whatever the corporate doc says.
Disclaimer: I work for a Tesla competitor. Usually I try to stay away from this topic, but corporate callousness makes me angry. I don't care if Tesla suceeds or not, but they should treat their employees properly and obey the law.
Edit: there's obviously downvote brigading taking place on this topic. I've posted several relevant pieces of information, which according to the site rules should not be downvoted.
No, it is Basil Besh who is the medical professional. Anna Watson is a physician assistant. Basil Besh is a doctor. Part of having your doctor's license is being subject to an oversight board of your peers. As a patient you can complain to this board and if the doctor cannot prove that he has provided adequate care, he can lose his very expensive livelihood.
They key here is that he has to justify himself to his peers, ie doctors who would look at the patient records and his notes and judge whether he provided a standard of care by calling or not calling an ambulance, etc. Randos on the internet speculating about patients they know nothing about is PR, not medicine.
The way you will know whether this story is real or another one of the endless Telsa hate pieces is that this guy will lose his license if it is real.
If a patient has a pain in his foot, but the doctor cannot understand the pain, then, according to Basil Besh, the patient doesn't have a pain in his foot.
This seems to advocate minimizing the importance of the patient's reporting of pain. Patients are experts in how they feel, and while they may not always be accurate, what a patient tells his doctor, should be fundamental in diagnosis & treatment.
Sorry, where does he say this or are you misunderstanding and making an huge assumption that the doctor's objective examination wouldn't include ultrasound, x-ray, and/or MRI diagnostics - which would all be part of determining objective cause? For example, if pain exists in an area - say in the feet - even if there's nothing visibly broken, fractured, or torn, an inflammatory process (which causes pain in itself) will show up as extra fluid in areas where there shouldn't be fluid noticeable.
He identified a problem with my wife's thumb that was causing pain for years. He root caused it and put a plan in place in our first meeting. He was excellent, professional, fast, and very reasonable.
What a load of absolute garbage. Shame. There are plenty, PLENTY of ambulances to go around. This isn't some wartime situation where medical care should only go to those about to die.
A few years back my wife had a back injury that prevented her from walking. We called an ambulance, and it was the best decision both according to her (who couldn't move) the ambulance paramedics, and the doctors at the hospital. Her injuries WERE NOT LIFE THREATENING, but she still required an ambulance to transport her without further injuring her back and potentially causing paralysis. Again, not life threatening, just paralysis - no big deal right?
Basil Besh should step down from whatever position they hold.
Most workplace injuries are not emergencies. Even the example given of a broken hand is not an injury that is helped by an ambulance ride, if anything you are delaying treatment by calling 911 and waiting for an ambulance to be dispatched for a very low priority injury. Most companies have a policy of calling 911 only to avoid liability -- they care more able getting sued for the result of a car accident on the way to the hospital than the employee. In this case Tesla has medical personnel on site who can make subjective judgements and do so with their license at risk.
The other thing being missed is once you're admitted to the hospital for a workplace injury, you're stuck in the Worker's Compensation system and end up in a kafka circle of bureaucracy where as an employee you end up wasting alot of time and potentially alot of money as the insurance companies, independent doctors, etc all fight over pennies.
As far as "there are PLENTY of ambulances to go around" that often is not true, especially when you're talking about a big workplace like a factory where getting in and out will take a long time. My brother is a fireman paramedic who gets bullshit ALS calls all of the time. It's really frustrating when September comes and people in car accidents or serious injuries are left waiting because some panicked coed calls 911 for a passed out drunk friend who is "dying, I don't think she's breathing" every Friday.
I'm no Tesla fanboy, if you look at my comments I'm often harshly critical of them. But IMO this is an article on a boring topic that nobody understands that is ginned up and novel because we're talking about Tesla.
Your anger seems grossly misplaced and based on a deliberate misreading or uncharitable reading.
And your response is some anecdotal story about calling an ambulance when it wasn't really needed?
Do you think ambulances (and trained medical professionals to staff them) come in plentiful supply?
Do you know that many people die every year waiting for an ambulance and due to ambulance non-availability all around the world?
