2022 and beyond Social Media Thread

[JPhillips]

How long until Kirk Cameron cites this as proof that God is real?

[Ksyrup]

Someone paid their $8, set up a fake TeslaReal account, and posted "A second Tesla has hit the World Trade Center."

I'm not sure Twitter is going to make it to 2023...

[sterlingice]

I just have this picture in my head that he's in this abandoned cubicle farm, surrounded by desks that used to have people he fired last week. Musk comes across the only guy left on the floor and yells "FIX THIS FAKE USER PROBLEM", only for the guy to go "Sure, boss, but I don't know how - I just clean the floors here".

SI

[Ksyrup]

In all seriousness, this is crazy.

Elon Musk is doing an all hands with Twitter employees. They got a one hour notice and he showed up 15 minutes late.

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 10, 2022

Wow. Elon Musk just told Twitter employees he’s not sure how much run rate the company has and “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question.”

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 10, 2022

[flere-imsaho]

Some business genius, this guy.

[GrantDawg]

How does a bankruptcy court treat a new company owner that files two weeks after the purchase mainly because of the debt he brought to the company?

[Ksyrup]

Bone saws, activate!

Meanwhile, the Twitter buyout debt banks are trying to offload is going for 60 cents on the dollar, per scoop by my colleagues: https://t.co/2eGds1weUp

— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) November 10, 2022

[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

How does a bankruptcy court treat a new company owner that files two weeks after the purchase mainly because of the debt he brought to the company?

Probably like any other bankruptcy, although this case from the Southern District of New York shows a judge taking a very dim view towards these financial shenanigans.

In reality, IMO, there need to be laws against this kind of leveraged buyout when it's not even close to clear how the debt will realistically be serviced. These stupid financing decisions end up, as we've seen time and time again, costing lots and lots of people their jobs & livelihoods (if you have little sympathy for Twitter's highly-paid coders, spare a thought for the blue collar workers who service their many facilities).

[GrantDawg]

The blue "blue" checkmarks that had gone white-grey recently have now turned bright blue. They have also turned off the ability to join "Twitter Blue in the US.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by flere-imsaho

Probably like any other bankruptcy, although this case from the Southern District of New York shows a judge taking a very dim view towards these financial shenanigans.

In reality, IMO, there need to be laws against this kind of leveraged buyout when it's not even close to clear how the debt will realistically be serviced. These stupid financing decisions end up, as we've seen time and time again, costing lots and lots of people their jobs & livelihoods (if you have little sympathy for Twitter's highly-paid coders, spare a thought for the blue collar workers who service their many facilities).

And it's not like this is a new problem - leveraged buyouts were really in vogue in the 80s and 90s and ruined a lot of companies. I have to think there should be some accounting rules about not being able to use what you're buying as collateral and the company being bought not having to service the debt of the owners. But I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than I understand to actually stop this sort of crap.

SI

[sterlingice]

Reddit has us covered for the Twitpocalpse

RealTwitterAccounts

SI

[GrantDawg]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

And it's not like this is a new problem - leveraged buyouts were really in vogue in the 80s and 90s and ruined a lot of companies. I have to think there should be some accounting rules about not being able to use what you're buying as collateral and the company being bought not having to service the debt of the owners. But I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than I understand to actually stop this sort of crap.

SI

That is impossible and really not even reasonable. Every mortgage and car loan uses the item purchased as collateral. Banks do that on cars knowing they could not possibly make up the loss if the buyer never makes a payment on that car.

I do call into question the reasoning of the banks on the Twitter loan. They loaned this money and immediately started trying to sell off the debt at less than the value loaned. How does that make sense? They are offering not two weeks later at 60% value and can't find takers. How does everyone involved not immediately lose their jobs?

[NobodyHere]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

Reddit has us covered for the Twitpocalpse

RealTwitterAccounts

SI

That's Gold Jerry, Gold!

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by NobodyHere

That's Gold Jerry, Gold!

Saw this on Reddit somewhere (paraphrased): "Remember when we had to use Photoshop to make these jokes? Now it just costs $8"

SI

[Ksyrup]

I added that script to Chrome that shows you who is actually verified and who just paid $8 and it's very helpful. It's like x-ray vision.

[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

That is impossible and really not even reasonable. Every mortgage and car loan uses the item purchased as collateral. Banks do that on cars knowing they could not possibly make up the loss if the buyer never makes a payment on that car.

But, to use that analogy, banks making the car loans have a reasonable expectation (based on your financial information) that you will, tempered with their own statistics on defaults from your cohort.

