November 20, 2022

"Twitter before Elon vs Twitter after Elon."

It's a powerful visual, but it doesn't prove anything without context (and we're not going to rely on professional context-providers anymore, not at Twitter (I don't think)).

98 comments:

Kevin said...

She is showing that a tweet attacking Twitter would have been banned before Elon but is allowed after.

Kevin said...

For all we know, the photo on the left is all the female programmers at Women in Engineering Day.

Xmas said...

The left picture is from Twitter's Chicago office. That office was for business outreach and marketing campaign consulting.

https://twitter.com/Jones/status/1235266996486492160

If you feel like digging into it deeper, the chalkboard on the left side of the picture has all those people's twitter handles.

Leland said...

Here is more before and after for Twitter. Musk sure is evil.

Leland said...

To Kevin's point, here is SpaceX.

Jersey Fled said...

Dorsey allowed child sexual abuse material on twitter but banned legitimate speech.

Musk reversed that.

Thanks Leland.

gilbar said...

it Is SAD, that (mostly) white women, that have no (coding) skills no longer feel that they can go into "work" and spend their day meditating and yogaing and drinking
WHAT WILL TWITTER DO? Without ALL this dead wood?

gilbar said...

Xmas said...
The left picture is from Twitter's Chicago office. That office was for business outreach and marketing campaign consulting.

and, the important word is: "was"

Gusty Winds said...

It’s a good illustration of the “20% of the people do 80% of the work” principle.

The group on the left is rightfully given first access to the lifeboats. The group on the right are the ones expected to go down with the ship.

Ironically, but expectedly, the group with Musk are the ones that will keep Twitter floating, and make it more relevant.

Gusty Winds said...

“Professional context providers”

Now there’s an unnecessary group of people that have done more harm than good. They are kin to the lying “expert” and “fact-checker class”

stlcdr said...

Am I supposed to be triggered? (Still don’t know what that means). And is this bad or good? Who’s side am I supposed to be on!? Or is this one of those ‘corporate would like you to tell the difference between these two pictures’?

Gusty Winds said...

A picture is worth a thousand words...

...but it doesn’t provide context, especially when you don’t like the context it’s providing. That can be really uncomfortable especially when it counters your world view.

Example: The blue dress and red pumps painting of Bill Clinton which Jeffrey Epstein prominently displayed in his house doesn’t prove anything, nor does it provide context, especially in the absence of professional context providers.

But we all know....it does.

~ Gordon Pasha said...

The culled and the whales.

tim in vermont said...

I remember once in my Engineering Mechanics class, which had one woman, I still remember the arena seating classroom in which she said it, she was distraught and her score on a recent exam and she said "In high school my father helped me with all of my homework..."

I don't know how "Women in Engineering Day" is going to make girls love math as much as I did as a boy with no encouragement from anybody. I didn't even know a single college graduate in my life other than the teachers, and my older siblings, who were not college graduates when I became infatuated with math.

Howard said...

File under immigrants deplorables approve of

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Lauren Chen appears to be a Musk supporter.

Here she responds to a tweet by ADL CEO attacking Musk for bringing back Trump:

“Twitter is a private company, and Elon can do whatever he wants with it 💅

That was the standard excuse last time I checked. It must be tiring moving all those goalposts.”

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

Xmas said...

The left picture is from Twitter's Chicago office. That office was for business outreach and marketing campaign consulting.

Not according to this. It's their culture committee.

Tregonsee said...

Until recently, I have had a steady trickle of new followers, virtually all of whom were clearly "camp followers," if you get my meaning. Oddly, those stopped when Musk took over. Let that sink in.

planetgeo said...

The analysis of this picture will not be complete until we hear what rhhardin has to say about it.

Larry J said...

Women in engineering classes have been known to say about their male classmates that “the odds are good but the goods are odd.”

Kate said...

I can say with certainty that Before Elon people posed in an organized fashion -- short in front, tall in back. After Elon people snap a photo with no posing. Also, he's kind of a Photo Bogarter.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Will Insta go back on Twitter?

Former Twitter aficionado wants to know.

Gusty Winds said...

Blogger Howard said...
File under immigrants deplorables approve of

What a deplorable false comment that purposefully lacks context. We could really use some professional context providers here a the Althouse blog instead of all the well researched independent context providers who simply spread misinformation. We could can employ the Twitter group on the left. I hear they are available.

