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Cluster F*ck 2011 (aka Election 2011)

Stoss — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:14:15 +0000

Over the past few days I have been sarcastically tweeting out random crap about the upcoming federal election in Canada. The problem with this approach is that I cannot sum up my frustration with this event in 140 characters. Below lies the complete platform with which I will base my future updates on this matter.

If I had to choose a motto for this election it would be this: An election that no one wanted, brought on by a reason no one cared about, at a time when we cannot afford it, amongst candidates that aren’t worth our votes.

This election was not spawned by the will of the people of Canada. It was spawned because of a light at the end of the tunnel by two wanna-be big-wigs and their fellow sheep, who leapt at the slightest opportunity that may give them a hope of adding PM to their business card. I mean, let’s be honest here: Iggy couldn’t lead an ant army to a picnic; Layton lives in a socialist dreamworld where money grows on trees and the streams flow with gold bullion; Harper’s platform is more anti-Canadian than the entire list of our enemies combined; Duceppe wants to split up our country; and May has about as much chance of changing Canada as I do getting a blowjob from Megan Fox. (Megan, if you’re reading this, I will vote Green if you do, in fact, blow me.)

And while Harper being our Prime Minister may leave a horrible taste in most of our mouths, it is certainly better than him having a majority government and wreaking his particular brand of havoc like George W did for his 8 years on the global scene.

On top of it all, we are still in the middle of an economic crisis. People seem to have forgotten that because we weren’t ‘as bad off’ as the US or UK, and because it isn’t exciting news. So, Sun and CTVGlobeMedia have relegated the story to the business section, which no self respecting ignorant Joe Blow reads anyway. Elections cost around $300 million. That’s $300 million less that the government can do something with. To put that in perspective; the Conservative budget, which Layton and Iggy both said they would vote against, offered $300 million to low income seniors as part of the Guaranteed Income Supplement program! So what they basically said was that they’d rather pay for an election, which by all rights should result in the same government, than give money to your grandmother. If this isn’t abuse of power, I don’t know what is!

What these guys seem to forget is they work for us. Given that 165 of 308 seats house didn’t go to Harper last time around, it’s pretty clear that he isn’t the Prime Minister of choice for over half of the country, but that doesn’t mean we should have an election every 18 months to try again!

Smoke & Mirrors

Stoss — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:07:09 +0000

The British Government just enacted a law which takes affect in roughly one year which will ban cigarette and other tobacco products from being displayed in shops. Instead they will need to be stored below the counter and asked for directly by the customer.

This week I was in London every day for work and on the way home read the free evening newspaper “The Evening Standard”, which ran multiple opinions and stories about this news event. Two in particular struck me as interesting.

In the first one a politician was arguing for this ban by saying: (paraphrased) “[The Government] has to do everything it can to cut back on cigarette availability to curb the number of smokers in this country”. If I was inside of his head during this interview I wonder if I would have heard the extension to that sentence: “… with the exception, of course, of making them illegal, because we couldn’t survive without the copious amounts of taxes they bring in.”

As a non-smoker living in a free country these political games of attempting to coerce our behaviour sicken me. The millions spent on this futile fight surely would be better served elsewhere; which leads to the second article.

In this opinion letter the writer argues (only half tongue-in-cheek) that we are being socially irresponsible by not smoking. An interesting premise, and here is why. He argues that because of our advancements in health care and medicines we are living much longer. Life expectancy ranges between 75-85 in the western world. However, most countries have a retirement age of 60-65. Which means for 15-20 years people who live in social service countries are drawing on pensions a lot longer than when these original legislations were passed. His argument is that by stopping people from smoking, you are losing valuable tax money, and then paying that person, who may have died younger because of smoking, for more years of his life you saved. The government is actually shooting itself in the foot twice! On top of that, because treatments are getting cheaper everyday, it is now or soon will be cheaper to treat that person for his eventual disease, then pay his pension. Economically speaking the government has made a very irrational decision. By ‘protecting’ their constituents, they are in fact hurting their cash flow, which in turn will hurt their constituents.

The problem is that the government’s motivations have nothing to do with the public well being. Their motivations are to please activist and lobby groups to solidify votes so the can be re-elected again and continue to draw their paycheques.

I mentioned this during the Environmental Summit meetings a while back; world leaders aren’t experts on things. They are experts at being politicians, not scientists who understand the environment, economists who understand financial models, doctors who understand healthcare. So having governments make decisions about these things without completely researching the subject with the top members of the specific field is asinine.

There is a good reason why I am not allowed to prescribe medication to someone or to sign off on designs for a traffic bridge. Why do we allow non-experts in our government make these uninformed decisions?

Of course, thorough research and investigation cost money and take time, neither of which the government really has in their relatively short terms.

There are certain prejudices that people fight and die for: Race, gender, religion, disability. Yet others we not only accept, but openly perpetuate without any sense of moral infraction (Gender based car insurance premiums is probably one of the most prolific). You could argue that smokers are now a part of this list. A few western countries seems so preoccupied with discriminating against smokers by forcing their habit underground it is like we are entering a state of prohibition on cigarettes, and we all know how well that worked.

In Germany offices, airports and other buildings have smoking rooms. Sealed off areas for smokers, which have ventilation and provide a warm, indoor place which doesn’t disturb the non-smoking crowd. Also their vast number of automated cigarette dispensers, check your age and dispense cigarettes at anytime of the day. The public there must be horrified to be forced to look at cigarette s and smokers everywhere! Or perhaps they realize that people make choices and in a free country they shouldn’t be persecuted for them.

Governments need to stop focusing money attempting to adjust a relatively small proportion of the public’s habits and put that money into healthcare and education programs that can benefit everyone. A child without a textbook in his classroom doesn’t give a shit if cigarettes are on display, because without those textbooks he’ll be too illiterate to read the display anyway.

Be offended, be very offended

Stoss — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:26:43 +0000

30 Rock aired its Season 5 opener last week and it contained within it a 15 second throw-away joke about having sexual intercourse with your wife when she is asleep. The Internet lit up with activists, rape care workers and apparently anyone who knows how to type, expressing their disgust at such an offensive joke and how horrible Tina Fey is for writing it and NBC is for airing it.

Now, I am not surprised about that. What I am surprised by is some of the debates I have read. In one of the debate essentially a Care Worker for rape victims argued that his free speech allowed him to call for boycotts, apologies, and ultimately eradication of something if he doesn’t agree with it.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the idea of free speech is not to limit the availability of potentially offensive things from existence. It is to understand that things exist which you may not agree with. Freedom is choosing what to agree with and what not to. And as long as no one is forcing you against your will to change your opinion, your freedom is unaffected.

Eradicating everything that has the potential to be offensive is absurd! The world would be pretty empty if we removed anything that potentially could offend people.

I am not saying the joke isn’t offensive and isn’t hurtful to a significant group of rape victims and their friends and relatives, but what I am saying is that that doesn’t mean the joke shouldn’t exist.

Recently some American religious fundamentalists decided that burning a Qur’an might be a fun thing to do. And almost everyone up to and including the President of the United States condemned it. I say almost, because one particularly public figure actually made the most sane argument of all:

In a strange way I’m here to defend his right to do that. I happen to think that it is distasteful. … But the First Amendment protects everybody, and you can’t say that we’re going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement. … If you want to be able to say what you want to say when the time comes that you want to say it, you have to defend others no matter how much you disagree with them - Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City

It is exactly what should have been said of the situation. Finding something disgusting is not a reason for it not to exist. Potentially putting lives at risk is not a reason to not do something. You know what else puts people’s lives at risk? A war in Afghanistan…

Similarly, opposing a mosque being built near the former World Trade Center site because it happened to be Muslims who were responsible for the attacks is like banning black trench coats in Highschools because the Columbine Attackers happened to wear them. It might be considered sympathetic and kind for the church leader to abandon their plans, but it certainly isn’t a necessity.

Without sounding cliché: Can’t we all just get along?

Sometimes there is a compromise. Like censoring arbitrary swear words on shows like ‘The Late Late Show’ which airs at 12:30am! But as far as I am concerned, if you are up at that time of the night and offended, go to fucking bed! I love how sitcoms now use douchebag like it’s a definite article, but we still can’t get over fuck and shit. Who decided a noun referring to a piece of cleaning equipment is somehow less offensive than a synonym for sex and a noun meaning feces? Apparently some douchebag.

If you don’t like 30 Rock, don’t watch it (Similar to my unalterable hatred of the ridiculous waste of 22 minutes an episode that is ‘Two and Half Men’). If you don’t think burning the Qur’an is productive, don’t burn one. But don’t, whatever you do, tell me I can’t watch 30 Rock because you find its content offensive, or tell me that I cannot destroy any object I own, regardless of the meaning it may or may not have to you or someone else, no matter how distasteful or disgusting you find my preferences.

And if you hate the word fuck for some reason other than somehow society is convinced that the devil spawned the word himself, don’t use it.

Protection Against Protection

Stoss — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:16:12 +0000

The US Federal Trade Commission recently released a report about how online/virtual ‘worlds’ protect underage children from harmful or explicit images. They investigated the mechanisms these companies put in place to ensure that children 13 and under did not access “things they shouldn’t.”

Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more effective age verification methodology.” Well, holy shit! They cracked it! It angers me when an agency, government or not, comes up with a recommendation that is as useful as, “My plan is to come up with a plan.” A 2-year-old could have figured out that the reason why they can log into adult online ‘worlds’ is because there is no mechanism to prevent them!

But what is the solution? The fact of the matter is there is none. Just as 16-year-olds can use their sibling’s ID to get into a bar illegally, condoms are not 100% effective, and people continue to inexplicably love Two and Half Men, there is no protection that can successfully eliminate an intentional desire to do “things they shouldn’t,” except blocking out the potential altogether. In this example, that would include shutting down all bars, not having sex, and killing Charlie Sheen. Alternately, there is the the always popular ‘lock yourself in an opaque box’.

There are really two problems at play here, and neither have to do with technology.

Accidental access: While this kills my sex analogy because in my research, accidental sex isn’t that easy… You can certainly accidentally wander into a bar, a naughty website, or flick onto a tv show that shouldn’t be on the air.
Purposeful circumvention: You can purposely attempt to buy beer underage, lie about your birth date on the web or in paperwork, and tune into CBS.

Before we go any further, we will never stop number 2. As I said above, the FCC, FTC, FDA et. al. and their world wide equivalents can do all they want and spend billions of currency units, but if someone wants to do something and they can find a way, they will do it. Just as Philippe Petit (“Man on Wire”, highly recommend watching), DB Cooper, the 9/11 perpetrators, etc., etc. proved: “You can do whatever you want.” By the way, does anyone else see the irony in that guidance councillors use that phrase as a build up to young students, and then we spend government money trying to figure out ways to prevent young students from doing so?

Now in the accidental case the FTC found that even in ‘virtual worlds’ that were kid friendly, there were sexually explicit references, violence, and other “things they shouldn’t” have access too. This is nothing new, I mean go back and watch old cartoons, movies, read comic books, or walk down any street in a major city. Now stop. The reason we have to go back and re-watch the cartoons and movies, or re-read the comic books is because in most cases we were too innocent to get the joke. The reason why this next generation (who have been surfing for porn since they could double click their index finger) is growing up so fast is not because there are subtle references in their world to all of this, it is because sex, violence, drugs and the like are promoted on a daily basis to them as ‘bad’, and ‘bad’ things are intriguing! Remember?! Forget the sexually suggestive graphic in Sims online. 12-year-old girls see women in short skirts on tv or on the street and then go and buy “Cosmo: The pedophile edition” to find out why, or the 8-year-old who knows in explicit detail what a blow job is because MTV bleeps out mysterious words, so the curious mind has to go and find out why! And to add to it all, today they have the capability find out quite quickly, whereas when we were young we only had older siblings or ‘the cool aunt’.

