The russians and arabs don't care about shareholder value. They want a platform to end american democracy. Their soverign wealth funds won't be affected.
TL:DR; Mohammed bin Salman paid $300 million for one (1) house in France.
The russians and the arabs (who financed it) have different goals. They wanted a platform to help end America democracy and Elon fired all the gatekeepers. The shareholders aren't invited to their party.
But corporate America did notice what he got away with and continues to get away with.
I think the fact that Twitter is still running is nothing but a testament to the brilliant work done by the engineers who built and documented these systems.
I would guess that, going forward, companies should expect less of this kind of quality - especially when combined with the overall push towards LLMs.
It’s still operating but so many of those people were things like support for advertisers and safety that ad revenue is down so much that he’s trying lawsuits to force former advertisers back and by all accounts usage is down, too. Most boards and C suites don’t want that.
Advertisers left because they didn’t want their ads showing up next to extremist content. There have always been political criticisms about ads but they rarely get traction, but no ad exec wants to see their ad next to some guy talking about the need to provide a safe place for white children. Getting rid of the people who used to keep that from happening was a very shortsighted cost savings.
Then Musk decided to sue companies who stopped advertising. That might indulge his sense of entitlement but it also sent a message that the safest move is not to do business with X because you can no longer predict what they’ll do if he thinks you should be giving him more money.
The site might be up, but my twitter app, even though updated, has been busted for months. Though that could be that I’m on the iOS beta.
I can’t even engage when I click on Twitter links cuz the whole link to app hijacking mechanism won’t even let me go to the website. Sure I can delete the app or copy/paste the url, but the fact that I have to do insane workarounds means, there’s whole sections of users that can’t use twitter even if they wanted to.
Abs I don’t care enough to actually fix this particular problem so, it stays broken.
>Yes, I could blame AI for 99 percent of the problems in the tech industry right now.
Tech is one of the less relevant industries being truly affected by AI in a negative light.
>And twitter is still operating.
A chicken with its head cut off can run around for a surprising amount of time before it falls limp.
Maybe you should check the working conditions of twitter rather than its heartbeat. If you remove 80% of staff and make the rest work 3 times harder you can do hide a lot of disfuntion. Until you can't.
Particularly if that chicken has billions of dollars backing it. That'll buy a lot of zombie-like robotic jerking around that occasionally moves in a direction.
Those people were quickly shouted down by activists and warned by HR for being disruptive. Then, no one dared openly argued against the move to main. They actually went back to, you know, work.
He’s the one tweeting hundred of tweets a day and complaining about being too busy for his lawsuits or doing his job as CEO of several companies. Oh and finding ways to force people to see his posts lol.
His platform, his rules. He's specifically not what I outlined: "Lots of engineers that spent more time opining in ERGs, virtue signaling on Slack, renaming things from "master" to "main" then patting themselves on the back for a year, etc. have been shown the door. Free money dried up, and so too have the bullshit jobs free money spawned."
I would say that bad ideas are having a heyday across all economic sectors, not only tech. You could call it the epoch of bad ideas having a heyday, if you want.
One has to be careful around opportunistic gold-rushes; if one is not actively purveying gold, one may be getting rushed.
Business as a whole is becoming much more unfriendly to labor. They're realizing that perceived external threats like temporary recessions, AI labor, a threatened US dollar, etc, can give them continuous leverage in any labor discussions and they're pressing the advantage for all that they can.
If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
I’m okay with the value of the dollar drastically decreasing. In fact, I think it will naturally do so due to the high debt and labor becoming more expensive in other countries.
I think it would be good for U.S. workers as it will help make them more competitive in a global labor market.
ANY call to set a debt ceiling needs to be directly tied to converting all for-profit corporations into public-benefit corporations.
That doesn't restrict corporations from generating profit. It just balances how they use said profits.
"Fixing" the national debt problem by putting a ceiling on it without addressing one of the main contributors to the current state of government spending and quality of life in America is a recipe for disaster.
It's okay to rip the band-aid off, but only if you're ready to deal with what may be a mortal wound.
Look at all of the major government spending and determine who benefits most and where funds are sent. If the recipient of funds is a corporation, also review how their profits are spent and which humans eventually profit from that.
Yup, that's part of the supposed "Gen Z is lazy" mentality they try to spread. While making them jump more hoops than ever for "entry level" jobs that has less buying power that may not even pay rent. And no pension/social secutity to even try to reel the few in that do that.
People may not all be financial experts, but they can do basic math and realize none of this makes sense.
