Boing Boing

RetroPi makes adorable 3D-printed replicas of old, large computers for you install new, tiny computers within. [via]

A deadstock DeLorean mechanic's jumpsuit turned up on eBay, and it's yours for $199. Better grab it quick or you'll be outtatime.Original Delorean Corp. Stock - DELOREAN MECHANIC'S UNIFORM - for the original KAPAC liquidation stock. I purchased this unbelievable find directly from KAPAC in the early 1990's once they got hold of the remaining Delorean bankruptcy inventory. It is new, never worn. It was sold to Delorean dealer's for mechanic's to wear as their uniform when servicing this amazing vehicle. They had a couple of these and I bought all that they had. I have worn mine to Delorean conventions - it is a great piece of Delorean history!

Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond called the Labour Party an "existential challenge to our economic model"; to which Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said, that is "absolutely right" and that Labour would destroy the current model, which "allows homelessness to double, 4 million children to live in poverty and over a million older people not getting the care they need." (more…)

(more…)

Vaquita CPR is the international effort to save the "pandas of the sea," critically endangered and super-cute vaquitas, the earth's smallest species of porpoises. Only 30 are believed to live in their range in the northern Gulf of California. (more…)

Excited to stumble upon this recently-released documentary on a real '80s phenomenon: 30 Years of Garbage: The Garbage Pail Kids Story*.In the 1980s a bunch of underground cartoonists parodied a popular doll. The resulting commercial product tapped into the international kid zeitgeist. That young generation felt, rather than knew, that this product spoke to the rebellious nature they had for the corporate pop culture that was being fed to them. To quote Art Spiegelman, "We were bringing the counter culture to a new generation of kids, only it was the candy counter."You can watch it on Amazon, like I will right now.Update: I just watched it and it's fantastic. It goes deep into the GPK story, from start to finish. As a pop culture nerd, I have to say that I loved every minute of it. *This is obviously NOT to be confused with The Garbage Pail Kids Movie from 1987. That is a whole 'nother beast.

This summer in Montreal I stopped by the Drawn & Quarterly book store on 211 Bernard St. Visiting the store was one of the highlights of my trip to Montreal, and it is definitely worth checking out.Drawn & Quarterly has published comics by some of my favorite authors, such as Dan Clowes. They also carry many awesome books and comics at the store from other publishers. I had a lot of fun looking through some books of R. Crumb's art. The store has a lively atmosphere and often hosts events. On the store's site, you can find out about upcoming events at the bookstore.I interviewed Alyssa who works at the bookstore. She told me the store has been open since 2007. Each of the staff members has a section of books that they have chosen for the store. The events that take place at the bookstore are often author readings, and book, poetry, and comic book launches. There's a stage and chairs in the back of the store for these events. These events happen often and the store is one of the most popular places in Montreal to attend a book launch.

Republican congressional candidate Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is super lucky because she is friendly with intelligent space creatures who once took her on a ride in the flying saucer when she was a little girl. It's nice to see a semblance of sanity returning to the Republican party.Via NY Post:Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera — a 59-year-old entrepreneur running to replace retiring Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen — said she remained in contact with three aliens, one male and two females, since the extraterrestrial joyride when she was 7 years old, according to a resurfaced 2009 television interview.“I went in,” Rodriguez Aguilera told America TeVe. “There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that controlled the ship – not like airplanes.”Image: Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera (right) with Ivanka Trump / Facebook

In The Guardian, my Institute for the Future colleagues Marina Gorbis and Sam Woolley write about social bots as a threat to democracy:Social media platforms may be able to track and report on political advertisements from foreign entities, but will they divulge information on pervasive and personalized advertising from their domestic political clients?This is a pressing question, because social bots are likely to continue to grow in sophistication. At a recent roundtable on the Future of AI and Democracy, several technology experts forecast that bots will become even more persuasive, more emotional and more personalized.They will be able to not just spread information, but to truly converse and persuade their human interlocutors in order to even more effectively push the latter’s emotional buttons.Bring together advances in neuroscience, the ability to analyze massive amounts of behavioral data and the proliferation of sensors and connectivity and you have a powerful recipe for affecting society though computational means."Social media bots threaten democracy. But we are not helpless" (The Guardian)

