Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M

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. So either “yay community” sentiment is acceptable, or it’s not. It’s in my interest for such sentiment to not be acceptable for white Americans, so it follows that it must be unacceptable for me as well.

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.

I've seen this kind of thing happen not through bias but because good people know good people, where by "good" I mean highly competent. They knew each other through university and other regional connections, so they happened to have the same ethnicity as one might expect from such a regional commonality. One got hired, referred another, and it cascaded. They were great to work with and highly competent, so I don't think there was bias even though it might appear that they're was.

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 perspectives

That makes no sense. The premise of non-discrimination laws is that someone’s ethnic background doesn’t affect their “perspectives” in ways that are material to employment.

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).

This idea is mostly a modern fabrication. Various more granular ethnic biases were of course present throughout American history, but those were never conflated with racial categories: in times and places where the white vs. black racial division was relevant, the ethnic groups you're referencing were always considered "white".

And the types of discrimination that people in white ethnic groups sometimes experienced was of of a type and of a degree vastly different from that experienced by black people. They're really two very distinct phenomena, and weren't evenly distributed throughout the US -- black people in the South had the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and other horrifying things to deal with, whereas white immigrant communities in the Northeast or Midwest never experienced anything remotely similar.

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.

I’ve just described some famously “excellent economy” countries, but I certainly didn’t describe Japan.

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.

BTW Brexit had no impact on the British economy. Check the ground truth stats if you don't believe me. There's lots of obfuscation on this topic and false claims as the British establishment tries to cover up the fact that it misled the population about the economic consequences of leaving, of which there were none whatsoever.

Is not accepting infinity immigration "taking away the EU"? And the population density is even more part of the conditions it has grown in. But much much harder to fix if it increases too much - shouldn't they take a precautionary approach?

Regardless, that's not the question I asked. I asked why the poster was pretending they don't know population number affects the quality of a place.

Did you intend to say the quiet part out loud?

...

Ethnicity is shied away from despite being a question for many years and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators.

Rates of collection and accuracy of ethnicity data were much higher in police data from Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. Their data shows there has been a disproportionality of group-based child sexual exploitation offending by men of Asian ethnicity in these police force areas."

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-audit-on...

> Gromer gangs were white just as often

Got a source for that?

I've upvoted you because it's a relevant point.

They secretly helped allies - check Campione d'Italia story for example. Thats very far from neutral behavior. And so on. But most people don't want to know facts, they want simple black & white stories.

It continues till today - they are officially neutral but look at their moves ie against russia during Ukraine war. Completely aligned with west (well apart from US which has top brass collaborating with their sworn mortal enemy). Look how their army looks like - 100% compatibility with NATO, 0% with russia or anybody else. They picked their side, they just don't boast around it, actions speak more than 1000 words.

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 despite claiming at the time that it was a "privilege" tied to everything else by the laws of physics. So the idea an organization that weak is going to try and genocide an entire country over FoM is ridiculous.

At any rate, there's nothing about being an island that automatically stops a crazy genocidal EU trying to starve another country. If I recall history correctly, less than 100 years ago a big European country was attempting to starve Britain to death by systematically sinking its cargo convoys. Then just a few decades later east Germany was trying to starve Berlin by shutting down rail links. Note: both attempts failed.

There was transient disruption around the time of exit, which might be where those stories you remember came from? Maybe someone found a photo of an empty shelf and blamed leaving the EU instead of COVID for some reason. But forms and stamps aren't very effective weapons and people quickly adapted to the new systems.

Brexit is one of those topics that resulted in a firehose of propaganda by the pro-EU global establishment because what it represented terrified them. It undermined deeply held visions of the future in which all of humanity was destined to be united under one world government. So you can easily find a long string of false or nonsensical claims about it if you look. For example, there are a bunch of academic papers claiming economic impact from Brexit. But if you look carefully, they show a loss of growth vs fictional countries that don't exist, or they assume the EU would have experienced sudden dramatic growth out of nowhere and stuff like that. It's all just sophisticated forms of lying.

Why are so many of your comments about race or religion?

Someone from India, China etc whose family immigrated in the 1800s to work in gold mines/railroads etc and probably has deeper roots in the country than the person criticising them = immigrant, bad, shouldn't be here. Somehow simultaneously taking all the jobs and living off the state and not contributing.

Someone from Europe/America/Canada with white skin who either came here as a child or was born here to immigrant parents = not a problem at all, they "don't count" for some reason.

