Tesla headquarters spills gallons of lime-green liquid into Bay Area street

It continued into a stream where it didn't touch natural areas.

What a bizarre double-think sentence.

"It's beyond the environment. There's nothing out there! All there is sea, and birds, and fish. And 20,000 tons of crude oil. And a fire. And the front of the ship that fell off. But there's nothing else out there. It's a complete void!"

Tesla out here trying to kill the Toons from ToonTown!

The headline saying “gallons” doesn’t really imply “550 gallons“ which was the actual amount. That’s a lot of pollution.

You know those giant white plastic cube storage tanks that hold 1000L? They dumped the equivalent of two of those full of toxic waste.
- I wouldn't go so far as to call it toxic waste but fuck anyone pouring industrial chemicals into a storm drain. That's embarrassing for such a wealthy company.
Well, 12 gallons, contaminating 500 that they pumped out.
A better way to put it would to say quarter ton, since that's what it really is
- If it's weight is anything like water, 550 gallons would weigh near 2.5 tons

The liquid, which the Palo Alto Fire Department has deemed to be a nonhazardous mixture of borax, lye (also called sodium hydroxide) and green dye, spilled out of the Tesla office at 1501 Page Mill Road onto Hanover Street.

“Storage of sodium hydroxide requires a City permit, which Tesla had not obtained.”
- Elon does not care about laws and it's been shown over and over that he doesn't have to.
How is lye nonhazardous? Can't it cause serious chemical burns? Maybe it's just in low enough concentration that that's not a concern.
- You don't want concentrated lye, but diluted lye is safe enough to make soap. My question, and I'm not the only one asking in this thread, is- is a mixture of borax and lye a good coolant for a supercomputer?
  
  I guess you could argue that the green is so they would recognize a coolant leak...

“The Palo Alto Fire Department recovered approximately 550 gallons of the mixture from the storm drain,” the report said. “The incident occurred while Tesla personnel were draining the system.”

Put Lonnie in jail, ffs.

"Because at this point, why the hell not"

—Elon Musk, probably

Elon probably told them to dump the coolant in the street because he thought it would be a very funny joke. And probably also told them to put the green dye in first.

Sounds like the sort of thing he would think is hilariously funny.

Is lye a common thing for people to use as coolant? I’m not saying it’s not, I’ve just never heard of it.
- Borax and lye are both cleaning agents.
- mildly concentrated sodium hydroxide solutions would corrode the living fuck out of aluminum pretty quickly (https://www.calpaclab.com/aluminum-chemical-compatibility-chart/), especially when hot and circulating, so no
  
  could have been a kind of additive maybe? but then it won't be a lot of it. borax forms a gel or at least high viscosity solution when mixed with glycols so both can't be used at the same time as a coolant
  
  Dye might be fluorescein, it fluoresces under UV (duh) could be useful in checking what's this thing
- It's possible they didn't properly treat the liquid they were using as coolant and needed the lye and borax to remove scaling and that it actually wasn't the coolant itself. That would also explain not having the proper permits for storing the chemicals if they were just being used for cleaning. Though wouldn't be surprised if they were then just going to dump it down the drain anyway...
- I have absolutely no idea.

Musk spewing bile, as usual.

This is why you dont liquid cool your stuff without proper maintenance

𝙇𝙖𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙡𝙤𝙪𝙙 𝙗𝙧𝙪𝙝... 𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙠 𝙢𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙖𝙣 𝙚𝙭𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙝𝙚 𝙙𝙤𝙚𝙨𝙣'𝙩 𝙜𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙨 𝙚𝙮𝙚 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 „𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙥𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙘𝙡𝙞𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚“
- I keep reading this and can’t figure out exactly what it means.
  
  Am you broke me?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can't_Do_That_on_Television

I don't know.

Really. Someone spills a few gallons of nonhazardous cleaning fluid on a street, and this becomes a highly-upvoted article with dozens of comments on a global news community?

Tesla broke the law on storing hazardous materials and as a result spilled 550 gallons of mildly dangerous cleaning fluid onto a public street.

It's not a national news story, you're right, but it's also not nothing. Mostly it's just interesting as one more tidbit of information about how they do things.
- It's not a national news story, you're right
  
  And this is fundamentally my point here. This is a trivial little story that at most warrants a paragraph in a local newspaper somewhere. Big companies have little spills of random stuff all the time. But since this particular company is the current hot target for Internet rage, its clickbait potential is vast and people are eager to dive in to it for their Two Minutes Hate.
  
  If people really want a meaningful story about Tesla's bad environmental practices or safety procedures or whatever to get angry about, do a little legwork to find some actually meaningful incident or perhaps some kind of study to determine larger scale patterns. The focus on this particular news item should be embarassing for Tesla opponents. Is this really all that it takes? Or all that they can find?
If only people cared about what you think as much as you seem to.
Wait, this comment is satire right? Please?

Sounds yummy