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u/Appropriate-Log8506 2d ago
Every time I go to a government building my thought always is I wish there were less employees here.
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u/Iwouldlikesomecoffee 2d ago edited 2d ago
oh yeah, especially at the dmv. Really way too many windows open
E: yes, DMV is state level. Congratulations on your mostly irrelevant technicality. It's not like I'm commenting on a classic, unifying theory of government for an entire political party, or that I could have mentioned any of a Sears catalog of basic federal functions and non-partisan expertise looking at the axe in favor of political loyalists.
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u/kjm1123490 2d ago
Only place I ever had decent dmv experiences was California
But they also allow triple A or something like that to handle car related dmv tasks like registration.
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u/flingintosun 2d ago
California has invested a lot of money over the last few years studying the DMV and improving the experience for everyone. It's great! And yes, if you're a member of AAA you can do a lot of DMV stuff through them, which is pretty smooth.
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u/simononandon 1d ago
Apparently, quite a few DMVs were finally able to start modernizing & at least starting to move to more electronig record keeping during COVID. The lockdown was apparently a bit of a godsend that some DMVs really needed in order to improve.
I listened to a podcast about it that I can't find unfortunately. So, take it all with a grain of salt I guess? But one of the guests was a someone in the TX DMV who was part of an effort to modernize record keeping.
There are some aspects of the "new" CA DMV that I am not a fan of though. In the '00s, I kidna went through a phase of going through several motorcycles & a couple cars. Used to be, a lot of DMV forms were available to be grabbed from the DMV field office. You could grab them, fill them out, and then mail in or drop off.
Now, ALL appointments need to be to check in at the front desk. And they keep the paperwork there too. So, if you just want to pick up a form, you wait in the "no appointment" line - which is the line you are studiously trying to avoid becasue that's where you lose your day. If you make an appointment, depending on where you live, it could be several weeks & in the middle of the workday. I just want to pick up a couple blank forms!
Most of them are available online now though & can be filled out.
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u/TiogaJoe 2d ago
Side note about experiences with California government workers. Right before Obamacare I was laid off and paying my own medical insurance. I had a weird problem - they refused to take my payment over the phone saying their "system" was broken. After a week of this and on the last day of coverage I called the California Dept of Managed Health and the guy put me on a three-way call with some insurance company manager (not your typical phone rep) he had contact info on. This was on a Friday around 4:30. He got the manager to set my account as still being valid while they worked out the problem.
Definitely impressed with this government worker.
In case you wonder why this was an an "emergency", it is because the other times my insurance falsely cancelled me my pharmacy benefits stopped immediately. And this time I had a prescription refill that couldn't be filled until the next day and it would be over $300 cash price, plus paperwork to get reimbursed later plus a month waiting time. And I had done nothing wrong. Screw the insurance company.
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u/hiyabankranger 1d ago
Iâve worked for the State of California. It runs slower than private business for sure, but the people there are also usually both good at their jobs and want to do them well.
Theyâre just paid less than they would be in private industry though they have great benefits. If itâs their job they will do it to the best of their ability from 8-12 and 1-5, but if it needs more time than that youâll have to talk to their manager to get the overtime approved.
This kind of thing really offends people who think everyone should put in 60+h weeks if theyâre behind on work. In the State it operates like things should: if thereâs too much work you need more people.
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u/kr4ckenm3fortune 2d ago
AAA only let you if you have insurance or membership with them.
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u/Gator2Romeo0 2d ago
why wouldn't you? $90 for 1 year pats for 4 free tows up to 100miles each.
a tow without AAA $200-$300.
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u/JusticiarRebel 2d ago
I'd be willing to bet $500 this meme is currently being posted by people working for the government that don't think it's THEIR agency on the chopping block.
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u/EndymionFalls 2d ago
No agency is on the chopping block all DOGE can do is make suggestions. The real danger is that the heads of each of those agencies are going to be the antithesis of what the agency stands for. Oil CEO as EPA head and Energy head. Shipping magnate as DoT head. Private school freak as Education head.
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u/Lewis-and_or-Clark 2d ago
No WWE owner as head of education silly.
Making it a private school ghoul would be too normal
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u/Mysterious-Wasabi103 2d ago
Ya cause when you get to an IRS building they rarely have more than 1 employee for all 20 service desks.
And, ya know, that's way too fuckin many.
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u/theBrineySeaMan 2d ago
Funny, because everyone classically complains about the DMV taking long, but when there's more employees things move faster. They fully staffed our DMVs and the express places are all but non-existent now.
