Downside: Sometimes laws can be delayed for 1+ years due to a referendum. The political process is slower and big reforms are much harder.
Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.
Further additions to your comment. Expanding on your downside: Big reforms like giving women the right to vote only took effect in 1971 on the federal level. On a cantonal level, Appenzell-Innerhoden had to be forced into it in the 90s by the Tribunal Federal, but well.
I'd add some advantages to the upside as well: some changes require a referendum, such as changes to the constitution. But there's more: a popular initiative can be launched and if you collect 100,000 signatures in 18 months, you can force a vote on your own law. This is most commonly done by political parties and adjacent organisations, so it is at least feasible that a privacy-conscious organisation could launch an initiative to make it illegal to store any kind of user-identifying data. It is even possible private citizens could do it. There would likely be a "contre-projet" arguing why this isn't a good idea, but there is often a for/against for any initiative or referendum and they get to present their views in detail (in paper booklets, the vote swiss app, and on the federal chancellery website).
Further upsides: unlike US/British/some other countries, nobody has a 50% voting block in the Swiss parliament and it has remained a coalition since the modern iteration of the country (since 1848).
Basically Swiss politics is extremely deliberative. I honestly think "we will quit Switzerland if they do this!" is a bit of a hyperbolic reaction.
Ah, so the referendum isn’t then scheduled for a date in short order if the requisite signatures are collected but held at the next regularly scheduled election? Fair enough.
Each will have 1-4 issues (approx) scheduled. Elections for politicians happen every 5 years, but no need to wait for those. What takes time (for votations) is the process: you have to verify the signatures once they're handed in at the federal chancellery and then decide when to schedule it.
If you look at the price tiers per country (https://www.theworldranking.com/statistics/671/youtube-premi...), you'll be able to see why - as a user in Switzerland - so far I wasn't willing to pay 250$ every year for YouTube Premium, it"s simply not worth the price to me. With less steep pricing, I'd pay.
> It's hard to find a building build after WO2 that's actually pretty, let alone an entire neighborhood.
Hold on, we're talking about Barcelona... The phallus tower (Torre Glòries) certainly has a certain aesthetic ;)
A bit on the more serious side: If you ask city planners, they will probably be able to list thousands of examples of beautiful neighbourhoods in modern cities. They do exist, but I agree that a lot of modern buildings appear quite "soulless" and exchangeable.
The main thing that changed "recently" is that NIST standardized ML-KEM (aka Kyber) for post-quantum cryptography, which was important for implementors. However, ML-KEM is still quite new, so it is mostly used in hybrid schemes with the "store-now-decrypt-later" threat in mind.
Other than that, I don't think anything fundamentally changed during the last 10-20 years.
I can't confirm that. Rust's safety features allow moving fast without fear of subtle bugs.
Developing in Rust can feel like fighting the compiler though when choosing approaches / architecture that aren't a good fit for Rust. This happens a lot when people only have little Rust experience. For example: Writing a linked list can be quite challenging in Rust due to self-referential types. With more experience in Rust, developer learn how to best structure the code so that it doesn't result in this friction.
For Zigbee, I can recommend using the Zigbee2MQTT (https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/) integration instead of HomeAssistant's built-in ZHA system. It might be a bit more complex to set up, but it's very powerful and works fantastically. (User "simon42" on YouTube has some good videos about the topic, but they're in German.)
Just this month, there was a court case in Switzerland where an ATC was charged and convicted because he gave wrong instructions to a military jet, which then crashed into a rock wall. The case was quite interesting to follow, due to the various implications of a conviction or acquittal. It had quite some media coverage.
(Note that this was a military court, not a civil court. Proceedings might be different in these cases, even though both civil and military ATCs work for the same company - Skyguide.)
Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.
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