Deplorables aren't against immigration. They just want immigration to add value to the country, and the border to be controlled to stop illegal drug importing, and human trafficking. We also recognize that immigrants provide labor that many Americans, like the American Twitter group on the left, no longer want to perform, but is necessary to cultivate food, run factories, fix roads, work the infrastructure system...and keep all our lights on a places of shelter warm. For them we welcome them with open arms and compassion.

Liberal elite and their worshipers just want to provide these refugees with the now defunct "effective altruism". It's an altruism that falsely feels good. You can embrace it for free, pat yourself on the back, while living an ivory towered life. Martha's Vineyard style. But it doesn't do shit for the exploited...

We realize the Twitter group on the left will NEVER perform those important societal functions because those jobs lack work-life balance and six figure twenty hour work weeks.

But it doesn't mean that without citizenship immigrants should vote, which is what Howard and our ruling uniparty want. Howard doesn't live in and area where the uncontrolled influx affects the local community. He just wants Texas to turn blue. And, like Madison, WI, he could give a rats ass about the exploited struggling lives of the border crossers and their suffering minority counter parts in America's violent cities.

That is my context. We can refer my claims to the professional context committee. But, I think I'm right on the money.

A hard working Hispanic woman at my company announced her son is coming to Milwaukee next week. She openly told everyone it cost $8000 for the coyote to get him over the border. $8000 in debt he will spend years paying off...just like student debt. But rather than tell Mexico and Central America to get their shit together, or choose to stop continued US exploitation of the continent is impossible.

Much like the African children that spend their lives in poverty mining gold for the French, in exchange for a worthless currency. As Georgia Meloni passionately stated the other day, the solution is not to import these people, but to stop exploiting them and let them live off the resources God gave them.

Now, the needed influx of workers being promoted by post-election Chuck Schumer is real. He's not wrong. The Twitter group on the left illustrates that point. But it can be controlled in a safe manner. But their corrupt rulers will never allow that.

Neither will ours. Except Donald J Trump of course.

Fredrick said...

All those capable women are going to create an even better version of Twitter in no time. Of course they won't be working for Trump's version, they'll build their own! I can't wait to invest.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

I like the reply.

cubanbob said...

Other than a hugely expensive vanity project and $44bn is without a doubt hugely expensive, I can't understand why Musk bought Twitter. Even after getting rid of all the deadwood which is probably 90% of the staff I don't see how it can make money. The capacity needed to make Twits nearly instantaneously is so expensive I don't see how Twitter can ever earn enough profit to keep up with the ever expanding capacity needed. If Musk really has a burning desire to burn money he could have waited for Twitter to go bankrupt and then buy it. However he is a multi billionaire and I am not so there's that.

Mary Beth said...

The percentage of women in the second photo is higher than the percentage of men in the first one. Not by a lot, but still higher. I think it's very possible to have taken these two photos last year (less Musk) just by taking them in two different departments.

They are taken in different rooms - a search tells me that the first group was Twitter Communications and the second is coding staff. I bet they always looked like this, although the communications people may have quit. Their job was self-promotion. They tweeted out what was happening at Twitter. I never noticed their tweets so I have no idea if they've stopped.

Bob Boyd said...

File under immigrants deplorables approve of

Yeah. Legal ones.

Temujin said...

Caroline Ellison could not be reached for comment.

Ann Althouse said...

When I click the second photo to enlarge it, it cuts off the woman in the top left corner.

Rusty said...

Gusty
That was a waste of time. Good sentiment, but a waste of time. It's Howard. And Howard is the brightest sixteen year old we have.

wendybar said...

The picture on the right is more diverse!!!

Beasts of England said...

’Even after getting rid of all the deadwood which is probably 90% of the staff I don't see how it can make money.’

After dumping 7,000 useless employees I’d guess that he has already achieved positive cash flow.

Masscon said...

A powerful visual? I think not. Any power it may have is self-imposed on the viewer, personally, it has no power over me. My feeling is just like Glenda said...Begone, before someone drops a house on you too...or maybe they can join the screaming ladies at the beach.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Room full of white chicks = ???

So what?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Reddit's Joe Rogan sub is calling the tweet deceitful.

Link to relevant post.

Drago said...

Howard: "File under immigrants deplorables approve of"

Naturally Howard's latest moronic gaslighting completely undermines his previous moronic gaslighting which entailed "deplorables" hating ALL immigrants.

