Elon Musk bought Twitter.

[laurent]

Well in Ireland at least it's confirmed that Twitter have broken employment law with these layoffs, & I have to say their redundancy offer is pretty derisory for a tech sector employer.

Two weeks per year above the statutory number is the bullshit.

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/1 ... 9-twitter/

Big surprise. Expect Musk to be railing against the "socialist" government soon.

He broke the law in the US too (in NY and CAL I believe)

[Biffer]

Well in Ireland at least it's confirmed that Twitter have broken employment law with these layoffs, & I have to say their redundancy offer is pretty derisory for a tech sector employer.

Two weeks per year above the statutory number is the bullshit.

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/1 ... 9-twitter/

Big surprise. Expect Musk to be railing against the "socialist" government soon.

He broke the law in the US too (in NY and CAL I believe)

And Australia

[fishfoodie]

The fines aren't substantial enough to stop the practice. For stuff like this, the fines need to be a percentage of income/employee, or something, so it stings.

[Insane_Homer]

Anyone seen an advert or promotion in their timeline in the last few days? I've had none, not one.

[laurent]

Anyone seen an advert or promotion in their timeline in the last few days? I've had none, not one.

Not much on my phone usually but none recently.

I don't get them on PC anyway.
I see a good amount of people moving to mastodon. It's not very intuitive but if that means avoiding the mob rule likely to happen on twitter (firing 50% of the staff is not a good sign).

[fishfoodie]

How shall I put this Elon ? ....
.
.
.
.
Go fuck yourself !

[Guy Smiley]

Sorry for a FB link...

[robmatic]

Sorry for a FB link...

I thought Elon was meant to be a techy nerd, sounds more like he has never even spoken to anybody in software development.

[Hal Jordan]

Sorry for a FB link...

I thought Elon was meant to be a techy nerd, sounds more like he has never even spoken to anybody in software development.

He's a salesman and carnival barker who fronts for the people actually doing the work (and presumably causes daily heart attacks with his boasts about this, that or the other feature which will be available by <date>).

[inactionman]

Sorry for a FB link...

I thought Elon was meant to be a techy nerd, sounds more like he has never even spoken to anybody in software development.

He's a salesman and carnival barker who fronts for the people actually doing the work (and presumably causes daily heart attacks with his boasts about this, that or the other feature which will be available by <date>).

To be fair to him, he's phenomenally good at what he does - getting people to put money into his ventures. Not sure that's what's required at Twitter.

[fishfoodie]

Well Elon's master plan to make Twitter profitable are going wonderfully !

The company now says that it intends to comply fully with Irish law; by now starting the mandatory 30 day consultancy period .... after it's already told people they've been sacked, & blanked their laptops !

What a fucking farce

Twitter has informed its Irish-based staff who are at risk of redundancy that it intends to comply with its statutory requirements to inform the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment about matters to do with its plans to reduce its workforce here.

The company has also told impacted employees that they are not required to work during the 30-day consultation period and has asked that they do not come into the office.

However, affected staff have been told no decisions will be made on redundancies until the end of that time and in the interim they will continue to receive all pay and contractual benefits.

In the communication, Twitter also told them that while their access to the company's systems has been turned off, this does not mean that it will not consult with them.

At the weekend RTÉ News revealed that Minister for Enterprise Leo Vardakar had not yet received a collective redundancy notification from Twitter.

Under employment law, companies proposing a collective redundancy are required to inform the Minister for Enterprise at least 30 days before the first dismissals take place.

Companies are also required to carry out a 30-day consultation with employees and their representatives where collective redundancies are being proposed.

In an update to staff who were notified on Friday that their role was potentially impacted or at risk of redundancy, Twitter said that in line with its legal obligations it will inform the minister of a number of things related to its plans, including the identity of employee representatives, once they have been elected.

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/1 ... undancies/

He's now been told he's sacked a lot of essential workers, & now in an effort to save face, he's unsacking them, until actual adults take control over who loses their jobs

[petej]

I thought Elon was meant to be a techy nerd, sounds more like he has never even spoken to anybody in software development.

He's a salesman and carnival barker who fronts for the people actually doing the work (and presumably causes daily heart attacks with his boasts about this, that or the other feature which will be available by <date>).

To be fair to him, he's phenomenally good at what he does - getting people to put money into his ventures. Not sure that's what's required at Twitter.

He is a very good industrialist. With spacecraft and cars he picked 2 stale industries that have been dominated by a management direction of cost saving and taking very little risk for decades. The novelty is that actually building physical stuff in the West is almost a lost ability.

Driving any development work through the sludge of middle management who dont want to make decisions and cost savers is a nightmare- the lack of doing costs more than doing and it going wrong a lot of the time.

[Biffer]

How is he planning to consult with them if he's turned their company email and company mobile phones off?

Also, saw some stuff that they'd basically taken the amount of code someone had written, kept all the people who'd written the most code and got rid of the ones who'd written the least. Which means they got rid of all the people who wrote the difficult code and fixed the stuff that wasn't working. Genius.

[Mahoney]

Judging a software developer by how much code they write is like judging a car engineer by how much weight they add to the car.

