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The Trustbuster Who Has Apple and Google in His Sights

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Shortly after Jonathan Kanter took over the Justice Department’s antitrust division in November 2021, the agency secured an additional $50 million to investigate monopolies, bust criminal cartels and block mergers.To celebrate, Mr. Kanter bought a prop of a giant check, placed it outside his office and wrote on the check’s memo line: “Break ’Em Up.”Mr. Kanter, 50, has pushed that philosophy ever since, becoming a lead architect of the most significant effort in decades to fight the concentration of power in corporate America. On Thursday, he took his biggest swing when the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. In the 88-page lawsuit, the government argued that Apple had violated antitrust laws with practices intended to keep customers reliant on its iPhones and less likely to switch to competing devices.That lawsuit joins two Justice Department antitrust cases against Google that argue the company illegally shored up monopolies. Mr. Kanter’s staff has also challenged numerous corporate mergers, including suing to stop JetBlue Airways from buying Spirit Airlines.“We want to help real people by making sure that our antitrust laws work for workers, work for consumers, work for entrepreneurs and work to protect our democratic values,” Mr. Kanter said in a January interview. He declined to comment on the Google cases and other active litigation.At a news conference about the Apple lawsuit on Thursday, Mr. Kanter compared the action to past Justice Department challenges to Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft. The suit is aimed at protecting “the market for the innovations that we can’t yet perceive,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Biden Faces Economic Challenges as Cost-of-Living Despair Floods TikTok

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    Economic despair dominates social media as young people fret about the cost of living. It offers a snapshot of the challenges facing Democrats ahead of the 2024 election.Look at economic data, and you’d think that young voters would be riding high right now. Unemployment remains low. Job opportunities are plentiful. Inequality is down, wage growth is finally beating inflation, and the economy has expanded rapidly this year.Look at TikTok, and you get a very different impression — one that seems more in line with both consumer confidence data and President Biden’s performance in political polls.Several of the economy-related trends getting traction on TikTok are downright dire. The term “Silent Depression” recently spawned a spate of viral videos. Clips critical of capitalism are common. On Instagram, jokes about poor housing affordability are a genre unto themselves.Social media reflects — and is potentially fueling — a deep-seated angst about the economy that is showing up in surveys of younger consumers and political polls alike. It suggests that even as the job market booms, people are focusing on long-running issues like housing affordability as they assess the economy.The economic conversation taking place virtually may offer insight into the stark disconnect between optimistic economic data and pessimistic feelings, one that has puzzled political strategists and economists.Never before was consumer sentiment this consistently depressed when joblessness was so consistently low. And voters rate Mr. Biden badly on economic matters despite rapid growth and a strong job market. Young people are especially glum: A recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that 59 percent of voters under 30 rated the economy as “poor.”President Biden’s campaign is working with content creators on TikTok to “amplify a positive, affirmative message” on the economy, a deputy campaign manager said.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThat’s where social media could offer insight. Popular interest drives what content plays well — especially on TikTok, where going viral is often the goal. The platforms are also an important disseminator of information and sentiment.“A lot of people get their information from TikTok, but even if you don’t, your friends do, so you still get looped into the echo chamber,” said Kyla Scanlon, a content creator focused on economic issues who posts carefully researched explainers across TikTok, Instagram and X.Ms. Scanlon rose to prominence in the traditional news media in part for coining and popularizing the term “vibecession” for how bad consumers felt in 2022 — but she thinks 2023 has seen further souring.“I think people have gotten angrier,” she said. “I think we’re actually in a worse vibecession now.”Surveys suggest that people in Generation Z, born after 1996, heavily get their news from social media and messaging apps. And the share of U.S. adults who turn to TikTok in particular for information has been steadily climbing. Facebook is still a bigger news source because it has more users, but about 43 percent of adults who use TikTok get news from it regularly, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center.It is difficult to say for certain whether negative news on social media is driving bad feelings about the economy, or about the Biden administration. Data and surveys struggle to capture exactly what effect specific news delivery channels — particularly newer ones — have on people’s perceptions, said Katerina Eva Matsa, director of news and information research at the Pew Research Center.“Is the news — the way it has evolved — making people view things negatively?” she asked. It’s hard to tell, she explained, but “how you’re being bombarded, entangled in all of this information might have contributed.”More Americans on TikTok Are Going There for NewsShare of each social media site’s users who regularly get news there, 2020 vs. 2023

