cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/86614

“Nearly everyone in Switzerland has been vaccinated and/or contracted and recovered from COVID-19. Their immune system has therefore been exposed to the coronavirus. In spring/summer 2023, the virus will likely circulate less. The current virus variants also cause rather mild illness,” Swiss health officials said.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/75431

• Nine months following the rollout of the COVID-19 mRNA “vaccines,” substantial birth rate drops were seen in 13 of 19 European countries, England and Wales (one entity based on how data is published), Australia, and Taiwan.
• The decline in births in Switzerland was the largest in 150 years – more than during two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the advent of widely available birth control.
• There was an 8.3% drop in the birth rate in Germany through three quarters of 2022. England and Wales had a 12% birth rate drop through June 2022, which is when their government stopped publishing data related to this.
• Taiwan reported an alarming birth rate drop, but its data are incomplete.
• Australian birth rates fell 21% from October to November 2021, followed by a 63% decrease from November to December 2021.

The text for the referendum has also already been completed and would stipulate that Switzerland’s population should not exceed 10 million until 2050. After 2050, this limit could be slightly increased but only due to organic, surplus births.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/70647

According to the government, such options would require too many changes to the country's constitution and laws at national and cantonal levels. They added now wasn't the right time to overhaul the system, citing a 2020 report via the national ethics commission.

Meanwhile, third-gender options on official documents are allowed in several European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Norway, and Belgium. An increasing number of western cou

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/68544

In the United States, the average decline in real wages for the entire population - across all sectors and income levels - was just over 2 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2022.

In Europe, Germany and Spain saw even more pronounced declines in purchasing power, with real incomes falling by just over 4 percent and 5 percent, respectively, nationwide.

Switzerland is for the time being one of the few economies analyzed that seems to have been spared.

cross-posted from: https://community.nicfab.it/post/21782

This is a very cool development in the world of government transparency. It’s not often a government entity forces another entity to expose information it would desperately like to keep secret. But it happened in Switzerland, following an open records court battle by Tagblatt, which sought information on export licenses granted to local surveillance tech purveyors. The agency in charge of the licenses didn’t want these revealed. The agency in charge of making determinations about what can be withheld from the public said, “Too bad.”

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/64858

Electric vehicles, which politicians have heavily subsidised as one of their primary policy responses to climate change, are just now crashing against that other great arm of the green agenda, namely renewable energy. You can’t drive everyone into ever greater dependence upon the electrical grid, while also orchestrating an energy transition to wind (which hardly blows in Germany, except in the north) and solar (which generates no meaningful power in the depths of the Central European winter). Gas from Russia was the magic ingredient that kept the whole renewables charade going, and we’re out of that now. There’s no way to cover up the failure; not even the green-friendly German media has any excuse or messaging angle here.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/59163

The U.S. and Europe can do better, Chaum believes. He acknowledges that “CBDCs are a big deal” in the world at the moment and is well aware of the fact that many believe CBDCs will be “the end of privacy in money.”

“It’s incredibly ironic for me that something I’ve been working on 40 years ago has become the actual pivotal distinction between the East and West – privacy in payments,” Chaum said.

“It really becomes a choice: are we going to have a kind of protection we are entitled to and that distinguishes us as a human rights-based democracy, or we basically are going to have the same thing as in China,” he added.

Switzerland topped the rankings with a score of 64.6 out of 100, the 12th time it has been named the world leader in innovation. The United States come second while the Sweden rounds off the top three.

cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/44526

Although Switzerland is one of the world’s richest countries, it is one of the least self-sufficient in terms of energy production, according to swissinfo.ch, with domestic electricity production covering just 25 percent of the country’s energy needs. It also does not have gas storage facilities of its own, meaning less gas from Europe would impact the country.

With the Swiss people anxiously awaiting Tuesday's governmental unveiling of their cunning plan to cope with potential energy shortages caused by the war in Ukraine, which is largely expected to push for voluntary cuts by consumers; Reuters reports that a group of Swiss politicians has formed 'Stop The Blackouts', which will launch a petition seeking a revision to the country's energy policy to guarantee adequate power supplies and keep nuclear as part of the mix.