In fact, just posted my voting letter today, before taking a 1h bike ride through the biggest city in Switzerland, having lots of space and freedom biking around in our beautiful city.
When taking the train to my parents house, I pass several farms and landly smaller cities. Alot of free space in between those, train mostly has spare seats, depending on rush hour timings. There usually are several big commercials on private farmer land stating “NO to 10 Million Population”, prompting people to vote YES on the SVP/UDC initiative.
The initiative’s lancers seem to play a lot on people’s fear of overcrowding, which even in the most population-dense city in Switzerland seems like a joke. There’s a lot of space and quality of living is still amazing here.
Yes, during rush hours, you might have to stand for 15-30min in public transport.
Yes, finding an appartment is getting harder and more difficult.
But is this a problem of more people coming here or the failures of the state preparing for future population growth? We have so much space, benefits from diverse cultures and love for human beings.
My letter was specifically voting AGAINST this initiative.
Also swiss here. So many people seem to think that this is about refugees. Wrong. It's about Europeans. Mostly Germans. They are educated and highly skilled and for some swiss, that's a problem. They blame them for not finding a job or an appartement. Just read the comments on inside paradeplatz, you can translate with any llm, on a post about the referendum. A subset of the swiss Middle class has decided that they don't like competition, they want them gone. Of course they themselves are never the problem, the german with a middle management position is however, because quote "they are only hiring other Germans".
I am German and live near the Swiss border. My wife is Swiss. I always tell Germans: if you want to get a feeling for the life of an immigrant in Germany, go to a non-touristic region in Switzerland. It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior.
My wife really enjoys talking to Swiss people in German first (she has no accent anymore), and if the reaction is hostile, she seamlessly switches to full Swiss German in mid-sentence. The reactions are often priceless.
It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat. You are treated differently as soon as you are identified as a foreigner, and this treatment is completely independent of your own behavior.
Sounds like Seattle in the 2000's.
As soon as one of the locals found out you're not from there, you get the "Seattle Freeze."
Fortunately, I read about it in a book before I moved there, so I knew it when I recognized it. But that didn't make it any less uncomfortable.
I guess with SEA filled with expat tech people these days, it's either gotten much better or much worse.
> It's definitely not open hostility, but many little things which quickly give you the impression that you are not welcome and seen as a threat.
Literally what most expats go through in Europe. I live abroad for 6 years and here, a Central EU country, this also happens. I am trying to learn the language and even then I got told implicitly several times that I will still be treated as a foreigner, no matter how much culture and language I learn from the local country.
We can swap anecdata back and forth, but that doesn’t reflect my experience at all, now in my 4th European ‘expat’ (migrant, really) experience.
Aside from a few somewhat racist remarks outside Berlin, I’ve always been treated fairly. Speaking the local language definitely helps, and living in 50k+ pop. cities.
And then… you visit Switzerland. Very quickly you realise what GP is talking about. Switzerland is the only place where I’d love to live, but hate the feeling of being there.
That's interesting (and a really fun stunt to pull). I always had the impression that the situation is slightly better for other minority-dialect foreigners (Vorarlberg/Südtirol) compared to "vanilla" german speakers, but that might wrong...
If you’re part of the majority group, you really don’t see how cliquish people in minority groups are. Every time I get into a cab with another “brown” person, there is a Q&A. When they find out I’m from a muslim country, it’s all “my brother,” etc. I’ve always found it distasteful.
People in general tend to be very tribal -- it's in our DNA. When it's about "yay community!" its kinda nice but most the time it's "other tribe bad". I think this is a core to a lot of legislation.
Not having a tribe to belong to I find the whole thing simultaneously amusing and horrifying looking in from the outside.
I don’t find it nice. I’ve gotten free stuff on multiple occasions from co-ethnics (lots of Bangladeshis working in hotels in the New York area). It doesn’t sit right with me, because at the same time we tell white people that ethnic favoritism is one of the worst social crimes. We would be very upset if they displayed the same kind of favoritism within their own group.
For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone. So either “yay community” sentiment is acceptable, or it’s not. It’s in my interest for such sentiment to not be acceptable for white Americans, so it follows that it must be unacceptable for me as well.
I hear you, I'm trying to find the bright side in "community" where people who don't know each other at least treat them as "brothers". The insular part is fucked and we need need to evolve past that.
> For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone.
Preach, brother! For this to happen we need to be prepared to examine the rules and how they are applied and call out when that isn't the case. Color, gender, faith, sexual orientation, origin, etc should never be qualifiers in how one is treated.
tribalism, Us vs. Them, racism, patriotism/nationalism, etc all seem closely related.
In terms of social life, and romantic life, it's interesting how heavily we rely on shared/common background, which tends to cause this clustering effect.
The irony is that virtue-signalling (which your comment certainly is) is a shared identity declaration. Which is a part of the same inherent human predisposition to form groups which we call "tribalism" when we like to don't like it.
That's called the paradox of tolerance and it's not the gotcha that you think it is. If you think "mankind should overcome bigotry" is such a divisive statement that it splits people into "tribes," that reveals more about you than it does about me.
Did I even write anything about political contents of your signalling? I believe I didn't. I also didn't "reveal" anything particularly bad about you. I said that your urge to ring it is of the same social nature (aka tribal), we (humanity) have been exhibiting for all written and unwritten history, while the message itself expressing that you're above it makes it contradictory in ironic way. No matter what your signal proclaims, the process of tribal-building around it is most certainly divisive[1], with obligatory bit of outwards directed derision. So... then you reacted with suggesting I'm some sort of morally inferior outgroup voice. Which I think, proves the point you have missed.
[1] Which is not always bad. This is core mechanics of our competitive adaptiveness probably. It's just that being more aware of this gives us a chance to be better in more universal terms with other humans. Including in politics, of course.
P.S. If you felt offended, sorry! I can't say I care too much ngl, it's the internet after all, but it wasn't my intention either. I also didn't downvote you.
I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.
You've got it backwards. That's a defeatist take that results in the exact kind of misery and cruelty documented in detail throughout history. Society prospers when people look past their differences and work together to improve things. It suffers when demagogues successfully divide the public and exploit the chaos to loot the resources required to improve the lives of everyone. Making punching bags out of a group of people is sure way to create instability.
Yes, we have a really well recognized Spanish team lead here, yet he’s mostly hiring Spanish people (in Switzerland), oh yes and one Italian is the exception.
Also we had a German team lead hiring Germans, well surprise it is easier being with similar ones.
Diversity back in the day meant Physics, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering working together…
I’m an American and I just had the thought - if I was working in Japan at a Japanese company and I had the opportunity to hire, would I have a bias to hire other Americans?
Honestly probably, since I understand them the best.
I’d disagree. I’m not American or British but and in my experience Americans or British are the least ethnically biased people on the planet. Any other group, I could believe that they are biased but not Americans, or British. Something in their particular culture right now.
You’re responding to an American who says he’d be biased towards Americans and telling him he’s wrong.
Maybe Americans are the least biased (though being an American I am not so sure) but that doesn’t mean we aren’t biased (even if sometimes for legitimate reasons like ease of communication).
Now this I disagree with. I expect that you are interacting with a specific subset of Americans. A lot of Americans are deeply racist and xenophobic and I believe that the average could definitely get lower.
I guess I work in tech. Maybe it’s different elsewhere but even there I think it’s probably lower than most of the world among similar classes of society.
So I actually agree with you here. America has a deep, ugly pit of unconstrained racism, and a less deep pit of quiet racism that permeates a lot of society. But so do many (and very possibly most) other nations, where the level of racism is often even worse, just with different targets than Americans. I think in a way America is much more aware of our tendencies than other nations.
It isn’t just a lack of ethnic bias, it’s a belief in capitalism or professionalism or “enlightened self-interest”: hire the best person for the job, and everyone will be better off.
I've actually been in such a situation and I didn't. Or if I did have such a bias it must've been rather small as none of the applicants benefited from it.
> well surprise it is easier being with similar ones.
It's not easier dealing with people from your own country but it is biased. From someone who has hired hundred+ remote developers in europe for 10 years to lead them and out of those hired a total of 2 people from my country. Wouldn't have been hard either.
At the same time I see some managers doing this, currently in another fully remote company have a manager colleague that has hired 3 brazillians back to back. Go figure. Just shows you that it's a biased person in other respects (we all are) and that they make zero efforts to keep it in check (this is a decision you make).
I've seen this kind of thing happen not through bias but because good people know good people, where by "good" I mean highly competent. They knew each other through university and other regional connections, so they happened to have the same ethnicity as one might expect from such a regional commonality. One got hired, referred another, and it cascaded. They were great to work with and highly competent, so I don't think there was bias even though it might appear that they're was.
Because it is real, and there _is_ in fact a large difference in the propensity to do this across cultures.
