I'm an American living in Russia. While there are many problems (politics and others), it actually "feels" freer than the West in a sense and the cities offer a higher quality of life than the USA. They are actually walkable with many affordable transit options). In my city, there is new construction of condo towers everywhere.
Taxes are lower, costs are lower and people can afford their own apartments, there's a ton of untapped human potential (highly educated intelligent people). My Russian is elementary, but from the business owners I talk to, while they complain about regulations and taxes, it seems they have fewer than the USA. Or do you think it's a lost cause?
I was robbed three times in my life, two times in 2007 just months before my departure, and the third time in 2016, just a week after my first visit there after 9 years abroad.
You can understand, I can't bare carrying that passport now.
I worked within OEM electronics industry since my first job 13 years. During those years I was fortunate to have experience living many different countries, with very different "systems."
I spent my childhood in early nineties Russia, where my parents had a business. My late teens were spent in Singapore, as an exchange student, and an interpreter in a trade company. Later I spent 6 years studying, working, and living in Vancouver, Canada, and Seattle, US. My career however only took off when I was forced to leave Canada by a paperwork mishap on behalf of my employer, and go to China for no better option.
SanderJD below has a very good point I wanted to talk about:
> I'm amused by these morality screeds from rich tech thought leaders. "Why don't the talented sacrifice easy money in software by getting into [insert super regulated, low-margin business]?" says profit-maximizing tech capitalists who ignored said businesses for a decade.
My own reason deciding not to return to the West was that I feel I simply can't do my job there, and an honest business as a way of making money doesn't work here.
I wrote many times here before how helpless I felt when I simply tried to "make money the normal way," and the normal way doesn't work. I feel the whole business culture in the West goes against the notion that a "normal, honest work" is the way to do things.
I saw many of those SV "mentors," "VC" guys, buffoon fund managers, and trendy hipstrepreneurs. All and every one of them is obsessed with NOT doing things the proper way. They all hellbent on the notion that the business IS to be done by some "special sauce," "a cheat," or "a secret trick" that is nearly equates to money out of thin air for them.
These people are wrong. They are so wrong. This is why you can not run manufacturing in America.
Maybe these guys can "make money out of thin air" by tricking banks, pension funds, clients, or the legal system, but there is no "trick" they think of to making physical things.