Roads, police, fire department, school, safety checks on food products, regulation for the standardization of various devices (e.g you are not fried when you plug in a hair dryer), a legal system to settle quarrels...
In short, a lot of things we like to call civilization.

Not all Swiss banks closed business relations with US customers.
And yes, some financial products may not be sold to US citizens. This is because of legal agreements with the US government.

Actually, according to OECD reports, the tax burden in Switzerland is lower than in most EU countries (but a bit higher than in the US if I remember correctly),

Swiss banks contribute 11.6% to the GDP of Switzerland.

Having an inside view of Swiss financial institutions (worked for several insurances and a bank), I got the impression that these institutions take a lot of care to avoid black money. Continuing with my personal opinion, I do think that our "wonderful Swiss lifestyle" has to do with hard work and a dedication to quality. If somebody is better off than you are, he is not necessarily a thief or an evil person...

They were entitled to close it. However, it was totally illegal according to Swiss law to reveal the customer relation with Assange!

Well, considering that the "informant" of Wikileaks worked years for the Swiss private bank Julius Baer until he was fired because customer information in the filial on the cayman islands disappeared...

You have a problem if you want to keep customer relation confidential (e.g. online banking for a Swiss bank) but your customers must download the app from the app store which is placed in a different jurisdiction.

You really think people ever complain about their salary?
And do you really think a CFO of a working company one day decides "oh, let us create more cost by handing out bigger salaries"?
So basically, you do think salaries just increase for no apparent reason.

Every company I have worked for does hire internally. You can apply for any open position and they even consider internal movers first. Because of the network, the specific business experience etc.
My current employer even has a policy so that my line manager cannot stop me. In this fashion, they do not support bad line managers who fail to provide an interesting enough position for their employees (aka using resources efficiently).
I would be surprised if your company is different. Ask HR.

The semi communistic cliches handed around are really funny.
Think about it for a second. What would you do if you were the CIO of your company:

• Good employees are difficult to get. So, you would use reasonable effort to keep them.
• Very good employees are impossible to get. So, you would use reasonable effort to develop good employees into very good ones.
• You would only train/support the development of employees once they show themselves initiative. Pumping training money into static people is no receipt for success.
• You would not promote employees because they still do the same job. You promote employees because they do more (responsibility, scope, talent)
• Average employees and pure technology knowledge you can hire. Why would you increase the salary for such employees?

It is not rocket science. It is supply and demand.

The emphasis is on a raise you are actually worth. How to decide your market value? Apply for jobs! What company would pay you defines your market value.

Every time I thought I am underpaid I gave early enough a signal to my line manager. Early enough because getting approval for a salary raise takes long in most companies. So, do not complain and expect them to increase your salary next month. Expect a salary increase at the next opportunity.

No, radiation is not making you delusional.
There is an interesting book by Gregori Medwedew, one of the engineers involved in building the reactor of Tchernobyl. He also visited the site during the clean up after the catastrophe. He went so far as entering the reactor building to check what actually went wrong. He describes nothing about delusions but claims that in high radiation zones the air has a metallic scent.

My project failed already in an early phase because community feedback hinted towards too much piracy to make it worthwhile.

2008: Annoyed with the problems of MythTV, I thought about organizing an electronic TV guide for Europe. This is a real issue as there is no stable version in Europe. Fine. I checked with several TV stations about how to get their program data and what was the cost involved. I found a website for the German user community and looked for alternative solutions. When none came up, I polled who was willing to pay for an electronic TV guide which would solve the MythTV issues.
The typical answer: "Sure I would pay for it. And as I could hand over the program data to the rest of the student home, it is cheap." The majority of answers was about how they could distribute my data to others! A rough estimation showed that there is no business case for me to develop such a program guide. Even worse, the investment necessary to buy (!) part of the data would be at risk.

In 2008 my electronic program guide for MythTV died before I wrote the first line of code.

Most countries in Europe already do this.
Switzerland was one of the last and bent to the pressure as well.

It might be off topic but as most of you have not read the article, here we go anyway:

I do work for a huge international bank and I do receive typically boni in the range of 4-6 monthly salaries.
As a lot of you seem to have strange prejudices about people receiving a bonus at a bank, let me rectify your picture. I am not an investment banker. I hardly ever wear tie nor suit. As a senior IT architect, my job is to look into the long term maintainability of large scale software systems. As a consequence, short term profitability is not part of my job description.

Funny enough, I do not feel motivated by receiving a bonus. Believe it or not but in the last years, I never cut corners to achieve my objectives. I kind of reach my goals anyway. At the bank I work, you do not receive a bonus for being extraordinarily good. You are entitled for a bonus if you did your job. And if I would fail reaching my targets, I could live without receiving a bonus. It feels more like extra money
However, the idea that as an employee of a company I also participate in the profit of the company I think very good. Personally, I think must people criticizing such a system are just envious. Yet, I do agree that banks handing out boni in years where they do not make profit strike me as strange.
Yeah, I took the money in 2009 anyway. Tell me that you would not have taken it...