This post is about Switzerland, and as said by parent a lot of this is about Germans in Switzerland.
Are Germans in Switzerland more prone to hiring another German rather than a French person, or Swiss person? I'm sure that such bias exists. But that bias is nothing compared to e.g. tendency for Indians to hire other Indians. Now of course some of this can be explained by economic opportunity. The extra benefit Germans can provide to other Germans by giving them Swiss job is smaller than for Indians.
However that only explains part of it. If that was all, then Chinese people should bias much more to hiring fellow countrymen than Japanese and Korean people, while the latter two should be similar to each other. This is definitely not the case (note that we're talking about immigrants here, not 2nd+ generation).
I'm sure there's been research on this subject, and there will be some cultural trait that proxies for how much immigrants from country X bias towards hiring others from X.
I can even give you a proxy for funsies: embassies. Look at the employees at the embassy of country X in country Y. How many of them are from country X and how many are from Y? Now compare that across embassies. You'll see a lot of similarities with what I've sketched. Sometimes you'll see that both the embassy of country X in country Y, as well as that of country Y in country X (the other direction), are both primarily staffed by people from country X! In those cases it's common that country X has a much stronger bias than Y towards hiring people from their own nationality rather than based on aptitude.
Because it's an unfalsifiable claim. If you need to bring in highly skilled people and most of them come from X Y or Z, it will be near impossible to distinguish in-group preference from a continuation of skilled immigration which for most countries that practice it, is beneficial for the economy.
Also hiring is often based on trust and networks. People refer others to their company and jobs. That trust tends to work out pretty well for companies. If people get laid off they tell their friends and their friends pass on opportunities to them or try to help them find new jobs. And people tend to make friends with others they share a culture and language with.
If you add a bunch of barriers to make companies have to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity or culture, that slows down hiring and can be an extra regulatory burden for what reason?
There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing.
When companies do make an effort to give everyone a fair shot there's a tendency for mediocre white men to lose out to more qualified minorities. The companies get better employees and more diverse perspectives.
Then those white men feel spurned. They imagine they weren't hired because they're white. It's an easier pill to swallow and then the next thing you know DEI is the great Satan of low IQ white men.
Are the “mediocre white men” the ones with a 27-29 MCAT/3.4-3.59 GPA, who have a 21% chance of admission to medical school whereas a hispanic student in that same range has a 61% chance? Are those the “mediocre white men” you’re talking about?
> The companies get … more diverse perspectives
That makes no sense. The premise of non-discrimination laws is that someone’s ethnic background doesn’t affect their “perspectives” in ways that are material to employment.
> The premise is that discriminating is morally wrong
Yes. And the clearest evidence we have of anyone doing that at scale in modern times is DEI programs in college and medical school admissions.
So why is it unreasonable for the people you call “mediocre white men” to conclude they’re being discriminated against? If Harvard and other elite universities are willing to go to the Supreme Court to defend such discrimination, doesn’t it stand to reason—absent data to the contrary—that the myriad companies and institutions run by graduates of those universities are doing the same thing?
>the clearest evidence we have of anyone doing that at scale in modern times is DEI programs in college
Congratulations you found the one place where a black person might have an advantage. Meanwhile virtually every other aspect of American society disadvantages black people and the supreme court ruled against those colleges.
College admissions and the job market are apples and oranges. It isn't actually safe to assume the same thing must be happening in both. It isn't. There's an unofficial affirmative action favoring white people across much of the job market.
From the report 'Specifically, Black males received sentences 13.4 percent longer, and Hispanic males received sentences 11.2 percent longer, than White males'
So, based on your own logic, you would argue for higher prison sentences for whites? It's all well and good to whine about 'discrimination' in one narrow area, but few have the courage to oppose discrimination when it benefits them.
> So, based on your own logic, you would argue for higher prison sentences for whites?
Yes. Your report shows that white men are more often given probation, which explains much of the difference. That should stop. Throw those fuckers in prison.
Your report also shows that black women received 6% shorter sentences than white women. So there seems to be more at work here than black versus white. We need less discretion in sentencing across the board.
> It's all well and good to whine about 'discrimination' in one narrow area, but few have the courage to oppose discrimination when it benefits them.
That describes people who point to sentencing disparities to justify affirmative discrimination in school admissions and employment.
> That should stop. Throw those fuckers in prison.
And yet, if I look at your comment history, you seem hyper focused on discrimination in admissions. I don't see a single instance where you even attempted to advocate for broader elimination of discrimination. It has always been a few narrow instances where whites were on the receiving end.
You’ve got it backwards. There’s 19 million people in college and graduate school, compared to under 2 million people in prison. And my contention is that the discrimination in admissions carries through to the workforce, at least to white collar jobs. There’s 70 million people in white collar jobs.
> There's no such requirement to hire proportional amounts of every ethnicity. There are requirements not to discriminate. Which isn't the same thing.
How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination?
> When companies do make an effort to give everyone a fair shot there's a tendency for mediocre white men to lose out to more qualified minorities. The companies get better employees and more diverse perspectives.
I just don't agree with this idea of "giving a more fair shot" if it's enforced because what it really is is slowing down hiring processes and second guessing people's judgments. I don't like it to bolster diversity and I don't like it to cut diversity (what many white nationalists in the US wish would happen in industries that hire from abroad like tech).
It's also not even defined what a fair shot means - once you discard merit and start trying to counter for all kinds of past or inherent disadvantages there is really no end to it.
A fair shot would be hiring based on qualifications and not race, relion, etc.
There seems to be no end to people wanting to perpetuate a status quo that advantages themselves.
You might feel differently if you were part of a group that faces discrimination at every turn.
How will you prove and prosecute supposed discrimination?
Usually someone who feels discriminated against will get legal representation, file a lawsuit, and use the discovery process to strengthen their case. They can compare their treatment to that of people who don't share their minority status. They can show internal communications. Call witnesses. compare the companies workforce to other similarly positioned companies.
> because what it really is is slowing down hiring processes and second guessing people's judgments
1. So what?
2. People's judgement should be second guessed if they're racist.
3. One of the easiest ways to reduce discrimination in hiring is to replace names on resumes with numbers before letting hiring managers access them. Which barely slows down anything and eliminates a variable that isn't relevant to the candidates qualifications.
I think it's pretty logical, though perhaps it is correlation rather than causation.
Say I am hiring as a native English speaker in a Chinese company (while of course still knowing enough Mandarin to survive) and I have 3 candidates, one of whom also speaks English fluently. I would definitely be biased towards the English speaker, because I would work better with them.
Now, it doesn't really matter what their ethnicity was, but there is a higher likelihood of them being of the same ethnicity. Especially if my first language is niche, the chances of hiring the same ethnicity would be higher.
I've been on the receiving end of this before, being hired in part because I spoke English due to my manager while the rest of the company was primarily Mandarin
The broader concern seems to be “outsiders taking our jobs/raising house prices/voting in elections” etc etc. Anything perceived to be done by “outsiders” is an issue.
Americans/British saying this about non-white immigrants. Switzerland about Europeans. India saying it about Bangladeshi migrants.
It’s like people dislike others who are worse off them.
I mean there is a tendency for people in the middle class to go all NIMBY and not want additional housing to be built which drives up the cost of housing. It's good that there's a middle class but there are also things that people in the middle class do that aren't good. Like drive f350s on their 40-minute commute to the office.
Eeh, not really. German's think because some Swiss resent them a little, it is all about them.
EU countries, especially Italy, Germany and Portugal are the biggest immigration source in Switzerland (EU/EFTA immigration ~60%), Germany is ~13% of the total.
Non EU, especially outside of Eurepean immigration is a smaller part, but if you looked at SVP pamphlets you see a very different picture.
Maybe its a bit like Brexit, i.e. not rational immigration being one of the major issues when it did nothing to reduce the immigration of (non-white) people from third countries and EU migration was rapidly decreasing anyway.
Funny enough, the voting of this weekend mentions as argument also "the lax asylum politics in the EU" while exactly THIS weekend the EU is strengthening a lot, and I mean quite a lot, the asylum procedures and including border controls. I guess they had to push it quickly before the Swiss voter notices...
Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is very different from blaming immigration for not finding a job. Jobs appear almost automatically (if some basic economic conditions are met), apartments have to be built and permitted.
Blaming immigration for not finding an apartment is also different from blaming immigrants. Blame has a moral connotation, and certainly no individual deserves blame because he lives in an apartment that you'd like to live in, whether he moved from another country, another place in the same country or another district of the same city, or whether he was born in that apartment. But that doesn't mean that immigration can't make it more difficult to find an apartment if not enough apartments are built.
Swiss as racists. Amazing. People know Americans harbor racist feelings because they are surrounded by people of many races. But it's trivial to demonstrate racism among any population as soon as you introduce an "other" of virtually any type.