>If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
2 years ago we were starting to properly talk about 32 hour workweeks. Sad how quickly things can go backwards. Really hope America isn't stupid and tries to go the Greece route with this inevitable crisis.
Then you tell someone to start their own business so they can treat their workers the way they deserve to be treated, then you get a bunch of excuses about why that is impossible! I guess there is just a conspiracy from every business to prevent honest people from being in charge
How can I do it without capital, straight out of college, with only around 2 years of real-world experience and no network? Honest question.
The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.
From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.
Find a good local problem that you have connections with people who'd buy it.
Doesn't need to be a software, many small businesses start as sole proprietor working for himself and slowly growing the company by hiring help.
No cheap programmer would copy your "fixes-fences-in-Boston.com" idea. A lot of local services aren't sold properly on the internet, so if you combine the two you can get something out of your time and labour.
Also local bureaucrats love to "regulate" and automating local compliance is also a good niche. Now with all LLMs around the scope of what is possible has grown, thus the niches where it could be applied have grown too.
Don't drink the VC/YC combinator cool-aid, that you "go big or go home". It's better to own 100% of your comany, than 3% of a VC based startup most of the time. You see outliers like Facebook, Airbnb & etc... but as 37Signals has proved for the majority of startup founders the risk/reward ratio is skewed not in their favor.
There are many local problems that require local knowledge and serving local customers.
I have a friend with a business for California vehicle compliance reports. Some stupid paperwork that needs to be updated yearly when the rules change. It's super local and he has 10 employees supporting clients remote and on site. It grew very slowly but it's in 11th year now and revenue is not bad at all. Nothing to compete globally, knowledge is local, clients need local services.
What all indie hackers are doing is getting support and resources from an equivalent of venture capital investment. Which is Cathedral approved education that effectively reduces to attaching an epistemology onto yourself that limits you and prevents you from functioning outside the cramped divisions of civilization-approved entrepreneurship.
The education offered by civilization includes logic that's crafted by a pedagogy that's biased toward vulgarity and social skills that don't perform well when it comes to building anything that would help a man get away from a forced commitment to anything more than maximizing viewer impressions on provocative Internet-uploaded content. The average tech entrepreneur isn't any better than a McDonald's hamburger grill operator or a female OnlyFans model or a delivery app driver, once you remove your civilly trained bias toward low resolution videos on socioeconomic dynamics.
To use a great illustration, even a billionaire techno-commercialist like Elon Musk can never hope to achieve independent wealth acquisition. Because his education, personal origin, and development are not really deviant and an instance of someone that can perform beyond the abstract black box that is knowledge given by civilization's life experiences which the life offers to every man. He will always come up short, whenever it's a question of exiting from the liberal-democratic regime and its permanent ironic anti-libertarianism stance. The question is: How to build a business that's not required to conform with all expectations, social and physical/ontological? Leading up to aerospace technology and acquiring science for Earth-to-Mars orbit transfers ain't it. Even having a business starting capital of one hundred dollars in the style of the $100 Startup comes with a history whose financial system component is tied to having a certain social obligation. A certain physical requirement commonly called life.
I work for a company which treats workers very well and the company is doing very well themselves. Of course it's possible; don't let anyone tell you it isn't.
1. As things get more technologically advanced/complex, the number of people who can tell you that a bad idea is bad keeps diminishing. Crypto and blockchain are classic examples. Financial experts told you crypto is going nowhere. Database experts told you blockchain is a nothingburger. But they were drowned out by the sea of laypeople (or experts in other things) telling you how crypto and blockchain would become the bedrock of tomorrow's society.
2. It is now common knowledge that one can become adequately rich from working on or investing in bad ideas, to the point where an idea isn't even considered bad if you can grift investor money from it. In other terms, it's no longer taboo to scam people richer or stupider than you; it's just "hustling".
The web platform itself isn't too hard in the grand scheme of things. But even then, I'm not sure if I'd trust true automation of thousands, maybe even a million different web clusters all working seamlessly with the management of a few developers.
A lot of what Musk cut out was support. the ones answering tickets or talking with adverts/big users to keep them happy. You can't solve that with a chatbot. The corrosion there is exactly why Twitter stock tanked.
90% of web dev is CRUD and landing pages, so yeah. But this kind of development starts with non-technical product people and designers crafting "unique" requirements and only including engineers at the implementation phase, so "everything is customized". Even within a single product you won't see standardization and automation, just a massive amount of redundancy due to a very fragmented and non-engineering-centric development cycles. The limitations of things like Wix or Wordpress works in their favor.
But the sibling reply makes an important point: most of the tech from Twitter is there because of scale. That's perhaps part of the 10%.
