Yep...I agree it works well here and let's you farm while holding down another job. You can get "vine ripened" and the flavor it much better. It also is more efficient for spoilage. Hogs or chickens get it right after it is too ripe.
As a Swiss guy, I must say I only see this in rural areas. It wouldn't work in big cities like Geneva I think (too many people living in urban areas who don't respect our wonderful country and that's a shame).
This is actually fairly common in rural areas in America too. Maybe someone sets up a bunch of pumpkins, apples, etc at the end of their driveway (which in rural America can be measured in KM) and a box to put money in.
Sometimes there will be someone out at their fruit stand, but most of the time it runs on the honor system with a money slot where you pay for your produce.
I see this with eggs and wood a lot in the more rural areas of New England. I think it's a simple case where whatever (if any) shrinkage is still significantly less than the cost of monitoring
Yeah, it's a bit odd that they focused so much on the Swiss.
Even the article mentions it's widespread: "Unmanned stalls with vegetables can be found all over the world. Germany, Norway, the U.S., Australia, Canada, the UK are among the countries where the honor system isn’t any novelty."
Yeah, this sounds like an article written by someone who lives in a big city and has never been to rural America. This isn't even uncommon; its pretty darn standard. Another common, similar thing you see all over (climatically appropriate) America are fruit orchards where you pay for a bag upfront and you can fill it as full as you want (or take more than the bag, or not even pay for the bag if you're dishonest).
Yeah but those pick your own fruit orchards are usually a really bad deal. Around here in Seacoast New England, for example apples, you are paying more for the privilege of picking your own apples then buying them at the supermarket.
Oh this fruit orchard tradition is so wonderful! I remember going on an outing like this with my friends (We aren't American citizens) and we went absolutely nuts, going on a binge carrying and eating fruits. (We were really hungry after a long road trip). We all felt appropriately guilty afterwards and apologised.
Oh, trust me; those orchards are a cash cow. There's practically no amount of fruit you could have taken which would have caused them material damage. Most of them don't even make most of their money from the fruit; they'll usually have little shops, or processed fruit goods (jams, syrups), or food, or hay rides as well. There's one near me that does the fruit-stuff during the summer, then converts into a haunted farm-type attraction in the fall, and the owner says they make a ton more money in the fall season. The "pick your own fruit" is just to get people in the door, and they usually overcharge like crazy for the bags under the assumption that their customers (A) are gonna take a ton, and (B) will end up buying some other stuff on-site.
It is pretty common in Vermont and it is not only about veggies (meat and poultry too). You can just write a check or pay by cash and take change(if you need) from the cash register which is open. It is not based on the honor system (pay as much as you want) but on decency and trust, you have to weight everything and calculate price for goods by yourself but there is no one who is watching you.
It seems to me that such a system makes people show their best. Surely there is a percentage of people who may not act very well, but I believe that there are more good people anyway.
It's still the case but I wonder for how long. Not because of theft but I assume the newspapers that survived are probably making the bulk of their income from subscribers. I haven't seen anyone putting coins into those vending boxes in a long time.
Yes, and the next logical question would be: what has changed in Geneva these past 30 years? Hints: individualism, globalization, multiculturalism.
My father told me that when he served for our national army back then, soldiers just left their weapons alone in front of the train station while they were having a coffee before going into the train.
Please note that the falling IQ has nothing to do with the foreigners, at least not according to the linked study; IQ is going down even within families.
These things are not mutually exclusive. The study [1] showed that the data indicated that IQs between brothers reduced far less rapidly than the IQ for the population as a whole: "Between the 1975 and 1991 cohorts, the average annual decline estimated using within-family variation is attenuated by almost two-thirds relative to the across-family trend: −0.08 IQ point per year versus −0.23 point per year (SI Appendix, Table S3, columns 1 and 3)."
They then extensively massaged the data to make this difference disappear, which is what yields the headline. They did provide perfectly valid justifications for such, including the fact that IQ testing data was missing disproportionately often from brothers where the brother who had data available was of a low IQ. They thus proposed that the high heritability of IQ would then suggest that the missing data is probably disproportionately weighted against IQ, so that's what they did.
