mercurious

Keep tabs on me

Make me an app that would auto-sync the URLs of all my currently open tabs to a shortened URL that I could syndicate at will.

For example

http://tabs.to/mercurious would redirect to the 11 browser tabs that I have open right now, in your browser.

I suppose it could be built as a Firefox plugin and companion website that syndicates vanity URLs and offers a social API to disseminate into other services.

It would contribute towards the notion of MEMEX, by putting the live trail of my research in front of a “camera” — a social feed, in actuality.

It would serve the function and purpose of this MEMEX accessory, illustrated in the figure:

One can only surmise that executives schemed these crippling aspects to AT&T’s GoPhone prepaid offerings to exploit every inducement towards a “postpaid” (ie. 2 year contract) plan.

I’ve been trying to equip unlocked Nokia devices with prepaid data accounts for benevolent design research purposes integral to my work at Parsons on mobile media design work for grant funded projects.

1. Relentless balance reminders. Even with a $20 100MB package for a month’s worth of data access, you are barraged with irritating and intrusive balance reminder service messages, after every single use. You’ll need to click to dismiss the message after every text message and every data connection, and certainly when data intensive apps are running in the background, such as Google Maps with Latitude. These USSD messages, apparently, cannot be disabled by a customer service representative. Clearly, they are an intentional annoyance disguised as a customer service to coerce you into a 2 year contract, or flee to a competitor.

   

2. No 3G data support. Online chatter can be found espousing the merits of enjoying pre-paid 3G data, but the phone company was listening. These comments remain mythical and historical musings, as GoPhone data only supports 2G (EDGE GPRS only), as of this writing, no matter how much you’d be willing to pay. Again, they’ll be happy to convert your account to a “postpaid” commitment in order to subscribe to 3G data.
3. No unlimited data offering. The same online whispers that spoiled the party on 3G prepaid data probably cued AT&T to cap its data offering to 1MB and 100MB denominations. Of course, this never implied tethering, although many forumistas falsely claim that prepay is the ultimate loophole.
4. No visual voicemail on iPhone. At least without doing naughty things like jailbreaking, it is reported that visual voicemail is not supported on a pre-pay GoPhone plan and SIM in an iPhone. To not have visual voicemail on an iPhone is like having a PBJ without the first ingredient. Apparently, the executives responsible for upholding the 2 year contract conspiracy agree.
5. No international roaming (beyond Mexico). Although the prepaid target market is clearly revealed by this sales policy, it dissolves the possibility of being able to keep a prepaid globetrotter number and bounce around the Earth’s sublime GSM network based on the à la carte reality of travel — it’s occasional and ad-hoc, not a feature to add to a monthly plan.

Research suggests that T-Mobile is the better choice for prepaid services in the United States. At the minimum, they do not employ the dealbreaker balance reminders, which is enough reason for me to expend my remaining balance and get a new number from the local German provider of mobile telephony. Those Europeans sure know a thing or two about running a mobile phone infrastructure. But there are so many reasons why telecom (and law enforcement, for that matter) will always keep prepaid mobile telephony a stinky deal.

A Simple, Radical Solution to the Financial Crisis

Could we fix systemic flaws simply by printing a new denomination with a picture of a mag-lev train riding through a wind farm on the back of the bill?

The Preamble

I’m not an economist or an expert on currency markets. But I am a designer. When designers are presented with problems, they instinctively imagine design solutions. This is my proposal to work towards solving the current financial crisis and restore the greatness of the United States of America. It is inspired by the three previous attempts of Presidents Lincoln, Jackson and Kennedy to re-nationalize our currency. Most people don’t realize that our currency is based on the Treasury Department selling debt to an international banking cartel that funds the Federal Reserve Bank. When you really try to figure out what the Fed is, you realize that it’s not really Federal (beyond the appointment of leadership positions by government) and it’s not really a Reserve either. And it’s certainly not the purest form of a United States currency. We’ve tried issuing a non-fiat currency of US Notes in the past, often nicknamed the greenback. According to economist, S.G. Fisher, ‘the Greenbacks were the best currency that ever a Nation had.’¹ Naturally, banks hate this kind of currency as it diminishes the role of debt in a financial system, which is how they get to make money out of thin air.

The Problem

The Federal Reserve is far too powerful; above the authority of Congress² and probably above the President.³

Our Lender of Last Resort is now so mired in debt and inflationary triggers that it’s hard to imagine its capacity to finance a green economy revolution. The Fed is stuck with financing the bailouts and an exponential debt that now equals the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and has doubled the amount of money in circulation. In other words, the international financiers that actually supply the Fed with loans to issue Federal Reserve Note dollars have not only doubled their investment, but also crafted the conditions to cause devastating inflation down the road, which will invariably benefit them with more and more indentured servitude to their unquenchable money making.

