I'm an American living in Switzerland for over 10 years, and this was definitely my impression as well. But that isn't really the case anymore here - you can no longer have anonymous (i.e. only numbered) accounts, and Switzerland is no longer a preferred locations for dirty money.
FACTA would only apply to Americans and permanent residents right? It isn’t hard to imagine that America is a good place for non-Americans to stash money, but that trick really wouldn’t work for Americans themselves. For example, the Canadian and American housing markets have been a good place to launder dirty or gray Chinese money into real estate.
The Nordic countries are famous for pioneering low temperature district heating. This can be as low as 50 C. Sorry, no citation, this is what I heard at a project meeting on district heating networks in Switzerland.
District heating with such (relatively) low temperatures is no problem, the energy to pump is much less than the energy to heat. My house is heated from nuclear waste heat pumped more around 10 kilometers.
Since we're having the semi-annual "how do taxes work in other countries" thread, here is my experience as an American living in Switzerland. Though I have been here a while, I still find it interesting and a little weird.
At the beginning of the year, you get a bill for that year based on what they think you will owe. This bill is due on October 31, i.e. you need to pay your estimated income tax before you have earned all that income. This is especially strange because most people will get a 13th month salary at the end of October (your annual salary is split into 13 months, the extra comes in time for Christms presents?). You are expected to save adequately to be able by the end of October.
Banking secrecy is not dead in Switzerland. There are no longer anonymous accounts, and banks share information with foreign governments. However, there is banking secrecy between the banks and the government. On the other hand, we pay a wealth tax each year (it's small), so you need to declare each account and how much you had in it on December 31.
To create an equal playing field between house owners and renters, house owners pay an imputed rent cost for how much they would have paid in rent for their house. This is added to their income before taxes are calculated. In my case, this means my assessed income is around 25k higher than it otherwise would be.
There is no automatic form filling in my state, but there is free tax software (Java app which runs everywhere), and it is pretty easy to use. If you have questions, the local tax office will nicely respond via "secure email" in 1-2 days.
Taxes are very progressive and family friendly. With 4 kids and one income we pay 6.5% combined local/state/federal on income of around 120k (plus imputed rent).
There are no property taxes. For the wealth tax, most people who own houses never pay off their mortgages. They will typically have a mortgage for 50% of the house value (which can be quite high, a typical house where I live is between 800k and 1000k, and more in bigger cities). The interest can be deducted, and the mortgage amount from the wealth tax.
You forgot the part where you need to also file and pay US taxes although you may no longer be living there, have any income or assets there but you still need to pay as long as you hold a citizenship or green card.
Are you sure about the dates? As far as I know, you need to file your tax declaration for the previous fiscal year by mid-March, and pay before the end of March. But as you say, you're supposed to pre-pay most of it before based on an estimation (though you have to do the estimation yourself, not the government). You don't have to pay all at once though, you can pay in monthly installments with no penalties.
Sorry for being late to the game, but we have an as-open-as-it-can-be tool to compare petrol, gas, battery, and fuel cell cars, both today and in the future, available here:
One nice thing about our tool is that it calculates life cycle emissions including projected changes in the electricity grid of the region you live in. Of course, these are uncertain, but most other academic analysis just use the current grid mix.
It's important to realize that, even with the advances in electric vehicles, while they are better than combustion cars, they are far from zero-emission. Lifetime emissions for an electric car could still be 200 g CO2/km, split almost evenly between the electricity supply and everything else. Depending on usage, which of course has wide spatial variation, just road construction and maintenance itself could be 20 g CO2/km (this number is valid for Switzerland, which has very high utilization rates).
I think most people who are have seriously investigated the current system and possible future developments in the next 10 to 20 years have come to the conclusion that a lot of the change has to be in consumer behaviour - clean tech is not clean enough, or can't be scaled up enough in the current economic and political climate, to reach any reasonable climate goal.
http://carculator.psi.ch/start
"Simple" doesn't work and fails with an error "We have not been able to detect the country to run the analysis for. Please wait a few seconds and try again."
Unfortunately for me, I can't access simple analysis since the site can't figure out what country I'm in (no permissions were even asked for), and when I click on the intermediate analysis, the link doesn't seem to be valid. Only the advanced seems available to me. It would be great to not have to make an account as well.
You are right that this is very expensive. Other firms in this space estimate that there should be a lower bound for direct air capture of $100-200 per ton of CO2 [0].
However, this is a very different product than BECCS - it direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 which would not occur without your purchase, in the only real permanent operating storage facility we currently have. It is very difficult to know what the marginal impact of changes in sugarcane production are, though we do know that there is potential for either indirect land use change, or mitigation of reduction due to shifts in demand/supply and knock-on effects.
Climeworks is a Swiss startup in business since 2003; they have built multiple pilot plants in Switzerland, and are well known here. See e.g. https://www.climeworks.com/about/
The ironic thing is that one of those new hot spots, in addition to the usual suspects like Cyprus, the Caribbean, etc., is the USA. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/wyo... for some juicy details.