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...

In fact, --- this is just your opinion. There is a lot of work outside of your personal experience which might appear less useful to you because you have not thought about it yet. This is ok. Nobody knows about everything. The limitation of your viewpoint does not set a standard and should not let you judge other people's work.

There are several jobs I would consider useful for society where it would be difficult to come up with "intrinsic motivation" (my opinion). For myself, I conclude that equaling the glamor of a job with its usefulness is highly flawed.

Maybe the number of cars, the space you can rent can be measurements for "being better off".
However, myself I would prefer metrics like general health, life expectancy, probability to be victim in a crime, outlook to improve your situation. Considering such values, I would rather be unfortunate in Europe.

P.S.: As a Swiss, I am neutral :-) I have been in both areas and I have relatives in both zones.

Well, once you leave your country to live abroad (which I highly recommend; it widens the horizon), you will learn that as a US citizen, although living abroad, you are still taxed by the US.
As I never cared about your constitution, I cannot tell you whether this is "unconstitutional" or not.

Offtopic, but I think noteworthy: "Even the Europeans..."
I am always a bit amused by this pattern of "us and the others" thinking. To me, this feels a bit old-fashioned. And if you need this small jabs against "the others" then this looks a bit small too. Sorry.

This is because taxation is not the only factor to decide where to build your new shiny factory. Often there are limited tax exemptions if you create jobs. Other important factors for market entry are the legal environment and the "social peace".
Two examples:

• DuPont once stopped selling some chemicals necessary for artificial joints in the US. The product was great. However, legal risk compared to the profit to be made on this component did not justify selling the product in the US market.
• Compared to Italy, Switzerland is a higher cost country. Higher salaries, higher material cost, higher rents. Yet, at the Italian-Swiss border, there are some Italian companies built on the Swiss side of the border. Industrial action is hardly known in Switzerland. Working time per week is longer. In the end, you have a more stable environment for production. This can justify the higher prices for production.

In the end, countries are competing with each other for corporations.

Xenophobia is difficult to measure. And as I grew up as a foreigner in Switzerland, I do not think that the country is "an embarrassment for all of western Europe".
Four different languages are spoken inside the country without causing much of a problem. There are not many other countries accomplishing this.
Most information at the townhall is available in several languages. E.g you can make the driving license in English.
In Switzerland, there are about 20% of foreigners. And this seems to work without issues. We do not have the racism of Italy or ghettos like France.

Show me other countries with a similar level of integration...

Actually, the Swiss always had an opinion about everything. However, we think our laws apply only in Switzerland. We do not think that we have to improve the rest of the world. So, maybe our opinion is not so known outside of Switzerland as the opinion of other countries sometimes is...

Disclaimer: Yeah I am biased.

If you consider the difficulties involved in the transfer of 1 mio USD you might see why it is expensive.
Clue: trust between business partners, cost distributed for the effort involved, every partner may go out of business at any moment

It is a bit different. Due to the SEPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area) agreements, money transfers got cheaper inside the SEPA area, but they are not for free.
Money transfers do cost money and they are suprisingly complicated for a bank. Worst case, a customer wants to transfer money to a bank with which the bank has no business relation. Then the bank has no accounts with the other bank which complicates things. Often such transfers are routed through half a dozen financial institutes to find a relation to the target bank. Nobody is doing this for free. Charging you 20 USD for such a service is a fair price.

Disclaimer: I work for a bank.

Switzerland is not sharing bank information with other countries; expect for defined cases of legal help. However, the crime which is the base for such a legal help request must be respected in Switzerland as well.

Disclaimer, I am Swiss and I work for a Swiss bank