Nonetheless this massaging of the data opens the door to methodological problems. It enables researchers to choose the factors that they consider most relevant and to determine effective weighting for such. You will tend to find in this scenario that individuals who have the preconceived notion of 'x' end up choosing factors that show 'x'. And vice versa for those who assume 'y.' This isn't necessarily even malfeasance, but simply the fact that trying to control for a practically infinite number of possible confounding issues is as much an art as a science, and preconceived notions are going to end up being reflected in what one chooses.
For instance my bias is self evident and if I were going to pursue this sort of balancing I would certainly be sure to try to control for factors such as increasing paternal age, fertility assistance, and other things which can have negative effects on IQ. Some studies have even connected higher IQ parents to various disorders including autism which may mitigate against the missing IQ data bias. Controlling for these things is important. The reason that these researchers neglected them is not out of malfeasance, but because you can come up with a practically infinite number of things you need to control for. And so peoples biases end up reflecting the issues they find important.
The ultimate point is that I think the most impartial idea is to look at the data alone, so much as possible. This study made some fairly extreme changes to the data. Of course if my biases were different, I'd probably be singing a different tune. Isn't social "science" fun?
Sorry I didn't know Breitbart. I posted a link to this website, because it was in English and most of the sources I have are from Swiss newspapers (in French or in German). For example, this link (from the Swiss national TV) :
TL;DR: If you have legal residency in Switzerland, they'd rather let you serve your time outside of prison; but without residency, you'd probably leave the country if they don't put you in prison. Maybe blame Schengen but it seems most Swiss would rather have borders that are faster to cross...
> The number of foreign detainees has increased significantly. 30 years ago, 56 percent of prison inmates were foreigners, most recently 71 percent. Weber says: "The legislator has increasingly introduced alternatives to prison for Swiss prisoners. I'm thinking of charitable work or electronically supervised house arrest. "
> However, such measures would only be suitable for people with a low risk of escape, ie persons with a secured, legal stay in Switzerland. These are mostly Swiss, but not foreign offenders resident abroad.
> Exactly the proportion of such criminal tourists has recently increased sharply. Over the last decade, they already account for the majority, 52 percent of all inmates. The society has become generally more mobile in the last 30 years, the same applies to offenders, the criminal law professor. "You can travel cheaper than before. So it is more likely that they go from, for example, Eastern European countries to Switzerland for a few days and then travel back."
I don't mean that at all! I am simply suggesting that mixing multiple cultures, religions and belief systems is harmful to the identity and the self-trust of a nation.
For example, in my city, they are building new pavements. They are building them high enough so a crazy Islamic guy can't run into pedestrians with his car (like one did in France and in Germany).
As a Swiss citizen, I have the right to say I am not happy with that without being accused of racism!
Of course you are welcome here if you are intelligent and respectful (like all the US people I have met here).
> mixing multiple cultures, religions and belief systems is harmful to the identity and the self-trust of a nation
This is true only if the peoples of a country refuse to mix and to seek a common national civic identity based on peaceful resolution of disputes and respect for the rights of minorities, whether cultural or religious.
It remains true that one thing no democracy can survive is a large fraction of citizens with contempt for the values that make self-government possible: respect for the rule of law rather than of strong men; a desire to help people who cannot return the favor, to list a few. This does indeed go to your "belief system" point.
But here in the US anyway, I'd suggest most of the rot of the civic belief system has been grown right at home.
I’m very proud to be Italian, and proud and love my countrymen.
If I were a Swiss, though, I would not leave my rifle, or any valuable, around in a Swiss train station if Italians are around. Or English, French, Germans, etc.
I wouldn’t be afraid if there were a group of Japanese though.
What's interesting about Japan is that it's a mono-cultural society with high IQ and this country has not surprisingly the lowest crime rate in the world. Italy and Switzerland were like that a few decades ago.
BTW, what do you think of Salvini? Switzerland chose not to be in the European Union and it was our best decision ever IMO. It's like a startup: it's better to be lean and agile.
IMO: it has to do with the number of repeat interactions you will have with people.