    Source: Pew Research Center surveys of U.S. adultsBy The New York TimesMr. Biden’s re-election campaign team is cognizant that TikTok has supplanted X, formerly known as Twitter, for many young voters as a crucial information source this election cycle — and conscious of how negative it tends to be. White House officials say that some of those messages accurately reflect the messengers’ economic experiences, but that others border on misinformation that social media platforms should be policing.Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, said the campaign was working with content creators on TikTok in an effort to “amplify a positive, affirmative message” about the economy.A few political campaign posts promoting Mr. Biden’s jobs record have managed to rack up thousands of likes. But the “Silent Depression” posts have garnered hundreds of thousands — a sign of how much negativity is winning out.In those videos, influencers compare how easy it was to get by economically in 1930 versus 2023. The videos are misleading, skimming over the crucial fact that roughly one in four adults was unemployed in 1933, compared with four in 100 today. And the data they cite are often pulled from unreliable sources.But the housing affordability trend that the videos spotlight is grounded in reality. It has gotten tougher for young people to afford a property over time. The cost of a typical house was 2.4 times the typical household income around 1940, when government data start. Today, it’s 5.8 times.Nor is it just housing that’s making young people feel they’re falling behind, if you ask Freddie Smith, a 35-year-old real estate agent in Orlando, Fla., who created one especially popular “Silent Depression” video. Recently, it is also the costs of gas, groceries, cars and rent.“I think it’s the perfect storm,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s this tug of war that millennials and Gen Z are facing right now.”Inflation has cooled notably since peaking in the summer of 2022, which the Biden administration has greeted as a victory. Still, that just means that prices are no longer climbing as rapidly. Key costs remain noticeably higher than they were just a few years ago. Groceries are far more expensive than in 2019. Gas was hovering around $2.60 a gallon at the start of 2020, for instance, but is around $3.40 now.Young Americans Are Spending More and Earning MoreIncome after taxes and expenditures for householders under 25

    Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey By The New York TimesThose higher prices do not necessarily mean people are worse off: Household incomes have also gone up, so people have more money to cover the higher costs. Consumer expenditure data suggests that people under 25 — and even 35 — have been spending a roughly equivalent or smaller share of their annual budgets on groceries and gas compared with before the pandemic, at least on average.“I think things just feel harder,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, explaining that people have what economists call a “money illusion” and think of the value of a dollar in fixed terms.And housing has genuinely been taking up a bigger chunk of the young consumer’s budget than in the years before the pandemic, as rents, home prices and mortgage costs have all increased.Housing Is Eating Up Young People’s BudgetsShare of spending devoted to each category for people under 25

    Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure SurveyBy The New York TimesIn addition to prices, content about student loans has taken off in TikTok conversations (#studentloans has 1.3 billion views), and many of the posts are unhappy.Mr. Biden’s student-loan initiatives have been a roller coaster for millions of young Americans. He proposed last year to cancel as much as $20,000 in debt for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year, a plan that was estimated to cost $400 billion over several decades, only to see the Supreme Court strike down the initiative this summer.Mr. Biden has continued to push more tailored efforts, including $127 billion in total loan forgiveness for 3.6 million borrowers. But last month, his administration also ended a pandemic freeze on loan payments that applied to all borrowers — some 40 million people.The administration has tried to inject more positive programming into the social media discussion. Mr. Biden met with about 60 TikTok creators to explain his initial student loan forgiveness plan shortly after announcing it. The campaign team also sent videos to key creators, for possible sharing, of young people crying when they learned their loans had been forgiven.The Biden campaign does not pay those creators or try to dictate what they are saying, though it does advertise on digital platforms aggressively, Mr. Flaherty said.“It needs to sound authentic,” he said. More

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    Biden Administration Unveils Tougher Guidelines on Mergers

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    The proposed road map for regulatory reviews, last updated in 2020, includes a focus on tech platforms for the first time.The Biden administration’s top antitrust officials unveiled tougher guidelines against tech mergers on Wednesday, signaling their deepening scrutiny of the industry despite recent court losses in their attempts to block tech deal-making.Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, the top antitrust official at the Department of Justice, released draft guidelines for merger reviews that for the first time include a focus on digital platforms and how dominant companies can use their scale to harm future rivals.The guidelines — which generally provide a road map for whether regulators block or approve deals — show the Biden administration’s commitment to an aggressive antitrust agenda aimed at curtailing the power of companies like Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon.The guidelines, which aren’t enforced by law, follow a losing streak in the courts. A ruling last week prevented the F.T.C. from delaying the closing of Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the video game maker Activision Blizzard. In January, a court sided against the F.T.C. in its lawsuit to stop Meta’s purchase of Within, a virtual reality app maker.The forceful antitrust posture is a pillar of President Biden’s agenda to stamp out economic inequality and encourage greater competition. “Promoting competition to lower costs and support small businesses and entrepreneurs is a central part of Bidenomics,” a senior administration official said in a call with reporters.The new guidelines would apply to all deals across the economy. But they highlight obstacles to competition among digital platforms, including how an acquisition of a nascent rival may be intended to kill off future competition. Such deals, known as killer acquisitions, are prevalent in the tech industry and at the heart of an F.T.C. antitrust lawsuit against Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The agency has accused Meta of buying Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to prevent future competition.The F.T.C. and Justice Department also said they would look at how companies used their scale, including their large number of users, to ward off competition. These so-called network effects have helped companies like Meta and Google maintain their dominance in social media and internet search.The agencies also laid out ways in which mergers involving “platform” businesses, the model used by Amazon’s online store and Apple’s App Store, could harm competition. An acquisition could hurt competition by giving a platform control over a significant stream of data, the draft guidelines said, echoing concerns that tech giants use their vast troves of information to squash rivals.“As markets and commercial realities change, it is vital that we adapt our law enforcement tools to keep pace so that we can protect competition in a manner that reflects the intricacies of our modern economy,” Mr. Kanter said in a statement. “Simply put, competition today looks different than it did 50 — or even 15 — years ago.”While they lack the force of law, the guidelines can influence how judges look at challenges to mergers and acquisitions. The effort to update the guidelines has been closely watched by businesses and corporate lawyers that navigate regulatory scrutiny of megadeals.The guidelines were last updated in 2020. In 2021, Mr. Biden ordered the Justice Department and the F.T.C. to update them again as part of a broader effort to improve competition across the economy. The agencies will take public comment on the proposals and could make amendments before final guidelines are adopted.“These guidelines contain critical updates while ensuring fidelity to the mandate Congress has given us and the legal precedent on the books,” Ms. Khan said in a statement.While the F.T.C. experienced the recent court losses, it has forced some companies, including the chip-maker Nvidia and the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, to abandon some large deals. The Justice Department blocked the publisher Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster, using an unusual argument that the merger would harm authors who sold the publication rights to their books. More

