Mark Zuckerberg's college-spawned startup is supposed to hire its 1,000th employee sometime this year. I don't think that's going to happen. If Zuckerberg isn't talking about layoffs behind closed doors, one of his executives must be brave enough to bring it up. I don't think the company is going to issue pink slips. But I do think its headlong growth in employees will come crashing to a halt before the end of the year.Here's some back of the envelope math on Facebook's burn rate. Figure the company's operating expenses are divided roughly half in labor, half in operations like running its servers. Count $100,000 in salary per employee, and double that in benefits and other overhead; double that again to account for the company's non-labor costs. You end up with an annual cost structure of $400 million. Facebook's revenues for this year are projected to be $300 million to $350 million; if the company isn't already operating in the red, it's headed there fast. Microsoft's $240 million investment? Most of that is already gone towards buying servers — and it's not like Facebook can stop buying servers as usage of its site continues to boom. Publicly, Zuckerberg has talked about the company making growth its priority. But a $400 million a year ship can sink fast, especially if the advertising market faces a hard contraction and media buyers cut back on their more experimental ad buys. And none of Facebook's new ad formats have proven to be a breakout hit, as Google's AdWords was earlier this decade. That's why I think Facebook's braintrust is talking about whether they can afford to keep hiring — and whether they need to cull their existing ranks. Here's where Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the law-and-order type Zuckerberg hired from Google, comes in. She's already made hiring considerably more bureaucratic, instituting new requirements straight out of the Googleplex, like a 3.5 GPA from a top school. Getting strict on recruiting is just the start. Facebookers should expect to see more rules, rules, rules. And even the slightest violation will prove cause for firing — especially for employees who are within weeks of vesting their first batch of stock options, which only come after a year on the job. Sandberg's very savvy about keeping up appearances. Google thrived in part because, in the darkest days of the dotcom crash, from 2001 through 2003, it was the only company hiring. Until it bought DoubleClick, Google had never done a layoff. That's part of Google's image, and I'm sure Sandberg wants it to be part of Facebook's image, too. So we won't hear about a Facebook hiring freeze. We certainly won't hear about layoffs. Whatever happens will be quiet: Candidates won't get called back about jobs they applied for. Managers will find their hiring requests tied up in bureaucracy. And employees will quietly box up their things and go. The sad thing is that those Facebookers will think they screwed up. They won't even have the saving grace of a layoff — the corporate kiss-off that says, "Hey, kid, chin up — it's not you, it's me." A layoff would be the honest thing. But it's the one cost-cutting move Facebook can't afford.

Civil war is stirring near Audrina Patridge's plush new Hollywood Dell redoubt, where the MTV crews following her every supple, dignified move has drawn outrage from neighbors insisting that the city regulate nearby shooting shooting on The Hills. And after hearing the residents' appeal, the Los Angeles film office has in fact interceded to bring you less Audrina from the comfort of her own home — marking a small victory for a tormented community under siege, and possibly marking the West Coast front in America's burgeoning Hills defensive.According to E!, the new permit lasts 30 days and allows for local filming only once per week, and never on weekends. An unnamed Patridge foe cites narrow streets and fire hazards worsened by MTV vehicles, but a member of the underground army known as the Hollywood Dell Civic Association issued a more pointed opposition today:

Hindsight is 20/20. Today's featured commenter, madox, has it in spades, on Twitter's lack of a business model:

Time for another one of those costume ideas/seasonal mini-mysteries you love so much! Hmmm...What do we have here? A shortsleeved collarless shirt, some black slacks, a screenwriting manual, and an odd suggestion to embed some popcorn in one's hair. Whatever could those daffy scientists at Defamer's Halloween Sciences labs be up to now? Wonder no longer: the finished product is after the jump!

Many developers are giving up on Facebook's third-party applications platform, finding it too hard to follow the social network's strict rules for programs which piggyback on its lists of friends and news feeds to find new users. But one application has thrived: Joe Green's Causes has seen traffic triple in the past month, helped in part by interest in the election. But only in part.Causes, Inside Facebook notes, is part of Facebook's "Great Apps" program — handpicked applications which enjoy special treatment from Facebook, including more frequent appearances in users' news feeds. What makes Causes a Great App? One hopes it doesn't have anything to do with Green being Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate. (Chart by Inside Facebook)

Milk, Milk, Milk, Milk, Milk.

Two days until 30 Rock returns, one week until the election, and a matter of hours before we know Cloris Leachman's fate. We'll be watching, but we didn't want to jinx anything. WATCH It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown [8 PM, ABC] - Charlie Brown, Linus, Franklin and the rest of the crew celebrate All Hallow's Eve in the #1 entry in our Halloween Specials Countdown. Recapture your lost innocence while drinking Newcastle, passing a bowl, and thinking about cashing in your 401k.The Rock [9 PM, Starz] - This is the perfect sorbet between Charles M. Schulz's animated classic and Coolio's new joint. The Rock is one of Michael Bay's best and almost all of the best character moments are in the first hour (Anthony Clark as the flamboyant stylist who gives Connery an opportunity to create a massive chase on the streets of San Francisco, Todd Louiso as Nic Cage's scientist buddy). After that, it's just people explaining the plot and screaming/shooting at each other for 90 minutes.