[Hal Jordan]

Judging a software developer by how much code they write is like judging a car engineer by how much weight they add to the car.

This post brought to you by Colin Chapman.

[fishfoodie]

Everyone knows that the only proper way to accurately measure Developers output, is track their caffeine intake.*

In other news; as work gets out what groups were cut, people in the know are now predicting how many ways the company is fucked.




* Years ago I worked with a company called Consilium, who were based in SLC, i.e, they were all Mormons. I couldn't conceive of how any dev could work on a code base of 3-4 millions lines of C, without caffeine

[Insane_Homer]

[Insane_Homer]

https://www.ft.com/content/21b1259e-4e6 ... bb89f111c0

Elon Musk disclosed he had dumped another $3.95bn worth of his Tesla shares on Tuesday, taking his total sales to nearly $20bn since he launched his $44bn takeover bid for Twitter this year.

[Insane_Homer]

Oh no! who could predicted this!?

[Hal Jordan]

https://www.ft.com/content/21b1259e-4e6 ... bb89f111c0

Elon Musk disclosed he had dumped another $3.95bn worth of his Tesla shares on Tuesday, taking his total sales to nearly $20bn since he launched his $44bn takeover bid for Twitter this year.

Ownership down to 14%. One wonders how much longer he sticks it out there.

[I like neeps]

In a memo to staff Elon is saying they need 20% of their users to be subscribers and subscriptions to make up for 50% of their revenue for twitter to survive.

Where I do think Musk is right as all social media platforms are declining in revenue and that advertisers are waking up. I think a tiered system would be better where the more followers you have the more you pay.

[Biffer]

In a memo to staff Elon is saying they need 20% of their users to be subscribers and subscriptions to make up for 50% of their revenue for twitter to survive.

Where I do think Musk is right as all social media platforms are declining in revenue and that advertisers are waking up. I think a tiered system would be better where the more followers you have the more you pay.

People are never going to pay for social media, that expectation has been set. There will always be another platform, and another group of lunatic silicon Valley bro venture capitalists willing to fund it.

[Biffer]

Twitters chief compliance officer, chief privacy officer and chief information security officer all appear to have quit, as they're being asked to do things that are illegal

[Biffer]

A summary of the week at Twitter

https://open.substack.com/pub/platforme ... medium=web

[Insane_Homer]

well, it's working out exactly as expected.









I'm sure none of these companies will sue.

[Insane_Homer]

[Insane_Homer]

[dpedin]

Going well for Musky Boy! Surely there must be some sort of tax break/allowance he is going to claim once Twitter goes bust, he can't be this stupid can he?

[I like neeps]

In a memo to staff Elon is saying they need 20% of their users to be subscribers and subscriptions to make up for 50% of their revenue for twitter to survive.

Where I do think Musk is right as all social media platforms are declining in revenue and that advertisers are waking up. I think a tiered system would be better where the more followers you have the more you pay.

People are never going to pay for social media, that expectation has been set. There will always be another platform, and another group of lunatic silicon Valley bro venture capitalists willing to fund it.

Don't really agree - I think people will pay for it if they have to and it's a high quality product.

Also, more brands that should pay. It's crazy they can market and communicate with customers essentially for free.

[Biffer]

In a memo to staff Elon is saying they need 20% of their users to be subscribers and subscriptions to make up for 50% of their revenue for twitter to survive.

Where I do think Musk is right as all social media platforms are declining in revenue and that advertisers are waking up. I think a tiered system would be better where the more followers you have the more you pay.

People are never going to pay for social media, that expectation has been set. There will always be another platform, and another group of lunatic silicon Valley bro venture capitalists willing to fund it.

Don't really agree - I think people will pay for it if they have to and it's a high quality product.

Also, more brands that should pay. It's crazy they can market and communicate with customers essentially for free.

But the problem is, although companies get stuff for nothing, so does twitter. All the content providers on there get absolutely zip for doing what they do. And they're not going to pay to give away their content!

There are two different systems I can see emerging out of this

1. An information based, supplier funded product where big companies have properly verified info accounts for both customer services and advertising, along with news, celebs, and such like.

2. A user content based platform that runs on su scription but returns some of the income to the content creators.

There's probably other ones but there's the problem - twitter is multiple different systems all on the same platform and separating them out into streams of revenue provision is very, very difficult.

[Insane_Homer]

[Insane_Homer]

[_Os_]

This 100%

The 2008 start date of that meme is interesting, the GFC.

Since then structural failings in many of the most developed economies have not been fixed. Instead huge debts have piled up whilst people like Musk got richer. The right can't propose any real meaningful change, because that means impacting the people who fund them (billionaires who benefit from the system). So instead the right targets minorities with the least power (immigrants/racial minorities/Muslims), the implication explicitly or implicitly is these powerless people are to blame for all the problems. To do this the right has to amplify what morons say on a university campus somewhere (places that have protests daily) and give every left wing nutjob they can find the biggest platform they can possibly give them. As this has been happening the right in many European countries and the US really has moved towards fascism, storming the Capitol, the UK's immigration system, Le Pen ... these aren't signs the right hasn't moved.