Because web developers like to create monstrous "frameworks" and other tooling that provide no value other than in generating more work for web developers.
So... free VC money is drying up (probably for some larger economic reasons?), and it's a lot harder to get paid to do things that don't make money? And this is a "shitshow" and means people are going to "revolt" (and do what instead?).
And somehow the latest improvement to low-code/no-code tooling (LLMs / AI) are making it all worse, maybe because they'll really for real this time finally let business-side people not need programmers.
Check how US steel and auto industry prospered in a connected world with unionized workforce competing with Mexico labour.
You can't legislate your way to profitability... Global competition will eat the profit margin and companies won't have enough money to honour their contracts and will go bust (as history shows).
No written law can compete with the invisible hand of the market.
While as much I empathize with tech workers (being one of them) at this point I feel automation and efficiencies they have developed in last 3-4 decades that displaced middle class jobs and skills are now good enough to displace large chunk of tech workers themselves.
Elite tech workers at top cloud/ software based companies can vehemently disagree but for mid level IT folks at typical enterprise shops situation is far more gloomier than it was even 10 years back.
Now if these employees are ready to revolt I suspect it will most fine by employers.
It's to weed out the types of ego-driven employees who like to threaten lawsuits and publicly complain about the companies they work for.
They'll lose some productive individuals.. but companies need their full teams to build success together, not just a series of individuals working for their own personal success at the expense of the team.
If any individual could complete the product on their own, then the company itself would be pointless.
Individual success is not mutually exclusive to team success, but the people who do not work well on teams are unlikely to return to office (or tolerate similar actions). Companies know this, and they've learned they can't find toxic employees by looking at individual success alone.
There's other ways to find this dysfunction, but looking at team metrics instead of individual means you have to cut an entire team to try and force out maybe a few employees who actively hate the company.
RTO is a unique opportunity to try a different, and perhaps more targeted approach. There will still be an some great team members lost for purely physical reasons, but perhaps fewer than firing entire teams.
If you are fired you get unemployment (which the company has to pay). If you walk out you get no unemployment benefits. A better strategy to use if WFH is enforced with the goal of getting workers to quit is to just keep working from home and let them fire you, at least in terms of your income. You'll have to convince your next employer that you weren't fired for performance reasons. In any case companies that are trying to force workers to quit may be doing it to save money on unemployment benefits. If you already have another job lined up then quitting is the right thing to do, but otherwise think about the consequences to your income.
Blaming this on the tech workers, or the automation technologies themselves, misses the true source of the problem: the business owners who take the profit all for themselves, rather than allowing it to be enjoyed by all.
The promise of automation is that people should be able to work less and still be paid enough to live comfortably.
When the incentives aligned. Pretty sure during the 90+% tax rate era offered insane incentives to reinvest into the business and employees.
I don't think we need to get rid of capitalism. The controls around capitalism like taxes, social safety nets, could use a little fine tuning.
Capitalism at its core is still pretty efficient compared to everything else. The hyper efficiency needs to not throw the baby (regular folks) out with the bath water(cutting expenses), that’s all.
While there have certainly always been greedy people, and greedy owners, there has been a very visible shift within my lifetime (~40 years).
Previously, the general rule was that a business was there to produce a good or provide a service, and the profit they made (if any) was the reward for that. There were some businesses that acted much more greedy, but overall it was clear that this was how business worked.
Now, the rule is much more that a business is there to make as much profit as possible, and the good they produce or service they provide is purely a means to that end—and, in many cases, largely an undesirable one. Again, there are still some businesses that operate based on the older philosophy, but overall this is the prevailing atmosphere.
This is what I would describe as the dividing line between "capitalism" and "late-stage capitalism".
As for an end to capitalism:
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
And even more so profit from the operating company is not a goal. It is profit from market valuation of the company. Which when you really think about obviously only can lead to some sort of failure or catastrophe.
Ofc, HN with VC funded companies love this model. Generate "wealth" from essentially imagination. Throw more money in and number goes up, end goal find someone to dump whole thing on. Be it public or some established company that found extractive niche.
I find lot less wrong in traditional capitalism. Start making something, sell it for profit, build a factory to sell more. Then use proceeds and possibly loans to build bigger factory. Rinse and repeat. At least you are generating possibly something useful for eveyone and getting money as part of process is not unreasonable.
Don't you have to have leverage to revolt? How do you revolt after you've been laid off? I don't understand this column. They're laying off because they've vastly overhired, and if they laid off too much (while everyone else was also laying off), they'll be able to pick people back up at a huge discount.
