You know, in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality - and it will fly off the shelves. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true.
Swisscom is the biggest ISP in Switzerland - they charge high prices for very slow internet. But they have the word "Swiss" in their name, so it's okay to sell 100 Mbps connection for 70 CHF, which many people buys. But the same people can get 10 Gbps connection at the same place for 40-50 CHF also by simply visiting a competing store, and spending 15 minutes on it. But that won't have the word "Swiss" in it.
There really is this bias — it’s crazy. Not just the name “Swiss,” but allusions to the Swiss flag, Swiss typography, other Swiss branding. It almost looks like some of the products are state run.
(Also, the internet connection actually is phenomenally good.)
> in Switzerland there is a thing, that if a product or service has the name "Swiss" in its name, then it can be sold for any price regardless of quality
That's just basic marketing. You'll see that in most countries, I don't believe that it is unique to Switzerland.
For example: in the US you'll see many products that say "made in America" on the box. Those will likely outsell competing products, even if those are cheaper and better quality still.
And similarly: if you try to sell the "made in America" product in a different country it'll likely by outsold by the "made in [country]" products there.
I feel it's a little more extreme for swiss companies though, especially outside the country. My aunt who works in Rome in the tourism industry told us of a local company that had 'swiss' in the name, simply because of the positive connotation, even when they don't seem to have any relation to the country.
It's why I feel wary of making business with any company with the word 'swiss' in it's name
And Decathlon's bikes are Van Rysel, which does mean "from Lille" (where the bikes are designed) but you wouldn't know it unless you speak Dutch. I don't think they hide anything really, but having a Dutch-sounding makes a connection to the Dutch and Flemish who are well known for cycling.
"made in" is completely different. A higher price is justified by supporting Americans in some way, rather than somewhere offshore.
This is more like McDonald's putting a maple leaf in their logo in Canada. It changes nothing but, apparently, Canadians like it more (I frequently watch Canadian television and non-canadian companies are frequently adding a leaf somewhere in the advertising).
I've noticed a similar thing when buying products online. Overseas sellers from Asia will package their product as "Designed in Germany" or include a red cross to indicate Swiss design, but may not actually be designed or manufactured in Switzerland. Nice packaging though :)
Kind of the ideal setup though. Apple’s design and engineering work has been great, China’s manufacturing can execute on it better than anyone else (see the issues with iPhone production in India).
It’s like saying the ideal car would be designed by Italians, engineered by Germans, and built by the Japanese.
Happy Swisscom customer here. I decided the price is worth it.
The internet they sell is the same speed as everyone else, gigabit is gigabit. Yes there are ISPs with lower prices, like Init7. DO NOT USE INIT7!!
I signed up for them some years ago back when gigabit was rarer, I liked their price and nerd orientation for things like IPv6. Big, big, mistake. Thoroughly awful company.
The problem: my wife wanted to watch TV. Reasonable. They offer it only via an Apple TV app but no problem, I happened to have an Apple TV already. Their app sucks, ugly MVP level stuff but worse, it just did not work reliably. Video stalls and freezes all the time. I get in touch with support, eventually, after much work and bad support experiences, I get in touch with the one guy they actually have working on their TV. It turns out the entire TV team either quit or was laid off and he was now trying to figure out how it all worked. We did some debugging and eventually figured out that their encoders/streamers were putting packets into the stream sometimes that older Apple TVs didn't understand. No warning about this anywhere. Also: they have no way to fix it. I was just told to buy a new Apple TV.
This is aggravating but I'm trying to be friendly to the small local geeky company that's competing with the big state-owned telco, so I do it. But this doesn't help, there are still TV streaming problems.
So I tell them, look, we tried, but your service just doesn't work. Please give me a partial refund and cancel my contract. This is where the hell really starts because I get an extremely rude email saying that actually if I check the fine print the TV service is offered for free and the entire cost of the contract is only for the internet service, therefore there's no expectation that the TV service will work at all and they accept zero liability or responsibility if it doesn't.
Also, Init7 only bills annually, and "your shit doesn't work" is not considered by them to be a reason to cancel. And because I was working with their TV guy to try and get their own problems fixed the billing period had just elapsed, so they forced me to pay the entire next year up front for a service that was broken.
I told them this was totally unacceptable behavior and probably illegal, their answer was I should take them to court.
