More votes reported half hour ago from CO03, Republican MAGA-maniac Lauren Boebert's margin now just 556 (0.15%) over Democratic challenger Adam Frisch.
The Wicked Witch of the West is melting . . . melting . . . melting . . .
On the other hand, the Wicked Witch of the East, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is her re-election in GA14 by 2/1, by over 80k vote margin.
"The OBR said it expected a million more people to claim sickness benefits over the next five years compared to forecasts just six months ago as the health service struggles to deal with record NHS backlogs.
Rising long term sickness means Britain is the only major economy to have seen a significant decline in its workforce since the pandemic."
"The OBR said it expected a million more people to claim sickness benefits over the next five years compared to forecasts just six months ago as the health service struggles to deal with record NHS backlogs.
Rising long term sickness means Britain is the only major economy to have seen a significant decline in its workforce since the pandemic."
Gardenwalker has surely got it right. Brexit alone is responsible for the loss of 4% growth according to the experts. That 4% is the difference between holding our own in a difficult climate and having the worst economic performance since records began.
The reason for the omerta is that all the political parties have something to hide The Tories for being 100% responsible for Brexit and Labour not wanting to offend their Red wallers who were taken in by it.
And of course SKS is now 'out' as a Brexiteer himself
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
"The OBR said it expected a million more people to claim sickness benefits over the next five years compared to forecasts just six months ago as the health service struggles to deal with record NHS backlogs.
Rising long term sickness means Britain is the only major economy to have seen a significant decline in its workforce since the pandemic."
The idea we are saving money by having nurses strike whilst patients are not seen and therefore stop working lowering productivity and tax receipts, is pretty fanciful.
Quite clearly Hunt has left the main unpopular spending and austerity decisions to tackle the deficit for the likely Starmer government to deal with after the next general election. He also froze thresholds and lowered the threshold for additional rate income tax but didn't really increase tax rates, again he left it to Starmer and Reeves to do that.
A bit like Liam Byrnes 'there is no money left' note for Osborne in 2010 there will be no golden economic legacy from this Tory government as Major and Clarke left for Blair and Brown in 1997
You sound positively buoyed by this scorched earth approach to governing a country properly.
But how many Conservative MPs do Sunak and Hunt bequeath their successors
Still about the same as in 1997 but Labour face a more 1974 economic outlook than 1997
Not sure you are right on either count.
Do you think Labour get all the blame from day 1? Probably a thousand days in before some voters start to say you can’t blame it all on Tories now, we want some delivery.
The sun of post recession rebound might be out, green shoots and all that mid way through their stint, which they get all the credit for, in run down to their re-election attempt
You haven’t thought this through have you?
In May 2010 Brown Labour got just 29% of the vote. By December 2010 Ed Miliband Labour was on 40% in the polls and leading some.
Now of course the Tories recovered by 2015 but a Starmer government would have to take as tough if not tougher decisions than this Tory government did today and would soon become unpopular.
Starmer is not going to get a golden honeymoon like Blair did for years after 1997
I'm curious to know how all this blew up so suddenly?
....Six weeks ago everything seemed so normal. The Tories had got rid of Johnson because he was caught bending the rules one too many times....
....The replacements seemed ordinary bordering on the dull but at least an improvement in most peoples eyes.
......Then the Queen died and they made their choice and Truss took over and out of the blue we were facing the worst economic crisis since records began.
It's as though someone opened the books and found the most heinous skulduggery had taken place.
.......We'd been robbed and they'd got away with the lot.....
Spot on Roger. How did this suddenly blow up? If it’s simply the Tories were stupid or lying, then why didn’t the media or opposition parties explain the truth?
So if it’s the right budget, not a ideological Tory wet budget as many in Tory circle thinking tonight, then yes, where did this budget come from? Where did these hideous conditions on tax, borrowing, struggling households & businesses, so little growth for us other countries over covid slump already, come from?
Nothing from Boris or Sunak as PM and chancellor setting the ground for this was there? Nothing from Johnson’s long good bye government that the country was in this mess, nor any hint on the endless Tory campaign trail - Sunak said Truss promises would go too far but Sunak was still promising tax cuts and giveaways himself, not explaining need for this Autumn statement. Still no hint of all this budget gloom when Kwarteng first stood to deliver his budget, nor much reaction from the media it should be tax hikes and budget cuts instead, in the papers first summing up, in fact Kwarteng’s was hailed as exciting budget by Tory Press, Tory Party and by many on this blog.
So where did the need for this budget come from?
The truth is the need to tackle borrowing and raise tax to help creaking services through credit crunch was there all year. This crunch was always coming. The politicians either didn’t see it or were never honest about what would eventually be needed.
But also how much of the media were switched on to the true state of UK and spoke up about what was needed? And the opposition parties too, how switched on were they?
Since the days of Brown and Blair we have been spending too much and crushing productivity. We papered over the issues with unlimited immigration (keep costs down) and government borrowing. Neither are possible now.
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
The Tories have increased Direct Taxation in this Autumn Statement , and by doing so have set a precedent which Labour can now follow much less timidly than has been the case since the 1980s. A Top rate of Income Tax of 60% - which Thatcher happily tolerated until 1988 - now becomes a much more realistic policy option.
Quite clearly Hunt has left the main unpopular spending and austerity decisions to tackle the deficit for the likely Starmer government to deal with after the next general election. He also froze thresholds and lowered the threshold for additional rate income tax but didn't really increase tax rates, again he left it to Starmer and Reeves to do that.
A bit like Liam Byrnes 'there is no money left' note for Osborne in 2010 there will be no golden economic legacy from this Tory government as Major and Clarke left for Blair and Brown in 1997
You sound positively buoyed by this scorched earth approach to governing a country properly.
But how many Conservative MPs do Sunak and Hunt bequeath their successors
Still about the same as in 1997 but Labour face a more 1974 economic outlook than 1997
Not sure you are right on either count.
Do you think Labour get all the blame from day 1? Probably a thousand days in before some voters start to say you can’t blame it all on Tories now, we want some delivery.
The sun of post recession rebound might be out, green shoots and all that mid way through their stint, which they get all the credit for, in run down to their re-election attempt
You haven’t thought this through have you?
In May 2010 Brown Labour got just 29% of the vote. By December 2010 Ed Miliband Labour was on 40% in the polls and leading some.
Now of course the Tories recovered by 2015 but a Starmer government would have to take as tough if not tougher decisions than this Tory government did today and would soon become unpopular.
Starmer is not going to get a golden honeymoon like Blair did for years after 1997
🤣 You implying if there was an election in December 2010 Ed Miliband would have won it.
🤣 Tory MPs were still blaming Labour for economic mess this morning.
Taking the mess of a country and mess of an economy from the Tories, and turning it round in 4 years will be far more electorally valuable to Starmer than any bequeathed golden honeymoon.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
@ZoeSchiffer NEW: Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why.
We're hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they're still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for.
BNO News - Ebola outbreak: UK investigating possible Ebola case
- New cases: 0 - Average: 1 (-) - New deaths: 0 - In hospital: 10 (-) - In ICU: 3 (-) - Case fatality rate: 50%
They were excellent during COVID, but where are they getting numbers for UK from. AFAIK, its one suspected case, I can't see any mention of 3 people in ICU in the UK mainstream media.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
There must be a decent chance the service actually collapses this week.
I'm curious to know how all this blew up so suddenly?
....Six weeks ago everything seemed so normal. The Tories had got rid of Johnson because he was caught bending the rules one too many times....
....The replacements seemed ordinary bordering on the dull but at least an improvement in most peoples eyes.
......Then the Queen died and they made their choice and Truss took over and out of the blue we were facing the worst economic crisis since records began.
It's as though someone opened the books and found the most heinous skulduggery had taken place.
.......We'd been robbed and they'd got away with the lot.....
Spot on Roger. How did this suddenly blow up? If it’s simply the Tories were stupid or lying, then why didn’t the media or opposition parties explain the truth?
So if it’s the right budget, not a ideological Tory wet budget as many in Tory circle thinking tonight, then yes, where did this budget come from? Where did these hideous conditions on tax, borrowing, struggling households & businesses, so little growth for us other countries over covid slump already, come from?
Nothing from Boris or Sunak as PM and chancellor setting the ground for this was there? Nothing from Johnson’s long good bye government that the country was in this mess, nor any hint on the endless Tory campaign trail - Sunak said Truss promises would go too far but Sunak was still promising tax cuts and giveaways himself, not explaining need for this Autumn statement. Still no hint of all this budget gloom when Kwarteng first stood to deliver his budget, nor much reaction from the media it should be tax hikes and budget cuts instead, in the papers first summing up, in fact Kwarteng’s was hailed as exciting budget by Tory Press, Tory Party and by many on this blog.
So where did the need for this budget come from?
The truth is the need to tackle borrowing and raise tax to help creaking services through credit crunch was there all year. This crunch was always coming. The politicians either didn’t see it or were never honest about what would eventually be needed.
