Oh, poor you....You should come work in Romania (where i am ) and see how it is.
Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
81–90 of 462 posts
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#82That's nice but she's just a spoiled rich lady. Americans work hard - but so does the rest of the world (except the Swiss I guess).
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The picture looks very different if you use purchasing power parity; per Wikipedia, which cites roughly the same nominal per-capita GDPs, in PPP dollars: Switzerland 58,731 United States 54,596 If you then factor in the demographics....
Just to make comparison even more complicated, I assume in Switzerland you don't need to pay as much for health insurance, and put as much money aside for retirement, and people in US do. And I know college fees in Switzerland are around 1000 to 3000 per year, not 10 000 to 40 000 like in US. So if you have kids, you don't need to save for their college. (...But then you can only send them to European universities. I…
On the other hand you have to pay a lot more in taxes.
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#84Interesting read but I think the author makes a false conclusion that taxes on wealth is better than taxes on income. If the US income-based tax system really were progressive in practice, then you could compare apples to apples. A wealth-based system could be just as non-progressive if there were similar ways around paying your fair share like there is in the US. Given systems that are equally difficult to circumven…
> But I think the Swiss succeed despite this because they have a much more compassionate view towards their fellow citizens
From what I've heard, that is predominately only true so long as their fellow citizens are sufficiently "like them".
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#85Can someone here elucidate the downsides to living in Switzerland, over the US, particularly for those in the HN crowd?
I hardly "lived" there, but I found the culture to be lacking a sense of silliness and in general less personable. It's like what they say about German comedy, it's no laughing matter. I still really like Switzerland.
It's important to note that there are 3 different regions (German, French and Italian) which all have their own 'sub-culture'.
Behaviors can be quite different ;)
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#86I think article skips anything negative. For start "lunch hour" is mandatory and in reality it means you spend extra hour at work. I would rather spend a hour with my kid than eating with my boss. Second the taxation leaves various compulsory "contributions": social, pension, wealth, tv, petrol etc. It is not 5% but more likely 50% of average salary. And third, I have totally different experience with american compan…
There's one thing I'm interested in since this is on HN... How easy is it to start a venture over there? Also, my old roommate from college works at CERN now as a researcher. He tells me that he can't afford to go out and eat since it's so expensive. Is this true?
There are some agencies which help you set all the paperwork up for free. You have to deposit 20k swiss francs on a locked bank account (the amount) you can be held liable for, founding and entry into the central corporation register costs 1-2k.
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#87"Driving Bentleys ruined me for BMWs and their poor make quality" Switzerland is one of... three maybe (Luxemburg, Norway) countries with higher standard of living than the US. Not even Switzerland's neighbours (Italy, France, Germany) with people coming from the same populations can reproduce it. All these great states are tiny (8M people) outliers. There are more people enjoying work-life balance in America than al…
France and Germany have a higher standard of living than the U.S. In fact except Greece, Italy and Spain all European countries have a higher standard of living than the U.S.. Face it you are the third world compared to Europe. Ooooh, those poor little jingoistic feewings are butthurt... :D
There are probably 10 countries whose average citizens enjoy a standard of living higher than your average American.
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#88I think article skips anything negative. For start "lunch hour" is mandatory and in reality it means you spend extra hour at work. I would rather spend a hour with my kid than eating with my boss. Second the taxation leaves various compulsory "contributions": social, pension, wealth, tv, petrol etc. It is not 5% but more likely 50% of average salary. And third, I have totally different experience with american compan…
> For start "lunch hour" is mandatory and in reality it means you spend extra hour at work. I would rather spend a hour with my kid than eating with my boss. Her boss invited her to lunch for one time, just to demonstrate that lunch is supposed to be (in Switzerland) something else than eating a sandwich at your desk. If you read 4 sentences further, there is: "When I was on maternity leave, my husband came home for…
>So you are free to spend the lunch hour however, also visiting your home and children.
Sure, if my job is very close to my house. Otherwise it's an hour spent neither working nor at home.
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#89In Europe, many, many people were essentially slaves. They were property of a small class of landed gentry who ruled over them with, at best, patriarchal indifference and at worst homicidal, spiteful authoritarianism. They were peasants. Then, over the course of about 200 years, some of these gentry got their heads chopped off or were stripped of their papal lands or were rounded up and put in front of a firing squad…
That's one theory that is easy to believe, but it's not true and is a gross simplification of how the European welfare system came about.
Here's an even more gross simplification:
All that great free stuff you want ? You will pay for it. Probably in ways you didn't imagine.
Go look at the economic flows (not the details, just the gross flows of resources) between master and servant in pre-revolutionary france ... now compare those resource flows to those proposed in a utopian "minimum basic income" society.
Those resource flows are the same.
EDIT: to be clear, I am not knee-jerk-opposed to MBI schemes - I find them somewhat intriguing. I'm just wary of them because they introduce a dynamic that ends up being very similar to other dynamics that have, in the past, been quite bad.
Re: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
#90Size matters. Switzerland shall be compared to Singapore etc instead of US.