Today Switzerland votes on the 10 Million Switzerland Initiative. The letterbox has been full of leaflets for and against it. In brief the population of Switzerland is currently 9.1 million. If the initiative succeeds the population cannot exceed 10 million by 2050 and if it gets to 9.5 million before, some drastic action must be taken; which would trigger a Swiss Brexit of sorts.
This is a popular initiative - triggered by collecting 100,000 signatures. And if the vote succeeds Switzerland will have to implement it.
We should find out the result later today. It looks very close.
In 1994 I collected the whole Panini sticker album for the USA ‘94 World Cup. Now for the 2026 World Cup here in Switzerland Panini produce a “United” edition, which has different coloured stickers than the rest of the world. And a few other changes. I guess that’s what happens when you live in the home of FIFA.
Apparently there are 992 stickers to collect and we only have 292 of them! It’s an expensive business, but a fun one too.
The bonfire at Sechseläutenplatz still needs some work before the burning of the Böög (Zurich’s snowman) on Monday. The guild parades, the horses, and the exploding head are definitely worth a look; if you can’t make it, SRF shows it live. It’s the traditional way to mark the end of winter. The quicker the Böög’s head explodes, the better the summer weather will be.
Enjoyable round of minigolf at Wirtschaft Schönegg, Wädenswil. Very busy though and some very slow groups.
A couple of good podcasts I have listened to recently:
- Die Peter Thiel Story – in German. My B1 level could cope pretty well with it.
- Unlearning, experimentation, and engineering rigor in an agentic world – great discussion around agentic AI for software development, getting enough context and what software engineering metrics might make sense in the future.
Incredible amounts of snow at Klosters, Switzerland. When we arrived it looked like spring. Now it’s all white and there is over 1 metre of fresh snow… it’s still coming down!
Welcome to the newest addition to planetjones.net - my new micro blog. It was built using the Gemini CLI in approximately 30 minutes and uses the same implementation as other sections of this website i.e. it is mastered using a JSON file which is rendered using Hugo’s template based content adapters.