Problem is, it’s not backfired - the example you cited “worked”, because it rapidly identified key personnel without weeks or months of subjective analysis and political posturing by workers and their supervisors.

I think in federal government the risks are much higher, and Musk is being an idiot by exposing the America public to those risks, but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positive, not negative.

It only works because you allow yourself to sorely disrespect human beings, their livelihood and their feeling of safety.

A strategy that seems to be hot in the US, but is an utter ethical abomination and shameful.

That is sadly life in private sector for a majority of all workers.

Yeah, I mean that's pretty much at the core of Musk's (and Trump's) philosophy.

I thought that a reasonably free, vital, innovative, and prosperous society was compatible with a fundamental respect for human dignity. That's why I moved to Europe. Now it seems I was overoptimistic, but that doesn't mean we should wholly embrace backsliding right into the 19th century version of "progress".

It is the same reason I moved to Europe.

I don't think I was overoptimistic. It was literally the best decision I ever made, in every aspect I can think of.

> I don't think I was overoptimistic. It was literally the best decision I ever made, in every aspect I can think of.

A lot of folks mention the lower salaries in Europe (generally, and especially for tech): has mattered much in your (personal) experience for quality of life and happiness?

What imho matters more is culture. There is less of a salary, but a culture of safety and stability.

However, this is not for everyone: While you can be more sure of keeping your job in rough times, you can also be sure that the lazy idiot 2 desks over will keep his job. And you can be sure that any change will be resisted because change is seen as inherently bad and threatening, and reasons will be found to shoot down your new-fangled fancy ideas. YMMV, to each his own, etc.

For me, the lower salary has not affected my daily life too much. I saved a lot of money in the US, but now making about 100k between myself and my partner in the Netherlands, we are still living a comfortable life. We own a car, bought a house in 2024, and we are saving about 1k per month into various sinking funds with a net savings closer to 500/pm. No kids yet, but hopefully with raises and generous family leave policies, I think we will be okay.

My quality of life is insanely better. I live in a walkable small city in the south. I walk to the grocery store a few times a week. I bike to the library or to the train station. My job turns off at 5pm and I don’t work on the weekends unless I want to. Even then, that weekend work time can be substituted for work during the week.

The biggest downside for us has been the cost of traveling back to the US to see family. It’s very expensive for us to fly home since we also need to rent a car usually. Even saving 1k per month, that’s a significant part of the yearly savings just going to buy plane tickets for one big trip per year. After we have kids, I suspect grandma and grandpa will be coming here to visit more often because we can’t afford to fly with a family of 4 or 5 more than once every other year. Not to mention the tax implications of spending too much time abroad.

If you can afford to try it out, take a 90 day visa and just chill and see if the lifestyle works for you (including remote work). Worst case scenario, you go back to the US after a year if you hate it.

No. But it depends on they type of life you choose to lead.

I just wanted enough to buy a house and raise a family, and I could earn enough for this. A comfortable middle class life in a nice neighborhood.

I also appreciate the safety nets and worker protections here in Europe. I recently went through a serious medical condition that in the US would have me bankrupt. Here I had no issues.

Had I moved to the US I would by now be either dead or broke.

I took the "overoptimisim" to mean that the parent thought Europe could defend and maintain this outlook well into the forseeable future, an assumption that is being tested by Europe's own rightward slide. The way things are right now in Europe, to say that it might have been overoptimistic to think that Europe will continue as it has makes sense to me. At the moment, it is unclear to most people who live there how much of their way of life (if any) is subsidized by the US.

This is exactly what I meant, thank you. I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted.

Before the election, Vivek or Elon or one of the galaxy-brains floated the idea of firing every other employee in the federal government based on the last digit of their social security number.

The cruelty is the point.

There is a difference between cruelty and arbitrariness. It isn't cruelty.

They're going up against a world-class bureaucracy; a human powered machine that is excellent at dragging out changes beyond the term of any politician. Something like "Yes, Minister" is a comedy show except a lot of it is fairly true - they aren't going to get anything done without doing something drastic like cutting a lot of functions and seeing what happens. Otherwise it'll keep growing.

It’s not arbitrary, though. He’s attacking CFPB because he wants to launch financial features on Twitter without oversight. He’s attacking USAID because they helped end apartheid in his native South Africa. It’s really all just a bunch of petty vendettas and looting.

> It’s really all just a bunch of petty vendettas and looting.

Yeah. The technical term for that is "arbitrary". It isn't ideologically motivated; it is based on some dude's opinions based on who-knows-what internal dialogue. Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild.

A financial institution created by the very person responsible for dismantling our most effective consumer protections against malicious financial institutions sounds like an extremely bad idea.

I'm very curious how anyone could think this is a good idea (for consumers, obviously it's a good idea for Musk)

You can't recognize DOGE as an extreme ideological endeavor simply because it aligns with your ideology.

No it’s not? “Arbitrary” would be if he were, like, picking names out of a hat, or the first one that he sees on Twitter in the morning. He’s attacking agencies for extremely personal and ideological reasons. Literally the opposite of arbitrary.

> Although this financial features on Twitter sounds like a pretty good idea and I'd like to see it in the wild.

Kind of a jaw-dropping reaction to the fact that he’s dismantling the very agency that would be in charge of regulating those features. Honestly, I really struggle to understand the mindset that’s not merely okay with but excited by this sort of egregious corruption.

> Honestly, I really struggle to understand the mindset that’s not merely okay with but excited by this sort of egregious corruption.

Seems like it should be easy to do. We're looking at this big corrupt blob thing of questionable competence that is the US political class, and then one polyp of the mass does something that probably makes the world a little better. Yay. Well done blob thing.

It'd be better if people committed to a high-integrity political class but it is a monumental task (probably multi-generational) and the people trying to progress it haven't made much progress. Suggestions welcome.

Is the "one polyp of mass that does something that probably makes the world a little better"… supposed to be DOGE? The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century?

Like, are we not commenting on an article about how we recklessly fired dozens to hundreds of people who were overseeing our nuclear weapons stockpile? And it turned out they're actually really important, but we're having trouble contacting them to hire them back? And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?

I don't really know what to say, man. It's pretty clear this isn't going to go anywhere productive. Have a nice night.

> The single most nakedly corrupt government body in probably the past century?

The last president was forced to issue multiple preemptive pardons for his own family after being dogged for years by serious corruption allegations. That probably counts as worse and it isn't even particularly outrageous by the standards of the US Congress, it seemed to be pretty routine stuff. I'd expect most members of the US congress to struggle if real scrutiny was bought to bear since their financial circumstances often don't appear to make sense.

Then beyond the personal corruption there is the lobbying network that constantly tries and succeeds in writing law for various unsavoury interest groups. Realistically if Musk is doing something corrupt - TBD in my opinion - his major mistake is being directly associated with the changes, he should have learned from the experts and done it discretely like everyone else does.

> And the group that's responsible for all this… is somehow not the questionably competent one?

You seem to have tapped into the mindset with this one. Say it again seriously and you've made it there.

As you mention "Yes, Minister", as a potential metaphor for truth...

That series was based on conversations between the writers and senior civil servants in UK Government. It was Margaret Thatcher's favourite show (she even wrote a scene to perform with the actors at some event or other), because in 1970s and 1980s Britain, it was incredibly on the money.

However, the more apt political comedy to reflect what modern politics looks like isn't "Yes, Minister" or "Yes, Prime Minister" (the sequel), but "The Thick of It", which shows well-meaning but put-upon civil servants dealing with the tyranny and abuse of special advisors and external consultants bullying and demeaning them at every turn. It, too, is based on conversations with real insiders in UK government.

I'll leave it to you to decide which is most apt for modern Washington, but there was a film of the latter mostly set in Washington, which tries to capture the tensions on that side of the Atlantic quite well, with the main joke being the UK's necessary subservience to a larger World power. It's worth a watch.

For my money, Musk looks a lot more like Malcolm Tucker than he does Jim Hacker.

I think being fair is the point. Instead of using any metric that might infringe on a protected class, let's use math?

(Curious what the last digit of Vivek's SS is.)

In another time it was called decimation, and was used as collective punishment.

Ah, thank you, I didn't know.

Seems like a stretch to compare executions and layoffs, no one else is immune to layoffs

The people deciding to execute layoffs are generally immune to those layoffs.

It was Vivek and his plan was to randomly (lottery) fire half of all federal employees the first year and then randomly fire half of those who remain the second year get to an overall 75% reduction.

Talk is cheap. These idiots.

at least it would be known when it starts and when it stops with this solution. the current 'audit' will take years....

Government employees shouldn't be immune to layoffs. If the government goes bankrupt, everyone is much worse off. The longer these systems stay down the worse things can go, this is the most humane way to do what needs to be done. Which is take away the power (money) that the parasitic relationship between business and DC is built on and make sure we don't go bankrupt.

They will be able to collect unemployment, do we know if they are getting severance?

This comment definitely appear to be written a bit too fast and with disregard to the context.

Firing is not an issue. The issue is fire to rehire.

It is not only indicative of poor leadership, but also does it break down institutions - one of the key values government provides.

to contextualize: Do you think you can get people to go to war for the US if you can not make up your mind on whether or not to keep them on payroll?

But we will see how the US will fare with broken down institutions.

I am aware that it is about the fire and rehire. If no one can say why something should exist, then yes, the quickest solution is turn it all off and see what breaks. You might not agree with it but it is a valid strategy given all the dynamics at play. Your definition of leadership isn't my definition.

I don't think we should go to war at all.

I don't think you understand why Trump was elected or middle America culture. The popular vote was a vote against deterring and corrupt institutions that already exist

Getting bureaucrats to fire each other is met with every delay tactic possible. Might be able to put it off for two years which is all they need.

Going in crazy like they are doing now, may serve the administration if they start having department do their own layoffs in a hurry, because they know otherwise it will be done for then.

