Today the design firm Cuban Council launched Aliens Vote. Whether you're a native-born American or fresh off the boat, check it out:

at least one out of every ten people living in the U.S. today is an alien. That’s approximately 29.1 million people; equal to the entire population of New York & New Jersey combined. They own homes & businesses, pay taxes and go to public schools. While these people play a huge role in the U.S., they can’t voice their opinion in government elections.

Because of this we decided to create Aliens Vote to see how this silent minority could sway the upcoming presidential election.

Alien visitors to the site are then asked which way they'd vote if they were, in fact, allowed to vote. A pretty nifty little project. Still, although the Cuban Council folks have effectively blocked people from voting multiple times, they have no way of verifying that the people taking the poll on the site are actual aliens (they would have had to ask for visa numbers, etc).

Be that as it may, it'll be interesting to watch how things go. As one person affiliated with the site tells me, "this is about raising the issue considering the government holds all this info, takes their money and then ignores them when it comes time to have a voice."

True story: One time a friend and neighbor of mine who worked for the World Bank was slated to go to Africa on some big fancy World Bank trip to Africa. In order to go on this fancy World Bank trip to Africa he was prescribed a potent batch of anti-malaria pills. As you may or may not have heard about anti-malaria pills, they can sometimes have adverse effects on the person taking them. Like hallucinations. This poor guy, for reasons he never fully explained, decided to check his e-mail--deep in the throes of medicinally-induced hallucinations and night-terrors. Long story short: he called one of his clients a terrible, terrible name. And to facilitate his hasty retirement from the World Bank, copied his entire department on the e-mail, boss and all.

If only he had Mail Goggles. 

What, you may be asking, are Mail Goggles? Simply put, Google's latest offering is raddest thing to ever arrive in Rad Town: a filter that strives to keep you from sending e-mail that, deep down, you don't really mean to send. You know, like when it's 3 AM and you've just emptied your cabinets of Johnny Walker and Ben AND Jerry before settling in to check your Gmail--and maybe ping that ex you've been thinking about stalking--before hitting the sack (a little moment I like to call "Wednesday").

Google wants to help you NOT send that e-mail! Behold:

The way it works, I gather from the official Gmail blog, is that you can choose when it's active. If you're routinely prone to, say, judgment-debilitating weekend behavior, then just have your Gmail account give you a little Mail Goggle quiz wduring certain judgment-debilitated hours. Presto! You can't send that e-mail unless you really want to.

Of course, if your will to self-sabotage is as strong as mine, you can always give up on the e-mail and send a really incriminating text message. Complete with photo.

[benandhank.com]

Good morning, children. Feeling weary? Beaten down by bad news? You must be ready for a little Humpday Bailout Fun. Turns out there's a little gallows humor to be had among the steady drumbeat of depressing economic news. With the able-bodied guidance of my esteemed and estimable Newsweek colleague and dot-comrade Kathy Jones (all sing her name in praise!), I have trolled the Internets near and far to find for you, my little cuttlefish, LINKS! Pertaining to All Things Meltdown. So, read on, brave explorers. Go forth and click (that is, after you've read all of Newsweek's own fine coverage):

• First of all, is it me or does it already smell like Halloween spirit in here? Behold the horned Bernanke and Paulson masks. (Because you know everyone and her mother is going to be Sarah Palin for Halloween anyway -- show some originality, folks! Be devil-Fed people!)
  
• Speaking of pretending to be Henry Paulson (*shudder*), I suppose it was only a matter of time, but lookee here! There's a fake Henry Paulson Twitter stream. Sample tweet: "Came home after sleeping in office all week. My cat, Mr. Thrifty, looked at me eyes that said, 'You owe me 700 billion tummy rubs.'" Good stuff. (But. Sorry Fake Hank, my heart still belongs to Fake Sarah Palin, and will forever -- or until she vanishes into the stuff of historical political-oddity footnotes -- whichever comes first.) 
  
• Americans! Listen here! Unregulated free market capitalism may be broken, but there is no crushing the entrepreneurial spirit! Bailout-themed t-shirts and worthless gewgaws are for sale by the bucketload at Cafe Press. A place for you to spend all that money you don't have anymore! Yay! 
   
• This Dark Knight bailout parody is fairly genius (and it also reminds me of this recent brilliant Daily Show bit --you know, as opposed to all those un-brilliant Daily Show bits). Imagine asking the Joker for $700 billion. His reply: "And I thought my jokes were bad" ... funny because it's true. Also mind-bendingly depressing because it's true. 
  
  Dark Bailout:
  
   
• Oh, and speaking of mind-bendingly depressing, be sure to grab this line of code and embed it onto your blog: The National Debt Clock widget, ticking ever upwards on the race to $10 trillion. <-- Seriously, don't click on that if you value your sanity. (But first, don't think of an elephant.) UPDATE: Horrifyingly, it appears we have now passed the $10 trillion mark. Oy.
   
• Another number that's steadily, ineluctably, unavoidably trudging upwards? That would be the number of failed banks. Thanks for that, Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter.
   
• OK, fine. The crumbling of our economic infrastructure as if it was so many stale stale sugar cookies is a serious matter. Fortunately, there are more seriouser people than I who are working hard to figure out what to make of it all: The Calculated Risk blog has up-to-the-minute news, analysis and projections -- maintained by "a senior executive, retired from a public company, with a background in investing, finance and economics." Sounds credibly fancy! Particularly chilling is this post examining Personal Consumption Expenditures (in normal-people words: "consumer spending," which may well see its first quarterly decline since the fourth quarter of 1991). "This is strong evidence that the indefatigable U.S. consumer is finally throwing in the towel," he writes, as I stash my precious, precious pennies into my horned Hank Paulson fright mask under the mattress of my bed in my house, the mortgage on which I recently defaulted.
   