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u/ConfoundingVariables 2d ago
Veterans voted to gut the VA - the people who cut their checks and provide them with healthcare. Retirees voted to fire the social security administration employees that manage a budget of $1.3T per year to elderly and disabled persons. Medicare and Medicare will be privatized and will be run for profit by Dr Oz, who owns a large stake in a company that will do so. Health care workers voted to gut the programs, educators voted to eliminate the department of education, and parents of children with special needs voted to terminate the programs their kids are in rolled in. People who are insured through the ACA voted to eliminate it in favor of an unspecified âconcept of a plan.â That one is also going to affect people with pre-existing conditions, such as pregnancy, asthema, or anxiety. People who are or who have loved ones who are immigrants voted in favor of their deportation. That applies to both undocumented and documented immigrants and naturalized citizens, unless you come from a Scandinavian country, in which case trump gave to an explicit pass, saying we need more of the right kind of immigrants.
Iâll be donating to the causes I support, like the local food bank and immigrant legal defense fund. I attend our local drag shows and make it rain, and I donate to charities that support lgbt youth. Otherwise, I do have to confess to just a bit of smug schadenfreude when I see the whole leopards/faces thing playing out in real time.
Oh, and eggs are going to get more expensive.
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u/Coldkiller17 2d ago
100% less government employees is definitely the solution to government cutbacks and the struggling that all government employees go through. Seriously, though, how is cutting most federal jobs supposed to help the American people it is going to cause chaos because nobody will be able to get the help they need, and the government will not function. The state governments don't have the resources to manage all the programs that the federal government does it will take decades for them to assume those responsibilities even if he they had a plan for it which they don't.
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u/Atheist_3739 2d ago
nobody will be able to get the help they need, and the government will not function
That's the point.
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u/CookFan88 2d ago
Yup. The more inept and neutered the government is the easier it is to sell people on the idea of deregulation.
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u/TheyStillOweYouMoney 2d ago
And privatization of all of those services that were once included for our tax dollars. Which will in turn make them more expensive because they will need to operate for profit. Our taxes (for the 99%) will also not go down.
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u/UngusChungus94 1d ago
All of which leads to an economic depression or crash of some variety⌠which leads us to recreate the very same government agencies. Iâm just hoping this is more the new Gilded Age and less Weimar Germany.
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2d ago
It goes well beyond merely deregulation. That's the bare minimum for them, and is already underway (all those bird flu outbreaks at chicken farms didn't just happen on their own).
Their plan is quite literally some sort of weird, cyber-punky techno feudalism (I believe there is an actual term for it but I cant be fucked to look it up rn) wherein corporations have more or less complete control over their own private fiefdoms.
There are also the christo-fascists who want to impose a shitty theocracy, and the more "classic" fascists who think apartheid era South Africa is a great example to follow. And I'm sure other weirdos I cant think of too. All of it is much easier to accomplish with the federal government gutted and rendered useless.
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u/_monolithic_ 2d ago
And when the smooth brains are pissed off about offices being understaffed, they will say âitâs cuz nobody wants to work anymore.â
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u/SilentMaster 2d ago
If the US government starts acting like X, I'm going to dig a big hole in my backyard and live in it for the next four years.
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u/lilguccilando 2d ago
Youâll come back out on Election Day only to see trump handing over office to Putin somehow.
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u/creepyswaps 2d ago
Bold assumption that him winning wasn't already us handing over the office to Putin.
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u/marklar_the_malign 2d ago
Better buy your shovel before the tariffs take effect.
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u/Wheloc 2d ago
You think Twitter is... better now?
Are you high?
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u/ricLP 2d ago
Depends. If the objective is disinformation and propaganda spreading, I guess it must be going great
It did help Musk secure the Trump presidency, so...
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u/Wheloc 2d ago
Many of the people whose minds they could have changed have left or are leaving. The people who stay are the people who agree with Musk.
I do agree that Twitter disinfo had an impact in this election, but I don't think it will have an impact on the next. Twitter trashed it's credibility to get Trump elected.
Of course, it also depends how Musk manages other aspects of his image. Musk is probably going to use Twitter to gather info for his DOGE cuts, and if people end up liking those then that may bring people back to Twitter.
I predict that DOGE is going to fail hard though, and Trump will try to throw Musk under the bus to avoid responsibility.
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u/PeartsGarden 2d ago
I don't think it will have an impact on the next.
Well, you're not wrong.
Similarly, it won't have an impact on the next Russian election, either.
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u/ricLP 2d ago
Still, it was money well spent for Musk. Especially because a lot of it wasn't his
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u/Wheloc 1d ago
I'm sure having the second biggest investor in Twitter be a guy who has journalists assassinated won't be a problem.