Astronomers have detected the collision of a pair of dead stars, called a kilonova, that caused a cosmic ripple of gravitational waves around 130 million years ago. It turns out these kinds of massive explosions forged most of the gold, silver, and other heavy elements in our universe. From Nadia Drake's story in National Geographic:First theorized by Albert Einstein in 1916, gravitational waves are kinks or distortions in the fabric of spacetime caused by extremely violent cosmic events. Until now, all confirmed detections involved a deadly dance between two black holes, which leave no visible signature on the sky.But with this latest event, teams using about a hundred instruments at roughly 70 observatories were able to track down and watch the cataclysm in multiple wavelengths of light, allowing astronomers to scrutinize the source of these cosmic ripples for the first time.“We saw a totally new phenomenon that has never before been seen by humans,” says Andy Howell of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s an amazing thing that may not be duplicated in our lifetimes.”Unlike colliding black holes, shredded neutron stars expel metallic, radioactive debris that can be seen by telescopes—if you know when and where to look.“We felt the universe shaking from two neutron stars merging together, and that told us where to go and point our telescopes,” says Howell, whose team was among several that chased down the stars tied to the gravitational wave signal."In a First, Gravitational Waves Linked to Neutron Star Crash" (Nat Geo)

Some models of Russian GAZelle Next commercial vans and trucks have Tetris integrated into the instrument cluster as an Easter egg. Here's the Google translation of the YouTube poster's instructions of how to bring up the game: 1) Turning the ignition on2) Start a car3) Three times the right turn signal4) Two times distant5) Five times on the clutch6) raise the speed to 2000and at that moment we light the arrow to the left

Radioactive toys for kids? Hell yes! In 1947 these Kix Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb rings were all the range.For .15 and a box top you could have your own wearable spinthariscope. The advertising claimed you could see atoms smashing themselves to smithereens inside this ring. It also declared the action perfectly safe. The polonium alpha particles were smashing against a zinc screen. The half-life of the polonium was super short. My ring does not work. Hell, it can even be a real pain in the posterior removing those red plastic fins, just so you can see the "reaction chamber."I like it.

Tired: cosplaying the carpet at Dragoncon (even if you do get bonus points for attracting spurious copyright threats from the venue!); Wired: cosplaying the venue itself!. (via Neatorama) (more…)

Alexis Madrigal describes What Facebook Did to American Democracy and why it was so hard to see it coming. Foreign exploitation of Facebook's ad system in the 2016 election was just the end result of Facebook's filter bubbles and its wildly successful efforts to get media to fill them. tl;dr: the horse was already dead before Russia flogged it.The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view. It wasn’t just liberal bias that kept the media from putting everything together. Much of the hundreds of millions of dollars that was spent during the election cycle came in the form of “dark ads.”The truth is that while many reporters knew some things that were going on on Facebook, no one knew everything that was going on on Facebook, not even Facebook.Facebook's uncanny method is to trickle enough traffic to publishers so they chum it constantly with Facebookish content, but not so much that publishers can assimilate Facebook visitors into their own audience. Unfortunately for this clever and destructive arrangement, the new far-right sites represented such a cohesive emergent affinity group that Facebook's machinery was co-opted.It's said (usually on Twitter) that no-one is better than Nazis at exploiting a libertarian dropout's ideological impostures. This sort of thing usually strikes me as pompous and vague, but Facebook so perfectly embodies it I'm going to need two leftist energy bars for breakfast this morning.