You are immoral.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did the twitter employees come back at the same pay or did they ask for much more expensive packages since they'd been identified as crucial to operations?

Sounds like the kind of thing that could end up increasing costs rather than reducing them.

If it ends up being something like 80% non-crucial and stays fired, the other 20% return with double-pay, you’re probably still running a net-positive with better resource allocation

Except in reality the 20% coming back are probably not the best. Some will be but at least some of your best employees are going to be smart enough (or have enough self-respect) to go elsewhere. And/or those are the people skilled enough to find a new job quickly (or know they can find one quickly) and aren’t willing to come back.

I don't know about Twitter but for the companies I know of that have done this people generally can't vack for 1.5x to 2x their old pay.

It only "worked" because the key personnel decided to come back. Had they decided to move on to greener pastures, the end result would've been very different.

That isn't much of a point because federal employees are much more likely to return than Twitter technical staff. Interesting approach, specially because it's not my country.

>> federal employees are much more likely to return

Not necessarily. It's generally understood that federal employees accept a lower salary in exchange for career stability. If a career as a federal employee now has higher risk then at least some people will be expecting a higher salary.

The advocates of Musk's firings will say that if these people could command a higher salary, they should be in the private industry producing goods and services for the population rather than the inherently wasteful government positions.

> […] they should be in the private industry producing goods and services for the population rather than the inherently wasteful government positions.

In this particular case, the government positions were maintaining the US's nuclear arsenal. Not sure how "wasteful" having a nuclear deterrent is.

Could we privatize the arsenal to increase efficiency?

If you're not joking: what private entity would you trust to not start WW3?

The profit-making part is when we pull back from being world policeman and instead sell nuclear weapons and weapon systems. Sorry, we won't go to war for you, but how about some H-bombs, Taiwan?

We're really going to pull a Cuban Missle Crisis again? but x10? I guess they'll be cheered on this time.

Government work is literally goods and services for the population.

This is some serious 1984 war is peace shit.

Thankfully this isn't the case or you would get the least talented people in government, making it even more ineffective and wasteful.

I think that incentive is part of the problem. Federal employees should get paid more with a reasonable expectation of being fired. The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.

How is firing large amounts of people on a whim going to solve the problem of people not caring about their work?

From what it sounds like (w.r.t Project 47/2025) DOGE is fund seeking for massive planned programs, not returning money to the citizenry or restructuring for efficiency.

It sounds like they are illegally looting agencies and programs that congress already funded, so they can fund the admin's proposed plans (virtual social cleansing, mass deportations, homeless relocation, freedom cities, etc).

It doesn't look like DOGE is trying to fund anything; at this stage my guess is they're trying to hack off the propaganda arm of the CIA/NSA and the web of NGOs on the theory that it is funding anti-Trump messaging. Otherwise targeting USAID for savings early is a bit pointless; what is $50 billion a year to the US government? They're $36 trillion in debt with no plausible path out of the hole. Annual deficit is around $2 trillion.

Or it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy. Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.

There are some hints toward this, like with recent reporting :

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-panel-ap...

> Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said she has expressed “concerns” to leaders about the prospect of steep spending cuts and told reporters that, before she agrees to vote for the budget resolution, she wants “better clarity” about the next stage — especially when it comes to cuts. “$4.5 trillion doesn’t leave a lot of room for the president’s priorities,” Malliotakis said

---

Also, why else would you directly reclaim funds as the executive? As a party, if you wanted to correct spending, you would do it in a budget. As the executive, if you wanted to get money without congressional approval, you would reclaim money that has already been appropriated. There are other ways (emergency orders), but they might not be popular with the party or a target voting base (in this case, more net spending).

It is the US Government. Nobody has minded funding their schemes since 1970. They're going to keep borrowing until something so terrible happens that they literally cannot borrow any more. It is a bipartisan consensus position that spans multiple powerful governing ideologies.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is much more likely to be using rhetoric than predicting how the situation will develop. If the Republicans as a party actually cared about the debt or intended to make meaningful improvements to the situation we'd have seen evidence of it in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s or 10s.

I'd love to be wrong, but there is pretty strong evidence here that they're going to tut-tut; maybe wag a finger or even in extreme situations someone will write a strongly worded letter. Then the government will borrow whatever they need to to pay for whatever hare-brained scheme is flavour of the month.

The problem here is that gilt rates have been on the rise for a year (most likely as a reaction to Trump's manifesto), meaning borrowing is getting more and more expensive. You can print more money, but that devalues the currency, which the USD has managed to shirk off by being the main reserve currency of the planet. Except, that might change soon - because of the seeming chaos of the Trump administration (based on experiences of the previous administration), people are eyeing up EUR as a safer place, and gold prices are moving in a direction that suggests people want out of dollars (even if gold is normally denominated in USD for most people).

Trump has therefore caused gilt rates to rise, borrowing costs to rise, and a potential currency devaluation.

If you want to see how that works out when people finally lose their confidence, see what happened to the Truss government in the UK: it's not pretty. The UK is still paying for that on multiple fronts, but we were able to end the experiment in 49 days - that's not possible in the US.

I don't think what has worked for the last 50 years - waving budget appropriations through, shrugging at the national debt - is going to hold up for too much longer, for multiple reasons. And when it falls, it's going to fall fast, and very hard.

I made this comment before digging deeper into appropriations impoundment.

However, it still seems plausible (in my limited understanding) that this strategy could still be the goal, if the goal is to first push appropriations impoundment to SCOTUS.

Here is the best cited and approachable article I found on the subject within the context of these events:

https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/the-overlooked-conundrums-of-imp...

Most likely the whole point is to destabilise and eliminate government structures with the goal of filling the resulting power vacuum with privately owned services. That's what Thiel and his ilk are all about.

The first part of this plan - destruction - is easier than the second half - creation. If they're successful with the second half, people will be worse off because it's a big step towards neofeudalism /strengthening oligarchy. If they fail, people will be a lot worse off because the structures they're destroying are actually doing important work.

> it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy

this. the optics are important for the Trump base

>Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.

They want to fund corporate tax cuts. the cut from 22 to 15 percent is estsimated to be worth 100-200b dollars of income for the government per year. That's about the yearly funding of the DoED.

So we aren't saving money nor paying off debt. we are just funding corporate profits.

None of these people were let go because of the quality of their work. What incentive would they have to do their job well if their continued employment is not based on merit?

They don't get paid more because the government is not a profit center. It gets money from the citizens and then appropriates those funds. raises and promotions need to be a strict process because all government workers have public salaries. They can probably pay a little more, but not anything close to competitive.

>The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.

blame the incentive structure, not the players. Government being efficient and saving money results in less budget next time. They are punished for their improvement. If Musk wanted governent efficiency, that's the angle to approach. Protecting against lower budgets after a high performance review would do wonders.

The problem with ongoing US "experiments" is how much the rest of the planet is dependent on American companies, related economics and politics, regardless of it not being our country, the schockwaves will be felt.

And this is the thing, the rest of the world has agreed to be dependent on American companies, because they believed in the legitimacy of the US and free international trade. If belief in that legitimacy goes away, we will see that dependence shift quickly. Let us begin with Mastercard and Visa where the US taxes every payment transaction in much of the world. Do we really believe that Europe couldn't run its own card schemes?

The European Payment Initiative, the EPI, abandoned its plans for a card scheme and decided to focus on an account-to-account instant payment solution (A2A) for all kinds of use cases, all through a wallet. There is an interesting synergy here with the European moves to develop a common digital identity service and euro-wallet infrastructure.

They're not just trying to get rid of the US middleman, but the middleman altogether.

Starting with this year, Germany has legally mandated free and instant (few seconds) direct account to account transfers. For some shops, you can now either pay by SEPA (for free) or agree to pay a 3% fee for using VISA. They already started cutting out the US middleman.

IMO, to me as layman non-American, it's not an if. The USA is done-for-except-not, just like Twitter has been for a while. This might be able to be undone, hypothetically, but is not being undone. Online armchair generals are already starting to discuss things like escalation strategy for European nuclear forces and so on.

I guess we'll be seeing Mastodon/Bluesky/Threads phenomenon across worlds, both horizontally and vertically in the coming decades, this time in real life with (more)real consequences.

There's going to be major efforts especially in Europe, to de-couple from the US. We saw this to some extent in Trump 1.0 but he didn't actually do much due to the ineptness of those around him and a Senate that was still dominated by the anti-MAGA GOP "old guard". This time it is much, much worse.

> Had they decided to move on

Why didn't they?

H1B

What a giant scam the whole program is. Corporations need a good finding out phase again

All key personnel were immigrants? Why did the others come back? Also, since the H1B were key to operations and therefore smart, couldn't at least some of them have found a new employer? 61% of the H1B population switched jobs that year, so why did all key H1B come back?

I think key personnel came back because they wanted to. It's the simplest explanation.

With h1b i think you have 60 days to find someone else to sponsor you or you have to leave the country. 60 days is no time at all to find and start a new job. Even if you’re smart.

Even in the best markets, I still had a 6 week interview to offer stage (5 stages). 45 days and if they decided someone else is better I may be out of luck restarting the process.

With a Visa, I would not take such a risk. Given the job market, they either need to extend the period, or somehow mandate companies decide on a full time candidate within 30 days of first conact. It's gotten beyond out of hand.

I don't live there, but weren't other tech companies laying off at a similar time?

Right, but that's all Musk sees: they came back, and so it worked. He seems like the kind of person whose ego would make him believe that any other time he tries this, it would work too.

I'm still waiting for file upload API v2. V1 was only made EOL like what, 9 months ago.. Its totally fine to gut your company when all you need is maintenance mode.

America won’t even have maintenance mode when these guys are done. Except for the billionaires.

