>> Especially with modern medical care and support, it's relatively low risk

Low risk of death, sure. But ripping pelvic floor and getting diabetes is not a low risk.

I'm still waiting for full self-driving car autopilot to materialize.

You can tax wealth, assets and paper wealth as well. Some countries like Switzerland does it. Annual tax is 0.05-0.3% and that what should billionaires pay to the society.

You can and Pollock paintings will go for 80 mil instead of 110 and luxury assets will drop in price but will still be owned by same people. Switzerland is tiny so not very constrained. There is some elasticity for converting paper wealth into physical things but it is miniscule. I think COVID should've being a pretty strong lesson there.

>> Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods

Is it? What is the cost of bag of rice? Potatoes? lentils?

Anyone who believes something like this you can be 100% sure doesn't know how to cook even the most basic of staple foods. Cooking your own food is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper and, with a few cheap spices and seasonings, almost always tastier. The only valid argument is prep time here, and that too even only applies to certain kinds of foods.

Because there is no point in reporting such complains. Just a waste of time.

>> It’s going to be difficult to achieve this without the establishment of a single official language

Swiss confederation solved this while having 4 official languages. Language is not the problem, especially nowadays when everything could be translated in a second.

Ehhh, the story of Swiss multilingualism is more than a bit romanticized. A lot of people under 40 know their region's language, English at a decent level, and at best a barely passable 2nd national language (exception would be those living in the actually bilingual regions).

I think there's a strong case to be made that, while the different Swiss linguistic regions strongly prefer to associate together, in reality they draw a lot from the countries they share their languages & borders with when it comes to business and markets, etc. But between linguistic regions, there is additional friction for sure. If anything, the share competency in English has been a major boon.

Source: been living in Switzerland for 10 years and very interested in its system.

Why ship owner is paying for the insurance while it's a captain making all decisions?

>> taxes are complicated to implement, I'm not sure how can you implement a progressive yet fair system without loopholes

It's hard, but possible. However the goal of people who created current tax code is exactly opposite: to create system with loopholes.

US tax code is a mess, there should be less amount of different taxes, more unified taxes.

And it's really hard to land a job in Switzerland simply because there is a small market with tendency to offshore everything except high management.

Swissre, UBS and many others all have open positions in Spain/Poland/India, not actually in Switzerland

Actual formal engineering jobs in Switzerland come with benefits gold plating better than full federal government employees in the USA. And they’re almost as hard to sack.

Nobody gives out positions like that easily to non geniuses. And even for more ordinary very smart candidates, there are enough of them to have a few hoops to jump through.

For old ice car the solution often is to swap with used parts from wrecked vehicles. Not suitable for batteries.

We had a 2010 Ford Transit van (diesel) and after 189000km, we sold it because the parts were becoming too hard to source (disclaimer: in New Zealand).

For old EVs the solution is to deal with used parts from wrecked vehicles. It can absolutely be suitable for batteries.