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    Meta, Facebook’s Parent, to Lay Off Another 10,000 Workers

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    It would be the tech company’s second round of cuts since November. Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, has declared 2023 the “year of efficiency.”Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday that it planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, or roughly 13 percent of its work force, the latest move to hew to what the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has called a “year of efficiency.”The layoffs will affect Meta’s recruiting team this week, with a restructuring of its tech and business groups to come in April and May, Mr. Zuckerberg said in a memo posted on the company’s website. The announcement is the company’s second round of cuts within the past half year. In November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force at the time.Meta also plans to close about 5,000 job postings that have yet to be filled, Mr. Zuckerberg said in the memo. Other restructuring efforts include a plan to wrap up this summer an analysis of Meta’s hybrid return-to-office model, which it began testing last March.“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” he wrote.Meta’s stock rose more than 7 percent by the close of trading on Tuesday.Mr. Zuckerberg is culling employees after years of hiring at a breakneck pace. His company gobbled up workers as its family of apps, which also includes WhatsApp, became popular worldwide. The coronavirus pandemic also supercharged the use of mobile apps, leading to more growth. At its peak last year, Meta had 87,000 full-time employees.But as the global economy soured, and digital advertising markets contracted last year, Mr. Zuckerberg began putting an end to unchecked growth. Meta trimmed employee perks. And after the layoffs in November, which largely affected the business divisions and recruiting teams, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at further cuts.On an earnings call in February, the chief executive said he did not want the company to be overstuffed with a layer of middle management, or “managers managing managers.” He said he took responsibility for last year’s layoffs, blaming his zeal for staffing up on the surge of use early in the pandemic.Meta’s layoffs are part of a wave of job cuts from the biggest tech companies. In recent months, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and others have also said they are trimming their ranks, and some of the companies have increased the number of people they are letting go after initial announcements. Many of the companies have cited a challenging global economic environment for their actions.But even beyond the macroeconomic conditions, Meta is dealing with many challenges. It is grappling not only with a digital advertising slowdown but also with Apple’s privacy changes to its mobile operating system, which have restricted Meta’s ability to collect data on iPhone users to help target ads. It also faces steep competition from TikTok, which has soared in popularity over the past few years. And regulators have stepped up efforts to rein in the company by pushing for new laws that would limit Meta’s data collection abilities.Meta is also in the midst of a tricky transition to become a “metaverse” company, connecting people to an immersive digital world through virtual-reality headsets and applications. Mr. Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as the next-generation computing platform, so Meta has been spending billions of dollars on the effort and reallocating workers to its Reality Labs division, which is focused on products for the metaverse.Yet it’s unclear if people will want to use metaverse products. In recent months, the public has instead gravitated to chatbots, which are built on artificial intelligence. Meta has invested in A.I. for years but lately has not been at the center of the conversation about the technology.Employees have been bracing for more layoffs for months, watching with anxiety as Mr. Zuckerberg embarked on a quest to dial back what he felt was no longer necessary to run the company, according to current and former employees. But the expectation was that he would take a light touch to his favored project of the metaverse.Some Meta employees who were affected by Tuesday’s announcement of layoffs — especially in the recruiting division — felt “gut-punched,” according to current and former employees who have spoken with those in the organization.“People are entering a job market that is the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Erin Sumner, a global director of human resources at DeleteMe, who was laid off from Facebook in November. She said the staggered nature of Meta’s cuts over the next two months was adding to employee anxiety.“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Ms. Sumner said. “There’s a lot of anger, and there’s the question many folks are asking: ‘How do you expect me to do work for the next two months while wondering if I will still have a job?’”In his announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg laid out a vision for streamlining the company by removing layers of management, ending lower-priority projects and rebalancing product teams with a focus on engineering.To that end, Mr. Zuckerberg wound down efforts on building NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, a cryptocurrency-based initiative that has dropped out of favor in recent months. Many of Mr. Zuckerberg’s crypto initiatives in general have fallen by the wayside over the past nine months as the public has grown more skeptical of the market after the implosion of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange.In his note, Mr. Zuckerberg added that the moves were a response to global conditions, including increased regulation, geopolitical instability, higher interest rates and a cooling economy.“The world economy changed, competitive pressures grew and our growth slowed considerably,” he said. “We should prepare ourselves for the possibility that this new economic reality will continue for many years.”Gregory Schmidt More

