Wapcaplets

I drive to work about one time per month on average. Usually, I take the train but the odd time when I have something to do after work and I don’t feel like taking the late-night GO-Bus home I take the car. Like many who commute to down-town Toronto, I exit the Gardiner Expressway at Yonge Street travelling east. If you want to travel north on Yonge street after this exit, there is a significant traffic anomaly. The road you’re on upon leaving the off-ramp bends gradually to the left (north) and you have the option of either continuing north to go on Yonge Street or turning right very gradually to get on Lakeshore Boulevard to continue travelling east (which would result in you driving in an elongated “S” pattern). You can only continue east if you’re in the right lane but you could turn safely onto Yonge Street from both lanes but, for some reason, it is only legal to continue on to Yonge Street from the left lane. I could understand restricting north-bound access to the left lane if there were only one north/south lane but since Yonge Street continue south of the intersection there are two lanes. In my experience, there is much more traffic (at least during rush-hour) that wishes to travel north on Yonge when exiting the Gardiner than wishes to travel east on Lakeshore Boulevard. Because of this illogical restriction to north-bound traffic, drivers are often queued up in both lanes attempting to merge left and anyone that actually wishes to go east on Lakeshore Boulevard has to sit and wait for the merging traffic to leave the right lane. The most irritating part of this traffic anomaly is that it is very poorly signed and, invariably, there is a police car sitting just past the intersection with an officer pulling people over and ticketing these so-called “improper left turns.” This is nothing short of entrapment. I likely would have been ticketed in this way at some point if someone in my office had not been ticketed for turning north from the right lane and told me about it. I have no problem in people being ticketed for legitimate traffic violations but this is so clearly a case of the police being fully aware of a confusing intersection and capitalizing on it.

Recently , Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade and his clap-trap morning show panel of imbeciles referred to the late Fred Rogers (AKA “Mr. Rogers”) as an “evil genius” that created a generation of adults that feel entitled because Mr. Rogers told kids that they were “special” citing a dubious study that I won’t even give credence to by mentioning it by name. I won’t argue that there’s a generation made up of a great many people who feel unduly entitled in North America but to blame it on the gentle message of love and being neighbourly to people that Mr. Rogers passed on to children via his television programming is utterly absurd. If the generation that grew up watching Mr. Rogers can be said to be of an entitlement mindset then perhaps Kilmeade should look to the people of his own generation that sired and raised them instead of a television program that tried to enhance children’s sense of self-esteem. But, of course, that would bring in the idea of accountability for raising children which is a notion to which pieces of human refuse like Kilmeade don’t seem to ascribe. Perhaps, Mr. Kilmeade, instead of hiding from being parents you and your generation could have equipped these entitlement-minded children with the emotional grounding that they needed instead of spending too much time at the office in the vain hope of advancing your careers, buying cars & houses you couldn’t afford to satiate your own egos, cheating on your spouses and destroying the notion of the family, and letting your children spend more time with television, electronic entertainment, and indifferent strangers that with their parents. You criticize university-aged students in 2010 for having an entitlement-based mindset. Who in the world do you think they learned it from, you pathetic excuse for a journalist? A child that grows up watching his or her parents spending all the money they earn on themselves and habitually ignoring any notion of family to further their own selfish agenda is bound to grow up thinking that the best way to act is to take for themselves at every opportunity. Kilmeade’s likely rebuttal would be along the lines of “well, I worked hard for all of this.” True though that may be, unless you act like a parent and teach your child to correlate hard work with success you’re going to wind up with a generation of children who have learned by watching that accumulating for themselves is the #1 priority. You blame Fred Rogers in your television segment for not teaching this lesson to children when it was your job to teach them and you failed. Yes, Mr. Kilmeade, you and your generation failed to adequately raise your children and now you’re blaming Mr. Rogers. Ironically, it is you that is living in the Neighbourhood of Make-Believe.

As time goes on I’m seeing more and more first-hand evidence of something I’ve believed for a while now: our population is being dumbed down. I don’t say that to sound like an intellectual snob nor to condemn those younger than myself. If anything, my generation (generation X) is largely culpable for the dumbing down of those 20 years old and younger as we are the educators, parents, and policy makers that have reared them.

I was out shopping for a birthday present for my father this evening and I went into the Best Buy at QEW and Brant Street in Burlington. I wanted to get him a carrying case for his new video camera so I asked a young man who looked to be between 15 and 17 whether they sold cases for my father’s brand of camera. He indicated that they didn’t have brand-specific cases but he directed me over to their rack of generic cases. I found one that I thought was suitable and brought it over to the display of video cameras which included the brand my father owns. I held up the case to the camera and it looked like it would fit but the camera had a bulky security tether attached to the bottom of it and, as such, I couldn’t place it in the case in a way that I was sure it fit properly. I asked the kid if he could remove the tether so that I could try it out in the case and he said something along the lines of, “I can’t. They don’t come off.” I responded by saying, “They must come off” to which he replied, “If I take it off an alarm will sound.” For the next few minutes I tried to convince him that, even if he’s not able to do it, there must be some way that someone in the store could remove it. I asked him to at least try and remove the tether and, after he fumbled for a minute or so with a screwdriver to no effect, I asked him if he could just take a new camera out of the box to which he replied, “I can’t do that. Then we can’t sell it.” At that point I just left.