Like his co-leftist woke "religionists", they change their story every 15 minutes or so because thats what it takes to be a loyal leftist woke "religionist".

See: gadfly, Inga.

Lars Porsena said...

Looks like it was Hoes vs. Bros

tim maguire said...

The thread on twitter doesn’t treat this as an attack on twitter. Most of the people I read are talking about the difference between people who care about work-life balance and people who are willing to make work their top priority. One of those groups is mostly women, the other mostly young men. (They didn’t say, but probably thought, especially white and Asian men.)

Big O's Meanings Dictionary said...

crop - definition

Webster's Unabridged - pg 478 col 3

VERB

19. Photog. to cut off or mask the unwanted parts of (a print or negative).

(only definition relevant)

*Comment*

Both the left and right pictures have been cropped from the originals.

The original left (viewed when clicked) displays the red-headed guy in glasses on the right and a desk on the left, the original right (ibid) displays the guy doing the peace sign on the left and a whiteboard outside the room on the right.

Information was lost going from original to thread shot, not the other way.

tim maguire said...

Blogger Howard said...File under immigrants deplorables approve of

How do you know they’re immigrants? Right, because you’re a racist who thinks Americans are white or black and everybody else belongs somewhere else.

Lurker21 said...

Thank you for not going with the knee-jerk response, "Elon fired all the women."

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Howard - what the hell?
Shallow numb-brain comment.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...


The white left have no problem bashing Asians.

holdfast said...

I saw the two photos and assumed it was essentially metaphorical.

Achilles said...

Howard said...

File under immigrants deplorables approve of

If you were as smart as you think you are you would notice that this is blatantly racist.

But you are stupid.

And you are a racist.

holdfast said...

I saw the two photos and assumed it was essentially metaphorical.

John henry said...

Beasts,

He has not dumped 7,000 employees yet. They are all still on the payroll at full rate including vacation medical and any other benefits. They are still legally Twitter "employees"

Until February.

They just are not doing anything for Twitter.

This is how they comply with the requirement to give 3 months notice of layoffs

There will be some savings from this. Maybe closing down office space, no IT support. But probably not a lot compared to the ongoing salaries.

John Henry

Curious George said...

"Ann Althouse said...
When I click the second photo to enlarge it, it cuts off the woman in the top left corner."

I could still see her, but you can also now see two woman on the right.

Yancey Ward said...

Howard put his Elon Musk dildo up for sale on EBay.

Yancey Ward said...

And Wendybar is absolutely correct- the photo on the right displays far more ethnic diversity than the one on the left by at least 1 magnitude.

Original Mike said...

"File under immigrants deplorables approve of"

You mean legal?

It's a fair cop.

Yancey Ward said...

Cubanbob,

I more or less agree with you, but Musk might have plans neither of us can imagine for making this a profitable play. However, it is entire possible he doesn't care about it profitability- that he spent the 44 billion for something more important to him than money.

Yancey Ward said...

One thing for sure- the photo on right is not a photo of the "Beautiful People". It is a picture of the guys you send out to off-site training courses the week you have a bigshot touring the facility.

JAORE said...

"...we're not going to rely on professional context-providers anymore, not at Twitter (I don't think))".

Is "context providers" a synonym or Journalist?

Seems like a pretty narrow Venn diagram.

Bruce Hayden said...

“I remember once in my Engineering Mechanics class, which had one woman, I still remember the arena seating classroom in which she said it, she was distraught and her score on a recent exam and she said "In high school my father helped me with all of my homework..."”

“I don't know how "Women in Engineering Day" is going to make girls love math as much as I did as a boy with no encouragement from anybody. I didn't even know a single college graduate in my life other than the teachers, and my older siblings, who were not college graduates when I became infatuated with math.”

My daughter is the 4th generation in the family to get a math degree. My great aunt got a Masters in Mathematics at Columbia in 1925. Mother was first in her class in sciences at U IL in 1945, with a degree in Mathematics. And said daughter was summa cum Laude, honors in Physics and Math in 2013, followed by a PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2018.