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    What TikTok Told Us About the Economy in 2022

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    From Barbiecore to revenge travel, social media trends gave us a clear picture of the forces reshaping the economy.The unemployment rate has hovered at 3.7 percent for months. But it is the TikTok-famous “quiet quitting” and live-tweeted resignations that really explained what was going on in America’s job market in 2022, a moment of renewed worker power and remarkable upheaval.While government data can tell us that the world is rapidly changing three years into the pandemic, internet trends — the ones that took off and the apps we’ve come to rely on — illustrate how people are responding to a new and evolving normal.Negroni sbagliatos catapulted into fame and onto cocktail menus, underlining the fact that people were ready to get back to spending on fancy happy hours. Instagram feeds filled with beach and mountain pictures as “revenge travel” took flight. We collectively learned what “vibe shift” means just as we realized that the economy was experiencing one.Below is a rundown of a few of the year’s more colorful memes and moments — and what they herald for 2023.Break My SoulBeyoncé imprinted the moment with her instant hit titled “Break My Soul.”Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressBetween high inflation and years of workplace flux — including pandemic firings, work-from-home burnout and most recently a plodding return to office — the economic status quo seemed like an increasingly bad deal to many Americans in 2022. Beyoncé imprinted the discontent on your favorite music app, releasing an instant hit titled “Break My Soul.” Its lyrics included “And I just quit my job, I’m gonna find new drive,” inspiring the internet to ask whether Queen B was encouraging everyone to join the Great Resignation.In fact, people felt so conflicted about work this year that they needed new words to describe it. The TikTok discourse gave us “quiet quitting,” a trend in which workers do the bare minimum. Then came “career cushioning,” discreetly lining up a backup plan while in your current job. At the same time, employers reported “worker hoarding,” in which they avoided firing people after getting burned by long months in which open jobs far outnumbered applicants. The jobs data made it clear that the labor market was out of balance, but it was social discussion that showed just how much.Money Printer Go ‘Brrrr-oke’The Federal Reserve reversed two years of rock-bottom rates this year, raising borrowing costs at the fastest pace in decades in a bid to control rapid inflation. Actual prices have been slow to react, but Reddit wasn’t. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, formerly featured in memes that sported the tagline “money printer go brrrr” and showed him cranking out cheap and easy cash. In 2022, the memes got an update — to Shrek. Today’s memes compare Mr. Powell to the 2001 movie character Lord Farquaad, who famously declared, “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”The crankiness on the Reddit discussion boards came as the Fed’s actions cost many investors money. Prominent cryptocurrencies tanked, and asset prices in general swooned, with stocks down about 20 percent from the start of the year. Financial markets are likely to remain on edge into 2023: Inflation is slowing but remains high, and the Fed is poised to raise rates at least slightly more to control it. The memes, in short, are likely to remain grim.Butter BoardsTikTok spent part of this year going crazy for butter boards. Sizie Cornell, via Associated PressTikTok spent part of this year going crazy for butter boards: slabs of the spread covered in flowers, fancy salt, honey or other flavorings. Was this a delayed reaction to the low-fat, no-fat fads of decades past? Evidence that influencers can make us do anything? One thing we can say for sure: It was expensive.That’s because prices for food — and especially for dairy products — have jumped sharply this year. Butter and margarine costs were 34 percent higher in November than 12 months before. Food overall was up 10.6 percent.But as the butter board’s enduring popularity underscored, people buy food even when it is getting costlier. In fact, while retailers reported that some lower-income consumers began pulling back on discretionary purchases and giving priority to necessities, spending in general has been fairly resilient despite a year and a half of rapid price increases and months of Fed rate moves.So far, inflation also remains heady, and it extends well beyond the dairy aisle. A popular price index is still 7.1 percent above its level a year ago, far faster than the typical 2 percent annual pace.BarbiecoreActor Margo Robbie in character in the film “Barbie.”Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Pictures, via Associated PressAmericans continued to shop in 2022, but what they are buying has been undergoing a quiet change. Americans had been snapping up goods like couches and clothing early in the pandemic, but they are now slowly shifting their purchases back toward services.Social media popularized over-the-top fashions in 2022, including “Barbiecore” (very pink, named for the doll and upcoming movie) and “avant apocalypse,” which paid sartorial homage to the coming end days. But another big trend of the year — buying used clothes, #thrifted — may have more accurately captured the year’s changing economic energy. Clothing store sales are slowing down, official data show, and falling outright if you subtract out apparel inflation.Have a Reservation?As the world reopened and Americans returned to spending on experiences, restaurant tables, in particular, became a hot commodity. Walk-in tables were down 14 percent compared with 2019, while tables with online reservations increased by 24 percent, according to data from the table booking app OpenTable. The figures confirmed what denizens of New York and other cities could tell you (and did, in various media dissections): It was a battle to get a table in 2022 as waitstaff shortages collided with hot diner demand.OpenTable’s data show that happy hour especially surged in 2022. People are dining earlier, and, after years of missed work drinks, this is the overpriced cocktail’s comeback tour. It’s one added reason that Negronis made with Prosecco, popularized by a promotional video for the show “House of the Dragon” on HBO’s TikTok account, are having a moment.Negroni cocktails where popularized by a promotional video for the show “House of the Dragon.”Leah Nash for The New York TimesNo Room at the InnIt turns out people missed the beach just as much as they missed that 5 o’clock martini. Cue the “revenge travel.”Vacationers made up for pandemic-delayed trips en masse in 2022, and as they splurged on big adventures, air traffic rebounded sharply, getting close to its 2019 levels. Hotel revenues fully recovered. At the same time, some travel-related sectors skated by on extremely thin staffing. Employment in accommodation stands at just 83 percent of its February 2020 level. Air transport employment overall is up, but industry groups have complained of worker shortages in key areas like air traffic control.As hotels, motels and airlines struggled to operate at full capacity, room rates and fares rocketed higher and major disruptions became commonplace. Air travel service complaints were more than 380 percent above their 2019 level as of September, according to the Department of Transportation. The mismatch underscored that key parts of the American economy are struggling to reach a new equilibrium after pandemic-induced tumult, even if people want to be in #vacationmode.Peak WeddingIn some instances, pandemic trends are colliding with demographic trends — and nothing showed that more clearly than the many wedding photos that filled up Instagram feeds this year. After years of historically few ceremonies leading up to the pandemic, this was probably the biggest year for weddings since 1997, based on data and forecasts compiled by the Wedding Report, a trade publication.Always, Always, Always a BridesmaidYou might have noticed a lot of wedding invitations in 2022. It was probably the biggest year for tying the knot since 1997.

