Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
Twitter can probably not use copyright to fight this, a Tweet probably does not fall under copyright because it is too short, right?
> There is not snapshotting of data - it's simply a URL that renders at request - an HTML iframe.
"Simply a URL", the resource to which it refers being rendered in an iframe, could easily be a snapshot - as it is on other sites. Hence to me this read like a non sequitur.
Heck, even taking a photo of the Mona Lisa is subject to copyright in the U.S under the theory there is creativity in the composition of the photo.
This seems unlikely. Journalists are pragmatists and won't abandon Twitter unless there is an alternative.
Now that Twitter is owned by a known bully (I don't use that word lightly), only the crappiest newspapers would fit that standard.
This seems unlikely.
I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been removed, either by Twitter or the author.
There are tons of subreddits that are devoted to catching some person or another with questionable tastes or interests in saying something they shouldn't. In these instances, rather than linking to the post (which may result in a moderator taking it down or the poster realizing how badly they're being dragged), they instead take a screenshot since it's a bulletproof way to retain the content.
It's not very interesting to see an alleged champion of free speech allow speech he likes. It's far more telling to see what he does about speech he dislikes.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitter....
When copyright expires in 125 years or whatever if the archive still exists they can publish them again.
Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government.
People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech only applies to government censorship, but they actually sound ignorant of the concept's millennia-long history pre-dating the discovery of America entirely.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“
When people say 'freedom of speech should be protected', they're being more broad than 'First Amendment Freedom of Speech should be protected'.
That an action doesn't breach the first amendment to the US constitution doesn't say all that much when it comes to whether it's consistent with the stated ideals of proponents of freedom of speech.
I've never seen this. I have seen people point out that Twitter isn't promoting freedom of speech and the somebody else conflating that with the first amendment of the U.S. constitution though.
[0]https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
The real debate is if society should value free speech.
And they should focus on busting up these trillion dollar monopolies because the amount of propaganda power they wield is unbelievable and should be reeled in for that reason alone. But as long as they're in cahoots with the very regulators that are supposed to care about this, that will never happen.
At least on HN, I’ve never seen this, except as a totem.
It's quite akin to opposing systematic racism from private businesses. You could argue that a private business should have the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, and it shouldn't concern any outside parties. But when these actions begin to interfere with the ability of large segments of the population to go grocery shopping, use the toilet, get a job, or get an education, it becomes a larger social issue that is deeply concerning to anyone who believes in the principles that underly a free society.
I disagree. Historically, the only time people were refusing service to anyone, the people being refused service were black. Hippies were sometimes discriminated against. We've come a long way since the 1960s, but there are more than a few politicians/people who want to drag us back into the 1950s.
In Colorado, such an act would be illegal. Which makes many people in today's polarized society extremely angry as they want to discriminate as much as possible.
Rule 20.4 (page 18 of the PDF):
> No person shall post or permit to be posted in any place of public accommodation any sign that states or implies the following:
> “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.”
> Such signage implies that management may rely upon unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited
https://www.sos.state.co.us/CCR/3%20CCR%20708-1.pdf?ruleVers...
These are regulations issued to support the administration of the state government.
Is it though?
Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free speech" even means...
Certainly in the context of Musk's campaign, neither he nor most of his followers are genuine in their support for "free speech". Musk in particular has been a staunch supporter of censorship in practice, and has only paid lip service to free speech for clicks.
The idea predates the existence of the US.
> It is thought that the ancient [Athenian democratic principle](hyperlink) of free speech may have emerged in the late 6th or early 5th century BC.
The hyperlinked page on democratic principle notably has no mention of free speech.
I've replied to a sibling commenter on Athenian "free speech" parallels - much of their association with modern concepts is appropriation.
> The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations. Many countries have constitutional law that protects free speech.
> The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted during the French Revolution in 1789, specifically affirmed freedom of speech as an inalienable right.[7] Adopted in 1791, freedom of speech is a feature of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
I think it unlikely that Ancient Athens was heavily influenced by US culture on the topic of free speech as an ideal: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates/The-Athenian-i...
Individual rights of expression predate the US and are part of a collection of ideals in a long tradition that finally exploded in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Don't forget how much of a grip the Church had on suppressing books and ideas, including meting out punishment.
The erasing of the history of freedom of speech including, within the US, forgetting the facts within the 20th century where it was primarily conservatives who advocated for suppression and censorship, is a very awful misreading of a general principle, especially by, today, people who identify as left.
Freedom of speech is an ideal intended to protect unpopular opinions. It's an individual right in the sense that the individual may be at odds with others, and just because it is a minority view it should not be suppressed.
Today the Zeitgeist is saying: freedom of speech is a silly American concept, and it's just to defend people on the hard right who should be deplatormed.
False, and false.
No, not at all. There are plenty of countries who go to greater lengths to protect their individual rights without the US even registering as a suggested influence. Most countries which managed to transition away from authoritarian oppressive regimes did grew political antibodies to ensure the right to freely express your ideas without being subjected to persecution as it happened in the not so distant past.
"the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689#Provisions...
Since we can't agree on a definition of "freedom of speech" this doesn't mean much.
In practice it seems to mean something is a "freedom of speech issue" when a speaker wants someone to not face social consequences for some action (For example an Elon Musk fan saying he shouldn't be charged with investor fraud because "freedom of speech"), and when a speaker wants someone to face social consequences they stay conveniently silent. (Say, an Elon Musk fan not complaining when he fires an employee for something they said).
For example, if I'm in line at McDonalds and the cashier tells me that I'm ugly and he hates my family, I should be able to say, "I've changed my mind, I'm not going to eat here". But not being able to apply consequence to speech prohibits me from doing even this simple act.
Going a bit further: not being able to apply consequences to speech is itself curtailing your speech, so you literally can't have one without the other!
No, not really.
Your right to speech isn't infringed if someone does not share your personal opinion. You're always able to express your mind about how profoundly you disagree or how wrong you feel everyone around you is.
What you cannot do is go around strong-arming people to shut up or stop expressing ideas you don't share. That is not a way to protect your right to free speech. That's just fascism 101.
I can't stop others from doing business with you, though I could convince them
Not really.
I have no right to show you the door at the local library or cinema or car wash or local cafe, or at your own home. At most, that lies in the right to property,which only applies to things I personally own. Consequently, in a free and open society "showing someone the door" is a right that's only at the reach of private property owners or people mandated by said owners to manage some aspect of it.
Even then, that right to "show someone the door" because you don't like their opinions is not all powerful and is limited in some jurisdictions which also recognize the right to equality and non-discrimination. Think about it for a second: how can you have a free and open society if you do not have tolerance?
If they say they hate your family directly to you, sure, don’t eat there. But most speech that people disagree with and try to retaliate against the speaker isn’t on that level - it’s bits of speech taken out of context, indirect expressions of opinion like donations to candidates, etc. People are being manipulated by professional propagandists, and they’re following along enthusiastically. It’s polarizing the country, and it’s actively harmful to the stability of the democracy.
Are you saying that pro propagandists don't have the right to their speech? Is the ability to persuade the problem? It seems like half of the reason why we speak is to persuade.
We both stated in our posts that the reactions must be legal on their own. So lets take illegal actions out of the picture. But if it is legal for me to start a boycott about your product, I think it is problematic to say it is now illegal to do so as a reaction to something you said. If boycotting is so problematic, just make it illegal all up.
The problem with our country isn't the speech. Its the fact that people are easily manipulated with bad data. But I don't see how prohibiting legal actions resulting from free speech is going to be helpful. All you've done is infringed on another "freedom". We should instead just be actively working on better educating people. Critical thinking and logic skills should be fundamental in our education system.
I don't think anyone is proposing making it illegal to boycott, it's just counter to a culture of free speech to try to punish people because you disagree with their opinions. That culture isn't legally protected, except the part where the government can't infringe on it.
And... that's really what it comes down to. Billionaires wanting to keep their profits.
As far as going after a person personally, I don't agree with that, but that's usually not how this plays out. Some idiot says something stupid, then advertisers stop advertising, because they know people like me actually give a shit about this stuff and I can make do without random piece of shit #726 cluttering my house.
Just not adding punishments to one side while granting money, privilege, and respect to another is the current state of propaganda for folks like Bill Gates.
If you make something that agrees, you'll be showered in funding, attention, and branding, but if you make something that disagrees, you're on your own. It's a retaliation for disagreeing
AKA "they make content I don't like."
I intentionally picked obvious example instead of anything nuanced.
Why? Its a private company..
Any legal pretense one could use to deny freedom of speech and expression to a company could also be used to deny any group - political parties, religions, specific races or genders, the press, etc.
E.g. the Portuguese constitution has much stronger guarantees. It explicitly recognises freedom of exprssion as a right, but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information as a right: you have a right to inform yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by any form of censorship.
It also specifically recognises a bunch more rights associated with media. Some rights protect journalists, such as the right to source confidentiality (which isn't even law in the US, let alone a constitutional right), and the right to elect representatives to their employers'editorial team. On the flipside, there's also rights protecting the public from media interference: regulators have the power (and responsibility) to prevent the consolidation of media ownership, and the media's ownership and sources of income must be made public.
1A on its own does not do this, but AIUI a subsequent amendment (I think one of the reconstruction amendments?) has been interpreted to apply the restrictions in the constitution to state governments as well.
This has been true when 1st Amendment has been passed, but has not been true since SCOTUS ruled that 14th Amendment incorporates 1st Amendment for states. Today, states are just as bound by 1st Amendments as the federal government is.
> but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to information as a right: you have a right to inform yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by any form of censorship.
That’s interesting, but what does it mean in practice? Can you give me an example of a situation where this right applied in Portugal? I want to know if this would actually protect us Americans from something that the government is currently not prohibited from doing.
You are free to post on your website and Twitter is free to manage their website.
To me the first amendment is much more interesting. Its roots in ancient Greece. Its importance in sustaining a democratic government. The paradoxical nature of trying to extend its reach to private entities...
John Stuart Mill specifically calls this out in the harm principle. From what I've observed, people who invoke "it's freedom of speech philosophy" rarely understand that even as a philosophy, free speech not a blank check to be able to say whatever you want w/o consequence. Or they equate it to freedom of reach.
Private spaces? Nonsense. You can't go in to a restaurant and start ranting about the Jews or whatever, and then say that they're violating the "ideal of free speech" when they kick you out. Free speech means you get to espouse an idea, not force people to hear it.
The disagreement is about whether Twitter is a public or private space. It seems to me to be pretty obviously private, and AFAICT the people who argue that it's public don't have much justification beyond "I want it to be, because I or someone I like got kicked out."
There are laws that try to codify the concepts. The 1st amendment is one of such laws, but it only applies to the US government. It doesn't mean that the concept it is based on is held to the same restrictions.
Basically freedom means less regulation from governments, which is only good for super riches and large enterprises. If you are not you should welcome more government regulation to counter the other elephant in the room. Two evils is always better than one.
It is a centuries long battle to find the balance in always changing times.
It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.
Twitter's legal and human rights teams were more valuable than is commonly understood.
Many of these people have been sitting in prison for two years without being charged with anything, and many of them who have been charged have only been charged with minor misdemeanors. Feel free to go look at ALL the cases, not just the handful cherry-picked by the Ministers of Propaganda.
Pretending he is championing the little guy, that he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.
Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution indeed!
It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that has been played very successfully in division politics.
For the left the common enemy is often greedy exploitative capitalists. For the right it's often socialists and/or communists.
Or people who believe in democracy and voting lately.
Crony capitalism it’s called colloquially.
Marc Andreesen was tweeting a few months about the pressure from DC to curtail behavior that the politicians felt was undermining them.
Around the time Powell began raising rates, memes in finance changed to “save”, banks raised rates on savings accounts to get people to park cash they can leverage rather than get free cash from Powell they can leverage.
Pulling cash out of the economy means fewer lattes and avocado toasts; being a bit glib, but those are the workers most likely to be hurt long term.
So yeah it’s basically division politics. The only reason it works like this is because of memory this is how it works.
NPR reporter literally just said employers offering higher and higher wages is what’s creating inflation, and they want unemployment to go up to bring inflation down. Manufacturing consent by repeating “truth”.
Behavioral economics runs the country. Politicians prefer behaviors like fealty to politically correct traditions. They are protecting the net worth class based system that keeps them from growing potatoes and determines which families thrive or die.
But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this is part of a massively complex plot that relies on second- and third-order psychological effects planned years in advance."
IMO it is way more damning to us as a society that people can be this stupid and still become so insanely rich, then if someone had an evil masterplan to manipulate others into making them more and more.
But at the end of the day, this concern is dwarfed by the fact that in either case we let them get away with it and ultimately reward them with insane wealth. This is the true damning of our society that these people are given all this wealth and power in the first place, and after the fact, honestly they can do whatever they like. And what they do isn’t pretty at all.
The difference between me, clever socially but idiot as an entrepreneur, and Musk, the definition of asshole but with good instincts, is enough I suppose ?
B.b.but a bunch of his PR guys convinced a lot of Redditors that he's the real-life Tony Stark who's saving humanity as we speak. What have you done? How could the PR not by true, if so many people repeat it?
I'm yet to see how that idiotic "pedo guy" episode turns out to benefit Elon Musk.
I see the accumulation of social capital no differently. This particular transaction might not have benefited him, he might even had lost some from it. But over time, other transactions more then made up for that mistake, and this one became irrelevant, which really is to his benefit.
Are you just noticing this?
Step two is whining endlessly and loudly. Step three he figures out a way to game government subsidies while whining about government.
Additionally, a settlement was reached to literally call himself a founder. At this point it's boring semantics of what "founder" means.
But go ahead and keep trying and failing to poke holes to push your unfounded narrative.
It’s a fact that Musk turned Tesla into what it is today. It’s possible to get that point across without falsely claiming you’re the founder of the company. Words have meanings.
> You are completely incapable of having an honest conversation about this
Yeah only other people have that issue!
But separation agreements need to be signed by both parties, they can't fire you and immediately say "btw no talking bad about us".
If there’s a current publicly-stated Twitter rule that prohibits screenshots of an internal Slack channel full of blue heart emojis, I’m not aware of it; it’s not abusive, it’s not hateful conduct, it’s not illegal, and presuming there wasn’t personally identifying information in the screenshot, it’s not private information by Twitter’s own definition as linked above.
If this was a screenshot from a Slack channel of any other tech company, do you really think Twitter would have quickly taken it down? I honestly don’t.
Freedom of speech is different than the first amendment. The first amendment prohibits the government from limiting freedom of speech, but the concept itself is more general than the law.
Leaking a private slack can be political activism for worker's rights. I'm not saying these particular heart emojis are, but here Twitter is still in position of judging whether particular tweet was acceptable or not.
Unless she's acting as a "whistleblower", then that argument carries zero weight.
The whole point of free speech ideology is that corporations aren't supposed to be unaccountable judges and executioners, and this should stay up until she is actually convicted of breaking some law.
If Twitter (or Elon as owner of his private company) wants to take down a post that exposes internal dealings then they're completely within their right to do that. But that doesn't relate at all to the other, more important conversation of Twitter limiting certain voices (Trump, et al). Stop mixing the two.
I remember some years back when Microsoft fired an employee for taking pictures of some boxes of brand new Macintosh computers on their campus and publishing it on the internet as a way to lightly smear the company (for using non-MS products apparently). MS was fully within their right to do that and nobody screamed "freedom of speech" back then.
But here a private company is executing its own unilateral judgement by their own clearly biased moderators.
Trying to create vagueness where there is none seems like motivated reasoning
Another ironic thing is the number of people who lectured anyone disagreeing with twitter's content moderation decisions that twitter is a commercial enterprise that can do whatever it pleases (usually this means yielding to activist pressure) and who are now acting indignant when Musk acts like he owns the place (which he does).
I don't know! Probably not. It is all a political struggle and Musk for sure pursues his own goals in it. But if all this results in a twitter that is more interesting, open and less prudish than before, I think it is worth it. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
That being said, I don't disagree with the sentiment here in the sibling comments, this just isn't the steelman you're looking for.
Best of luck to all remaining and recently parted Twitter folk.
Their HR and PR people are busy enough today.
This isn’t a broad defense of Musk or Twitter. Just a comment that there doesn’t have to be a conspiracy around any corner.
You have time for the things you really care about.
It's not a free speech issue.
Edit: that said, I'm not sure it's been confirmed yet whether the employee just deleted the tweet themself - which would be a very different story.
That's an entirely different issue. The issue at hand here is Twitter removing Twitter internal confidential material that Twitter employees agreed to not publish as a condition of employment.
This is contract law, not free speech law.
If they don't, they have no obligation to remove it.
But banning someone or their Tweets on Twitter for posting an internal corporate communication is wrong (at least, it's not the Twitter I want to see). That's using one's privileged position as steward of a public platform to enforce internal rules in an extraordinary way. If how Twitter moderates users on its platform is a free speech issue (I believe it is), this is just as much of one.
Considering there is already some legal questions being raised about the firings - and I'm not arguing in favor of the merits of those cases - there is some possible scenario where an internal leak may be justified.
Cause if they use the service under a personal agreement with Twitter that is separate from their employment, then removing the Tweet isn't really so actionable under their employment agreement.
I mean, I guess it probably isn't separate, but I'm also not sure why people are so eager to pat Twitter on the back for using their position to control the public communications of employees/former employees.
But closing our eyes to the optics of the situation would be a mistake. These are not normal circumstances by a long shot. Given the turmoil Twitter is going through and the heavy handed approach the new management is employing, it seems likely to me that very little work is being done through the normal channels (who's to say there's even someone on the other side of that channel?), while much is being done by direct instruction from the new management.
There are some coarse-grained things that he can do, like fire the the top execs. The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff. He's got to lay off half the company to begin to even get some kind of handle on all of the machinations going on outside of his team's review.
That was completely fake news indspired by a comedian calling himself "Rahul Ligma [Balls]"
You're right, but Elon himself is pushing this narrative. Remember when he pretended he was going to personally review the code of a bunch of Twitter engineers? There's also the Twitter blue pricing exchange and a number of other topics he's trying to appear deeply involved in the details for.
If you're really a free speech absolutist then this is a violation of that principle (not of a law, but of a principle).
Workers should be able to freely talk about their condition with other workers, both internally and externally to the company. And as an absolutist, then the ability of individuals to freely speak without any chilling effects must take precedence over the companies concerns. The employees are effectively being "cancelled" and much more effectively than the people who most complain about that actually have their ability to speak being impaired.
For example, failing to pay your mortgage is not theft. It is a contract dispute.
If you freely accept payment in exchange for not revealing certain secrets, that does not violate your free speech rights in any way.
I literally wasn't talking about free speech rights.
Yeah, except Musk himself already did that:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824
I mean it’s his company he can do as he likes, but that was one of the first things he did after the buyout.
I guess it depends on your definition of corporate wrong-doing. If Elon just looked for all posts that include his name and he's firing everyone who was critical of him, that might stretch the definition for most people. That could even cross over into creepy big-brother like oversight and might dissuade people from working at Elon led companies (or maybe attracts people who want him searching their private messages for references to him).
Everyone who works for Elon, and half the people who don't, how heanages his companies.
I can only imagine how much collateral the banks demanded to fund Musk's boondoggle.
It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.
So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content. And the judge would reject the suit and scold Twitter for wasting the courts time, and tell Twitter that if it wants something removed from its own website then it should just remove it.
Generally I think you can only sue the person who violated the NDA, not anyone further down the chain who posted the material. The same is even true for classified info in most cases - the NY Times won a famous Supreme Court cases about that over publishing the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam era. Same principle that protected publishing the Snowden leaks, etc.
> So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it take down the content.
is this how it actually works, or is it make a request to the website and sue if request is deemed unduly denied? if the latter, then some Twitter HR/lawyer person can make a request to a Twitter moderation person and the request would be immediately approved. At that point, there's no "difference" in the procedures for internal/external moderation requests.
That's nonsense, because under that interpretation of the law no news agency could ever report anything with anonymous sources, or people "familiar with the situation", because under your definition they are now violating an agreement about which they know nothing.
I think there are a lot of things that are legal that may cause civil penalties. E.g. there's no law banning the dissemination of screenshots of Twitter's internal Slack (so the screenshot is legal speech), but Twitter may have grounds to sue the leaker for breach of a private contract.
"""
By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
"""
I don't think it's reasonable to interpret this as referring to any speech which constitutes a civil wrong. There is simply no way for a third party to have the slightest clue based on the content of a tweet whether that tweet causes someone to suffer a loss, or constitutes a breach of contract,
If you’re a “free speech platform”, who are you to adjudicate whether a leak of corporate information is malicious vs a brave whistleblower?
This is why we have a court system. Twitter needs to decide what they are actually trying to accomplish with their direction, because right now it appears that this was all about changing the censors, not removing them.
Hence what people are complaining about: one set of rules for Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform) and another set of rules for everyone else.
And really, it's the own-goalness of this that's likely irking everyone. Musk wants to get the high ground of a public space... and then he/someone at Twitter immediately burns that narrative on something trivial that doesn't even matter.
The sheer stupidity of taking it down makes me think it's probably internal HR.
It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.
That was obviously wrong, as lots of legal speech makes the platform worse (eg, spam or spam-like behavior), but it was one of the claims made.
Is this an actual distinction or just being thorough for specificity? I know some companies are like Mozilla having the browser and the foundation, but just not familiar with Twitter.
Either they comply without hesitation to all takedown requests, or they don't take anything down unless ordered by a court. Doing something in the middle injects a level of moderation that goes against their "free speech" principles.
So Twitter will now take down leaked internal comms from Facebook? What about from NYT? What about from CIA?
Obviously they have the right to do this, but yes it's also obviously hypocritical given Musk's approach.
For example, Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison for copying a confidential spreadsheet containing Waymo status updates (out of the charges against him, that's the only one he pleaded guilty to - the rest were dropped).
Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point where that can even be considered a point of debate.
This is not the case - you can be convicted of a felony and go to jail for taking a private company's confidential information. Nowhere did I call layoffs a trade secret.
There's a difference between removing a politically neutral piece content which violates some arbitrary rules and censoring political news which benefit a certain party.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/caliphat...
The world is full of hypocrisy and Elon has his share. But I don't really care if the guy is a hypocrite; I'd be more interested in discussing if the move is right. If it violated internal company policy, or revealed internal identities or anything of that sort, then maybe it was the right move?
I'm just glad I don't have to make these decisions.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
Extreme cases i.e. leaked passwords are under hacked materials policy.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info... https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi...
The employees probably sign NDAs. It's only a civil suit, but I think that would still fall outside the realm of what he's been preaching. Note, I'm not taking his side or anyone else's.
It is usually illegal or in breach of contract to share internal company communications. This isn't the "gotcha" you're looking for.
Twitter is using a privileged position to protect it's own IP. It's fine for a company to do, but just doesn't really sit with "we're just running a public square for the good of the world"
This is why hate speech I think is a much more controversial topic than copyright.
This is, to me, more like your neighbor ripping down your derogatory sign about them because he doesn't like what it says, and the neighbor happens to also be your boss and landlord.
Same Twitter employee today (November 4): furiously posting on Twitter about having gotten fired from Twitter.
Karma?
Ref:
Is it because people feel special advertising that they're part of some elite/secret ring of true knowledge sharers? Literally if the phrase was excluded, it's factualness would still be true.
Basically, I find people who say "IYKYK" to commonly be completely insufferable performance artists.
IYKYK.
Everyone: what about our freedom of speech?
Enforcers: those are our rules
New Boss: You're playing by my rules now
Ex-enforcers: what bout our freedom of speech?
New Boss: Welcome to your machine
Somehow the notion of rights is being expanded as a catch-all of various hopes and desires, misunderstood or expected to put obligations on people or entities that those rights do not apply to. This makes rights soft and hard to disagree with, and actually less clear and less valuable.
You have the right to say something. You can go say it at politicians making a speech, you can write a letter, publish an article in some newspaper that will publish it. Not the right to say it on Twitter. Or the New York Times, or whatever outlet. You don't have the right / specific private entities are not required to enable your opinion.
he is, as we speak—and will continue to prove in the future—that “the censors” have been correct all along, social spaces of a certain number of people, if you don’t want the visitors to flee en masse, will need moderation to keep things from breaking down.
The outcry is real. Many many bot networks create massive amounts of cry content.
substitute "richest" for "most powerful" and it gets worse
I guess it is just a numbers game, but this whole page is one of the more unintelligent threads on HN I have ever seen.
...annotated with fact-checking, and historical context.
Probably with a few lines from speeches thrown in as well. To really document the heck out of how insane those years were.
escalator
My favorite was the Twitter account to see if it would get banned by only retweeting Trump's account(s). They wanted to show how the rules were applied differently between accounts.
Obligatory Mitch Hedberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHopAo_Ohy0
Here is what happened, the documents gets split into 5000 tweets. Twitter will randomly include one tweet in a feed and someone will respond. For example one person said what npr is calling to overthrow the government because the specific text has a reference to that.
Didn't see any unAmerican comments. Saw comments like tweeting 5000 tweets is a stupid thing to do.
Not sure if nutjob should be used in 2022 to label someone you disagree with as having mental issues. Mental illness is a serious issue and using it a weapon is not something to be casually used
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-supporters-react-to-np...
Yay! Journalists that do nothing but build a story around Tweets is not journalism. That's BuzzFeed. The fact that legit news sources decided to follow BuzzFeed is just a very sad comment on the state of affairs we live in now.
I know I used the formal capitalization of the specific site BuzzFeed, but it is a pretty good phrase if used as buzz feed. "Journalists" that try to make a story out of "what's the buzz" is more of the underlying point. That's just an aggregator. There's not complexity to the story that a journalist has pulled together. There's no getting a feel for the person being interviewed to feel if they might have more info to be pulled out to expand the story.
Having said that, there is a time and a place to a feel for the buzz, and places like BuzzFeed are perfectly adequate at doing that. But to confuse a buzz feed as a piece of news/journalism is just insulting to journalism.
He hasn't made any major changes to algorithms / policies yet. They're tripping over their own pre-Musk rules.
When one is laid off, there are often clauses in the severance agreement that forbid disparaging the company or leaking secrets, or similar things.
If I wanted that severance check and someone pointed out to me that the tweet may be in violation of the severance agreement, I would delete it too.
It is stupid, but free speech became codeword for "my opponents should shut up while my friends can arbitrary harrass them". And that is me being euphemistic about it.
Who decides what is „news” and what is „fake-news” ? (Few PC ppl in big corpos?).
Why sayin that „sure you can say what you want, but you have to defend your words” is so controversial ?
Are ppl afraid of being proven wrong or look stupid ?
Censorship at its best. Not optimistic about Twitter and where it's heading to.
Always a lot of assumptions in the comments of every Twitter story I have read over the last week or so… and so far most of the assumptions tend to be pretty wrong when the dust settles.
Smart journalists destroy their own relevancy? Barely anybody reads their articles, that's why they post and link to it from Twitter. And thereby grow a personal audience they can take to any other newspaper.
It is a bit frustrating how people refuse to understand the difference between "you can't speak this because we don't like what you said" and "you can't post internal company privileged information while being employee at the same company". Supporting freedom of speech doesn't mean Musk would endorse anybody doing anything, including divulging company's internal communications publicly (and without permission from people whose communications are getting revealed, probably).
> then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
That has long been the case, Twitter was removing and blocking messages (and people) for much less reasonable causes than leaking private communications of Twitter employees.
Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in.
Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
On the other hand, I think Twitter has so much momentum, it will take a lot of time to implode if Musk makes (even a lot of) mistakes.
I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of what life actually is like for billions of people on the planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take:
1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join their causes, leading to further polarization of politics across the globe, and especially in the US.
3 Years: Quality and use is declining as celebrities and politicians have begun to move away from Twitter due to constant abuse from toxic individuals, up to and including "vague" threats of violence. A minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them.
5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter live. This may be a state level politician or federal, but it will be someone many people know the name of. Elon Musk blames the engineers for not properly implementing his AI software intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Edit: If you disagree, could you tell me why?
I'm no expert in Twitter, but I have heard many people of note complain about receiving death threats on Twitter. One example:
https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dea...
> Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed that some mornings she starts her day by reading the death threats she has received from men on Twitter.
Making a death threat, or a threat of violence, is not protected speech, it is a crime. Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
Also, if it was already happening (up to and including "minor celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan stalking them"), is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership? And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
If Twitter, under the previous leadership was full of death threats to leftists, and the new leadership is promising less moderation actions taken against the sort of people who make those threats, it seems reasonable to assume that those threats will continue or get worse
Less moderation to the point of not taking actions against content which is criminal, i.e. threatening violence?
> new leadership is promising less moderation actions taken against the sort of people who make those threats
I think there is some leap in logic here, which is that conservatives are more likely to be criminals, but if that holds then banning them from the platform for non criminal offences will reduce the amount of criminals on the platform, however you will also be banning people who are not criminals in the process, and this does not really seem like a terribly morally sound thing to be doing. How many steps from banning people from twitter for conservative views to reduce crime to jailing people who frequent bars because they are more likely to be criminals? If your only value is to reduce crime, then I'm not sure I see where the breaks are.
Yes, obviously. Because Musk sure isn't pushing for more of this oversight.
The correlation runs the other way. Mass shooters and people who carry out acts of political violence in the US are overwhelmingly driven by conspiracy "logic" that has recently been embraced by the right; Qanon, pizza parlor conspiracies, racism, etc.
