[kadushka]

You're talking about something else. This discussion started from the claim that private sector has to absorb the eliminated government workers.

If I understand you correctly, you claim that necessary government positions have been eliminated, and therefore, government is unable to perform some of its important functions. If this is true, sooner or later these positions will be reinstated and filled: if enough people are negatively affected, their voices will be heard by the next election.

On the other hand, Twitter laid off ~80% of its employees, including roles seen by some as important, and yet, it's running just fine today, so I guess we'll see about the government.

[ben_w]

> On the other hand, Twitter laid off ~80% of its employees, including roles seen by some as important, and yet, it's running just fine today, so I guess we'll see about the government.

Except for reportedly losing 84% of its revenue, and apart from getting into legal trouble by not having staff fulfilling legally required roles…

If the people of the USA went into this eyes wide open and actually want to strip the federal government down to the bone and turn it into something much more like the EU — where states are sovereign and the "federal" part that remains is the bare minimum for smoothing inter-state trade, freedom for states to leave the union when they feel like it, and only a very small fraction of each state's income is shared with other states — then I'm sure they'll be very happy with this outcome.

But… are you sure you meant to do that? 'cause one thing it ain't gonna do is make y'all "great again". EU doesn't even have a single unified military (that's a matter for member states); and despite the Euro existing, not all member states use it as their currency.

[kadushka]

There's a lot of room between a loose union of independent countries, like EU, and a federal system like in US. There's a huge difference between a state like California, and a state like Louisiana. Perhaps we should let them govern themselves more.

Re: Twitter - did it lose its revenue because of the layoffs, or because of some stupid things Elon said/did?

[ben_w]

> Re: Twitter - did it lose its revenue because of the layoffs, or because of some stupid things Elon said/did?

Both, in so far as one of the things he did was lay off content moderation and that this led to brands seeing their names and adverts associated with content that harmed those brands.

Compare Twitter to Tesla stock price to separate the effect of man himself from the layoffs: his personal gaffes have short-lived impacts on the price, but Tesla's stock price still went up.