“What I hope the president does… is talk about jobs, debt, terror and if he stopped right there it’d suit me fine, because if he focused on those three and got them in a better direction, then we could deal with health care.”

- Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) via NPR

In a fit of anger upon hearing this, I tweeted:

“Lack of access to health care kills more Americans every month than terrorists have in our nation’s entire history.”

- Me, via twitter

Admittedly, this is a very bold claim.  And I stand behind it.

The presumptions I’ve made in making this claim take into account the following assumptions which, depending on your point of view, are refutable:

• “Americans” means US Citizens on US soil.
• “Terrorists” means those who apply the calculated use of violence to achieve mass casualties against US citizens  in order to forward political goals.

The thing about statistics is that you could game either body count either way.  You could immediately throw out the study I reference, using a 2002 Institute of Medicine study which puts the total at less than half of the study I quote.

You could also pile on to assume that Terrorist attacks are any random act of violence leading to death, in which case the reverse claim could be made.

In looking at Terrorism, I’m using a much narrower focus.  The “terrorist” I speak of is the kind that we’re supposedly fighting in this War on Terror.  This precludes things like hate crimes, campaigns by the KKK, and many other uses of systematic violence with political motives.   It also precludes attacks on those working for the military, law enforcement or those attacks committed abroad.  I’m talking about organized terror groups acting specifically against civilians in the US along political lines.  All that being said:

Deaths attributable to Lack of Access to Health Care: 44,789 Annually, (approx. 3,732/month)

Deaths attributable to Terrorism in US History: 2,910 (Running total)

• 9/11: 2,668
• 1995 Oklahoma City: 168
• 1920 Wall Street Bombing: 38
• 1910 Los Angeles Times Bombing: 21
• 1993 WTC: 6
• 2001 Anthrax Attacks: 5
• Unabomber: 3
• 1996 Atlanta Olympic Bombing: 1

Which basically means there’s 822 terrorist deaths left to go before my statistic fails.  Any other attacks I forgot?

bre: Banks are broken. [link]

Nickf4rr: @bre Try credit unions instead. [link]

johl: @Nickf4rr I misread that as “credit unicorns” and thought it was awesome. [link]

Nickf4rr: @johl I make you this solemn vow: Credit unicorns will be a real, viable financial product before I retire.

Since making this solemn vow, I’ve been consumed with designing a financial product or service worthy of the name “credit unicorn”.  Somehow, after chuckling to myself about snakes on my girlfriend’s flight to Portland, it hit me.  The credit unicorn should take on credit card debt!

The credit unicorn is my first experiment with Peer Directed Banking.  Cloud Banking, while catchy, never quite caught captured the essence of the fundamental shift banking I envision.  Our savings are in a cloud right now–out there, somewhere.  What we really need is the ability to direct where our savings go, to have a solid grasp over what our money is doing.

All well and good, but it needs to start somewhere.  So here goes:

The Credit Unicorn

The Credit Unicorn is an installment loan financed by individual savings, designed to replace and encourage the retirement of high interest rate revolving debt (i.e. Credit Cards). It works like this:

1. The borrower of a high interest rate card agrees to surrender it.
2. The Credit Unicorn will pay the balance in full and cancel the card.
3. The borrower makes minimum payments into the CU that are twice as large as those required by the card in exchange for half the interest rate (or 3x as large for 1/3rd the interest rate, and so on) until the balance is paid off.
4. The lender/s keep the interest payments, less a small amount for insurance, payment fees, etc.

It’s a simple idea that I believe will connect those looking to get better returns on savings with those who really need to learn to save.

Anyone interested?

One such model I’m personally familiar with is the Rhizome Commissions Program. I joined Rhizome so I could support commission proposals from Edith Kollath and Diana Eng, both friends of mine from NYC Resistor. Were it not for their participation, I wouldn’t have even heard about Rhizome let alone added them to the list of organizations I’m proud to be a supporter of.

While contests like these aren’t a perfect way of picking worthy art projects, the program’s use of online approval and instant run-off voting is one strong way Rhizome helps “encourage and expand the communities around … emerging artistic practices that engage technology.”

I’m happy to report that Diana’s proposal, Fictional Jewelry and Other Wistful Adornments is one of the finalists. All of the projects themselves are worth checking out, and I expect to blog more about these artists and their work in the future. Below the fold are the links and my ranking of the finalists, with their project summaries (some of which I truncated for brevity’s sake).

