Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

swissinfo.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 600 posts

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#391

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #389
Turing_Machine wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young people almost always change their mind about that once they have kids. This isn't a new phenomenon.

Buying a house doesn't necessarily mean buying in the suburbs. We've got kid and live in the city, and we know other families that do as well. Probably still a minority, but a growing trend. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that people with kids lived in cities too.

This is a weird comment. Is this a Baltimore thing? American cities are full of families. With the possible exceptions of San Francisco and Manhattan, they are mostly families, aren't they?

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#392

Post by dang »

wendallplatform wrote: post #162

> Question, how does Switzerland avoid becoming more polarized country with so many referendum questions each year? I don't know if you're a non-native speaker, but in English the question mark (the '?') shows that something is a question, so you don't need to also literally put 'Question' at the start of your question to make that clear.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11840717 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#393

Post by usrusr »

Ressuder wrote: post #299
krisdol wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's a downside, unless you prefer hearing prayer 5 times a day. I fled Bosnia during the war, but I visit it occasionally and each time it appears more religiously extremist than the last. All other countries should take a look at what has happened there and consider the importance of implementing cultural integration in addition to economic integration when accepting large incoming migrant population…

You deal with that by restrictions of noise. Outlawing minarets to stop noise is like banning vodka to stop alcohol drinking. It doesn't make any sense.

It is very common in many places to restrict highly visible outside advertisement (e.g. the Hollywood sign would not have happened in Switzerland). Visual attention-grabbing is considered just as much as annoying as noise. It seems very reasonable to not exclude religious communities from that rule.

I do agree however, that things like minarets should better be left to a general building code addressing the problem of architectural shouting contests without explicitly mentioning religion. The stupidity of having the literal phrase (well, in german) "it is forbidden to erect minarets" in the constitution should serve as a warning to anyone who praises direct democracy all too blindly.

I really don't get it why cases like that are solved with a polar vote (change or no change), not with approval voting offering more than two possible results on different levels of compromise. There seems to be a tiny glimse of it (only on the wiki in german: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppeltes_Ja_mit_Stichfrage ) but that is just three way between no change, proposal and one administrative counter-proposal, which still leaves the door wide open to polarism.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#394

Post by jacalata »

Ralfp wrote: post #20
_nalply wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside are populistic decisions like the Swiss minaret referendum. Now we have the sentence «The construction of minarets is prohibited.» in the constitution. ( https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19995395/... ) I think such regulations should be decreed as a law and not as a constitution norm if at all. But if everybody has a say you get bikeshedding in the constitution.

I would actually sign under such prohibition. Few years back my city (in Poland) rolled in regulations prohibiting churches to ring the bell for mass with exception to one 1000 years old cathedral located in "church's town" (de facto small island owned and containing only buildings operated by the church).

Mosques were already prohibited from making an audible call to prayer. The new law was explicitly and only banning them from being visible. It's more like if your city was introducing a new law today that banned the existence of church towers.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#395

Post by ryandrake »

wicker wrote: post #367
ryandrake wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently commute 2 hours each way. It's not as bad as it sounds. If you happen to be able to afford to live close to work, consider yourself lucky.

Do you do anything in particular to make use of the time during the commute besides just concentrating on driving, listening to music, or daydreaming? I struggle with long commutes since I inevitably feel like I'm wasting the time.

Music, NPR

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#396

Post by illumen »

ZoeZoeBee wrote: post #375
illumen wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" The last time they reported rapes by nationalities those born in a foreign country or born to a foreign parent accounted for over 70% of all rapes. " That is not a factual remark. according to Brå you quoted, immigrants were 5.5 times more likely to be CHARGED[edit: but not convicted, convictions have "little difference"] on reported rapes in Sweden. Not on the total of REPORTED rapes. There's around 190 conviction…

That is a factual remark, though and its quite simple math. If 15% of the population is 5.5 times more likely to be charged than the remaining 85% of the population in order for that to be true the 15% of the population must account for 85% of the instances. 15.5* 5.5=85 + 15.5 = 100 Those numbers are in the Bra report its not difficult to deduce... There is something wrong with reporting if less than 3% of rapes are…

I think it's much more likely the police are afraid of being accused of racism.

