Tell that to the "teach everyone to code" people. You know, the ones who have spent most of the last decade claiming that the way to build a solid life is to mortgage your future to whatever extent necessary to get a STEM credential, and once you have that, you're all set.

I know a lot of people who bought into that, got the credential, and are now learning it isn't worth what they were promised it would be. They're furious, and why shouldn't they be? They didn't expect to find they had been lied to, and they're still holding the bag.

I also know a lot of people who either didn't buy into that, or couldn't, because they weren't born into a situation where even as bad an option as mortgaging their future was available. They don't see any better hope in the "economic system" than to spend their whole lives working three shit jobs, never having time to breathe, and never having even the basic level of "I won't be homeless in a month even if I lose my income today" security that you and I have, and you probably take for granted. (I don't; I've been close enough to homelessness to know better.) Those people are furious, too, and why shouldn't they be?

It's not just the West Coast, either, and it's not just tech. I live in Baltimore, and housing prices in this town have more than doubled in the last twenty years, most of the increase occurring in the last ten. As I alluded to before, I've been fortunate enough to stay ahead of that. Most people aren't. And no one should need to be lucky to have a reliable, healthy place to live.

It's not just the single dimensionless number you cite, either. That doesn't account for regional differences in starting pay, or how your imaginary Omaha kid can't expect to make that kind of money starting out. It doesn't account for how that kind of money barely affords a one-bedroom apartment in my own town, to say nothing of in an actual center of the tech industry. And it doesn't account for all the new college grads for whom that number is meaningless anyway, because they can't get a job at all. The article you linked makes mention of that, but you don't. Why is that?

And it's not just about "job creation". Uber alone could be said to have created tens of thousands of jobs, but that, again, is a dimensionless number that explains nothing. Are those jobs worth having? Do they pay enough to deserve counting one-for-one with others? Hell, given the effort and expense Uber goes to to avoid being required to treat its employees as employees, do those deserve to be counted as jobs at all? And where in the tech industry does anyone deserve more favorable consideration? Amazon, another leading light in this sort of discussion, only gives a damn if its warehouse workers live or die inasmuch as it affects DH production targets. If this is the best we can do, we should at least have enough of a sense of shame not to big ourselves up as "job creators". But maybe you'd like to demonstrate, with cited examples, that we predominantly do better. That's what you seem to want to argue, so, okay, argue it.

I mean, I get that you want to blame all these people for the shitty situation they've found themselves in, but what I don't get is why. Why do you want to make it their fault? It doesn't take much benefit of the doubt to assume that they're no more foolish and no more stupid than you and I were when we were young, and that they can't make it the way we did is for some reason other than their own incompetence. But you won't give them that benefit of the doubt. Why not?

That isn't a rhetorical question, either. I really want an answer, because I really don't understand where you're coming from with this stuff. Like, when we were kids the joke was about "underwater basket-weaving", now you're making it about ancient Chinese art history, but it's still basically the same joke, and it already wasn't a good joke even when it still had the virtue of novelty.

So, what? Is it that you think nothing has changed in the decades between our own youth and today? I have a hard time imagining anyone could actually think that, but you're not really giving me a lot to work with here. Will you please explain your thinking, so I can at least understand where you're coming from on this?