"Tesla expanded massively during Covid, as of now half of the dev team(including me) don’t have parking space or desk. It’s physically impossible for everyone to return to office.
"Should I ignore the email, or should I drive to the office and sit under the stairs?"
Commenters' general feeling was that it was a soft layoff, and some speculated that it might amount to constructive dismissal.
I'm suspecting that we'll see forced return to office as a way to implement layoffs without as much bad PR. Stock will go up since costs will drop, but management will be able to say that is more an issue with return to office rather than a company failing. "We're doing great, it's just that some employees don't share our commitment and focus on doing things well, and making our mission a priority."
There has been a sudden uptick in return to office talk (despite plenty of reporting that covid is actually much worse than people realize now). Other people on HN have mentioned it and all of a sudden the leadership at my office, who were always extremely pro-remote work have suddenly started making mention of how valuable in-face communication is.
So the feeling of a "soft layoff" might be the intended effect.
The main issue with that approach is that you basically also lay off all of your good workers who prefer remote. Maybe it's worth the cost for employers. Idk. We're remote-first and hiring. Looking forward to chatting with these employees once companies try and implement their in-office policies.
Elon has in the past talked about a growth-pruning cycle, so this is likely part of that - planned to some degree.
I imagine, too, if there are "100x engineers" (or whatever their role is) there may be compromise otherwise that's not generally applied; I would however think that someone who's that production - unless it's somehow a mostly solo role - would necessarily need to be on-site to utilize whatever resources necessary.
But at this point everyone knows. It’s already become mainstream business news. If other companies try this, the market will absolutely know they’re lying, and additionally lack the transparency and morality to actually admit they need to do layoffs.
this might be a good excuse for companies under-performing but others doing (rather) well, will be (are) able to save a lot of costs (office spaces is #2 expenditure for software companies). And then the added possibility to recruit talent worldwide (and paying those in developing countries a fraction of resources in US / EU :-) )
I know a lawyer who works exclusively in the tech space, who’s dealt with Musk companies a number of times. He said they use the slimiest tactics he’s ever seen, are constantly acting in bad faith. Would not surprise me one bit if this was an attempt to get people to quit so he could avoid paying severance.
I know automation, engineering consulting firms, etc. who have done business w/ Tesla and I have heard thr same types of stories. Often they (Tesla) just burn through relationships, many companies choose to not do business with them a second time.
The fact that its not a great situation aside, the concept of an engineer making ~300k plus a year having to setup a little office Harry Potter style on the floor under the stairs is pretty funny in a "its so egregious its funny" way. Imagine hiring people, paying them a ton of money and then saying everyone has to come into the office due to the CEO's arrogance but having zero infrastructure setup to handle these people. So millionaires (not that any income level should have to endure this) are working under the stairs or in the lobby to appease the God King. Its pretty bad and pretty amusing too.
Maybe Elon read https://www.richardkmorgan.com/writing/market-forces/ and thought it was a good time to implement capitalism 2.0. He's got the cars, the engineers, open roads in Texas, and the vision, he can make it happen!
if they desire sympathy for being forced to sit under stairs, maybe they should first be forced to sit under stairs before offering self-serving excuses.
Well, except for the part where there are news articles with him talking about doing a layoff because the economy is super bad. But maybe Tesla’s workers have drank the “all journalism is clickbait” kool-aid and don’t read the news. In which case this becomes smart again.
This reminds me of Musk's recent comments about "political attacks against him in the coming days".
It has since been learned that he had been reached by Business Insider to comment about the sexual abuse case beforehand. He already knew that an article against him was coming so he framed the narrative before it even reached the public.
I would not be surprised this was the same here. Tell everyone "Leave if you don't like it or we will fire you" when you very well know that 10% of the workforce will need to be dismissed.
This is pure speculations but would not be surprising at all. I cannot imagine that the company's management is unable to do the math on number of employees vs. number of workstations.
Yeah, since the BI story – and in particular his attempt to frontrun it and turn his personal legal troubles into a culture war battleground – I think we can assume pretty slimy tactics from Musk.
I'm starting to wonder more and more whether Musk has forgotten to think about the individuals negatively affected by his actions. I wouldn't be surprised if he really cares about humanity and wants to save the world by going to Mars, but I'm not so sure though whether the end justifies the means.
