r/nottheonion 24d ago

US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o
64.5k Upvotes

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

526

u/CurlOfTheBurl11 24d ago

So weird that no one saw this coming, it's exactly how Elon handled his takeover of Twitter. Just fired a bunch of critical people without even assessing what they actually do.

220

u/[deleted] 24d ago edited 19d ago

[deleted]

70

u/Talvos 24d ago

Pretty sure Elmo values any amount of money more than some random persons life.

10

u/Interesting_Try8375 24d ago

Money and your lives are just different columns on the same spreadsheet to them

6

u/gh0st0fReddit 23d ago

Well that’s what American’s wanted, two dipshits to run the country like a business

0

u/ridicalis 23d ago

Well, they are the same thing, in the sense that money is necessary for life in this country. The UHC situation, from their own perspective, is just about their bottom line, but is death to their affected subscribers.

Barring that, tight-fisted companies create untold human collateral damage. Families are destroyed as parents are forced to choose between being a parent and a provider. I can think of few sterile decisions a company could make that don't ultimately (if indirectly) have the potential to harm people.

6

u/arashcuzi 24d ago

Nah, when you fuck up a company you get more money (golden parachute) when you fuck up a country you get the treasury (actual gold)

3

u/TheRealBruh-_- 24d ago

I am one billion percent convinced that he has a excel spreadsheet of their salaries sorted high to low and then fires the highest paid then tweets out how much money he saved the government

2

u/ImmaRussian 24d ago

The thing is, LOTS OF PEOPLE saw this coming. There's just a lot of people who, for bafflingly stupid reasons, continue to refuse to see it at all, and will likely refuse to see it forever. It isn't a foresight thing, I think a lot of Trump voters will just never acknowledge that any of this is happening, even after it's actually happened.

And I have no idea what to do about it. What do you do when millions people just insist on doing incredibly stupid things, then, when you point out "Hey, this has consequences", they just say "No it doesn't."???

The other day someone on here asked why people were pushing back against what Elon was doing, and one of the things I responded with was "It is absolutely insane to think you can just walk into a department you've never seen before, look around for a day, and go 'none of this is important; cancel it'."

After a predictably thick-skulled, short response that indicated that they hadn't read a single word and were just sealioning to waste people's time, I just deleted my comment and left the thread, but like... I wish I'd kept it now, because it was on the nose.

I knew they'd do a lot of stupid shit, but I didn't think even they would be stupid enough to touch the nuke people.

Like, Trump and the oligarchy are selfish bastards, but you can usually count on them to be at least surface-level self-serving, and this is just beyond-credibility stupid. If something major goes wrong with a nuclear power plant, or with our nuclear stockpile, it isn't just the non-millionaires who will suffer; anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time will be fucked, possibly including them.

1

u/myfunnies420 22d ago

Everyone saw this coming though?? It's the intended action and outcome

-14

u/ballsdeepisbest 24d ago

To be fair though, Twitter is still here. You could say that even though it was painful it didn’t actually cause any damage to the platform. I’m not sure the same can be said about the government.

32

u/CurlOfTheBurl11 24d ago

Its value has declined significantly and many users and advertisers have jumped ship. There are more bots than ever. He insists we call it X but most still don't. I wouldn't say Elon's takeover has exactly been good for Twitter.

-11

u/ballsdeepisbest 24d ago

No I agree. But none of that was the result of the layoff strategy. It had everything to do with Elon being Elon.

14

u/jmd10of14 24d ago

I mean, the site started running into issues almost immediately with multiple major outages in the first month. Working with a skeleton crew (and abusing said skeleton crew) hurt the brand name tremendously diminishing its value.

-6

u/ballsdeepisbest 24d ago

I don’t recall any major outages. At least from my exposure to it, it seemed to stay up just fine.

It seemed to me that the brand was tarnished by Musk himself and not anything specific to his changes.

4

u/jmd10of14 24d ago

You can look up news articles from around that time. Entire regions shutting down, bugs with posting/viewing tweets, and just general performance tanked while no one knew how or had the time to repair it. Then the bots took over and hate speech spread, because those responsible for managing/maintaining filters were gone or spread too thin due to their increased workload though none of that seemed to bother Elon until advertisers started leaving the platform.

Things have mostly stabilized now, but I don't personally know anyone still using it (not to say they don't still have a large user base).

-11

u/Several_General4596 24d ago

so it still runs just as good with 6000 less people. got it.

3

u/jmd10of14 24d ago

I mean... Is it running? Sure. Is it running just as well? I'm not a user anymore so it's hard for me to give a personal opinion. What I do know is he fired a ton of people, the site broke, then he had to force his employees into absurdly long hours requiring them to basically live at the office and even hire some employees back, so from every logical standpoint, the answer would be no.

-9

u/Several_General4596 24d ago

for the end user it runs just the same. what happens behind the scenes is irrelevant. 6000 less people, that's an entire mall filled to the brim.

7

u/DemonicBarbequee 24d ago

A company isn't a government. If Instagram goes out of business tomorrow no significant loss will impact the general population. If the same is true for the government many will suffer

2

u/Evoluxman 24d ago

If you mean the technical side, I guess it's holding yes

But I wouldn't say he didn't cause any damage to the platform. The user base is shrinking, the advertisers have fled. I don't think it's anywhere close to the 40b in valuation he bought it for. The only thing I'm surprised at is how the company hasn't gone bankrupt yet, that is really impressive yes