My salary has not kept up with inflation over the last 15 years. The industry I am in, which is not related to tech, has undergone massive consolidation leading to 2-3% raises some years and no raises other years.
Hourly wage for all private sector workers is up +32% since Dec 2019 ($37.54 vs $28.38)[1]. For non-management workers +35% ($32.31 in May 2026 vs $23.85 in Dec 2019)[2].
I'd say almost no one gets a 30%+ increase staying in the same company. There was a short period between 2019 and ~2022 when tech was hiring like crazy and you could just hop from job to job for huge increases every 6 months to a year.
The problem is that is now over, and so wages are back to being suppressed again.
I don't work as a specialist, nor at any "special" company in the tech industry, and my yearly wage increase has met or exceeded inflation. Nor has there been any layoffs at my large company.
The only thing I want to spend a bunch of extra money on is a nice property and making twice the money would not get me there in what I consider a reasonable amount of time. I'm also not interested in going on an extra two fancy vacations per year or a nicer car. I'm plenty content to read, cook, learn, and enjoy the arts.
If the first 1x covers all your spending, what else are you going do with the other 1x? Invest it in even more investments to produce more income that you already cannot spend? That turns into what is essentially working for free. Why bother?
That turns into working hard so you or your descendants can eventually own the world. Jeff Bezos did it. Elon Musk did it. Bill Gates did it. If any of today's billionaires stopped when they had enough money, we wouldn't be talking about them.
Except all of the above settled for 1x, quitting their jobs (where they had one) to pursue their personal dreams. It so happens that their dreams also turned into something valuable, but that's secondary. They would have never been able to seek out their dream or turn that dream into something valuable had they accepted 2x.
I was speaking in the sense that the base game is free and you can buy it with non-ascii graphics for a price.
However,
The "raws" that drive the game are completely configurable and accessible by a user.
It's more like the engine being closed source and the gamedata being source-available. Modding isn't quite the right word - that implies it being less open.
You can delete stuff from being present in your game, add new plants or objects, new diseases, etc.
Also related, the game has been opened up with Lua scripting thanks to Putnam's efforts, for even more powerful procedural addons.
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