Fun With Ideas

I'm an idea-lover. I love all kinds of ideas, even stupid ones. These days that means I am perpetually giddy. There are exciting new ideas everywhere I look.

It happened in Australia, but there's no reason it can't happen here, too: A landlord successfully sued a man's family to collect rent remaining on his lease after he died. In the landlord's own words, "A tenant has died. Is that my problem?"

Why isn't anyone doing this here in the United States? I'm seeing a trans-oceanic heartlessness gap! What's great about this idea, apart from the inherent meanness, is that, in principle it shouldn't matter much how the tenant dies or what the landlord may have reasonably expected. Say a landlord allows a 97 year-old man breathing from an oxygen tank, lesions all over his face and hands, and an organ-donor card glued to his forehead, to sign a twenty year lease. Well, that's twenty year's rent guaranteed, isn't it? It's better than predatory lending, you don't just squeeze the mark, you squeeze their offspring to the umpteenth generation. "A daughter of the son of the tenant has died. Is that my problem?"

Here in America, USA Today reports that many schools are experimenting with programs that pay kids to learn. For example a pilot program in a couple of suburban Atlanta schools pays students $8 an hour to study with tutors. This is the sort of idea that's fun not so much in and of itself but for what it inspires.

Let's face it, school kids are smarter than the rest of us. They can learn anything, even things we don't want them to learn. When I was only 15 I knew a dozen things my parents didn't want me to know, and I didn't even have the internet. Kids are even smarter than tutors. So I say, let's take this idea a step further. Let's not just pay them the $8 an hour to learn, let's throw in the $5.85 or whatever we were going to pay the dumb-ass tutor, and let the kids learn whatever they want, however they want, so long as they pass the WASL. If they don't pass the WASL they have to pay it all back, plus interest. If they run away to Australia, their parents have to pay it back. "A high-school student has run away to Australia. Is that the tax-payers' problem?"

[Above Right: Without the internet, I was forced to learn from whatever print materials were available.]

In Ohio we are seeing a Brave New World of creative punishment. A non-homeless salvation Army worker, I'll call him Mr. Smith, stole a Salvation Army kettle containing $250 meant for the homeless. Painesville Judge Michael A. Cicconetti, who has done this sort of thing before, gave Mr. Smith a choice between 90 days in jail or 24 hours being homeless with a GPS tracker to prevent cheating. He opted for the day and night of homelessness. He did it last week, and 7 hours into it was reported as saying "It's not that bad, but I'd hate to have to do this every day, especially in this weather. It's too cold to do it in this." I don't know what he had to say 17 hours later.

Nearly everyone who has written about this thinks it's great. How creative! Now Mr. Smith will know what it's like to be homeless and he won't be so quick to steal from them.

I can think of a lot of other great ways to apply this brilliant creative new idea.

We could force George Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et al, to go live in Tehran, and THEN bomb the bejeezus out of it, so in the future they won't be so quick to bomb the bejeezus out of people.

If a man committed murder, we could murder that man back, so that next time he would know what being murdered was like and not be so quick to do it. If a man poked another man's eye out, etc.

Maybe these ideas aren't that new.