The forces of globalism naturally seek a more stable currency, one that is more protected from the boom-bust cycles that work out great for the international banking cartel. Just consider how unbelievably profitable the housing-bubble collapse and ensuing bailouts have been to JP Morgan and Goldman-Sachs.

In addition, a Central Bank system thwarts pure capitalism and fuels crony capitalism by centering monetary policy in the hands of a winner-take-all few. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve is widely regarded as the most powerful man in the world economy. And this is good? The US campaign finance and lobby system only worsens the situation, nurturing a corrupt partnership between the corporate person and legislators.

Whether your political perspective is leftist or rightist, it’s pretty easy to accept that the Federal Reserve just might be the source of all economic evil. Libertarians hate it. Liberals should hate it for epitomizing the secret subversion of government and a blatant conspiracy to enrich private interests at the expense of the state and the public common good. The only people who really support the idea of the Federal Reserve are Centrists, who by nature, don’t want to rock the boat. And dissolving the Fed is a truly radical idea, Titanic Big, maybe bigger.

The Solution

Launch a parallel, alternate US NOTE greenback dollar in the spirit of a national project, such as financing a war or major sci-tech project. Like JFK’s proposal, Treasury could issue $30 and $200 US “green” notes. The New Greenback’s value would be directly coupled to Green bonds to fund new eco-economy projects (renewables, mag-lev trains, smart electric vehicles). The value derived from the presumed economic strength of a “free” energy grid that fuels a “clean” transportation network promises a staggering profit potential once initial outlay is capitalized. The Greenback 2.0 captures our national economic potential as an alternative to the petroleum economy. Big Oil is completely tethered to Fed notes and the entrenched oligarchy.

New Greenbacks would likely have restrictions like the original US fiat currencies: maybe you couldn’t pay your income tax with them, or buy gasoline. Instead, they would be used to buy green energy and transportation, as well as acceptable goods and services. We would use New Greenbacks to buy clean energy from wind/solar/tidal farms, pay fares on mag-lev trains, purchase leases on electric smart vehicles and debit tolls on smart highways (with EZPass 2.0 powered by Greenbacks). Commercial business would be free to accept Greenbacks for everyday transactions based on a market-derived exchange rate against Fed Note dollars. Banks and other financial institutions would probably disparage this currency since they’re in on the Federal Reserve cartel.

The Result

Greenbacks (US Notes) would compete in the marketplace with Federal Reserve Notes to diminish the international banking cartel’s grip on our government, economy and monetary policy.

Greenbacks would buffer against inevitable Federal Reserve Note inflation while providing a means to exchange value based on the assets of environmentally sound, renewable, basically unlimited energy sources and the subsequent transportation capabilities that would drive a new 21st century marketplace towards a future without debt.

Instead of making money out of thin air through the Fractional Reserve System, an alternate US Note currency would make money out of an ambitious, game-changing clean-and-green energy and transportation system.

Footnotes

1. This is an awesome quote and S.G. Fisher is an awesome name, but I’m having trouble fact-checking this person and attribution beyond the Wikipedia entry where I found it. [↩]
2. According to the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950, section, 31 USC 714(b), congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include “deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters.” According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter. [↩]
3. Conspiracy Theory: In 1963, President Kennedy had tried to circumvent the private Federal Reserve banking cartel by issuing legal tender notes in $2 United States Notes denominations. Many speculate that this cost him his life as all the notes were recalled days after his assassination. Andrew Jackson killed the Federal Reserve, but we don’t really know the whole story. Some say it was just a shallow personal vendetta against the bankers that ran it. Others say Jackson was sincere. Abraham Lincoln used US Notes to help finance the Civil War, also assassinated. Call it coincidence or assume the banking cartel operates above the law as it has every reason to and has gotten away with it for more than a hundred years. [↩]

Society Needs a Redesign

Incendiary Questions

Despite electing a visionary leader, the United States is grappling with its essential sustainability as a society. The financial collapse and its reverberations through all aspects of our life reveal the need to ask a mortifying question. Is the American Dream just that, a dream? Perhaps the financial collapse is the alarm clock buzzing us out of lucid imagining and towards realizing sobering realities. We cannot make money out of money. We cannot borrow ourselves into oblivion. We cannot expect business as usual to keep working.

Has the time come for radical thinking? Should we start to take seriously ideas that, prior to 2009, were dismissed as outright heretical to American thinking? Do we really think that familiar policy solutions will address the devastating implications of our current predicament?

What follows are some radical ideas that some people may actually begin seriously considering in the coming years. Yes, they are incredibly insane, heubristically harsh, certainly cruel and definitely difficult to even think about. You have been warned about being exposed to controversial ideas.

