In Switzerland about 90% of people submit their votes by mail.

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As a Swiss - no, this is sadly still not really contested by any parties besides greens and socialists. Maybe some singular politicians from center and center-right, but our government made it very clear that they still intend to buy the jets.

You probably missed the “digitally processing” part. Reading it isn’t that difficult (still much more than french or english) but due to spelling variance and some other challenges it is mich more difficult to adapt existing models and architectures designed for modern German to premodern German.

In my case, working with administrative documents, there is also a problem concerning gerne-specific words (old terms for legal xoncepts basically) which for example are not well understood by systems created for modern German.

My work focuses on digitally processing texts from between 15th and 17th century in German. It’s a pain and i look with envy to my colleagues working in English and French (around the same time). On the other hand, i like the challenge. :-)

I’m a researcher and i would gladly send anyone a paper who asks, without a reason needed. Although all my papers are open access anyways so shrugs. Btw it’s also not unusual that people may just ask some questions related to ones paper via email and im always happy to answer those. I believe that most researchers are always glad to share their expertise and findings (as long as it isn’t a huge effort ofc).

If you’re not dependent on your parents, think about cutting them out of your life or at least strongly reducing contact. Trust me, mich less stress this way, choose people who are good to you to keep around.

In general i miss all the TTRPG communities

If anyone is interested in the state of things in Switzerland:

Our defense is in chaos right now. A scandal in our state-owned but public weapons manufacturer just broke a few weeks ago and shortly after the secretary of the departement of defense announced her resignation. We will see if the newly elected one will improve the situation.

The army is generally seen as somewhat of a joke, especially by people who served, which is more than half of all Swiss men. We like to call it a “Pfadiverein” (boy scouts association).

Even with all that, the right wing parties want to give a shitload more money to defense, and cut costs in social spending and foreign aid to compensate. Left of centre the need to improve defense is also accepted, but 1) before the army gets more money, they need to get their shit together and 2) more important than the army itself is integration with the european security Infrastructure (the left parties are also very pro-EU). The centre politicians usually mix blth stances and lean more one or the other way.

Also we still stand to buy fighter jets from the US, and only the left parties are calling to cancel the deal.

If you meant democrat vs republican just write that next time lol

Yeah the only option would be if SPD declares that they won’t do a coalition if Merz becomes chancellor. But 1) that would require SPD to have some guts, which they don’t have and 2) in that case the CDU would likely go for a minority government and work with AfD to push their cruel proposals.

So yeah, lile you say, realistically the GroKo is pretty much guaranteed.

Left vs right is literally down vs up

By your logic, AfD should now be below 5% because all major parties in Germany are now tougher on immigration, the CDU is now directly taking positions of the AfD a few years back.

In Denmark this may have worked, might just be correlation, but in general, what your saying is wrong and would make AfD even stronger.

No disagreement, just ÖVP should be FPÖ.

This is absolutely wrong. The validation of immigration concerns by the SPD, Greens and CDU is what gave AfD the popularity they have now.

This effect is well proven in political sciences.

They didn’t write communism, they wrote tankies. And while I won’t equate tankies to nazis, they do share a lot of ideology, such as their love of strongmen.

In most places, if you’re a child or spouse of the deceased, you don’t pay any tax at all on it.

How are your gun laws structured? Could you briefly describe the purchasing process? Do private citizens have to store their firearms in a centralized location or can they keep them secured at home?

As a Swiss citizen, owning a gun is pretty easy. I’m not an expert and don’t own one, but afaik to buy a gun, one needs to do a background check and have some basic training with it. You can keep your gun at home, but carrying (hidden or open) is only allowed in exceptional cases, e.g. for professional reasons, and must be allowed in a court decision.

I hope these answers cover it more or less, feel free to ask more :-)

How do you feel about Switzerland’s semi direct democracy governance?

Now I’m not sure which part you mean, the direct voting or our parliament / government? In short, I think the biggest flaw which is directly a part of the system is our Ständerat and Ständemehr, which is basically like the US Senate, where the voice of a person from Uri counts 500 times as much as the voice of someone from Zurich.

Then there are the problems outside of it, where I’d say the biggest one is Corporate money influencing voting and elections.

And while sometimes misused, I still like our direct voting on issues. In the past 10 years we (from the left) were able to prevent multiple things decided by the parliament thanks to this system and even succeeded in winning a proposal to raise pensions for poorer people, which (winning a equality issue proposal) has never happened before in Swiss history.

As someone already commented, there is narrative that the free market is the reason for Switzerland’s success. A narrative pushed by corporate media and burguois politicians of course, but imo also not completely untrue.

But I also want to point to a different reason, which is our value system. Due to historical reasons, similar to the US, there is a strong emphasis on personal freedom, usually overshadowing solidarity and equality. A big part of that is for many people the right to own private property and to play as little taxes on it as possible.

Then there’s also protentatisms ideas about work etc.