Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Motown is Joe-Town!

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

The lights are all blinking red.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

We still have time to mess this up!

Everybody saw this coming.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

T R E 4 5 O N

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

You are here: Home / Organizing & Resistance / Enhanced Protest Techniques / Twitter Open Thread: But Seriously…

Twitter Open Thread: But Seriously…

by | 201 Comments

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“Reliability engineer on the Twitter Command Center team (TCC)”:

Oh, and while the press is focused on how advertisers will handle changes to content moderation, I really think they should be focused on this:

Nobody is going to advertise on *or subscribe to* a site that isn’t reliable.

And a whoooole bunch of SREs got laid off today.

For the record, “SRE” stands for “site reliability engineer”. These are the people who keep this place functional – who make sure your tweet is published and your DMs delivered and your Space usable etc. – and they are, quite literally, the backbone of this company.

It’s a tough job, but we had – past tense! – a world-class team of SREs keeping this place operational, even when whole datacenters go down (and then Queen Elizabeth dies, spiking traffic dramatically).

We had laudable uptime, to the extent that Twitter was where people came to see if something else was down. (Case in point.)

Our stuff wasn’t perfect, but we kept it going.

With skeleton crews of SREs, though,
* incidents will be more frequent
* incidents will be more severe
* incidents will last longer
* incidents will be more likely to repeat

This is not sustainable.

I’m still here, and I’ll still do my job while I’m here, but I don’t plan to stick around.

Perhaps that’s the point – if you get rid of those expensive, experienced reliability types then you can save a bit of cash up front – but it’s a deeply, deeply shortsighted point at best.



Click over and read the whole thread:

Welcome to Twitter, Mr. Musk! Here’s your accordion

There is no sign that Elon Musk has approached the purchase of Twitter in any coherent fashion. He spent six months trying his hardest to get out of the deal, and only gave in and bought the site after discussions of the purchase were publicly revealed in discovery.

I don’t believe that Musk must surely have a nine-dimensional chess plan to make Twitter work according to all the conflicting desires he’s already posted for the site. I think it’s more likely Musk never had a plan, and he’s now floundering from crisis to crisis, all of his own making.

He has absolutely no idea how to fix this. There probably isn’t a way…

Twitter’s 2021 advertising revenue was $4.5 billion. Compare Google’s $209 billion in ad revenue. [Barron’s]

Can Twitter squeeze more money from advertisers? Not by going the way Musk wants to…

The term “free speech” should mean so much more than “gibbering racists and bigots.” Unfortunately, this is 2022, and there’s one very loud group of swivel-eyed loons using these words to mean their assumed right to scream spittle into your face.

Others have written how there just isn’t the market for the sort of right-wing “free speech” site that Musk and his advisors Peter Thiel and David O. Sacks want. This sort of site has been tried, over and over — Parler, Gettr, Truth Social. These sites only ever attract a small core of fringe nutcases, who drive away any non-nutcases. Even Gab eventually had to put in content moderation. [The Verge]…

Twitter can’t work as a money-making business the way Thiel and Sacks have talked Musk into trying to run it. If Thiel wants this, he’ll need to fund it himself, substantially, as an influence loss-leader…

Yes, but what about crypto?

Crypto remains heavily dependent on Twitter.

The Binance crypto exchange put $500 million toward the purchase of Twitter — a bit over a 1% share. Note that this cost them $500 million in actual money, not cryptos…

The people Musk went into the Twitter deal with very much like one thing about cryptocurrency: the promise of a private currency for rich guys to swing their cash around as they please, without such dire threats to human liberty as taxes, capital controls or regulatory oversight. Musk, Thiel and Dorsey (who is also advising Musk) are very into this promise of cryptocurrency…

I don’t believe cryptocurrency can deliver on this promise of the sort of private money that rich guys want. When Facebook tried with Libra, it was rejected instantly by every regulator in the world. The regulators are still writing new rules to stop any such thing happening again.

As well as regulators not allowing it, crypto is just technically bad at being money. Bitcoin failed hard at being a currency for payments. Even the dark net drug market users hated bitcoin, they just weren’t able to use dollars.

That a cryptocurrency-based private money for rich guys can’t possibly work will never stop them from trying, of course. Perhaps they can alienate Twitter’s remaining non-crypto users…

Yahoo! bought blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013. Yahoo!’s buyer Verizon eventually sold Tumblr to WordPress.com in 2019 for $3 million. The only question for Twitter is how long this takes.

Reader Interactions

201Comments

  6. 6.

    Splitting Image

    I confess that I hadn’t really considered the cryptocurrency angle to all of this. I’ve been assuming that Musk would handle the takeover in a way that will likely bankrupt him and destroy Twitter, but I hadn’t thought about the fact that Twitter has been instrumental in delivering the message of cryptocurrency to masses of ignorant punters. Without a steady supply of new punters to buy bitcoin at inflated prices, the Glorious Hand of the Free Market will doubtless work its magic on the industry.

    So the upper end of optimism at this point is that Musk may remove himself, Twitter, and bitcoin from the public sphere by this time next year. Not bad for one man’s work.

  11. 11.

    CaseyL

    @Baud: Everything old is new again.

    This has happened before; it will happen again.

    And so on.

    (FTR, I’m very grateful to all the blogs I hang out at that they still exist, and excited to see them possibly flourish anew.)

  12. 12.

    pluky

    Missed a point above.

    In a crisis panic will hack a band-aid solution that quickly fails making things worse.

  13. 13.

    Martin

    So, the Trust Thermocline thread rhymes with a post from a long time ago that served me well in my investments. It was written in 2010 and argues that Blackberry was doomed despite their increasing sales. Understand this was predictive, not analysis of what went wrong. And part of the argument is around the concept of diffusion of technology (how a new technology gets adopted by the public) and how individual companies perform in that setting. The authors argument was that Blackberry was getting increased sales but no new users. New users were going somewhere else – they were buying iPhones. And the ‘yes, but not much – and they still paid’ has this kicker – your old users still paid, but did you get any new users at that price? Did your new user growth fall off? Because if it did, you went too far. Attrition always happens. People lose jobs. They die. Even if they don’t *want* to stop using your product, they sometimes do anyway. You have to always grow ahead of that.

    I wonder how many new durable users Twitter is getting right now? They sure as shit are getting no new advertisers. You may not see a lot of people actually leaving, but that doesn’t matter.

    But Apple is also a company that is VERY dependent on that trust thermocline. I monitor their opening weekend phone sales to gauge how that’s going. The moment they cross that trust line, those sales will dry up because people only buy phones sight unseen if they have a degree of trust that the product will live up to their expectations.

  15. 15.

    emmyelle

    I keep thinking of this thing that Ross Dumbass said, on Twitter, last May after Dobbs: “Worth noting that in the 50 yrs since Roe, men have become less likely to find a spouse, less likely father kids or live with the kids they father, and less likely to participate in the workforce.”

    And if you focus on that line “less likely to participate in the workforce” you understand why tech bros have a permanent hard on at the thought of a right-wing autocracy: they won’t have to compete with smart women anymore for jobs and paychecks.

  17. 17.

    Splitting Image

    @The Moar You Know:

    I’d like everyone to go back to long form. One of the many things I loathe about Twitter is that their users forget how to form a long, informative, interesting bit of work.

    The one good thing I would credit Twitter for is that it helped some writers learn to write essays where each sentence has one thought, fits into a tweet and leads directly into the next.

    This is a good thing to learn and I’ve seen many writers on Twitter do this, especially younger ones.

    A lot of older writers fall into the habit of ending tweets in the middle of… 4/x

    … a sentence just because they want to fill up every tweet with the maximum number of characters. This tends to weaken their arguments. (Steve Schmidt is bad at this.)

    I think the people who managed to use the twitter format the best will probably all be fine if they move to long-form writing.

  19. 19.