Despite the zealous beliefs of the visionary, thought-leader techbro space that Musk's every move was to drive civilization forward in some kind of libertarian, technocrat utopia, it seems very clear at this point every one of these moves was absolutely a self-serving narrative shield around incredibly typical corporate/rich-person bad behavior.
Oh but who could have seen this coming except oh wait everyone.
The schadenfreude has been hilarious. Twitter has been blessedly devoid of the kind of chest-thumping he typically elicits and it has been glorious.
I feel like you could have said a lot of this with less words. But, exposing Elon seems to be the focus of your comment. Non-sequitur after non-sequitur.
You show up to work, go to your manager and tell them you have no where to park and nowhere to work. Ask them.what you should do. If they tell you to go home and check back you go home and phone them every day asking if there is space for you and if you can come back to the office.
Parking space? Ride your bike or take public transport, individual cars are not the best option. Electric buses and trains and bikes (for moving people) and electric trucks (for moving goods) are really where the future is going to be.
Tesla’s HQ is on the outskirts of Palo Alto, pre-pandemic most employees commuted in from San Francisco or San Jose. It’s a 3-4 hr bike ride each way from SF, or a 1.5-2 hr bike ride each way from SJ. Not exactly practical. Public transit isn’t great in the area either.
That’s neat, but the USA has garbage public transport. Many towns just have none. I think it’s unreasonable to expect people to use a resource that just isn’t there in most cases.
I've lived very few places with public transport, and often what was in place was poor. Winter exists and biking infrastructure simply doesn't exist in ways meaningful enough to ride a bike, if you are lucky enough to live close enough to do that.
> The message, sent on Thursday and titled “pause all hiring worldwide”, came two days after the billionaire told staff to return to the workplace or leave
So people who claimed less than 24h ago it was at lest partially a way of creating cheap layoffs, were proven right pretty swiftly.
This is par for the course. Every time there is big news expected, Elon’s antics are elevated and a coordinated distraction by way of a tweet is posted. See the “political attacks on me” tweet as an example, which coincidentally was posted the day prior to his sexual assault allegations.
The man has bought Twitter for the purposes of distracting and manipulating the public.
He did the same thing with stock sales last fall. The sale was already in motion when he created a Twitter poll and made a bunch of noise about voluntarily paying taxes. It's bizarre how many people still take his manipulative actions at face value.
I am still amazed the DoD will work with this guy. Yes, there are thousands of people at Space X, many of them former government employees that are well (and still) respected by their colleagues on civil/military side, but the latitude this guy gets...
Wasn't it kind of the same thing in all the likelyhood? Their troubles became apparent shortly after, they were likely trying to get rid of employees people without making layoffs apparent.
It's hard to imagine that severance from a 10% layoff is a significant cost for a company of Tesla's size and revenue. It's not small by any means, but not necessarily worth a complicated scheme in relative terms
I think it's just a game for executives at this point to think of what dumb policy will people put up with to keep their jobs or to quit and reduce severance.
More erratic decision making from Mr Musk. Like, I dunno, the time he told Twitter he was taking Tesla private while tripping on LSD. He needs to step aside from Tesla at this point.
Not defending Tesla or Musk specifically here, but this happens all the time. Until you're ready to announce to internal staff (and publicly, if you're large enough) that you're in a hiring freeze and/or doing layoffs, you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring.
The absolute worst thing you can do is go into a "soft freeze" mode where new hires slowly stop getting approved, backfills aren't happening, middle management gets told that hiring will be revisited next quarter, etc. Non-management employees will notice this and you'll start getting rumors circulating and people leaving.
> you need to keep up appearances that things are operating normally, even if that means keeping up the recruiting pipeline for positions that you have no intention of hiring
This reminds me what I once read about the challenges of zookeeping big cats. They tend to appear very often perfectly healthy until one day they just die. And when you do an autopsy on them you realise that they were sick since weeks or even month, but it often does not “show” in a way you would expect.
The speculation is that since they are not incentivised evolutionary to show that they are hurt. In the wild they are often solitary creatures so no one would or could help them, on the other hand if they appear hurt that would invite other predators to challenge them. Sounds like the incentive structure is very similar for companies.
I've experienced similar at a large tech employer. During a brief, now-forgotten market downturn, we froze hiring but kept open all of our position advertisements, in order to keep the pipeline 'warm'.