Clearly you have no regard for people and their needs. I hope one day you find yourself in a similar situation, fired for no reason other than some billionaires selfish reasons and desire to increase his wealth and it impacts you greatly. Maybe then you will see that what you wrote was idiotic. Though unlikely from a tech bro and elon lover like yourself

A difference with government is that you and I pay the salaries of these people. With Twitter a lot of it was just schadenfreude. Many of the employees were acting in a way perceived to be partisan and vindictive, which left a rather sizable number of people somewhat less than upset when the tide turned.

It's one reason we should all endeavor to treat each other, perhaps especially those we disagree with, with some degree of respect - even if your sole and only motivation is your own interests.

If a company gets too big, its not the employees fault, why should they be the first on the chopping block? If a government is too big, is it again the employees fault? Or is it someone elses?

The concept that some dude with more money than another can make screwups, then happily go off and impact thousands of lives thinking this is the way forward with no impact on them is utterly mind boggling. Similarly, we, the people who pay the salaries of government employees, are the ones who are at fault for voting in people who keep making mistakes. So why should the employees be suffering for this?

Do people not realise all of this is a smoke screen to push attention away from the conversation that existed to tax billionaires? To make them pay their fair share? This has all been nothing but an act to divert attention away. And its working. We are arguing about nothing when the solution is so obvious.

The people that should suffer are the ones in control. Not the ones who just want to live day to day.

Employees with zero to negative productivity should be on the chopping block because we want the employer to survive.

The United States has an highly progressive tax system where the rich pay the vast majority of the taxes. Why isn't that already their "fair share" (a propaganda term)?

Do you really believe that your second sentence is true? wow. So what you are saying is that billionaires, while they do pay taxes, pay their fair share with no attempt to avoid taxes? No overseas accounts or shady businesses? Its all above board?

But anyway, lets focus on the low productive people, because that really what is going to bring America out of the rut that it is in. Not the overly powerful rich that are totally screwing the regular joe. You're on another planet bro if you think the problem is the low productivity person and thats what America needs to focus on right now.

The main way taxes are avoided is by a lot of their wealth being paper wealth. For Bezos that's Amazon stock, for Musk it's Tesla. So when the stock doubles in price, so does (nearly) their net worth. But they're not taxed on this until they convert it to cash. So they can see their wealth double or triple with 0 increase in paid taxes, unless they try to access that money.

Taxing unrealized capital gains is possible, but it's not clear how you'd do this without destroying the entire financial (as opposed to goods/services) economy, since taxing 'wins' without crediting 'losses' makes any margins-game like investing impossible, but billionaires receiving billions of dollars in refunds when the market crashes is probably not visually great. It also seems fairly certain you'd introduce investment hedge possibilities with this, which is also probably undesirable. Not an easy problem.

And of course on top of all of this there's the Norway Problem. [1] Norway decided to introduce a hugely unpopular increase to their wealth tax system. It was expected to increase government revenue by about $146 million per year. Instead it resulted in a loss of about $448 million per year. Make taxation sufficiently onerous and people will simply leave your country. We're not talking about a captive audience, especially in modern times.

[1] - https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2024/09/11/the-failure-of-norw...

Certainly I do. I'd like the United States to change to a simpler and more regressive tax policy so that everyone has skin in the game. For example, eliminating all taxes in favor of a VAT or the like.

You live in a fantasy world. If thats what you think is the core problem right now in America or what needs to be focused on, good luck buddy!

Were it trivial to attribute the performance of complex systems to individuals, they would have no need to seek employment at firms and would be able to get the fair value for their labor in an efficient market.

And what if it turns out that let's say 70% of individuals have a zero to even slightly negative 'value', as seems increasingly possible as organizations shed mass numbers of employees but continue to function just fine? Or we can look at evidence in the other direction where you have companies taking on dramatically more employees yet not showing anywhere near proportional increases in 'productivity' (which I'm using as as a catch-all rather than as the precise term).

I really think this is the future many people behind evangelization of e.g. "AGI" futures are aiming for, with the assumption that well then we'd just have to create some sort of a basic income and everybody would live happily ever after. Of course that rather voluntarily chooses to ignore centuries of evidence to the fact that that's probably not quite what would happen. And even if it did, instead of everybody living happily every you'd instead create a dramatic stratification in society that would, over time, come to make Feudalism look like Communism. People that live only to consume will, over time, come to be marginalized with 100% certainty.

It's definitely a worry I have!

You have provided no evidence that the fired employees provided zero productivity.

Firing thousands of people should not be the decision of one unelected man. Congress funded those agencies congress has to defund them.

The middle class pay the vast majority of the taxes. The mega-rich pay very little as a percentage of their wealth.

> The middle class pay the vast majority of the taxes.

This is objectively false [1].

> The mega-rich pay very little as a percentage of their wealth.

This statement is a very different one than the previous and it’s expected since there’s no wealth tax.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

It is objectively false in the same sense it is 'false' to suggest renters pay property tax.

They don't sign the check, but the costs of tax burdens are often captured in the prices of goods/services offered by rich company owners.

They are not supporting the decision in this comment, they are just pointing out that Elon had a positive experience with the twitter layoffs which led him to want to run that playbook again. I would even venture the guess that they DONT support Elon's decision here.

It takes pretty advance level of self deception to frame "loosing money" as "positive experience".

Another perspective on that is if some highly-ranked agent may do so, maybe the system itself is wrong. This is basically allowed and works. Why someone who remains in practically legal limits to blame if clearly your ideas are based on morals and not these limits?

I’m not justifying him here, it just seems naive to make the rules which produce (and most of the times promote) ones like that and then blame them for doing what’s effing effective within it. I mean, as a hi-tech american(?) you’re eating a cake baked in the same oven. Maybe it wouldn’t be as tasty if the oven had different settings, and you’d have different life experiences and opinion then.

This is horribly naive. It’s not twitter. There are safety outcomes which need to be considered in safety critical agencies.

I mean can you even claim to make the assumption that the actual key staff were rehired? Can you make the assumption that they are working safely with the resources they need? Can you make an assumption that they have covered the entire scope of the organisation?

Probably not.

Chess is played one piece at a time, not smashing all the pieces off the board.

Unless you are playing against a selfish child who can't bear to lose.

Move fast and break the nuclear weapon arsenal.

Move fast and break the nuclear weapons arsenal.

edit: OK, so parent edited to match what I wrote and now I'm being downvoted because I look like I copied parent?

I am being downvoted too if that’s any consolation

Well, now I upvoted you because now I feel sorry for you for some reason!

Did it work? Is Twitter profitable now?

No.

Maybe? They went private so that's not a good sign usually.

There's more of a surge on wall street, but similar to tesla a lot of this is upheld by an undeserved hype. If Elon Musk died, I suspect these valuations would plummet harder than '29. TSLA is informally called a meme stock for a reason.

Makes sense. And isn't this the ol' military trick, that in software dev / project management parlance is now called a "scream test"? I.e. if your unit feels like it's doing nothing but endlessly filling out all kinds of reports, and no one knows which ones are important, the solution is to stop submitting any reports at all - and wait until calls and angry letters from higher-ups begin. That will quickly reveal which reports you need to keep filing, and which you can ignore.

The Scream test is very valuable for time efficiency, in general. In this application though, I think they’re realizing sometimes it’s difficult to reverse, such as firing the new blood who just moved to DC and have been there only a year… like I would feel so abused, why go back?

If they tell you it was a scream test, and it turns out your team was actually pretty important and also gives you a raise, you might. Especially if you have nothing else lined up.

And especially if you're not a tech worker, so you can't exactly chill out and wait for a better gig to fall on your lap.

(Though recently, even in tech changing jobs is much more precarious than it ever was.)

Yeah that's the thing, the government can't unilaterally give raises like that. reason #20 this was a horrible move.

>Especially if you have nothing else lined up.

Sadly, yes. I do find the irony here that the FEDS said the economy was recovering and Trump promised to fix inflation and make jobs. Then he's taking advantsge of the bad market to force people he abused back.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I spent a dollar, because then, I'd have all my money back

Yes, using this tactic in the govt is much riskier than a private company. And we won't know in this case if it "works" until after many months. And then deciding whether it "works" is very subjective depending on whether the collateral damage on human lives is acceptable or not.

Yes, and the personnel rapidly identified that their new boss is a jerk that has no respect to their work and their life, so why should they work for him, when any boss in random fastfood is probably more capable to their job better that this one idiot, plus private sector pays more...

That's like popping your tires to figure out that you need them for driving, and then discovering there is only one spare in the trunk.

Valid point, but Twitter's development post acquisition stalled and the company was massively devalued, so I'm not sure that can be considered a positive case.

The point was never to turn it into a profitable venture, but to acquire a widely adopted and established communication channel, turn it into an echo chamber and make it run with the least cost possible. It became what was expected of it.

There's a big difference between a website that shows you posts, and the federal government.

Degrade the service of a website, and maybe it loads a little funny; degrade the services of a government and people die.

>Rapidly identified key personnel without weeks or months of subjective analysis and political posturing by workers and their supervisors.

This doesn't make sense to me. The federal government isn't a company making Widget X, where you can gut, tweak, and repair it until you minimize the cost per widget and maximize the number of widgets sold. The government does a lot of things, often in the hopes of results in one or more decades, and there's rarely an easy and immediate way to measure success.

For example, the Surgeon General announced tobacco's link with cancer in 1964. It wasn't until the 1990s that smoking rates really started to fall in any significant way. The federal and state governments have spent decades and billions of dollars to reduce smoking rates, and they've been wildly successful. The tax revenue generated by any person-years alive which were won through that effort will never make up for the billions spent. But those people will contribute more to the economic and social life of the US, and the tobacco settlement deterred other companies from causing so much harm.

"works" implies that they are able to a) find those personnel and b) win them back over. It seems like they shokingly cannot do either.

It's also still weird because a lot of the firings focused on probationary workers.Very few would prove themselves in a year, so they did have to defer to key personell in he end to figure out "hey, he needed those people". Except he may not get those worers back.