We played cops and robbers as kids and never even put together the fact that this was violence personified. Today they play cowboys and Indians and are scolded because it is racist to portray Indians in that manner!

We try and protect kids against things they don’t understand, and they therefore want to understand it, and at an age too young to comprehend it. Instead of letting them hear the word “Fuck” and explaining that society doesn’t want them to use that word (A-whole-nother blog entry there), or letting them play with blissful ignorance without imparting our adult morals, we attempt to hide what has always been in the open and then wonder why they become more interested in it. Kids don’t need our adult constructs forced upon them. While we need to monitor their access to various things, whether it be bad TV or naughty websites, we should do this in an effort to guide them morally, not force them to learn adult life lessons at a younger and younger age.

PS: I hate Two and Half Men.

The Great Pretender

Stoss — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:22:55 +0000

Pretending is ingrained in us from the very beginning. As a child, we would sit Calvin & Hobbes style in a box and blast off to space, or watch the Muppet Babies invent crazy worlds and adventures, or turn a sandbox into a Jurassic playground. Imagination is one of the very components which make us human. We have the ability to invent things in our heads and seemingly make them real.

However, while imagination should be encouraged, and is quite frankly important to all aspects of science, technology, advancement etc., it also can be overdone.

As a society, there are some things which we ‘pretend’ that actually change the way we live. This can have serious consequence. But what is worse is that we pretend things that don’t make sense, just like thinking a box is a space ship and four -inch dinosaurs can terrorize our backyard…

We pretend things like people don’t swear, smoke, drink, insult each other, fight or argue. We pretend that age has something to do with abilities. In Canada you can legally consent to sex at 16, but can’t purchase a tape to watch others have sex until 18. You’re old enough to vote for the leader of our country at 18, but not mature enough to consume alcohol until 19. You can choose to purchase potentially deadly cigarettes at 16, but can’t sign a do not resuscitate until 18. We pretend that people shouldn’t die, and that when accidents occur it is always someone’s fault. We pretend we can protect society by putting in place legislation to enforce laws against people who purposely break the laws already in place.

The Canadian Women’s Hockey team, who just took gold at the 2010 Olympics, were seen after the game sharing beer and cigars on the ice once the stadium had cleared of fans. They have since come under fire, because one of their stars was just 18 and, of course, everyone below 19 doesn’t drink, therefore they were setting a bad example. On top of that smoking in a public place!? You must be joking! That is illegal in British Columbia! The problem is that every law has a purpose. For example the “No Smoking” laws were put into place to stave off second hand smoke in people who choose not to smoke. If I am at a private party where all parties consent to smoking, then why does it matter that the place was public or private? In a room the size of a 20,000-person stadium the smoke from 15 cigars would be like placing a droplet of cyanide in the ocean and calling it poisonous water… And a member of a professional hockey team having a drink before she is ‘legally’ allowed to? I’m surprised she wasn’t doing a line of coke off the naked thigh of their goalie. Just 6 days before this event, John Montgomerie (gold medallist in skeleton) walked through Whistler with a pitcher of beer in his hand, and not only wasn’t chastised, but was celebrated on CTV as “an every Canadian man.” Last time I checked drinking in the streets was still illegal.

RDS recently had a commentator make a derogatory remark about openly gay skater Johnny Weir. A gay activist group immediately filed a complaint to the CRTC and demanded an apology from RDS. But Weir himself asked, “Why?” He fully acknowledged that this is a free country and people have their opinions. It doesn’t matter if your opinion is ignorant in a free society; you are still entitled to it. People will always fight, and have ungrounded opinions. Pretending otherwise is not only foolish, but detrimental. If no one has the right to disagree with anyone else then in what way are we free?

NBC repeatedly showed the Georgian Luger in his final grave moments, finding new people and things to blame and then issued an apology when their Shaun White’s coach used a curse word (which are in themselves arbitrarily chosen and changed on a regular basis) on live television. It’s fun to pretend when people fuck up they say ‘frak’ and ‘derrnit’, but all we are doing is further perpetuating the falsehoods that are turning everyone into whining, snivelling babies when anyone does anything they don’t like.

Pretending is fun. It really is. But hell, even the Bible says we are born to sin, so even the Christian right has to agreethat watching an 18 year old have a sip of booze is expected (assuming that is a sin and not some arbitrary human-made rule) and two guys kissing is just a spec in the eyes of their God to the other 6.5 billion humans out there with the potential to lust, murder, adulter, steal, etc. Let’s stop pretending people and society are perfect and start enjoying the fact we are different and can make our own decisions as long as they have no adverse effect on others.

Why we’re destroying TV

Stoss — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:01:06 +0000

I started thinking about this topic after I watched this Craig Ferguson clip:

By now we have all heard about Conan and Leno dueling it out for the sacred 11:35 slot on NBC. However, the situation brings to light something that hasn’t yet sunk in at most major corporations yet. The public is changing.

Ferguson’s hypothesis is actually quite intuitive. The youth do rule our society. The 18-49 demographic is what all advertising dollars are based on, and that is what makes the big 3 networks all of their money. What Ferguson missed, however, is that that “deification of youth” has continued, but the youth have drastically changed.

The public today want convenience. They want everything now and exactly how they want it. It started slowly with Sunday shopping, and 24 hour supermarkets. Then it grew with super stores that sell everything from perscription drugs to fresh chickens and motor oil. Pay Per View popped up and let us watch movies whenever we wanted without leaving our homes. The web started creeping in and suddenly we could monitor prices of things like flights, toys, books and more to buy when we wanted to at the price we wanted to. Then, in one of the smartest moves of the 21st century, someone put a harddrive into a VCR and PVR (TiVo) was born: So now we could watch TV when we wanted. Bittorrent made a debut about 7 years ago and made data share faster and easier. Pagers and then cellphones became ubiquitous in people of all ages: So now we were always conveniently available and could conveniently contact anyone. We became obsessed with everything being at our fingertips (There’s an app for that™). We started bitching when we were charged for Internet outside of our house, so Free WiFi became synonymous with Café. Undergrounds subways across Asia and Europe starting piping in cellphone signals. TV companies started endevours like Hulu and BBC iPlayer to satisfy the lust for anytime access. LoveFilm and NetFlix popped up so we could stop strolling to Blockbuster and the Kindle changed the way commuters read.

But in the process, what happened, almost by accident, is we started to kill traditional television. Primetime was called such because that is when most people watched tv, and while that is probably still true, it isn’t the 18-49s any more. The ‘sacred youth’ are playing XBox or using MSN or any of the other things that can be used to relax our lazy asses that didn’t exist in 50′s when this all started. Prime time is becoming ‘When I Want Time’ and this is what started the demise of such shows as Arrested Development, Jericho, The Fly and probably (sadly) soon to be Chuck. The fan base was there and arguably still is, but the generation of people that watch these shows isn’t watching them when Neilsens is recording the metrics. Suddenly advertisers are saying it isn’t worth their money and the networks are are saying we need to find something better, regardless of the quality. This is why cable shows like Dexter, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and the like became such big long lasting hits, they don’t rely on ads, because the revenue comes from the cable fees.

Conan/Leno are the same in this regard. The part most people want to see of any late night show is the monologue, and in the case of SNL, Weekend Update. So we PVR that while we watch the prime time shows that we didn’t watch between 8 and 11, then watch the first 15 minutes and hit the sack, or save them up for another time: Convenience.

Mind you, the movie, airline and music industries are much farther behind then the big 3 when it comes to accepting the new technologies, but this doesn’t stiffle the fact that every year dozens of shows go off the air before they get to 6 episodes, because their on air rating are ‘too low’. Eventually the large corporations need to start catering to the desire of convenience. The food industry made the transition years ago with frozen dinners, the microwave etc., and pre-made dinner sales are always on the rise. Eventually the other industries will need to go down this path, because, for better or for worse, this is what their customers are demanding.

Publicly Private

Stoss — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:33:31 +0000

I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:

1) A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2) Employees in a service industry being reprimanded for posting negative comments about customers on their social sites.

3) Causing of problems in relationships when one person makes relationship-based remarks, or when a person ‘updates their relationship status’ without approval of the other party.

Hold on, none of those are examples of losing privacy; they all made their opinion public on purpose. Everyone at one time or another is bored at work. Everyone complains about idiots they have to deal with, and everyone has relationship troubles. It isn’t the fact that those people had those thoughts; it is the fact that they consciously made the thought public. Consciously making something known to people is not losing privacy, losing privacy is something that you didn’t make known to people, becoming known to people. For example, having your private diary published, or your best friend write a tell-all book about you, or a doctor telling everyone about your genital herpes is a loss of privacy. Standing on a box in the middle of Times Square and screaming that you have genital herpes, or handing out free copies of your sex tapes to strangers is not a loss of privacy.

If Facebook openly released all of your pictures to the general public, not just registered Facebook users or specifically your ‘friends’, then that is an invasion, but they don’t (I didn’t say can’t). In fact, they are putting in more restrictions around what can be seen.

We live in a knowledge-starved world. We put Tiger Woods on the front page because we found out he had a secret, but then scream bloody murder when someone finds out ours. We can’t have it both ways.

The sad part is that government agencies are spending millions to study Facebook for security holes, when in reality we live in a society that cares less about privacy and more about reading about our acquaintances’ lives than ever before. If something isn’t meant to be public, don’t make it public. It is as simple of that. Posting “I’ve had a horrible day,” is enormously different than posting “I hate my boss and work is shit.” Facebook does not require the same level of professionalism as a man in a suit in front of a microphone (but then again, even Obama called Kanye a “Jackass”), but it does require some common sense.

And you want to talk about privacy? Well how about laws that restrict who you can love/marry, in what orifice you can have sex, or upcoming flight rules that you can either be photographed in an ‘naked scanner’ machine or have your genitalia juggled before you can get on an airplane? We don’t live in a private society at all when a government can invade it like that. BTW: This is for another entry, but ‘naked scanner’ is by far the newest gross exaggerated term. Given the above two options I will gladly let a couple people stare at my colourless, featureless ‘naked’ body only to have the picture removed immediately upon exiting the scanner. It’s not like Playboy is standing behind them saying “Yep, I’ll take that one for our ‘frequent flyers’ issue.” In those pictures you are no more nude than that chick’s silhouette on a trucker’s mud flaps.

This last year 3 or 4 guys got caught for misuse of a firearm and animal cruelty because they did really stupid, depraved things to a duck during a hunting trip. They got caught, not because someone discovered the duck, but because they posted themselves on YouTube doing it. Had that not happened, the ducks would have decayed or been eaten and, assuming they wouldn’t brag about it (which is a stretch based on the video), they certainly wouldn’t have been charged.

Why haven’t we learned from this? Because we are not used to a truly global media. While screaming on top of a box in Times Square all of your dirty secrets certainly isn’t maintaining privacy, it is not the same as electronically posting something that within seconds the entire world can see… Until, of course, someone starts streaming your NYC rant. Which really poses the question, do we have any privacy anymore? If anyone can video/photograph us doing anything and YouTube it, wouldn’t you think that would make everyone more afraid than the stuff they knowingly post? It sure does for me…

Flight Sense

Stoss — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:08:07 +0000

As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.

Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do! Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.

I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.

Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.

World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because they are the experts.

All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.

The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)

I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.

Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.

The Fight Against Futility

Stoss — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:35:52 +0000

Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…

With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder the impact any of these widely publicized mini-victories has had?

The American “War on Drugs” was a late 60′s initiative and while various reports indicate drug use is down, an equal or greater number seem to report little change. Which isn’t surprising to me. If I ask any random yes or no question to any x number of people the result will likely vary from survey to survey.

