It's a shame Bari got cancelled. We just never hear from her or even about her anymore!
Meanwhile, I heard that Twitter is now running with just under 20% of its original workforce, and just under 30% of its original ad revenue. I'm just waiting for some back-end function to break down and the whole Twitter machine comes grinding to a halt.
Twitter was hugely over-staffed under prior mismanagement.
And the lack of a need of any actual management of what's posted, tanking ad sales, and $13b of debt and 20% doesn't look at all unreasonable.
Meanwhile there's a little buzz of the lenders rolling over the aforesaid loans from Twitter to High Lord our god Musk personally. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the TSLA shareholder derivative action.
I view Twitter in much the same way I view corndogs: Many people love corndogs, but I have never tasted one and will rest content in my grave if I never taste one
A good corn dog (and they are few and far between) is actually excellent. Unless you dislike hot dogs, breading, or both that is. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Well, that's no fun, just saying that people have different tastes and leaving it at that, I was looking forward to an extended and increasingly heated back-and-forth about corn dogs, eventually ending with someone being called JUST LIKE HITLER. Or else what's the internet for?
There is a proliferation of right-wing accounts on Twitter that chortle about how Melon fired so many people, and yet things are running fine HA HA THEY WERE JUST GOLDBRICKING LIBTARDS - kind of the same way the GOP throws a tantrum and shuts down the government and they're all SEE THINGS RUN JUST FINE WITHOUT WASHINGTON HA HA (up until they don't, but conservatives have issues understanding causality).
My first genuine horse laugh in some days at Bofa Deez Nutz.
I am crude and juvenile.
As far as I can make out, the alleged Twitter Files Scandal, as fronted ably by such as Weiss, is “content moderation on twitter has a liberal bias, or we could have seen Hunter Biden’s dick.”
Are there files online for actual searching, or just a name for those curated by the Muskovite Regime? And claimed to prove their assertion?
I'm very amused by the RW media trying to hype that the presence of dick pics on HB's laptop is evidence of some sort of sin -- this isn't 1992 anymore. The vast majority of US men of dating age have at least one dick pic, and about 80% of them want you to see them very badly, whether you want to or not. It's now an SOP of digital life by now.
The fact that HB's laptop waited to show me his dick pic already puts it in a higher class of manners than 80% of US men.
And if we want to get technical, showing someone's nudes without their consent is "revenge porn" -- which is illegal in many states. If Twitter demurred to allow these pics on Twitter, it was not because they were Hunter's, but because of this.
Fun revenge-porn fact: When Matt Gaetz was in the Florida State Legislature, he was one of only two legislators to vote against a revenge porn bill, his argument was that it violated his property rights as the owner of any pornographic images sent to him:
Of course he did. Matt Gaetz looks like what you'd get if you asked an AI to generate a picture of a sex offender...
That whole Ken Starbuck in FLA looks like it might get spicy. I'm hearing rumors that the whole state is a hub for sex trafficking, & you know very important people must be involved...
It's too bad Wari "Bofa Deez Nutz" Beiss still has some trace memory of doing journalism, so she wants to talk with genuine employees. If she were more like Salena Zito she'd just find Elon's cousin and build out her narrative from there.
I'm still trying to nail down what this "Cancelling" actually involves, but if drowning someone in vat of acid or dropping them into the center of a live volcano doesn't do it, we're really in trouble.
I fervently hope *somebody* is holding a management position open for Sinema in 2025. If she runs as an Independent she splits the votes by getting the Independent and center-Right votes of people who would find a GOP candidate like Kari Lake too revolting and would have otherwise voted Dem. Splitting the non-crazy, non-fascist vote between her and a Dem candidate would likely hand the election to the GOP Kari Lake lunatic.
So she’s either trying to force the Dems not to challenge her in 2024, or maybe she won’t run for re-election at all but is trying to minimize her humiliation in making that choice seem “mavericky” instead of acknowledging she’d go down to crushing defeat in a Dem primary contest.
Right now I'm imagining a late-nite informercial running on all the White Supremacist Youtube channels: "Are you tired and frustrated with doing those messy pogroms manually?" [cut to soldiers shoveling dirt over a corpse-filled ditch]
I admit I was intrigued by "President of the University of Austin" so I went to their website uaustin.org to see if I could find a list of classes offered, or an "enroll" button, or even a application form. Maybe Georgi could help with my search? Because I couldn't find nothin'. Seems like "Undergraduate Curriculum" should say more than just "Intellectual Foundations Core" with the blanks to be filled in later, but I'm no University President, so what do I know?