It wasn’t that long ago that American racists debated whether Italians and even Irish were truly “white.” The definition of white had expanded considerably over the years.
Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”
Maybe we should just keep expanding it. Declare everyone white. Black people are just white people with more melanin.
Then we can be racist about aliens from outer space.
There is a distinction between racism and xenophobia, no need to assign the same label to everything. i.e. the thing about Italians was cultural an educated immigrant from Northern Italy would have been considered as white as a French (not that there a significant number of those in the US) at least.
Technically yes, but usually I think there’s a racist undercurrent to xenophobia.
The US stopped accepting refugees recently… except white South Africans. I’d say these people share no more culture or values with the average American than a Central American refugee. Maybe less. I’d much rather party with a bunch of Central or South Americans than a bunch of Apartheid lost causers.
If ethnically white people were pouring across the US border I don’t think many of our immigration hawks would care much, even if some were committing crimes.
> It wasn’t that long ago that American racists debated whether Italians and even Irish were truly “white.” The definition of white had expanded considerably over the years.
Eastern Europeans, Jews (of course), and Russians were also at times not “white.”
This idea is mostly a modern fabrication. Various more granular ethnic biases were of course present throughout American history, but those were never conflated with racial categories: in times and places where the white vs. black racial division was relevant, the ethnic groups you're referencing were always considered "white".
And the types of discrimination that people in white ethnic groups sometimes experienced was of of a type and of a degree vastly different from that experienced by black people. They're really two very distinct phenomena, and weren't evenly distributed throughout the US -- black people in the South had the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and other horrifying things to deal with, whereas white immigrant communities in the Northeast or Midwest never experienced anything remotely similar.
Yeah it's much better to make your money by enabling the worlds worst dictators to steal money from their populations. In fact it's all the other countries taxes that are paying for the swiss social security, because of all the aid money being funneled into swiss bank accounts.
It's not just the state - it's your neighbors pushing the same building restrictions as the rest of the developed world, where people say "I don't want another neighbor next to me", which results in too few apartments for even the existing people's children...
You should check Geneva then - they are building apartment buildings like crazy in past 5 years. Too much if you ask me - in very center, almost every small park or green spot is now 6 story concrete building. Only the biggest protected parks are untouched. City is visibly and permanently degrading into concrete field. Weirdly schizophrenic move - they try to keep pushing bike lanes everywhere, even where not safe to share the road, yet they also remove greenery and trees. I guess the money is too juicy. But not to just bash - they build on outskirts too.
Switzerland as a country usually strikes good balance between various extremes, much better than US or EU countries do. I have no doubt they will work it out, not ideally, but better than most. Immigration they tackled much better than rest of Europe for example.
And for the vote - its 1:1 Brexit. Vote for capping, damage your long term prosperity, and those unpopular jobs still will need to be staffed, or country will work worse, be dirtier etc. And if one can earn cleaning streets or putting stuff in shop shelves as much as cca doctor in France (with higher costs of life, but it doesn't have to be extreme), the amount of people willing to try coming and working is basically endless.
The idea one can freeze time and keep the country as some idealized image from their childhood (without the nasty stuff that happened ie in 70s to orphaned kids en masse, aka Verdingkinder), one would have to become second North Korea. Everything changes these days, massively and quickly. Dictators won't be sending their kids to study here under false names anymore, would they.
These jobs are unpopular because the pay is shit, not because people don't want to do them, the government could simply have grants/bonus program for people employed in these positions so that the taxpayer money directly funds the bettering of the society and environment around them. Besides, Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"; it's one of the most ethically homogeneous countries and also one of the cleanest places you can visit.
> Besides, Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"
This was true before about 10 years ago. In last 10 years, there has been a dramatic rise (I mean millions of "technical interns") in low-skill foreigners living and working in Japan. (To be clear: I harbor no resent towards these people.) They work in any industry that needs cheap low-skill workers: agriculture, hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, convenience stores, manufacturing, construction, civil/civic maintenance etc. That said, the friction has been pretty low. The difference between the original late 1990s wave of highly-skilled foreigners (mostly bankers and lawyers) and the most recent wave for low-skill foreigners: The most recent wave arrives to Japan with some Japanese language. (They study in their home country and need to pass a test to demonstrate basic Japanese language skills.) In my experience, their "median" Japanese is much better than most highly-skilled migrants, which helps to reduce the integration friction. Also, the low-skilled migrants have a maximum number of years they can work in Japan. They either need to skill-up and get a better visa (I guess about 5-10% can do it), or they need to return home after their "technical internship" is complete.
> Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"
Japan heavily utilizes foreign workers via a Gulf style guestworker program, and even that has led to the far-right Sanseito becoming Japan's highest rated opposition party and the far-right wing of the LDP winning internal party politics.
They get to keep their passports and can return any time, calling it Gulf-style is a bit much. There are abuses - so are there in Europe - but it's not like they sacrificed a thousand or so immigrant worker lives on the Tokyo Olympics in Qatar 2022 style.
I think they mean gulf style as seen by westerners. You can get a visa but you'll never be seen as a "local" nor granted citizenship. In places like Dubai multiple generations live without ever getting citizenship or a path to it and always with the notion you can be booted at any minute if you inconvenient the wrong person or run out of money.
Though I don't think this is fully true of Japan -- it's one of the easiest countries to naturalize in if you give up your other citizenships but does have the quality of always being seen as a foreigner. It's just that few people naturalize as Japanese because their immigration is most open to people from developed countries who aren't interested in giving up their birth passport to acquire Japanese nationality. If you just want a Japanese passport though no matter the downsides, I think it's one of the easier citizenship to get for an American to obtain.
This is no longer true. With recent legislation, you need to live in Japan for 10 years before applying for citizenship. In the old days, it was only 5 years, which is pretty short for a highly developed nation. UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are now much easier to obtain.
> Japan is a good real world example that you do not need to lean on immigrant labor to stop your country from becoming "dirty"; it's one of the most ethically homogeneous countries and also one of the cleanest places you can visit.
It's also one of the worst developed nation economies and has a massive old, shrinking population problem and is well associated with people having no kids, having no prospects for a better life, and having huge amounts of its population live alone shuttered from the outside world.
A good economy has many benefits and skilled immigration can significantly improve developed nation economies.
You would think that such a terrible, untenable, broken economy as I hear the Japanese economy described (oh no, it’s not growing fast! The horrors of checks notes equilibrium) would precipitate a very dirty landscape, vast swathes of nature torn down, civility breakdowns, mass homelessness, and a high murder rate, bridges collapsing out of nowhere, etc.
I’ve just described some famously “excellent economy” countries, but I certainly didn’t describe Japan.
Instead of those things, Japan has extremely high suicide rates, extremely low rates of coupling, extremely low rates of family formation, extremely high rates of loneliness, etc.
It's a place with no economic growth prospects, where you have to work far longer than people in other developed nations, and where your chance of companionship and having your own family is the lowest it can possibly be in the world.
To be clear, the economic performance of Japan is pretty similar to Italy. They have incredibly low population growth (or shrinking), but their GDP per capita continues to increase year-over-year. Surprisingly, quality of life is pretty good in Japan and Italy (the second will be a bit controversial here). As long as you have a middle class job, your life will be pretty good.
I am going to make a wild claim: "Happiness" is a stupid metric for quality of life. So many of the answers are tainted by local culture. Most Japanese people would feel like they are bragging to say they are somewhat or very happy. The very question is flawed. And I guarantee the survey was created by people with mostly Western European culture. To be clear: I said "quality of life" not happiness. There is a big difference. Let me tell you what "works" in Japan: health care, education (primary, secondary, and tertiary), home buying/building (wildly cheap by world standards), labor protections, national pension, mass transit, personal safety, taxation... I could go on and on. Quality of life is objectively extremely highly in Japan when compared to other nations.
> Among Japanese respondents who said they were not happy, the most common reason was their "economic situation," cited by 64%
> Only 15% of Japanese respondents said "overall quality of life will be much better in five years," the lowest among all nations surveyed. In contrast, the highest optimism for the future was seen in Colombia at 79%, followed by India at 78% and 76% each in Argentina, Indonesia and Mexico.
> Only 13% of Japanese pollees answered that their current quality of life is "good" -- the lowest among all 30 countries. This was less than half the average of 42% and notably lower than Hungary (22%), the second lowest, and South Korea (24%), the third lowest.
> in very center, almost every small park or green spot is now 6 story concrete building
I struggle to see this. Central Geneva is full of beautiful, well-maintained green spaces and children's play areas with plenty of larger parks scattered around.
Geneva had an extreme shortage of housing while there were plots of land perfectly suitable for construction but older people willing to sacrifice their kids' future for the sake of today's comfort and for one more year of ignoring the world around them. This problem is no unique to Geneva though.
