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 <insert numbers here> 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.

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

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…

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.