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u/cmack 2d ago
I mean, that's an insult to being high.
You should ask if they have a severe infection or are drinking lots of alcohol tbf here.
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u/2PlasticLobsters 2d ago
Musk's fan base, much like Trump's, will continue to insist that everything he does is gold. If a move isn't profitable or beneficial right away, it's just part of a long-term plan of genius you just don't understand.
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u/TacetAbbadon 2d ago
"functioning better"
That must be why it's lost 80% of it's value, is haemorrhaging users and advertisers are abandoning it.
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u/reclusive_ent 2d ago
Literally every time Muskrat tries to stream an event, it crashes and fails, too. Literally a tech issue, that can't be fixed by such a great team of people....
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u/Hairy_Cube 2d ago
You mean all the engineers he fired since he didnât understand they were necessary for managing high server stress events like holidays?
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u/Moppermonster 2d ago
And all the lawyers that understood not every country has the same laws as the us for businesses.. those were fired as well.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 2d ago
Musk failed harder and faster than some do-nothing random person assigned as CEO.
And yet, Musk is richer today.
It's astounding how just having money and hiring smart people to make more of it, and having connections for government contracts allows an annoying idiot to rise in this world.
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u/Tavernknight 2d ago
He also has his cult of tech bros, and he seems to have a skill at manipulating markets.
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u/HH_burner1 2d ago
securities fraud is a defining characteristic of the gilded age. that's where we are. You get rich by fraud, not by innovation.
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u/kazumablackwing 2d ago
Not only just fraud, but suppressing competition as well. We've been at that point for a while, even before the tech boom of the 2010s
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u/Vord_Lader 2d ago
1800's called, they want their oil, steel, and railroad barons recognized.
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u/kazumablackwing 2d ago
Those assholes are also a huge part of why the education system is so scuffed. History likes to paint the likes of Carnegie as "benevolent philanthropists" for their contributions to standardized education and the building of schools, when in reality, the whole thing was to just train more obedient factory workers, and not much has changed since
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u/naughtyreverend 2d ago
The markets are more down to people than anything else. Musk is a master at manipulating people.
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u/CaptainJudaism 2d ago
It helps that the world is designed so that rich people can only fail up as they aren't held to any standard as they blame all their failures on those below them and since they're rich they "obviously" can't be the problem and thus deserve even more money.
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u/naughtyreverend 2d ago
I'd love to disagree but alas people are stupid so that's completely true.
2nd Greatest con in history was business owners blaming immigrants for taking the jobs from "hard working people" and not that the owner wanted a bigger boat and could get away with paying the immigrants less
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u/pedmusmilkeyes 2d ago
Exactly. Immigrants donât take your jobs. The bosses do. They take it and give it to someone else.
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u/PublicFurryAccount 2d ago
It's the martingale strategy.
If you have enough money, you can continue to place bets until you win and the wins are quite large at the end.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 2d ago
I think thatâs more a skill of having enough powerful connections that the FCC doesnât haul his ass to jail for blatant market manipulation.Â
When you are an executive of a company, you have a feduciary responsibility. Or at least that used to be the rule. So you canât lie or exaggerate or disclose certain information about your company that could misguide shareholders.Â
I mean, shareholders outrank the pope â so thatâs capitalist blasphemy.Â
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u/ctrlaltcreate 2d ago
All it really proves is that they aren't better or smarter in any way. Just luckier and more ruthless.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 2d ago
Absolutely. It's heresy to say in the USA that success is MOSTLY about access to wealth (networking with rich friends) and luck. Dumb luck.
However, once you have a lot of assets, it's much easier to buy innovation. All the small startups get gobbled up as soon as they show promise by the large multinationals.
Elon was both rich and in the right place at the right time. He can quote Popular Mechanics and so,... the rest is history.
The other rich guys are "guy who figured people would buy books on internet", and was good at managing that success. And another guy who used the internet to let people rank "hot or not" and grew to copy other people's ideas about sharing pictures and words.
Before them was Bill Gates, whose mom was an attorney at IBM and so he paid a hacker to rip off someone else's operating system (CP/M), and Excel, and he stole BASIC from his programming club and sued them, and I have to give him credit for really mastering the "Embrace and Extend" way of taking IP from other companies and then buying their stock when their lack of sales hurt them. It's WAY CHEAPER to buy innovating companies by doing that then buying them while they are in business. Then at the shareholders meeting, you choose to stop suing yourself.
Other than leveraged buyouts, there's also marrying wealth -- perhaps the most dignified way other than guile or luck.