Because, put plainly: I don't think there's much reason to expect Musk to take them seriously.The previous management had only minimal capability to curb this behavior, or claimed they did, because of scale. They'd deal with cases that rose to the top, but not a lot more. Musk, on the other hand, is ideologically congruent with much of it, and there are no indications that his yelling about "free speech, especially for the right wing" comes with consequences or even minor disapproval for that speech when you use it to threaten to kill somebody.
Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so, though.
Absence of indication is not indication of absence though.
Another way to look at it that by having less strict moderation, and keeping moderation mainly focused on unprotected speech such as incitement or threats, you have more resources to go after unprotected speech.
> Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so, though.
Fair enough.
>Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
The old owners only did what they had to when the threats floated to the surface of the lagoon. The new owner has explicitly said that free speech means free speech. I believe overt threats of violence (read: I will kill X on June 5, 2023) will be addressed, but anything that can be played off as "satire" or "joking" (Read: somebody should kill X. lol jk) will be ignored, if not promoted for the extra eyes and clicks.
>is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership?
No. I believe with old ownership we would see what we currently have in perpetuity. There was no innovation from Twitter, but there was also no real negative change either. Status quo.
>And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
From what I read/see, Elon Musk espouses the view that people who disagree with him are lesser than. I believe he genuinely thinks he is better than everyone else; smarter, stronger, faster, better. I believe he will see people who act and think the same way (read: toxic) on Twitter, and automatically defend them if not outright promote them. This group will include people who incite violence.
The internet has existed for decades with laxer moderation and nothing like this has happened - seems like you're making some hidden assumptions about how the political climate will evolve that are pretty questionable.
Twitter has no real impact on polarization on politics especially in the US. The problems of the US are first past the post elections, the broken 19th century style primaries, people literally not having enough money to take a day off to vote and/or being too burnt out daily to give a shit about politics.
The result is the extremes get a very very loud voice since they are the only ones with nothing better to do. Twitter suddenly being more "free and open" means the extremes get an even louder voice.
Your average person making up most of the population just wants to kick back and relax from the daily grind. Not go argue on twitter.
The toxic threats even sometimes come from twitter staff and insiders, for example when Coinbase announced their no-politics-at-work policy, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo tweeted in reply that that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong would be "lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary".
The fish rots from the head.
Myspace still exists in some form.
Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc.
Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions.
This TC article sums up the X challenges pretty well: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wec...
Not sure what problem a cryptocurrency would solve in this case.
Can you imagine someone as volatile and vain as Elon Musk having your porn viewing history? There's a good reason why most sex entrepreneurs stay off the radar.
I personally can't wait for him to kinkshame a Twitter influencer who makes him mildly upset.
And can Musk and others staff up in China (if US and Chinese politics/government allows it)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system#ByteDa...
I think you'd have to provide a lot more research to "996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China". What type of companies, what type of jobs, ubiquity etc.
In order to make 996 work in the US, there would need to be a pretty big oversupply of talent (and a lower standard of living) to make people desperate enough to give up their entire lives to their work. Unfortunately, I think we may be getting close to that about now or at least heading down that path.
Just as an example: both Facebook and Snapchat (and I'm sure others) have tried adding games to their platform. Both efforts have failed because you can get a better gaming experience by playing a standalone game. If you want to play with a friend, you can message them and say "hey, let's play X." There is limited upside to playing in Facebook or Snapchat, and a lot of downsides (limited catalog, performance restrictions, etc.)
One exception to this is any feature that requires exposure to an audience. Social media is very good at exposing people to content. Something like Facebook marketplace can be successful because sellers want their listings to be seen by people and buyers want to go to places that have the most sellers.
Considering the leadership culture that grew twitter to nearly ten thousand, for Twitter, I don't think "dozens" was anywhere near feasible. I suppose it depends on your definition of "product".
The Chinese internet is heavily restricted and censored and regulated by their government. It simply cannot be used as a model in the west. Technology progresses in cycles, and the Chinese and American internet cycles don’t line up. Eg China uses QR codes for payment everywhere because they cycled off cash while the US largely missed that train, but has near universal credit cards and NFC availability. Americans would never pay at a cash register through QR codes.
Android and IOS are great at providing a moldable surface for apps. A super app aggregates censorship to one entity, which isn’t a market force in the west. The “chat bot” style super apps also didn’t take off in the west because our technology is more expensive. We’re richer so we have, on average, higher end devices that can render more AND we can pay to build more feature rich native apps. We aggregate app data at the operating system level (notification center, Google home app, Siri, Uber integration into native mapping app, etc). China can’t because most of android is created in America, and they’d essentially have to hard-fork it to build changes their way (again those changes largely include censorship choke points)
He'll either be the GOAT or the goat, but the gamble is clearly on the table, and Musk being Mush will declare victory before the dice even start to roll.
Unfortunately, eventually you need more than hype before the public and regulators come for you because you haven’t delivered.
And musk hasn’t delivered.
Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public visibility on issues they're facing helps companies with their public image. There are many times where I or friends have posted about issues after exhausting the standard support channels, and quickly cut through the bureaucratic red tape and got our problem solved. I think that's a monetizable angle.
I think something similar would apply to other elites as well. Politicians can get direct feedback from constituents, music artists get direct feedback from fans (see the recent Lizzo "spaz" thing), and so on. However, in the current climate, elites are getting skewed feedback, so "more free speech" could actually help, if it's done right.
Besides the fact that "more free speech" seems to involve making fun of trans people and bringing back donald trump, which do not correlate with more accurate feedback to elites.
Twitter was on its death bed until Trump signed on and became the shit-posting President. This is not an endorsement of Trump or bringing him back, but the type of "free speech" people are talking about saved Twitter, made it a pile of money, and made other media/press companies billions of dollars covering the chaos.
https://www.zippia.com/twitter-careers-11916/revenue/
It seems like Growth was actually lowest during Trump's presidency.
I think this is failing to imagine how bad things could get societally. Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
Yes, that would mean a majority of people would have to adopt those perspectives - to the detriment of society at large - but it's happened before in many parts of the world, and could happen again. That is a long-term goal of fascists anyways - to re-normalize that kind of thing, and to re-combine industry and media with a religious ethnostate.
At the very least, the previously quiet pre-existing enjoyment of malevolent speech has been exposed for all to see over the last several years. The question is whether it has a growing audience.
I'm not saying that's Elon's goal, but accelerationism seems to be something he is aligned with as long as it doesn't come at a cost to him.
On the one hand if this keeps going bad maybe he just says fuck it and goes accelerationist like you said. On the other hand, there's a lot of people who put money into this. I truly hope it remains sensible, and do still have faith that our nation isn't this bad off.
If you start with the proposition "Anyone should be able to post anything on Twitter"...
... and want to get to "Everyone enjoys reading Twitter," then there's a lot of black box space in the middle.
You can have the most vile things on your platform, but your userbase self-censors. E.g. crowdsourced shadow-banning / down-voting. Or reputation with verified identities underneath.
Or just... more transparency.
Empowering the public to data-mine Twitter opens some interesting windows to a platform that has terrible things, but empowers interested parties to fruitfully research who they're coming from.
Incidentally, in the US at least, the idea of “free speech” is now firmly associated with the far right conservatives.
You have that backwards.
White supremacist rallies have labeled themselves as "free speech" rallies in an attempt to normalize their cause. This is a well documented strategy [1]
However, exercising one's free speech rights by rallying for a cause (i.e. Charlottesville's "You will not replace us") does not automatically make that cause synonymous with supporting "free speech".
1. https://iop.harvard.edu/forum/im-not-racist-examining-white-...
The latest impression is driven by conservatives' current messaging that "big tech" is censoring them, coupled with their belief that the tech mores used to calibrate that censorship are coastal, and therefore more liberal.
Ergo, free speech is conservatives' right to say conservative things.
In the 60s and 80s and 00s, it was liberal. Give it another few years to swing back.
It's not a "messaging", it's an observable fact. Look at political leanings and donations for Twitter or Facebook workers. Over 80% goes to the left. And that's before we consider that the power is not distributed equally there and if you look at the people in power it's more like 100% to the left.
> Ergo, free speech is conservatives' right to say conservative things.
That's a completely wrong conclusion. Free speech is everybody's right to say their things, but conservative's rights are infringed much more frequently, so they complain more.
Free speech as in the first amendment is pretty universal.
Free speech as in Twitter bans and complaining about cancel culture is largely the far right.
It’s hardly the far right. People from all 3 political groups are scared of cancel culture. Painting this as far right serves only to label anybody that cares about such things as far right. You’re attempting to shut the conversation down. This is part of the problem and is literally misinformation that could cause violence against those labeled “far right” in the future.
> could cause violence against those labeled “far right” in the future.
That’s quite the scaremongering there, hyperbole does not move the dialog forward.
Oh but it is, why else would you label people that care about such things as extremists?
> That’s quite the scaremongering there, hyperbole does not move the dialog forward.
No it serves to make you aware of the danger of your speech.
> Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
I may be sidetracking the conversation here, but I must admit I find it fascinating how “hatefulness” online is almost always assumed to be right-wing extremism.
Have everyone forgotten the BLM and Antifa riots going on for months where innocent people had their property, livelihood and in some cases even their lives taken?
That was fully encouraged and endorsed by the left, en masse, and especially so on Twitter.
Was that not “hate”? If not, what is?
Ofcourse the people burning the city down and looting think they are doing the right thing, or at least doing it for the right reasons. Ofcourse the black people "taking the streets back" feel entitled to it, after whatever backstory there was.
But during the Antifa and BLM riots, actual businesses, owned by innocents bystanders got ruined. Innocent people got murdered. There were real tragedies to real people, mostly white.
When that gets cheered on at social media-sites like twitter (or live on CNN!), it's hard to frame it as anything except hate against white people.
Maybe they thought they were fighting oppression. But at the same time they were oppressing. They became what they claimed to fight.
Who are to say they are better than the people they claimed to be fighting, which didn't burn down cities, didn't kill innocent civilians?
The ends does not justify the means. Not in a lawful society at least. These were hateful acts. EOT.
What I was originally responding to was the fear of twitter allowing hateful speech, which ofcourse had to be right-wing "hateful" speech.
My comment was more directed towards how I found that (default) assumption weird, since I see tons and tons of clearly hateful content and attitudes from all sides of the political spectrum online and in social media.
When I see people complaining about all that "hateful" speech online from one end of the political spectrum, I have a hard time seeing that as something else but denial about the hateful speech their side of the political spectrum themselves are promoting, or worse deliberately ignoring.
The fact that you find someone else's opinion disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" is not a blanket-license for you yourself to act disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" in response. It's a chance for you to be a better person.
If you want to fix our divided world, you need to show people there's a middle way, and you do that by calling out bullshit on both sides.
And they are upset that they are called uh, names.
I get what you're saying: name-calling is mean. It can deepen divides. I've been called names before. It felt bad.
Yes they’re names, does this mean the position of the left that speech can be hateful is invalid?
NO! This is extremely dangerous misinformation. Nobody on the right is trying to end democracy. This is a lie started by the left media in order to convince the left to get out and vote. If you keep spreading this misinformation, you will likely push people on the left to violence.
George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced. Does that mean nothing?
Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police. It’s unfortunate what happened but perhaps one shouldn’t associate with people doing such things if they want to avoid these situations.
Sure, which cities did they burn down? The person I replied to made a specific claim I was asking about. You don't seem to be able to list them, either, despite them being all over the news.
>George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced... Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police.
And? The comment I was replying to said that the people BLM claimed to be fighting hadn't killed any innocent people. What was George Floyd's killer convicted for then? What did Breonna Taylor do that left her guilty?
I understand that situations are more complicated than what they end up reduced down to. But op made specific, false claims.
Is it conceivable that perhaps the statement employed hyperbole to make a point and was not literal?
Your hairsplitting between "burning cities down" and arson misses the point completely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_arson_damage_during_th...
https://www.yahoo.com/video/rioters-set-fire-federal-courtho...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
Maybe they thought they were fighting
oppression. But at the same time they
were oppressing. They became what they
claimed to fight.
Oppression involves systemic power. Control of the courts, the justice system, the police, the government, of business. Some or all of the above.
Some protestors acted badly! They were wrong! I agree with you! But that is not the same as oppression.
But such equivalencies appear to be an idea you've promoted though, if I'm reading your past comments correctly.
Also, give Azamat a hug for me. I miss that guy.
I realize it's not HN-appropriate, but once in a while I break down and make fun of those who see no difference between oppression and fighting against the oppression (or fundamentally don't understand the difference between "being mean" and "systemic oppression")
Why is what BLM and antifa always excused? Why can’t you condemn it so we can fix the country? Some of us are over the left v right politics and want the left to realize their problems so we can all move on.
So how come BLM and Antifas actions are not condemned by the left?
This is actually a fundamental problem with discourse that I don’t know how to solve. There is a reasonable moderate left that struggles with these kind of issues, and its pretty large. Most maybe even!
Why is it you’re acting like there’s only one “left voice”? There will always be communists and SJW’s free speech doesn’t work if you act like the extreme voices are the mainstream or only voices of value.
I actually completely agree with this.
> Why is it you’re acting like there’s only one “left voice”? There will always be communists and SJW’s free speech doesn’t work if you act like the extreme voices are the mainstream or only voices of value.
Because increasingly they look more and more aligned. And regardless if personal beliefs, the non-extremist still vote on the same lines as the extremists. That’s why we’re coming up on a recession now.
Why imagine? Twitter is full of malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech on any day of the week. That has long been the case. True, some instances of such speech which went contrary to political ideology of Twitter employees and management was deleted, but other instances, that aligned with their ideology, were flourishing. And consumers of Twitter and advertisers don't seem to mind too much.
I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t work out for him because network effects are really hard to overcome.
But my confidence that I can forecast this is low, I'm mostly taking a stab for a bit of fun and to look at this comment in a few years.
One thing I have a high degree of confidence is that Musk will declare victory in almost any outcome, and if it's really so egregious that he can't declare victory with a straight face, he'll find some way to blame everyone else in the world.
Pretty sure you mean "erring", here.
In reality... they'll probably move to TikTok because "that's what the kids use these days".
I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep a few large companies going.
I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from the public crap that he’s done to ruin his public image. He has achieved the impossible so many times that he’s developed a god complex. I can’t speak to the electric car part but I’m impressed that he was able to will the country into caring about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space industry and made it cool again. But personally he’s a shit show that has gone unchecked for too long.
When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry over to running a social media company. His style works because of the culture he’s able to build and the vision that he’s able to sell. From what I can tell he’s ruining the good parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn’t have a vision. Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a working at spacex were the best years of my life that I’d never want to repeat again.
The strongest argument is Tesla still doesn't have self-driving cars considering he's given it tons of attention for years and missed ETAs many times, but they're clearly getting there.
That said, while I do think space travel is crazy cool, the prospects of living on Mars are quite long-term and a _lot_ of work to the point you might ask if it's really worth it worrying about it right now. How are they going to solve the atmosphere? Or even more impossible, how are they going to solve the ionizing radiation from space? I guess they could just live in closed-off domes but still...
Things are not worth doing simply because they are risky - that's just more fetishism. They are worth doing because they solve problems. Space travel has the potential to solve certain problems, and is already solving lots of problems today. Mars colonization is not a serious proposal to any problem, because it can't be accomplished on any time horizon we're planning for. Mars colonization will likely never happen, and if it does, it is far beyond the foreseeable future (>100 years).
So; SpaceX's rockets (and satellites) could certainly be useful, and are certainly useful today, but as GP pointed out, Musk's stated purpose is nonsense.
Feel free to sit down and do nothing. While others do something.
Why do you feel entitled to dictate how other people must spend their time and resources, even to fail.
At the scale of individuals I would agree people should be free to try whatever hairbrained schemes they please, at that scale who am I to say what will work out or won't or what success even means.
What concerns me is that so many people are buying into false solutions and transparent grift about real and pressing issues that impact us all collectively. Musk isn't a crackpot who should be tolerated in the interests of liberty, he's a public figure who is actively causing harm, and I believe will cause more in the future. So I'm certainly entitled to share my views on this public figure, and I'll continue to do so. I'm curious why you would respond to that so defensively.
Because
I think I shouldn't do X. == ok
I think You shouldn't do X. == no
I think you should get all the rights to not start a rocket company, car company, a tunnel boring company, solar panel company. But you demanding others not start all those companies seems to be wrong to me.
Again, I give you all the rights do sit down and do nothing.
The freedom you seem to be advocating for is freedom from other people having opinions, existing, or speaking to you. As if they only mattered when they agreed with you or were willing to help you, and they became irrelevant the moment they had a criticism. I think you should reconsider. I think life is better with vigorous debate with people you disagree with, and that the things you so badly want to "get done" will be richer and deeper if you engage with people who may not like what you're doing. Otherwise, how could there be any other outcome than finding yourself surrounded by yes men?
I observe that Musk’s biggest wins is where he has used his enthusiasm and large cachet of celebrity capital to challenge the status quo. Tesla and SpaceX both embody elements of society that sci-fi has been dreaming since we were kids. Self landing rockets flying all the time! Electric robot cars that drive themselves! He challenges entrenched industries to do a thing that people wish they would do, but the bean counters say isn’t worth it. It least that’s how the fanciful narrative goes.
The problem with Twitter (or any social network/super app) is that it is not clear what that “go big, go beyond, dream big” trajectory is. For me personally, it’d be about open source, open walls, federation, and above all no fricking advertisement/surveillance economy. I don’t see how Musk’s acquisition here achieves that or any other “dream for the stars” aspiration one has for Twitter.
And His dream for the stars aspiration for Twitter is a public square where people exchange communication and ideas freely, civilly and honestly. Some might argue that is a crazier dream than autonomous rockets, Mars and electric cars!
That is his really great talent: getting smart people to put their resources behind ambitious projects. That was also Elizabeth Holmes's talent, and Adam Neumann's. So far, he has done well at pivoting that inspiring message to real results, unlike the other two.
Cargill to Ikea
For example, Walmart has 560B+ revenue per year and a market cap of 380B.
Several big law firms are likely worth over $100 billion if they ever were equity financed, but use a partnership structure for legal reasons. The same for large hedge funds, which use partnerships for tax reasons.
This list has some more traditional companies that have stayed private but have high revenue:
https://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/
Some of them would crack $100 billion valuation, but not all (eg Publix at #3 on the list probably wouldn't, but Mars at #4 would).
Here's a worldwide list with the same caveat:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_non-...
These lists only include companies that report their revenue for one reason or another (eg to get a loan). Many profitable private companies don't - their owners like to stay private and extract cash from the business rather than having to keep the profit in the business.
State-owned companies are another group entirely, and are often worth a ton.
you can read this sentence and come away with the conclusion that he doesn't do anything, or that he is responsible for everything. To me, it mostly seems like he has a bunch of money / financing so he can pay people to try lots of often very dumb ideas and some might work. His core "skill" being an accumulation of immense wealth.
you might say "you need both ideas and execution, and he is an ideas guy", which is correct, but i think the level of credit (and compensation) is wildly skewed towards the "ideas guy" in this case
Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that was his first time there instead of returning.
Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.
You say his core skill is accumulating wealth but that’s a reductive way of looking at the world. His core skill is his ability to sell you on his ideas. He sold the world on electric cars and he sold the best rocket scientists and engineers on his space ambitions. He’s a tremendous leader and you’d be foolish to underestimate him.
Again, I don’t fanboy him but I do give credit where credit is due. I worked there and I even briefly worked with him on a project that he cared about. He’s brilliant at some things but his god complex is off the charts. He’s an asshole and his deadlines were insane, but he’s not selling snake oil. It takes a team, and that includes leadership.
Our culture tends to deify leaders when it’s really a team effort. Don’t blindly hate the guy because others fawn over him. He’s human, and a deeply flawed one at that, but wow can he motivate a team to achieve the impossible.
"If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be unremarkable and we’d have no end to amazing things" ever heard of bell labs?
These people and quite a few other experts in this field disagree with you.
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Maybe? But I think he and others would argue that Twitter was gradually losing popularity and had no direction. So I'm not sure "slow death" is such a great culture to hold onto.
1: Profitable
2: More signal, less noise
3: Significantly less misinformation
4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news
Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good and bad organizations, I'm very curious about the layoffs.
Considering day 1 the new head of Twitter posted false information about the Pelosi attack from a site known to publish fake news, I'm going to guess this probably won't be the case.
It’s weird to editorialize fact checks. If Biden said the payments were the highest ever, but the payments were actually lower, then sure add a fact check and provide the real number.
It’s honestly an example of how much of a mess Elon is stepping in with this venture.
Bullshit. ". . . through President Biden’s leadership" is objectively false. It's through the CPI adjustment he had nothing to do with. Even if you leave that out it is intentionally misleading.
It's the sort of lie the media (rightfully) wouldn't let Trump get away with.
Politician X makes a claim that would be torn to shreds in a setting where people are at least trying to be honest. Politician X then gets thousands of supporters blindly agreeing or having meta discussions about almost anything besides what matters.
Until we as a people stop rewarding this behavior, it will only continue.
Unless you want to take the position that it was "biden's leadership" that caused the high inflation, then you could say it was objectively true but uhhh... not something they should be bragging about.
The "fact check" specifically said it was providing context: https://twitter.com/cwt_news/status/1587863492077330432/phot... it was written in a very neutral and factual style. I think it was well placed.
If it were the Trump whitehouse though people would probably be asking if the administration broke the law by removing the tweet and thereby causing the removal of the 1A protected 'fact check'.
I can't see a path to profitability. In particular, "cutting to profitability" never works in momentum driven tech companies. I think he's underestimated how many people love their twitter community but hate twitter as a platform steward.
I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those affected, but let's not also forget that prior to the acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company. This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.
Vastly more innovative and scaled crazy fast without fail whales or anything.
Or look to Telegram today. Delivering a vastly more complex product with a fraction of the company size it seems.
The difference between a messaging app and a microblogging app is basically the difference between an O(n) problem and an O(n^2) problem.
If you don’t think that adds some complexity, you’re kidding yourself.
But have you looked at the scale of what Telegram provides both in width and at scale?
Certainly there are celebrities with more followers on Twitter than the largest Telegram channels, but Telegram scales surprisingly far, and I haven't seen it struggle more than once or twice since the start.
It's clear you are totally clueless about how many features telegram has.
Scaling this is easily done with decomposition and sharding coupled with a suitable key->value mapping of external id to current shard. I first sharded e-mail delivery and storage for millions of users 23 years ago. It was neither hard nor novel to do then, with hardware slower than my current laptop handling hundreds of thousands of users each.
Do you believe that every Twitter user has an inbox stored on disk somewhere that just contains every tweet posted by someone they follow?
You also don't need to store every tweet, you need to store the id's of the tweets (a KV store of the tweet id to full tweet is also easy to shard), and since they're reasonably chronological the id's can be compressed fairly efficiently (quite a few leading digits of tweet id's are chronological).
You also have straightforward options for "hybrid" solutions, such as e.g. dealing with extreme outliers. Have someone followed by more than X% of total userbase? Cache the most recent N tweets from those accounts on that small set of timelinesyour frontends, and do joins over those few with users who follow them.
Most importantly, it's an extensively well tested pattern in a multitude of systems with follower/following graphs whenever consumers/reads dominate over a period of decades at this point, so behaviours and failure modes are well understood with straightforward, well tested solutions for most challenges you'll run into, which matters in the context of whether it'd be possible to build with a small team.
Put another way: I know from first hand experience you can scale this to millions of users per server on modern hardware, so the number of shards you'd need to be able to manage to deal with Twitter-level volume is lower than the number of servers I've had ops teams manage (you'd need more servers total, because your read load means you'd want extensive caching, as well as storage systems for e.g. images and the like - there's lots of other complexity, but scaling the core timeline functionality is not a complex problem)
Look at what they didn't do, which was make any revenue, or support any customers, or moderate any content.
I know I at least was shouting at them to take my money: it was the perfect HN product, reasonably priced, technically superior and with no ads or tracking.
And yes, I paid as well.
Twitter is a 'universe of 100M connected people'.
WhatsApp mostly connected single entities together.
So, for example, 'real time search' and 'relevant updates'.
Imagine taking a firehose of 100M people's random thoughts, putting that into an index, making it instantly searchable. Now pull up the most relevant thoughts from those 100M to each and every other 100M user.
Now moderate all of it in really subtle ways, whereupon most of the 'negative activity' is tantamount to spam or annoying behaviour, and not anything we might normally consider 'abuse'.
That's an incredibly different challenge and that's only two small artifacts of what they are doing.
Twitter is not rocket science, but it's not trivial either.
Also consider that R&D is usually maybe on 20% of overhead - yes - it takes 'all those other jobs and expenses' to run a company.
Some of these statements are a bit glib.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
(A blog is also a broadcast messaging service, so I think you’re both right).
I don’t like EM at all, but truth is internet companies are making so much goddamn money, they have employee pools absolutely full of turds.
When you're generating and distributing and moderating multiple TB of tweets in real time every day to billions of people and also feeding other corporations parts of that data... maybe you do.
But I don't see why an company and an application of that size couldn't be run by a company of, say, 1500 people, instead of 7000. 250 engineering staff, 250 doing moderation/support, 800 doing sales & account management and 100 in management and 100 doing sundry tasks.
Let's do some napkin math here:
500 million tweets, let's say 10% are reported, and evenly distributed. That would make for reviewing 200,000 tweets per employee per day. That's 7 tweets that need to be moderated per second for a standard 8 hour day.
190m active users, .1% of which need support daily. On top of 7 tweets per second, that's just shy of three user support tickets per second that they need to manage as well.
And that's without weekends, holidays, sick days, etc.
EDIT: Let's go the other way with napkin math too.
Let's say each content moderator can review 6 tweets per minute.
50m tweets to be moderated at that velocity means you need around 136,000 man hours per day. For an 8 hour day, that's 17,000 employees. Too many.
So you make an ML algorithm that processes the reported tweets, but needs backup and spot checking on 10% of those. 1,700 content moderators (and a team dedicated to building/maintaining the ML report checking algorithm).
Now, about those support requests. Based on my experience from being a CSR for Amazon years ago, you'll probably want 2-3 minutes per support request, and that's if you're sending a form letter back. 1.9m requests at 20 per hour means some 95,000 man-hours per day, or 12k CSRs. Too many. Another ML algorithm (and team to maintain it) and we're down to 1,200 CSRs.
About 3 thousand employees plus their support structure, just to handle tweet reports and CSR requests.
Based on napkin math, 7,000 employees makes a lot of sense to me.
10% reported seems high, possibly by as much as an order of magnitude. The overwhelming majority of tweets are vapid and innocuous.
It seems like an ML algorithm could do better than 90%. It doesn't have to be as perfect as driving a car; if it screws up occasionally it will merely annoy users (and probably the users that are most troublesome).
If twitter becomes a more permissive environment, less censorship is necessary. Agree or disagree with it, it means less work for the censors.
Paid subscriptions give you a significant new trust metric for users.
The rest you can farm out to mechanical turk?
250 seems within the realm of possibility. People will complain about you the same way they complain about Google, but they'll keep using your product.
Also, having worked for a company that did ML sentiment analysis and content analysis against the twitter firehose, the accuracy of ML was closer to 65% than it was 99%. Yes, the company had a huge in-house crew dedicated to checking that 35%, and monitoring twitter manually for anything missed.
Twitters actual numbers (from https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/rules-enforcemen...) show that 11.6m reports were generated in the period July to December 2001, which is roughly 65,000 reports per day. ML could easily reduce this number further, but with 100 employees doing moderation, even without ML, that's 650 reports per day. That's getting towards doable.
Not all reviewed-for-moderation tweets would happen because of user reports.
Seeing how poorly ML works for moderation (Too many false positives), I don't think it belongs anywhere near it.
The problem is that you could offer a user a path to request a human review moderation action taken by ML, but bad actors that knowingly break rules will just request human review and at that point, the ML is worthless.
The types of things that require scaling out engineers is supporting video embeds from 100s of different video hosting platforms.
Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described that way.
Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000 people to run a freelance taxi app', when they had hundreds (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast numbers of people but has a relatively small number of impactful products, only some of which make money.
Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.
So in this hypothetical, the people building the future of the company have achieved nothing during this time and should absolutely be removed or replaced.
Uber cut their losses. Twitter needed a change of owner to get there.
That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from my perspective).
As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the positions after acquisition.
"Love to borrow money to buy a company and then saddle that company with the debt so I can lay off thousands of people"
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945
I do however feel that there should be civility in these layoffs regardless of what Musk's belief's about performance of these employees (or Musk fanboi's). There should be proper severance/healthcare and prorated vesting.
Similar stuff is happening with most of the local papers in the country. Although in that case the whole business model is dying. But vulture capitalists are hastening the demise by squeezing every the lifeblood out of the business and destroying what's left of the public goodwill.
Actually it does when large number of houses get repoed. it did happen in 2008. that was because of securitization & rating mistake by banks but that speaks to my point, if the banks have a bad valuation model & give out unservicable loans then they have to eat the loss, just that everybody was doing that in 2007 because of repeal on many laws around such speculation.
this seems to be a similar thing as long as it does not happens to be systematically tilted towards overvaluation but I'd argue businesses (esp public ones) are more closely watched and market does a semi reasonable job of valuing them over time. personally there is not a whole lot of growth left in twitter (or FB) except for changing to a new business model like identity verification or eat into FB's lunch ;-). But as I said we'll see.