    Splitting Image

    @Martin:

    But Apple is also a company that is VERY dependent on that trust thermocline. I monitor their opening weekend phone sales to gauge how that’s going. The moment they cross that trust line, those sales will dry up because people only buy phones sight unseen if they have a degree of trust that the product will live up to their expectations.

    This also happened to the comic book industry in the 1990s. Sales kept growing as they used a variety of sales gimmicks to sell multiple copies of a book to collectors, who kept up the habit of buying comics after losing interest in reading them (due to poor stories and artwork). When the crash came, it hit hard and fast.

    Even today, with super hero movies conquering the world, the number of people who are spurred to buy comic books after seeing one of them is a rounding error.

  21. 21.

    Josie

    The best thing about all this is that I really don’t care what happens to twitter or cryptocurrency and would be just as happy if they both disappeared along with the people who hype them. Neither one has contributed much to incisive thinking or saving our democracy. I hadn’t thought about the fact that blogs might make a comeback, but I see that as a positive thing.

  23. 23.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    The new management in a buyout typically takes a year learning how the company runs before the layoff, and even then  the layoff does a lot of damage because no management team really understands how their company works and inevitably some critical job or someone with critical information is elimated.  How Musk can not understand that is beyond me, but he really should have heard the phrase “The Devil is in the details” by now.  IDK, maybe before Musk was the “big picture idea guy”, as the engineers sarcastically put it, the actual management was handled by others and the management team Musk usually works with isn’t interested in a Social Media company.

  24. 24.

    Carlo Graziani

    We need a “Musk vs. Lettuce” Meme contest. Winning entry is the best suggestion for the “Musk” contestant to beat the lifetime of an unrefrigerated head of lettuce.

    Examples could include:

    Time until first Tesla shareholder lawsuit;
    Time until $44B worth of Twitter = $22B of real money
    Time until Musk sheds tears in public

    But hopefully funnier. Extra credit for proposing a graphic image that could be repurposed for this use.

    WaterGirl nominated as contest judge by universal acclamation of contest proponents (to wit, me).

  25. 25.

    MattF

    My ‘engagement’ with Twitter is low— reply to a tweet or two daily, block all ‘promoted’ tweeters. I like the weird and funny stuff, it promotes my ‘always OT’ online persona. Not worth $8/month, though.

  28. 28.

    Brent

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I have seen the theory bounced around of course.  But no,  I don’t buy it.  One,  Musk’s ego and self regard is far too inflated to publicly and deliberately humiliate himself with this sort of epic failure.  Two, 44B is a lot of money even for the wealthiest man in the world. He has no real incentive to light it on fire on purpose. Thats even setting aside that his “wealth” is mostly on paper and soon enough (within the next couple of years) the lack of any real value behind his claimed value will become clear enough to everyone.

    Thats also not getting into how much his other more viable assets are tied to the success/inevitable failure of his ill advised twitter adventure.

  29. 29.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Carlo Graziani: ROFL, apparently the first beat should be on “Will Twitter make it threw the traffic spike from the Mid Terms without exploding?”

  30. 30.

    Martin

    @emmyelle: I don’t think that’s it at all.

    One of the large studies I helped produce was to explore why academic discipline choices are gender biased. The basic takeaway was that on average women choose disciplines where they can see that knowledge/skills helping them to make a meaningful contribution to society. Men don’t to the same degree. Their choices are based on earning potential, interest (fun), prestige, etc. This is why women are more likely to go to nursing and men to business. It was interesting within engineering where electrical engineering was very male dominated, but biomedical or environmental engineering was mixed or women favored. The social benefit of those disciplines was more easily surfaced to potential students than it was in electrical engineering, even though electrical engineering (EE) has tremendous social potential – but that potential is almost never discussed.

    That carries over to tech. In part because it’s often just an extension of the same biases – companies with a lot of EE will be predominantly male. But the goal of the company also follows. Is the startup everyones express lane to getting rich, or is it a better way to get medical abortions to women in states where it’s been banned? For a lot of guys, even that is an express line to get rich and the women saying ‘whoa, we need these other people to make sure we’re doing this properly’ are just seen as an impediment to that.

    You see some of this in Twitters layoffs. Who got eliminated – the human right team – gone. The ML/algorithm transparency/trust group – gone. Those may or may not have been male or female dominated, but neither one was a profit center. They were part of Twitters social responsibility efforts and Musk nuked them from orbit. My guess is that women were more likely to gravitate to those units even though in the near term they hurt profitability, which hurt share prices, which hurt the value of stock options, which hurt the ability for everyone to retire a millionaire at 30.

    I don’t think competition really has anything to do with it because by and large they are seeking different jobs. The competition is really over what kinds of jobs should exist, what role tech should play in the economy, what kinds of startups are worth funding, and the gender preferences over individual jobs are sort of a 2nd order effect of that. Basically, it’s a competition over what should be valued, rather than individual competition for jobs.

    The more individual aggressive behavior we saw as well, but it didn’t seem to be based on competition, not exactly. Engineering (and therefore tech) are inherently team exercises. What we routinely saw was a lack of *trust*. Men didn’t trust women to know what the men knew, or to have the judgement that men had. That wasn’t just bullshit, but it was the opposite. Women had better instincts than the men did and were less likely to run down dead ends, or plow ahead without seeking feedback, or assume they knew something they didn’t actually know etc. Men were very activity oriented rather than result oriented, women were the opposite. And once you had a situation where women were in the minority, the men just bullied the women out. They weren’t perceived as a competitive threat, but they were perceived as a detriment, and therefore threat to the team’s success (you’d expect a competitor to be perceived as equally or more capable). Once the women were in the majority, the whole calculus changed. The men were now dependent on the women for team success and generally their behavior changed completely. Their behavior got better once women were elevated to the status of being an *actual* individual competitor.

    I’ve seen a few studies that show that persists beyond university and into the workplace which is why the better tech companies seek out women for leadership positions. They know that alone makes a big difference to the culture.

  31. 31.

    rikyrah

    Yep.

    All the time, we were told that RATINGS were the be all, end all.
    But, she got the RATINGS.
    So, RATINGS aren’t the ‘ bottom line’, after all?

    Uh huh

    Hungry and Hopeful In DFW (@Kennymack1971) tweeted at 1:39 PM on Sat, Nov 05, 2022:
    It’s this. MSNBC has empowered the racists to do this to any Black media figure who offends them. Especially if it’s a Black woman.

    (I bet Sunny Hostin is next)
    (https://twitter.com/Kennymack1971/status/1588964168191070208?t=iMC0v4xsptavSMMsdAQsOw&s=03)

  32. 32.

    Ken

    I haven’t heard specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Musk also fired the team that handles GDPR compliance. If so, it’s only a matter of time before Twitter violates the “right to be forgotten” provisions and the fines start.

  36. 36.

    rikyrah

     

     

    Sherrilyn Ifill (@SIfill_) tweeted at 11:51 AM on Sat, Nov 05, 2022:
    By firing #TiffanyCross two wks after she was targeted by Tucker Carlson, @MSNBC has further empowered a dangerous man who has a huge platform, emboldening him to target others.Many of us have had our turn as Tucker’s target of the night & endured the response of his minions.

     

    Sherrilyn Ifill (@SIfill_) tweeted at 11:54 AM on Sat, Nov 05, 2022:

    It’s not for the faint of heart. But for a rival network to give the appearance of acquiescing to his demands and firing one of their highest rated anchors is a boost I’m thought he never dreamed was possible. It has encouraged his use of his platform to target & silence.

  41. 41.

    Martin

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): No. Not exactly at least. I do think he may be the victim of a broader influence campaign that has lead him to think that this is the path to riches when the folks running the campaign know that it’s the path to some political outcome.

    He seems to think that Nazis are an untapped revenue stream, when every industry has long identified that not only are the right not a revenue stream, but it’s actually profitable to troll them deliberately. Nike’s Colin Kapernick campaign got the MAGA faithful to all burn their sneakers but losing them as customers was *way* cheaper than all of the free social media exposure they gave Nike. They made billions off of that.

