Live data from Hacker News

Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

admin.ch

581–590 of 891 posts

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

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#582
post #146

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…

> 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).

[flagged]

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

#583
post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly, the American bias level right now is probably as low as it can get humanly.

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.

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

#584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a population cap, you can read this proposal its like 5 lines of text.

It's a migration cap. There's no provision on sterilizing Swiss women should the threshold be reached through birthrate…

They're economically sterilizing themselves by starting a conflict with the EU at that point.

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

#585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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?

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

#586
post #31

This is such a fascinating referendum. The population is at 9.1m, and at 9.5m it appears they'll stall asylum and family reunification, and at 10m they'll execute a Swexit - Switzerland isn't in the EU but it allows freedom of movement to EU nationals. Boy it is interesting to see what's going on in the world right now. There were so many things that I saw growing up as relatively solid but I just happened to grow up…

The EU will retaliate this time around and impose ruinous costs on Switzerland if it chooses to go through with this.

Unlike the Brits, the Swiss have absolutely no leg to stand on here. If EU closes the borders, the Swiss will literally die of hunger.

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

#587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the joke goes the HRE was none of the 3. As for a source on the history of the confederation: https://youtu.be/OpA_ET9bYGY

…why is a lawyer my old firm used a Swiss historian!

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

#588

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 :-)

The EU is effectively paralysed in foreign affairs and a common fighter jet project died just today due to economic infighting. They're right.

This is a deeply dishonest characterization of the FCAS.

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

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

But what did Romania experience?

Half of the Romanians moved to other EU countries and then sent significant chunk of their earnings back home :)

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

#590
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I _am_ Swiss. You missed the part where we _voluntarily_ chose to enter into a contract with the EU that does in fact beholden us to EU laws. We can go back on that contract, but breaking your word is something that people remember for a reason.

Maybe not a legally smart move, but morally... when was it signed? Perhaps way before some EU countries decided to stop enforcing their borders beyond the performative level? And since these agreements basically force countries (especially rich countries with socialist systems) to somewhat share the burden of that choice they didn't make, I don't blame them in the least.

These agreements do not force countries to share that burden.

Freedom of movement for EU citizens. Migrants and asylum seekers don’t have the right to live and work in Switzerland because of our EU agreements.

A migrant or asylum seeker living in Germany has 0 right to move to CH.

We do have some asylum obligations from the Dublin accords and from global human rights laws, but those we can regulate ourselves separately anyway. EU doesn’t care. Countries within EU do it already.

Post reply on HN