Compare the no build scenario to the scenario where you build one more apartment, but that one new apartment is smaller than you want.
In the no build scenario, the person who wants to move to Geneva doesn't get to, or they have to rent a room in an existing apartment.
In the scenario where you build that one additional apartment, a person moves into it instead. So they make a choice that that was better than their existing situation.
That choice is someone increasing their comfort level. There are lots of housing situations that are worse than a new apartment, even a very small one.
The mistake is not realizing that everyone who moves into a new unit is increasing their comfort.
I agree about bike lanes in Geneva, they should take the space away from cars. Their success is so phenomenal, that they are carrying more passengers/h in some sections than the much wider street they flank.
It seems like a good idea to start worrying about population long before it feels overcrowded and there's no room left on the trains. The issue isn't about how much open space there is to stuff people into, but about how many people an area can sustainably support. I'm not sure that 10 million is a good target to aim for, but you sure don't want to wait until your quality of life declines before you start making plans.
If people are already starting to have trouble finding work and housing that seems like the conversation is long overdue.
The economy is strong because of immigration, particularly white collar immigration from EU countries. Without them businesses cannot grow in the same rate. Immigration leads to net job creation, meaning also more jobs to fill for locals. It's not zero sum.
Public finances would be in a much more dire state without immigration and the locals will have to bear the public debt burden, maybe not immediately but eventually.
Granted, housing and infrastructure do have to be built to keep up with population growth indeed, but it's a better problem to have than a depressed economy with decaying infrastructure and housing stock.
Or you can rather prepare housing and infrastructure for the increase of population instead of blaming foreigners and risk all bilateral agreements with EU in which Switzerland's economy depend on.
This seems like xenophobia masked as sustainability. The article indicates the referendum specifically would block immigrants but not, say, require free birth control for citizens. Interesting how narrow the target is if sustainability is the real goal.
No, you don't have that much space. The entire Switzerland is half the size of Czechia and half of it is taken up by high mountains.
Your cities are already pretty dense. Maybe your threshold for "too many people" is very high, but in general Switzerland doesn't have much free real estate left in/around its urban centers and most people would probably prefer to keep the rural places rural. You could turn your cities into a highrise maze - does the majority of the population want to?
I can fully see where this initiative is coming from. If Czechia was pushing 20 million people, I would consider it on the edge of being overcrowded.
Yes. We can cap non-EU/EFTA immigration to zero but that's relatively small anyway. Getting out of Schengen-Dublin and more importantly the Freedom of Movement of workers would basically unravel all bilateral agreements.
EU citizens can freely live and work in Switzerland and vice-versa. It would be difficult to reliably cap immigration from other EU countries and stay in the Schengen Area.
When I was at CERN, it was before Schengen became a thing, so as Portuguese I had the same VISA issues as someone else coming out of the other side of the planet.
Worse, being at CERN wasn't a plus for the hiring process, I would need to apply to the position as if still living in Portugal, as my VISA was tied to CERN directly with a three month deadline to leave Switzerland after the contract duration.
It also did not help, that my fellow country folks do not have a positive image across the country, for various kind of reasons, which is another issue I experienced while living there, like being refused entry in clubs when showing a Portuguese ID card.
Eventually I moved back to another EU country, still I do visit Switzerland, from time to time.
Pity that right wing movements are taking off all over the place.
You're throwing a lot of words that you don't understand nor have much relevance to the topic.
Before bilateral agreements and the freedom of movement, not Schengen which was ratified much later and is completely irrelevant here, you needed a work permit, not a visa (lowercase), which anyway at CERN is the equivalent of a diplomatic permit given to all international and tax-exempt NGOs in Geneva/Switzerland. And of course you lose your CDL permit quickly after your contract expires.
Getting a B permit before FoM would specifically not have been as hard for you as for someone from another continent.
Getting a B permit in 2003 - 2004 was indeed hard enough experience that I ended up not staying there and refuse any job offer from Swiss companies to this day, regardless of the Swiss friendships I managed to make there.
My stay at CERN was temporary, and every single company where I had an interview clearly communicated to me that the paperwork to get a B permit instead of a Swiss national, or a foreigner with existing permit.
The need to switch permit status from the CERN diplomatic one into a B one, killed all conversations.
But lets be pedantic in the meaning of words instead, which I used for folks that never lived in Switzerland, that is what is relevant for the whole discussion about foreigners how experience Switzerland.
Bilateral agreements were signed in 1999 and freedom of movement enacted in 2002 so you must not have looked very hard. Also claiming that immigration from a country like Portugal was hard before FoM is extremely funny given the number of Portuguese immigrants in Romandie.
Words have a meaning and bringing diplomatic permits to the topic when they follow their own rules and are specifically outside any immigration quota is not particularly helpful.
In one of the religious texts, the supreme god Indra says "man acquires sin by living amongst humans, and ward it off by wandering in faraway places (void of humans)". Not far off to think that Indians have always had this trauma due to population.
There are plenty of such places and as the population in many countries gets older there will be more even with available housing etc; the only issue is relatively lower pay.
Really? I live in Lausanne and it’s getting a bit crowded. The buses and trains are completely packed to the point of over flowing, the city as well. Sure there’s a lot of land but that doesn’t mean we need to maximize its use at the expense of the environment and the nature it supports.
Maybe some (or many) people believe that more people will make it less "lovely". I think this is a popular stance and I think many people are more than satisfied with the current population density of their area.
Because it is the place it is due to the conditions it has grown in. Take away the EU and Switzerland loses a significant part of their economic power, which is needed to sustain being the place it is. Just like Brexit.
Is not accepting infinity immigration "taking away the EU"? And the population density is even more part of the conditions it has grown in. But much much harder to fix if it increases too much - shouldn't they take a precautionary approach?
Regardless, that's not the question I asked. I asked why the poster was pretending they don't know population number affects the quality of a place.
A rhetorical question is supposed to make you think, not state the obvious. Especially since the obvious has already been stated - it is the premise of the referendum!
It's also a much smaller economy and Switzerland, unlike the UK, is landlocked and surrounded by EU countries. More than half of its exports go to the EU. Switzerland needs the EU more than the EU needs Switzerland.
About half of UK trade is with the EU too and leaving made no difference.
As for "surrounded by EU countries", unless you're jumping in the same boat as joxdasba and claiming France, Germany, Italy and Austria will all simultaneously attempt to starve Switzerland into submission, that just doesn't matter much.
I simply think that it's self-destructive to block end all bilateral agreements that are dependent on the free movement of people in order to put a cap on population/immigration, and especially that not knowing whether or when would it be applied would create uncertainty to a country whose best strength is certainty and stability.
European countries have traded with each other long before EU free movement. In fact, most countries today, EU or not, manage to trade just fine despite strict borders.
For sure, but going back to this after such a close integration is much harder than the previous situation. Moreover, the uncertainty of when or if these measure will be applied would damage the predictability and stability of Switzerland, which are their best assets.
The UK went with the "hardest" exit possible in law, in which all integration was unwound, but trade levels continued on their pre-referendum trajectory. So it's not that hard, apparently.
Well, you may be right, who knows. I still think is not worth it to create uncertainty in a country whose biggest strengths are certainty and stability for limiting immigration in a country where immigrants cause no troubles.
> The majority of economists believe that Brexit has harmed the UK's economy and reduced its real per capita income in the long term, and the referendum itself damaged the economy.
That specific statement has five citations and all of them are from 2016 or 2017, when Brexit hadn't happened and so they were merely speculating about possible future effects. So none of the citations supports the claim.
The citations also contradict the statement, "the referendum itself damaged the economy". Instead they admit the referendum's effects were better than predicted by which they mean there weren't any:
"It won't mean Armageddon, but the broad consensus of economists—whose predictions about the initial fallout were largely too pessimistic—is for a prolonged effect"
and
"Unlike the short-term effects of Brexit, which have been better than most had predicted"
Wikipedia is a hopelessly compromised source, you shouldn't rely on it for anything where a left wing activist might have strong opinions because they'll just straight up lie to you, unfortunately. Grokipedia's article is marginally better, but still makes the mistake of citing discredited analyses and making false claims based on them.
If you really want to know the truth about this you have to just go to the core data and see for yourself, because the space is full of claims made by people with a clear agenda.
That's not an answer. Raw data is useless without interpretation. There's a myriad of other things affecting economic development, which need to be compensated for.
Or does your "raw data" have a column for "growth deficit due to Brexit" showing 0?
Just compare the British economy with that of France, or its own prior trajectory. Very similar economies, neighbours, one stayed in and the other left. France establishes there was no unexpected growth surge Britain missed out on. Continuing on the prior trajectory establishes there was no direct negative impact from leaving. Put them together and there's your answer.