In the case I linked the judge pointed out that the numbers didn't add up from the start. It would have taken a series of business miracles for the debt to be serviced. From the moment the deal was signed it was a foregone conclusion that the company would go bankrupt after the asset stripping was done.

I do call into question the reasoning of the banks on the Twitter loan. They loaned this money and immediately started trying to sell off the debt at less than the value loaned. How does that make sense? They are offering not two weeks later at 60% value and can't find takers. How does everyone involved not immediately lose their jobs?

We're back to mortgage defaults, CDOs, and 2008 all over again. The reason the banks are fine going through this are (and, again, it's part of the case I linked above and the judge's castigation of the lenders):

1. The banks know they can offload a certain portion of the debt to rubes (Twitter's implosion happening so quickly has clearly hampered this, but it was absolutely part of the original strategy).

2. There's potential upside that could have materialized.

3. Losses for banks, as long as they're not existentially ruinious, are actually beneficial from a tax avoidance standpoint, especially since you can carry those losses, year-over-year, until you need them (e.g. to offset a windfall year).

Don't get me wrong, some people are going to lose their jobs, but as the years since 2008 have shown, there's simply not enough regulatory disincentive against this risky practices, and importantly the people who get hurt aren't those involved in the transactions, they're the people who lose their jobs due to bankruptcies (either directly or indirectly - e.g. contracted cafeteria staff, janitors, etc...).

There's a real, tangible societal harm to allowing this behavior to continue.

[sterlingice]

I think Twitter is showing to be a good counterexample of "I don't give a damn what you say about me, just so you spell my name right."

SI

[Lathum]

Eli Lily may destroy Musk and Twitter.

[whomario]

Update: The Twitter wildfire is at 44 billion acres and 0% contained.

— Washington State Dept. of Natural Resources (@waDNR) November 11, 2022

[Ksyrup]

$44 billion Twitter ✅ pic.twitter.com/65inksoSDq

— 🦃🇺🇦 Douglas M. Charles (blue checkmark)🏳️‍🌈🍂 (@DouglasMCharles) November 11, 2022

[Mota]

Originally Posted by Lathum

Eli Lily may destroy Musk and Twitter.

Oh my, their stocks have dropped 5% overnight because the "insulin is now free" fake tweet. I sense a lawsuit coming.

[RainMaker]

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

I do call into question the reasoning of the banks on the Twitter loan. They loaned this money and immediately started trying to sell off the debt at less than the value loaned. How does that make sense? They are offering not two weeks later at 60% value and can't find takers. How does everyone involved not immediately lose their jobs?

In fairness, he's done quite a bit in 2 weeks to destroy the value of the company. The Paul Pelosi tweet probably sunk the company by itself.

A lot of the financing was put together when he bought the company earlier in the year. Things have changed since then (recession fears, high interest rates).

The Saudis and Chinese on the other hand just wanted access to Twitter to root out dissidents. I don't think they care much about the actual return on investment.

[miami_fan]

Originally Posted by Mota

Oh my, their stocks have dropped 5% overnight because the "insulin is now free" fake tweet. I sense a lawsuit coming.

Is Eli Lily anti free speech?

[RainMaker]

Reports are they sold a little over 100,000 Twitter Blue subscriptions. So all that for about a million dollars.

[Ksyrup]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

The Saudis and Chinese on the other hand just wanted access to Twitter to root out dissidents. I don't think they care much about the actual return on investment.

I assume the value for them would only hold if Twitter still, uh, exists...!

[Lathum]

https://twitter.com/aleshadalin/stat...n1uYddi3FULu0g

[Kodos]

That was good!

[albionmoonlight]

Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2022

Years ago, I had a friend whose mom would periodically "clean up" her computer to get it to run faster. She would do this by going through and just manually deleting files that she did not recognize. This, of course, led to her computer ceasing to function because some of those seemingly pointless files were actually necessary to keep the machine running.

Anyway, food for thought.

[whomario]

Saw a Twitter employee go to town on this issue, going out in a blaze of glory. Also, i can't believe how fervently random people will defend a billionaire against being corrected.

[sterlingice]

"I don't always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production"

SI

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by albionmoonlight

Years ago, I had a friend whose mom would periodically "clean up" her computer to get it to run faster. She would do this by going through and just manually deleting files that she did not recognize. This, of course, led to her computer ceasing to function because some of those seemingly pointless files were actually necessary to keep the machine running.

Anyway, food for thought.

