alt Hacker NewsThis is such a fascinating referendum. The population is at 9.1m, and at 9.5m it appears they'll stall asylum and family reunification, and at 10m they'll execute a Swexit - Switzerland isn't in the EU but it allows freedom of movement to EU nationals. Boy it is interesting to see what's going on in the world right now. There were so many things that I saw growing up as relatively solid but I just happened to grow up in an era of European unity and American primacy. I thought that even Brexit was a one-off event, but perhaps it is the other way around and European unity is a temporary thing that fragments easily. An interesting age, in the Austen Chamberlain sense.
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> There were so many things that I saw growing up as relatively solid but I just happened to grow up in an era of European unity and American primacy
European unity works well in a world of mostly-stable populations. Having mass migrations from large, relatively empty countries, to pretty full ones, is going to make the full ones increasingly expensive to make housing for, to power, and to water.
Change is the only constant.
Nothing lasts forever. Good times will come and go and so would bad times.
I think as humans we are used to small time frames which are proportional to our own lifetime.
But the world: say climate, population, geology etc. moves at a much different cycle, if at all you can call it a cycle since none of the iterations are exactly the same.
So the lesson is this: change is coming. Change will always be coming. Embrace it.
If you like something, you have to struggle to preserve it as much as you can, for as long as you can, but you can never make it permanent.
> execute a Swexit
It wouldn’t be full Chexit. Just renegotiating and then rejecting the Schengen chapter. It would then be up to the EU to execute its Guillotine clause.
Elderly people in our village in east Europe used to be super suspicious of the EU project and would say that European countries get along like "a sack of horns." Hopefully they were wrong :-)
I was a teenager when 9/11 happened.
Until that point, I thought wars were a stupid thing that humanity realized were stupid and stopped doing.
damn, the word 'execute' reverberated interestingly
> interesting
The word I'd choose instead is "concerning" if not "scary".
Just wait til Canada joins the EU and we will have a rethinking of any such unions as not necessarily being related to geographic location.
It veers too close to Logan’s Run when they cap things like that. I’m sure it’s just policy action at the various thresholds but it sure sounds odd.
Calling it a population cap for something that seems to be about stricter border controls is a wild marketing choice.