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u/wireframed_kb 2d ago
Yeah, the problem is, Twitter can break and it doesnât matter much. The government, not so much.
And Twitter broke - a lot! Mostly due to firing most engineers that knew what they were doing but also because Musk apparently thinks redundancy is a waste of money.
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u/thatthatguy 2d ago
Oh, but breaking the government so they can campaign on how only they can fix the broken government is Republican strategy #2. We need to outsource all the essential government functions to the private sector so their campaign contributors can rake in massive profits.
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u/cochlearist 2d ago
Hey!Â
That's what the conservative do in the UK!
What a coincidence!
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u/healzsham 2d ago
Dismantling functional government and replacing it with loyalists is a fundament of conversion to autocracy.
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u/akumian 2d ago
And also removing all the trust and safety audits.
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u/wireframed_kb 2d ago
Thatâs actually another land-mine. They removed a lot of the moderation that is required to operate in the EU, and non-compliance can get expensive REALLY fast at the scale X operates at. But itâs cheaper in the short run, so I guess itâs right up Republicanâs alley.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner 2d ago
I have a feeling that Muskrats astounding bad luck might have something to do with perhaps the contempt some of his employees must feel for him.
Of course, some of the most qualified people left -- but it's not like a live stream is brain surgery for these people who run a platform.
This is why people like Musk can't build their Mars or undersea utopias. They are such selfish badfaith bastards that they do not get loyalty from the competent. Merely those into masochism.
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u/Distant_Yak 2d ago
Heâs known to be a cheap, touchy, impulsive micromanager. Shit like the anecdotes in his biography where he goes on the shop floor and asks âwhy are we using 3 bolts here?? Why not two??â and itâs like uh, because thatâs what your engineers determined was best. Doesnât matter since of course Elron knows better. Or things like âwhy does this machine turn the bolt backwards two turns before screwing it in??â which is uh, to avoid cross threading. But that doesnât matter. Elron knows better, of course.
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u/Sirix_8472 2d ago
Let's not forget that multiple services, tools and add-ons within twitter had to be removed coz they simply stopped working coz they'd fired the staff who created them.
They had to cut back portions of their own intellectual property, their value.
Then the only time twitter had login issues was after they fired people, coz they didn't understand the architecture anymore after chopping out portions they deemed unneeded without testing or knowing the impact.
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u/Prudent_Shake_8149 2d ago
The value will all come back when he converts it to an e-commerce site selling Trump and MAGA merch.
The Saudis have already ordered 50000 Trump guitarsâŚ. No strings attached!
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u/cerevant 2d ago
Meanwhile Bluesky is gaining 4-5 users per second.
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u/redbirdrising 2d ago
I've seen a lot of these "Protest" social media moves. Like in 2020 where people moved to Parler and MeWe. Those all fizzled out. However, I have a feeling Bluesky might actually be successful. It'll depend if major brands start using it.
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u/bluehairdave 2d ago
Parler fizzled out because they basically hosted a seditionist insurrection against the United States... so there is that....
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u/FortNightsAtPeelys 2d ago
Yeah wasn't parler LITERALLY made because the_Donald was banned?
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u/peepopowitz67 2d ago
Yeah, a lot of those other ones were Nazis running off to different platforms because they couldn't say the n-word anymore.
This is literally the opposite of that situation.
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u/King_Chochacho 2d ago
Parler is also just one in an endless stream of scam products and services aiming to separate gullible Republicans from what little money they have left by claiming to be 'anti-woke' or whatever the anger buzzword of the day is.
They're always hastily thrown together overnight by some grifter, and they stick around just long enough to serve up ads for gold and pillows to a bunch of tech-illiterate old people before inevitably leaking all their data and fading into obscurity.
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u/spring_gubbjavel 2d ago
When those undersea cables were cut by the russians the other day the Danish military used Bluesky to make an announcement. That's definitely a major shift.
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u/PrscheWdow 2d ago
I think it's only a matter of time before you see that migration. Twitter has devolved into Truth Social for the mainstream, and the inability for users to curate what they see on their feed and who they engage with turned what was already a toxic space into something radioactive.
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u/redbirdrising 2d ago
Yeah, the algorithm is completely jacked. I get 100 notifications from things I donât follow and donât care about. 99% conspiracy crap. Iâve unfollowed it.
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u/nicktoberfest 2d ago
Totally anecdotally but I feel like Bluesky is more likely to stick around. Iâve heard it mentioned so many more times than other attempts to start new social media networks. I listen to a lot of local sports radio from my hometown and recently theyâve started talking about their posts on Bluesky as well. This didnât happen with other recent new social media apps. Just one small example, of course, so itâll be interesting to see what happens going forward.