I thought it was short-sighted. There were a small number of qualified people for the positions and we constantly complained that it was hard to find them. If one of those qualified candidates applies to a position and gets ghosted, they may never apply again, either because they lose their confidence or out of spite.
"This happens all the time" at badly managed companies, or perhaps at well managed companies if there is a huge macroeconomic shock like in 2001 or 2009. Given that great software is what supposedly gives Tesla its competitive advantage, it's really bizarre to me to go from having 20 open software dev positions to a layoff within 48 hours, because Elon Musk "has a very bad feeling" based on no new data points as far as we can tell. Unless he learned something this week that he isn't telling us.
People always leave. Isn't people leaving the desired result?
Big cuts like that, in my experience, happen when there is an either mismanagement or an external shock that requires action faster than what can be achieved with natural turnover.
Otherwise, headcount targets can be reached by managing the hiring rate. There is always natural turn-over. If you need to grow, hiring rate>turnover rate, if you need to shrink hiring rate<turnover rate.
That's actually pretty standard practice. An official layoff at a large company is going to be kept to a pretty tight circle until it is officially announced. It isn't uncommon for hiring managers to be unaware and only know that currently they have open head count, even if the plan in the works is to include open positions as part of the reduction in force.
Even in small companies, I've definitely had times where I had to drop everyone in late stages (like offer negotiation) due to a surprise hiring freeze. I can't think of many times even when I've been in the exec meetings that I knew about it more than a few days in advance of everyone else.
The thing is, Tesla isn't a Coinbase. Tesla is now a giant manufacturing company that makes a lot of things, brings in revenue, and has some really solid engineering. I don't like their cars from a UX standpoint, but the engineering in their motors and battery packs are solid good products.
Move fast and break things might have been fine in the early days. Seems to me like the company needs to 'grow up' and demonstrate responsibility to shareholders and customers, and to do that it likely involves significantly sidelining Musk, who clearly behaves very erratically.
I don’t think Tesla needs any illusion though. Their product Sells like hotcakes. Of course the stock is still crazy valued so it’s not sustainable to keep this valuation
Lots of big companies in the past couple years have had 10% layoffs and still have job openings because they are shifting strategy and need different skill sets.
I'm sure that's the case. But personally I wouldn't want to be a SWE in that kind of scenario. Dumpster fire all around you and company as a whole pivoting to austerity while at the same time hiring 20+ software engineers? When I see that many open postings at once, alarm bells go off.
I'd be the last person to defend Elon Musk, I don't know the guy, but just want to point out that when you're at his level of wealth and power you also have very wealthy, powerful enemies.
I see ongoing, what appears to be coordinated, attempts in the mainstream/social media to paint him as crazy. I have no special access to the truth but I'd be unsurprised if those stories are 100% politically motivated and have no basis in reality.
> I see an ongoing, what appears to be coordinated, attempts in the mainstream/social media to paint him as crazy.
The parent never used the word crazy, you did. His behavior is erratic. I don't know how that's not obvious to anyone watching him. Does it make him crazy? I don't know, but he is most certainly erratic.
In the same vein, when you have that much money and power you can simply buy/create your image.
There is a lot to criticize about Elon Musk but he's too influential for any of that criticism to reach the majority.
When you're that wealthy you can also circumvent the law. During the pandemic, Tesla "threatened" to move from California to another state if they wouldn't be allowed to reopen their factories. This caused the state of California to basically make an exception for them... so they circumvented the law which other smaller companies could not do.
Personally i can't understand the obsession with someone like Elon Musk or even someone like Bill Gates... It's easy to control your image when you're a billionaire, so you don't actually have to behave and live ethically.
From a strictly economic viewpoint, Tesla has made major inroads that threaten sales from other automakers (Ford, GM, Toyota) who were behind the curve on electric vehicles. Long-term mass adoption of electric vehicles threatens the profitability of the entire oil refinery sector. Similarly, SpaceX has made major inroads against other government contractors for the space delivery sector.
So it's pretty clear why these interests would want to badmouth Musk, but this doesn't really change the viability of the fundamental business models of Tesla and SpaceX. Basically, this is an industrialist model, not a financialist model, and that's the opposite of what the likes of Warren Buffett have been into. Industrialist models are really what the USA needs, the whole neoliberal financialization game has been a disaster for most of the country.
