741–750 of 891 posts
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Are the people supposed to eat rocks? Agriculture takes a lot of land but people need to eat. If anything agriculture is going to require more land in order to be sustainable.
So this is essentially a way to reduce immigration to the country? And if they get close to the cap they will "need to take measures, particularly in the areas of asylum and family reunification." Would be curious to learn more about why this is being proposed.
It's being proposed in order to maintain quality of life. No one wants to be overcrowded. This is a sane solution: collectively agree on the maximum tolerable population. Then it's down to individual responsibility to obey the norms of one's society. Edit: unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant. Swiss voters have a right to decide how they want to live. They're not beholden to EU laws; they can make their ow…
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> mass migrations > pretty full ones C'mon, why parrot this nonsense? There are no "mass migrations" and neither the European countries nor the US are "full". Yes the Europeans screwed up real integration across the board, but nobody is really working on fixing that. Easier to just claim to be full and the immigrants are causing higher crime rates so no more people in but oh demographics, please everybody make more b…
Xenophobia is on the rise across the board with the rising unequality and an alliance between extreme-right elements of the society and the wealthy class that wants to use them to destroy democratic institutions and take over the power. Rationally with the ageing population we actually need managed mass migration but instead get managed mass hate and unmanaged migration.
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Uh, that escalated fast! I really hope you're not European with threats like that. EU tried all this bullshit with the UK too. Threatening to cut off electricity supplies and so on. The mask really fell, but in the end they didn't do it, they didn't even respect their own supposed red lines like cooperation on academic research. They meekly invited the UK back into their academic collaboration a few years later despi…
What threats? I was simply pointing out the undeniable fact that Switzerland is utterly dependent on the benevolence of the EU. The EU has unlimited ability to punish Switzerland with extreme precision and at a low cost, Switzerland has no meaningful ability to go tit-for-tat even at a very low level. > At any rate, there's nothing about being an island that automatically stops a crazy genocidal EU trying to starve a…
I am not certain if all the respective governments would simply obey such an instruction if they didn't have any beef with the Swiss themselves.
Which now means that the EU has to block not just Switzerland, but (say) Austria, which means compliance from four other countries (CZ, SK, SI, HU), which is even less probable etc. etc.
Ultimately, the EU is really good at processing papers, but doesn't have the power necessary to initiate physical punishments of this sort unless the relevant member states agree.
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…
Change is the only constant. Nothing lasts forever. Good times will come and go and so would bad times. I think as humans we are used to small time frames which are proportional to our own lifetime. But the world: say climate, population, geology etc. moves at a much different cycle, if at all you can call it a cycle since none of the iterations are exactly the same. So the lesson is this: change is coming. Change wi…
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Change is the only constant. Nothing lasts forever. Good times will come and go and so would bad times. I think as humans we are used to small time frames which are proportional to our own lifetime. But the world: say climate, population, geology etc. moves at a much different cycle, if at all you can call it a cycle since none of the iterations are exactly the same. So the lesson is this: change is coming. Change wi…
Embrace negative change?
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> 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 heavily utilizes foreign workers via a Gulf style guestworker program, and even that has led to the far-right Sanseito becoming Japan's highest rated opposition party and the far-right wing of the LDP winning internal party politics.
> via a Gulf style guestworker program They get to keep their passports and can return any time, calling it Gulf-style is a bit much. There are abuses - so are there in Europe - but it's not like they sacrificed a thousand or so immigrant worker lives on the Tokyo Olympics in Qatar 2022 style.
Though I don't think this is fully true of Japan -- it's one of the easiest countries to naturalize in if you give up your other citizenships but does have the quality of always being seen as a foreigner. It's just that few people naturalize as Japanese because their immigration is most open to people from developed countries who aren't interested in giving up their birth passport to acquire Japanese nationality. If you just want a Japanese passport though no matter the downsides, I think it's one of the easier citizenship to get for an American to obtain.
The strong point of the Swiss political system is that the government is, by (EDIT) convention, made up by all significant parties. No major political force can say “if only we were in power...” because they already are. Also, no party can create disasters and then disappear and leave the consequences to the following election winners to deal with. This referendum is an attempt by the members of SVP/UDC, the right-mo…
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That's almost laughably infrequent - you can use single level trains with more doors to triple that without even going to automation.
Has any railway network managed to get less than 15 minute headways? Metros don't count, they're isolated and often enclosed.