The poll is by Tamedia, a reliable polling company (as much as any polling company can be). It has been widely cited in others media, including the public one.
There is significant support for the initiative. Initiatives tend to lose steam as time go by, so it might not be enough in the end, but like Brexit, don't underestimate it.
Let's not pretend like Tamedia doesn't have a bias that has a significant overlap with people who tend to follow the SVP vote suggestions. Much like it's well known NZZ will come out with articles against the 10 million cap because it has a significant FDP bias. Swiss private media has well known biases and is just thinly veiled propaganda most of the time.
But SRG does a good job at presenting things neutrally.
Of course nobody should underestimate the initiative. But I think you will agree that "Most Swiss back initiative to cap population at 10 million" is a sensationalist title since most people probably didn't make up their mind about their vote yet.
People in this thread are missing an interesting perspective:
We could, if we really wanted to, actually force this issue via referendum. It takes only 100k signatures to force a vote at the federal level, and less at lower levels.
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.
No country in Europe automatically grants citizenship just because you were born there. That’s a US thing. The closest are places like France where you can get it at 18 if you were born in France and meet a few more criteria.
And because Switzerland has mandatory military service, a lot of men born in Switzerland don’t _want_ to naturalize, especially those with EU passports.
Switzerland isn’t really that much different from other EU countries when it comes to citizenship, except for the 10 year requirement. That one is on the high side.
But for some reason it gets a lot of press as a particularly difficult country to naturalize in.
More accurately it's a New World thing. Almost all (30 out of 35) of the countries that have jus soli are North or South American. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli
For an international perspective, I can tell you that their competitors are doing very well in my corner of Europe, but the competitions quality is 10x-100x that of Beyond.
People buy competitors products because they are simply legitimately fine tasting products on their own, no vegetarian vs meat marketing required.
Beyond just has shit product, even if they genuinely were the first to develop the technology.
I guess I just don't get it. Obviously there's a decent sized market for vegetarian convenience food, but the meat-based branding, and attempts to copy texture/flavor of meat products would seem a turn off for that market. Good flavors and mouth feel (not tofu!) are important, but why explicitly try to copy meat unless meat eaters are the market you are targeting?
It'd make more sense to me to have different products/brands/advertising for different market segments. For the meat eaters the marketing would be "healthy/cheap, tastes just like beef/chicken" (which seems to be what Beyond Meat are going for), and for the vegetarians "delicious flavors, plant based, high in protein" (not "fake beef").
> Good flavors and mouth feel (not tofu!) are important
as one of those vegetarians who isn't particularly compelled by anything intentionally imitating meat, this is always somewhat funny to me. tofu already has good flavor and mouthfeel if prepared well, and presumably the rest of this alleged market segment is as capable of preparing tofu adequately as i am personally. so even if beyond was to pivot to (also) being beyond tofu, i fail to see how that would capture appreciably more of the market.
i could be wrong, but it's always seemed to me that most of the apparent demand for something better than tofu is not in fact coming from inside the house.
I love tofu too but mostly buy pre-prepared ones, open and bite it cold (yummy !) My current favorites are the "dried" Taifun like their Japanese Style.
sorry, can't say i've ever cooked from a recipe, but i highly recommend caramelizing already-crispy tofu with soy sauce, sriracha, and ginger (+ fish sauce if you swing that way)
Imagine you liked something, then realized that thing was bad and you didn't want to do it anymore. Then somebody offered you an alternative without the ethical problems.
I ate meat for like 30 years, then as I learned more about the realities of the meat industry in the US (suffering of animals, development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, pollution of air and water, exploitation and harm to workers, etc) I decided I couldn't buy meat anymore. I like having burgers and sausages and such, and Beyond meat gives me something that tastes good, is easy to cook, fits into a healthy diet.
Interesting way to frame the fact that the members of the european parliament voted 311 to 218 yesterday to reject the companies right to spy on you.
I'm the first person to admit the EU has democratic deficit, but MEPs are directly elected by EU citizens and they chose this in a democratic process. The companies are certainly making a choice with this blogpost.
I dunno, man. If tech companies responded to a failure to extend interim guidance by terminating their CSAM detection programs, and claimed when challenged that the EU made them do it, I'm pretty confident there would be much more outrage about "malicious compliance". If the EU wants companies to stop detecting CSAM until the final guidance arrives, they should say so directly.
What is the false negative rate and total rates? Without those we are missing too much. If the false negative rate (saying fine but it isn't) then the whole thing is useless. If the total cases are a few hundred (either CASM isn't a problem or those doing it use other platforms cause they know they will be caught on these) I don't care much that some are false positives - odds are it didn't get me.
Sure you can, random sampling should work. Don't just go making things up.
Of course actually carrying out that experiment would be absurd since I don't think anyone expects an appreciable percentage of clearnet material to be CSAM. The working assumption is that the goal is to find a needle in a haystack so GP's objection about needing to know the false negative rate is misguided.
I expect the equivelent of the fbi is investigating this using other sources and so has plenty of data without needing to randomly sample any non-suspect conversation. CASM has been a problem since before computers.
The report you're referring to by the European Commission [1] shows that the mass surveillance of Chat Control 1.0 is probably not very proportional. They even note themselves that "The available data are insufficient to provide a definitive answer to this question".
However, the "13-20%" that you're quoting is a dishonest propaganda number itself. It's the false positive rate that a single small company (Yubo) reported. The reported false positive rates of other companies are between 0.32% and 1.5%, which is still a high error rate in absolute numbers.
Just to be clear: the report itself is full of uncertainty, convenient half truths and false causality. They for example completely rely on Big Tech platforms themselves to count false positives when a moderation decision was reversed. Microsoft apparently even claims that no user ever appealed against a decision ("No appeals reported"). There is no independent investigation into the effectiveness of the regulation at all, while it is in direct conflict with fundamental rights and required to be proportional to its goals.
The section about "children identified" is also a complete mess where most countries can't even report the most basic data, and it isn't clear if mass surveillance contributed anything to new cases at all. But somehow they still conclude "voluntary reporting in line with this Regulation appears to make a significant contribution to the protection of a large number of children", which seems extremely baseless.
I'm sure a lot of HN commenters would agree that a CSAM detection system with a 13-20% false positive rate should be terminated, but we're not EU regulators. And you've got a sibling comment saying this would be malicious compliance, so even on HN it's not unanimous. Is there an example of a specific EU official, MEP, etc. explicitly stating that tech companies should not perform hash-based CSAM detection or should not perform CSAM detection at all?
Yes? The Pirate Party has MEPs, it’s not exactly difficult to find their quotes. 3 seconds of searching was enough to find the following quote from MEP Markéta Gregorová:
„We can now finally say with certainty that Chat Control 1.0 will end on April 3 without replacement. The European Parliament has sent a clear signal: it is time to put an end to this ineffective and disproportionate derogation from privacy rules. Under the pretext of protecting children, millions of private messages from innocent citizens were being scanned for years without delivering adequate results. This system simply did not work and had no place in a democratic society.“
It doesn’t have to be unanimous on HN. It wasn’t even unanimous in the EUP.
But what it was is legal and democratic. And the discussion in the parliament explicitly included the fact that the companies will either have to stop, or find a different legal grounding.
The companies in this blog post are effectively admitting they are making a choice to go against the law.
> I'm pretty confident there would be much more outrage about "malicious compliance".
As there should be.
The big tech companies have done that every time the EU passes some consumer protections, and have been spanked in court several times for the disingenuousness.
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