You've got it backwards. Techcrunch and YC are not in any way responsible for the economic environment that has been forming over the past decade. We're exper

You've got it backwards. Techcrunch and YC are not in any way responsible for the economic environment that has been forming over the past decade. We're experiencing the second wave of the tech boom from the 1990's. TC and YC are cheerleaders for what was already occurring. * Recession/weak job market for programmers is a thing of the past, at least in Silicon Valley. The job market is weak, in terms of quality jobs and pay. Outside SV the job market for job seekers is absymal. There are many skilled programmers who don't live in SV and can earn more money developing websites and web apps than they can in the job market. Companies are being left with open jobs and unable to fill them because the talent is being eliminated from the job pool. * Reducing this to $50/month has no meaningful impact on startup costs. I was referring to the large-scale cloud computing, not replacing virtual dedicated hosts with VPS. I don't have exact numbers but I'd gamble that it costs 2 orders of magnitude less money to develop a large-scale datacenter than it did a decade ago.