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Comment by gr2020 | Hacker News Reader

gr2020

Title here is misleading. Actual title of article at LA Times is "Tesla had worse safety records than slaughterhouses and sawmills" - note "had", past tense. The records in question are from 2015, and as the article says, they are working on improvements.

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And even then, the records are for number of incidents rather than severity. The two specific things they mention are tendinitis and carpal tunnel, which suck, but aren't the sort of injuries one associates with sawmills...

Or falling into a machine at a slaughterhouse and having it mangle your leg or everything below your waist.

The title is clickbait.

It's analagous to saying "Elon Musk's mouth has worse bacterial contamination than petri dish of Lyme Disease." Sure, by number of bacterial agents, Musk's mouth is more contaminated... But that's not a very useful statement unless you want to mislead people.

Agree, could also have been written Tesla had lower than average safety incidents in ..2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016.. Nothing to see here

Most sawmill injuries involve splinters and worn out work gloves with holes in them.

Machinery doesn't kill people every day at Tesla nor at sawmills but considering the differences between the workplaces it's impressive that the number of little injuries at an auto manufacturer adds up to the number of little injuries in a sawmill.

Ok, we've changed the baity title to representative language from the article, in accordance with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

All: let's please have a more substantive discussion now. It's amazing how sensitive these threads are to hot coals in the title.

I don't think you would get much productive discussion for the article, which makes apples to oranges comparisons, misrepresents the report or focuses on irrelevant details. The report itself is fairly clear and easy to read and probably serves as a much better starting point for a discussion. The report is linked in the article - http://worksafe.typepad.com/files/worksafe_tesla5_24.pdf

Even the report is a bit misleading, comparing Tesla's yearly rates to the same-year averages paints the picture that Tesla got an additional 15% more risky than the industry in one year. About a quarter of the y/y change in the industry average between 2014 and 2015 is apparently residual[0]. There are only three points, but the residuals on the slope of Tesla's TRIR are lower than the residuals on the industry average [1]. What this basically shows us is that Tesla hasn't been a company long enough to establish a trend, upward or downward, of workplace injury. Worksafe Inc.'s report claims that Days Away, Restricted [activity], and Transfer[red] (understandably [given how inconsistent OSHA themselves are about what it stands for] misquoted as Days Away Transfer Rate) is a better indicator of rates of serious injury, but it's obvious to a layperson that days off, even on a 300 form, are discretionary. It could just as easily be the case that Tesla workers are encouraged to take days off for more minor injuries.

[0]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=linear+regression+of+%5... [1]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=linear+regression+of+%5...

FWIW, the article is written in a vindictive and personal tone; there's basically no way that's going to generate a balanced discussion about the ethics of workplace risk, or the usefulness of labour statistics.

I don't see that at all.

Is there any chance that we can change the rules to make comments about the title and it's clickbaitiness off limits? This is getting to be the majority of comments.

Later in the article they give the numbers from 2016; they aren't quite as bad then, but still pretty bad.

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