Making a tour through my Tiktoks so I can prune & establish my own "GM" feed to enhance the algorithm & bump up my engagement. So along the way, I find some gems,
Bari's an eeeendependent journalist? WTF does she do that's even tangentially associated with journalism? "Professional whiner", more like.
(Speaking of eendependent, I hear this morning that Kirsten Sinema is no longer a Democrat but an Independent, but she won't be caucusing with the GOP, either. Perhaps she will just sit in the cloakroom and fume.)
Maybe it will help with that large group of confused people who call themselves "Independent"? Look, there's THREE Independents in the Senate now, and they're all basically Democrats! (For years, I've been going on the assumption that "Independent" meant "Republican who's ashamed of being identified as Republican.")
I was in a call yesterday at an org I consult in where the acting exec was desperately trying to pretend she was running a safe place even though the previous exec was fired without cause and everyone knows the big guy is a randomizing moron. Nobody took the bait.
But this appears to be the case across all the clients I work with. Every senior randomizing moron sees Elon as his (almost exclusively the pronoun is "his") moment of vindication. "We don't need people who know what they're doing! Confidence is more than enough!" they tell their immediate subordinates, as real leaders always try to communicate. The ones who know better update their resume and the rest eagerly pile into the tram on the left side of the dunning-kruger curve for the ride up to the top of Mt. Stupid.
If you don't know or understand or even care what people actually do in their jobs, it's easy to assume they don't do anything. Thus John Bolton's claim you could lop off the top 5 floors of the UN Building in New York and nobody would notice. Colleges and Universities get this a lot, because there's been a big increase in administrative spending over they years and it's easy to assume it's all Assistant Deans wasting everyone's time with pointless meetings. When you look at where the growth is actually happening, it's almost all in direct student support services, including counseling and mental health. I don't suppose there's a reason why Universities today might be especially concerned about the mental health of their students, is there?
There are a lot of assistant deans wasting everyone's time with pointless meetings, too. There's this very definite growth of parasitic bureaucracy to "support" the people who do the actual e.g. mental-health support work. I've worked with clients from health care to advertising to government and they've all grown the same way.
There appears to be some iron law of organization that the parts you might consider "overhead" form the thickest epistemic bubbles. They're emotionally thin-skinned, too.
One sure sign of how thin-skinned they are is that suddenly there's someone actively checking to make sure everyone has the right priorities. The conversation I was in yesterday pretty much went exactly the same way Roy's did.
I think the question is how can we know whether people are actually doing something useful or not? And if we really don't have any idea what they do, aren't we more likely to assume they're not doing anything useful? So I'm not talking about those experiences we've all had where we really do get to know what someone does and decide it's valueless, I'm talking about someone looking at a large organization where it's just impossible to know what everyone's doing, and then assuming you could lose half of them and nobody would notice. It's a case where the less information you have, the more confident you can be you're right.
For decades I've wanted to write something funny-but-true like The Peter Principle. That idea--that promotions for doing something well inevitably send people up the ladder to land in jobs they can't do--might explain a lot of those levels of valueless employees.
I know. It's like a law of bureaucracy physics. I keep thinking, "There must be another such phenomenon that's so obvious that we take it for granted, and can't see it." Aside from the alienation of one's labor, I mean.
Also, as Dr. Peter further elaborated, promotions were not necessarily for doing something well since the criteria for promotion may have been determined by people who had already reached their own level of incompetence. And in some cases, instead of being promoted, an employee would be subject to "The Lateral Arabesque," going sideways to arrive in jobs they couldn't do. It was a terrific book.
I agree. Most of these large organizations lack visibility between the pieces and make dumb hiring, firing, strategic and tactical decisions as a result. In some cases - the large advertisers - there is actually more or less an intentional separation between the pieces, for privacy and anti-competition rules and reasons. In other cases the left-hand-doesn't-like-the-right-hand-ism is much more obvious. They both create strange distortions in organization visibility.
But there is also, no doubt, a growth in the mindless managerial class. I'm not willing to describe every job that doesn't fit the paradign of "true labor worthy of the man" you find in Jacobin as a firing offense. But the inwardly-directed management bubble has gotten worse over the course of my career, not better. Maybe that's just my anecdotal evidence.
Maybe its nostalgia. When I was a kid, we vilified Henry Ford, who at least knew how to run a company. Musk is just a Nazi kid who failed upward.