This is VC speak that is gibberish and means nothing.
what I hope is that it shrinks to about 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up. I think one thing that makes social media hard to manage is the sheer scale. It's likely much easier to manage/moderate a smaller social network than a huge one. Also, it wouldn't be as dramatic to be kicked off a platform because then you'd just go somewhere else.
if not that, then i hope Musk moves it from the users being the product to the users being the customer. Charge $10 for 1,000 tweets but keep it free to read. Or maybe charge money for rate of tweets like $10 gets you 5 tweets a day. Make it cost money to engage. Twitter would probably shrink (which is good IMO) but also make more money ( which is good ) and make mobrule, massive information warfare etc cost actual money.
and they are successful by interoperating, until one becomes more popular than the others and turns proprietary. (I just want to get my prediction in also)
That's not how social networks work because the bigger they are the more useful they are to users.
I get the point information warfare, but you may as well just wish for Twitter and other social media platforms to outright die.
People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.
However good you are, if you pay way too much for something, you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no other changes.
People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk:
A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B) Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he can solve big problems better than other people, and power and money are side effects.
I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of person, his positive return is solving the problem. He thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth saving.
I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.
He seems to embody all three “types” fairly well.
And I agree with OP - all this will be forgotten when Twitter is considered an elite place to work in a few years. Love him or hate him, but the guy attracts really talented people that want to work with really talented people.
+1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization.
On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.
I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about battery prices and buying raw materials on the London exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no wonder his companies do well. It’s not till later that I found out that everything he says is someone else’s idea that he takes credit for.
There are a zillion ideas out there. The idea (!) is to be able to pick the right ones.
For example:
1. never give up
2. don't beat a dead horse
Which idea is correct?
Among hiring managers at big companies, they absolutely do.
The idea that spacex engineers are lazy / don't work hard etc is fanciful thinking. SpaceX being badly managed? Maybe true. But engineers at spacex? If you look at competitors like an engineer on the SLS project (which has taken 10-20 years to get to one 20B rocket launch) - no question who you'll want to hire if you are in "new space". I think for old space companies - probably still worth hiring SLS type folks just given that they will know how to deal with the paperwork of those jobs.
I would NEVER work for Tesla or SpaceX (work life balance way off). But neither would I claim they are lazy or poor engineers.
John Carmack reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE
George Hotz reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P_Y8CUcqks
Andrej Karpathy reflects the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE
I know of a few folks from what I would call older line engineering (thinking boeing / SLS type places) actively looking to get onto a musk company (younger folks generally pretty eager to do work).
It's pretty visable when you see NASA administrators doing presentations and then SpaceX folks (who all seem like they are in their 20's to me). Pretty clear you are getting a lot more experience at SpaceX then in the big SLS subcontractor stack for example. I'm adjacent to this space a bit and I think most of the senior folks leaving tesla / spacex (plenty of them) have all landed pretty well despite your claims.
I don't like Musk, I don't like Tesla, I don't like (most of) what SpaceX does. But as a professional I can't agree with your Reddit-AntiWork-MuskIsEvil portrayal of those companies. It's just not true.
What do you not like about SpaceX?
It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different operating environments.
Twitter is long, long established as another company.
The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of customer.
He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support from Big Gov.
I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.
Energy is subsidised, roads exist, international commerce, the internet, laws, money.
It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people that couldn't have been done with 10% of that
Feel like there are more and more people here who know nothing about the industry.
In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.
This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart.
It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible.
But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.
Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money.
So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore).
The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.
I'm also curious at the rumblings from US politicians. What would happen if the USA nationalised Twitter? Given that politicians from all over the world use it too. A case for a UN intervention?
So many people I know are leaving Twitter, but the political class seems to need it, so I don't see it dying any time soon.
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the altar? Dang indeed!
If Musk's behavior with exec termination is any indication, there will be no severance package.
He’s going to have to be paying out at least 2 months pay as severance.
Twitter had a loss but had been profitable before. Twitter has a huge following/user-base worldwide. The hard part of creating the brand has happened.
He just needs not to break it, trim some fat and appease advertisers. (In a possible recession, so that is the hard part of his job.)
The HARD problem Elon has is of his own creation. He leveraged massively to bring this deal to fruition. During a downturn. So if let us say Tesla stock goes down considerably that might be an issue.
If Twitter does not get called for its debt, Elon is going to make lots of money when he "brings it back to the people," out of pure kindness mind you, and it goes public again or there is a secondary offering. He bought it in bad times at "low brand value."
The other value to Elon is he will increase his brand. Elon's value is in his name. Twitter can help him there, as it does daily.
Edit: P.S. Oh, a bit more related: It will get sued. In fact it already is in the process from my understanding for botching/ignoring California WARN act regarding layoffs. So... good way of spending money. And he can not demand them to waive it off with a severance letter.
that’s akin to saying, I hardly drive so I don’t care about the price of gas. Doesn’t bother me.
twitter has influence and reach far beyond what the mDAU implies.
At that point WhatsApp had first class clients for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia and Web + a server backend that scaled to 2B+ daily users.
This doesn't happen by accident. WhatsApp founders created an environment where this could happen:
- focusing on a few things (saying no a lot)
- everyone on the team is highly capable
- a work environment that allows people to focus on work (minimal meetings, good long term planning, fixing root causes vs constant firefighting...)
If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean for the future of tech jobs?
So, here's what I've never figured out...
Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it, and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the engineers? Why do you need to keep growing?
At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to build?
Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think automation could take care of most grunt work involved with maintenance.
Anyway, on this one I consider the chance of failure to be high, from a financial point of view but also because a social network is not an engineering challenge. That said, he seems to seek out such unlikely adventures.
I think Twitter will first take a massive hit before it rises to new heights, if it does.
this is a sign that youve never had to support the scale of a popular social network
From the chat log exhibits from the Twitter vs Musk case: https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47
A VC (Jason Calacanis) does back of the envelope calculations:
Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021
Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021
Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021
Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard)
Elon: "Insane potential for improvement"
If the rumours of 50% downsizing are correct these functions were way bigger than I expected.
Where is all this new money coming from, and why do suggest it requires these new employees to keep that stream flowing?
Are the new features for advertisers rather than consumers?
Given these factors, I wouldn't be surprised if Mush cuts the employee base in half again.
I loled at this. Why redact the name if its in the content. SMH
Interestingly, he’s already tweeting out complaints about a massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free speech: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880?s=46...
https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/158860354056966...
Not to mention there’s countless cases of this happening over the last decade, across payment processors to CDNs.
Some dude: "it's totally not them!"
Why would he not think that?
“Activists groups pressuring advertisers trying to destroy free speech in America ?”
The dude is a conspiracy theorist now ?
So the more undeniably-short-sighted-flat-out-wrong stuff he does the more logic goes out the window.
More succinctly, Musk performed an activist takeover.
So there might be some philosophical attempt to reduce headcount. There might also be some attempt to hire more later and at a lower price (or at least one that isn’t artificially high).
It feel a little bit misleading to take a look at company in isolation, as different companies have different dependencies and depths of integration.
Twitter EBITDA per employee: $211mn / 8k employees = $26k per employee
Google (Alphabet) EBITDA per employee: $93.7bn / 135k employees = $694k per employee
Apple EBITDA per employee: $130.5bn / 154k employees = $847k per employee
Twitter EBITDA per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $211mn / 3k employees = $70k per employee“Maybe we don't talk twitter on twitter”
“Satya: Thx for the chat. Will stay in touch. And will for sure follow-up on Teams feedback!”
“jack [presumably Dorsey]: I'm off the twitter board mid May and then completely out of company. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin.”
Larry [Ellison; Oracle] I agree that it has huge potential... and it would be lots of fun Elon: Absolutely:) [2022-04-26] Larry: Since you think I should come in for at least $2B... I'm in for $2B
The implications would be many -- and I'm skeptical scalability and the user experience would be comparable. Any good writings on this?
Bill gates foundation has made tremendous progress with healthcare in developing countries. He’s probably made as much progress that can made in these countries as the walls he’s hitting seem to be corrupt/incompetent governments rather and money or technical.
Mark Cuban’s cost plus drugs company is making a life changing difference for Americans paying a lot per month in medicine, often saving their customers hundreds of dollars per month, and committed to expanding their selection of generic medicines.
Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world's internet. This is an absurd conspiracy theory.
They can easily scale it up or down depending on how other projects/priorities are going and how many people don't have tasks to do. All of the deadlines and KPIs are internal and they don't expose themselves to lawsuits or financial penalties when they have to delay something.
In the case of spacex, it's even more beneficial because they need to launch rockets anyway for testing. Sending them to space empty is a wasted opportunity.
Example of how musk can blackmail governments at critical juncture. Never ever should any govt depend on this egomaniac POS for such critical infra
Do you expect companies to provide services for free? The hypocrisy that Elon pointed out is that the military industrial complex is getting paid billions, but the ideological mob via captured MSM is smearing him for no longer wanting to provide free/subsidized services?
P.S. Their "withdrepw" typo in the article, doesn't bode well for overall quality.
Edit to add: Found another source confirming the units were down, oh - and look at that - it was due to non-payment. People demonizing Musk for war mongerers not paying their bills eh? Let the smear campaigns continue..
> Before the terminals went completely dark, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense made a request in early October to their British counterparts to pick up the $3.25 million monthly bill. The batch of terminals were also rotated out as concerns grew that service could be turned off, in order to minimize the impact, the source said.
> A British official said after discussions between the ministries "it was agreed there were higher priority military capabilities." Among many other channels of support, the UK has been flying thousands of Ukrainian troops to Britain for training before they head back to the frontlines.
It's possible for a perfectly reasonable person to justifiably strongly dislike Elon Musk, but what you're doing here is not that.
what I worry about now is that musk fanbois are willing to bend the rules (in peacetime not covid panic or early days of EVs) for him will set a horrible pressident for workers in general.
Sorry I may have missed this in the article–was it something beyond being laid off? Being laid off sucks (it's happened to me) but it's a normal part of business operations.
How is this not disgraceful? This not “normal business operations”, this is peoples lives being torn apart while the ultra rich play games with their livelihoods.
> Employees get to quit at a moments notice
Most employees have to work in order to make an income. To assume that it's at all common for employees to just jump ship and leave a mess behind is inaccurate
> leaving the company scrambling to find a replacement at potentially great costs
And to this point, most employees are redundant. Other employees can pick up the slack. A well managed organization usually doesn't let the bus factor get too high. And if an org isn't well managed, it's not fair to blame employees for wanting to leave
> I choose to care about my employer and my employer chooses to care about me. I could make a lot more money at a company that does not care, but I value that relationship more than money. Everyone should have the choice.
I think this is closer to the mark. Employment is first a legal agreement, but also a social agreement. And this is the social agreement that Musk is destroying through his game of chicken with Twitter. He doesn't get a pass because "it goes both ways"
It is a choice that is going to cost his company money. Talented potential employees are going to be well aware of the potential to be fired without a second thought(or severance) on the whim of Elon from now on. Twitter will have to increase compensation or settle for less talented individuals to balance that potential. That is where he does not "get a pass".
I agree of course from a human social standpoint that it would be moral and appropriate to give as much notice and severance as possible. However, there are many factors that come into play when making decisions of this nature. I do not know the full compensation package of the employees(were they already overcompensated?) or the total financial status of the company. The company could in theory be on the brink of failure. If Elon gave the fired employees a sweet parting deal and the company subsequently goes broke, leading to even more layoffs that would be terrible for the remaining employees. Furthermore, what of the employees that have to be fired or never hired in order to compensate the employees that are already leaving? I wonder how the vote would go from the employees if a company proposed the following:
"Would you rather we fire without severance pay 100 employees tomorrow or fire 150 with severance pay next month?" That's essentially the question that happens in management when a layoff is happening. Sadly many people fail to see that 50 jobs were saved in the first scenario when they read headlines about layoffs.
Either way we think, the complexities of human interactions in the markets and business is fascinating!
that assumes management is acting in good faith towards the employees, more often than not that decision is tilted towards shareholders ie.. if they think they can cut 150 employees and make it work then it just becomes a choice between cutting 150 employees with or without severance as soon as possible. the amount of severence is essentially decided by local laws and prevailing standards but mind you the game is mostly give as little as needed.
On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political leaders, and billionaires?
Checkout Postman and McLuhan.
Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.
Rage, on the other hand, can be perfectly encapsulated in a few characters.
I’m sorry you don’t see that.
You can find a lot of very deep, long-form content. I'd recommend following Samo Burja or Doomberg for example.
The platform isn't the problem. The people using whatever platform they can find to spread an anti-democratic anti-intellectual anti-humanitarian message are. I'm sorry you don't want to see that.
The panopticon they’ve build is bigger and wider (sharing data between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don’t know what would be the “Cambridge Analytica of Twitter” but time will tell.
Twitter’s catching up though.
It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have seen families torn apart because of this.
I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile at strangers.
Inflammatory language get's more reaction - well documented and your probably aware of that.
I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of their friends, but you better believe they and all their Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of the other social media.
Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.
Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.
None of the articles on HN have much of good faith discussion. I just see it as “progressives are pissed because their platform of power is being seized”. A lot of that relied on platform censorship on places like Twitter.
Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked. That doesn’t sit well with progressives.
This isn't some conspiracy theory, we have the current Biden Administration working with Big Tech to censor speech. "Public health" is just a trope under far more insiduous political agenda for power: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
And the WH deleted some of those tweets after being fact checked.
White House Deletes Misleading Tweet Giving Biden Credit For Social Security Check Raise:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/11/02/whit...
The white house press releases have been a total disaster. I thought we had it bad in the previous admin. Lies after lies told to American public. Much of this stuff goes unchallenged on all social media.
I’ve been following epidemiology experts and no one implied “everyone dying”, nor recommended “24/7” mask wearing (rather cited lowered transmission rates) and yes isolation lowered transmission rates too.
The flak they had to take for inconveniencing the lifestyle of people in the interest of prioritizing health outcomes for all, is insane.
If anything, we learned that the thought of care for others at a small cost to the self is extremely triggering for many Americans and is easily politicized as a wedge issue to influence voting.
> Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium
And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable and informative news outlets went under.
Also standards of journalism integrity were bad then but they are abysmal now. Very few journalists actually investigate stories, most just re print press release.
But of course you are right: who could have foreseen how much bad news people want to read and how little they want to pay for quality news. Why do people watch Fox or read Murdock media rags?
That’s just to say everyone is in a bubble and people are the problem.
Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety of professionals across different disciplines and regions to parse together some useful info.
You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being misinformed in some way.
If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform.
I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem?
If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.
- https://twitter.com/saxomarketcall and their podcast
- https://twitter.com/macroalf
- https://twitter.com/unusual_whales
Then you’ll see their retweets and likes in your feed and thats how you can build a good list.
I would stay away from anyone whose primary focus is crypto, biotech or tech stocks unless you are a critical reader.
FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter employees, its good to be grounded in suffering of fellow techies.
Twitter workers are highly intelligent and the current pity party for them is unseemly. Everyone in the industry saw a day coming when the music would stop, whether because of economic changes or automation, but no one chose to act.
I mean, we definitely could. They'd be seriously fucked if we did. It's a wonder it hasn't happened yet
Surely a union would help avoid this exactly kind of things, I can assure you. Once I kept my job thanks to a union when there were mass layoffs at a company I worked for. Also, a union would probably have negotiated something better than an "at will" contract, which I assume Twitter employees are bound to.
It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to talk about the bigger picture rather than wallowing in sympathy.
The difference is that people are being laid off, terminated, or otherwise losing their jobs every day. It's not a new or interesting phenomenon. What's interesting are the conditions that led to it happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter. It's novel and may have broad impacts well outside the ~3.5k people who are now looking for work.
Which, in your estimation, are?...
Outside of Twitter: the purchase was high profile and novel, made by a popular figure whose star seems to still be on the rise. There was drama around it for months, and we still don't really know if Musk really meant to buy it. Musk's personality alone is interesting. Then there are the responses of people approximately split down party lines in the US, the various communities that use Twitter heavily today, advertisers, and high-profile people who have run afoul of Twitter in the past.
Finally - and perhaps most impactful of all, though it's not been extensively discussed here - there is the possible impact this will have on US politics. Exactly how much of Trump's popularity ~2015-2020 was due to his tweets? Will his account be reinstated? If so, will he use it? Will he resume using it the way he did before, or will he feel less encumbered by Twitter's policies and be even more bombastic/inflammatory? How will that impact the 2024 presidential election?
From where I sit, I have no idea where things will end up. Any outcome from "Musk loses tens of billions of dollars as Twitter ceases operation" to "Elon Musk sends his congratulations to President Trump from his home at the SpaceX lunar outpost after his election to a second term".
If you don't find such a range of possibilities interesting, I don't know what to tell you :)
At the end of the day, CA is an at-will employment state. Anyone can get fired anytime, and it is up to everyone to be prepared for that. Any person working in any company X can meet the same fate - it's like being prepared for an earthquake, which can happen anytime. I'm not condoning what's happening at Twitter, but the idea that those employees had no way to be prepared for this is false. Though I agree with you that we should show empathy to those affected.
What I’m seeing here, however is a discrepancy between saying that working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines) and on the other hand the expectation to dispassionately deal with being fired.
That just doesn’t go together. It‘s just a weird perspective. Those views don’t seem to be consistent with each other.
If your work is meaningful to you then psychologically being fired can have a devastating impact. You can’t be at the same time emotionally invested in your workplace and also not affected by being fired.
I know that HN is not one person, but that’s the perspective I’m perceiving.
but how many people actually do this? Even then, if someone does it and learns from it then they've set themselves up to make even more down the road
It just seems weird to me. And again: you are taking the financial perspective about making money. That‘s just plain weird to me.
I’m talking about psychological impacts, not money. Having empathy for the psychological impact of the situation these employees find themselves in. Presumably if you are willing to work long hours as an employee you identify heavily with your work, probably also your colleagues, you value what you are doing. To suddenly have that taken away is certainly not easy. I mean, if you liked your colleagues that‘s people you were around a lot and suddenly won’t be …
And in that context Musk unemphatically arriving with a fucking sink as a joke, overall handling the layoffs extremely badly and without a shred of empathy anywhere to be seen is fucking awful. And I’m just weirded out that that‘s not the tone seen here.
There have been a lot of layoffs during the last few weeks and months and while, yes, HN commenters typically did recognize the economic circumstances that led to that they also had a lot of empathy for those who were laid off and were able to differentiate and recognize if employers were treating those laid off well (severance payment – and this is not strictly about financial safety but about respecting employees – and communicating with empathy) or not so well.
Why is that impossible with Twitter? And I think hardly anyone would give Twitter and Musk good marks here.
You're assuming here that people work long hours because they identify with their employer. If a programmer works long hours, is it because they love their employer or because they love programming in general? I'd say the latter, it sounds to me like you're saying the former
As far as the colleagues part goes, if someone is truly close to their colleagues, they keep in touch even after leaving the job. If working at X employer is required to keep in touch with those colleagues, the relationship isn't that strong to begin with
> (severance payment – and this is not strictly about financial safety but about respecting employees – and communicating with empathy)
I mean, if you're laying someone off, how it's communicated is of secondary importance. There's a way of doing it professionally and giving them proper severance, doing the right thing, et cetera. But what exactly do you have in mind here, with "laying someone off with empathy"? Are you talking about Musk being a dickhead? Personally that's less insulting than seeing a CEO fake crying about laying people off on LinkedIn
> And in that context Musk unemphatically arriving with a fucking sink as a joke, overall handling the layoffs extremely badly and without a shred of empathy anywhere to be seen is fucking awful. And I’m just weirded out that that‘s not the tone seen here.
You might be generalizing a bit (with respect to attitudes seen here). Musk is an unprofessional asshole. Would you prefer he pretend not to be one and lay people off with "heartfelt conversations" instead? Personally I find the former less sickening than the latter, but ideally he would've just done a normal layoff sin theatrics and moved on
As for the employees, I'm sure it's awful and they're scrambling rn to find new employment. Luckily for them they have Twitter on their resume. I do however worry about the people on H1b finding new employment in this economic climate
The vast majority of comments near the top don't seem to be of this type, so not sure what you're referring to.
I have a lot of sympathy for Twitter employees who just had to deal with the total shitshow of the past ~10 months, with the media spotlight on them.
But that said, the thing I fundamentally disagree with (and I'm speaking from experience) is that getting laid off if this colossal, tragic thing that many HNers seem to think it is:
1. There will definitely be ups and downs, but getting laid off in a growing industry is very different from getting laid off in a shrinking industry. Many companies are tightening their belts but there are still tons of companies hiring right now, and it's not like most tech workers have the concerns of, say, medical transcriptionists, where the vast majority of those jobs just won't exist in 10-20 years.
2. Tech pays well, and the likelihood of huge layoffs at Twitter have been known for months. While I can empathize with people who were laid off, it's difficult to have sympathy if folks haven't prepared, i.e. saving up a cushion and starting their job search early. It is rare to get this much foresight into a layoff.
3. Tech also tends to give much better severance packages than in many other industries. To be clear, lots of other industries give 2 weeks max, if anything at all.
Again, I have tons of sympathy along the lines of the "man, that really f'in sucks that you had to deal with that" level. I disagree with some of the melodrama I'm seeing that this is something like the worst thing that can happen to someone - one of the linked tweets in the article had a Hunger Games screenshot.
I read elsewhere that they all get 60 days of salary as severance, so I'm not interested in hearing sob stories about being fired right before the holidays either.
If you got laid off in these cuts, you'll do fine. Just find another SV company that's hiring, go in there with "Twitter" prominently on the CV and play up a sob story about how that mean ol' racist fascist homophobe fired you because you wouldn't give him a Roman salute or whatever, and you'll be back to working in an office with bean-bag chairs and free vegan flatbread brunches in a jiffy.
No it’s crazier than that they get paid for the next 90 days but are not allowed to work at Twitter. They’re in a paid but ‘non-working’ status. In addition they will be offered severance. This board is hilarious in thinking that the package musk is offering is in any way ‘cruel’.
So much agree. The attitudes here are just laughable. The drama, entitlement, the faux "empathy", violins, crocodile cry me a river tears.
The factory worker or janitor working hard doing honest work and struggling to put food on their table get my sympathy, not these tech workers with cushy jobs in the top percentile of wages.
I'm one of these btw and am very thankful and I don't feel I'm entitled to it. I've been laid off. And you know what I did? I got another tech job. Barring special circumstances, it is that simple.
Apparently Twitter was too bloated, with some staff not working a lot or doing useless stuff.
In CA this is fully allowed and legal so yea tough luck, but im pretty sure these poor Twitter #OneTeam souls will be gladly picked up other tech companies, they dont have to worry.
It has not. The debt was conditional on the acquisition of Twitter by Musk, so Morgan Stanley could not sell it before the acquisition was completed. But the debt was necessary for the acquisition, so the acquisition could not be completed without the debt money. Therefore, they had to happen at the same time, with M&S fronting the money.
Of course the terms of the debt, and the price of the acquisition, had to be both defined for everything to move forward, so they were finalized months ago.
When Musk signed a contract with Morgan Stanley, money was cheap, so the debt has very low interest. When the debt has actually been issued, a few days ago, money had become more expensive; Morgan Stanley won't find anyone to buy it as-is. To sell it they will have to discount it quite deeply, losing a bunch of money; otherwise they'll be stuck with it.
(Edit: typo)
The crown prince already owned a large stake of twitter, and decided to maintain ownership stake after the buyout. They are still a shareholder, like before, not a loan holder.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prin...
If you click the link to the actual SEC filing, it says otherwise. Alwaleed put stock, not cash towards the purchase and will "retain an equity investment in Twitter following completion of the Merger"
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922...
> Each Equity Investor listed in the following table has committed to contribute to Parent, at or immediately prior to the closing of the Merger and subject to the conditions set forth in the Co-Investor Equity Commitment Letters, cash in the amount set forth opposite such Equity Investor’s name in the following table in order to fund a portion of the Merger Consideration contemplated by the Merger Agreement. Certain Equity Investors have retained an option to satisfy such Equity Investor’s equity commitment with shares of Common Stock held by such Equity Investor (valued at $54.20 per share).
[0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922...
0. https://www.cnet.com/culture/tesla-motors-founders-now-there...
I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just impossible.
For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at the end of the day, I think life will go on.
You win some, you lose some, I guess.
https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1588685426088628225
I honestly don't know much about those ventures at all. Seems they just started testing though?
Like justin.tv/twitch, they might do well to identify the pivot.
maybe he can turn Twitter into a super-app on the console of every Tesla. a plan is not in evidence other than throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. 'move fast and break things' might really unlock opportunities, or destroy trust.
Zuck was unusually good at fake apologies while continuing to data-rape and strip-mine users, but trust is a problem for Facebook and will be exponentially worse for Musk.
it could indeed turn into MuskChan. if he is really going to turn a blue check into something anyone can buy without providing ID it's just a matter of time before impersonation scams multiply.
it will be an incredible distraction from challenges at his other ventures. Saudis and pedophiles are going to use it to abduct people. what is he going to do when people/nations go nuts about something on Twitter and take it out on Tesla?
I'm also skeptical of the weird turnabout between 'get me out of this deal at any cost' and rushing to pay up in full. either a side deal with e.g. Saudis or there was something existential about to come out in discovery.
Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive, tighter run ship.
Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest & vest.
This goes way back. In 2014 there was a show called Silicon Valley that had an entire character and subplots based on this phenomenon in tech companies. Big Head hanging out on the roof resonated for a reason. Compassion is warranted regardless and productive employees got caught in this too, but that doesn't mean we have to engage in selective amnesia and kneejerk outrage.
That is not to say the layoffs were not needed or justified (I don't know) but the asymmetry exists because it's an asymmetric situation.
layoffs shouldn't be celebrated because they cause pain and they mean someone screwed up.
time will tell whether Musk is putting the business on a sustainable footing or killing a golden goose.
I think the other 99% would disagree.
Yeah, we've heard of it.
> resonated for a reason
Mike Judge has a gift for exaggeration and humor. I'd be surprised if even one out of 100 so called 'slacker' rest and vest employees even resembled 1/10 of big head's cluelessness and "beach / roof" lifestyle.
1) those who quit in solidarity, because they don’t like where things are going
2) those who are saddled with the work of those who were laid off / quit and burn out, causing them to quit (which can snowball to others remaining).
I think these days this is a known and intentional effect from upper management and they absolutely are accounting for another 5-10% of voluntary leavers post layoffs. Its free money from their POV, no severance.
But we aren't in that scenario any longer. People who remain will find it much more difficult to find a good job somewhere else as more and more companies are freezing hiring. This could go on for awhile.
It's not really just Musk, it feels like there is a turn on any social media platform that doesn't do wide arrays of censorship that lean whatever way you're inclined to agree with (this includes conservatives hating TikTok.) Musk has said he wants a free-speech platform but has never claimed it would have no moderation. There was a piece somewhere about a rise in the use of the N word, but there was no follow up showing if those accounts were banned. Seems like an important part of the story.
Honestly some of this feels like a hit job. I've not found anyone that can point to something inherently wrong with the new vision of Twitter that isn't based in some crazy hyperbole not in tune with reality. Twitter has been horribly run for ages, someone trying to revive it isn't bad.
When I use a platform, unless the person is a literal Nazi or Communist, I don't care what their political beliefs are. I care about the product. I think that is being lost on people where now everything revolves around politics. It's kind of sad, especially when we all basically agree on 90% of things and policy.
We used to complain about data silos and filter bubbles...and now people just leave platforms because leadership may not share their political views? How is that good? I think the media itself has fed into this because they have always hated social media (for better or worse) for making them no longer the first source of news when print was already dying.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/03/tech/twitter-layoffs/inde...
It's a dick move and demonstrates someone who doesn't understand how to build worker loyalty. Forcing people to tap dance 80+ hours a week or be fired (without mega compensation) doesn't earn you loyalty. Yeah, he claims he works 120 hour weeks, but he also reaps nearly all of the compensation.
But I think the benefit of all this is having someone trying to break the laws. He's pentesting federal & state worker protections. That's a good thing in the long term, not so much in the short term.
All of which kind of supports my point of the media doing a bit of a hitjob. They did the same during the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a huge portion of the reporting came out to later be mostly not true. The irony is that the media may be doing exactly what they want Twitter to crack down on.
It has been reported on here on HN multiple times on how a large part of the CA scandal was not actually as big as the media portrayed. The media loves to make a bigger scandal out of something then slowly backtrack it over time. It happens a lot. Scandals get clicks and eyeballs.
That's true. The "2020 election was stolen" lie was amplified by all the mainstream media. Word for word.
Vacation time!
To me, all of the reaction seems to be completely appropriate given his actions. This is why actions matter! This is why CEO’s get communications training, because in the absence of reading his mind, the world has to react to his behavior. Being a leader of a 45 billion dollar corporation is hard, this is why most CEO’s that do it don’t have two other part time jobs. Maybe it will turn out ok, but I don’t see how you can not see that his behavior warrants scrutiny and pause, and seemingly attribute it all to vague notions of political beliefs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475005
But in April he was like chief internet meme operator manipulating dogecoin markets and building a case for free speech absolutism. So yeah, I 100% honestly believe that the public and media's reaction is mostly rational.
You're applying good faith reasoning to someone with a proven track record of acting in bad faith. That's noble of you, but you shouldn't be surprised if others don't follow suit.
(Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)
That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.
It may seem to ignorant people that a space program is more advanced than "just a website" but actually running these kind of websites is extremely complex. Especially when you're needing to compete with Facebook and Google at serving ads in a relevant and effective way.
