> Not interested in making America some sort of loser fiefdom operated by the inadequate who need regulation because they cannot compete. No way.

Only if ability to compete is defined as accepting a much smaller wage for the same job with the same skill level.

The way you get 'fiefdoms' is by helping companies build up enormous piles of profit without paying their workers well.

America is a beautiful land of opportunity for folks in tech. The exploited/exploiter dichotomy is a problem for someone whose primary advantage is being a native English speaker and located in the US. That sort of engineer is already been commodified away by the thousands by remote engineering teams from Gdansk to Lahore to Manila. He has one more generation while the young Asians start up as native English speakers and everyone gets used to remote workers.

On the other hand, the engineer whose primary advantage is his engineering is super-charged by focusing on where he provides comparative advantage.

Yeah, it turns out updating your Coldfusion website to display a notice on Sunday is something a child can do, and making a scalable backend for Dropbox's storage requires immense expertise. If you're the first guy, the writing is on the wall. If you're the second guy, the less time you spend on things that don't require your skill, the more valuable you are.

Has it? Or is that like saying 2500 square miles of Delaware has produced more economic value than half the globe, let alone the rest of the US?

Companies started in SF, grown in SF, serve the world. SF engineers with SF money in SF offices made that. These mythical super-Europeans we're supposed to pin our hopes on have nothing to show for it but Jetbrains, Deep Mind, and SAP (successful companies, yes, but three countries' worth to match one tiny piece of land).

No disrespect intended. They run things in Europe the way they want to. But regulating to ensure only immigration from Europe is not in America's interests.

I have no disagreement with your final sentence, but I still take issue with attributing purported value created by people in the vicinity of SF with SF itself and concluding that the key to that sort of success is how SF is run.

Delaware, a state of somewhere around a million people, has "over half" the companies on the S&P 500. That's like $15 trillion in market cap. That's a reasonable sized stock market for a billion people in the wider world. Should we conclude that everyone should emulate Delaware in how they organize their society? If they did do that, should we expect that the rest of humanity, unleashed, could produce $15 trillion in value for every million or so people? If they can't, does that mean they're inferior or failing to follow the example of Delaware? Not to put too fine a point on it, what about the Cayman Islands?

Edit once more: and, "SF engineers" and "SF money"? Come on!

Are you saying I'm attributing Silicon Valley's achievements to SF? I wasn't intending to do that. I was talking about solely SF companies because that illustrates the point on its own, but we can make it the SJ-SF-Oak CSA if you'd like. But that sort of blows Europe's tech companies out of the water. I wanted to keep it in the range of comparison.

I didn't write "Silicon Valley", and I didn't notice you saying "Silicon Valley", until now.

Maybe you could clarify with some examples of the companies you're talking about, in SF, that mostly draw on local talent and resources.