The $205.4B Gulag
I&#x27;d like to remind people about the terrible working conditions in extremely wealthy places such as California too.  Right now, University of California grad students and researchers, who produce a massive proportion of science on the West coast, are on strike.  In most locations, it&#x27;s nearly impossible to pay rent on their stipends. Grad students may be in training, but they are also the source of nearly all the novel ideas and the analysis and the basic work that goes into moving science forward. Principal Investigators these days write grants, and perhaps collaborate on the ideas and analysis, but in nearly every major paper I have seen come from a lab where I know the people well, it&#x27;s the grad students at the heart of the intellectual work.<p>This inability to pay rent isn&#x27;t as much because wages got lowered, it&#x27;s mostly because certain cities decided that they didn&#x27;t want any more housing, in order to appease land owners and drive up housing prices to astronomical levels. But it&#x27;s also unethical to pay somebody for a job if they can&#x27;t use those wages to live.<p>Fortunately I&#x27;m not aware of any police violence against the grad students yet, but there has been plenty of UC police violence in the past against striking workers.<p>This is not an identical situation to the delayed bonuses discussed in the article.  But as tech heavy as HN we may not be as in touch with a workforces that get squeezed on basic ability to survive, such as assembly in China or grad students in California. (Or dare I mention the farm workers that put all the food on our table...)