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Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

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Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#471
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#472
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> consuner spending is increasingly debt Geneva has the highest minimum wage in the world precisely to try and avoid the "working poor". Also the "consuner spending is increasingly debt" is very US centric view. The situation in Europe is less extreme and totally absent in many countries.

>locals largely won't do This is never true and just economic denialism. There is a market price for labor. If there is no supply at a given price it is not evidence that a market does not exist, only that the demand is mispriced.

> This is never true and just economic denialism. There is a market price for labor. If there is no supply at a given price it is not evidence that a market does not exist, only that the demand is mispriced.

There can be situations where the market for a particular type of labor does not exist. Populations aren't infinite, and if there are enough good paying, desirable jobs for full employment, then there may be no one available to do a job economically.

For example let's imagine a hypothetical town where only residents of the town are allowed to work in the town, though they can provide services to those outside of the town. Let's say 100 people live in this town, and they are all doctors. There is a hospital in this town that needs 100 doctors to run. There are other jobs to be done in this town - someone needs to pick up trash, someone needs to mow lawns, someone needs to sell food, etc. Now if you pay someone a doctor's salary to pick up trash, they could potentially leave the hospital to do that job instead; but then the hospital is understaffed. Something isn't going to get done; indeed in this scenario where there are a lot more jobs to be done than people to do them, a lot of stuff isn't going to get done, no matter how good the pay is, and the jobs that are done will be insanely expensive.

In this case you would simply allow people from outside the town to work in the town, or get more people to move into town. If you scale up this scenario to cities, provinces, and ultimately nations, it's clear that at some point you must choose between structural unemployment (ie number of workers greater than number of jobs to be done), bullshit jobs (people who would be structurally unemployed are hired to do unnecessary tasks), a managed economy (employment opportunities restricted to ensure necessary work gets done at any population level), or immigration/emigration of labor (labor supply varies to meet demand) regardless of wages. In practice you'll likely get a combination of the above.

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elderly people in our village in east Europe used to be super suspicious of the EU project and would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns." Hopefully they were wrong :-)

>would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns." True words of wisdom. > Hopefully they were wrong :-) They weren't. EU membership and cooperation is built on favoritism and necessity. You get into the EU if you have something of value the other members need from you (capital, geopolitical, industrial, human or natural resources) done via treaties instead of via war and conquest. So it ended up as…

Sometimes members are added just to prevent the EU from working better together, the reason why UK pushed hardest for expansion in 2004/2007. Funny how they'd leave the EU a few years later because of a vote that might've been decided becsuse of the 'polish plumber'.

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Too much if you ask me

Good thing no one asked you. Why should you have a say in how someone else uses their land if all they are doing is building more housing units?

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#475
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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";…

> 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.

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#476
post #443

This is a good move. I hope Switzerland doesn't become like the UK.

Population caps by fiat have always been terrible moves. Example: every country that's ever had them.

What counties have had population caps exactly, like the one proposed? I know China and Singapore tried to limit birth rates, otherwise some countries have various quotas/intake control for residencies, but those countries don't seem especially "failed", like Andorra or Singapore, not do they have "population caps".

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> benefits from diverse cultures 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).

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

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s nothing to do with race, then why is a country with four official languages being called “homogeneous”?

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…

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.

Re: Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

seems to be a common concern amongst the local population everywhere "X identity is hiring only X identity"

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.
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