âSome of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake, according to two people familiar with the moves. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information,â Bloomberg wrote.
Reports say that Twitter began asking laid-off workers to come back on Saturday. Business Insider quoted a source as saying that one âworker who Twitter asked to return rejected the offer because they felt âused, and think they will be fired again soon.ââ
I do not blame them one bit. I would also not blame anyone currently employed or re-employed there to be paid while they look for another job.
Twitter is also reportedly delaying the implementation of Muskâs plan to verify accounts account for $8 a month until after Tuesdayâs midterm elections. Twitter prematurely said on Saturday, in the release notes for an iOS app update, that the paid verification was being rolled out âstarting today.â But a company official confirmed in a tweet that the change isnât live yet.
Iâm not convinced this was delayed out of an abundance of caution as much as it was likely that a major feature change like that canât be reliably rolled out on a major website in a week.
Musk defended the Twitter layoffs on Friday, writing that âunfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.â
Iâm pretty sure Twitter is a private company now, so there were presumably more choices in terms of how to handle issues that a public company beholden to shareholder valueTM and the marketTM would have.
Also, is 60 days severance normal, or is that just alluding to how you can more or less circumvent the WARN act by paying the former workers 60 days pay in lieu of notifying them 60 days in advance? Iâm reasonably certain Iâve never received that much in severance, usually just two weeks or sometimes more depending upon seniority, plus sometimes some vacation time. To be fair, CA != KS, so there may be stronger labor protections there that Iâm not familiar with.
Personal story time: I worked for a e-commerce software company in the early 2000s. Through a series of managerial missteps, the company eventually went bankrupt and was purchased by another company out of bankruptcy. I and other employees stayed on with the newly acquired company, while others were let go. I found out later that there was a third group of employees who were neither on the âkeepâ or âlet goâ list, and continued to come to the office until presumably someone figured out what to do with them. I assume they got paid, but I never got a chance to ask them about it. It was a weird time, and I canât say that I regret the choices I made at the time, but I might make different choices now.
And how much of that is due to the additional debt that Musk saddled the company with during the purchase? After all, the company was starting to occasionally have profit show up on the books recentlyâŠ
Twitterâs privacy and security teams are in turmoil after Elon Muskâs changes to the service bypassed its standard data governance processes. Now, a company lawyer is encouraging employees to seek whistleblower protection âif you feel uncomfortable about anything youâre being asked to do.â
Everyone here should also know that our CIO, Chief Privacy Officer and Chief Compliance Officer ALL resigned last night. This news will be buried in the return-to-office drama. I believe that is intentional.
Over the last two weeks. Elon has shown that he cares only about recouping the losses heâs incurring as a result of failing to get out of his binding obligation to buy Twitter. He chose to enter into that agreement! All of us are being put through this as a result of the choices he made.
Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them. I do not believe he cares about the human rights activists. the dissidents, our users in un-monetizable regions, and all the other users who have made Twitter the global town square you have all spent so long building, and we all love.
Theyâre already subtly noting a difference between the two. Why not make it a green checkmark, or better yet, a dollar sign?
What a mess.
What an asshole.
According to Liss-Riordan, Twitter told laid-off employees they âwould receive the same severance pay and benefits they would have received under Twitterâs previous ownership,â but it now appears thatâs not true. Twitterâs prior policy was to provide âat least two monthsâ severance (or more, based on years of service), as well as bonuses, equity, and other benefits,â Liss-Riordan said, but Muskâs Twitter told employees given the official termination date of January 4, 2023, that they would only get one monthâs severance pay.
All employment under capitalism involves coercion. Itâs very hard to ask former employees to wait to be paid in the hopes of being compensated fairly later on. You bills wonât wait for your legal proceeding to resolve, and if youâre unsure about future employment prospects (especially with an additional 11k unemployed from FacebookMeta), it makes decisions like this even harder.