Recession or not, Musk's emails (the stoppage of remote work 2 days ago, and then yesterday's "super bad feeling") seem like reactionary outbursts than wise management. What was the point of pissing people off with the abrupt change to the remote work policy, only for the next day to announce imminent layoffs?
People have pointed out that he’s likely going through mental health issues and Im inclined to agree with them.
He went a bit too far with the Twitter buyout stunt.
Honestly, he should just get off social media and take a vacation or something. But of course he’s too egotistical to do that and will try to muddle his way through it. Its amusing to watch as an outsider but I can’t imagine its a lot of fun for people at Musk companies (+ Twitter).
It's sad really. I used to idolize him so much. I read through all of WaitButWhy's [0] blog post series on Musk back in '15/'16 and loved every bit of it. He literally became my demigod during my undergrad days.
And from all that... to this?
From a much admired and respected 'inventor' to a cringeworthy Twitter 'edgelord.' Just been a crazy ride.
Interested to see this go down in parallel with Elon's "everyone must be in office decree". I have multiple friends that work at Tesla and at least one of them has it in their work contract to allow remote work for at least a year (they started 2 weeks ago). Not sure how his decree will work out (though I have only heard about the employment contract, not actually seen it).
Is the statement in an actual work contract? Or just an item in the offer letter?
In the US (and many countries) we don’t actually have work contracts as full-time employees. Offer letters aren’t contracts, as an lawyer will remind us.
Companies can, and will, change employment terms and compensation as they want.
Tesla does have an exception process for remote work, though.
Unless your friend lives in Montana, their employment is “at-will”. Which means at any time Tesla can change their mind on any aspect of the agreement and offer you a choice between a new contract or the door.
That’s not true. At will is almost never an excuse for violating contracts, employment law, or various discrimination protections. That said they can do it, but they would expose themselves to copious lawsuit liability.
Make that popcorn. Elon’s going to try and dodge all those laws and rules about layoffs, severance, etc. The only thing he might end up hiring is lawyers.
Musk’s return to office directive is likely a mechanism to force quits and avoid the WARN act and paying severance to thousands of workers.
Edit: If you’re looking for SWEs, I’ve spoken to three at Tesla who are looking for new opportunities. They’re an org to target for talent acquisition.
Yeah, his directive seemed obviously aimed at getting people to quit. As I have understand it, legally, that's transparently the same thing. Hence his very public hiring of lawyers whose qualifications are "fighting" to discourage employees from seeking what they are owed.
1) you're likely correct, the "return-to-office" was in part a stealth layoff
2) given that this sort of thing is very common during a downturn, I think Tesla's lawyers probably have a well worked out method on how to do it; I'm not saying it's kosher, but it's common. The only reason this gets so much press is that it's Elon Musk.
No, I think that the real message is "If your employees don't want to leave, make them return to the office". And then you announce a hiring freeze, and that equals an official downsizing.
There are a lot of people who are good at looking busy in the office and doing very little.
I can come in at 7AM, crush it, and leave at 2PM. Here is the thing, however - the guy who came in at 10:30AM and is sitting at his computer for some reason at 7PM is going to be viewed as the "hard worker". It's all bullshit.
If this is what Musk is doing, he is going to shed some of his most productive workers and leave those in place who are just good at fronting.
BLS issued job numbers today and May was still very strong. 390K new jobs, participation rate is up and unemployment rate steady at 3.6%. We're in a bizarre situation where labor is in such short supply that eliminating millions of jobs would just bring us to parity and not lead to a spike in unemployment. It would at least relieve upward pressure on wages and possibly put downward pressure.
It will be far worse since we're still in the unresolved credit bubble that created that crash. We never actually solved the core problems that created that crisis.
What we're seeing now is the beginning of what we have avoided for over a decade, and narrowly dodged during the pandemic, start to finally unravel.
Is it just bias from such a long, fun ride that tech has had that make people unable to see this? Back in 2019 there were plenty of people deeply worried about our credit system and the fragility of our global economy. Our actions to avoid catastrophe in 2020 only allowed the issue to become worse.
We've been living in a fantasy economy so long people have started to believe that nothing is real (just a few days ago there was a post claiming that "natural resources" don't exist and everything is fantasy). But a variety of factors are coming together that so that we'll see the revenge of reality. I don't think it's going to be pretty.
