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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

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

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

#732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't the premise. The premise is that discriminating is morally wrong. Also when did we change the subject to college admissions?

> 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 discrimin…

>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.

http://www.racialdisadvantages.com

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.

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

#733
post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Wow that’s racist

How?

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

#734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure, it's nationalism instead of racism. Born on the wrong side of the Rhine? F right off. No better at all. Worse, arguably.

Yes, that's how nations work. Otherwise you end up paying for the world's social security while not collecting everyone's taxes.

Who's paying for what social services is an entirely different question, that is in fact being currently renegotiated:

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/swiss-warn-eu-jo...

This thread is about migration and residence, not benefits.

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

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> 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 perspective…

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.

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

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 perspective…

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.

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

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reducing parcel sizes and similar development decreases not only your own comfort but also those of people living there in the future.

It doesn't.

I know that sounds weird, but bear with me.

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.

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

#738
post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The treaties don't explicitly say "you may not grant residence en masse to city sized populations of illegal immigrants", because not doing that was considered so obvious it didn't need to be said at the time they were written. Such treaties don't cover a lot of possible but unlikely eventualities, which is why it's bad and wrong to make treat renegotiation artificially difficult. > it's the fine and reasonable ideol…

So no treaty was broken? Why did you write "Sure it did" when you know it wasn't? > They actually can pick and choose and both have done so successfully. They didn't. What happened was that some parts of some treaty were renegotiated or amended and agreed by both parties. Which is quite common in any such relationship.

You can use that definition of breaking a treaty if you like. But it's not a good idea. It sends the world a message that negotiating with European countries is dangerous because to avoid getting screwed you'd have to write down all known common sense and social conventions in the text of the treaty, and probably include the contents of a specific dictionary as well, and even then they might just do something crazy you never predicted whilst claiming the agreement was being respected.

Note: this argument was actually used by the pro-Leave faction in the UK. They explicitly argued that any deal Cameron reached with the other EU member states would be worthless because European countries can't be trusted to honor their agreements when it becomes ideologically inconvenient. And that argument landed, which is why Cameron returned with a vaguely worded emergency break deal and then never mentioned it again - nobody took it seriously, and he was forced to campaign on the state of the union as it was, and lost. So these tactics do have a cost.

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

#739
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And this is why it's in the interest of Japanese people in Japan not to make it easy for you to have an opportunity to hire people for jobs in Japan.

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

#740
post #647

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…

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, an…

Yes a “grützi” at the right moment is often priceless, especially when abroad.
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