On Corporate Evolution

Once upon a time, there was an automobile industry that was so hung up on playing PR games trying maintain its image as Numero Uno, that it missed about a hundred signs that it was having its lunch money pilfered either by the American company across town, or by foreign (ie: Japanese) car makers.

Enter Lee Iacocca, Carroll Shelby, and the Ghost Of Harley Earl.

Those companies had become ossified, mostly because top-down plutocrats couldn't figure out how to listen to the guys on the line - the guys who were actually doing the work.

Things have and haven't changed a bit.

A 120-Year-Old Company Is Leaving Tesla in the Dust

Tesla had me convinced, for a while, that it was a cool company.

It made cars that performed animatronic holiday shows using their lights and power-operated doors. It came up with dog mode (a climate control system that stays running for dogs in a parked car), a GPS-linked air suspension that remembers where the speed bumps are and raises the car automatically, and “fart mode” (where the car makes fart sounds).

And, fundamentally, its cars had no competition. If you wanted an electric car that could go more than 250 miles between charges, Tesla was your only choice for the better part of a decade. The company’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, came across as goofy and eccentric: You could build great cars and name each model such that the lineup spells “SEXY.”

Or you would, if not for the party-killers over at boring old Ford. Ford thwarted Mr. Musk’s “SEXY” gambit by preventing Tesla from naming its small sedan the Model E, since that sounds a bit too much like a certain famous Ford, the Model T. So Mr. Musk went with Model 3, which either ruins the joke or elevates it, depending on how much you venerate Tesla and Elon Musk. I count myself as a former admirer of Mr. Musk and Tesla, and in fact put a deposit on a Model 3 after my first drive of one.

But the more I dealt with Tesla as a reporter — this was before Mr. Musk fired all the P.R. people who worked there — the more skeptical I became. Any time I spoke to anyone at Tesla, there was a sense that they were terrified to say the wrong thing, or anything at all. I wanted to know the horsepower of the Model 3 I was driving, and the result was like one of those oblique Mafia conversations where nothing’s stated explicitly, in case the Feds are listening. I ended up saying, “Well, I read that this car has 271 horsepower,” and the Tesla person replied, “I wouldn’t disagree with that.” This is not how healthy, functional companies answer simple factual questions.

That was back in 2017. In the years since, Tesla’s become even crankier, while its competition has loosened up. Public perception hasn’t yet caught up with the reality of the situation. If you want to work for a flexible, modern company, you don’t apply to Tesla. You apply to 120-year-old Ford.

Tesla’s veneer of irreverence conceals an inflexible core, an old-fashioned corporate autocracy. Consider Tesla’s remote work policy, or lack thereof. Last year, Mr. Musk issued a decree that Tesla employees log 40 hours per week in an office — and not a home office — if they expected to keep their jobs. On Indeed.com, the question, “Can you work remotely at Tesla?” includes answers like, “No,” and “Absolutely not, they won’t let it happen under any circumstances,” and “No, Tesla will work you until you lose everything.”

But on the other hand, the cars make fart noises. What a zany and carefree company!

Ford’s work-from-home rules for white-collar employees, meanwhile, sound straight out of Silicon Valley, in that the official corporate policy is that there is no official corporate policy — it’s up to the leaders of individual units to require in-person collaboration, or not, as situations dictate. There are new “collaboration centers” in lieu of cubicle farms, complete with food service and concierges. That’s not the reality of daily work life for every person at Ford — you can’t exactly bolt together an F-150 from home — but it’s an attempt to provide some flexibility for as many people as possible.

Ford also tends to make good on its promises, an area that’s become increasingly fraught for Tesla. Ford said it would offer a hands-free driver assist system, and now it does, with BlueCruise; you can take your hands off the steering wheel when it is engaged on premapped sections of highway. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system is not hands-free in any situation, despite its name, and Tesla charges customers $15,000 for the feature on the promise that someday it will make the huge leap to full autonomous driving.

If you want to pay $15,000 for a feature that’s currently subject to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall whose filing is titled “Full Self-Driving Software May Cause Crash,” don’t let me stop you, but a Tesla engineer also recently testified that a company video purporting to show the system in flawless action was faked. This makes sense, given all the other very real videos of Full Self-Driving doing things like steering into oncoming traffic or braking to a complete stop on a busy street for no reason. Tesla’s own website warns, “The currently enabled features require a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.” So, full self-driving, except for that.

