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.