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[sebastian_dangerfield]

I'm not ignoring anything -- maybe you are thinking of Adder. Technology inexorably marches on, taking away a lot of decent jobs feeding and grooming and shoeing horses and creating a smaller number of great jobs building cars, concentrated in some place that most people don't get to live, like Detroit. Then it does it again. I happen to live in a place where a lot of great jobs are being created, except that it's not happenstance -- I moved here twenty-five years ago, and I didn't move to Detroit, no offense.

OK. I still don't know how this addressed my original point, but I agree with it. It is true. But it also misses something. Tech is not like the automobile. Cars put buggy whip makers (a tiny piece of the economy, btw) out of business collaterally. The intent was not to eliminate the costs of buggy whips (indeed, cars were a bit pricier than horses and horse appliances). The express intent of many forms of tech - and how it makes the huge sums it does for the fortunate few - is to eliminate massive pools of labor by doing the work that labor does via robot, platform, or algorithm.

Many forms of tech prosper enormously because consumers pay the tech creators (let's say, 10 people in a tech firm), XXX dollars, which is a huge amount of money when split by so few, instead of paying the hundreds of workers who used to perform the service replaced by that tech XXXXXXXXXXXXX dollars in aggregate.

Tech makes its huge margins in this regard by diverting and eliminating wages that would otherwise be paid to people. In this regard, it is predatory.

NTTAWWT. That's how innovation works. But I never hear anyone in tech describe what they do in terms of paring labor costs and eliminating jobs. It takes people like me, responding to people like you, to force that concession.

The current economy is creating lots of jobs in cities, and is leaving a lot of places behind. That sort of thing has been going on since, like, forever. The rest of the world is full of places like Bruges and Venice and Malacca that once were boomtowns and now try to get what they can from tourism.

It is creating lots of jobs in certain sectors, many of which are located in a few cities.

What are you going to do about it? That's what I'd like to know.

Nothing. I'd vote for UBI. But that isn't happening. So I'll just do what I do. I'll avoid paying any assistants for work I can use tech to deliver.

Many of us believe that government should act to protect the less fortunate, and to provide social insurance to ameliorate harms that are hard for any individual or family to manage, like what happens in a one-industry town when the one industry leaves.

I'll rephrase that for you: "Many of us believe that our enormous profits at cost to the displaced workers should continue, but the entire country should subsidize a safety net for those we displace. I want the orthopedic surgeon to pay more in taxes to support the workers my tech firm puts on unemployment."

We run into opposition from the cynical and selfish, the people whose attitude is, I've got mine, who cares about you?, the people who don't really care if government tries to help. My question for you is, which side are you on?

I'd let it get ugly to the point that the pitchforks come for tech, finance, and everybody else who's profiting at cost to the little guy. Let a class war erupt. I can hide.

Nothing ever really gets fixed unless there's a terrible crisis. And crises provide profit opportunities. (By strange circumstance, I think my household might actually make money and be far stronger relative to others coming out of this pandemic.)

And I'm not preying on anyone. I don't demand that the family making $150k down the street subsidize my family's income by contributing to a safety net for out-of-work legal assistants or secretaries I've replaced with tech. I don't demand the out of work young law firm associates be supported with dollars from the medical sales exec next door to me.

You seem to think that increasing taxes has no victims. Where do you think the money comes from? The tech billionaire gobbling firms in your neck of the woods? It comes disproportionately from people who earn a good bit of money in places other than the bubble in which you live.

Am I willing to pay more taxes for UBI? Sure. But that's me. I'd sound quite pompous to dictate to others that they must do so. They might have worked a lot harder than I have to get what they have. How can I be such a clueless arse?

If you sell your $1.5 million condo in San Francisco and buy a $1.5 million estate in, say, Pittsburgh, you are definitely trading up.

But trading down in terms of experiences available to you.

At least here, that's not right at all. The start-ups need to tap the labor market. In the Bay Area, that means they prefer to be in San Francisco, because that's where their workforce lives or can commute to. Rents are cheaper in places like Union City or Antioch, but that's because the people that start-ups want to hire don't live there and aren't looking to commute there.

OK.

The larger the company, the more challenging to manage, and the more the need to put everyone in the same physical space to do it.

This makes no sense, for obvious reasons. One of which would be, if it were true, huge companies would have campuses in one location rather than own office space all over the place, as most of them do.