A most satisfying fantasia, but having spent too many years in a "largish" software company i know that cooperating with knucklehead projects and dysfunctional managers is a core competency for employees. True, Twitter is a more existential case than most, but the plan is the same: keep your head down, never volunteer, attend every meeting but say nothing, update your resume and start going out to lunch with friends at other companies. Other than whatever hired guns Elon has brought in, I'd bet a paycheck this is what who's left are doing. I'd talk Bari's ear off about the projects I was working on, and she'd never talk to me again.
In any case, their whole shtick is pretending the 1st Amendment applies to businesses, that's all they've got. It's so mind-bogglingly stupid we should try wrapping a towel around our head.
It's just part of Elmo's Brilliant Plan to sort through tens of thousands of employees, keeping only those who can't get jobs anywhere else. But you, a mere human with sub-200 IQ, could never understand that.
It's a shame Bari got cancelled. We just never hear from her or even about her anymore!
Meanwhile, I heard that Twitter is now running with just under 20% of its original workforce, and just under 30% of its original ad revenue. I'm just waiting for some back-end function to break down and the whole Twitter machine comes grinding to a halt.
Same. I've now signed up to no less than 3 alternate sites -- Mastodon, Post Social, and pre-registered for Christopher Bouzy's Spoutable.
Twitter was hugely over-staffed under prior mismanagement.
And the lack of a need of any actual management of what's posted, tanking ad sales, and $13b of debt and 20% doesn't look at all unreasonable.
Meanwhile there's a little buzz of the lenders rolling over the aforesaid loans from Twitter to High Lord our god Musk personally. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the TSLA shareholder derivative action.
Whatever, Twitter will survive this.
I view Twitter in much the same way I view corndogs: Many people love corndogs, but I have never tasted one and will rest content in my grave if I never taste one
Me too, and I adhere to the dictum "We betta off".
I don't know what I'm missing, and I like it that way!
A good corn dog (and they are few and far between) is actually excellent. Unless you dislike hot dogs, breading, or both that is. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Well, that's no fun, just saying that people have different tastes and leaving it at that, I was looking forward to an extended and increasingly heated back-and-forth about corn dogs, eventually ending with someone being called JUST LIKE HITLER. Or else what's the internet for?
We reserve that level of vitriol for disputes about the proper type of mustard for one’s wurst. Whole grain mustard, not yellow, DEBATE ME COWARD!
ADDRESS MY POINTS
But are they sandwiches or not?
But corndogs with ketchup OR with mustard?
I'm on Team Mustard.
Any hot dog based food and ketchup is an abomination.
Verily.
Likes are not endorsements. Hot dogs take mustard and ketchup 'round here.
There is a proliferation of right-wing accounts on Twitter that chortle about how Melon fired so many people, and yet things are running fine HA HA THEY WERE JUST GOLDBRICKING LIBTARDS - kind of the same way the GOP throws a tantrum and shuts down the government and they're all SEE THINGS RUN JUST FINE WITHOUT WASHINGTON HA HA (up until they don't, but conservatives have issues understanding causality).
So now corporate over-staffing is a liberal thing? Is there ANYTHING we don't control?
According to the letters to the local paper, which are basically the transcribed yowling of Marjorie Trailer Greene, no.
Ever notice how when you say "Thank you" to someone, they now say "No problem" instead of "You're welcome"? So infuriating, GODDAM LIBRULS.
There's no prob' with "Bob"!
(Eddie Izzard voice) Give this man Slack.
My first genuine horse laugh in some days at Bofa Deez Nutz.
I am crude and juvenile.
As far as I can make out, the alleged Twitter Files Scandal, as fronted ably by such as Weiss, is “content moderation on twitter has a liberal bias, or we could have seen Hunter Biden’s dick.”
Are there files online for actual searching, or just a name for those curated by the Muskovite Regime? And claimed to prove their assertion?
Ah, so this is why there's no porn on Basic Cable, it's the liberal bias.
At least nobody's demanding we see King Toad's peener 🤮
Stormy's verbal description was quite enough, thank you very much.
I'm very amused by the RW media trying to hype that the presence of dick pics on HB's laptop is evidence of some sort of sin -- this isn't 1992 anymore. The vast majority of US men of dating age have at least one dick pic, and about 80% of them want you to see them very badly, whether you want to or not. It's now an SOP of digital life by now.
The fact that HB's laptop waited to show me his dick pic already puts it in a higher class of manners than 80% of US men.
And if we want to get technical, showing someone's nudes without their consent is "revenge porn" -- which is illegal in many states. If Twitter demurred to allow these pics on Twitter, it was not because they were Hunter's, but because of this.
