> in very center, almost every small park or green spot is now 6 story concrete building
I struggle to see this. Central Geneva is full of beautiful, well-maintained green spaces and children's play areas with plenty of larger parks scattered around.
In 1910 the foreign-born population was 14.7% and the drop around WWII was caused by other factors.
Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants. Arguably the wealth of today is the product of managing to avoid the worst of WWII and profiting from Switzerland's "neutrality" but that's an entire conversation by itself.
Well they were neutral, its just most folks, even otherwise smart ones, don't like true neutral behavior if it doesn't actually favor their side, hence such 'smart' snarky remarks I can see all the time, by people feeling they know history. Swiss accepted everybody, hundreds of thousands of refugees too, some parts even when it became obvious they will all face starvation since they were completely encircled by axis. Private banks accepted everybody's money, just like every global bank did before and after the war.
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.
> Much of the industrialisation and banking industry was driven by immigrants.
This. In particular the chemical/pharmaceutical industry (which is still a major Swiss industry today) got bootstrapped in great part by French and German chemists moving to Switzerland where they could make chemicals that was patented elsewhere but not in Switzerland due to looser industrial property laws at the time.
More importantly, education isn't everything. Half the economy runs on work that doesn't need higher education and that locals largely won't do: cleaning, care, hospitality, construction. The Spanish and Portuguese speaking workers doing those jobs are propping up a standard of living for everyone.
Geneva has the highest minimum wage in the world precisely to try and avoid the "working poor".
Also the "consuner spending is increasingly debt" is very US centric view. The situation in Europe is less extreme and totally absent in many countries.
This is never true and just economic denialism. There is a market price for labor. If there is no supply at a given price it is not evidence that a market does not exist, only that the demand is mispriced.
> This is never true and just economic denialism. There is a market price for labor. If there is no supply at a given price it is not evidence that a market does not exist, only that the demand is mispriced.
There can be situations where the market for a particular type of labor does not exist. Populations aren't infinite, and if there are enough good paying, desirable jobs for full employment, then there may be no one available to do a job economically.
For example let's imagine a hypothetical town where only residents of the town are allowed to work in the town, though they can provide services to those outside of the town. Let's say 100 people live in this town, and they are all doctors. There is a hospital in this town that needs 100 doctors to run. There are other jobs to be done in this town - someone needs to pick up trash, someone needs to mow lawns, someone needs to sell food, etc. Now if you pay someone a doctor's salary to pick up trash, they could potentially leave the hospital to do that job instead; but then the hospital is understaffed. Something isn't going to get done; indeed in this scenario where there are a lot more jobs to be done than people to do them, a lot of stuff isn't going to get done, no matter how good the pay is, and the jobs that are done will be insanely expensive.
In this case you would simply allow people from outside the town to work in the town, or get more people to move into town. If you scale up this scenario to cities, provinces, and ultimately nations, it's clear that at some point you must choose between structural unemployment (ie number of workers greater than number of jobs to be done), bullshit jobs (people who would be structurally unemployed are hired to do unnecessary tasks), a managed economy (employment opportunities restricted to ensure necessary work gets done at any population level), or immigration/emigration of labor (labor supply varies to meet demand) regardless of wages. In practice you'll likely get a combination of the above.
The market for anything isn't infinite. When S/D shifts the market price changes to reflect that. The price reflects the relative supply and demand. You seem to be operating under the delusion that prices must be fixed at where you desire them and that no market existing there is a failure. In fact the availability of goods and services in a market is a function of your willingness to pay a market price for them. If you don't objectively value such goods and services they won't exist for you. It's not the responsibility of everyone else to subsidize your lifestyle because you're not willing to pay market prices.
You very clearly did not understand what I wrote, so let's simplify this further.
There is one guy alone on an island. There are two lighthouses on the island. Each lighthouse needs an operator to function. The guy operates one of the lighthouses. How much do wages need to rise to get both lighthouses operating at the same time?
