AZ_IZ_OT posted:

media should publish celebrity death drug cocktails, how else am I going to figure out polypharm LD50s

Very carefully

cars posted:

elon musk is dating grimes now and grimes is walking around wearing a tesla T necklace lmao

noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat

While observers were preoccupied with its CEO's personal life, Tesla disclosed it has added its Fremont, Calif. factory to a pool of collateral backing its US asset-based revolving credit line from nine banks.
...

This might not improve the company's ability to borrow, either. The analysts wrote they “suspect that the Fremont collateral addition was demanded by the banks to enhance the borrowing base though not necessarily to expand the facility size”.

“In response to these considerable financial and operational challenges, the Tesla board has been unduly deferential toward Chairman and CEO Elon Musk,” Waizenegger writes. “Mr. Musk’s peripatetic focus -- he is also CEO of SpaceX, a proponent of the hyperloop, and apparently about to start a candy company -- is exacerbated, rather than contained, by a board most of whose members have family or non-Tesla ties to him, lack industry experience, and have no track record of effective independent board service at a public company.”

{...}

CtW was among the group of influential investors that pressed Tesla in April 2017 to add new directors who didn’t have ties to Elon Musk, citing concerns about the lack of independence on the board. The carmaker named longtime media executives James Murdoch, the son of News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch; and Linda Johnson Rice, chairman of Johnson Publishing Co.

Waizenegger listed scandals involving companies James Murdoch managed, including News Corp.’s phone-hacking episode and Twenty-First Century Fox’s sexual harassment lawsuits. Murdoch doesn’t appear to have any experience in manufacturing or engineering, Waizenegger writes.

“Given that the simultaneous appointment of Linda Johnson Rice added significant media experience to the board,” Waizenegger writes, “it is not clear why Tesla would need two directors with media but not automotive backgrounds.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/tesla-urged-to-raise-its-game-as-activist-seeks-board-shakeup

Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is said to have made two new hires as the electric carmaker continues to lose high-level executives amid a structural reorganization and a myriad of headwinds.

Musk will officially bring on two interns as “professional problem solvers” after they impressed him, as reported by auto news site Elektrek.

funny how in an introductory article or a retrospective bio, this story would be there to flatter musk, but in the middle of a public crisis at Tesla, the writers & editors are instead using it to low-key suggest he's lost his mind

Paper gains on Grab/Yandex deal propel Uber into quarterly "profitability" though company has always thought we should pay attention to EBITDA

— Eric Newcomer (@EricNewcomer) May 23, 2018

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/05/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-exists/ posted:

Following critical coverage of his electric car company, Tesla, Elon Musk has been on a Twitter tear against the media, threatening to build a service that would allow the general public to rank the trustworthiness and "core truth" of stories, journalists, publications, and editors.

Musk claimed to be toying with the name "Pravda," a reference to the state newspaper of Soviet Russia. The Paypal Mafia billionaire's invective against journalism - so in line with the current administration's tack that one of these salvos was retweeted by the president's dipshit son - may have seemed out of the blue, but Elon Musk's Pravda already exists. It has since October.

As spotted by tech writer Mark Harris, Pravda Corp was certified as a foreign corporation in the state of Delaware on October 18th of last year. Its officer is listed as Jared Birchall, who is also listed as the president (among other roles) of Neuralink, and the director of The Boring Company - both Musk ventures. Musk confirmed the filing to Gizmodo via Twitter DM, and claimed Pravda would move forward as "soon as I'm done working on the Model 3." He declined to confirm the involvement of any other individuals in the venture.

Of course, there's reason to doubt Pravda will ever materialise. Musk has taken to Twitter before with claims of launching a candy company, and Thud! (believed to be the name of a humour media company Musk hired former Onion staffers to create) has yet to produce anything.

Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider show that the company expects that as much as 40% of the raw materials used to produce batteries and driving units manufactured at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada need to be scrapped or reworked by employees before they are sent to Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, and assembled into Model 3s. The documents were dated in the first quarter.

That is to say, for every 2,500 battery packs and driving units that leave the Gigafactory, an additional 1,000 pieces of “nonconforming material” is created. Half of that will be reworked and put into other car parts. The other half becomes scrap.

Tesla has spent almost $US150 million on scrap materials so far this year, according to internal estimates Business Insider has seen. That number does not include the overhead cost of creating that scrap (energy, labour hours, etc.). Tesla reported manufacturing 9,766 Model 3s in the first quarter of this year.

Tesla told Business Insider that $US150 million was an overstatement.

A specific example for you: In February, a misprogrammed robot that handles battery modules repeatedly punctured through the plastic housing (called a clamshell) and into some battery cells, the employee said, adding that instead of scrapping all the modules, some were fixed with adhesive and put back on the manufacturing line. According to internal documents Business Insider reviewed, this foible affected more than 1,000 pieces.

An example: In May, Gigafactory employees turned off the “criticality” of the “genealogy” on a specific component in the Tesla battery pack, according to an internal email viewed by Business Insider.

In layman’s terms, that means they bypassed putting a tracking system on that specific part (the bandolier) in that stage of the manufacturing process to speed things up.

It’s common practice for automakers to create a genealogy for every part in a car. That way, if something goes wrong, the part’s source manufacturer, production time, serial number, lot number, expiration date, and more can all be traced. It follows the part through its entire life in the manufacturing process before it gets to your car. This is especially important during recalls because it ensures that companies can locate potentially defective parts.

Now that’s no longer the case for at least one part in the Gigafactory-made batteries. Tesla said they were being tracked by lot number because laser-etching the parts individually was causing them to be scrapped. The company did not provide Business Insider the number of parts in a lot or explain why that was the case. It said that while it would not get into internal procedures, any modifications it made to the genealogy were to make the process better.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 (June 5, 2018 03:31:13)