Thank you for the network programming guide.

Switzerland has treaties with the EU. The EU would prefer a single treaty, Switzerland prefers lots of piecemeal treaties.

Current political climate in Switzerland is a bit like Brexit before Brexit: lots of populist blathering about how the EU exploits Switzerland so there are lots of votes in being anti-EU and in demanding "fair" deals ("fair" always means "more for me, less for you").

These treaties are currently being renegotiated -- I think some of them technically expired but both sides pretend they are still valid during the negotiations.

There are forces in Switzerland that would like to break one or more of the treaties and keep the others.

The EU won't like that so we got guillotine clauses = if one treaty is no longer valid, none of them are valid, to prevent the Swiss from playing funny games.

One of the Swiss complaints is fair: they provide roads for lots and lots of EU transit traffic.

> they provide roads for lots and lots of EU transit traffic

Not for free though

If you want to. Like Italy and France, there is no sign visible from the outside that you are.

They’ve not been defaulting on government bonds, therefore they’re paying the debt.

It isn't, but it is inching closer.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w...

Debt to GDP ratio of 107%, only Greece, Italy, and France are worse. Even Spain and Portugal are better! It is frightening how many member states are over 80% when they are supposed to be at 60% or better.

It really helps that the current European Parliament is not as insane as the previous one... and that both Merkel and Scholz are gone.

536 and the Norse stories about the Fimbulwinter ought to be argument enough.

For the 1% who are so interested in science & history & such that learning about those would not be an issue, plausibly yes.

For the 99% - who don't have the time, or interest, or attention span, or cultural identification, or whatever, to sit through all that - NO.

Is your priority further education of the 1%? Or to actually get some large-scale public disaster prep done?

Belgian greens are remarkably less crazy than German "greens".

Even someone like De Sutter didn't come across as crazy in the European Parliament -- but the German ones, meine Götter!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_De_Sutter

Baltic Pipe is not destroyed (and it goes in the other direction and not even through Germany).

Nord Stream, on the other hand...

That's an argument in favour of using such reactors in the EU, isn't it?

We need EU-level nuclear missiles and we need them fast. We also need EU-level nuclear-powered submarines and maybe carrier groups.

> continued by cdu in 2011.

because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public.

The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).

Not only that, aggressive cuts to the EEG subsidies killed dogfooding their own solar industry in the country.