Elon Musk is a nice chap

[EEVblog]

It also didn't hurt that I was an hourly paid contractor at a major software company at the time and worked a lot of OT several summers in a row. 70+ hours a week earned me quite a bit of money and left little time to spend any of it. That's why I don't blame people at all for not wanting to commit to that kind of death march at Twitter. It's something you can do when you're in your 20s and single, for a while, but nobody with any sort of life can sustain it for very long and if it were demanded of me today I'd quit.

And that's exactly what Musk wanted. He only wants the ones willing to work crazy hours and sleep at their desk. Tesla and SpaceX are (in)famous for this culture.
If that's not what you are after, simple, dont work there. Remember when everyone said "Twitter is a private company and it can whatever it wants"? It works both ways.

If you are a young talented programmer willing to work hard then turn up the interview with a sleeping bag over your shoulder (I'm serious, do it) and your git repo printout and you'll get hired for a few hundred $k. Great opportunity for those with the drive.

[EEVblog]

It is not particularly good time of year to voluntary quit, we are getting into Christmas holidays, much less hiring, I'd think with 3 months of severance most of the quitters will barely make it until they receive their first paycheck from their new employer.

Join the cue for the jobs. Meta laid off 11,000, Netflix, Stripe, Microsoft and many others, twitter is only like 5th on the list of biggest tech layoffs recently.

[Psi]

It also didn't hurt that I was an hourly paid contractor at a major software company at the time and worked a lot of OT several summers in a row. 70+ hours a week earned me quite a bit of money and left little time to spend any of it. That's why I don't blame people at all for not wanting to commit to that kind of death march at Twitter. It's something you can do when you're in your 20s and single, for a while, but nobody with any sort of life can sustain it for very long and if it were demanded of me today I'd quit.

And that's exactly what Musk wanted. He only wants the ones willing to work crazy hours and sleep at their desk. Tesla and SpaceX are (in)famous for this culture.
If that's not what you are after, simple, dont work there. Remember when everyone said "Twitter is a private company and it can whatever it wants"? It works both ways.

If you are a young talented programmer willing to work hard then turn up the interview with a sleeping bag over your shoulder (I'm serious, do it) and your git repo printout and you'll get hired for a few hundred $k. Great opportunity for those with the drive.

This.

[Microdoser]

Twitter (Musk) can indeed do whatever they want, and (so long as they act within the employment laws for the countries the employees live in) can treat their employees any way they want.

Of course, it will reap the whirlwind it sows and IMO it is on a rapid downward spiral that will lead to it declaring bankruptcy relatively quickly for a multi-billion dollar company.

[Psi]

Twitter (Musk) can indeed do whatever they want, and (so long as they act within the employment laws for the countries the employees live in) can treat their employees any way they want.

Of course, it will reap the whirlwind it sows and IMO it is on a rapid downward spiral that will lead to it declaring bankruptcy relatively quickly for a multi-billion dollar company.

People were saying Tesla and SpaceX would never work.
So I wouldn't count Twitter out just yet.

What remains to be seen is how Elon can handle a social network company rather than a manufacturing company

[tom66]

There's a statistic around that suggests the average American would struggle to fund a $500 car repair.  There's vast income inequality and many people living on the breadline even in a first world country.

It's not about inequality but unwise financial decisions by individuals. Each month they spend as much as they possibly can and have many credits to pay. Especially true in US where buying on credit is basically ingrained in culture. When some unexpected spending is needed, they have no additional money whatsoever.

I mean, no.  This is the moral argument against homelessness again.  There are plenty of people who have no skills or qualifications so all they can do is get $12 an hour working fast food.  And they live in a city where rent for a 1 bed apartment is $1200 per month.  Pretty easy to be paycheque to paycheque there and have no way out.

There's a middle class cohort of people not earning that much and leasing/financing everything, sure, but that's not what the statistic refers to.

