The Free Money Stopped

Now Facebook is planning to fire even more workers than Twitter did:

Just over a week ago, Meta CFO Dave Wehner confidently stated that the not-so-giant tech firm will basically freeze headcount and limit new hiring…

With the shares down 36% since then (and is down over 70% this year), something has apparently changed extremely fast.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to people familiar with the matter, Meta is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week. As of the last earnings, Meta had over 87,000 employees (and has never seen a quarterly decline in headcount in its 18 year history)…

The WSJ sources say that layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, with company officials having already told employees to cancel non-essential travel beginning this week.

Many thousands….

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The Problem Remains

Elon Musk cut Twitter’s staff in half, but didn’t remove the corporate cancer:

Social media platform Twitter has made good on its warnings and slashed 50% of its workforce, the company’s head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth announced in a tweet on Saturday.

“Yesterday’s reduction in force affected approximately 15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact,” he tweeted, emphasizing that the team responsible for monitoring and preventing misinformation and harmful content on the platform has remained largely intact.

According to Roth, battling misinformation on the platform will remain a top priority for Twitter. The same goal was emphasized by the company’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, in his own tweet.

Trust not in ticket-taking billionaires. No matter what they say, no matter what they do, they aren’t on your side. An evil that is more efficient is still evil.

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Midwit, Confirmed

I never thought Elon Musk was intelligent. I can’t recall reading a single thing that he was reported to have said that indicated any sign of higher intelligence. And now it’s evident that his pattern-recognition skills are nonexistent.

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Elon Musk, 4 November 2022

Imagine that. It’s not as if for the last decade, corporations haven’t been losing massive amounts of business and abandoning entire markets at the behest of the activists. See: Intel, DC, Marvel, Disney, etc. Perhaps someone should have sent him a copy of Corporate Cancer before he went through with the acquisition.

I have the impression that the ongoing travails of Twitter are going to be of great benefit to parallel economy icons such as Gab and Unauthorized over time.

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That Pretty Much Sums It Up

We covered this on the Darkstream last night. There was never any reason whatsoever to believe that Elon Musk – a ticket-taker par excellence – had any intention of standing up against the Prometheans and their determination to control the mainstream media Narrative, which now includes Twitter, Google and Facebook as well as the older organizations like ABCNNBCBS, the NYT, and the wire services.

But the speed with which Musk bowed down before those he serves was a little startling, even for those of us who had zero faith in his intentions. Considering how bad his public behavior is, one hesitates to even try to imagine what the information harvesters must have on him concerning his private conduct.

That being said, it’s still nice to see there are some positive consequences of his takeover of Twitter.

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk plans to lay off about half of the social media company’s employees in an effort to cut costs, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing sources. According to the report, the cuts will affect about 3,700 of Twitter’s 7,500 staff. Employees being let go will reportedly be informed of the decision this Friday.

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50 Percent is a Good Start

But I suspect Elon Musk will soon discover that it’s not enough to cut Twitter’s staff in half.

Elon Musk will ax “around 50%” of Twitter’s staff within the next few days, according to a new report. The immediate terminations could save the new Twitter CEO significant money.

Just days after Musk’s goliath $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, a massive amount of layoffs for the big tech company could arrive as early as Saturday. There could be job cuts of “about 50%” of Twitter’s 7,500-person workforce, according to a report from the New York Times.

“I was told to expect somewhere around 50% of people will be laid off,” Ross Gerber – CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management – told the New York Times. Gerber said he was informed about the layoffs by Jared Birchall – the head of Musk’s family office.

A report from last month claimed that Musk was going to cut Twitter’s staff by nearly 75%. On Wednesday, Musk told Twitter employees that he doesn’t plan to fire 75% of the workforce, according to Bloomberg.

Apparently a substantial amount of bonuses will vest on Tuesday, November 1, so it would make sense to make it a very unhappy Halloween for soon-to-be former Twitter employees.

But I wouldn’t get even remotely excited about the coming changes at Twitter. It’s just moving from Insane Hard Globalist Left to Sane Moderate Globalist Left. It’s still enemy ground run by a corporate celebrity ticket-taker.

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Yes, And?

A white individual complains about a preference for black employees:

I know a company diversity officer whose salary is $160k plus bonuses. His entire job revolves around how to avoid hiring qualified whites for unqualified blacks. He also provides special treatment and exceptions to blacks for their underperformance which is about 95 percent of them.

Not long ago, he offered a corporate scholarship to a black graduate student. This student ultimately scored in the BOTTOM 10 percent of his class and was hired to a position when hundreds of white candidates scoring in the TOP 10 percent of their class were not hired because they were white.

So what? Why shouldn’t a corporation hire whomever they want to hire? Isn’t that what free association is all about?

Of course the deck is stacked. That’s fine! All they’re doing is creating opportunity while teaching you that all that equalitarian nonsense about meritocracies and equal opportunities was a lie from the start.

Stop believing nonsense and start looking out for the interest of your family, your community, and your people. There is no such thing as “equality” or an “idea nation” and life isn’t fair.

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Abandoning the Indefensible

Even the corpocratic media has reluctantly thrown in the towel on Dem Rangz despite being more than willing to accept the sadistic defacing of Tolkien’s legacy, to endorse the rampant blackwashing, and to osculate the Bezosian backside:

I’ve come to a sad realization: The creators of Amazon’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power know how to create spectacle, but they don’t know how to tell a good story.

