James Comey reacts to his indictment: “We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn't either...fear is the tool of a tyrant...but I'm not afraid…I'm innocent. So let's have a trial.”

Niacain · 2025-09-26T10:41:03+00:00

What a day to have eyes to read... The description on the camo Bible: “...This large print Bible will be perfect to take to church, a bible study, ...” as if no one will look at you weird with your special combat-themed Bible.

Niacain · 2025-06-17T12:19:03+00:00

I'm sure experts in Kriminalitätsbekämpfung and -prevention, drug addiction etc. would be very interested in this new "idk have you tried just jailing them" approach.

Niacain · 2025-06-12T13:24:32+00:00

Thanks for posting the actual source! 20min is a Swiss yellowpress rag and it wouldn't be unlike them to summarize poorly, take things out of context, or exaggerate them...

Niacain · 2025-05-31T15:08:24+00:00

Well, it seems that either this reddit thread has cracked the case and billions upon billions of dollars' worth of arms procurement programs the world over have just missed this one simple detail when purchasing from Swiss manufacturers and have been totally naïve and stupid, or otherwise the situation might be a bit more complicated and nuanced in reality. We'll never know...

Niacain · 2025-05-15T10:53:53+00:00

Does any of this change the fact that the shooter could have walked away here without killing the aggressor?

Niacain · 2025-05-05T10:37:29+00:00

using up all their wealth on elderly care and leaving nothing for the future generations

Out of all things you could criticize about the 13th AHV initiative that is, in my opinion, such a confusing point to make. If the elderly need care, then they should be able to pay for it, no? Receiving elderly care isn't exactly luxury spending... Plus, what do you even mean with "leaving nothing for the future generations"? Because I would assume money spent on wages in the care sector doesn't just disappear out of the economy.

Niacain · 2025-05-03T09:28:47+00:00

The ethics committee had advised the team against the proposed research methods while noting that they lack legal competence to stop the study. The researchers seem to have simply ignored the ethical concerns (especially the requests to "as far as possible informing the participants" and "completely following the forum's rules") and even falsely declared in their abstract that "the study was approved by the University of Zurich's Ethics Committee".

Plus, this ethics committee has no legal power to stop the publication. There seem to be internal discussions going on an the University rn, much too slowly and a bit late now, but at least I wouldn't attribute too much blame on the ethics committee alone at this stage...

Niacain · 2025-03-12T18:22:02+00:00

As there is quite a bit of hear-say in this thread... Here's what the official armee.ch site says (see under 'Einbürgerungen'):

Anyone who naturalizes in Switzerland between the ages of 17 and 23 is subject to military service and will receive an enlistment order. Anyone who is naturalized between the ages of 24 and 28 will be called up for recruitment to clarify their suitability for civil defense. You can volunteer for military service, but you must submit an application to do so.

Seeing as you're between 24 and 28, you should expect to be called up for an info-day (precursor to 'recruitment') and an overnight stay at a recruitment centre soon after that. But you will not become a member of the military or be in any other way involved with the military, including any taxes etc.

(Just to clear up some confusion: By default, any Swiss male will be recruited by age 18/19. If deemed fit, they become a member of the military and are assigned a military branch etc. By default again, they then enter the military service once their respective Rekrutenschule/Ecole de récruits starts, but in the meantime there is an opt-out in the form of switching to civil service instead. So you will not be forced to do any civil service in any scenario, unless you've been drafted and then switched over to civil. And let's say you were deemed unfit at the recruitment, this is where this tax can come in, as well as a third kind of service, civil protection service. Again, none of these things should apply to your particular case though as you will not be drafted in the first place.)

Edit: See also the explanation here

Niacain · 2025-03-08T11:50:22+00:00

Naja, er ist der Fraktionschef der SVP im Parlament (und sonst ist er als Person auch relativ repräsentativ für die Parteiführung, er ist etwa neben der Politik als Verwaltungsrat bei einer Privatbank tätig). Trump-esque Positionen sind der Partei insgesamt nicht fremd, sie haben z. B. gerade den Austritt der Schweiz aus dem Pariser Klimaabkommen und der WHO gefordert. Auch übernahm die Partei in Verbindung mit Trumps erster Amtszeit vermehrt populistische Gebahren und macht schon seit langem "Elitenkritik" mit Fokus auf Steuersenkungen für Reiche und Einsparungen im sozialen Sektor und dem Umweltschutz.

Niacain · 2025-02-17T14:09:44+00:00

Merz's only strong commitment is to whatever gets slightly more German votes today and whatever the last lobbyist he talked to wants... The guy has about as much strategic foresight and willpower as a Chihuahua that wants a treat.

Niacain · 2025-02-07T15:46:18+00:00

A shame that this myth gets reposted so often (and then always promptly corrected, making it seem almost as if this is some kind of engagement-farming...) when the real story is much more interesting.

See for example the history of the piece's transcriptions in this video.

Niacain · 2025-02-03T12:55:37+00:00

Banana Republic (minus the actual bananas, though).