It is really interesting reading through their infrastructure challenges alone:
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
Anyone ever seen a relevant Twitter ad?
Just seems very dumb location based placement. Nowhere near the level of IG.
Facebook and Google are in a completely different league which is why for most brands ~95% of online ad spend is spent there.
Twitter has been slowly getting better until now when Musk's attitude has frightened the brands off i.e. GM, L'Oreal, Pfizer etc.
Musk looks like hes done the classic: "the office is clean why do I need cleaners" dance. I am surprised he can fire that many people that quickly and still expect momentum.
It doesn't help that he appears to be shitting out product ideas that he's just "dreamt" up. Rather than talking to people to see why twitter didn't do it in the first place. He clearly has a low opinion of the entire company.
I don't think so. I see far more hate towards Meta and Amazon.
Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than building and maintaining the existing Twitter.
Not that there aren’t some smart web people, obviously.
Tesla is known for fucked up WLB and low compensation compared to FAANG.
I bet Twitter employees have higher average IQ. Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized removing radar and parking sensors.
Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized removing radar and parking sensors.
rocket science and software engineering are two skills that take years of experience to hone. they come with their own set of challenges.
i feel like this sentiment belongs alongside "isn't netflix just an ftp server and a media player?"
I’m writing from a faang office with a few decades of experience. I know some people in aerospace. They’re on average smarter than 4/5ths of my colleagues (who are also clever).
For one, I anecdotally know people in FAANG who were smart by effectively “studying for the test” by focusing more on leetcode than projects/intellectual exploration. In contrast, the people I know who went into aerospace tended to have a genuine interest in physics (and some with more interest in philosophy), and had more experience with projects (e.g. worked on an aerospace team in university), with many of them having little-to-know experience with software development.
Interestingly, the aerospace people I know anecdotally happened to be better at soft skills/networking for getting into companies, whereas the FAANG people focused on leetcode for admissions. After getting into a company, also from my anecdotal experience, more FAANG people focused on metrics/compensation, whereas more aerospace people tended to focus more on the mastery of the craft. I acknowledge that my anecdotes shouldn’t be generalized, but it aligns with the motivations of many people looking to get into each company (it seems more people go into FAANG for compensation/prestige, whereas more people go into aerospace for the passion).
So, I would say that people from both categories tended to be very smart at learning quickly and solving hard problems, though anecdotally, the aerospace people seemed to be generally more intellectually curious. Then again, perhaps the aerospace people were better at soft skills/presenting themselves so they appeared smarter, whereas the FAANG people didn’t focus on presenting themselves as intelligently. For limitations, note that the people I’m thinking of are at the junior level.
In any case, I don’t think one can conclusively say that people in FAANG have more/less/the same intelligence as people in aerospace companies, though maybe one can tentatively say that people who go into aerospace tend to be more curious and interested in mastery of one’s profession (versus material compensation).
* Meta: 71,970 [2021]
* Apple: 164,000 [2022]
* Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020]
* Netflix: 11,300 [2021]
* Alphabet: 156,500 [2021]
* Microsoft: 221,000 [2021]
* The New York Times: 5000 [2021]
* Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020]
* Reddit: 700 [2021]
(Anyone else I should add?)
I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier, and my impression is having only 3750 employees would probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...
To get the ratio metric up, they have to increase income or reduce employees.
This rationale, given by Musk (and I imagine VC friends) is all outlined in the discovery documents of the twitter vs musk legal case.
edits, i dug it out and made it a top level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467305
Google, for example, has more contractors than full-time employees, bringing the total employee count up to over 300,000
They were responsible for local marketing and news curation.
[1] https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/musk-starts-mas...
Twitter rinsed Musk on the way out, which I deeply respect considering his behaviour.
That will only be some salve for the employees losing their jobs, but hopefully their packages get some of that.
One of the theories knocking around last week was that these layoffs are just before a stock vesting was to happen, presumably in an attempt to avoid paying them.
I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it.
Out of honest curiosity, what was your intent for bringing it up?
Has anyone confirmed that the stock vests actually happened? Or did they get postponed whilst the layoffs where being organised? Haven't seen anything either way.
And I don't think it's that odd to consider that a man well known for flaunting the law would flaunt the law on this as well.
Elsewhere it has been announced that laid off employees are getting quite generous Severance packages, so this would be out of line with that.
Consider revenue and income (losses) and Twitter doesn't look good at all, they look horrible. They don't have that many employees, but they must be very very highly compensated and concentrated in very high cost areas. Otherwise the company is wasting serious money somewhere else, because to lose money on $5B/yr revenue with 7500 employees year after year in a business that's as high margin as pure software is incredibly terrible performance.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-fir...
As others have pointed out, Elon has already been involved with WARN lawsuits from former Tesla employees. He surely understands that the law exists, and what Twitter's obligations are under it. So what else could result in this apparent indifference, which so many other people see, and care about so deeply? Ergo, he must not care about the legal implications of how he is going about these layoffs. Hence, he must be ready to just pay the fines.
But, sure, expecting people to connect those dots must be more appropriate for other social media platforms.
The point of the law is to provide worker stability. 60 days payed severance does that just as well if not better than 60 days notice and no severance.
There is no evidence listed in the suit that says these employees were not given such notice.
Further, it specifically states that employees assumed that they were laid of without severance because they were locked out of their accounts and hadn't been yet presented a severance package.
The lawsuit is routine legal nonsense.
So how is it legal nonsense if the lawsuit has good faith reasons to believe that neither of your assumptions hold?
I am not an expert on these things, but I believe this notice is required. I am surprised there is not an easier way to receive this information, this is certainly something I would want an alert set up on.
(That doesn't mean it hasn't happened!)
Your security team and HR team must be really good lay-off some many people without causing violence, law suits, data leaks.
I can easily imagine that if 50% of people present in a office were laid off some would start a protest within the office which could degrade into some violence, damages and law suits. Also, having the HR systems automation must be really on par to revoke access correctly to so many people.
But this is something that should be implemented gradually. Here is someone who just stepped into the company, and he's laying off people en masse. Even if you concede that Musk is some sort of genius (which I don't, but that's besides the point), that doesn't mean that you can just walk into a company and tell from day 1 who is productive and who isn't. And even if you could, making redundancies obsolete isn't something you can just do in one go, even if certain people and processes are inefficient there would probably be a need for a transition period where the institutional knowledge can be transferred.
Given everything else I know about Musk and this deal, this looks to me like a knee-jerk action, not a careful business decision.
When Twitter massively expanded their headcount over the last 3 years their stock price was nearly 30%+ higher than it was before the stock market tanked.
People here aren't paying the bills or looking at the financial sheets. We're taking a human look at it (which is good) but there's more to this stuff.
The C-suite was probably waiting for Musk to take over to make any hard choices that were coming anyway.
Memes aside (I kinda LOL at his sink joke), he is breaking laws and terminating entire departments without any handover or planning.
The entire verified fiasco is a good indicator - the new process won't actually require verification of identity - is essentially a shakedown of existing verified users.
Nothing. As much as I dislike Twitter overall, it's not replaceable. The main characters driving it (journalists, politicians, the like) have no other central gathering place where they would have the cultural influence that they have now. Their status is exclusively bound to Twitter and cannot be reliably replicated elsewhere.
Have a look at the typical big accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a decade-long history of a few dozen tweets per day. These are the 1-10% Twitter users generating 90% of activity on the network.
Where would they move to? Reddit? Discord? Mastodon? Facebook? I don't think so, that would be a worse experience but more importantly, the audience won't follow.
Twitter power users see themselves as creators, but they are not in the ordinary sense. A photographer or videographer produces tangible content that can stand on its own. As such, they can move it across networks.
The same thing is not true for a tweet. Sure enough you can move a tiny piece of text to another social network, but it makes no sense there. It doesn't have the cultural relevance or unique twitter mechanics of amplification. When your creation is snippets of texts that generate outrage, you're in Twitter prison.
Bottom line, I believe the above is what would keep Twitter alive even if temporarily takes some hits.
Lots of gross comments here today, and I don't have the time to go check every last username but I only hope it's not long-timers here who are being so snarky and callous at people losing their jobs.
And if it is, y'all should remember that the best developers have long memories. Would be wise to have a little empathy and delight a little less in the turning of the business cycle, even you think it benefits your interests.
is this a threat?
The irony is that Twitter, more than any other social platform, helped create the aura around Elon, Tesla in particular. In some sense, Twitter was quintessential to what Elon is today.
For him to now - make a bid for twitter - back out of it in futile - acquire it, lay off execs - lay off half the force
Is surreal. If this had been anyone apart from Elon, they would have been ostracized.
I am saddened, but also a bit terrified since I see strong parallels between Elon, and... Other such figures. But Elon now owns a social media platform that "informs" upwards of a 500million users a month.
At one company I worked we had a bug in the software for the device we were manufacturing. There were millions of units at peoples' homes and the bug caused couple hundred of these units to loose the content of their flash, every day. This in turn a huge ongoing loss both financial and reputational for the company.
Because of the nature of the bug, we spent something like 3 months trying to find it. We even built a special lab with dozens of units hooked to specially designed rig to have a chance to observe one unit in the process of getting wiped.
Finally, one guy with an oscilloscope cracked it. It was electromagnetic interference between two different circuits within device causing the flash to receive a command telling it to wipe itself clean.
The fix was one line, two characters really.
I am sure Tesla engineers will do a good job evaluating worth of each one of those lines people printed out.
It’s fairly obvious their metric isn’t «number of lines of code».
Code is not valuable in itself. Code is liability because it costs a lot now and will have to be maintained in the future.
Frequently, best solutions and decisions are the ones that result in avoiding to write any code.
As to code, I put a lot of effort into solving complex problems with simple code. Anybody can write complex code. It takes experience and effort to make stuff look simple.
When you'd bring that tiny print of code and give your explanation, do you honestly believe a Tesla engineer is not equipped to understand the value of those few lines?
Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
How they fire people means very little, because very few people in tech think of themselves as the ones being fired in the near future (most likely also why few people in tech are into unions, they don't feel as replaceable as factory workers).
There are companies with actually bad reputation and they either have problem to find staff or have to pay a lot more while still having issues.
Yes and that is bad. And still, if you work inside one of those companies, the environment does not have reputation of being toxic. It just dont, in case of google the reputation is that they treat you well most of the time, but it is slower speed then, say facebook. And facebook does not have toxic reputation either.
Their reputation is not bad, actually. People who work there criticize some, but also are generally content and happy. Because, even with that agreement, neither company is overly toxic.
Take for instance booking.com. They unceremoniously dumped lots of their employees at the beginning of the pandemic despite being flush with cash. Then they tried hiring people back. Guess what, lots of people didnt want to even hear how much they are offering. There are other such companies.
But yes, there are people who would not, for instance, work for AWS due to their, shall we say, internal culture.
By definition, if they were having a hard time filling roles, they were not paying competitively enough to offset their bad reputation.
I bet they could have easily filled the role if they added a zero or two to the compensation offer.
Twitter might succeed or it might fail but Twitter in its current form both as a company and social media paltform was bad.
Twitter on the other hand is another matter - no huge technical barriers stopping him from getting his hands dirty, no lives are at stake or regulatory bodies that are going to tell him "no that is dangerous" - so we're finally seeing what Elon unleashed looks like. So far it can probably be described as "chaotic" at best, it remains to be seen whether this chaos will disperse and Twitter will emerge leaner and better.
My belief is that he doesn't understand Twitter and its users quite as well as he thinks, and that Twitter will slowly get a bit more annoying and less profitable until he loses interest or gets distracted by something else. We will see, I use Twitter a lot so I hope that I'm wrong.
If you hate Musk, fine, but please just stick to the facts and articulate why you hate him.
I don’t understand why there is so much emotion around Musk. He has done good things and bad things. He has done incredible, near possible things. He works ridiculously hard. He’s rich. He has said and posted things he shouldn’t. I don’t feel that I am in a position to say he is a terrible person. I don’t even know the guy. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without SpaceX and Tesla. I am genuinely fascinated by this hatred.
I’ve tried to compile a list of why people might hate him:
- posted a conspiracy theory on Twitter (which he did then delete)
- childishly insulted a diver
- is a shameless self promoter
- fires staff brutally
- makes huge and sometimes unreasonable demands on his workforce
- disagreed with covid policy, partly on the argument that the fatality rate is low and there’s not much you can really do about it
Ok, these are bad. But he’s hated as if he is the new Hitler. I don’t get it. I’d really appreciate it if someone could rationally explain why Elon is deserving of such great hatred.
He's not treated like the next Hitler by any stretch of the imagination. He's more like a village drunk who just keeps showing up doing stupid things like peeing on your doorstep or passing out in your garden. You don't hate that person, you're just like "[sigh] ok I guess we have to deal with him again..."
If your town drunk is doing that much good for the world, I think you’d forgive them for pissing on your doorstep once or twice a year.
Honestly this discourse has played out a thousand times over. Some people love him, attribute all his companies' wins to him and memory-hole any of the fuck-ups or gaffes. Some people acknowledge his business acumen, don't quite believe the hype on the company-level achievements that get attributed to him personally and find his personality as portrayed on traditional and social media to be grating.
I'm clearly in the latter group and I think that's a pretty uncontroversial position to take.
Edit: would the drive-by downvoters care to explain?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
I think that's missing the point, which is the question of whether these innovations (the re usable rockets, scaling e cars) would have happened without his involvement. If the answer is no, then the question of whether 'someone else did it and he took credit' seems irrelevant. That's what leadership is, driving results, not pulling up your sleeves and doing it yourself.
At a meta level, I consider Musk and Trump both to have the same approach to media: say whatever you want to create publicity. Words mean nothing, in the sense that there are no repercussions large enough to outweigh the created buzz/fame. Outrage works extremely well to that end (look at this thread.)
Because he says things helping both extreme sides (lovers and haters,) all they have to do is latch on to whatever fuels their fire, and ignore the other words. And it is well-know that confirmation bias is a thing among humans. This causes polarization that fuels the debates, creating a spiral of even more debates, buzz and fame. Even sparks meta-debates.
Edit: Another side of this is that it seems that everything must be classified as good or bad. Both on HN and elsewhere, commentors go to extraordinary lengths to argue why something has one abstract label or the opposite. Does everything have to have emotions assigned to it? Does everything have to be categorized in the very coarse good and bad buckets? It would be nice to read comments where the author tries to explain both sides, instead of just arguing for one.
Edit: ok I just saw someone call him “Elongated Muskrat” so now there is someone who is mad at him in the thread :-)
Sorry if that wasn't clear.
... I wonder if polarization can be seen as a market spread, and that more polarization causes higher volatility, which leads to more "trading" to close the spread. I.e. discussions follow some version of the efficient market hypothesis? Need to do a PhD on this. :)
I think you've hit on more here. I think Musk has become associated with Trump. I think that might be because Trump is the champion of the losers of globalisation, and Musk is also a hero to those people because (a) he has created a lot of manufacturing jobs and (b) is creating a sense of patriotic pride in some of his achievements... just see SpaceX staff chanting "USA USA". I'm not criticising anyone, just drawing a connection.
So I think after reading these posts and talking to others, that Musk is hated because he is part of the war between left and right. To praise Musk is to praise Trumpism, and to hate Musk is to show you are against Trump.
These days though, it’s quite clear to the 250k a year tech-guy that, even though they’re making bank, they’re never going to be “Elon rich”, and so the jealousy disguised as virtue has come out in full swing.
Is he perfect? Of course he fucking isn’t… we work in tech, we all work with atleast one “brilliant ass-hole”… they’re the ones that make our days a little bit more painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes most of our workplaces profitable.
Elon is just the end of that bell-curve.
It’s pretty clear he leans right so that makes him an enemy of a lot of people automatically.
If he leaned left, nobody would care. Hell, they’d probably encourage it.
Yeah, no. He was that much richer even at birth, whose father owns an emerald mine?!
And regardless of wealth, Elon’s only actual contribution was paypal, which is.. well, paypal (I quite literally left some money in that because it was so scammy I couldn’t even rescue it by donation..), and funding tesla (not inventing anything!). The latter is pretty much impossible without some form of privilege.
Even if family wealth only helped him through insanely good relations to other people in the top 1%, it is still all that much more than you will likely ever achieve/get. And I frankly don’t buy this “daddy doesn’t love me” BS.
People like to think that but in my experience there are far more brilliant nice people than brilliant assholes. This is the mythos antisocial engineers tell themselves to justify their poor social skills.
Yep 100%, this has been my experience too
A "bell end", if you will.
Personally, I thought he was a cool guy building a revolutionary car.
But once I saw his hour long talk on how he was going to build a Mars colony, the fact that he was actually a Tesla investor - not a founder(the super fast LI ion lotus had already been demonstrated to him when he invested) and his absurd claims about AGI - I realized he was completely out of his mind. I have been skeptical of his personality since 2014, even as I held TSLA shares.
Yes he is able to manage and productionize probably the best car on the road right now and maximize Tesla shareholder value, but he is a shell of a person beyond that.
I will admit to having a few feelings of jealousy of the founders I know who have done far far better than o have on the game of building big companies, but that is also mixed with happiness for them.
With Musk, it's different. It's sadness and disappointment, to see someone throw away so much goodwill and be such a horrible person. Some of this is the media becoming adversarial with tech, while at the same time profiting off the hype bubble that the media itself created for Musk. But I view him as a lost man that needs a better support network and a slightly better filter so that he stops looking so foolish all the time.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-sta...
https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/ukraine-uses-over-11000...
> SpaceX has said it pays for about 70 percent of the services used by Ukraine, offering all the terminals in that country the best possible option, valued at USD 4,500 per month even though most have contracts signed only for the USD 500-per-month service option.
There’s no way Russia loses this war if it doesn’t escalate beyond local conflict. The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering, not lines on maps from 2015.
Stopping recurring monthly donations of something very expensive is also not “blackmail”.
I believe this topic has been discussed more than enough since February, by people with way more expertise than Musk. Ukraine has made it very clear that they do not intent to let their country be oppressed by the foreign aggressor. It is their decision to make.
Asking Ukraine to bow to Russia now that they are successful in their defense is a pro Russia stance. Claiming otherwise is just dishonest.
Especially since he was attempting to imply that anything close to a proper voting process would even be possible in that region now.
His statement means he is either incredibly stupid, or malicious. Both possibilities are dangerous. And Musk fans will vehemently disagree with the former.
It was anti Ukrainian lives on occupied territories and pro Russian soldiers lives. It was also pro next invasion once Russia recovers at which point Russia will argue that Ukraine is failed stated due to having destroyed infrastructure.
>The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering,
The causalities are not minimized by rewarding Russia for invasion and letting it continue with genocide.
> not lines on maps from 2015
The issue is not so much lines on the map as actual consequences of those maps. The torture, genocide, suppression of Ukrainian identity and so on. And obviously favorable position for next invasion again and again, until whole of Ukraine is taken.
I thought he was just a lucky cult like futurist before but now I think of him as what he truly is - a billionaire narcissist that craves adulation from the mob.
I think a good comparison in the US would be Trump and I think more people hate Trump than Musk.
Weird way to spell serial labor law violator
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/tesla-factory-is...
According to whom? His internet comments are sci-fi libertarian mainstream with a dash of NWO.
His business accomplishments are impressive, but he's rather boring, no pun intended.
I think the only argument against Musk's success is that he enjoyed unfair regulatory advantages.
PayPal's KYC was non-existent for years, you could send money with little more than an email. Amazon had similar miraculous regulatory exceptions. No State sales tax until it had a near-monopoly network effect.
>According to whom?
I found that time he called a diver who was trying to save those kids a pedophile to be pretty revealing. Also, calling himself "Lorde Edge" was pretty awful. I suppose if you're asking "who has the right to tell him not to say that?" the answer is "no one", but I find it hard to respect the guy when he acts so childishly.
His factories have a history of complaints about racial abuse: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Elon Musk hates the color yellow so hazards in the factory aren't properly identified: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...
Elon Musk made up the hyperloop just to kill high speed rail and sell more cars: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article26445107...
(Thanks also to whoever un-downed me, as it is from genuinely wanting to understand).
The last link is paywalled, but I doubt that is really his motive. It sounds silly. There was plenty of outspoken criticism against that highspeed rail link without a Musk conspiracy theory. He gave an interview on the BBC where he was similarly bemused by how poor our high speed efforts were, and his criticism was fair.
I'm not sure we can see incidents in very large organisations as indicative of the character of the CEO. For sure he is ultimately to answer for them, and has a responsibility to sort them out, but Tesla employees about 100 000 people and in any sample of people that large you'll have some horrible ones.
Someone else told me about the harassment suit today, now that is directly attributable to Musk and awful. Are there other such incidents?
Still, doesn't seem to explain the sheer hatred for the man. I do have a different theory about that having spoken to others, which I'll post elsewhere...
I'm always amazed at the double standard where musk is solely responsible for the success of multiple companies, but any fault is attributable to someone else. He claims to have slept in the factory! He's this hands on car-building ubermensch. How can he be completely oblivious to safety and discrimination issues?
As much as people would like to believe that Elon musk, a materials science graduate with his only career experience being online payments with PayPal, is actually responsible for the core founding engineering of SpaceX and Tesla is crazy.
Musk made bank with PayPal and has been an investor in many companies including failures like Neuralink, boring company etc. He has both invested and managed Tesla.
He just has the ego of a manchild and bought the title of “founder” as wellz
Yeah sure, he just invested in Paypal, then invested in Tesla, then invested in SpaceX.
I'm not even sure if I'm answering real people or bots anymore, everyone sounds the same now: "Elon good, because environment and space and he made reusable rockets and tesla cars are so good etc.", (Elon starts saying wrongtalk about the media and other sensitive subjects), "Elon bad, because he called some diver years ago a pedophile, and he just invested in tesla and spacex no biggie easy for anyone".
But hey who cares right? I've been getting insulted by everyone here for saying Youtube censors videos and google censors results etc. yet just a couple days ago some leaked documents showed the DHS with the help of tech giants are planning to push the censorship even harder.
This is flamebait, plain and simple.
I worry much of that will be lost without having a natural new home with the same reach and impact.
Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that. I don't see any way out of this that leaves Twitter better.
Agree
NASA, ESA, and all the other space agencies might disagree with you here.
Also, SpaceX would not exist were it not for a US government decision to fund and develop private spaceflight launch capabilities for NASA and the US Air Force. In fact the idea was given to Musk by Mike Griffin who at the time headed up In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm and could also source the right technical experts to form the core engineering group. Shortly after he became NASA's administrator and gave SpaceX a huge development and launch contract before it had flown anything.
The idea that SpaceX emerged from nothing and bootstrapped its way to success has always been false. That doesn't mean they don't deserve praise for doing a ton of things right and having an impressively bold engineering strategy, of course.
Remove those subsidies tomorrow and the companies fold, all of them
Can Elon figure out a way to get the government to subsidize Twitter? Maybe, but it's going to be harder
You want stability? Join stripe
You want to be sharp? Join Twitter
Then when you go and work at company like stripe, its easy.
People are most productive over the long term when they feel encouraged, supported, self-motivated etc.
Positive emotions not negative ones like fear, coercion, hostility etc.
Because SpaceX and Tesla totally crashed and burned and are doing so much worse than Boeing and Volkswagen?
Legacy car brands had electric cars (Toyota, BMW definitely). Boeing could have created landing rockets. Market wanted those products from anyone.
Why didn't they? Because they're dinosaurs, asleep at the wheel. Bad corporate culture.
and the established automakers with billion dollar war chests didn't have access to the same subsidies if they had innovated and made electric cars that didn't suck? The established military industrial complex companies like Boeing and Lockheed that have failed in their space endeavors aren't subsidized?
Nothing about this acquisition as been impressive or promising. I see no sign of that changing. A mass disrespectful layoff like this is going to backfire, hugely.
That's a great way to get a bunch of cowboys in their 20s who think they are hot shit after five years in the industry while kicking out the people with deep experience because they actually like spending time with their families. Now you've got hyper-trendy software design everywhere with nothing supporting it.
Didn't Stripe just announce their own set of layoffs because they over-hired? That doesn't seem that stable.
You want actual stability, join a fortune 500 company.
Being sharp as in the positive performance terms requires sharp leadership and decision making. It means leadership that actually knows what is going on and that requires trust. That is not the same as rage layoff after you impulse bought company you dont want while trolling on social medias.
I’m glad Australia has decent laws to protect workers. It’ll be interesting to see if Australian Twitter staff who are locked out of their accounts have been laid off and what happens next.
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/tools-and-resources/fact-sheets/...
The one with the better offer, taking a possible layoff payout into account. The comp ranges can be so drastically different between companies that a possibly generous layoff (that is no means guaranteed if Stripe has to do this when circumstances are more dire) is negligible financially.
Is the only thing that determines whether you take a job the salary ?
Because for many people how much you get paid is important but far from the only factor.
Most people have a price at which they will sell out. Those who don’t, are too few to make any significant difference
Billions of people love and use Meta products every day and their tech stack is one of the world's best with technical challenges almost no other company faces.
Palantir also has many parts of their business that benefit society e.g. combating human trafficking etc.
The same goes for twitter.
Working at Twitter now means a daily grind means being subject to the whims of an increasingly petulant emperor who does not respect anyone's expertise. What good does it for your career if he's just going to drop the ball at a moment's notice anyway?
The reality is that Twitter as a business (and, imho, as a product) was sorely in need of a course correction. Layoffs, if they need to be done, should be done crisply and thoroughly so that remaining employees don't feel like the other shoe is about to drop.
You rip off the bandaid, it sucks, then you refocus on the work ahead.
Twitter is different - there are other big companies that provide as much tech challenges or more (whether they are better/worse than Twitter is another question). Twitter employees have many more options (relatively speaking) than SpaceX employees
Working at Meta/Google doesn't necessarily do that. I'm almost certain most of these companies' moonshot divisions are not as well-run as many startups, nor are these companies assured success in these areas.
Their main products are already at a "don't fix it if it ain't broke" stage, even though many will claim these are broken. I doubt it's exciting work.
Working at Tesla or SpaceX will be like working on a moonshot that's actually taking off. I'm sure it's a thrill. But increasingly, I don't think Musk is level-headed enough to be trusted with such things.
It takes time to reject nitwitted leaders, so we can't expect employees to abandon ship overnight just to prove my point.
Thats exactly how a lot of people will view Twitter. You might think its horrible and they are terrible for laying of people, but plenty of good engineers ready to fill those roles for the money without the need of having free snacks, free coffee, rest booths, ping pong area, LED illuminated reading rooms, etc etc etc. Twitter will be fine.
I don't doubt the technical excellence of these companies. They are technically very capable because of the talent they hire, and they are able to hire top talent because of the high salaries they pay, not because of some altruistic or egoistic reasons
A workplace can actively kill humans and still treat its employees very good.
You are mixing very different factors together here.
Prestige, to name another example, is very important to a lot of people. Having "worked at FAANG" on your resume opens many opportunities afterwards that don't have anything to do with money.
For what it's worth those companies have not brought any real innovation in the last 10 years, give or take, because if they had they would have been on top of the world (quite literally). Which makes me hopeful that some of the real geniuses out there (today's von Neummanns and the like) might still avoid those companies out of principle.
Basically, if they aren't offering "f** you money", pay has a diminishing effect on my employment choices. And if they are offering that kind of money, I'm assuming that'll come with even more consequences. My resume is alright, but it's not enough for an offer of way more money without strings attached.
I can't speak for everybody of course, but I think not heeding the above leads to burnout.
> Which company is going to have an easier time hiring
The one that people want to work for and don't have to "sell out" to do it.
> Most people have a price at which they will sell out.
Sure. Agreed. But now you've tripled your OpEx vs your competitors. And the people that sold out aren't in any way loyal, so will bounce. But if they aren't offering substantially more, the money doesn't matter. It's all basically the same anyways.
And then you have to consider financials and leadership. Twitter financials got substantially worse (20x) from my understanding after Musk took over because of the debt he now has.
And as far as leadership goes: he was forced to buy it. That really doesn't look good.
Nope, this is wrong if the company can afford to pay more. Just look at companies like Jane Street, HRT, etc. The high comp they are willing to pay makes them harder to get into than Twitter, Meta, etc by a long shot. They have a far easier time hiring.
Yes.
Pornhub, Exxon, Smith and Wesson, all the big tobacco companies, the guys that manufacture fentanyl, infowars, they all have IT staffs. Some have extremely sophisticated IT staffs. Money talks, but there other factors. when you’re working on migrating from .net to cloud native at Exxon and you’re building some kind of new container registry or something you probably don’t spend your days pondering climate change; you get paid every two weeks, you are learning some cool stuff and you’re building some cool stuff. Most people need jobs too.
A pay check and some sort of plausible rationalization is all that is needed. “Twitter is free speech” sounds pretty strong. “Twitter connected Ukrainians during that invasion” sounds strong.
I mean yea I work for pay.
Does the pay by itself mitigates some of the following shitty behavior:
- Timing bathroom breaks - Requiring lengthy security check prior to entering work location - Micromanaging and invasive monitoring
Just small things that would drive some people livid regardless of pay. Scratch that, at the higher end of the spectrum it could easily drive them away.
The only time those things haven't been an issue is when I do charity work which isn't really work as I don't get paid for it, which I think is the only reason the charities take what they get and are happy with it as they have no other choice.
Oddly, my most recent volunteer gig was very.. structured. It may not help that it is sponsored by corporate so maybe they started demanding a lot of data.