    The only industry that benefits from appealing to the right is the gun industry. Everyone else loses. Sure, you can carve out a specific company or two that benefits, but the industry as a whole knows there’s more money on the other side. Musk seems to have been convinced of the opposite and I do think *that* might have been intentional. I think that Musk is doing so many things that so strongly favor US political enemies isn’t intentional by him, but is intentional by someone.

  45. 45.

    Anoniminous

    It was questionable Twitter was a viable business before Musk bought it.

    Now there’s absolutely no doubt: it isn’t.

    Twitter has entered the MySpace death spiral.

  46. 46.

    emmyelle

    @Martin: This is effing brilliant. Thank you for sharing that insight. I live in the world of biomedical science and bioengineering and can tell you that the majority of PhDs in both fields are going to women, and women are flocking to biotech in numbers I’ve never seen in my 20 years as a faculty member, program director, and VP academic affairs. And the main driver-not just the $$ but the desire to be part of getting drugs and devices and treatments to patients. And a few are even talking about the desire to “change biotech culture”, meaning less bro-ish.

  50. 50.

    piratedan

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): possibly…. will try and respond to this pragmatically…

    thru continued shaming and knowledge of twitters own professed policies, a decent number of the worst bad actors had been banished, tools in place to reduce and deflect those still surviving on the margins to where Twitter was a tool used by the center and the left to successfully pass information outside of the MSM bubble and keep people informed.

    So, rich white dude comes in and burns it all down and the libs and those not completely beholden to the narrative have to go rebuild all that all over again, while the right  is busy doing their best to run the same game plan with modified tactics from J6’s failures and now one of the main sources of communicating and tapping into the right now is being crippled.

    coincidence… in this day and age of conspiracy theories, maybe that’s not as much of a reach as it might have been after witnessing 2016 and 2020.

  53. 53.

    Citizen Alan

    @Martin:

    I wonder how many new durable users Twitter is getting right now?

    I haven’t used Twitter in years. The only reason I ever go there is because I’ve clicked on a shared tweet here and occasionally in the process got intrigued enough by some hashtag to click further. But I usually am reminded within a few minutes of why Twitter is garbage. Also, I can’t post because I got suspended several years ago for my perfectly reasonable comment that anti-mask, anti-vax shitposters deserve what they get, and I’ve never been remotely motivated to even try to get reinstated or open a new account.

  58. 58.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @emmyelle:

    My theory on why men are failing with women is that they have turned nature on its head. By “nature” I mean that they have redefined what “manly” means and thus unable to keep a mate. Rather than identifying what attracts women and then using that knowledge to find someone to build a relationship with, they have decided to behave as they wish and then blame women for their lack of success. One claim of theirs is that women are trying to “pussify” men, making them less manly.

    No. Women want a partner, someone who thinks of them as their best friend and acts accordingly. They don’t want an angry, unstable bullheaded conservative “manly” asshole. If they were peacocks, men would cut off their tail feathers because they look girly and then whine when the ladies turn their backs to them.

    Our daughter figured this out and told me about it. Boy did she nail it.

  59. 59.

    Citizen Alan

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I’m still pissed that I didn’t sell my comics during the boom, but in the 90s, I had other priorities and wasn’t following the market. I think at the peak, I could have sold my whole collection for $10-20k. Today, I doubt I could get $1k for the whole lot.

  60. 60.

    rikyrah

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    Let’s say a few words about “brand safety”. Musk and top Republican leaders are now complaining that the problem is “woke” activists breaking Twitter and pushing it toward financial collapse. Nope. That’s not it. Not remotely. Are there people pushing for boycotts or …

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    2/ “pauses”? Absolutely. But that’s not why Twitter is in trouble. It’s not just that advertisers don’t want their ads showing up next to Kanye West ranting about how his Jewish doctor wanted to have him eliminated. It goes way beyond that. Advertisers don’t want to be …

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    3/ near controversy. And they don’t even want to be near things that are upsetting or agitating. This is why ALL political media faces an inverse premium in advertising because the content is inherently polarizing. You can sell the same ads, watched by the same number of …

     

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    4/ people and actually the same people and you can get more money if the content is fashion or parenthood or entertainment than if it’s politics. It’s because there’s hate speech or terrible things. But advertisers won’t you to see their ads in a good moment, in a comfortable …

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    5/ setting. Here’s an example. Why do you think even in his heyday Drudge never had better than low rent, crap ads, and tshirt and supplement ads on his site. Mostly because even though it was a hugely hugely popular site premium advertisers just don’t want to be near something..

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    6/ so hot and contentious. Half the people are hate reading anyway. There’s always a big inverse premium for uck and discomfort and controversy. That’s just how the ad business works. The nature of the advertising market is actually a big BIG reason for bothsides …

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    7/ journalism. In a politically polarized society advertising are very VERY cautious about any hint they’re taking sides in the great political or factional debates. They want to put their odds in venues that are above any hint that they’re partisan or taking sides.

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    8/ It’s not that these places get no advertising. But there’s a huge inverse premium. The exceptions are venues that have something that can’t be matched. All the post-2016 controversy notwithstanding this is why Facebook was so successful. Especially ROI advertisers …

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:

    9/ just believed they couldn’t not be there. All the crap on Facebook was just something they had to live with because the power of the ad ecosystem was just too good. Twitter has never had that. It’s never been a particularly attractive ad buy. That’s for a million …

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    10/ reasons. But that’s why Facebook was a cash cow and Twitter has never done better than break even. Musk basically bought Twitter on a lark. He was riding so high he thought he could basically buy Twitter with Fuck You money. Since then he’s been operating on the …

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:
    11/ premise that he could both be Mr Free Speech ™ memelord and make Twitter operate at a profit. It’s one or the other. No advertiser wants to be near this drama or controversy let alone the next N-word explosion. It’s not the activists fault. If you want to

     

    Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) tweeted at 6:49 PM on Fri, Nov 04, 2022:

    12/ run a fancy restaurant, you don’t put an open air outhouse in the middle of the dining area. Just not how it works. Maybe it’s your thing. Not how it works. You don’t get the blame the people who say ewwww it’s way smelly.

  63. 63.

    Ruckus

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    Bingo.

    You left out one part though – often new management thinks they can do things a lot better than old management did, because they are obviously smarter and more knowledgeable, which is why they are replacing the last management team in the first place. I’d bet they rarely base it on the new owners desire to make money over everything else. And of course because they are so smart they reject anything the old management did. Which of course the old management did in it’s own style until Lisa in shipping noticed that the boxes that were $.02 cheaper each would regularly and often fall apart in shipping, damaging the product and got purchasing to buy the more expensive boxes to save the $12 plus shipping per each lost product, not to mention customer satisfaction.

  64. 64.

    Anoniminous

    No need to overthink this.
    Musk was forced to buy Twitter. Now he doesn’t have a clue what to do and is facing public humiliation.
    So he’s doing what rich entitled shit-for-brains always do in that situation: throw a tantrum and lash out, blame everything and everybody but themselves.​

  65. 65.

    Citizen Alan

    @WaterGirl: To be fair, I gather she called Florida “America’s Dick,” which would probably be enough to get a journalist fired from any reputable news outlet regardless of their race, gender, or political identity. Faux, of course, would let their people say that and worse so long as the vulgarity was exclusively directed at Dems.

  67. 67.

    way2blue

    I think we’ll be learning a lot about the mechanics of how Twitter works ‘under the hood’ in the weeks ahead as we watch  to see if the ship rights itself or rolls over…

  68. 68.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @Ruckus: ah yes, the New Broom syndrome.  I hate when we get new upper management.  They always have some awesome new idea and “new” management magic ideas that will magically fix the problems. Yeah the problem is we are bleeding people and somehow new technology will fix it.

  71. 71.

    Geminid

    Trump fanatics are just too appalling for some people to laugh at, but those who can might check out @ronfipkowski if they want some yucks.

