A long drive without stops
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I didn’t have time to write today.
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Exponential Pandemic Growth And A Lack of Accountability
In theory I should remain neutral and not comment about current affairs but what is happening in Europe and the US merits comment. The runaway growth of the pandemic warrants comment. We are in week 98 of the pandemic, just two away from 100 weeks and people are still debating whether to wear masks, sing in choirs and more. People are still meeting in large crowds and doing more irrational things.
I was looking at the statistics for the last few days in Switzerland and the situation is nuts. Almost all canton are with rates of at least 1000 per 100,000 but some are as high as 2000 or more. What is nuts is that there are no soft lockdowns, no self-isolate at home, no “please avoid events”. It feels as if the guarde fous have been removed and the nutcases are running the asylum. Governments are not being held to account for their incompetence, and in cities like Geneva people are protesting against masks for children, during what we know is an airborne pandemic. That’s nuts. It shows that people are not as knowledgeable about this pandemic as they should be, but also that the fourth estate is not keeping governments honest. Look at England and Switzerland as two examples.
A few months ago Japan had the olympics, and the number of cases went up, but within days they got the situation under control and within weeks it was back to normal life. In Europe countries like Switzerland have been through five ways, and no lessons have been learned.
We have gone from a pandemic that affects old and vulnerable people, to one that affects young adults and older, to, one year later, i.e. this summer, where the Delta and the Omicron waves work their way through child populations where masks, safe distancing, vaccinations and other measures are not taken. Governments are behaving in a manner that could be labelled as Eugenics, and they are getting away with it. We are in a pandemic and the emergency brakes have been disabled.
In the grand scheme of things I am frustrated that children’s lives and well-beings are being endangered by health ministers with economics backgrounds, rather than health or humanities, and by the prospect that this could go on for decades, not weeks, months or years. Every wave is getting to be worse and people are failing to learn from their mistakes over and over. We are living through an irrational time.
We know how to end the pandemic. We see that Australia, New Zealand, Japan and other nations have little flare ups but they deal with them immediately. Switzerland and other countries are just watching a pandemic, without doing everything to stop it. If Australia, New Zealand, Japan and other nations can control the pandemic then so can other countries. Europe, the US and other continents are failing. This pandemic could have been over a year ago. It is irrational that it isn’t.
I keep this post because I think it is important to log the absurdity of the situation we are in today.
Blogging and Medium
During the early days of the pandemic I wrote for at least one days every day. I was blogging the pandemic experience from my point of view. More recently I have kept up another blogging streak. This time I am reaching day 274 as I write this blog post.
Developing a Writing Habit
I mention this because when Medium was first created I liked the idea of a website where we could share writing daily, but at the same time I blogged irregularly and didn’t have a voice. As a result I created an account but never used it. Things have changed now. Now I have written for 274 days in a row. Writing has become part of my daily routine. I was toying between the idea of Substack and Medium but I prefer Medium for the reason that I dislike the idea of sending an e-mail that will be ignored. I subscribe to newsletters but almost never read them. Usually I go through them when working on Inbox zero. E-mails stroke the ego of the writer, but they’re just noise.
No Obligation to Read
In contrast Medium posts are more volatile. They appear in our timelines but we are under no obligation to click through and read them. This is better. Most of what we write has little value but the act of writing, in and of itself has value. It is by writing that we develop the habit of thinking, not just 140 characters, or even 1000 characters, but for an ever growing stream of conscience.
Practicing with VIM
For a while I was using Day One to write my blog posts but the software kept crashing on me so I dumped it for VIM. What I like about VIM is that it’s minimal. I get to practice writing Markdown whilst at the same time practicing with VIM. Vim is a powerful tool that is worth getting familiar with.
The Decline of Social Media and the Increase in Attention
As I write this I read a post about people no longer reading. I read every single day. I read both from a kindle before going to sleep, but also from Audible during my daily walks or runs. Remember that if you don’t have to read in one format, you can always read with another one.
The same was said of blogging. “I don’t have time to blog because I’m distracted by social media”. That was true before. During the pandemic something changed. Social Media emptied of conversations and people we would desire to meet in person, either because we wanted to self-isolate, or because we grew tired of seeing others ignore COVID lockdowns. That’s why I quit Facebook and Instagram. I was tired of feeling more lonely, rather than less lonely.
