zlacker

[return to "Twitter Is DDOSing Itself"]
1. Topfi+Ew[view] [source] 2023-07-01 21:09:47
>>ZacnyL+(OP)
Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement.

Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof.

I can of course not say whether the people currently working at Twitter did warn that the recent measures could have such major side effects, but I would not be surprised in the slightest, considering their leadership's mode of operation.

Even as someone who very much detests what Twitter has become over the last few months and in fact did not like Twitter before the acquisition, partly due to short format making nuance impossible, but mostly for the effect Tweets easy embeddability had on reporting (3 Tweets from random people should not serve as the main basis for an article in my opinion), I must say, I feel very sorry for the people forced to work at that company under that management.

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2. beebma+8I[view] [source] 2023-07-01 22:24:03
>>Topfi+Ew
A union vote is the only way to save that platform. Either unionize or let the company die.
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3. drekip+hJ[view] [source] 2023-07-01 22:33:36
>>beebma+8I
Unions are for the people, not the company
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4. zen928+S21[view] [source] 2023-07-02 01:28:27
>>drekip+hJ
a company is made of: _____
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5. typon+d31[view] [source] 2023-07-02 01:33:02
>>zen928+S21
The board of directors, rich shareholders and the C-Suite team. Incidentally they also employ powerless servants who are interchangeable and disposable.
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6. vba616+He1[view] [source] 2023-07-02 03:36:05
>>typon+d31
Modern Western capitalism is pretty similar to the Soviet Union or China's.

"State capitalism" and "monopoly capitalism" (the bad kind according to socialists) are about as different as Coke and Pepsi.

Ultimately the "owners" in practice are people you never heard of that work for (government) pension funds and index funds. The billionaires, founders, and celebrities are mostly a sideshow. That's not a denial of wealth inequality, just as officially socialist countries have.

But nearly all big companies have no owner in a top hat running the show, just faceless committees, responsible for buying everything - that company and all its competitors. Bureaucrats, apparatchiks, public or private, it's much the same.

If the C-suite and directors of huge companies are generally parasites, it's because robber barons and corporate raiders are the exception today. People whose job is to invest trillions of dollars by simply buying everything for sale have the least control imaginable over company managers. The current situation reflects classic criticisms of socialism, but it won anyway.

Nearly every source of information on public company stocks in the US has a figure for "institutional ownership". If a company is of any size, and is a real business, this is usually a high % - this is a reality check if what I'm writing sounds outlandish because nobody talks about anything but Twitter around here.

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7. cyber_+qj1[view] [source] 2023-07-02 04:41:54
>>vba616+He1
From David Graeber's "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class"

(The full link is https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4...., recommend reading the whole thing):

"As radical theorists like Michael Albert were already pointing out in the 1970s, this is the key flaw of traditional socialism: actual members of the working classes have no immediate hatred for capitalists because they never meet them; in most circumstances, the immediate face of oppression comes in the form of managers, supervisors, bureaucrats, and educated professionals of one sort or another—that is, precisely the people to whom a state socialist regime would give more power, rather than less (Albert and Hahnel 1979; Albert 2003). The decisive victory of capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, ironically, has had precisely the same effect. It has led to both a continual inflation of what are often purely make-work managerial and administrative positions—“bullshit jobs”—and an endless bureaucratization of daily life, driven, in large part, by the Internet."

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8. vba616+un1[view] [source] 2023-07-02 05:33:18
>>cyber_+qj1
I disagree with every part of this quote and the whole "bullshit jobs" thesis.

People think they know what a job is, without having done it.

You cannot imagine even, say, stocking shelves at a retail store, without doing it.

If, for the sake of argument, most jobs are bullshit, the only way that can be maintained is if people are ignorant of what other people do.

But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them.

One job I had I suppose was bullshit, was sweeping a fairly spotless warehouse, because, I was told, a division boss was coming to inspect, and so they hired a temp to look busy.

But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty.

And I'm pretty sure that "the key flaw of traditional socialism" is not that they recognized reality. I think it was Lenin who declared that there would have to be a temporary phase of socialism. It's a sick mind that thinks the "key flaw" of existent socialism was employing educated administrators and not, say, dekulakization.

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9. vba616+jq1[view] [source] 2023-07-02 06:06:01
>>vba616+un1
You know who thought he knew what was a "bullshit job"? Paul Bremer, that's who. That worked out well.

Edit: Maybe the clusterf*ck was Rumsfeld's idea.

"all public sector employees affiliated with the Ba'ath Party were to be removed from their positions and be banned from any future employment in the public sector... When the CPA turned over enforcement of de-Ba'athification to Iraqi politicians, however, these rules were broadly expanded and used to punish political opponents, including nearly 11,000 teachers who were dismissed from the party and removed from government"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bremer

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