Tech layoffs exceed 240k so far in 2023, 50% more than 2022

> Top 25% among agriculture workers in Kansas?

Top 25 across all us workers

> The newgrad earning those 100k will have to live sonewhere in Northern California, where rent alone will claw 25k back for a crappy apartment

Yes, I know. I lived as a new grad making 75k in a major city (Los Angeles, not bay area though). Rent is expensive and will likely take 1/3 of your paycheck or more. It's been like that for years though and that's not something that's changed recently. It also doesn't negate the fact that our industry still pays far better than most.

> food expenses another 25k

The fuck are you eating? If you're spending 2k a month on food you don't get to complain about money. I hate cooking and love good food and regularly spend $1500 a month on dining, but I'm well aware that if I needed to I could drop that by $1000. Spending $2k a month on food is choice you're making.

> save for a 200k downpayment and 7.5k/month (is this the current rate?) mortgage payment.

Who is saving 200k for a down payment? The days of 20% down are long gone and pretty much everyone gets PMI. Especially for your first home you can cut that in half.

Also, why are you as a new grad buying a million dollar home? Where did you get this idea that a new grad's salary should allow you to purchase a long term home in a major city without making some financial trade offs? That has never been the case. Your expectations are completely disconnected from reality and you're comparing your situation to a reality that never existed.

You can either wait until you're further along in your career and your salary is higher to buy, buy something cheaper (don't say this isn't possible, I know for a fact it is in), or move to an area with a lower cost of living.

BLS jobs data is available to the public, go read it and you will confirm what I already told you

If anything, these massive companies will benefit when they can pick up struggling startups with great tech for a 1/1000th of their peak private valuation.

But, Microsoft, Meta, Google, etc. are not raising money on the open market; they have treasuries and revenue. I really think there's a lot of complexity going on here; interest rates going up didn't cut consumer spending by that much, so discretionary purchases didn't decrease, which meant that people were still buying ads and funding these companies. (I guess Microsoft doesn't make any money off of ads, but Google and Meta do.) I am guessing that people didn't expect the discretionary purchases to remain steady; in the past, interest rate increase = unemployment increase = nobody buying anything, but that appears to not be happening this time. Additionally, on the tech side of things, hype about AI is giving investors a serious fear of missing out, so there is definitely a bit of investment happening.

So all in all, I think these are very weird times, and it's hard for anyone to plan. You can guess, you can hope, but at the end of the day, we don't really know. We know what caused recessions in the past, but we don't know what the 10 year horizon looks like for "there is a deadly disease, everyone work from home and buy as much stuff from China as possible, oops they are all sick so only the highest bidder gets their thing, and oh btw you don't have to pay off your student loans anymore so bid away!" It made the $ worth a lot less. That's about it.

Witness: Walmart, Costco, Target and most of the retail sector. People have never stopped creating these low margin businesses.

You're not actually earning a return via US treasuries, you might get lucky and keep pace with inflation.

More broadly you've dropped the context, which is that the business in question can be growth positive even with high risk and tiny margins. US Treasuries are not growth positive, they don't grow and spit off new capital to reinvest into further expansion. Operating with a 2.3% operating income margin is a risky business, retail is extraordinarily difficult and is extraordinarily risky to start a business in due to the very low margins, and yet people will keep on doing it perpetually regardless of interest rates.

Earning a lower rate of return for eg five years on a business (vs treasuries), while re-investing into said business, can be the rational thing to do for a larger longer term payoff (which you'll never get out of treasuries). Your premise ignores pretty much all the very complex nuance to business. To say nothing of that the rational thing to do sometimes, is to do what you enjoy, which perhaps is operating a very low margin convenience store instead of sitting on a stack of treasuries. Businesses (more common in small to mid-size businesses) are frequently not run for maximum return, and that action can in fact be quite rational.