For two days I rode twenty five kilometres, which, by my standards, are quite small rides. Today I rode with a group and for a while I was fine but then, when I climbed from Nyon towards Duillier I began to feel that I was fatigued. I slowed down and I couldn’t keep up with the group, or more accurately, the group had better acceleration and once you’re dropped you have to make more effort.
In the US people are obsessed with the lure of self-driving cars and robotaxies but I think these are looking in the wrong direction. If you’re looking in the right direction you improve bus services. You improve their frequency and you improve their coverage. You also improve the bike sharing infrastructure.
If you live in a village that is a half hour walk from the local train station then it is key that you add more buses, at more times. It is key to provide bikes so that people can go from villages with one bus per hour to towns with a train every fifteen minute, or even more regularly.
Two nights ago I saw that Netflix was recommending that I watch The Platform 2, so I watched The Platform instead. The Platform is a Spanish film that takes place in a pit/prison. Within this prison every cell is stacked vertically and those on the first floor get first dibs on food. Those at the bottom fall victim to the greed of those on the top level. If you have not watched the film yet, stop reading now as I will include spoilers
Threads, for the very beginning was an awful idea. Facebook already has Facebook, Instant Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram and more. It was greedy so it created Threads but Threads has one fatal flaw. It’s a web chat driven by algorithms rather than chronological conversations.
The reason for which this matters is that it pushes content that has been seen and interacted by thousands of people, rather than half a dozen. We’re seeing posts that had a thousand comments and five thousand comments. This is not positive for community building because it enforces the cult of personality, rather than a network of friends of friends.
Yesterday I walked with a light rain coat because it rained a few times during the day. This morning it has been raining heavily for hours. I stepped outside to get 4 season tyres from the post box for the bike and my back was quite wet after a few minutes.
Such rain might feel limiting if it fell several times a week, but it doesn’t. It usually falls heavily for a few hours, and then it stops for a few days, before coming back. If I want to go outdoors, I will need to wait until this afternoon today. It’s meant to stop at 1500 or so. That’s when I can go for a run.
Yesterday I finally tested Publibike after years of considering these bikes. There is a paradox. I think nothing of spending three francs, for a coke, rivella, hot chocolate or coffee but the idea of paying 3 CHF to use a bike for a six minute ride is disturbing. I didn’t pay for six minutes, because that was my first ride. I paid 3 CHF for 11 minutes.
When you compare it to the price of a coffee or a coke, or a can of redbull from a vending machine the price is reasonable. It’s when you compare it to the price of walking, free, and the bus, 60 centimes less, that it seems expensive. If it was two francs for half an hour it would be an excellent price point because it would be cheaper than the bus.
I like to cycle but I don’t like the idea of having my bike stolen. I loved using a foot scooter but I find that e-scooters are frustrating because we can’t go above a certain speed. For months, or even years, I have been considering using Publibike bikes for shopping and getting to the train station but didn’t because a bike costs 3 CHF for half an hour, and ten centimes per minute to use after that. An e-bike is 5 CHF for the first half hour and then 20 centimes per minute after that. A muscle bike costs 24 CHF per 24 hours, and an electric bike is 48 CHF per hour.
WordPress and WordPress engine are fighting at the moment. Mullenweg wants WP-Engine to pay its fair share, or contribute more developer hours to keep improving WordPress as a whole. To be more specific “a significant percentage of its revenues for a license to the WordPress trademark.” source
“The abbreviation ‘WP’ is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is ‘WordPress Engine’ and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress,” the updated page reads.
In 2030 the motorway between Nyon and Geneva will be expanded to three lanes because they think that this will encourage growth and promote the economy. At the same time almost every village is lowering the speed limit to thirty kilometres per hour and villages like Signy, Gingins and others are placing traffic calming to slow down traffic and discourage traffic from crossing villages and towns.
In light of this I saw that Signy are adding new traffic calming measures to slow traffic down, which would be fantastic, if it wasn’t completely absurd. The absurdity of the change in Signy is that the road has bricks in the middle, and now cars are forced to drive across these bricks increasing road noise but also congestion.
There was a time when it was much easier to listen to every episode of a podcast for two reasons. The first of these is that they were new so it wouldn’t take too long to burn through one hundred episodes. The second reason is that podcasts were half an hour long so you could listen to two or three during a one or one and a half hour walk.