US CERT has privately circulated an advisory warning key stakeholders about the imminent publication of Key Reinstallation Attacks (KRACK), which exploit a heretofore unknown flaw in the WPA2 wifi security protocol, allowing attackers to break the encryption and eavesdrop upon -- and possibly inject packets into -- wireless sessions previously believed to be secure. (more…)

Mike Monteiro writes about his experience of Twitter over the years, and the growing failure of its leadership to take responsibility for what it has become....when companies tell you they need to be more transparent it’s generally because they’ve been caught being transparent. You accidentally saw behind the curtain. Twitter is behaving exactly as it’s been designed to behave. Twitter, at this moment, is the sum of the choices it has made. Even when the coop is covered in chickenshit, the chickens will come home to roost. Twitter never saw Donald Trump as a problem, because they saw him as the solution. Trump is key because his threats have long passed the nebulous, never-quite-defined point where Twitter tends to eject toxic internet celebrities. So it looks like cowardice is at hand: Twitter's brass won't take him on because they're scared of him. And the obviousness of it is unraveling the last faith anyone has in Twitter to get anything significant done about the broader problems of abuse, harassment and general addicted-to-misery behavior on the site.I still love Twitter and think it could be fixed, and that the people in charge of it are in an "impossible" place where all options lead to pain. I hope they wake up and find the strength to deal with it.

I just read Marco Arment's lament for the dire state of the USB-C ecology, where you never know if any given machine, gadget or cable will do the thing you want it to. I thought about all the ports in my life, over the years, and my experiences of the moral qualities thereof.Previously: Shopping Cart Alignment Chart

Turns out it's not just cats who like to watch videos on smartphones. InsecthausTV played one for a praying mantis, who responded in quite a catlike manner. (more…)

Springing from the august tradition of esoteric programming language Brainfuck, behold the mind-mangling power of JSFuck. (more…)

Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers are making the rounds to support The Long-Awaited Album, including this stop at NPR. (more…)

Tens of millions of Americans have had packages stolen from their porches and mailboxes. Now major online retailers are looking at novel ways to deliver packages to car trunks, lockboxes, and even inside locked homes. (more…)

I'm going to brag about my friend Kyle Kesterson for a minute. A few years back, I listened to him tell his story on stage at Dent, a fabulous retreat we both attend. I was immediately captivated by him and we soon became friends.Without a doubt, he's one of the most incredible, soulful human beings I've ever met AND he's a true multi-creative with an endless imagination. A big win-win in my book!Right now he's blogging about his past "30-day challenges," times in his life when he's pledged to do something consistently for a month straight. In his latest "30-day challenge" blog post, he shares about that time when he committed to drawing one doodle a day.He writes: As I started to get into doodling in my late teenage years, and more specifically, intricadoodling, the world around me changed, and the sickness of Pareidolia really started to take hold."Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists (e.g., in random data)."Basically, everywhere I look, I see faces and characters hidden in objects, stains, clouds, light, and the really obscure relationships among objects overlapping. They can haunt me, tease me, keep me from feeling lonely, make me laugh, and make me appreciate the power of perspective...As I'd walk around during my day, if I saw an interesting shape, I'd just snap a pic on my phone, then sometime later that day, sit down for 10-60 minutes and bring it to life to show how I saw it. It was my daily 👁 Spy.Here's a peek at those doodles:Aren't they fun?Go check out all 30 drawings at his blog. Then, go to his Instagram feed to follow his many adventures with his dog, Bean.

Pep rallies were never this cool at my school. Watch the dance team at Walden Grove High School in Sahuarita, Arizona slay it with their energetic interpretation of The Wizard of Oz.(Pee-wee Herman)

Happy Sunday!

Jake Tapper explains to the United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, why folks care if he called Orange Julius a "moron." Tillerson doesn't care.

Bellevue Theatre Amsterdam's Sunday with Lubach sets their scopes on the NRA.