“It’s shocking how close or how often the ambulance level
gets to ‘Level Zero’ or close to ‘Level Zero.’ What this
means is there are no ambulances left in the city,”
Joseph Ross told the committee.
https://globalnews.ca/news/3995973/hamilton-code-zero-ambula...
https://www.boston25news.com/news/someone-is-going-to-die-25...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/04/11/5230259...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/david-harvey-de...
https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/daily-dispatch/2018...
https://www.bmj.com/content/321/7270/1176.2
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/18/ambulance-cr...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/mar/31/ambulance-cr...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/17/alarm-sharp-...
>Basil Besh should step down from whatever position they hold.
Perhaps, but not because of an ignorant rant.
Note also that Basil mentions "life OR LIMB threatening" -- not just life threatening. And that can easily include risk of paralysis...
It's quite clear Basil would be calling an ambulance in your wife's situation - as there was significant risk in additional injury (the "limb" part of his statement) if not otherwise done.
Knowing medical professionals who actually work in the ED overuse of all emergency services - including ambulances - is embarrassingly common.
Do you have a citation/source/link for statement?
>“And when we told them, ‘No, we really want to do what’s best for you’ … it’s taking some time to get buy-in.”
How fortunate Tesla employees are to have somebody making the unpleasant decisions to save them from becoming heroin addicts!
Also, this sounds like something my grandparents would say about life in the USSR:
>“I have spoken again with (the workers’ compensation official) at Tesla and he informed that the forklift did not have electric current running. With that said, in my medical opinion, the patient does not have an industrial injury attributed to an electrical current,”
Reporters say Tesla is shitty. But reporters often lie and even more often exaggerate.
Musk says he cares about safety and all accusations are wrong. But CEOs often lie and even more often are uninformed or delusional.
If anyone has advice about how I can develop some trust in one side or the other, please let me know.
Gaining true knowledge about a situation is not possible without establishing a chain of trust. Whose reporting do you trust ? Each person in the chain needs to be evaluated individually and re-evaluated when new information comes to light.
Right now I rather trust what Tesla says when I hear horrendous claims like until proven otherwise. Especially since news media are not independent. They rely almost entirely on advertisement which is a direct relation to "most eyeballs moved away from other 'free' options", which is directly related to the impact of the headline.
And on the other side you have a guy who is stepping down as Tesla CEO after fraud charges, and who's being sued for losing his temper and calling some random cave-diver a paedophile, twice.
Personally I trust the news organisation more.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? Citations, studies showing reporters lie .. often?
And generally speaking, if it's to the point of multiple articles written on a subject, there's almost certainly a fair amount of truth there.
By the way, this also explains why prosecutors sometimes lie or exaggerate.
Furthermore, some reporters want to influence public opinion in a certain way because of their personal beliefs or peer pressure.
I do not claim any of this applies to Reveal. I just want to point out why money from views isn't the only mechanism for misleading reporting.
A really good news organization may create pressure against reporters overstepping the bounds in pursuit of a story. But IMO it takes an incredible effort to counteract the human tendency to bend the facts to help make a point.
Of course, CEOs have even more obvious reasons to mislead people: maintainging good corporate and personal image. This is compounded by the fear subordinates have in telling the CEO that they are wrong. Also, the more successful the person, the more likely they are to be a bit delusional by believing everything they do is right, and ignoring any criticism.
The regulators will insure that corrections take place if the company is really misidentifying, mistreating, and underreporting injuries.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/one-year-in-tesla-update
You don't pass a 4 month long safety inspection by California OSHA by making injured workers continue working.
"News organization" writes article about a company in California under reporting and hiding injuries, leading to a 4 month OSHA investigation that completely clears company of the accusation. Do they retract the accusation, write an article on why they made the previous accusations given we now know they were wrong?
No, they write a new article making new accusations about the company.
https://www.businessinsider.com/california-regulators-open-a...
The thing about inspections is that it's quite possible for a company to put on their best face during an inspection, only to resort to their unsafe practices after the inspection concludes. This is, for example, why restaurant inspections are conducted without notice.
