Apparently Tesla is run by crazy people
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Tesla's CEO Feared Microsoft Would Make His Car Racist And Slow
I'd just taken over as Tesla's PR guy and had been contacted by old friends at Microsoft Game Studios about including the Tesla Roadster in Project Gotham Racing 4. Darryl Siry, my boss, took me into Martin Eberhard's (Tesla's Co-founder/then CEO) office to broach the topic. That's when it went...
David Vespremi had just taken over as Tesla's head PR guy and had been contacted by friends at Microsoft Game Studios about including the Tesla Roadster in Project Gotham Racing 4. So he goes to the CEO (company co-founder Martin Eberhard) to explain why this would be good for Tesla.
"We would be getting some premium placement in the game for free and, in the past, I have paid many hundreds of thousands of dollars for that kind of placement."
This results in a lengthy rant by the CEO about why he doesn't want to do business with Microsoft, which incudes these objections: @Crazy CEO said:
Eventually, the CEO changes his mind, and agrees to let the car be used in the game, with no explanation other than "I've had bad experiences with Microsoft in the past".What control do you think you would have over how the car performed in the game?! What if they made it suck on purpose?! Maybe it will be the slowest car in the game!! Maybe they’ll have Volkswagen Bugs that are faster!”
And that’s if you’re lucky! They may just have it be a car that runs over black people. Now, Mr. PR guy, what are you going to do?!”
“Black people?”
“Sure, why not!? Maybe they will turn it into a racist car that runs over black people. And that’s the image you want for this company?!”
Later, the CEO is fired ("asked to leave" according to his Wikipedia article) and the PR guy was fired along with several other employees for being "bottom performers". The PR guy just recently won a $200,000 lawsuit over his firing.
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I heard you had to preorder the game to unlock the slow Tesla and track made of black people only it can drive on.
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@El_Heffe said:
A car that runs over black people
It's funny, no matter how far we've come, every now and then sad facts like these just pop up. Even in this day and age, every manufacture keeps making cars that run over black people. Every. Single. One.
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He's obviously getting confused with Carmaggedon - great game that - totally non-politically-correct :) I used to play it against my boss when I working in Hong Kong in the 1990s
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I don't remember there being any black people in Carmaggedon
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@Lorne Kates said:
@El_Heffe said:
A car that runs over black people
It's funny, no matter how far we've come, every now and then sad facts like these just pop up. Even in this day and age, every manufacture keeps making cars that run over black people. Every. Single. One.
Cars running over black people is a real issue. When I was in college there was one black guy in our clique (we also had a gay asian and a girl with a flat chest - we were really a wild bunch of liberals back then) and it was always complicated to cross a busy street because none of us would agree to cross at the same time as the black guy, and I think this drove us apart (so to speak).
Thinking of that, maybe the burning cross on his birthday also played a part in our falling out. Some people are picky when it comes to birthday presents.
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People who don't play video games and are wholly ignorant of video games don't know the difference between Project Gotham Racing and Grand Theft Auto. And also are kind of crazy.
The difference between people who don't play video games and people who don't (say) go scuba diving is that people who don't go scuba diving don't assume they know everything there is about scuba diving and are experts in the subject. I have no idea why this happens.
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On the one hand, I understand the CEO's basic point. That it's somewhat risky to leave the positive impression of your product up to a third-party with whom you don't have a trusting or contractual relationship. They could end up generating a negative impression through either incompetence (the car handles like shit and looks terrible) or through malice (it's deliberately coded to be evil). The fact that he personally has a poor impression of Microsoft simply makes him even less willing to extend trust than normal.
His choice of hypotheticals though...
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FWIW, the all-VW-Beetle race event in Gran Turismo left me with a generally poor impression of Beetles, though this was partially because a) it was in a game that styles itself a "simulator" and tries to be as true-to-life as possible, and b) most of the time in the game you are driving actual cars designed, built, and tuned for racing.