> but the feedback loop for him on these previous experiments has been positive, not negative.

Sure, positve for his ego. He didn't care about recovering the supercharger conractors, he didn't care about repairing his adverts' relationships on Twitter and even threatened to sue as if they are obligated to advertise on his plaform. Call me treachorous but I don't think he really cares about making an efficient government. He's just funding his tax cuts.

No agency is going to admit to fraud, which is not totally different than paying employees they didn't need.

I'm also not a fan of the fire and rehire method, either.

It does feel like more time should have been spent, from an outside agency, watching and deciding.

What they're doing now is an old trick, and I'm surprised more people don't tell them to screw off.

Yeah, baseless accusations of fraud just to hide own incompetence ...

the accusations of fraud are probably mirror politics.

Given the lack of respect for process its plausible that in 10 or 20 years or whenever we'll find out this government was the most corrupt out of any in the past century.

And the lack of respect for process breaks trust. Some people might not care about this, but you can’t magically summon trust. It takes years for trust to rebuild. I don’t care which party you are from, you have take into account the other side, if only for that trust reason. Inform them of what you are doing, and your process. This is a public institution build upon the foundation of the Constitution.

> No agency is going to admit to fraud

Which is why Congress employs an army of auditors, who audit and report their findings to them.

The difference is, they are largely non-partisan appointments, who are expected to actually do their job, instead of rubber-stamping propaganda pieces. Their work can be verified, and there are consequences to them engaging in fraud, and there's a chain of custody for the evidence they find.

Which is more than can be said for giving a bunch of politically-appointed teenagers read/write access to every single system in the government... Paired with a blanket immunity from prosecution.

> Everything else aside why repeat the same mistakes?

Because good governance is not the goal.

People should read Elon Musk by Walter Issacson. Here's an excerpt from the chapter on his "algorithm":

> [Step 2] Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.

He thinks this is a feature, not a bug. Is he wrong? I don't think so.

If we fired 25% of the federal govt workforce, it would save 1% from the federal budget.

This has nothing to do with trimming waste and everything to do with replacing the government with loyalists from top to bottom. What comes after that isn't going to be pretty.

Absolutely.

The effects are going to be felt for a good couple of decades to follow.

Is that staff costs only? Or including the things those staff would spend money on too?

Overhead for staff isn't that much more. And even one person can spend money like it's going out of style if they have a budget that says they can and the implicit threat it'll be cut if they don't. They'll just spend it in dumber ways.

The "federal budget" is something people often mention, but it's quite misleading. At least in terms of what we think of.

The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category. The remainder of the budget, including military, is considered discretionary. That discretionary spending is the thousands of pages that Congress creates (and fails to read) each year. And it's in that budget that most of the things we associate with government came from - everything from education, to roads, to infrastructure, and also the military.

So by the numbers in 2024 the discretionary budget was "only" $1.7 trillion and after military spending "only" $900 billion was left. "Only" obviously needs to be in quotes but that's indeed only about 13% of the e.g. $6.7 trillion total budget in 2024. And so each time you cut something the amount of money left for the things we generally associate with government skyrockets. So for instance USAID was "only" $50 billion, but that was more than 5% of the entire discretionary budget!

US Federal Workers cost $293 billion [1], and contractors amounted to $760 billion. This is excluding secondary costs/benefits, which are extremely high for government workers, and only direct payments. It also excludes budgeted expenditures that would have been performed by those employees. So that's already $1.05 trillion and we're clearly substantially lowballing the figure. Yet that's already more than the entire discretionary budget excluding military, and certainly far more than 4% of the entire budget (as would be required for cutting 25% to only result in a 1% cost saving, as proposed).

[1] - https://www.afge.org/article/afge-continues-to-debunk-miscon...

If I spend 90% of my budget on mandatory items, and I cut 10% of my discretionary spending, I've shaved 1% of my total budget. Have I really accomplished that much? Is that going to keep me out of the poor house if something goes wrong? Is it worth a massive sacrifice to obtain?

Probationary employees means not just the new hires, but any federal employee who changed jobs internally in the last year. Who's going to want to work for the Federal government after this bloodbath? No one with any talent, which I'm sure is either the goal or a happy by-product.

This is about Trump and Co. destroying govt institutions they don't like, and weaponizing other institutions with loyalists. Just look at what's happening in the DoJ.

Most mandatory spending is on healthcare, social security, interest payments on debt. For anyone who values anything other than those things, every penny should be accounted for. The percentage of the total budget now becomes irrelevant.

>For anyone who values anything other than those things

Nah, we'll cut those too: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...

As mentioned elsewhere, this is literally impossible. Directly cutting mandatory spending would require new laws which, in turn, would require a supermajority in the Senate due to the filibuster, meaning the DNC would also need to be all-in on it. On the note, keep this in mind the next time some party, which can't see past tomorrow, tries to eliminate the filibuster.

Checks and balances are very important and I'm very happy to see the GOP making 0 effort to end the filibuster in spite of it currently being rather liberally used by the DNC.

It's important to note though that the goal is not to reduce debt. The goal is to cut taxes (largely for the rich).

I mean if debt was an issue why vote for the guy who has increased the national debt by the most in history and whose spending plans were going to increase the debt by almost twice of his opponent?

https://www.investopedia.com/democrats-vs-republicans-who-ha...

The person who wrote that article is remarkably ignorant of essentially all topics that she covered to the point I'd consider that lower quality than an average internet shitpost. I don't know where to start so I'll just bullet point things in no particular order:

- The US parties almost entirely ideologically swapped sometime in the 19th century. Some claim it happened with FDR in the 30s, others claim it didn't "really" happen until LBJ in the 60s. Everybody acknowledges it happened. What a "Democrat" did in 1913 is irrelevant.

- Congress dictates budgets, not the President. The President has veto power (which can be overruled by Congress), but nothing more.

- The modern US economic system enabling us to go arbitrarily far into debt only began in 1971, when we defaulted on our obligations under Bretton Woods.

- The total deficit under Trump was $5.6 trillion, under Biden it was ~7.6 trillion [1]. I assume the author was looking at delta debt and then 'inflation adjusting' it... ugh.

---

That's just the basic historic/factual backing. The "stats" are even worse, but enough is enough. In any case, the issue is not what happened in 1913 or even Trump's first term, but what is happening now. Trump's first term he promised to do what he's doing now but instead just mostly carried on the military machine (at least without starting any news wars, which was nice - though he was trying his hardest with Iran) and filled his entire cabinet with political establishment types who did their thing.

Trump 2.0 seems to have genuinely gained some sort of messianic delusions, probably from the attempted assassinations, and is actually doing what he said he would do before. And those current actions are what is really changing the game like nothing that's happened in decades.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD/

The deficit also doesn’t paint the whole picture. The debt significantly increased near the end of the Trump administration which added to mandatory spending via interest payments.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN

>Congress dictates budgets, not the President. The President has veto power (which can be overruled by Congress), but nothing more.

congress makes budget, but the president has always been a means to apply pressure and influence the budget. After all, if a president declares an emergency or crisis, and congress doesn't fund for that, then they may risk re-election. That's always been the "legal" means of the president settting the budget.

Also to cut regulations, aka the police for corporations and the rich.

Trump got saved by the pandemic so we can call his policies “unprecedented” for unprecedented times. It hides a lot of how poor he did.

Did he? I was under the impression that Biden did a lot of the stimulus in 2021. Trump did a bit, but if that still hid how badly he did that's crazy.

That's great. Congress should be the ones making budget decisions, not Musk. Trump has control of both houses, why not cut spending and give Musk his tax breaks legally?

Congress has not made a budget in many years. They pass “continuing resolutions.” Why aren’t they doing their jobs?

They will try to: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...

But despite being a minority, such a budget will be highly unpopular and democratic congress can still use that to push back against it. It's faster for Trump to just force it through, if he's going undeterred.

>The reason is that the overwhelming majority of the budget is spent automatically - pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category.

Don't worry, they want to cut that too:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/gop-targets-88...

March is going to be a bloodbath. For who, I can only wait and see.

As is typical for media on this issue, that article is highly misleading. That's the House, not DOGE, asking a committee to cut an average of $88 billion per year over the next decade. That committee in particular also has oversight over a stupidly large number of things from commerce to energy (as per their name) and everything inside which somehow even includes healthcare as well.

But it's impossible to cut mandatory programs' spending directly without a law passed which would require a super-majority in the Senate due to filibusters. On that note, consider now how critical the filibuster is. It wasn't long ago that Democrats wanted to end the filibuster to try to roughshod some voting law changes. Had that succeeded then now the Republican party on a super-narrow majority in the Senate would similarly be able to pass literally any law they want. Checks and balances are important because tomorrow will not be like today - a truth that will remain forever.

So in any case, they're going to need to carry out cuts not related to mandatory spending, or indirectly cut mandatory spending which can be done by things like reducing administrative costs, not spending millions of dollars on Politico subscriptions, and so on. But healthcare (or any other mandatory spending) cuts themselves will be impossible unless the DNC is also on board with it.

Those expenses are only unavoidable if you don't consider cutting fraudulent claims, which may have been enabled by people who are incompetent and/or working inefficiently. If you're able to cut a small but significant portion of fraudulent "pensions, medicare, social security, and all of these expenses are unavoidable and in a mandatory expenses category" by proxy from cutting the people, that represents a larger proportion of the total budget.

If we take Twitter/X as an example of this process, my personal experience has been that it has been degraded to a spams and bot hell shortly after Musk took over. But my personal experience isn't quantifiable, what is quantifiable is X valuation which, according to Fidelity, has been depreciating and back in Oct. 2024 was estimated at nearly 20% of the original acquisition price.

The Fidelity valuation is old news. All the most recent debt sales were either just below or just above 100% of the original price. Example article: https://www.afr.com/technology/banks-offload-8-8b-in-debt-li...

