> Do you think Nintendo would look at that and say "well, he did a lot of work so he's escaped our license"? Of course not. It's just silly.

That's because you're re-using assets.

You're using that fallacy wrong.

How exactly are the Swiss in any position that would mean economic destruction?

They are in a position of having no seas and only EU on every side, which means things are getting more bureaucratic the more EU-Swiss relationship sours. Think border checks on the ground and flight restrictions in the air and the less than 10M rich people in the mountains can now trade only among themselves.

Why would the EU be so irrationally butt hurt about it? It seems easy enough to let the Swiss have their policy and both continue to benefit

Edit: EU can void all the other contracts, but why would it want to? Why do they care so much about how many immigrants Switzerland has?

Swiss can have their policy, who said they can't have it? It's just that they can't make EU have the Swiss policy. If Switzerland wants to be a 3rd party country, they can do that and negotiate visa regime, import/export controls etc with EU like everyone else who is not part of EU or don't have a deal. They can be like UK or Turkey for example, or be have entirely different relationship.

Swiss can never be like the UK or Turkey if it reneges on the deal it has now. The other two have leverage, Swiss do not.

It’s up to the Swiss to decide regardless, if population limit is more important than being integrated into Europe they can do that. What they can’t do is to have equal access to the single market like the other EU countries without the obligation that other countries have.

It’s up to the Swiss to decide as much as it was up to the Melians.

The EU is effectively paralysed in foreign affairs and a common fighter jet project died just today due to economic infighting. They're right.

This is a deeply dishonest characterization of the FCAS.

How so? Neither Germany nor France wanted to meaningly influence Airbus nor Dassault Aviation in any way to solve internal bickering. There was a ton of political bargaining over subsystems and job guarantees.

Of course, I can go off of what‘s publicly available.

Neither of them could, there was a very slim set of circumstances where their goals might have sufficiently lined up for this to work. They studied it, arrived at the conclusion that it wasn't going to happen.

To frame this as something that should happen is just taking an overly simplistic view on how fighter jet development works. Even if everything went perfectly, it's far from obvious that a Franco-German designed fighter could be better than a purely French one.

Seriously? This keeps happening over and over.

well duh let's just import food from elsewhere (and completely ignore that foreign politic squabbles might crash this system)

It's not like countries that import the majority of their calories have frequent food riots or anything.

There is hardly any need to import food from anywhere besides the EU, though. Which would be rather low risk.

citation needed

Ah yes, market manipulation, a key trait of fascism right next to authoritarian military regimes and ulta-nationalism.

Words have lost all meanings.

Not every (slightly) authoritarian government is akin to a regime that was responsible for the industrial scale killing of more than 11 million people.

Perhaps you should wait to make that case, we're starting to see ramifications from USAID cuts as the worse one, but there's also health and nutrition effects from Medicaid/SNAP reductions, and whatever in the world is happening on immigration and detention with insane ICE behaviour, plus second order effects from abortion and public health changes.

We shall see. I hope you're right.

The point is that decisions can remain arbitrary