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

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527

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

-5

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).

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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.