    Note: Future data represent forecastsSource: The Wedding ReportBy The New York TimesThe pop, the combined result of pandemic-delayed nuptials and a big group of marriage-age millennials, translated into booked-up venues and vendors. It has also raised questions about the economic ripple effects: Will those couples have children, sending up birth data, which already ticked up slightly in 2021? Will they buy houses? We could start to find out in 2023.GrandmillennialTikTok sensation Tariq, known for his love of corn.OK McCausland for The New York TimesAmerica’s younger generations are doing more than getting married. They have been forming their own households and buying houses in greater numbers since the start of the pandemic. In the process, they have helped to fuel strong demand for houses and popularized interior decorating trends — including “grandmillennial,” also affectionately called “granny chic” on Pinterest, in which the young-ish repurpose floral wallpaper and old-style lamps for a cozy but updated look.But many millennials, who are roughly ages 26 to 41 and in their peak home-buying years, may be losing their shot at becoming real estate influencers. As the Fed lifted interest rates to stifle rapid inflation this year, a wave of would-be homeowners began to find that the combination of heftier mortgage costs and high home prices meant they could not afford to buy. New home sales have declined notably. Fed rates are expected to continue climbing in 2023, which could make for a tough road ahead for a generation struggling to make the leap in homeownership. And after a year of serious economic changes and major policy adjustments, it’s uncertain what is coming next: A recession? A benign inflation cool-down?On the bright side, we will have social trends to help us interpret the data, and occasionally to help us find its lighter side. To quote corn kid, a precocious vegetable lover who ascended to TikTok royalty in 2022: “I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing.”Reporting was contributed by More

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    Computer Science Students Face a Shrinking Big Tech Job Market