Fun revenge-porn fact: When Matt Gaetz was in the Florida State Legislature, he was one of only two legislators to vote against a revenge porn bill, his argument was that it violated his property rights as the owner of any pornographic images sent to him:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/06/matt-gaetz-revenge-porn-bill/
And then the good people of Florida looked at this guy and said, "Yep, he sure deserves a promotion, let's send him to Washington!"
Of course he did. Matt Gaetz looks like what you'd get if you asked an AI to generate a picture of a sex offender...
That whole Ken Starbuck in FLA looks like it might get spicy. I'm hearing rumors that the whole state is a hub for sex trafficking, & you know very important people must be involved...
Thanks, I needed that!!
It's too bad Wari "Bofa Deez Nutz" Beiss still has some trace memory of doing journalism, so she wants to talk with genuine employees. If she were more like Salena Zito she'd just find Elon's cousin and build out her narrative from there.
"Maybe you should check your spelling."Made me laugh pretty hard!
Don't get me started on "Bofa Deez etc."
"Bari Weiss" rhymes with "Edelweiss" the most National Socialist of flowers.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence
Doesn't rhyme with "Weiss Supremacy" but it jibes.
A supervillain nevers gets cancelled, they just return in 12 issues to complain about it some more.
I'm still trying to nail down what this "Cancelling" actually involves, but if drowning someone in vat of acid or dropping them into the center of a live volcano doesn't do it, we're really in trouble.
Bari: Senator Sinema, how wonderful to hear from you! Welcome to independence! We’re holding a management position for you in 2025.
Sinema Parodies, Mo?
I fervently hope *somebody* is holding a management position open for Sinema in 2025. If she runs as an Independent she splits the votes by getting the Independent and center-Right votes of people who would find a GOP candidate like Kari Lake too revolting and would have otherwise voted Dem. Splitting the non-crazy, non-fascist vote between her and a Dem candidate would likely hand the election to the GOP Kari Lake lunatic.
So she’s either trying to force the Dems not to challenge her in 2024, or maybe she won’t run for re-election at all but is trying to minimize her humiliation in making that choice seem “mavericky” instead of acknowledging she’d go down to crushing defeat in a Dem primary contest.
Thanks, it's only a month since the midterms, and now I'm imagining Senator Kari Lake [shudder].
De nada, baby :)
Don't thank me, thank Senator-DINO-look-at-me-I'm-still-relevant-Sinema.
she’s either trying to force the Dems not to challenge her in 2024
she'd still go down to crushing defeat
Pogromatic.
Right now I'm imagining a late-nite informercial running on all the White Supremacist Youtube channels: "Are you tired and frustrated with doing those messy pogroms manually?" [cut to soldiers shoveling dirt over a corpse-filled ditch]
Get with the pogrom, people!
I admit I was intrigued by "President of the University of Austin" so I went to their website uaustin.org to see if I could find a list of classes offered, or an "enroll" button, or even a application form. Maybe Georgi could help with my search? Because I couldn't find nothin'. Seems like "Undergraduate Curriculum" should say more than just "Intellectual Foundations Core" with the blanks to be filled in later, but I'm no University President, so what do I know?
did you try ben shaprio in the search?
Making a tour through my Tiktoks so I can prune & establish my own "GM" feed to enhance the algorithm & bump up my engagement. So along the way, I find some gems,
Like this one:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRV1kGsx/
OK, I laughed.
Bari's an eeeendependent journalist? WTF does she do that's even tangentially associated with journalism? "Professional whiner", more like.
(Speaking of eendependent, I hear this morning that Kirsten Sinema is no longer a Democrat but an Independent, but she won't be caucusing with the GOP, either. Perhaps she will just sit in the cloakroom and fume.)
Maybe it will help with that large group of confused people who call themselves "Independent"? Look, there's THREE Independents in the Senate now, and they're all basically Democrats! (For years, I've been going on the assumption that "Independent" meant "Republican who's ashamed of being identified as Republican.")
That definition doesn't really fit Bernie.
The Autoerotic Asphyxiation Party wasn’t accepting new members
Nah. That's just the mothballs.
Ignored Bari is the best Bari
"By now you must have gotten the memo from Elon suggesting you respond to my invites."
Access journalism!
Elon: "I don't have to know how anything works if I can just buy enough journalists to plant positive news stories."
Elon and Bari need to design some uniforms.
I was in a call yesterday at an org I consult in where the acting exec was desperately trying to pretend she was running a safe place even though the previous exec was fired without cause and everyone knows the big guy is a randomizing moron. Nobody took the bait.
