It's exactly as bad as you imagine!

In the comments under What does it feel like to be fired from Facebook?:

As for legal standing, [...] I had zero energy to put into a protracted legal battle with my former employer. In the discovery process we also had a glimpse of the potential defense we would battle in court, and let this be a warning to all current and future FB staff: Everything you say, IRC, write, email, Messenger, and post to Facebook (internal and external Groups included) WILL be used against you. Your politics, your opinions, your friends, your sarcasm, your funny meme posts, your likes and gruesome likejacks, who you party with, photos and videos... everything. If it can build a case, even a "distracting from the main issue" case, it WILL be used against you. You won't be trying your case and its issues, you will be defending everything you have ever done or said in your life online. Facebook has it all in a database called UDB. But you Facebookers already know that... you just never imagined it would be used against you by Facebook. Classic victim-blaming/shaming strategy.

Wages around here

I have heard complaints in the Bay Area that anything below 85k a year is not a "living wage", primarily because of the cost of housing, which has risen to exploit the high salaries of tech workers.

Where is the true evil here? That tech workers are making "too much"? That baristas and store clerks are making "too little"? That landlords are able to charge something close to what the market will bear for rents? That federal taxes are not progressive enough and the techies keep "too much" of their wages? That county taxes are majorly skewed to exploit young and new owners thanks to Prop 13, and they seek high wages to compensate?

There are many angles to take, but the most popular one is that the high-paid tech people are ruining it for everybody else and so, everybody else should get a slice of their money pie to even things out.

Which they do, indirectly, through higher tax revenue and the improved public services it buys - but that's not enough for the people who are seeing their rent hike up every year. They want these tech people to dry up and blow away, so things can get back to "normal". Barring that, they want their own wages to go up, to compensate.

If all these people got the government to force all wages up into the 85k a year range, to compete with the tech people for a middle-class life in the Bay Area, what would happen if they did? Wouldn't they only succeed in driving up their own cost of living, as all their employers raise prices to keep making payroll? Would things be worse if they got that wish?

On the other hand, if they managed to drive all the tech (and finance) people out, what would happen? Rents would go down I assume, but a lot of money would stop flowing into the local economy as well.

-;-;-

In the Bay Area, you can have a married couple, both working full-time, both living in the same 1-bedroom apartment, each making about 125k a year (total 250k) and they will tell you that they MUST leave the area if they want to start a family, because having one stay-at-home parent is too hard on the finances. For the area, I have trouble calling them "upper class". For the country, based solely on their income, that's what they are.

This situation says something about the cyclical nature of the tech industry, and how it compels people to migrate to follow the best wages: People can become horribly isolated from their family and even their local community, in pursuit of the highest wage ... And family and community are exactly what you need to make child-rearing about ten times easier and cheaper. If you can't raise kids where you live, is it JUST because your income isn't high enough? Or is it because you've prioritized income over many other things?

And so, couples here work and save until they can't stand it any more, and bail out for some other part of the state/county. I have seen this progression first-hand ... let's see ... at least five times in my own friend group. Move here, work for 5-10 years, move away to have kids, never to return. What kind of effect does this have on the Bay Area as a community of families?