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    A new reality is setting in for students and recent graduates who spent years honing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies.Ever since she was a 10th grader in Seattle, Annalice Ni wanted to develop software for a prominent tech company like Google. So she went to great lengths to meet the internship and other résumé criteria that make students attractive hires to the biggest tech firms.In high school, Ms. Ni took computer science courses, interned at Microsoft and volunteered as a coding teacher for younger students. She majored in computer science at the University of Washington, earning coveted software engineering internships at Facebook. After graduating from college this year, she moved to Silicon Valley to start her dream job as a software engineer at Meta, Facebook’s parent company.Then last month, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees — including Ms. Ni.“I did feel very frustrated and disappointed and maybe a bit scared because all of a sudden, I didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Ni, 22, said of her unexpected career setback. “There’s not much I could have done, especially in college, more than I already did, better than I already did.”Over the last decade, the prospect of six-figure starting salaries, perks like free food and the chance to work on apps used by billions led young people to stampede toward computer science — the study of computer programming and processes like algorithms — on college campuses across the United States. The number of undergraduates majoring in the subject more than tripled from 2011 to 2021, to nearly 136,000 students, according to the Computing Research Association, which tracks computing degrees at about 200 universities.Ms. Ni spends her days interviewing for jobs and brushing up on her skills.Jason Henry for The New York TimesTech giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft encouraged the computing education boom, promoting software jobs to students as a route to lucrative careers and the power to change the world.But now, layoffs, hiring freezes and planned recruiting slowdowns at Meta, Twitter, Alphabet, Amazon, DoorDash, Lyft, Snap and Stripe are sending shock waves through a generation of computer and data science students who spent years honing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies. Tech executives have blamed a faltering global economy for the jobs slowdown.The cutbacks have not only sent recent graduates scrambling to find new jobs but also created uncertainty for college students seeking high-paying summer internships at large consumer tech companies.In the past, tech companies used their internship programs to recruit promising job candidates, extending offers to many students to return as full-time employees after graduation. But this year, those opportunities are shrinking.Amazon, for instance, hired about 18,000 interns this year, paying some computer science students nearly $30,000 for the summer, not including housing stipends. The company is now considering reducing the number of interns for 2023 by more than half, said a person with knowledge of the program who was not authorized to speak publicly.More on Big TechMicrosoft: The company’s $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, which rests on winning the approval by 16 governments, has become a test for whether tech giants can buy companies amid a backlash.Apple: Apple’s largest iPhone factory, in the city of Zhengzhou, China, is dealing with a shortage of workers. Now, that plant is getting help from an unlikely source: the Chinese government.Amazon: The company appears set to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, in what would be the largest cuts in the company’s history.Meta: The parent of Facebook said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work forceBrad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, said the company was committed to its internship program and the real-word experience that it provided. A Meta spokeswoman referred to a letter to employees from Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, announcing the company’s layoffs last month.Hiring plans are also changing at smaller tech firms. Roblox, the popular game platform, said it planned to hire 300 interns for next summer — almost twice as many as this year — and was expecting more than 50,000 applications for those spots. Redfin, which employed 38 interns this summer, said it had canceled the program for next year.There are still good jobs for computing students, and the field is growing. Between 2021 and 2031, employment for software developers and testers is expected to grow 25 percent, amounting to more than 411,000 new jobs, according to projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But many of those jobs are in areas like finance and the automotive industry.“Students are still getting multiple job offers,” said Brent Winkelman, chief of staff for the computer science department at the University of Texas at Austin. “They just may not come from Meta, from Twitter or from Amazon. They’re going to come from places like G.M., Toyota or Lockheed.”College career centers have become sounding boards for anxious students on the cusp of entering the tech job market. In career counselors’ offices, the search for a Plan B has heightened.Some students are applying to lesser-known tech companies. Others are seeking tech jobs outside the industry, with retailers like Walmart or with government agencies and nonprofits. Graduate school is also an option.“This particular class has been a lot more savvy than previous classes,” said Hazel Raja, senior director of the career development office at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. “Even those who have secured job offers, they’re still making sure they’re networking and staying engaged in campus recruiting opportunities.”Helen Dong, 21, a senior majoring in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, interned at Meta twice, in 2021 and 2022. So she was surprised at the end of this summer, she said, when she did not receive a job offer from the company. Meta’s recent layoffs prompted her to apply for jobs outside tech, at automotive and financial companies. Last month, she posted videos on TikTok advising her peers to adjust their job expectations.Helen Dong, 21, a senior majoring in computing at Carnegie Mellon University, interned at Meta but did not receive a job offer. Now she is looking in the finance and automotive industries.Helen Dong“I chose to major in computer science so that I could get a ton of offers after college and make bank,” Ms. Dong joked in one TikTok, as she sang along to “Reduce Your Expectations to 0.” In this job market, she wrote at the bottom of the video, “be grateful with 1 offer.”In interviews, 10 college students and recent graduates said they were not prepared for a slowdown in jobs at the largest tech companies. Until recently, those companies were fiercely competing to hire computer science majors at top schools — with some students receiving multiple job offers with six-figure starting salaries and five-digit signing bonuses. An entire genre of TikTok videos had sprung up dedicated to young techies extolling their job perks and their annual compensation, with at least one highlighting a $198,000 package, complete with stock options and relocation expenses.Dozens of people who were recently laid off, or whose tech job offers were rescinded, have posted details of their plights on LinkedIn. To alert recruiters, some have added the hashtag #opentowork to their LinkedIn profile photos.Tony Shi, 23, who majored in computer science and business at Western University in London, Ontario, is one of them. After graduating this year, he began working as a product manager at Lyft in August. In November, the ride-hailing company laid off about 650 employees, including Mr. Shi.Now he is on a tight deadline to find a new job. Mr. Shi is Canadian, from Waterloo, Ontario, and obtained a visa to move to San Francisco for his job at Lyft. Under the visa, he has 60 days to find a new job. He said he had become more sensitive to the businesses and balance sheets of potential employers.“I need to be a little more risk-averse. I definitely don’t want to get laid off again,” he said. Instead of his taking a company for its word, he added, “now, the product needs to make a lot of sense.”Meta rescinded its job offer to Rachel Castellino, 22, weeks before she was scheduled to start work.Jason Henry for The New York TimesSome recent graduates did not get the chance to start their new tech jobs.Rachel Castellino, a statistics major at the California Polytechnic State University, worked to land a job at a major tech company. During college, she interned as a project manager at PayPal, received a data science fellowship funded by the National Science Foundation and founded a data science club at her school.Ms. Castellino, 22, knew she would have to grind to pass companies’ technical interviews, which typically involve solving programming problems. Last year, she spent much of the fall job hunting and preparing for coding assessments. For four days a week, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., she studied probability concepts and programming languages. Even so, she said, the interview process was brutal.In November 2021, Meta offered her a job as a data scientist, starting in December 2022. Last month, Meta rescinded the offer, she said.“I worked so hard for those interviews. It felt really good to earn something of a high caliber,” she said. “I had so much to look forward to.”The setback has been disheartening. “I was upset,” Ms. Castellino said. “It wasn’t good to hear.”As for Ms. Ni, she now views losing her dream job as an opportunity to broaden her career horizons. Over the last month, she has applied to midsize tech firms and start-ups that she finds innovative — potential employers she had not previously considered.“I’m exploring opportunities that I didn’t before,” Ms. Ni said. “I feel like I’ve already learned some things.”Karen Weise More