If programmers wanted to force companies to maintain wildly irrational staffing levels, they should have unionized a decade and a half ago when they had the leverage. There are too many programmers, now. Current innovation is high-level and academic, and maybe 2% of the people posting on HN are educated enough to ride the bleeding edge of that.
This is just comments by engineers having a pity party, clicked on an article. Lesson for a retired 40 something VC, minus high functioning aspergers, you will be employees. Be happy with your 250k+ per year and realise you only see the business world from a small wedge that is your department and rarely understand scope unless it's drilled into you.
This whole thread is pathetic. Gen-Zs threatening to "revolt" because they get fired soon after being hired for being lazy and not even having the skills to use Excel? Sure, children. You go and revolt. Fling your Legos. Stomp your feet. Flail your hands. Take some selfies at the unemployment office and post them on TikTok, the social network for tiktards. Then go back to your room at your parents house. They are the ones to blame for raising losers.
No-one is going to revolt. Everyone's laden with debt of various kinds, children, spouse, and familial and social obligations--a burden we'll bear for the rest of our lives. One can't simply wash them off and start again. And our masters know that.
98 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadTL:DR; Mohammed bin Salman paid $300 million for one (1) house in France.
That is not what shareholders want, hence why no one is copying it
But corporate America did notice what he got away with and continues to get away with.
I would guess that, going forward, companies should expect less of this kind of quality - especially when combined with the overall push towards LLMs.
Then Musk decided to sue companies who stopped advertising. That might indulge his sense of entitlement but it also sent a message that the safest move is not to do business with X because you can no longer predict what they’ll do if he thinks you should be giving him more money.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/musk-sues-advertisers-ov...
I can’t even engage when I click on Twitter links cuz the whole link to app hijacking mechanism won’t even let me go to the website. Sure I can delete the app or copy/paste the url, but the fact that I have to do insane workarounds means, there’s whole sections of users that can’t use twitter even if they wanted to.
Abs I don’t care enough to actually fix this particular problem so, it stays broken.
Tech is one of the less relevant industries being truly affected by AI in a negative light.
>And twitter is still operating.
A chicken with its head cut off can run around for a surprising amount of time before it falls limp.
Maybe you should check the working conditions of twitter rather than its heartbeat. If you remove 80% of staff and make the rest work 3 times harder you can do hide a lot of disfuntion. Until you can't.
Those people were working on new features for the most part. The investors wanted Twitter to grow, so they could get a return on their investment.
Twitter has been shrinking.
One has to be careful around opportunistic gold-rushes; if one is not actively purveying gold, one may be getting rushed.
If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
I think it would be good for U.S. workers as it will help make them more competitive in a global labor market.
That doesn't restrict corporations from generating profit. It just balances how they use said profits.
"Fixing" the national debt problem by putting a ceiling on it without addressing one of the main contributors to the current state of government spending and quality of life in America is a recipe for disaster.
It's okay to rip the band-aid off, but only if you're ready to deal with what may be a mortal wound.
What’s the main contributor to the current government spending ?
People may not all be financial experts, but they can do basic math and realize none of this makes sense.
>If the US sets a debt ceiling and inevitably hits it (based on past performance), the ensuing devaluation of the dollar may lead to an even stronger form of corporatism that makes such power plays about wages, hours worked, and work conditions look relatively tame.
2 years ago we were starting to properly talk about 32 hour workweeks. Sad how quickly things can go backwards. Really hope America isn't stupid and tries to go the Greece route with this inevitable crisis.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-closing-gender-...
The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.
From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.
-Dropped out, no connections, still built stuff.
No cheap programmer would copy your "fixes-fences-in-Boston.com" idea. A lot of local services aren't sold properly on the internet, so if you combine the two you can get something out of your time and labour.
Also local bureaucrats love to "regulate" and automating local compliance is also a good niche. Now with all LLMs around the scope of what is possible has grown, thus the niches where it could be applied have grown too.
Don't drink the VC/YC combinator cool-aid, that you "go big or go home". It's better to own 100% of your comany, than 3% of a VC based startup most of the time. You see outliers like Facebook, Airbnb & etc... but as 37Signals has proved for the majority of startup founders the risk/reward ratio is skewed not in their favor.
The education offered by civilization includes logic that's crafted by a pedagogy that's biased toward vulgarity and social skills that don't perform well when it comes to building anything that would help a man get away from a forced commitment to anything more than maximizing viewer impressions on provocative Internet-uploaded content. The average tech entrepreneur isn't any better than a McDonald's hamburger grill operator or a female OnlyFans model or a delivery app driver, once you remove your civilly trained bias toward low resolution videos on socioeconomic dynamics.
