#tech bastards

SpaceX employees have accused Elon Musk, the rocket company's founder, of being fast and loose when it comes to safety measures. Four SpaceX workers told Reuters that Musk discouraged employees from wearing yellow-colored clothes for safety purposes because he does not like bright colors. The employees also told the news outlet that Musk would play around with a novelty flamethrower during visits that the billionaire made to SpaceX sites. Three former SpaceX supervisors told Reuters that Musk would have machinery painted in industrial safety yellow repainted to black or blue because of he didn't like how it looked. The ex-supervisors also said that some workers were told not to wear yellow safety vests when Musk was on site. The investigation by Reuters found that SpaceX has had at least 600 previously unreported worker injuries since 2014, including eight accidents that led to amputations. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Insider on Friday. Reuters' report comes after some SpaceX employees wrote an open letter last year criticizing Musk's behavior as a "source of distraction and embarrassment." Musk has been known to run his companies with a high level of intensity, sometimes calling for work sprints and even sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla.

Lower Mosley Street, Manchester.

But for many, that hardcore philosophy bordered on abuse. Tesla employees would sleep on the floor after working upward of 12-hour-long shifts. Workers were fainting from dehydration. One man’s leg was crushed by a car coming down the assembly line. There were fires and a burst sewage pipe, forcing employees to wade through waste. An investigation found that Tesla’s Fremont, California, plant had three times as many Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety violations as 10 other US car factories combined. Injuries were higher than the national average, and training was shorter. And Tesla was found to have repeatedly misclassified and underreported injuries at its facilities in California and Nevada. And then there were the allegations of racist and sexist abuse hurled at workers of color and women. Several lawsuits have been filed, though Tesla denies the accusations. “My supervisor called me the n-word right in front of other co-workers,” said Melvin Berry, who worked as a supervisor at Tesla from 2015 to 2016. “And when I heard it, I had to make sure I heard what I heard.”

In 2018, the Times reported that members of the Tesla board had grown concerned about Musk’s use of the prescription sleep aid Ambien, which can cause hallucinations. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that he uses ketamine, which has gained popularity both as a depression treatment and as a party drug, and several people familiar with his habits have confirmed this. Musk, who smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, prompting a NASA safety review of SpaceX, has, perhaps understandably, declined to comment on the reporting that he uses ketamine, but he has not disputed it. “Zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much,” he tweeted, referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, another category of depression treatment. “From what I’ve seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option.” Associates suggested that Musk’s use has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions. Amit Anand, a leading ketamine researcher, told me that it can contribute to unpredictable behavior. “A little bit of ketamine has an effect similar to alcohol. It can cause disinhibition, where you do and say things you otherwise would not,” he said. “At higher doses, it has another effect, which is dissociation: you feel detached from your body and surroundings.” He added, “You can feel grandiose and like you have special powers or special talents. People do impulsive things, they could do inadvisable things at work. The impact depends on the kind of work. For a librarian, there’s less risk. If you’re a pilot, it can cause big problems.”

“we observed that self-reported AI use and actual AI use were only moderately correlated (ρ = 0.329).”

Workers at Tesla’s Gigafactory in South Buffalo, New York claim that the plant is infested with bed bugs. If that wasn’t bad enough, management has also apparently sprayed the facility with toxic chemicals that haven’t worked and are making them sick, according to the New York Post. A Tesla employee shared a video of a bed bug she claimed was crawling on the floor of her workspace with WKBW Buffalo. She anonymously told the reporter that the situation “makes me feel like they’re treating people in general as not human.” Non-disclosure agreements mean employees have to share their experiences anonymously. A spokesperson for OSHA told WKBW that they had received dozens of calls regarding bed bugs inside the Gigafactory. Still, anytime they’d ask questions, management would tell OSHA it was looking into the problem, but they wouldn’t get back to them.