But also how much of the media were switched on to the true state of UK and spoke up about what was needed? And the opposition parties too, how switched on were they?
Since the days of Brown and Blair we have been spending too much and crushing productivity. We papered over the issues with unlimited immigration (keep costs down) and government borrowing. Neither are possible now.
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
The long running fundamental problem is low productivity. Which is what happens when you have year after year of hundreds of thousands of low skill migrants come in. The new people don't have skills and the companies don't both to invest in upskilling or automation when cheap labour will plug the gap.
Question: Do they dance through all the tiny stages or do they do the functionally identical, in this case, elimation of everyone below the SNP - none of whom can make second even with all the lower place transfers.
I'd be itching to get to the result in a single, effectively AV, transfer.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
There must be a decent chance the service actually collapses this week.
I would have thought that just keeping the lights on doesn't need masses of people. The core platform has been build for years now, just like Whatsapp doesn't need many engineers, and I think they use AWS / Google Cloud as the infrastructure to deliver the timelines. A rogue employee is certainly a possibility.
I think a bigger issue is that twitter as a company has always been a mess. It isn't some cash cow that just need some gradual improvement. It needs massive improvement of the core product and fast. Its baby out with the bath water / Trussonomics stuff going on though.
I'm curious to know how all this blew up so suddenly?
....Six weeks ago everything seemed so normal. The Tories had got rid of Johnson because he was caught bending the rules one too many times....
....The replacements seemed ordinary bordering on the dull but at least an improvement in most peoples eyes.
......Then the Queen died and they made their choice and Truss took over and out of the blue we were facing the worst economic crisis since records began.
It's as though someone opened the books and found the most heinous skulduggery had taken place.
.......We'd been robbed and they'd got away with the lot.....
Spot on Roger. How did this suddenly blow up? If it’s simply the Tories were stupid or lying, then why didn’t the media or opposition parties explain the truth?
So if it’s the right budget, not a ideological Tory wet budget as many in Tory circle thinking tonight, then yes, where did this budget come from? Where did these hideous conditions on tax, borrowing, struggling households & businesses, so little growth for us other countries over covid slump already, come from?
Nothing from Boris or Sunak as PM and chancellor setting the ground for this was there? Nothing from Johnson’s long good bye government that the country was in this mess, nor any hint on the endless Tory campaign trail - Sunak said Truss promises would go too far but Sunak was still promising tax cuts and giveaways himself, not explaining need for this Autumn statement. Still no hint of all this budget gloom when Kwarteng first stood to deliver his budget, nor much reaction from the media it should be tax hikes and budget cuts instead, in the papers first summing up, in fact Kwarteng’s was hailed as exciting budget by Tory Press, Tory Party and by many on this blog.
So where did the need for this budget come from?
The truth is the need to tackle borrowing and raise tax to help creaking services through credit crunch was there all year. This crunch was always coming. The politicians either didn’t see it or were never honest about what would eventually be needed.
But also how much of the media were switched on to the true state of UK and spoke up about what was needed? And the opposition parties too, how switched on were they?
Since the days of Brown and Blair we have been spending too much and crushing productivity. We papered over the issues with unlimited immigration (keep costs down) and government borrowing. Neither are possible now.
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
The long running fundamental problem is low productivity. Which is what happens when you have year after year of hundreds of thousands of low skill migrants come in. The new people don't have skills and the companies don't both to invest in upskilling or automation when cheap labour will plug the gap.
I think there is another long running problem in the UK. In previous recessions in the 20th century companies sank or swam, lots of unemployment, but its meant a lot of businesses had to become a lot more productive, do more with less etc. All the tales of so many businesses that made it, coming out of those recessions much stronger position due to taking hard decisions and improving every element of themselves.
Instead, instead in 2008, because of concerns about the whole system collapsing, instead we had a sort of hybrid approach, government ramped up the printing presses, where in effect everybody took a real terms pay cut over the next 10 years in return for less unemployment, but those unproductive businesses just kept chugging along.
I'm curious to know how all this blew up so suddenly?
....Six weeks ago everything seemed so normal. The Tories had got rid of Johnson because he was caught bending the rules one too many times....
....The replacements seemed ordinary bordering on the dull but at least an improvement in most peoples eyes.
......Then the Queen died and they made their choice and Truss took over and out of the blue we were facing the worst economic crisis since records began.
It's as though someone opened the books and found the most heinous skulduggery had taken place.
.......We'd been robbed and they'd got away with the lot.....
Spot on Roger. How did this suddenly blow up? If it’s simply the Tories were stupid or lying, then why didn’t the media or opposition parties explain the truth?
So if it’s the right budget, not a ideological Tory wet budget as many in Tory circle thinking tonight, then yes, where did this budget come from? Where did these hideous conditions on tax, borrowing, struggling households & businesses, so little growth for us other countries over covid slump already, come from?
Nothing from Boris or Sunak as PM and chancellor setting the ground for this was there? Nothing from Johnson’s long good bye government that the country was in this mess, nor any hint on the endless Tory campaign trail - Sunak said Truss promises would go too far but Sunak was still promising tax cuts and giveaways himself, not explaining need for this Autumn statement. Still no hint of all this budget gloom when Kwarteng first stood to deliver his budget, nor much reaction from the media it should be tax hikes and budget cuts instead, in the papers first summing up, in fact Kwarteng’s was hailed as exciting budget by Tory Press, Tory Party and by many on this blog.
So where did the need for this budget come from?
The truth is the need to tackle borrowing and raise tax to help creaking services through credit crunch was there all year. This crunch was always coming. The politicians either didn’t see it or were never honest about what would eventually be needed.
But also how much of the media were switched on to the true state of UK and spoke up about what was needed? And the opposition parties too, how switched on were they?
Since the days of Brown and Blair we have been spending too much and crushing productivity. We papered over the issues with unlimited immigration (keep costs down) and government borrowing. Neither are possible now.
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
The long running fundamental problem is low productivity. Which is what happens when you have year after year of hundreds of thousands of low skill migrants come in. The new people don't have skills and the companies don't both to invest in upskilling or automation when cheap labour will plug the gap.
I think there is another long running problem in the UK. 2008 recession, in previous recessions in the 20th century companies sank or swam, lots of unemployment, but its meant a lot of businesses had to become a lot more production, do more with less etc. Instead, instead in 2008, we had a sort of hybrid approach, government ramped up the printing presses, where everybody effectively took a real terms pay cut over the next 10 years in return for less unemployment, but those unproductive businesses just kept chugging along.
Yep, the combination of constant cheap labour at the bottom and financial bailouts during recession has meant there hasn't been any requirement for increasing productivity for 25 years. That is why we are in the mess we are in.
If you search 🫡💙 there are literally hundreds of engineers leaving Twitter in the last hour after Elon’s ridiculous deadline - and you just get the sense that this man absolutely fucked up a workplace and ethos people really loved for some sort of pointless egocentric vendetta
This is kind of the core of the problem with a lot of tech....the employees love working at a business that loses money every year with no clear path to becoming profitable, in no small part to the fact they get paid massive wages with extremely generous comps and incredible work environments in very expensive locations.
And even the ones that are profitable, it is often only a small core element that makes all the money. Then huge sums are hosed at stuff that never makes any money and gets binned e.g. Google are forever binning things or ending up with multiple teams working on essentially the same thing, all subsidised by their core ad selling offering.
I'm curious to know how all this blew up so suddenly?
....Six weeks ago everything seemed so normal. The Tories had got rid of Johnson because he was caught bending the rules one too many times....
....The replacements seemed ordinary bordering on the dull but at least an improvement in most peoples eyes.
......Then the Queen died and they made their choice and Truss took over and out of the blue we were facing the worst economic crisis since records began.
It's as though someone opened the books and found the most heinous skulduggery had taken place.
.......We'd been robbed and they'd got away with the lot.....
Spot on Roger. How did this suddenly blow up? If it’s simply the Tories were stupid or lying, then why didn’t the media or opposition parties explain the truth?
So if it’s the right budget, not a ideological Tory wet budget as many in Tory circle thinking tonight, then yes, where did this budget come from? Where did these hideous conditions on tax, borrowing, struggling households & businesses, so little growth for us other countries over covid slump already, come from?
Nothing from Boris or Sunak as PM and chancellor setting the ground for this was there? Nothing from Johnson’s long good bye government that the country was in this mess, nor any hint on the endless Tory campaign trail - Sunak said Truss promises would go too far but Sunak was still promising tax cuts and giveaways himself, not explaining need for this Autumn statement. Still no hint of all this budget gloom when Kwarteng first stood to deliver his budget, nor much reaction from the media it should be tax hikes and budget cuts instead, in the papers first summing up, in fact Kwarteng’s was hailed as exciting budget by Tory Press, Tory Party and by many on this blog.
So where did the need for this budget come from?
The truth is the need to tackle borrowing and raise tax to help creaking services through credit crunch was there all year. This crunch was always coming. The politicians either didn’t see it or were never honest about what would eventually be needed.
