Europe launches program to lure scientists away from the US

In your typical US setup you're going to be paying a lot more of your salary. Suppose no public transit, there goes ~15% of your salary for an automobile. Maybe an extra 5% to healthcare and health insurance, if you're healthy. If you're chronically ill or spontaneously get cancer go ahead and bump that up to 20%. Retirement, another 5% at least. And there's probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting.

Point is: it's apples and oranges. It's nice if you're someone who is young, healthy, has no problem commuting two hours a day, etc. As soon as this is no longer true, it becomes a little bit tricky.

Society is not entitled to value. If you have the skills to create value for others, then you will inevitably have to use capital to actually scale it. In the process, through voluntary transactions, that enterprise might profit and grow - creating more value for others in the process. The question is really: who profits? I think your perspective is exceedingly misplaced in that, by necessity, it intrinsically hands control of each new innovation to said MBA-types. If a society drafts policies that make it extremely difficult to take control of your own innovation and scale it according to your own wishes, then you are implicitly leaving that work to others who (more often than not) will not share your philosophies. If a society wants to enact policies that make it difficult for a person to take ownership over their own innovations, then they should not be shocked when it becomes extremely difficult to appeal to innovators in the first place. Instead of realizing that the commentor wants to take command of the destiny of their innovations, you go down this peculiar moralizing argument that's orthogonal to their entire point. How do you know they haven't created more value for society than you have, and why are you so comfortable demanding the nature of that value creation happen on your terms?

Also, this forum is managed by a VC firm. They explicitly support people taking charge of their own creations and scaling that to society. People are allowed to ask if a society has created legitimate bottlenecks to accomplishing that.

However, my host country is Switzerland, where if you are not already a EU citizen, you have to live 10 years basically working on the same permanent job before even getting a permanent residence, _without interruptions_, and years in the academia up and including to the postdoc level do not count. Both me and my wife are researchers. Our life was all about academia and interruptions and temporary contracts and travel. And they kept resetting the counter. For _twenty years_. Even though my daughter was born here more than ten years ago, goes to local school, speaks French and never has been in Russia. They don't care.

And what I, personally, have to do with what Kremlin is doing? I live in Switzerland since 2005 (and I am as far away from citizenship as when I just came here). I left Russia because I hate authoritarianism and Putin. Last time I even was in Russia (for five days or so) was in 2014, and I noped out of there and vowed never to come there again specifically for that reason, as I have seen the writing on the wall as clearly as anyone else. I always publicly supported Ukraine and donated a lot to her cause, so it is not a good idea to ever go back.

And now you are telling me that what is done to me is "necessary", while true perpetrators keep opening their shadow companies and earning money from gas exports to Europe. How come?

> EU loans will have been on generous terms - so Ukraine will be repaying less interest than it would normally. In some cases, Ukraine isn't expected to pay anything, with repayments coming from revenues from frozen Russian assets.

However, your critique of the wealth tax on unrealized gains is a big problem more generally. I have some interaction with the startup ecosystem these days here. Anecdotally, I have seen several founders choose to incorporate elsewhere in Europe or the US because of it. Unfortunately, it's incredibly hard to quantify how many do not stay here because of it.

This aspect of the tax has had significant opposition for years, but nothing ever seems to come from it.

Opposition to tax on realized gains/assets is less vocal. Someone else here characterized that part as similar to property taxes in the US and I think that is fairly accurate.

Details on what is taxed how much, if you are interesed: https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/taxes/get-the-taxes-ri...

ETA: we are looking for evolutionary biologists. Not many entrepreneurial personalities here, more like a lot of bird watchers (I say this lovingly). Over in the groups with translation potential is a different story of course.