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Comment by mr_mitm | Hacker News Reader

I, a German, went to Switzerland for vacation once. I talked to a Swiss guy about how I like Switzerland and all that. I told him how impressed I was with how organized everything is and how well everything works. The train system and public transport in general is wonderful compared to the one we have in Germany, for example. To my surprise, he said something along the line of "yeah well, it only looks like that from the outside".

Perhaps the tendency to complain is a necessity to achieve a high level of efficiency.

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I moved from Sweden to Switzerland, and I don't know what that guy was talking about.

Switzerland is an extremely well run country.

I mean it helps that there's around 9M people living there, 1/10th of Germany or about the same amount as London or New York.

Also helps to accumulate wealth by taking care of global blood-money and being a diplomatic hub :) and let's not forget the tons of gold we got gifted about a hundred years ago, sadly can't quite remember where we got that from.

> Also helps to accumulate wealth by taking care of global blood-money and being a diplomatic hub

People say that, but ETFs that invest into plain old boring sectors of Swiss industry give long term returns half way between USA AI insanity and everything else in the world. So they must be doing something right with their industrial economy as well.

we got some huge, international companies here. pharma, banks, insurance, food and beverages, resource trading and a more-or-less stable political system.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/switzerland/largest-companies...

It also helps that Switzerland has a decentralized and direct democratic system of governance.

The rest is just noise.

I suspect natives have a more nuanced view of their home country, compared to expats who end up getting a tinted view. At least it likely takes a long time for an outsider to truly understand how things work. Reading the newspapers isn't representative, you know...

The natives have their own biases.

If you call "must more anecodtal knowledge" a bias, I give you that.

Do you know, that by now Switzerland frequently refuses German trains to enter the country, because of delays? They don't want Deutsche Bahn mismanagement and delays to affect their own train network. Very reasonable to put a stop to this.

Yes

What they do is very interesting, though IMO "refuse to enter the country" sounds harsher than it actually is.

If an inbound German train is late to Basel by more than 20 minutes, the Swiss run their own substitute train from Basel (they keep rolling stock on standby). The replacement train runs to the original timetable so that local passengers are unaffected. The late train is then pulled out of service at Basel (there are frequent onward connections).

They do something similar at Schaffhausen.

Trains that are late into St. Margrethen are made to queue behind local traffic.

That sounds like an excellent solution for locals.

But it also seems very inefficient because of the need to keep rolling stock in reserve, ready to go just in case. That’s a lot of maintenance, staff, and machine time to burn.

> But it also seems very inefficient because of the need to keep rolling stock in reserve, ready to go just in case. That’s a lot of maintenance, staff, and machine time to burn.

Considering how often the Deutsche Bahn isn't on time (I say this as a German), the SBB should have use for this rolling stock nearly all the time - so it's rather efficient. :-)

It was the locals who decided that it was worth the extra hassle and expense (and that doing the same thing at St. Margrethen wasn't).

There was probably a referendum at some point. :)

I am not sure whether the stats are comparable, but I read somewhere that about half of Deutsche Bahn trains are late into Basel (and there are many trains a day). While I don't know this for a fact, it wouldn't surpise me if patterns of delays are relatively predictable and can be planned for.

There was some talk about just ending those routes at Basel at some far-away point in the future, but I'm not sure if that's something that's been decided.

Inefficient compared to what? DB being on time is not an alternative that the Swiss can choose.

That inefficiency is the very reason, why the Swiss have a more reliable network. The DB used to have all these inefficiency too and was reliable. Then they decided to cut all that and that's the current state now.

Personally I think that there is no "real inefficiency", the money just achieves something else, that you don't consider the goal yet. Sometimes that is making someone else richer, sometimes that is making the system more reliable in ways you couldn't plan.

As southern European that has lived a couple of years in Switzerland and eventually moved into Germany, I always mention that from flexibility and rules point of view, being in Germany versus Switzerland, feels so much better in Germany.

Sorry for the stereotypes, it was just how it felt dealing with everything, which is how everything gets to be so organised in first place, and the difference on similar matters in Germany, still I go back into Switzerland with some regularity.

Swiss voted against tax reduction in the past. I do not know of that many countries, where people would have done that. So the way they think is a bit different.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/poison-withholding-tax...

If you have a high ROI it's a bad idea to stop putting money in. Logically all people should be for high taxes, but they are not, because they don't believe that their taxes fund things they profit from and that it's easier to put less money in, then to fix that.

A normal sized plot with a house listed to be torn down on in outskirts of Zurich costs 7mil. A 2 bedroom apartment on the countryside costs 2mil. You will not pay this in a lifetime from 2 good level swiss salaries.

Are you Swiss? I'm no expert but from talking to Swiss people, their mortgage system is very different from the American one, and people are in no hurry to pay off their mortgages, and often they're never really paid off. Americans might find that appalling but the Swiss people I've spoken to find it normal. Tax incentives also help with this.

It is the UK/Nordic system which I find morbidly bad. It already assumes you will never pay off the property and you pass it down to family and children, possibly multiple generations. It allows for property prices to go to the moon instead of incentivising for affordability. Makes for a system giving up owning property. How did we humans come to this.

Allowing financial system abstraction on one end, and allowing our brains to rot on the other.

Swiss people often don't see how awesome swiss is themself except they have been away for a longer while to see how shitty every other place tends to be.

Ex. Most people here think Europe is generally this clean. They never bothered looking out of their car in literally any other neighbor country.

Source: Austria living in Switzerland who also lived in Thailand, Malaysia, Czech, .. for a while.

> Perhaps the tendency to complain is a necessity to achieve a high level of efficiency.

I am pretty convinced about that. Especially after having lived and worked in other countries where people like to complain less. If people will just accept and not complain, problems also will not get fixed.

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