But also how much of the media were switched on to the true state of UK and spoke up about what was needed? And the opposition parties too, how switched on were they?
Since the days of Brown and Blair we have been spending too much and crushing productivity. We papered over the issues with unlimited immigration (keep costs down) and government borrowing. Neither are possible now.
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
The long running fundamental problem is low productivity. Which is what happens when you have year after year of hundreds of thousands of low skill migrants come in. The new people don't have skills and the companies don't both to invest in upskilling or automation when cheap labour will plug the gap.
America, with a similar rate of immigration, must be REALLY screwed then.
I'm curious to know how all this blew up so suddenly?
....Six weeks ago everything seemed so normal. The Tories had got rid of Johnson because he was caught bending the rules one too many times....
....The replacements seemed ordinary bordering on the dull but at least an improvement in most peoples eyes.
......Then the Queen died and they made their choice and Truss took over and out of the blue we were facing the worst economic crisis since records began.
It's as though someone opened the books and found the most heinous skulduggery had taken place.
.......We'd been robbed and they'd got away with the lot.....
Spot on Roger. How did this suddenly blow up? If it’s simply the Tories were stupid or lying, then why didn’t the media or opposition parties explain the truth?
So if it’s the right budget, not a ideological Tory wet budget as many in Tory circle thinking tonight, then yes, where did this budget come from? Where did these hideous conditions on tax, borrowing, struggling households & businesses, so little growth for us other countries over covid slump already, come from?
Nothing from Boris or Sunak as PM and chancellor setting the ground for this was there? Nothing from Johnson’s long good bye government that the country was in this mess, nor any hint on the endless Tory campaign trail - Sunak said Truss promises would go too far but Sunak was still promising tax cuts and giveaways himself, not explaining need for this Autumn statement. Still no hint of all this budget gloom when Kwarteng first stood to deliver his budget, nor much reaction from the media it should be tax hikes and budget cuts instead, in the papers first summing up, in fact Kwarteng’s was hailed as exciting budget by Tory Press, Tory Party and by many on this blog.
So where did the need for this budget come from?
The truth is the need to tackle borrowing and raise tax to help creaking services through credit crunch was there all year. This crunch was always coming. The politicians either didn’t see it or were never honest about what would eventually be needed.
But also how much of the media were switched on to the true state of UK and spoke up about what was needed? And the opposition parties too, how switched on were they?
Since the days of Brown and Blair we have been spending too much and crushing productivity. We papered over the issues with unlimited immigration (keep costs down) and government borrowing. Neither are possible now.
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
The long running fundamental problem is low productivity. Which is what happens when you have year after year of hundreds of thousands of low skill migrants come in. The new people don't have skills and the companies don't both to invest in upskilling or automation when cheap labour will plug the gap.
America, with a similar rate of immigration, must be REALLY screwed then.
The US does have a major, major problem with low incomes at the bottom end. Poor Americans now have lower incomes than 40 years ago.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
There must be a decent chance the service actually collapses this week.
I would have thought that just keeping the lights on doesn't need masses of people. The core platform has been build for years now, just like Whatsapp doesn't need many engineers, and I think they use AWS / Google Cloud as the infrastructure to deliver the timelines. A rogue employee is certainly a possibility.
I think a bigger issue is that twitter as a company has always been a mess. It isn't some cash cow that just need some gradual improvement. It needs massive improvement of the core product and fast. Its baby out with the bath water / Trussonomics stuff going on though.
I'm sure that's true, you can keep the system running without all those people, and the better it's been run up until now the less trouble it'll be to keep it running.
However the question is whether he's keeping the *right* people. Firing the least productive half may not be a big problem. What is likely to be a big problem is doing that, and then aggravating your employees enough that the most productive people leave.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
There must be a decent chance the service actually collapses this week.
I would have thought that just keeping the lights on doesn't need masses of people. The core platform has been build for years now, just like Whatsapp doesn't need many engineers, and I think they use AWS / Google Cloud as the infrastructure to deliver the timelines. A rogue employee is certainly a possibility.
I think a bigger issue is that twitter as a company has always been a mess. It isn't some cash cow that just need some gradual improvement. It needs massive improvement of the core product and fast. Its baby out with the bath water / Trussonomics stuff going on though.
I'm sure that's true, you can keep the system running without all those people, and the better it's been run up until now the less trouble it'll be to keep it running.
However the question is whether he's keeping the *right* people. Firing the least productive half may not be a big problem. What is likely to be a big problem is doing that, and then aggravating your employees enough that the most productive people leave.
Well that's what I said, baby out with the bath water. He gone full Big Dom.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
"activists first / employees second"
What do you mean?
Twitter almost certainly does not need 7,400 employees. So the questions then become how many does it need, which ones it needs (it's no good keeping all the graphics designers and letting go all of the server ticklers), and where they need to be (they have, and need, locations all over the world) ?
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
@ZoeSchiffer NEW: Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why.
We're hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they're still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for.
"I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices.
Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out."
There are also reports of people being locked in toilets, and in parking lots unable to drive out because their badges are disabled and the barriers will not operate for them.
There seem to be certain H&S problems in all of this...
The Tories are an utter shambles. The largest tax cut in history followed by the largest tax rise ever. My arse.
How do you think the members feel, having voted for the tax-cutting PM only to see a mutiny from the MPs, replacing her almost immediately with the tax-rising, big-spending loser in the contest?
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
If you're going to build a social media website from scratch, you're probably best not giving away the $44bn you had earmarked for the project before you start.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
The obvious thing to do from here, is to actually shut it down for a couple of weeks, and bring in outside developers to review all the code. There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
The administrator doesn’t have much good to say about how the company was run! They didn’t do a daily reconciliation, and appeared to have no audit nor data protection systems in place. Unsurprisingly, his first job is to work out what assets actually exist, and suggests forcefully that any financial statements from the previous management may be less than accurate. In other words, most of the money isn’t there.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
There must be a decent chance the service actually collapses this week.
I would have thought that just keeping the lights on doesn't need masses of people. The core platform has been build for years now, just like Whatsapp doesn't need many engineers, and I think they use AWS / Google Cloud as the infrastructure to deliver the timelines. A rogue employee is certainly a possibility.
I think a bigger issue is that twitter as a company has always been a mess. It isn't some cash cow that just need some gradual improvement. It needs massive improvement of the core product and fast. Its baby out with the bath water / Trussonomics stuff going on though.
I'm sure that's true, you can keep the system running without all those people, and the better it's been run up until now the less trouble it'll be to keep it running.
However the question is whether he's keeping the *right* people. Firing the least productive half may not be a big problem. What is likely to be a big problem is doing that, and then aggravating your employees enough that the most productive people leave.
Most of those staying are likely to be the ones on visas - they don't have a choice.
And it never was about 'firing the right people' when Musk started making the job worse than unattractive from the getgo. 'The good people' are the ones who will find it easiest to get a better gig elsewhere. And a lot have.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
The obvious thing to do from here, is to actually shut it down for a couple of weeks, and bring in outside developers to review all the code. There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
Sounds like a great plan for retaining your ad revenue.
The Gox one was more fun in terms of total management obliviousness: Not only had their wallet been compromised years before without Mark noticing, the hacker had imported their keys into their own wallet and was using them to generate addresses, so the hacker continued to get money from Gox, but also Gox was getting money intended for the hacker.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
The obvious thing to do from here, is to actually shut it down for a couple of weeks, and bring in outside developers to review all the code. There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
"There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. "
It's breadth is tiny. It's depth is massive.
Twitter has nearly hundreds of millions of users, who are in dozens of countries. It is not just designing an app; it's ensuring those users get a reliable service, even when reading tweets from the other side of the world.
The Cloud etc makes this easier nowadays. But it is still a large undertaking, with lots of backend stuff that needs to be done. The server ticklers are just as vital as the app developers. Heck, even backups are 'core'.
There are several people on here who could probably write a Twitter-style web service or app (*), either alone or as a group. It is not particularly difficult. To do it efficiently, to millions of users in many different countries, is a different matter.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
The obvious thing to do from here, is to actually shut it down for a couple of weeks, and bring in outside developers to review all the code. There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
If Twitter is down for a couple of weeks, how many users are lost forever?
"I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices.
Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out."
There are also reports of people being locked in toilets, and in parking lots unable to drive out because their badges are disabled and the barriers will not operate for them.
There seem to be certain H&S problems in all of this...
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
The obvious thing to do from here, is to actually shut it down for a couple of weeks, and bring in outside developers to review all the code. There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
If Twitter is down for a couple of weeks, how many users are lost forever?
And how many of their advertising contracts ? The lost revenue will likely outweigh any saving on employment expenses.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
The obvious thing to do from here, is to actually shut it down for a couple of weeks, and bring in outside developers to review all the code. There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
If Twitter is down for a couple of weeks, how many users are lost forever?
Against that, is the risk of a number of rogue employees sabotaging the company before quitting.
