I saw the first Rivian of my life about a week ago when I was in Bellevue, because of course that was in Bellevue. So, stocks are eating shit, we're no longer rewarding the perception of money-making (which, I mean, is it a perception when everyone has known that Uber and ilk have either never made a profit, or have only made a profit through accounting tricks)? And there's a lot of instability in the world, and interest rates are going up again to make it harder to make money, but if the market finally corrects to what was supposed to happen in 2008. I don't even know what that could look like, outside of something very, very bad for the general population whom received none of the benefits of 2008 - current financial policy.
In the past two weeks I have seen two Rivians and a Lucid! I find this horribly depressing because Teslas are the car you buy if you hate cars, but Rivians and Lucids are the cars you buy if you hate cars and also hate Teslas. Everything is shit, everything is hideous, everything is heinously expensive. Why would you buy this garbage. We're hiring right now. For pricing? We take the going market rate, near as we can determine what it is, and add $2 an hour. Hiring sucks but rehiring sucks more and while ours is an entry-level position, there's a lot of folklore to learn and once you've mastered what we need but determined you're ready to move on to something better, we'd like you to give us enough time so that you can pass along what you've picked up and hopefully say nice things about us to the people you meet on your journey. We interviewed babysitters for the kid like seven years ago. We had women with Masters' degrees show up with prospectii in letterpressed folders. It was f'n unreal. We needed someone to change diapers, they were applying like we were buying a timeshare. Now? Now we get maybe three out of four interviews flaking. We have candidates applying for full-time work who say "actually I'm only interested in three half-days." We ask for a cover letter just to get a sense of the candidate (Indeed is a shithole, also the only thing anyone uses anymore) and of 80-odd applications we've gotten two. I no longer look for typos, I look for a more-or-less concept of sentence structure. We thought it must have been us? Naaah. It's everywhere. Now - if you're a cranky old man your obvious reaction is "kids these days." The socially acceptable reaction is to snark about avocado toast. But the minute you've decided the rest of the world is wrong you've stopped thinking. So it's worth considering a few things: - more adults 18-29 - a majority! - live at home than at any point since the Great Depression. - rent is up 15-35% nationwide, with some situations being batshit. - used car prices are like a bad video game glitch. - Gas prices are skyrocketing - customers are terrible ...and if you were a young adult that got remaindered by the pandemic or thumped out of college or stuck doing your senior year remote and have been spending the past two years interfacing exclusively with your parents, grocery checkers and Zoom, your sense of social self has been decapitated. There is nothing out there for you. So you're gonna pay $5 a gallon to borrow Dad's spare car to spend an hour in traffic to sit in front of women yelling at you for $18 an hour? I fucking don't think so. Now - you can argue that things are going to get better when student loan payments kick back in, and the 2 year moratorium on evictions is fully lifted and has run its course. But that stinks of "beatings will continue until morale improves." I think it's better to observe that young adults in particular, but the country in general, got to observe that the worst of capitalism is optional. That we're horrible to the lower economic deciles by choice and by design. That a better present is possible, but the people in charge prefer the cruelty. And I think that's a rough environment to have people realize Netflix isn't worth $16 a month in.
On the job front, I think every sub-group in my department has a vacancy. That's probably six vacancies in a department of ~30. I left my old job six months ago. My old vacancy is still posted. As long as I'm skimming my old employer's career page, I see they have vacancies listed for positions they laid off 18 months ago. With the job market the way it is, it's time for corporate execs to actually look at employee survey results. They won't, though. I put an offer on a house last week at $105k over what they paid in 2018 plus liability for a pending assessment for road improvements around $12k. Didn't get it.
Reading this made me think about life & the world & where everything is heading and that was not a good feeling :( Think you're right on about this. Everything feels so bleak and pointless. At my job right now I'm doing stupid busywork fiddling with the UI for some garbage product nobody is going to buy so that some asshole venture capitalists can enrichen themselves. And since I'm living at home not paying rent most of that is going towards stocks which are of course doing dismally. And a new job would maybe pay more (whopee) and then I could be making richer and more prestigious venture capitalists money working on a product that's competently evil instead of just not very good. Or if I wasn't doing anything things would be pretty much the same except with too much free time and I'd feel a little guilty but if I got fired tomorrow it'd be kinda whatever. Which is a very privledged take I know but aaaa what's the point of doing things if it barely makes your life better and probably makes the world worse off overall. I think that's a lot of the appeal of FIRE, certainly is for me at least. What else is worth spending money on other than getting Out. Anyways sorry if this was off topic just what your comment reminded me of
I remain optimistic. I mean, look - we know that the cruelty is optional. We know that brutality and deprivation won't get anyone back to the office. We know that when rents go up, people move in together or move out of town. David Rosenberg is fond of saying "the cure for high prices is high prices." Nothing we're doing right now is steady-state; on Mother's Day we went for a walk in a neighborhood I love and I realized I hadn't seen a single house for sale in there for the duration of the pandemic. Everybody there decided it was a great place to hunker down and that if they sold at a profit, they'd have to buy somewhere else and no thanks. If you can sit this bullshit out, you are sitting this bullshit out. I haven't been on a plane since February 2020 and that's not by accident. I've been rearranging everything I can to help our employees do more with less. Online scheduling, online billing, infrastructure changes, etc. It's not just because I can't hire my way out of the problem, or the fact that I'm too cheap to give everyone raises (when your income is determined by insurance company contracts that change every five years, inflation is a problem). It's that everyone's patience is hanging by a thread, our capacity to be kind to others has been exhausted and people suck right now and I don't see it getting better any time soon. But I mean look. If you can do your job remotely, why not move to rural Kentucky? Maybe vote out Mitch McConnell while you're at it. There's a real network effect to metropolises but it's too expensive right now, and if you set up somewhere else you get to be a big fish in a small pond. I think things will get better. Historically? They always do. That's just reversion to the mean. It just sucks living through history.