If that ain't a major reason why people relocate from all over the world to SV, then I am missing something. Of course the salary is one of the major factors.
For me, knowing Musk's reputation for demanding workaholic mentality.. %20 might not be enough and that is before WFH issues.
Twitter was a public company with quarterly vests where you could get liquidity on your compensation (and from what i understand you were cashed out at buyout.) Stripe remains private and much of your money remains locked. Not sure if they issue RSUs, options, or what, but quite possibly you lose a lot or your historical compensation 3mo later. They were two different beasts. (Of course, now both are private, so going forward they might be similar.)
There are laws that take care of it in my country
The new owner of Twitter took on $13 Billion in debt, which probably costs $1.3 Billion+ in interest payments alone.
Twitter has gone from a hundred-million loss / year into a Billion+ per year loss in the past week, because of the decisions related to this buyout.
That is the problem. $200 million loss per year is manageable. $1500 million loss/year is not.
Twitters losses in 2021 were over 221MM, and 250MM to 700MM between 2013 and 2017.
So the myth that Twitter was a healthy company is only promulgated by agenda driven opinions, not factual ones.
That's all I'm saying. The $1.3 billion/year in interest payments alone is a magnitude more loss than Twitter ever had before.
I worked for a couple startups and the severance package for companies losing money was pretty bad. The package for profitable was ok. And the package for insolvent was “your last paycheck was your last.”
As for hiring peons, it's hard to say. A bigger factor (IMHO) is Elon himself. Fans will probably go there. Those who don't like him probably won't. I expect that to have a far bigger impact than firing a bunch of employees right before bonus time several years earlier.
My read of the situation is that Elon never really wanted to buy Twitter. I mean he did try and get out of it but the Twitter board crafted a good contract and I believe Elon realized he was going to get dumpstered by the Delaware Chancery Court.
So what does he do now?? The private equity playbook is my guess. He'll massively cut costs, repackage it somehow, claim victory (for "free speech" or whatever) and then sell off a minority stake or even the whole thing. He may even try and do the tech thing where he sells most of the equity but retains all the voting power.
In such an environment, short term hiring probably isn't on the cards.
He's too successful now with too many fans for this to have an impact. People know he demands a lot and can do crazy things. That's just part of the package.
1. An infrastructure element that creates an open API/protocol for sharing/pushing messages, contacts and media between content/social media platforms. The basic idea is to have a generic interface similar to email.
2. A content company that provides aggregation, search, moderation (possibly based on user preference) and possibly editorial features, as well as a front-end for users. Basically what gmail is to email.
As soon as Republicans gain control of congress (and possibly the presidency), he starts lobbying to make it mandatory for all social media platforms to allow their users to connect through the API/protocol under (1) with a generalized account, similar (or identical, at least in form) to email addresses.
This would kill the monopolies of Facebook, Insta, Tik-Tok, etc, by allowing a user to use only one of them to connect with user on all of them, similar to how they can use an email client of choice.
Twitter could then charge some small fee for communicating over this protocol, or could simply sell the protocol company to the government, who could make the protocol publicly owned, like email/smtp.
Would this make him a huge profit? Not likely. At best he would get his investment back, perhaps. But it could help break down some echo chambers and counteract some of the crazy polarization that's currently going on in the US.
And if I'm reading Musk correctly, profit is no longer his primary motivation, if it ever was. Rather, it seems that he has some Messiah complex where he wants to be seen as the guy that saves the world.
Whether you see that as a sign of genuine altruism, a severe case of Narcissism or just a sign that he's really an insecure nerd that seeks social validation, is up to you.
In politics corporate interests transcend politics and cross party lines. There is no shot any Congress would destroy the value of all these American companies that way.
> But it could help break down some echo chambers ...
Nobody wants this. The idea that any of this is about free speech is a complete myth. The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is problematic. People are going to engage in content they like and not engage with content they don't like. It affects what websites you go to, what TV you watch, what channels you subscribe to and so on.
The post on HN yesterday from the ex-CEO of Reddit was great in this regard. He put forth a cogent argument that none of this is about content. It's simply a user behaviour problem.
So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-semitic screed he gets banned. Not because of the content per se but because he's annoying and he's making the experiene worse for everyone else. Whenever conservatives (in particular) talk about "free speech", they really mean "hate speech" and wanting to avoid getting silenced even when everyone else just wants them to stop being anti-semitic, homophobic, transphobic, racist or whatever.
Maybe Elon can afford to take a loss to achieve this?
Or maybe the platforms ARE able to find ways to split add revenue (and other revenues) in ways that don't really destroy value.
> In politics corporate interests transcend politics and cross party lines.
How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to Republicans? In fact, I think it's primarily Meta that has a lot to lose from this, out of the American companies. Alphabet/Youtube may actually benefit, as they are specialists when it comes to video, and if Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are forced to permit sharing of Youtube videos through their platforms, they may gain traffic at the cost of native video alternatives.
> Nobody wants this.
Well I do, for one.
> The idea that any of this is about free speech is a complete myth.
I'm pretty sure quite a few people care about free speech, and even more are worried about American polarization. Even many non-Americans, like me.
> The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is problematic.
That's an interesting point of view. You're not only saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere IDEA is problematic? Isn't 4chan an echo chamber?
> People are going to engage in content they like and not engage with content they don't like.
I agree. People should be able to filter content they find problematic, just like we do with email spam or how we can restrict porn in browsers, etc.
> So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-semitic screed he gets banned.
I watched Kanye's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast/youtube a few days back, and it was mostly sad, tbh. Lex, being Jewish himself, pushed back pretty hard when Kanye started his Anti Semitism. But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have take it down.
> It's simply a user behaviour problem.
On Twitter, maybe that's what it looks like. But if you sit through the podcast, maybe your conclusion is that this is more of a symptom that Kanye is going through a very rough time than some intent to be evil. Obviously he DOES have racist thoughts when it comes to Jews (or, depending on your definition of Racist, they would be if Blacks had as much power as Jews, or if he were white).
But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks about "white" people. One could argue that white people have some obligation to avoid Anti Semitism due to the Holocaust. But the left seems to be quite accepting with Anti Semitism that comes from Palestinians, since they're "punching up". Aren't African Americans also "punching up" in this case?
Anyway, Kanye is a lot more than his prejudice against Jews. It IS interesting to hear his story and point of view, even if it did make me quite sad.
So, in conclusion. Let's say social media gets a protocol similar to smtp, they would be able to add optional moderation/spam filters against content like this. But I think users should be able to check their "junk folder" and whitelist content they don't think should be block listed, as long as the content is not illegal.
Even if he is, it's a massive risk. Another platform that he doesn't own could simply rise and take its place.
> How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to Republicans?
The Trump administration tried to block Tiktok (briefly). Many officials and politicans call it a national security risk, most recently the FCC chair just this week. While there are noises made about a break up of Meta, I suspect it's going nowhere.
> You're not only saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere IDEA is problematic?
I'm saying anywhere people can in any way filter their experience, what they see will differ from the unfiltered view. Even if they see the same things, they will engage with things they like. Basically, this is inevitable. The problematic part is this only tends to get lablled an "echo chamber" when people filter in such a way that the criticizer doesn't like.
> But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have take it down.
In case you didn't see it, I encourage you to read this HN submission from yesterday [1]. I'll also bring up the Paradox of Tolerance [2]. Free speech absolutism is the extreme view where anything can be posted. Not even 4chan has this. So when I say "nobody wants this", I mean everyone agrees there are and should be limits on speech so it's just a question of what those limits should be.
Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where everyone else leaves. Moreso, advertisers (who still pay for the platform) don't want to be associated with it so they leave too.
As you mentioned, Kanye still got an incredible amount of exposure for his views between various podcasts and the right-wing media (eg Tucker CArlson, Ben Shapiro) so it's not like he's been silenced. There's just one thing out of many he couldn't do because Twitter didn't want to be associated with it.
> But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks about "white" people.
Free speech is fundamentally a political issue, otherwise I'd try not to get into this topic. I understand your confusion, which I certainly believe to be in good faith. I'll scratch the surface of this as neutrally and briefly as I can.
"Whiteness" and "blackness" as concepts are not equivalent. "Blackness" is an invented concept for various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture and language through chattel slavery. It's why we say "African-American" for black people but "Italian-American" or "Polish-American" or whatever for white people.
"Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1) The proximity to power and 2) Not being black. It is a concept rooted in white supremacy. Who counts as "white" also changes. Ben Franklin, for example, didn't count Germans as "white". Now we count Italians as "white". That wasn't alwyas the case.
You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs "punching down" but you should also know that this idea of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists. "White power" was a reaction to "black power" as an emancipating force in the 1960s. "White Lives Matter" (and even "All Lives Matter") are the same response to "Black Lives Matter" (BLM). They're also insidious because they imply that BLM means white lives don't matter. It's more accurate to say "Black Lives Matter Too" even though no one was suggesting white lives don't matter.
Kanye is actually pushing white supremacist views. You don't have to be white to be a white supremacist.
> But the left seems to be quite accepting with Anti Semitism that comes from Palestinians
Anti-semitism (hatred of Jewish people) isn't the same as anti-Zionism (opposition to the policies of the state of Israel). People try and conflate the two to deflect any criticism of Israeli actions. There are very valid criticisms to be made of Israel's treatment of Palestinians (eg [3]). The ADL is extremely active in American politics and spends a lot of money in races to defeat candidates critical of Israel.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33449791
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
[3]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
Not burn to the ground, simply build something with a lower monetary value today, if he thinks it can lower tribalism. Consider something like linux. It's precicely the fact that it's not monetised that ensures the near monopoly in the server OS space.
> Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where everyone else leaves.
My take is that anything that is within the law should be allowed to be posted, but extremist propaganda (especialy when fueled by hate), whether it's from the left or right, should be supressed hard unless the reader explicitly disables such suppression.
Btw, one sign that someone is close to one of the extremes is that the person stops recognizing that there IS indeed dangerous extremism on both sides.
> "Blackness" is an invented concept for various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture and language through chattel slavery.
I'm not American. I live in a place with a different history and context. Generally, though, it seems that most "normal" people seem to assign identity to themselves and other based on how they appear, and that this happens at an early age.
Precisely how this forms categories tends to vary with time and space, like for almost all other categories. Even basic things as the number of the colors in the rainbow varies between cultures. For instance, in Islam, the rainbow only has four colors. The truth is that colors form a one-dimensional spectrum, while ethnicity forms a multi-dimensional spectrum.
> "Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1) The proximity to power and 2) Not being black.
For me, this is not a useful way. When I meet people from around the world, I associate them by origin to some extent, but at a much granular level, even within countries. Hamburg is different from Munich, Manchester different from Brighton, Chongqing is different from Shangahai, And Dehli is different from Bengaluru. Africa is similar. Egypt has a distinct identity, especially in the big cities up north. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya each have theirs. Together these countries have a lot in common, and also a lot in common with Southern Europe. Nigeria or Mozambique are both quite different from North Africa, but also very different from each other, and so on.
When you meet people from most of these places, they will have a word to label "people of European descent". For instance, in Thailand, the term is "Farrang". When these people speak English, they may use terms such as White, Black or Asian, but in their minds (as in mine) they will keep the same meanings as they assign at home.
Someone of the Chinese elite in Singapore definitely don't think of themselves as "White", nor are they "Black". If their status is high enough, they may not even allow their daughters to marry someone of European descent.
> You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs "punching down" but you should also know that this idea of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists.
It absolutely is. This way of thinking is precisely what leads to much of the most extreme racial hatred. Hitler saw the Jews as oppressors. The Hutus saw the Tutsies as oppressors, just to name a couple.
You mention the Paradox of Tolerance. I definitely do not think we should tolerate racial/ethnic hatred, whether it comes from someone with ancestors from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India or China. "Punching up" should not be a valid excuse. The only way we can coexist in a multi ethnic and multi cultural society is by demanding tolerance of everyone, and be intolerant of those who do not.
I believe that we actually do not have a choice about this, if the culture we live in is to survive. If we tolerate racial prejudice, I belive there will eventually be some kind of physical conflict likely to end up with a really bad outcome, either genocide or ethnic cleansing/balkanization.
In fact, I think it may be impossible to sustain a multi ethnic/multi cultural society forever. A culture of tolerance may keep tribal conflicts at bay, but unless we can merge into One People (through cross-marriage), there will be a day in the future where some even or charismatic person will cause a massive conflict.
> Kanye is actually pushing white supremacist views.
I recommend seeing the podcast with Lex. Kanye seems quite confused, but if anything, it seems he identifies with the "gang" (his term), and that he simply has come into conflicts with some number of people that happen to be Jewish. He does NOT seem like a puppet of Maga republicans as far as I can tell. He simply seems to think there is a conflict between people like him (basically "gang members" in the music industry) and "Jews".
> Anti-semitism (hatred of Jewish people) isn't the same as anti-Zionism
Obviously not, but I didn't mean only anti-Zionism. Not all arabs, especially in and around Palestine are making that distinction. In fact, the books "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" and "Mein Kampf" are both popular books in Palestine and to some extent other Arab countries. The hatred does NOT seem to be limited to Israel and Zionists.
In Northern Europe, using the word "Jew" in as a derogatory term was strictly taboo 30 years ago. Now, however, after considerable immigration form Arab countries and Pakistan, the term has come back. Mostly in immigrant communities, but it is also starting to come back in working class locals that go to the same schools as the muslim immigrants. You do NOT want to walk around dressed like a orthodox Jew in the rougher neighborhoods of Northern Europe.
For example, if the new owner of the company I worked for demanded on a Saturday that a new feature needs to be ready for testing by Monday, I'd be pretty upset.
Or, if I was on a team working on the problem of trust and ethics, and the new owner personally and un-ironically posted a completely false and inflammatory "news article" about a current event, and then several days later laid off my entire team, I wouldn't consider it irrational to be quite upset.
On the other hand, Stripe was much more productive and is workforce wasn't so inflated.
It’s quite the contrast. I think there’s a lesson here. A well-drafted email could’ve saved twitter a lot of heartache.
Then again, maybe the email drafter got laid off too.
Would never consider Twitter as a possible employeer after what just went down.
I don't know internals of Twitter. I'm just asking a theoretical question.
Is one week of ownership enough to actually understand this and identify those people?
It seems they had a preconceived notion of how much revenue the business should have per employee, and that’s a key driver of this: https://mobile.twitter.com/sf_mills/status/15758387853712220...
Not all companies die after massive layoffs. Sometimes all you need is to contract before building a better place again. Whoever is hired next by Twitter is going to be coming for the future potential, not for what happened during the layoffs.
Truth is we don’t know. I see it as someone is finally taking action to turn Twitter around. They’ve been floundering for years.
It's also interesting that nearly every tech person I read thought Twitter was over-staffed prior to Musk taking over. Now he's doing something about it, and people are pearl clutching.
Is there such a thing as a warm personable firing email? You think HR drones are your buddies whose role is to make you feel good? Egads.
Stripe gave one more month of severance, but twitter employees get to cash out of company stock.
For those who are cheering this on - good thing its not you getting mauled by tigers in the gladiator pit, huh?
Based on my experience in a 2nd tier SV company I believe this to be true
Don't take everything Elon tweets at face value
> There seem to be 10 people "managing" for every one person coding
Take this literally, not as as a ration. - each SWE in a product team has an EM, Dir Eng, VP Eng, PM, Director Product, VP Product, ...
They do not own datacenters, AFAIK.
> The majority of people who earn more spend more.
You don't need a Prolog engine to compute the conclusion...
What I'm saying is that is difficult to live "bellow my means" when it comes to, well, living, which means having a roof on top of my head. I don't want anything fancy, just a safe enough area, decent amount of space and decent amount of transportation options. I'm of course willing to pay for all that, the problem is that there are people who are willing to pay even more, which leaves me with two options: either compete against those other people, which, like I said, makes the "live bellow my means" moot, or, the second option, to compromise on my housing/living arrangements (choosing to live in a less safe area, giving up on access to public transportation, choosing a studio apartment instead of a one-bedroom thing), which is less than ideal (because housing is a basic thing in one's life).
Going to have a hard time finding some goodwill when you refer to other countries as "less civilized". A tad hypocritical.
I suppose I should admit as an European that confidence in your own superiority is not solely and American trait.
It's significantly better to be a high earner in the US than almost anywhere else in Europe (in terms of capital)
And that outside of your own retirement.
I’m currently on a US salary that is very generous. I don’t spend a dime extra because of those. It’s kinda terrifying I don’t know how they do it.
Assuming working independently, some of that is deductible, and one might argue how much left over is "a lot" or not. There's still food, shelter, utilities, transportation, education, etc. they need to account for, as well as saving for the future.
Actually, looking at it, if the person is 'independent', they'd pay another ~$10k or so on FICA, or have some LLC structure set up. Or they might be lucky enough to have an employer who pays for some/most of this 'fantastic' insurance... until they don't.
Perhaps in terms of raw dollars, there's some advantage, but there's a pervasive threat of "what if" scenarios that is hard to shake for a lot of folks.
If you are working independently yea it may be more expensive, but (unfortunately) so few people work independently so it’s an edge case not really that valuable here. Though worth noting providing a way to untie healthcare from employers and still make it affordable so that you can more easily start a company is a good idea.
It’s really difficult to do good analysis here. If you were in Ohio making $190,000 your family is automatically in the top 10% or so. If you worked remote you could buy a house outside of a major city for your salary equivalent, or in a city like Columbus for 2x your salary with some fantastic public schools.
Also a nitpick while I think you get much more efficient and cheaper healthcare with the government running it, at the end of the day it’s never free so you have to actually compare taxes to premiums to get a fair assessment of cost.
This 1000 times. I don't think we'll see a meaningful change in my lifetime, but it's an existential burden that we, collectively, have had for generations. So much so, really, that hundreds of millions of people seemingly can not envision meaningful change.
The constant "just get a great job with great benefits!" refrain irks me to no end, and demonstrates a privilege that people often deny exists. Even if/when I can get that "great job with great benefits", I still only have it at the pleasure of the employer. I grow old? You're gone. Employer makes bad decisions? They "take responsibility" by letting me go.
The notion of having access to health care, regardless of my employment status, should be such a basic thing to grasp. If I'm unemployed for a year or so (illness, family issues, whatever), having to upend specific doctors/medicines/hospitals/treatments because "insurance change" is life altering for many. Seen it myself in dozens of personal connections over the years. Want to change jobs? Whether abusive working conditions or just need to be with family? "Can't do it... I need my health care... the only doctors that take my health care are in this area...". Or... "I won't have health insurance for 6 months if I take that new job".
There's 1000 different examples I could find why "employer/insurance" connection is bad, and very few I can think of that are good for all parties, yet, we continue in this mess.
> but (unfortunately) so few people work independently so it’s an edge case not really that valuable here.
I know a growing number of folks doing this, and many more who would love to, but ... "health insurance" keeps them tied to "employers".
argh...
Maybe an idea there to start an independent business owners healthcare association or something that redistributes profits via lower premiums or something? How the hell do you start something like that?
You've generally always been able to buy health insurance independently. I started... 14(?) years ago. The ACA, well-intentioned, was hobbled from day one, and my $220/month high deductible plan has morphed in to a $1300/month plan which is still high deductible ($14k/year), has fewer options, and ... well... some pregnancy services will be covered (cis male here). You want a 'low' deductible? You're looking at probably $2k or more for 2 adults. And yes, I know health insurance has an age component - I'm years older than I was then too. $3k/year in exchange for taking on some risk (higher deductible) makes some sense. But base price of $15k/year in health insurance, plus another $14k/year in deductibles means this is essentially catastrophic only, but not really priced as such).
It's all region-based, and even where I'm at, I get measurably fewer options because I live 2 miles over a county line, and 'no one' insures out here. It got worse for several years - I know in NC, there are ~100 counties, and I believe there were more than 30 at one point who had only one insurer even selling health insurance in those counties.
Also.. FWIW, I didn't take it as you didn't care, but yes, freelance workers are generally overlooked, even as the ranks grow. They just tend to be growing on the lower-end of the spectrum - rideshare drivers, door dash delivery, etc. Much easier to just ignore growing segments of society while we pride ourselves on our ability to "get a better job with great benefits!". I'm not in a position of having to choose food over medication, but having to decide between medication or surgery today over funding retirement savings? I've been there, as have some friends of mine. Yes, it comes across as a bit privileged, but privileges are all relative.
The tax rate for my income bracket in the UK is 45%, and while federal income tax is 39.6% I still have to pay state and city taxes on top of that which works out to be about the same.
However I get free medical care in the UK, affordable college tuition (10x less than the US at least), maternity leave, great public transit, I could go on. What does the same amount of taxes paid get me in the US? I’m not complaining about having to pay taxes, but sure would be nice to get something back that isn’t military.
This statement is meaningless without specifying the brackets or providing an effective tax rate for a certain amount of income.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-...
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
The 45% UK income tax rate is for 150k GBP, which is $167k. The top bracket for US federal income tax starts at $578k/$693k at a 37% tax rate.
It does not seem to pencil out to being remotely close, and that is ignoring UK National insurance and pension tax rates, but I am not sure how UK pension works to equivocate to US FICA taxes.
People here are talking like the difference between US taxes and EU taxes is 20% or more, when in reality it’s maybe 5%
UPD: looked at the tax wedge, the US vs UK looks pretty similar to me- which supports my point. Germany looks a lot higher, but they have 100% free tuition and I am not familiar with the rest of the benefits germans get.
Also, lol at UK public transit. Horrifically expensive - probably more than a single digit % of total income if you actually have to commute anywhere on a regular basis.
In the US, that sounds like a need to either ruin your finances/life/pension/etc. In most places of Europe, not so much.
An American doesn't have that privilege.
The delta in wages from my home country to the US, after taxes, could pay for private insurance for 5 families.
It's unfair, as all short takes are, and it saddens me to see my friends who live there, who are at no fault for the mess they are in, suffer. I fear the coming mid-terms will only make things worse.
US wealth is a joke.
Developers are already very well off no matter what country they live in, and I'd wager that "normal" people in the US are not far wealthier than people in Nordic countries for instance.
Trust me, the unemployed life in third world countries, and even in second world countries, is far more brutal than the unemployed life in the US, especially for unemployed big-tech workers who can find a new job anytime.
> unemployed life in third world countries, and even in second world countries, is far more brutal than the unemployed life in the US
We should work out a deal where we continue to provide their security, and they provide our healthcare. Even Stevens.
Having said that, the US healthcare system is very efficient at extracting profit.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
That said: tying insurance to employment is evil. I’m a New Zealander and our healthcare system certainly has its problems too.
Coz like… it’s not hard to spend trillions of dollars when you charge $5000 for a tablet you can buy in Australia for like… $20.
A lot of people hold the belief Healthcare in the US is bad because it callously refuses to spend money on people. This is not the case.
When you remember that those funds were largely deducted from someone's paycheck, it has a real impact on those workers and it's important not to dismiss all the hard work that did go into supplying those funds.
That's not to say that there are major structural issues with how Healthcare is regulated in the US, primarily related to how those funds are spent
I don't know if it is better, but it is certainly a different problem, which matters if anyone is interested in understanding or fixing it.
I think it is important to understand the problem specifically there are a lot of patients dying of treatable cancer who would benefit from a health care system that functions better.
As for labor laws, the US does far better than it seems. Easy to fire also means easy to hire too, as the risk taken by the employer is also far lower. And the stronger the protections, the higher the slack, showing in unemployment. Very few European countries have the unemployment rates of the US, and the ones that do get there via a lot of temporary work, which has about as many protections as US work. And even with those protections, you still see Spain and Greece at well over 10% unemployment, while the US is under 4.
The easiest is basing Medicare spending on patient benefit in terms off quality adjusted life years.
I think it is a common misunderstanding that European countries maintain lower costs via price caps. In actuality, most don't limit the sale price, but control how much they are willing to pay for a drug, device, or procedure. This means that a product has to be substantially better to command a substantially higher price. More treatment with slightly worse products means much more benefit overall. Similarly, it puts some downward pressure on the price of new products because they have to compete with cheaper but less effective ones.
Also it has been proven many times by many people that if US were to transition to single payer insurance system, it would actually decrease the spending. No one claims it is easy, but there is absolutely no reason for the US insurance system to exist under single payer, that would be just setting piles of cash on fire.
It's also worth noting that many countries with single pair still have a supplemental insurance market for premium coverage not included.
The US should grow up and stop it with these bicameral partisan pissing matches.
Both the US centre right and alt-right parties are equally responsible for putting US citizens taxes directly in the grubby hands of middlemen who fail to deliver outcomes.
Most people fired from Twitter will find a new job without problem and if they can't, is their problem, not mine.
In a down economy, human resources and artificially underutilized and many competent workers with solid financial discipline will still find themselves in financial trouble.
If your argument is an ad hominem, ok so.
It sounds heartless, but it's the reality.
Edit: Sorry, this refers to a comment further below: Also, comparing this to the pandemic is kinda crazy, isn't it? It's one thing to have a global scale event effecting the lives of billions and another of just buying a company for way tooo much because you wanted to make a dumb joke about smoking weed.
America truely is a heartless, dystopian society...
In australia you cannot hire for a redundant role for I believe 9 months? If you do you must rehire the people made redundant or face big fines.
That's not true, there are minimum periods for which you must continue to pay the employee after notice their contract will be terminated, but I'd be surprised to learn of any country where it's illegal to prevent the employee having access to the building, confidential documents, etc.
Cf. 'gardening leave'.
And I'd surprised if there were many countries where you couldn't prevent an employee who had been notified they were being let go from having access to systems, documents, etc.
I've worked in both the US and various EU countries, while the higher salary is certainly enticing, it's also a trap; When shit hits the fan, you better have been saving. In Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use, because the rest is taken care of for me.
I wonder where this happy country is. In Germany it is already a common knowledge that relying on state for your retirement is a sure recipe for poverty in the old age.
Is it? I'm living in Germany since so many years and nobody told me this. They send me estimates about the money I'd be getting when retiring regularly, and while it'd mean downsizing, I'd not be poor with the amounts named.
These high pension values are also quite sure to be unsustainable for the government, as the workforce shrinks quite dramatically and people still get older.
Generally, people are advised to put some money for retirement on the side, if they can. If you are in a position to put some money aside probably try to do some research. "Geldanlage für Faule" by Sina Groß is a very down to earth starting place.
Seriously though, in Germany, you always get this sense that everybody seems to know what they are doing until ??it hits the fan and you realize all that time nobody had cared about what's coming.
I wouldn't bet on any of it happening, but predicting the future is always hard.
For 100000 USD it's actually a bit higher than for 100000 EUR.
However, as another commenter said, income tax is not the full story - far from it. There are other taxes that you have to pay. Also, while social security comes out of your paycheck, it's considered taxable income in France for the purposes of the income tax. Also, social security is usually insufficient, so you usually have to pay for a separate insurance. Which, you guessed it, isn't deductible from taxes.
As far as a company's concerned, if the employee costs 100 EUR "fully loaded", they only get around 55-60 EUR in hand. Also, when comparing with the US, don't forget that VAT is at 20-25% depending on the country. And, at least in France, VAT is levied on some taxes (yup), like for example electricity and gas.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/income-tax-calculator/califor...
[1] https://simulateur-ir-ifi.impots.gouv.fr/calcul_impot/2022/s...
US is around 25% whereas France is 45%
You're right in that employers restrict hiring as much as possible, what tends to happen here is you get a 1 year contract with the option to be taken on permanently, and these contracts don't have all of the insurances. Taking a permanent contract here is seen as a serious commitment to the company, so most people who just want more money in their bank account at the end of the month choose not to take permanent contracts and take the risk themselves.
If I saved for these things myself in the US, I would've been netting less than I do here in Europe, despite my US salary being 100k higher. A lot of people live way beyond their means with all these things considered.
Salaries in Europe are much lower even when all the salary and benefit related expenses (so called "gross 2" salary) are taken into account.
That's why Twitter didn't start there.
So imagine your the next unicorn? Would you hire like crazy in Europe?
Modern Switzerland is much of a socialist state. It’s lost all the things that made it a great place for business. Zurich is still a small tech hub for startups but mostly services and finance. Labor is usually hired in US or elsewhere.
About the only place in EU that's pro-small business is Italy. It still has some 50% of the GDP from companies less than 50 employees.
If you're on a permanent contract, there's a minimum legal notice that depends on years served and your age. So it's not "6 months", it's a variable amount of months. It may be as little as 0.5-2 months if you've worked there for < 5 years. If you're not on a permanent contract, the notice is: BYE.
As for "75% for 2 years", that's not the employer paying you, it's the state. Unemployment benefits. Where both "75%" and "2 years" are lacking some crucial details. It's max 75% of a fixed cap. So if you're a high earner, you might only get 25-50% of your previous salary. Further, you'll be intensely pressurized to find that new job, where you need to supply weekly evidence of job interviews. You can't just take a holiday for 2 years. By the way, you paid for the above yourself, directly from your payslip.
As for "50% indefinitely", this is state wellfare. Which is absolute hell. You don't easily qualify for it and you're even more pressurized to find a job, any job. You'll be closely monitored and you can't own anything of any worth. So if you were a highroller owning assets before, get ready to be stripped naked. Next, you'll have the social stigma of being a leech. Have this on your resume, and its goodbye career.
I'm honestly pissed about the inaccuracy of the poster.
So you can just retire after being fired?
