AUSTIN | Economic Development

[ILUVSAT]

Originally Posted by lzppjb

For sure. If it does really well, I could see a rotation. I don't see them ever taking it away from Nashville for good.

You're probably correct. The article did say that the folks behind the Moody Center had been working on this for more than two years. So, a one-off would not be worth that amount of effort.

A rotation - maybe. A "permanent" move - maybe. I just don't see this being a one-off event for 2023.

[freerover]

https://www.texasobserver.org/tesla-elon-texas-workers/

“ TESLA GIGAFACTORY BUILT ON WAGE THEFT AND SAFETY VIOLATIONS, TEXAS WORKERS ALLEGE”

Hoping Tesla steps up and makes things right instead of dumping blame on their subs.

[lonewolf]

Originally Posted by freerover

https://www.texasobserver.org/tesla-elon-texas-workers/

“ TESLA GIGAFACTORY BUILT ON WAGE THEFT AND SAFETY VIOLATIONS, TEXAS WORKERS ALLEGE”

Hoping Tesla steps up and makes things right instead of dumping blame on their subs.

that's not how the client-contractor-subcontractor relationship works.

the fact you have assumed guilt over allegations as well as framed said allegations as something tesla needs to "offload" reveals bias.

this is why we are not allowed to talk about elon! please stop it!

[chinchaaa]

Originally Posted by lonewolf

that's not how the client-contractor-subcontractor relationship works.

the fact you have assumed guilt over allegations as well as framed said allegations as something tesla needs to "offload" reveals bias.

this is why we are not allowed to talk about elon! please stop it!

excuse me? are you saying Tesla isn't responsible for the working conditions of their subcontractors?

[lonewolf]

Originally Posted by chinchaaa

excuse me? are you saying Tesla isn't responsible for the working conditions of their subcontractors?

Telsa hired Anning-Johnson as GC for giga texas

[freerover]

Originally Posted by chinchaaa

excuse me? are you saying Tesla isn't responsible for the working conditions of their subcontractors?

Just ignore him before the mods come in and start deleting/locking stuff again.

[chinchaaa]

Originally Posted by lonewolf

Telsa hired Anning-Johnson as GC for giga texas

That’s not what I asked you.

[undergroundman]

Originally Posted by freerover

https://www.texasobserver.org/tesla-elon-texas-workers/

“ TESLA GIGAFACTORY BUILT ON WAGE THEFT AND SAFETY VIOLATIONS, TEXAS WORKERS ALLEGE”

Hoping Tesla steps up and makes things right instead of dumping blame on their subs.

To hold Tesla responsible for the acts of the main contractor seems like a nonsensical argument, no?

To put it in an analogy that everyone can relate to, if I hired a maid service and the service cheated the maid out of wages after I paid the service full price, or forced that maid to work in an unsafe house, how would I be negligent? It's up to the maid service to provide safety policies that dictate whether the maid should work in certain situations. And if they're forced to work by the maid service in spite of those policies, that's not something the home owner should be held accountable. The same spirit of the law should apply to construction.

[DougRockstead]

Tesla shouldn't be held liable in a court of law, because legally they are not required to do anything in that scenario.

...However, If they are morally and ethically responsible, and executnig due diligance in that area, once they were made aware of the violations something should have happened.

Then again, we are talking about Tesla, and they use Cobalt in their batteries (approximately 50 lbs per vehicle battery) And if you look it up, the Cobalt was mined by children.

"the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The majority of cobalt used in electric car batteries comes from mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but many electric car makers are trying to transition away from using cobalt for several reasons, such as: The high demand for electric vehicles far outpaces the rate at which cobalt can be extracted."

I have a serious problem with this, "Of the 255,000 Congolese mining for cobalt, 40,000 are children, some as young as six years. Much of the work is informal small-scale mining in which laborers earn less than $2 per day while using their own tools, primarily their hands."

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-po...0their%20hands.

Everyone in the "1st world" has a prolem with slavery, child labor, and unethical corporations until it effects their "toys." We see this with Nike, and Apple laptops, etc. etc...