To use a great illustration, even a billionaire techno-commercialist like Elon Musk can never hope to achieve independent wealth acquisition. Because his education, personal origin, and development are not really deviant and an instance of someone that can perform beyond the abstract black box that is knowledge given by civilization's life experiences which the life offers to every man. He will always come up short, whenever it's a question of exiting from the liberal-democratic regime and its permanent ironic anti-libertarianism stance. The question is: How to build a business that's not required to conform with all expectations, social and physical/ontological? Leading up to aerospace technology and acquiring science for Earth-to-Mars orbit transfers ain't it. Even having a business starting capital of one hundred dollars in the style of the $100 Startup comes with a history whose financial system component is tied to having a certain social obligation. A certain physical requirement commonly called life.
What's changed in the last few years is a new focus on bringing white collar labor to heel.
At least there probably won't be another eMeringue this time?
2. It is now common knowledge that one can become adequately rich from working on or investing in bad ideas, to the point where an idea isn't even considered bad if you can grift investor money from it. In other terms, it's no longer taboo to scam people richer or stupider than you; it's just "hustling".
A lot of what Musk cut out was support. the ones answering tickets or talking with adverts/big users to keep them happy. You can't solve that with a chatbot. The corrosion there is exactly why Twitter stock tanked.
I apologize for the loose language, but yes. It's pretty clear that people smarter than me value Twitter much less for a variety of reasons.
But the sibling reply makes an important point: most of the tech from Twitter is there because of scale. That's perhaps part of the 10%.
A big portion of the web is WordPress sites, created by some site builder, etc.
And somehow the latest improvement to low-code/no-code tooling (LLMs / AI) are making it all worse, maybe because they'll really for real this time finally let business-side people not need programmers.
You can't legislate your way to profitability... Global competition will eat the profit margin and companies won't have enough money to honour their contracts and will go bust (as history shows).
No written law can compete with the invisible hand of the market.
Elite tech workers at top cloud/ software based companies can vehemently disagree but for mid level IT folks at typical enterprise shops situation is far more gloomier than it was even 10 years back.
Now if these employees are ready to revolt I suspect it will most fine by employers.
If any individual could complete the product on their own, then the company itself would be pointless. Individual success is not mutually exclusive to team success, but the people who do not work well on teams are unlikely to return to office (or tolerate similar actions). Companies know this, and they've learned they can't find toxic employees by looking at individual success alone.
There's other ways to find this dysfunction, but looking at team metrics instead of individual means you have to cut an entire team to try and force out maybe a few employees who actively hate the company. RTO is a unique opportunity to try a different, and perhaps more targeted approach. There will still be an some great team members lost for purely physical reasons, but perhaps fewer than firing entire teams.
The promise of automation is that people should be able to work less and still be paid enough to live comfortably.
When has this ever not been true? And how would it be fixed?
"it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism"
I don't think we need to get rid of capitalism. The controls around capitalism like taxes, social safety nets, could use a little fine tuning.
Capitalism at its core is still pretty efficient compared to everything else. The hyper efficiency needs to not throw the baby (regular folks) out with the bath water(cutting expenses), that’s all.
Previously, the general rule was that a business was there to produce a good or provide a service, and the profit they made (if any) was the reward for that. There were some businesses that acted much more greedy, but overall it was clear that this was how business worked.
Now, the rule is much more that a business is there to make as much profit as possible, and the good they produce or service they provide is purely a means to that end—and, in many cases, largely an undesirable one. Again, there are still some businesses that operate based on the older philosophy, but overall this is the prevailing atmosphere.
This is what I would describe as the dividing line between "capitalism" and "late-stage capitalism".
As for an end to capitalism:
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
― Ursula K. Le Guin
Ofc, HN with VC funded companies love this model. Generate "wealth" from essentially imagination. Throw more money in and number goes up, end goal find someone to dump whole thing on. Be it public or some established company that found extractive niche.
I find lot less wrong in traditional capitalism. Start making something, sell it for profit, build a factory to sell more. Then use proceeds and possibly loans to build bigger factory. Rinse and repeat. At least you are generating possibly something useful for eveyone and getting money as part of process is not unreasonable.
( /sarcasm, if it's needed.)
If programmers wanted to force companies to maintain wildly irrational staffing levels, they should have unionized a decade and a half ago when they had the leverage. There are too many programmers, now. Current innovation is high-level and academic, and maybe 2% of the people posting on HN are educated enough to ride the bleeding edge of that.
Boeing tried this strategy, and its definitely having noticable results.