Google and LinkedIn announce massive land swap

Well then it's a good thing we have courts to decide what "too far" is. The Supreme Court has decided that zoning laws are not inherently unconstitutional (Euclid v. Amber), but they've struck down more infringing laws on multiple occasions. Maybe you don't agree with the exact balance they've chosen, but that's your problem, not a fatal flaw of our government.

> I think what we need is a constitutional limit on state power in the United States.

We already have one: the Supremacy Clause. Federal laws and the national constitution override state laws in all cases. If a certain right is not granted either by a state or by the Supremacy Clause, it's because both the state and the Federal government have decided that particular right isn't a natural one. Again, you seem to be taking your particular conceptions of liberty and what the law should be, and deciding the government is flawed for not obeying them. A lot of us like the current system.

If there's a particular right you feel should be Constitutionally protected against state laws, we have a system for that with Constitutional amendments enforced by the Supremacy Clause. Propose one to your representative if you like. But your suggestion of more non-specific Constitutional limits on state power is not going to win you many followers: the vague right-libertarianism of your attitude will alienate the Left, and the Right will balk at your suggestion of more Federal limits on state power. You're walking a lonely road here.

And yet your alias is all too apt.

But highways are nonetheless terribly inefficient. One extra lane or off ramp isn't enough to handle all of Google's traffic. They've already widened 101 around Google, rebuilt the whole Shoreline/85/101 interchange area to add more lanes, etc. The bottleneck is the off ramps themselves and the local streets -- they cause traffic to back up onto the freeway and make all lanes congested.

The real solution is to allow more housing to be built close to the campus, and elsewhere in Mountain View, so that more people can walk/bike/take transit. The land use just across 101 is really inefficient right now.

there is a marina in redwood city, but notice how shallow the bay is south of SFO (aside from the channel) - much of that is mudflats (lakes don't have tides), marine preserves, etc.

Lesson: it's a mistake to design to the limit.

I suppose in some idealized, maximally YIMBY world, the difference between 8 stories and 10 represents some horrible market interference by "NIMBY asshats". But in the real world, Google would be foolish to build above 8 stories no matter what the Mountain View city council says. The Precise Plan just reflects the practical limits of building in that area.

Furthermore, as you point out, the more teams you have, the more overhead there is in cross-team collaboration, which means that engineering output is sub-linear with the number of engineers due to having more meetings. It's not really about talent, but mostly about having to spend more time coordinating. For example, in a small company, say that you want to create a new feature, then you just do it and check with one or two other people if need be. In a larger company, you might need to have meetings with other teams to deal with provisioning hardware resources, security review, data schema review, compliance with privacy regulations, code reviews, etc.

It's a very different thing from coding by yourself or in a small team/company.