I have a gentle rule, which is when discussing (geo)politics with friends, we should try not to use Switzerland as an example. It's just too good, too rational, too sensible, too well run, in myriad ways that other countries should be able to emulate, but consistently and constantly don't.
There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny, homogenous country that you can't do in a enormous, diverse country.
If my house were a country, I'd be in the top 0.1% of household internet speeds compared to other countries. Obviously everyone should be just like me!
> There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny, homogenous country that you can't do in a enormous, diverse country.
The US is a large collection of a whole bunch of rich (by global standards), tiny, fairly homogenous areas. We manage roads and schools at state, county, and local levels; we could do municipal broadband.
The difficulties of American internet speeds have little to do with the total size of the country, but how far individual families are from each other. Spain is roughly the size of Texas, and Spain has a higher population, but you need a lot less fiber to each home, because metro areas are so much denser, and therefore it's so much easier to lay the fiber.
As usual, blame the suburbs, which make all kinds of infrastructure quite a bit more expensive per capita.
Right. It’s things like Baltimore (when I lived there) requiring that high speed internet had to roll out in poor areas first, before it could go into the rich neighborhoods.
But this was the early 2000s and the internet was still “new”. Only the richer areas cared and were willing to pay the price. Letting them have first (or even equal!) access would have made it easier to fund the rollout in low income areas.
> There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny, homogenous country that you can't do in an enormous, diverse country.
US states are little islands entirely capable of doing things like building infrastructure. There is no excuse for our states and their lack of movement, certainly not “the entire country is just tooooo big. whoa is us.” nonsense.
Rich is a key attribute here. Tiny, not really. The key is dense. That makes terrestrial connections cheaper. A country with the population of the US and the richness and density of Switzerland would be just as capable of building out high speed internet connections. It would have ~38x the population of Switzerland, cost ~38x more to wire, and have ~38x the resources with which to do it.
Incidentally, the northeast of the US has a similar or greater population density as Switzerland and is pretty rich. That area, at least, should be as capable of this sort of thing. Doing it for, say, everybody in Alaska would be a bit tougher.
I don't know what diversity has to do with anything here. As far as I've seen, people from all sorts of different places and cultures seem to like high speed internet about equally well.
Tell me you know nothing about Switzerland without telling me you know nothing about Switzerland. Try asking a German Swiss what they think about a French Swiss or either about the Romansch.
And yet, living in Switzerland after the UK involved one after another discovery of how well-ordered and -run a country could be. And then moving to Germany was like stepping back even further behind my memories of the UK.
I'm sure you could find examples of countries that do specific things as well as Switzerland; but I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently. (Maybe Japan, in many respects, but I lack sufficient direct experience to adequately judge.)
Nothing is insurmountable; however each one of us must play within the practical constraints of our local geographies (political, social, financial and physical). The parent comment probably means that Switzerland is in a positive on all axes unlike the rest of the world.
It’s politics. Boil most things down and the technical is inconsequential when compared to the politics.
Look at the political system of Switzerland and you will see a radically different setup.
And I think that’s the horse. The rest is cart. Yes they are rich but why? Yes they are relatively stable socially but why? Decentralised Canton government structure + direct democracy (referendums all the time for things that matter). That, I think, is why all the rest.
From a philosophical perspective, I love the cantonal/direct democracy model. But it's supported by a strong culture of awareness of current affairs, and involvement in the political process. (Of course, these two aspects are likely strongly synergistic.)
However, I'm not sure this unique political structure explains the trains running on time, the sensible choices made about the internet structure (per the article), the top-of-the-world healthcare system, the Swiss cheese science institute, or many other aspects of the broader country. It may partly explain the routinely excellent government bureaucracy (say that with a straight face anywhere else!), the convenient and reliable local public transport options, and the local police being well-resourced to the point of apparent boredom.
Heh, you were walking right up to my viewpoint and then turned away. A parliamentary democracy with proportional representation has way more influence IMO, and you'll find another couple of relatively well-run countries that work like that.
For me, this is the point of the article. People fought and the best decision was the result. And I suspect there's a fundamental cultural difference that makes the fight much less fair in America.
I'm an American and I've heard it often, usually with a bunch of strange excuses. We're too big, we're too diverse, there's too many states, and on. None of those actually make very much sense, but I've heard it all for why universal healthcare could never work in the US.
> President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.
I guess I'm pretty confused on what your point is here?
Universal Healthcare would be a new program in the US that would see a drastic tax increase, in that our healthcare spending currently going to insurance companies would instead go to a new federal agency. The amount of money companies and citizens spend on it may or may not also increase, but your quote has basically nothing to do with that.
We must live on opposite sides of US cause I’ve never heard anyone say that it is possible (except few politicans who thought it may be a good way to win an election but also knew that it was not possible and gave up once they got elected)
> I'm not aware of many places that do almost everything so excellently
Probably Singapore, which is sometimes described as the Switzerland of Asia anyway. 10 Gb symmetric fibre is broadly available at around SGD $50/month (about 35 EUR).