Telcos provide API access to your phone's location, along with your name and address, writes Philip Neutstrom. With two links, to danalinc.com and payfone.com, he shows that these sites can access this data when your phone connects. The pages are demos for the API and serve some of the data provided back to the visitor.In 2003, news came to light that AT&T was providing the DEA and other law enforcement agencies with no-court-warrant-required access to real time cell phone metadata. This was a pretty big deal at the time.>But what these services show us is even more alarming: US telcos appear to be selling direct, non-anonymized, real-time access to consumer telephone data to third party services — not just federal law enforcement officials — who are then selling access to that data.>Given the trivial “consent” step required by these services and unlikely audit controls, it appears that these services could be used to track or de-anonymize nearly anyone with a cell phone in the United States with potentially no oversight.It knew my name and address and more besides, and located to me to a few hundred feet's accuracy. I certainly never knowingly opted-in to it.

Most jobs don’t demand much in the way of serious technology proficiency, but knowledge of Microsoft Office is all but required for any position that involves a computer. If you’re looking to add a few more in-demand skills to your resume, both eLearnExcel and eLearnOffice are being offered together in the Boing Boing Store to teach you how to use every member of the Microsoft Office Suite. (With a special focus in Excel.)This bundle includes eight courses dedicated to each software in the Suite. With eLearnExcel, you’ll get expert training to help you build spreadsheets the right way. In addition to earning a continuing professional development (CPD) certificate to show off to potential employers, you’ll learn how to craft complex pivot tables, write bulletproof formulas, and compile data into beautiful reports. After immersing yourself in Excel, eLearnOffice will guide you through the lesser-known parts of PowerPoint, Word, OneNote, Outlook, and every other piece of productivity software that comes with an Office365 subscription.To help you become the resident Microsoft guru at your next job, a lifetime subscription to eLearnExcel and eLearnOffice is currently $49.BUY NOW

Though Puerto Rican law prohibits ownership and bearing of most long-guns and especially semiautomatic weapons, the streets of the stricken US colony now throng with mercenaries in tactical gear bearing such arms, their faces masked. They wear no insignia or nametags and won't say who they work for, apart from vague statements in broken Spanish: "We work with the government. It’s a humanitarian mission, we’re helping Puerto Rico." (more…)

Since the 1990s, North Korea has aggressively pursued development -- and importation -- of CNC mills, the ubiquitous makerspace staples that automatically machine complex forms out of blocks of metal, wood, plastic and other materials. (more…)

It's been nearly a decade since the first proof-of-concept demos showing that keys could be reproduced on 3D printers from distant, angled photos surfaced, and six years since the first parametric Openscad models that could turn easy key-measurements into working house-keys appeared. (more…)

Trisha Weir writes, "In the wake of the massive fires in Northern California, one of the biggest problems was a lack of centralized infrastructure for information. A group of engineers at a non-profit maker space in Sebastopol banded together to make Sonoma Fire Info, a website with information on evacuations, shelters, donations and support, and have been working around the clock to update it with verified information from a variety of sources."

Under US copyright law, creators who have signed away their copyrights for the "full duration of copyright" can still get their rights back from publishers under something called the "Termination of Transfer," which is a hellishly complex and technical copyright provision that is almost never used, since it requires that creators wait decades and then successfully navigate all that complexity (even knowing how many years you have to wait is complicated!). (more…)

Strawberries are delicious, but is DNA extracted from strawberries delicious? Chemist NileRed extracted some DNA using food safe ingredients, then dried it and tasted it so we don't have to. (more…)

Keith Calder has been looking around on Reddit and has found a string of messages from baffled, distressed women whose male romantic partners literally don't wipe their asses because touching themselves between the cheeks might make them gay. (more…)

You probably remember indie Canadian band Walk off the Earth from their 2012 viral cover of Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know." In the video, five band members cover the song by playing just one guitar... all together. Well, they're still doing their thing, and by "doing their thing," I mean "covering pop music in clever and unusual ways."They pull out some wacky instruments for their latest, a fun and entertaining cover of Outkast's 2003 hit "Hey Ya!"The band starts a U.S. tour in March 2018.(reddit)Previously: "Little Boxes" performed on little boxes

