The ethics of citizenship

[jaguar]

Lausanne for 4 generations, you'll find our family name outside a few buildings around Saint Francois. I live in Lausanne for the moment, family is either in Lausanne proper or down around Rivaz, along the coast of the lake towards Vevey, bit past Saint Saphorin.

What would you say the root causes of your situation were exactly? bad engineering aside.

After 20 years at that kind of level you either must've
a: had a godawful portfolio manager.
b: not had a very wise investment scheme
I know guys in their early 30s who've made enough working sallary jobs (admittedly at the higher end of the food chain) who have clocked up enough to retire comfortably.

Parlez-vous français ou deutch?

The root cause was divorce. You men are not the only ones who suffer financially from unfair divorce settlements. I'd been the main wage earner, yet my ex managed to walk off with the major share of our joint savings and investments.

Once upon a time I spoke very lousey German. Its become almost non-existance from dis-use since its been a while since I traveled in Europe. I grew up in the states and my Mom always spoke English to me because she felt that it would do me very little good to be bi-lingual in Swietzer-Deutsch which, as I'm sure you know, bears as little resemblance to high German as Dutch does.

[Shattered Soul]

Originally posted by Troubleshooter

I'm going to learn to communicate to people how important thinking, communicating and cooperating are and how to do them.

Thinking, communicating, and cooperating start at home. If you can't set a good example for your family ("your" in the broader meaning) then when they get older or out in the world, they're going to approach life with the examples you've given them.

It doesn't matter what they read in some book, or what people tell them. People do what feels normal to them. If communication isn't a normal behavior, if cooperation isn't something they've seen in action, all the talk in the world won't get them out of their familiar/safety zone.

And a person can say "we need to communicate, cooperate, and think" all they want. but if they don't practice it, then it's only words. That's why I say it starts at home. If mommy and daddy say "you're supposed to do this, it's important" and yet they do the opposite, their children are going to internalize what they SEE, not what they hear.

Society is just a bunch of people in one place, and criminal justice just deals with people who care more about themselves than they care about anyone else (ultimately)... I think that the criminality rate would go down a bit if people learned good interrelational skills in the home. It would better prepare them for dealing with people at large in such a way that it's easier for them to achieve their goals.

Hey, write my Mom. I wish she WOULD have taught me Sweitzer-Deutsch (if nothing else, it would have been a fun secret language here in the states).

[jaguar]

Swiss-French has some oddities (particularly in numbering) but it's fairly close to 'real' french, enough to make yourself easily understood at any rate.

That's interesting that the Swiss French dialect is more comprehensble to "French" French speakers. I studied 4 years of German in college and once one of my professors played the class a tape of people speaking in Swiss-German dialect and asked us to translate it. Everybody was completely lost. When I go to visit my Mom's family I do fine as long they speak high German, but they always eventually lapse into Entlebucher, and I can't follow a thing. I talked with a linguist who wanted to record my mother speaking in her Entlebucher dialect. He said that since my Mom left Switzerland in 1935 before the era of modern communications really got started, that her dialect is very pure compared to that now spoken in German speaking Switzerland. My uncle speaks excellent German and French, but he only studied a little English. Sometimes when my German gave out on me, we would end up communicating in Latin of all things because we had both studied that language in school!

[jaguar]

From what I understand the gap with german has narrowed considerably but it still there. With french it's merely some cultural oddities. One thing I do like about swiss-french compared to french is the slightly more sane numbering.

In french 70 is quite literally, 60+10, 80 is 4x20 and 90 is 4x20+10.
In Swiss-French 70 is 70 and 90 is 90, a little more reasonable. The one that confused me for a while is the reordering of the meal names. Lunch becomes breakfast, diner becomes lunch and dinner becomes supper.

I envy you being able to live out the Swiss part of your heritage more than I was ever able to (My Mom got this big resentment against Switzerland because it took them so long to give women the right to vote and resigned her Swiss citizenship in favor of the US - big mistake in my opinion).

If you don't mind me asking, what got you interested in a debate about what a US citizen should do and all the stupid stuff that's happening in this country? I mean I can see why from your perspective the things that go on in the third world are much worse, so who cares about what we foolish Americans quibble about?

[jaguar]

Switzerland is a good place for me to be right now, particularly while i sort out various issues in Europe. It is not, however, somewhere I'd choose to live in the long term. On the other hand I'm not the kind that stays anywhere long.

I participate in most threads here. In terms of most US-Centric threads here, when the shit hits the fan in the US the whole world feels it, your stupid legislation like the DMCA has a tendency to go global via the WTO and trade agreements (most recently with Australia, one of many reasons I'll be voting the fuckers out at the next election).