Tesla vs Alameda County [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Tesla vs Alameda County [pdf]

wholemars.com

50 pointsxoxoy66 comments

Neighboring counties have already allowed work like construction to resume. Is a car factory really that different in terms of risk? Just based on the sheer size of the facilities, I can't imagine the density of people is that high, and due to at least some of the work going on, ventilation is probably good.

It definitely makes sense to keep businesses like bars and restaurants closed given their nature as a "hub" in the graph of human contacts, but we also need to allow what work we can to continue as long as it doesn't contribute to significant spread of the virus.

At the same time, last I saw, car sales had fallen off a cliff. Is there much point to aggressively reopening if those cars can't be sold? But that's a question for Tesla to answer, not Alameda County.

> ventilation is probably good

I'm not clear on what ventilation being "probably good" means in the context of reducing SARS-Cov-2 exposure to a safe level. What if the air is recirculated and the filters don't capture enough of the virus?

Nobody knows anything for certain. We do not even have good data on mask effectiveness. The basis of all the restrictions is already a gut feeling/whim of the governors, not any concrete scientific data about what works and what doesn’t. Asking whether air conditioning system is good enough doesn’t make sense if we don’t even know what’s good enough. Nobody is doing any studies in that direction anyway, so we’ll never know.

I don’t know if lockdowns and restrictions make any practical difference or not, but people affected are definitely justified in complaining about large degree of arbitrariness in all of it. For example, NYC is still running subway and never stopped through all of it. Sure, people are relying on it to get places in New York, but so is everyone else in this country relying on their job to make a living, and yet many of their jobs were banned just like that.

New infections in NY i heard are majority 76% from ppl staying indoors. Not sure how are they are getting it, from recirculated air in apt complexes?

Last measured antigen rate in NYC was north of 20%. My bet is almost all “essential” workers have been exposed and that part of the “herd” is immune.

Who does that leave but everyone else, who are still shopping, going for walks, exercising, doing laundry in communal facilities and all the other minutiae of life that cannot be paused.

I’ve seen this comment a few times and don’t see the mystery. The virus has saturated the mobile and now is finding vectors into the less mobile.

This is a feature, not a bug, since the pickup rate is hopefully under the critical care capabilities.

> I’ve seen this comment a few times and don’t see the mystery.

Well, its not clear to me what "people who are staying indoors" means. I am exclusively inside my apt for last 8 weeks and have groceries delivered and workout on my bike trainer/zwift indoors.

I feel like there should be some distinction between, 1. mostly staying indoors 2. exclusively staying indoors.

If second group of people are getting it, then yea its mysterious.

If an average person lives with two other people, it’s safe to assume that something between half and two thirds of all infections will be from people staying indoors, because people getting out will easily infect other people in their household.

This is for the Palo Alto HQ as well. Tesla HQ is one of the most densely packed open office plan I have seen. It’s going to spread like a meat packing plant if the workers are asked to come back.

that lawsuit is about Fremont (Alameda County) factory (the last car factory in CA).

The HQ is in Palo Alto which is in a different county

But the fact that it's the 'last' car factory doesn't have any bearing on the choice of opening, right?

The demand for Tesla's seems to be very strong. Also, arguably, the people who would consider buying Tesla are the ones who are less affected by covid economically than the ones who buy cheaper cars

Sigh, it is kind of embarrassing for me that I was a fan of this guy and even own a Tesla. Elon has gone off the rocks quite and bit and now is a straight up loon. He is now full on spreading FUD, which is weird considering the amount of FUD That was spread against Tesla for a while

Two threads on this already:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126517

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23127552

Not sure this is likely to go any better.

It’s the actual lawsuit though. Much more substantive.

Yes, and the hope is that it would support a better thread.

The legal reasoning seems like interesting discussion, would've been nice if he had the legal filing ready and linked at the time he made his first tweet threat.

Is this legal argument actually any good?

It seems like the major claim is that Alameda County's order "overrides an express order of the Governor of California," which doesn't make much sense to me. Newsom's order said that individuals working in critical infrastructure sectors are exempt from staying at home. I don't see how Alameda County saying Tesla must stay closed contradicts Newsom saying Tesla employees could go to work, if their workplace was open. Seems sorta weaksauce to interpret an exemption for individuals from a stay at home order as a order than Tesla must remain open.