• Speaking of which! The housing bubble blog. Ooof.  
   
• Finally, if you haven't already actively been using this for all your old Winger cassingles, check out Buy My S---pile, Henry! -- because you too have a heaps o' regretable purchases you'd like Uncle Sam to take off your tired, caloused hands. From the site: 

With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their "distressed assets", i.e., assets that no one else wants to buy from them. We figured that instead of protesting this plan, we'd give regular Americans the same opportunity to sell their bad assets to the government. We need your help and you need the Government's help!

Use the form below to submit bad assets you'd like the government to take off your hands. And remember, when estimating the value of your 1997 limited edition Hanson single CD "MMMbop", it's not what you can sell these items for that matters, it's what you think they are worth. The fact that you think they are worth more than anyone will buy them for is what makes them bad assets.

Now. Ready for some good news? Here is precious little some!

• Not all millionaires are scumbags! No, really. Take this quiz and see how even you misunderestimate these poor (and increasingly poorer) creatures. Then target your rage at CEO billionaires. Seriously. Screw them!  
   
• Lastly, don't just sit here reading my stupid blog of stupidity. Tell Congress what you think of this mess. GO! NOW!
  
  

Twitter has launched an election page, an outpost where users can share their thoughts on the various twists and turns of this wacky season. It's a neat example of what Twitter should be doing more of going forward. Twitter has great unrealized potential -- imagine a series of watercoolers where users can interact over shared interests (as opposed to just publicly IM'ing friends). It would be a very powerful thing indeed. The users are already there. It'll be exciting to see where Twitter takes them.

The funny, fast and informative Calculated Risk blog (read and commented upon by both Average Joes and economists, like Paul Krugman)

For news on failing banks, there's the Implode-o-Meter.

CNBC has a speedy market ticker--to keep track of late-breaking ups and downs (and further downs).

Thejuciest Wall-Street gossip can be had at Dealbreaker.

And, may you never need it, Bloomberg's debt-consolidation calculator.

(The Troll and his liberal arts degree would like to thank Newsweek.com photo editor and finance wizard Kathy Jones for this post)

Mark Zuckerberg, listen up! Ad Age's Bob Garfield (co-host of NPR's On the Media--whom I've interviewed and whose bitingly dry wit I lurve) is the latest and perhaps greatest to offer up a business model. Monetizing Facebook, what a novel concept. He begins his piece, "Your Data With Destiny," with a little context for you, young padwan:

The quid pro quo between the marketer and the audience, for several centuries, has been free or subsidized media in exchange for inundation with ad messages. Madge didn't say "You're soaking in it" for nothing. In the Brave New World, and already in the last remnants of the cowardly old one, the value proposition will be similar but the barter items very different. A marketer needn't pay for episodes of "Gunsmoke" or "Married With Children" or "24"; it need only provide value -- whether in entertainment, information, discount or utility. In exchange, the consumer surrenders data.

Nothing too surprising there. Gradually he winds his way through his argument, taking you in the process to MIT, Silicon Valley, even Israel. Here's a little nugget of wisdom he picks up in Dulles:

"'Now we have the ability to automate serendipity,' says Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, the behavioral-marketing firm sold to AOL in 2007 for a reported $275 million. 'Consumers may know things they think they want, but they don't know for sure what they might want. They're not spending all their time hunting for those things.'"

"Automating serendipity" is a concise and almost lovely way of putting it -- if you find sophisticated Orwellian marketing schemes to be lovely. But hey, if you play online, you probably know that you're leaving behind breadcrumbs for advertisers. You may have noticed those ads on Google or eBay or even, yes, Facebook pages that already seem eerily tailored to your interests. You have only yourself (and your web surfing habits) to blame/thank. Don't like it? Log off. After about eleventy thousand words, Garfield gets to his advice to Zuckerberg. People who have even passively paid attention to developments in online advertising aren't going to find any of this particularly earth-shattering or revolutionary. But the fact that Zuckerberg hasn't adopted a common sense approach like Garfield's (yet, anyway) is nonetheless surprising:

Dude, blessed as you are with the megaphenomenon called Facebook, why are you just another popular utility in search of a business model? Could it be that you're fixated on the notion that your revenue must come from typical advertising? Haven't we agreed that advertising is problematic, because users are suspicious of it, resent it and employ every means to avoid it? Yes, we have. Yet the same people 1) love goods and services; 2) crave information; and 3) are so fabulously self-involved that they display every last detail about themselves, their tastes, their preferences, their favorites, their hobbies, their embarrassing drunken photos, their damn near everything right on your site.

So why in the world do you not have a big honking box on the bottom of every Facebook page titled "What You'll Like" or "YouStuff" or "The Mirror" with a category-by-category selection of books, music, films, videos, news articles, websites, tennis gear, shoes, power tools, specialty foods, flea and tick protection, you name it?

So what do you think? How would you monetize Facebook?

Hey, it's Friday! At the end of August. You don't want to work, do you? Here. Let me help you. It's my job to track down excellent diversions, get diverted, and then pass the word along to you. Don't be jealous. Join me!

Play some Bubble Shooter -- this game will eat up the rest of your day. And your brain. And probably your soul. Enjoy!