The Silver Lining
By becoming less sticky Social Media freed us to do other things. It freed us to study, to read, to write, and to work on projects again. For wishful thinkers the pandemic is over. For others, like me, the habits that helped me cope with solitude are still valid now. Now that I have a writing habit that is consistent, I can share blog posts, rather than tweets, toots or notes, depending on wheither you’re on Twitter, Mastodon, Firefish, other Fediverse instances, Threadiverse, or other.
Online Communities
Remember, before Social Media took over online conversations we had social networks. Bloggers are part of a social network. Medium is a social Network. The Fediverse is a social network. Social networks are centered around human being communicating by electronic means. The problem with Corporate Social Media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram TikTok, Threds and others, is that they use algorithms to control the conversation, rather than chronology. Mastodon and the Fediverse are chronological social networks, like the real world. where conversations take place in real time, where algorithms don’t manufacture conflict.
A Personal Blog First, Medium Second
Sharecropping between Medium and a Personal Blog is the reason for which I didn’t want to post to Medium. I’d rather have my own blog, that I write for, daily, and then share on Medium. I have had my own website since 1996. I left Facebook because I felt they benefited more from me wasting my time, than I got.
User ROI
Since 2007 or so I said that Social Media companies spent so much time thinking about ROI for brands, PR firms and corporations that they forgot about ROI for the user. This is demonstrated beautifully by the Threads situation. It picked up one hundred million users within days, but lost four fifths of them within a week or two. Threads forgot about the ROI that users got out of being on their app. I loved the idea of Substack Notes until I saw that it was a popularity contest. My enthusiasm for Substack lasted for minutes.
Medium
As I mentioned above I like Medium because we can read or ignore what people write, without having to mark things as read. We can also read articles on the site or app, when we’re on the app, rather than working through e-mails. I like the idea of revenue sharing but I don’t like that some content is paywalled. I feel that this removes from the user experience. There are two issues with the Paywall:
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We need to pay to finish articles
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By paying to read articles our content has to have much more traffic to break even.
And Finally
Medium doesn’t have to be a mirror of my blog. It can highlight the better content, the content I feel is worthy of being shared more broadly. Now i the time to start a new experiment.
The Age Old Hatred of Pedestrians
Last night I was reading from a book, rather than from a kindle or audible book. As a result I had to keep the bedside light on. I also had to ensure that the light light the pages of the book. I was reading from the book “Beneath My Feet, Writers on Walking” introduced and edited by Duncan Minshull and I came across an exert written by Karl Philips Moritz. He wrote Journeys of a German in England in 1782.
In this book he writes about walking in England and about how people were puzzled that someone would want to walk from London to Richmond and back. People couldn’t fathom that someone would want to walk such a distance on foot.
Pleasant English Miles
At one point he says “Walking four miles in England feels like walking one mile in Germany”, to paraphrase. He enjoyed walking in England. He speaks of stopping by the side of the road, finding the shade of some bushes and reading. Apparently people on the road were puzzled that someone would stop by the side and read.
What is so striking about this writing is that it is from 241 years ago, before cars, before the steam age, and before the forms of transport we are familiar with today.
Several centuries later another eccentric would go for long walks, Grandma Gatewood. People were puzzled that someone her age would walk the Appalachian Trail alone, more than once.
Confused
According to Google Bard walking was normal in 1782, as was horse back riding, horse drawn carriages and sailing ships. Given the context it’s interesting that so early, before steam and trains people would have seen walking from Point A to Point B as strange.
The idea we have that the car encouraged people to stop walking is erroneous, in that people did not walk from A to B long before then. The idea that the carriage was an ordinary form of transport to get from A to B, rather than walking is interesting. Was the writer trying to save money, for his travels, or did he simply enjoy the act of walking?
And Finally
I found copies of the book in electronic format so I will take the time to read a copy, to understand more about the reasons for this long walk.
Relaxing with Language Learning
Today I practiced vocal German and I found it relaxing compared to being with people in person. This pandemic sees the opportunities almost impossible.