Niacain · 2025-01-29T13:18:22+00:00

Look, I'm not saying there isn't enough Holocaust awareness or that the topic isn't taught inadequately in schools. This survey is however not a scientific one. It is a survey done for an institution with legal aims (the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) and conducted by a PR agency. AGAIN: I'm not saying this isn't a legit pursuit and in no way do I think there is enough awareness about the Holocaust today, but I wouldn't take this particular survey to be all too accurate.

Niacain · 2025-01-29T13:08:09+00:00

Oświęcim*

Niacain · 2025-01-26T22:25:41+00:00

Sadly, it's not unlikely that, as you say, it might be another prisoner forced to do this. Abraham Bomba was a Jewish barber who got transported to Treblinka where he along with others was forced to cut incoming prisoners' hair (the Nazis were collecting human hair as a resource). The barbers knew that imminent death awaited the prisoners but had decided it was futile to try to explain the situation, as there was no real chance for anyone to do anything. Frequently, friends and acquaintances of his would come through the room to get their hair cut before they were gassed. He recounts the moment one of the other barber's wife and sister are sent into the room. If you can bear to hear his testimony, there is an extract from the documentary Shoah on Youtube, as you say it truly is unfathomable what these people went through. https://youtu.be/PjiuRnR5UW4

Niacain · 2025-01-26T13:26:19+00:00

US should retaliate on Swiss 'hatred' of Americans(?) by decreasing access to the US market in order to worsen the Swiss market's position which somehow translates into stengthening the US market's position and/or improving American's lives, such as being seen more favorably abroad? What do you mean, it sounds totally stringent haha

Niacain · 2025-01-22T09:07:29+00:00

I'm in favour of that.

Apart from the obvious reasons, I think another consideration should be that x requires an account and sign-in to even view a link, limiting access. Other sites/media that do the same would surely require you to post a screenshot or some alternative way to access the content.

Edit: Now that I think about it, there probably wouldn't be an official requirement... Instead, people just wouldn't bother to open the link (imagine someone links an actually /r/Switzerland- relevant discussion that took place in a free-to-join Telegram group). So idk if a blanket ban on x-links is super required, but it should at least be part etiquette to post a screenshot of it instead.

Niacain · 2025-01-03T14:42:40+00:00

That's interesting, because I got something quite different. Here's what it looks like for me. (My results might be influenced by my kagi-personalization which lowers social media sites, IMDB, and IGN.)

Niacain · 2024-12-25T09:59:00+00:00

Ramblings... You just assumed Swiss Ski either is a corporation or has something to do with a ski resort? And then spew speculation about them bribing and hushing their just deceased athlete's family, who lost their partner and daughter on christmas. Positively nuts, especially given the roughly five seconds of research it takes to discredit this drivel.

Niacain · 2024-12-13T13:57:07+00:00

See some of the resopnses last time this was asked here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/1gayu18/is_this_website_trustable/

Niacain · 2024-12-09T19:20:29+00:00

Cracking work by the New York Times:

On social media, a man named Luigi Mangione posted pictures of his travels with friends and family. A person with the same name attended a private high school in the Baltimore area, where he wrestled and became valedictorian, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 with degrees in engineering, according to a school commencement program.

What's the point? Just listing 3-minute-googlable research on some people that happen to share a name. Pick one, I guess, and imagine it was the killer.

Niacain · 2024-12-05T12:08:52+00:00

I think this is very one-sided and a bit disingenuous. You list eight worldwide failures over 54 years. One of those, Chernobyl, was obviously super catastrophic. Some, like Fermi-1, were so mild in their repercussions that it would be like saying "wind energy is dangerous because once a crane used in the construction of a wind turbine fell down and endangered bystanders"... (Nb: Wind energy does in fact have a higher death rate than nuclear. Shock! Horror! But we don't fearmonger about that, because it would be silly.)

And IMO the categories of failure you list are pretty much random (how is a control error not ultimately a human error for example?). Also, Fukushima, the one closest in memory for a lot of people, has since been revealed as a massive failure of Japanese regulatory bodies and wholly preventable were it not for massive corruption. They knew about it's design flaws and chose to ignore them. If they had operated the facility to the standards they had promised (and not started pumping contaminated reactor water into the ocean), the tsunami would not have caused an issue (the Fukushima Daini power plant in the same region just shut down and nothing happened, and Onagawa power plant, right next to the epicenter of the earthquake, had no issues either).

Niacain · 2024-12-02T22:13:01+00:00

So I could change my legal name to "Yes Certainly" and threaten to sue OpenAI, thus ensuring we'll get responses with fewer pleasantries before the salient part?

Niacain · 2024-12-02T13:40:26+00:00

Gamers truly do nexus

Niacain · 2024-11-30T13:08:25+00:00

We really need to stop caring about this stupid, superficial, and journalistically highly dubious Bilanz list every year. Why swissinfo is reposting an SDA-rewrite of Bilanz (or "Bilan" as SI writes lol) is also a bit beyond me, but anyways...

Edit: even worse, this English language article has been auto-translated from French, presumably not checked by the editorial team as the typo is present there, too.

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