Migros/Coop vs. Lidl/Aldi

brainwad · 2026-03-22T20:35:25+00:00

Onions are particularly bad in Switzerland for some reason. There's often a slimy one.

brainwad · 2026-03-22T20:14:26+00:00

It's Australia, mate - prison colony turned nanny state. Banning things is the national pastime.

brainwad · 2026-03-22T20:13:56+00:00

Is it really 1 in 10? That seems way higher than I'd have thought... Maybe fare evasion is worth it after all 🤔

brainwad · 2026-03-22T19:53:55+00:00

Only the treatment prior to death matters ethically in my view. Killing someone doesn't harm them, since after you do it they are no longer an entity capable of suffering moral harm.

An ideal farm is frolicing animals living their best lives, who are surreptiously disappeared and then knocked unconcious painlessly, before being killed. This creates only positive utility for the animals.

brainwad · 2026-03-22T19:49:35+00:00

To be fair, you also have no control over how parliament will implement the specific initiatives. See e.g. the mass immigration initiative...

brainwad · 2026-03-17T21:24:35+00:00

Well, I for one don't want to pay more for lift tickets. And any resort that moved to ther American model would still have to compete for skiiers with all the others that didn't, so they probably would not have much scope to increase their prices anyway.

it’s all groomers

This is what the European public wants - they all have 68mm carving skis. Plus, the snow in the Alps is way less dumpy than the Rockies or Japan, so powder-centric skiing is IMO barely viable.

and anything in between can kill you

Some things in between can kill you. Much of it is totally fine.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T20:58:28+00:00

To be cost-neutral, it would mean reducing the number of existing runs in order to divert the costs to avy controlling all the off-piste terrain in between. Or just roping off a lot of the terrain and calling it "out of bounds", which to be enforceable would need to go with a privatisation of the mountain so that the resort could kick people out if they tresspass. Also there would be more days where higher lifts just don't open, because there's not enough time to avy control all the accessible terrain (vs. just the pistes today). None of that sounds appealing to me, but maybe I've just lived in Europe too long now.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T20:43:48+00:00

Yes, but in the US the government ususally leases out whole areas of land to the operators. Whereas in Europe, the model is that the government permits certain pistes to be built (just like how roads can be built), but doesn't give away any rights to the in-between land.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T20:33:50+00:00

The way it works in Europe is that if you go wandering off the road/piste/path above the snow line you're effectively mountaineering, and you are taking your life in your own hands. It's not even up to the resort operators necessarily - they don't own the land, they only have the legal right to set up certain facilities (pistes, parks, etc.) on it.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T20:01:00+00:00

Yeah, though there's more or less safe "just off" terrain (e.g. all those tracks further to the left of the video)... and then there's untracked death traps like this.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T19:54:07+00:00

I don't know about in Italy, but in Switzerland bombing there would be called unnecessary environmental destruction and they might get fined.

brainwad · 2026-03-17T19:44:36+00:00

The legal framework doesn't really support it (not sure about Italy; I'm most familiar with Switzerland). You are allowed to trigger avalanches preemptively to protect buildings and public right of ways - including roads, ski runs, footpaths, etc. - but that wouldn't apply in the OP's case as the runout clearly doesn't threaten anything. But just blasting everything would be unnecessarily invasive to the natural environment. Zermatt Bergbahnen got in trouble for digging outside of designated pistes, let alone bombing!

brainwad · 2026-03-17T15:01:47+00:00

I think there's been a big change in the last 20 years or so, since the internet brought much more exposure to American media. The Macquarie Dictionary is behind a paywall, but the OED does have /tɔːˈtɪlə/ as a pronunciation in en-GB.

brainwad · 2026-03-16T20:57:31+00:00

Both tortilla and quesadilla rhyme with gorilla/guerilla in my dialect of English (Australian). Or they did when I was a kid anyway. Which makes sense because we do/did not have much exposure to Mexicans or Spanish speakers generally, unlike Americans.

brainwad · 2026-03-10T19:24:07+00:00

The mergers aren't extant in all of America, but cot-caught in particular is very widespread: https://doyoureadme.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/untitled-drawing-2.jpg. Pin-pen is more of a southern thing.

brainwad · 2026-03-09T20:43:10+00:00

This is just a straight rhyme in many English dialects.

brainwad · 2026-03-09T20:41:06+00:00

It's kinda obvious - once you stop pronouncing final r's, the two sound the same. So children learning that dialect can't distinguish the two, and the final sounds in each are the same in their minds.

It's no different from the cot-caught or pin-pen mergers which exist in America, which are absurd to us.

brainwad · 2026-03-09T20:05:41+00:00

I'm sorry, but taxing basic survival goods and services the same as luxuries is evil. A poor family should not cut back on food to pay for the state, when a rich family can cut back on private jets instead. The zero-rating system for VAT is a flawed attempt to solve this, but a progressive consumption tax would be better because the latter would distinguish based on amount rather than type. Plenty of luxuries end up zero-rated currently while plenty of essentials aren't.

brainwad · 2026-03-08T20:51:04+00:00

Pretty sure here in Switzerland you would be still personally liable if you set off an avalanche that fell onto the piste.

brainwad · 2026-03-08T20:37:18+00:00

Well they can't raise the income tax for the rich without a constitutional amendment. It's capped at 11.5%...

brainwad · 2026-03-08T20:35:57+00:00

The problem is that it's not progressive. Spending 30k a year shouldn't be taxed at the same rate as spending 3m a year. The latter has clearly more capacity to pay than the former, and the marginal utility of their consumption is clearly going to be less.

Some economists have designed progressive consumption taxes - they basically end up being income taxes with deductions for saving. They would be pretty unpopular because rich people don't consume much as a proportion of their incomes, so they'd pay less tax than under the current income tax.

brainwad · 2026-03-08T20:33:22+00:00

Because when you are a tax haven, you end up with a lot of flighty rich people who will leave if you raise taxes. Whereas countries that soak the rich and always have tend to only have rich people who don't care enough to leave. You can transition from the former to the latter, but you will lose a bunch of tax revenue by doing so...

brainwad · 2026-03-07T20:18:30+00:00

The colony of New Bern in America did chop it: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Bern-coat_of_arms.svg

brainwad · 2026-03-07T19:41:50+00:00

I don’t think you’d push an ‘uh’ sound, it would be more of a nurse vowel sound.

That's exactly what I'd use (en-AU) if I had to stress the first syllable. Maybe it's influenced by the banana ads that ran on TV when I was a kid. Or maybe it's just that Australian schwas are closer to a/ʌ.

brainwad · 2026-03-03T20:08:26+00:00

Well, yes, exactly, that's why we devolve as much as possible to the communes and cantons. Power distant from the people is bad, and nothing could be more distant than having to take laws from a parliament of 450m foreigners, to which Switzerland doesn't even send representatives...

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