Civil rights also tend to find a captive audience among hackers, I guess because it is (lately more so than ever) tied into freedom of speech and by extension, freedom of information.
* Crappy immigration. I can get around the EU (Schengen) and across borders without breaking stride. In the US, it's 3 hours minimum, and that's assuming you get in.
* Crappy legislation and tax. Your tax codes suck. Starting a business sucks. In the UK, fill in a single bit of paper, and pay your corporation tax when it's due. Flat percentage of income, two rates, one for most businesses, one for huge businesses. Don't get me started on the strength of behemoth corporate interests lobbies.
* Crappy businesses. The American way seems to be to hold a gun to your "partners'" heads, and use lawyers to enact your will. In Europe, people actually tend to trust one another.
* Crappy security. By this I mean not "THERE SHOULD BE MORE POLICE", but rather "I don't know if I can run a business in the US without the state meddling, and/or simply taking it away from me, and/or the state collapsing leaving mayhem both for a business and for anyone stuck out there when the brown stuff hits the whirly thing.".
I just don't understand why anyone would want to either start a business in the US, or do business with the US. We used to, but pulled out, as the EU is a plenty big enough market, and far more... humane.
Come to Europe, it's nice here, and there are paid holidays.... and a government.
Here are some companies you could ask:
Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Google, HP, Facebook, Cisco.
Here are some others:
It could well be - I would even suspect it myself - that the US is an imperfect country. And yet it seems to have a few companies who are able to do business there notwithstanding the harsh conditions.
Have you ever left your home city? State?
Bam, America. I'm not supporting anything, but looking at it from a business point of view this is pretty tempting.
For English, Western Europe.
>The deep rooted anti-American theme of the EU does not take long to emerge. This undertone is rarely flaunted, but is intuitively detected. Few seem to understand that it is one of the bases of the United Kingdom’s deep unease with the EU, because UK people simply do not understand or share that objective.
Stick your head out of your shell, and you'll realise there's a world out there, beyond America. I know it's hard to believe, but it does exist.
Actually, I live in Italy, where some of your "in Europe" lines do not hold true at all.
Frankly, things aren't that much better in the UK, but I stand by the fact that it's a damned sight more straightforward to operate a business here than in the US. I have done both, and have lived in UK, US, HK, ZH, DE, FR, BE, SA, so have a fairly broad (but of course still limited) gamut of experience.