What is this supposed to imply? us states are also a poor representation of humanity. This matters a great deal: switzerland is notoriously ethnically homogenous and unable to get along with anyone. Life on easy mode!
> The Swiss Air Force did not respond because the incident occurred outside normal office hours; a Swiss Air Force spokesman stated: "Switzerland cannot intervene because its airbases are closed at night and on the weekend. It's a question of budget and staffing." Switzerland relies on neighboring countries to police its airspace outside of regular business hours; the French and Italian Air Forces have permission to escort suspicious flights into Swiss airspace, but do not have authority to shoot down an aircraft over Switzerland.
Switzerland has a population larger than all but ~11 US states.
It's got 9m people. The US has 30x the people and 250x the space. It's not comparable.
So why do we struggle to get the infrastructure to work in dense urban areas still?
Switzerland and California have the same population density. Why can’t CA build high speed rail?
What is this supposed to imply? us states are also a poor representation of humanity. This matters a great deal: switzerland is notoriously ethnically homogenous and unable to get along with anyone. Life on easy mode!
It implies that Switzerland is by no means so tiny their lessons learned can't apply to other multi-million human sized regions.
Switzerland gets along with others just fine, to the point where Italy and France used to handle their air defense on the weekends (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_702).
> The Swiss Air Force did not respond because the incident occurred outside normal office hours; a Swiss Air Force spokesman stated: "Switzerland cannot intervene because its airbases are closed at night and on the weekend. It's a question of budget and staffing." Switzerland relies on neighboring countries to police its airspace outside of regular business hours; the French and Italian Air Forces have permission to escort suspicious flights into Swiss airspace, but do not have authority to shoot down an aircraft over Switzerland.
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"unable to get along with anyone" is an interesting claim given that the last armed conflict in Switzerland was in 1847 (Sonderbund War).
you going for the cherry-picked-but-functionally-meaningless statistic of the week award?
I'm going for the "Switzerland isn't a little village of 50 people, we can learn lessons from them just fine" award.
Every large country breaks things up into small chunks. No one says Vermont can't handle a school system just because it's small.