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    Meta Is Said to Plan Significant Job Cuts This Week

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    Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said last month that many “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year” as his company faces economic challenges.SAN FRANCISCO — Meta plans to lay off employees this week, three people with knowledge of the situation said, adding that the job cuts were set to be the most significant at the company since it was founded in 2004.It was unclear how many people would be cut and in which departments, said the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The layoffs were expected by the end of the week. Meta had 87,314 employees at the end of September, up 28 percent from a year ago.Meta has been struggling financially for months and has been increasingly clamping down on costs. The Silicon Valley company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has spent billions of dollars on the emerging technology of the metaverse, an immersive online world, just as the global economy has slowed and inflation has soared.At the same time, digital advertising — which forms the bulk of Meta’s revenue — has weakened as advertisers have pulled back, affecting many social media companies. Meta’s business has also been hurt by privacy changes that Apple enacted, which have hampered the ability of many apps to target mobile ads to users.Last month, Meta posted a 50 percent slide in quarterly profits and its second straight sales decline. The company said at the time that it would be “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently,” including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.More on Big TechMusk’s Twitter Takeover: Elon Musk has moved quickly to overhaul Twitter since he completed his $44 billion buyout of the company. But can he make the math work?Big Tech’s Slowdown: Amid stubborn inflation and rising interest rates, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other tech companies are signaling that tough days may be ahead. Some have already announced hiring freezes and job cuts.App Store Battle: Spotify wants to get into the audiobooks business, but Apple has rejected its new app three times. The standoff is the latest in a series of confrontations between the companies.Inside Meta’s Struggles: After a rocky year, employees at Meta are expressing skepticism, confusion and frustration over Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, had added that most “teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year.” He said the company would “end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Meta’s plans for layoffs this week.Mr. Zuckerberg has been signaling tougher times ahead for months. In July, he told employees that the company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” and that workers should prepare to do more work with fewer resources. Their performances would also be graded more intensely than previously, he said.“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Mr. Zuckerberg told employees in a call at the time. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”Meta joins other tech companies that have been laying off employees as economic conditions have grown more challenging. Tech companies boomed during the coronavirus pandemic but many of the largest firms reported financial results in recent weeks that showed they were feeling the impact of global economic jitters.On Friday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, laid off half of the company’s staff. Last week, Lyft also said it would cut 13 percent of its employees, or about 650 of its 5,000 workers. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs. Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase are among other companies that have announced job cuts this year.Other tech companies are freezing their hiring. Last week, Amazon said it had decided to pause incremental corporate hiring because the economy was “in an uncertain place.” The move added to a freeze from last month, when the e-commerce giant halted corporate and technology hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year. More

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    Elon Musk Begins Layoffs at Twitter