Anyway, seems like a mess, will be interesting to see what happens with this.

The exemption for individuals is so that they can go to work what good would it be if their work place was closed?

My thinking is that the exemption allows for counties to have the opportunity to allow those businesses in critical infrastructure sectors to stay open. The order says that employees "may continue their work," and Tesla's lawsuit seems to interpret that to mean that Tesla must stay open.

I'm obviously not a lawyer, I'm just interested in if the argument in the complaint is likely to get them anywhere.

I am curious how Tesla employees feel about this, and more generally Musk's continuous and baffling insistence that the coronavirus is no big deal. (Heck, it seems like until and unless this wipes out > 10% of humanity it seems like he'll keep saying 'no big deal')

It's one thing if your company and its CEO acknowledge the seriousness of the situation and develop a plausible contingency plan, including masks and random asymptomatic testing. But he seems rather unconcerned about such pedestrian matters and has decided it's a nothingburger and all hype.

Has Tesla actually proposed a reasonable plan to do this while Alameda county is seeing a spike in new cases?

He does seem a little petulant. As soon as things don't go his way he stamps his little feet in anger.

But I guess that's part of why he's so successful, he just blasts through any kind of roadblock. Straight to the nuclear option.

If he really believes Corvig-19 is nothing then his actions make sense. But he's a smart guy, and he must understand it's dangerous... maybe he just doesn't care if people die? Or maybe Tesla succeeding and his cars end up saving more lives than a factory shutting down for a few weeks would?

It's an ugly side to him, that's for sure.

[edit] My neighbour works in ICU and we have few cases here. He has now caught Corvid-19 and is really ill. My neighbour is late 40's and is training for an iron man, so he's pretty darn fit. This is a dangerous bug, that's for sure.

Seems to me like they do have a plan and experience that whatever measures they will take work based on the fact that they have been operating the Tesla China factory safely for months now. He has never said "don't take precautions" and assuming he means that is probably a mistake.

Edit: they have a 38 page plan on their website https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/T...

Tesla just closed their Shanghai factory and is being evasive about why.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/07/tesla-reportedly-halts-car-p...

I don’t know anything about how Tesla is dealing with this in their factory, but nothing about Musk’s recent comments suggest rational consideration or cautious planning.

No they aren't it was closed for routine maintenance around a planned holiday, May 1-5 is labor day holiday in China, and they changed the reopening date by 3 days to allow for completion of maintenance on the line.

A decent CEO would've explained the precautions to local government officials, persuaded them it was the right thing to do and then kicked in a donation of 500,000 masks or something. Instead, Musk is tweeting conspiracy theories and going on Joe Rogan. It's just incompetence. Even if the Tesla factory does have real and effective measures to reduce the risks, no one is going to trust Elon Musk.

Off-topic: I haven't downloaded many legal PDFs lately, but whatever legal software was used to make this one seems to obfuscate the text? The PDF seems like a normal text PDF (as opposed to scanned images), and you can highlight lines of text, but copy-pasting it results in gibberish; find-text-in-document is likewise borked. Using `pdftotext' generates a mostly empty file, though Google Docs conversion manages to extract and preserve the text.

I bring this up because the document has several URLs which are non-clickable and non-copy-pastable. I know PDFs can be encoded in away in that the visual layout of the content is completely different to the underlying data, this was just the first time I've seen such obfuscation.

edit: here's a normally-behaving copy of the PDF from one of the SF local news stations:

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/1...

Assuming the TV station has uploaded the PDF straight from the source (Tesla's lawyers, or the county court system), then maybe the site wholemars.com re-processed its copy of the PDF? In any case, the text/data obfuscation is pretty interesting and I sure hope it doesn't become a standard practice!

(I don't blame the OP for posting the wholemars.com link; that was the first I saw of the lawsuit too, at least on Twitter)

I have to wonder if there's any rules that would be violated by crap like this in the courts. It's 100% to prevent other lawyers from copy-pasting things, and that's absurd since it's defeated by OCR. It's extremely not accessible to the blind as a result.

It also makes it invisible to search engines. Google "Tesla COVID-19 lawsuit" and this PDF will not show up...

The curious thing is not _everything_ is obscured. Namely, `Attorneys for Plaintiff Tesla, Inc. ` isn't.

Either is `Identifying Critical Infrastructure During Covid-19`

So eventually this is probably going to get indexed by Google.

