I see your secure Swedish parking/bunker and raise you the Moscow subway system that has multiple stations built as a emergency shelters, with huge doors embedded into walls that can seal the interior and incospicuous regular-sized doors on each side of these, fronting airlock-like bypasses to allow for scouting the outside when needed. There are several types - swinging, sliding and even draw-bridge like - all still presumably in operational state.
The cellar of my home in Switzerland also acts as a bunker and has massive concrete doors (0.5m thick). When I was a kid, inspectors came by to check that enough water and food was stocked and not too much stuff inside the cellar. There was also a list of which bunkerless neighbour you have to host in case of emergency.
Do you think there would be less conflict in the Middle East if everyone had the same (lack of) nationality? Unless you are willing to engage in mass genocide, eugenics and eternal subjugation to achieve your world of peace, there is little you can do about people that look like each other and live close to each other from identifying as a single unit. The idea of social constructivism has deluded people into believing that any human problem can be fixed by removing words from the dictionary. It's absurd.
Those things existed before and without nations. Civil wars happen despite the participants being of the same nationality. A country is (usually) simply a label for a group of people with a shared culture, language, mindset, etc. Removing those labels is a naive attempt at achieving some global utopia filled with uniform drones.
I might have worked for the largest Swiss bank and was responsible for the software that ran their Financial Investigation Unit. This entire department had the mandate to investigate large deposits and accounts to ensure that there was no link to nefarious sources. The reasoning was that they would rather not have the income than be linked to any "criminal or dictator".
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, and it definitely did happen, but Switzerland is no longer the place where dark money is hidden -- that's moved on.
As someone who has worked at a Swiss bank: This might have applied a couple of decades ago. Especially in the last decade, Swiss banks introduced rules to overcome this problem with international customers. Smaller banks started to turn down US customers right away (like the one I worked at). It has become dangerous for bank employees and banks themselves to support criminals like you mention. There is zero tolerance for money laundering. While it is far from perfect, the financial sector has matured in that regard.
"Birkenfeld himself had provided a variety of “concierge” tax-evasion services: he once bought diamonds for an American client, then smuggled them into the U.S. inside a toothpaste tube.
"A 2014 U.S. Senate report describes a Credit Suisse banker travelling to America to meet a client for breakfast at a Mandarin Oriental hotel, and passing along an issue of Sports Illustrated in which account statements were concealed between the pages."
To my knowledge, these rules came from intense diplomatic pressure from the US, not from some internal realization that it wasn't ethical. I wouldn't be at all shocked if subtler approaches to dealing with tainted money have been adopted.
> it can be seen that bank deposits of Indians in Swiss banks have decreased from ` 23,373 crore in year 2006 to ` 9,295 crore in year 2010.
> the share of Indians in the total bank deposits of citizens
of all countries in Swiss banks has reduced from 0.29 per cent in 2006 to 0.13 per cent in 2010.
You think they not culpable for the past because money got move around? Or that they are not guilty because the numbers are not astronomical.
Why do you think India is bent on AEOI with the swiss. Just to spite them?
Don't you think they can just wipe the slate clean of decades of money laundering with zero consequences? What about millions of lives that were lost/affected by this?
No you can't, encryption doesn't have awareness or morals.
The Swiss made their fortune on the misfortune of others from Nazi gold to modern dictators they have an entire industry around cleaning effectively blood money.
There are two side of that coin - take WW2 for example - some Swiss banks catered to Germany helping expropriate and conceal their loot, while others played a role in safeguarding assets from illegal/immoral expropriation...in a sense you can't have one without the other...
In fact bitcoin makes it harder to conceal transactions from your peers. Wallets are pseudonymous and can be correlated to IRL identities if used similarly to traditional banking accounts/physical wallets.
Just because you can't correlate identities doesn't mean you should expect the network to guard your "financial privacy".
John McPhee's book "La Place de la Concorde Suisse" covers the history and culture of the Swiss army, and spends a bit of time talking about the bunkers in Switzerland, including the secrecy around them. Worth a read if this stuff interests.
Early 2000's, Mercedes used to have (might still do, don't know) a data center near Munich that was housed in a former Nazi bunker. The Allies blew up most bunkers at the end of the war but they calculated that the walls on this one were so thick that blowing it up would cause damage over a 5 km radius (I was told). You had to go through a double door that fully fit within such a wall, 2m+ of reinforced concrete. Mighty impressive.