    Filikowski is following pre-rally coverage for a trump rally in Pennsylvania. A “Right Side” internet news site is interviewing ralliers, and Filipkowski is tweeting out the real doosies with appropriate commentary. It’s a real freak show. A lot of the ralliers seem to be from other states.

    Filipkowski’s tweets on other topics are pretty good. He’s a former Republican who has turned on his party with a combative vengeance. A Floridian, Filipkowsi is especially rough with DeSantis and Rubio.

  72. 72.

    gratuitous

    Isn’t Twitter a big enough employer that it’s subject to the WARN Act? If Musk is cutting payroll to save money (ostensibly), he’s going to have to pay out a lot of money in the short term to compensate a whole bunch of people who aren’t going to be doing any work down on the Twitter farm.

    Meanwhile, Twitter still has to service that debt Musk saddled the company with. Musk may not be the corporate genius he’s been marketing himself as. I’m shocked, too.

  73. 73.

    Citizen Alan

    @Van Buren: 0.001% of $44.1b would not only satisfy all my needs for the rest of my life, it would allow me to live a life that nearly everyone I know personally would consider unimaginable luxury. In Brewster’s Millions, Richard Pryor had to spend $30m (in 1985 dollars) within 30 days to obtain a $300m inheritance. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $78m and $780m today. The latter figure is less than 1/5 of what Muskrat squandered on Twitter.

  75. 75.

    RepubAnon

    @Ken:  If I recall correctly, GDPR fines are capped at 4% of the organization’s world revenues.  Once Musk succeeds in eliminating all Twitter’s revenue…

  76. 76.

    Brachiator

    @emmyelle:

    And if you focus on that line “less likely to participate in the workforce” you understand why tech bros have a permanent hard on at the thought of a right-wing autocracy: they won’t have to compete with smart women anymore for jobs and paychecks.

    But the men less likely to participate in the work force are dude bros, not tech bros. The losers who endorse fantasies of autocracy can’t compete with anyone. They focus on women as convenient scapegoats.

    I dread to imagine what autocracy in America might look like, but I feel in my bones that anyone who thinks that it will mean a simple return to the good old days of racist patriarchy will be deeply disappointed.

  78. 78.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @James E Powell:

    Not really. I just remember hearing that some authoritarian governments were investors in Musk’s Twitter takeover. That, and his apparent closeness to Putin too

  80. 80.

    RepubAnon

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: Remember when Musk almost bankrupted Tesla by trying to fully automate the Model 3 assembly line?  He did the same “insane hours and firing people struggling to implement Musk’s foolish ideas” method there – until he finally realized that he had to get some cars out the door and put up a standard assembly line in a tent outside the main production area.

  81. 81.

    BruceFromOhio

    @EmbraceYourInnerCrone: ayeeee, you nailed it with New Broom! The team I’m in “inherited” one of these bright-eyed bushy-tailed critters when another section went tits-up, and super-senior management dictated we would absorb the bodies because so many were “high value” employees. Irony that “high value” couldn’t make a go of what they were working on. So now we have a ‘new broom’ performing an evaluation (~cough~AUDIT~cough~) of our little team with the objective of implementing big-A agile project management … in an already-successful and efficient operations support group. Looking forward to how some future scrum master will work my 300 annual incidents into a epic, back log, or user story in the next iteration while we chase that 0.01% improvement in our customer service metrics.

  82. 82.

    emmyelle

    @Brachiator: Sadly, I don’t thing you will need to imagine for long. I suspect we will all be pretty familiar with what it looks like pretty soon.

  83. 83.

    Jinchi

    @Splitting Image: I wonder what percentage of Musk’s supposed $(300-44) billion dollar net worth is actually in bitcoin and other crypto.

    I assume he wasn’t stupid enough to join the NFT craze.

  85. 85.

    James E Powell

    @Van Buren:

    If I had that money, I’d be laser focused on acquiring a major sports franchise. It’s the only thing that much money is good for.

  86. 86.

    Martin

    @emmyelle: Precisely. I’m the guy who did the US News rankings for our engineering program. I did systemwide admissions modeling and analysis for UC as well as statewide for certain disciplines like engineering, and for broader discipline issues.

    If you want to recruit women into disciplines where they are underrepresented (most of engineering, computer science, physics, a few others) focus both your involvement in professional societies and at your local institution on the role that practitioners in the discipline play in society. For some disciplines that’s kind of apparent in the name (environmental), but others like materials science – prospective students have no fucking idea what that is, what materials scientists do, and how they influence the world.

    It’s the leaders in the discipline (like you) who have to do this. It’s slow, but it works.

    On the local level, if you teach a course with a team component, you will serve the female students VERY well if you structure your teams either so that women are at least 50% of the team, or where the team lead is female. This is *critical* in 1st year courses, but still important in 4th year. One of the top stated reasons women attritioned out of our engineering program was how they were treated in first year design courses by their teammates. By always having them in the majority, or having them in a position of authority, improved that dramatically. Women who already feel like they don’t belong cannot have that doubt reinforced in practice. You have to break it immediately.

    I demonstrated this to my faculty by filming students at our campus wide summer orientation. We’d bring in about 1000 students campus wide and they’d break up by academic unit for advising. Student leaders would walk them out of the student center as an academic group. One group stood out above all of the others – the engineers. Every other group was heterogeneous in terms of race and gender, but the engineers had a very clearly defined group of male students being followed by a very clearly defined group of female students.

    I pointed out this was not behavior they learned from the institution or even from each other – this was literally their first day ever on campus. This was instinctive behavior they brought to the campus. The women exhibited very clear ‘group up as a defense against predators’ behavior from the very outset. *That* was what the engineering unit was starting with. They couldn’t pretend that there was a neutral gender behavior, because there wasn’t. It had already established itself before the students even arrived. It was the engineering units job to break that behavior as quickly as possible, because ignoring it would at the very least cause it to persist, and most likely to get worse.

    Convincing the faculty that their first year design course needed to NOT focus on academic learning was a real challenge. The first year course had to focus on emotional and cultural learning. How to work in a team without pissing off your teammates, or slacking, etc. How to build that confidence in the female students. How to tear down some of the overconfidence in the male students. Plus all of the usual bits of appreciating the value of design process, professional ethics, standards and constraints, etc. (I ran the accreditation effort there for some time.) If they successfully did that, the academic learning that followed would go much better. And it worked – retention of women in the program increased by about 25% just from that. Benefitted other underrepresented groups similarly.

    BTW, feel free to hit me up for info around this stuff at any time.

  88. 88.

    Geminid

    @gratuitous: I read that Musk fired all its staff in Australia, in a way that was a flat violation of that country’s labor laws. He reportedly tells Tesla managers violate OSHA standards in Tesla factories. It’s like he sees himself as an Ayn Rand hero.

    There are plenty of assholes who still are rational actors, and that’s how I’ve viewed Musk. But now I wonder if he really has his feet on the rational ground.

    I think about how just six weeks ago Musk acted like he wanted to wriggle out of his commitment to buy Twitter. Also, that he’d boxed himself in, at least so far as being able to back out without paying a heavy penalty.

    Maybe Musk weighed the pluses and minuses and decided it was better to go through with a financially dubious deal. Or maybe his pride compelled him to. Either way, his behaviour seems passive-agressive, like he’s mad at the world. Or mad at himself, which to Musk might be the world anyway.

  90. 90.

    Jinchi

    @Martin: But Apple is also a company that is VERY dependent on that trust thermocline.

    I lost a lot of faith in Apple when a required update bricked my otherwise perfectly functional Iphone.

    This was shrugged off as a “what can you do about it?” problem for Luddites like myself, who didn’t want to drop $1000 every couple of years just to get the lastest bells and whistles.

  91. 91.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Carlo Graziani: Folks are already on it.

