You change to median in the whole USA and median in the whole Europe then? Still the same conclusion. SV tech engineers arent rich because someone's is flipping their burgers. Someone is flipping an engineer's burger in France, in Detroit, In Tehran. So blue collar exploitation exists everywhere and cannot explain the outrageous salaries in SV.

Ok let's do a fairer comparison. Avg annual income across EU was 33,500 Euro in 2022[1]. For the USA, that was 60,500USD [2]

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

[2] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/

Exactly, and my wife and I spend easily tens of thousands a year out of pocket for things that would be "free" or close to free in the EU. Things like healthcare, transportation, childcare, etc. Its not uncommon for health plans have a 10k deductible per year, 20k for the family.

And yet you do not hear of normal people in the EU going bancrupt over medical expenses or not taking an ambulance because they cannot afford it. Funny, isn't it?

But you do hear a lot of them complaining in different ways about how they are oppressed. I won't even give citation apart from [1]. So nope, not funny.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=protests+by+poor+people+in+e...

Man, the French have been rioting for weeks over raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, after raising it from 60 to 62 and incurring similar riots about twelve years ago.

In comparison, when the French Fifth Republic was founded in 1958, the life expectancy was about twenty-two years shorter than it is now. One would think it's reasonable to raise the retirement age a little to fit that.