I haven’t figured out yet where I’m going yet, as to how to replace the messaging, but we have to acknowledge that money and firms and markets aren’t going anywhere. They’re as much a part of democracy and socialism as they are a way for the scumbags to steal and keep score.
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Because the problem is just rich people. Which is fewer characters.
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There’s probably no problem with doing this already, but that could be a pretty useful list of people if one wanted to, say, start some form of collective action…
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There’s already at least one class-action lawsuit filed, and could potentially be another (or two) coming up. Musk is also trying to weasel out on agreements already made for severance pay and also trying to weasel out of work agreements for remote workers.
It’ll be really amusing if they play that ‘at least a year’ quote, and Musk gets ordered to pay a year’s salary to everyone he laid off.
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I love the symmetry in that headline.
Musk kept his responses brief and said top priorities included growing Twitter’s user base by 1 billion
A quick search turns up that Twitter has ~400 million users, so he’s expecting to effectively triple the user count.
In short, he asked his remaining team members to go “hardcore” to make Twitter “more compelling,” so he can sell that product to users, or else resign.
“We just definitely need to bring in more cash than we spend,” Musk replied. “If we don’t do that and there’s a massive negative cash flow, then bankruptcy is not out of the question.”
This is (was?) the richest man in the world. Only the very best could have accomplished that.
Musk doubled down after already laying off thousands of Twitter employees, saying, “I’m not trying to increase attrition, but I think we are not understaffed. I think we are overstaffed. That is my opinion, which you’re welcome to disagree with.”
He wants all of them to work harder, but also thinks there are still too many of them, after already eliminating half of them.
The New York Times reported that Musk refused to pay out scheduled bonuses to employees until a payroll audit confirmed that all of Twitter’s employees were “real humans” and not “ghost employees.”
What a ridiculous idea. Everyone knows that ghosts don’t even use money.
“That’s definitely a direction we’re going to go in, enabling people on Twitter to be able to send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real time,” Musk confirmed, detailing plans to link debit cards to Twitter accounts and even issue checks to users so they can pay rent from their Twitter accounts.
There are no words…
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Yeah, because his first try at being a bank was so good.
Paypal still owes me money that I’ll never see. No thanks, Elmo. Go die in the flames of you destroying Twitter.
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Yeah, because everyone wants to open an account at a bank that’s already on the verge of bankruptcy and run by a flip-flopping lunatic who keeps insulting and firing all of the bank’s employees while enacting policies to allow anyone to impersonate any account holder?
That is not so much an idea as the mud scraped off the boots of an idea that just walked through a cow pasture.
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I just can’t look away from this clusterfuck. It’s not every day you see a tech giant crash and burn so quickly for so little reason.
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The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude.
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I couldn’t remember how to spell it; it was the first word I thought of.
And I have to concentrate on not pronouncing “freude” as “freunde”; I don’t want to damage friends.
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I thought that the stuff he was floating in the lawsuit over the sale was the most ridiculous, impossible-to-believe excuses I’d ever hear.
I was wrong.
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Good thread
[edit]
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“One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” one manager wrote in Slack, according to Newton’s tweet thread.
One contract worker messaged Newton directly to confirm his reporting, claiming, “I learned I was laid off by reading your tweets.”
“Thank you for your service,” Twitter signed off the letter, directing any questions from contract workers to the IT staffing company that hired them, Surya Systems, Inc.
Somehow I can’t seem to find the gif of Channing Tatum from Dog flipping off the MP while saying “Thank you for your service.” Try to imagine it instead.
Journalist Kara Swisher tweeted a question that many watching the Twitter chaos unfold are probably wondering, “Why were there 5,500 contractors in the first place?”
Twitter continued growing its contract workers to what Swisher suggested was “major bloat." Swisher suggested this second round of layoffs was perhaps one of the more defensible of Musk’s moves since taking over Twitter.
Regardless of whether or not these individuals were part of Major Bloat, they are people that will now have to find jobs in a difficult market, and will experience some amount of hardship due to this seemingly rash and callous decision. Regular workers under capitalism already exist at a severe power imbalance, contractors are usually at an even greater disadvantage.
These newest cuts, however, could further destabilize the platform. Workers told Newton that Twitter losing so many contractors is “expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.”
It’s almost as if these people were doing actual work that can’t be easily absorbed by the remaining workforce.
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Uh… because doing moderation on huge incoming datasets requires people. You can’t just plug in some magic algorithm, no matter what the movies or people like Elon say. And contractors are often a lot cheaper for stuff like that than the equivalent direct employees.
How is this considered an insightful question when it can be answered with a few seconds of thought?
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What? You can’t just build a bot to remove tweets which parody Melon Usk? Maybe you can charge $8 to remove an unwanted tweet.
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Maybe this should be in the silly grins thread, but…
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