In an eventful Presidential campaign, to say the least, the suggestion that Elon Musk would be tasked with gutting the Federal bureaucracy stood out for me. Why? Because of what he did to Twitter. I spend a lot of time in organisations like that. I see how bloated they become, how they develop an immunity to ‘transformation’ initiatives, shaking them off or adsorbing their remnants as yet another layer on the management mud ball. I see it close-up in tech organisations but we all see it in so-called reforms of the NHS and other state sectors.
When Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, he commenced a transformation like no other. It was summarised in a tweet from the company’s engineering feed one year later. Ignore the tech jargon, the numbers are the point:
This has been a year full of engineering excellence that sometimes can go unnoticed. Besides all the visible changes you see on our app, here are some of the most important improvements we have made under the hood.
- Consolidated the tech stacks for For you, Following, Search, Profiles, Lists, Communities and Explore around a singular product framework.
- Completely rebuilt the For you serving and ranking systems from the ground up, resulting in a 90% reduction in lines of code from 700k to 70k, a 50% decrease in our compute footprint and an 80% increase in the throughput of posts scored per request.
- Unified the For you and video personalisation and ranking models, which significantly improved video recommendation quality.
- Refactored the API middleware layer of our tech stack and in doing so simplified the architecture by removing more than 100k lines of code and thousands of unused internal endpoints and eliminating unadopted client services.
- Reduced post metadata sourcing latency by 50% and global API timeout errors by 90%.
- Blocked bots and content scrapers at a rate over 37% greater than 2022. On average, we prevent more than one million bots signup attacks each day and we’ve reduced DM spam by 95%.
- Shut down the Sacramento data centre and re-provisioned the 5,200 racks and 148,000 servers, which generated more than $100 million in annual savings. In total, we freed up 48 MW of capacity and tore down 60,000 lbs of network ladder rack before re-provisioning it to other data centres.
- Optimised our usage of cloud service providers and began doing much more on-prem. This shift has reduced our monthly cloud costs by 60%. Among the changes we made was a shift of all media/blob artifacts out of the cloud, which reduced our overall cloud data storage size by 60%, and separately, we succeeded in reducing cloud data processing costs by 75%.
- Built on-prem GPU Supercompute clusters and designed, developed and delivered 43.2Tbps of new network fabric architecture to support the clusters.
- Scaled network backbone capacity and redundancy, which resulted in $13.9m per year in savings.
- Started automated peak traffic failover tests to validate the scalability and availability of the entire platform continuously.
Take it from me, that’s absolutely astonishing and they don’t mention that it all happened while reducing the headcount from 8,000 to 2,000. Musk thinks he can take $2 trillion out of the federal budget if he is appointed to a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge, geddit?) With his track record at Twitter, I believe him.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
86% of those who took part voted for left wing parties. 14% voted Reform. Anyone who is still voting Tory is either not a conservative or hopelessly deluded.
Then there is the Harrogate Agenda, and whatever else. In 2022 the government’s behavioural scientists discovered that the people were more pliable than they expected – like sheep. I fear that campaigns like this are not only a waste of time but give a false impression that something can be done. It says, ‘Don’t vote!’ but many did not vote. Are things better as a result? If we want better government we will need a better populace.
Anyone who supports the idea of “Not in my name” basically supports the idea of. smaller state.
Some of them know it, and some of them just haven’t realised it yet.
The latter have yet to discover that you can’t rely on getting wise, intelligent, selfless leaders. You might miraculously get one from time to time, for a bit. But as a general rule you will get self-serving midwit grifters. So the only solution is to shrink the state and have absolute minimal need for political leaders.
Indeed. Sadly none of the mainstream parties are standing on that platform – turkeys not voting for Christmas.
This solution started out with Maggie Thatcher. And after 45 years of shrinking the state in a row, it’s widely acknowledged that all the remaining public and privatized services have become both massively worse and massively more expensive and Deadweight Ed and Chaos Keir are in the process of selling our bodies and souls to an international cartel of “green technology” billionaires and pharma companies, we being the last commodity the state controls which hasn’t been privatized yet.
Shrinking the state has proven to be a massive, f***ing disaster and more of it won’t help, in the same way more COVID boosters won’t suddenly lead to Zero COVID wonderland.
Shrinking the state is not just about privatisation, which has been only a partial success, but about reducing the involvement of the state in our lives. We have too many laws and regulations. I think the state should get out of healthcare and education.
Shrinking the state is not just about privatisation, which has been only a partial success, but about reducing the involvement of the state in our lives. We have too many laws and regulations. I think the state should get out of healthcare and education.
When it’s not about privatisation, why aren’t you calling for anything specific except more privatisation? A lesson which should have been learnt from COVID is that so-called private entities are much freer wrt to discriminating against customers they don’t like for any reaons than the state.
Privatizing the NHS in its present state will lead to the exact NHS we have, just free from any requirements of fair and equal treatement outside of discrimination because of protected characteristics named in the Equality Act. In extremely simplified form, this will mean no more hip replacement or cataract surgery for smokers because “it’s not cost effective” as they’re going to die too early to profit from it, anyway. And this will extend to all so-called “elective procedures” of today: The same kind of would-politicans while then be able to use them absolutely freely to further whatever political goals they happen to have.
Banks are supposedly private. Yet. people get debanked for undesirable political opinions and their only redress is — public oversight which still sort-of works in this sector. When it comes to ‘funky injections’, the regulator has been completely privatized, ie, its bills are paid by the pharmaceutical industry and hence, the presently most profitbable product will invariably become the safest, effectivest and most required one.