While it shows investors aren't concerned about X ability to pay back its loan term, it isn't a proxy for valuation. Banks usually sell issued debt to investors soon after the debt is issued. In this case it took 2 years.

Ah yes, sold Feb 15 2025[1]...right as the CEO took over running the US government and raided the US treasury department.

I'm sure this is a completely above board sale that definitely does not represent a legal-if-you-don't-look-at-it way to bribe the de facto head of the US government / the expectation of massive corruption (ala: Tesla's stock price rising on the news Elon Musk was running DOGE - weird right? The CEO is apparently going to be too busy to run the company because he's now running the government so the stock price goes up...to be fair, technically that's not a bad bet)

Because we know the new administration definitely wouldn't take bribes in the form of financial instruments[2]. Definitely no history of it[3].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-mor...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/08/02/tru...

If you invent reasons to dismiss what people say then there's nothing anyone can say to convince you otherwise.

There's a gap between "no you can't see the dragon in my garage, he's invisible, intangible, emits no body heat, and has no gravitational field" and "here's some citations to back up my belief".

Are the citations sufficient? Dunno. Just saying this isn't what you call it.

> a legal-if-you-don't-look-at-it way to bribe the de facto head of the US government / the expectation of massive corruption

How does the sale of the debt help Elon Musk or Trump? They don't own that debt, they don't make money off that debt. Do you expect the fund managers to forgive the debt as a bribe? That would clearly be a bribe, but until that happens, it isn't and I don't think it is terribly likely.

There are plenty of real things to be upset over, you don't need to make up imaginary ones. All that does is dilute the real concerns and make your opposition less effective.

I'm saying when you see a lot of smoke coming from a house, the neighbours probably didn't just buy an industrial sized BBQ and suddenly decide to have a huge cook off after some kids threw a bottle through the window.

So you think a debt purchase is blindongly obvious example of bribery? Then it should be easy to explain how it is bribery.

You comply, we buy your asset for 5x its value. You don't comply, we don't. Simple.

The debt was the bank's asset, not Musk's or Trump's. That isn't an explanation.

[2] seems like a grift, not a bribe.

[3] is an unnecessarily verbose story with practically no substance. In 2017 a $10m cash withdrawal was made to a Research and Studies Center said to have a “relationship with the Egyptian General Intelligence Agency.”

Using those facts, and the fact Trump was friendly with Sisi at a UN event, an entire investigation was launched to see if Trump was the final recipient.

If you look at it with the counter assumption of Trump being innocent, there still seems to be a reasonable motive for all this.

The FBI wanted information about an Egyptian cash withdrawal from one of Egypt’s own banks, subpoenaed them by bringing up presidential relevancy, and punished them $50k a day until the bank sent the documents.

> He thinks this is a feature, not a bug. Is he wrong? I don't think so.

Twitter lost 84% of its revenue.

Do you want the USA GDP to shrink that much over the next few years?

The good news is that GDP is positively correlated with greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Lower GDP, lower temp. I mean the famines will certainly "help"... I don't think the Senate will let it get that far, though. Only takes a few Rs in the House to impeach. 67 senators is a hard climb but 0% YoY GDP decline could do it... Or it could give Trump the stimulus he so badly craves.

They won't go hungry. I don't think famine will stop them. They don't want to lose their dictator that is willing to advance their agenda.

But they need to have a strong economy AND strong, consistent revenue to fund their defense budget. Don't forget that...

They need it to seem like that. Russia mistook the illusion for a reality, and is now stuck in a war of attrition with an economy that, on paper, is only a tenth of their own, and which is being supported by the international equivalent of loose change.

When Putin realised that, his body language changed: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-war-putin-neumann-int...

(Oh how hyperbolic headlines are…)

The US's GDP isn't based on the amount of bloat in its government. Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will. As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon. Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing. Considering big advertisers are coming back to X, that's probably only going to look better.

The twitter deal kind of worked out for Musk because Trump won the presidency. It's a way to buy favors from the US government now. Basically a corruption vehicle. From a end user stand point, twitter is terrible now. Lots of bots, full of life hack and crypto scams and a lot of scientists and other interesting people completely abandoned the platform.

Control the media, control the narrative. A tale as old as time.

> The US's GDP isn't based on the amount of bloat in its government. Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will.

"Bloat" presumes. "Tax dollars saved" would only be relevant — still incorrect, but relevant — if you were matching tax cuts with spending cuts, rather than trying to balance budgets.

If the USA balances its budget in a way that *somehow* has no side-effects, the GDP shrinks 7% just from that cut alone — but these cuts do have side effects so it is worse than that.

And doing using layoffs as a discovery mechanism is going to have Chesterton-fence type mistakes, where you only find what's wrong when the stuff you stop paying for is maintenance whose absence takes a while to become visible to non-domain experts. Dams will fail and flood valleys, bridges will fall into rivers, that kind of thing has gotten into the news in other countries when maintenance was forgotten.

The infrastructure that your government is responsible for is the backbone upon which the wealth of the rest of your country is built. You can eliminate the entire Federal Highway Administration and Joe Average won't notice anything for nearly a year… but if and when you do hire them back, you may have to hire back a lot more than you fired just to catch up with the damage done.

And so it goes for many other aspects of your country. CDC's also in the news now. OK, until you get your next pandemic… oh, wait, you're already having one. Nukes? You won't notice the problem until other governments no longer fear your nuclear deterrent. Armed forces in general? British didn't see any problem with shrinking their forces until the Russian invasion of Ukraine and realising how close they were to not being able to defend themselves if invaded. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration? Getting rid of that means a lot of companies can get away with skipping safety processes, so it might even seem like the economy goes up… until you get some equivalent of the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal.

> As for Twitter/X - the goal isn't revenue but profit, and Twitter was not in a good shape before Elon.

They made a profit in two of the years before he took over; an 84% revenue decline means that the company cannot even service the debt he saddled the company with during the purchase, even if he fired all remaining staff and reduced server, utility, real estate, and insurance, and all other costs to zero.

> Musk recently noted they are barely breaking even now, and the recent sale of X debt was just above original pricing.

Do you trust him?

According to this link, they sold more of their debt than they were expecting to, for more than expected to, but it was still less than they paid for it.

Going from $1b to $5.5b and from 90¢/$ to 97¢/$ is less bad rather than good.

https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/morgan-stanley-...

>Sure spending finds its way into the economy, but tax dollars saved also will.

Tax savings too a $40k a year person immediately find their way into the economy. Tax savings to multi-millionaires and billionaires tend to result in ever higher asset prices. They have too much spend effectively, so they hoard it.

So essentially the process here is:

1. Buy Twitter.

2. Fire most of the staff.

3. Piss everyone off so all the advertisers shun you.

4. Barely get the company breaking even, mainly due to all the cuts, even though the platform itself is barely limping along.

5. Cozy up to a wannabe dictator that dupes (slightly less than) half the country to elect him as president again.

6. Make the advertisers realize that their continued prosperity depends on bending the knee to you, due to your political connections. Not to mention your platform is now a way for people to buy favors from the government.

7. Profit.

(No need for a "???" step before "Profit", well done...)

We truly live in the darkest timeline.

> Twitter lost 84% of its revenue.

How much of that is because of politics? Already at the point of takeover, Musk was so hated by half the US for various reasons that it became profitable for major publishing platforms to abandon Twitter/X "on principle". When you're in that situation, nothing on the object-level can help you - neither good management nor technical competence. Revenue depends indirectly on the public opinion, and half of it wants nothing to do with you.

US nuclear arsenal is not in this situation.

Is it politics that people don't want to do business with shitty people? I'd call that being human.

If I owned a bill board space, and set everything around it on fire, wouldn't you think it was my fault that advertisers didn't want to pay to use it any more?

No, but then burning everything around the billboard doesn't necessarily make you a shitty person, and also opinions of people siding with advertisers aren't somehow the definitive ones.

I mean, why do people who hate what Twitter is now care about it's lost revenue? Especially given what it was, and where the revenue came from, this isn't exactly an argument that generalizes well.

The real question is why people think Twitter's lost revenue is linked to Musk's management. There doesn't seem to be a theory about a causal link. If anything the argument is "Musk is a bad person -> Twitter lost revenue" which suggests his management practices had no effect on the company's operation.

FWIW, I absolutely blame his management of Twitter rather than his political alignment or questions of morality.

Reason being, look at Tesla stock price: Musk's gaffes have a short term impact, but overall the price is way up since buying Twitter.

Tesla is not in advertising business, though. They are affected by the whims of public opinion, but not as much, as they're established company selling a quality product worldwide.

Musk used to dabble much more in Tesla directly than he's now, I wonder whether the ups and downs of the company correlate with his involvement, especially before he started going off the rails so badly? That would be informative and help separate object-level impact from political hysteria.

> Tesla is not in advertising business, though.

Tesla is absolutely in the advertisement business.

Their marketing and image is the only thing holding the company up (for now).

What I meant is: they buy ads and care about their opinion. They're not a platform selling ads, and they're not an ad delivery vector (like e.g. publishers) either. The latter two kinds of businesses have particular dynamics that are highly sensitive to public opinion, much more so than for any other kind of business.

Did people already forget he allowed Anti-semitism? And then brands left Twitter? And then he threatened to sue the brands for leaving?

We can argue the first part all day. The point was Coca Cola and co. did not want to assossiate anymore and that had an objective dollar amount.

I know less about this situation, but Twitter in 2024 apparently made some controversial blocking changes and that started the bluesky migration. I don't know the dollar amount there, but they apparently lost some big influencers.

If Musk was so politically toxic as to drive an 84% revenue decline, the Republican politicians wouldn't have allowed him to support them or their party.

Why? That entirely depends on political alignment of revenue sources, and I bet that (before the takeover) the balance was heavily on the US left-wing side, as that's also the overall bias in tech industry and social media and news publishing. And all that is amplified by advertisers in general, regardless of political leaning, being very touchy about controversy.