Girls can do, and love, math. The funny thing is that in the summer/fall of 2013, the entering class in the CU ME PhD program were over half women (said daughter assures me that was an anomaly…). One of the tricks is to make it fun and easy. For both my daughter, and her mother (CS major, Math minor - opposite of what I had), I think that a lot of it was about Daddy Time. Her mother competed with her uncle with their father, an EE, teaching them math. I taught my daughter Algebra in maybe 5th-6th grade, and Derivatives a couple years later. Turned out that it was drop dead easy - I had her cranking out easy ones in an hour. Getting her ahead of the crowd this way allowed her to excel there in class. And by the end of HS, while some kids in the class were known for their Field Hockey or Lacrosse expertise, she was the “math whiz” of her small class (though not the only math related PhD - her Sr Prom Date got his in Physics). That was one of the things I loved about that school - they made sure that almost everyone could excel in something. Her dissertation, and where she works, is in industrial combustion laser spectroscopy, which is a mix of quantum mechanics, optics, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics. She is a far better mathematician than I ever was, as a result.

I was surprised that my ex allowed my daughter to have Barbies, esp after the one that would say “Math is hard”. But amazingly she had a collection from her misspent youth, and gave them to said daughter, as a start. My partner claims never to have understood Algebra, but aced it anyway. But then complains that her own daughter can’t adjust recipes for different quantities, which she finds dead easy. Her daughter, at 40, still calls her mother to figure it out for her. She could also scale sewing patterns in her sleep, and designed and sewed most of her own outfits through Jr High and High School.

My theory is that part of it is innate ability (and males, on average probably are better at abstract thought, while females are better at verbal pursuits), and part of it is how you are raised, and how you are taught in school. In my family growing up, it was assumed that math was easy, and only stupid people couldn’t get it. If we got stuck, our mother would make it clear to us. The result was that of 5 boys, 4 of us had math or engineering degrees. The 5th though ended up with a history degree, and probably with an inferiority degree, thanks to our mother. But I think that schooling can be even more important, and overall public school does a horrible job at that. Daughter’s two best friends in HS were being tracked into pre-calculus, instead of Calculus, based on testing. But if my daughter could do it, so could they. They begged, worked hard, did well, and both now have STEM doctorates. It’s the difference between a well rated prep school and most public schools - they had the support to accomplish this, and likely wouldn’t have at most public schools.

Old and slow said...

"File under immigrants deplorables approve of"

Yes indeed. LEGAL immigrants with skills who pay taxes.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

Yancey Ward said...

One thing for sure- the photo on right is not a photo of the "Beautiful People". It is a picture of the guys you send out to off-site training courses the week you have a bigshot touring the facility.

I'd bet that crew could tell you everything that needed to be fixed on the platform and already had an idea of how to fix it.

Bruce Hayden said...

“Other than a hugely expensive vanity project and $44bn is without a doubt hugely expensive, I can't understand why Musk bought Twitter.”

My theory is that Musk thinks synergistically. SpaceX has allowed him to throw up the StarLink network, of thousands of satellites, in very short order. I think it likely that he is also looking at SpaceX to build the infrastructure in space to solve the two big EV problems: providing electricity and precious metals, both much more abundant in space. How does Boring fit in? His test project is running self driving Teslas under Las Vegas. That’s something that really can’t be done with ICE vehicles.

So how does Twitter fit in? I think by pairing it with StarLink, which may well end up being the predominant method of accessing the Internet. Think of Twitter maybe as the next HTML, Ethernet, Windows, Office, or IOS. The social warrior side of Twitter was a big weight slowing down this vision of making Twitter ubiquitous. It cost a lot of money, and alienated a large percentage of the population. To make Twitter ubiquitous, he needs to make it innocuous. And it sure wasn’t innocuous when it was used so heavily by the statist elites around the world to police their definition of mis and dis information, imposing their definition of the truth on their masses.

tim in vermont said...

Bruce, the idea that women and men have equal disposition to mathematics is ridiculous. Yes, I have run into first rate female programmers, I even had a boss who was a woman with a math degree from a decent school, but even she, like most, quickly took a management path, while the guys were mostly happy to keep doing the work, which they found rewarding of itself.

Bruce Hayden said...

“The thread on twitter doesn’t treat this as an attack on twitter. Most of the people I read are talking about the difference between people who care about work-life balance and people who are willing to make work their top priority. One of those groups is mostly women, the other mostly young men. (They didn’t say, but probably thought, especially white and Asian men.)”

One thing I noticed about the After photo, is that not only is it almost all guys, but the majority are probably POC. Some Middle Eastern. Some (dot) Indians. And various Oriental (East Asian) ethnicities. All known to be willing to bust their asses.

Michael K said...


Blogger Howard said...