Surely, somebody else has done that and either posted about it or even submitted an academic paper in some economy journal. Do you have any links?
[Ed.: nevermind, https://ukandeu.ac.uk/brexits-impact-on-the-uk-economy/ does what you described & it very much indicates an economic impact. You'll of course claim it's biased. Feel free to back that up with your own links to analysis.]
There's no point submitting papers to academic journals given that the entire economics profession systematically lied about Brexit for years. Even Paul Krugman has publicly admitted, in writing in the New York Times, that the profession has been manipulating the public for ideological purposes:
> "What we’re hearing overwhelmingly from economists is the claim that [voting leave] will also have severe short-run adverse impacts. And that claim seems dubious. Or maybe more to the point, it’s a claim that doesn’t follow in any clear way from standard macroeconomics — but it’s being presented as if it does. And I worry that what we’re seeing is a case of motivated reasoning, which could end up damaging economists’ credibility."
Your link is an example of what Krugman was talking about. It's a press release about the NBER paper. It's not doing what I described, it uses an invalid methodology. It:
• Compares Britain to a synthetic country primarily based on the USA and Estonia, i.e. a country with a massive tech industry and a fast-growing ex-Soviet state still catching up from the damage caused by decades of communism. Notably missing: France and Germany. Then it assumes any underperformance in this correlation must be caused by Brexit. This assumption is invalid.
• Argues that if it hadn't left Britain would have had a sudden growth spurt out of nowhere that would have made it by far the fastest growing economy in the G7 outside of the US, leaving the rest of the EU in the dust. From where??
• Argues that if it had stayed British unemployment would be 4pp lower, but the current unemployment rate is 4% so they think staying in the EU would have reduced British unemployment literally to zero. Not a single unemployed person anywhere.
The paper can't even be described as biased, really. It's straightforward manipulation of the public. Anyone can "discover" any impact they like if they're allowed to make absurd assumptions about the counterfactual.
You can find other papers written outside of academia that are much more honest:
> Contrary to initial concerns, Brexit has not had a major detrimental effect on UK–EU trade. Trade data doesn’t support the Office for Budget Responsibility’s claims that Brexit has caused significant negative impacts on the UK economy.
I did. First of all, its primary trade claims collapse when you look at more recent data from https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpay... - it appears 2022 was simply an outlier year. On top of that, I'm not sure the premise about "trade would shift away from the EU" is valid. It wouldn't capture an overall cooling of the economy. Further, a lot of trade goods cannot be shifted arbitrarily between trade partners due to logistics limitations. It's not even worth discussing though, considering it collapses on its own when you include 2025.
The paper was written in 2023. Citing numbers from years after it was published doesn't make sense, as it didn't make any specific claims about what would happen in future years. It was only pointing out that the narrative from pro-EU economists was false, which is what you wanted a paper for.
2022 had a catchup effect from COVID. Nonetheless exports and imports are both higher than in the 2010s, exports have been rising since 2023 and exports to the EU are currently increasing, not decreasing:
> Exports in the UK rose 0.2% month-on-month to £79.13 billion in March 2026 from £78.98 billion in February. Goods exports edged up 0.1% to £32.35 billion, driven by higher shipments to the EU (3.9%), while those to non-EU countries remained relatively unchanged.
The further we get from the actual date of leaving the less any specific trend can be argued to be caused by it though. It's especially tricky because lockdown impact was so massive it drowned out everything. But Brexit was years ago. None of the predicted economic disasters came true which is why its critics are reduced to playing with Excel.
Australian/Brit here. A Sudanese man tried to decapitate someone in the middle of the street in Belfast this morning. I suspect if the UK had better immigration controls this wouldn't have happened.
Many people are awful. I’d be fine with Afghan refugees moving in. Even if we accept the premise that Afghan culture is “awful,” wouldn’t the fact that they’ve fled the country indicate they’re not exactly in sync with that culture?
I live in an extremely diverse area with many immigrants on my street and it’s fine.
They could have fled for any number of reasons- that doesn't mean that they aren't exactly in sync with the culture they are coming from. And even if they aren't in sync with the culture they are fleeing- they very likely still hold radically different values than you.
I met a man from Afghanistan sometime last year, however, once we got past the introductions and realized we shared things in common- he opened up to me and began trying to make me realize the value of Sharia law in America, and how much better it would be here if it became the cultural norm.
That makes perfect sense. But clearly Switzerland, unlike America, barely has any proponents of Sharia-like Biblical law. This is a large cause of misunderstanding in threads like these by fellow Americans. Because the US has very similar people at home, it just looks like "potentially a little more of something there's already lots of, they'll never outgrow that existing group anyway, what are they even complaining about".
My point is not actually "potentially a little more of something there's already lots of," but rather that the shittiness of people is not well correlated with what country they're from. I'm sure Switzerland has plenty of shitty locals, even if it might manifest in a different way.
The reason I'm not afraid of Afghan refugees moving in isn't because I think their love of Sharia law will be drowned out by my other neighbors' love of Christian Sharia, but because I don't think it's particularly likely they're going to love government-imposed Sharia law in the first place.
>but rather that the shittiness of people is not well correlated with what country they're from.
Would you say it even doesn't correlate in the US with what church they go to?
Whether they go to a Fundamentalist Baptist church or are Quakers? I find that hard to imagine to be true in a meaningful way. And if it can be, then it can also hold for villages, cities and countries.
>I'm sure Switzerland has plenty of shitty locals, even if it might manifest in a different way.
The way it manifests is incredibly important and cannot be waved away. That's an entire half of what makes up the issue.
As far as their desirability as neighbors, I have no idea how it correlates to church membership. I mostly don’t know what churches, if any, my neighbors go to. The old Trump-loving Catholics who used to live next door were fine neighbors. I don’t know the religious proclivities of anyone else in the neighborhood that I can think of.
Sharia law is quite big! So big that I'm fairly certain that there is at least one aspect of Sharia law that you would agree with, even if (as it sounds like) you are overall against. If you accept that, you can have a honest discussion of the merits and detriments.
I find it's best to break these things down and discuss them individually (or discuss how multiple rules combine to produce a particular effect, as the case may be): then it's easier to tease out which arguments are honest ("I genuinely think X is better, for Y reasons") and dishonest ("I think X is better for Y reasons, but I believe you'll find Z more persuasive, so I'll say Z"). There's also a phenomenon where people attribute beneficial (or detrimental) properties to one, visible part of a system, when they're really due to another: consider the arguments about capitalism versus communism, which are rarely actually about economic policy, and are more often about other (on the face of it, unrelated) policies of the state: your interlocutor might realise this after detailed discussion, if that is what is going on, when otherwise they might have gone their whole life without noticing the misattribution (as many people do).
Cultural exchange can be mutually-beneficial, even if you both go away thinking "wow, that other guy was an idiot".
Yes, I'm well aware of how big it is, and of course there are aspects of it that I do agree with. What I came away from the conversation with was "wow, this other guy has zero understanding of how important individual liberties are in the United States"
I know people who have been victims from these far-right cultures being brought into my community. I have no tolerance for it. If you wish to call that xenophobia then so be it.
I'd highly recommend not visiting places like Afghanistan, not because the weather isn't nice, but because the people are awful. That's not just me saying that either, most Western governments will tell you not to visit either. Perhaps that's xenophobia, but either way I think it's correct.
According to PEW research 99% of Afghan's support Sharia Law. If you wish to present an argument for why this kind of cultural diversity is good for my community, then be my guest.
I too know people who have been victims of the far-right culture that has festered amongst native-born Americans.
This country was founded on the idea that we allow competing opinions and ideologies, even those we find distasteful. If people commit actual crimes, we have processes to deal with that.
But why do you feel we should tolerate and import far-right foreign ideologies under some notion of "competition of opinions and ideologies"? I guess I don't understand why I should want that?
Your analogy about native-born Americans doesn't seem relevant here. Obviously there are always going to be issues within our own communities, but surely that doesn't mean we should want to bring people in from foreign communities which we know to hold views that we wouldn't want?
After I left my original comment here the other day it was reported that yet another child in my city was raped by an Afghan "asylum seeker". This isn't simply competition of "opinions and ideologies", it's a social experiment which I'd rather people I care about not have to participate in.
Your ideology in my view tolerates real-world harms because you cannot admit to the fact that not all cultures are equal and some cultures hold horrific views.
I know you're well meaning and I am grateful for your pushback. I genuinely hate talking about this stuff. I know it makes people perceive me in a certain way which is why I'm being flagged for my views while people saying we must be tolerant of far-right individuals are being upvoted. I just know I must try to get through to people because I see the harm this well intentioned ideology is causing.
If this were the HN of ten years ago, I might have expressed similar sentiments.