Readit News
"Tesla expanded massively during Covid, as of now half of the dev team(including me) don’t have parking space or desk. It’s physically impossible for everyone to return to office.
"Should I ignore the email, or should I drive to the office and sit under the stairs?"
Commenters' general feeling was that it was a soft layoff, and some speculated that it might amount to constructive dismissal.
There has been a sudden uptick in return to office talk (despite plenty of reporting that covid is actually much worse than people realize now). Other people on HN have mentioned it and all of a sudden the leadership at my office, who were always extremely pro-remote work have suddenly started making mention of how valuable in-face communication is.
So the feeling of a "soft layoff" might be the intended effect.
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-wastewater
A week or so ago, it didn't look too bad. It is indeed much worse than I realized right now.
I imagine, too, if there are "100x engineers" (or whatever their role is) there may be compromise otherwise that's not generally applied; I would however think that someone who's that production - unless it's somehow a mostly solo role - would necessarily need to be on-site to utilize whatever resources necessary.
Isn't your Tesla supposed to be robotaxi, driving around autonomously while you work ? Why do you need parking spaces ?
Deleted Comment
Another instance of Tesla violating labor laws, this time to get out of paying unemployment....
TIL and now that I know the term, I think I've had several employers use similar tactics.
Should be enough time to evaluate whom to keep and not offending anyone directly by stating economic issues
It has since been learned that he had been reached by Business Insider to comment about the sexual abuse case beforehand. He already knew that an article against him was coming so he framed the narrative before it even reached the public.
I would not be surprised this was the same here. Tell everyone "Leave if you don't like it or we will fire you" when you very well know that 10% of the workforce will need to be dismissed.
This is pure speculations but would not be surprising at all. I cannot imagine that the company's management is unable to do the math on number of employees vs. number of workstations.
Oh but who could have seen this coming except oh wait everyone.
The schadenfreude has been hilarious. Twitter has been blessedly devoid of the kind of chest-thumping he typically elicits and it has been glorious.
So people who claimed less than 24h ago it was at lest partially a way of creating cheap layoffs, were proven right pretty swiftly.
The man has bought Twitter for the purposes of distracting and manipulating the public.
To be fair, twitter ownership is not required to use twitter for this purpose.
Business insider gave him a heads up because they asked him for comment before publishing the story.
How would you tell?
Seemed to work out well for them.
I don't think it was a good decision, but Yahoo had/has way more issues with its business than whether or not it allows employees to WFH.
Even for IT workers, I guess that sometimes you need to test on the actual hardware, and the factory is where most things happen.
I am not saying that working from home is impossible, or that banning it is a good thing, but you can't really compare Yahoo and Tesla.
Whatever Yahoo's issues were they were going on for a LONG time. Even when they HAD WFH...
Two days ago the "Who is hiring" thread here had something like 20+ software engineering positions for Tesla.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31585021
More erratic decision making from Mr Musk. Like, I dunno, the time he told Twitter he was taking Tesla private while tripping on LSD. He needs to step aside from Tesla at this point.
The absolute worst thing you can do is go into a "soft freeze" mode where new hires slowly stop getting approved, backfills aren't happening, middle management gets told that hiring will be revisited next quarter, etc. Non-management employees will notice this and you'll start getting rumors circulating and people leaving.
This reminds me what I once read about the challenges of zookeeping big cats. They tend to appear very often perfectly healthy until one day they just die. And when you do an autopsy on them you realise that they were sick since weeks or even month, but it often does not “show” in a way you would expect.
The speculation is that since they are not incentivised evolutionary to show that they are hurt. In the wild they are often solitary creatures so no one would or could help them, on the other hand if they appear hurt that would invite other predators to challenge them. Sounds like the incentive structure is very similar for companies.
I thought it was short-sighted. There were a small number of qualified people for the positions and we constantly complained that it was hard to find them. If one of those qualified candidates applies to a position and gets ghosted, they may never apply again, either because they lose their confidence or out of spite.
Big cuts like that, in my experience, happen when there is an either mismanagement or an external shock that requires action faster than what can be achieved with natural turnover.
Otherwise, headcount targets can be reached by managing the hiring rate. There is always natural turn-over. If you need to grow, hiring rate>turnover rate, if you need to shrink hiring rate<turnover rate.