I did some more reading and found this: "The report is based on statistics for those "suspected" of offences for reasons of comparison, but Stina Holmberg of the Council for Crime Prevention said that there was "little difference" in the statistics for those suspected of crimes and those actually convicted. "

It seems those 5.5 times more likely rates were not convictions but being 5.5 times more likely to be suspected and charged, but not convicted. Actual convictions were about the same according to the same report.

There was a police memo circulated stating the reason they were not reporting ethnicity traits in their public reports now is that they were afraid of being accused of racism.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#397

Post by rayiner »

mortehu wrote: post #293
tptacek wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Chicago, the third-largest city in the US, is single-family houses with yards. For that matter, when I lived in San Francisco back in 99-2001, I had a yard.

But by European standards, Chicago is a small city of about 100,000 people surrounded by an enormous commuter town.

To pick a random European city, let's compare Chicago to Amsterdam: http://swontariourbanist.blogspot.com/2015/01/amsterdam-area.... Amsterdam's metro region has about 670,000 people living in neighborhoods above 20,000 people per square mile.

Chicago has between 1.1-1.3 million people (twice as many) living at that density or higher: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Z3ai_T6K_40/T4I6B9akQDI/A.... It's actually more than that, because this data excludes satellite cities, which the Amsterdam figure above includes.

Another point of comparison. Chicago the city has 2.7 million people at about the same weighted density (19k/sq-mi) as the Amsterdam metro, which has 1.7 million people.

EDIT: these are not my charts. They're from this thread: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=198004.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#398

Post by germanier »

jessaustin wrote: post #292
s3nnyy wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Switzerland, imported and unprocessed food is surprisingly cheap. Veggies are maybe 20-30% more expensive than Germany. Processed food like frozen pizza is expensive as a substantial amount of (manual?), well-paid labour goes into convenience food.

In Switzerland, imported and unprocessed food is surprisingly cheap. Veggies are maybe 20-30% more expensive than Germany. I must be misunderstanding something, because these two sentences seem to contradict. In Germany itself, "unprocessed food" is more expensive than in most of the rest of the world.

According to Eurostat food prices in Germany are at the EU-15 average and slightly above the EU-28 avarage with fruits and vegetables slightly below.

Sure, in most of the rest of the world food is pcheaper but that compares to even lower income levels.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#399

Post by sosborn »

nemo44x wrote: post #366
_9MOTHER9HORSE wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do incur a lot more costs as a property owner than as a renter, which you should bear in mind. Over the life of your average 20-25 year mortgage you should expect to have to replace numerous appliances, encounter a couple of catastrophic and unexpected issues (leaking roof, etc.), and after 10 years the decor will be outdated and shabby. To get optimum resale value you will have to sink a lot of time/money into r…

I was waiting for someone to mention that. Home ownership is expensive and makes you inflexible. Also, consider property taxes (which will scale with inflation) and the fact home owners insurance is more expensive than renters. And besides finance you need to consider if you want the responsibility of owning a home. Cutting the grass, shoveling snow, cleaning gutters, fixing things, painting, etc. It's a lot of work.…

Taking care of the building is actually a lot of fun for some people!

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#400

Post by sosborn »

enraged_camel wrote: post #188
akerro wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, the burden of being rooted, and of having to maintain a house, could be such a significant detraction to quality of life that it totally makes up the difference. Yea, so I'm renting a house where my agreement states that I am not allowed to fix or improve the flat myself. All changes must be agreed and made by agency. Current faults in the flat include: leaking water from toilet flush since seal is broken, rep…

>>Yea, so I'm renting a house where my agreement states that I am not allowed to fix or improve the flat myself. That's the beauty of renting: if you don't like your current agreement, you can find another place with more preferable terms. Plenty of landlords allow tenants to change/improve the property. Whereas when you buy a house, you are stuck with the same neighbors (and sometimes the same HOA) for a much longer…

> That's the beauty of renting: if you don't like your current agreement, you can find another place with more preferable terms.

Not where I live. Rental market is WAY too tight.

Post reply on HN