Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture

>There's one thing I'm interested in since this is on HN... How easy is it to start a venture over there?

On paper, it's easy. You go to a bank, deposit either 20K or 50K depending on your corporation type, and they give you a letter. You take the letter to a notary, and the bank gets a doc from him. They put your money in your new company's account. Whole process may cost you 2.5K in notary fees and a few hundred more in government fees.

Of course, there's some more things a company needs than mere existence. If you're looking for capital, it isn't SV. But they do have government programs to help startups and that sort of networking thing. There's contests. What I mostly see though is high-tech university type stuff rather than "guys hacking in a garage".

There's also a number of designated venture parks where you can find cheap office space and infrastructure. A friend of mine rents one in Luzern, and my wife went to see some in the one in Zurich. They're reasonably large buildings, but not entire towns like in SF.

>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?

It is ridiculously expensive to eat out in this country, and your friend is probably not exaggerating. A pizza can easily cost 25 CHF. You can't do a meal at a middling restaurant for less than 100CHF. And the food is not great for the price. I've been to Michelin star places that cost less money than an ordinary meal at a Swiss restaurant.

> The poster mentions the low rate of federal tax on the average wage. This is only part of the story.

In my experience, when considering EVERYTHING (e.g. remaining net monthly salary) the overall tax rate in the US (California) and Switzerland ended up being similar and around 30%. However, in the surrounding countries from the Eurozone, tax rates for similar income brackets tend to be significantly higher.

To be honest, I did like living in Switzerland, but my feeling is that a lot of the benefits they enjoy arise from arbitrage situations with neighboring countries. Taking your example from shopping at Marktkauf [1] (right across the German border in Basel), people living in Switzerland massively go there for multiple reasons:

   1) prices are generally much cheaper, and on top of it 
   2) being from outside the EU you can get the 18% tax rate back, so essentially you can shop tax free and bring it over the border for no fees up to 300 chf/day.

In general, probably Switzerland has opened up in the last few years, but it still feels like a very traditional (even old-fashioned) country deeply rooted in its own ways of doing things, in spite of a very large foreign population, e.g. around 23% of its population (from [2] and [3]) are foreign residents, who live there but have NO right to vote.

[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Marktkauf/@47.5901807,7.59...

[2]: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL

[3]: http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/themen/01/07/bla...

As for getting a job here, I know a handful of people from 'third-world' countries here although the term doesn't mean as much these days (India, China, and Brazil) and they all have MDs or PHDs.

The only other way is as a refugee, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Switzerland does give a small benefit to Americans and Canadians - we get our C permit after just five years. But that's all as far as the benefits go. The system is quiet rule based.