It is impossible to determine the exact number of drug users for a variety of reasons. Avoiding the “since drugs being illegal, there is an apprehension about discussing their use” cliche, consider how I could go about calculating the number of smokers.

Obviously countries, and regions within those have different habits of smoking habits. If you broke down those regions based on something say like #of packs sold in a week, then determined the average number of cigarettes a smoker in that region smoked you could then calculate an estimate on the number of smokers in that region. Add all the regions up and (albeit with a fairly high margin of error), you could still get an idea of # of smokers..

There is no way to do this with illegal drugs in most of the western world. There is no idea how much of the product exists, and therefore no idea how much is sold and therefore no accurate measure of the use, or for that matter the change in use.

I am not arguing that the War on Drugs hasn’t worked, I am arguing that there is little they could do to prove it has and it has been going on since the 60s!

Assuming we know that for 40 years the government of the US (and many other countries) has put billions into fighting a war on something which we also know still exists and have no real way of measuring any affect, what does that mean in the case of Internet file sharing? Is the War on Pirated Music/Video identical to the War on Drugs?

Before every movie in the UK there is an ad with a famous person saying don’t copy this movie and there are plenty of celebrity anti-drug campaigns out there. The agencies doing the fighting have just as much propaganda available see the little bit I did on drug propaganda previously and the RIAA’s wonderful news releases on their slowly being killed industry which set a new record for profits last year.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not indicating that because music and theatres are making money this legitimises illegal actions, what I am simply putting forth is that fighting something that isn’t going to go away is like randomly waving your hand in the air with hopes it’ll hit and kill a fly.

It took 40 years to make an insignificant dent (if there is one at all) in drug use with “The War on Drugs” and its Most Wanted culprits are still in daily use. My bet is that the Internet landscape will change so vastly in the next 40 years that by the time the corporations fighting this massive swarm of file sharing website “flies” by waving lawsuit “flyswatters” randomly around the world the technology will have advanced far past today’s torrents and will become even more widespread. Their method is too much like peeing in the Atlantic Ocean: It isn’t going to change the pH level of the Pacific.

Trick or Hack!

Stoss — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:39:00 +0000

Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!

First lets be clear: These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are clever people who realized that you can get people that are less clever to tell you things they shouldn’t. This is not new to e-mail, Facebook, corporate logins… In fact people take advantage of less clever people all the time. 3card monte in some form has existed for centuries and continues to fool people! Yesterday and today a fake Amber Alert message has been circulating the web, thousands have been fooled into propagating a false message. Tricking people is not the same as hacking. mafiaboy is a hacker. Kevin Mitnik was a hacker (although he was never malicious and wrongfully imprisoned).

The people who did this have done nothing wrong (I assume the lawyers for the above companies will disagree)… They asked for people’s passwords and the people gave them to them, I can do that right now: Please send me your passwords… In fact post them directly below this entry so that everyone can see them…. Sure they set up a fancy phishing site and sure they claimed to be someone they aren’t, but that is immoral, not malicious. Now, the people that use those passwords for malicious purposes are the ones breaking the law. Just as it is illegal for me to open your (snail) mail. (and yes, I concede these people could be one and the same, but it is important to distinguish that, which the media is not)

The problem, and I know I have beaten this to death, is that people seem to think technology is something new, and it isn’t. It is an adaptation of something. All technology is is an advancement of a previous incarnation of something else. Cell phones are an advancement of cordless phones, which are an advancement from corded phones, where were an enhancement on dial phones, which were an advancement on the original switchhook phones, and the cycle goes back to the first person to every tie a string between two cups. The concept and basic requirement is the same in all of these cases: I have information and I want to share it with someone who isn’t within sound wave receiving distance of my voice.

And finally, the calls for “increased security” and “more education” at these companies is absolutely preposterous. There is NO level of security or education that can prevent a person divulging personal information. How hard is it to understand “Don’t tell people your password.”? And yes, these guys used a sophisticated website to garner this information, but how is Google to prevent people from writing a webpage that looks like theirs? I mean I could mock up a Gmail page and have it be identical to it. How do you teach the mass public to make sure the website they are typing personal data into is legit? Well forward this Blog URL to 15 people and you will find out, because if you don’t you will have bad sex for the rest of your life! I mean after dozens of friends sending me hundreds of those over the past 10 years I am sure they all learned that that is a scam…

Contrary to popular belief, people do not learn from their mistakes.

Driving me to Drink

Stoss — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:36:45 +0000

The other day in the paper there was an article about a 22 year old English man who died due to liver failure. The doctors were quoted as saying “He had the worst case of cirrhosis they have ever seen”. In fact his alcohol consumption was so bad that he was denied a liver transplant on the basis that it was felt he could never kick the habit enough to treat the new organ properly.

The mother has come out saying that he “made a mistake” and was not “given a fair chance” at a transplant. He also “didn’t know what he was doing … He didn’t know he was going to die.” The articles stated he started drinking at age 11 and binge drinking by 13. I am never one to trample a man’s grave, but does anyone else see anything wrong with this?

Just yesterday I was treated to a wonderful article linking alcohol to cancer. Wow. It sounds like this alcohol stuff is the worst substance on this planet! Killing humans! Causing cancer! We should definitely fear this beverage! It’s almost as bad as dihydrogen monoxide*!

But then, a little bit of my faith in humanity was restored, with an article talking about how a drinking age of 21 in the US is hurting society, not stopping any drinking.

The truth is everything is harmful. You can die from drinking too much water (DHMO?), people are struck by lightning by doing nothing more than standing outside! Hell, LIFE KILLS YOU! Every notice that 100% of lives, end in death?

The problem here is not the substance, whether it be alcohol, pot, tomatoes, red meat… the problem is the over consumption and lack of education about a substance.

I hate to say it, but one thing the government got this one right with the Canadian Food Guide. Having a moderate amount of various foods. Another example where our government succeeds?

Check out these 2 pages:

Health Canada Drug Facts

Drug Enforcement Agency (US) Drug Facts

Canada explains in calm and clear statements what we need to know about drugs. Click on any of the drugs listed and they use phrases like: ”May be addictive”, “Scientific studies are not complete”, “Smoking can lead to bronchitis”.

The US site in contrast uses phrases like: “It’s like playing Russian Roulette.”, “can lead to addiction, impairment and even death.”, “far better not to start, not to experiment, not to tempt fate.”

See a different approach here?

Moderate consumption of any and all substances is fine. Binge drinking is bad, period. We’ve all done it, I hope not at age 13 and hopefully not every day, but we have all done it. Smoking tonnes of pot, while popping e? Yeah, probably not an ideal hourly activity. But remember your 21st Birthday? Yeah, neither do I.

Drugs don’t kill people. Alcohol doesn’t kill people. Red Meat doesn’t kill people. These can kill people. However, having the ability to do something is not the same as actually doing it. We all have abilities we choose not to use. “With great power comes great responsibility” one Peter Parker used to say. Part of having control of our fate is being able to have self control of our fate. Learn your limits and read realistic literature not propaganda. Enjoy a glass of red wine instead of a bottle or 3, have a juicy, medium-rare steak every couple of weeks instead of 2 meals/day, drink 8 glasses of water a day, not 50.

Is it sad that this man died? Absolutely. Was he given a fair chance? Well, if you were giving your liver to someone and you got to choose who, would you have chosen this man? Doctors get paid a lot of money to make these decisions, certainly not something I am going to tackle. Suffice it to say, I don’t think the British healthcare system is broken.

*Please, please, please tell me you know that DHMO is H₂O aka: water!

Top One Reason People Hate Technology

Stoss — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:44:09 +0000

I hate “Top” lists. I do. All of them. I’ve hated them since before Letterman tried to make them his own, and I hate them even more now when webpages take 10 links to show 10 pictures of the top 10 potentially homophobic animated characters as judged by someone with the television knowledge of my left ass cheek.

But here is a list that I cannot even begin to tell you how much I hate. The Top Seven Ways Technology Owns You. For those of you who don’t want to (or can’t) read:

OnStar cars
Google’s data mining
Facebook and other social networking sites
Digital Cameras being used in public
Credit Card data mining to determine your risk as a card holder
CCTV
RFID Tags

OK, where to start…

OnStar: OnStar uses is the combination of 2 major technologies. One is a similar system to the black box on a airplane. This technology in cars has been around since 1970! It tracks data on crashes and is used to make cars safer for the general public and can be used in court to show dangerous driving. The second is GPS. Now, although this become operational globally in the 90′s, similar technologies have been around since the 40′s and were widely used in WWII. Having cars speeds controlled by these technologies is not scary, in fact it is probably the best method of accident prevention. Several years ago they started demo’ing Magnetic cars in California where there was no need to accelerate or drive. Speeds were controlled by magnets in the roads and a computer system. Cars could drive 70 mph within 5 feet of each other without any human error causing accidents… computer error, well, that is for another entry Oh and BTW, don’t you have to voluntarily buy OnStar?

Data mining (Facebook, Google, Credit Card): I wrote on this before, but I will re-iterate. Credit Cards companies are just that: Companies. They are in business for the bottom line. In the same vain as Health Insurance companies charging more to people with heart disease in their family and car insurance companies charging more for 17 year old males, they have every right to determine your risk to their bottom line and the bonus to them is, you can’t lie like you could on a physical, every purchase tells a story about you. One thing the article did teach me though is to stop paying for lapdances on my Visa. Now, Google and Facebook are very similar in this regard. You tell them something about yourself and they use it to their advantage. Write or wrong, that is the agreement you make by using their services. There are 100′s of search engines, don’t like it, use one who cares less about who you are… The one example I am tired of hearing about is this (which seems to be in every tech article I read) “Facebook changed their terms of service and essentially gave themselves the ability to do anything they wanted with user’s data and content whenever they felt like it, the community freaked out.” THIS IS PROPOGANDA! Facebook wasn’t trying to steal your data, they were trying to protect themselves like any company who holds sensitive information. The term actually was put in place because: If I send a picture or a message to you there are now two copies of that item: mine in my outbox and yours in your inbox. Now if I cancel my account they can simply delete my copy, but who “owns” the other copy? If you sent a Christmas gift to your girlfriend and then broke up, just try getting it back! In exactly the same manner Zuckerberg said that they need to keep control of that item, because now that you are gone you certainly aren’t the rightful owner. Admittedly, they could have gone about this in a better way, but regardless, they were not giving themselves the rights to all data!

Digital Cameras and CCTV: The argument here is that because everything from cellphones to pens have cameras in them, you can be recorded at any moment and placed on YouTube for millions to see. Fair enough. I myself don’t see the necessity of a camera built into every object. But is it really changing our lives? Do you walk around constantly thinking that you better not take a peak at that hot chick’s ass for fear of being caught on a total stranger’s camera? I am the first to admit this is a small small world, but I am not about to start panicking that I will be caught with my pants down by someone that happens to snap a picture at that exact moment and by some miracle that picture will be seen by someone I know. The biggest load of bullshit on this list is CCTV. This is the most useless technology ever concieved (at least in its current form). I don’t care that I am on camera nearly my entire day, because a) no one is watching and b) even if they were they couldn’t tell it was me! There is no magic CSI “enhance” button that turns %^#$%& scribbled on a gum wrapper in the backseat of my car into “I shot JR” and lands me in jail.