When I played with voice recognition on the laptop it failed but when I use it on the phone it works fine. Practice speaking with a phone, when you’re in a quiet room.
Farming In Switzerland
The Pandemic is alive and well and I am still walking around in circles. I would go for bigger, more interesting adventures but no one is publicising those events until after the fact. During a pandemic it helps to be misinformed, an alcoholic and a festival goer.
If you like real sports, like climbing, cycling, group hikes etc then you have to wait for months, or at this point, probably years, for the pandemic to end. Last year when the government made the mistake of opening too early you could believe they were silly. By making the same “mistake” again it starts to look like government policy. That leads to the obvious conclusion that at the current level of incompetence the pandemic will never end.
The way that countries around the world are making the same mistakes, in the same way, at the same time, is leading people to discuss whether eugenics is being experimented with. I prefer to think of it as incompetence, rather than deliberate.
Israel, England and the United States are clear indicators of what Switzerland can expect from the pandemic and yet they fail to take the lessons and warnings on board. Instead they let the situation degrade and get worse. We are now at 20+ percent of ICU beds taken up by COVID patients, out of 79 percent occupancy, according to the RTS.
The Swiss have a strange threshhold limit. They prefer for it to reach a certain critical limit. I’m impatient for the next soft lockdown, as that is when the numbers will decrease again.
Day 60 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – The Sixtieth Day of Solitude.
It’s the sixtieth day of solitude for some of us and if we look at Twitter we see that people in other countries are suffering. One person spoke of the dark dog whilst another expressed distress. A third expresses another emotion. Around the world we see people suffering and trying to cope in their own unique ways.
I went for my daily walk but I wasn’t fully motivated so it was a relatively short circuit. Just 7.65 kilometres according to my SUUNTO Spartan HR Sports Wrist, Black. 
There is a cruel irony in society going from soft lockdown to rebooting in safe mode because our consumerist habits can return and crowds are re-emerging but as single people living alone we are stil not allowed within two meters of others unless there is plexiglass or we’re on a video call.
I saw a large crowd of people all standing together. I write this as a joke. The “crowd” was a cluster of toddlers at a kindergarten. They were going out of their classroom to play on the swings outside. I didn’t linger as I saw this as I was starting my walk.
During most of this walk I felt warm enough to open two layers of clothing. In theory I would have been happy in a t-shirt while I was sheltered from the rain. I wasn’t rained on but the wind was active so when I was exposed to it I closed my layers.
I passed over the motorway and it’s back to pre-pandemic levels. People are once again using their cars as much as before. It’s a shame that despite the short re-starting of society the use of the car is so quick to grow in amplitude.
In the US the pandemic is affecting farmers. According to the New York Times meat plant closures mean pigs are gassed or shot instead. Some slaughterhouses are closed so there is no one to process the meat in some cases and in other cases the animals have become too big for the slaughterhouses to deal with them. Plenty of animals are dying needlessly as a result.
On the lighter side of the news people are experiencing flute solos at Stuttgart Airport. It’s interesting that they would choose to do this. It reminds me of an industry, although only theoretically.
The Economist wrote a column titled Casual sex is out, companionship is in but this column is boring because it looks mainly at dating apps and the cardinal sin of dating apps is that it forces lonely people to know who is interested for exorbitant amounts of money. They speak about video dating but the best app I played with was Seesmic back in the day. I’m still in contact with many of those people. Seesmic was as effective as Twitter for creating new friendships and relationships, back in the day.
The closest we have to online flirting in an open society is Tik Tok. On Tik Tok you see that we can play, flirt, and collaborate together in a way that is similar to what we did on Seesmic back in the day. During this pandemic Tik Tok may be the only place for us to have fun. Last night I did a planking duet, and I see a few more duets that tempt me. We will see if I get round to them.
I really need to play and laugh. Tik Tok made me laugh out loud several times yesterday. It is an oasis of companionship in a sea of solitude. As I mentioned at the start of this post, plenty of people are unhappy and struggling to cope during this pandemic so we must do what we can to endure it, and to come out ofthe other side in a good mental state.
I’ll leave you with a video about cooking Lasagna and cake in a van for a change of ideas.
A Demain.