Having been to all three, driving in Miami and San Francisco is child's play compared to driving in Manila. Driving in Asia is a whole other ball game. There are no rules, and honking is a "hey I'm here" every couple of minutes. LA freeway raffic ain't got nothing on Manilla.
The money flow matters. It matters because those are jobs that Americans aren't getting. That friend of yours in the US that down on their luck and looking for a job? That's a job they could be doing. The Everyone driving for Uber could be doing it from their living room in the US. The money that Waymo riders are spending is going to other countries, not America. I'd pay more for an all American company who had remote drivers in the US.
Kids in the PI are much better at paying attention to traffic, because it is utter fucking chaos in Manila, routing by a school is not particularly interesting. So they might feel better about providing waypoint near a school in the US than an American person would -- not realizing US children are comparatively retarded to Filipino children in dealing with traffic.
I'm sure no ill intent on your part but referring to the Philippines as "The PI" (short for The Philippine Islands as it was known under US colonial administration) is roughly equivalent to calling Thailand "Siam" or Sri Lanka "Ceylon".
Since 1946 the country has simply been known as the Philippines, officially "the Republic of the Philippines" and the ISO 3166 code is PH.
Surely what matters is the architecture:
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
Waymo tell us that fleet response agents can only provide waypoint suggestions, they don't have steer-by-wire remote control of the vehicle.