Comment by mlacks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlacks | Hacker News Reader

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>We can debate the merits of this sense of corporate responsibility. The fact remains, though, that Musk's operation is not hampered by this galaxy of moving parts. By keeping many of these functions in-house, Tesla can innovate 24/7 and implement a new technology tomorrow, not in 2025.

There is a quote I'm fond of; to paraphrase: To go fast, go alone, to go far, go together.

I while I think that TSLA is doing a great job at innovation, it does seem to be leaving a lot of jobs in uncertainty.

On one hand, those people can be find new, innovative problems to solve now that (theoretically) the problem their job was working on is now solved.

On the other, most people in those positions aren't really in a position to find and pull resources to solve a new problem. Here in the US, there isn't much of a safety net to support them while they're just trying to put food on the table.

Love the progress of Tesla, but I think there needs to be a solution to the jobs that are going to be made obsolete by reducing the number of suppliers and jobs. Don't know if this is a policy issue or a market issue to solve.

The market doesn't care about suppliers and jobs going out of business (actually more cynically the market encourages efficiency, and useless suppliers are inefficient).

Sometimes places try to legislate make-work jobs into existence, using laws to create jobs where none are actually needed. There's famous a milton friedman anecdote:

> Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

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Other policies might protect the workers by providing baseline resources (UBI or services), or job retraining. There are all sorts of interesting discussions along these lines.

Similar things have happened in the past, so we do have some idea of the devastation it causes.

Throughout history this has been a recurring concern, ever since the dawn of the textile machines.

While the transition isn't always smooth, new industries always crop up. While driving may be going away, we're seeing many new 'content creation' jobs where people are paid through many platforms (social media, youtube, patreon) to make videos/content about a huge variety of subjects.

It’s a policy issue, no bones about it. Just need politicians with a backbone and an electorate that supports them to implement. We have neither currently.

As Churchill said, “You can count on Americans to do the right thing after exhausting all other options.”

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