I can easily imagine this to alone be responsible for wiping 84% revenue.

Real world has a different political distribution than the Internet. "Politically toxic" on-line in particular is a knee-jerk reaction that is great at generating consistent revenue streams for publishers and social media on-line, but doesn't translate well to how the entire population of a country actually thinks or votes in the real world.

> Real world has a different political distribution than the Internet.

5% different, almost everyone is online.

But, thinking about your oft-quoted blog post about advertising bring a cancer, I guess if the top ad spenders cut themselves out entirely, then the bidding system could result in the runner-up bidder finding their ads are now almost arbitrarily cheaper.

>5% different, almost everyone is online.

We at best get 70% participation in voter representation. Online wise, I'd wager we get at best 20% "public" participation in terms of who bothers to participate online as opposed to lurking. And that 20% is spread amongst hundreds of subjects.

And we know these aren't created equal. The internet is disproportionately on the younger side, is very slightly biased by "middle class", educated workers, and the gender demographics vary site to site, despite being overall even (e.g. disproportionately male on Reddit, female on Pintrest). There will definitely be a different resuts online compared to making physical surveys.

> Already at the point of takeover, Musk was so hated by half the US for various reasons that it became profitable for major publishing platforms to abandon Twitter/X "on principle"

No, Musk became hated by half the US __because__ of the way he took over Twitter. That lost him a great deal of good will.

> How much of that is because of politics?

The US government is a lot more affected by politics than twitter will ever be.

Different kind of politics. For the Twitter-affecting kind, I'm struggling to come up with a term that wouldn't be seen to some as offensive.

Pretty sure it's the same type of politics. If you think private, profit driven corporations are reluctant to deal with individuals viewed as problematic by their customers, wait until you see how elected, popularity driven officials deal with people viewed as problematic by their constituents.

The only reason you think he isnt wrong is because you think it wont impact you. I hope one day you find yourself in the same situation, even worse, then I hope you remember this comment.

If I do, whether or not I remember my comment, I'll certainly remember yours :(

Sometimes people like you need to go through what others do to realise how wrong you were. Some people have empathy to know. You seem like the former. Its not too late to see that Elon is nothing but a fraud though if you wish to.

I think there is a tiny difference if Twitter is not working or if the nuclear arsenal is malfunctioning.

Yes, so it's a good thing the first step is:

> [Step 1] Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.

I REALLY doubt the recent high school graduates "yes boys" he brought in are even capable of providing the "name of the real person who made that requirement."

come on bro, you must know somewhere deep inside that this is more complex and consequential than fucking twitter of all things.

I know that the US government is more complex than twitter lol. I just think it's stupid to automatically invalidate an idea because it was used in a less complex system (especially when it worked lmao).

... and failed to turn that less complex system into a more profitable company

Unfortunately Twitter is now a machine that allows people to buy favors from the US government, so I expect it to become profitable pretty quickly.

Pretty messed up way for that to work out, though.

I invalidated it because it was tried and spectacularly failed in a complex system.

This is not quite as innovative as you might think, I guess you are advocating for the Chernobyl approach: "Let's turn all safety features off and see if it breaks!"

They turned off the safety features to test a safety procedure. I don't think it is a fair analogy.

They weren't testing a safety procedure, they were testing whether they could get rid of a safety feature. Specifically they were checking whether the plant's turbine could provide enough power to keep coolant flowing without the help of a counterweight system.

It's clear from the speed at which these changes are going in place that step 1 is not being followed, nor is it being encouraged.

> Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them.

This is just absolutely silly. What other reasonable ways are there to create requirements?

Move fast, break things.

Didn't facebook end up changing that?

There's some things you can't undo once they break.

And also, what if a nation state is different than a tech startup and shouldn't be run quite the same?

Next you’ll tell us sovereign debt isn’t the same as personal debt!!! /s

It is if you have your own personal currency

Once at a certain size didn’t Facebook say move fast but don’t break the infrastructure. Maybe they learned something about being at a certain scale.

Infrastructure and countries if I recall

surely a nuclear arsenal isn't one of those things.

It could also be the motto of an ICBM

If anything ICBMs are better at moving fast and breaking things than the tech industry

i run into this problem often when building teams, people who fail to understand that the real world is not an algorithm. the very first people i release are those incapable of seeing beyond math.

their failure to see wider context, their failures to understand that massive chaotic fractal tier contexts interplay will forever be these people’s downfalls.

sisyphean masochists.

I was going to mention this as well. This is pretty standard musk, delete large swaiths of stuff, see what breaks, and put the essential pieces back. It's supposed to be much faster than meticulous planning.

Yes all with no regard for the impact on people, families and their needs. Lets just make sure to focus on the need of a billionaire to create more wealth. The only reason you think like this is because you think it wont happen to you. Oh boy, I hope it does, then I hope you remember this comment. I so hope the people in here defending this bs end up on the street and impacted like the many innocent people are today. I love hearing the stories of regret from MAGA people, only more to come.

Web company world

1) Delete a system

2) 404 error

3) add the system back with a simple git command

Nuclear world

1) Delete a system

2) Nuclear meltdown causes the abandonment of the Atlantic coast

3) Add the system back over the next 20 years

I have seen it before. This is the “Coffee is for closers” scene from Glengarry Glen Ross: https://youtu.be/elrnAl6ygeM

By that logic, perhaps we should trim 10% of his wealth.

And then we can stop and check - if he is still fine after it, then maybe we didn't trim enough.

It's easy to trim other people when you are completely insulated from the consequences.

Yeah this works for processes.

Doesn’t work in with people though. You will be deemed as unreliable.

Alliances will form without you as no one needs a partner that can leave you standing at any moment.

Running the company is the very opposite of running a country.

The feedback loop is weeks vs years/decades.

Yeah I'd heard this and I think he is right. I'm about to use the approach in a coding task in work.

However this is people's livelihoods, mortgages, kids etc. being on the receiving end of it through no fault of your own must be awful.

This sounds like a software developers take. I think it is an algorithm that can work well in non critical systems. I think it is naive in the extreme to apply it to critical systems.

I don't want to live in a world where it's right. Treating people like this, toying with their livelihoods, is wrong, full stop. It might "work" for certain definitions of "work", but it's morally repugnant.

You could apply the same reasoning to parts of the human body.

Or maybe not.

> Is he wrong?

When it comes to government, yes.

>Is he wrong? I don't think so.

He's assuming everyone will grovel back to him and that this can be undone. That's the wrong part.

Layoffs will often cost you your best employees. Either because you laid them off, because they saw the signs and jumped before the layoffs, or because you end up overworking the post layoffs and they leave over the bad balance. You're never paying 10xer 10x the salary, so the attritiion is usually a matter of when, not if.

people aren't machines. They have their own interests and very few want to feel like they are one step away from being let go.

It's the tech bro way

Very similar to the story about the Supercharger network.

Apparently the boss of the team was told to make layoffs, she did some but not enough to please Musk, so Musk in a face to face meeting demanded she make more. She said they couldn't without affecting delivery.

Musk fired her. Then fired the team. Then hired the team back because she was correct.

But not before lots of ongoing projects got stalled because contacts just disappeared and stopped answering phones.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...

> The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team.

and

> The contractor said he had expected Supercharger projects to provide about 20% of his 2024 revenue but now plans to diversify to avoid relying on Tesla.

Why people think it’s a good idea to put this wealthy dickwad in charge of one of the most (allegedly) important projects in the current admin is beyond me. Move fast and break things is a stupid policy to apply to public policy.

Musk's track record suggests it's a very effective strategy, especially when he's coming into organisations where the existing performance management processes are lacking, so you don't have good reliable data to look at to figure out who is required and who is not.

The public sector typically has practically no effective performance management processes. It's been a big problem for a long time. Trying to figure out who should stay when you don't have good data was always going to be error prone.

Given that, this strategy might actually be the best. It's quick, it's objective (did anything break?), and it's usually easily undone.

> and it's usually easily undone

Because employees are automatons that have no feelings and won’t hold a grudge.

Also, all employees are just cogs in the machine. You can totally lay off that grizzled senior dev and hire a kid fresh out of college, what’s the difference? It’s not like there was any institutional logic locked up in the senior’s head right?

/s if it wasn’t painfully obvious.

Not to mention the externality of having extra people floating around who know intimate details of the nations nuclear weapons secrets, who you have now pissed off.

I'm sure anyone who has been entrusted with such a position is fairly responsible, but it still seems like a bad idea.

Plus our adversaries would know we're hiring, and this bunch doesn't seem to care so much about proper vetting.

A grudge?

They've just been put into a strong negotiating position, because now both parties acknowledge that these are key employees.

I would never go back under a boss who thinks even for a second that I’m easily replaceable. It would immediately indicate to me, that I can’t trust in my boss at all. Nobody really can work effectively without trust. That’s the base of our whole society.

If you're not easily replaceable then the company has failed on some level.

This is why I think current org structures, and incentives, don't map properly to SWE and fuels this employment theater of "trust me I'm not a cog" => "trust me you are".

Don't know what an ideal arrangement would be, maybe SaaS is closer. Even then, still have to convince some 'cogs' to build your SaaS corp while you recoup 90% margins off their labor which is a fast path to class consciousness and we're back at square one!

Yes good, and now because their value is appreciated they can be paid what they will be paid in the private sector, perhaps ~180k/y instead of 60k/y. So if you fire 2/3 of the workforce and pay those that remain what they are "worth", you have saved exactly what ?

In your hypothetical scenario, it would be a no brainer to proceed.

Your key workers are now paid at market rate, and those who were unnecessary will find other jobs.

Sorry, they are servants of the public.

Maybe they ought not have been fired, but their feelings are 2nd place when their salary is funded predicated on men with guns forcing people to pay up. Maybe my feelings are hurt and I hold a grudge for being forced to pay their paycheck rather than spend that money on my family, but I'm nearly certain most of them don't care nor does much of HN.