RFID Tags: I left this for the end for no other reason than it is my most simplistic and unelaborate argument. RFID tags are not going to take over humanity. They aren’t. It is a fantastic technology that can be used in numerous industries and in many fashions, but assimilating humanity into having all ID inserted under the skin is not going to happen overnight. AND even if it does, this is not a way for the governement to track our every move. The range of an RFID tag is less than 10m, so unless the gov’t wants to invest in more monitors than human beings, our every move isn’t going to be tracked! The passport argument doesn’t even hold either. If anything this will speed up airport times, and give border guards the exact same information they already have! Doesn’t sound like an apocalyptic move to me.

It is “Top” lists like this that promote the ignorance and fear mongering that sweeps through and takes over rational people’s minds. And this is the Top One reason why people hate technology: Dipshit reporters writing fake stories about exagerated technological capabilities with the underlying message being “EVERYBODY PANIC!” I myself will live my life, own a camera, use Google and Facebook, charge stuff on credit card, walk around in any major city surrounded by CCTV. I suggest you do too.

Anatomy of a Con

Stoss — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:25:40 +0000

My Lonely Planet Guide for India (which was a God send of a book) had countless warnings about scams in India. Almost each city/section had special headings on the type and nature of scams in that region and spoke about how to spot them and avoid them. Aside from being a yet another fear mongering product of the US, this made me think about cons in general.

I recall the first scam I encountered abroad was in Rome when I visited my friend Sarah who had lived there for several months.. Along our walking tour a man offered her a rose as a gift, she declined rather poignantly and continued to walk on. I inquired shortly after why she turned down such a nice gesture. She replied that if she took the rose I would then be expected to pay for it. An interesting and simple scam that acts upon a female’s desire for something nice and a male’s inherent ego to be the provider and not wishing to disappoint his partner.(Ah conventional gender roles, is there any area of life you don’t penetrate?)

So how do we define a scam or a con? If a con is pulled off well, it may be that the victim wouldn’t even know it was a scam. Sort of like the tree falling in the woods making that inaudible sound (an oxymoron I suspect, however entirely suitable to the analogy), is it a crime if the victim doesn’t feel victimized?

For example: In Beijing I watched an artist chisel a beautiful image of the Great Wall onto a small piece of marble. I asked the price and was given a response which was well below what I would have been willing to pay for such a unique piece of work. I happily paid and continued on my way. What if the price of this was much lower in reality and he had in fact taken me for a rube? If I was willing to pay more, then really in my mind I got a great deal, all this while the artist was potentially laughing all the way to the bank.

So perhaps the definition of a scam is written by the victim and not the perpetrator. An interesting notion in that this fits my previous discussion on living in the reality that we ourselves create. Not everyone experiences the same scam the same way. Some people truly think the queen is one of the other 2 cards in a three card monte game. I pity those poor bastards.

Then enter movies such as the Die Hards, Clooney’s and originally Sinatra’s Ocean’s series. Each of these contain elaborate plans with an end goal of financial gain. Maybe the last sentence could be a definition for a con as well. But we never hear about these plots in real life. If someone attempted to pull of a Nakatomi heist or rip off the Bellagio, it would be on Twitter in real time and on CNN before Bruce Willis got in an elevator shaft.

In India the scams were not sophisticated at all. In general they were mainly just lies like: “No No, this is a gift” or “I am an employee here” or “I don’t want money”. And here in my opinion is the problem with cons: Everything could be a con. Charity donations, the moon landing, (dare I say religion?) etc. In India we met an English couple and discussed this very aspect. Because of the fear-mongering instilled in us by Lonely Planet no matter who spoke to you, there was a little voice somewhere in the back left side of the brain saying “How is this guy conning me?”.

If a tourist guide to the US outlined all the possible measures for “protection against terrorism” you’d do exactly what the American media does to their population already: Put them in a constant state of fear. A recent example is the (rather stupid idea of a) photo shoot of Air Force One in New York at low altitudes. Immediately the thoughts of NY’ers turned to 9/11, their “little voice” immediately turned to what they were programmed to turn to, a connection between low flying planes and terrorism, just as ours minds in India turned to the connection of Lonely Planet warnings and people wanting to scam us.

We are constantly scammed. We pay more money for beer in Skydome than in a pub across the road an economic scam that happens in all wakes of our consumerism (explored in The Undercover Economist, an excellent read). People get screwed on Ebay every day by “mildly used” products and P&G owns several brands of toothpaste so they can charge varying prices for each and skim all the demand it can.

Ever wonder why you can send snail mail to your MP or to the Prime Minister without a stamp? Because the government way back when invented mail as a way of communication for itself. It then decided that the public could use the service, but instead of funding it on generic government revenues, they would tax mail users on a per use basis. The fact that you paid the tax was put on your parcel in the form of a “stamp”. Nowadays we pay tax on top of the price of a stamp. We are paying a tax on a tax! Sounds like a scam to me…

They may not be scams in the traditional definition, but then again if, as I stated above, we define our own sense of scams, and if none of the above is considered a scam by you, you’re never scammed! Or, alternatively the collective human population is the most gullible group ever.

India-ology

Stoss — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:30:51 +0000

Greetings from India where my friend Andrew and I have been traveling around for 2 weeks now!

In that ime I have learned a few things and thought I would share.

1) I am white and rich
- It sounds almost racist, but in a country of over 1 billion Indian residents being white makes you stand out like Elton John at a mennonite convention. In most of the countries I visit I stand out because of my “American” accent. Here I stand out because of my skin colour. Sadly I cannot change either of these traits.
To many of the touts and cab drivers a white person is a walking wallet that never runs out. For example I was at a 16th century mosque built by King Akbar. After being followed around for 15 minutes by a man selling stone necklaces “perfect for my mother, girlfriend or sister” and after 15 minutes of saying not interested I was told by the tout: “Americans waste money on travel and everything, please give some to me”. Shortly thereafter my “free” tourguide told me, when I said I didn’t want to buy his soap stone (or was it marble as he claimed?) elephant, that “To say you have no money is an insult to England, all England has money”. I am sure the recent recession hit workers would love that sentiment.
It is also shown in that all sites have 2 prices: Nationals (~Rs10) and Foreigners (~Rs250-Rs750). 40 Rupees (Rs) is approx 1 Canadian dollar. Of course there is no passport check to determine this, as I am white.
This is, of course, not true of all people here at all. Many of the people I have met including our hired driver Sitesh, a hotel manager Mohan and one of our cab drivers Anil were extremly friendly, not for money at all, but for curiousity about who we are and why we wanted to see their wonderful country. Of course we were also paying them for a service, it could have been like a prostitute “enjoying” sex with a john… I doubt it, just saying.
Where this really hits you is that we do treat money poorly. We flaunt our huge houses and expensive cars. Take one of our waiters, who essentially waited on us hand-and-foot for 2 meals, offered to make us breakfast whenever we wanted, constantly checked we had enough water, beer, food as well as gave us travel and site tips. I gave him a Rs100 tip ($2.50ish) and told him we really appreciated his service and he pressed it to his forhead as a sign of respect and smiled like I haven’t seen in a long time. If you dropped a Toonie in the trash would you even look for it? What about in a lake, down a crack in a deck, or a toilet? A European soccer player just got signed for £90million a year that is Rs138million a week. The most expesnive hotel we had which is 4-5 star with a pool and restaurant/bar, free pickup upon arrival, internet included, 24 hour security cost Rs2000. He could stay every night in this (essentially luxury) hotel for 19 years on one weeks salary. Makes me think…

2) An obvious statement or the word “Hello” followed by a noun can start a conversation
- The Taj Ganj is made up of 5 buildings. The Taj Mahal is dead center and massive and white, the other 4 are flanked on the left and right and dark red. Andrew and I were walking up the path towards the Taj Mahal and decided to turn right to see the other buildings first, a kind “guide” stopped us and said “Sirs, the Taj Mahal is that way”… Well thank you! It really wasn’t clear in any of the millions of articles and pamphlets and documentaries what exactly the Taj Mahal looked like! We really got turned around on the 200m straight ahead walk!
Also we constanly hear “Hello, rickshaw?” or “Hello, fruit juice?”. imagine if every one did this, life would be easy. It cuts the BS for sure! “Hello, date?” Would be a normal pick up line, “Hello, dying” would be indication you are choking on a chicken bone. Life would be so easy!
This has happened to us countless times so far. Apparently stating the obvious or repeating the name of whatever product is in front of you, is necessary for some tourists, and Andrew and I are way ahead of the game by buying a guidebook and having eyes.

3) We are always lost
- Standing means we’re lost, reading signs means we’re lost, looking at a map means we’re lost, scratching our asses means we’re lost,being a tourist means we’re lost…
In reality this is actually a little refreshing. In England if an obvious tourist is stopped looking at their map in 4 different angles a Londoner (and now I) would just plow over them. Here they actually care: Most people genuinely want to help. In fact we had 3 people stop the other day to ask where we were going while waiting for a bus. One man even stayed and verified in native tongue that we had the right one. People here love to help. Sometimes (as in point 1) the intentions are poor, but in general they know we are in a strange country and want to make us feel comfortable.

4) Everything will work out
- All scientists in Chaos Theory research need to live here! This country seems to thrive on being chaotic. There are people, cars, cows, honking and construction everywhere. There is something truly beautiful in that it works. No matter how much noise or how much confusion there is, it always works out. There is no need for a watch in India. Buses come when they do, train times appear to be estimates. The western world relies so much on time and the pressures of being “on time”. If a train is 2 minutes late in England an apology announcement is made. Here if the train shows up you’ll be happy. I absolutely love this. Check out times at hotels are approximate, there are no real restrictions on breakfast/lunch/dinner menus in restaurants, if you want to nap and are driving a transport, you pull over as far as you can and lay a mattress under your trailer and sleep (seriosuly, I saw this).
In the end everything is “No problem”. Here I am in a strange country with little English in some parts and I doubt my blood pressure has every been lower.

5) People can help people
- A study was once done on some religion students. They were told they were having a 2 part interview, but due to a booking mistake the rooms were in 2 seperate buildings seperated on the same street. I forget the specifics, but essentially they were “programmed” with the Bible story about helping a hurt man in a road. Half were then told they were really early for part 2 of the interview and half were told they were late. Between the buildings a man was put on the sidewalk pretending to be injured. A small percentage of the “early” students stopped to help and almost none of the “late” students did. This is India vs the western world.
We all know that traffic rules are basically guidelines here, but if you choose to run a red at an intersection, go ahead, just stop if a car is coming towards you and let them go first. Honking here, while it can be used for anger, for the most part is actually courtesy: It lets a biker or truck driver know your behind them and passing. We got in a traffic jam in Agra heading towards the Taj Mahal. Some folks from the shops came out and started directing cars to make 3-point turns without hitting one another. We saw a cyclist fall off his bike and then dozens of locals run to him to help.
We all have this capability.

I have loved every second of this experience. The train fiasco which I didn’t detail here, but will later, the sketchy light show we attended, our hotel down a back alley of some market that you couldn’t see down, the bus ride on a bus without any English words/speakers on it. Everything. This country has taught me a lot already. It has shown me some things that we really do have wrong and some things I wish India would adopt from us. After just 2 weeks here I am convinced that everyone should come here and witness this for themselves.

The Re-Linking

Stoss — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:38:52 +0000

Those of you fortunate enough and/or with enough spare time to read my Facebook, Twitter and Blog sites are aware that I recently de-coupled Twitter updates automatically updating Facebook statuses. I did this for a very specific reason, and have just “un-done” this for another. I had a few people comment on that decision, and felt I should explain it in more detail.

I think the concept of “Status” has vastly changed and continues to evolve in the virtual world we tend to view each other in.

When Facebook first was rising it was no more than MySpace without the annoying interface, I held off signing up for a good couple years, as I was more about “doing it myself” at that time. As such, I wrote my own blog program which was basically a minimalistic WordPress without any skins or fancy add-ins and definitely didn’t dominate in the professional and amateur world of blogging. But it worked for me and allowed me to learn new PHP and CSS skills, so why not?

