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!
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.
As usual, blame the suburbs, which make all kinds of infrastructure quite a bit more expensive per capita.
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.
https://www.reviews.org/app/uploads/2024/11/Verizon-Fios-cov...
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.
We also don’t have weapons in every household, if we’re talking myths
It all depends if you did your military service (which implies that you're swiss) and if you didn't decide to drop out of it or deemed as unfit. I don't think it's a myth really, it just happens to be that a lot of people don't do their military service and thus don't have to keep a weapon at home
> I’m not even talking about the languages, we have 20% immigrants in the population, and an even larger part has foreign roots.
> We also don’t have weapons in every household, if we’re talking myths
I'm joking, I realise that you are Swiss, but until I looked at the username I wasn't sure which side of the comparison you were referring to. Goes to show that even the nations' stereotypes are not dissimilar!
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.
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.
But all except 9 US states are larger in geographic area and only 5 have a higher population density.
Those are pretty salient statistics when you're talking about infrastructure that links houses.
But we can look at the opposite part of spectrum - Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre, >90% of population has option to get 1GBit fiber
There are always reasons why something can't be done, just like solving frequent school shooting problem in US
I remember moving there, hearing talks about how international Zurich was, and then realizing most of those foreigners were German. :-) It's diverse on paper (and probably to the Swiss), but it's not like it's a cosmopolitan melting pot.
If you exclude neighboring countries Zurich has a foreign born population share of 27% (compared to 18% of Los Angeles). If you only look at the last 10 years Zurich has foreign born non neighboring immigration of 10% (compared to 4% for Los Angeles).
If you only look at intercontinental migration then Los Angeles wins with 14% (compared to 8% of Zurich).
So yes Zurich is less cosmopolitan then LA, but most of it is just because the US has more diverse neighbors.
It's way more diverse than Zurich. Well, if you mean "diverse" as "more brown people" as your comment seems to imply.
Perhaps he's talking about a different kind of homogeneity (one that conventionally falls under the "racism" category)
> Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre
Do not arm him with arguments
That is absurd for anyone who lives in the Old World. Some of the worst wars in history were fought amongst people whom you wouldn't be able to tell apart in a sauna.
Heck, even Palestinians and Israeli Jews are physically very similar.
"White", "brown" etc. aren't meaningful categories in the Old World, with a few exceptions like South Africa. Most of the Old World is intensely tribal.
Intelligent folks look at a system and figure out ways they can adapt it to their own situation. You can take systems they use for rural areas and figure out ways to do it on your own. The US is enormous, but most folks live in cities. States are tiny portions of the US, and some of those states would likely mirror Switzerland in diversity, density, and size.
It wouldn't matter if the country had a population density similar to the US and was similar in many ways. It'd still need adaptation because of the differences in culture, laws, and so on.
Sweden, for example, is tiny in population compared to the US but geographically its size covers from north Florida to NYC, with barely 10m people it's able to have great public transportation, fiber coverage to 80-85+% of buildings, cellphone coverage to 98% of the population even in remote locations.
Being enormous like the US might leave a vast area of low density population centres but it doesn't excuse at all that the areas where the vast majority of people live are dense enough to have these services very well covered. That doesn't happen though so the issue isn't being an enormous, diverse country at all.
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.)
I doubt they're insurmountable. Again, because the Swiss aren't some genetically superior subspecies. Culture can be changed.
I see Americans talk about how impossible universal healthcare is as if the rest of the developed world hasn't largely figured it out.
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.
Ppl also recently voted for eid which should reduce bureaucratic hurdles
Imo in many cases public transport problems in other areas are heavily related to corruption
> 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.
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.
If I can pay $100 in tax to save $200 in premiums and copays, that’s a win. The US is an extreme outlier in healthcare spend.
Again, no one has said this is impossible, which is my original point. Even Trump's idiotic rambling, which was mainly about child care costs, said nothing about the impossibility of universal healthcare.
Over the course of a hundred or so years maybe. Culture is hard work.
And the “more voluntary” bit is pretty important. As is it costing about double.
The FR and UK systems are better IMHO.
Just to be clear, the Swiss healthcare system is still very good. Just not perfect.
The NHS (for example) costs less, and (depending on how you measure the value of health outcomes) might be more cost effective, but the outcomes aren't as good.
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).
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).
Switzerland gets along with others just fine, to the point where Italy and France used to handle their air defense on the weekends (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_702).
> 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.
If the swiss were able to get along with others, they wouldn't have such a reputation as racist nazis
> 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.
They were friendly enough with their neighbors to let their own Air Force have the nights and weekends off.
Passport control when I went from France to Switzerland was someone coming onto the train and yelling “anyone not allowed in Switzerland? No? Good!”
I think they’re fine.
Every large country breaks things up into small chunks. No one says Vermont can't handle a school system just because it's small.
Switzerland and California have the same population density. Why can’t CA build high speed rail?
It might also worth it to check them out
“Others do it even better and cheaper” makes the US failure to build and maintain infrastructure like this even sadder.
In addition, if we built proper high speed lines, would could increase the frequency so much that it doesn't actually matter anymore.
So it doesn't actually break the system, it improves it.
Join us in advocating for this vision: https://swissrailvolution.ch/#goals
Go find the last major Swiss route that was built, and compare its land acquisition difficulties to what happened with the California project. I'll rankly speculate that difference will be the meat of your answer.
I don't think rules and regulation in California are actually worse then in Switzerland.