> But what stands out is that this heavy-handed, controversial tax is being proposed during a time of relative prosperity.

There are CS graduates with a masters degree working 12-hour shifts at Sweetgreen to afford rent on a 300 square-foot apartment.

You are not living in a period of relative prosperity, it's not the 1990s anymore. You are living in a unique, post-gentrified nightmare that does not exist anywhere else in the United States.

So SV flip-flops when they finally realized that supporting "eat the rich" meant that they were putting themselves on the menu as one of the starring entrées. One would have expected more foresight from hackers with incomes in the top 20% for the country.

SV is presently running Donald Trump. It ran DOGE. It is deeply embedded into politics at all levels.

Silicon Valley is all over politics right now. Look at the All In podcast. David Sacks is “AI Czar”. Chamath regularly sucks up to the administration. Palantir (Alex Karp, JT Lonsdale) regularly talk about political things on Twitter and whenever they appear in interviews. Jensen Huang is a major donor to the ballroom project to avoid antitrust of the Groq “acquisition”. Tim Cook gave Trump a gold award to avoid regulatory problems. And there’s Elon Musk, obviously.

The problem is a lot of these folks are cowards too. They keep praising Elon Musk even as he posts (almost daily) things about the greatness of white culture, or creepy AI-generated videos of “sexy” white women in traditional or historical settings. They have said a lot about how important immigration is to Silicon Valley’s talent density but are staying quiet when the DHS openly talks about deporting one third of America (AKA all non whites). They value America’s robust capital and financial systems but stay quiet when the Fed’s independence is openly threatened.

I can agree that California needs to moderate (as does Oregon, Washington, and a number of very progressive states). These states need moderation and balance to fix their budgets, but also to appeal to a broader public politically, so that we don’t keep electing Trumps. But at the same time, I see a major problem arising from concentration of wealth and power. The few that use this power for their own goals or just to get richer, are letting all the other bad things happen. They may not be victims of those bad things, so maybe they don’t care. B ut the rest of us will be victims. I am for free markets but also see a need to talk about reducing the wealth of these ultra rich Silicon Valley overlords, instead of having them be kings at the state level instead of just nationally.

So apparently the mass homeless crisis, forest fires, mismanaged water rights, declining schools, healthcare being taken away... all of that was just background noise until suddenly the state has crossed a line expecting fair returns for people who profited from the state the most?