> In Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use, because the rest is taken care of for me.
That's certainly not universally true in Europe.
Not in my country (in Europe). You get unemployment benefits for up to 2+ years that is a percentage of your salary up to a certain level, depending on your job history in the last 2-3 years. The maximum you can get is around $40k USD, which can be difficult because you probably have a mortgage and other expenses that were calibrated to a much higher salary.
You are also required to actively apply for jobs, and you may be required to take a job application course. I think you can even be assigned to a job interview if you delay. It is not intended as a "free" paid vacation. I think that even in some cases you are theoretically required to take any job anywhere in the country even if you have to move, but I haven't heard of anyone who had to do that. I assume they look at your social situation (family etc.)
Every 2 weeks you need to send in a form where you state that you have been actively looking for work and your financial situation is unchanged. If you forget to check some boxes, you lose all your money for the 2 weeks. Vacation is also regulated and you need to inform your local government and in some cases you will not receive money for the period. You are assumed to spend a full working week applying for jobs.
After 2 years you are placed into a different type of program where you don't get a fixed amount, but you get money according to what the local government decides you need. That means you would need to sell your big house and move to a cheaper appartement if you want to get any support. If you had any savings, you would probably have to spend them before getting any assistance.
Very rich people and large companies, generally.
No, definitely not in "Europe" in general (well, according to sweaty you can in some parts of Europe, although I have my doubts).
I support a modest minimum income provided by the government, but 50% of salary indefinitely is insane, it only makes sense if everyone is low paid.
I still feel like I must be misinterpreting something here, because I can't imagine even the leftiest of leftists thinking this sounds fair. That's basically just UBI except the rate is set for each individual based on whatever the high-water mark of their lifetime earnings were at any point?
But this is not paid by the company, right? Where in Europe do companies have to pay you 6 months for firing you?
Its actually great, skilled people can choose their priorities and how they want to setup their lives and career (stupid immigration policies and bad stuff coming out of it notwithstanding).
I prefer something in between - ie Switzerland. Salaries higher, taxation lower, some middle ground on social security - ie easy to fire people, usual 3 months notice by law, but social system will give you 70% of your salary (up to an OK limit) for first year, you just need to keep doing the job hunt. It means you are not shit-scared if you take a mortgage for example, you don't need to have such a massive reserve like in US. And of course top of the world healthcare that cost very little (sickness, accidents are 0 if you work/retired) and cca free top notch education including best universities.
Just a few examples: Automotive manufacturers, Siemens, ASML, Several arms manufacturer, Airbus just to name a few.
In addition, at least where I am, there are a million small companies (a few hundred employees) who deliver to customers around the world and, I assume, at market prices.
It's a balance and probably one of the reasons we lost out on the digital race so far.
If it makes you feel better people in the US don’t have massive reserves either. They just gamble and hit up credit if things hit the fan, even at FAANG salaries.
At this point we have no idea what kind of severance package Twitter will be offering. I think it's likely that what you're saying is pretty much what they're going to wind up with - that is, Twitter will push them out the door, but with a check equivalent to something like 60 days of pay plus like continuation of benefits. Of course, I don't know this for sure, but neither do you, so there's no point in condemning or praising them yet.
Knee-capping the dynamism of youth is a current consensus of the European system.
Twitter has some profits last year first time. I am not saying it was perfect company. But the deep deep financial trouble it is in now is because of leveraged buyout motivated by politics (stick it to ennemies) and ego.
And if they're not?
Side note, but the fact that people will "be fine" based on their level of economic usefulness - and, indirectly, linking their value as a human to their ability to be productive - is what keeps me up at night thinking about what happens when automation outclasses all of us
If we reach some zen state where truly all has been automated then we’ll have UBI (or some dystopian hellscape) so I don’t worry about it.
I’ve always struggled with programmers who feared automation and wrote shitty, complicated, buggy code happy that they had “job security.”
I go to sleep wishing for the day when I can automate everything away.
Also, there’s tons of one person businesses you can run if you automate workflows.
You're also missing that programming isn't the only sector that's going to be upended by automation. Basically every job market is going to be affected by the end of the century.
>If we reach some zen state where truly all has been automated then we’ll have UBI (or some dystopian hellscape)
In the States at least, the resistance to any form of socialism is so strong that I have no faith UBI has a snowball's chance in hell.
>there’s tons of one person businesses you can run if you automate workflows.
and when literally everyone can do it, competition will be brutal. When the stakes are "make it or end up homeless", and everyone is desperately trying to run their own business because corporations don't need to hire anymore, we're in deep trouble
Actually, in some sense, more people have servants, just that they are part-time: cleaning services, people who keep track of your schedule (executive assistants, but for normal people, can't remember the word).
When Microsoft Word automated away secretaries, it also raised the level of quality to be what was formerly available only at professional printers, so people spend the same amount of time, but now the expectation of quality of output is higher.
There can't really be widespread unemployment due to automation, because then labor costs would decrease and handmade goods would become more affordable, so people would start doing that.
Isn't this pretty much a description of the US manufacturing sector over the last 40 years?
I've been sitting here trying to suss out why something about saying this outside the context of a job interview feels so cringe to me. Best I can figure is that it's two things. 1.) Having that thought as a central part of your inner life implies that you have a very limited social life. 2.) The lack of worry about your own well being - "we'll have UBI or a dystopian hellscape, oh well" - feels almost ... subish in a sadomasochistic sort of way. Like you're bottoming for the economy (not that there's an issue with bottoming, lol).
If you owned your own business it wouldn't strike me this way, but if you're just a programmer at a company you don't actually get to work less by automating things, you just get to work on different stuff. But if you automated everything you'd just be tossed aside and reap no benefits. Wishing that on yourself is just.... so strangely pathetic. I know you didn't mean to sound pathetic. You probably consider it cool or heroic (in a nerdy sense) to talk about how much you want to automate everything.
Sorry to derail like this. I'm just fascinated by my revulsion and trying to untangle it.
I’ve never actually ended my day wishing for automating everything. But it is an ideal that I would like.
I wouldn’t be tossed aside from automating my own business as I own it and no one could toss me aside. There’s not a requirement that I have an employer.
So I don’t think automating all my work away means I won’t have a purpose any longer. I think it will lead to more interesting and meaningful work.
I could be wrong but I’ve automated hundreds, maybe thousands of processes over the years for various companies and it’s always led to me working on more interesting stuff.
I don’t think it’s cool or heroic, whatever that means, just part of fun problems that I get to solve.
My lack of worry is based on not having any control over the situation so instead focusing on other things. It’s just a reductive analysis that lets me think I don’t have to worry about it.
In the extremely small chance that it is possible to automate everything so that there’s no more work, I don’t have control over it. In hellscape mode, that sucks and is not fun. In UBI mode that’s great. Either way, it’s not affecting my decisions today. I certainly don’t wish for the negative outcome or relish it’s potential.
I think your revulsion may be due to misunderstanding some of my motivations.
But you can't have the boom without the bust, and shrinking bloated companies is a thing that has to happen one way or the other.
Also, the Twitter layoff in particular has had about as much advance notice as anything I've seen. It's been clear for months and months it was going to happen. Plenty of time to get yourself in order or get out first.
Also, civilized societies have come up a long time ago with appropriate social nets that mitigate the hurdle of unemployment.
And our food is vastly superior.
It’s fine: you can find anything you want.
But you have to suffer posh places and step markup.
I just want some decent unpasteurized cheese.
Joke aside, I was more thinking of culinary traditions.
Like cooking things from the season, from scratch and eat it with other human beings around a table.
US friends: that when I look at you like barbarian : when you shovel food in your mouth between you desk and break room.
Get a table, look at your food! Talk to another human about his food. Share food and diner time.
No, it was pretty clear you were a smug Frenchmen from the start
Your definition of "civilized" just means a socialist state.
We’re established that all life are equals and each humans deserves rights.
Not out of kindness but because it yields more cohesive and resilient societies.
All places are civilized in one way or another, more in some aspects depending on the locality .
In my books, Démocratie in Switzerland is more advance that anywhere else in Western Europe for instance.
But more robust social nets would help shield workers and their families from hick up in supply chain or markets. Preventing unwanted ripple effects.
If that make it socialist, so be it. That word has lost most of its meaning from me. Let’s talk policies and not political classification.
It's great to see the fat getting cut and hopefully more companies follow suit
And, shouldn't need to say this, unionize!
Some here have perhaps been victims themselves, for relatively mild things (I'm not talking about the really egregious cases where cancellation has been justified!).
If you live by the sword, things may turn around at some point.
Watching twitter ban dissenting doctors and scientists reminded me of Hannah Arendt and the Eichman trial: "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution"
And this from a NYT movie review:
"Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners. That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement."Being at home seems indeed scary compared to dying in a hallway of an overloaded hospital
Being weeks away from deportation is unimaginably terrifying.
That's your mistake right here - making long term plans while being on temporary visa. Just assume that you're here for a few years to make money, and then need to go back to your home country. That's the idea behind H-1B visas anyway.
Just to be clear, since H-1B (or visas with similar restrictions) are the only path to permanent residency for people of many countries, this attitude is tantamount to "we don't want any immigrants from ______, period".
The idea behind h1b is to bring people to this country to work in useful and productive ways. Telling people to get the fuck out after a few years of work (even if they've spent 8-10 years in school here prior to that) is heartless and definitely not good for the country.
Specifically, in a temporary way. H1B is not an immigration visa, it's a temporary working visa, for which duel-intent is acknowledged (it's legal for an H1B holder to intend to get and apply for a green card.) But at the end of the day, an H1B visa is still a temporary work visa, not an immigration visa.
I'm not saying I like it. If it were up to me all the temporary work visas would be done away with and replaced with a system of permanent visas. But it is what it is.
Tell me, which decade of your life would you be OK with throwing away this way? Your 20s? Your 30s? Get back to me on that.
By the same logic college students should never date, as they may move somewhere far off after graduating.
Sadly, while there is surgery that takes away your ability to procreate, there is as yet no surgery that will supress your ability to fall in love or to live a normal life.
So even if an immigrant comes here with the same stupid mindset you are displaying, and tries hard to never fall in love, it may happen anyway.
I don't know if I've read a more unempathetic statement on HN. Perhaps you are a happy lifelong bachelor, and can't relate to any other point of view. That is the only case that would make me understand where you're coming from, for if you have ever actually experienced love, you would understand the hypocrisy of your view.
btw No H1B is just 6years, thats just paperwork, all employers know this & workers know this & us gov knows it too because you commonly file for a GC near the end of that term & use it to further your stay. the problem parent post is facing is that us immigration rules are unclear and adhoc in many cases & folks in the pipeline end up suffering for it mostly.
Well, if you ignore reality of your situation because you are high on love hormones that's on you.
BTW. I'm not even from US, I live in central Europe, I spent a year in the US for one of the projects I worked on, didn't last, so I came back. You might say that I also fell victim to "unclear and ad hoc immigration rules", except they aren't ad hoc or unclear at all: if your intention is to immigrate to the US then H-1B (temporary worker visa) is not even the right visa type for you, you should apply for EB-3 instead, from the very beginning. So, to sum it up, original poster is trying to game the system, and bitching about the fact that the system is hard to game.
EDIT: Another problem with China and India is that combined they have population 10x that of the US. That's why US puts limits on number of immigrants from there (via wait times), otherwise the US population can easily double or triple in the next decade, leading to a lot of problems.
you mean getting married & starting a family? Even bloody monks who take chastity wows are not immune from carnal desires but you want some poor immigrant to be better than a monk because you waived a legal doc? btw thats works out great for illegal immigration in US.
> if your intention is to immigrate to the US then H-1B (temporary worker visa) is not even the right visa type for you, you should apply for EB-3 instead
Yet most GCs happen either H1B or asylum path. its because its designed that way. BTW I have been through the process so keep this BS to yourself, H1B is dual intent. And OP was not trying to game the system the system is poorly setup, surely your solution to a jobloss could not be just up & leave. especially when the rules are not clear (hence the needed to be clarified).
>..China and India is that combined they have population 10x that of the US..
nope, India's population is 4x of US. and agree there are per company h1b quotas BUT if US wants to limit the number of immigrants then they should stop issuing APs after H1Bs 6 year and force workers to go back. thats totally fine, but what US does is worse because they are stuck in a limbo state (I personally know many such people) waiting for GC to become current at some arbitrary date. And while this happens they have little leverage over company so they get treated like shit with subpar pay. So USCIS should either come up with a better plan to resolve the backlog or invalidate APs. they wont do that because employers dont want that.
Oh and BTW if they dont let workers become permanent residents then they should return all the SS & medicare taxes they took from paycheck as that is just plain theft.
edit:formatting
I agree with the above assessment that your posts are simply heartless.
Do you have different feelings about people who are laid off by the machinations of centi-millionaires?
Sounds like he’s trying to cut to profitability to me… after spending 44 billions dollars.
Also I’m sure you didn’t have this intention, but your comment made me think about East Germany. When the wall came down, there were all these state owned companies that had to be sold, something had to be done with them. They could not produce enough income to maintain the workforce that they had. This really upset a lot of people and they lost their jobs. It was not their fault, it was the fault of the state and the structure of the company.
Twitter apparently is quite bloated, and for the company to survive and succeed it needs to cut costs, or go out of business.
Germany could’ve easily just closed all of those companies in the east and laid everyone off, but they did their best to sell them so that people could still be employed.
Obligations shouldn't be one way, they should be mutual. If you want an ironclad employment security, etc, etc, you should also accept to be bound to your workplace until the business hires somebody else to do your work who is as qualified to do your work as you are. And if you think that your obligation is only to work well until you decide to quit at the moment of your choosing... then you should also accept that this moment might be chosen by your employer.
In at least some of those cases, it was a matter of livelihood and financial security for the people who were banned, too.
People make mistakes but they also correct them and there’s no reason to believe individual Twitter employees were callously nuking accounts, much less at the scale where it’d justify being dismissive about thousands of people losing jobs they were performing satisfactorily.
That includes financial planning and money set aside for these types of events.
Aren't all employees, in all companies on this planet, submitting to some form of dominance in exchange for money?
He usually has very accurate inside information.
Everybody wants to think they’re Andy Hertzfeld, but generally speaking for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
No, this is completely nuts! It encourages all sorts of pathological behavior to fake the metric, and throws the thing you might actually care about - business value - under the bus. It's even worse for senior people and those with architectural responsibilities. Spend time helping a junior on your team? Well, that's going to count under his commit metric and not yours, so he can figure it out himself.
My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric.
If your duties are mentoring, show me the meetings you had, the action items from those meetings, and what changed as a result. Nearly every job’s productivity can be showed in a pretty simple way. It’s the people who argue that their contribution can’t be simply shown that are often not that productive.
OK, so, I fundamentally disagree with the if condition.
This is in no small because of a previous coworker, in a place that shall not be named, who regularly duplicated entire class files rather than subclassing them, and his given argument when we challenged him on this was that he "couldn't subclass because the access specifiers were set to private" (yes really his defence was that bad).
Worse, I'd already added some "TODO: deduplicate this method" comments to the original, because the original was already a mess of copypasta code, and the new class duplicated all of these too.
So, a lot of new LOC that day, but none of them were good additions.
I think of metrics like this as a way to guide deeper looks and decision making. You just have to accept that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” LOC can be useful when it guides you to the right questions. It’s a starting point not the end of the conversation.
I think what's being criticised is when its used as a direct scoring system (e.g. bonus = k * LOC).
You'd probably say no, because his request is way over the line; to me having a jerkoff know-nothing telling me "Print your work and I'll judge whether you're worth it or not" is over my line.
If you interviewed at a company and got told "Every quarter, the know-nothing jerkoff CEO wants to see 50 printed pages of your code", and you accepted the job, hey, you've accepted that this is the norm in that company...
0) It keeps me (the CEO) humble 1) It weeds out the prima-donnas 3) It develops respect, everyone leaves the toilet better than they found it
- lunch shopping and preparations, clean up
- transport from one branch to another for Factory Acceptance Testing
- at one point I worked as a consultant for a rather large Norwegian company and one thing I noted was the the most senior leader I ever saw in that company (that I was aware if at least) was also one of those I remember who would make sure to tidy the kitchen and make sure everything went into the dishwasher
> Equal service at the end of the day
> But I know what you think, you thought
> 'Cause you've got the Ps, the ball's in your court, but it ain't
JME - The Money
You shouldn't be paid more than folks with 10K GitHub stars on big projects just because you reinflicted DSA hazing on yourself.
The person with 10K GitHub stars is overwhelmingly more likely to be a massive contributor than the leetcode warrior.
I hope this recession kills or at least hurts leetcode warriors.
All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.
Some say it's the world's town square. Fine, but how do you support (pay for) that? Town squares are generally funded and maintained by public organisations and tax money. Twitter is a private company and I don't think there's much enthousiasm for giving Twitter public funding in order to run it.
Hope that those looking for new challenge find it and those that remain can grow into new things without doing the work of 3 people.
BTW, lots of ML people got hit, also some brilliant ones. Cortex org got hit hard. I guess Musk doesn't care about people running experiments in Notebooks on expensive GPUs.
50% layoffs and likely more attrition soon due to mandatory RTO and people who cannot work 996.
regarding RTO/996 I dont see why any good developer should still stay beyond say six more months when economy starts to recover. Musk may think he is a Messiah but so far he has shown he's just a slavedriving billionaire. Those who can escape would as soon as they can & twitter will be left with lifers.
Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO.
If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone idolises Jobs.)
To other CEOs: you can make a distinction right there when you fire people and do not need to look to Musk.
I think a lot of people would be OK with being pushed hard to really do something great, if they were paid fairly and the economic profits spent on good areas of society/customers, but not to enable a man-child's ego and waste.
(It related to the philosophical idea (not the implementation details) of Gates's "tax my consumption, not my income".)
You mean like the guy who's trying to address the main existential risks facing humanity right now? Last I checked, Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change, Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI, and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes. Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard?
He could definitely stand to be less of an ass, but I can at least recognize that Musk is actually doing the kind of good work that you're talking about.
Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that. "Making humanity interplanetary" is simply impossible with current or forseeable technology, so there is no sense in attempting yet (especially since we can develop this technology on Earth, by creating self-sustaining habitats in the Arctic desert, if we really want to).
Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps?
> Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars.
Tesla make solar roofs and grid level energy storage. Like I said, it's portfolio is very clearly geared at climate change solutions.
> Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that.
Maybe he is (I've heard he's a bit of a germaphobe). I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
My point is that the rockets are the easiest part of settling Mars. We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a huge unknown. The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions. Until we have a 10000+ self-sustaining city underground in the Arctic, there is 0 reason to send more than a handful of people to Mars (like we did to the Moon). So, if you actually care about that, you should be investing in the Arctic city, not Mars.
> I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).
Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable launch vehicles?
> The real problems with settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in extreme conditions.
I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.
> We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at his actions and their results - and in the latter case, he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company presentations at least).
OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.
Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of science and engineering, not making money on space launches. Also, it has often been severely mismanaged.
> I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business focus to continue funding these efforts because governments have been seriously falling short.
You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
>OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass transit is not going to save the planet on its own. Personal transport is something like only 20% of global emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public transit might make another single digit difference over that. It's just not a big change.
No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility - especially given that the grid is already far too dirty and we need to replace a huge amount of it with green tech to reach CO2 emissions goals even without the extra pressure from EVs.
So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.
Pushing science and engineering requires using money wisely, and creating a reusable launch vehicle is an obvious way to do that. In fact NASA did have multiple efforts that ultimately stalled, and literally none of them looked like what SpaceX did. You simply have no basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.
> You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
I honestly have no idea how you can conclude this. We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.
> No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would basically require doubling the electricity grid in the USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic possibility
The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency. You're also assuming that EVs would be powered from the grid. Tesla has the powerwall and solar roof tiles to address distributed power generation rather than reliance on the grid for everything.
> So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that can be supported by the grid while also shutting down existing coal, oil and gas power production.
What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change, just not in the way you personally think it should be addressed. Seems beside the point frankly.
I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed that they were not revolutionary - that is a big difference.
> We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far from running marathons. This argument is incredibly unconvincing.
We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new - we've already been to the Moon and to Mars, and we've been to plenty more exotic places.
The problem of space colonization is just not the rockets.
> The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable intermittency.
The grid needs to expand, but the fewer consumers there are, the less it needs to expand, so the easier it is to close down the big polluters.
> What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is addressing the existential risk of climate change
I am saying that overall EVs are at best close to neutral - they obviously pollute less than ICEs if the grid is green enough, but they will also delay the green-ification of the grid if adopted in enough numbers to matter. Not to mention, Teslas are typically pretty big cars. If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).
Sure, but I'm not sure why SpaceX has to be revolutionary in that sense. It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space launches private. Or am I wrong in thinking SpaceX was the first company to successfully commercialize space launch, and the first company to successfully dock a commercially financed and owned vehicle with the ISS?
> We have taken our first baby steps into space a few decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing is bringing us to any place new
So what? You can't build a skyscraper without the right foundation. SpaceX is still building the foundations for routine space flight. Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
> If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just an afterthought, there are more important businesses he could have gotten into (such as green power generation directly).
Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with. He was a millionaire when he started Tesla, and you wanted him to focus on building wind turbines or solar cells to compete with huge multinationals like Siemens? Come on. Electric vehicles was completely underserved market by contrast, a clear business opportunity that also serves similar ends.
Secondly, nobody is so altruistic that they'd work as hard as Musk does on something that they weren't passionate about, even if it were good for humanity. Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need. This is what progress under capitalism looks like.
To say he should work slavishly on something he's not passionate about for the betterment of humanity is setting up an ethical bar that nobody would clear. The people who do work on non-profits are passionate about that.
Good for him? I'm not sure why that is something to praise.
> Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
It's the other way around: cheap space flight is the penthouse of planetary colonization. The foundation is the ability to build a self-sufficient colony. Once we were able to colonize the least hospitable places on Earth, only then would it make sense to think about how we move this technology to Mars - 50 or 100 years from now, most likely.
It's also worth noting that we have no reason to assume that a human population can even survive on Mars, as we have no idea if humans can live long term or even reproduce in Martian conditions (especially the very low gravity). Before even thinking about this colonization, we would actually have to establish whether it's possible for mammals to live long term and reproduce in low-G conditions. If it's not, there's a whole new world of technology we would have to discover before attempting it.
SpaceX is to Mars colonization like buying your dream wedding dress not just before finding a boyfriend, but before even knowing if you're gay or straight.
> Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to compete with.
You could say the same for the car industry itself.
> Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's need.
Fair enough.
Rocketry is a similar story. Rockets, since the 60s, have gradually become less capable and more expensive. For instance Boeing/Lockheed have been granted defacto unlimited taxpayer money to develop a basic functional 'homegrown' rocket system - the SLS. The goal was achieve little more than we did in the 60s. They started work 11 years ago, have received more than $30 billion, and and have yet to manage to get off the ground. Stay tuned for their latest failure - they will [fail to] launch on November 14th! For reference, we went from nothing to putting a man on the moon in 9 years in the 60s.
If it ever manages to be fit for duty, the SLS is estimated to cost an average of $2 billion per flight, and is completely incapable of landing massive-load cargo on Mars, let alone transiting things back. It's completely and absolutely unfit for duty. Most of everything Musk has done with SpaceX was being mocked as literally impossible by Boeing et al (by Tory Bruno) while he was struggling to achieve rapid reuse among various other technologies which have completely revolutionized the industry.
We would not be getting to Mars had SpaceX (or a similar company) not emerged.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
Regardless, a self-sustaining habitat is a research project, and it will not be successful without political/diplomatic agreement.
Note that outer space is anyway in the same situation - you can't just settle outer space and claim it's your own - especially Mars, which is still a pristine environment that could even possibly harbor signs of life.
Quick? No. Fast maybe. It’s hard to replicate the quickness of jumping into your car and hopping onto the freeway to get somewhere. Little or no planning required. Yeah the train if it is deployed as envisioned would be faster.
Inexpensive? The latest estimate is 107 Billion. Hardly inexpensive.
The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.
The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.
The company pulled out in 2011.
“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.”
Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
But sure, blame Elon for California setting tens of billions of dollars on fire with nothing to show for it. Also Florida just built a high speed rail in under a decade for about 1/30th the per-mile cost of the CA project and it'll be open early next year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990
Separately the Florida "HSR" isn't all that comparable because it only goes 80mph with a planned max of 125mph for future routes, and afaict a lot of it was built on an existing corridor. Again, not to say California HSR has been well managed, but imo it's not a particularly useful datapoint to compare against.
Is that really the meat of this "allegation"?
There is - to me - obviously no chance that that would derail HSR, and Musk is definitely smart enough to understand that.
Also, the effect on car sales 15 years in the future in a small corner of the global market is such a tiny thing. I'd easily believe that, as a California tax payer, he was annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably won't work.
Well he seems to be that dumb then. That or Ashley Vance is a complete and total liar. fwiw I think it was a long shot but not as absurd as you see it. There was already a lot of opposition to it with decades of no progress and money spent without a single mile of track being built, meanwhile Elon was quite the rising star of green technology. He had a vision for transportation of personal automobiles + tunnels and hyperloop and all he had to do was get legislators to buy into it compared to an unpopular embarrassment of a project.
But either way, you're right I probably shouldn't have included speculation as to why he did it.
> annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably won't work.
So instead he proposed something that definitely won't work?
Also I'm not aware of anyone at any point that thought it "probably won't work". A waste of money, mismanaged, is gonna get cancelled, etc? Sure, but it was proven technology 30 years ago.
Might want to check again. He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. ~Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in it.~ EDIT: the SpaceX one is wrong.
And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
To be clear, Ethical AI - being able to trace an AI's decisions and vet that those decisions aren't being biased by improper input data - is a big topic in research groups right now. It's actually quite fascinating.
Even if true (Wikipedia disagrees), it's a distinction without a difference. Arguably, neither SpaceX nor Tesla would be where they are now without him.
> And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
Arguably the kind of AI Twitter needs doesn't pose an existential risk. He's trying to make Twitter profitable so that's obviously a waste of money.
How does Wikipedia disagree?
Originally "Tesla" the brand, was started by Martin and Marc, but all they had was a brand and a vision but no physical product nor prototype.
At around the same time, Elon wanted to build an electric car based off the tzero by AC Propulsion. He was introduced to Martin and Marc who had a similar vision, and basically Elon invested money into Tesla Motors.
It wasn't until Elon put in money, that the first prototype was built (the tesla roadster). Arguably, if Elon didn't join the team and bring on Straubel, Tesla wouldn't be what it is today. Likely wouldn't even have a launched consumer product. Even Elon was the one that managed to get the trademark "Tesla Motors" which wasn't even owned by Martin or Marc originally.
Lengthy source: https://youtu.be/AeeeEDSekG8?t=900
Granted it's out of Elon's mouth but there's tons of other sources that corroborates with that story.
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MikKu6Juhok
source: https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/the-short-...
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqPsdlQDOYQ
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/27/with-jb-straubel-departure-t...
More concretely: Helping the teams who actually build and maintain these models ensure that the behavior isn't biased, that the model isn't being exploited by adversarial data, that the decisions made by the model are explainable, that the decisions are fair, coming up with corporate-standard-definitions for those various mutable terms (like fair), etc.
The usual things handled by a team that is tasked with AI Assurance/Ethics.
Now for my opinion: When it comes to impugning Elon Musk's character, he's done enough of that himself. He doesn't need my help. Additionally, firing an AI Ethics team in a company which requires AI(ML) to even operate speaks for itself.
Sure, but this is just a feature of the product in question, so if you have some metrics to measure such outcomes then the product developers themselves can do this checking as part of their development process. I'm not sure why this would need to be a separate division. Presumably Tesla's autonomous driving developers are also creating metrics to ensure they don't run over dogs and children, they don't need a separate ethics division to tell them this is important.
Then there is the far trickier case of the AI picking up on real things that we choose not to accept or talk about. Perhaps it is safe to give an example using white men? When they go bald very early in life(prince William for instance), it generally is due to high testosterone. Which in turn leads to all sorts of predictable behaviors and health issues, good and bad. AI would spot all that from a simple picture, judging people on their appearance can occasionally work really well. But that doesn't mean we should do it. And again, it isn't improper data, just data we choose not to act on.Musk has been the only CEO of SpaceX since he founded the company. Gwynne Shotwell often doesn't get enough credit for her huge role in making SpaceX what it is today, but to say Musk isn't one of the creators of SpaceX is absurd.
Musk has made plenty of bad choices and done unethical things that deserve to be criticized, but that is no excuse for the level of ignorant, misinformed hatred that is directed at him.
On Tesla this your statement is technically true, but misleading. 7 months after the company was founded, and made up of just a handful of people, Musk invested and became the majority shareholder and chairman of the board. He would go on to eventually remove the original founders of the company (over disagreements that were never publicly revealed) before production began on their first product. The original founders played no meaningful role in the company we now know as Tesla.
> Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change,
He created Tesla for the money that's in the growing electric car market
> Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI,
Neuralink exists for the possible future where neural computer interfaces are successful and popular so he can make lots of money
> and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes.
Actually, SpaceX exists because there's tons of money to be made with government and commercial contracts.
> Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard?
It's probably more because they like getting paid so they can afford nice things while they're not working. It might also be because Musk enterprises are in "interesting" areas of the job spectrum and thus workers might be more tolerant to bullshit because they get to tell themselves they launched a rocket into space.