File under immigrants deplorables approve of


You're right, Howard. Immigrants who are literate and can support themselves. I used to review workers comp claims in CA. That was ten years ago plus. One third of them were Mexican illegals. Many did not even speak Spanish. Most claimed an education to second grade. A guy I knew worked for the biggest workers comp insurance company in the state. He told me that most of these claims were generated by the absence of any safety precautions of equipment.

At least those illegals were not on welfare as all the Biden illegals are.

Browndog said...

After years and years of being brow beat into believing the only thing that matters is gender and skin color, conservatives now feel a certain awkwardness defending meritocracy.

Bruce Hayden said...

Gordon Pasha mentioned this earlier. Here is what Whaling and Culling Is meant here. This may well be part of what is going on right now at Twitter. Musk has chosen to pose with his Whales here in the second photo. I think that is significant.

Jupiter said...

"When I click the second photo to enlarge it, it cuts off the woman in the top left corner."

The picture has been cropped. In the original, she was almost in the middle.

Browndog said...

One thing I noticed about the After photo, is that not only is it almost all guys, but the majority are probably POC. Some Middle Eastern. Some (dot) Indians. And various Oriental (East Asian) ethnicities. All known to be willing to bust their asses.

Care to assign a "color" to the ethnicities you cite in order to fully understand what you mean by "people of color"?

Yancey Ward said...

"I'd bet that crew could tell you everything that needed to be fixed on the platform and already had an idea of how to fix it."

Oh, I don't doubt it a bit.

tim in vermont said...

Hypothetically, if one percent of women were as talented as the top ten percent of men, and you were running an elite program at your university, you would have little problem getting a class that was fifty percent women, and all worthy to be there, but the State U’s like I went to would still be starved for women. So your anecdotes of exceptional cases proves nothing, it’s simple math that anyone who ever played rummy or go fish could intuit.

Mr Wibble said...

So how does Twitter fit in? I think by pairing it with StarLink, which may well end up being the predominant method of accessing the Internet.

I think that it's simpler than that: Musk saw how control of information was being used for political effect, and he realized that he needed to get into the fight if he was to have any chance of seeing SpaceX succeed. A Trump admin is going to be a lot friendlier towards Musk's plans, and towards the kind of energy and manufacturing infrastructure necessary to achieve those plans. You can't charge Teslas from wind and solar farms, and if he really wants to mass produce rockets, at some point he's going to find himself facing an alliance of leftwing environmentalists, union grifters, and others who are looking to either get a cut, or shut him down.

Mason G said...

The grapes, they are sour.

n.n said...

They changed the wallpaper? People of Yellow? Also, the second scene disturbingly lacks a window to the natural world. Is that a metaphor or a literal image of a back... black hole... whore? h/t NAACP An African-American CEO and virtual slavery.

hpudding said...

Elon will wreck the company, and is creating the hostile work environment for which he’s so famous.

It’s a purge to satisfy his grandiosity, and those who weren’t purged are just getting ahead of the game.

Features don’t work, the company is crashing and all because an autistic lunatic who by definition can’t relate to other humans thought that defending the “free speech” of psychopathic conspiracy theorists, disinformation propagandists and trolls was his job instead of an obligation owed by the US government to private actors generally.

Even benzodiazepine addict Jordan Peterson recognizes that forums like Twitter cater to the most mentally unstable, and Musky just enabled that destruction while losing upwards of $40b in the process.

Shows you his values and true character at least as much as his multiple failed marriages, neglected parenting and naming his recent kid with unpronounceable symbols that you would assign to a robot or product line rather than a human being.

JK Brown said...

Mary Beth said...
" a search tells me that the first group was Twitter Communications and the second is coding staff."

Ah, there's the rub, Musk has always proven to be his best marketing and communications department himself. So those in the first picture were redundant after the buy out. There have been few instances of real programmers at Twitter abusing users, but many of the non-technical staff have pursued their own agendas. Why would a communications app need more people in corporate communications than people where the code meets the hardware.

Seems to me Twitter was focused more on hiring pretty young women than on their core business.

JK Brown said...

tim in vermont said...
"I remember once in my Engineering Mechanics class"

In my Eng 102 class, which as mostly about learning problem solving using basic physics as the medium, the single woman in the class once complained "Why are the homework problems not like the ones we do in class". To which the instructor replied, "Because I want to you think".