When you interact more than twice with the same people, Game Theory says it is better to act honorably. At 2 interactions it is roughly balanced, and with a single interaction it is better (as an individual) to cheat. These assume balanced payoff/penalty, but changing the penalty only works to a certain extent and humans are very bad at evaluating the payoff of low-risk high-penalty actions, essentially becoming used to the risk after a while as they learn from repeated actions that they don't get caught (until they do).
So, the question is why repeat interactions have gone down. I guess larger communities, and better transport means just in terms of regular day-to-day you don't have many repeat interactions, and this changes mindsets of people inclined to crime in terms of what they think they can get away with, at least to start with.
It also explains to some extent the distrust small communities have to strangers, where they are not used to living with that regular stranger-danger that people in cities constantly deal with.
For most print mediums, circulation is more important than sales. Because higher circulation generates more Advertising revenue, which is higher than sales.
But they can't give a newspaper/magazine away, because that would bump them to a lower category for which advertisers pay less.
The solution is to sell as cheap as your desired advertising demographic allows, and incurs lots and lots of "loss".
That is why even in the USA (land of the people-will-grab-anything-not-bolted-down) some newspapers still have that coin+trust box for newspapers.
I live in Zurich (biggest city in Switzerland), and know of several such installations in the city itself. "Cities" in Switzerland are really not that urban ;-)
> too many people living in urban areas who don't respect our wonderful country
I think people from lots of different countries feel that way. There’s something about being connected to the land that gives one a love for both the land and the human culture connected to it. That connection to the land is easily lost in urban environments.
Being from Gimel (a small town in Vaud), a lot of the stories in the article remind me of happy memories growing up.
Switzerland has been struggling with an identity crisis of late as a lot of poorer immigrants from war-torn places (Albania when I was growing up, Maghreb and Middle East now) have been moving in to the cities, oftentimes not respecting our old traditions. Theft and petty crime is on the rise, and almost always at the hands of those poorer immigrants. It's led to a backlash that hasn't really brought out the best in us.
It's sad to see the cohesion and trustworthiness of the Swiss society disappear, though I guess it was somewhat inevitable.
Once upon a time I cycled through vast fields of strawberries and other yummy looking produce in California.
I did see honour system stalls but they were pretty rare considering the size of the area. They were more like curious exceptions rather than the norm. They were also geared up to sell at volumes that didn't suit the bike, so too much to carry.
I got the impression from the article on Switzerland that this was more of a way to do your shopping, so sensible quantities not vast bulk purchases.
Incidentally I did not stop to freeload a single strawberry. On a bike with nobody around this should have been simple, there weren't even any barbed wire fences. However, my riding buddy - also a non-American tourist - was not so keen. The reason why was a simple one - 'don't they have guns in America?'.
Actually they have guns in Switzerland too and there is a lot of national service practice going on at the weekends. In fact weekends are quite wonderful in Switzerland as the shops are closed and people go out and do things including going to honour system stalls. The guns though are quite terrifying if you are cycling as you can turn a corner on a descent and feel like you are suddenly in a firing range (rather than right next to one).
I have to say that the Californian produce looked good but was not that good when I bought it in the shops. The land of plenty turned out to be quite expensive and bland to European tastes. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, the roadside appearance of plenty was not so good but the food bought in shops was as expensive as everything is in Switzerland (so no surprise) but delightful to taste.
The relative abundance of Swiss roadside honour stalls doesn't just say things about how honest people are in squeaky clean Switzerland, it also says something about the produce being of value rather than bland.
So this! The lovely clicky sound of rifle bullets passing by above your head as you stroll on well signposted paths. I understand they do have concrete blocks preventing beginners from shooting too low. Still...
Even retail establishments with staff and security systems balance the extra costs of these “loss prevention” measures against customer convenience. The goal is never perfect security but sufficient security. Large retailers typically set targets on loss and try to minimize them, within reason. Farm stands that operate like this have simply found a reasonable cost/benefit trade off. (There’s an apple orchard near Boston that leaves their store unattended for the slow winter months... My wife pops in a few times to buy some more apples.)
Loss from stealing was called 'shrinkage' by retail industry people, in Sam Walton's autobiography 'Made in America'. As you say, they expected to have some. I wonder why it can't be prevented 100%.
Prevention to 100% would be costly. They have diminishing marginal returns.