Tesla’s long-promised new vehicles, like the Cybertruck and a new version of its Roadster, also keep getting delayed. The Cybertruck was unveiled in 2019, and on Tesla’s most recent earnings call Mr. Musk admitted that it won’t be in production this year, which is becoming an annual refrain. Sure, Ford sold only 15,617 electric F-150 Lightning pickups in 2022, but that beats the Cybertruck’s sales by, let’s see, 15,617. Besides stealing Tesla’s market share on trucks, Ford’s stealing its corporate impishness, too — when the electric Mustang Mach-E was unveiled, Ford demonstrated its tailgating possibilities by filling its drainable front trunk (or “frunk”) with shrimp. “Frunk shrimp” became a meme, which surely tormented the emperor of try-hard social media posting, Elon Musk.

Speaking of which: Twitter. I will hazard the opinion that Mr. Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has not exactly burnished Tesla’s reputation. Besides showcasing the questionable decision-making inherent in paying that much for Twitter, Mr. Musk’s heightened profile on the platform hasn’t really done him any favors. For instance, when the bulk of your car company’s sales are in blue states, is it helpful to tweet, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”? Moreover, you’d think that the self-appointed class clown of corporate America would at least strive for a joke that eschews the hacky “my pronouns are/I identify as” construction. Maybe just go with “Fauci makes me grouchy”? Elon, let’s workshop this next time.

Maybe predictability isn’t trendy, but if you buy a new car you’d probably like to think that its manufacturer won’t cut the price by $13,000 the next week, thus destroying your car’s resale value. And you might hope that features you pay for work on the day you pay for them, and not at some unspecified future date. Maybe you want a car from a company whose C.E.O. isn’t indelibly associated with the product.

I just bought a Jeep and I have no idea who the C.E.O. is there. That’s cool with me.

BTW - when was the last time you saw a 4-door sedan stomp a tricked out Corvette in a drag race?

This is not your grandma's Insight

Buh Bye Now

Pleasantly uneventful

Today's Video

Every February through the 90s, I spent a weekend at either Trump Plaza or Trump Taj Mahal.

That's where the New Jersey chapter of ACEP (ER Docs) held their annual conference, and I was obliged (also happy) to attend - not because it was Trump or Atlantic City, but because setting up my little booth to showcase my wares in the exhibit hall was part of what I did to earn my filthy lucre.

It was not a happy place though. Whenever the point of the exercise is pretty much exclusively to separate people from their money, the enterprise always attracts some not very wholesome characters. Not that everybody who worked there was a money-grubbing asshole, but I'm hard pressed to remember anyone who didn't have that kind of glassy predatory look about them. It's just something that happens to people in that kind of environment.

It's little wonder a guy like Trump believed he could thrive there. And in spite of his apparent failures (how the fuck do you go broke in the casino business?), he did just fine for himself - prob'ly (IMO) because his end was just to put up a front for the money laundering operations run by his Russian mob "partners".

Anyway, the Metaphors Department has been working overtime lately, and - well - this:

Paraphrasing David Corn: Monuments to racist assholes are being torn down all over the place.

Trump's legacy will be in keeping with that of every Conqueror-Wanna-Be - ego-centric, delusional, narcissistic, abusive and ultimately self-destructive.

The demolition has begun.

Today's Today

August 12, 2017

CHARLOTTESVILLE — Ryan Kelly had been working all day when he heard a car rev its engine and saw a flash of metal speed by. He didn’t know what was happening; he didn’t think. He did what photojournalists do: pointed his camera and shot.

What he captured on Aug. 12, 2017, was an image that would command the world’s attention, win journalism’s highest honor and symbolize the worst moment of this university town’s worst day: a gathering of white nationalists and the killing of a young woman who came to protest them.

WaPo:

White supremacists made Charlottesville a symbol of racism. Black residents say it still is.

Her whole life, Dorenda Johnson has endured racism in Charlottesville. Growing up in a city built with the help of enslaved people, she attended integrated schools but often found herself assigned to segregated classes. She spent years working as an administrative assistant in a University of Virginia hospital wing that — until last year — was named after a notorious white supremacist.

So she was hardly surprised in 2017 when hundreds of white nationalists and neo-Nazis descended on the college town for a “Unite the Right” rally — an event that transformed Charlottesville into a national symbol of racism. But the 61-year-old hoped the violence that left a counterprotester dead and dozens injured would finally jolt local leaders into a commitment to address the city’s racial inequities.

For Johnson, now a member of the city’s new Police Civilian Review Board, that day has not arrived.

“I said after ‘Unite the Right,’ ‘Well, now, hopefully your eyes will be finally open.’ Not! I am very disappointed and plain old sick and tired of being sick and tired,” said Johnson, who lives with her two grown sons in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhood of Orangedale-Prospect. “I would really like my sons to leave the city. I don’t want them to get stuck in a rut here. There is very little that they can do to better themselves here.”