This is not to say that it isn't well run, but I think it would be fair to mention that Singapore is one of the most densely populated countries on Earth (#3 overall; #1 among countries with population >1 million.)
Separately, I am not totally sure just how widely deployed FTTH is in Switzerland. Here in Zürich it's everywhere, but zooming in on some rural place on init7's map tells quite a different story (perhaps not surprisingly).
Well and a little bit of research, tells me it’s far from universal across Switzerland. This article is so provable false in many of its premises it’s worthless - see my other comment.
CA’s high speed rail isn’t high speed by European standards and it looks on the way to cancelation or significant curtailment. We can’t even manage what y’all would consider slow rail.
I don't know but Swiss isn't the only train system that works but also Spain, Italy, France. Poland has a growing better train system . The swiss system has it's advantages but it is also very expensive.
What is this supposed to imply? us states are also a poor representation of humanity. This matters a great deal: switzerland is notoriously ethnically homogenous and unable to get along with anyone. Life on easy mode!
> The Swiss Air Force did not respond because the incident occurred outside normal office hours; a Swiss Air Force spokesman stated: "Switzerland cannot intervene because its airbases are closed at night and on the weekend. It's a question of budget and staffing." Switzerland relies on neighboring countries to police its airspace outside of regular business hours; the French and Italian Air Forces have permission to escort suspicious flights into Swiss airspace, but do not have authority to shoot down an aircraft over Switzerland.
Lets just exclude the best example, as everyone knows, we should never try to be the best. Being the best is dumb, liberal and possibly communist. Settling for 105th, that's freedom and democracy baby.
Quick oats are typically just rolled/cut to be smaller, so that they have a higher total surface area and so soak up liquid more easily. The downside is that this also makes them easier/faster to digest, so they have a higher glycaemic index (i.e. deliver a higher blood sugar spike) and give a shorter period of satiety.
Rolled oats are the uncut variety, which don't cook quickly for convenient porridge, but are great to soak as overnight oats. You can also get some which are basically in the middle - cut a bit so good for reasonably quick porridge (~5-7 minutes) but a bit more filling.
Interesting. Unless we have different standards for what constitutes a cooked oat, maybe we're talking about slightly different things? The full-size rolled oats (sometimes called 'robust') here in Germany are nowhere close to soft (and are still distinctly floating in the milk) after simmering for 20+ minutes. The alternative is also described as rolled oats (sometimes called 'tender') but are visually smaller; that's what cooks in 5-6 minutes.
This must be different, the "old fashioned rolled oats" sold in America would be more than done after 20 minutes of simmering.
Going by Bob's Red Mill, which is an excellent brand, we've got:
* Old Fashioned rolled oats, 10 minutes: https://www.bobsredmill.com/product/regular-rolled-oats [the store brand I always see, on the other hand, is 5 minutes]
* Steel cut oats, 15-20 minutes (this is a lie, it takes longer than 20 minutes for them to get sufficiently soft in my experience, for any steel cut oat brand): https://www.bobsredmill.com/product/steel-cut-oats
They also have a second species of oats that are significantly higher in protein, and they take 15+ minutes to cook in "rolled oat" form, which from personal experience is accurate: https://www.bobsredmill.com/product/protein-oats
Sure, but you're attributing this, deliberately or not, to the wrong cause. It wasn't that the fossil fuel industry somehow won - it was range of factors possibly including geopolitics, some existing plants aging, an emotional response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the Green lobby.
Basically, they voted to kill nuclear without a solid plan for an alternative, and coal/gas is the default option for filling the gaps left in the absence of timely and sufficiently rapid investment in other technologies.
Hmm. After former chancellor (Schroeder) heavily pushed Russian gas pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and 2) and then swiftly moved to working for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom, I have a different outlook on things.
One can never discount lobbying and influence behind the scenes, but Schroeder finished being Chancellor in 2005, which was six years before the initial post-Fukushima vote in question, and even longer since various aspects of the plan continued to be supported by various politicians.
He'd be a spectacularly successful lobbyist if your suspicion is correct.
> The problem in Ukraine is that anti-air defenses control the skies... <snip> ...US forces can fly relatively cheap bomb trucks anywhere and drop ordinance on anything. Stealth aircraft and NATO doctrine apparently work.
In Ukraine, neither side has access to the air weaponry (in capabilities or volume) that the US does - so the battlefield has evolved into one of drone superiority.
So yes, the US could (logistics willing) pummel Iran with B52s, B2s, and the like, maybe largely unopposed. However, this would only achieve so much: "winning" would be very different, especially when it's likely to turn into into a grinding resistance/insurgency ground war. A better analogy than Ukraine may be the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, only Iran has far more trained fighters and weaponry from the start. Or Vietnam, of course.