(and I know someone will bring this up, but the 8 grams of Cobalt used in cellphones is nothing compared to 50 pounds per Tesla Battery). You could make approximately 3K modern mobile phones with the cobalt used in 1 Tesla Battery.

And those Tesla batteries have a lifespan of 1500 battery cycles. You will hit that in 5 years if you drive every day. (My cell phone is 5 years old)

Originally Posted by undergroundman

To hold Tesla responsible for the acts of the main contractor seems like a nonsensical argument, no?

To put it in an analogy that everyone can relate to, if I hired a maid service and the service cheated the maid out of wages after I paid the service full price, or forced that maid to work in an unsafe house, how would I be negligent? It's up to the maid service to provide safety policies that dictate whether the maid should work in certain situations. And if they're forced to work by the maid service in spite of those policies, that's not something the home owner should be held accountable. The same spirit of the law should apply to construction.

[wwmiv]

Delete

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by undergroundman

To hold Tesla responsible for the acts of the main contractor seems like a nonsensical argument, no?

To put it in an analogy that everyone can relate to, if I hired a maid service and the service cheated the maid out of wages after I paid the service full price, or forced that maid to work in an unsafe house, how would I be negligent? It's up to the maid service to provide safety policies that dictate whether the maid should work in certain situations. And if they're forced to work by the maid service in spite of those policies, that's not something the home owner should be held accountable. The same spirit of the law should apply to construction.

This is a bad analogy.

The problem isn’t liability, the problem is breach of contract.

A more appropriate analogy to the current situation is:

The city makes a contractual deal with your business that it will deduct your taxes by a certain amount over a certain time frame provided that all your business dealings satisfy certain criteria based around a system of business ethics city leaders are attempting to normalize. You hire a subcontractor to clean your place of business, pay in full prior to the service being done, and that subcontractor does not satisfy in performance and practice the criteria laid out in your deal with the city.

Thus, you were negligent in choosing and making a business deal a contractor (which is done by contract, fwiw, hence: contractor) that did not then ensure the same criteria were satisfied via your contract with, and oversight of, them. It was your responsibility to make sure that any and all business dealings you have satisfied certain criteria laid out in your contract with the city, and your contract with the maid cleaning service for your place of business did not satisfy that criteria. Hence, your business dealings did not satisfy that criteria. Therefore, you are in breach of your contract with the city and should lose all tax benefits.

[enragedcamel]

Anyway, with the Twitter meltdown, it seems quite unlikely that their HQ will be moving to Austin as some people here were speculating. There's rumor that the company may not survive for much longer, having lost most of its workforce within the span of a week or two.

It's a shame IMO. We could have used another big name software company - and I say that despite my dislike of Twitter.

[freerover]

Originally Posted by enragedcamel

Anyway, with the Twitter meltdown, it seems quite unlikely that their HQ will be moving to Austin as some people here were speculating. There's rumor that the company may not survive for much longer, having lost most of its workforce within the span of a week or two.

It's a shame IMO. We could have used another big name software company - and I say that despite my dislike of Twitter.

It still might but there needs to be some stability established. Seems like he has reduced the workforce to people who are willing to work unpaid overtime so he’ll be getting a lot of hours out of the staff he has left. We’ll see. He might pull twitter off with the help of his ability to have workers consent to their own exploitation. It’s quite impressive but that’s why selling yourself as a cult like figure pays off.

[paul78701]

Originally Posted by enragedcamel

Anyway, with the Twitter meltdown, it seems quite unlikely that their HQ will be moving to Austin as some people here were speculating. There's rumor that the company may not survive for much longer, having lost most of its workforce within the span of a week or two.

It's a shame IMO. We could have used another big name software company - and I say that despite my dislike of Twitter.

This whole idea that Twitter is about to just break beyond repair is pure nonsense. It's being pushed by people who have zero understanding of how this stuff works.