Does the new management *know* there isn’t an “rm -rf” job scheduled to run at some point in the future?
"I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices.
Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out."
There are also reports of people being locked in toilets, and in parking lots unable to drive out because their badges are disabled and the barriers will not operate for them.
There seem to be certain H&S problems in all of this...
You realise that's a parody account ?
Nope, and tweet is deleted. He got a reply from Musk though which is also a little bit of a problem.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
The obvious thing to do from here, is to actually shut it down for a couple of weeks, and bring in outside developers to review all the code. There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
If Twitter is down for a couple of weeks, how many users are lost forever?
Against that, is the risk of a number of rogue employees sabotaging the company before quitting.
Does the new management *know* there isn’t an “rm -rf” job scheduled to run at some point in the future?
Musky baby should have thought about that before so incompetently forcing out so many people.
I mean, he's a genius super-tech bro, isn't he?
If anyone had not noticed, I've gone from being a Musk fan, to someone who thinks he is a bit of a prat, to someone who thinks Musk is an utter and total waste of space.
I'm now at the stage of thinking that everything he says is a lie. "Is Musk lying?" "Is he breathing?" "He's breathing." "Then he's lying."
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
The obvious thing to do from here, is to actually shut it down for a couple of weeks, and bring in outside developers to review all the code. There can’t be more than a couple of dozen actual core developers required, for what’s a tiny product. It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
If Twitter is down for a couple of weeks, how many users are lost forever?
Against that, is the risk of a number of rogue employees sabotaging the company before quitting.
Does the new management *know* there isn’t an “rm -rf” job scheduled to run at some point in the future?
Musky baby should have thought about that before so incompetently forcing out so many people.
I mean, he's a genius super-tech bro, isn't he?
If anyone had not noticed, I've gone from being a Musk fan, to someone who thinks he is a bit of a prat, to someone who thinks Musk is an utter and total waste of space.
I'm now at the stage of thinking that everything he says is a lie. "Is Musk lying?" "Is he breathing?" "He's breathing." "Then he's lying."
Has he ever considered a career in the Department of Education?
Quite the socialist budget. Actually more than that because the burden is falling heavily on middle income tax payers.
As ever with this lot, it's socialism for the Tory core vote and the harsh gales of the free market for everyone else. Ignore the tinkering around the edges: the long term thrust of policy remains to funnel an ever-increasing share of national wealth to older, mortgage-free homeowners (and thus, in the long run, to regress to an Eighteenth Century economic model, in which wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of property owners, the main mechanism of enrichment is inheritance, and the large majority of those not born into the "right" families live poor and die poor.) Consider:
*The income of the average pensioner after housing costs is now higher than that of the average worker - and yes, I know that not all pensioners own their own homes, but most do (and the ones who don't vote Labour so the Government doesn't care about them.)
*The triple lock remains in place, with no indication that it will ever be repealed, which means that the low wage economy (pay settlements almost invariably being lower than the rate of inflation) will continue to impoverish people on earned incomes, whilst they watch helpless as pensioners with their generous guarantees accelerate further into the distance ahead of them.
*The Government still plans, even if it's delayed the measure, to implement a social care cap, which will mean that rich pensioners in fabulously expensive properties will have their crippling care costs paid out of general taxation above a certain limit. Yet more transfer of wealth from struggling low income families to allow old people to hoard their assets and pass as much as possible on to their heirs.
*We're all aware of the imbalance between supply and demand in housing, which grows more acute every single year. This is, of course, also a matter of deliberate policy. Choking off supply guarantees a near-continuous house price spiral, enriching existing owners and making living costs increasingly unbearable for the have-nots. Building homes almost anywhere results in an eruption of Nimby rage from comfortable, mostly older, voters who don't want supply to be eased because they want those lovely prices to keep escalating unchecked.
*The Government's program of tax rises consists principally of freezing tax allowances, and waiting for fiscal drag to do the rest - pulling millions of low and middle income earners into higher bands, and once again crushing earned incomes (which are already, of course, contracting at a rate of knots in real terms because of inflation,) in order to raise more money to throw at pensioners, without levying more tax on property.
There's no future at all for a country that hates its youth, and shuns investing in them and its productive capacity in favour of showering unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (pensioners) with cash. But that's how Britain works, and the grey vote is now so huge that it looks like there's no way out of the doom loop. Collectively, as a nation, we are finished.
FWIW, I think the OBR forecasts are too pessimistic. They appear to be forecasting flat-growth for years.
This might be the "responsible" thing to project, to ensure protection of the public finances, but I don't think it will happen. Post-Covid and post-Ukraine there should be a supply constraint lift, and demand will sort itself out, bringing down inflation, and I think the confidence that causes in the West will start to lift up investment and growth.
I'm curious to know how all this blew up so suddenly?
....Six weeks ago everything seemed so normal. The Tories had got rid of Johnson because he was caught bending the rules one too many times....
....The replacements seemed ordinary bordering on the dull but at least an improvement in most peoples eyes.
......Then the Queen died and they made their choice and Truss took over and out of the blue we were facing the worst economic crisis since records began.
It's as though someone opened the books and found the most heinous skulduggery had taken place.
.......We'd been robbed and they'd got away with the lot.....
Spot on Roger. How did this suddenly blow up? If it’s simply the Tories were stupid or lying, then why didn’t the media or opposition parties explain the truth?
So if it’s the right budget, not a ideological Tory wet budget as many in Tory circle thinking tonight, then yes, where did this budget come from? Where did these hideous conditions on tax, borrowing, struggling households & businesses, so little growth for us other countries over covid slump already, come from?
Nothing from Boris or Sunak as PM and chancellor setting the ground for this was there? Nothing from Johnson’s long good bye government that the country was in this mess, nor any hint on the endless Tory campaign trail - Sunak said Truss promises would go too far but Sunak was still promising tax cuts and giveaways himself, not explaining need for this Autumn statement. Still no hint of all this budget gloom when Kwarteng first stood to deliver his budget, nor much reaction from the media it should be tax hikes and budget cuts instead, in the papers first summing up, in fact Kwarteng’s was hailed as exciting budget by Tory Press, Tory Party and by many on this blog.
So where did the need for this budget come from?
The truth is the need to tackle borrowing and raise tax to help creaking services through credit crunch was there all year. This crunch was always coming. The politicians either didn’t see it or were never honest about what would eventually be needed.
But also how much of the media were switched on to the true state of UK and spoke up about what was needed? And the opposition parties too, how switched on were they?
Since the days of Brown and Blair we have been spending too much and crushing productivity. We papered over the issues with unlimited immigration (keep costs down) and government borrowing. Neither are possible now.
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
The long running fundamental problem is low productivity. Which is what happens when you have year after year of hundreds of thousands of low skill migrants come in. The new people don't have skills and the companies don't both to invest in upskilling or automation when cheap labour will plug the gap.
Nothing to do with 1980s labour market reforms designed to disempower labour at the expense of capital then?
FWIW, I think the OBR forecasts are too pessimistic. They appear to be forecasting flat-growth for years.
This might be the "responsible" thing to project, to ensure protection of the public finances, but I don't think it will happen. Post-Covid and post-Ukraine there should be a supply constraint lift, and demand will sort itself out, bringing down inflation, and I think the confidence that causes in the West will start to lift up investment and growth.
Not to 2.5% pa again, but better than this.
My gut feeling is that you're probably right about the near term outlook, but the reality is that it's very uncertain, and there is every chance that it could be even worse than forecast. I do think we have a problem with longer term growth and I find it hard to be optimistic there.
Lets put this into perspective — at the beginning of this month, Twitter had 7,400 employees. Barely half way through the month, if 75% do actually stick to their decision today, the company will have shrunk by a whopping ~88%.
Musk seems to be taking the Big Dom approach....he isn't wrong in the analysis that twitter doesn't need 7400 employees to run their service and many seem to be activists first / employees second (the content moderation is mostly out-sourced). But he is going for the burn it down and start again approach, which as a Sir Humphrey might say brave.
There must be a decent chance the service actually collapses this week.
Especially since someone decided to have a World Cup soon.
According to the New York Times, employees at Twitter just began hanging up as Elon Musk was talking during videoconference call today, apparently deciding to quit and take the severance package as the 5 pm deadline passed.
FWIW, I think the OBR forecasts are too pessimistic. They appear to be forecasting flat-growth for years.
This might be the "responsible" thing to project, to ensure protection of the public finances, but I don't think it will happen. Post-Covid and post-Ukraine there should be a supply constraint lift, and demand will sort itself out, bringing down inflation, and I think the confidence that causes in the West will start to lift up investment and growth.
Not to 2.5% pa again, but better than this.
They are still predicting 2.5% growth in 2025.
Given the likely persistence of high (t though falling) energy price next year, and the growing squeeze on middle incomes, and therefore consumer spending, their forecasts for 2023 and 2024 don't look overly pessimistic.