> Geneva has the highest minimum wage in the world
I was surprised when I read this, but I Googled, and it looks true. Minimum wage in Geneva is 24.59 CHF per hour. Wow! With 1.5 working parents, you can definitely live on 1.5 * 2000 * 24.59 CHF = 73,770 CHF (92.5K USD) per year in Geneva. (To be clear: I am not writing this sarcastically. I think 74K CHF per year will definitely not be "working poor" in Geneva.)
It's not simple with the "clock-face scheduling" system which is used which times the trains to all meet at the big nodes (Zürich, Bern, Basel) so connections work. To achieve this trains are supposed to fit into 30/60/120 minute beats which synchronise the entire system. See [1,2] for how this works.
Also many of the most important parts of the system are at capacity. Bigger trains can help but a lot of these gains have already been realised in the crowded areas. The current hope is digitalising signaling to allow density to be increased but that's not simple/cheap even if it's cheaper than working on the lines themselves.
I'm not saying this is wrong, that makes a lot of sense. But on the other hand why have I never heard of other, much more dense countries facing this problem? I just never hear of Japan, China, Germany, Taiwan, etc seeing overcrowded trains and raise their hands saying "there can't possibly be a solution!"
Germany's passenger rail is notoriously failing. China is big and empty compared to Switzerland so there's lots of room to build. Japan's population is stagnant, and so train use might be stagnant too. (No idea about Taiwan.)
What does it have to do with they way they have to manage way higher population density? Singapore is 2/3 Swiss population on 1/3 of the Canton of Vaud.. They are 18 Chinese cities with a population over 10 million.
It's not impossible, but Switzerland's geography means tunneling is involved in adding capacity which makes it very expensive. Also the beautiful synchronisation of a country-wide integrated timetable where you can reliably get between any two places in the country with connections that always make sense is a point of national pride.
Japan, Taiwan and China all added dedicated infrastructure which took a long time and cost a fortune (vs the shared tracks currently used for intercity/regional/European freight). Tokyo accepts famously absurd levels of overcrowding during peak hours. Deutsche Bahn in Germany is widely thought of a joke due to chronic underinvestment meaning on-time trains are surprising.
That said, these technical concerns have nothing to do with the 10 million proposal. It's worth asking why a camp that spent decades opposing sustainability legislation has suddenly discovered the word now that it can be pointed at immigration.
I have visited India, and if you ever travel on a train in Mumbai, you will understand what overpopulation really means. Your body will be pressed against other people’s bodies. To get on the train, you have to learn how to do gymnastics. They are absolutely not managing crowd better.
In early 2023, I was debugging an issue in a long abandoned package that used OpenSSL and needed to be fixed for OpenSSL 3. The entire thing was a mess and the parts of OpenSSL it was using are almost entirely undocumented.
Copying a pasting into a ChatGPT window gave me the lines of code to print the error message rather than failing silently. Copying the error message then gave me a detailed explanation of problem and the diff to fix it. I still have no idea where this knowledge came from as I spent a decent amount of time searching and found nothing about this corner of OpenSSL.
I’m very confident it would have taken me a week to make sense of what the package was trying to do and with LLMs it was done in a couple of hours.
And to keep this thread, I think our three languages should count as one, because at least 20 years ago, it was quite common to have Portuguese, Italian and Spanish mingle in several activities.
I’m a little confused by this submission. CASTOR is the old system that has since been replaced by the CERN Tape Array since ~2020: https://cta.web.cern.ch/cta/
This is mentioned on the page but it’s easy to miss.
Does tape array replace castor? Just from the names it sounds like tape array is the actual storage, and castor is an abstraction that automatically decides what's kept on disk and what's kept on tape
The abstraction isn’t really a thing any more. It was a nice idea but in practice it’s an operational nightmare not knowing if data is available and for how long it will be. For reference staging can take days during intense activity and you don’t want to loose performance randomly seeking around and switching between tapes.
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