On Monetary Policy

Can we really fix our money problems with debt? Our currency is a debt note. Do we need to abolish to Federal Reserve again? Do we need to bring back the Greenback, a debt-free dollar?¹ Do we need to start talking about a post-monetary society? Isn’t money the root of all evil? Do we really need it anymore to incentivize the mechanics of humanity now that we have obliterated the notion of scarcity with the abundance of information technology as a primary currency of value? Imagine the Earth’s bounty unleashed from the grip of the international banking cartel and the Network’s infinite collective intelligence thriving on a crowdsourced wiki culture. Picture conventional manufacturing made obsolete by inexpensive personal networked home fabrication units (3D printers and inevitable nanotechnology and biodesign): make your own shoe at home on the computer. A life that’s been fully open-sourced, hyperconnected, hyperfragmented; physical currency’s use diminished in favor of hyperbarter: value exchanging in perfect fluidity and abstraction, totally intangible. We forget about the need for a transaction gradually but completely, the need for immediate compensation, the notion of property itself.

On Financial Regulation

Can we all agree that unregulated derivatives are intrinsically toxic to an economy and a society? Didn’t we prove that allowing the use of unfettered financial instruments like CDOs and credit default swaps will only lead the market to cannibalize capitalism upon itself? Shouldn’t derivatives be banned completely as the casino sham that they are? Shouldn’t the market demand that our financial riches be used to build the country and support resources that will actually advantage a national participation in a global economy — rather than facilitate a winner-take-all society? Do we actually think that China and India won’t devastate the long term health of our nation by leveraging their massive population and its potential output against our dependence on the mega-rich to hedge the market in our favor as a surrogate to our comparatively impotent population’s capacity to generate non-debt wealth? In other words, by letting the top 1% own the vast majority of our wealth, we are complicit in a social contract that states: let the richest handle the wealth production of the nation so that the rest of the 99% can be lazy consumers and live an indulgent life based on the endless amusements of celebrity, athletics, home-grown religion and pornography.²

On Education

Has our obsession with assessment and accountability ruined the excellence that was once the American Education System? Our need to measure success has transformed teaching and learning to merely teaching to the test. We traded teacher credibility and confidence for the Assessment Industrial Complex. Our blind faith in numbers reflects our failure to recognize the real problems of educational dysfunction (eg. cruelly coupling school funding to local property taxation). Has our insistence on leaving no child left behind and nurturing every special educational need from every newly diagnosed disorder destroyed our ability to teach to the most promising students because disproportionate money and focus is redirected towards teaching to the least promising students? In other words, we’re saving the hopeless at the expense of those who could really contribute to the national common good. We compete for resources globally and yet our funding policy feeds the bottom, flattens the top and advantages the rich.

On Health Care

The majority of health care money is spent at the end of life.³ Does truly fixing the health care system imply legalizing euthanasia? How is the sanctity of life preserved when we make it a miserable and devastatingly expensive experience at its twilight? Shouldn’t people have the right to retire? Right-to-die isn’t ageist genocide. It’s nudging social norms towards greater personal freedom and away from legal and social limitation. The human body wasn’t designed to live as long as it does now. It’s time to start wondering if senior citizenship is an unintended consequence of modernity, rather than a virtue. Or, does a sustained Depression cause the emergence of family compounds, multi-family dwellings? The nuclear family expands to extended and multi-generational sizes, a return to village life. Families re-assume elder care responsibilities.

On the Environment

Can we agree that the internal combustion engine and the auto industry as we know it today will be the dinosaur of tomorrow? It’s ironically elegant to realize that this industry is built upon burning the remains of the dinosaurs. GM and Chrysler could be nationalized and the factories re-tooled to build electric smart vehicles. Design a tax incentive or financial instrument to fuel a run on renewable energy capture technologies like wind, solar and tidal systems. Let’s build a trans-continental mag-lev train from New York to Los Angeles. Go from coast-to-coast in the time it takes to fly with the environmental impact of a single lawn mower. Mag-lev trains aren’t science fiction.⁴ We need a national mission on the scale of WWII and the Manhattan Project to mobilize the entire nation’s resources towards a complete and utter redesign of the energy and transportation network from the ground up. This will force us to go back to making productive physical objects that directly support our national wellness and force us away from designing winner-take-all obscure financial instruments that do nothing but mortgage our future for the sake of Russian-roulette ponzi-schemed wealth accumulation.

Footnotes

1. See difference between a government issued currency and an international bank debt based currency on Wikipedia [↩]
2. See Matt Taibbi’s colorful but forcefully convincing diatribe from Rolling Stone, The Big Takeover [↩]
3. See Wikipedia Citations involve Health Care Spending section. [↩]
4. See Wikipedia. Estimation assumes a non-direct “hub” style flight, sure. But “express” trans-continental maglevs are viable. Think MetroCard for the USA. [↩]

Two significant events occurred since the last post.

1. O8AMA
2. K8TLYN¹

We hope this helps explain the hiatus. These two projects consumed all of my extra time. I’m just catching my breath now. A new semester brings new potential.

Footnotes

1. Reference to my daughter, Kaitlyn Carroll, born December 7, 2008. This girl is no mere footnote in history. Mark my word. [↩]