This was great - thank you, nicely done.

In case you didn’t recognize this as an epic comment, you should know this is an epic comment.

>European regulatory state

*Switzerland

Not EU but still a european state

Of course, but they're fiercely opposed to the notion of being subject to regulation by EU institutions. The Swiss are well capable of regulating themselves to death entirely on their own, thank you very much. ;)

On the other hand, this same thoroughness makes their trains run on time and their products well-respected for quality and precision. Two sides to a coin.

To get back to my nitpick: It's a bit like casually referring to the US when you're actually talking about Canada. Some Canadians might be offended.

And yeah, I'm fun at parties.

> Of course, but they're fiercely opposed to the notion of being subject to regulation by EU institutions.

They're also fiercly opposed to not having an open border, both for people and goods, with their EU neighbours.

One of these days something is going to have to give.

There had already been a few upset people over the issue, but then the war in Ukraine happened and the Swiss said "we're neutral!", and a few more got upset.

Eventually one of the deadlines the EU give them to get their act together will stick. It will presumably coincide with an economic crisis for one side or the other..

> They're also fiercly opposed to not having an open border, both for people and goods, with their EU neighbours.

Switzerland is part of schengen and has open borders. The same goes for a lot of goods but even between EU members there are some tariffs for certain goods.

Your nitpick doesn’t even stick though.

The EU does not have a monopoly on the “European” moniker. There’s a lot of Europe outside the EU that is still “European”.

The looming sense of EU technocracy is ever present - I guess the kind of person to take offence at a cheeky marmot is probably going to be a perfect drone beurocrat. Although we do have to ask ourselves as a society, if we live in a world were a cartographer can't sneak in a little drawing, is it a world worth living?

I think what we need to do is fund an exhibition into the swiss alps to reconstute the terrain in the shape of a funny little marmot.

To be fair, the Swiss are not in the EU, but they do have a curious relationship with it as a landlocked enclave. (Much like Andorra, San Marino, and the Vatican.)

almost similiar to the UK - while being very anti-eu, there's a complete technocratic acceptance, and beurocratic minutea has taken it over.

Real sense of legislation above all

A wee bit. Maybe more like Norway. UK obviously left and has no real border (except in Ireland.)

[delayed]

Most of them were only in the lower scale maps and one of them is still there. Swisstopo even wrote an article [1] about them and gives some background and names the cartographers that added them. So our bureaucratic machine seems to have a sense of humor.

[1] https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/hidden-images-20161221