1. Fictional Jewelry and Other Wistful Adornments

Fictional Jewelry and Other Wistful Adornments are pieces of a fashion fairytale, a flower broach that blooms, wilts, and dies blooming again instants later. A necklace that glows warmly to the beat of your heart. A pet ring that sits atop your finger breathing gently or moving playfully. In a time of emails, text messages, and one-click delivery food, let’s use technology to create whimsy in a world that’s still fantastic, fashion. This is a collection of jewelry that is real life fiction.

2. Automata

Automata is a counter-surveillance internet bot created to record and display the mutually-beneficial interrelationships between institutions for higher learning, the global defense industry, and world militaries. This bot acts to subvert top-down surveillance techniques by making data about the confluence of economic and violent power visible to the public at large for research, activism, and examination

3. Cross-Border Communication

Cross-Border Communication will attempt to remediate communicative efforts between Windsor and Detroit, which has historically been based solely on economic exchange, through an ongoing series of text-based projections on buildings along the Detroit River. The text will be projected from the Windsor riverfront onto Windsor buildings, but will be legible from Detroit.

4. The Work Office

The Work Office (TWO) is a multidisciplinary art project posing as an administrative bureaucracy. Informed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the Great Depression, TWO is a gesture to “make work” for visual and performing artists, writers, and others by giving them simple, idea-based assignments to explore, document, or improve life in New York.

5. SolarCircus

In my studio practice, I’m exploring various possibilities of retooling existing solar toys into a nomadic city with robotic characters that need just the sun to run. I will also organize several workshops and online performances—the proposed project is homage to Alexander Calder’s 1927 show with handmade wire toys in his Paris studio.

6. The Ghana Think Tank

Think tanks in so-called “developing” countries solve hyper-local problems in the United States…These think tanks then propose solutions, which we enact physically back in the United States – whether those solutions strike us as scary or silly, humiliating or brilliant.

7. Immaculate Telegraphy

Immaculate telegraphy seeks to test if electronic communication could have occurred at any point in history given the knowledge base and desire… armed with no modern tools except information from the Internet, arriving at a working battery and a telegraph switch primitively smelted out of handpicked metal ores. The resulting telegraph will be a first step towards electronic communication.

8. Catching Shadows

Our lives have been encoded and entrusted to systems that we no longer understand. Modern interfaces make life easier while obfuscating the ways in which technology truly operates. As we sell off our old digital cameras and other electronics we leave traces of ourselves within them. Through a process of digital voyeurism, I hope to explore the ways in which we have become estranged from our data – collecting fragments of lives that have been handed over to strangers willingly, yet unknowingly.

9. Natural Interaction Project

…experiences like ‘Multitouch Space Invaders’ -a reinvention of the classic where people play together and use foam balls instead of joysticks.

10. Ghosts of Adak

I wish to explore the “ghost town” of Adak, Alaska … where my 87-year old father was based as a Naval machinist in WWII. I want to document Adak as it now stands as a web-based panoramic documentary … and create a dialogue with my dad in North Canton, Ohio.

11. Measure of Discontent

Inspired by an oppressive environment of national crisis and fear, artist and designer, Michael Kontopoulos proposes a series of conceptual household tools for harnessing and visualizing unhappiness and anxiety.

12. Microtonal Wall (in 1-Bit)

1,536 small speakers blanket a wall (8 ft. by 12 ft), each emitting tones … each speaker, emitting a single, primitive 1-bit tone, becomes a microscopic voice in the total composition, which substitutes individual pitch for larger sonic masses.

13. trickle-down-town

Inspired by images of limestone sculpture eroding due to acid rain, the purpose is to create a series that deals with human presence in art and how it can take its toll … eventually, over the course of a month’s time, a large mass of each painting will be carved out leaving layers of color similar to geological layers that move through each piece.

14. Gnathonemus Petersii (tentative title)

The project centers around a fish, originally from Nigeria … [that] produces a constant electrical pulse which it uses as an aid in navigation. This pulse can be easily amplified and made audible. Essentially, I am in a band with my fish and we are working on a record and hope to play some shows soon, in the interest of generating income for a fresh water coalition in Nigeria.

