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Forced to Wear Mask Outdoors
Switzerland is currently toying with the idea of forcing people to wear masks outdoors but it’s not clear whether this would be for cities or whether it would be for villages and even rural walks. If the obligation to wear a mask at all times is enacted then I have two reactions.
The first is that I never leave the house without a mask and that I wear it when I am forced to walk within a few meters of people. Since the end of March I have been staying as far away from people as possible, which is how I discovered all my new walks.
The second reaction is that wearing a mask outdoors in a city makes sense. It doesn’t make sense when you’re out for a two to three hour walk along main roads where you rarely cross paths with anyone. To be forced to wear a mask even when we are kilometres from any other human would really suck. I know it’s not a scientific term, but that’s a step too far.
No one had to say “Don’t socialise, don’t meet friends, don’t go to restaurants, don’t go to pubs, bars or nightclubs.” No one had to say “Walk along rural paths where no one else walks to avoid any and all human contact”. These are things I did of my own free will. It’s not easy, but the documentaries I have watched and the books and articles I have read make this logical.
If I have to wear a mask for the entirety of my three hour walks where my exposure to others may last half a minute or less then I will be quite disappointed. The reason for that disappointment is that we would never breath fresh air if this rule was enacted. We would always breath mask air. We will suffer from Vitamin D as a result of not getting any exposure to sunlight and we will fall sick, for a new reason.
From what I understand in the Le Temps article this will not include my cherished quiet walking routes, luckily. I will have to keep hoping for rain as the only valid reason for indoor training. 😉 (I know an ascii wink is not good form, but I want you to know this is meant to be taken as a joke.)
For Context Switzerland, yesterday, became world leader in highest percentage increase in the number of new cases. “C’est en tout cas le pays qui compte la plus forte augmentation de nouveaux cas de Covid-19 ces 7 jours: +106%,” Within this context Switzerland must take rapid and immediate action to get the number of new cases per day back in control.
For those who understand French this article presents the situation.
The three points of the article are:
- The situation is similar to how it was on the 16th of March.
- only semi-confinement helped to reduce the number of new cases.
- If the measures were taken today it would take three to four weeks for things to get back under control.
For months I have been saying that people need to take responsibility and that everyone has to do everything possible to reduce the risk of propagation of this virus, and as we see from the current crop of articles the scientific and medical communities say the same thing.
It’s a shame that ordinary people need to be confined for a pandemic to be controlled and then contained. It’s a shame that people can’t take a one or two month break from socialising during a pandemic to get life to return to normal as soon as possible.
The Guardian Article: Inside the Airline Industry Meltdown is an interesting article that looks at the growing number of planes that are being mothballed until better times come, about the removal from service of 30 aircrafts from a single airline etc.
Switzerland got down to 11 new cases per day in June. Yesterday there were 6600 new cases.
The amplitude of the second wave is much greater than the first as we can see from the graph above.
I enjoy Google Buzz
Whilst everyone makes fun of Google Buzz and continues living their daily life between google buzz and facebook I have jumped into google buzz with a passion and found it to be nice. It’s a social aggregator of content from a number of google services where you can discuss the content with a close network of friends.
The strength of this social network is that it is plugged right into google mail. As a result you are guaranteed to log into this site for the whole day. When you have some free time you can go through the threads of conversation and comment on those of interest. Once this is done you can go back to the mail client.
As the day progresses so will the number of people commenting on posts. You will see these comments in gmail and answer straight from there. It means you don’t have to wait for a notification, click on the link, scroll to the bottom of the page and finally comment. Here you just type the comment and then use the keyboard to progress onto the next thread with a comment.
The J and K keys can be used to go backwards and forwards between e-mails in Gmail. They can also jog from one item to another in Google buzz. The result is a very quick, natural way of conversing with the least amount of resistance.
The biggest drawback at the moment is the lack of users who find any use for such a site. It’s hard enough getting interactions from Facebook so you can wait a few months before Google Buzz reaches critical mass. I will be there in the meantime enjoying conversation with others, who like me are early adopters.
Interview with the creators of Minsh tomorrow
Minsh is launching tomorrow and I will be meeting with them to record an interview with them about the website. They’re university students who did this as one of their projects.
Minsh is a 3d virtual environment in which twitter users are represented as fish swimming in the ocean. Each fish is a different twitter user. I saw this project in pre alpha and it’s an interesting idea.
Tomorrow I will see how it’s evolved and I hope to have a video up by Friday lunchtime which will help you understand what the website is about.
The Work-Visa program and US tech domination
Trump’s next steps could strike even closer to home: His administration has drafted an executive order aimed at overhauling the work-visa programs technology companies depend on to hire tens of thousands of employees each year
Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Fitbit, Garmin and other companies benefit enormously from the international appeal that their products have. Not only do the products have great appeal but the environment within which they work is envied globally. Tech entrepreneurs from Europe and other regions migrate from Europe to the US precisely because they want to be part of the most influential tech landscape. By making this migration more complicated it could encourage technological development internationally.
According to a recent article in Le Temps scientists are considering a move from the United States to Switzerland, to continue their research at the EPFL.
By blocking migration from the rest of the world to the US people like Trump are reducing the flow of intellect and ideas for an industry that owes billions of dollars per year to international audiences. We saw the stories about Apple, the European Union and Ireland from a few months ago.
Under the Trump administration the US is saying “We want your money but not only will we not pay taxes in your nations but we will also not hire your skilled workers”. They are practically monopolising the global social media landscape at the moment. It would be nice to have European alternatives.
With the Trump administration I wish that I had EU alternatives to social networks. Could this be an encouragement to revert to blogging?
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