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Comment by microdrum | Hacker News Reader

More and more I agree with this.

Google and Facebook are boring monopolists. It makes sense that we enjoy their failures.

But Tesla is a really amazing company. The media coverage makes more sense when you realize that most journalists are deeply unhappy people who are, internally, banging their heads against the wall as a result of never having learned any practical skills. They viscerally hate the idea of progress, because by definition they will not be part of progress. They much prefer that the world be stuck.

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> The media coverage makes more sense when you realize that most journalists are deeply unhappy people who are, internally, banging their heads against the wall as a result of never having learned any practical skills. They viscerally hate the idea of progress, because by definition they will not be part of progress. They much prefer that the world be stuck.

I think your overthinking this unless you have a trustworthy source; humans are just captivated by all drama related to the most successful. It's not that most people reading celebrity gossip know they will never have a successful long-term marriage and therefore buy magazines publishing the divorce of Brangelina.

Wait, what? If the world stayed the same, there wouldn't be anything novel to cover.

The survival of journalism is inherently motivated by a need to keep things changing, which is why most outlets by-and-large are either progressive or reactionary: it's change either way.

For a car journalist, “new and exciting” is a slightly different interior, or a fresh layout for the expected knobs on the dashboard. When you start doing stuff like removing the binnacle, taking away the gear shift, and switching to a completely new Power train, they can’t cope anymore.

They have a vocabulary of a few dozen superlatives, mostly related to internal combustion engines (turbo lag, musical exhaust, roar of a motor under load at full throttle, etc). None of that works anymore. They have to develop an entirely new vocabulary for the hums and whirs of an electric drive train with torque vectoring, full torque at 0 RPM, and no exhaust to modify for truly manly neighbour-waking noises,

Electric cars have totally emasculated automotive journalism.

Science journalists, of whom there are comparatively few, cover new things.

Most journalists cover vituperation, politics, and angst.

They take press releases from Nasa, rewrites them, publishes. Profit.

As long as they don't care that they are killing people, and will do so forever (with the current hardware), they are "amazing" in a different sense of the word.

And please spare me the "if they can lower the number of car fatalities overall, they have every right to actively kill a few people here and there" spiel.

> please spare me the "if they can lower the number of car fatalities overall, they have every right to actively kill a few people here and there" spiel

Why? Instead of telling people not to make arguments, please make an argument against it. It love to read a well written argument. Until I do, I'll pick less accidents of a different kind over more accidents of the usual kind.

Simple ethics.

If I have saved someone from drowning I still may not kill an enemy. Unsurprisingly the state will still imprison me.

Are you seriously arguing the opposite, under the guise of „just asking questions“?

I'm both asking a question and showing that I differ in opinion. There's no trying to hide it, it's pretty obvious.

Ethiscs is a personal thing, so it's hard to argue in. Your argument though, is not in resonable. Tesla isn't willingly and actively killing people, like you write in your example. It's selling a product, that when used inappropriately, might cause accidents. Meanwhile, when used appropriately, it's saved many lives.

The point isn‘t that some new technology leads to different failure modes. That‘s okay, and good if the total number of fatalities gets lower.

But that isn‘t the case with Tesla. Tesla tries to get away with inadequate hardware and misleading advertising (I‘d even call it outright lies if you show a video touting the ease of unattended autonomous driving, and deep down on the page you bury in small print that availability depends on the jurisdiction — meaning „nowhere“)

Tesla not only wants to make a lot of money, which means that getting adequate hardware is unattractive, they also need the „Elon as visionary“ nimbus, which also means they cannot concede that their initial estimate what they needed was simply wrong, and they seem to have money trouble on the horizon anyway.

That‘s what makes the company scummy.

Why do you think they don’t care that people have died using auto pilot? And who is honestly arguing that they have “every right to actively kill people”?

Because they don‘t change a damn thing. Not even the advertising that suggests that autonomous driving is here, now, and usable. And of course not their hardware package, because they promised existing customers that it would be sufficient.

For the stupid argument, see any Tesla accident thread on this site. There are always a few commenters who dismiss all accident analysis and blame by claiming that current car traffic is so dangerous, of course Tesla must be allowed to be sloppy and play with peoples‘ lives.

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