Me, I was having the time of my life, frustrated as my thinking was rewired, but solving problems was fun. I've used those skills ever since. I haven't used the math so much, but the math in the problem solving was there to keep you honest and beat your assumptions back into line. When you start you start seeing things that aren't intuitive that the math brings out, that's when it's really fun.

gilbar said...

i find it interesting, here at Althouse; that whatever the topic..

Someone will say;
"This Thing (girls not liking math, modern pot causing psychosis, etc) is generally true"

And right after, someone like, say; Bruce Hayden) will pipe in, and say:
"That is TOTALLY UNTRUE.. In MY family, (my daughter's a PhD, or I never had probs with pot in the '70's)"

I am in no way doubting that some of you have daughters that lay on the right side of the curve..
BUT, i Really wonder at what passes for logic with y'all?
OBVIOUSLY your daughters are REALLY Smart.. YOU are REALLY SMART
OBVIOUSLY you had no problem with marijuana.. You are REALLY SMART (and here now so you made it through)

But, What does THAT have to do, with whether or not women are likely to be engineers?

Rabel said...

"Most of the people I read are talking about the difference between people who care about work-life balance and people who are willing to make work their top priority."

For a quarter million a year you just might need to be willing to compromise a bit on that work-life balance.

Mary Beth said...

When I click the second photo to enlarge it, it cuts off the woman in the top left corner.

When I click it, I can see more people to her left. Are you looking at it on a tablet, phone or computer? (I'm viewing from a desktop.)

rcocean said...

The "after" picture is from a recent Musk visit to Twitter HQ where he held an "All-nighter" with the Engineering staff. Needless to say, the female participation was rather low, since women aren't really into Engineering or hard work.

They are however, into complaining and demanding equality of rewards, even when there hasn't been an equality of effort. I'm sure women in the HR and twitter censorship departments still go home at 5 PM after a tiring 8 hour day, assuming they even come into the office.

rcocean said...

The amazing thing about corporations is the large numbers of "non-essential personnel". Not only are there too many Chiefs and not enough Indians, you have large numbers of G&A and Overhead positions, few of which actually produce or sell the product or service. It'll be interesting how many people Musk can get rid of.

Michael K said...


Blogger hpudding said...

Elon will wreck the company, and is creating the hostile work environment for which he’s so famous.


More pudding head "reasoning." I guess that's why you are so rich and Elon is so poor.

Ann Althouse said...

"Are you looking at it on a tablet, phone or computer? (I'm viewing from a desktop.)"

Desktop

readering said...

AA noted the new work rules would be tough for many women.

Just interviewed HS student for Early Action admission. She has loved taking advanced AP calculus.

Big O's Meanings Dictionary said...

Comment

As I recall, you have an Apple desktop.

If you've gone back and reviewed the images and found that the enlarged ones indeed cut off part of the images, I would suggest it's a problem with Apple's rendering.

Static Ping said...

The meme may be misleading. I have no idea.

What I do know is large companies that do not have good controls tend to get bloated. When the money is good, managers go about empire building, hiring more and more people to manage. It is possible that some of them are useful, or at least were useful, but at some point it just becomes a matter of hiring people for the sake of hiring people. If you don't do it, then the other departments will, and what if you actually need someone and there is no budget for it? These people tend to be administrators and/or Human Resources or adjacent (diversity experts, etc.), who actually do not produce anything relevant to the survival of the company and are often counterproductive. When a company is in financial trouble, either these are the first to go or the company is doomed.

Also, keep in mind that great managers usually hire great employees. Mediocre managers hire mediocre employees, such that they are not a threat to take their jobs. So bloat tends to be employees that are not particularly good at their jobs, performing jobs that are non-essential.

Do not lose sight of your core business! I can assure you it is not diversity statements!

Mary Beth said...

Desktop

Then I don't know, I'm just an unofficial context provider, my IT troubleshooting skills extend to "have you tried turning it off and turning it back on?". I don't think that will cure this problem, though. Maybe it's an ios vs Windows thing. (I'm on a PC.)

ccscientist said...

Curiously, the layoffs of 10,000 at Amazon and lots at facebook are just ignored. Only Elon's layoffs matter.

Rosalyn C. said...

I was thinking about the Hadron Collider this morning and how some people thought their experiments might cause a black hole and eliminate everyone and everything, but no one got to vote on this.

Then came across this photo of the scientists involved in the Chinese particle collider project, and found there really are a large number of female scientists.

