Manufacturing engine = bleeding-edge tech + financial game rules
The US Civil War was decided by European investors not buying cotton futures and north having the technologically higher value textile machinery base
WW2 was won in Detroit, fueled by war bonds, lend-lease etc
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This is a kremlinology bait. It’s tempting to try and guess visas from faces, and sort forced/real smiles etc. That’s the point. So long as you’re obsessively analyzing such photos, whether with sympathy or hostility, attention is being misdirected from what’s not in the photos.
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I don’t blame him from trying. He has to attract enough genuinely talented missionary idealists among the scaramuccis, bannons, millers, and visa-serfs to give this a real shot. And protect any islands of clean-sheet startupish energy from the siege of 15 years of history.
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The interesting thing with software is that manufacturing capital base is not heavy hydraulic presses and factories but people. Detroit in 1940 had to spin up lots of new factories and raw material flows. Labor was less of a bottleneck. People could be trained up fast.
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In sw, it’s always a core of irreplaceable artisan geniuses building mysterious/puzzling bits, small armies of good, hard-to-backfill people around them, building less mysterious/puzzling bits, and vast crowds of fungible drones doing what sw still can’t: moderation, tagging…
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In dictators handbook terms, these are the essential, influential, and interchangeable parts of the “ software factory” (the labor IS the capital, not the hardware)
Twitter’s lost thousands fairly randomly, including presumably enough essentials and influentials to be in crisis.
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Forget visa status. Can you guess from this photo which of these people is which group? I can’t.
It’s not actually a bad time to be fighting a talent war. The industry’s laif off 10x as many people as twitter, in all 3 categories. It’s a buyer’s market.
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I’d guess Twitter needs to replace at least a dozen “essentials” and maybe 100-200 “influentials.” The interchangeables (70-90%?) can be ignored. Can be replaced or automated (a lot of biz-process bureaucracy and moderation is going to get automated everywhere in this downturn).
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The influentials backfilling I think will be fine. Even with the terrible optics that this photo is attempting to counterprogram, enough people will be desperate or just morbidly curious enough. This photo is designed to recruit them. It’s like a college brochure stock photo.
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