One can argue that the NHS is broken by design and should be replaced with a different kind of healthcare system. But be that as it may, the present mess needs to be fixed first. Simply throwing it over a fence so that Virgin, Black Rock, Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca and all the other usual suspects can pick up whatever parts of it they like is not going to improve things.
There’s nothing stopping the state providing health insurance cover for uninsured/uninsurable people.
Discrimination is a tricky one – in theory the market should provide alternatives if there is demand, but if barriers to entry are high and a cartel of providers all behave in the same way for various reasons then it doesn’t work so well. Arguably a lot of the behaviour of private providers is a result of political/regulatory pressure.
The market should provide alternatives because it’s assumed that people operating companies have to care about their customers in order to make money. However, a large company which is profitable can always afford to piss off some minority of its customers. Economies of scale favour oligopolies and people working for a company that’s part of an oligopoly have no particular reason to care for the demands of individual customers as something like “annual revenue is £500 less than what it could have been” simply won’t figure on the balance sheet.
Case in point: I need a new harddisk because one of the two I have is dying. I ordered one from a company named Box (box.co.uk) a fortnight ago which advertises “Free next day delivery” on its website. Reportedly, the item got passed to DHL and then returned for a reason I don’t know. Nobody bothered to tell me about this, because “Why bother?” — this is a £55 transaction really nobody cares about.
The present state is that the company took my money but the people working for it won’t ship the item. I can probably get my money back but – in addition to the waste of time – that’s not going to help me. Granted, I can probably buy the item elsewhere but only as sort-of an act of mercy, ie, due to good luck, manageing to find some people who are willing to ship it, maybe because a throw of the dice went in my favour. That’s an absolutely typical “market performance” I’ve already plentifully encountered elsewhere.
The myth that private companies care for their customers because “competition” forces them to is simply wrong. And hence, the myth that anything can be improved by making it private is, too.
I certainly agree that privatisation doesn’t inevitably lead to better service, but I think its hard for the state to perform BETTER than a private firm because the incentives are trickier to put in place.
This gets me back to the German proverb Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopfe her — The fish stinks from the head. Incentives are really a matter of organization culture and work ethic and that’s ultimatively a matter of what leadership demands and is willing to impose onto itself. The people who were legally partying in Downing Street while the rest of the country was under lockdown attract followers like themselves. Every borough council probably had its own lockdown parties.
People don’t magically become shit just because they’re working for the state and they don’t magically turn into high performers seeking to fullfill their duties to the utmost just because they’re paid by some internet merchant company. It’s by-and-large the same kind of people who are working for public and for private organizations and this mens that, by-and-large, their performance will be identical.
To continue the story from above for illustration: It seems that the company supposed to ship the disk handed it over to DHL. DHL apparently never even made an attempt to deliver but just returned it to the sender. Maybe an error on their part, I don’t know. I’ve had an extensive live chat with some of the customer support guys in the vain attempt to get a disk delivered to me. But I could as well have been talking to a wall. Status of the item was “returning”, script for returning said “apologize to customer and promise refund once the item has returned”. Hence, that was all of the reply I could get from this guy, no matter how often I told him that I didn’t ask for this item to be returned and didn’t want a refund but a disk I had paid for. When I started to become insistent, I got an additional reply “No, we can’t ship out returned items again. We apologize … bla bla bla … wait for your refund”.
It’s hard to imagine that even the most aloof civil servant could have been more intransigent and less interested in whether his employer will end up making a profit or a loss here.
I agree that individuals and their approach to work are very important and make a big difference and that there is a mixture everywhere. But I am sure financial and other incentives (threat of losing your job) do also make a difference. Another issue is staff retention. A friend of mine is a young, very bright and hard working civil servant – exactly the kind of person the civil service should be trying to retain. But he is most likely going to work in the private sector because the money is much better and he has much better leverage there – he wants more flexible working arrangements but there is no flexibility on offer, despite his high value to the department he works for.
Many in the establishment probably regard Parties of that kind as a virus. From their position, they welcome the first past the post system, which offers quite high immunity from infection. Even if you look at the devolved countries (Scotland and Wales) which have partially proportionate systems, it won’t be easy to move away from FPTP.
The idea that MPs should be people from their constituencies elected because of themselves and not because they were running on some party ticked is IMHO principally sound.
Indeed. My MP says he will represent ALL of his constituents but how can he – he was elected on a party platform and will be whipped to vote with his party? He doesn’t represent me.
Apropos your comment a bunch of vain inadequates, who – at present have control over us, but no moral, ethical or logical authority to rule https://www.hughwillbourn.com/post/54-madness-and-the-evaporation-of-authority
However. 13 million people voted leftist (Labour communists and Lib Dum Marxists) and only 10 million voted right ish – Tory and Reform.
Britain could be argued to be a failing, left wing nation. We are done for if those figures keep happening.
The Tories are not right wing – just less left wing than the other Uniparty parties.
We need more direct democracy like Switzerland. We should decide on major issues by referendum.
And, a proportional voting system that had transferable votes in the second round. I suspect that would push voters to really be careful about who they wanted to take power. I suspect that if voters had had that choice at the last GE, there may have been a different outcome.
Has ‘notinmyname’ looked at all possible political systems and worked out which system will work best, both from a representative and pragmatic angle?
I would like to see it.
Is there a merit to start a political party with it’s only remit to change the electoral system to the new system and once that has been achieved to bow out and call new elections based on the new system?
If we want the current political class to change the system it won’t happen. It is not in their interest.