EDIT: It is already!

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Identifying+Critical+Infr...

EDIT 2: Why the downvotes already? I was pointing out that not all text is obfuscated in the text, namely COVID and Tesla are not. So it _is_ going to get indexed to some extent, it seems. If you want to downvote me, at least give me the courtesy to reply to your reasoning for it!

EDIT 3: You can check it yourself. Open the PDF, ctrl+f tesla, the only sentence unobscured shows up. ctrl+f for Covid-19, only one unobfuscated occurrence..

What Google is indexing appears to be the original and normally behaving PDF (before processing by wholemars.com):https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/1...

(the submitted link for this thread should probably be changed to the sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com hosted version of the PDF)

But yes, I do agree that not all the text in the wholemars.com version was obfuscated. Seems like the metatext and boilerplate stuff was left as is in this processed version.

They're overlaying text that's transparent. It appears you can highlight but you're just highlighting the invisible text. Loaded it up in acrobat and if you add any text styles its pretty obvious then whats happening.

At least, that's my working theory.

Edit: If you open in google docs it's fine, just formatted wrong.

wholemars.com is run by a Tesla superfan, Omar Qazi, who was banned from Twitter for harassing a legal non-profit and doxxing the non-profits founder in a bizarre attempt to "prove" Musk's Neuralink could give his autistic brother an implant to fix his autism. (???)

as an ex-Twitter employee with a Tesla, it's sad to be on all sides of the debate, see how long it took Twitter to pay attention, and then to watch Twitter let him evade the ban and use Third Row Tesla as a fig leaf. Do we deserve credibility with the public on this issue? :/

I opened it in Adobe Acrobat Pro and the regular text selection tool had the same obfuscated result. However, when I used the text edit tool, I was able to select the text and copy/paste it elsewhere and the text remained intact. I'm on the fence about whether the obfuscation is intentional, or if the legal software that was used to format and generate the line numbers is just bad at encoding PDFs.

Edit: I looked at the metadata for the two files and the borked one was generated with PDFium, the same open source PDF library that google and many others use. The normal one was created with Acrobat Distiller and signed by iText and mentions a license to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. The metadata could have been altered, but a first glance suggests the working one is the original.

Edit: I was a little late in noticing a "show more" link at the bottom of the list that Google gave me for [16 critical infrastructure sectors] and found "Transportation Equipment Manufacturing" is also among the 16. So consider the below moot.

In spite of my sympathy for Tesla in general and maybe even their wish to resume operations in particular, their arguments, as I understand it, doesn't seem to be very convincing?

It appears to hinge on the categorisation, with Tesla's view being that they belong in the "Energy Sector", which is among the "16 critical infrastructure sectors" exempt from any requirements to shut down.

While I guess you can draw a connection of Tesla with the energy sector if you're doing so in a complete vacuum, it is entirely obvious that, when the "energy sector" was exempt from closure, it was based on a definition that under no circumstances would include Tesla. I. e.: power plants and gas stations obviously need to stay open for reasons that just don't apply to manufacturing cars.

He is just being selfish. Everyone wants to get back to work. Public confidence (stock price, etc) in Tesla has hinged on quarterly performance for awhile, and they dont have an extremely long runway. It make sense he wants to get back to work, so does everyone, but it's just not wise.

Short runway? They have like 2 years of cash on hand and a better debt to cash ratio than any other US automaker.

I think 2 years is not a lot with debt obligations during a pandemic that is slated to crush the auto industry.

Yeah, IANAL, but this document doesn't sound to have been written by someone punching arguments, it sounds more like a whiny teenager.

On top of page 2 it somehow claims a car factory is permitted to operate because this FAQ says so:

>My business installs distributed solar, storage, and/or electric vehicle charging systems – can it continue to operate?

> Yes, this is permissible construction activity and must comply with the Construction Project Safety Protocols in Appendix B of the Order. Businesses may also operate to manufacture distributed energy resource components, like solar panels.

I guess they're going to go to court over the definition of "distributed energy resource components". Tesla cars are consumers (also storers) of (electrical) energy resources, but a gas-powered car does the same for energy stored in gasoline. If they let this in, then I could argue that my battery-powered phone is also an "energy resource component"...