Deleted Comment
Move fast and break things might have been fine in the early days. Seems to me like the company needs to 'grow up' and demonstrate responsibility to shareholders and customers, and to do that it likely involves significantly sidelining Musk, who clearly behaves very erratically.
I'd be the last person to defend Elon Musk, I don't know the guy, but just want to point out that when you're at his level of wealth and power you also have very wealthy, powerful enemies.
I see ongoing, what appears to be coordinated, attempts in the mainstream/social media to paint him as crazy. I have no special access to the truth but I'd be unsurprised if those stories are 100% politically motivated and have no basis in reality.
The parent never used the word crazy, you did. His behavior is erratic. I don't know how that's not obvious to anyone watching him. Does it make him crazy? I don't know, but he is most certainly erratic.
There is a lot to criticize about Elon Musk but he's too influential for any of that criticism to reach the majority.
When you're that wealthy you can also circumvent the law. During the pandemic, Tesla "threatened" to move from California to another state if they wouldn't be allowed to reopen their factories. This caused the state of California to basically make an exception for them... so they circumvented the law which other smaller companies could not do.
Personally i can't understand the obsession with someone like Elon Musk or even someone like Bill Gates... It's easy to control your image when you're a billionaire, so you don't actually have to behave and live ethically.
So it's pretty clear why these interests would want to badmouth Musk, but this doesn't really change the viability of the fundamental business models of Tesla and SpaceX. Basically, this is an industrialist model, not a financialist model, and that's the opposite of what the likes of Warren Buffett have been into. Industrialist models are really what the USA needs, the whole neoliberal financialization game has been a disaster for most of the country.
You realize that much of our opinions aren't from critical think but are simply assigned to us by elites.
He went a bit too far with the Twitter buyout stunt.
Honestly, he should just get off social media and take a vacation or something. But of course he’s too egotistical to do that and will try to muddle his way through it. Its amusing to watch as an outsider but I can’t imagine its a lot of fun for people at Musk companies (+ Twitter).
There could be all kinds of other factors, but I have been a Musk watcher for a decade and I have a theory on the timing.
There was a major shift in Musk’s public behavior, and his state residency, around the time he was about to have to pay a lot of CA state income tax.
Having to write a ten digit check to the government appears to make most people lose some of their rational thinking abilities.
They seem to go into a siege mentality for one thing.
It appears to me that humans are just not evolved to handle his level of wealth/resource disparity.
And from all that... to this?
From a much admired and respected 'inventor' to a cringeworthy Twitter 'edgelord.' Just been a crazy ride.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html
In the US (and many countries) we don’t actually have work contracts as full-time employees. Offer letters aren’t contracts, as an lawyer will remind us.
Companies can, and will, change employment terms and compensation as they want.
Tesla does have an exception process for remote work, though.
Edit: If you’re looking for SWEs, I’ve spoken to three at Tesla who are looking for new opportunities. They’re an org to target for talent acquisition.
Deleted Comment
2) given that this sort of thing is very common during a downturn, I think Tesla's lawyers probably have a well worked out method on how to do it; I'm not saying it's kosher, but it's common. The only reason this gets so much press is that it's Elon Musk.
I can come in at 7AM, crush it, and leave at 2PM. Here is the thing, however - the guy who came in at 10:30AM and is sitting at his computer for some reason at 7PM is going to be viewed as the "hard worker". It's all bullshit.
If this is what Musk is doing, he is going to shed some of his most productive workers and leave those in place who are just good at fronting.
We'll now see who will survive this correction, no matter how long it takes.
https://tomtunguz.com/sales-marketing-spend-model/
It will be far worse since we're still in the unresolved credit bubble that created that crash. We never actually solved the core problems that created that crisis.
What we're seeing now is the beginning of what we have avoided for over a decade, and narrowly dodged during the pandemic, start to finally unravel.
Is it just bias from such a long, fun ride that tech has had that make people unable to see this? Back in 2019 there were plenty of people deeply worried about our credit system and the fragility of our global economy. Our actions to avoid catastrophe in 2020 only allowed the issue to become worse.
We've been living in a fantasy economy so long people have started to believe that nothing is real (just a few days ago there was a post claiming that "natural resources" don't exist and everything is fantasy). But a variety of factors are coming together that so that we'll see the revenge of reality. I don't think it's going to be pretty.