Monthly Archives: March 2019

Tesla CEO Elon Musk Overworked in 2018

by Danlu Ding

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, seemed to spend a hard year in 2018 that made him really overworked. He described himself “felt like aging five years in one.”

In 2018, Tesla faced “production hell” of Model 3, with issues of making batteries, producing parts,  and developing assembly lines. And the production was far behind his expectation. To escape the hell, Musk worked almost 120 hours, staying in Gigafactory for 3 to 4 days a week. However, it doesn’t mean Musk was at leisure during previous years. He continuously had sleeping problems and didn’t even celebrate his own birthday. Theexperts pointed that his busy life might lead to cardio disease, suicide, and even cancer. 

“Tesla super charger spot, non-Tesla cars don’t park here↓” This is one of the five parking spots with Tesla chargers among several hundred spots in a shopping mall in Shanghai, China. And they are all empty. Photoed on Dec 24, 2018

Beginning in 2003, Tesla now becomes one of 2018’s 500 Most Influential Brands, after experiencing the “production hell.” The products based onthe concept of IT is till innovative among motor industry. The company has involved into several events and experienced ups and downs. Mucks, undertaking such pressures, went through most of the difficulties and made great progress. 

Running a company with innovative products is risky. So maintaining success needed not only intelligence, but also the input of large amount of time and effort. This is also what Musk exactly has done during these years since he was in office to maintain competitive in the automobile industry. Since cars based on electricity is not convenience enough to be widely used, Musk needs to work harder to make innovation and development on the products and services that can satisfy the consumers. So it seems reasonable and not at all surprising about the overworking of Musk. 

The last paragraph of the passage also talked about the Karoshi(means working to die) in Japan, with the case of the death of a 31-year-old Japanese woman in 2017. It seems sad but is not totally avoidable, at least in recent years. Extra effort is necessary in most countries due to the competitive market. The conclusion stated in the passage is that “Working too much…is dangerous to your health.” But people have no choice. If they relax, as the author wishes, they will fall behind. So they can either work hard or leave the job. This is the trend of the world and is it really what we want after putting ourselves into hard education? 

Original news: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-dangers-of-overwork-2018-8

TikTok to pays $5.7 million over alleged violation of child privacy law

by Danlu Ding

TikTok is a media app from China used to or create and share short videos. The company called ByteDance. The media app was launched as Douyin in China in September 2016 and then became world wide one year later. It attracts users from a wide age range, especially young people and even children. 

In Feb. 27th, TikTok fined 5.7 million dollars because of the charge of “illegally collected images, voice recordings, and geolocation” of children under 13 years old. This was regarded as “the largest civil penalty ever issued by the agency in a child privacy case.”The company sometimes refused to delete children’s information even complained by children’s parents and still remained the videos after deleting the children’s ID. Moreover, it also encouraged children to engage in sexual activity online. Since TikTok was making profit by damaging children, the FTC complaint accused the company of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.  

In the aspect of commercial law, TikTok went against the policies of consumer and users’ privacy. In terms of protecting children, the Supreme court also have limitation and filter of  obscene speech and pornographic materials. So allowing those material to be spreaded is not only responsible to the society and needs to be changed by the law. Since many children don’t have the awareness of protecting themselves from the potential danger, many groups can easily use the information for their own profits. 

Tis case is really important to operating a business since when we provide a platform on social media, we really have to think about the safety and privacy to protect users and consumers, thinking about whether the media will be illegally used and taking action to protect the users, prior to how much profit it can earn. Once some issues break the law, that will be the loss and danger of both users and operators. 

What’s a good news is that after this case, TikTok now realizes the importance of privacy and safety of users, especially children and is making changes to make the usage of  the app by children safer, following the requirements of  FTC. The users’ personal information will not allowed to be shared and interaction between users will have more limitation. 

The original news: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-pay-5-7-million-over-alleged-violation-child-privacy-n977186