    Much folks here love to slag on Twitter (and Facebook), I really can’t understate how much that social media enabled marginalized groups to find each other and organize. Keffals being able to shut down the notorious doxxing site Kiwi Farms that harmed hundreds if not thousands of people, especially trans women, (I’m on my phone so Google for background) wouldn’t have been possible without Twitter.

    Twitter’s freewheeling nature also meant I could encounter numerous engaging voices that I would never of found otherwise.

    Yes, it had problems, and we joked about it being a hell site. But Musk driving it into the ground is going to leave an important void that I don’t see being quickly filled by any of the existing competitors. (FWIW, I don’t see anyone Twitter saying they’re going to Facebook, even as a joke.)

    So while I’m on there 1) until the midterms, and 2) for morbid amusement, mostly I’m a rich, baby man child is wrecking it because he’s bored.

  92. 92.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Citizen Alan: ​
     

    0.001% of $44.1b would not only satisfy all my needs for the rest of my life, it would allow me to live a life that nearly everyone I know personally would consider unimaginable luxury.

    Nitpick: 0.001% of $44.1B is $441,000. Not knowing your style of living or your expected remaining lifespan, it might well satisfy all of your needs for the rest of your life, but probably not in a manner of unimaginable luxury.

  93. 93.

    Martin

    @way2blue: Yeah. One of the exercises the folks who keep the lights on constantly do is work out systems to ensure the lights stay on as long as possible unattended.

    This takes the form of various kinds of automation, which to be honest is the easy parts. The hard parts are the meatspace stuff – making sure the recurring purchase order goes through, who knows which button needs to be pushed should the regular team be indisposed, etc. For Silicon Valley tech, it’s the ‘can we run this entire operation from NY or Europe if the big one hits and everything burns to the ground including all of the local staff’.

    The problem with the exercise is that the automation bits can be tested but none of the rest can be. You may have clear delegation policies and practices, but will they work? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That’s what the XKCD up top is referencing.

    Twitter is about to find out the hard way. I’ll say this, as someone who did considerable contingency planning (hell, I closed 4 public universities at the outset of Covid) edgelord mass firing was never part of the contingency plan. You planned around geography for natural disasters and things like that, not some dickhead arbitrarily wiping out half the workforce in a week. There are no plans that even attempt to address that situation, let alone ones that were tested.

    Having wrestled with our internal HR systems, I’m not even convinced that Twitter fired the half of the workforce they intended to, locked out the right people, etc. There’s no fucking way our HR team could have pulled that together correctly in that timeframe even for 100 people, let alone 3700. And there’s always some carryover. They didn’t lose 3700, they lost more than that, because a whole pile of people either quit or will quit in response to the radical restructuring. The lone remaining PR individual may not be excited about taking on the entire workload of a team that previously numbered a dozen. That too isn’t in the contingency plan.

  94. 94.

    Martin

    @Jinchi: Yep. Trust requires a huge amount of work to acquire and is trivial to throw away. Apple doesn’t always get it right, but it clearly drives every decision they make. They at least *try* to get it right, because they recognize that all of the money they want is on the other side of that trust. If they lose trust, they lose access to the money. It’s that simple.

  95. 95.

    DMcK

    @Martin: Looks like there are quite a few examples of the Trust Thermocline out there. For me it brought to mind the time I decided to “cut the cord” and move to streaming-only. My cable bill had increased to a threshold I had previously decided would be the trigger to do so. I had actually planned on them breaching the Thermocline!

  96. 96.

    lowtechcyclist

    @James E Powell:

    If I had that money, I’d be laser focused on acquiring a major sports franchise. It’s the only thing that much money is good for.

    I’d buy a major newspaper or two, un-bothsides it, and have the political reporters cover the parties’ proposed policies and their implications.  And I’d buy up local newspapers, re-incorporate them as nonprofits, and give each a small endowment to keep them going.

  97. 97.

    Martin

    @Citizen Alan: More notably, $44B is about ⅔ of the total out-of-pocket cost for student tuition in the US.

    Problems like climate change and homelessness aren’t lacking in solutions. We know how to solve them. The problem is we don’t want to tax guys like Musk in order to solve them.

  98. 98.

    Tony G

    It would take an army of psychiatrists to figure out Elon (not that he would listen to them anyway).  He just spent $44 billion on a new toy, and broke it (probably irrevocably).  Half of the staff laid off.  I’ve been in situations as an I.T. guy in which I was one of the remaining people after a much smaller percentage (about 5%) was laid off.  It does not enhance the productivity of the remaining staff.  Most (maybe all) of the remaining staff at Twitter are already updating their resumes and looking for other jobs.  They will go through the motions until they’re hired somewhere else, but they are PISSED and will do no more than the minimum at their jobs.  Almost all of them have now seen friends (or, at least, friendly acquaintances) booted out the door.  People at other companies who are good at their jobs will NOT seek employment at Twitter.  Elon Musk is now the captain of a sinking ship, and as more people leave (and as more advertisers steer clear of that mess) the sinking of the ship will accelerate.  Nice job, idiot.  Of course, even if he loses all of his $44 billion, he will still have a net worth of more than $150 billion, so he literally doesn’t care.  A pampered child who never grew up.  No wonder he’s a hero among the “libertarian” right wing.

  99. 99.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Martin: I’ll also note that the number of lines of code written seems to be a key criteria in who got fired — with those writing the least getting ax.

    For those who aren’t programmers, those who can make something work with the least amount of code are generally your best, and/or most experienced programmers, and they’re often tackling the most complicated problems. (Lean code is more efficient which a Good Thing.) Also another important job is “refactoring” existing code to clean it up, make it better and more efficient. The programmers who do that work often have negative lines of code produced.

  100. 100.

    StringOnAStick

    I know a SRE at Twitter, he was laid yesterday along with most of his team.  He was relieved because he knows whoever remains is going to get worked to the bone.

    The problem I see with what is happening to Twitter is every politician and reporter in DC checks it before they take their first morning pee, and that’s their entire world.  That’s way more control on the national discourse than any company should have.  Reading Bill Browder’s latest book (Freezing Order, about going after Putin and having the same returned to him), Twitter is what prevented him from being extradited from Greece to Russia because he posted that he’d been arrested so all the people he couldn’t reach directly knew and set things in motion to stop it.  So, Twitter has done some good things.  Maybe it needs to be a utility.

  101. 101.

    Lyrebird

    @Martin: Hi Martin, I am going to ask Anne Laurie here to send you my contact info if that is agreeable.  This year is not my year to do accreditation work, but I have, and I would be very glad to learn more about what you explained to emmyelle.

  102. 102.

    bbleh

    So, anybody up for a quick monetization of schadenfreude.com?  I figure we can be in and out in just a few months, with maybe a couple mil tops up front, and who knows how much on the back end if we hit it right.  Act fast, these things don’t come along every day!  Email for wiring instructions, and include a return address for progress reports.

  103. 103.

    M31

    @Carlo Graziani: Time until $44B worth of Twitter = $22B of real money

    from what I’ve read $22B was about right for Twitter’s value, and I’m sure it’s less now lol

  105. 105.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Tony G: When one of the companies I worked for got acquired by private equity and gutted, that’s exactly what happened. I was relieved to be in the initial rounds of cuts. Two years later I think no one from my original department is still there (and most of the lay-off survivors were the most junior members of the team).  A whole lotta institution memory got escorted out the door.

  106. 106.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Martin: ​
     

    Just wanted to say that while I haven’t been part of this conversation, I’ve been reading with interest. Thank you for helping me see some things I never would have seen or thought of.

  107. 107.

    Geminid

    @Dangerman: According to a CNBC article from October 28, Musk is putting up around $27 billion in cash. He sold Tesla stock in April and August to get $15(?) billion of that. Seven banks are investing another $13.5 billion and the rest comes from a number of private equity outfits including Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.  So Musk has not put all of $44 billion into Twitter, but he and his partners still could lose a lot.