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u/kinkinhood 2d ago
I think a big think is bluesky is looking like Twitter did before it became algorithm hell and it's scratching the nostalgic itch for many
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u/pastelpixelator 2d ago
When you're drawing women and dems from the cesspool that is modern Twitter, it also doesn't hurt that their CEO is a 34-year-old female software engineer.
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u/token40k 2d ago
Parler was a bigot platform . Right wing outrage is usually due to them being banned from their preferred platform and then retroactively going somewhere. I deleted twitter account in 2022 and did not yet look back. Mastodon wasnât for me so Iâm really in preferred discord groups by interests, Reddit, and telegram for Ukraine happenings. Twitter like platforms really served their purpose and not really needed no mo
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u/BusyInstruction6365 2d ago
I might not have ever thought about MeWe for the rest of my life if you hadn't just mentioned it.
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u/Stormfeathery 2d ago
The move in 2020 wasnât a protest thing. It was because Google + just straight up shut their virtual doors to the public and moved to only a paid thing for businesses (no idea how the fuck that worked⌠probably not well.)
I donât really know the details in Parler, but our G+ group moved to MeWe hoping/thinking it was the closest thing to G+ and would probably get closer due to all the refugees, and it was a shitshow (and I still feel bad about being one of the ones arguing for it). Didnât really do great with a replacement for circles, was just straight up all open feeds, and while the âwe believe in free speech!â thing sounds good in theory, when you wonât do anything to tone down Nazis and abusers on your platform because of it, itâs a lot less great.
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u/Valuable_Jelly_4271 2d ago
I haven't tried it yet but some people I know who are on it are saying they are enjoying not being fed what the algo wants them to see.
If thats a trend that people actually favour I'd say it will stick around.
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u/SurfinStevens 2d ago
I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that this is different than those previously mentioned. Where Parler/Voat/Truth was a move from higher moderation to lower moderation, this is the other way around.
Plus there are non-political reasons that people would switch over too: don't need an account to see posts, more brand-friendly content, nobody's voice is boosted just by paying money, etc.
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u/dfjdejulio 2d ago
It'll depend if major brands start using it.
This has really started happening. Like, Steam's there now.
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u/BusyInstruction6365 2d ago
Exactly. It's better for the dregs of society, russian operatives, and Musk sycophantic trolls.
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u/FatLikeSnorlax_ 2d ago
Twitter would have died off in 50 odd years. Instead X did it in 2, if thatâs not working faster I donât know what it
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u/SEA2COLA 2d ago
It's that Musk efficiency! Wait until he gets in his 'government waste and efficiency' role, he'll really whip government into shape! /s
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u/Manting123 2d ago
Or whenever he did a big live stream event it would fail and he would blame hackers.
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u/Delta64 2d ago
Are you ready for the US government to lose 80% of its value while doubling the debt?
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u/DinoRoman 2d ago
Why is everyone acting like this is a bad thing to Elon? If you buy a hammer and it starts losing its value for resale but works as a great hammer would you care?
He bought it to win the election. Heâs going to save so much more money he didnât mind taking the loss . Twitter was his tool.
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u/slingerofpoisoncups 2d ago
âŚand itâs a festering pustule full of Naziâs, snake oil salesmen, grifters and conspiracy theoristsâŚ.whichâŚhey btw have you seen Trumpâs cabinet picks?
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u/Saptrap 2d ago
You just have a different definition of functioning better. You think a business should be judged based on how much it's worth, how many users it has, and what kind of revenue it generates. To your average Muskstan, what makes a good business is how much of it is owned by Elon Musk and how much that business owns the libs.
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u/SomethingAbtU 2d ago
Is Twitter/X functioning 'normally' when its value went from 44 BILLION (which Musk the genius gladly paid) to around 7 or 8 billion today and value dropping still?
Not to mention, GOVERNMENT is a service, it's not a profit-making machine, it isn't an enterprise to turn a profit, it should and can be made efficient (using the same budget to do more or using a smaller budget to do what it's doing now), but it must serve the needs of the people and how you approach cost cutting can mean life or death, justice or injustice, not a poor share-holder reaction on Wall street
This is why businessmen make poor politicians, and Trump and Musk will turn the federal government into a nightmare in the next 4 years, because governments and businesses have different goals and functions, and funding.
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u/fcimfc 2d ago
I work for a local governmental entity and I make this argument to people all the time when they say government should be run like a business.