Also, seems like a pretty good way to reduce head countâŠ
Definitely a pessimistic take. This part was interesting, though:
When you say things like this, a lot of peopleâincluding front-pagers and commenters on this siteâwill respond with something along the lines of âgood riddanceâ, and expound airily on twitterâs toxicity and uselessness. And frankly, I find that smug and not a little bit stupid. In the current state of the internet, with RSS effectively dead and Facebook a walled garden, there is no other platform for discoverability that isnât ultimately about lifestyle, that allows people to just talk and share their experience and expertise. Even if youâre not on twitter, youâve benefited from it. Every time youâve been exposed to a new perspective, from activists, scientists, artists, or critics. Every time a self-satisfied pundit has found themselves getting cut down to size by people who actually know what theyâre talking about. Every time a video or a photograph that the news wasnât going to air has gone viral. And thatâs just among people like us. In other parts of the world, or among marginalized communities, twitter has been an invaluable tool for connection and organization, for promulgating information and new ideas. There is nothing else that fulfills that need, and it will be a profound loss when it is gone.
Twitter has been far from perfect, but itâs been far above some of the other offerings, and it was clear there were attempts to make it better. There wouldnât be so much outrage at Muskâs fumbling and trolling if there werenât something of value being lost in the process.
100% agree with all this. iâve been on Mastodon for 2 weeks as of today, and in general i like it â the people are pretty nice, itâs definitely got a lot of promise, and all the handwringing in the media about how itâs âconfusingâ is overblown to me. once i understood that it didnât really matter which server i was on, and that i could follow anyone i wanted to no matter which server they are on, everything else was very intuitive. Itâs like twitter in the early days, when servers would get bogged down and posts would lag. Just be patient. i havenât found replacements for ALL the things i used to love on twitter, but iâm willing to give it time.
One thing i find a tad annoying (and hypocritical) is all the finger-wagging from the OG Mastodon people. if they would just post a list of Mastodon culture norms somewhere and direct expats like me to them, it would help a lot, rather than everyone constantly posting and saying âdonât do/say such-and-such! we donât do things like that here.â
Thereâs also a HUGE âJan Brady syndromeâ problem at Mastodon. everyone talks about how much they hate twitter (excuse me, âthe birdsiteâ), and how Masto is so much better, and yet everyone canât stop talking about twitter and reposting stuff they find there about how twitterâs doing today, etc⊠i mean, if youâre over twitter and youâre better than twitter, than just ignore twitter and MOVE ON, you know? Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!
I blame the newcomers for so much of the birfsite discourse. Iâm there for cat pics, shitposting, and discussion - if I wanted to whinge, I have a plushie to do that to.
I am familiar with that, in other contexts.
Any essential services created under capitalism are a side effect, not the goal. If that werenât true, the entire startup->VC funding->IPO model wouldnât exist. There would be no need to incubate a company until they pivot to be profitable if doing the the thing they were designed to do was profitable in the first place. Thatâs not me suggesting that these services shouldnât exist, but rather to point out the market gymnastics necessary in order to create them in spite of capitalism.
âcapitalismâ = ârich assholes taking over every useful technology and spaceâ
Just say it and stop hiding the problem behind a abstraction that doesnât mean anything.
If Iâm understanding it correctly (and yes, somebody please correct me if Iâm wrong), capitalism is the socioeconomic structure/mechanisms created by and for the rich assholes in order to take over every useful technology and space (and exploit the working class.)
Itâs still abstract, but itâs a useful catch-all word to describe the process (and much easier to type. 
)
Todayâs Ars coverage(so far)
Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner confirmed leaving the company in a tweet.
If I ever work for the postal service, and then voluntarily stop, I intend to send out postcards announcing it.
The Verge also paraphrased another anonymous employee as saying that this weekâs launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription âdisregarded the companyâs normal privacy and security reviewâ in which a âred teamâ reviews potential risks before launch. âNone of the red teamâs recommendations were implemented before Twitter Blueâs relaunch, the employee said,â according to The Verge report.
If his intent was to destroy the company, there were certainly cheaper options. He does seem to be doing so pretty efficiently, though.
Generally, it costs $10 or less to make a vial of insulin. Yet, patients in the US can easily see monthly insulin bills of hundreds of dollars.
Capitalism âRich assholes taking over every useful technology and spaceâ isnât any good at providing useful services in medical care, either.
There is help on the wayâfor some. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in August, will cap the out-of-pocket costs of insulin for people on Medicare to just $35 a month, starting in 2023. But proposed caps for those with commercial insurance were scrapped, and thereâs no protection for those who are uninsured.
JuxtapositionPutting things side-by-side for comparison.
Capitalism is one word, instead of the nine you supplied. If it lacks sufficient meaning, that has more to do with a couple of centuries of equating Capitalism with Freedom than it does with the actual useful meaning of the word.
Very well-put.