I used to be that guy. You learn a lot about troubleshooting when you start randomly breaking stuff

SI

[albionmoonlight]

I'm gonna stop piling on, but this really is gobsmacking.

Elon is just demanding random people on his website tell him how it works now pic.twitter.com/k3jEG9DVZz

— worms cited (@christapeterso) November 14, 2022

[albionmoonlight]

Originally Posted by sterlingice

I used to be that guy. You learn a lot about troubleshooting when you start randomly breaking stuff

SI

You learned a lot. She got my friend to come in and reinstall Windows

[whomario]

In the mentions of a verified murderer cool pic.twitter.com/e2c1Ohb0D1

— Aaron Stewart-Ahn (@somebadideas) November 14, 2022

Responding to a 'verified' user named FBIPantyRaid alerting him to the plight of Rittenhouse just adds to the absurdity.

[RainMaker]

Originally Posted by whomario

Responding to a 'verified' user named FBIPantyRaid alerting him to the plight of Rittenhouse just adds to the absurdity.

Can't figure out why none of the big companies want their ads on the site.

[Ksyrup]

This is perfect pic.twitter.com/29ZEa56ycA

— Megs (@the_meghaning) November 15, 2022

[sterlingice]

Sure, it's not about Twitter, but how about FB?

Facebook fact-checkers will stop checking Trump after presidential bid announcement | CNN Politics

The memo noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.”

Somehow politicians are immune from fact checking. For... reasons?



SI

[Kodos]

They didn’t want to hire the amount of people needed to fact check The Liar.

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by Kodos

They didn’t want to hire the amount of people needed to fact check The Liar.

"Good news: We just laid off 11K people from the Meta project. Bad news: we had to rehire them all back to fact check TFG"

SI

[flere-imsaho]

Hearts & minds, people....

[HerRealName]

Originally Posted by flere-imsaho

Hearts & minds, people....

What type of person would click on 'Yes'? You could accidentally hurt Musk's feelings next week and get fired anyway.

[CrimsonFox]

Coming soon.....TWITTER...IN....SPACE-space-sapce-space-space...

[Lathum]

This seems like a great way to attract young talent. Who wants to bring their dog to work when you can work sweat shop hours instead.

[albionmoonlight]

Doesn't this just mean that the talented people (i.e. the ones best able to get a new job) will take three months pay and leave and the less talented people will stay?

[sterlingice]

Tell me you didn't understand that you bought a social media company and a user base that's worth billions without telling me.

SI

[whomario]

He's doing what Trump did: Weed out anybody qualified and critical (often going Hand in Hand) and elevating sycophants and those that are fatuated with some idea of him or simply desperate enough to let themselves be abused. Those that need these jobs are the the big loosers here.

[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by albionmoonlight

Doesn't this just mean that the talented people (i.e. the ones best able to get a new job) will take three months pay and leave and the less talented people will stay?

Yes, although I'm sure some talented people who can't afford to lose their job (e.g. can't have a break in health insurance, visa is tied to Twitter, are in a tough financial situation) will also stay.

The problem, I would imagine, is that desperate and/or sycophantic are indistinguishable from talented to Musk. Note how he decided to fire people who wrote less code than others, not understanding that the truly talented people write less code because a) they're more efficient and/or b) they're working on more thorny issues which require more thinking and less coding.

[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by HerRealName

What type of person would click on 'Yes'? You could accidentally hurt Musk's feelings next week and get fired anyway.

If my company did this, I'd probably click "yes" since I'm in a comfortable financial situation and don't have a worry about finding a new job. I'd then see how little I could do before getting fired, just for the lulz.

[albionmoonlight]

Originally Posted by flere-imsaho

If my company did this, I'd probably click "yes" since I'm in a comfortable financial situation and don't have a worry about finding a new job. I'd then see how little I could do before getting fired, just for the lulz.

I knew a guy who worked for a famously sweatshop-like law firm. He had a co-worker who decided he had had enough. But instead of quitting, he just kept turning down work from the partners, telling them he was too busy on a project from some other partner, etc.

And because (at least at the time) the bosses didn't look holistically at one's hours until the end of the year, he basically pulled down a big law firm salary for a year while pretty much doing nothing.

[albionmoonlight]

dola:

I suspect that one could hang around Twitter/Tesla for a while doing very little work as long as you randomly sent out messages at, like, 4AM and made sure Elon was aware that you were "working" then and publicly defended/fanboyed him on Twitter and in staff meetings, etc.

He'd probably promote you several times over people who were actually working.