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Every barrier we can out in place will result in fewer bullies making it through the funnel. It’s like a marketing funnel in reverse.

==then why have far older and desirable professions like law and medicine continued to be incredibly well paying?==

These are actually two perfect examples to illustrate my point. Both industries are represented by organizations that systematically make it harder for more people to enter the profession (AMA for medicine and Bar Association for legal). They have eschewed the free market in favor of regulatory capture in order to maintain their market advantage.

==Software is hard, humans have a hard time doing hard things, that's why we get paid more.==

Same could have been said of building cars and planes 50 years ago.

No goalposts were moved. I questioned the premise of OP's comment on whether unions can exist in a world where employees choose to switch jobs every 2-3 years.

You responded with an authoritative answer backed up with zero evidence or supporting data. That it was about unions is an embedded assumption based on that fact that the entire discussion is about unions.

==Do people actually think that software engineering is going to become a job that isn't skilled, and isn't sought after?==

I'm not sure why you would be so sure it wouldn't. Are the software engineers of today truly that different from the machinists of yesterday?

If you believe in the free market, then it is elementary that more people will flood into these careers which will lower the wages and diminish the bargaining power of existing software engineers.

Unions could help in each of these case, so you haven't answered the question or provided any evidence.

==We can form a union when we need to form a union.==

In my 35 years of life, it has become harder to start a union, so it isn't out of the question that it becomes harder and harder to start a union when software engineers "need to". There's no guarantee that what exists today will exist tomorrow.

Is the average tenure truly due to "employee choice" or simply a result of the system we created?

==makes everyone spend money they don't actually have.==

So much for all that personal responsibility we used to hear so much about. Far easier to blame the government for everything.

Companies use credit to buy back stock because we deregulated that activity. It used to be that the government didn’t allow it. This point is actually a counter-point to your theory.

You had to go back 12 years for your example. I think that speaks pretty loudly to the differences between countries.

The vagueness is how the American legal system has worked since inception. I don’t see it changing now.

Society changes faster than representatives can legislate.

I think the point is that once the cat is out of the bag it’s hard to put it back. For example, at first more people were helped by opiates than harmed. As time passed, by the time we realized that relationship had changed, we already had a bunch of addicted citizens.

It isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine an authoritarian government using our own surveillance video for nefarious purposes.

Not what I said at all. I thought there was an opportunity to make a larger connection between what has happened in the Appalachian towns he focuses on and larger Rust Belt cities who face much of the same issues.