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    The social media company’s 7,500 employees have been bracing for job cuts since Mr. Musk took it over last week.SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk will begin laying off Twitter employees on Friday, culling the social media company’s 7,500-person work force a little over a week after completing his blockbuster buyout.Twitter employees were notified in a company-wide email that the layoffs were set to begin, according to a copy of the message seen by The New York Times. About half the company’s workers appeared set to lose their jobs, according to internal messages and an investor, though the final count may take time to become clear. The email instructed Twitter employees to go home and not return to the offices on Friday as the cuts proceeded. Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Oct. 27 and immediately fired its chief executive and other top managers. More executives have since resigned or were let go, while managers were asked to draw up lists of high- and low-performing employees, likely with an eye toward job cuts.Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, faces pressure to make Twitter work financially. The deal was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. The billionaire also loaded about $13 billion in debt on Twitter for the acquisition and is on the hook to pay about $1 billion a year in interest payments. But Twitter has often lost money, and its cash flow is not robust. Mr. Musk may benefit from cutting costs so the company is less expensive to operate.Twitter’s layoffs are unlikely to be the largest in the tech industry by total number. The computer manufacturer HP cut 24,600 of its employees, about 7.5 percent, in 2008. It later cut tens of thousands more, reaching about 30 percent of its work force.Elon Musk’s Acquisition of TwitterCard 1 of 8A blockbuster deal. More

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    Mark Zuckerberg Prepares Meta Employees for a Tougher 2022

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    In an internal meeting this week, Mr. Zuckerberg said the tech giant was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history.”SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg has a message for Meta employees: Buckle up for tough times ahead.At an internal meeting on Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said the Silicon Valley company was facing one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” according to copies of his comments that were shared with The New York Times. He told Meta’s 77,800 workers that they should prepare to do more work with fewer resources and that their performances would be graded more intensely than previously.Mr. Zuckerberg added that the company — which owns Facebook, Instagram and other apps — was lowering its hiring targets. Meta now plans to bring on 6,000 to 7,000 new engineers this year, down from a previous goal of around 10,000, he said. In some areas, hiring will pause entirely, especially of junior engineers, though the head count will increase in other parts of the business, he said.“I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on the call. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”The C.E.O.’s comments, which were some of the most sharply worded ones he has made to employees, reflect the degree of difficulty that Meta is facing with its business. The company, which for years went from strength to strength financially, has been in an unfamiliar position this year as it has struggled. While it enjoyed strong growth in the early parts of the pandemic, it has more recently grappled with upheaval in the global economy as inflation and interest rates rise.That economic uncertainty is hitting as Meta navigates tumult in its core social networking and advertising business. Mr. Zuckerberg declared last year that his company, which was renamed Meta from Facebook, was making a long-term bet to build the immersive world of the so-called metaverse. He has been spending billions of dollars on the effort, which has dragged down Meta’s profits.The company is also dealing with a blow to its advertising business after Apple made privacy changes to its mobile operating system that limit the amount of data that Facebook and Instagram can collect on its users.As a result, Meta has posted back-to-back profit declines this year, the first time that has happened in over a decade. In February, after a dismal financial report, Meta’s stock plummeted 26 percent and its market value plunged more than $230 billion in what was the company’s biggest one-day wipeout. In March, the company told employees that it was cutting back or eliminating free services like laundry and dry cleaning.In a memo to employees on Thursday, Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, echoed Mr. Zuckerberg’s sentiments and said the company was in “serious times” and that economic “headwinds are fierce,” according to a copy of the memo that was read to The Times.“We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” Mr. Cox’s memo said. “We must prioritize more ruthlessly, be thoughtful about measuring and understanding what drives impact, invest in developer efficiency and velocity inside the company, and operate leaner, meaner, better executing teams.”Mr. Zuckerberg’s and Mr. Cox’s comments to employees were reported earlier by Reuters. A Meta spokesman said that Mr. Cox’s memo echoed what the company has said publicly in earnings calls and that it was being frank about its “challenges” and “opportunities.”In the internal meeting on Thursday, which was held via videoconference, Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments appeared to come out of a sense of frustration, according to one employee who watched the call. After someone asked whether the company would continue having “Meta Days” in 2022, an internal name for paid-time-off holidays, Mr. Zuckerberg paused and mulled aloud about how to answer the question appropriately, said the employee, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak.The C.E.O. then said the company needed to crack down and work harder than it had before, “turning up the heat” on internal goals and metrics used to rate employees’ performance. He said he expected some degree of turnover from employees who were not meeting those goals and that some might leave as a result of the intensified pace.But Mr. Zuckerberg noted that he was not averse to spending heavily on projects that matter for the long term and was not focused solely on profits. He cited the efforts on building the metaverse with virtual and augmented reality products over the next 10-plus years.Mr. Cox in his memo also said that Meta was continuing to focus on investing in Reels — the TikTok-like video product featured heavily in Instagram — as well as improving artificial intelligence to help drive the discovery of popular posts across Facebook and Instagram. Meta is also working on making money from its messaging apps and looking to more opportunities in e-commerce sales across the platform, he said.Internal recruiters at Meta said that after a surge of new hires during the pandemic, the company’s recruiting slowed this year. The company was mostly hiring for vital positions, and many roles were being filled internally, said two recruiters who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.There are no current plans to lay people off, two people with knowledge of the company’s plans said, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak. In chat room channels that accompanied the live broadcast of the employee meeting, some workers said they were celebrating cutting the “dead weight” after feeling that the “bar was lowered” for hiring over the course of the pandemic, according to comments that were described to The Times by one of the employees. More