Head -> desk
Figuring out how to make someone else's life better and make a living off of it isn't a roll of the dice. It's a process of observing and learning about the world around you, coming up with ideas... etc.
It is all the things you list and a roll of the dice. It is working very very hard and also getting lucky.
just continuing to come up with new ways to make your boss's life easier.
This is getting back to my original point: you are thinking incredibly small. We are talking about a societal problem. The GP wrote:
your two options are to be perpetually poor (basically limiting you to a life of indentured servitude), or to out-compete your rivals and achieve an upper-middle class to upper class income
You do realize that what you're describing falls on the "out-compete your rivals" side of that scale, right? It isn't a rebuttal to what GP was saying, because it's just an example of it.
Higher education is an investment and comes with risk
And who is making that investment? In most developed countries, the state has determined it has an interest in an educated populace, and pays for people to go to college. Young people graduate debt-free, and are able to do all this innovating you're talking about. For some reason in the United States, we look to private institutions to fund education.
you don't need to pay back your debt by going through the process of filing bankruptcy
You realize that student loan debt is incredibly hard to discharge through bankruptcy? And Congress has made it even more difficult in the last decade.
So, to clarify, in most developed countries, the state takes on the risk from education (just like health care!). In the US, who takes on the risk? Not the bank that does the lending - the government guarantees the debt! But not the government, either, because they've made it nearly impossible to discharge the debt. No, the risk falls almost entirely on the borrower, the individual in that trio that is least able to absorb the risk.
but you can live the life of leisure you so desire then.
This is not about leisure, it's about having the freedom to have a role as a human being separate from your role in the capitalist system. It's about not having to live your life in fear of losing what little you have, and being able to make choices that maximize factors that have nothing to do with capital.
Both of you complain about a lack of imagination and then fail to offer any sort of alternative, just further complaining.
This is the same argument I heard from people who supported the Iraq war during the worst of its quagmire phase. My response was that there were no good options (other than not having gone there in the first place), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't point out the problem.
In this case, there isn't much an individual can do to change a society that has been withered and corrupted by corporate control. We have to live in it. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't also point out that there are better ways to live.