[tooki]

It's not about inequality but unwise financial decisions by individuals. Each month they spend as much as they possibly can and have many credits to pay. Especially true in US where buying on credit is basically ingrained in culture. When some unexpected spending is needed, they have no additional money whatsoever.

But that “culture” of buying on credit is more due to simply insufficient wages than of it actually being “ingrained”. (Yes, compared to many countries, it is, but those countries have wages that enable people to save).

I used to think like you until I read a statistic around 10-15 years ago that completely changed my perspective: 62% of personal bankruptcies in USA were due to illness, be it because of medical bills, lost wages (including losing the job entirely), or both. It doesn’t matter if you were the best saver in the world and had saved $100k by age 22: get cancer, lose your job, and you get medical bills after insurance for a million dollars, then your savings are gone, so you’re buying groceries and gasoline on a credit card because the alternative is literally to starve. It was not uncommon for an entire family’s wealth to be obliterated because everyone in the family had to pitch in to keep their loved one alive. 

I hope it’s gotten better since insurance reform, but the upshot remains: in USA, medical problems can wipe out your finances in an instant. Even if insurance pays for everything, if serious illness prevents you from working, you’re fucked. There’s little to no job protection, so your boss can fire you for being absent too much. Unemployment or disability are minimal, and literally do not allow you to save even if you had an excess somehow.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t irresponsible morons who buy things on credit because they think it’s “free money” (actual quote from someone I know, uttered when he was a dumb teen; he’s now grown up, and it took him years to climb out of that debt hole). But they’re actually the exception, not the rule. The overwhelming majority of active debt in USA is in mortgages (which most people consider a sound investment) and car loans (which are structured as mini-mortgages), the latter of which are unavoidable for many people because you need a car in order to get to work to make money, and a low-wage job doesn’t present any opportunity to save up enough to buy a good car outright. (Many poor people are stuck between choosing a car loan to buy a late-model car, or paying for expensive repairs on their old car that exceed what the car is worth. Well that, or having no car and thus no job.)

And I do think that we really need to make financial numeracy an important part of a primary education.

One last thing to remember: until a few years ago, people here in Europe tended to pay electronically much less than Americans. And for various reasons, until about 20 years ago, most banks in USA didn’t issue debit cards you could pay with in stores at all. (And once they did, it was mostly as Visa or Mastercard-branded debit cards, visually almost indistinguishable from a Visa/MC credit card.) Many Americans have credit cards for convenience and security of not carrying cash, plus the consumer protections afforded by the card (fraud protection, extended warranties, etc), and then pay them off in full every month. (Only 27% of Americans carry a balance most of the time. 45% always pay in full, and the rest occasionally carry a balance. [src])

My point being that when you see Americans on TV paying with a card (where you might have used cash), it a) might not have been a credit card at all, and b) if it was, there’s a quite high chance it was paid off immediately or quickly. It doesn’t mean someone is going into debt to pay for a latte.

[AndyBeez]

Code: [Select]

DoOverCoders()

define REQUEST = _
"Please provide TEN examples of well written, robust, _
tested and well documented functions, modules, _
libraries, classes, namespaces or APIs, that you_
personally contributed to as an agile team member._
" )

IF REQUEST THEN

   println "The boss will ASYNC callback"

ELSE

   @import microsoft.copilot( REQUEST )

   ITER DoOverCoders()

FI

This code is in pre-beta testing

[coppice]

It is not particularly good time of year to voluntary quit, we are getting into Christmas holidays, much less hiring, I'd think with 3 months of severance most of the quitters will barely make it until they receive their first paycheck from their new employer.

Join the cue for the jobs. Meta laid off 11,000, Netflix, Stripe, Microsoft and many others, twitter is only like 5th on the list of biggest tech layoffs recently.

Although these places obviously wanted and needed to slim down, I wonder if they are taking advantage of what is happening at Twitter for their timing? While the media is in full Musk hate mode, they aren't paying a lot of attention to the whole sector slimming down.