Why would someone pay $50,000/year for a hypothetical system which would theoretically catch everyone and fill out the police report automatically when the store experiences a tiny $300 annual shrinkage loss?
Lying for Money makes the case that the optimal amount of fraud in any real world system is non-zero. Fraud prevention has direct and indirect costs. At some point the costs of fraud prevention will exceed the cost of fraud itself.
It's very common with firewood bundles in areas of New England where, in the summer, a lot of tourists are buying firewood to burn at a campground. Quite a few houses have some bundles of firewood out that they probably cut themselves from dead trees/branches on the property along with an honor box. Very small-time supplemental income operations that aren't nearly worth someone hanging out all day for maybe only $20 or so.
I've seen some in Germany (e.g. Pick flowers, put coins into the box), but I like the ones I found in Switzerland more - larger selection including fruit, vegetables and eggs. Maybe I just got lucky.
I was recently in Zurich and entered a small shop that was honor system. Scan and pay for your own items, no staff. Small food items, drinks, wine available.
Might be different since there could be cameras or some other form of accountability, but I found it interesting.
You have to understand that Switzerland is a very rich and very expensive country. Stealing some fruits would be a really dumb crime to commit, when you can steal much more expensive things easily.
Like several other commenters noted, these types of roadside stands are prevalent throughout rural areas of the US. You usually only see them on side roads though, if you're just passing through on the highways you'll miss them.
I ran into this in California at a small farm along Highway 1 a few miles north of Santa Cruz. It's a scenic ocean side rural locale but near all the big Bay Area cities and frequented by day visitors from there. There was a shack with a good variety of their produce laid out, with price labels. Up front there was a cash box, with about $40 already in it, and a sign that said pay here. This was late '90s. I really hope that it continued to work for them for a long time after that. I haven't seen that elsewhere before or since. I overpaid as a tip. I hope that happens enough to offset cheats.
In rural south west England, on holiday last year, the well-stocked local farm shop operated not only an honesty box, but an honesty credit card machine, with detailed instructions how to put a transaction through. The merchant receipt went in the honesty box, of course. I was astonished but pretty pleased, because I was low on cash and far from any ATM.
PayM would be the easy implementation of this, it's the generic mobile phone based bank transfer system for the UK.
In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland the same shop would have a phone number. You type the phone number into the app (which shows the name as confirmation), the amount, and press send. It's not tied to any particular bank.
Unfortunately, the UK system isn't really catching on. Instead, my friends seem to be using proprietary apps which only work for friends at the same bank.
I've been here since the late 90's and the same self service stands that were here then are still here - there are several between Palo Alto and Cupertino.
There's also a self service rest stop mainly for cyclists that's been in operation for the last 10 years or so, between Woodside and Half Moon Bay.
https://potreronuevofarm.org/bike-hut/
Last year we found a place on the Oregon coast that had a little freezer with Salmon and Halibut. Also a table with Cherries, Peaches, and a few vegetables with an honor box and, interestingly we thought, QR codes to accept BTC and ETH.
Halibut was killer, but I paid in USD because my phone was dead.
161 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] thread- farming contracts where all produce is owned by X
- decrease in honesty
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.249591,-121.909198,240m/data...
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x808e340f2c491c5...
Sometimes there will be someone out at their fruit stand, but most of the time it runs on the honor system with a money slot where you pay for your produce.
Even the article mentions it's widespread: "Unmanned stalls with vegetables can be found all over the world. Germany, Norway, the U.S., Australia, Canada, the UK are among the countries where the honor system isn’t any novelty."
It seems to me that such a system makes people show their best. Surely there is a percentage of people who may not act very well, but I believe that there are more good people anyway.
My father told me that when he served for our national army back then, soldiers just left their weapons alone in front of the train station while they were having a coffee before going into the train.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/02/08/foreigners-make-...
IQ scores are falling and have been for decades, new study finds:
https://www.sciencealert.com/iq-scores-falling-in-worrying-r...
https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html
They then extensively massaged the data to make this difference disappear, which is what yields the headline. They did provide perfectly valid justifications for such, including the fact that IQ testing data was missing disproportionately often from brothers where the brother who had data available was of a low IQ. They thus proposed that the high heritability of IQ would then suggest that the missing data is probably disproportionately weighted against IQ, so that's what they did.