It was pretty ridiculous though. All the cars in the race were pretty well evenly matched so there wasn't much distance between first and last place, and the speeds were nowhere near what you'd think of on a race track - maybe a highway.
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@blakeyrat said:
People who don't play video games and are wholly ignorant of video games don't know the difference between Project Gotham Racing and Grand Theft Auto. And also are kind of crazy.
The difference between people who don't play video games and people who don't (say) go scuba diving is that people who don't go scuba diving don't assume they know everything there is about scuba diving and are experts in the subject. I have no idea why this happens.
That, and the fact that scuba divers seem to turn up at schools to commit mass-drownings.
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@blakeyrat said:
People who don't play video games and are wholly ignorant of video games don't know the difference between Project Gotham Racing and Grand Theft Auto. And also are kind of crazy.
The difference between people who don't play video games and people who don't (say) go scuba diving is that people who don't go scuba diving don't assume they know everything there is about scuba diving and are experts in the subject. I have no idea why this happens.
It has to do with the equipment for reading email and playing games or actually working on a computer being technically the same; a computer with a monitor and a keyboar. I'm sure you'd find sunday pond snorcle hobbyists trying to be know-it-alls about deep-water diving if you listened in the right circles.
@Lorne Kates said:
@El_Heffe said:
A car that runs over black people
It's funny, no matter how far we've come, every now and then sad facts like these just pop up. Even in this day and age, every manufacture keeps making cars that run over black people. Every. Single. One.
Of course. Doing it any other way would be discriminating against Canadians, Chinese, Indians, arabs, hindus or Swedish, depending on which tone the skin color detector was set to.
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@eViLegion said:
That, and the fact that scuba divers seem to turn up at schools to commit mass-drownings.
Ladies and gentleman, I present: the WORLD'S MOST OBVIOUS TROLL
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@blakeyrat said:
@eViLegion said:
That, and the fact that scuba divers seem to turn up at schools to commit mass-drownings.
Ladies and gentleman, I present: the WORLD'S MOST OBVIOUS TROLL
?
You thought I was trolling?
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Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if the CEO's statement was prompted by the news stories about the kinect not identifying black people.
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@El_Heffe said:
Later, the CEO is fired ("asked to leave" according to his Wikipedia article)
That will teach you to bad mouth your Redmond overlords!
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@Snooder said:
Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if the CEO's statement was prompted by the news stories about the kinect not identifying black people.
It's not Microsoft's fault if some people go around absorbing all the visible light, and reflecting none of it.
Edit: on a more serious note, I have narrowly avoided running down black people in the car, when they've been wearing jet-black clothing at night, having been completely unable to see them until almost the last second. Now, does it make me racist if I think their choice of attire was potentially dangerous?
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@eViLegion said:
@Snooder said:
Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if the CEO's statement was prompted by the news stories about the kinect not identifying black people.
It's not Microsoft's fault if some people go around absorbing all the visible light, and reflecting none of it.
So typical of black people; they take and take and never give back.
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@eViLegion said:
@blakeyrat said:
I wasn't sure. It's sadder if you weren't.@eViLegion said:
That, and the fact that scuba divers seem to turn up at schools to commit mass-drownings.
Ladies and gentleman, I present: the WORLD'S MOST OBVIOUS TROLL
?
You thought I was trolling?
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@garrywong said:
I don't remember there being any black people in Carmaggedon
Of course not. The Tesla Roadster got there ahead of you.
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@blakeyrat said:
@eViLegion said:
That, and the fact that scuba divers seem to turn up at schools to commit mass-drownings.
Ladies and gentleman, I present: the WORLD'S MOST OBVIOUS TROLLblakeyrat fails at reading comprehension once again. I took this post as pointing out that whenever some loon shoots up a school and happens to have played video games, that gets a lot of coverage, so it tends to enter people's consciousness and provide a simple explanation.