A huge myth of productivity is that is a positive number. In reality real net productivity ranges from highly negative to highly positive. Keep that clearly in mind when looking at a business throwing out vast numbers. Net productivity can easily rise when you do that.

[Zero999]

Well, you know who's twitter account has been reactivated. Or more precisely, unsuspended. No new tweets yet...

Crap! Voldemort's account has been reactivated? Damn.

Use the block button if it bothers you.
Twitter is a choose-your-own-adventure.
He said he's not coming back, but the meltdown has been hilarious anyway 

It's only right he let Trump back on. Love or loth him, but there are people on the other side who have done far worse and haven't been banned. He's also running for president and Musk wouldn't have wanted to be seen to be attempting to interfere with the election. Democracy isn't just about free and fair elections, but giving all sides the same platform to air their views, however disagreeable they may be.

It also didn't hurt that I was an hourly paid contractor at a major software company at the time and worked a lot of OT several summers in a row. 70+ hours a week earned me quite a bit of money and left little time to spend any of it. That's why I don't blame people at all for not wanting to commit to that kind of death march at Twitter. It's something you can do when you're in your 20s and single, for a while, but nobody with any sort of life can sustain it for very long and if it were demanded of me today I'd quit.

And that's exactly what Musk wanted. He only wants the ones willing to work crazy hours and sleep at their desk. Tesla and SpaceX are (in)famous for this culture.
If that's not what you are after, simple, dont work there. Remember when everyone said "Twitter is a private company and it can whatever it wants"? It works both ways.

If you are a young talented programmer willing to work hard then turn up the interview with a sleeping bag over your shoulder (I'm serious, do it) and your git repo printout and you'll get hired for a few hundred $k. Great opportunity for those with the drive.

It's interesting the demographics of those who have left/been fired vs those who've stayed. I saw picture of a group of Twitter employees before and after and the change in demographic was notable: all the women, blacks and those with dodgy hairstyles and piercing have gone, leaving mostly Indian and Chinese men with a few whites. Elon clearly doesn't give a toss about the ethnicity and sex of his employees. It's obvious who were only there to tick the appropriate diversity boxes.

[Siwastaja]

That’s an extraordinarily arrogant claim. Not everyone has the ability to earn enough money to save, never mind that much. Many Americans who work full time don’t even earn enough money to pay for rent and basic expenses, never mind luxuries or savings.

It's arrogant and it's harsh, but unfortunately - it's mostly true. Not all, but most of the people who complain they can't afford the basics and can't save up any money are actually spending a lot of money without truly understanding it, by making poor choices on groceries, buying services (entertainment etc.) they do not need, buying middle class luxury items (for example, spending thousands a year in clothing when in reality you could wear the same clothes until they wear out, or even learn to fix them!), insurances (what a scam), eating out instead of learning to make healthy, normal, affordable food, traveling expensively (going into nature near you does not cut it) and so on and so on.

Case in point, and the price level of Finland is roughly similar (a tad higher on groceries etc.) to that of US. I have been homeless and tried to get my own business running in a small industrial estate which I rented and where I also unofficially lived (I caused zero trouble and helped them out so the landlord was happy with it), there was a period when I earned just some 100-200€ per month on the top of the rent and I was OK with it, I spent some 50-60€/month on food and it forced me to very healthy eating habits. Later getting into a small startup with little but at least some money, I was still able to get an actual salary of 2200EUR/month, and with that I paid off my remaining student loan of 5000EUR in matter of half a year, plus made necessary investments like buy a car (420 EUR, old rusty Toyota, just excellent car) and get some test equipment etc. That lasted for maybe two years and by keeping my expenses down, basically everything went into savings, and finally I had some 25000 EUR in savings, the same as my soon-to-be-wife who had lived modest life, too. Neither of us never earned much over ~2000 EUR/month and averaged out much less than that. Yet finally we bought a 75 000 EUR old house with only 20 000 EUR of debt, which we then renovated (and this is of course still going and never finishes).