The fact that Tesla has survived two inspections doesn't mean anything--companies are expected to pass inspection. However, the fact that they have had 3 inspections in a single year... That is a matter for concern, since CalOSHA generally doesn't inspect a workplace more than once every few years. If they felt that multiple inspections were warranted--especially a new one so soon after finishing a thorough, months-long inspection, that means they have serious concerns about Tesla's safety practices. Given the relative lack of issues pointed out so far by CalOSHA, it's likely that they don't trust management to adhere to safe practices or that they feel that Tesla is changing work practices while inspectors are present.
Or that Tesla's the most shorted stock in history and there's a lot of negative, probable propaganda, being created/distributed to impact the stock price.
It includes the fact that the statute of limitations had expired on many of the reported violations. As a result, state legislators ended up changing the window so that it wouldn't happen again in the future for similar reports.
But assessing fines is one thing -- it's not clear whether the statute of limitations restricts OSHA from considering these past injuries when scrutinizing Tesla's recordkeeping. Reveal certainly implies it does, and Tesla doesn't mention it. Neither Reveal nor Tesla links to the published investigation results. I think it's OK to assume that Tesla isn't going to be punished by OSHA (in this case; several more investigations are still ongoing. But I see no reason until OSHA says otherwise that its investigation "completely clears [Tesla] of the accusation." Only Tesla itself has asserted that, and well, Tesla has been creative in the past at interpreting results; NHTSA having to publicly clarify an Autopilot statistic that Elon Musk eagerly touted comes to mind [0].
Whatever the case, I don't agree with your interpretation of cause-and-effect -- i.e. "No, they write a new article making new accusations". Tesla's statement about OSHA came on Oct. 26 [1], just a little more than a week ago from the submitted article's publish date. While the article does have several confidential sources, it leads with a former employee making litigious claims. The lawyering for this story alone would've taken at least a week, nevermind the time it takes to find the sources and interview them, and to talk to Tesla and check the related sources and documentation. I wouldn't be surprised if this story was at least a couple months in the making, with the timing of its publication only coincidental with Tesla's recent statement.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-safety-statistic...
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-releases-workers-safety-upda...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/california-regulators-open-a...
When I see things voted up which are misleading, false, or ridiculous, my reaction is typically that of distrust and an expectation of manipulation. But my hope for humanity lies in believing that some posts are simply because the poster was mistaken.
@danso: Please consider this the follow up to our earlier discussion on the issue. [3]
[1] https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-left-injuries-off-t...
> Reveal had documented many other cases of injuries that Tesla had failed to record. But the agency had only about six months from the date of an injury to fine a company. By the time Cal/OSHA concluded its four-month investigation, the statute of limitations had run out.
Of course, it could both be the case that the time limit ran out and Tesla books happen to be fine. But if OSHA doesn’t consider the contrary examples reported on by Reveal, then it’s to be expected they won’t find Tesla at fault.
I’ve dreamt of buying a Tesla but I could not ethically rationalize that to myself if this article is true.
It also shows the problem of measuring companies by specific metrics. It sounds like good old “juking the stats” (the wire).
It gives the impression that things actually end up worse because of how injuries are measured.
>A Tesla recruiter called me, high pressure tried to get me to move to California, ending in- "So you don't want to do anything important with your life?"
>Elon's marketing team spam reddit and manip upvotes. This was my first wakeup call that we were being tricked
>That Tesla =/= getting to Mars in 2023.
>The Chevy Bolt was car of the year. Tesla's will be unreliable for ~10 years until they work out design related issues. (This is unavoidable for every new car company)
>The horrid conditions of employees, seems like we are taking a step back in employee conditions in favor of 'progress'.
>Manipulation of news, numbers, etc... make the company seem unethical.
I still have Elon as my wallpaper, with a motivation phrase telling me to "Get to work". But I've sobered up, he was a cult of personality.
* They track everything about the vehicles, including GPS. You have no privacy when driving in a Tesla.
* The cars have extensive DRM.
* Automatic remote updates that can, and sometimes do, brick the car.