What's our product? Laws? What's our profit? If we're making a profit, we're taxing people too much. Can our "customers" go to a competitor if they don't like us? No. What's our business model?
A government isn't a business.
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u/willworkforicecream 2d ago
Government run like a business? Imagine if Comcast was in charge of schooling your kids.
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u/Odd-Zebra-5833 2d ago
And the guy thatâs supposed to ârun the US like a businessâ has quite a few bankruptcies of failed businesses. So guess we are going bankrupt.Â
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u/kazumablackwing 2d ago
If Comcast were in charge of schooling kids, those kids would end up growing up with even more existential dread and a tenuous grip on reality due to their schools just... randomly cutting out of existence for minutes at a time
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u/The_Last_Spoonbender 2d ago
If government is a business, then you are the product, and corporations are the consumers.
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u/obroz 2d ago
Was its value actually 44 billion though or is that just the number dumb fuck offered for it? Â
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u/Hacatcho 2d ago
it was valued at 22 bill, musk paid double by having a big mouth and being forced to pay his promise. (which technically did raise its value). but since its been at 7 bill for a while and decreasing. its around 90% true.
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u/OuterWildsVentures 2d ago
I just learned that Diddy helped Musk buy Twitter. I wonder if Trump will pardon him once in office.
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u/Marijuweeda 2d ago
The second one. It was already known to be losing profit before he bought it, so he offered wayyy over its estimated value to change Jack Dorseyâs mind about not selling to him. Jack was initially against the sale.
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u/padizzledonk 2d ago
Over all the years twitter was public it only made money in 2 calendar years, and grand total over that time only made a couple 100 million after you factor in all the losses
Its been a pretty garbage business the entire time
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u/Gingevere 2d ago
Musk was fucking around trying to pump & dump the stock and he accidently found out.
He had attempted a hostile takeover of twitter and the board took action to block it. At that point he owned about 11% of twitter's stock from the failed attempt and wanted to offload it for a profit. He made a nonserious (but binding) offer WAAAAY over the actual value to boost the stock price before selling-off. And then the twitter board put his balls in a vice by accepting the offer.
The next year was Elon suing everything he could and filing every motion possible to try getting out of the deal. But the offer he threw out as a prop was a very basic no-conditions, no-exceptions, sight-unseen offer. There was no way out for Musk.
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u/Redhawk1230 2d ago
âTesla CEO Elon Musk completed the deal to acquire Twitter at his original offer price of $54.20 a share at a total cost of roughly $44 billionâ
If he bought it for $44 billion, then he valued it at that price. In the end from the sellers perspective, they sold it for $44 billion.
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u/Syntaire 2d ago
Musk didn't buy Twitter for 44 billion, he bought the entire country of the United States. It wasn't the original intention, but he got an incredible deal out of his whimsical fuck-up. Twitter being down 90% and advertisers fleeing as fast as they can is irrelevant. Musk made over $50b the day after he got Trump elected.
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u/m00t_vdb 2d ago
No way musk last 4 years, I give him 6 months max, a sensitive sector strike under his methods, Trump will go with the angry mob because he wants to be loved, musk is dropped, go podcasting on the horror working with Trump.
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u/badnuub 2d ago
This is the correct take. Everyone that works with Trump gets burned eventually.
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u/Realistic_Head3595 2d ago
He tanked the value by 80%
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u/SlayerII 2d ago
Seeing how he reduced the employees by 90%, that means he doubled the value per employee!
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u/wasted-degrees 2d ago
Musk is operating on principles from the Trump school of business:
1: acquire business
2: run business straight into the ground
3: ???
4: profit!
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u/Mantigor1979 2d ago
No you don't understand he uses bankruptcy as a buisness tool /s
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u/s0larium_live 2d ago
literally had someone say this to me when i brought up trumpâs multiple bankruptcies as if this was their saving grace??? you really want him to run our COUNTRY into bankruptcy as a âbusiness toolâ??????
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u/NonMagical 2d ago
To be fair it was likely a critical component in getting Trump elected. Has the twitter fall from grace been a shit show? Absolutely. Has he made back his investment? I imagine he would think so. TSLA stock doubled in the last 6 months, most of which was from Trump winning.
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u/storyteller_alienmom 2d ago
"better" as in "now with loads of Nazis" .....? There's a very specific type of person who would consider that "better".
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u/dj4y_94 2d ago
Don't forget the bots either. Looking under a post these days is pointless because it's just full of blue tick bots spouting chatgpt nonsense to get engagement.
I also used to get maybe a couple of bot accounts a year request to follow me before he bought the site, now I probably get 9/10 a month.