Now I of course earn more and we are free of debt. We never complained, but if we look at media, we have to listen to / read bullshit like "boohoohoo I'm poor, I only earn 3500 EUR a month and no one can live with that because after the bills* you only have 500 EUR left for living**, boohoo".

*) oh how I hate that saying. Bills are not something that just appear out of thin air. Bills are for products and services you chose to buy.
**) I hate this "living" thing even more. Basically it means entertainment and cafes. By that definition, I don't live.

No, we two have lived together with my then-girlfriend being unemployed with zero benefits and myself earning 2200 EUR a month yet deposited at least 300-500EUR every month on savings account. But no frappe mocha lattes at Starfucks, obviously.

It's a lifestyle thing. Now we have a lot more moneyz than back then, but still not wasting it. Never had financial stress; people think it's caused by too little income, but in reality it's caused by misbalanced income vs. living expenses, and while adjusting your income can be quite difficult (negotiating for more salary / changing job is not easy, and is risky), living expenses are under your full control. You just need to realize and admit this, and get rid of mental limitations.

[AndyBeez]

I saw picture of a group of Twitter employees before and after and the change in demographic was notable: all the women, blacks and those with dodgy hairstyles and piercing have gone, leaving mostly Indian and Chinese men with a few whites.

So it looks the same as any other IT company/consultancy the world over. (Except in Seattle maybe)

[coppice]

I saw picture of a group of Twitter employees before and after and the change in demographic was notable: all the women, blacks and those with dodgy hairstyles and piercing have gone, leaving mostly Indian and Chinese men with a few whites.

So it looks the same as any other IT company/consultancy the world over. (Except in Seattle maybe)

Or India or China. Those are ethnic monocultures, with usually a few more women than in western countries. There's usually more than a few white men in western countries, though. Also, depending on its history, there many be a lot more East Asians than South Asians or vice versa.

[floobydust]

It also didn't hurt that I was an hourly paid contractor at a major software company at the time and worked a lot of OT several summers in a row. 70+ hours a week earned me quite a bit of money and left little time to spend any of it. That's why I don't blame people at all for not wanting to commit to that kind of death march at Twitter. It's something you can do when you're in your 20s and single, for a while, but nobody with any sort of life can sustain it for very long and if it were demanded of me today I'd quit.

And that's exactly what Musk wanted. He only wants the ones willing to work crazy hours and sleep at their desk. Tesla and SpaceX are (in)famous for this culture.
If that's not what you are after, simple, dont work there. Remember when everyone said "Twitter is a private company and it can whatever it wants"? It works both ways.

If you are a young talented programmer willing to work hard then turn up the interview with a sleeping bag over your shoulder (I'm serious, do it) and your git repo printout and you'll get hired for a few hundred $k. Great opportunity for those with the drive.

Remind me again about this "great opportunity".  Isn't this Silicon Valley startup notion finally buried as a myth? Twitter's original employees thought the same "what a great opportunity" and here they are jumping ship or thrown under the bus.
Work a 70-80 hour week for the same pay (salary), have no time for a personal life, live in an area with a very high cost of living, get nothing for payback which instead goes to the exec's and shareholders, work even more with short-staffed groups and clown management.
Learning anything new... Twitter needs to at the very least copy WeChat: add calling, mobile payment, ride-hailing, food ordering etc. - none of which seems like rocket science.

Elon thinks the solution is clever code, but anyone with software engineering experience knows being organized and having well defined requirements is essential and more important. "Code too soon, debug forever" is the old adage I remember. Proof is his blue check mark rollout as a disaster. The best coders are going to hell letting the Emperor call shots he doesn't even have qualifications to do.
The Trump survey, did Elon do anything about the bots? No mention of that problem being addressed yet he's caught up trolling away.

