Have anyone else had similiar experiences?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files

The problem with that index is that each culture reacts differently to corruption. In some cultures, if a public servant buys a coffee using the company card, that's a scandal, and some of those cultures have a reputation for being corrupt. In Germany, everyone downplays corruption for some reason. But I see it everywhere, especially in everything that had to do with public funds. But it's never called corruption, so corruption does not exist because it is never acknowledged.

> would that mean life in such a town is worse than in a comparable small town somewhere in the middle of the US?

You lose a lot of the advantages that you listed such as public transportation, walkable cities and free healthcare (availability is terrible in certain locations). But honestly, it's a terrible location to live in, if you want to have any kind of social life, and consider that as a foreigner you probably don't have loads of contacts in the country.

I have met a couple of Americans with 10+YOE who have been imported to Germany with competitive salaries, like 150k€/year. They live in Berlin or Munich, are already partnered up, have a nice nest egg from their years working in the US, and just enjoy being expats on a little adventure.

This is not the typical skilled immigrant experience. If you start with 0YOE in Germany, it's much harder to go anywhere in life. And when you don't already have a well populated nest egg, you start getting anxious about your inability to accumulate savings. And a lot of jobs are unfortunately not in Berlin or Munich. A lot of these skilled immigrants end up in some 20,000 pop town, 1hr away from the nearest mid sized city. And then, if they come from non-western countries and they do not look European enough, that also adds something to the experience.

For example, you might get a job at a research institute or at government funded startup and gain experience working with cutting edge technologies. The pay is mid, but you don't care because you are gaining experience. Then your contract ends. The private sector cannot make use of your experience. So you have to pivot to programming CRUD webapps or you emigrate, or you get another public sector contract with the corresponding public sector salary.

But how do you accomplish this? Where do you get the money from? Nobody wants to invest in Germany, not even the Germans themselves. So the government tries to jump start investment, but the government is both incompetent and corrupt, so for example the German government bet on Quantum Computing instead of AI. Now the government in investing in AI, but instead of investing in LLMs they are investing in "AI for science" projects, 99% of which are complete deadends. Actually this is a sort of theme. The government funded startups are always doing some sort of "science" based product. For some reason this appeals to the founding agencies because science sounds like a solid investment. But most of these startups are either attacking a problem that is way too improbably of yielding any results, or they are projects that sound good to the uninitiated but are actually fundamentally flawed when you actually dig deep into them (like a lot of AI for science crap).

I think, if there is a way forward, it's for the government to stop trying to be a startup accelerator. They are too incompetent and corrupt for that. Instead, it should be a mediator between foreign investors and local talent. Make it attractive to build in Germany and use local talent to do that. And make sure the local talent gets competitively compensated so they do not emigrate.

My second controversial point regarding AI research and startups: doing research sucks. It's risky business. You are not guaranteed success. If you make it, your competitors will be hot on your tail and you will have to keep improving all the time. I personally would rather leave the model building to someone else and focus more on building products with the available models. There are exceptions like finetuning for your specific product or training bespoke models for very specific tasks at hand.

This kind of completely unhinged dehumanizing nonsense is bordering hate speech.