    Musk’s bigger vulnerability is his stake in Tesla, whose stock has lost almost 50% of its value since its high last year. It still has a lousy price to earnings ration of ~70 to one. In contrast, Toyota’s P/E is around 10.5 to 1.

    Tesla earned its name and investors by being “firstest with the mostest,” so to speak. Soon his competitors will be selling large numbers of EV’s as well, and they are experienced automakers who intend to build better cars more efficiently, and likely can. I don’t know that Tesla can maintain even 80% of its stock value. And consumer appetite for its product is partly a matter of prestige, and that can depreciate quickly in the face of real competition.

  108. 108.

    karen marie

    @Josie:   Twitter is more than just politics.  I follow lots of amazing people who share their lives and talk about all kinds of things – art, history, architecture, farming – you name it.  That’s the community I’m going to miss if/when it goes tits up.  Mastodon is the only site I’ve heard about that it might be possible to re-find interesting people to read but from the descriptions of it, it seems like it would be a lot of work.

  109. 109.

    M31

    I’m also convinced that Twitter’s lawyers who drew up the contract put in all the ‘waive due diligence’ and ‘no backsies’ clauses assuming that M*sk’s lawyers would tell him not to sign it, which I’m sure they did.

    My prediction is he’ll cook the books so that one quarter’s results look good, then do an IPO and get all his stupid loser minions to go to WallStreetBets/GameStop/NFT bro-land and pump it up, and sell on an undeserved wave of enthusiasm and claim he meant to do that all along

  111. 111.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Geminid:

    And consumer appetite for its product is partly a matter of prestige, and that can depreciate quickly in the face of real competition.

    I’ll admit to owning a Tesla — wasn’t a fanboi even before he went full Lex Luther — but at the time there weren’t many options and I wanted something sporty. These days I’m embarrassed to drive it, but not In a position to replace it. I’ll never buy one again, even if, as I suspect, one of the big auto companies eventually buys it out at fire sale prices.

  114. 114.

    karen marie

    @Dangerman:   Musk only lit $27B of his own money on fire  He lit $17B of other people’s money on fire.  Imagine being stupid enough to get in on that deal.

  115. 115.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Geminid: ​
     

    I read somewhere earlier this year that Tesla had a market cap bigger than the next nine automakers, combined. Obviously even if Tesla is worth more than some of them, it’s not remotely anywhere near worth as much as the whole lot of them. And a 70-to-1 P/E is crazy. I can only believe that a lot of well-off Musk fanboys are keeping the price of Tesla stock way inflated.

  117. 117.

    BruceFromOhio

    @EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Ayeee, you nailed it! The team I am on was the lucky recipient of one of these bright-eyed, bushy-tailed “New Brooms” after another department went tits-up and the senior leadership wanted the remaining departments to “absorb” the high-performers – irony that this purported “high performance” resulted in canceled projects. So New Broom is now the highest-paid least-senior team member and is busy doing a survey (~cough~AUDIT~cough~) to understand how to apply big-A agile project management … to a 7-person operations support group. And will take the next year to do it.

    “New Broom” indeed. I’m now referring to the effort as Project Roomba.

  119. 119.

    Geminid

    @karen marie: I’m starting to run into people on Twitter who are offering helpful suggestions on how to navigate Mastodon and set up a usefull account. Also, a lot of people are announcing their own Mastodon accounts, including Marcy Wheeler and just now, retired general Mark Hertling whose Tweets on the war in Ukraine have been very informative.

    I’m a very “slow adopter” when it comes to the digital world, and won’t jump into Mastodon any time soon. But for those who are interested, there seems to be a lot of information out there, put up by knowledgeable and sincere people.

  121. 121.

    Splitting Image

    @Geminid:

    According to a CNBC article from October 28, Musk is putting up around $27 billion in cash. He sold Tesla stock in April and August to get $15(?) billion of that. Seven banks are investing another $13.5 billion and the rest comes from a number of private equity outfits including Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. So Musk has not put all of $44 billion into Twitter, but he and his partners still could lose a lot.

    I just wanted to add that this makes everything Musk is doing much, much worse for him. If he were simply blowing through $44 billion of his own money, the failure of Twitter would be just something that happens occasionally. If a man is a genius businessman, you can forgive him for a bold venture that doesn’t pan out.

    Not the same story if he is losing his partners’ money as well as his own. If seven banks have to write off billions of their own money because Musk is screwing this up, they and other investors have to be more diligent the next time the supposed genius gets another bold idea.

    Most of Musk’s wealth is still in stock shares, and depends entirely on people being willing to invest money in his companies. That can change in a hurry. Trust is difficult to acquire and easy to lose, as Martin says above.

  122. 122.

    bbleh

    @M31: concur, and in the meantime he’ll go for the biggest splash(es) he can, notably ones that will appeal to his target marks — I mean, market, that’s what I mean! — which may well involve turning Twitter into Parler/TruthSocial except with a MUCH bigger initial subscriber base.

  123. 123.

    Martin

    @M31: Catch-22. It was about right for Twitter before Musk tried the first time. But his inability to produce a plan for the company before advertisers back in May basically cut the value of the company in half again.

    There’s an event in early May where media outlets sell future ad slots. This is when the acquisition was still on (about 2 weeks after Musk announced it). Twitter usually books about about $1B in ad contracts for the upcoming year at that event, and advertisers wanted to know in Twitters presentation what the plan was – basically what was Musks plan for the company. It’s a perfectly reasonable question, and considerable work should have been put into being able to answer that. Musk did no work. Twitter booked no ads because advertisers couldn’t even get basic questions answered.

    It’s an event where a LOT of the upcoming year ad revenue gets committed and Musk blew it. This is likely part of the reason he tried to back out – he’d already fucked up the first year ownership, even before he took ownership.

    Since then, he’s had 6 months to prepare proper answers to the very same questions. He still has no answer. He tried a redo on that effort last week and fucked it up completely. That was his second chance, and he fucked up the second chance. I don’t expect many will give him a third. He’s not some new startup learning the process. He jumped into the big leagues and with billions on the line, it’s his burden to get on top of the job, and he’s completely failed to do so.

    So yeah, in April it was probably worth $22B since ad spending had already started to nose off for the whole social media industry. Everyone but Musk seemed to be aware of this, so of course investors were open to selling. By mid-May considerable harm had already been done to the company by Musk, and $22B was looking awfully generous by then.

  124. 124.

    RSA

    Based on what I’ve read about Musk, I suspect he sees solutions (Twitter, Tesla, Space X, etc.) in terms of technology. He doesn’t seem to consider the human element that makes the technology work over time. There’s no way you can figure out in a week which of thousands of people to fire, for example. And you wouldn’t do it if you could empathize, if you could see the disruption it brings to those people’s lives. Musk also doesn’t seem to recognize the human element in social media platforms, whether it’s from the perspective of advertisers or end users. Even if Twitter can keep the lights on, a company whose owner has just fired half of its staff is not one that people want to associate with, all else being equal. The stock market doesn’t care about the human cost, but a lot of other people do. They may stick around, holding their noses, as with Facebook, but as soon as a reasonable alternative shows up they’ll be gone like a shot.

  125. 125.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: I think that for some people, owning Tesla stock is like being partners with John Galt, Ayn Rand’s hero. But Musk might end up looking more like a hero in a novel by Ayn Rando.

  126. 126.

    persistentillusion

    @karen marie: Hi KM, I tried to sign up for Mastodon, CounterSocial and one other whose name escapes me.  Three hours lost, can’t sign into any. (Yes, I’m a luddite and pilot error may be at fault, or the sites may be FUBAR, either works.) I will mark this as a lost time experiment and move on.  As several other have more ably expressed, if blogs rebound as a result, it’s probably a good thing.