My “Status” at this point was really static. I had a basic About page that essentially (with a little more wit I hope) said: “I’m 21 years old @ UoG and I tend to drink a lot of beer”. But technology and inquiring minds were not content with this dorment and long term relevant data, so as tecnology and speed of access continued to grow, Facebook moved “Status” into a changing forum of “Craig Stoss is …” land. And while “Craig Stoss is 26 years old, a UoG grad and still drinking too much beer”, our voyueristic tendencies have taken this even further.

What used to be a daily update or two on Facebook from “Craig Stoss is sleeping” to “Craig Stoss is at work and eating snacks” to “Craig Stoss is going out tonight”, the public demanded Facebook remove the “is” and spawned a new concept of our “Status” world where at a click I can get a brief summation (and an accurate timestamp of said “Status”) of all my Facebook friends. It allowed your “Status” to not be tied to you are all. By removing the small ‘is’ the freedom was given to type any update you chose. But Facebook had a few problems. 1) it isn’t an easily visual medium for mobile devices and the Blackberry and iPod apps are still HCI nightmares and 2) logins and security were hindering lay people access to the up-to-minute details they so craved without all that pesky permissions crap getting in the way.

Enter Twitter.

Twitter not only gave us the ability to see anyones realtime “Statuses” in chronological order, but now we had an interface that was agnostic to medium. Its vast extensibility all but encouraged and begged developers to find ways to dig deeper into our personal lives, and at the same time make them instant and accurate! Now I can post a photo in real time of the shutter closing. I can provide you with a map accurate within meters of where I am standing and locate others who “Tweet” in my vicinity. And I can follow trends of what people are talking about most and join “conversations” with absolute strangers.

Our “Status” literally has become the very thing we were doing that instant, not a generic or vague reference to something happening or about to happen, but an actual view to that instant in time.

There is a Vedic language where each word is in itself the make up of the object the word describes. So the word “tree” would describe the tree itself. We have now converted this to ourselves: We are no longer a series of long running activities and chapters of our life such as “I am 21 and attend UoG” we are now a series of points in time strung together and interleaved with other points in time “I am 26 and 9 months and am currently in Paderborn Germany at the Best Western room 705″, or even more granular “I am taking a crap in said hotel room, it had corn in it”.

I de-coupled Twitter and Facebook for that reason. In my opinion, and as sure as the sun will shine tomorrow there will be disagreement, Facebook is not a place for granular updating of the milliseconds on my life. It is a more gradual timeline of my growth in various friendships, the travels I have done and the activities I do on a generic scale so that people close and formally close can understand the person I am and am becoming. It has generic references to me being single, my birthdate, my trip to Australia, not specific instances of un-censored details held together via nothing more than the neurons in my brain firing in different patterns when I react to something external to me. Twitter is just that (for me). A timeline of quick random thoughts I have as my days progress. I minimilize the experience into a phrase of 140 characters, hopefully with a bit of wit and insight to my “Status” at that given point In time.

They serve different purposes and will continue to do so until we replace Facebook and Twitter with whatever comes next in the technological journey we are on.

However, all that being said, I have chosen to recouple them as of this week as over the next 4-8 weeks I will on the road extensively and, while I want to maintain a separation of who I am vs. the instant I am experiencing, I feel the two have a MasterCard style Venn diagram when remote from the comfort of my home and work laptops. So, please excuse the amount of updates, but also enjoy the ride! I hope to bring you plenty of updates via Twitter/Facebook from India, Germany, Switzerland, the US and wherever else I am taken and hopefully will have some chance to blog a bit along the way! I am a bit geeky after all

The Tri-Tour Conundrum

Stoss — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:57:22 +0000

I love guests. Since moving to England three years ago I have had the fortune of being host to several of my friends from back home and always welcome more people to my humble abode. This week I was lucky enough to have 3 seperate groups of people pop over the big pond for a visit and that resulted in the now patented “London: Stoss Style^©” tour being held on 3 seperated occasions over 4 days.

What was interesting (beside the rather amazing way foot blisters heal and re-form over the course of 4 full days of walking, is that none of these tours resulted in the same sites. I never really noticed it before, but looking back I realize that each time I have taken friends around London I tend to follow the same general walking/Tube path, but never have I had the same tour twice.

What makes this interesting to me is that I have just spent 4 solid days, on top of the countless times before this week, walking in basically the same 7 or 8 major areas of London and I still see new things. It really is a tour for myself, guided by the people who think I am guiding them.

I lived in Toronto for 4 months and never got this feeling, I lived in Guelph for 4 years and pretty much can claim to have seen it all. What is it about Europe that makes cities like Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam etc. places that you can go to over and over and never see the same site the same way twice? Is it the exotic-ness of simply being in Europe? I doubt it, that wore off a year or so back for me. Perhaps it is the copious amounts of alcohol I drink? Nah, been doing that for years too, especially in Guelph, you bastards (you know who you are)… In my opinion it is the lifestyle they lead.

See, in general, Europeans drink more than North Americans, they smoke more, they eat more meals (albeit in smaller portions) and yet, in general, they are in better health and happier then we are. Why?

If you watch Sick-o by Mr. Michael Moore you will see a “documentary” that gives a lot of credit to the healthcare over here, especially in France. Mr. Moore basically makes Canadian Healthcare almost Utopian and then surpasses Utopia in Europe and specifically Scandanavia. We all know this isn’t really true, but he has some interesting points.

Europeans are more relaxed and depending on the survery 6-8 out of the top 10 “happiest” counties are European.

I recently went to the Doctors for a minor problem and instead of immediately feeling me up or doing unmentionable things below the belt the doctor asked me about me. How UNIQUE! Was I in a relationship? Were there any problems? Has my eating pattern or work habits changed? How was I sleeping? Any added stresses in my life? I strongly believe these questions are the reason why English medicine doesn’t work for me. It is weaker medicine and it can be because it isn’t their first line of defense. Their first attempt is figuring out why “all of sudden” something went wrong with your body. Likening this to a computer problem. The first line of defense isn’t to reformat, or to start deleting things or changing settings somewhere, it is to do a generic scan of your machine for problems using antivirus, or antispyware software. Our medicines have to be stronger, because we grew up taking them after each cough. We “change our settings” until something works better. I spent the better part of 5 years getting allergy shots and so many times as I sat there waiting to be received I saw people walk in and ask how long the wait was, and if it was more than 30 minutes they left. Clearly these are not sick people, they are people who aren’t 100% well who want a quick fix drug to get back to their busy lives.

Recently, a counterpart of mine felt faint one day at his office. His boss called him an ambulance and they gave him 2 weeks stress leave from work. No perscriptions. The Doctor (this happened to be in Switzerland) determined that this was nothing more than over work and exhaustion. He was a perfectly healthy man where something had changed, his hours at work were longer, he had some tight deadlines to meet and his blood pressure rose signifcantly because of this. They even gave him a free heart monitor and if it ever went off he was told immediately to stop what he was doing and go and get a coffee or a tea and sit for 15 minutes to let his heart rate even out! Would a North American Doctor ever perscribe that?

Regardless, I am no Doctor and I don’t know what is best for the human body and this rant isn’t about health care, BUT all I am saying is: Europeans don’t rush home from work at 5pm sharp. They finish up their job and move on to the pub for a chance to unwind. They don’t rush to the stores after dinner for some late night shopping because they are closed at 6pm. They eat on patios facing outwards towards the sidewalks, not in a fenced in area to appease alcohol restrictions.

They schedule and enact their lives around living, not around doing.

So, what does this have to do with my recent trips to London? It is simple: London is a city where anything can happen because the people want it that way. They spend so much time enjoying the sites around them, they want them to change. I walked through the same tunnel twice today about an hour apart. The first time there was a string quartet playing and the second time 2 opera singers, ever seen that in TO?

Bottom line here is relax a little. Smell a few roses…

Greed flies high

Stoss — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:06:20 +0000

I have flown quite a bit, not a lot, but more than most and less than quite a few. I have flown on everything from “Can this legally be considered a plane?”-class on Delta to Executive First on Air New Zealand, one of the best airlines in the air. I have been on Virgin Blue who during a crash I am positive would charge you AUS$10 to use a lifevest and Swiss Air who end every economy flight with a delightful Swiss chocolate. I have been delayed for hours, over night, diverted to other airports, stuck on tarmacs, missed connections, been late for boarding, been held at security, had my balls cupped and man-tits groped by too many strangers to count and yet I continue to enjoy flying and still do not find it a task or an annoyance. I think it is a great way to travel and would have no qualms about booking any fight to any country if I wanted to go to that location.

That is why when I am taking a special interest in the articles about New Democratic Party MP Jim Maloway’s new private bill which has serious implications for all Canadian airlines (A summary can be found here).

Mr. Maloway’s bill seeks up to $500/hour/passenger of compensation for every hour delayed on the tarmac, bumped passengers on long haul flights would see $1200 in their pockets and “failure to announce delays” is a $1000 fine payable to the traveler. (I do note that the above is only if certain conditions aren’t met, but I will touch on that later)

But, before I start to discuss, let me be clear: For the most part Air travel is one of the most poorly structured and inefficient industries out there. I once took 3 flights in 3 days in China, each plane boarded on time, left on time or earlier and always landed within 5 minutes of the planned arrival. In the past 4 years, that is the 1st time all of those things have happened on more than 2 consecutive flights for me. What does this tell me? Well it tells me exactly the same thing as why in Germany I know exactly when a train arrives to the station, departs from that station and what platform I will arrive/depart from a month+ in advance, and in England, France, Canada and Brussels I do not: Some companies know how to be efficient and some do not. I do not advocate the Air travel business model of BAA in London, England, just as I wouldn’t pitch Canada’s Via rail as a good transportation solution.

But all that being said, can you really honestly tell me that every flier is worth $500/hr if there is a delay? That number seems to be picked out of thin air! What’s next? Making the Transit authorities pay you if there is a traffic jam?

Yes, air travel is rough sometimes, and yes it is expensive and yes it can be very annoying when you are stuck somewhere you don’t want to be. But this isn’t airline specific! Just as the clause in this bill that states an airline can be fined $10,000 if they don’t advertise their prices with service fees and taxes included. WHAT?! Canada and the USA don’t do that in any industry! And as stupid as that may be (especially since the vast majority of the world does do this and it makes soooo much sense) forcing one industry to add in taxes is asinine! If anything that will cause even more confusion, because customers would be expecting the tack-ons.

The people that agree with this legislation are the people that travel once a year or less and are annoyed that their plans are changed by someone else. If they were driving somewhere they’d call ahead and say “sorry, got stuck in traffic”, but when a hurricane is destroying New Orleans and that causes a two hour diversion to get to their margarita in Acapulco; Jesus Christ! Call in the lawyers.

Now Mr. Maloway says that it won’t cost airlines a penny if they meet the conditions. Well that is just bullshit. The airlines not only will need someone to monitor that this is occurring, but will also need to go to court countless times to defend that it has been done. What does “failure to announce a delay” even mean? What if I only speak Spanish or am blind and can’t understand/read the announcement? Is that failure? This all costs money and with an industry that is already so inefficient it is hemorrhaging cash from every orifice those costs ain’t going to be on their shoulders, they’d be on yours. So sure $500/hr sounds great, but when the flight costs $2000 to pay for all this shit, it may not seem as wonderful.

This is yet another case of the “Don’t incovienience me” syndrome that is spreading faster than Swine Flu (*ahem* H1N1) across North America. And for God’s sake don’t breast feed in public, or smoke anywhere within 10 miles of civilization or let homosexuals marry because somehow that inconvieniences me and we all know my rights are more important than yours.