So I'm not seeing anything worth the sweatshop experience. It will be the usual panic, rush, push in a disorganized mess that gives programmers Stockholm Syndrome.

[John B]

Of course, it will reap the whirlwind it sows and IMO it is on a rapid downward spiral that will lead to it declaring bankruptcy relatively quickly for a multi-billion dollar company.

Except under the previous management twitter was losing $4M per day.

[Bud]

Elon thinks the solution is clever code, but anyone with software engineering experience knows being organized and having well defined requirements is essential and more important. "Code too soon, debug forever" is the old adage I remember.

Old adage? Where have you been the last several years? Requirements have been thrown out of the door. Companies jump in droves onto the latest and greatest framework. It is called Agile. "Code too soon, debug Never".

[Zero999]

I saw picture of a group of Twitter employees before and after and the change in demographic was notable: all the women, blacks and those with dodgy hairstyles and piercing have gone, leaving mostly Indian and Chinese men with a few whites.

So it looks the same as any other IT company/consultancy the world over. (Except in Seattle maybe)

Or India or China. Those are ethnic monocultures, with usually a few more women than in western countries. There's usually more than a few white men in western countries, though. Also, depending on its history, there many be a lot more East Asians than South Asians or vice versa.

Twitter is based in the US, where a lot of Indian and Chinese immigrants came to settle. They appear to be much harder working than African/European-Americans, so it's not surprising they're the main demographic, who have decided to stay. A good number of blacks and women, were solely hired for diversity. The women will generally quit through family commitments and the blacks and many whites generally don't like to work long hours. Needless to say, I'm generalising: there are always exceptions. I expect my analysis will offend someone and don't care.

[floobydust]

Elon thinks the solution is clever code, but anyone with software engineering experience knows being organized and having well defined requirements is essential and more important. "Code too soon, debug forever" is the old adage I remember.

Old adage? Where have you been the last several years? Requirements have been thrown out of the door. Companies jump in droves onto the latest and greatest framework. It is called Agile. "Code too soon, debug Never".

Either way you need a feature defined and owned by somebody. How hard was it to roll out that blue $8 checkmark before the dev team is in place and anyone had thought it out? Too hard apparently.

[CatalinaWOW]

It's not about inequality but unwise financial decisions by individuals. Each month they spend as much as they possibly can and have many credits to pay. Especially true in US where buying on credit is basically ingrained in culture. When some unexpected spending is needed, they have no additional money whatsoever.

But that “culture” of buying on credit is more due to simply insufficient wages than of it actually being “ingrained”. (Yes, compared to many countries, it is, but those countries have wages that enable people to save).

I used to think like you until I read a statistic around 10-15 years ago that completely changed my perspective: 62% of personal bankruptcies in USA were due to illness, be it because of medical bills, lost wages (including losing the job entirely), or both. It doesn’t matter if you were the best saver in the world and had saved $100k by age 22: get cancer, lose your job, and you get medical bills after insurance for a million dollars, then your savings are gone, so you’re buying groceries and gasoline on a credit card because the alternative is literally to starve. It was not uncommon for an entire family’s wealth to be obliterated because everyone in the family had to pitch in to keep their loved one alive. 

I hope it’s gotten better since insurance reform, but the upshot remains: in USA, medical problems can wipe out your finances in an instant. Even if insurance pays for everything, if serious illness prevents you from working, you’re fucked. There’s little to no job protection, so your boss can fire you for being absent too much. Unemployment or disability are minimal, and literally do not allow you to save even if you had an excess somehow.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t irresponsible morons who buy things on credit because they think it’s “free money” (actual quote from someone I know, uttered when he was a dumb teen; he’s now grown up, and it took him years to climb out of that debt hole). But they’re actually the exception, not the rule. The overwhelming majority of active debt in USA is in mortgages (which most people consider a sound investment) and car loans (which are structured as mini-mortgages), the latter of which are unavoidable for many people because you need a car in order to get to work to make money, and a low-wage job doesn’t present any opportunity to save up enough to buy a good car outright. (Many poor people are stuck between choosing a car loan to buy a late-model car, or paying for expensive repairs on their old car that exceed what the car is worth. Well that, or having no car and thus no job.)

