At least in the UK the vaccine passports are made available through the NHS App, and stored AFAIK the same way any other health information on your person is stored already. At least they show up the same way like all other healthcare appointments, prescription s, etc. The only unique things are the QR codes to "export" that information - the validity of this is not checked against a (separate) database to my knowledge.
Other countries that have nationwide systems should have been able to do something similar - of course there's a good chance they didn't, but that's really not an argument against Covid passports but against bad security practices.
My impression was rather it's consensus that the vaccine provides more predictable immunity, which is the most important thing if you want to set policy. So recommendation in most countries I checked is to get the vaccine, even if you had Covid, cause it's the same dose for each patient and we have much better data on efficacy, whereas immunity from infection is much less predictable and traceable.
How was the UK gov blocked from running trains? From what I read some lines actually did get nationalized again after how poorly Virgin & co run some of the lines.
For sure privatizing them in the first place was a pure UK decision with - IMHO - predictable outcome.
> The difference is that direct democracy doesn't scale.
I hear that every time Switzerland is mentioned. I've yet to see a strong argument to suggest why it wouldn't scale in this day and age.
What I think doesn't scale is centralized systems like France, where all money flows to Paris and rarely any back. Switzerland on the other hand is extremely federated, to the point each canton, often smaller than average cities, have their own school system. Most tax money stays on the local level and didn't go to Bern. This independence IMHO is the critical factor for scaling that would work for moch larger countries.
As to the homogeneity: US has one language any natively born American speaks. Switzerland has 3, with a considerable political divide between the French and German spanking areas. Finally Switzerland has 20% Foreigners vs 10% in US. So again I would very much challenge you there.
Did I miss it or was there no mention of companies like Transferwise at all?
From a laypersons perspective this seems exactly how the "private sector stepped in" to fix the problem, with a solution that's actually out there and working well, without the need for blockchain or other form of digital currencies.
That seems to me still too conservative. What about Transferwise, which actually offer easy and cheap cross-border, multi-currency transfers right now?
This is the commonly assumed tension but I think it's a slightly false dichotomy.
The choices are not just between concentrating an obscene amount of money with individuals vs concentrating an obscene amount of money with a handful of bureaucrats.
Why have a system that allows so much money to be concentrated with any kind of entity in the first place and put everyone else at the mercy of their philanthropy? MHO handing all that money to the government instead of a billionaire class is just changing from private trickle-down economics to nationalised ones.
As soon as your having someone deal with billions of dollars a couple thousands become a rounding error and your local concerns become benign, small picture issue. But for you having that 3000 available to finally fix that pothole on your street is critical.
Worker co-ops, taxes on municipal level and wealth taxes might be ways to prevent extreme concentration with any entity.
This can very easily be solved by making it inflation adjusted (i.e. the value increases with inflation every year). This happens for instance with many social contributions in Switzerland and is IMHO the only reasonably way to set such value.
It's exactly how it should be! We generally, like in this case, vote for a change of the constitution. The constitution should not contain specific monetary values like this that need to be regularly adapted anyway, nor would it make sense for people to vote on specific values. We should vote on general ideas and the government, together with specialists, impels implements them. Otherwise it's some kind of micromanagement by the masses.