Covid will continue to affect China next year, which will have a chilling effect on the world economy, and its uncertain how long the Ukraine conflict carries on.
Things might turn out better, but there's space on the downside, too.
The Twitter episode of the eventual Musk Netflix biopic is gonna be pretty wild.
Quite amusing browsing #twitterrip. So much hyperbole. Even our own JJ has fallen down with a severe bout of MDS.
Why is it MDS? Are you saying this is all some form of genius masterplan that we're not God-level enough to understand?
In which case, can you explain it to us? For us plebs, it just looks like an hilarious clusterf*ck of epic proportions.
It's a bit like the more famous "Boris Derangement Syndrome" - can you imagine there were people who had such a totally irrational dislike of Johnson (probably jealousy) that they thought he was unfit to be Prime Minister!
Quite the socialist budget. Actually more than that because the burden is falling heavily on middle income tax payers.
As ever with this lot, it's socialism for the Tory core vote and the harsh gales of the free market for everyone else. Ignore the tinkering around the edges: the long term thrust of policy remains to funnel an ever-increasing share of national wealth to older, mortgage-free homeowners (and thus, in the long run, to regress to an Eighteenth Century economic model, in which wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of property owners, the main mechanism of enrichment is inheritance, and the large majority of those not born into the "right" families live poor and die poor.) Consider:
*The income of the average pensioner after housing costs is now higher than that of the average worker - and yes, I know that not all pensioners own their own homes, but most do (and the ones who don't vote Labour so the Government doesn't care about them.)
*The triple lock remains in place, with no indication that it will ever be repealed, which means that the low wage economy (pay settlements almost invariably being lower than the rate of inflation) will continue to impoverish people on earned incomes, whilst they watch helpless as pensioners with their generous guarantees accelerate further into the distance ahead of them.
*The Government still plans, even if it's delayed the measure, to implement a social care cap, which will mean that rich pensioners in fabulously expensive properties will have their crippling care costs paid out of general taxation above a certain limit. Yet more transfer of wealth from struggling low income families to allow old people to hoard their assets and pass as much as possible on to their heirs.
*We're all aware of the imbalance between supply and demand in housing, which grows more acute every single year. This is, of course, also a matter of deliberate policy. Choking off supply guarantees a near-continuous house price spiral, enriching existing owners and making living costs increasingly unbearable for the have-nots. Building homes almost anywhere results in an eruption of Nimby rage from comfortable, mostly older, voters who don't want supply to be eased because they want those lovely prices to keep escalating unchecked.
*The Government's program of tax rises consists principally of freezing tax allowances, and waiting for fiscal drag to do the rest - pulling millions of low and middle income earners into higher bands, and once again crushing earned incomes (which are already, of course, contracting at a rate of knots in real terms because of inflation,) in order to raise more money to throw at pensioners, without levying more tax on property.
There's no future at all for a country that hates its youth, and shuns investing in them and its productive capacity in favour of showering unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (pensioners) with cash. But that's how Britain works, and the grey vote is now so huge that it looks like there's no way out of the doom loop. Collectively, as a nation, we are finished.
Some truth in this but:
There is no future for a country where young people don't vote.
Labour is clearly on track to win the next election so the above doesn't work.
Not all NIMBYs are old
Benefits for young as well as old rose by inflation
The point about income 'after housing costs': Gosh. People have more money after paying off mortgages. Who knew?
If Tories care about social care costs they have a strange way of showing it.
We have no idea what Labour will do about your points. But I doubt if they plan to bankrupt OAPs.
You can't win an election on old votes alone. The budget hit hard lots of natural Tory aspirational non-OAPs.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Google are diversifying a bit, in fairness. The bulk of revenue/income is absolutely ads, but in a field in which they are utterly dominant, and with a product that is effective (and practically essential) for brands.
But they have Cloud, Play, their Android interests, physical products like Pixel. And YouTube, while still ad-funded, is a different advertising proposition and continues to grow (and in terms of viewing hours and minutes is the single most popular video platform for under-24s; beats linear TV, subscription VoD like Netflix and broadcaster VoD. It’s a giant).
Meta seem more vulnerable to market changes, as their various attempts to diversify have largely failed so far.
Twitter is more precarious still, as even pre-Musk it sat in an odd place in the advertising ecosystem, and it’s targeting product is half a decade behind Meta’s sophisticated offering. He’s right to look at different revenue models, but probably shouldn’t be burning down the existing one first. And you’re right about payment. Oddly, folk are more apt to pay a four or five quid monthly increase to something they were already paying for, than even a pound for something they use regularly but is currently free. The psychology of pricing is interesting. For me, I assume because something is free, the value (my data) has already been exchanged and therefore I resent then *also* paying on top. That’s why I don’t think subscription will work.
Amazon of course have this all sewn up, and why Bezos is many times the business operator that Musk is - because he is relentlessly focused on the customer (and of course, wisely invested in the bedrock of the internet in AWS).
I'm curious to know how all this blew up so suddenly?
....Six weeks ago everything seemed so normal. The Tories had got rid of Johnson because he was caught bending the rules one too many times....
....The replacements seemed ordinary bordering on the dull but at least an improvement in most peoples eyes.
......Then the Queen died and they made their choice and Truss took over and out of the blue we were facing the worst economic crisis since records began.
It's as though someone opened the books and found the most heinous skulduggery had taken place.
.......We'd been robbed and they'd got away with the lot.....
Spot on Roger. How did this suddenly blow up? If it’s simply the Tories were stupid or lying, then why didn’t the media or opposition parties explain the truth?
So if it’s the right budget, not a ideological Tory wet budget as many in Tory circle thinking tonight, then yes, where did this budget come from? Where did these hideous conditions on tax, borrowing, struggling households & businesses, so little growth for us other countries over covid slump already, come from?
Nothing from Boris or Sunak as PM and chancellor setting the ground for this was there? Nothing from Johnson’s long good bye government that the country was in this mess, nor any hint on the endless Tory campaign trail - Sunak said Truss promises would go too far but Sunak was still promising tax cuts and giveaways himself, not explaining need for this Autumn statement. Still no hint of all this budget gloom when Kwarteng first stood to deliver his budget, nor much reaction from the media it should be tax hikes and budget cuts instead, in the papers first summing up, in fact Kwarteng’s was hailed as exciting budget by Tory Press, Tory Party and by many on this blog.
So where did the need for this budget come from?
The truth is the need to tackle borrowing and raise tax to help creaking services through credit crunch was there all year. This crunch was always coming. The politicians either didn’t see it or were never honest about what would eventually be needed.
But also how much of the media were switched on to the true state of UK and spoke up about what was needed? And the opposition parties too, how switched on were they?
Since the days of Brown and Blair we have been spending too much and crushing productivity. We papered over the issues with unlimited immigration (keep costs down) and government borrowing. Neither are possible now.
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
The long running fundamental problem is low productivity. Which is what happens when you have year after year of hundreds of thousands of low skill migrants come in. The new people don't have skills and the companies don't both to invest in upskilling or automation when cheap labour will plug the gap.
Nothing to do with 1980s labour market reforms designed to disempower labour at the expense of capital then?
And the sclerotic influence of finance capitalism that has no idea how to do anything productive, or interest in that which is produced.
The Twitter episode of the eventual Musk Netflix biopic is gonna be pretty wild.
Quite amusing browsing #twitterrip. So much hyperbole. Even our own JJ has fallen down with a severe bout of MDS.
Why is it MDS? Are you saying this is all some form of genius masterplan that we're not God-level enough to understand?
In which case, can you explain it to us? For us plebs, it just looks like an hilarious clusterf*ck of epic proportions.
Even if the servers hold up, I'd like to see an explanation of how this works financially. The extra billion a year in financing costs, for a company that was only intermittently profitable, means that even drastic cost cutting isn't going to sort things out.
And he's just sabotaged a significant amount of his ad revenue.
Having already announced that he's actively looking for a CEO to hand over the running to, how is the Musk genius going to stretch between his existing ventures and the new toy ?
Question: Do they dance through all the tiny stages or do they do the functionally identical, in this case, elimation of everyone below the SNP - none of whom can make second even with all the lower place transfers.
I'd be itching to get to the result in a single, effectively AV, transfer.
Time for a courageous politician who will be listened to to announce that Brexit is costing the UK £40 billion each year and will continue to do so.
This is £32 billion more than we were paying into the EU for services as advertised on the Red Bus. It is causing the country genuine hardship from which we are unlikely to recover.
Ideally the person announcing their Damascene conversion will be a respected Brexiteer. The likes of Lord Wolfson of Next won't cut it. It needs to be someone who would command all the front pages and would lead the news for days.
It needs to be someone who would open the floodgates,
Boris would be ideal. Even Cummings would be a possibility. Gove is considered a heavyweight intellectual by Tories so he might do. But it has to be done quickly and the narrative could change overnight. A new mood of optimism could sweep the country
The Twitter episode of the eventual Musk Netflix biopic is gonna be pretty wild.