  128. 128.

    dnfree

    @Martin: fascinating explanation.  I was a (female) computer programmer starting in the 1960s, when everything was very tied to machine characteristics.  In my professional life, my interest was in what I was doing for the users to make their jobs easier and more efficient.  I disliked having to calculate how my records would fit into the track and cylinder size of the physical disk. The more removed from technical limitations and the more hardware-independent computer languages became, the more I enjoyed my job.  And yet, in some ways I miss the days when you could read a hex dump to see exactly where things were going wrong.

  129. 129.

    Gravenstone

    @Citizen Alan: Similar, M:TG cards. Had a buddy who was really into the game and sold out a good sized chunk of his collection a few years into it. I sold off most of my far more modest collection at the same time. He got enough to buy himself a new car. I got enough to buy a mattress set…

  130. 130.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Sister Golden Bear: One of the most difficult bug hunts I ever did ended in a fix that was literally changing one character from a 0 to a 1 — a one-bit code change.

    That wasn’t the most difficult one. The most difficult one ended in ZERO code written by me, because after figuring out that there were no errors at all in the C code but the customer’s compiler was literally misusing the chip registers, I passed it off to one of their engineers who realized a compiler flag was set wrong. That was a bug that had been popping up sporadically and stumping the customer’s entire engineering team for weeks. So, yeah, not good for KLOC if anyone had been measuring that.

  131. 131.

    cain

    @Martin:

    If you want to recruit women into disciplines where they are underrepresented (most of engineering, computer science, physics, a few others) focus both your involvement in professional societies and at your local institution on the role that practitioners in the discipline play in society. For some disciplines that’s kind of apparent in the name (environmental), but others like materials science – prospective students have no fucking idea what that is, what materials scientists do, and how they influence the world.

    My wife just did a talk about STEM and women. It was much heralded. If you’re interested I can provide a short youtube link (the first version is a lightening talk only 5 minutes long) She did another one today for 30 minutes – but it’s not yet published.

  132. 132.

    SpaceUnit

    Musk will reconsider his content moderation policy when there’s nobody left on Twitter but 4chan trolls driving away advertisers and people calling him a dumbfuck.

  133. 133.

    cain

    In the meanwhile, demand to get onto Mastodon has become overwhelming – new servers are propping up. The blue checked people are starting accounts on the big ones – my political feed has moved to Mastodon. Even our favorite Angry Black Lady has started an account on Mastodon.

    It’s a great place with no ads, and the ability to pick servers that serve the kind of more positive topics that you couldn’t see. I could see servers around Democratic fundraising and other bits. I think in the end, all these folks moving to a non-centralized setup means that it will be much harder to gas-light than if it was a single area.

  135. 135.

    sab

    @BruceFromOhio:// You two are why we have so few young jackals. What on earth are you talking about?

    I miss when the top twenty-five search answers weren’t ads, of which the first ten are Amazon.

  136. 136.

    Geminid

    @cain: Cheryl Rofer was talking up a Mastodon server devoted to Ukraine, that a Ms. Allide(sp?) had joined. Ms. Rofer knows Allide from her reporting on Eastern European affairs and spoke highly of her. Rofer predicted she’ll likely sign up on the same server. For now, Rofer said, she intends to stay on Twitter until it starts to disintegrate.

  137. 137.

    gwangung

    @RSA: And the thing is….Twitter is nothing BUT human factors. Using technology to solve problems there is like bringing a hammer to a lumberjack’s job.

  138. 138.

    gwangung

    @cain: I’m perusing the comments to grok out where to go. I’ve gone on twitter, but Mastodon seems a bit too silo’ed for my tastes. Though if enough people go there…..

  139. 139.

    Baud

    On Mastodon, for instance, you have to join a specific server to sign up, some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it’s not accepting more users; I’m currently using one called Mstdn.social, which is also where I can sign in to access Mastodon on the web

  140. 140.

    sab

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I just asked my husband this. His guess is the guy is a moron. My concern is that some foreign entity paid him big bugs to blow things up, but why would Dorsey assist in this? So I am back to rich morons. Wasn’t the original point of twitter to help softball and soccer teams communicate practice schedule changes? Just because it grew into a behemoth doesn’t mean Dorsey was a genius. He might have been a lucky energizer bunny.

  141. 141.

    JMG

    There have been more than a few professional sports team owners who did just what Musk has done with Twitter. They were very successful in some other field, and bought a team because they were a fan either of the team or sports in general. They didn’t realize being a fan gives one no insight into what’s required to be a good owner. They didn’t lose money, that’s almost impossible for an owner in pro sports, but boy did their teams lose a lot of games.

    Musk is a Twitter fan who bought the team. Except he’s in a new racket where he can indeed lose a lot of money, not just games.

  142. 142.

    Captain C

    @sab:

    why would Dorsey assist in this?

    How much did he make on the Twitter deal?  Certainly making $44/share on what were probably a lot of shares worth no more than half that (and possibly less as @Martin: pointed out) would be worth a good deal of money, even before any golden parachutes and buyouts.  It’s almost like a guaranteed short sell falling into your lap.

  145. 145.

    Tokyokie

    @Splitting Image: Your point about comic books and the trust thermocline reminded me of what happened with me and baseball cards. When I first started buying them as a kid, they were 5 cents for a pack of 5 and included a slab of crappy bubblegum. That’s a penny a card. Now I think they’re like $1.75 for a pack of 10, more or less, depending on the line of cards, and the bubblegum is long gone. I used to accumulate several sets a year, but then Topps drew competition from Fleer and Donrus, and that became harder to do. Then Upper Deck came along with its “premium” cards, and the hobby became one for old farts with money. Putting together a single Upper Deck set of Upper Deck by buying them a few packs at a time was financially ruinous.
    But I knew it was time to drop the hobby altogether when I realized that a Bo Jackson rookie card was priced higher than one for Brooks Robinson. Rookie cards are more highly prized than newer cards of a player, but basically three factors should drive the price for a baseball card: how good the player was, how old the card is, and how rare the card is (which is a factor of age as well). Brooks Robinson is a Hall-of-Famer; Bo Jackson was a good player whose injuries kept him from becoming a great player. At the time I made my decision, the Robinson rookie card was about 30 years old, the Jackson card brand new. But the rarity of the two cards was what got me; although the card companies don’t like to divulge how many cards they print a season, it’s thought that the press runs are 10 times or more the size of those back in the 1950s. People were acquiring enough Jackson rookie cards to compile 100-card bricks of them. Nobody did that with Brooks Robinson cards. (Robinson’s rookie card was in the third series, and, as a rule, the first two series were easier to find, the third and subsequent ones increasingly more difficult.) So I sold my collection of more than 100,000 cards, and got out of the hobby. Shortly thereafter, card prices crashed badly. I still buy a few packs a year, mostly to play Baseball Card War (I game I made up that’s played like War with a deck of playing cards, only you argue over which player is better), but that’s it. The card companies lost my trust forever.

  150. 150.

    Another Scott

    @Matt McIrvin: Great story.  Coding can be inscrutable.  I remember a tagine from another old discussion site:

    I love RedBrick, it’s the only database I’ve met than can consistently give different results for

    Select count(*) from table

    and

    Select count(*) from table where 1=1

    :⁠-⁠\

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  151. 151.

    Ohio Mom

    @Martin: You have confirmed what I’ve long thought.

    Ohio Dad would come home from working as a computer engineer in an all-white male office completely wrung out by the shenanigans of his co-workers. Mostly it was a lot of a vicious one-upmanship and a lot of spirited discussion repeating Fox talking points (Ohio Dad was undercover as a Democrat).

    When I got tired of listening sympathetically, I would say, Next time pick a career that is mostly female.

  152. 152.

    karen marie

    @persistentillusion:   Yeah, it’s one thing for people who are interested in having a following to invest the time but for people like me (and I suspect, you) who are just there to learn or look at cat/dog pictures, ugh.

    I looked initially at CounterSocial and bailed immediately.  It’s ownership is impossible to determine but it looks like there’s something unsavory going on there.  My guess is it’s full of Bernie bros.  I’m not at all interested in a political silo.

