Spoiler alert (don't read ahead if you like the rose-tint of your glasses): SF never made sense, and the standard-of-living compensation offset was a bubble des

Spoiler alert (don't read ahead if you like the rose-tint of your glasses): SF never made sense, and the standard-of-living compensation offset was a bubble destined to collapse. The Bay Area artificially displaced the majority of it's service worker population and replaced it with high-turnover middle-managers and product designers. Now everything sucks, and the businesses don't want to blame themselves because it would mean they were wrong about San Francisco. So instead they blame dubious corollaries of their influence, like homelessness and rent costs. Gentrification 101. I've traveled around a bit to the smaller tech communities (Boston, Redmond, Detroit, etc.) and they've never left me wanting for a higher-stakes location like San Francisco. It was an obvious bubble from the start, plainly apparent to anyone with an understanding of economic causality. The only thing keeping it afloat was hype and deliberate ignorance, two trends that aren't yet dead as evidenced by AI and cryptocurrency, respectively.