There it is, scrawled in blood on the wall. The writers and showrunners responsible for this show could have won me over with good fan-fiction. They could have tossed Tolkien’s lore onto a bonfire and I’d have been perfectly happy if they’d simply crafted an enjoyable story with characters I care about.

Unfortunately, The Rings Of Power is written so poorly it defies even my worst fears. Oh yes, I was awed and impressed by the opening two episodes just like many others. But my how quickly a badly written TV series can wear out its welcome once the shimmer fades….

Galadriel’s adventure in Númenor is honestly just embarrassing. She arrived there—after being rescued—and effectively just bullied everyone in her path like the elven version of a steamroller. The queen regent has her hands full from the moment Galadriel barges through the door, and soon she’s demanding to see the king, then asking for an army.

Miriel has to lock her up and then pack her off back to the elves just to get her to stop. Then—thanks to petals falling from a tree*—she decides to take her back and commit her people—who moments earlier were all but chanting “death to the elves!”—to a war in a strange land? Everything taking place in Númenor is just a shortcut for the plot. Move the plot forward at all costs no matter how many characters are butchered in the process. (I wrote about the hilariously bad Black Speech spy note recently which is another great example of the shoddy writing in this show)>

Instead of actual character drama, the creators of Rings Of Power simply make everyone bicker and argue with one another all the time. Whether that’s Isildur and his father and friends, Elrond and Durin, Nori and the village elders, Bronwyn and the village idiots, or Galadriel and, well, everybody—all anyone seems to do is argue.

The people Galadriel wants to go save are evil and stupid and some of them seem ready to throw in with Sauron at the drop of a pin. But for some reason we’re supposed to care about Galadriel’s quest to go fight to save them from the Enemy?

As an aside, here’s a thought for those producing future films and television series: if casting a cute blonde with a mild case of resting bitch face in the place of an ethereal blonde beauty is enough to functionally derail an A+++ production, imagine how much you are lowering the odds of your own little project being successful if you submit to the creative death by diversity that the Hellmouth is presently demanding?

It’s never a good sign when the most entertaining thing about a production is the commentary on its ongoing immolation.

Anyhow, back to A SEA OF SKULLS. Lodi is discovering he’s got a new task at hand, and he’s not very happy about it….

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The Cancellation of Dilbert

This is not the best thing that ever happened. The corpocracy has finally turned against its longtime jester.

A popular comic strip has been canned by 77 newspapers after its creator Scott Adams started incorporating anti-woke plotlines, including a character black that identifies as white.

Adams’ much-loved ‘Dilbert’ comics have been in circulation since 1989 and frequently poke fun at office culture, but he announced he was sensationally dropped by publisher Lee Enterprises.

The media company owns nearly 100 newspapers across the country – including The Buffalo News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Arizona Daily Sun – and has been publishing Adams’ jokes about the corporate ladder for years.

One of his most recent controversial comic strips included a black worker, who identifies as white, being asked to also identify as gay to boost his company’s environmental, social, and governance ratings.

Dave, his reoccurring character, replies: ‘Depends how hard you want me to sell it,’ before the boss responds: ‘Just wear better shirts.’

For all that I’ve given Scott Adams a hard time about his refusal to accept that anti-vaxxers were right all along, and for good reason, I have to respect his willingness to continue making clear and cogent observations about the increasingly absurd office environment in Dilbert. Because the reason he’s being cancelled is that he is revealing truth that the converged corpocracy does not wish to be revealed or openly mocked.

Of course, it will be interesting to see if Scott has the courage to stick to his guns and continue his honest observations or if he cucks and submits to the SJWs.

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Amazon’s Pants are on Fire

Unlike Tha Rangz o’ Powah, which apparently are not being watched anywhere nearly as much as Amazon is trying to claim. The Dark Herald busts the Bezos machine on the Arkhaven blog.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “numbers don’t lie?”

Accountants say that all the time… When they want a good laugh.

Amazon is proudly claiming they have 25 million views for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, on its very first day of streaming. That is a nice ROUND number, isn’t it?

“25 million people viewed it.” Always be careful with the exact wording.

We can start with I don’t believe it for a second.

Warner Brothers is, for their part, claiming 25 million for the first week of House of the Dragon, and Warner Brothers put the first episode up for free on YouTube. Realistically, House of the Dragon has had way better public reception than Rings of Power. And ain’t it funny that Amazon had the exact same ROUND number?

So, where did this massive overnight number come from?

Well, it came from Amazon.com.

UPDATE: OWWwwww! Samba.TV has released its metrics on Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and they are b-a-a-d. Amazon was claiming a huge number for it’s first day. Samba.TV uses the first three days. On its first three days, the Rings of Power only got 1.8 million US views.

I didn’t buy the 25 million number myself. But an average of 600k/day? I also wasn’t expecting anything that cataclysmic. This looks like it is going to be a downright proverbial failure.

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He Should Have Listened

Jeff Bezos didn’t listen to his son:

Being one of the richest people on the planet, Jeff Bezos is not used to being told what to do. But when Amazon announced it was creating The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which is likely to become the most expensive television series ever made, he received a blunt order from his son: “Dad, don’t fuck this up.”

Sorry, Jeff. A verdict is in. And you done fucked it up.

OH LAWD, DEM RANGS! DEM RANGS A’ POWAH!

Past success sows the seeds of future failure

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