They are humans first, public servants second. We are in the business of governing and employing humans. A wise government would acknowledge this truth.

Emotions are the motivator for everything, the question is, which emotion is getting the better of the human today? The better angel of their nature, or the other, darker one, that ineptitude stoked into relevance?

Everyone has a breaking point, for them, it’s losing a livelihood, for you, sadly, it’s the garnishing of your wage for the collective good.

I take it you’d also be fine paying 100% of the cost of the roads you use to buy food for your family? Men with guns take money from my family to pay for your roads after all.

Absolutely privatize them all. The roads for miles around my house are private easement (no tax) that are publicly accessible and it works beautifully. I built my own roads to access my land and it's great, my property taxes are near 0.

These firings will have no impact on your taxes. Instead of people having a job, the money will just get given to oligarchs and you’ll pay largely the same taxes but have moderately less government services. Socialism is needed to some degree for society to function. Capitalism alone is an awful system.

So, basically, left wing conspiracy theories?

In reality, whether taxes fall or not likely depends on whether the savings are returned in the form of income tax cuts, or whether the savings are used to repay the massive debt that has accumulated from decades of deficits. Both outcomes are good in the long run.

I hope you’re right, but I suspect you’ll be wrong. I think Obama was the last president to shrink the national debt. Clinton did before that.

False dichotomy. They will likely be used to continue tax cuts for the wealthiest (and corporations? I don't remember), which are set to expire. That is neither scenario that you envisioned.

Whom does income tax cuts help? Median US salary is 62k. That person pays ~12k in income taxes. Conservatives are going to ‘save’ that person 1k on their taxes or some other paltry sum and then cancel a bunch of services, fire a few hundred thousand workers, and raise tariffs to make the actual cost go up on everything that person buys.

Prediction: when Trump leaves office, the federal workforce, budget, and debt will all be higher than they were at the start of his second term.

come on, that was easy. for a challenge, predict how much each will go up.

What do you mean when you say "it's an effective strategy"? It's hard to say for certain since Twitter is now private, but it certainly seems to have lost value since Musk took over. What would "work in the public sector" entail for you?

The value wasn't lost, it was consumed. You're looking at what it was consumed to achieve, in the election results.

I would actually agree with you on that in the case of Twitter, but in what sense is that comparable to the current situation? Unless you mean that Musk is succeeding by destroying a bunch of American assets (i.e. the agencies) and then being lauded for this destruction. I could see that value once again going to Musk (and Trump), but in what sense would that value not be lost by your average US citizen? It's not like Musk bought these agencies before destroying them, he's just destroying them. He's no longer burning his own house down for life insurance, he's burning your house down for life insurance.

Operationally, Twitter is performing better than it did when it had 5x the headcount.

According to reports, revenue is down, but that's more due to advertisers objecting to Musk content moderation decisions (plus politics no doubt).

They are objectively in a worse financial position.

I wasn't getting advertisements for female sex toys (I'm male) on Twitter before Musk took over. That's a long way to fall.

Neither of us really know Twitter's financial position, given it's now private.

The rumours I'm hearing are that EBITDA is now above pre-acquistion. The fact that debt is trading hands without a haircut suggests that's probably accurate.

There was a lot of waste at Twitter. Given that headcount was cut by 80%, and advertisers are returning, I'd suggest it's doing fine.

It's wild — people that look at employment of the citizens of this country as just data to feed into some kind of profit/waste equation that needs to maximize profit, discard any hint of waste.

It's not waste when those employed have paychecks to spend in the economy. What would Corporate think if half the population of the U.S. were unemployed and/or homeless?

I guess that's fine as long as profits have been maximized.

Right? I am astounded by these takes. If every corp and every job was this way, our country would be a high-stress, unemployed wasteland. Any org will drop thousands in a heartbeat. Your family would never be safe.

We work so hard already. We already have such high stress. I do not believe we need to eke out the last %s of profit to pass to shareholders and create crushing stress and work on those remaining.

> Neither of us really know Twitter's financial position, given it's now private.

> The rumours I'm hearing are ...

You are literally contradicting yourself in two phrases one after another.

Literally every valuation shows its worth <10b, at best a 25% of its paid for value what, two years ago? a little more?

After reading through your posts its like you live in an alternate reality where Musk's integrity is bulletproof, his decisions are awesome, and he's basically doing it for the rest of us.

I don't know how you can sustain this with everyone throwing reality in your face that he's a short sighted rich kid who lies through his teeth and throws money around until he gets what he wants.

It was, but advertisers are now returning which has driven it's earnings back up while it's operational costs remain significantly below pre-acquisition.

According to https://www.wsj.com/finance/banks-sell-5-5-billion-of-x-loan... earnings are now nearly twice pre-acquisition.

I'm not going to respond to the ad hominem.

Advertisers are returning because Elon Musk is the long arm of the president and literally threatening tech companies with reprisal. On Twitter. It's open corruption! They're not even bothering to hide it.

paywalled article so this link isn't really worth much. And given your credibility I don't trust your analysis. Especially when you also seem to be ignoring any reasonable responses and focusing on arguing instead.

> Neither of us really know Twitter's financial position, given it's now private.

Then why are you making any argument that it was a success?

> There was a lot of waste at Twitter. Given that headcount was cut by 80%, and advertisers are returning, I'd suggest it's doing fine.

Why would you suggest it's fine? Without knowing their exact costs, debts, revenues, etc. you know _nothing_. Why would you suggest it's doing fine when knowing nothing about it's financial position?

It's odd you admit you do not know and then make your own opinion anyway.

This is one of the few times to listen to Wall Street, since it's not public. https://www.ft.com/content/4f44c0c1-0113-4054-be0b-adc119557...

Revenue is down because they fired most of the salespeople and told their customers to f off. Hardly a wise management strategy.

You are wrong on two accounts.

There are plenty of ways for getting rid of underperformers in a goverment organisation. I've seen entire teams being sacked, and also some of the hardest working people I know work for goverment organisations.

Also, you cannot run the goverment like an startup that is always running on the edge. A majority of startups fail and that's fine, but one goverment organisation failing could cause problems for the entire country.

>I fully acknowledge that it will result in mistakes,

The people arguing the other side are not talking about reversible mistakes with minor fallout. They are claiming that taken as a whole the damage will be very difficult to undo. Countering this simply by accepting that there will be mistakes doesn't quite suffice. As pg tried to remind Musk on twitter (I'm paraphrasing): Countless startups come into being and die within the system. But this is the system we're talking about. There is only one.

I take it you want the others to believe this administration geniunely cares about providing the public efficient services without fraud and corruption by establishing highly-efficient meritocratic institutions. There's overwhelming evidence in the events of the past few weeks that this not the case. Just looking at the Eric Adams fiasco and, say, the cabinet picks of Hegseth, Gaetz, Bondi (straight of the movie Idiocracy) show this administration does not care about fighting corruption or hiring people that are most qualified for the job.

Pg, the guy screaming about woke? He should be on Musk's side, they both want to de-woke society by force

I've never witnessed pg screaming about anything ever frankly, maybe people close to him have. He would be the last person I use the verb for.

A lot of people and Democrats in STEM fields who voted for Kamala in the elections, including pg who publicly stated he was voting for Kamala, thought the corporate DEIA initiatives were counterproductive to their stated goals. It's not a extreme minority position in the tech crowd, nor is there a complete lack of criticism of corporate DEIA in the progressive media either.

I also give pg credit for being one of the rare VCs who posts "pro-Palestinian" viewpoints on occasion. So he does buck the trend from time to time. Calling David Sacks, Musk's unwavering eternal sychophant, possibly "the most evil person in Silicon Valley" was also a great line in the sand for him. But the basis for this opinion was more from his knowledge of how terrible Sacks treated founders as an investor rather than from Sacks being a Musk acolyte.

You must have missed his recent blog post where he very much so did that: https://paulgraham.com/woke.html

> I fully acknowledge that it will result in mistakes

Yep, but as opposed to a startup those "mistakes" will be deadly.

Literally so.

> Yep, but as opposed to a startup those "mistakes" will be deadly.

Well, these mistakes are also deadly if it’s a move fast and break things startup in medtech. And these mistakes are deadly in healthcare.

I am calling this out because I see this complete myopia of abstracting people’s lives as OK to ever lose on purpose.

Statements like “no one thinks that!!!” “Most people are XYZ!!!” are thrown around because computer scientists start being computer scientists - we try to solve problems the way we do at work. Big O notation is not an acceptable way to manage other people’s lives.

In computer science, 100,000 people in the global population converge to zero. If you are counting DAU… OK.

If you are estimating the number of people you might accidentally kill… not OK.

If you are trying to reduce corruption and you don’t actually know if you will kill people or not, and you do it anyway… I don’t see how anyone can consider that ethical.

> you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years

I do blame him. What harm of 2 years of status quo could be greater than the risks of completely breaking safety organizations?

> Elon who has to get rid of underperformers without credible data

No, this is not a valid solution to the problem, if there even are significant performance problems. “We don’t know exactly who the problematic people are, so let’s just fire every probationary employee, you know the ones who haven’t even been around long enough to be chronic underperformers?”

It’s either a very foolish attempt to solve the problem, and/or he actually just wants to destroy government.

> the real blame for this is with the previous administrators who neglected this problem for years

Trump was in charge 5-9 years ago, does he get some blame too?

> While you might not like his methods, you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years for these issues to be addressed, data to be collected, and then action to be taken.

Yes, I definitely can blame him and anyone who wants to 180 the government in that time - that's stupid, childish, short sighted, and suicidal for keeping the lights on.

>this problem

What problem?

The problem of how people are fired? You dont fix that specific problem by firing everyone!