Quite amusing browsing #twitterrip. So much hyperbole. Even our own JJ has fallen down with a severe bout of MDS.
Why is it MDS? Are you saying this is all some form of genius masterplan that we're not God-level enough to understand?
In which case, can you explain it to us? For us plebs, it just looks like an hilarious clusterf*ck of epic proportions.
Even if the servers hold up, I'd like to see an explanation of how this works financially. The extra billion a year in financing costs, for a company that was only intermittently profitable, means that even drastic cost cutting isn't going to sort things out.
And he's just sabotaged a significant amount of his ad revenue.
Having already announced that he's actively looking for a CEO to hand over the running to, how is the Musk genius going to stretch between his existing ventures and the new toy ?
Its running costs have only been about $3bn a year. If he’s succeeded in halving that for the same product offering, even with the debt interest on top that’s a pretty good cost base to grow from as they build out new revenue sources. His “hardcore” message shows he wants to build a startup culture at Twitter, which had become lazy in its approach to innovation, bloated in its operating model and without a credible plan to become long term self sustainable.
The burn it down to start again approach might not work but he’s giving a good crack and he has a good track record of forcing success.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
I'd have been happy to pay for twitter, there are a bunch of things they didn't have that I wanted and other things they could have restricted to make me cough up without driving out non-paying users.
But instead he wrapped it up with this weird grudge about verification resulting from some kind of falling out between Silicon Valley and US journalists.
If you search 🫡💙 there are literally hundreds of engineers leaving Twitter in the last hour after Elon’s ridiculous deadline - and you just get the sense that this man absolutely fucked up a workplace and ethos people really loved for some sort of pointless egocentric vendetta
This is kind of the core of the problem with a lot of tech....the employees love working at a business that loses money every year with no clear path to becoming profitable, in no small part to the fact they get paid massive wages with extremely generous comps and incredible work environments in very expensive locations.
And even the ones that are profitable, it is often only a small core element that makes all the money. Then huge sums are hosed at stuff that never makes any money and gets binned e.g. Google are forever binning things or ending up with multiple teams working on essentially the same thing, all subsidised by their core ad selling offering.
Well, that’s an interesting view, but it’s not very well grounded in reality when it comes to Twitter. Twitter had two profitable years before the pandemic. It’s been hit by a decline in advertising spend, but it has been profitable and it has a “clear path to becoming profitable”… or it did until Musk took over.
Right now, Twitter’s core problem is that Musk is dumb.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Google are diversifying a bit, in fairness. The bulk of revenue/income is absolutely ads, but in a field in which they are utterly dominant, and with a product that is effective (and practically essential) for brands.
But they have Cloud, Play, their Android interests, physical products like Pixel. And YouTube, while still ad-funded, is a different advertising proposition and continues to grow (and in terms of viewing hours and minutes is the single most popular video platform for under-24s; beats linear TV, subscription VoD like Netflix and broadcaster VoD. It’s a giant).
Meta seem more vulnerable to market changes, as their various attempts to diversify have largely failed so far.
Twitter is more precarious still, as even pre-Musk it sat in an odd place in the advertising ecosystem, and it’s targeting product is half a decade behind Meta’s sophisticated offering. He’s right to look at different revenue models, but probably shouldn’t be burning down the existing one first. And you’re right about payment. Oddly, folk are more apt to pay a four or five quid monthly increase to something they were already paying for, than even a pound for something they use regularly but is currently free. The psychology of pricing is interesting. For me, I assume because something is free, the value (my data) has already been exchanged and therefore I resent then *also* paying on top. That’s why I don’t think subscription will work.
Amazon of course have this all sewn up, and why Bezos is many times the business operator that Musk is - because he is relentlessly focused on the customer (and of course, wisely invested in the bedrock of the internet in AWS).
Also rambling; also in need of coffee.
Points: Unless you are totally conformist the only way of relating to the world of online/advanced capitalism/advertising lies etc is to carefully pick your way through it and don't think about the rest. In this respect the much maligned Amazon is a winner.
Recently I looked at 2 mins of TV advertising. It was just shocking and a total affront.
To lots of people there is much more resistance to paying for anything accessed online compared with anything tangible.
Daily newspapers are dead because their old use does not conform to the 24hour pattern. Serious weeklies and monthlies are in some cases doing OK, even in hard copy subscription.
As a test, what monthly fee would people pay to see/contribute to PB? (Or perhaps how much would you pay to see it disappear).
FWIW, I think the OBR forecasts are too pessimistic. They appear to be forecasting flat-growth for years.
This might be the "responsible" thing to project, to ensure protection of the public finances, but I don't think it will happen. Post-Covid and post-Ukraine there should be a supply constraint lift, and demand will sort itself out, bringing down inflation, and I think the confidence that causes in the West will start to lift up investment and growth.
Not to 2.5% pa again, but better than this.
They are still predicting 2.5% growth in 2025.
Given the likely persistence of high (t though falling) energy price next year, and the growing squeeze on middle incomes, and therefore consumer spending, their forecasts for 2023 and 2024 don't look overly pessimistic.
Covid will continue to affect China next year, which will have a chilling effect on the world economy, and its uncertain how long the Ukraine conflict carries on.
Things might turn out better, but there's space on the downside, too.
Tbf to Casino maybe the OBR are predicting flat growth for the years 2010 to 2024?
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Google are diversifying a bit, in fairness. The bulk of revenue/income is absolutely ads, but in a field in which they are utterly dominant, and with a product that is effective (and practically essential) for brands.
But they have Cloud, Play, their Android interests, physical products like Pixel. And YouTube, while still ad-funded, is a different advertising proposition and continues to grow (and in terms of viewing hours and minutes is the single most popular video platform for under-24s; beats linear TV, subscription VoD like Netflix and broadcaster VoD. It’s a giant).
Meta seem more vulnerable to market changes, as their various attempts to diversify have largely failed so far.
Twitter is more precarious still, as even pre-Musk it sat in an odd place in the advertising ecosystem, and it’s targeting product is half a decade behind Meta’s sophisticated offering. He’s right to look at different revenue models, but probably shouldn’t be burning down the existing one first. And you’re right about payment. Oddly, folk are more apt to pay a four or five quid monthly increase to something they were already paying for, than even a pound for something they use regularly but is currently free. The psychology of pricing is interesting. For me, I assume because something is free, the value (my data) has already been exchanged and therefore I resent then *also* paying on top. That’s why I don’t think subscription will work.
Amazon of course have this all sewn up, and why Bezos is many times the business operator that Musk is - because he is relentlessly focused on the customer (and of course, wisely invested in the bedrock of the internet in AWS).
Also rambling; also in need of coffee.
Google's advertising revenue is fairly robust - it comes at the point people are actively looking for XYZ so there is a fairly quick and trackable link between advertising costs and revenue.
Meta / Twitter are very much background display advertising. The argument was often made (by both firms) that immediate success wasn't their purpose - it was about introducing the brand to the customer and / or keeping your brand in the customer's mind. And Twitter wasn't great at doing that (the number of utterly inappropriate ads was massive) but it's way worse now.
Worth saying Amazon are also cutting back - 10,000 redundancies this week. And remember a lot of Amazon workers don't actually work directly for Amazon they are just short term agency staff.
Musk doesn't have some super secret genius plan for Twitter, we know this from the texts and messages shared from the court case. He bought Twitter because he's plugged into the same American right-wing echo chamber Leon is.
Time for a courageous politician who will be listened to to announce that Brexit is costing the UK £40 billion each year and will continue to do so.
This is £32 billion more than we were paying into the EU for services as advertised on the Red Bus. It is causing the country genuine hardship from which we are unlikely to recover.
Ideally the person announcing their Damascene conversion will be a respected Brexiteer. The likes of Lord Wolfson of Next won't cut it. It needs to be someone who would command all the front pages and would lead the news for days.
It needs to be someone who would open the floodgates,
Boris would be ideal. Even Cummings would be a possibility. Gove is considered a heavyweight intellectual by Tories so he might do. But it has to be done quickly and the narrative could change overnight. A new mood of optimism could sweep the country
I'm not sure it would change the narrative *for the Tories*. It would be more like one of the cats fighting in the bag of cats saying "on second thoughts, I don't think we should have got into this bag after all".
If you search 🫡💙 there are literally hundreds of engineers leaving Twitter in the last hour after Elon’s ridiculous deadline - and you just get the sense that this man absolutely fucked up a workplace and ethos people really loved for some sort of pointless egocentric vendetta
This is kind of the core of the problem with a lot of tech....the employees love working at a business that loses money every year with no clear path to becoming profitable, in no small part to the fact they get paid massive wages with extremely generous comps and incredible work environments in very expensive locations.
And even the ones that are profitable, it is often only a small core element that makes all the money. Then huge sums are hosed at stuff that never makes any money and gets binned e.g. Google are forever binning things or ending up with multiple teams working on essentially the same thing, all subsidised by their core ad selling offering.