A Conclusion to a Discussion on Social Networking

Stoss — Sun, 03 May 2009 14:09:42 +0000

I could spend a lot of time reviewing each absurdity of this book, but alas I like to branch out more. Instead I think in my final reflection I’ll finish with why I believe Mr. Keen has this sense of reality that I do not share.

Since I stated posting blog entries I have received many comments such as “Stoss, you really think about the world in a fucked up way.” And I agree. I tend to think about things differently. I am not near arrogant enough to think my opinion is the only one, or necessarily correct. To paraphrase a quote from The Truman Show _{(highly under-rated movie)}: “We all live in the reality with which we are presented.”

About 3 months ago I went on a date with a smart, pretty, 20-something professional in the bio-medical field who lives by herself away from her family. On the surface you might think we are very similar. We are both white-collar workers, we are independent, well traveled and have the means to sustain ourselves. The topic came up as to how often we order take away. I said not that often, usually just Friday night curry or something. She gasped! “Once a week?! That is really often!”

At the time we had a quick laugh and moved on, but the above story is directly related to this book. I live in a reality where once a week takeout is not only normal, it is considered infrequent. That being said, lately I also live in a world where if I am not on 4 or 6 airplanes in a month I consider it “downtime”.

The point I am trying to make is that in Mr. Keen’s reality the Internet is the culprit for the downfall of society. I am sure he truly believes that and I wouldn’t fault him on it. In my reality the Internet is one of, if not the most important technological advances ever and has potential to propel society in directions we cannot even fathom yet.

The later part of the book has a couple themes. One is human behaviour and the other is the disadvantages to an all electronic society.

Keen blames sex addiction on the vast amount of porn on the Internet. Sex addiction? The only purpose for us to exist is for sex. Monogamy, humility, these are man-made concepts. Sex addiction is fundamental to our existence. The fact birth control, condoms, abortion were invented just helps us to not over-populate the shit out of this planet. Just think, if they diverted the attention give to the industry of preventing pregnancy to a field like cancer, how would this world be different?

Our realities did meet in a few way though. Keen talks about the information gathering on the net and the potentially disastrous effects it could have if it leaks. I agree. I find it very spooky when I log into Facebook in Germany and my ads are in German, or when I land in type in www.google.com in Switzerland and get directed to www.google.ch.

What if every search, every online purchase and every website you ever visited was somehow displayed to the world? Would you be embarrassed? Would losing the expected anonymity of the Internet be detrimental to your life?

Now the big brother view is that the Information Superhighway has CCTV cameras at every metre to watch you, track you and record your every move. The truth is that this is nothing new. Credit card companies have been data mining your information for decades to find patterns and anomalies to help them prevent credit card fraud. For the most part these measures are there to help you. It lets Google know when you search for Mustang, do you mean horse or car. It lets Amazon recommend books to you to save you searching or when you are stuck for a choice. But as I discussed earlier, all technologies have the ability to be used for nefarious purposes.

How is it different that you have a subscription to a gardening magazine and that magazine sells your address to gardening supply stores so they can send you mail, than Facebook putting up a “singles in the UK” ad on my page because I am listed as single and living in the UK?

The ironic part of all of this discussion is that at the end of bashing amateurs, saying that we can have no idea when someone isn’t a paid professional on a subject if they are telling the truth or lying, the author admits in the final pages of his book that he himself is an amateur, that this is first book and he had to rely on several others in writing it. Think about that for a bit.

Mr. Keen clearly sees the Internet as something vastly different than any previous technology. I do not. I see it as an advancement, sort of like VHS->DVD->Blue Ray. If Keen took the time to think about this in the grand scheme of our society and not in the individual case studies (The Internet poker player who robs a bank to pay off his debt, or the German teenagers who faked a political message on YouTube etc) he would see we are no worse off at all. We have just transitioned to a new form of culture, economy and values, not destroyed them at all.

Bottom line: I am glad I read this book. I hated it page after page, but sometimes it takes something that you hate for you to reflect on why you like something.

What Hogwash…

Stoss — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:34:35 +0000

I mentioned briefly in my last post about the Swine Flu. And today I read that Air Transat and other airlines have suspended flights! Has this world gone mad?!

Swine Flu World Wide Stats

This picture was in the UK morning paper. Notice that the only place that has any deaths in it is Mexico? Yes, the US A just confirmed its first death this morning, but since I have been typing (According to word press 80 words), 43 people have died of cancer and 39 by communicable diseases! 152 deaths in 2 weeks in Mexico is not a significant number!

Now, please don’t take this as “Go out and lick sick people’s faces”, all I am saying is be reasonable! This is same problem i wrote about in “Tazed and Confused“, people don’t understand reasonable precaution versus gross over-reaction!

I am flying in the next coming weeks to Canada (13 cases), the US (65) & Germany (3). And now for my favourite part: Math!

Country	Population (mil)	Percentage Affected
Canada	35	3.4×10^-7%
USA	307	2.1×10^-7%
Germany	83	3.6×10^-8%

So, statistically 0% of the population. Last year globally 1600 people died by falling out of bed. Including 450 people in the US. At that rate the Swine Flu would have to be in action in the US for 1 death every 2 weeks for about 17 years!

I’ll take my chances.

Editor’s note: I just read another article which said the “US death” was actually a Mexican boy in the US. If this is true, are we really counting a death on US soil as a “US death”?

A Social Networking Discussion (part 1)

Stoss — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:50:28 +0000

Preface:

Lately a phenomenon has taken off like many of the fads of the 80s we all love so much. Starting with the BBS systems in the late 70s and through the 90s we have had this intrinsic need to network with people at any distance via computer. With the web becoming more accessible, network speeds getting faster and the advent of many advanced web technologies we have seen phases like Classmates.com, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and we are now looking at Twitter and the even weirder Omegle where you can (advantageously?) talk to a total stranger.

An ongoing trend throughout this advancement has been the Blog. Starting as Usenet threads and advancing to Weblogs and containing everything from political updates to fart counters, there has never been an outlet for expression that has been utilized by so many people. Useful or not, they are a social medium that won’t soon disappear.

Now, I am the very first to admit that many of these are time wasters and marketing gimmicks. I am also the first to admit that many people live too much of their lives collecting MySpace friends and looking up old highschool classmates that they would never speak to in any other capacity. And finally I will admit that there are heinous and illegal uses for each of these technologies. BUT, and let me be very clear on this, that doesn’t mean that they do not have a place in the social paradigm that any individual wishes to maintain.

And this brings me to my Easter weekend trip to a bookstore to find something to enjoy on my upcoming slew of flights. In my search for Malcolm Gladwell’s new Outliers, I found a fluorescent orange cover with the caption “how blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values“. What a strong statement that is. Not only grouping together the 60+ million blogs as 1 entity, but comparing them to the pre-teen obsession that is MySpace and the completely different medium that YouTube boasts. Immediately Andrew Keen had grabbed my interest, as I am sure he intended to, and I decided that “the cult of the amateur” was a book I needed to read.

Now, I like to think I have an open mind. I enjoy a debate, and am always willing to try and understand why people have a certain point of view, regardless if I agree with it. And in fact Mr. Keen even reminds his readers to keep an open mind as he has been described in various media as everything from “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley” to “The Martin Luther King of the Internet counterreformation”. Intrigued yet?

You will notice I have labeled this post as ‘part 1′, I have done so for the following reason: Never in my adult life have I ever put down a non-fiction book before reading it through. I am currently on page 45, half way through the 2nd chapter and have already considered doing so. This man takes generalizations and blatantly false information and is trying to sell them as the demise of society. Since I do not want to break my streak, I vow to read this book and write about any interesting subjects I can find, positive or negative I will try and form an objective opinion to post here. Today it is mostly negative…

The Forward to Chapter 1:

Mr. Keen continually refers to all blogists as monkeys and relates blog entries/writers to “T. H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem”. (The theory that “If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters they will eventually write a ‘Great American novel’”) Aside from the fact that it has been proven that Huxley did not come up with this phrase at all, blogists are in no way random and their intent is not to come up with the ‘Great American Novel’. Blogging is a medium to project thoughts, express opinions, dabble with poetry/art, offload stress, among many other things, but not on that list is any intent to write a piece of work that will be recognized by a publisher, let alone compete with Shakespeare or Fitzgerald.

He then goes on a rant about Wikipedia and how with no editors, no reporters and no expertise in reporting necessary to join: (I am quoting this as it is so preposterous)

It’s the blind leading the blind – infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.

What?! Firstly, it is not the intent of Wikipedia to educate. Wikipedia is very clear that it is edited by anyone and no credentials are necessary. If people are misusing Wikipedia for education instead of entertainment that isn’t the fault of Wikipedia or a cause of social breakdown. In fact it is the exact opposite! Social breakdown is causing people to mistake entertainment for news. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia! Our education system has taught laziness and hasn’t updated to the new age we are in. Education has to change to support the media available. Like in my Economics class using the Internet to gather real time statistical data about the world stock markets to learn real world examples of market trends as opposed to using Wikipedia to find vague averages, or Google to find Forbes’ lists.

Mr. Keen also claims that every post on Craigslist for free is taking away paid jobs at newspapers and that every Wikipedia reader is taking away money from Brittania… Again, setting aside that I am sure most local papers won’t post a request for a hot MMF ass orgy, and Encyclopedia Brittania contains no episode guide list for Futurama, I guess my small and simple point is that the audiences aren’t the same! I am sure the Venn Diagram looks like the MasterCard logo, but the overlap is not significant enough to impact large organizations like New York Times or Grolier! The decline in the circulation of newspapers and the sale of encyclopedias is attributed to the fact that people don’t read the morning newspaper, and don’t want a bookshelf of facts from A-Z that has the weight of a locomotive! Say what you will about the fact that people work 20 hours a day, check their Blackberries non-stop and require up-to-the-second news sent via txt msg, it is where we are. Adapt to it! Utilize the technology that is here to stay, don’t complain that it is stealing from you. Yes, video killed the radio star, and DVD bitch slapped VHS, no one at Sony yelled about technology changing, they made a different product! And comedians, musicians, newsmakers are more popular and wealthy then they were!

So, did you make it through that? I apologize for the long entry. I am sorry that I am destroying our economy, culture and values, but as long as I continue to read this book I will do my best to keep that destruction down to the minimum… oh and yes, I get the irony that I am reviewing a book whose thesis is anti-blog in a blog…

A bright idea!

Stoss — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:46:57 +0000

Sometimes I get to work before anyone else, not because I am overly keen, but I live an 8 minute walk away… Pretty hard to blame traffic.

When I do this I do not turn on the 57 fluorescent lights that line our ceiling so I can sit at my desk in the very back of the office and work. The morning sun is usually enough light for me to find my seat and turn on my computer.

I have been doing this for 3 years and yet my coworkers are constantly surprised that I am sitting in the dark! Is it such a novelty for me to not want to bombard my eyes with blue-tinged, glowing chemicals at 8:30am?

On this note of turning lights off, recently “Earth Hour” seems to be deemed, by the media at least, a success. But really… Was this event really a success?

I was in a meeting the same day as Earth Hour occurred. We came into the room turned out the lights so that we could view the projector and held the entirety of the meeting in the darkened room. When the meeting was done, we got up to leave and the host of the meeting turned the room lights back on and closed the door to the now empty room. Why? What is our obsession with having everything lit up to its fullest potential? I walk through cities at night and see rows of 50+ story buildings with every floor brightly shining into the night! Even if there is some one on every floor, is it necessary that every single light be on? The linked Wiki page says the TO saw a 15% decrease in electricity consumption during that hour. Now I am no expert on energy, but if all I had to do to decrease consumption by 15% was shut a light switch off for one hour, and energy is a big concern for me, can’t this be done every night of the year?!