Laid-off sex blogger Violet Blue has resurfaced after her unpublishing. She appears to be in good spirits, debuting her Halloween costume as a naughty nun. Never mind that she should be the one getting her knuckles rapped for fibbing! We hear her departure from Fleshbot, Valleywag's smutty sister site, wasn't as consensual as she'd have you believe. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: nirreskeya, for "Elevation's new partners." (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Though Joaquin Phoenix was once famously saved from a car wreck by wacko auteur Werner Herzog, apparently there's one aspect to the actor still in dangerous need of resuscitation: his love of acting. While attending a Paul Newman charity benefit last night, Phoenix told Extra that he's done, finished, finito with doing films, and he's got one shaky reason why:

God bless John Markoff's ethics-addled heart. The veteran New York Times reporter sucks up industry-spin bullshit, fake quotes and all, then repackages it as truth I can cut and paste. Why is Windows 7 suddenly in the news? Same reason Microsoft's cloud-based Office knockoff, whatever it's called, was also demoed to developers in Los Angeles this morning:

Hollywood PrivacyWatch 2 for 1! 10/25 — A friend and I were at eating at Ammo on Highland around 1 p.m. In the private room in the back was none other than JOANNA KERNS, a/k/a Mrs. Seaver — the original MILF. She still looks hot! She was with a motley crew of people. Everyone was pleasant. And outside on the patio was KIRSTEN DUNST. Also looking good, though not as hot as Mrs. Seaver. [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]

"We're not doing this because of the wave of layoffs," pleads ReadWriteWeb editor Marshall Kirkpatrick, announcing a new site-within-a-site called Jobwire at his also-ran business blog. It's true, Jobwire has been in the works for some time. But Kirkpatrick, who chronicles tech startup trends for a living, forgot to lay off a token employee last week. Now everyone thinks wrong: Either they believe Jobwire missed its launch window ("on schedule for next week," Kirkpatrick tweeted 12 days ago), or worse, they presume this is a hastily-assembled attempt to cash in on the sudden glut of unemployed Web workers. Poor guy. I'll probably end up working for him.

Cranky old John Updike has always used his bully pulpit at The New Yorker to blast popular writers who didn't fit his idea of fiction. As he's gotten older, his hatred of anything he doesn't understand has become commensurately more transparent, earning the ire of Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, and David Foster Wallace. And when you use that power to throw both Toni Morrison and William Faulkner under the bus in that magazine while making sure to say that you find her white characters the most convincing, we have a problem with you, you old bastard.In 1975 Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times that as a critic, John Updike was "too kind." In the years since he seems to have taken that diss to heart, relentlessly smearing even the most slightly ambitious work that's not in his preferred, realistic style...of men who only think about sex. He starts off this truly wretched review in this week's New Yorker with the following bon mot/machete, "Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on." This is nothing new for Updike — as his prose has gotten more journalistic and dull over time, his level of tolerance for more exciting stylists is inversely proportional to his own ineptitude, and he's made many enemies. (Salman Rushdie once said after Updike criticized how he named his characters, "Why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there's a male prostitute named John Updike.") He needs to take a cue from the man who said, "Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt." That of course was John Updike, more than three decades ago. The 76-year-old Updike pretends to be more politic before throwing Morrison under the bus, as if it were impossible to know exactly what he thinks of A Mercy. Ironically, his language becomes more circular and winding than Morrison as he puts her down in the most condescending fashion possible. Does he know how transparently pathetic he sounds?

Listen up, younguns: Here's how this recession is going to go. You're going to get laid off. You're going to find a new job right away, and convince yourself things aren't that bad. Then you're going to get laid off from that job, too. And all your friends are going to get laid off, too, and move out of California. It's time to revisit Odd Todd, the 2001-era dotcom layoff victim who chronicled his unemployment online. The downside: "You can't buy any ice cream, because you have no money, and you can't go shopping, because you have no money." The upside: "It beats frickin' working." Go watch it, and laugh now, before it stops being funny.

With Gus Van Sant's Milk set to world premiere tonight at San Francisco's famous Castro Theater—an event that has the locals so excited, the biopic is practically bubbling up and dribbling down their nostrils—we thought we'd take a moment to introduce you to its breakout star. No, not him—you know him already. And not him, or him, or him, or even him. We speak, of course, of screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, whose name you might have noticed standing approximately 30-feet tall at the last moments of the Milk trailer.Variety announced today that the extremely photogenic and openly gay recovering Mormon would be writing Van Sant's next feature—an adaptation of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Pack it up, Diablo. There's a new It Scribe in town. We now run down for you Everything You Always Wanted to Know About DLB but Weren't Yet Aware of His Existence Enough To Ask: I. HE LOOKS GREAT WITH HIS SHIRT OFF