Between the comments in this thread though, and the complete lack of moderator attention, I can only come to the conclusion that xenophobia is perfectly fine on HN - provided you couch it in the appropriate rhetoric and don't use any mean words.
i deal with uncomfortable questions regularly so obviously there will be a bias on my part for handling them. it seems to me like a lot of people believe that shutting down questions is the best idea here. can you please explain to me why it is xenophobic to ask questions? i dont really see the link and i dont see why shutting people down for asking questions is a good idea.
you must understand that I don't see myself to have bad faith here. I don't see what's stopping people from asking their own questions back instead of waving the finger. why not query me to determine my nature based on my response? making assumptions based on the way I sound, i cant believe that you people dont see the irony, this is how actual racists behave.
TODO perform natural join on concepts of prejudice/categorization, map intersecting behaviours, classify results as positive/negative relative to wider community outcomes, back propagate specific result scores to refine social objectivity circuit ... prioritize acknowledgement of personal fallibility regarding argumentative positions ... gently handle percieved conflicts ... disregard advice regarding validity of querying ...
They're partially right, some cultures are awful by any common usage of the word. The problem of course is that they're dogwhistle implying that this means all Afghan asylum seekers must be part of such cultures and therefore must be awful, which is of course not true.
> implying that this means all Afghan asylum seekers must be part of such cultures and therefore must be awful
99% of Afghans believe in Sharia law according to Pew research, so you're right it's not quite all.
I understand some people will round up to 100%, but I don't personally. I do appreciate there might be 1% of Afghans out there who deserve compassion, but it's not exactly controversial to suggest that Afghans broadly are not good people by any normal Western standards. And if we didn't know this already, we now have plenty of evidence of this in the form of rapes of women and children in my country and across Europe by Afghan migrants we have shown compassion to.
If we could reliably select the Afghans who are more like us and have less of the cultural diversity, then great, but practically we can't do that and the odds are massively against us ever being able to do that.
The parent commenter seemed to be implying that we should be welcoming of diversity broadly, which is why I raised the question – because you'd have to be a pretty horrible person to want to bring Afghan culture into Switzerland.
I am from an immigrant background myself and my best friend is a Muslim asylum seeker. I am also pro-immigration. People can try to paint my motivates however they like. I know why I say what I say, and it's not out of hate, it's out of compassion.
Not that it should need to be said, but I'd urge people to respond in good faith rather than making assumptions about my character.
if you were a gay man, why would it benefit to you, being in close proximity to a sub population that believed your violent death was the best path forward? now im not saying youre gay, or that religion is bad, or anything else. im not asking any other questions either. im genuinely curious as to how you would respond in that particular scenario.
Gromer gangs were white just as often, but instead of addressing the problem evaluating it correctly and responding right wing extremists instead focused only the immigrants didnt give a single shit about the actual abuse and made it all about leaving the EU and in general promoting ethnic violence against all braun people. Literal riots.
And of course never talk about immigrant woman that get abused who gives a fuck about them.
"
Child sexual exploitation is horrendous whoever commits it, but there have been enough convictions across the country of groups of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds to have warranted closer examination
...
Ethnicity is shied away from despite being a question for many years and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.
Rates of collection and accuracy of ethnicity data were much higher in police data from Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. Their data shows there has been a disproportionality of group-based child sexual exploitation offending by men of Asian ethnicity in these police force areas."
thanks for clarifying your personal situation, given the stated context my initial question was not a valid method of assaying your perspective, please let me try again. what would your reaction be if you lived in a peaceful place, and a violent neighbour moved in? to be clear i am not asking any question other than this one.
I suspect you are implicitly trying to make the point that a hypothetical afghani neighbor is potentially a violent person. Regardless, my answer is the same.
Violent people live everywhere. Many of them are native-born Americans, and are already my neighbors. Many native-born Americans even actively support clearly anti-American and fascist political policies.
If my neighbors commit violent acts, I expect and assume the law will deal with them. Until they have demonstrated otherwise, why should I presume that any possible neighbor is violent?
Could just stop state financing farmers and raise import taxes on non bio products which will raise food praises hence less people will be able to survive is better option?
Well, first UK had to vote for their own anti immigration nonsense, then US tried out their MAGA winning and now it's time for Switzerland to follow in their footsteps and make their country great again with SVP at the helm.
It didn't work out that well for UK the first time. So now they are trying a second time. By voting for the guy that promised he would solve it the first time. This time he really means it.
You mean "benefits from increased population," right? Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people. So the only benefits come from having more people, or more people with certain skills (if you're filtering based on that).
Nobody in Switzerland is worried about the population growing due to birthrate. This referendum is about stopping immigration (even though in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth).
> Wasn't Switzerland already a rich country by then?
In 1940, Switzerland’s GDP/capita was 2.9x [EDIT: the world average]; it peaked at 4.4x in 2000 and is now 3.8x [1]. (It increases linearly, long term, from the mid 20s until 2000.)
Relative to Western Europe, Switzerland was 1.6x in 1950, about the same as today.
In 1910 the foreign-born population was 14.7% and the drop around WWII was caused by other factors.
Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants. Arguably the wealth of today is the product of managing to avoid the worst of WWII and profiting from Switzerland's "neutrality" but that's an entire conversation by itself.
Well they were neutral, its just most folks, even otherwise smart ones, don't like true neutral behavior if it doesn't actually favor their side, hence such 'smart' snarky remarks I can see all the time, by people feeling they know history. Swiss accepted everybody, hundreds of thousands of refugees too, some parts even when it became obvious they will all face starvation since they were completely encircled by axis. Private banks accepted everybody's money, just like every global bank did before and after the war.
They secretly helped allies - check Campione d'Italia story for example. Thats very far from neutral behavior. And so on. But most people don't want to know facts, they want simple black & white stories.
It continues till today - they are officially neutral but look at their moves ie against russia during Ukraine war. Completely aligned with west (well apart from US which has top brass collaborating with their sworn mortal enemy). Look how their army looks like - 100% compatibility with NATO, 0% with russia or anybody else. They picked their side, they just don't boast around it, actions speak more than 1000 words.
> Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants.
This. In particular the chemical/pharmaceutical industry (which is still a major Swiss industry today) got bootstrapped in great part by French and German chemists moving to Switzerland where they could make chemicals that was patented elsewhere but not in Switzerland due to looser industrial property laws at the time.
It saw a fair bit of immigration before the war to get there. The war itself obviously helped enrich them by not being in it and also practically zeroed immigration. Immigration continued after the war.
There’s other factors, obviously, like early industrialisation.
>in Switzerland more than anywhere else, immigration is at the foundation of the country's wealth
Such a claim would need terms to be defined, even before justification. Switzerland's mercenary attitude to immigration is well known, yes. I would argue that endogenous factors (history and culture) are far more important in explaining Switzerland's success. Neither natural resources nor immigration are determinative of a country's wealth. See: Japan, which historically has had neither.
Historically, Switzerland has taken the same approach to immigration as the Gulf Arab states: immigration is strictly contingent on labor needs, and citizenship is almost completely out of reach.
> Switzerland has taken the same approach to immigration as the Gulf Arab states
I need to say: Have you watched any YouTube videos about the way that low-skill migrants live and work in Gulf Arab states? It is horrifying. I will not downvote your comment if you reply in good faith. My point: Italian migrants who worked on big Swiss infra projects may not qualify for citizenship, but they did not have their passports confiscated by employers, nor lived in housing anywhere near the appalling conditions of Gulf Arab states.
If the referendum passes and the population crosses the threshold, Switzerland may need to remove itself from e.g. the Schengen area. All the remediations mentioned in the referendum are about suspending immigration.
All the butthurt people are going to come in here with screeds trying to upend a basic economic tenet that a growing population translates to economic growth if you can employ that growing population gainfully
> Because isn't the whole theory that people are the same? If so, you're just adding new people who are exactly the same as the existing people.
That's a very dumb theory. People cannot just be exchanged: you cannot take say, 60 million people out of Bangladesh, put them in Japan, and expect Japan to stay the same. Just as you cannot take 60 million Japanese, put them in Bangladesh, and expect Bangladesh to stay the name.
That's a fact. But I could give a shitload of historical examples too... Here's one: when white and black people arrived in the americas, there was still cannibalism taking place in both northern and southern america. The americas had neither white nor black people. Today there's no cannibalism anymore and there are not many kids sacrifices happening in the US to please Inca/Maya gods anymore either.
A slightly more reasonable theory is that if you import people through immigration at a reasonable rate, you can assimilate those people. For example for a long time in Europe female genital mutilation wasn't a thing anymore. Now sadly due to mass migration, ask any ob-gyn doctor in western Europe what he sees and what kind of act he has to do: like re-stitching hymens to pretend the women-to-be-married are virgins (because, yes, there are patriarchal cultures where men are going to inspect a woman's hymen to make sure she's a virgin).