He arguably created that market. The same applies to your other points. Musk created the markets that didn't exist before. Others had tried and failed, so I'm sorry, but you just can't deny that. It could be luck, so I suppose we'll see.
I have no doubt that Musk is interested in making money. I also have no doubt he enjoys that money from time to time. However, I think it's indisputable that no other billionaire works as hard as he does at his ventures, and I think a lot of his interest in that money is so that he can continue funding work to combat those existential risks.
> It's probably more because they like getting paid so they can afford nice things while they're not working.
Maybe you should read up on the working environment at these companies. There's not as much downtime as you imply. I personally wouldn't want to work for him given his management style, even on these existential problems.
He didn't, he started the company at a time where governments all over the word started to really (depending on the country, obviously) kick companies butts for not innovating. There where electric cars before he started his company. Now, you could argue that he made it popular with the people, but I argue that the market penetration, especially during the early years, hasn't been sufficient for that.
Musk also didn't invent space travel. You may have a point with neuralink, but I have yet to see a successful product come from that so if he is to create that market I'll give him that.
He's really good at making his opinions heard though. Other companies don't have a relatively unfiltered channel like this, so it's easy to see how his viewpoints stick out.
Yes, and they all failed commercially. I'm not sure what point you think I'm making. It's undeniable that Musk was instrumental in creating the first commercially successful electric car. If he took advantage of government incentives to do so, that doesn't seem relevant, that's just good business sense.
If your argument is that anyone could have succeeded in that environment, then why was Tesla the only successful electric car manufacturer for literally years? Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles?
> Musk also didn't invent space travel.
Again, I'm not sure why this is relevant. Musk created the first commercially successful private launch company. Do you agree or disagree?
I'm not disputing that Musk is also after money and fame and probably a few other things. I'm not sure why that's relevant to my point either. Even if it's enlightened self-interest driving him, it remains the case that Musk either founded or took over and pushed successful commercial ventures that are tackling existential risks to humanity.
Because every other car manufacturer had no incentives to invest in that space when their ICE technology was working well for them. Musk made the bet that he could go big and make lots of money with that missed opportunity, and he arguably did.
Other electric car companies weren't competing because it takes absurd amounts of money or people willing to give you that money, which Musk has.
> Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles
I don't live in the US and honestly, while I saw some tesla cars rolling around here, their popularity correlated very strong with the rise of other brands. It's almost like consumers aren't opposed to the idea of electric vehicles, it's just that until that point all options where shit and tesla finally put some pressure on that market, so the other companies reacted.
> Musk created the first commercially successful private launch company. Do you agree or disagree?
He did, and I argue that it's just like the first point, it was inevitable and Musk made the right call to invest his money in commercial launch operations because there where tons of money to be made.
This wasn't about if he started those companies, it's about the why. And the why is: There's tons of money to be made.
Yes, the question is indeed why: so why did he just so happen to invest in the only ventures where humanity is facing existential risk, when there are so many other ventures that could also have yielded great returns with less risk? Are you suggesting it's merely coincidence? Or is it simply more plausible that Musk recognized the problems that needed solving and found a way to make lots of money from them?
I have yet to see someone successfully explain how neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
Electric cars may have some success shifting our oil based man-transports to electric, but the world fails to use the advantages that brings and just burns more coal.
Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from public contracts.
Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
So, besides tesla, for which there was probably the best monetary incentive, none of those companies achieve any higher function you advertise then to have.
Firstly, you seriously underestimate the asteroid risk. They literally do appear out of the void and we do not have the resources to track them all, and existing efforts are seriously underfunded. Having a commercial entity that regularly performs multiple launches per year is invaluable as it means we can react more swiftly in case of a late detection, or have multiple attempts at deflecting it. NASA previously had very few launches by comparison, and the fact that their launch systems were not reusable without significant refits makes it ridiculous to claim that we would be just as safe without SpaceX.
Secondly, asteroid risk is only one risk to planet Earth. Another is nuclear war, or climate change, or an even more deadly pandemic, or any number of other things. Making humanity interplanetary requires reliable and frequent launch capability.
> I have yet to see someone successfully explain how neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
If you agree that artificial general intelligence is an existential risk to humanity, then why is it a risk, exactly? presumably because it has computational abilities that we cannot match with biology. Does it not then follow that augmenting biology with those same abilities would somewhat mitigate those risks? Whether that pans out remains to be seen, but AI performance is accelerating so this is going to become a serious problem within 20 years.
> Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from public contracts.
The boring company is not one of his ventures to combat existential risk, and so is not something Musk cares about too much. Why do you think he called it the boring company? Because its products are boring by comparison.
> Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
He literally just bought it, and he has explicitly stated that he thinks Twitter is important for a functioning democracy. How about you give him a chance to actually prove it out.
The guy is a loon, and while I think he’s done some good for the world (mostly via Tesla), he’s a walking, talking clusterfsck of Dunning-Kruger, narcissism, and unchecked ego.
Digging tunnels and conceptualizing hyperloops instead of improving public transport and bikes? IMO he‘s just afraid of public transport and hates traffic jams.
Ok, so maybe he needed to become the richest person in the world before tackling the really big issues? Yeah, not sure whether distracting himself with the Twitter acquisition is the best way of addressing climate change or even preserving survival of the human race long term.
I think that, like Jobs, he’s mainly scratching his own itches. And paints himself as the world‘s savior in the process.
If you view the massive endemic corruption and polarization of our political system as one of the key reasons we are failing to solve climate change, and you also view Twitter as the core public square through which our political system can be fixed, then Twitter is not a distraction at all.
I don't personally think that twitter has a major role to play in fixing our political system, but maybe I'm wrong.
Musk got bullied into buying Twitter by a bunch of WallStreetBets folks, took a puff and tweeted out a number, and surprise surprise, the offer was accepted. And he’s been struggling to get out of the deal ever since.
Musk didn't create Tesla, he bought it. I don't claim to know why he bought it, but here are two options: maybe it was to solve climate change, and if so it was a failure. Maybe it was to make himself immensely wealthy, and if so it was a success.
People are great at finding ulterior motives for people they've already decided they dislike. I don't think Musk is an altruist, and I'm certain he has multiple motives for the ventures he cares about, but I think it's hard to deny that he's found success where others have struggled, and that his ventures will ultimately benefit humanity.
[0] https://electrek.co/2022/07/07/tesla-tsla-achieves-best-sola...
So, my temptation is to say it's just a publicity stunt. But, I am prepared to praise it if it produces some viable solution, as unlikely as I believe it is.
My position is that Musk has focused largely on business that can or do make the world better, and also make a profit. The two are not mutually exclusive and I think the former is a major factor in what Musk selects. Obviously good is determined from Musk's perspective,but I have generally agreed with him with respect to Tesla, spacex, boring, neurolink, solar endeavors, and xprizes.
I don't believe that those up thread were actually claiming Musk will or thinks any of his ventures single handedly will solve climate change. If that was your assumption, I think it was wrong.
I am curious if you agree that his work in these areas is laudable?
I agree that it seems like he is more successful at increasing his fortune than solving the world's problems. I don't hold that against him because the latter is a very tough challenge. I don't hold the fortune against him because it was made from companies that advance humanity, and most of it is tied up in other ventures that also advance humanity. I don't know about the whole Twitter thing, which could be a deviation from this, but I am open to the idea that it could be an improvement over the current state, if not particularly relevant to humanity. I am also open to the idea that he thinks it is more relevant than I do.
As for whether it's a failure, that remains to be seen. Combating climate change is a long-term battle. All of Tesla's products are clearly geared towards this end though, from electric cars to solar roofs to grid level energy storage.
How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
AI is a threat because of human information processing limits. Neuralink's ultimate goal is ostensibly to remove eyes and hands as inherent limits to I/O, and augment human information processing in the ways in which we are weak (formal computation).
> How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
Cheap launch to orbit is critical in any efforts to counteract asteroid threats. Musk has also been very vocal about colonizing Mars in case something happens to the Earth.
He didn't create Tesla. He bought it. He may have grown it, which is impressive, but he certainly wasn't the creator, or funder of the original creators. Ironically, he's more of a Thomas Edison than a Nikola Tesla, in that regard.
Starting an AI/transhumanism company as a CEO who's known for software-locking and remote-controlling his sold cars, isn't very reassuring. I'm quite certain we're going to see "pay $80 a month to unlock your now-societally-vital brain-to-brain communications!" Or a tiered model to his probably inevitable digital eyeballs replacements. "$20 a month for 720p vision, $40 a month for 1080p, $60 for 4K..."
As for SpaceX... so far that's been pretty badass. Government/NASA hasn't been doing crap for exploration or transportation innovation. Nor satellite internet advancements. He's doing all of it himself. To that, I applaud his efforts (and his impressive engineers, to that extent).
if he wanted to do that, tesla would stop selling carbon credits. but that would cost $1.6b and stop tesla being profitable.
After the Twitter poll for offloading 10% of his stake.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/business/donor-advised-fu...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/07/elon-musk-faces-a-15-billion...
That not withstanding though, what genuine act of philanthropy requires conducting a Twitter poll to ask strangers if you should donate to charity?
If you investigate his back story, who he works with, it becomes clear it's not about Mars.
His real enterprise is a massive DoD program, built off the Strategic Defense Initiative (the "real" Star Wars). Republicans have been trying to resurrect it for decades and Elon was part of it since at least 2001. The idea is to intercept ballistic missiles from space and end the threat of nuclear armegeddon. In that sense he is trying to "save humanity", but it's misguided because the project is already aggrevating China and Russia and is fundamentally destablizing to the nuclear stalemate/M.A.D.
This project, operating under the Space Development Agency and working with the Missile Defense Agency, requires Republicans to fund--Biden and most Democrats been trying to stop it. Twitter helps Musk with the elections and boosting Republican power, while currying favor from them when it comes to these contracts.
If you're interested to know more, Mike Griffin is the ringleader.. he goes way back with Elon. Read his career history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
Starlink is building up the basic tech for these constellations--currently just sensing ballistic missiles and hypersonics--but with Starship, putting kinetic weapons in orbit become feasible. Some good references here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
Yes military will use thing they can to theyr advantage, but acording to your logic all industries that manufacture anything of use for military is doing everything they do ONLY becaus of DoD.
In the end he didn't want to, because it probably became clear there was no money to gain.
EDIT: Bosch is a tech company too, just an earlier generation.
Took the words out of my mouth.
In American terms, it would be the equivalent of the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation owning 60-70% of Meta’s stock, and Zuckerburg’s children continuing to get dividends and a significant ownership stake in FB while also bypassing estate taxes.
[0] - https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f1b666a8-1257...
Not with their profits, but as their primary product. Tesla is getting the world off fossil fuels, and SpaceX is getting humanity into space.
> Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style
When did that happen?
Tesla is arguably doing more than any other company to decarbonize the world, but that is very far from a complete solution.
[0]: https://www.thedrive.com/news/32191/did-you-know-elon-musk-w...
The post I commented made it sound like he destroyed it for fun, perhaps to taunt poor people.
Maybe you can see why I'm unimpressed with the quality of the anti Musk rants here?
Altruism has never been a part of it.
They might take a pay and lifestyle cut. do you consider that not an option?
People don't pay good developers lots of money because they want to pay lots of money, they pay because good developers are in short supply.
The difference might be in the fact that Musk founded it and allegedly takes part in the recruitment process himself. Maybe he wants to do the same at Twitter. Turning an already existing company with an already existing company culture around is much more complicated, though.
This is a political play.
Musk may be a competent engineer, but he's used to being Emperor. He's completely out of his depth with culture and politics. So he's unprepared for the brutal muck-racking, humiliation, and character assassination that underpin political power games.
The "You can have free speech for just $8/month" accidental branding is already such a bad look. I don't see that he has the instincts, talent, or experience to even understand why - never mind to do better.
What has he personally engineered. He's an 'ideas guy' and maybe a manager.
Tesla, saving the work through EV
SpaceX, projecting humanity into the cosmos
Twitter, ?
Twitter is boring. Its explosive growth days are behind it, working there now is basically about maintaining a legacy platform that has a bunch of problems that mostly aren't technology problems. It's about as interesting as working for a big insurance company; if the paycheck and working conditions aren't there, you're not going to be able to attract talent.
Elon Musk would probably suck as a middle manager for the reasons you state. And probably as the big boss too.
I believe his opinions are correct. But I wouldn't necessarily want to work for him. He is a machine.
Luckily we'll still have Oracle as a counterexample...
Tech companies that treat their employees right might put a veneer of strategy to it in order to make it palatable to shareholders ("we're not wasting your money, we're retaining critical talent"), but I think the real reason that some CEOs and company cultures value treating people right is just for the sake of it, not because of ulterior motives. I guess, as the boss, it's kind of nice to work at a place where people don't hate your guts bc they think you're a psychopathic monster. Being nice to employees is a value that's easier to sustain when there's massive profitability growth but it is not necessarily done in pursuit of profit itself.
Yes I think it’s immoral to put a person with a visa in a situation where they risk deportation unless they get hired just when hiring is slow, not just because of the job market but because other hiring managers are literally spending time with their family.
Everyone is optimizing their personal outcome, be it the CEO firing people, people quitting their jobs to work elsewhere, people quitting their jobs to live off of benefits, people having children early, or having children late, it's what we all do: look out for what's best for us.
I find that totally okay, but I prefer to be honest about it, and don't pretend that it's not perfectly normal, or that people aren't doing it.
In a sense it's the inverse of the "it's moral to steal bread to feed your family" argument.
Nobody has to be there to survive, everyone is there willingly because they saw it as the most advantageous place to work, and they'd switch to a different company tomorrow if they got the right offer. Loyalty is a term from a different era.
That said, I do find that people are fairly loyal to a company that treats them well.
Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to leverage it in order to get even more? Where do you think this will end up if allowed to continue longterm?
At Twitter? That's hard to say, lots of places are hiring, and getting good people is hard for all of them. Many of those that were fired will probably come out ahead financially. Twitter will probably continue to exist.
> Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to leverage it in order to get even more?
What do you think salary negotiations are? You go in, say you want even(!) more money, and if your value is high enough, you have the power to make them do it. Again, both Twitter and the employees are playing the same game, they're just on different sides of board, but neither of them is a charity.
But in the US it's really not well supported. If you want to found an LLC you click a few buttons on a form online and talk to any lawyer.
If you want to found a co-op, you generally have to file the paperwork in person or via the mail. No one in the municipal government will help, because they don't know anything except LLCs. You'll need to find a lawyer who can draft not only the articles of incorporation, but also can advise on the issuing of shares, democratic operation, and how new members can join.
Because profits are controlled by the workers, capitalistic investors won't know what to do with you, so you'll need to put in extra effort to find investors who are willing to be paid but not be made owners (or not more than any workers).
It's a high, high initial cost. But once it's going it can be incredibly self sustaining. Every dollar of profit ends up back in the pockets of the people working there, equally. Or they can collectively choose to use that profit to expand.
Social justice means not "equality" but "equity": looking at perceived disparities between social groups and then equalizing them by taking property from perceived "oppressor" groups and transferring to "victim" groups. This is exactly what Stalin, Mao, etc. did.
Why does no one argue that Hitlerism/Mussolini-ism/Francoism wasn't real fascism? "Real" fascism would of course usher in an era of peaceful law and order, harmonious cooperation between govt and business... /s
>Social justice (communism) killed upwards of 100 million
>social justice wins the "Worst Thing Ever" award
You're absolutely insane.
Social justice is NOT communism. Got it? Because I'm repeating myself, and you're not listening to me or refuting what I said.
Apparently you have convinced yourself that phrase means something totally different than it actually does, and you're histrionically obsessing and freaking out about it.
You don't get to make up your own whacky definitions of words, and expect people to think you're not crazy or just another worthless troll when you keep insisting you're right and they're wrong.
So social justice is "communism" and the "Worse Thing Ever", huh?
Please link to the professor at Brown University and the syllabus of the class you took where you were taught that social justice is equivalent to communism, and the "Worse Thing Ever". Or perhaps you're just making shit up, or completely misunderstood what they were trying to teach you.
Do you really believe that's what the original poster was referring to when they wrote "demanding your employer take on some social justice cause"?
Exactly who is demanding their employer support communism or perform the "Worse Thing Ever"? You mean stop paying their employees and insist they keep working for free, or mass murder hundreds of millions of people?
Is that what you're afraid Twitter will do? Then give me some evidence of that, or admit you're just making crazy shit up and trolling.
If you're simply against health care, and for racism and fascism, and hate to pay any taxes, and you abstain from using any government services like public roads or police or air traffic control, then just come out and say it, and stop beating around the bush.
Come back when you'r less unhinged, and can use the same language and definitions that the rest of the world does.
This is "no true scotsman". The ideas underpinning Communism, Marxism, Socialism, and Social Justice are intrinsically linked and overlapped. Castro himself supposedly said "No hay comunismo ni marxismo, pero... justicia social". At the core is the proposition that certain classes / socio-economic groups are "oppressors" while others are "oppressed", and that we in the present must right the social injustices of the past. None of this is controversial or a mischaracterization.
My professors at Brown of course advocated for socialism and social justice, and I too drank the kool-aid while I was there. I graduated 15 years ago so good luck finding links :) (As an aside, there is current a prof of econ Glenn Loury who publicly takes the anti-social justice stance, he has a YouTube channel. Other profs I knew such as one who escaped the Cultural Revolution in China are surely opposed to it as well, but they keep it on the DL.)
Back to the original post, employers who play the SJ game find their employees dividing themselves into oppressor and oppressed groups, and starting grievance wars which ultimately distract from the mission of the company. It's a silly exercise at companies like Twitter where most employees would be within the top 0.5% of wealth worldwide.
WallStreet is used to the ups and downs (they are somewhat comparable compensation-wise), and it's a way of life. You win big and you lose from time time. In tech you have some people who think it's their birthright to have good jobs with good pay and benefits and never have to go through a downturn.
Startups and smart companies realized that if you couldn't compete on pay you could compete on how you treated employees. In the years leading up to the start of the current boom the pay differential between big companies and startups was't as vast as it is now.
Then industry started pushing hard to create more software engineers from the traditional path of increased undergrad comp sci enrollments to the development and expansion of the bootcamp industry. Then the money started to go up and more and more people started rushing into the industry for the money. When I started in tech ~2005 almost every software person I knew got into the field because they loved to write code and build things, when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
Now anyone hiring today (or let's say 3 months prior to today) will claim that it's still really hard to find good devs. However the amount of work being done that is essential and productive has dramatically decreased. Head counts have been expanding because money was flowing and managers need more people under them to get promoted (this logic flows even to the CEO level).
But now this long, long tech bubble is starting to burst and we'll companies across the board start asking "how much of this work is really necessary? how can we become profitable?" and we'll realize as an industry that we are way over indexed on software engineers.
This is exactly what happened during the dotcom era, I guess most people are just too young to remember. Anyone who could use a computer got hired to work in tech, paid ridiculous for the time, there were tons of people enrolling in EE and CS, a huge number of software engineers. The the bubble burst and a lot of the engineers disappeared, CS enrollments dropped radically, salaries went way down, and the only people left in the industry were people who just really like writing code and building things.
> when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.
I don't really understand what you're saying here. If you're trying to imply that folks are getting into the industry solely to make money, there is some truth to that but it's hardly the majority. That being said it's foolish to imagine that if the money dried up that everyone writing software would keep doing it. But software isn't going anywhere, so neither will the money.
Outside of a few areas, the global situation is that software engineers make decent salaries but are far from the top, especially outside of North America.
Layoffs aren’t the same as mistreatment. It matters more how he treats the employees who stick around and the new ones he brings in
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-04/twitter-s...
That’s the quid pro quo here.
So they won't care much - spin the wheel, see what a court decides, etc.
It won't get people their jobs back - reinstatement is not a penalty in either WARN act.
The WARN act states that companies that dont provide notice have to pay 60 days severance. the penalty is reduced by any severance pay from the employer. Twitter is already paying 60 days of severance.
I know this is a heated topic with diverse opinions, but lets try to improve the quality of information and knowledge..
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
There are many carve-outs that will dismiss WARN liability: if severance packages are offered and accepted (with appropriate conditions), the WARN act is irrelevant.
Musk could never show up again after some changes, and the company would perform better than under the previous leadership.
There could be entire departments dedicated to figuring out whether or not the "like" and "retweet" buttons should have rounded corners or not, that sort of thing.
At some point, reality has to hit and apparently, Musk is the one who's going to bring it.
Is it being done in a shocking way to those who haven't been through this with other companies? Maybe. But how else is this company going to actually ever become profitable?
He is not hand of the market. He is someone who made pretty bad business and has very little chance to fix.
And yes, there is likely someone doing UI decisions. Usually it is good idea to have special people good with visuals to make these artistic decisions.
The question is, how many people?
I know that that comment was just pure emotion and hate. But, the fact is, there is nothing wrong with having department for visuals. Or department for marketing or department for communication with advertisers or what have you.
It sounds to me like you’re repeating talking points and memes, but speaking from a position of ignorance.
Twitter does one very specific thing, and it doesn't look like it has changed its goal much over the past 10 years, so what is it they're trying to develop so rapidly they need hundreds (thousands?) of developers.
Though I think the number of developers are still too high.
> One occasionally reads newspaper accounts of how two programmers in a remodeled garage have built an important program that surpasses the best efforts of large teams. And every programmer is prepared to believe such tales, for he knows that he could build any program much faster than the 1000 statements/year reported for industrial teams. Why then have not all industrial programming teams been replaced by dedicated garage duos? One must look at what is being produced. In the [attached figure] is a program. It is complete in itself, ready to be run by the author on the system on which it was developed. That is the thing commonly produced in garages…
He then goes on to describe how you can take a program and make it a programming product (by generalizing it, adding testing, documentation, maintenence) and a programming system (requiring interfaces and integration with the rest of the system)
Why would they agree to a ToS that clearly lays out things like "don't intentionally misgender people" if they fully planned on breaking their agreement
"But no one reads the ToS!" sure, but when you have your account suspended until you agree to delete a specific tweet and are given the exact area in the ToS you agreed to that you violated, then you should revoke your agreement to the ToS
When it's brought to your attention that you signed a document agreeing to Twitter being the thought Gestapo, just... cancel your agreement. Don't continue to agree to it in writing while whining about it publicly.
I agree with the rest of your comment though
Where in the ToS is this explicitly stated, and when was it added there?
> We reserve the right to remove Content that violates the User Agreement, including for example, copyright or trademark violations or other intellectual property misappropriation, impersonation, unlawful conduct, or harassment. Information regarding specific policies and the process for reporting or appealing violations can be found in our Help Center (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-repor... and https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/suspended-...).
So the ToS refers to the policies in question. The list of things is only "for example," with more in the specific policies you agree to.
The Terms of Service:
https://twitter.com/content/twitter-com/legal/en/tos
states “You may use the Services only in compliance with these Terms and all applicable laws, rules and regulations”, and links to the Twitter Rules and Policies:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies
Following the link to the “Hateful Conduct Policy”:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-condu...
Which states:
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.
In the Wayback machine, it looks like that direct language was added in an update between October 19 and October 28 of 2018, about four years ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181028023901/https://help.twit...
The older version had this, which reasonably encompasses that behavior, though doesn’t name it specifically:
> repeated and/or or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone.
That said, I have trouble believing that "why would you agree to a ToS that you don't actually intend to ascribe to 100% of the time" is a question that requires serious consideration.
Yeah, "fun police" - it's not fun if your "jokes" are made on the back of minorities.
As a German, I actually take offense to this kind of expression. You apparently have NO IDEA what Gestapo really was if you think banning gaslighting assholes for hate speech is in any way comparable or even remotely in the same neighborhood as the Gestapo.
These kind of phrases ridicule and downplay the horrific crimes and offenses against human rights committed by that organization and even the most unreasonable and idiotic ban on Twitter cannot ever be compared.
Words matter - and that's why we deal with "free speech" differently than Americans. Btw it's also pretty clear what holds on court and what doesn't - independent of how strict or unreasonable private social networks moderate their content.
Is/was it? The shortage of qualified engineers have made some employers extra careful/generous, to attract and keep them. Or some others to divert brains away from their own occupations which could have ended up competing with them.
They just don't seem to dare to do it yet, because they poached a whole lot of people from companies that did RTO. This would like leave a bad impression.
It's never been in fashion on the whole. Tech is little privileged bubble in the work world with little exposure to what happens outside of it.
Tech workers are still in very high demand. And the younger generation seems much more willing to unionize or refuse poor working conditions.
I really do think they are going to speedrun themselves to labor pool exhaustion in a first for a company in the US. Their management seems fully head in sand.
But hey, even Bezos said in an interview that he doesn't see Amazon lasting forever, even 30 years tops.
How bold, to speak for everyone ;-)
I really don't see this as a "treat employees nicely" issue. I'm open to being convinced otherwise. But... Elon's premise from day 0 was that Twitter was mismanaged -- bloated, misguided, bad as a business and broken as product. This echoes the sentiment even by many here on HN over the years. Now Elon owns it, and is undoing the hiring decisions of previous management, to start with a clean slate. Seems to me this was simply an inexorable part of his takeover, and so you may as well be saying it "wasn't nice" of Elon to buy the company.
Also, a completely different counterpoint: If an employee's layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for that is be part of a mass layoff like this, rather than a surgical one later. Because these people have a perfect explanation for their dismissal when they apply at their next job.
And then he bought misguided broken product for 4 time the price and took deep debt for it.
I imagine the last man is dying 500 years from now and thinking "... now we just could have gotten to Mars if Elon Musk hadn't posted that tweet"
Selling advertising is all about the emotions of the buyer: you'd better believe that half the price of ads on the radio has to do with how the business owner feels when they hear their name on the radio and that the first, second and third tactic of the person who sells ads for your local newspaper is "I know this tiny ad in our paper costs about as much as an employee and it might not seem to pay for itself, but if you stop advertising your customers will think you went out of business."
Women inherit the earth.
He’s a billionaire that treats employees like shit.
Typically you want to make major changes as soon as possible after a transition of power. It sets a new baseline to work from and avoids an overhang of fear that more drastic changes may be coming. You change regime and set a calm new normal.
It's also crucial to not then continue making drastic changes. Tbd on that.
I say that both for the weekend work crunch and the layoffs. The long hours and removal of benefits should be harsher on day one than going forward. You want to set the tone upfront and shake out people who aren't willing to go along, but you don't want to make unsustainable practices a constant. And you especially do not want the overhang of fear of additional layoffs coming.
So important to make harsh decisions day one and then back off a bit going forward.
The Stripe layoffs came with a clear message from the top brass, solid severance and benefits continuation options, etc., while Twitter staff have received no communication from new management (until the unsigned and rather robotic letter last night), arbitrarily implemented deadlines that require extreme hours, and what appear to me at least to be attempts by Twitter to construct cause in order to weasel out of severance and notification requirements.
Nobody is owed a job, layoffs are sometimes necessary, and Musk bought the company and can do whatever he wants within the bounds of the law, sure. But I think we’re all better off when we treat each other with respect, and that doesn’t seem to be happening here.
Actually, I think we're more on the level of "threat employees with basic decency".
The other choices are just more work.
No. The fact that it even crosses his mind as an acceptable demand at any time is a problem. No one, under any circumstance, should ever be asked to work that much in a week. It should be a criminal offense for an executive to even allow employees to work that much.
> Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it.
Nope. Even if it would otherwise go bankrupt that choice shouldn't legally be available.
you mean an illegal one?
I suggest you try it.
Look the issue is this, Musk is creating a climate where it is expected that people effectively sleep at the office. Do you have a family? well you don't anymore.
and through all of this pain, shit stirring and general "disruption", there is no strategic leadership, or clear headed product leadership. Unless you count "pay to spam/harass" & scaring away your advertising partners as a product strategy.
Layoffs are not a strategy, they are a side effect.
* Not treating employees "nicely" (original comment above)
* Legality of layoffs (should be straightforward to determine)
* Environment where people are asked to work unreasonably-long hours --> Irrelevant to layoffs.
I would argue there is very clear leadership happening: Musk made the unambiguous (and by definition, clear) determination that Twitter's staff is bloated by 50%. Cut the fat, take the short-term hit in ads and usage, rebuild it stronger. Whether I agree with how he determined the "fat" isn't important.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gi...
> But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”
> Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They were too noisy, too brash, too hostile to the old guard’s cherished sense of decorum. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs.
> Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. “My idea was to work within the committee structure, take care of my district, and just pay attention to the legislative process,” Livingston told me. “But Newt came in as a revolutionary.”
> For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.
Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes have done far more damage to political discourse than anything social media could hope to do.
I was similarly told to be with my very sick parent, no time constraints, and I was part of an inner sanctum engineering team, and later similar when I had a pet get ill, in all cases because we all had one another's backs, and we all were NOT fungible assets, but, rather, harmoniously integrated by years of working together and a strict hiring filter in the first place.
Your comment made me wonder, how much of Bezos and Musk sociopathy is innate, versus imitation of some excerpt popularly known of earlier successful albeit at times abrasive characters. And how might they be different if the decent stories were so well known, because they do exist.
That's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one...
If you don't accept that people new to something will make mistakes, then you're not going to get very far. Steve changed as much as Apple did over the years, and mostly for the better.
