I saw that there is a hike taking place nearby. I would have really liked to join it but I would have been participant eleven with a limit of ten people. I wanted to participate because it would have required walking to Nyon, and taking the train de St Cergue to St Cergue and then walking for a few hours, before taking the train back down and walking home. Both my carbon footprint and my travel time would have been small and the environment would have benefited.
Last night I listened to Yuval Harari and Ari Meiber speak about Nexus, the new book and related topics and the concept that I found really stood out is about freedom of speech and volume. Yuval Harari believes that we should be able to share information and lies, but that social networks are responsible for how it is promoted and amplified, how loud the volume of certain ideas is.
“Freedom of speech is very different to control of volume” source because freedom of speech is the ability to discuss without fearing imprionsment but control of volume is how visible, or amplified a post becomes, and whether by encouraging engagement a post is spreading hate or negative messages. They spoke about how Facebook, “by turning up the volume of hate speech encouraged violent attacks”.
Recently I have been walking and running into and out of Nyon and in the process I have had to cross busy roads regularly and what has struck me recently, especially when running is that people stop to let me cross the road, even when they don’t need to. I really appreciate this.
When you cycle and walk between villages cars skim you, fast and close, and after several years of it I grew tired of it so I shifted to walking towards Nyon, along pavements, and avoiding busy roads when I could. In the process I often walk across main roads, if possible at crossings without lights, in the hope that cars stop for me.
When I was walking in Neuchatel I noticed something striking. I didn’t see a single advert in favour of expanding the motorways. I expected that the Right Wing friends of Global Warming would push for the expansion of the motorways in Switzerland. That wasn’t the case.
In Switzerland, at the moment, they want to expand the A1 motorway between Geneva and Nyon and I suspect that the Gravière in Eysins was expanded to store all the soil that will be needed to widen the motorway.
Yesterday I spent three hours on a train and hiked for a few hours. I also spent two hours in a museum. During this time I was using the fairphone 4 to listen to an audiobook and streamed media. At the end of the day I think I was at about sixty to seventy percent battery life. The battery has only had three or four cycles so far so you would expect it to last.
If you wanted an iPhone with a terabyte of storage it would cost you 1549 CHF for the iPhone 16 Pro. With the Fairphone 4 128 GB model you would pay 329 CHF for the phone and 101 to 109 CHF for a 1TB card. That’s about 440 CHF and you’d have an absurd amount of storage. Absurd because you never want to lose a device with that much data on an SD card.
Today I followed a link where a writer wrote “My every-other-day workout is walking three miles, fast, on a high incline on the treadmill—often times with hand weights too.” and I find it amusing. It’s amusing because in Switzerland, and especially in the old town of Geneva, Nyon, Lausanne, Neuchatel, Fribourg and other towns it is impossible to go for a walk without having a steep climb or a steep descent.
For months now I have had Pihole running, and other ad blocking solutions working. I said, at the time that I don’t feel bad about using ad blockers because they’re so invasive, especially with YouTube, among other platforms.
I also find that when I play games on Android ad blockers work. Ads fail to load so I get blocked. With iOS when you have an ad it plays despite Pihole. Apple have a way to ignore Pihole.
For years I automatically took the car for everything I did, or almost. Over the last seven or eight years that habit has changed as I grew used to walking locally, and catching the train to activities. This shift in habits is due to two things.
The first is that I met with people who take trains. If you meet with such people it makes sense to take a train with them. If you go by car the journey time might be shorter but the goodbye at train stations can be quite brutal. “Goodbye” and that’s it. The activity is over. With the train it’s just as brutal but at least you sat in silence before saying goodbye. When I say silence I mean that you listened as someone else talked.
I read Blindness last month and finished it yesterday and although it won a Nobel Prize I was not a fan of the book. I haven’t had time to digest it properly yet but I think that it was at a disadvantage.
It explores what it would be like to live through an epidemic, but we have all been through a global pandemic now. The ideas and concepts of this book, are thus theory, rather than life experiences that we have all had.