who the hell cares?!

I am working from India for the past 3 months instead of my San Francisco office. Nearly every large IT company in India offers benefits at par with Google. Yes I mean multiple food vendors. Food being served 6 times a day.

The salary of an IT professional in India easily puts him among the highest wage earners in India (something similar to how Wall Street traders were a couple of years ago). Chauffeur driven cars, cooks and daily house cleaning services are all easily affordable.

The biggest question I have to ask myself is should I return to my studio in SF.

Don't laugh, but it's a kind of patriotism.

I love the country. It's beautiful. I like its philosophy. American values resonate close to my values. In the years I lived there I grew to think of it as my home much more than the country I was born in. I could see calling myself American.

When I went there I was received well. I was helped. I made friends. Now I think I can help in return. I would like to contribute, especially in a downturn. I would buy a house, I would create jobs.

Now, I travel a lot (including in US) so I live all over the world. And financially I'd have little to gain in States (no extra income, higher living costs, higher taxation, higher business costs). So it'd be mostly an idealistic gesture, a way for me to participate in building something larger than myself and what I've already built. Something I truly believe in.

But I am not getting myself again in the Kafka's nightmare that US immigration is. Waiting years for some bureaucrat to decide if your life will go on or will be completely changed "just because". No thanks. I'd only consider another country if I'd have a clear, legal and quick path to residency. Otherwise... I'll only be a tourist.

Whether or not you like it, TC is the "paper of record" for startups. Most of the new startups I hear about, I hear about there first.

But the reason I said that I cared is that I worry about Michael personally. The new kind of journalism people like him and Om Malik have been evolving is very stressful. They end up being constantly plugged in. It's alarming to watch

I left USA after being an H1B for 5 years with delay after delay in my GC application. HARD decision. Hated leaving...

Went to my home country, created a software company with successful products. Now a few dozen jobs are here instead of there and some million $$$ are flowing into my country.

Still, I would move to the US and open an office if I'd have a legal, fast way to get a residency there. Not likely though.

The main reason I'm usually not a huge fan of the college-no-college discussions is because they're "big identity" discussions (http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html). Most readers of this site made a choice when they were kids or very near to it and the position that they defend tends to reflect the choice, well informed or otherwise, that they made then.

I'm sure he'd be astonished to find that anyone thought that.

It's an interesting data point about what a minefield it is to be a public figure though. People get offended by the stuff you write, so you go off and stop writing for a month, and then they're offended that you were able to go on vacation for so long.

I would argue that while this certainly sucks for the US in the short term, it's awesome for the world in the long term. This is exactly what globalization is good for -- expose talented people from all over the world to the free market, get them to our level of expertise, and then have them go back home and start the arduous process of improving local standards of living.