As a Swiss guy, I must say I only see this in rural areas. It wouldn't work in big cities like Geneva I think (too many people living in urban areas who don't respect our wonderful country and that's a shame).
This is actually fairly common in rural areas in America too. Maybe someone sets up a bunch of pumpkins, apples, etc at the end of their driveway (which in rural America can be measured in KM) and a box to put money in.
Sometimes there will be someone out at their fruit stand, but most of the time it runs on the honor system with a money slot where you pay for your produce.
I see this with eggs and wood a lot in the more rural areas of New England. I think it's a simple case where whatever (if any) shrinkage is still significantly less than the cost of monitoring
Yeah, it's a bit odd that they focused so much on the Swiss.
Even the article mentions it's widespread: "Unmanned stalls with vegetables can be found all over the world. Germany, Norway, the U.S., Australia, Canada, the UK are among the countries where the honor system isn’t any novelty."
Yeah, this sounds like an article written by someone who lives in a big city and has never been to rural America. This isn't even uncommon; its pretty darn standard. Another common, similar thing you see all over (climatically appropriate) America are fruit orchards where you pay for a bag upfront and you can fill it as full as you want (or take more than the bag, or not even pay for the bag if you're dishonest).
Oh this fruit orchard tradition is so wonderful! I remember going on an outing like this with my friends (We aren't American citizens) and we went absolutely nuts, going on a binge carrying and eating fruits. (We were really hungry after a long road trip). We all felt appropriately guilty afterwards and apologised.
Oh, trust me; those orchards are a cash cow. There's practically no amount of fruit you could have taken which would have caused them material damage. Most of them don't even make most of their money from the fruit; they'll usually have little shops, or processed fruit goods (jams, syrups), or food, or hay rides as well. There's one near me that does the fruit-stuff during the summer, then converts into a haunted farm-type attraction in the fall, and the owner says they make a ton more money in the fall season. The "pick your own fruit" is just to get people in the door, and they usually overcharge like crazy for the bags under the assumption that their customers (A) are gonna take a ton, and (B) will end up buying some other stuff on-site.
Yeah but those pick your own fruit orchards are usually a really bad deal. Around here in Seacoast New England, for example apples, you are paying more for the privilege of picking your own apples then buying them at the supermarket.
It is pretty common in Vermont and it is not only about veggies (meat and poultry too). You can just write a check or pay by cash and take change(if you need) from the cash register which is open. It is not based on the honor system (pay as much as you want) but on decency and trust, you have to weight everything and calculate price for goods by yourself but there is no one who is watching you.
It seems to me that such a system makes people show their best. Surely there is a percentage of people who may not act very well, but I believe that there are more good people anyway.
Being from Gimel (a small town in Vaud), a lot of the stories in the article remind me of happy memories growing up.
Switzerland has been struggling with an identity crisis of late as a lot of poorer immigrants from war-torn places (Albania when I was growing up, Maghreb and Middle East now) have been moving in to the cities, oftentimes not respecting our old traditions. Theft and petty crime is on the rise, and almost always at the hands of those poorer immigrants. It's led to a backlash that hasn't really brought out the best in us.
It's sad to see the cohesion and trustworthiness of the Swiss society disappear, though I guess it was somewhat inevitable.
I live in Zurich (biggest city in Switzerland), and know of several such installations in the city itself. "Cities" in Switzerland are really not that urban ;-)
For most print mediums, circulation is more important than sales. Because higher circulation generates more Advertising revenue, which is higher than sales.
But they can't give a newspaper/magazine away, because that would bump them to a lower category for which advertisers pay less.
The solution is to sell as cheap as your desired advertising demographic allows, and incurs lots and lots of "loss".
That is why even in the USA (land of the people-will-grab-anything-not-bolted-down) some newspapers still have that coin+trust box for newspapers.
Yes, and the next logical question would be: what has changed in Geneva these past 30 years? Hints: individualism, globalization, multiculturalism.
My father told me that when he served for our national army back then, soldiers just left their weapons alone in front of the train station while they were having a coffee before going into the train.
IMO: it has to do with the number of repeat interactions you will have with people.
When you interact more than twice with the same people, Game Theory says it is better to act honorably. At 2 interactions it is roughly balanced, and with a single interaction it is better (as an individual) to cheat. These assume balanced payoff/penalty, but changing the penalty only works to a certain extent and humans are very bad at evaluating the payoff of low-risk high-penalty actions, essentially becoming used to the risk after a while as they learn from repeated actions that they don't get caught (until they do).
So, the question is why repeat interactions have gone down. I guess larger communities, and better transport means just in terms of regular day-to-day you don't have many repeat interactions, and this changes mindsets of people inclined to crime in terms of what they think they can get away with, at least to start with.
It also explains to some extent the distrust small communities have to strangers, where they are not used to living with that regular stranger-danger that people in cities constantly deal with.
Sorry I didn't know Breitbart. I posted a link to this website, because it was in English and most of the sources I have are from Swiss newspapers (in French or in German). For example, this link (from the Swiss national TV) :
Please note that the falling IQ has nothing to do with the foreigners, at least not according to the linked study; IQ is going down even within families.