    Mastodon will probably be where I end up but I’m going to wait until too many of the accounts I follow have abandoned twitter.  I’m just so tired of constant change.

    Fucking MS Word now has this new thing where every time I do a spellcheck, it tries to sell me a subscription to grammar help that I DO NOT WANT, and there’s no way to make it stop.

  153. 153.

    Sanjeevs

    @Martin: It’s possible one of Musk’s motivations was to have an excuse to sell a lot of overpriced Tesla shares without crashing the value.

    A bit like AOL merging with Time Warner right before the dot com crash

  154. 154.

    Geminid

    @karen marie: I think am a digital dinosaur; signing up for this fine site was the first time I ever even used my gmail address. I’m kind of like James Michener’s diplodocus, plodding around a swamp and observing what you quick mammals on the shore are up to.

    Depending on the reports, I may eventually plod on over and check out a Mastodon site.

  157. 157.

    TS

    Trust Thermocline

    This completely describes my offline/online subscriptions behavior – but I never had a name for it

    Newspapers, national geographic, ancestry, netflix, mint issue new coins etc. They weren’t all related to cost – content & low usage were big reasons for dropping the subscriptions.

    I have kept my sub to Washington Post because it was such a cheap subscription ($19US per year) that if I cancelled I could never get similar.

  163. 163.

    ian

    @karen marie:

    It isn’t, but those people are usually employed on FOX or OAN.  They won’t get fired from there for saying terrible things about Democratic places.

    According to this Variety article, she (Tiffany Cross) may have been about to have been let go anyway.  Her contract was up for renewal and hadn’t been finalized yet.  Apparently NBC wasn’t happy with her.  The whole calling Florida a dick thing is probably just the last straw or an excuse.

  164. 164.

    lowtechcyclist

    @persistentillusion:

    Hi KM, I tried to sign up for Mastodon, CounterSocial and one other whose name escapes me. Three hours lost, can’t sign into any.

    I came across this guide to joining Mastodon, and it was very helpful.  I’m in, and it took maybe 20 minutes of my time.

    At this point, I have no clue as to whether or how much I use it. In Twitter, I tend to spend nearly zero time in my own timeline; what I do instead is read a few other people’s feeds and occasionally throw in a comment.  If those other people gravitate to Mastodon, then so will I. If none of them do, then I won’t either.

  165. 165.

    Ruckus

    @Geminid:

    HIs only real plus is that he’s been selling EV for a while now. But he keeps raising the price and at some point his market will plummet. Right now there are other EV here in the US but not a huge amount of brands or models. That should change soon and then Elon’s constant price raises will be a lot more obvious.

    A lot of business over the decades have gotten a big head about their market share and value and it almost always goes bad at some point because they push until it’s too late and someone else comes along and they have priced themselves out of a market.

  169. 169.

    cain

    @gwangung: ​
     
    Depending on where you are .. the fed feed will give you a fairly good diverse feed. It’s an honest feed as well since there are no algorithms trying to get you to follow others.

  171. 171.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: I’m keeping my eye on Michael Paulauski and Mangy Jay (who is now Magdi Jabobs again). They are discerning people who will split from Twitter when the time is right, I think.

    One of my favorite Twitter accounts was Xeni Jardin’s. She has a conflicted relationship with the tech world she used to report on for BoingBoing and other sites, and left Twitter a few days before Musk closed thd deal. Jardin may be taking a break, but I expect she’ll turn up on some platform if she hasn’t already.

  172. 172.

    cain

    I think what’s great about the move to mastodon is that it is harder to run an influence operation except to target the larger mastodon servers but building a bot farm and trying to game the algorithms is not going to work on mastodon.

  175. 175.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): It’s the whining that makes me think he’s not. It’s the pattern where, when the market runs away from liberal stuff, they chortle “go woke go broke”, but when the market runs away from right-wing assholes (and Musk is one, at this point) it’s “the woke mob is suppressing us!!”

  177. 177.

    Ruckus

    @RSA:

    Musk only sees humanity when he looks in a mirror. Everyone else is a liability against him being the worlds greatest human. So if they have no other value than making him look better, they are useless to him. He very likely has zero actual talent at basically anything other than having money. But as he and his money are the most important things in the world he doesn’t need any other talent and people with other talents are basically useless to him and their lives mean jack and shit. So he likely spent less than ten minutes (more likely less than five) thinking about firing 3700 people because none of them are him or anywhere near as charming, pretty, useful, or human – to him. Lucky them.

    Point is that if ego had a body, it would look exactly like Elon.

  180. 180.

    Aziz, light!

    I don’t think Musk cares about losing advertisers. He is turning Twitter into a protection racket by announcing he will send all unpaid tweets to the bottom.

    “Nice ability you have to share your views with others. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”

  184. 184.

    Baud

    Just saw that stupid anti-Ukraine ad during the World Series.  Interesting they decided to target Spanish speakers.

  185. 185.

    Ruckus

    @karen marie:

    I copy and paste into Google. Works far better than most anything I’ve tried. In the last few years it’s only missed a very few times and that’s mostly my fault as when I can’t spell a word, I REALLY can’t spell a word. Lesdixya often rears it’s ugly head at the strangest times.

  187. 187.

    Hamlet of Melnibone

    @Citizen Alan:

    You might be surprised at what your old comics are worth these days.  If they were worth a lot back then, they are probably worth a lot now.  The movies have pulled a lot of speculators into comics, and the money people pay for them these days seems crazy to me.

    There are a huge number of books that were dollar books back then that are $100+ books these days.  Most key books ( especially Marvels ) are worth more than they were then.  Things have cooled down in the last year or so, but prices are still pretty impressive to me.

  189. 189.

    Another Scott

    @Baud: I’m on the wait list for mstdn.social

    We’ll see if I make the cut. ;-) And if I find it worth spending time there…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  190. 190.

    Tony G

    @karen marie: “Only $27 Billion”!  Yeah, the man has much too much money.  Confiscate everything except $1 Million.  Let him live as a millionaire.

  192. 192.

    geg6

    @Citizen Alan:

    I think that exact same thing every time FL crosses my mind.  But I’d never say it during an event with prospective students and their families.  If this is what actually happened, I can understand why they canned her.  And consistency is a virtue in my mind, most of the time.  If I’m going to be outraged by the shit Tucker Carlson says, I should be very unhappy with anyone on my side who says stupid, alienating shit.

    However, if this is not exactly what happened, then Ifill and rikyrah are spot on.

  193. 193.

    geg6

    @Martin:

    I could not agree with this analysis more.  We have more than our fair share of engineering majors at PSU, even at my small campus.  We saw this exactly the same way and our ENG professors worked hard to have the women in leadership positions for this very reason.

  199. 199.

    Ken

    @cain: We could create a balloon juice instance and have everyone here join like a exclusive country club

    What would that give us that we don’t have here?  I guess we could all be the equivalent of front-pagers, but I can’t deal with that kind of pressure.

  200. 200.

    Noskilz

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I doubt it – aside from the expense, this is having a devastating impact on his public image. I don’t think being the guy who conned himself into buying Twitter for twice as much as it could possibly be worth, only to have it collapse while enduring relentless public humiliation along the way was what he had in mind.

    Even if he doesn’t really care that much about Twitter’s survival, his antics have already hit Tesla hard, and he supposedly cares about that company. Having Twitter flame-out and die because of flamboyant incompetence seems like one of those defining moments that investors, lenders, and the general public will remember for years to come.

    If there was some grand plan, it’s a little weird that he went for the one that makes him look like the sort of stumbling clown lenders and advertisers would want to avoid at all costs.

  201. 201.

    SW

    A few months ago I started feeling like I was dumping too much time and effort into Twitter.  It is seductive because with enough feedback you can convince yourself that you are accomplishing something.  And let me stress this, you are not.  So, when the rumors that The Chief Muskrat was determined to buy the joint I said adios.  And have felt much better for freeing up that time.

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