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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

TBQH it's crazy to have 2,100 distinct choices. Why isn't there a national-level host that frees municipalities from having to think about it?

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Switserland is a true confederation. It consists of 26 cantons and in most ways each canton is sovereign.

As an example, swiss cantons are considerably more independent from the Swiss Confederacy (i.e. what most people know and call 'Switserland' the entity) than the states of the USA are.

As an example of how far that goes: Switzerland essentially does not have a capital. The cantons usually do, though. Bern is the seat of the Federal Assembly and is usually considered the capital, more because social norms and systems are based on the notion that all countries must have one.

Swiss cantons can work together and often do, but evidently, not on this.

Even things like citizenship and elections are fully decentralized, which has some.. interesting outcomes sometimes, like the fact that one canton didn't allow women's suffrage until 1990 (!) [0] or that a lady who's lived there for 34 years had her citizenship application denied because the local dairy farmers found her animal rights activism "annoying". [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807

Ultimately the people are sovereign, but realistically the Kantons are. Which is why that often cited „lady denied citizenship“ is incomplete. The Kantonal court overturned the decision of the municipality and gave her citizenship.

It’s also why it took considerable more effort to force Appenzell to accept women’s suffrage.

Citizenship is federal (you're a citizen of the country, not the canton), but the procedure for getting citizenship varies and usually involves being in good standing with the local community. Especially in rural areas this sometimes needs court intervention if people are being too arbitrary.

It’s a federal republic like the US and many others. (Edit to add: « federal state » may be s better term.)

is it though? I guess it depends on the definition you use. The line between federation and confederation is rather thin, and I believe those terms were historically even used as synonyms. Switzerland is at least called Confoederatio Helvetica, but you could probably argue it's a federation due to the centralized government. But then we also have to keep in mind that the sovereignty and the power of the country stays with the people and the cantons, and not the central government due to it's direct democracy.

> is it though?

The federal goverment and the federal assembly seem to think it is, maybe because the federal laws say so starting with the federal constitution.

yeah, that's true, a lot of stuff refers to it as a federation

Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations. Local self-determination. Amazing place if you ask me would move back there in a heartbeat.

They also (at the cantonal level) have disparate education systems, with classes and grade levels mismatching between neighboring cantons. Yet, if you check what typical Swiss high school students are actually leaning (say at College de Candolle in Geneva), they are learning 3–5 languages, real literary analysis, and set theory. So somehow it’s working despite not having some perfect plan handed down by central authority. Hmm.

Incredible to see my high school mentioned here

OK, also pretty wild to just say "typical Swiss high school" without mentioning the selective system that steers people into and, overwhelmingly, away from the collèges.

Yeah, basically 20-25% are going to gymnase, and the rest are split between professional and "generalist" student.

In Vaud, they merged the generalist class with the professional ones.

Literacy is dog shit even in the so call native language. Until 11-12, what they cover at school is barely better than what kids learn at 8-9 in other countries. The change in middle school for the 12yo+ are huge, and 2-3 years are caught back within less than a year.

Kids often struggle because of that huge difference. Needless to say, the bottom 75% are in even worse place, trying to study with kids who have no places at school.

Marvelous system.

Which are also interesting when you get certified in a trade school in one canton and then move into another one.

I remember when I used to live there, early 2000's, this was a problem, having to get an additional permit.

The flip side of this is that you can't possibly use a canton Zurich 1st grade arithmetic exercise book in a school in canton Aargau, despite 2+2 not depending on the canton (it would if the Swiss had any choice in the matter).

Well, without advocating that municipalities would be compelled to use it, isn't there at least some national service that they could opt into? I am sure that most of the red on this map is because it's a cinch to get Microsoft or Google to host your email. Of course in California we consider GSuite itself to be the green choice.

> Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations.

And three republics! Geneva, Ticino, and Neuchâte.

I love going to Geneva and seeing the personification statues of the Republic of Geneva and of the Swiss Confederation standing side by side with the same height.

> TBQH it's crazy to have 2,100 distinct choices.

It's crazy to have 2100 distinct municipalities? The site isn't showing "here are 2100 different email hosts that municipalities in Switzerland use," but rather "here are the 2100 municipalities in Switzerland, and if you click you can see what host each one uses."

There's plenty of overlap, just from a cursory look.

I dunno. I live in washington state, in a county, a city, a fire district, a public utility district, a library district, a park district, a school district, a transportation district, and probably one or two other things. Some of them share borders with the city, but not all of them, and my city happens to be an island which makes sharing borders easy.

There's lots of reasons to separate municipal agencies, even if they cover the same geography, so it doesn't surpise me that each canton has about 100 municpal agencies.

Freedom

What improvement?

You wouldn't end up contracting with some weird local nerds for critical systems?

It doesn’t say that each of the services they are using is some local small ISP, the whole point is to show they are also using large US companies.

Also, it would probably be easier to get a real human on the phone or proper support from the local nerds compared to Google.

I’ll take rsync.net

over OneDrive,

all day long.

As one example.

What local nerds? Usually you go to a so called "Systemhaus" for that. Like a contractor or I think you'd call it managed service provider. Some municipalities (or companies for that matter) get everything done by them, some have some admins but need some support in more complex matters. Completely professional and not some side gig, lol...

The issue is that the choice of those companies is sometimes to host your stuff on MS365...

It is up to the municipality to tell them where to host it. If you go there with no demands or restrictions they will take the easiest route and setting up a new mailserver is just really simple with exchange online. Additionally every license sold is a bit of MRR. So the incentive is quite high to sell m365. But it is up to the client and if the msp pushes too hard I'd go and look for another msp to be honest.

But you end up with 1 already large, foreign provider getting all your critical infra, at once?

Honestly yes. What's your threat model here? You don't want your systems held hostage by ransomware gangs. At local levels of government this is the main problem.

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