These things are not mutually exclusive. The study [1] showed that the data indicated that IQs between brothers reduced far less rapidly than the IQ for the population as a whole: "Between the 1975 and 1991 cohorts, the average annual decline estimated using within-family variation is attenuated by almost two-thirds relative to the across-family trend: −0.08 IQ point per year versus −0.23 point per year (SI Appendix, Table S3, columns 1 and 3)."
They then extensively massaged the data to make this difference disappear, which is what yields the headline. They did provide perfectly valid justifications for such, including the fact that IQ testing data was missing disproportionately often from brothers where the brother who had data available was of a low IQ. They thus proposed that the high heritability of IQ would then suggest that the missing data is probably disproportionately weighted against IQ, so that's what they did.
Nonetheless this massaging of the data opens the door to methodological problems. It enables researchers to choose the factors that they consider most relevant and to determine effective weighting for such. You will tend to find in this scenario that individuals who have the preconceived notion of 'x' end up choosing factors that show 'x'. And vice versa for those who assume 'y.' This isn't necessarily even malfeasance, but simply the fact that trying to control for a practically infinite number of possible confounding issues is as much an art as a science, and preconceived notions are going to end up being reflected in what one chooses.
For instance my bias is self evident and if I were going to pursue this sort of balancing I would certainly be sure to try to control for factors such as increasing paternal age, fertility assistance, and other things which can have negative effects on IQ. Some studies have even connected higher IQ parents to various disorders including autism which may mitigate against the missing IQ data bias. Controlling for these things is important. The reason that these researchers neglected them is not out of malfeasance, but because you can come up with a practically infinite number of things you need to control for. And so peoples biases end up reflecting the issues they find important.
The ultimate point is that I think the most impartial idea is to look at the data alone, so much as possible. This study made some fairly extreme changes to the data. Of course if my biases were different, I'd probably be singing a different tune. Isn't social "science" fun?
TL;DR: If you have legal residency in Switzerland, they'd rather let you serve your time outside of prison; but without residency, you'd probably leave the country if they don't put you in prison. Maybe blame Schengen but it seems most Swiss would rather have borders that are faster to cross...
> The number of foreign detainees has increased significantly. 30 years ago, 56 percent of prison inmates were foreigners, most recently 71 percent. Weber says: "The legislator has increasingly introduced alternatives to prison for Swiss prisoners. I'm thinking of charitable work or electronically supervised house arrest. "
> However, such measures would only be suitable for people with a low risk of escape, ie persons with a secured, legal stay in Switzerland. These are mostly Swiss, but not foreign offenders resident abroad.
> Exactly the proportion of such criminal tourists has recently increased sharply. Over the last decade, they already account for the majority, 52 percent of all inmates. The society has become generally more mobile in the last 30 years, the same applies to offenders, the criminal law professor. "You can travel cheaper than before. So it is more likely that they go from, for example, Eastern European countries to Switzerland for a few days and then travel back."
I don't mean that at all! I am simply suggesting that mixing multiple cultures, religions and belief systems is harmful to the identity and the self-trust of a nation.
For example, in my city, they are building new pavements. They are building them high enough so a crazy Islamic guy can't run into pedestrians with his car (like one did in France and in Germany).
As a Swiss citizen, I have the right to say I am not happy with that without being accused of racism!
Of course you are welcome here if you are intelligent and respectful (like all the US people I have met here).
> mixing multiple cultures, religions and belief systems is harmful to the identity and the self-trust of a nation
This is true only if the peoples of a country refuse to mix and to seek a common national civic identity based on peaceful resolution of disputes and respect for the rights of minorities, whether cultural or religious.
It remains true that one thing no democracy can survive is a large fraction of citizens with contempt for the values that make self-government possible: respect for the rule of law rather than of strong men; a desire to help people who cannot return the favor, to list a few. This does indeed go to your "belief system" point.
But here in the US anyway, I'd suggest most of the rot of the civic belief system has been grown right at home.
I’m very proud to be Italian, and proud and love my countrymen.
If I were a Swiss, though, I would not leave my rifle, or any valuable, around in a Swiss train station if Italians are around. Or English, French, Germans, etc.
I wouldn’t be afraid if there were a group of Japanese though.
What's interesting about Japan is that it's a mono-cultural society with high IQ and this country has not surprisingly the lowest crime rate in the world. Italy and Switzerland were like that a few decades ago.
BTW, what do you think of Salvini? Switzerland chose not to be in the European Union and it was our best decision ever IMO. It's like a startup: it's better to be lean and agile.
It's still the case but I wonder for how long. Not because of theft but I assume the newspapers that survived are probably making the bulk of their income from subscribers. I haven't seen anyone putting coins into those vending boxes in a long time.
> too many people living in urban areas who don't respect our wonderful country
I think people from lots of different countries feel that way. There’s something about being connected to the land that gives one a love for both the land and the human culture connected to it. That connection to the land is easily lost in urban environments.