So what did Barack Obama say when questioned about the weird and terrible plot on his life by those idiot neo-Nazis the ATF busted? He was not angry or outraged or even really sad or shocked. He just said, "I think what has been striking in this campaign is the the degree to which these kind of hate groups have been marginalized." He's, uh, totally right! There was a tendency in New York, among liberals used to assuming that the elections are all stolen anyway, to assume the Obama campaign was doomed before it began because of his blackness, plain and simple. There was, similarly, a dark speculation, sometimes in the form of macabre joking, sometimes serious paranoia, that Obama would not survive the campaign if he got too close to the prize. What that didn't take into consideration was that as he looked more and more electable, more people liked him. Honestly, some thought Iowans were more likely to shoot him than vote for him. Then he proved them wrong, and the paranoia lifted, slightly. And the fact is, with the economy in the toilet, those bitter and ignorant poor whites are finding their distaste for Republicans is beginning to supersede any distaste for Blacks they might also feel. Crazy white power types found their numbers swelled a bit by the immigration "debate"—remember the Minute Men? they were certainly on TV a lot!—but now, the crazies are almost resigned to an Obama presidency. It's actually kinda shocking how few death threats we've heard about, especially considering the attention this patently ridiculous one received in the media. (Though we'd figure the ATF would be more likely to crow about breaking up an assassination attempt than the Secret Service, who tend to prefer to keep things quiet and not encourage the crazies.) But don't get too complacent! A Missouri Nazi tells The Guardian that a couple more Nazis will still promise to kill Obama, and Andrew Krucoff finds proof that Mississippi is still, you know, Mississippi. But Obama's right—they're marginalized. The debate's shifted immeasurably, even from a couple years ago. As a fine measure of how far we've come, the GOP has to use code words for "Muslim terrorist" this year instead of just reminding us of his conventional, acceptable Blackness. God bless us all!

Why can't News Corp. find anyone to run MySpace Music, the spinoff from its social network which is part-owned by major labels? No one seems able to state the obvious: MySpace Music is a feature, not a company. The outside investment it garners is just an elaborate way of cutting in the labels on MySpace's music-related profits. No wonder former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta turned down the job; TechCrunch reports that he cleverly tried to get MySpace to buy Project Playlist, a music startup he'd invested in, as part of the deal. Van Natta picked the right test: If MySpace had been willing to fold Project Playlist into MySpace Music, it would have proven that the music venture really had some independence. Any other CEO candidate should ask the same questions Van Natta raised with his quid-pro-quo deal.

Strong words from retired investment CEO John Bogle in Forbes, about financial-sector layoffs: "We have quite enough lionizing of the notion of 'success' as popularly defined, by a certain kind of material wealth, fame and power, the kind of success, in other words, that we have come to associate with Wall Street's wizards." [Forbes via Young Manhattanite, who noticed that today's Media Word of the Day is "Lionize."]

This year's Oscars Best Picture race is still fluid enough to account for the presence of two films that would normally seem like longshots: the Pixar masterpiece Wall-E and the box office blockbuster The Dark Knight. One is the tale of a lonely hero who talks in a funny voice, and the other is Wall-E, but both films have one thing in common: they're huge, mainstream blockbusters, which Oscar voters don't typically reward. However, the New York Times reports that the studio behind each film is readying a big Academy Awards push, and they've got their eyes set on Best Picture. Which has the better shot, and should we expect either film to wrangle a nomination for Oscar's biggest prize?First, let's take Wall-E. The indomitable Pixar robot has collected some of the most glowing reviews of the year and many of those critics then called it the best American film of 2008 — in fact, Wall Street Journal scribe Joe Morgenstern was already talking Wall-E up for Best Picture in July. Still, the film has several things working against it: it opened early enough in the year to have been forgotten, it made a ton of money but not as much as much as, say, Cars (thereby falling into an Oscar trap where the movie is too successful, but not so successful that it can't be ignored), and it's animated. "Younger-skewing" films like Beauty and the Beast and Babe have been nominated before, but almost offhandedly, and not in a while. Then, there's the Bat. The Dark Knight has one big thing going for it: Heath Ledger's performance is a mortal lock for a Supporting Actor slot, which may help grease the wheels for the film to grab a Best Pic nom. Also, its box office total, second only to Oscar favorite Titanic, is so massive that The Dark Knight has remained the biggest story in the industry all year. Yes, it's still just a comic book movie (and one that had a minor Bat-lash), but what isn't in Hollywood these days? Thus, in the race for Best Picture, we're going to give the edge to The Dark Knight. With previous contenders like Frost/Nixon and Changeling losing steam among the chattering class, The Dark Knight's chances are certainly improved, and it has the best precedent: The Fugitive, a well-reviewed action blockbuster that rode a buzzworthy supporting performance to Oscar glory. We're going to hold out hope in our hearts for Wall-E, but we fear it'll take something stronger than a laser blast from EVE to bust this robot out of the Best Animated Film ghetto.

Click to view Imagine a website where you can view every music video known to man. Yes, that's what MTV.com should have been 10 years ago. Now that MTVmusic.com exists, what is it good for? Oh yes: A whole new way to rickroll your friends.