I am seeing this behaviour more and more among people under 20: an almost complete inability to think laterally outside of specific instructions of little complexity. This sales clerk’s world view was such that the cable on that camera did not come off. Not that they’re “not supposed to come off” or that “I’m not allowed to take them off” or even “I don’t know how to take it off.” In his mind at that moment that tether on that camera was a permanent fixture that existed in perpetuity, period. The idea to ask his manager to take the cable off simply did not enter his head. I don’t even think, in this particular case, that this was due to “teenage laziness.” This kid was articulate, well-spoken, attentive, and well-groomed, not your stereotypical acne-ridden slob just there to collect minimum wage with as little effort as possible. What’s concerning to me is that he was doing his job as instructed with zero deviation from instruction and not because he was consciously adhering to his training but rather because the notion to do otherwise never even occurred to him. This, to me, speaks of a complacent, cowed population and it scares me.

Time to put on the tin-foil hat for a moment. When it comes to mobile computing I’m a bit of a caveman and that’s intentional. My work and my hobbies put me in front of a computer screen a lot so, when I’m away from the computer, I value the time I have being relatively un-tethered. Apart from the odd work-related emergency I use my phone almost exclusively to keep in touch with my wife when we’re in different locations and the bulk of that communication is via SMS.

Global positioning technologies have really grown in leaps & bounds over the past decade and there are some great applications. I smirk when I think that, 15 years ago, my friends and I would actually consult paper road-maps when planning a trip instead of just typing an address in a $200 GPS unit. I laugh out loud when I recall that, at that time, it was illegal for consumer GPS units to be as accurate as they are now over security concerns (disclaimer: I have no reference to cite in relation to my remark of the legality of GPS’ accuracy; I’m making that statement based on anecdotal information told to me by someone who I’d have no reason not to believe).

Being in Canada, we’re sometimes behind the curve in terms of the flavour-of-the-month gadgets and associated web-based services. I had heard about foursquare on shows like TWiT but I never fully understood how it was used until I started seeing posts in my Twitter feed this week from someone I follow. Essentially, you can use Foursquare to “check in” to various locations using your mobile device and, depending on how you have it set up, Twitter will display where you are in very-near-real-time.

I’m pretty open in terms of my online presence and the way I use social network sites. I’m not so cynical as to be of the “privacy is dead” mindset but I firmly believe that individuals need to assume that any information that they put online is out there for the world to see, regardless of any website or services assurances of privacy. Sites like Facebook are businesses out there to make money and they use your information to know which ads to put in front of you. The better they can prove their ads’ efficacy to be the more they can charge other companies to advertise. You can make the argument that Facebook is subversive or underhanded in the way that they handle your so-called “private” information but I have relatively little sympathy for people who claim to have been inconvenienced or “exploited” in this regard. Caveat emptor.

But getting back to Foursquare… like many popular technologies, Foursquare hasn’t really done anything radically new from a technological advancement perspective but rather they have found a way to use existing technology in an innovative way that people like to use. Essentially, they’ve turned where you go into a game where you can earn badges and credentials by going to places the most times, with the most people, going to the most diverse assortment of places, etc. In isolation, I can see how that would be a fun game to play, particularly for hipsters & poseurs wanting to vainly assert their “credibility.” Not my cup of tea but I won’t condemn it as frivolous simply because it’s not something I’d use.

Making your address, e-mail, and phone numbers public is one thing. Those are avenues that someone could use to get in touch with you that you can separate from yourself. You can leave your house, you can close your e-mail client, you can turn off your phone. Even though privacy invasions take place by people knocking at your door, spamming your e-mail account, or cold-calling you at the very least there is some barrier, whether physical (your front door) or technological (the “Close” or “Off” buttons) that can grant an individual privacy when desired. What concerns me about applications like Foursquare is that it’s conditioning people to proactively inform the world where you are at all times. Having an e-mail address or phone number do not, in and of themselves, invite invasions of privacy but broadcasting your precise geographic location is equipping people keen on exploiting you. I won’t even go into full on crackpot mode and say how something like Foursquare will tell the black helicopters where to find you, but I am surprised more burglars aren’t using Foursquare so they know when their marks aren’t home. Home invasions aside, broadcasting where you are at all times will invite a litany of unwanted attention.

As a personal policy, I strive to never update any network status saying where I am “right now.” Any location-specific updates should always be in retrospect (i.e. “I went to this great concert” as opposed to “I’m at this great concert”).