I used to be a youth camp counselor when I was college-aged. I went to Switzerland many times; of which 4 or 5 times to a large 'hotel' that had several stories of bunker underneath. It was rumored to be a full hospital, fully equipped and ready to do surgery within 12 hours. Another rumor was that some kids (somewhere between 12 and 15) of a group of my organization once went on an 'exploration expedition' in the middle of the night, and then couldn't find their way out. One of them then did find a way out, and thought the best thing to do was to find a phone in one of the manager's offices and call his/her parents (1000 km away) with the story that 'he escaped from an underground abandoned hospital and his friends were still stuck' (in the middle of the night). Which (allegedly) then caused the parents to call the national emergency center, who called the Swiss emergency, who called the villages major (still in the middle of the night), who send in an emergency team (obviously the major would have known about this hospital but, as this rumor goes, the story of what was happening got worse and worse every time it was retold; Chinese whisper style).
We also went on multi-day hikes, and we'd stay in some of these bunkers in the mountains (the whole of Switserland is mountains, but I mean far away from villages or houses - smack dead in the middle of the mountains). We got a tour once from the 'grounds keeper' as it were of the bunker we were at. In the kitchen was a hatch in the floor; it was an air tight hole to put bodies in, because it was quite likely that people would die while inside (either because of pre-existing wounds or due to the stay in there). It never made much sense to me that you'd put such a hole right where you'd normally be cooking (how would that work - 'hey guy peeling the onions, move other because we have another one here'?), but it was too deep to be a storage hole, didn't have anything that indicated being water storage like pump holes or so, so I just nodded and thought 'not sure if surviving a nuclear holocaust is worth it, if you have to spend 6 months in this place for it - and then go out and have to rebuild the world'.
Below the ski resort of Verbier (Swiss) there is bunker which has been converted into a hostel. I've stayed there for a week and it is very bad, and this is just sleeping there at night. Think tiny 3 story bunks, 10+ person dorms, 2 showers and almost no communal area.
Not sure about "many" European countries. Switzerland is certainly the only one who went to extremes on it.
"None" is the wrong answer for the US as well (but the number might be approaching it). In the 50's and 60's the Civil Defense group published books on how to convert a basement into a shelter, or dig one in the back yard. Faced with the immense cost of building community shelters, they instead went about identifying which buildings would be designated as shelters (with minimal-if-any engineering work to see if they'd hold up under the air pressure of a nearby blast). You would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed occupancy. A few shelters were stocked with food, water, radios, Geiger counters, and so on. But even that expense was deemed too great. These days the signs are very rare.
Oh, and lots of propaganda films were produced to assure people that nuclear war was survivable.
You would see the shelter signs pretty frequently, along with their designed occupancy.
The approach to this in Manhattan in NYC was beyond farcical. Yes there were shelter signs at various buildings. Presumably their basements would be able to hold a few hundred people each. But consider:
1) what would an H-bomb or two do to Manhattan?
2) if alive, how do several million people survive in Manhattan if there is no water supply?
3) even if there is water, for how long will a few cases of moldy food feed them?
4) what about waste and hygiene? That many people will produce a lot of poop. Does it all stay in the basements if the sewage system isn't functional?
5) etc. As I said, the situation couldn't have been more absurd if it was deliberately written to be a farce. Manhattan wasn't the place to be hunkered down during a nuclear war. The movie Escape From New York depicted a Utopia when compared to what reality would have been.
Thankfully we never had to use any of those shelters during a real war.
Depends on whether your bunker location is known, and/or if it's considered to be high-value. Conventional weapons like the GBU-28 that can penetrate 30 meters of earth or 6 meters of reinforced concrete make any bunkers that aren't very deeply buried obsolete.
It's also possible that with today's precision guided bombs that successive impacts of "ordinary" 2000-lb bombs on the same exact spot could destroy a bunker.
> Not sure about "many" European countries. Switzerland is certainly the only one who went to extremes on it.
From what I can read, it seems to be mainly Switzerland and Scandinavia.
In Sweden during the cold war it was a requirement for many building permits to add a bunker to the basement, so we still have 65,000 bunkers with about 7 million seats. It's very common to go into the basement of e.g. a library or apartment building and have to pass through massive protection doors with air filters. I doubt any of them are still stocked with food/supplies anymore though.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarinabergets_skyddsrum
Google translate link: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev...
In a typical Swedish utilitarian way it was designed with two uses in mind:
a) peace-time: parking cars
b) war-time: securing people
Here's a sketch: http://hjak.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/kbgt-ritn.jpg