Python is an amazingly versatile programming language. Aside from being a primary tool for both data scientists and web developers, it’s also very well-suited for building network infrastructure. To teach you how to build, maintain, and secure software for distributed computer systems, this Python Network Programming Bundle is currently available in the Boing Boing Store.Throughout the 28 hours of video content included with this collection, you’ll learn the fundamentals of Python programming while writing a wide variety of apps for networks. Get introduced to essential concepts like SSH/Telnet communication, task automation, and basic information security, and discover how to use Python scripts to remotely configure hardware, scan networks for threats, and maintain device inventories.If you’re looking to gain practical programming experience working with business-critical IT systems, take a look at the Python Network Programming Bundle. Pick it up today in the Boing Boing store for $24.BUY NOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rujeOqadOVQThere's knowing about it, and there's knowing where your bread is buttered, and then there's this.

Protesters against ICE's campaign of mass deportations were treated to a bizarre public stunt by Portland, OR police, who put them in isolation hoods and sound-muffling ear-protectors reminiscent of the treatment described by Gitmo prisoners and other survivors of US torture. The police were attempting separate the protesters from the bonds they used to stick themselves together and the measures were nominally taken to protect the protesters' hearing and vision from police power-tools. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Justin Delay breaks down and recreates the otherworldly 1980s synth sounds of Vangelis's stunning score for the original Blade Runner.

The US is the only developed country in the world without universal healthcare. Americans pay more for their healthcare than anyone else, and get significantly worse outcomes than people in every other developed nation. The majority of Americans support universal healthcare. And yet, we are told that universal healthcare is impossible in America. (more…)

On Wednesday, security researcher Randy Abrams visited the Equifax site to contest bad information in his credit report and was attacked by malicious software that tried to get him to download a fake Flash updater that was a vector for an obscure piece of malware called Adware.Eorezo. (more…)

Actor Ben Affleck expressed surprise after Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a serial abuser of women, but few seemed to have time for his denunciation of the famous producer. It was remembered that Affleck not only groped Hilarie Burton on camera, but was well-aware of Weinstein's behavior.After this, McGowan, who received a $100,000 settlement from Weinstein, was kicked off of Twitter. Here's The New York Times:The message in the screenshot said that the lock was in effect because Ms. McGowan’s account had “violated the Twitter rules.”It was not clear which tweets had resulted in the suspension. However, on Tuesday, after Mr. Affleck tweeted that the allegations against Mr. Weinstein “made him sick,” Ms. McGowan called him a liar, saying he had long been aware of what Mr. Weinstein had done.Grim irony in the attempt to silence a Weinstein survivor speaking out. And another warning of the power social media companies wield, their blindness to its consequences, and their growing complicity in the harm caused.

A version of Yes, an app that says "y" at maximum speed, is built-in to unix-based operating systems. You can test it by firing up a terminal, typing "yes", and then watching it fill your window; you'd usually pipe it to another app or script. But there's a problem: it can only generate 51 megabits per second worth of yes, and something must be done about it.Lessons learnedThe trivial program yes turns out not to be so trivial after all. It uses output buffering and memory alignment to improve performance. Re-implementing Unix tools is fun and makes me appreciate the nifty tricks, which make our computers fast.As benchmarked by the author's computer, 3GB/s of yes is now possible!