As my former roommates know I do tend to prefer darkness, probably my inner geek coming out, but I don’t think it is this preference that makes me think that Earth Hour (note the highlight) is a ridiculous concept. It is the fact that turning off a light when a room is empty is common sense that makes me come to this conclusion! All throughout Europe they have sensors that turn off hallways lights in hotels and business when empty, and turn on lights as soon as doors open. Even our office building in England has that, and we are a small building. These are not expensive tools, and according to Earth Hour, can save 10s to 100s of MWs every hour!

Regardless, you have to admit that organizing a global project to save sporadic amounts of energy for one hour in 88 out of 195 countries is not an efficient way to tackle this problem. Declared success or not, the real problem Earth Hour was trying to address wasn’t even scratched. How can you make the smallest dent in a problem by changing your behaviour 0.01% of the time (1 hour out of an entire year). Let’s put it this way: I want to lose weight using exercise. Using the Earth Hour Methodology® I only need to exercise 1.15 minutes in a week. Sounds good to me, but how many health experts would advocate that as a solution?

Look, I am not an environmentalist. I try to apply common sense to my daily life. Don’t throw wrappers on the ground, reuse shopping bags, use reusable containers for leftovers etc. So before the environmentalists say I am dismissing the effectiveness of the awareness Earth Hour spread, all I am saying is: Take all the effort you put into Earth Hour; The viral Tweets and Facebook groups, the banners, the government lobbying and put that towards a longer term solution and the Earth would benefit more.

BTW: This is all assuming that the Earth benefits from this… But that is another blog entry

A View from the Street

Stoss — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:58:13 +0000

As was my view in this entry of my blog, I can now provide even further proof of this ridiculous world we live in.

Google Street View has recently come under fire when trying to photograph a specific town in England.

Now the camera has been used by the public for about 100 years. Over those years there have been some drastic changes that now have evolved into digital pictures. Pictures that don’t physically exist, but that can be immediately transferred around the world. This evolved into Google Street View: The ability to see, given a postal code, an area in pictures.

Every single article I have ever read on this topic includes some form of this quote:

But it has been accused of invading people’s right to privacy. Those left embarrassed include customers filmed leaving sex shops and a man caught being sick in the street.

In fact some articles even claim that divorces have been filed, which of course seems really ridiculous…

What the people in this particular village are now discovering is the same phenomenon that I spoke to before: By making a scene you are in the end screwing yourself over. Also known as the Streisand Effect.

Google Street View is not an invasion of privacy. Why? Privacy is the ability to keep things about you private to you or a group of people. The front of your house is not a private matter. I am willing to concede that the ability to view a streamlined picture of an entire street could be used for evil, but in the same token so can phone books! Millions of telemarketers use phone books to call you every single day. All a phone book is is a collection of every phone number alphabetically for a town. All Street View is is a collection of house fronts for a village in the order they appear on the street!

All technologies have the ability to be used for undesirable purposes. Do you think it is a coincidence that when you are listed as single on Facebook ads for singles in your area appear in the toolbar? No! This site is data mining what you upload to try and entice you to buy something. 20 years ago a company would spend millions on researching people to figure out who was single, what age range some one was in, what their favourite movies are, and now we are voluntarily typing that data into an international database!? For Christ’s sake there are marketing people who have wet dreams about this sort of thing!

CCTV is all over the UK. I am on camera every single day. There are people everyday being caught coming out of sex shops, vomiting in the streets and yet someone taking a static, let me repeat, STATIC photo of your house is an invasion of privacy? Are you kidding me? I walk past houses everyday, I see though the front windows and sometimes see a family having dinner, sometimes see the tv on. Is it really private knowledge that people eat dinner and watch tv? Hell, a friend once told me she was coming home from work and her neighbour had the blinds open watching hardcore porn!

The bottom line here is that irrationality and un-education about a technology or a cause makes the situation worse. If all these people did was read Google’s Policy, they could perfectly quietly ask to not have their pictures on the site, and Google will comply as several hundred people have done and no one would have known. (Coincidentally, just as you can do with the phone book)

Unfortunately my house is not on Google Street View, so I cannot show you my lovely flat and let you invade my “privacy”.

Stopping abuse 1.5 pints at a time

Stoss — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:44:28 +0000

Yesterday after a meeting in London and a couple of pints I was approached by a 20-something woman who asked if I had a moment. I certainly did have a moment, so here is our (annotated and slightly abridged) conversation:

Woman – “I work for Amnesty International and they are doing a £27,000 ($50,000 CDN) charity drive to raise money. Do you feel that women being beaten and raped is a problem?”

Now, at this point what could I have said? I mean, honestly, did she want me to say “no”? If this was some religion I probably would have, just because it is fun to debate with religion, however I played the innocent and said “yes”.

Woman – “Were you aware that up until recently it was not a criminal offense for a woman to be beaten unless the woman filed a formal complaint? That means that a man could beat a woman in front of a police officer and the officer could do nothing about it.”

This I had a hard time believing. I truly believe if an officer was watching you being punched by someone he would help you, but then again this is England. However I nodded politely and looked “shocked”.

Woman – “Amnesty International was instrumental in stopping this and now abused woman have better avenues for protecting themselves.”

I could have corrected her and said: “No, they have better avenues for prosecuting/removing the abuse once it is done”, however I let her continue.

Woman – “What are you in Leicester Square for?”

Me – “I had a meeting earlier today, and had a couple pints with a coworker and I am now waiting to meet a friend for dinner.”

Woman – ”Interesting you say pints…”

Interesting? That isn’t interesting, it is a loose segue into your question about how I spend my money… oh and also if you were to ask ask any man on a Wednesday night in England what he was doing, the word “pints” is bound to be in there.

“… because for just the price of 1.5 pints a month you can support this important cause.”

Two things here:

“What cause? You have told me that you already “solved” the only problem you mentioned to me.”
“But then I would have 1.5 pints less each month, you bitch!”

I let this slide, and I was glad because this is where it gets fun!

Me – “Do you have some literature I could read on this topic? I am not really familiar with Amnestity International…” ( A bit of a lie really, but she doesn’t know) “… and I would like to learn more”

Woman – “Yes, and for just £0.20 a day you can receive all the details on our organization”

Me – “I don’t think I will be donating today, but I would love to read more on…”

Woman – “Well, due to the cost we cannot just give out literature.”

Me – (jaw dropped, a charity that doesn’t want to promote themselves?) “Ok, do you have a website I could view?”

And here my friends was my favourite part of the conversation… I want to point out that this next line is the factual quote that this woman said to me:

Woman – “By the time you view our website 260 women in the UK will be raped.”

I want to pause here to apologize to those exactly 260 women that were raped between yesterday at 6pm and today at 9:30am. I really am sorry that you had to be raped due to my neglect in not donating 1.5 pints to this cause. I wish you all the best and hope you receive the treatment and care you deserve.

My immediate response was this:

Me – “Sorry, but really you can say that about anything: 1250 African children will starve by the time I view your website, 180 Big Macs will be consumed in Brighton by the time I view your website… That really isn’t an argument for you not to give me the web address.”

She of course was not amused at my apparent disdain for her attempt at guilt. It was at this point I realized this woman was working on commision and that the facade of actually caring for these women was replaced with the greed for her portion of the £27,000 Amnesty has for this endevour.

Here is where I smiled and wished her good luck and we parted ways. It is sad that the only mechanism this woman had was a guilt trip about raped women to try and convince me her charity was worth supporting. It is also sad she tried to con me out of 1.5 pints, so she could get money to buy herself pints.

For more information on Amnesty, I googled this: http://www.amnesty.org/

140 characters…

Stoss — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:19:01 +0000

I am a bit of a geek. I like technology and I like understanding the various uses of that technology. I have spent the last month or so reading every news article I can about a new (I won’t say newest, because as we all know in this industry “newest” is outdated within minutes) phenomenon: Twitter.

I signed up for an account after some prodding from other fellow geeks and went on my way exploring my life 140 characters at a time. What I found out quite quickly is: My life in 140 characters is quite boring. I don’t mean to say I lead a boring life, in fact I argue far from it, but my thoughts and experiences as a whole are not sum-up-able in such arbitrarily small space (I mean even a txt message has 165 characters).

Stephen Fry, the “UK poster boy” for Twitter, tweets non-stop from what airport he is in, to what he had for lunch, to the amazing sunset he sees in Singapore. Now don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of Stephen Fry. His brilliant comedy and sharp wit is some of the best the UK has to offer. (Watch QI for an excellent display) But I don’t really need to know about every little thing he does, especially since: a) I will never meet him to discuss those thoughts and b) I appreciate him because of his comedy based on his life experiences, not his life experiences themselves.

Then I stumbled across Christopher Walken. How, here is a Twitter-er that actually is funny and only posted when something is necessary. Only one problem: It isn’t Christopher Walken!

This started my brain in motion. This is the Internet, and as is too often the case the hot blonde 19 year old you are hitting on is a fat 45 year old Star Trek fan trying to make it big in the “Dear Penthouse” letter writing business. Nothing on the web is real. This blog isn’t real, it is a series of 1s and 0s cleverly placed to form something we can read. You don’t really have proof that the Stoss you know and love (well…know and put up with) is writing this article. In fact you have no idea where this article is even stored! Truth be told, I am writing it and I have no idea where it is stored. I pay an amount of money to people to let me use a computer and tie that space to a memorable mnemonic. (Fellow geeks will recall the original CompuServ who thought that complex number letter combination would be memorable, yeah, not so much.)

To some extent, aren’t we all a bit thinner, a bit more built, a bit smarter and a bit more popular on the web? Think about your Facebook, do you post the 3am picture of you stumbling drunk down a back alley to piss, or do you post the one that has perfect lighting and shows a great smile with you giving the shocker to thin air? We form an online persona to escape reality and befriend people we haven’t spoken to in 15 years just for the ability to brag that we have more than 500 hundred “friends”.

We don’t show our real selves on the net for the same reason we dress a bit nicer at work, or for the theatre, or when we go out to a club: We want people we don’t know to see us the way we want to be seen, not the way we actually are. We spend all this time in public school being told “be yourself” when the truth is, in ever y area of our lives we are someone different. This is actually an area discussed in The Tipping Point a fantastic book that in one chapter discusses how our personalities are situational and mutable, not constant. You could even extend this theory to divorce, work problems etc. When the situations change, your mutate your personality, unknowingly and change the former perception of you to other parties.

This isn’t going to change, and in fact I don’t want it to change. I enjoy being my-multiple-selves and I enjoy each wake of life as much as I can, but I am also aware that “I” is not a singular word. So enjoy your life, use Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, but don’t be fooled into believing you are that person. You are who you are, not what people read about you.

Editor’s Note: cwalken, whose twitter page I mention in the post above has now been asked by Twitter to be changed to explicitly state that he is not Affiliated with the real Christopher Walken.

Second Editor’s Note: Twitter has now removed the page and the ghost writer has come forward.

Tazed and Confused

Stoss — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:01:48 +0000

Many of you may have heard about the trial of the mounties in the taser death of some nut at an airport. I don’t want to minimize a death in anyway, and I feel for his family and friends, but many words have been thrown around about these officers: “knee-jerk reaction”, “impulse acting”, “instinctual” etc. and all I can think of is “Wait… What?!”

