So you shop at almost Walm... er, wait, almost any retail shop in America.

Uber & Lyft offer basically the same service and very similar pricing. Formerly I used Uber because (at that time) I slightly preferred their Android app over Lyft's app. Now I mostly use Lyft because they seem like a subjectively "nicer" company.

When there are multiple companies offering equivalent services, it doesn't take a lot to sway people's loyalty.

Open floor plans and cubicles alike indicate that a company doesn't really value the employees who work therein. If a company truly values a worker, they put their money where their mouth is and give that worker a real office. But talk is cheap, whereas real estate is expensive.

While ago I worked for a venture-backed company. The code was an awful steaming pile of dog shit. But a few modules were much higher quality than the rest. Logical design, solid implementation, good comments, full test coverage, etc. The programmer who wrote them had only worked for the company a few months before he was canned - apparently management thought he sucked balls.

Yup. I made the mistake of getting into software development, because it a) was accessible to a liberal arts drop out and b) it seemed to pay well (for a kid just out of college in the early 2000s). Now I realize that a not-very-successful real estate agent makes double a successful programmer's salary, while doing way less miserable work. Time for career change.

I worked on a project for several years where the team was split between Boston, Sydney, and San Francisco. It actually wasn't all that hard for us to communicate and keep in sync. It probably helped that the SF and Sydney folks were on flexible schedule, while only the Boston team were cubicle slaves chained to their desks 9-6.

FWIW, scheduling wasn't really any harder with SYD included than it was for just SFO and BOS.

Uh - maybe auto accidents and deaths for a starter

With human-driven cars, crashes result from mistakes made by drivers. With computer-driven cars, crashes result from bugs and vulnerabilities in software. Without wide deployment it's pretty speculative to assume the latter will necessarily be less than the former. At least with current technology there is no way for a malicious attacker to simultaneously cause thousands of car wrecks from the comfort of his sofa.

Perhaps Google's attorney had lunch with the head Chinese censor and "forgot" to carry home his briefcase full of unmarked, non-sequential large bills.

What isn't a Node.js replacement?

I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I've biked on Mass Ave and it didn't feel suicidal to me either. Urban cycling in Boston is fairly safe and easy. But "light" traffic in LA is heavier than the heaviest traffic I ever saw in Boston.

Perhaps you haven't visited LA. Traffic there is different from traffic everywhere else. It's omnipresent, all times all places - it's atmospheric. Imagine for a moment the worst traffic jam you've ever seen in your city. Or, if you live in a small town, way worse than the worst you've ever seen. That would be what Angelenos call "unusually light traffic".

Central LA average is probably more like 4mph in heavy-ish traffic. But the actual speed of cars at any given time ranges from around 35mph to barely inching forward, and can change quite suddenly. Not a very safe place to bike.

And how!

Clearly you haven't spent much time in American airports.