https://youtu.be/EzdQE3fJW2EI'm not a guitar player (though I did take lessons in my youth), but I am a huge Nick Drake fan and have always been haunted by the very unique, dark, and moody guitar tones that he achieved. In this fascinating video by YouTube guitar teacher, Josh Turner, he presents and demonstrates his theory for how Nick got his signature sound. Spoiler Alert: He identifies these four characteristics that he thinks are the most significant contributors:1. Small-bodied guitar (probably)2. "Dead" nickel strings3. Medium-length fingernails, long thumbnail4. Classical guitar-style hand position with bent wrist and thumb angle (and playing over the sound hole)At the end of the video, to demonstrate the sound, he launches into the first part of Things Behind the Sun. It sounded so beautiful, it made my eyes want to roll back in my head. And made me immediately run to the original as soon Josh's video was over.https://youtu.be/L1AkYgBTc4MIf you are also a fan of Drake's, you'll want to check out Remembered for a While, the the lovingly curated scrapbook of all things Nick that his sister, Gabrielle Drake (perhaps best known as the purple-haired Lt. Ellis on the cult-fave 70s British TV series, UFO) put together. Here's the review I wrote of it here on Boing Boing.

People will share anything on camera. These 100 were asked, "What's the worst thing you've ever done?" Their answers ranged from the innocent to the downright criminal, like that girl at the 1:29 mark. Yikes.

Tucked away in a quiet neighborhood in Alameda, California is "A Very Very Trump Halloween," a lawn display that may well be the world's scariest.The decor is the brilliant creation of Alamedans Cathy and Dan Balsam who shared, "These decorations are the scariest thing we could possibly think of."What makes their lawn decor so spooky?Well, it features an all-star monstrous cast of the ghouliest of all ghouls in American politics.Like...Lizard man Mitch McConnell...Putrid undead Pence...The ever-grim Steve Bannon...Dark puppetmaster Vladimir Putin...(Skeleton Putin riding a horse skeleton is a nice touch on that one.)Scary Steven Mnuchin...The eerily-silent Sarah Huckabee Sanders...Brainless Ben Carson...Melancholy Melania Trump...The resemblances are spooky, aren't they?! And, there's lots more frightening faces here. "A Very, Very Trump Halloween," indeed. photos by Rusty BlazenhoffPreviously: 'Fuck Trump' projected on a building in California's 'Mayberry by the Bay'

Vigilante mobs in Malawi have killed five people accused of ritualistic human blood drinking and the threat has left a bad taste for United Nations officials. The U.N. has pulled staff from two southern districts where the vampire scare has spread from neighboring Mozambique, according to the BBC. U.N. staff members were temporarily relocated to safer areas when the organization reported villagers began placing roadblocks to hunt for “vampires.” The Malawi government put a curfew in place from 5pm to 7am local time to try and prevent more deaths, which is appropriate considering would-be vampire hunters are likely to work during peak nighttime vampire hours, according to most vampire folklore. Image: Illustration by David Henry Friston, 1872

In September 2016, we learned that the University of New Hampshire was going to use $1 million that an incredibly frugal librarian saved while working as a library cataloger for 50 years to buy a new scoreboard for its stadium. (more…)