In interviews with The Washington Post, numerous other Black residents and activists echoed her frustration. They said they are still pressing for change even as racial justice protests grip the rest of the country after George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police May 25.

It matters little, they repeatedly said, that much of the city’s leadership is Black, including the mayor, police chief and city manager/chief executive officer. They say gentrification continues pushing minorities and other low-income residents out into neighboring counties. About 20 percent of Charlottesville’s 47,000 residents identified themselves as Black, Black/Hispanic or other races in the most recent census data.

- and -

In recent weeks, “volunteer statue guards” have arrived at night armed with guns to ward off protesters eager to deface the statues of Lee and fellow Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, according to C-Ville, a weekly newspaper in the city. (Last month, the Lee statue was splattered with red paint.) And burning tiki torches were recently discovered outside the homes of two local anti-racism activists. Similar flaming torches were carried by white supremacists three years ago in their march on the University of Virginia campus to the statue of Thomas Jefferson.

“These guys are not going away,” said one of the activists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for reasons of safety. “I keep finding alt-right stickers on my mailbox and all around my neighborhood. Did I feel like my life was threatened? After 2017, it’s hard to dismiss something like that.”

There's a feeling of "wanting to get back to normal", but we have to keep in mind that "normal" wasn't a very good circumstance for way too many people.

We have to try to get back to wanting something better - wanting to move towards that more perfect union.

We have an awful lot of work to do.

A Little Progress

WaPo:

The House voted Wednesday to remove statues of Confederate leaders from the Capitol and replace the bust of Roger B. Taney, the U.S. chief justice who wrote the Supreme Court decision that said people of African descent are not U.S. citizens.

The vote was 305 to 113 for the bill that would replace the bust of Taney, which sits outside the old Supreme Court chamber on the first floor of the Capitol, with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first black member of the Supreme Court.

The legislation also would direct the Architect of the Capitol “to remove all statues of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America.” It specifically mentioned three men who backed slavery — Charles B. Aycock, John C. Calhoun and James P. Clarke.

Democrats were unified in backing the measure; all the no votes came from Republicans, who were divided with 72 GOP lawmakers voting for the bill and 113 opposed.

And of course, everybody's favorite Designated Yahoo has to get in one more little dig on "states' rights" because what would these discussions be without some good old-fashioned GOP fuckery?

The legislation faces opposition in the Republican-controlled Senate, where several lawmakers, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have said the decision should be left to the states.

Fake lord have mercy.

Each state provides two statues to Congress of individuals the state wants to honor.

House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that a museum would be the appropriate home for the unwanted statues.

“When people say these are symbols of heritage not hate, I say to them hate is a heritage depending on what side of history you’re on,” Clyburn said.

The House That Ralph Built

Usually, when Americans talk about "creative destruction", we're rationalizing doing something shitty to people "in the name of progress" or "for the good of the economy" or whatever the plutocrats need us to buy into so we're distracted and not paying attention as they fuck us with our pants on.

Sometimes though, it really is a thing of beauty.

Today, 10AM EDT, Charlottesville VA

I was going to see if I could figure out a way to do a compare-n-contrast thing - like:

"How Americans see the destruction of their historical landmarks versus how Syrians see the destruction of theirs."

But somehow, self-restraint got the better of me.

The Tribe Explained - update

Here's a bit more on Agnotology from Wired Magazine.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," Proctor says. "But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

I get into arguments all the time.  Usually online, but sometimes, I just can't let some random comment by some random acquaintance slide by unchallenged.  I also have a few drinkin' buddies and when we get together, it's time to play "What's Yer Fuckin' Problem?".  It gets pretty heated on occasion, but we're still good friends and at least nobody's ever hit anybody.  I've been trying to work on tempering my more aggressive impulses.  I wouldn't say that I have a short fuse for the most part, but there are definitely some things that'll set me off, and this idea of WIllful Ignorance is at the heart of the matter for me.

I'm always looking for obscure (or just different) and seemingly unrelated concepts; trying to find ways of mixing ideas together to come up with something new or at least something that pushes me forward in my own development in whatever small way is possible.  I guess I tho't everybody did the same, and I should hope that most still do, but it's pretty apparent that an awful lot of folks don't.

Anyway, my new synthesis has to do with putting Agnotology together with the ice cream scene from Thank You For Smoking.  I can argue with somebody who is impervious to the facts all I want, but I'm never going to change his mind.  So the point of the exercise is not to wear myself out on him, but to argue in a way that could influence whoever else might be listening.