SF isn't the entire country, though. Surely there are cities worth living and dreaming in beyond this bubble.

Silicon Valley ideologues always preach the concept of "exit." Well, maybe it's time to exit Silicon Valley.

The problem is you can exit silicon valley, but you can’t exit the silicon valley mindset. Where can you go work where you can believe that your employer has your best interests at heart, where you don’t have to worry about them outsourcing your job to increase profits by a couple percent. In the quest for ‘shareholder value’, business leaders have taken an overly cut-throat and self-centered approach to employees and their obligations to the country. Politics is the only way to reign this in and that is exactly what’s happening.

That's not the Silicon Valley mindset, that's the Wall Street mindset, which was unfortunately exported to Silicon Valley sometime between the dot-com boom and the mid-2000s. Corporate raiders started dismantling the labor/capital social contract in the 80s.

I would also be very skeptical of any politician who claims to be the solution to this. They're using you; economically frustrated masses are a very good way to gain power.

The people I know who actually manage to cobble together fulfilling lives today usually do it by thinking locally: developing local friendships, local business relationships, consumption preferences that reflect what they want, and then opting out of the national conversation.

nostrademons, love your name and comments but disagree with a few points.

>>> That's not the Silicon Valley mindset

Having grown up in the heart of the valley, Palo Alto, traveled the country and the world in the military, and now back working in tech, my observation is that this mindset is more SV than people give it credit for. It’s better packaged as meritocracy and innovation but the results are fairly apparent in the disparity of economic outcomes. I like a lot of aspects of the SV mindset (engineer focused, innovation focused, risk and failure tolerant) and know a lot of good people in SV, but I wouldn’t imbue it a purity above Wall Street, or Hollywood, or D.C. or any other power center. All are fairly dismissive of flyover country and self-assured in their wealth, power, and status.

>>> skeptical of any politician… They’re using you;

I got used by the military for a decade and assume everyone is using me. Haven’t seen much change in SV. But I’m also a sucker for trusting people. Life ain’t easy.

>>> Economically frustrated masses are a very good way to gain power.

Yes, but they are also the primary internal way to change power structures. And democracy allows us to do this in a controlled fashion through law.

>>> thinking locally… opting out of the national conversation

While I agree with the ethos of thinking locally, to the extreme it can also be taken as, "Don’t worry about the big things, leave that too other people. Don’t worry about what the hirer-ups are doing, just do your job. Don’t worry about the country, you can’t change anything” As a Veteran, I disagree with the attitude of total disengagement. I got sent to war by politicians. Only two presidential candidates are saying the Iraq war was stupid. That gets my vote. These decisions are life and death for people.

SF isn't the entire country. True.

Large swathes of the country it is very difficult to find any work at all. Never mind work with pay one can exist on.

>Large swathes of the country it is very difficult to find any work at all.

That's not true at all. It's just that all the jobs are now temporary and part-time. . . sorry, I meant to say contract and flexible scheduling.

This is an added value! People value flexibility in their employment, and millennials don't want to be tied down by full-time employment. Problem solved!