Some of the generalizations about women in science being extremely rare might be self fulfilling and wrong.

tim in vermont said...

Check this out gilbar, just saw it just now and had a laugh.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1594425362922045441

tim in vermont said...

I always liked the counter-intuitive results too. To this day I have to work through the Monty Hall problem again in my head before I will believe it. I get the feeling though that if I had five or ten more IQ points, I could work it out in one thought.

Original Mike said...

"I was thinking about the Hadron Collider this morning and how some people thought their experiments might cause a black hole and eliminate everyone and everything, but no one got to vote on this."

Nobody who knew anything thought this. It was impossible.

Rusty said...


Blogger hpudding said...
"Elon will wreck the company, and is creating the hostile work environment for which he’s so famous."
You're in over your head. Also parroting what your masters tell you on the Daily Kos is not critical thinking.

Bruce Hayden said...

“Care to assign a "color" to the ethnicities you cite in order to fully understand what you mean by "people of color"”

POC= ¬White (¬=Not/negation)

Of course our Yellow contingent is officially turning White, as the Jews did before them.

FullMoon said...

LOL. It's a joke. duh.

n.n said...

"People of Color" under diversity [dogma] (e.g. racism) is politically congruent ("=") and inclusive of People of Brown, People of Black, People of Yellow, People of White (i.e. albino), People of Rainbow, and other color blocs, but not People of Orange, and Planned (i.e. dead, cannibalized, aborted, sequestered) People of Pink (i.e. babies).

n.n said...

how some people thought their experiments might cause a black hole and eliminate everyone and everything

The last back... black hole... whore h/t NAACP was conceived in diversity with profit motives, culminating in a peculiarity that is still observable in social justice, social progress, and similar politically-oriented cults.

tim in vermont said...

Even I would not have been this harsh IQ Filter

Bruce Hayden said...

@VT Tim.

I agree to some extent, except that on the one hand, we are talking mathematical aptitude and ability, and on the other, software aptitude, ability, and interests. I was good in math, but far better in software. I loved software, because I could build something in my mind, then implement is through coding. And it worked. I never got that joy with mathematics. CS was my passion, and has been for better than a half century (1st CS class was in 1970). My ex has three degrees in CS, but got out of actual coding after maybe a decade, and moved into IT management, moving up through the ranks. She was good in coding. Never knew anyone who could knock out PERL scripts for testing as quickly as she could. But, I think that she really excelled in IT management. She several times worked herself out of a job, for example by moving the back room operations of an ancient household name across two states, on time, under budget, with few hiccups. It’s not something that I could have done, nor wanted to, regardless of pay.

For me, the two are very different. In software, for the most part, the highest level of mathematics that you typically need is Algebra. And I don’t think that a lot of COBOL programmers even understood that much - hence the language. I enjoyed math in college, because you could play “let’s pretend” in abstract math classes. But the more practical classes were booring to me. Too much homework for too little gain. But those classes are the ones that my daughter exploits every day at work with her laser spectroscopy.

hpudding said...

Taking over someone else's electric car company or programming an online payment platform does not mean someone has the social skills to run a social media public messaging company. It's called "social" for a reason, though I realize most conservatives are too socially pathological to understand this.

Musk fits that bill with his autism. He didn't even understand that the first amendment has nothing to do with what a corporation allows to be said on its platform. But then, most conservatives don't know that either.

In any event, Scott Galloway (and every other intelligent observer) is probably right about all this. Musk bought the company for three times the value and has seen even that price drop by half since the purchase he was forced by a court to finalize. He wanted to get out of it for a reason - he came to know too late that it was the wrong move and only started it due to his vanity and idiotic impulse to defend Trump's obnoxious misuse of the platform. And now they've lost needed talent and features only understood by certain individuals who chaotically left. A fine way to run the third reich or any typical tyranny but not a functional company.

Anyone with a brain can see that. But again, since conservatives are socially deficient they usually confuse money or wealth with omnipotence or moral virtue. That didn't stop Bernie Madoff or Jeffrey Epstein from getting what was coming to them, though. And if you or any other con had better values you'd understand that Musk isn't immune to consequences either. None of his wealth (rapidly depreciating) makes him the god that you wish he were.

But by all means, continue worshipping him if that makes you feel good. Just don't pretend that everyone is stupid enough to evaluate his catastrophe according to the same shallow and immature arithmetic that you employ in deciding to defend him for purely emotional reasons.