That isn't their argument they are presenting that as an example of how the county isn't being reasonable by saying one thing then acting contrary to their publicly stated guidance. Their core argument begins on page three paragraph 8 and is more about the county claiming to superseded the authority of the State and Federal government when they don't have the legal basis to do so.

For what it's worth, Fremont, the city where Tesla is located, appears more sympathetic to the company

http://www.fremont.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=1768

I don't know that this is that notable, is it? Surely there are dozens or hundreds of suits all over the country from businesses quibbling over their non/categorization as essential?

It's a pandemic. No one wins here. No policy can be completely fair. Hell, I have opinions about everything and I genuinely don't know that I can find one about this situation. Obviously Tesla (and every employer) wants to open. The county wants people to stay home. Some exceptions get made. Should Tesla be one? Meh.

It's not just the county, people want to stay home to avoid getting sick.

Musk should be taking steps to improve virus safety on his lines instead of this sort of Trumpian vilification and lawsuiting. Obviously the later is much easier and much cheaper than the former.

I agree that it's not notable.

Which of those businesses are as large or well-known (i.e. notable) as Tesla? And no I don't think it's that widespread yet because a Texas salon owner who defied the state order (and was jailed for contempt of court) made national news last week, and Gov. Abbott modified the state order in response to the case:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/shelley-luther-dallas-salon-own...

You don't think a controversial, SV darling CEO suing to allow his non essential business to open amidst a pandemic is notable?

What about his public attacks on the civil servants involved in determine the rules for public safety?

What about the fact he's decrying "unelected officials" and "fascism" in the US,while praising the CCP and expanding Chinese production?

It's unbelievable people continue to defend this man here.

If the factory is operating safely in China w/o employees getting sick why isn’t it possible in the USA?

Objectively it's because the Chinese outbreak is well controlled at this point without lockdown measures. Alameda isn't there yet, though the Bay Area is closer than many areas in the US which are still growing.

The Chinese outbreak was much less controlled when they allowed the China factory to reopen.

What does one thing have to do with the other?

The public health officials who, believe it or not know more about this than Elon Musk,said they want specific metrics met before opening. Period.

So Elon did what he does and is bullying them. He called the public health official in charge, a pediatrician at Oakland's Childrens Hospital "ignorant" and "unelected". His horrible fanbase is loving it,and spamming the Alameda County offices with complaints. Why doesn't he say that about the officials in China? He'd be out on his ass, that's why.

Because it shows that in a country with a bad outbreak a factory of similar makeup can be operated without exacerbating an outbreak. They reopened the factory in China well before cases were zero in China.

Do you have a source where he specifically praised the CCP? This is surprising to hear.

how is car manufacturing 'critical infrastructure'?

Is the case number, 'Case 4:20-cv-03186' significant?

The list of critical infrastructure industries is outlined in this federal government document...

https://www.cisa.gov/publication/guidance-essential-critical...

It lists among other things...

"Workers critical to the manufacturing, distribution, sales, rental, leasing, repair, and maintenance of vehicles and other transportation equipment (including electric vehicle charging stations) and the supply chains that enable these operations to facilitate continuity of travel-related operations for essential workers."

I don't think this really covers manufacture of general consumer passenger vehicles.

The intent is clearly to maintain transportation capability for genuinely critical workers (healthcare, food distribution and sales, police and emergency, etc). If their tesla breaks down, there is no need to manufacture a new one, they can just grab one from the sales lot.

It definitely does, you are reading way to much into it. Look at the full list. How do you think all the other essential workers are going to get to and from work?

Well i don't think they are going to buy a new car for the purpose. Even if they did, there are many already-manufactured waiting to be sold.

I feel like you are confusing your personal opinion and preferences with what the document says in writing.

I think you are reading the document too broadly.

Suing the government for COVID closure only six days after tweeting "Minecraft has amazing legs"

Tesla compared to their competition is actually doing very well even during the pandemic. So Musk would not be hurt even if its shut down. It’s disappointing that a man of science, who understands data is throwing a fit like this.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

― Upton Sinclair, a once failed candidate for the Governor of California

Just move then, dont threaten, don't sue. Just make the change, its cheaper and faster.

It's cheaper to sue and win.

Not with the government. If you win you now have soured relationships that will last terms and terms.

Probably not cheaper once the workplace safety lawsuits start rolling in.

They already said they are planning too but what’s done is done.

Cheaper to move a factory and staff than sue?

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