Somw other problem? Show us evidence that there was a problem, before you fire. That's how you do it in a democracy.

>The lack of effective performance management in the federal workforce. >Resulting in poor service provision and wasteful allocation of taxpayer funds.

Alleged. Not proven, alleged.

>No large private sector workforce would have gotten away with such broken processes.

What broken processes? You havent shown them to exist.

Large companies are built to maximixe profit. Governments are not, so why should their organizational choices be similar?

Performance management is important in both public and private sector organisations.

You have clearly never worked in any sizeable workforce, and I can assure you your basic presumption that large private sector workforces does not have broken processes is childishly naive. The "problem" is you, making assumptions of waste where there is none to speak off, unless you can provide some actual data to back that up. The average federal employee earns about $60k/y, they are not there for the money. Firing all federal employees will same about 7h of borrowing.

I'm sorry but the narrative you have invested in so deeply is not founded in reality, not that I expect anyone explaining facts to you will make any appreciable difference.

Enjoy the pain you elected to bring upon yourself, you deserve the government you got.

I've worked in several large federal departments, and private sector companies that are even larger by headcount.

Trust me, basic performance management processes that exist in the private sector are almost entirely absent in the public sector.

You can’t generalize about the entire public sector from a couple anecdotes. Of course there are going to be badly run groups inside an organization of that size. I can tell you there exists management inside the federal government that runs performance management and fires underperformers.

Since you fall victim to such an obvious fallacy, it makes sense that you would wind up hired into low-performing groups.

What processes are broken? What lack of effective performance management? What poor service provisions?

Where is your citation for any of this? And don't bother citing Musk since we already know he's a sociopathic liar.

You're right it's not a startup. It's an organization in a town that voted 90%+ in favor of keeping their jobs, not being prosecuted, or some kind of "threat to democracy".

You can't run an organization if the ground troops are resistant to executing the vision of leadership

Management is as much about convincing people you’re right as it is about getting your way always. Sometimes your subordinates are right and a good manager can still work with that situation. Even in a professional army like the US military there is disagreement and negotiation. This idea that we are all troops in some kind of militia who should blindly follow one person’s will is the bottom half of fascist ideology.

The term "ground troops" was just used as a metaphor for people at the bottom who do a big chunk of the actual work. Every organization would rather have people at least be pro "big picture" vision, and, yes, there should be dissonance and compromise on the "how" we get there part

You can say that but you could also have called them “workers.” Calling them ground troops is intended to evoke the image of people being shelled in foxholes and then running away. It is a bad euphemism that is meant to suggest we are fighting a war. You have to ask yourself—-when someone evokes the imagery of war, do you not think they are spoiling for a fight?

Pesky things, these laws.

Honest question, what laws in this context?

I can’t say if you’re serious or just trolling. It is beyond stupid to compare government institutions with private sector.

Let’s say (just for discussion purposes) that some government agency (USAID, for example) is wasting 100% of their budget on parties (again, just for discussion purposes). What is the right way to fix it? Step one - you hire an auditor and collect proof of any misconduct or wrongdoing. Step 2 - find out the people who did wrong. Ask for an explanation. Show the public your proof. And so on.

You don’t shut down departments without a shred of evidence, overnight. It is just cruel and stupid. But then, cruelty seems to be the point here.

You don’t set fire to your entire face because you got a pimple on your nose. You just treat the pimple

Whether or not it's a good strategy for either companies or the government, this particular case involved randomly firing a bunch of folks who build and maintain nuclear weapons and then almost immediately trying to un-fire them. There wasn't enough time to see if anything broke (not that you'd see that with nuclear weapons until it was way, way too late) but now you've managed to piss off a bunch of people who are likely only going to come back long enough to find a new job, if they come back at all, and you've probably also damaged your ability to retain even the people you didn't fire or attract new prospective employees. It's basically all damage with zero value and it certainly isn't going to fix any performance management problems.

I think it's a questionable strategy anyways, especially when applied to government, but carrying out the strategy in such a ham-fisted way seems unlikely to be the secret to making it successful.

>it's objective (did anything break?

Did you even try to read the article?

>The US government is trying to rehire nuclear safety employees it had fired on Thursday, after concerns grew that their dismissal could jeopardise national security, US media reported.

It hasn't even been one business day. We don't know how much this will break. The titanic took 4 hours to sink; these things don't instantly show its aftereffects. Clearly, the administration thinks something will break if they are reversing course.

> usually easily undone.

article:

>A memo sent to NNSA employees on Friday and obtained by NBC News read: "The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel."

We are definitely in unusual times.

You also responded 2 coments downstream to another story where this strategy cost a company an entire division and utterly missed its goals.

perhaps effective, but not efficient. shouldn't there be some due diligence on selecting people and departments from dismissal? some kind of measurement and analysis.

Whether or not it's a good idea depends on what outcome you desire. If the aim is to weaken the U.S. then putting a foolish unelected billionaire in charge of things that he has no idea about is a great idea.

> If the aim is to weaken the U.S.

Say if you're China and Russia...

> then putting a foolish unelected billionaire

With ties to both...

I don't think Trump's aim is to weaken the US. I don't think here's some big secret Russia conspiracy.

I think the situation is much simpler. Trump wants to be king. What happens to America in the future is immaterial. And a king needs a kingmaker, who in this case also wants to be MOTU.

Putin and Xi know this too, and help out making it happen - good for them with a clown begin the king of the US.

(Not sure if any help was needed this time though.)

>I don't think Trump's aim is to weaken the US. I don't think here's some big secret Russia conspiracy.

That's not really the claim these days. The Stelle Dossier accusations haven't really been substantiated.

He's more likely to be just a useful idiot. Far more easy to manipulate than politically educated stable people, and with less connection to the institutions of State.

One goal is to get rid of any critical voices. Only yes-men (or women) will be left standing. It is a test of allegiance, and those that care more about the mission of the organization, or team, customers, users, general public than the boss - are considered to fail. It is core to authoritarianism. Kneel before the king :/

As it was at Twitter.

Imagine the lack of empathy one would need to fire 500 people for being challenged, sociopath antics (assuming the reporting is accurate)

Such a fragile ego. A mature manger should be able to handle a subordinate disobeying without throwing a temper tantrum and firing the whole team and damaging the whole company out of spite.

lol, there are “managers” making 40k a year (with 3 people reporting to them) that have huge egos. It isn’t surprising that world’s richest man child has the ego to match his wealth.

Something wrong with society as a whole. People being cruel to each other for no reason, people can’t think/plan beyond the current quarter etc. Everywhere I look, people seem stressed, and they lash out in whatever way they can. Seems like a much bigger problem than Trump/Musk, though they are a big contributor to society’s stress for sure

When I spend time outside without my phone for a few days it’s amazing how much better things are.

These people that parent mention do not live in people's phones. They live in people's offices. Not all people have the luxury to just quit working.

Can confirm, can't say where or when, NDA + non-disparagement.

Nice walks help, even so. Absolutely doesn't solve everything, but does help nonetheless.

>>lol, there are “managers” making 40k a year (with 3 people reporting to them) that have huge egos.

Power trip has its pitfalls. It convinces nobodies that they are special. Its one of the big reasons many times the middle managers end behind their reportees.

Once you taste power its easy to convince yourself that you are coasting along the path of a guaranteed victory, and winning is a given.

There was once this interview of a man I watched who would be around the head of a army, his staff pretty much treated him like a god. And he even got used to that sort of stuff over time. You can't expect good things to happen from there.

I haven't had th misfortune of having such managers myself. But I've been right next door to other managers like this and it's the absolute worse.

Even then, a power trip that actually fired hundreds of people on the spot is just ficticious levels of stupidity. It's the exaggerated evil businessman that everyone would laugh at. And musk fits it to a T.

Everyone seems to think they know Musk, it sure does look like Musk himself is included in this list.

What is he thinking how this will turn out?

I don't know him, but as a programmer I hope I'm at least half decent at identifying a pattern. Musk's business acument is horrfying consistent, if nothing else.

In that case I'd say it seems to have proven effective for Musk multiple times now, so why stop now? In his experience, he can just keep shit-canning feds until something immediately bad happens - say he is sorry and give them a job back.

As others have already pointed out, the real damage is silent, has already been done, and will be suffered by generations to come while being able to blame others.

Reputation takes a life time to build, and can be squandered in a minute.

> fired people who had credentials

I agree. Federal credential management and safekeeping is not particularly well crafted.

It's to let people fear that they could lose their job, so they won't speak up.

Expect this story to be flagged soon...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43061481

i don't see how this is (technically) related to the twitter layoffs - and even less how it could be "literally" given that the twitter layoffs where about LAYOFFS and this news item is about reHIRING ... or are you maybe a little challenged with language and what you actually want to say is that in both cases Elon Musk is involved?

> Everything else aside why repeat the same mistakes?

"Move fast and break things." /s

Then try to move fast to fix the things you just broke.

(Perhaps government tend to moves slowly for a reason: when a company breaks things customers can go to a competitor, when government breaks where can you go?)

Almost all government employees are necessary.

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

more guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why is that a guideline?

My bet is that using using all-caps looks like you're yelling, and yelling isn't exactly conducive to effective conversation.

> Just go a little slower and give agencies time to compile accurate lists of necessary employees

It's not about achieving results primarily, it's a public perception game. Trump and Musk are going for the perception of "they do what they say from day 1" - it doesn't matter if what they plan succeeds at all (and if it's struck down by judges, it's just additional fodder for "un-American judges!!!" propaganda), or if what they do actually has the outcome they promised.

The GQP voter base no longer cares about anything but the appearance of "winning", and it's aided by completely off-the-rockers media and influencers.

It worked with twitter though. The site did not implode like all the naysayers predicted, it's at least as good, if not better than it was, just going off of usage statistics.

This is basically 0 based budgeting, where you get rid of everything and then only add back what you deem to be absolutely necessary. I expect good results.