At this point I investigated who these cowboys are a bit more and discovered their CEO flaming random customers on Twitter, in again totally unprofessional ways. He's since decamped for Bluesky which says it all.
In the end I didn't take them to court, I just told them I'd warn anyone I met away from their shitty company, sunk the 667 CHF penalty (I will NEVER sign up for yearly billing from an ISP again), and switched to SwissCom.
What a giant difference. A massively more professional outfit with identical feature support and speed. They cut you in on savings if you agree to talk with their LLM support bot first before escalating to a call center, but "Sam" actually works so this turned out to be a good deal. Their TV app is much better, and reliable. I switched phone service too and often have reception where other people don't. Every interaction with them is easy, zero complaints.
Lesson learned: paying for "Swiss Quality" is sometimes worth it even inside Switzerland. Also with smaller firms you're just sometimes signing up with assholes and don't even know it. I still think their "TV is free so it doesn't have to work" trick is probably illegal, I don't know how you can get away with that.
I wish my country India was like that, because we are totally opposite. Anything made in India is considered very bad quality and will not fetch a good price even if better than imported goods.
What's your goal? If you want just a random site, then WP will do the job. If you want to learn web development, then I'd start it with a local http server (apache/nginx/whatever's your poison) and start writing html/css/js by hand, and see how it builds up line by line.
Look for a "static site generator". Bearblog and Hugo are popular ones. Then you can host your site anywhere and don't have to worry about security problems.
Bearblog is a service, not a static site generator one can use like Hugo.
From the Bearblog GitHub:
> Bear Blog has been built as a platform and not as an individual blog generator. It is more like Substack than Hugo. Due to this it isn't possible to individually self-host a Bear Blog.
I don't have lived experience, but "Who is hiring" had only 2 or 3 posts from my country this whole year. Until about 2 years ago there were 5-8 posts in each threads.
(I'm in a small central-European country, that is full of tech companies, both domestic and international)
Just guessing, Czechia? The Central European software engineering market seems to be softening as well, likely due to second-order effects from the U.S. tech layoffs and decreased demand for remote roles from SV companies.
This is a longshot, but -- I have a lychee tree that's fruiting right now, with more fruits than I know what to do with, and I'm about to go on a road trip from Florida to the midwest in a week or so. I could drop off a bucket along the way. Shoot me an email at concat("ksymph0", "@", "proton.me") if you're in the area.
That's weird... that was one of the very few of his initiatives that had bipartisan support... pretty much everyone was happy with this, except for the employers.
It's good because the legal system isn't supposed to be about sentiment or politics.
If it has bipartisan support then it should be easy for congress to do its job and pass it as a law. And it should be easy for the President to ask them to do so.
Oh my. The original Spyro games (especially the first) on the venerable PSX are my all time favorite games.
Their modern remake was the only reason why I bought a PS4, I got it exclusively to play that game. And it was the disappointment of the decade. It looks nice, it sounds nice, but it is different enough that muscle memory doesn't work anymore, and it's more annoying than entertaining.
("Funnily" after this I got myself a PS3, and bought the original PSX version in PS Online. It turned out that it runs very badly on the PS3. So I also got myself a PS2, and bought the disc version on ebay, which finally worked as it should. I wish I was kidding.)
Considering that the previous Spyro from Toys for Bob was more on the lackluster side, I won't keep my hopes too high.
Wait a second. You mean that until now you could just open a Stripe account with random personal details, without verification? You could just say "trust me, bro about my details", and Stripe did trust you?
Based on your description this sounds to me like a big KYC hole which they are trying to plug in now.
It would be interesting to know how many such accounts exist...
It has been a long time but IIRC, I had to send them scans of my ID, articles of incorporation, etc. I am an USA Person with a real business and USA based bank accounts. None of that has changed in a decade.
The problem here is obvious? One day they decide to freeze payouts, and inform me of that with a weakly worded email saying there is a ToC update. What if I was on vacation, didn't have access to a smartphone to do their Biometrics demand, or just didn't see the email? My business would have gone unpaid until something breaks and I'm scrambling to deal with unpaid bills.
Swisscom is the biggest ISP in Switzerland - they charge high prices for very slow internet. But they have the word "Swiss" in their name, so it's okay to sell 100 Mbps connection for 70 CHF, which many people buys. But the same people can get 10 Gbps connection at the same place for 40-50 CHF also by simply visiting a competing store, and spending 15 minutes on it. But that won't have the word "Swiss" in it.
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