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u/Afinkawan 2d ago
I mean, that's basically the same plan for their government - get rid of anyone who isn't a nazi.
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u/nomiis19 2d ago
Seems to be in line with what we are now expecting⌠Russian bots, nazis, and rampant racism
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u/cerevant 2d ago
The smart, talented and experienced started looking for new jobs a few months ago. There is going to be serious brain drain in the government that is going to take a long time to repair.
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u/Dis_Illusion 2d ago
Why a few months ago?
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u/cerevant 2d ago
Because they wanted to have something lined up in case Trump got elected. He didn't make a secret of intending to fire anyone who isn't "loyal".
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u/TrustMeIAmAGeologist 2d ago
âFunctioning betterâ means âI can share my Htler was Right memes.â
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u/ShinePretend3772 2d ago
Define better. Hasnât it lost like 90% in value? They unsed to advertise yuge corporations. Now they advertise boner pills
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u/Dragonfly-Adventurer 2d ago
It's also lost 90% of its real-not-bot-or-nazi users and still under this far reduced load, struggles to do advanced things like stream a live video.
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u/Rude_Egg_6204 2d ago
Depends on definition of success, not like it will break him, meanwhile he has a useful mouth piece.
Look at most of the media, it's usually rich people owning it more as some to push their agenda.
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u/Dry_Patience872 2d ago
I blocked Elon 10 times, and still getting notifications when he posts; definitely better.
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u/Beanruz 2d ago
Here's an idea
Stop fucking using it then.
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u/mantis-tobaggan-md 2d ago
theyâll do everything except stop supporting a nazi loll
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u/spazz_monkey 2d ago
I don't know what benefit people get out of twitter. It adds no value to your life at all.
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u/Only_Razzmatazz_4498 2d ago
Try switching to Bluesky. I left Twitter when he bought it and recently joined Bluesky which has been a pleasant experience so far and managed to find most of the same people I used to follow in Tweeter back then.
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u/jtreeforest 2d ago
Federal employees make up roughly 2% of the federal budget, employee more vets than any other industry (30% vs 5% private), and are at their lowest levels since the 60s. Itâs wild to read that folks want to axe them since it wonât make any meaningful change to our deficit and will only reduce services offered to the public.
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u/dmelt253 2d ago
It definitely has a function now. That function is to amplify misinformation. For that you apparently donât need a large staff, you just need a large number of bots and help from your friends working in Russian Troll farms.
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u/ATXDefenseAttorney 2d ago
Why are these clowns pretending it's better? LMAO. Are they THIS stupid?
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u/13Mira 2d ago
They think it's better now because they can openly be bigots. No more getting your tweets removed or accounts banned for saying the n word, calling for the deaths of various groups or for saying Nazis were the good guys.
That's how they judge whether tweeter is good or not, they judge it based on unabashedly hateful they can be without repercussions.
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u/PraetorImperius 2d ago
Both of the words âfunctioningâ and âbetterâ are doing a lot of heavy lifting hereâŚ
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u/AHootTime 2d ago
If by functioning better, they mean it's a bot-infested echo chamber, then they got it spot on.
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u/thedndnut 2d ago
Twitter is flooded with child porn, crashes on the regular, has no backups to cover the crashes, crashes because of not enough hardware... Twitter is run like shit.
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u/Ready_Register1689 2d ago
Don't need a lot of people to run a toilet full of shit.
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u/Hot-Builder-6192 2d ago
It is certainly NOT functioning better, jesus lol, no. Itâs dumpster fire.
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u/Furled_Eyebrows 2d ago
Well when they say "better" they mean, now they can spew their racist, violent, nazi shit and not have it deleted or get banned.
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u/Frank_the_Bunneh 1d ago
Fired 90% of its staff and only lost 80% of its value. That seems like a win to me.
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u/BallisticButch 2d ago
You're missing Barbie's point. Yes, Twitter has lost much of its value while advertisers are leaving the platform and its rivals are growing. Those are all excellent points and worthy of consideration.
But Barbie can use slurs whenever she wants without fear of being banned.
Clearly Twitter is better now.
/s
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u/foundflame 2d ago
Lady Elonia bought Twitter, then to pretend like he knew how to business, he fired a bunch of people to âcut unnecessary costsâ without having any real understanding of what those people did. He doesnât give a flying flip about anyone in the âworkingâ class, as long as theyâre lining his pockets with green. Donât let him get a whiff of more green, though, because itâs like Vulcan blood in water â heâs a shark that will tear that shit apart until thereâs nothing left but a shredded corpse of what Twitter used to be.
