I grew up in Fort Collins, and live here now after an itinerant period, and I'll say that overall the city government has always been far-sighted, a good steward of the tax money they get, and provided good public services.
This is definitely true for my 7 year old daughter. She's an avid reader, but even when I buy a book she is very interested in reading (typically the next in a current series) on a Kindle rather than getting her a hard copy, she'll end up reading something else.
Isn't that a chicken-and-egg problem? IMO if a society treats people like responsible adults they'll rise up to the task. The question is of course how to transition there. I can't say to have any recipes, but I'm reasonably sure that taking away civic rights is counterproductive. Maybe try to get one electable political party that makes it their thing to protect and even expand citizen's rights and allow for more self responsibility? I don't like the Libertarians for some of their antisocial ideas, but at least that's where they seem to have gotten something right.
if there would be public vote about this in all european countries, most if not all would ban it. that's the current attitude unfortunately. swiss are just the most free nation to decide these things themselves
I'm sure it has genetic components, but the question for me is rather whether those components differ between peoples. I'd assume that evolutionary pressure selected quite heavily for people who can be trusted to cooperate.
But there are also obvious evolutionary pressures towards self-interest, even when it means breaking promises/trustworthiness. (Remember, selection happens at the level of individuals, not of whole groups and societies!) The balance between the two pressures could be different in different environments. In other words, it's quite possible that one environment could select more for trustworthiness, another more for untrustworthy self-interest.
Not being a dick and working together without everyone constantly on edge that everyone else is going to screw them the first chance they get is a totally valid strategy, even from a self-interest standpoint.
Actually, what I recall from reading studies of adoption and criminality (it was a few years ago, though, so I don't remember the authors or exact titles to find them) the "the children taken into care at a young age turn into bad people just like their parents anyway" has a truth in it - if you analyze the heritability of antisocial behavior and criminality (and the heritability clearly exists) to see how much of it is e.g. "nature vs nurture" or genetics vs environment and socioeconomic status, then about half of it still remains in case of adoption to a 'low risk' environment.
One plausible explanation for some of that, which wasn't analyzed there, but has some basis in other research is that things like risk-taking behavior or being prone to addiction are quite genetic.
But in any case, for many(most? all?) "moral" characteristics saying that they're only about "poverty, inequality and values" is wishful thinking. Yes, they are in part about that, but they are also in part about genetics; the answer to "nature or nurture" pretty much always is both.
"The best fitting model for 41 key studies (58 independent samples from 14 month old infants to adults; N=27,147) included equal proportions of variance due to genetic (0.50) and non-shared environmental (0.50) influences, with genetic effects being both additive (0.38) and non-additive (0.12). Shared environmental effects were unimportant in explaining individual differences in impulsivity."
So impulsivity (which is obviously closely related to your propensity to betray the trust of your fellow-man for a short-term gain) appears to be a combination of genetics and random luck (non-shared environment).
I don't know about trustworthiness in particular, but lots and lots of personality traits turn out to have a heritability of about 50% (or more), so much so that it's a decent rule of thumb to guess that a trait is about 50% heritable.
We got an Echo over the holidays, and watching my 7, 5 and 3 year old daughters interact with it has given me a glimpse of what bringing home a black-and-white TV in the 50s must have been like: Objectively it's pretty limited, but it (voice-driven interaction, rather than the Echo specifically) is so obviously the future it's striking.
Separately, I've told my daughters that they probably won't ever need to learn to drive--cars will probably do it for them by the time they are driving age.
They've put two and two together, and the other day I overheard them saying "Someday we'll be able to call an Alexa car and have it take us where ever we want."
I've had the same experience. My 5 year old came down stairs the other morning and put on some music for herself (Bowie, even) which I thought was wonderful.
Though it was pretty funny/depressing hearing how broken the experience was this morning.
"Alexa, play Moana" - "Here's songs by Nirvana"
"No, Alexa, play Moana soundtrack" - "I think you might like music by Adelle"
"What? Alexa, play the Moana original motion picture soundtrack" - "Playing Moana original motion picture soundtrack"
We're so close, but we still have a long way to go.
The other night, sleepless and excited by having found a few commands around podcasts / reading kindle books back (apparently "read from my Kindle" is an Audible command, grr) I tried:
"Alexa, play me a podcast"
Sadly, I got:
"Here's a station you might like: Linkin Park"
...it even got my request right in the app. I have no idea how it managed that "fulfilment".
Well, unless you ever annoy Amazon, bounce a check, charge back any purchases, or get put on any government no-drive list. Then you're walking for the rest of your life.
I watched my friends' two-year-old stand in front of their Echo excitedly and yell "Alexa Alexa Alexa Alexa!" Her "toddler accent" meant it had no idea she was trying to say the keyword.
My four-year-old son is the same way. He talks to my Google Home all the time, asking it weird questions (which it sometimes answers! "Hey Google, are you a robot?" "I prefer to think of myself as your friend."), getting it to tell him jokes, turning our Christmas tree on and off via IFTTT and a WeMo switch. It's all very natural for him.
I think we still far away from "Someday we'll be able to call an Alexa car and have it take us where ever we want.". It might or might not be possible. We need anyway several leap in AI innovations to achieve that.
Swiss culture is very small-c conservative, with heavy value on making rational, pragmatic decisions. It is no surprise that they have a system which reflects that, and performs well for that population.
Perhaps the NSA is savvy enough to know that a heroic effort isn't needed, and that the FBI is mostly looking to set precedent rather than find anything worth the cost and risk of chip-hacking.
I'm pretty confident that they'll do this well.