Indeed, there's an old expression that when a new management team with a reputation for brilliance, takes over a firm with a reputation for a bad culture, its the culture that remains.
88% of staff leaving, if that is indeed what has happened, is probably here in both parties interests. The leaving staff can be happy together that they left in solidarity and gave it to the man. Musk can build a new culture without those staff. Win/win.
I've no idea whether Musk's Twitter will be a success or not, but pre-Musk Twitter was a toxic hellhole anyway.
There's another aspect to all of this that's worth considering:
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
Free services I couldn't face living without: 1. Wikipedia, 2. Google, 3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Musk doesn't have some super secret genius plan for Twitter, we know this from the texts and messages shared from the court case. He bought Twitter because he's plugged into the same American right-wing echo chamber Leon is.
Morning all! The morning after the night before, and we're all waking up with a massive hangover from a 6 year bender that a majority of voters hadn't accepted was such.
As others have pointed out up-thread, the unique to the UK factor is Brexit. It has consumed our politics for 10 years and we're permanently economically and politically poorer because of it. Remaining people who are still off their tits insist all is good, but the facts - economic data that can no longer be denied or excused - now clearly disprove them.
'Why did the media or opposition politicians not point this out' was the question asked. Some did. I know the SNP up here crow on about it. Some hacks have gone at it. But in reality whilst the nation partied it was hard to deny there was a party happening. You won't be thanked by the alcoholic for taking the bottle away no matter how much that needs to happen. And in electoral politics you need to be thanked...
Hopefully now we can have a more honest conversation about the damage done and the options to repair it. Pointing to all the areas where Britain is poorer - everything from infrastructure to social care to crumbling public services or the ludicrous cost of crappy everything - this is not talking Britain down. This is wanting to fix these things. As with anyone with a problem help can only really begin once they accept they have a problem.
The Twitter episode of the eventual Musk Netflix biopic is gonna be pretty wild.
Quite amusing browsing #twitterrip. So much hyperbole. Even our own JJ has fallen down with a severe bout of MDS.
Why is it MDS? Are you saying this is all some form of genius masterplan that we're not God-level enough to understand?
In which case, can you explain it to us? For us plebs, it just looks like an hilarious clusterf*ck of epic proportions.
Even if the servers hold up, I'd like to see an explanation of how this works financially. The extra billion a year in financing costs, for a company that was only intermittently profitable, means that even drastic cost cutting isn't going to sort things out.
And he's just sabotaged a significant amount of his ad revenue.
Having already announced that he's actively looking for a CEO to hand over the running to, how is the Musk genius going to stretch between his existing ventures and the new toy ?
Musk might do better to cut his losses and sell Twitter as a job lot for, say, $22 billion, half what he paid for it, rather than keep swinging his wrecking ball.
Comments
The Wicked Witch of the West is melting . . . melting . . . melting . . .
On the other hand, the Wicked Witch of the East, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is her re-election in GA14 by 2/1, by over 80k vote margin.
"The OBR said it expected a million more people to claim sickness benefits over the next five years compared to forecasts just six months ago as the health service struggles to deal with record NHS backlogs.
Rising long term sickness means Britain is the only major economy to have seen a significant decline in its workforce since the pandemic."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/11/17/welfare-bill-soars-90bn-jeremy-hunt-protects-pensioners-clobbers/
Neverthless, seems the Rishi bounce is over.
It’s the rather tedious and thankless task of managing defeat and decline from hereonin.
SO which party had ruled the borough and let the roads go to ruination since (at least) 1967?
The reason for the omerta is that all the political parties have something to hide The Tories for being 100% responsible for Brexit and Labour not wanting to offend their Red wallers who were taken in by it.
And of course SKS is now 'out' as a Brexiteer himself
https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1593395225371688960?s=46&t=71a9GIZIJ1DjE6rcoI17CQ
Now of course the Tories recovered by 2015 but a Starmer government would have to take as tough if not tougher decisions than this Tory government did today and would soon become unpopular.
Starmer is not going to get a golden honeymoon like Blair did for years after 1997
It’s 25 years of mismanagement coming home to roost
🤣 Tory MPs were still blaming Labour for economic mess this morning.
Taking the mess of a country and mess of an economy from the Tories, and turning it round in 4 years will be far more electorally valuable to Starmer than any bequeathed golden honeymoon.
NEW: Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why.
We're hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they're still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for.
https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593391604785504257
Labour: 2227 (43.4%, +11.4)
SNP: 1702 (33.2%, -0.2)
Green: 409 (8.0%, +1.9)
Con: 327 (6.4%, -5.1)
Lib Dem: 294 (5.7%, -0.6)
Alba: 90 (1.8%, +0.5)
SSP: 46 (0.9%, new)
UKIP: 19 (0.4%, new)
FA: 18 (0.4%, new)
Labour elected stage TBC.
- New cases: 0
- Average: 1 (-)
- New deaths: 0
- In hospital: 10 (-)
- In ICU: 3 (-)
- Case fatality rate: 50%
They were excellent during COVID, but where are they getting numbers for UK from. AFAIK, its one suspected case, I can't see any mention of 3 people in ICU in the UK mainstream media.
I'd be itching to get to the result in a single, effectively AV, transfer.
I think a bigger issue is that twitter as a company has always been a mess. It isn't some cash cow that just need some gradual improvement. It needs massive improvement of the core product and fast. Its baby out with the bath water / Trussonomics stuff going on though.
Instead, instead in 2008, because of concerns about the whole system collapsing, instead we had a sort of hybrid approach, government ramped up the printing presses, where in effect everybody took a real terms pay cut over the next 10 years in return for less unemployment, but those unproductive businesses just kept chugging along.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232?s=20&t=PguRyTdK9C6N8qtA9hQbZg
https://twitter.com/thomas_k_r/status/1593382901638434816?s=20&t=PguRyTdK9C6N8qtA9hQbZg
This is kind of the core of the problem with a lot of tech....the employees love working at a business that loses money every year with no clear path to becoming profitable, in no small part to the fact they get paid massive wages with extremely generous comps and incredible work environments in very expensive locations.
And even the ones that are profitable, it is often only a small core element that makes all the money. Then huge sums are hosed at stuff that never makes any money and gets binned e.g. Google are forever binning things or ending up with multiple teams working on essentially the same thing, all subsidised by their core ad selling offering.
However the question is whether he's keeping the *right* people. Firing the least productive half may not be a big problem. What is likely to be a big problem is doing that, and then aggravating your employees enough that the most productive people leave.
What do you mean?
Twitter almost certainly does not need 7,400 employees. So the questions then become how many does it need, which ones it needs (it's no good keeping all the graphics designers and letting go all of the server ticklers), and where they need to be (they have, and need, locations all over the world) ?
Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out."
https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593404311832338442
To his credit, he did it.
There are also reports of people being locked in toilets, and in parking lots unable to drive out because their badges are disabled and the barriers will not operate for them.
There seem to be certain H&S problems in all of this...
It’s almost certain that hundreds of current employees have way too much access to the systems.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/17/ftx-ceo-shreds-bankman-fried-never-seen-such-a-failure-of-controls-.html
And it never was about 'firing the right people' when Musk started making the job worse than unattractive from the getgo.
'The good people' are the ones who will find it easiest to get a better gig elsewhere. And a lot have.
It's breadth is tiny. It's depth is massive.
Twitter has nearly hundreds of millions of users, who are in dozens of countries. It is not just designing an app; it's ensuring those users get a reliable service, even when reading tweets from the other side of the world.
The Cloud etc makes this easier nowadays. But it is still a large undertaking, with lots of backend stuff that needs to be done. The server ticklers are just as vital as the app developers. Heck, even backups are 'core'.
There are several people on here who could probably write a Twitter-style web service or app (*), either alone or as a group. It is not particularly difficult. To do it efficiently, to millions of users in many different countries, is a different matter.
(*) I am not one.
Quite the socialist budget. Actually more than that because the burden is falling heavily on middle income tax payers.
The lost revenue will likely outweigh any saving on employment expenses.
Does the new management *know* there isn’t an “rm -rf” job scheduled to run at some point in the future?
I mean, he's a genius super-tech bro, isn't he?
If anyone had not noticed, I've gone from being a Musk fan, to someone who thinks he is a bit of a prat, to someone who thinks Musk is an utter and total waste of space.
I'm now at the stage of thinking that everything he says is a lie.
"Is Musk lying?"
"Is he breathing?"
"He's breathing."
"Then he's lying."
Many web-facing companies such as Meta/Alphabet rely on a finite amount of advertising resources for much of their revenue. It is not a brilliant business model when an economic crisis occurs and companies/orgs reduce their advertising budget.
Yet we, the great unwashed public, like using services that are free. I don't directly pay to use Google or Facebook. They do not directly get any revenue from me. And if they asked for a monthly or annual fee, I would probably leave the platform (Google would be hard to leave, admittedly). We have sold our data, and our souls, to save a few quid a month. It's a trade-off many do not mind.