People just live in a fantasy land in their heads: there are 300 million women alive, today, who've been genitally mutilated (that's a very sizeable percentage of all the women out there). What's actually ongoing is weirder and shittier than most people realize.
I say good for Switzerland to curb immigration a bit.
People may be not dissimilar but cultures certainly are.
The first time I was in Switzerland was 1985, and even then, I would not call it "homogenous." The people at the time spoke French, German, Italian, and Romanisch. Switzerland is an excellent example of the "harmonious" rather than "homogenous": it manages to integrate people from four linguistic groups into a well-ordered society.
China has 8-10 major dialects that are not mutually intelligible, but many would say that China is pretty homogenous. 90% of the population is classified as "Han Chinese," even though the subgroups are quite visibly different from each other.
While it's terribly fascinating for linguists it's generally understood that the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture.
> the languages and cultures within Switzerland are more related and generally homogeneous than when compared with for example asiatic language and culture
Switzerland speaks languages from the Italic and Germanic clades of PIE [1]. That makes them about as dissimilar as Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages are from each of them.
Helvetia is a confederacy specifically because Switzerland has never been particularly homogenous. Homogeneity explains, in part, Nordic and Japanese success, though less and less the former in the modern era. It does not explain Switzerland’s.
Due to geography Swiss city states were able to maintain their independence and resist incorporation into larger principalities and subsequent empires. The Swiss militia that defended this was the basis for the American 2nd ammendment. Arguably it was the Swiss greater class homogeneity that explains their success.
> Due to geography Swiss city states were able to maintain their independence and resist incorporation into larger principalities and subsequent empires
Swiss territory has been part of, variously, the Roman Empire, various Germanic kingdoms, the Carolingian Empire, the HRE and Napoleonic France. Swiss independence was really only enshrined at the Congress of Vienna, I believe at the courtesy of Metternich. Of Austria-Hungary.
> Swiss militia that defended this was the basis for the American 2nd ammendment
Source?
> the Swiss greater class homogeneity
Yes, Switzerland was universally poor and started becoming wealthy with less inequality than other nations in the 1920s. (Note that in the 1910s like 15% of Switzerland was foreign born.)
The homogeneity pitch just doesn’t work for Switzerland.
Thank you. If the source is correct, and I have no reason to doubt it, the Founders were operating on bad information. Napoleon wasn't the "first successful foreign invasion" of the Confederation, unless we're being cute about how the HRE was organised.
"In early modern Switzerland, the Swiss Confederacy was a pact between independent states within the Holy Roman Empire. The populations of the states of Central Switzerland considered themselves ethnically or even racially separate: Martin Zeiller in Topographia Germaniae (1642) reports a racial division even within the canton of Unterwalden, the population of Obwalden being identified as 'Romans', and that of Nidwalden as 'Cimbri' (viz. Germanic), while the people of Schwyz were identified as of Swedish ancestry, and the people of Uri were identified as 'Huns or Goths.'
Modern Switzerland is atypical in its successful political integration of a multiethnic and multilingual populace" [1].
I know plenty of Swiss-for-generations Swiss whose complexions would not have passed as white a hundred years ago.
Switzerland does not have a homogenous population, and to a reasonable person who has travelled in Switzerland I think this is an insane thing to be defending. A significant proportion of the population (certainly for Europe) do not even share a common first language. Significant proportions sit on different sides of the reformation which is again a big deal for Europe. etc
Homogeneous isn't likely the correct word. Shared cultural norms and "harmonious" is often more accurately what people describe when the call a country "homogeneous".
> what people describe when the call a country "homogeneous"
The Nordic countries were historically ethnically homogenous. Switzerland has been a multi-ethnic place since like the Helvetii were being picked on by Caesar.
Then they should say white. I'm prepared to give a lot of leeway when conversing with non-native speakers but as somebody who has grown up within a culture that understands that the concept of cultural homogeneity cannot refer to native speakers of non-mutually-comprehensible languages or historically antithetical religious positions, if they choose to use the word in novel ways that's their problem not mine!
I don't know what the exact word is - I wouldn't quite say "culture", as there are clearly different cultural backgrounds at work, but just as with Canada mixing French and Anglo traditions, there is a generally homogenous Western European metaculture at work, premised on the Enlightenment, classical liberalism, the rule of law (and equality of opportunity under the law), freedom of religion, the importance of education and hard work, private property, and personal responsibility.
Ah, a generally homogenous Western European metaculture then, like that Canada! Thanks for engaging with the specifics of the Swiss Enlightenment you can keep the change
> it provides an incredibly valuable and trustworthy banking service to the world
For most people in developing countries, Swiss banks are places where politicians and rich people stash ill-gotten wealth (corruption, crime, etc), because they know the banks will never let the legal system get back the money.
Because it favors social cohesion and social trust, which are strongly correlated with economic success. Americans are reflexively thinking of race, but that's entirely incidental and basically irrelevant.
But Switzerland emphatically does not have a homogenous population. It has an exceptionally diverse population, linguistically, religiously and culturally. And yet as you say it has an exceptional record when it comes to cohesion and social trust. Living the dream!
The social cohesion of Switzerland is mainly within the linguistic communities. Many Francophone Swiss hardly speak a word of German (just as their Belgian counterparts don't speak Dutch). And a large proportion of Switzerland's "diverse" immigrants are in fact from just across the country's borders (particularly Germans). "Diversity" is not what explains Switzerland's wealth.
Absolutely agree, and of course I would never argue that "diversity" explains Switzerland's wealth. It occupied a pretty unique and interesting place during the Reformation, and maybe there is something there. But the idea that either diversity or homogeneity can explain economic performance is obviously not bourne out by any serious examples. I was thinking about Belgium (and also thinking about Harry Lime) whilst typing away--it seems a bit of a counterexample to Switzerland where the same linguistic and cultural diversity within a country can lead to very different outcomes and senses. Nobody would ever write "Il n'y a pas de Suisse" as Destrée wrote "Il n'y a pas de Belges"--long history vs short history and as always the Reformation upheavals explain it perhaps
1) While Switzerland combines several ethnicities and cultures, the fusion dates back almost a millennium. The Old Swiss Confederacy arose in the 14th century, before Italian, French, and Romansh were even recognized as separate languages.
2) The Swiss federal structure goes to great lengths to give autonomy to the distinct groups.
So it’s not accurate to say that Switzerland is “homogenous” in the same way Denmark is homogenous. But it’s not like Switzerland’s Italian-speaking population grew from nearly 0% to the current 8% over a period of a few decades. There is a common umbrella identity encompassing these groups that dates back a long time.
Absolutely! Although I would have thought it was common knowledge. 62% of the Swiss population have German as their main language, 22.7% French, 8% Italian, and 0.5% Romansch. This is an extraordinary level of diversity for a European country, and as other commentators have noted it isn't like there's a lingua franca: a large proportion of Swiss do not speak the languages used by other groups fluently--for example, 85-87% of Swiss don't speak French at all!
This should be quite straightforward evidence regardless of your cultural assumptions, but many people may not be aware of the impact and cultural importance of the Reformation in Europe, which in general meant that nations ended up with a state religion that was either Catholic or Protestant. Switzerland was pretty exceptional and in the 16th Century (which is the important period here) the population was split pretty much 50/50. This religious diversity is pretty important to its history as well as to wider European history.
I wouldn't call that extraordinary diversity - these are all Western European. I note you've added a new caveat "for a European country" as a get out of jail free card, but this "diversity" is extremely long-standing and, still, exists within Western Europe, the cradle of a hilariously disproportionate percentage of all of the social, civic, scientific, and technological advances the world has ever seen.
Interesting statistics and I for one will back up your analysis. But the Alpine woolly mammoth in the room is that, in 21st-century Europe, "cultural and religious diversity" does not, for most people, imply a heterogeneity of Germanophones and Francophones, or Protestants and Catholics. It means something else.
Sorry if cultural history and facts are a bit dull. I don't really want to argue about *something else* though; let's leave that to the *something else*ists.
It's not that the facts you presented are dull. It's that given the massive extra-European population influxes since WWII, the "cultural diversity" of any given West-European country (including Switzerland) is now far broader than the linguistic and religious distinctions you keep mentioning. You surely know this.
It's not even true, 40% of the population has an immigrant background. And as for low crime, yes, blue collar crime. Please don't ask about white collar crime, we don't talk about that here...
Why do people say China is “homogenous” when people speaking Cantonese can’t understand people speaking Mandarin? It’s because those groups of people have been part of a common polity off and on since the Qin dynasty more than 2,000 years ago.
Similarly, Switzerland has been a thing, in various forms, since French and Italian were considered different dialects of vulgar Latin. The groups that speak the four different languages nonetheless share 800+ years of common political and social history.
