I've been Learning Watchmaking

Thanks. Yeah, I called myself out on lying about not having brand loyalty. In the video I'm wearing an IWC Cal 853 Ingenieur ref 666 from 1963 with a slightly newer IWC oyster-style bracelet.  The truth is as much as I love Rolex for sentimental reasons and because it owns and employs half of Geneva, I have as much or more affinity for vintage IWC for their absolute simplicity of design.  I have never bought a Rolex for myself, whereas I have bought three IWCs for myself and one for my wife. I also love vintage IWC for its connection to Carl Jung.

The problem is I have no affinity, and perhaps even negative affinity for modern IWC because it was bought by Richemont and all of those luxury conglomerate buyouts still bother me at the moment.... but that may change in the future so I'm not comfortable talking about it yet.

Because of the complexity of that (including my contradictory and possibly evolving feelings about it) I just tried to stay away from it for now. I plan to go to Schaffhausen soon and learn a bit more about the history and the effect of the changes on ownership of IWC over time. The issues is white knight vs opportunist, and which one it is (or was) depends on perspective and whose opinion you ask.  A white knight for the local community and employees can also be an opportunist on the market level, which I guess is okay, but it depends a lot on how they treat the employees, and also how faithful they remain to manufacturing in Switzerland when they can get away with a lot of outsourcing to China and still use the Swiss Made imprint according to Swiss laws. I'm super interested in all of that, just not that knowledgeable about it yet with respect to IWC. Having a decent following on YouTube will hopefully open doors to talking with people and getting the views of others closer to the industry than myself. According to Glassdoor (not that it's an oracle), IWC, Rolex and Patek all rate in the range of 4 out of 5 for employee satisfaction, so I guess that's a vote of confidence for IWC. The thing is if it went from having 10,000 employees to having 500, then 4 out of 5 employee satisfaction doesn't mean anything to the other 9,500 families.

Too long of a reply, but these conversations help me think about what I want to talk about and what I need to research do to be able to talk about it.

Thanks. I haven't studied Oris. Will check it out. Also those microbrands. 

Swiss in general have huge carbon footprint and also talk a lot about carbon reduction and carbon free. I believe they are sincere in wanting to bring it down but it's a nation of rich people with very high per-capita energy consumption, so they have a lot to bring down just to have average numbers. I believe Geneva has a plan to power 20% of all heating with geothermal by 2035. Last summer they did a seismic study of the region using twenty thousand sensors. It was insane - every 10 to 20 meters there were GSM transceivers monitoring micro blasts to do the subterranean mapping - from one side of the city to the other including the countryside. 

https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/successful-geothermal-study-for-the-geneva-basin-switzerland/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz83CuOqTsI

They risked black creating an out of control black hole at CERN so why not drill down to the core of the earth and see if anything bad happens? (actually I trust that they know how to dig here and they're obviously good at thank kind of engineering as a result of all the tunneling.)

Socially friendly I think Switzerland is by tradition and by law. It's a place that does look after everyone.