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@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:
I took it to mean that video games cause violence, and scuba doesn't.@eViLegion said:
That, and the fact that scuba divers seem to turn up at schools to commit mass-drownings.
Ladies and gentleman, I present: the WORLD'S MOST OBVIOUS TROLLblakeyrat fails at reading comprehension once again. I took this post as pointing out that whenever some loon shoots up a school and happens to have played video games, that gets a lot of coverage, so it tends to enter people's consciousness and provide a simple explanation.
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@Sutherlands said:
I took it to mean that video games cause violence, and scuba doesn't.
And so did blakeyrat. But recall, blakeyrat was asking why people thought they knew all about video games but not scuba diving. I haven't noticed any hysterical reporting on scuba diving (Shark Week notwithstanding), but relatively plenty about video games.
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@eViLegion said:
@blakeyrat said:
@eViLegion said:
That, and the fact that scuba divers seem to turn up at schools to commit mass-drownings.
Ladies and gentleman, I present: the WORLD'S MOST OBVIOUS TROLL
?
You thought I was trolling?No it's one of his personalities talking another of his personalities. Keep up with things.
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@blakeyrat said:
The difference between people who don't play video games and people who don't (say) go scuba diving is that people who don't go scuba diving don't assume they know everything there is about scuba diving and are experts in the subject.
Quite a lot of people who don't play video games on The Daily WTF, then.
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<font face="comic sans ms">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_Of_Mass_Shootings_By_Scuba_Divers</font>
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The Boomzilla interpretation was the correct one.
@Buttembly Coder said:
<font face="comic sans ms">en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_Of_Mass_Drownings_By_Scuba_Divers</font>
FTFY.
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@eViLegion said:
@Snooder said:
Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if the CEO's statement was prompted by the news stories about the kinect not identifying black people.
It's not Microsoft's fault if some people go around absorbing all the visible light, and reflecting none of it.
Edit: on a more serious note, I have narrowly avoided running down black people in the car, when they've been wearing jet-black clothing at night, having been completely unable to see them until almost the last second. Now, does it make me racist if I think their choice of attire was potentially dangerous?I'll see your "at night" and raise you riding a bicycle, on the sidewalk, on the left-hand side of the street behind a row of parked cars, and dashing out into intersections between minor side-streets and the main road at bicycle-speeds and not a hint of slowing down. With no lights, obviously, and definitely no helmet.
Now, the white guy I almost ran over were doing the same thing at the bottom of a steep hill, but it was daytime.
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@Snooder said:
Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if the CEO's statement was prompted by the news stories about the kinect not identifying black people.
Was the Kinect doing that too? I know HP webcams were. (Actually the facial recognition wasn't, so the webcam wasn't auto-following one guy's face in the video I saw.)
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Microsoft doesn't run over black people. They just remove them from photographs.
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@boomzilla said:
@Sutherlands said:
I'm not saying your interpretation wasn't reasonable, but the phrasing was clearly ambiguous, since there is absolutely nothing in the post to give it context.I took it to mean that video games cause violence, and scuba doesn't.
And so did blakeyrat. But recall, blakeyrat was asking why people thought they knew all about video games but not scuba diving. I haven't noticed any hysterical reporting on scuba diving (Shark Week notwithstanding), but relatively plenty about video games.
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@eViLegion said:
@blakeyrat said:
Meh. Lots of people, including lots of youths, play video games. It's a lot more common activity than scuba diving. Is it any wonder that a fair number of those who do school shootings have played video games in the recent past? Most of their peer group has as well. Yet if video games caused school massacres, we'd expect school massacres to be much more common around the world. Some other factor must be involved. (All perpetrators of school massacres during the first Obama administration were also users of dihydrogen monoxide! Oh noes!)People who don't play video games and are wholly ignorant of video games don't know the difference between Project Gotham Racing and Grand Theft Auto. And also are kind of crazy.