And I do think that we really need to make financial numeracy an important part of a primary education.

One last thing to remember: until a few years ago, people here in Europe tended to pay electronically much less than Americans. And for various reasons, until about 20 years ago, most banks in USA didn’t issue debit cards you could pay with in stores at all. (And once they did, it was mostly as Visa or Mastercard-branded debit cards, visually almost indistinguishable from a Visa/MC credit card.) Many Americans have credit cards for convenience and security of not carrying cash, plus the consumer protections afforded by the card (fraud protection, extended warranties, etc), and then pay them off in full every month. (Only 27% of Americans carry a balance most of the time. 45% always pay in full, and the rest occasionally carry a balance. [src])

My point being that when you see Americans on TV paying with a card (where you might have used cash), it a) might not have been a credit card at all, and b) if it was, there’s a quite high chance it was paid off immediately or quickly. It doesn’t mean someone is going into debt to pay for a latte.

It still isn't the whole story.  What that statistic says is that a huge percentage of people who have sufficient assets to benefit from a bankruptcy declaration needed that because of medical bills.  But the problem of overspending income after bankruptcy is often because of lifestyle choices, since bankruptcy essentially eliminates trades the majority of current assets for elimination of prior debt.  And a great many people never gather enough assets for bankruptcy to be useful, again at least partially due to poor spending choices.  Look at the demographics of who buys expensive designer shoes for example.   Most Air Jordan sales aren't to the top quartile of income earners.

I agree, medical costs in the US are insane.  And incomprehensible.  For a variety of reasons.

1.  Health is so valued here that any cost is judged reasonable.  TV adds here are peppered with ads for cancer treatments.  In small print at the bottom they report that in clinical trials their miracle drug reported survival of x days where those treated less effectively or not at all lived only y days.  Where x/y ~ 1.1.   A hundred thousand dollars of drug for a few days more life?   Makes no sense to me.  I believe that countries with more nationalized health plans do less, or perhaps none of this type of treatment. 

2.  Optional health options are treated as necessary.  Viagra being the most obvious example, but breast enhancement and a myriad of other surgeries whose medical necessity is based on mental health reasons.  The same logic would say that mental health requires everyone to have a huge income.

3.  Actual costs of medical care are unknowable.  Every medical bill I have ever received starts with some huge number.  Then (in periods when I have been covered by medical insurance) you get a statement that says the insurance authorized a fraction of that number.  Anywhere from 25 to 75% of the original bill.  And then comes a statement that says the original billing service will settle for some additional amount, often zero and usually far less than half of the difference.   Of course in periods where there was no insurance coverage the initial bill was non-negotiable.   

[james_s]

And that's exactly what Musk wanted. He only wants the ones willing to work crazy hours and sleep at their desk. Tesla and SpaceX are (in)famous for this culture.
If that's not what you are after, simple, dont work there. Remember when everyone said "Twitter is a private company and it can whatever it wants"? It works both ways.

If you are a young talented programmer willing to work hard then turn up the interview with a sleeping bag over your shoulder (I'm serious, do it) and your git repo printout and you'll get hired for a few hundred $k. Great opportunity for those with the drive.

Sure, the company can do whatever it wants and he can try, but who is going to want to work there? The other big tech companies have laid off workers but only a small percentage of their total staff, Twitter has lost a catastrophic percentage and I expect it to continue. Tesla and SpaceX are way cooler places to work than Twitter, they're new and hip and working on exciting stuff. Twitter is old at this point and they run a website. If the pay is really that much higher than other tech companies then maybe it'll work, but historically the compensation there has been comparable to other large tech companies. I expect departures to continue and I think they will have difficulty recruiting. I'm in the same industry and have a lot of friends and acquaintances that work for Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others. The big ones are having layoffs but if the economy doesn't totally implode they'll be hiring again within a year or so.