I can't really reply to anything else you posted, there's reasonable counter-points to all of it. You shouldn't blindly trust any one source of course, and excitement/emotion for someone or an organization doing something good can prevent use from critical thinking. At the same time, it's important to understand what it means for a company to be the most shorted stock in history - and the amount of effort, and financial gain, that will come to people purposely trying to put down Tesla et al.
Good can come from this process if everyone involved is being reasonable. Is it good that someone who asked for an ambulance to go to the hospital, instead after an assessment by an onsite doctor, were said to take a Lyft? It clearly wasn't life threatening in that doctor's eyes to require the life-stabilizing ability/necessity of an ambulance - I suppose that person sharing their story might not be talking to us then today. Likewise, is the issue that Tesla is purposefully trying to avoid "an ambulance being called" to avoid a log in OSHA records? I doubt it, however this does highlight that the processes and requirements for OSHA likely need to be updated: so that if there are on-site doctors who do an assessment, then that also gets into the log. I imagine it's more likely an incomplete/inadequate process of reporting because how many work places have on-site doctors 24/7? Not very many I'm guessing.
Ubfortunately, people buy products produced by effectively torturing workers all the time.
That doesn't in any way justify what Tesla is doing of course. Just pointing out that this is "peanuts" compared to other products that people do not tend to boycott.
Wish there was a good solution. I try to buy fairtrade-marked goods when I can but the selection is limited as most people seem to not care.
For cars, there is no measurement or guarantee that other brands are better that is easily available to me, especially if you include Asian subcontractors / parts producers.
Also, this report was done by one of the most respectable investigative news organisations in the world. Its hard to see how the PR wing of a corporation that just settled with the SEC for fraud could be considered more trustworthy.
Print newspapers definitely had more editors proofing your copy. But even with a completely computerized publishing system, if I wanted to make a last minute change, I still had to go through at least 2 editors. At some point, making a fix requires, well, literally "stopping the presses". Having several editors in a well-defined editing workflow was a luxury that news orgs could afford decades ago, but it was also a necessary cost to prevent any reporter from making a costly "stop the presses" last minute fix. Digital-only news orgs don't face that consequence.
Not many people want to pay for badly informed opinions dressed up as journalism with cut & paste from other sites and Reuters.
Take the Economist vs. most other publications. An usual Economist article has 20 facts about the issue (e.g. elections in South Sudan) and at the end sometimes an opinion (notwithstanding the general thinking of the Economist). Opinion pieces are easily spotted ("Charlemagne"). Others take 20 facts and write 20 articles and add 10 opinions to each of them to get out more content.
Editors cost money. Text without proper editing is worse, but not bad enough to impact readership. Therefore, editors are not needed.
Ultimately, what you get is the worst possible product that can still be sold.
Although I hope the US adopts a more Nordic/German style union system which is less adversarial. I think the US system has sadly given unions a bad reputation.
You mean big corporations have spent millions of dollars and hours lobbying against unions and crushing any whiff of unionization by immediate termination of employment? All hail to your corporate overlords ...
It's a double-edged sword really, explotation of low cost labor allows you to innovate and be the technologically advanced society you are, but it also hurts those at the bottom who have no other choices/options.
Tesla obviously sucks at everything when it comes to workers. But recommending stretches can make things worse if it’s not clear what kind of back problem it is. In any case I think it’s all about liability and costs.
Never heard of it. Strike 1.
Ok.
How different is this from the policies of most auto factories? They are all incentivised to minimize the number of reported injuries.
But since osha found tesla was doing a good enough job after months of investigation, it's hard to trust this report. I searched google news for osha penalties and found issues about nail gun injuries, plumbing, a death of a worker at a winery, metal working, foundry, etc. So I don't see them as just letting tesla get a free ride.
Could it be that tesla meets the legal requirements but some injuries aren't well treated? I like tesla generally but I want to see them treat their workers well. I'd like to see a more mainstream media investigation further, like the ny times maybe.
With tesla there was also an incredible negative fud campaign about them, leading to many sensible financial journalists mystified that they didn't go out of business. So I am struggling to be neutral about this story.
https://twitter.com/PlainSite/status/1059875691263483904
According to the tender it used to get the Tesla engagement, one of Access Omnicare's explicit objectives was to reduce OSHA recordability: