561–570 of 891 posts
Swiss here and able to vote. 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 ar…
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>source Arguably common knowledge but if you must. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
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.
As for a source on the history of the confederation: https://youtu.be/OpA_ET9bYGY
Swiss here and able to vote. 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 ar…
As a Indian I envy you. My whole life has been a struggle for living in places where there could be fewer humans.
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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).
Or perhaps said American genuinely is unaware of how much more biased other ethnic groups are in their own homelands.
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Can you show me where the “mediocre white men” are on this chart?: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med-1.png?x97... 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 perspectiv…
That isn't the premise. The premise is that discriminating is morally wrong. Also when did we change the subject to college admissions?
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?
[1] Those numbers are medical school admissions, but the numbers for college admissions is similar: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...
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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.
> When it's about "yay community! its kinda nice 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.
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.
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> 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).
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The data/facts disagree with you. In a low birth rate society a constant influx of new tax payers is required. Without it you end up with decades of stagnation like Japan.
Why shouldn’t the need for tax revenue go down as the population it’s intended to serve declines?
1) Populations are their most expensive at their oldest age and each subsequent generation is smaller and needs to pay for an old generation larger than their own
2) infrastructure and many of the things a government provides is not scalable down and up. A road is not (much) cheaper to maintain because less people drive on it
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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…
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'…
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).
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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).
Or perhaps said American genuinely is unaware of how much more biased other ethnic groups are in their own homelands.
Meken: “I would be biased”
Sashank: “I disagree”
Others being more biased doesn’t make Americans unbiased.