Of all the outlandish technologies I propose in The Punch Escrow, the one nobody seems to ever take umbrage with is “printing.” For those who haven’t read my book, a base assumption I make about 22 century Earth is that we will be able to 3D print pretty much anything: the food we eat, the silverware we eat it with, heck, maybe even some people to join us for dinner.Tal M. Klein's The Punch Escrow is available from Amazon.How? E=mc. Really, it all comes down to E=mc; Einstein’s energy-matter equivalence principle. This equation tells us that mass is just another form of energy. That means we should be able to take some mass and directly convert it into pure energy, a thesis supported by real evidence. For example, it’s how we explain the energy that keeps atomic nuclei together. If we were to weigh the nucleus of any atom, we’d find it weighed slightly less than the sum of its parts. Where’d the extra heft go? It was converted into energy -- the “glue” holding everything together (in other words, dude, energy is the carpet of our universe). Since E=mc is a balanced formula, we should be able to -- at least in theory --convert energy to mass.In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles which then transmogrify back to pure energy. At small enough scales, the energy of these fluctuations would be large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth spacetime seen at macroscopic scales, giving spacetime a "foamy" character. This “quantum foam,” were we to harness it, could be used to essentially construct anything — it is the quintessential building block of the universe. Quantum foam’s a hell of an ink.In The Punch Escrow, “replication printing” is the catchall name for the process used to create objects in this way. Basically, everything is available anywhere, provided one has the “blueprint,” printer, and “ink.” Replication of valuable or patented items is prevented through safeguards such as unique molecular signatures. I looked to the way we handle digital rights today as a model for how we might handle a world where anything could be printed. For example, if someone managed to illegally replicate a gold bar, it would have an identical signature to the original blueprint. Any piece of gold with that bar’s molecular signature could only be sold once, thus branding any other copy a fake. That doesn’t prevent two of the same bar of gold from existing, but only one of them could have market value. And lest you still think printers would collapse the market value of consumable things like expensive liquor, fancy cheese, and truffles, these are all things which could be licensed, either permanently or ephemerally. I use the Big Mac as an example in the book.My thesis is that we humans place a lot of stock in originality -- our culture has always focused on “the real thing” having true tangible value, and with the use of authentication techniques such as the aforementioned molecular signatures, it could become nearly impossible to make illegitimate replications of anything patented. The printing infrastructure itself would need to be built to enforce legitimacy, akin to an Amazon Prime of things -- one only has access to things that come with the service or they’ve which they have already purchased -- such that if someone illegally replicated a Big Mac, the printer that printed it would flag it as illegitimate. To enforce this illegitimacy, we need mechanism for governing and tracking folks.Because The Punch Escrow’s 22 century Earth is a corporatocracy, infrastructure, federal institutions, and the legal system are all semi-privatized. “Semi” in that I didn’t reinvent law. A company could only hold one equal seat on a nine governing corporate panel, that is in essence what we now know as the executive branch in America. Each seat is doled out annually based on the nine firms with the respective highest valuations that year. There’s a legislative branch too. It ensures further checks and balances, as well as prevents collusion, by providing companies from specific geographies with a voice and a vote. There is also a judicial branch entrusted with enforcing common law. There are no elected officials -- companies make decisions and people vote with their chits (we’ll get to those in a sec). Minimum basic needs are provided for everyone free of charge. That way, the corps reckon, nothing is out of reach for anyone. The rich could still be rich, but things like food and shelter are readily available to all.The Punch Escrow’s global economy is powered by “chits” -- an elastic global blockchain cryptocurrency. Chits are secure and unforgeable by design and make most financial crime obsolete. What do I mean by “elastic”? The idea is that the “price” of something is a moving target based on real-time demand, the wealth of the procurer, and the percentage of the procurer's wealth that the procurement transaction represented. This allows a rich jerk to buy the last piece of bread in a hypothetical municipality, but it would make the cost of bread incredibly prohibitive to that person (because 80% of their income might be worth more to them than 80% of the income of the local municipality’s denizens. Since 80% of zero is zero, if someone is truly broke, the bread is free, and they could afford to pay 100% of their income to buy it). It sounds complicated, but we’re also talking about a world in which no one can effectively lie to “the system” about their worth; the tradeoff for these societal capabilities is the loss of privacy.So, is a world where basic needs are provided for and we can print anything a utopia? I posit: No. But it’s no dystopia either. Is a system that ensures nobody goes hungry and that no one person or corporation could manipulate the market beyond its natural elasticity worth the loss of what many of us believe is a fundamental inalienable right? Only the future will tell.Tal M. Klein was born in Israel, grew up in New York, and currently lives in Detroit with his wife and two daughters. When his daughter Iris was five years old, she wrote a book called I’m a Bunch of Dinosaurs that went on to become one of the most successful children’s book projects on Kickstarter —something that Tal explained to Iris by telling her, “your book made lots of kids happy.” Iris then asked Tal, "Daddy, why don’t you write book that makes lots of grownups happy?" Tal mulled this over for a few years, and eventually wrote his first book, The Punch Escrow. It won the Inkshares Geek & Sundry Hard Science Fiction Publishing contest, and will be the first book published on Inkshares’ Geek & Sundry imprint.Photo: Lai Long