Nonetheless this massaging of the data opens the door to methodological problems. It enables researchers to choose the factors that they consider most relevant and to determine effective weighting for such. You will tend to find in this scenario that individuals who have the preconceived notion of 'x' end up choosing factors that show 'x'. And vice versa for those who assume 'y.' This isn't necessarily even malfeasance, but simply the fact that trying to control for a practically infinite number of possible confounding issues is as much an art as a science, and preconceived notions are going to end up being reflected in what one chooses.
For instance my bias is self evident and if I were going to pursue this sort of balancing I would certainly be sure to try to control for factors such as increasing paternal age, fertility assistance, and other things which can have negative effects on IQ. Some studies have even connected higher IQ parents to various disorders including autism which may mitigate against the missing IQ data bias. Controlling for these things is important. The reason that these researchers neglected them is not out of malfeasance, but because you can come up with a practically infinite number of things you need to control for. And so peoples biases end up reflecting the issues they find important.
The ultimate point is that I think the most impartial idea is to look at the data alone, so much as possible. This study made some fairly extreme changes to the data. Of course if my biases were different, I'd probably be singing a different tune. Isn't social "science" fun?
[1] - https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6674
Whatever message you wanted to get across drowned because of the Breitbart quote.
https://www.rts.ch/info/regions/fribourg/9345276--les-prison...
Let's quote the same institution (Swiss Radio/TV) https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
TL;DR: If you have legal residency in Switzerland, they'd rather let you serve your time outside of prison; but without residency, you'd probably leave the country if they don't put you in prison. Maybe blame Schengen but it seems most Swiss would rather have borders that are faster to cross...
> The number of foreign detainees has increased significantly. 30 years ago, 56 percent of prison inmates were foreigners, most recently 71 percent. Weber says: "The legislator has increasingly introduced alternatives to prison for Swiss prisoners. I'm thinking of charitable work or electronically supervised house arrest. "
> However, such measures would only be suitable for people with a low risk of escape, ie persons with a secured, legal stay in Switzerland. These are mostly Swiss, but not foreign offenders resident abroad.
> Exactly the proportion of such criminal tourists has recently increased sharply. Over the last decade, they already account for the majority, 52 percent of all inmates. The society has become generally more mobile in the last 30 years, the same applies to offenders, the criminal law professor. "You can travel cheaper than before. So it is more likely that they go from, for example, Eastern European countries to Switzerland for a few days and then travel back."
Trick or treat? https://imgur.com/KJvJgT2
We live in cowardly times where the instant gratification of believing you're the morally superior person outweighs everything else.
For example, in my city, they are building new pavements. They are building them high enough so a crazy Islamic guy can't run into pedestrians with his car (like one did in France and in Germany).
As a Swiss citizen, I have the right to say I am not happy with that without being accused of racism!
Of course you are welcome here if you are intelligent and respectful (like all the US people I have met here).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack
This is true only if the peoples of a country refuse to mix and to seek a common national civic identity based on peaceful resolution of disputes and respect for the rights of minorities, whether cultural or religious.
It remains true that one thing no democracy can survive is a large fraction of citizens with contempt for the values that make self-government possible: respect for the rule of law rather than of strong men; a desire to help people who cannot return the favor, to list a few. This does indeed go to your "belief system" point.
But here in the US anyway, I'd suggest most of the rot of the civic belief system has been grown right at home.
If I were a Swiss, though, I would not leave my rifle, or any valuable, around in a Swiss train station if Italians are around. Or English, French, Germans, etc.
I wouldn’t be afraid if there were a group of Japanese though.
We’re just not as civilized.
BTW, what do you think of Salvini? Switzerland chose not to be in the European Union and it was our best decision ever IMO. It's like a startup: it's better to be lean and agile.
When you interact more than twice with the same people, Game Theory says it is better to act honorably. At 2 interactions it is roughly balanced, and with a single interaction it is better (as an individual) to cheat. These assume balanced payoff/penalty, but changing the penalty only works to a certain extent and humans are very bad at evaluating the payoff of low-risk high-penalty actions, essentially becoming used to the risk after a while as they learn from repeated actions that they don't get caught (until they do).