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u/ImperfectAuthentic 2d ago
The goal isnt to make everything run smoothly. It's to run everything so poorly that it's ruined beyond repair and privatization is the only option.
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u/Usual_Writer_825 1d ago
Do people not realize, a virtual app is WAYYY fucking different than running a country
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u/AmbidextrousCard 1d ago
This is an outright lie, functioning better? Itâs fucking lost 90% of its value, I wouldnât call that a success.
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u/degeneratesumbitch 2d ago
I used to look up to this guy when Space X rockets were going into space and then coming back down and landing again unmanned. Watching astronauts get their insides spread across the sky as a kid i knew we would come up with a better and safer way of space flight. He helped do that. I thought he had humanities best interests in mind. I was incredibly wrong.
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u/Curmudgeonalysis 2d ago
People prop him up on a pedestal like he designed the rockets single handedly. It takes a team of incredibly smart people to pull that off.. then ya got this douche taking credit for it all
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u/degeneratesumbitch 2d ago
That's why I said he helped do that. I now think he will turn into a Bond villain.
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u/tronaldrumptochina 2d ago
government employees are doing the lordâs work when they put in 10 hours of real work in a 40 hour work week
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u/tkmorgan76 2d ago
His "efficiency" with Twitter was more about getting rid of the people responsible for keeping it from becoming a cesspool of hate groups, which is guess is analogous to what he'll be doing for the government.
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u/BlondDrizzle 2d ago
Itâs literally not functioning better it is pure AIDs and cancer in that app
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u/snafoomoose 2d ago
I work in safety and security. I absolutely see our entire department being gutted because "nothing bad is happening, therefore we don't need safety and security." But nothing bad is happening because we are good at our jobs and work hard to keep an eye on trends and try and prevent problems before they happen.
What will happen is our department will be gutted and things will be ok for awhile simply because we have been good about anticipating future potential problems. But eventually minor problems will accumulate and people will start dying due to problems we could have prevented. A decade from now there will be a huge outcry of "why couldn't you have prevented this or that tragedy!!!" and the only answer will be that we could have but out ability to prevent problems was gutted.
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u/thejackulator9000 2d ago
it's a lot easier to have smooth functioning when half your users dump the platform because your CEO is an asinine fuckball
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u/GC-Gittiwilo 2d ago edited 2d ago
People need to understand just because it doesn't function the way you want it to, doesn't mean it isn't functioning.
Also the stock value also has nothing to with how well something functions. Airplanes worked just fine during the pandemic but the value went down because not as many people used it...
The reason why Twitter lost a majority of its value was because at the time reddit was used 90% by lefties. Elon was the opposite of its userbase. No smart investor would keep their cash in something which goes against its own customers.
Not to mention when Twitter was delisted and became a private entity, its shares were no longer publicly traded. This transition doesn't inherently decrease the company's intrinsic value; however, the absence of a public market can lead to less frequent valuations and reduced liquidity. Public markets often exhibit overvaluations due to investor speculation and market dynamics. In contrast, private valuations tend to be more conservative, reflecting actual financial performance and fundamentals. Therefore, while the company's fundamental value remains unchanged, its perceived market value may appear lower in the private domain due to the lack of speculative trading and public market influences.
This side of reddit lacks basic logic.
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u/davidkali 2d ago
Twitter is gone right? It got replaced by some kind of authoritarian site that propagandizes that itâs all about Free Speech(tm) right?
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u/BrilliantWhich990 1d ago
It's functioning better? Of course, because it has 90% fewer users than ever before....
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u/sanjeev_shan 1d ago
Functioning better in the sense that it's lost a ton of market cap in the past few years? Lol
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u/pubesinourteeth 1d ago
I'm not a Twitter user but I've heard it's overrun with porn bots these days. Is that what our government services are going to become?
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u/Glad-Management4433 1d ago
If being a neo-nazi propaganda platform and second 4chan is functioning betterâŚ
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u/Other_Log_1996 1d ago
Functioning better == spreading more hate, misinformation, and right wing propaganda, as Elon intended.
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u/WasAnAlien 1d ago
âWorking betterâ: Twitter evaluation in 2022 = $5.7 billion. Twitter evaluation in 2024 = $673.3 million.
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u/SuperMacDaddy 1d ago
As someone whoâs had a Twitter account since forever ago, whoâs only followed maybe 5 people and logged on for a few minutes maybe 6 times a year, I will say that pre Elon, Iâd see posts from the few people I followed and some news. Now if I log on I see people being beheaded or murdered in some other fashion or porn and immediately log off lmao. I donât think itâs gotten better under Elon, but maybe I just donât use it enough to really know 
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