>As to 19A (and theory and practice of democracy) I note that Switzerland didn't have full female federal suffrage until 1990.

!!!!!

I did not know this. To be fair it looks like except for one Canton it came in the 70s? (from Wikipedia):

Women in Switzerland gained the right to vote in federal elections after a referendum in February 1971.[1] The first federal vote in which women were able to participate was the 31 October 1971 election of the Federal Assembly.[2] However it was not until a 1990 decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland that women gained full voting rights in the final Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden.[3]

They really take that hyperlocal stuff seriously it seems? I knew naturalization was also a PITA but... sheesh!

I might have a biased views since everyone I met was a PhD student or staying in my hostel, but ll the Swiss folks I've met were extremely egalitarian. (The academics sometimes hated me because I had hacked* my way into Carnegie Mellon despite never going to school there, but at least we were on the same page that everyone can vote, everyone can be an engineer, etc etc.

>I recently learned (from HN?) that Microsoft was already incorporated while Spain was still fascist (by a few months...but still!) and I had an impression, when visiting this century, that discussing Dali was welcome, but discussing the fate of the Republic was a bit "too soon".

Art people are the worst, I just took a tour of a museum where they said all the right things about marrying whom you want but when someone brought up Ukraine, we were admonished to avoid "politics".

(I guess the personal is political only when you're timing your kids, not when folks are having their nuclear power plants shelled. ¡Ay, caramba!

Speaking as a former Moztern, Microsoft is a bad company and should feel bad -- the death of "trustworthy" computing is something no one seems to want to talk about in public for reasons I will never underastand, and their weird obsession with the wall between MSR and the rest of the company was... interesting.

(I still remember making a clippy joke in Redmond and having someone stiffly reply "Sir I worked on that. No sense of humor!)

As for Spain: I've been there, it was too short, and I may have pissed people off in Vigo when we walked by a bank being protested and I separated from a group of professors to try to express my support.

Imagine a herd of stuffy academics loudly talking in English as if no one in Galicia will understand them mocking anything left of neoliberalism, then having a first year grad student break off and excitedly telling a man dressed as a clown "8Hell yeah! Do 'em like Iceland! Put the bracelets on 'em!!8" and having the poor guy thinking he's being shouted at (partly because said academics began to yell at me for "encouraging him".

(The only reason I was even in a PhD was that even in America the job market was still reeling from the 2009 crash, and by 2012 towns like Vigo were still fairly devoid of tourists, though I got the impression this was partly because Porto was some kind of drug free fire zone -- some "anarchists" yanked out a Hunter S Thompson level suitcase on the balcony the night before my talk -- I ended up declining LSD and possibly getting roofied... I always suffered from early waking after a night out, but nearly slept through my lecture. Years later I got clued in the rohypnoly tastes salty and someone in attendance had a beef with me.)

Luckily a thumbs up is pretty universal?

Anyways, I'll quit wall of texting as I take a break from my MLK weekend adventure of breaking into my own iPhone backups and leave it at this:

the line between anarcho-capitalism and fasciscm is fairly thin if you're lacking capital IMHO.

Thanks for your reply! :-)

[*] I exploited a loophole to take a single course, then got myself hired as staff, and openly joked "Why pay all that tuition when one piece of paper and an A gets me the same network", which apparently rubbed some people the wrong way. Tough for them - hail to Pitt! :D