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Comment by krisdol | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that's a downside, unless you prefer hearing prayer 5 times a day. I fled Bosnia during the war, but I visit it occasionally and each time it appears more religiously extremist than the last. All other countries should take a look at what has happened there and consider the importance of implementing cultural integration in addition to economic integration when accepting large incoming migrant populations.

When you hire for a company you want your dream team to have a diverse background of ideas and experiences but that doesn't mean you let them work on the goals and products they worked on at their previous employer with whatever processes they want.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not sure the specific minaret law is a downside from my experience, but that is not to say that your overall point on populist reforms is invalid. I was just focusing on the specific law.

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> I'm not sure that's a downside, unless you prefer hearing prayer 5 times a day

Is/Was prohibited anyway in Switzerland, so this vote didn't change anything on that fact. Though this argument has been used during the campaign before the vote.

A good point. I'm not familiar with the switzerland law or referendum.

You deal with that by restrictions of noise. Outlawing minarets to stop noise is like banning vodka to stop alcohol drinking. It doesn't make any sense.

It is very common in many places to restrict highly visible outside advertisement (e.g. the Hollywood sign would not have happened in Switzerland). Visual attention-grabbing is considered just as much as annoying as noise. It seems very reasonable to not exclude religious communities from that rule.

I do agree however, that things like minarets should better be left to a general building code addressing the problem of architectural shouting contests without explicitly mentioning religion. The stupidity of having the literal phrase (well, in german) "it is forbidden to erect minarets" in the constitution should serve as a warning to anyone who praises direct democracy all too blindly.

I really don't get it why cases like that are solved with a polar vote (change or no change), not with approval voting offering more than two possible results on different levels of compromise. There seems to be a tiny glimse of it (only on the wiki in german: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppeltes_Ja_mit_Stichfrage ) but that is just three way between no change, proposal and one administrative counter-proposal, which still leaves the door wide open to polarism.

Yes, Approval Voting with multiple options would have been better. They did this in Landerd, Holland last year, where voters had six options to select from with regard to how to restructure the municipality (e.g. merge with various bordering municipalities). I believe one of the options was "Status Quo". Voters could select any number of options.

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