Maybe the US could "win", but it would depend on the strength of the political will to continue losing soldiers and spending huge amounts of money; and it would certainty be seen as a "forever war". And of course (as noted elsewhere) the US' more recent forays into Iraq and Afghanistan show how difficult regime change by force is.
They sell to cash-rich organisations who are a bit clueless about technology and so can't or wouldn't want to either roll their own, or go with a better but smaller provider?
e.g. I was unsurprised when I spotted that Novartis (no connection, btw) was deep in with Oracle. Big pharma, lots of money, typically-clueless-big-org-IT-leadership, etc.
And, their product have worked correctly for decades.
So if you have a lot of money and don't want to take any risk you go the oracle route. It's not the best product today, but you won't have any surprise, except cost, that you can justify because it's oracle.
Which is the same as using a tank to go grocery shopping because you're afraid of an accident on the way.
You need everything in house to support a thank, special garage, specifically trained crew, specific fuel...
Precisely this. They prey on outsource-happy big orgs that have 1 million different SaaS all tied together by scotch tape (because their IT dept. is also outsourced)
The whole medical industries business model is that they create so much compliance regulation that you need every compliance product under the sun to comply with them, thereby you can keep out competition.
I have a theory that being cash-rich creates an atmosphere of technological cluelessness, or more specifically weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of working at a top company. These executives display a unified front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition whenever said software has the smallest bug.
I've tried various code CADs before, and they're fine as long as what you're creating is simple enough to build from independent pieces, ideally that you can keep in your head. As soon as you need to refer to aspects that have been created within the CAD, like an edge, or a particular face of an extruded shape, the paradigm falls apart.
I agree. I hate it with a passion and usually regret loading the page within about 10s of doing so.
But it’s the default for recruiters, and it’s thus unavoidable to support necessary communication with them.
I’ve been thinking recently it’s surprising that they never carved off a communication and calendar/meeting function – ideally in a separate app. But this would probably hit some product manager’s metrics, and LinkedIn is so far down the enshittification hole, it’s also understandable that they didn’t.
On the one hand, yes - and (to be reductive) enshittification is basically making decisions according to incentives that aren't aligned with your users, so it fits.
On the other hand, MS have Outlook email/calendar and Teams for video calling - so it could have been an opportunity to benefit different parts of their broader ecosystem. You could also build in limited access to Word for CV creation/editing (with Copilot support, of course) - and then bundle it and charge users for features, and charge recruiters even more for a 'premium' offering.
Except those two divisions were at others ends of the hall, in between was the gauntlet of enterprise deference, with obstacles such as Service Now approvals and meetings about meetings about how to have good meetings… it’s an MBA’s wet dream.
Not to sound snarky, but now please get it to run Microsoft Office. I'd argue that this is the last barrier to many, many people being able to use Linux full-time for business purposes.
If you really / actually want Linux and Linux Gaming to really take off, contribute with whatever helps to get Office 365 running in Linux without a VM.
Like it or not, the business world runs on Office.
I have quite a few machines under my direction, and I would drop Windows on every single one of them for employees that have never used Linux in their lives if I could be assured that they had Office and Teams.
I'm not an heavy o365 user but i'm almost happy on Debian KDE with thunderbird 148[0] (email only), teams-for-linux[1] (chat/calendar/whatever), Onedrive[2] and webdav (sharepoint)[3]. Libreoffice/Onlyoffice for documents.
[3] Store the SP cookie via konqueror visiting the SP site, then open it in dolphin via "webdavs://CORP.sharepoint.com/sites/SITE/Shared Documents/" (sometimes the cookie is very short-lived)
I tried very hard to make something similar work for a couple of months - Mint, teams-for-linux (which is great, actually!), web-apps for everything else.
The main problem is Word - for the documents I regularly work with professionally (large, complex, collaboratively-edited) the web-app is just not feature complete and sometimes struggles to cope.
Also, FWIW, the web Powerpoint is an awful experience.
After a brief flirtation with a virtual machine for Windows and Office (nah) I had to take a step back from Linux and use a Mac again.
I'd consider using it as Windows replacement. Exclusively Windows, as I don't care for the Linux applications, or anything Linux, at all. I don't enjoy being an admin, and the system is more stable without package management. Linux is a fossil from the age of the admin, best used today to emulate Windows, just like it runs under Android, as a HAL. If so, 2026 could be the year of the Linux desktop!
ReactOS is always almost there.. except it doesn't quite get there; same goes for Wine, as they have a lot in common?
I don't know if it is. Most businesses seem to use the web-based Office365 interface now, rather than native Office.
I expect the biggest reasons businesses use Windows these days are momentum, and lower support costs (Linux is still less reliably than Windows on real laptop hardware).
I work in an area where large heavy collaborative Word documents are very commonplace.
I've tried very much to make this work on Linux with the web apps, but they're just not good enough - not feature complete, and quite slow and clunky compared to the native equivalent.
I don’t think so. Windows is very easy to administer compared to both, Linux and Mac. There is also a compliance part that MS makes easier, though it’s a bit beyond what I really know.
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