But this appears to be the case across all the clients I work with. Every senior randomizing moron sees Elon as his (almost exclusively the pronoun is "his") moment of vindication. "We don't need people who know what they're doing! Confidence is more than enough!" they tell their immediate subordinates, as real leaders always try to communicate. The ones who know better update their resume and the rest eagerly pile into the tram on the left side of the dunning-kruger curve for the ride up to the top of Mt. Stupid.
If you don't know or understand or even care what people actually do in their jobs, it's easy to assume they don't do anything. Thus John Bolton's claim you could lop off the top 5 floors of the UN Building in New York and nobody would notice. Colleges and Universities get this a lot, because there's been a big increase in administrative spending over they years and it's easy to assume it's all Assistant Deans wasting everyone's time with pointless meetings. When you look at where the growth is actually happening, it's almost all in direct student support services, including counseling and mental health. I don't suppose there's a reason why Universities today might be especially concerned about the mental health of their students, is there?
There are a lot of assistant deans wasting everyone's time with pointless meetings, too. There's this very definite growth of parasitic bureaucracy to "support" the people who do the actual e.g. mental-health support work. I've worked with clients from health care to advertising to government and they've all grown the same way.
There appears to be some iron law of organization that the parts you might consider "overhead" form the thickest epistemic bubbles. They're emotionally thin-skinned, too.
One sure sign of how thin-skinned they are is that suddenly there's someone actively checking to make sure everyone has the right priorities. The conversation I was in yesterday pretty much went exactly the same way Roy's did.
I think the question is how can we know whether people are actually doing something useful or not? And if we really don't have any idea what they do, aren't we more likely to assume they're not doing anything useful? So I'm not talking about those experiences we've all had where we really do get to know what someone does and decide it's valueless, I'm talking about someone looking at a large organization where it's just impossible to know what everyone's doing, and then assuming you could lose half of them and nobody would notice. It's a case where the less information you have, the more confident you can be you're right.
For decades I've wanted to write something funny-but-true like The Peter Principle. That idea--that promotions for doing something well inevitably send people up the ladder to land in jobs they can't do--might explain a lot of those levels of valueless employees.
Holy shit, I haven't thought of that book for years. It still works!
I know. It's like a law of bureaucracy physics. I keep thinking, "There must be another such phenomenon that's so obvious that we take it for granted, and can't see it." Aside from the alienation of one's labor, I mean.
You just described a lot of why many Federal agencies don't (seem to) work.
The sub title of The Peter Principle is "Why Things Always Go Wrong."
Also, as Dr. Peter further elaborated, promotions were not necessarily for doing something well since the criteria for promotion may have been determined by people who had already reached their own level of incompetence. And in some cases, instead of being promoted, an employee would be subject to "The Lateral Arabesque," going sideways to arrive in jobs they couldn't do. It was a terrific book.
I agree. Most of these large organizations lack visibility between the pieces and make dumb hiring, firing, strategic and tactical decisions as a result. In some cases - the large advertisers - there is actually more or less an intentional separation between the pieces, for privacy and anti-competition rules and reasons. In other cases the left-hand-doesn't-like-the-right-hand-ism is much more obvious. They both create strange distortions in organization visibility.
But there is also, no doubt, a growth in the mindless managerial class. I'm not willing to describe every job that doesn't fit the paradign of "true labor worthy of the man" you find in Jacobin as a firing offense. But the inwardly-directed management bubble has gotten worse over the course of my career, not better. Maybe that's just my anecdotal evidence.
Maybe its nostalgia. When I was a kid, we vilified Henry Ford, who at least knew how to run a company. Musk is just a Nazi kid who failed upward.
Well, they're only concerned about the mental health of those who don't commit suicide, so...
@Roy, can we find you on Mastodon somewhere?
@edroso@mastodon.social
A most satisfying fantasia, but having spent too many years in a "largish" software company i know that cooperating with knucklehead projects and dysfunctional managers is a core competency for employees. True, Twitter is a more existential case than most, but the plan is the same: keep your head down, never volunteer, attend every meeting but say nothing, update your resume and start going out to lunch with friends at other companies. Other than whatever hired guns Elon has brought in, I'd bet a paycheck this is what who's left are doing. I'd talk Bari's ear off about the projects I was working on, and she'd never talk to me again.
In any case, their whole shtick is pretending the 1st Amendment applies to businesses, that's all they've got. It's so mind-bogglingly stupid we should try wrapping a towel around our head.
"I'd bet a paycheck this is what who's left are doing." And you'd win!
It's just part of Elmo's Brilliant Plan to sort through tens of thousands of employees, keeping only those who can't get jobs anywhere else. But you, a mere human with sub-200 IQ, could never understand that.