Technology

two factors:

1. those novels were warnings about the path we were on
2. dorkasses like musk and altman missed the allegorical point

Because they were about late state capitalism.

Torment nexus go

Wasn’t there an announcement from proton a few days back to possibly move their data Centers out of Switzerland because of this?

Holy shit. An actual interrobang.

This is like finding a shiny.

In their AI announcement yesterday they mentioned that they are moving to the EU because of legal protections.

You account is anonymous only if you have over a billion.

@poutinewharf commented a screenshot of Proton's post, but the headline was about their AI chatbot, and the news about the Swiss move is buried at the end.

Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals(new window) to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.

what covid response? our government simply played on "eigenverantwortung" (personal responsibility). in a country with one of the highest education levels it wasn't difficult to keep a distance of 2 meters during the peak of the pandemic unless you're surrounding yourself with naive people. I was able to go swimming in the lake in the summer, and skiing in the winter while Italy, France and Austria had this banned. weird to think about it but I honestly had a pretty fun time during covid and made some of the best friends to date during it. hell, we even had music festivals and our numbers were not horrible. I think you're thinking of Sweden. happens a lot.

I visited Switzerland just after the vaccines dropped. The Swiss COVID response far surpassed the response in the United States. They rolled out a nation-wide app for vaccination attestation, and any museum, restaurant, etc. could scan a QR code on someone's phone with a phone. But do they have a scary, socially reactionary subset of their population? Yes.

In some harmful ways they are fanatically culturally conservative. But they also care about community, sustainability, health, the well-being of children, environmental preservation, organization, and self-reliance. Being a small, rich, homogeneous, topographically-isolated country drives these characteristics.

Surveillance State developments are depressing but not surprising.

You've not heard of shady banking, Nazi gold, reluctance to stop dealing with Russia, women not being able to vote until the 70s, and Nestle?

Switzerland gets aggressively simped for online, and there's certainly some nice things about them, but there's also some pretty awful things.

There's a reason every billionair has a bank account in Switzerland.

And it's not to pay more taxes. Or to launder less money.

There’ll be a clause that banks are exempt

This is not law yet. The Federal Council (the executive) has started a consultation process at the beginning of the year which ended in May. They are now looking at all the feedback that came in, that was - unsurprisingly - exclusively negative from all sides. If the responsible minister wants to go ahead with it, it goes to the Federal Council for a vote. If they approve it, this would be a decree to change an existing decree and that would come into effect next year or the year after.

And this is where direct democracy comes in: If this is the case anyone can start getting signatures for a public initiative which would change the constitution to prohibit such practices. In fact anyone can start doing that now. If it succeeds, then it'll come to a popular vote. Threema (a secure chat provider) has already announced that they would do that and I'm sure that they wouldn't be the only ones to band together in this.

The process might take long, but this is in no way "not good enough to counter a campaign for legal change with a goal" and in fact has happened multiple times in the past. Hence why Switzerland has a direct vote on issues every few months because of something called "Referendum", whereby a popular vote can be forced on an issue passing through parliament. I might have my criticisms of the political system, but this ain't it.

its system encourages it to have politicians as a thing

Well yes, there is some level of representation, so over 8 million people don't have to decide every little detail on 1000s of changes of law. The system is built upon a "milita" system. I.e. politicians usually have a job. So people have the possibility to vote in experts or their vicinity and know that they won't solely be career politicians. Unfortunately the laws around financing and propaganda are rather lax, giving an advantage to the rich, which leads to an over-representation of the capitalist class with occupations such as lawyers and business-owners and a clear under-representation of classical working-class jobs such as craftspeople or office workers. This is amendable though to correct the mismatch, if people realize their class interest and don't fall for the same right-wing propaganda of a party whose playbook has been inspired by the US GOP for decades and who is inspiring Germany's AfD now.

The main downside of the system imo has to do with people with no knowledge on an issue having to weigh in on them and therefore how powerful propaganda campaigns can be, which means that money buys power, as in every other existing so-called democracy - direct or not. Especially with how money shifts power away from the populace, this is inherent to capitalistic systems and it would be on the populace to protect itself from it. With enough propaganda though, people keep voting for more power of capital unbeknownst to them or not, just as they might vote against their interests on other things. The fact that you have to convince so many people, who hopefully do have some degree of education, makes it a lot harder though, for big capitalists to reach their goals, compared to less direct systems. And I know of several examples, how such a vote did not go in favor of big capital. What usually makes the difference is whether they succeed in portraying their advantage as the advantage of all.

Democracy is an infant still learning to walk. You plug the holes and add new institutions for oversight. You don't shoot the damn baby and start over because you know how you'd force everyone to do it.

Kowloon wasn't built in a day.