Musk is probably right in trying to get Twitter users to pay for the service, as it gives another income stream. The problem is that people do not like paying for something they have got for free. It was free before, why do I have to pay now?
So a company really needs to start off charging users from the beginning, even if those charges are small. Yet a small company that charges when others do not, will find it hard to grow.
Is this an issue with the entire social Internet sector? The potential revenue pot is mostly limited to advertising because someone will always offer an alternative free service, as it is so easy to set one up?
(Apols for the rambling; I have not had enough coffee yet.)
*The income of the average pensioner after housing costs is now higher than that of the average worker - and yes, I know that not all pensioners own their own homes, but most do (and the ones who don't vote Labour so the Government doesn't care about them.)
*The triple lock remains in place, with no indication that it will ever be repealed, which means that the low wage economy (pay settlements almost invariably being lower than the rate of inflation) will continue to impoverish people on earned incomes, whilst they watch helpless as pensioners with their generous guarantees accelerate further into the distance ahead of them.
*The Government still plans, even if it's delayed the measure, to implement a social care cap, which will mean that rich pensioners in fabulously expensive properties will have their crippling care costs paid out of general taxation above a certain limit. Yet more transfer of wealth from struggling low income families to allow old people to hoard their assets and pass as much as possible on to their heirs.
*We're all aware of the imbalance between supply and demand in housing, which grows more acute every single year. This is, of course, also a matter of deliberate policy. Choking off supply guarantees a near-continuous house price spiral, enriching existing owners and making living costs increasingly unbearable for the have-nots. Building homes almost anywhere results in an eruption of Nimby rage from comfortable, mostly older, voters who don't want supply to be eased because they want those lovely prices to keep escalating unchecked.
*The Government's program of tax rises consists principally of freezing tax allowances, and waiting for fiscal drag to do the rest - pulling millions of low and middle income earners into higher bands, and once again crushing earned incomes (which are already, of course, contracting at a rate of knots in real terms because of inflation,) in order to raise more money to throw at pensioners, without levying more tax on property.
There's no future at all for a country that hates its youth, and shuns investing in them and its productive capacity in favour of showering unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (pensioners) with cash. But that's how Britain works, and the grey vote is now so huge that it looks like there's no way out of the doom loop. Collectively, as a nation, we are finished.
FWIW, I think the OBR forecasts are too pessimistic. They appear to be forecasting flat-growth for years.
This might be the "responsible" thing to project, to ensure protection of the public finances, but I don't think it will happen. Post-Covid and post-Ukraine there should be a supply constraint lift, and demand will sort itself out, bringing down inflation, and I think the confidence that causes in the West will start to lift up investment and growth.
Not to 2.5% pa again, but better than this.
Catastrophic == greater than 3 hours down time.
Quite amusing browsing #twitterrip. So much hyperbole. Even our own JJ has fallen down with a severe bout of MDS.
In which case, can you explain it to us? For us plebs, it just looks like an hilarious clusterf*ck of epic proportions.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twitter-employees-worry-its-infrastructure-is-hanging-by-a-thread
(The teaser is enough to get the gist.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/technology/twitter-elon-musk-ftc.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare https://twitter.com/justinbaragona/status/1593405187745619975/photo/1
Given the likely persistence of high (t though falling) energy price next year, and the growing squeeze on middle incomes, and therefore consumer spending, their forecasts for 2023 and 2024 don't look overly pessimistic.
Covid will continue to affect China next year, which will have a chilling effect on the world economy, and its uncertain how long the Ukraine conflict carries on.
Things might turn out better, but there's space on the downside, too.
There is no future for a country where young people don't vote.
Labour is clearly on track to win the next election so the above doesn't work.
Not all NIMBYs are old
Benefits for young as well as old rose by inflation
The point about income 'after housing costs': Gosh. People have more money after paying off mortgages. Who knew?
If Tories care about social care costs they have a strange way of showing it.
We have no idea what Labour will do about your points. But I doubt if they plan to bankrupt OAPs.
You can't win an election on old votes alone. The budget hit hard lots of natural Tory aspirational non-OAPs.
https://twitter.com/SteveBellovin/status/1593414068634734592
But they have Cloud, Play, their Android interests, physical products like Pixel. And YouTube, while still ad-funded, is a different advertising proposition and continues to grow (and in terms of viewing hours and minutes is the single most popular video platform for under-24s; beats linear TV, subscription VoD like Netflix and broadcaster VoD. It’s a giant).
Meta seem more vulnerable to market changes, as their various attempts to diversify have largely failed so far.
Twitter is more precarious still, as even pre-Musk it sat in an odd place in the advertising ecosystem, and it’s targeting product is half a decade behind Meta’s sophisticated offering. He’s right to look at different revenue models, but probably shouldn’t be burning down the existing one first. And you’re right about payment. Oddly, folk are more apt to pay a four or five quid monthly increase to something they were already paying for, than even a pound for something they use regularly but is currently free. The psychology of pricing is interesting. For me, I assume because something is free, the value (my data) has already been exchanged and therefore I resent then *also* paying on top. That’s why I don’t think subscription will work.
Amazon of course have this all sewn up, and why Bezos is many times the business operator that Musk is - because he is relentlessly focused on the customer (and of course, wisely invested in the bedrock of the internet in AWS).
Also rambling; also in need of coffee.
The extra billion a year in financing costs, for a company that was only intermittently profitable, means that even drastic cost cutting isn't going to sort things out.
And he's just sabotaged a significant amount of his ad revenue.
Having already announced that he's actively looking for a CEO to hand over the running to, how is the Musk genius going to stretch between his existing ventures and the new toy ?
This is £32 billion more than we were paying into the EU for services as advertised on the Red Bus. It is causing the country genuine hardship from which we are unlikely to recover.
Ideally the person announcing their Damascene conversion will be a respected Brexiteer. The likes of Lord Wolfson of Next won't cut it. It needs to be someone who would command all the front pages and would lead the news for days.
It needs to be someone who would open the floodgates,
Boris would be ideal. Even Cummings would be a possibility. Gove is considered a heavyweight intellectual by Tories so he might do. But it has to be done quickly and the narrative could change overnight. A new mood of optimism could sweep the country
The burn it down to start again approach might not work but he’s giving a good crack and he has a good track record of forcing success.
But instead he wrapped it up with this weird grudge about verification resulting from some kind of falling out between Silicon Valley and US journalists.
Right now, Twitter’s core problem is that Musk is dumb.
Recently I looked at 2 mins of TV advertising. It was just shocking and a total affront.
To lots of people there is much more resistance to paying for anything accessed online compared with anything tangible.
Daily newspapers are dead because their old use does not conform to the 24hour pattern. Serious weeklies and monthlies are in some cases doing OK, even in hard copy subscription.
As a test, what monthly fee would people pay to see/contribute to PB? (Or perhaps how much would you pay to see it disappear).
Meta / Twitter are very much background display advertising. The argument was often made (by both firms) that immediate success wasn't their purpose - it was about introducing the brand to the customer and / or keeping your brand in the customer's mind. And Twitter wasn't great at doing that (the number of utterly inappropriate ads was massive) but it's way worse now.
Worth saying Amazon are also cutting back - 10,000 redundancies this week. And remember a lot of Amazon workers don't actually work directly for Amazon they are just short term agency staff.
Sometimes politicians get what they were asking for.
https://twitter.com/Gia_Vang/status/1593428267519725568/video/1
https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1593474503996280833?t=qnWR30EWr4onBKDV2cXJ_w&s=19
88% of staff leaving, if that is indeed what has happened, is probably here in both parties interests. The leaving staff can be happy together that they left in solidarity and gave it to the man. Musk can build a new culture without those staff. Win/win.
I've no idea whether Musk's Twitter will be a success or not, but pre-Musk Twitter was a toxic hellhole anyway.
1. Wikipedia,
2. Google,
3. ...that's it
(and even Google is just habitual, Bing or others would probably do as well).
Edit: Oops, sorry: 3. PB obvs!
As others have pointed out up-thread, the unique to the UK factor is Brexit. It has consumed our politics for 10 years and we're permanently economically and politically poorer because of it. Remaining people who are still off their tits insist all is good, but the facts - economic data that can no longer be denied or excused - now clearly disprove them.
'Why did the media or opposition politicians not point this out' was the question asked. Some did. I know the SNP up here crow on about it. Some hacks have gone at it. But in reality whilst the nation partied it was hard to deny there was a party happening. You won't be thanked by the alcoholic for taking the bottle away no matter how much that needs to happen. And in electoral politics you need to be thanked...
Hopefully now we can have a more honest conversation about the damage done and the options to repair it. Pointing to all the areas where Britain is poorer - everything from infrastructure to social care to crumbling public services or the ludicrous cost of crappy everything - this is not talking Britain down. This is wanting to fix these things. As with anyone with a problem help can only really begin once they accept they have a problem.
Yesterday's budget was saying we have a problem.
My estimation of catastrophic twitter outrage during the world cup has stayed at 100%.