So, the question is why repeat interactions have gone down. I guess larger communities, and better transport means just in terms of regular day-to-day you don't have many repeat interactions, and this changes mindsets of people inclined to crime in terms of what they think they can get away with, at least to start with.
It also explains to some extent the distrust small communities have to strangers, where they are not used to living with that regular stranger-danger that people in cities constantly deal with.
For most print mediums, circulation is more important than sales. Because higher circulation generates more Advertising revenue, which is higher than sales.
But they can't give a newspaper/magazine away, because that would bump them to a lower category for which advertisers pay less.
The solution is to sell as cheap as your desired advertising demographic allows, and incurs lots and lots of "loss".
That is why even in the USA (land of the people-will-grab-anything-not-bolted-down) some newspapers still have that coin+trust box for newspapers.
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.234931,8.6521491,3a,75y,13.9...
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.2063957,8.6876991,3a,60y,55....
I think people from lots of different countries feel that way. There’s something about being connected to the land that gives one a love for both the land and the human culture connected to it. That connection to the land is easily lost in urban environments.
Switzerland has been struggling with an identity crisis of late as a lot of poorer immigrants from war-torn places (Albania when I was growing up, Maghreb and Middle East now) have been moving in to the cities, oftentimes not respecting our old traditions. Theft and petty crime is on the rise, and almost always at the hands of those poorer immigrants. It's led to a backlash that hasn't really brought out the best in us.
It's sad to see the cohesion and trustworthiness of the Swiss society disappear, though I guess it was somewhat inevitable.
Can the govt do something like introduce culture lessons for new immigrants?
I did see honour system stalls but they were pretty rare considering the size of the area. They were more like curious exceptions rather than the norm. They were also geared up to sell at volumes that didn't suit the bike, so too much to carry.
I got the impression from the article on Switzerland that this was more of a way to do your shopping, so sensible quantities not vast bulk purchases.
Incidentally I did not stop to freeload a single strawberry. On a bike with nobody around this should have been simple, there weren't even any barbed wire fences. However, my riding buddy - also a non-American tourist - was not so keen. The reason why was a simple one - 'don't they have guns in America?'.
Actually they have guns in Switzerland too and there is a lot of national service practice going on at the weekends. In fact weekends are quite wonderful in Switzerland as the shops are closed and people go out and do things including going to honour system stalls. The guns though are quite terrifying if you are cycling as you can turn a corner on a descent and feel like you are suddenly in a firing range (rather than right next to one).
I have to say that the Californian produce looked good but was not that good when I bought it in the shops. The land of plenty turned out to be quite expensive and bland to European tastes. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, the roadside appearance of plenty was not so good but the food bought in shops was as expensive as everything is in Switzerland (so no surprise) but delightful to taste.
The relative abundance of Swiss roadside honour stalls doesn't just say things about how honest people are in squeaky clean Switzerland, it also says something about the produce being of value rather than bland.
I don't think articles like these are good for the system's health :)
I don't see a lot of similar arrangements around here...
In Switzerland, an entry level retail worker starts at around $4500 a month and goes up from there.
I guess the number of people in a city make it more likely that there'd be enough 'cheaters' to ruin the whole enterprise and not make it worthwhile.
Why would someone pay $50,000/year for a hypothetical system which would theoretically catch everyone and fill out the police report automatically when the store experiences a tiny $300 annual shrinkage loss?
I had no idea this was much more widespread.
Might be different since there could be cameras or some other form of accountability, but I found it interesting.
Even if there is excellent video and identification?
https://imgur.com/a/wmka5yA
In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland the same shop would have a phone number. You type the phone number into the app (which shows the name as confirmation), the amount, and press send. It's not tied to any particular bank.
Unfortunately, the UK system isn't really catching on. Instead, my friends seem to be using proprietary apps which only work for friends at the same bank.
There's also a self service rest stop mainly for cyclists that's been in operation for the last 10 years or so, between Woodside and Half Moon Bay. https://potreronuevofarm.org/bike-hut/
https://en.japantravel.com/saitama/honesty-shops/59159
Halibut was killer, but I paid in USD because my phone was dead.