This is obscured in the US by all the money greasing every part of their democratic system, in the UK it's a lot more obvious because there's less money most of which goes to the Tories. The US and the UK are two of the most impacted highly developed nations, because they're among the most unequal where there's also a significant amount of poverty and at least in the UK's case low/no growth too. All the right can do in those nations is attack powerless minorities whilst they themselves undertake industrial scale embezzlement whenever they can.

I imagine the "culture wars" isn't going to work so well for the right, when there's millions of people in poverty in these highly developed nations and their lives are still getting worse. But who knows, the right seems to have manufactured quite a large Russian style alternate reality that has trapped about 10%-30% of the electorate in some of these nations (as that meme points out, the left has gone crazy but Q-Anon is completely normal). And that's really what Musk's play here is about. He needs to unchain Trump, the Russian bot networks, and all the other crazies including those on the left, because all that helps him get richer. He needs to help build the alternate reality.

There's a very simple solution, it's called tax. Some parts of the developed economies have done fantastically well from globalisation, they should be taxed so that those who have not done well can have a chance to do well too. But those who typically back the right wing parties don't want this, because it means taxing them. So instead they've decided to attack everything that's brought the prosperity they wish to keep for themselves.

Things that are common in Europe seem not to be on the agenda in the US and UK. Free or near enough free university education. Strong labour unions that work with businesses. A generous welfare state funded by taxes. For example, Swedes generally support AI/automation/robotics, because they trust that whatever the disruption and job losses, there will also be increased productivity which the state will ensure benefits everyone.

Musk is pro every type of disruption possible and therefore maximum job losses, but also anti anything to counterbalance that (which must come from higher taxes on people like him). That's what Musk's politics is, and that's what the right ring talking points you're parroting are too.

My point is Musk has a vested interest in no solutions being reached that help the least well off, because that inevitably means Musk paying more. Therefore Musk supports all the "culture war" bullshit, because it's all a meaningless Potemkin created by the right to advance their interests (which are increasing productivity and sharing that with no one), they distract people by exploiting their fears/bigotry/racism, whilst stealing from those same people.

I forgot I commented on this thread. This still looks like Musk's initial motivation to me. He's now paid way too much for the business and wants it to immediately make a profit (probably so he can sell).

Twitter's strength is in the speed it gets news out. It's sometimes days ahead of traditional outlets, and it manages to do that because every journalist is on there shoveling stuff out for free, there's some good non-journalist users in every niche, and anyone can trend if they put up something relevant. It's poor as a marketing platform (Google/Youtube and Meta/Facebook are much stronger), and a poor place to have a discussion (Meta/Facebook, Reddit, Substack are all much better, and old style forums like this too).

Making it a subscription service would change its dynamic (the network would be smaller), for me it would then be competing directly with a high quality news outlet (New York Times, Financial Times, and the better SA outlets). If I'm paying I would prefer slower but higher quality, rather than faster but having to sort through tons of shit. The other issue with making it subscription is for advertisers the users are the product, less eyeballs means less advertising revenue.

I reckon all he can do without destroying the platform, is the Youtube model. Which is ads on videos (Twitter video has no ads), strict moderation (porn is still available on Twitter), and a subscription service with more features/functions/id verification. He's kicking his devs out though.

[fishfoodie]

Fuck em !

... but I still hope they sue Musk & twitter.

[inactionman]

Fecking chancer.

Elon Musk has given Twitter’s remaining staff a Thursday deadline to commit to working “long hours at high intensity” and being “extremely hardcore” or else leave with three months’ severance pay

Should really read:

I've fucked up and need you to work your arses off to bail me out

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... g-hardcore

[robmatic]

Fecking chancer.

Elon Musk has given Twitter’s remaining staff a Thursday deadline to commit to working “long hours at high intensity” and being “extremely hardcore” or else leave with three months’ severance pay

Should really read:

I've fucked up and need you to work your arses off to bail me out

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... g-hardcore

I suspect this is probably a terrible idea to try and implement at a non-startup company. Asking employees to sacrifice their work/life balance for whatever salary they were previously getting and with no goal or end point.

[robmatic]

Also, for a dude who is CEO of 3 different companies he seems to spend a lot of time tweeting and not working long hours at high intensity.

[sockwithaticket]

Fecking chancer.

Elon Musk has given Twitter’s remaining staff a Thursday deadline to commit to working “long hours at high intensity” and being “extremely hardcore” or else leave with three months’ severance pay

Should really read:

I've fucked up and need you to work your arses off to bail me out

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... g-hardcore

From what I've read about Tesla and SpaceX he seems to insist on his employees having no life in general, so it's not necessarily related to the slew of recent fuck ups with the Twitter acquisition.

If I had the skils and CV a lot of these Twitter people likely do, I'd be looking to the gtfo asap.

[sockwithaticket]

Also, for a dude who is CEO of 3 different companies he seems to spend a lot of time tweeting and not working long hours at high intensity.

Makes his 'no remote working' stance more than a little hypocritical too.

[Insane_Homer]