Can you please fix CoreBluetooth? It desperately needs async-await APIs :)
Also a non-location-permissions-based bluetooth background wakeup mode would be amazing
While we're at it, not locking new Swift features behind iOS X would be incredible. WWDC each year is basically "here's all the stuff you can use in 3-4 years when you can up the min-spec iOS"
At no time did I think there'd be any retribution or problems because of this. We both had strong (and in this case, contrary) opinions, and Steve respected you a lot more if you voiced those opinions rather than just accept whatever he told you. He was also perfectly happy to over-rule you if you didn't persuade him, but he didn't want Yes-(wo)men around him.
I don't get that vibe from Musk. It's like he read some stories about how a maverick CEO can be an asshole and get away with it in some trashy red-top newspaper, and modeled his entire character around that.
I doubt if any CEO can pull it off for the long run without being caring enough about his/her inner circle. Even ruthless dictators have to be 'mostly' nice to their inner circle ( guards, butlers etc.).
The larger point being that often they can be ruthless with people who are not in the 'inner circle', sometime justifiably so and sometime not so justified. I'm basing all of this on typical human behavior, not specifically on Jobs/Musk/Bezos, of whom I know nothing. You will see this trait even in families, the stereotype of the current ruthless man being a gentle and loving father to his kids.
if twitter employees understand now the excess capital from their labor has been extracted without due pleasantries such as notice or severance, then Musk has done far worse to the tech industry than just lay a bunch of people off, hes galvanized the case for tech worker unions.
This is obviously not sustainable, because it’s difficult to recruit after you’ve built a reputation as burnout central.
Unless the business is run by a “tech visionary” who is “making the world a better place” and has millions of fans. These millions of fans would jump at the chance of working for him.
Musk burning out Twitter employees by making them do twice as much work is fine, because he’ll have no trouble recruiting. He might be able to turn the business around.
It’s quite possible there will copycats, but they’ll have less success than Musk.
I can't verify the veracity of this claim. Tech spans a wide spectrum of job conditions. I have worked in traditional suit and tie places, and show up with pizza stained sweat pants places.
Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy. Make no mistake, no company tech or not wants to bend over backwards like tech companies have. Hence, all of the effort in outsourcing and getting code camps running.
Don't make the mistake of thinking tech is charitable. A lot of engineers I know are very soft because they think like this. Tech CEOs have a problem no other CEO has. A legion of smart, hard to replace, highly paid people that have enough power to demand more or less what they want.
The whining about Musk has to stop. He's being a dick about this because he has a personal vendetta against the old guard. When you look past the personal vendetta he is doing what anyone would do when a billion dollar turd is dropped on their desk. Dramatic, fast, often negatively viewed change.
Ask yourself, if Twitter was such an incredible company would the CEO have taken the offer? Probably not. The C-levels saw the ship sinking and rightfully jumped at the opportunity. Who is responsible for this lack of profitability? The old guard. So, task #1 is to get rid of them.
On the other hand employees hold the power to also enable the company. I'm not accusing you of personally holding the "the company must do what I want" mindset, but at least for me what motivates is the idea of solving problems and helping people rather than lording some kind of power of them. IT has always felt powerful to me (and I'll be honest made me feel powerful in some small way) because it let me automate away things or make them measurably better. Hopefully I'm not alone in that.
If you're a fan of Matt Levine, "the modern investment bank is a socialist paradise run for the benefit of its workers."
It's common for a top trader to make more than the CEO at major banks. You'll see this on occasion at tech companies but generally pay is far flatter and so they come up with other ways to entice staff.
Once layoffs begin in earnest across tech, there will be no more shortage.
Maybe that was what the field was letting visible, but in reality that has never been the case. There is everyday news about unicorns where employees complain that the culture is toxic, and that the CEO is impossible to work with. Only need to read Glassdoor pages.
Until complacency settles in, blubber accumulates and the productivity takes a nose dive.
You don't have to like Musk to agree that 7500 employees seem like few Ks too much for what Twitter is.
My real curiosity from the whole affair is gauging the actual impact a CEO can have on a company's success / failure. No doubt Twitter's had issues as a product for a long time, long before Musk came along. Whatever direction the company goes next, will be be due to or despite Musk's input.
Yea but guess what will come into fashion at that point?
Unions.
"Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately 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"
big tech layoffs are actually very good because they release into the wild a slew of competent workers with great credentials who will hopefully get hired by a company which does something useful for humanity instead of selling ads
Companies usually fire people on Friday, and show you the door the same moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
> While federal and California laws require companies to provide advance notice of mass layoffs, it was not clear whether Mr. Musk had done so. A spokesman for California’s Employment Development Department said on Thursday evening that it had received no such notices from Twitter, which is based in San Francisco and is expected to report mass layoffs to the agency.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/twitter-layoff...
The whole response to the layoffs just doesn’t sit well with me. It’s the righteous elite complaining that they have to eat cake
This is either a joke or Musk (or his team) doesn't know about something called version control and how it can be used.
Welcome to the dystopian future... I find it a bit galling how companies can force you into home office nowadays if it suits them (you want to avoid your underlings congregating in the office in such a situation), but also force you to come to the office when it suits them.
Unless you think every time I buy some bread from my baker I'm stealing it from him?
If anything, this is more akin to the baker calling their employees to say "you'll be baking from home today, I'm firing a lot of people today and need to protect the bakery."
They aren't 'forcing' you to do something - they're offering you money in return for doing it. If you don't like the money they're offering you don't have to accept the deal.
"Really dystopian that they're offering me $300k a year + benefits to be able to ask me to work in one of two locations" doesn't really work does it?
"Really dystopian that I can walk up to a baker and force him to give me a loaf of bread by offering him the agreed price in money."
This isn't even dystopian, it's just a management clusterfuck. Whoever thought this is the right way to handle this kind of a situation should be the first to go in these layoffs. Wow.
Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny people access to the office for any reason or no reason at all? Did you put a contractual clause in about the right to office access when you signed?
> This isn't even dystopian
Well yeah my comment agrees.
Of course it is. The point I am making is that it's extremely bad management to handle layoffs and firing like that. You have the team leads schedule an appointment with the people who have to be let go. They tell them they are being let go, effective from X, with such and such terms (including access rights if they're in any way more specific than "you can't come to the office after X"). You have them thank them for their work and offer them a recommendation if they need it. This isn't some advanced HR management guru advice, it's common sense that should be standard adult behaviour.
Telling people who you have not yet fired that they can't come to the office anymore, possibly minutes before they come in to work, but also insisting that they go home so they can get the email that they've been fired is just about the worst way to handle it.
There's a potentially infinite set of actions that are within a company's contractual rights to do. Not all of them are okay.
He’d bought it immediately planning to hand it over to the business… wasn’t quite so keen once they laid him off!
For 1 day, maybe a week or so by the sounds of it. It's not like they're suddenly closing all the offices permanently
This is really what has happened inside of just the last 8 weeks. I can't blame anyone who just can't keep up, especially while that 12 hour a day death march was going on. This is really not how you should treat people, even for a day.
And if you refuse to work you are not 'forced' to become homeless and have no healthcare?
'Professional footballer forced to play football game!'
'Teacher forced to speak to children!'
You could generate all the electricity needed for the next 20 generations by harvesting the energy generated by the eyes rolling of people who live in countries with workers rights who just read that comment
There is nothing dystopian about denying people that are no longer employed office access.
That conveniently leaves out the dystopian parts. Being logged off remotely, no personal communication, no delay, &c.
All our contracts are managed by unions and you can't just fire someone out of the blue, there's notice periods on both sides (unless there's just cause for termination)
Yes, and most of the time the fired employee will be sent home during his notice period, so im not sure what you are talking about?
The thing is, mass layoffs are often discussed widely in Europe since its mostly blue collar employees and the unions and politicians are often trying to prevent the layoffs.
Mass layoffs (or some kind of forced unpaid leave) is typically something that happens for blue collared jobs when there is a reduction of demand for their products.
The twitter case is different, though. Twitter was a hostile takeover (even in the end, it was the company that forced the transaction). The takeover was not done for economic reason (or that was what was claimed), but because the new owner wanted to radically change the values of the company.
For employees that base their personal identity on those old values, this makes them natural enemies of the new owner. When Musk carries the sink in, he is like an enemy warlord accepting the surrender of an enemy tribe.
After a short tally, the enemy warlord lets half the prisoners go, after disarming them (takes away access to accounts and buildings), while the other half are allowed to join his forces, if they desire to.
This is probably the way this had to go. Letting everyone keep their access to the infra would be crazy. Now the question that remains, is how much does he have to pay those that got fired.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/xgoouz/americans_ha...
Also we can have a heart surgery here without going bankrupt.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...
People think work is democratic but it s not: it's transactional and worker rights are just here to pay workers more, not give them any sort of novel ownership of the work tools.
That can be done, but it s called communism and never works because workers want money not access to their work pc, and leaders want money not management oversight of every single work tool. So you end up with people pretending to work for people pretending to pay them in a lunatic worker paradise where there are no humans anymore, just workers and their work tool mindlessly fullfilling the glorious work tasks assigned to them by mindless work allocators.
Working from h for a day hardly seems dystopian.
For me that is dystopian.
Yes. It's much worse.
It is a little dystopian, but (assuming you're talking about the Zhengzhou story from a couple of days ago) it's also not Foxconn's decision. The local government mandated that the industrial park be locked down.
It's also worth noting that many workers at places like Foxconn live in on-site dorms anyway.
Not having a consultation period, whether people are working or on "gardening leave", is illegal in CA, NY, the UK, and many other places for an employer of that size.
Not dystopian at all and there was nothing in the article about go home and work, just go home and receive decision information.
Nothing in that 'please return home' is anything to do with forcing anyone to have a home office, to go there and work, to do anything really. The company doesn't control you.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
For example you cannot just fire people in the UK like you can in the US, it is against the law.
> Musk’s deal to buy Twitter included making the company take on $13 billion in debt from banks, which means Twitter will owe about $1 billion a year in interest payments
puts things in a slightly different perspective. I had somehow assumed that all the acquisition money had come in from Musk himself together with a bunch of other business "friends" or investment vehicles, didn't know there were direct bank loans involved.
That’s an extra cost on future Twitter of which I was not aware of, a cost entirely brought by this acquisition.
Either, you still believe in the long term vision and that some day it make you rich or you can't find another job. Is the first choice even plausible now?
.. also many I'm sure wanted to stick it out to cash their profit shares.
Musk bought Twitter, but Twitter itself is on the hook for $13 billion of that. It reminds me what happened with ToysRUs. It was saddled with the debt of having been taken private by vulture capitalist, eventually couldn't make its interest payments and folded. Despite never really having a down year of sales.
That's right, it was sold, not because it was losing money, but because it wasn't growing at the time. Profits were stagnant. So they were essentially made to buy themselves and the people who engineered this deal and "bought" ToysRUs collected consultancy fees and percentages and made out like bandits.
The difference here is that I don't think there's a clear way for Musk to extract that kind of money from Twitter in the same manner.
Change happens, it's uncomfortable at first but it can be made to work for you too. Change isn't always bad. Can anyone look at Twitters performance as a public company and say that no changes were warranted? Twitters "mission" wasn't exactly being well executed either. Something was bound to happen eventually and this was a long time coming.
Had it been some Generic Private Equity Company that took Twitter private nobody would even be talking about this at all. But since you-know-who lead the buyout a lot of people have their tails in a knot over it. Has anyone considered what a giant hornets nest Elon has kicked in all this? I personally feel sorry for the poor bastard myself and I bet he wishes he could go back in time and ctrl-z all this terrible idea.
More or less he's put a big chunk of his lifes work on the line over a silly tweet about buying Twitter. You know this all started off as a silly tweet, that turned into a funny joke, that got serious and became a potentially career wrecking mistake with too much momentum to stop.
It's a forty-four billion dollar drunk ebay purchase. But it comes after previous occasions when he'd been told by the SEC to stop making stock-price-moving announcements on twitter. It's just astonishingly irresponsible of him to have got in this position in the first place.
ROFL!!! Well said! Very succinctly put.
Maybe some lawyers here can chime in: How soon will we see some class action lawsuits?
[0]https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/layoff-protections-c...
[1]https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/june/what-are...
It means you can't fire people for being minorities and pregnant.
Laying off half the company is pretty strong evidence you aren't targeting based on protected class.
My money is on settlement to prevent any judge from seeing how the firing decisions were made.
Any method of firing is allowed as long as it wasn't based on protected class, even if they pulled names randomly from a hat. The person suing would need hard evidence. Firing based on lack of fanboy attitude is also perfectly legal. Age and disability are not.
Anything is possible, but my money is on nothing happening.
So thankful I don't work in the US.
These actions aren’t about you the individual. They’re about protecting the business against malcontents. With large polarizing companies this is a likelihood. Not so much with random company b with a couple hundred employees.
I am a professional adult not some immature kid that is gonna delete databases or servers - did not even lose my dev rights to our SAP systems or company email until the last day.
Maybe if you treat your employees like babies.
FB Instagram Youtube Linkedin
Notice that twitter, despite it's age is nowhere close to closing on LinkedIN's current 700 million users.
Those worried about Journalists have not followed the upswing in Instagram users by journalists...some well known Liberal leaning journalist networks are now current Instagram users and creators.
The Twitter employees let go, got a gift of being freed from working for someone that factually is perceived as white superior race advocate including racism.
Advertisers, current Twitter employees and users all have the most important vote and objection to this...our feet and attention.
Policies also placed were just not popular regardless from what you heard from the vocal minority.
I personally hope Twitter develops into a platform that has more fair policies, and makes some sort of profit.
It sucks to be laid off, but honestly it was a bubble waiting to burst. At least these people are getting some sort of severance.
The only thing I hope is that the COs don’t get their golden parachute. They haven’t done much for the platform, and only made it worse for a majority of the user base.
>"Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone."
Does anyone if this team published any of their research on algorithmic transparency and algorithmic amplification? Could anyone say more about their work and what if any literature or tooling might be available to the public?
I don't like Tesla, but Elon having trouble with this team in particular is no surprise.
The ethical AI folks who wrote the fairseq library at Microsoft have done more for AI Ethics and fairness than every single one of twitters AI ethics and responsibility folks.
A lot of these companies tend to be manager heavy, I’ve worked in places where it seemed over half the people in meetings were managers or other unproductive people. It frequently felt like these people were stifling the work as they all had their own agendas etc.
Elon is an engineer first and has s big vision. If you’re one of the people left it must feel like the company has taken a new direction.
Glad to know they exist
Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
If you don't know you're the problem tbh
We're living in a world where voting rights of pensioners have been delegated to big companies like Vanguard and Black Rock. They clearly are not keeping the best interest of the shareholders which would be their duty, and vote politically instead.
If you look in the medical industry for example ethical decisions are always managed by a different group than Product/Legal because it's a completely different set of skills and competencies.
Even more so at places like Twitter which are heavily dependent on ML models to make real-time decisions. And so you need a dedicated team that is proactive rather then reactive like a Legal team would be.
Putting the "what will our users think" question in an ethical framing is not obviously (to me) going to benefit users. (Especially when modern fashionable ethics centers around utilitarian normative ethics, but that's besides the point.)
Some companies, such as for instance Procter & Gamble or Apple care about their brand equity a lot, since they rely on it to charge above market premiums. Twitter needs to care about that too, since if they get caught doing something unsavoury they will turn toxic to their advertisers, or at least those who care about their brands. I am not a marketing exec but if Twitter now drops the pretense of caring about ethics you will see major advertisers pull out, and make a point of communicating why they do it. Thats the ROI on having functioning ethics teams.
But that wouldn't be the crony capitalism that we're stuck with now. Also, things have been moving too fast for a long time, making it nearly impossible for governments to keep up.
I consider much of the practices of social media companies designing for dopamine hits to be unethical, but it had been very lucrative for shareholders for more than a decade. It’s still lucrative but shareholders are taking it on the chin for other macro reasons.
As political discourse and more elections are swayed by rage-bait and disinformation pumped into voters retinas by these platforms, the political risks to these platforms and their bottom line will increase (and become wildly unpredictable).
ML ethics and accountability is beneficial to both society and to any company which has an interest in self-preservation.
[Stephan Livera Podcast] SLP421 Vivek Ramaswamy - The Antidote to Corporate Woke-ism https://podcastaddict.com/episode/146353684
My reply was,
"you're a global sentiment barometer"
Actually almost everyone who is in the Data/ML space knows about it.
It's one of the biggest challenges in ML which is making sure that models don't amplify biases in the training datasets and cause harm to users and the company. There have been many stories with TikTok for example recommending accounts which promote unhealthy eating [1] to users with a known eating disorder.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Because Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have gotten under fire multiple times for the shit their artificial "intelligence" did - promoting content harmful to society (antivaxxers, flat-earthers, antisemitism, ...), sending them into outright radicalization spirals (YT autoplay), banning of people by automation based on shoddy input or without context...
If you're running AI that has a direct impact on wide society and you're not running an ethics oversight program, you should be arrested for endangerment of society.
If you are going to be hosting petabytes of data and in the business of showing advertisment, a lot of recommendation algorithms work in the background. A lot of times they aren't perfect and end up showing information which could be very high correlated but culturally sensitive, offensive or avoidable. People working in fairness and accountability run a lot of experiments to make sure biases don't get amplified in service offerings.
Social networks like Twitter use ML to boost engagement.
It turns out this tends to lead to ML amplifying pretty destructive patterns... racism, conspiracy theories, ideological bubbles, anti-semitism, etc.
A company might wonder how to boost engagement without promoting these things.
Good points. I agree with all you write.
However, Musk's stated intent when buying twitter, was to make it a non-partisan town square. This comes with a context of the US currently being divided more and more into two competing "tribes" of similar size and power. (Ie. the perfect setup for a civil war.)
If you look at the "ethics" teams kind of like law enforcement, it's important that they are neutral to this partisan divide, and don't have a "My side good, other side evil!" attitude.
If Elon is of the opinion that Twitter has been engaging in a partisan way, it is natural that roles like this are torn down and built from scratch, where the new teams are thoroughly screen to make sure they have as little affiliation with each of the tribes as possible, and to make sure that any affiliation remaining is balanced between the tribes. (Kind of like one does when recruiting a jury for a high profile court case, and also how presidents should select supreme court justices)
Hopefully, Musk goes through with this the way he has stated, by aiming for non-partisanship, and not in a pro-Republican way.
Humane would be telling the person who works for you that you can no longer employ them, not hiring some stranger to come and tell them.
Will it be based on revenue, earnings, MAUs, or some other metric.
Twitter will be fine operationally. It might have some short term hiccups as people pick up the pieces but the network effects and the value proposition are unchanged.
Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party.
Sometimes the team that got you there isn't the team that can take you to the next level. I feel bad personally for everyone who liked their job, but many of these jobs existed for years longer than they should have.
These are all smart individuals who have a big important company on their CV. No one is going to fault them for being laid off from Twitter when the cuts are this deep; they're already neck deep in recruiter spam if they have any degree of competence.
The pain is the result of Elon Musk overpaying 3x for a company he didn't want to buy and aggressively cost cutting to lower expenses.
1 billion a year in debt interest payments due to the 12 billion in loans he took on to purchase Twitter matches reality more closely than "accumulated managerial debt".
> Twitter will be fine operationally.
I'm unsure how anyone can say this with any confidence.
> Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party.
I think I met you at a gathering in SF once and had to walk away from the conversation.
If he were put in charge of twitter and paid no money, I don't think his actions would be any different. He's that kind of crazy.
What does it really matter to Musk or the other investors if this thing fails spectacularly.
The people that get hurt in this sort of thing aren't the rich and powerful.
They are laying off a large portion of workers who have previously expressed being hostile to the new leadership. There is bloat, laziness, aimlessness, and the company is being taken in a radically new direction. It’s pretty tactful so far, as far as I am concerned. We haven’t even seen the severance.
You have nothing to complain about. First priority is to protect Twitter systems, so locking everyone out temporarily (or as the case may be, permanently) makes a lot of sense.
I’ve seen more than a few of these things and had a partner in HR. You’re confused.
Employees can be terminated with 0 notice. (Which is how it should be).
You’re probably thinking about some payroll law. Termination is different.
Which is how it should be IMO.
Anyway just google “ca at will employment” and you can learn about how you are wrong here.
Here’s an article that explains it in paragraph 2 https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
I have been close to the counsel and HR during execution of several CA layoffs, within blocks of Twitter HQ :)
https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN
There's also the issue of the agreement Musk signed in buying the company.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
Even your own source provides this important caveat.
<<<It does not mean that an employer may not be sued ... for terminations that violate public policies set forth in statutes or regulations.>>>
You idolize Musk, we get it, but please stop spreading misinformation.
That’s a fact, friend.
That’s compliant and it happens all the time in CA.
You’re making the claim they are not compliant and you have none of the info needed to make that claim. (You’re the disinfo, bub)
You guys were going around essentially saying "THEY ARE BREAKING THE LAW!!!" it's a no notice layoff!!!
And obviously there is no evidence for that.
They are basically about to do the layoff "notice", which will also involve telling these people to stop working immediately and turn in their assets. Telling them to stop working is totally in compliance.
I'll admit that I am not in HR. But, to be clear workers are still legally revoked all access and told to cease producing with no notice and that's fine.
Layoffs exactly like this take place all the time.
Happens all the time.
I'm not trying to imply they are not giving notice, but if they don't give 60 days, they are breaking the law.
The only claim someone might have is if they individually fully terminated in the past ~30 days. Then there is question about whether they were "part of" the layoff or not and therefor required more days of payroll / benefits.
This is why in a medium+ company, if you are fired even individually, they often pay the 60 days salary + benefits, with any severance on top. It leaves them the option of being able to fire other people in the same time period without exposing them to a BS lawsuit where the plaintiff/s may claim they were part of a layoff and weren't given 60 days.
WARN act.
The termination is still “no cause”. At least in CA.
And all duties are typically over on the day of the layoff notice. Turn in your badge, take your stuff off the premises, etc.
Regular companies do meetings, shady companies send a pre recorded video to their employees, and then you have Musk, just logging you off. I guess he missed the part were "transhumanism" still contains "humanism"
Even Stripe’s layoff was far less than 50% but it got pretty impersonal. They just paid severance better from what we know so far.
Doesn't respect work two ways? You give respect, you get respect?
It's easy to make Elon Musk the bad guy, but people who were let go were freeloaders. Let's not try to make them anything but that, we've all seen plenty of Twitter employees using up work-time to be active on various social media. They didn't show respect to the employer because their work and demeanor did not reflect it.
The "boss bad, worker good" just doesn't apply here. Twitter is a troubled company, I'm surprised Elon bought it in the first place but I'm absolutely not surprised by the wave of layoffs.
You can assume the moral high ground and employ the talent that Twitter has decided to part with and prove your words with actions. Are you ready to do so?
Should we, the IT experts, not be thrilled by so much experienced talent being available for employment?
Whenever a layoff announcement is posted on HN, many people closely scrutinize the wording of the announcement and the severance conditions. Words of consolation are given freely, and occasionally people will offer to help with finding new work. In this thread, though, I find people saying that former Twitter employees need to suck it up and not be entitled babies.
Many who have ardently supported remote work policies (and would raise pitchforks if their employer tried to drag them back into the office) are calling Twitter employees entitled and coddled for attempting to push back.
Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. His plan seems to be "I need to double free cash flow ASAP, we'll figure out how along the way". Trying to figure out how to lay off half of the company, without negatively impacting free cash flow, in a week seems like a fool's errand.
I think his success has gone to his head. But time will tell.
He clearly does, but most people don't care to engage with it in good faith.
Something like:
- Twitter's value is its integrated GLOBAL network of professionals/leaders/celebrities
- Twitter Co has not remotely leveraged this, going for a FB/Reddit/etc content-centric advertiser model instead
- Sprinkle in some "super app" ambitions. If the new KYC subscriber model is successful, then Twitter could disrupt LinkedIn, then possibly payments too.
SV has been captured by advertisers and many people think "there are no alternatives". But there clearly are.
This seems to directly contradict Musk's plan to start charging these people $8/month (previously was going to be $20/month).
If you want to justify your position, I would suggest highlighting the positive changes you _did_ make, rather than the positive changes you _intended_ to make. If you didn't make any notable positive changes over the time you worked there, that might explain why you no longer do work there.
'Ethical AI' in my opinion is essentially the AI version of 'positive discrimination', i.e. they will keep biasing the inputs and outputs until the algorithm yields the desired result. In this case the desired result in not equality, but "corrected equality". Don't get me wrong, biased and misleading training sets are a problem, but the AI itself is not unethical.
Also I would like to know whether algorithm transparency included blue check-marks (that were obviously biased), or government take-down requests, or the promotion of completely random people for no apparent reason? There was never any intention for algorithm transparency, this is Twitter's 'secret sauce' after all.
Imagine where the world would be if bell labs didn't invest all that money into positive changes that people _intended_ to make.
If Twitter had a vice-grip on the social media market, we'd live in a different world... for better or for worse.
Specifically on your response: while planning specific changes is good and so is attempting to solve hard problems, during mass layoffs the teams with few accomplishments are usually hit first. Ambitious plans seldom help. Mass layoffs are rare, but this is something one should keep in mind. My 2c.
Specifically on Bell Labs, new employees until the 1990s were told "you have a job for life" (paid by the AT&T's monopoly generating huge cash flows). But when the AT&T became less profitable and mass layoffs did start, as far as I know they followed the same pattern.
The people at Bell Labs could point at something and say "despite this never making it to market, this is what I contributed to the world".
Also Bell Labs is probably not a great example of a sustainable company, because they are not still operating today.
Based on these details, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a team like that.
I'm not saying that some of these people are not doing good work, but I think these people need far more criticism than they get.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221104125809/https://techcrunc...
does that mean anything? (especially "mention" seems to carry no predictive value here.) were layoffs mentioned for years and nothing happened? were they put on hold because the ex-CEO wanted Musk to take the blame?
The value isn't in the loudest and most active accounts, but the long tail of expertise that was previously either not widely visible or connected in the way Twitter enabled.
All that will be lost.
but yeah it’s going to sting r badly…
What, specifically, has Twitter done, that has been a negative influence on the culture? If you look at, say, Donald Trump, he was across the internet being divisive in every venue he could get his hands on, from Facebook to Reddit... and outside of the internet too, on Fox News and the like.
If we went back 2 decades and put all of humanity on a bbs or newsgroup instead, you'd have the same outcome.
It's great to see it getting shaken up
Hoping that other people will be destroyed, is pretty dark...
all sound and fury, signifying nothing
Dell went private loaded with debts then add more debts by buying EMC and now Dell is public again.
October 6, 1997: Michael Dell makes an infamously bleak appraisal of Apple’s fortunes. Asked what he would do with the struggling company, the founder of Dell Inc. says he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
But my sense was there were many peripheral teams that your average Twitter user would never notice if Twitter were to cut them.
we currently do not have a proper social network:
* Twitter is infested by bots * Facebook is a ghost town for our parents * Instagram is just for narcissists in yoga pants * TikTok is literally a Chinese cyberweapon designed to degenerate western youth
Reddit is somewhat OK, I guess, but like HN, feels too anonymous and therefore not very social.
Like, it’s his. It is his property. He bought it.
Big fan of judgement swarms over what you do with your property, are ya?
No?
(Not an endorsement of his management techniques nor this idiotic purchase, but, it is his now.)
1 - During periods of company growth (increased revenue and profits), there is a tendency of leadership to not have their hands on the wheel. You tend to see growth in company "cost-centers" instead of "profit centers." So you'll get new efforts that don't directly contribute much in increasing revenue. Early in my career I wasn't tuned into the need to really build your work and projects directly into profit center activities.
2 - Internally, I have seen people grow the number of staff underneath them as an almost weird way of justifying a promotion (eg, "executive VP mucky-mucks have N employees and I'm now managing N employees, promote me to executive VP mucky-muck").
3 - I have seen smaller companies really focus in on the revenue and/or profit per employee number to guide hiring plans. So during a good period of revenue/profit growth, a CEO/owner-type will say something like "It looks like every engineer I add at $1X0,000 is resulting in $[2|3|4]X0,000 additional revenue or profit - let's just keep adding engineers." These napkin calculations are devoid of deeper market analysis.
If you went one-on-one with every single software engineer at a big tech company or in a smaller org, you probably wouldn't find many who aren't busy with work. You just probably would find a bunch on "nice to have" work instead of real revenue generators.
How are you detecting human trafficing and reporting it (FOSTA-SESTA)?
How are you detecting CSAM and reporting offenders to NCMEC?
How are you detecting and removing spam? How are you preventing fraudulent ad clicks? How do you deal with "whale" accounts (very large follower counts) and returning an algorithmic feed for their followers?
I interviewed for their deveng team and they were doing things like build-caches because it sped up compiles and increased productivity. Also optimising the Scala compiler (more productivity gains).
I think most people who are whinging about this -- especially here, on this forum -- are people who wouldn't think twice, if this were happening at any other big "Web 2.0" company. And, in fact, they'd probably cheer on the "decisive" and "courageous" leadership. I think they just don't like Musk, and don't like that he's bought Twitter, because they believe the narrative -- as I've seen many people suggest -- that it's going to somehow veer hard right, and become 4chan 2.0.
I'm sorry, but I have a really difficult time feeling anything other than schadenfreude for these people. You guys are making how much money working at a company which appears to be unable to actually make money, and at which you appear to see yourselves more as activists than employees.
The gall of these people to then put together a letter of "demands" (not suggestions or requests, DEMANDS), and then the next week complain that they're being asked to show what they've been working on for the last month is just...
Sorry guys, but the gravy train of $250k/yr as a 23 year old product manager working 2 hours a week remotely while making tik toks about how cute your life is are over.