That, and the fact that scuba divers seem to turn up at schools to commit mass-drownings.The difference between people who don't play video games and people who don't (say) go scuba diving is that people who don't go scuba diving don't assume they know everything there is about scuba diving and are experts in the subject. I have no idea why this happens.
I hate to think of the amount of infrastructure required to commit a mass-drowning in a school. Unless it's a school of fish…
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@dkf said:
I hate to think of the amount of infrastructure required to commit a mass-drowning in a school. Unless it's a school of fish…
I tried to drown a school of fish once but it didn't work very well.
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@FrostCat said:
@Snooder said:
Actually, thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if the CEO's statement was prompted by the news stories about the kinect not identifying black people.
Was the Kinect doing that too? I know HP webcams were. (Actually the facial recognition wasn't, so the webcam wasn't auto-following one guy's face in the video I saw.)
Link Here
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@eViLegion said:
I have narrowly avoided running down black people in the car, when they've been wearing jet-black clothing at night, having been completely unable to see them until almost the last second. Now, does it make me racist if I think their choice of attire was potentially dangerous?
It's the clothing that's dangerous, not the person in it. Dress a Buddhist monk like that and let the black guy wear the monk's saffron robes, and you run over the monk instead.But that's not just a visibility issue. As anyone who ever watched TOS Star Trek knows, the most deadly thing to wear is a red shirt.
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@da Doctah said:
@eViLegion said:
I have narrowly avoided running down black people in the car, when they've been wearing jet-black clothing at night, having been completely unable to see them until almost the last second. Now, does it make me racist if I think their choice of attire was potentially dangerous?
It's the clothing that's dangerous, not the person in it. Dress a Buddhist monk like that and let the black guy wear the monk's saffron robes, and you run over the monk instead.But that's not just a visibility issue. As anyone who ever watched TOS Star Trek knows, the most deadly thing to wear is a red shirt.
Actually, it isn't the clothing that's dangerous at all. A black person with no clothes on at all is still not safely visible at night on a road.
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@El_Heffe said:
Microsoft doesn't run over black people. They just remove them from photographs.
I had to look this up. Wtf.
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@Ronald said:
I had to look this up. Wtf.
I wonder what the original looked like; both of those look like terrible uses of photoshop to me…
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I want to see it as an animated gif.
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@dkf said:
@Ronald said:
I had to look this up. Wtf.
I wonder what the original looked like; both of those look like terrible uses of photoshop to me…
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@Ronald said:
@Lorne Kates said:
You think you had it bad? My gang included me, a frog, and a chicken that could only cross the road in a perfectly straight line. Plus, there were friggin' snakes all over the sidewalk.@El_Heffe said:
A car that runs over black people
It's funny, no matter how far we've come, every now and then sad facts like these just pop up. Even in this day and age, every manufacture keeps making cars that run over black people. Every. Single. One.
Cars running over black people is a real issue. When I was in college there was one black guy in our clique (we also had a gay asian and a girl with a flat chest - we were really a wild bunch of liberals back then) and it was always complicated to cross a busy street because none of us would agree to cross at the same time as the black guy, and I think this drove us apart (so to speak).
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COnsider what happened with Tesla and Top Gear
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@blakeyrat said:
people who
don'tDO (say) go scuba diving don't assume they know everything there is about scuba diving and are experts in the subject.The set of divers who *think* they are experts is self correcting. Hopefully, they simply give up diving, sometimes they give up much more.....
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@Ronald said:
@El_Heffe said:
Microsoft doesn't run over black people. They just remove them from photographs.
I had to look this up. Wtf.
That sort of makes sense, actually. There are no negroes in Poland and having a negro there makes the advertisementan obvious American grab at Polish Euros. In fact, having a negro in the ad is completely insensitive towards Polish people, because it implies that if you don't own negroes you can't be a true westerner! Well I'm sorry America, but not all of us can import negroes from Africa. Some of us have to make do with turks and gypsies.