You do realize who a great deal of the "southern Italians" in certain parts of New York and New Orleans actually are, right? Or is your point solely about religion?

France used to be “the China of Europe” (which is why we kept being at war with the whole continent at once). Had France followed their neighbors' demographic, it would be home to more than 200 million people today.

The demographic collapse of France in the 19th century, while Germany kept growing, alone explains the French defeat in 1870 (and then the two world wars).

More data on that piece of history, and a hypothesis to explain it, here: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust/

France was historically always focused on Paris, because that was where the Emperor was. If you were not a farmer, there was little reason to live anywhere but Paris or other large cities.

In contrast, Germany historically consisted of thousands of small fiefdoms that each held some sort of local importance and each held authority of some sort. The Kaiser was pretty far away and only mattered in practice when the Kaiserreich was involved in some sort of conflict.

I think it would be very odd that less educated people on average contribute more than natives, especially if they are at risk of being discriminated when looking for a job.

It's not like Germans, Dutch etc or the "new europeans" they imported, were rushing to wiping the asses of their elders in their own care homes or picking fruit all day in the sun on their own farms.

What was left to send home after that wasn't "significant" by any stretch, after paying taxes, rent and CoL to further boost the local economy and the wealth of the local asset owners.

Romanian telecom: post communist crash Romanian telecommunications were a disaster. For example two different phone numbers shared the same line (a.k.a. Cuplajul). In late 90s some western telecom companies started investing in Romanian cellular networks- they built all the tower and network infrastructure. I do not understand what you mean when you say the west stole telecoms from Romanian - the west actually built it.

Energy, oil and gas- the heydays of Romanian oil producing days were during the WWII when Romania supplied a lot of the oil used by the Germans. After that Russians took whatever was left over because of war reparations. Since I can remember Romania did not produce oil - it was dependent on Russian imports during communism for example. So there was no oil and gas for the West to steal either.

Re: NATO - in the 90s and early 2000sn Romania wanted to join NATO because that particular generation remembered the Russian all too well. The priceRomania paid was enforcing the embargo on the Serbs during the Kosovo and Bosnian wars.

Re: F16 - romanians are flying some hand me downs from Holland which were purchased at the dizzying price of 1 euro.

I am sorry, but you sound like a Romanian nationalist, one who unfortunately is convincing enough do that the current generation does not know how much better their lives are because of EU and NATO. But who knows, maybe they will get a chance to find out…

[edit - some typos]

It has treaties, but not membership. That doesn't make it "leaving" if they annul the treaties.

> the Swiss are to be the recipient of some draconian action "we'll show them"

It's quite clear that the EU-Swiss agreements were negotiated as a whole and one side just can't suddenly pick parts of it that it will reject.

what the Swiss are trying to do here is very uncommon, in fact it's so uncommon literally nobody has ever done it before. No country in history has imposed a numerical population cap on its population, and in addition, freedom of movement isn't a detail. It's the very core of the Treaty of Rome and the Schengen agreement that Switzerland is part of. That Europeans can now move freely between countries is the bedrock achievement of virtually all its labored for.

And the EU is not going to do braconian measures, the EU does not bully its smaller neighbors. Britain wasn't intimated, threatened and nobody tried to interfere with it when they wanted to leave. THey decided to do so and did. Swizterland can cap its population and deny freedom of movement, nobody's going to bully them, but they're obviously not going to have the relationship they had with the EU.

To even rhetorically compare the EU to the US (which has threatened to annex an ally's territory) or China (which throws minorities into camps and threatens a democracy with force) is pretty damn absurd. Ask Taiwan if they want to trade places with Switzerland on the world map if they could.

Edit: EU can void all the other contracts, but why would it want to? Why do they care so much about how many immigrants Switzerland has?

Japan's number of tourists has famously exploded over the last decade, and they take trains more than the resident population.

Most of these are double decker trains and long platforms so they move a lot of people at once.

Here's is the timetable for a suburban station on a commuter lines: https://train-cloud.navitime.biz/en/odakyu/railroads/timetab...

On a weekday at peak hours, there are up to 20+ trains an hour, with commuter trains continuing directly into Metro systems, and directly onto different commuter lines on the other end.

Shanghai Hongqiao to Hangzhou East is about 10 high speed trains per hour, all trains using the same line.

Tokyo to Shin-Osaka is also about 10 high speed trains per hour.

