Article from last year, before the life support got pulled
Someone needs to write a book on what the hell happened here - in the history of corporate America, I don't think we've ever seen a blunder this costly. Facebook spent an obscene amount of money on the Metaverse, changed the name of their company, and then pulled the plug without any return on investment.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think the revenues are so dwarfed by the investment that for practical accounting purposes they are effectively zero. And it's not like this is useful stuff that will be repurposed for some other project down the road - the end product was so bad that it couldn't even be used internally.
And yet.
Meta is basically fine! Over the past few years they took Ecuador's entire yearly GDP and set it on fire, and they're chugging along smoothly. They laid a bunch of people off (because they were paying them all to work on a useless product) but otherwise have cruised through mostly unaffected.
How much of this 'gen z is so special like no other generation before' lame humor is the exact same things people were saying about millenials just 5 years ago. I think like about 80%
When people say the gig economy is fucked, they may not be able to put it enough into persepctive for those outside of that sphere to understand.
Let me paint you a picture.
My partner and I just dashed for about 2 hours. Drove through snow and high winds. Dealt with grumpy retail employees. Navigated the hell that is city-downtown driving. ALL on Black Friday, the day that's supposed to be highest-paying.
Guess how much we made.
I'll wait.
○ ○ ○
$12.
That's it. $6/hour. McDONALD'S pays more than that. More than double, in-fact (at least in NYS).
Uber, doordash, instacart, all these businesses that tout themselves as helpful to the entrepreneurial spirit-- they're all lying to us.
They're using every old excuse in the book to not properly compensate their workers, then crack down on the organizations that could ACTUALLY help them, like unions.
Don't be fooled by propoganda.
Corporations are NOT our friends. Fight for your rights.
think one of my favorite things abt compiling my "employment moodboard" tag is watching complete strangers find one post from it and immediately go thru the entire tag. not joking btw please keep doing this we are all young adults struggling in this world i love you all we are connected Thru the waves of the universe
If my living situation weren't hell right now (and for the recent past and foreseeable future), I could see myself enjoying the momentum of having >6h of class each day plus required reading plus extracurriculars and reading for fun on my breaks plus hanging out with my dear IRL bestie. But alas, my living situation is hell right now.