Could Twitter have outages? Sure. The fact that they've lost a lot of Site Reliability Engineers definitely makes this possible. But it's not like a bridge that falls down and needs to be completely rebuilt. As long as the data remains intact, they'll be able to bring it back up. It just might take longer than normal due to the loss of people who have more intimate knowledge of the software and infrastructure behind it all.

Twitter could run into business/revenue issues due to the crazy man in charge chasing away advertisers and whatnot, but that doesn't mean that the doors are going to shut overnight. Even if Twitter does file for bankruptcy, it's more likely to be of the reorganizing type than the going out of business type.

[paul78701]

Originally Posted by freerover

It still might but there needs to be some stability established. Seems like he has reduced the workforce to people who are willing to work unpaid overtime so he’ll be getting a lot of hours out of the staff he has left. We’ll see. He might pull twitter off with the help of his ability to have workers consent to their own exploitation. It’s quite impressive but that’s why selling yourself as a cult like figure pays off.

Some of the people left (I have no idea what percentage) aren't exactly consenting. Some have work visas that were sponsored by Twitter. Those people can't just up and quit. They are in a real bind.

[H2O]

Only Elon Musk could spend $44 B acquiring one of the largest, and arguably, most useful social media companies in the world and in a matter of weeks turn it into Truth Social.

[lonewolf]

wow! misguided speculation and personal agendas have turned this into an elon thread!
who could have guessed!

I think the solution is to bring back the elon/twitter/tesla/neuralink/boring/spacex/etc thread and try to contain it.

I strongly feel we cannot allow any discussion pertaining to elon or his companies on any of the other threads.

I also feel an outright ban on talking about him is unfair given how central he is to austins economy and what we talk about on here (infrastucture/construction) is based on local economic performance.

The thread will be an absolutely toxic dumpster fire but we have to allow an avenue for people who want to get on here and just talk construction. The best bet IMO is attempted containment.

[lonewolf]

Originally Posted by chinchaaa

That’s not what I asked you.

Ok. So to answer your question I will say that tesla does not have any subcontractors. At least not when it comes to construction of gigatexas.

e.g. If you sign a contract with dr horton to build a home and in the process of doing so they violate labor regulations do you feel you should be held responsible?

and in all likelihood i doubt anning johnson will be found guilty of anything. It will probably fall all on the shoulders of the subcontractor. if these allegations are found to have merit

[freerover]

Originally Posted by lonewolf

I strongly feel we cannot allow any discussion pertaining to elon or his companies on any of the other threads.

How about this. How about not moderating content unless someone breaks the terms of service. If you don't want to participate in a conversation, then you don't have to. You also don't have to let other people know that they aren't posting content you want to see. You can just not enjoy it and move on to something else. This is suppose to be a place where we can talk about complicated multi-layered developments so if Elon or his companies are relevant to a thread like in one called "economic development" then you should be able to do so. If you don't want to participate in that conversation then don't. You can reply to a different post or you can post your own item of interest. No One is obligated to reply to every single post here which is why it's so strange that news related to Tesla and Musk is moderated so heavily.

[lonewolf]

Originally Posted by freerover

How about this. How about not moderating content unless someone breaks the terms of service. If you don't want to participate in a conversation, then you don't have to. You also don't have to let other people know that they aren't posting content you want to see. You can just not enjoy it and move on to something else. This is suppose to be a place where we can talk about complicated multi-layered developments so if Elon or his companies are relevant to a thread like in one called "economic development" then you should be able to do so. If you don't want to participate in that conversation then don't. You can reply to a different post or you can post your own item of interest. No One is obligated to reply to every single post here which is why it's so strange that news related to Tesla and Musk is moderated so heavily.

the problem is we have low cognition bad actors who have a personal vendetta with musk and use this forum as a medium to broadcast their personal narrative. thus creating the need for moderation

the mods don't enjoy moderating. people don't like reading emotionally held opinions about public figures on a construction forum. the discourse on here wrt musk is not remotely close to "a place where we can talk about complicated multi-layered developments" it's more akin to monkeys throwing feces at a wall then screeching at the moderators when they have to clean it up

it's unfortunate but it is what it is