[james_s]

It's interesting the demographics of those who have left/been fired vs those who've stayed. I saw picture of a group of Twitter employees before and after and the change in demographic was notable: all the women, blacks and those with dodgy hairstyles and piercing have gone, leaving mostly Indian and Chinese men with a few whites. Elon clearly doesn't give a toss about the ethnicity and sex of his employees. It's obvious who were only there to tick the appropriate diversity boxes.

It would be interesting to know how many of those are here on H1B visas. At a place I used to work there were a few of those and I was friends with one, he said his visa was sponsored by the company and if he lost his job he had to find another company to sponsor him within a period of time or he would be deported back to India. They are practically indentured servants, a company can treat them poorly and they have little recourse short of returning to their home country.

[fourfathom]

[...]
So I'm not seeing anything worth the sweatshop experience. It will be the usual panic, rush, push in a disorganized mess that gives programmers Stockholm Syndrome.

Is Twitter able to issue useful stock options to the employees?  By "useful" I mean ones that have a real potential of becoming valuable?  If so, there's your incentive.  I've personally worked many 80-hour weeks and invested huge amounts of my energy at a couple of startups.  One was a minor success, the other a huge winner.  Both were valuable experiences for me, financially and career-wise. 

Even without the stock-options sometimes a good salary, experience, and connections can be very rewarding, even if there are long hours and no big stock-option-lottery payoff.

[james_s]

But that “culture” of buying on credit is more due to simply insufficient wages than of it actually being “ingrained”. (Yes, compared to many countries, it is, but those countries have wages that enable people to save).

My view is skewed somewhat by the fact that I live in a region with an average annual wage of $87,000, and there are plenty of people around that earn well over that and still live paycheck to paycheck. They have bigger houses, nicer cars, more toys, but they still make poor financial decisions, buy stuff they don't need with money they don't have and take on enormous amounts of debt. Almost anyone with a job can save something if they make it a priority, even if it's just a few dollars a month.

[SiliconWizard]

It is not particularly good time of year to voluntary quit, we are getting into Christmas holidays, much less hiring, I'd think with 3 months of severance most of the quitters will barely make it until they receive their first paycheck from their new employer.

Join the cue for the jobs. Meta laid off 11,000, Netflix, Stripe, Microsoft and many others, twitter is only like 5th on the list of biggest tech layoffs recently.

Yup. As I mentioned, this is a pretty common event. But it's apparently very bad because it is Musk. If it's one of the "approved" guys, then it's just normal business and bad luck.
When a company lays off thousands of employees, it is never pretty. The methods used are often just as ugly, if not worse.

As to employment, a thought. Haven't we been told that a lot of the more traditional jobs would disappear, but that will largely be overcome by the huge number of job opportunities created due to the society becoming increasingly "digital"? All the new jobs should be in those big tech companies right? Well, people who thought they'd be ahead of everyone else and much better off because they hopped on the bandwagon, they are in for some harsh reality check. As Dave said, join the cue. As everyone else.

[wraper]

But that “culture” of buying on credit is more due to simply insufficient wages than of it actually being “ingrained”. (Yes, compared to many countries, it is, but those countries have wages that enable people to save).

My view is skewed somewhat by the fact that I live in a region with an average annual wage of $87,000, and there are plenty of people around that earn well over that and still live paycheck to paycheck. They have bigger houses, nicer cars, more toys, but they still make poor financial decisions, buy stuff they don't need with money they don't have and take on enormous amounts of debt. Almost anyone with a job can save something if they make it a priority, even if it's just a few dollars a month.

Also they have much higher credit score than you because banks like when you take so much debt you can barely repay. They are the most profitable customers for banks.