15. Lit From Within

In “Lit From Within”, plants thrive on light emanating from within their own living tissue. Technological and biological merge to create a unique hybrid living system which inverts fundamental biological relationships.

16. The Collected Memories of the Mechanical Turk

…I propose to document the inner life and experiences of the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workforce by creating tasks that explore the personal memories of these workers…

17. Solar Symphony

… a symphony of individual kinetic instruments powered by solar energy…

18. Greetings from Cleveland, Ohio

“Greetings from Cleveland, Ohio” will utilize the early photographic form of the “living photograph” to recreate a classic Cleveland postcard image using thousands of Clevelanders as “human pixels.”

19. Hit the Planet Running

I have been using state-of-the-art astronomy software to visualize the sky from [distant] planets, and construct and map out new constellations (and accompanying stories) as a courtesy to those who might colonize those distant planets.

20. Iota: an aural mapping
21. Grey
22. Here Comes the Sun
23. Antlers Wifi
24. Really Fast Syndication
25. Dialectical Software Gundam Suit

The More Things Change, The More Stay the Same

1. In the future, there will still be bad, memory leaking code
2. More data will be collected, and they still won’t know what to do with it
3. More “content” will be produced, it will be cheaper and of lower quality
4. LOLCats will not die, stupid memes will only get worse
5. Privacy is a relic of the past
6. Hackers will proliferate: Hacking in general will become more important
7. You’re still going to die

Old Memes: Things Ain’t Like They Once Was

8. Profanity
9. Arbiters of Taste
10. Context
11. Linear Narratives
12. Fixed Realities : Everyone Will Construct Their Own Reality
13. Newspapers : The Daily Newspaper is Dead

The Future is Now: We Can See, Touch and Taste It.

14. Voluntary Surveillance : The Creation of Parallel Realities
15. Ethnic Identity as a Choice : Everyone Will Decide What Race to Be
16. Smarter Terrorists : More of Them, More Creative Attacks
17. More Democracy : People Have the Tools to Make Decisions
18. People Will Do More With Less : Work 2.0, Energy 2.0, Materials 2.0
19. World Population Will Shrink (Because It Has To)
20. Money Will Lose Importance
21. Information You Produce Will Gain Importance as Currency
22. We Will Have to Use Less Energy: Fewer Resources, More Users, Heavier Load
23. We Will Source More Locally

Tomorrow : Educated Guesses About the Future

24. Makerbot = Altair 8800
25. Girls Will Get Into RepRap…When They Find Out It Makes Shoes
26. We Will Design Our Own Things
27. We Are Making Backup Copies Of Our Personas
28. Symbolic Interactionism ++
29. The Future Will Be More Modular
30. Microsoft Won’t Sell Software Anymore
31. The Basic Income Will Be The New Idea of Freedom
32. The Final Frontier Belongs to Us (Government Has Failed at Space Exploration)
33. Sattelite Internet by 2020: Net Neutrality Fight Will Be Won in Space
34. C-Base Will Pwn the Moon

Revenge Affects: The Future Is Not All Hope and Dreams

35. Water, Water Everywhere : And Were Flushing Out What’s Left to Drink
36. People Will Get More Spiritual

Crowdsourced Items

37. Radioactive Mutant Vampire Zombie Robots from Outerspace (Corrected, see comments)
38. Future of Warfare: Perpetual, Asymmetric Warfare
39. Digital Drugs & Data Integrity : Your Best (and Possibly Last Trip)
40. Risk Cannot Be Managed
41. Crowdsourcing Works, Bitches
42. Time is a finite resource … Even If We Have Club-Mate

To illustrate the concept of money as a metric, I used the ever awesome Haribo Saft Goldbären they have on sale here in Mediapark 7 at SIGINT.

The first of my three talks here managed to snag a near capacity crowd, more likely due to the timing of the talk right after dinner on Friday night.  The crowd seemed relatively sedate until midway through, when a great series of questions came up.  Based on the interview I did with German Public Radio and comments from those who approached me since, it seems the topic really resonated with the attendees  here.

Seeing Johannes sing corporate anthems and Astera and George talk about robot uprisings was also really cool.  Jens gave a great Day 1 keynote…or so say the German speakers I begged an aftermath from.  It was also great spending time chilling with Jon and Ivory.

The slides from the talk and more about cloud banking are now posted over at my cloud banking page.  Thanks to jmtosses and function for the pictures!