These are police officers we are talking about! In most cases all they have is a knee-jerk reaction time, or a split second to make a very difficult decision. We are literally listening to a group of Monday morning quarterbacks tell us what “They would have done” and that is absolute bullshit. I have never faced a situation where a person was directly threatening my life or the life of others around me (although perhaps I should get myself in those situations, according to Die Hard 4, Transformers and most action movies all I have to do to get the hot chick is save the world), but I can certainly say that my frame of mine would not be the same as having to make a decision about über-stressful work. Sure, hitting send on an email to an executive with the word “fuck” in it isn’t smart, but it isn’t a mistake that is going to kill me!

In the same regard, an actress recently died while skiing. A headline in the UK from this tragedy: “Natasha refuses £6 helmet”, are you kidding me?! A woman has died and before the dust settles on her grave we are starting to say that “helmet action is overdue”? The article I linked even says that 2 people who died (of the VAST 3 he talks about) were wearing helmets and still died! Dying is a risk of being MORTAL it is what makes life so much fun to live! if there wasn’t a fear of dying the X-games wouldn’t exist!

Everyday people die from smoking and car accidents, and yet we legally sell cigarettes and hand out driver’s licenses to anyone who wants them, but 1 famous woman dies and someone decides it’s time that helmets be mandated for skiing, what happens when someone dies after that law is passed? Is the next logical step to wrap all people everywhere in styrofoam?

We are so bent on saving everyone, that we forget what rational safety is.

Skiing has been around since over 1000 years! How could we have survived that sport for so long if helmets are mandatory for it?

Taser’s have been around for 35 years, and we are just now realizing that people can be injured by injecting them with electricity?!

Wake up people, death is inevitable and no bylaw or government mandate will solve that.

Few see anything wrong

Stoss — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:54:58 +0000

As always I have an opinion: The recent Virginia situation as before when this has occurred is being brought out to be a sign of the decline of society. This is because it is easy to point to a moron with a gun and blame him for all the fear in the world.

What you never hear is that the decline of society is the cause, not the affect. And this is where I step in.

We now live in a world where a 16 yearold girl with her tits popping out of her waterbra can talk on one cell while txting on a another and last night was rammed harder than King George’s 12th century castle during the crusades by the highschool quarterback who eats E for breakfast alongside a 6-pack of fine 3% beer and a picture of the American flag which he gives the finger to for 3 hours a day. And few see anything wrong with that.

We now live a society where anyone (as the shooter did) can purchase a Glock and 50 rounds of ammunition and have it described by the store owner as “an unremarkable purchase”. And few see anything wrong with that.

We also live in a society where dozens of twisted, murderous Hollywood movies gross billions of dollars each year and yet the shooter now has two “twisted plays” he wrote posted on the internet as “proof” that he was psychotic. And few see anything wrong with that.

And, we live in a society where you shoot 32 people and CNN does 24-hour coverage of the “ongoing updates” including: What colour his toothbrush was, the MacDonald’s employee who served him a Big Mac just minutes before the shooting and the climax of the story: The frowny face he used on MSN the night before to end his conversation with his German penpal. This guy got exactly what he craved: attention. And few see anything wrong with that.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not in anyway condoning or rationalizing shooting 32 people, but to have the chief of police and president of Virginia Tech stand on national TV and say that the shooter “was a loner” is just a sign that they would rather polish the knobs of a self-righteous group of spoiled brats and dismiss the sociopath as a nobody, loser, than address the fact that there is a large societal problem here.

Can stupidity be stopped? Of course not! And to think otherwise, is to disillusion yourself like the majority of the western world. It isn’t the fact we can stop it, it is the fact that we need to acknowledge it that is my concern. I have said it a million times, you cannot legislate against stupidity. It is impossible. If someone wants to do something dumb, whether it be to shove fireworks up their ass and light them, or kick a dog in front of a bus or shoot 32 people for no reason… they WILL. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when.

Stop feeding the fire with your insistence that only “loners” are capable of this type of massacre! This was a stupid, stupid act. In a society where we can accept drugs, alcohol, glorified media, depraved sex, horror and destruction as daily things that occur, do not try and convince me that a “loner” who was mad at his ex-girlfriend is the cause for decline in our society.

Sanity or Sanitization?

Stoss — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 08:21:26 +0000

As many of you who are faithful readers of my rants know, I have this very unexplainable obsession with hygiene. We humans have this insane fetish with being absolutely sanitized from top to bottom, so much so that we are actually making ourselves susceptible to worse diseases, by killing the very ugly helpers that eat that bad stuff!

What gets me the most is lining the toilet seat with toilet paper. When I sit down and the toilet seat is warm, I just enjoy the sensation… I don’t wish there was a cushy layer of “protection”.

We will spend hours rolling around in a hot sweaty lovemaking session swapping unimaginable fluids, then go wash our face before bed.

We blow our nose into 1-ply Kleenex® and then scrub our hands until he skin comes off. But five minutes later we grab a greasy burger, carry it to our booth on a “well washed” tray and then eat it and lick our fingers.

Or how about Chicken wings? Served in highly sanitized wicker baskets coated with wax paper? YUM!

We religiously check expiry dates, and then eat day old muffins from Coffee Time because we same 10 cents.

Humans are insane.

Social Commentary

Stoss — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 01:06:13 +0000

I have to comment on this article, because it shows a LOT of what is wrong with society.

I am not sure if you followed this story, basically because I have no idea who “you” are, since you are sitting at a computer looking at this at any time and in any place.. So regardless, here is the Reader’s Digest version:
Morgan Spurlock (of SuperSize Me fame) was asked (NOTE: Asked) to give a talk to a group of Highschool students about his experiences.
Upon arrival to the school, the school administrators asked him not to bad mouth McDonald’s because someone on their board own’s one. This in my mind is absurd! The only reason why this man has the little amount of fame he has is because of his research into how crappy fast food is! When he refused, he became the bad guy.
Then during the lecture, he reffered to himself as retarded, and insinuated that the highschool teachers smoke pot.
Two points here:

He is retarded! Anyone who injects that much McDonald’s into his body, without some sort of torture being threatened upon him, has to be! This is not an insult to the mentally handicapped people, this is an illustration of how freaking STUPID Morgan Spurlock is!
I dunno about you, but I think many of my highschool teacher’s smoked pot, and if they didn’t they sure as hell should have!

Because of his comments, he had to post the above mentioned article as an apology. Now I 100% agree with his decision to not apologize for the words, but explain that they were not meant as hurtful. He was hired to entertain. Making derogatory remarks IS entertainment, just ask Hollywood… Will & Grace made a sitcom out of that concept.

Some of the comments to his entry are from parents not even in the same country as him saying how ashamed he should be! (oh yeah, he said “Fuck” as well, b/c we all know that is the devil’s tongue speaking)…

Does anyone over 30 REMEMBER highschool? You used to mock the fat kid, the ugly kid, the stupid kid! And yes I mean you, the one reading this who I have no clue who you are! It’s a generaization that ACTUALLY works! Oh yeah, and I bet most of you once, just once, dropped an F-bomb!

The kids of the school wrote in some of those comments how they were not offended and how they thought he was great, and everyone else was taking this too far… these are 16 year olds being more rational than the 45 yearolds teaching them! The principal actually called them immature for laughing at such trash humour! TRASH HUMOUR! Turn on MTV! Listen to 50 cent! Morgan is a fucking saint compared the crap these kids are into!

It boggles my mind that rational people can be so irrational about a man who isn’t even famous! He is like Subway Jarrod’s evil twin! These two have the combined influence on society as a Canadian flee has on weather patterns in China! The only reason I heard about this is b/c of the uproar! Not b/c of the original comments! These parents are furthering the evil they are trying to defeat by making it more public!

People are starting to go insane. That is the only possible explanation. I hope there isn’t an insane gene that turns on inside me when I have highschool-age kids, because if I am considered sane now, you guys better watch the hell out!

Is this It?

Stoss — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:48:35 +0000

So I was thinking, which is scary enough in itself, but regardless. What if human beings are exactly like any other animal, except that we have this highly developed brain which causes morals, emotions, thought etc?
Do the popular lions always win Class President? Is there a class system of buzzards flying above us? Do lonley, bored seaturtles lay in their boxers shorts, sipping on a beer while channel flipping at 3am hoping to catch an exposed boob on cable tv?

My guess is not… We have invented these constructs using our all powerful minds, which leads me to believe that, yes, this is it. There is no magical purpose in life for a zebra. He trots along ’til a cheetah makes it dinner. This is the same for us. We are not here to unveil some mystical truth, we are here to trot along until cancer turns us into compost.

Some may view this as depressing. I view it as liberating. Once we stop thinking we are higher and mightier beings, we can start to notice the little things more. A friend of mine had as an MSN name “95% of species that have existed on this planet are no extinct, what makes you think your odds are so good?”

Forget about social constructs, stigmas and arbitrary rules that can change depending on which way the wind is blowing. Animals, plants and humans ([sic] see animals) are here for one reason: None. So enjoy it, this is it. That’s not a bad thing. And until we accept it, we’ll all just be like the seaturtles.

Gay is not Brocolli

Stoss — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 22:07:56 +0000

When we were kids we had to be forced to eat our brocolli. There was no inherent reason why we didn’t like it, we just refused to eat it based on the principal that it was green and a vegetable. I find nothing wrong with this, because kids are generally nonsensical and don’t need to find reasons, because reasoning is a skill that should be devloped as we mature.

What I do find wrong is how adults can extend this principal well past its overdue point. But unlike a library book, the fee is not laughable. Adults refuse to do all sorts of things based on nothing more than a belief: they refuse to try the brocolli.

This is the root of many major problems in our society. Racisim, gay bashing, unequal rights. If people would give certain things a chance, instead of blindly forming an opinion, then the world wouldn’t be full of insensitive babies. Plus, if this happened, the French may cease to exist…

As we age, the arguments become more unresonable. Your parents could coax you into eating Brocolli by saying, if you eat 3 pieces of it, you get dessert, once you “negoatiated” down to 2 pieces, you got dessert. However:

This is a typical coversation between a leafs fan and a Canadians fan:
Habs fan: Hey man, why do you hate the Habs?
Leafs fan: Cause they suck, man.
Hab fan: Well, historically the Habs have a better record.
Leafs fan: Fuck you.

And…. no one gets dessert… but they may get drunk.

We have problems as adults in trying or accepting new things. People can try skydiving, white water rafting etc. But we hear about two men in love and we think that the second coming of the devil is nigh.

In short, we are adults. Act like it! You don’t have to accept things, but understand them before forming your opinion. Except of course people in hood, you just keep on shooting eachother.
By they way: For all the kids out there, eat your damn Brocolli.

Thoughts By Stoss p5

Stoss — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:51:39 +0000

So, one thing that is quite neat about women and men is the different approaches they take on appearance. I found that when women need a haircut, they plan long in advance, have 2 or 3 magazine clippings chosen for the style and have had, at minimum, an hour or 2 discussion about what colour, style, and whether it will accentuate their jaw line too much with a few close girlfriends.

With guys, for instance me, it took 5 minutes of asking directions to the nearest Salon, and my only requirement was “Before Sunday”.

I spent more time deciding on what brand of cereal to buy then I did on what I should wear for the next month on my head. And on that note, don’t buy Muslix, it’s actually birdseed. That stuff is like eating trailmix that actually was made from mixing elements found along a dirt trail. I will stick to my Special K.

I think if a guy went to a salon and asked for the “George Clooney” look, the hairdresser would assume he was gay and could cut his own hair.

And why is it that male haistylists have to be gay? And not just gay, flambouyantly gay. You can spot a male hairstylist from 10 blocks away hidden behind a wall, in the middle of the night. They’re so flaming they light up the street.

Anyway, I think the most important point here is having the “Jennifer Aniston” does not make you Jennifer Aniston.. if it did, men would be even more horny and the world does not need hornier men. ‘Cause at the rate women turn down sex, we’d have to start tapping the gay hairdressers…