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Comment by Bhilai | Hacker News Reader

From what I have heard from friends at Tesla, 40 hours is literally the minimum. A particular friend told me that they put 60-70 hours easily every week and so do their teammates.

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But they get to build cars! Very expensive cars! That fundamentally alter which limited resource we start wars over!

>That fundamentally alter which limited resource we start wars over!

Sodium?

https://www.unige.ch/communication/communiques/en/2022/un-no...

It's getting very tiresome to see big oil/right wing talking points repeated on HN constantly. You can go read the Tesla impact report here: https://www.tesla.com/impact and see that they're doing their best to eliminate conflict minerals in their battery chemistry.

I mean, you can also hit up the Shell website and read all about how good they are for the environment, driving the transition to clean energy etc.

I know you're taking the piss but I worked for a Shell subsidiary for 2 years very recently and they actually take all the "green" stuff very seriously despite the fact their core business accounts for 2% of global co2 emissions. It's very bizarre and much of the internal "greenwashing" dialog reads like a catholic confessional.

With that out of the way there is a difference between corporate PR greenwashing and literally changing battery chemistries to not contain as many rare earth minerals.

It's the same at SpaceX. Everyone I know who has worked there said the pay sucks and the hours are long and the only reason to do it is a passion for the industry.

Musk seems to be modeling his companies on the video gaming industry.

I wouldn't say it's the industry, but the mission. You can earn more and work less at practically any other major aerospace company, and also get hired more easily. But instead of working on a goal of getting humans living on Mars, you're working on a goal of maximizing quarterly gains for shareholders.

You're still maximizing value for shareholders, it's just wrapped in baloney about a Mars mission.

As a European i am astonished that this is even legal, especially in factories where dangerous machines are in every corner.

The same culture that embraces this is the same culture that will take risks to start a new electric automobile company. It's give and take. If the workers at the factory are hourly they're also being paid overtime to do this work. My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime. Safety incidents happen because that's just life, but most issues are attributable to drugs/alcohol, and people being scumbags.

Instead of banning something, I think we need to make sure we're allowing people to seek employment options that work best for them with sensible safety practices of course. Being able to work overtime, for example, afforded my parents a great life and a reasonable "retirement" age. You might say, well they could get paid more and join a union, etc. and while I don't care too much about unions one way or another, Honda employees routinely reject unionization because they're really happy with their employment arrangement. I bet Tesla is similar.

Speaking for Honda, many people go straight from high school to work on the factory floor. They work overtime, and they have to do a good job, but if you go and ask the employees or the town of Marysville everyone is pretty happy with the arrangement. Again, I'm not sure why Tesla would be dissimilar except that it's popular so it makes the headlines.

In the case of office workers, software engineers, or others who are salaried, well they're professionals and they're paid a lot of money.

The first reaction to seeing something like "xyz is happening at Tesla" shouldn't be to ban something that you don't understand.

I was not talking about tesla, i was talking about working 60 hours in a risky environment, but hey why not work 120? Or better, sleep in the factory eat there and pay for it?

>My parents worked at Honda in Ohio and often worked more than 40 hours/week because they would get paid overtime.

Yes that's normal, sometimes you have to do overtime, but 60 hours at a regular basis is something else.

You’re now accidentally describing the Shanghai factory

"accidentally" ;)

This general attitude is why Europe has barely produced any great new companies in decades.

HSBC, Airbus, Deutsche Telekom, AXA, Shell, Nestle, Barclays, Metro, L'Oreal, BP, Michelin, AstraZeneca, Air France, Christian Dior, Philips, Anheuser-Busch, Vodafone, Lufthansa, Volkswagen, Siemens, Allianz, Bosch, Unilever, Maersk, Renault, Saint-Gobain, Bayer, Nokia, Ericsson, BT Group, Accenture, Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH

You do realize that by including companies from the 19th and early 20th century, you're agreeing with him?

They are all older then a decade (some more then 100 years), he's not wrong that europe has massive problems making "big new company's", however the conclusion that it has something todo with the ~absence of exploitation is probably wrong ;)

Europes business landscape is distinctively different. In Europe you have many small global champions (mostly specialized in something that only they can produce well) and only few Mega-Corporations compared to US or Asia.

I think this is a better diversification than concentrating all GDP into a few big player.

"but europe didn't make facebook!"

> Madrigal Elektromotoren GmbH

Wait, isn't this a fictitious company from breaking bad?

Yeah I thought someone would get this (the only fake company on here).

Accenture came out of American firm Arthur Andersen which went bankrupt because of its involvement with Enron. It was incorporated in Bermuda, then moved to Ireland about 10 years later.

How many of those were founded in the last few decades?

Also, not really sure how state sponsored airlines and telecoms are a great counterargument to Europe's failure to innovate.

Disagree with that statement but I get the sentiment.

Look at Asia and how many new companies they produced despite overworking themselves to death.

The problem with Europe is not mainly this but that we truly do not have a common market.

We cant pool resources and talents into one place and launch a pan-european project. Europe is still countries actively engaging in competition among themselves.

FLSA exemptions are great! And if an employee is not exempt you can just misclassify them, they probably have no way to know they're not exempt, and if they complain you can completely coincidentally not-at-all-in-retaliation fire them because at-will employment bebe.

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