I’m pretty sure people say China is homogeneous because 90+% of the population is a single ethnicity, and approximately 100% is “Asian” for some meaning of that word.
What you’re describing is national unity or identity or something like that, not homogeneity.
Kind of a funny example, since Japan got crushed by the poster boy country for diversity, and this nonsense about homogeneity played no small part in their arrogance in thinking they could win.
I wonder why this got downvoted. Are we not supposed to mention the war? Does it make people uncomfortable to be reminded of how their rhetoric mirrors that of fascists?
That doesn't make much sense. Do you think foreign money is directly paid to people who would otherwise be welfare recipients? Is there anything foreign money can't do, would you say?
When foreign money flows into the economy, it generates jobs, and because there is so much of it, these jobs can be well paid. And when you got a population that has a low unemployment rate and high wages, you consequently need to spend less money on social welfare.
Probably the same as Britain, which didn't suffer any economic damage from leaving the EU. Look at current trade ratios, GDP and other core stats vs neighbouring France. No difference.
The EU single market is apparently not as important as it's cracked up to be. The EU has sanctioned Switzerland before and it didn't matter. And the Swiss economy is very strong.
One of those is an island, the other is a landlocked country that would quite literally starve to death if the EU decided to stop facilitating its access to international markets.
Switzerland exists purely at the mercy of the EU, it lacks the military capabilities to fight its way out to the sea and force an alternate reality.
The day Switzerland is able to conquer the north of Italy is the day they get to meaningfully negotiate with the EU.
Uh, that escalated fast! I really hope you're not European with threats like that.
EU tried all this bullshit with the UK too. Threatening to cut off electricity supplies and so on. The mask really fell, but in the end they didn't do it, they didn't even respect their own supposed red lines like cooperation on academic research. They meekly invited the UK back into their academic collaboration a few years later despite claiming at the time that it was a "privilege" tied to everything else by the laws of physics. So the idea an organization that weak is going to try and genocide an entire country over FoM is ridiculous.
At any rate, there's nothing about being an island that automatically stops a crazy genocidal EU trying to starve another country. If I recall history correctly, less than 100 years ago a big European country was attempting to starve Britain to death by systematically sinking its cargo convoys. Then just a few decades later east Germany was trying to starve Berlin by shutting down rail links. Note: both attempts failed.
What threats? I was simply pointing out the undeniable fact that Switzerland is utterly dependent on the benevolence of the EU.
The EU has unlimited ability to punish Switzerland with extreme precision and at a low cost, Switzerland has no meaningful ability to go tit-for-tat even at a very low level.
> At any rate, there's nothing about being an island that automatically stops a crazy genocidal EU trying to starve another country. If I recall history correctly, less than 100 years ago a big European country was attempting to starve Britain to death by systematically sinking its cargo convoys. Then just a few decades later east Germany was trying to starve Berlin by shutting down rail links. Note: both attempts failed.
Yes, you’ve succeeded at explaining why it makes a difference that Britain is an island. At the very extreme end, the EU would actually have to go to war with them instead of just issuing a NOTAM and sending a few cop cars to monitor border crossings.
Also, FWIW, at no point during Brexit has Switzerland been a better partner for the EU than the UK has.
The EU would have to rely on German, Austrian, French and Italian cops/soldiers to actually enforce any sort of physical blockade against Switzerland.
I am not certain if all the respective governments would simply obey such an instruction if they didn't have any beef with the Swiss themselves.
Which now means that the EU has to block not just Switzerland, but (say) Austria, which means compliance from four other countries (CZ, SK, SI, HU), which is even less probable etc. etc.
Ultimately, the EU is really good at processing papers, but doesn't have the power necessary to initiate physical punishments of this sort unless the relevant member states agree.
> The EU would have to rely on German, Austrian, French and Italian cops/soldiers to actually enforce any sort of physical blockade against Switzerland
Without these treaties, there absolutely will be permanently manned border checkpoints.
None of these countries love Switzerland enough to be willing to end the EU over it.
Manned border checkpoints are inevitable in that case, it would be an external border.
But of course a blockade isn’t a realistic option, the Swiss would fold immediately if they thought things were headed in that direction. You could never get to that point.
The point is that the EU can crush Switzerland with the stroke of a pen, they couldn’t crush the UK without going to war. Switzerland could never even consider a kinetic response, so its room to manoeuvre agains its vastly bigger neighbour is limited to begging for mercy.
It’s also important to remember that nobody in the EU likes the Swiss, they are notorious troublemakers who are tolerated at best and despised at worst.
only there are several studies like this:
"These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%"
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34459
If you read them carefully, you'll find no such studies are using a valid methodology. It's not a hard question to answer either, just compare like with like.
I guess? I mean, I'm sure there's a non-zero number of companies that relocated HQ on paper as that's easy to do, but it doesn't show up in GDP or trade stats. There aren't any problems with imports/exports either. Actually trade ratios between EU/rest-of-world have continued on their long term trend, you wouldn't know anything had happened if you look at the zoomed out view.
There was transient disruption around the time of exit, which might be where those stories you remember came from? Maybe someone found a photo of an empty shelf and blamed leaving the EU instead of COVID for some reason. But forms and stamps aren't very effective weapons and people quickly adapted to the new systems.
Brexit is one of those topics that resulted in a firehose of propaganda by the pro-EU global establishment because what it represented terrified them. It undermined deeply held visions of the future in which all of humanity was destined to be united under one world government. So you can easily find a long string of false or nonsensical claims about it if you look. For example, there are a bunch of academic papers claiming economic impact from Brexit. But if you look carefully, they show a loss of growth vs fictional countries that don't exist, or they assume the EU would have experienced sudden dramatic growth out of nowhere and stuff like that. It's all just sophisticated forms of lying.
We are inheriting about 50-100 bonsai plants from father. All my life I’ve been wondering how he’s been caring for them, but never gave a chance to actually learn from him.
He is not doing well and we don’t know how many years he has left.
That’s why 2026 will be the year of finally learning the craft from him, taking time to acquire his techniques and in general just spend more time with him.
There are one or two nice people from Switzerland (assuming you are there, just guessing from comments) on bonsainut if you are looking for local resources and helpful people. A decent-sized collection like that is a real testament to unbroken continuity (especially during the growing season where you can't skip a day or even a few hours sometimes), other hobbyists can help you fill the gap when situations come up. Stop by the r/bonsai beginners thread any time if you wanna talk trees!
I don't think they "shot the PoW", and I don't even know if they emprisoned them. Feels very weird how the original comment put it (why link the Swiss to the Germans like this?).
But I know that German planes ended up in the Swiss airspace. The Swiss told them to land (like "we will now escort you and you will land on our soil, and if you don't comply we shoot you down"). They refused and got shot down.
But it's very different from shooting a pilot that would be in a state of PoW.
Cassette tapes doubled as music storage and data storage for machines like ZX Spectrum and C64. You could just copy software like you would copy a music cassette. Code via radio would be as easy as playing a song. Another time long gone computer magazines would print code that you could enter yourself! Before that Sussman is reported to meditate on code, and acolytes where supposed to create machines that could run that code.
Pretty much all the early 8-bit computers had cassette storage. On the Apple ][ series, the interface to write to the cassette was identical to the speaker interface so you could load audio into memory from a cassette and play it back (at 1-bit resolution) on the internal speaker of the Apple ][. It sounded like crap (although a lot of cassette decks did too) but seemed like magic.
As my partner is pretty much from that area, I really appreciate this small excursion from the typical topics on HN. Especially the small things, like the foods and the palinka :)
Thanks! Really glad that you read and appreciate my posts, unfortunately I don't have always much time to write but when I can, and I have something to share, I try to write and post useful info.
They wanted to see, if we were selling nest devices. I told them no, but they could find them in this and that shop.
They answered something along the lines: “Don’t worry, we already have enough of them. Our son Tony invented those, and everytime we travel around the world, we would check, if stores would sell them and send him a picture.”
In fact, just posted my voting letter today, before taking a 1h bike ride through the biggest city in Switzerland, having lots of space and freedom biking around in our beautiful city.
When taking the train to my parents house, I pass several farms and landly smaller cities. Alot of free space in between those, train mostly has spare seats, depending on rush hour timings. There usually are several big commercials on private farmer land stating “NO to 10 Million Population”, prompting people to vote YES on the SVP/UDC initiative.
The initiative’s lancers seem to play a lot on people’s fear of overcrowding, which even in the most population-dense city in Switzerland seems like a joke. There’s a lot of space and quality of living is still amazing here.
Yes, during rush hours, you might have to stand for 15-30min in public transport. Yes, finding an appartment is getting harder and more difficult.
But is this a problem of more people coming here or the failures of the state preparing for future population growth? We have so much space, benefits from diverse cultures and love for human beings.
My letter was specifically voting AGAINST this initiative.