Taipei to Taichung is 8-9 trains per hour, high speed + conventional. Shanghai to Suzhou is similar.

Rome to Florence is 6-7 trains per hour.

Hong Kong West Kowloon to Shenzhen North is 6 high speed trains per hour.

Beijing South to Tianjin is 5-6 high speed trains per hour.

The broader context is Canada is on paper a small pop country with sufficiently alright governance to get per capita rich selling shit from ground. The more people you have have, the less that model works, and frankly Canada at 25m in the 00s already passed that point (vs 6m Norway). It doesn't help that... foreign influence have stagnated Canadian fossil/extractive industries development. Trudeau thought it was good idea to aim for 100m Canadians by 2100 (century initiative)... which on paper makes sense - only way for Canada to compete/influence vs US is heft, but of course that means a lot of brown and eventually black people fighting for housing and opportunities in the interregnum.

Unsurprisingly, broken housing market = no one likes that interregnum.

While to a certain extent it has caused some social issues (eg. Indian, Chinese, Viet organized crime took advantage of it to leave crackdowns during the 2010s and 2020s and degree mills abounded), it's impact on the economy is overstated.

Canada's economy was always a resource extraction and construction driven economy, and

1. the blocking of the Keystone Pipeline project (thus making Canadian ONG less competitive than American sourced ONG for refineries)

2. the rise of America as a net energy producer and exporter especially in ONG (thanks Obama/Biden, Trump/Pence/Tillerson, and former Govs Burgum and Perry)

3. the blocking of the GasLink LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)

4. the blocking of the Northern Gateway pipeline project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)

5. the blocking of the Energie Saguenay LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Europe)

6. Bipartisan support in America for trade barriers against Canada even before the Trump tarriffs (eg. Biden and Trump's softwood lumber tariff policy)

7. (becuase this failure is bipartisan) Blue provinces halting renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA, thus preventing Canada from building domestic dealflow in GreenTech

all played a much larger role than immigration in causing economic malaise for Canada.

At the end of the day, Canada's economy in the 2010s was structurally unprepared for America becoming a major energy producer and exporter by the 2020s, and was unable to successfully build infra to make Canadian ONG cost competitive against American ONG nor the ability to sell outside of North America.

THIS is the legacy of the Trudeau administration - if your economy is based on resource extraction, fighting against it for political reasons is self-harming.

Canada's GDP has essentially been stagnant for almost 15 years, and all kinds of infrastructure projects that would have helped the Canadian economy grow were blocked. Additionally, Canada has the same economic complexity [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2] and is even less complex than Mexico [3], which makes Canada the least competitive choice for FDI within NAFTA.

Australia is in the exact same boat as Canada, but unlike Canada, their political class fully backed their resource extraction industries.

[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124/export-complexit...

[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/100/export-complexit...

[2] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/688/export-complexit...

[3] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/484/export-complexit...

It really depends who is in power where when and if the 10mm limit is crossed. If there is a conservative in Paris or Berlin, chances are Switzerland can simply abrogate Schengen.

March 26, 1995 (The Implementation): The Schengen Area officially became effective on this date. Internal border controls were finally lifted among seven member states.

I say! That's news to most.

And somehow despite this, the European economies had the biggest share of global GDP back then.

And now they're more integrated than ever, have more immigration than ever, have created the EU as their "big daddy" leader and enforcer, and yet they can't stop losing share of GDP to the rest of the world. Stange. Maybe they should hit the brakes for a second and reflect that their current course of action isn't the cure but the disease.

Like ASML, Concorde and Airbus were created via European cooperation when EU was a nascent baby and present day Schengen freedom of movement did not exist. Now we EU bureaucracy, open borders unlimited freedom of movement but haven't created the next Airbus or ASML. Food for thought that the EU is tackling the wrong issues on its economic stagnation. Maybe the solution is not more EU, but less EU.

A large part of this is due to bilateral agreements and free flow migration. This referendum directly affects that.

That's just made up claim there's no evidence to support this. Even if it were true it's not the taxpayers responsibility to import all the degenerate murderers and rapists from all over the world in the hopes of civilizing them.

Why should someone from a developed country agree to give up their safety and wealth to run this ridiculous and deadly experiment?

I have to say, that not every country is the same. United States from an outsider perspective seems like you could come from anywhere and look like anyone, as long as you pleadge your allegiance to the flag and become and 'American' you will be accepted. This is probably because US has a short history, and it wasnt too long ago when it was literally all migrants.