[zinodaur]

The MIT startup is like a breath of fresh air - a company that is actually doing something!

Stanford style startups are a way better way to make money - but I wish people would just stop making them. Filling the economy with parasitic middle men hasn't worked out too well for us.

[jobs_throwaway]

What about the tech economy hasn't worked out well? Americans and tech workers in particular have never been better off

[sterlind]

The enshittification of the Internet? Search results overrun with SEO, internet-connected dishwashers, toxic social media full of dark patterns, discarded Juuls littering the streets, ads on paid streaming services that cut half their content because of mergers, meanwhile the planet is burning.

Yes, there's a burgeoning middle class of engineers who design those Juul pods and build those ad networks, but imagine if all those people were hard at work engineering desalination plants and better batteries. Imagine if that paid better.

[jobs_throwaway]

That all sounds dramatically preferable to an economy that follows what you suggested and companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Salesforce, etc etc don't exist because we haven't solved desalination yet

[sterlind]

Wanting Salesforce rather than clean drinking water is a rare take, I'll give you that.

[zackmorris]

I almost can't tell if you're trolling. If we look at quality of life metrics like the percentage of work hours required to rent or buy housing, then it takes about 1.5 times more hours worked to live today than it did in the 1990s when I was a young adult:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/05/raw-data-rent...

https://www.manausa.com/blog/wage-inflation-home-affordabili... see "Wage-Adjusted Monthly Mortgage Payments" section

Because housing costs keep going up while median wages have been stagnant since the turn of the millennium:

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/census-income-rent-gap-grew-in-201...

The last affordable years were around 1994 before the internet arrived, 2012 during the middle of Obama's terms and maybe 2020 during the pandemic.

But we've had so much corporate greed inflation to save the rich from losing any money for the 2 years that workers took off during covid-19 that any income gains by labor have been completely wiped out. $15 hourly wage? What a joke.

Sure, we have fancier video games, smart phones and even passable AI. But I can tell you straight up that in 1994 we had no concept for the level of anxiety that people live under today. I feel awful for young people born after that who think that whatever all this is is how it always was.

Had wages kept up with inflation and trickle-down economics not happened, so that the wealthy paid their fair share of taxes and we had the government services we're due like free public education and healthcare, the inflation-adjusted median US income would be twice what it was in 1994 and 3-4 times what it was in the 1970s. Well over the $70,000 mark where happiness peaks and more money provides diminishing returns. In other words, we could work for 3 months of the year and more than afford everything we have now, including savings and retirements. But the wealthy keep us down and divided because the highest profits come from struggle and war.

The financialization of tech under the Stanford model widens wealth inequality. I can't even imagine how many things would be fully automated and approaching free by now had the MIT model kept the pace of true innovation at 1960s and 1980s levels in areas like pharmaceuticals, genetics, miniaturization and other pure research. Instead we have 2 day shipping and privatized space travel, which are cool and everything, but people are homeless and dying of starvation all around the world and on our watch in proxy wars. Words like travesty don't even begin to capture how far astray we've gone.

[addicted]

For like 20 years. The job market for tech workers is hell right now and is only gonna get worse