Exploit Me, Please

I'm a big fan of exploitation. I think exploitation is great. So long as it's rational exploitation, of course. The main model of irrational exploitation would be the killing of the goose that lays the golden egg; the main model of rational exploitation would be the not-killing of said goose. I think more rational exploitation all around would be hunky-dory.

A cool example of rational exploitation is the REX Agreement. This is something you learn about if you watch too much late night TV. Say someone, I'll call him Mark (first name: The), has equity in his own home. REX & Co. will give him an "interest free" cash loan, in return for a percentage share in the future appreciation of the house added to the loan value. If the house goes up in value REX & Co. exploits Mark. On the other hand, if the house goes down in value, REX & Co. shares that loss, the percentage of the loss is subtracted from the lump sum owed, and Mark exploits REX & Co. If housing prices plummet throughout the country REX & Co. will hurt badly. They're betting that won't happen.

Note Mark can only exploit/be exploited this way by NOT being homeless. Homeless people are rarely exploited in any decent rational way, and that's one of the reasons being homeless sucks.

Last week a rare exploitation of homeless people was reported, involving some Los Angeles area hospitals. The hospital CEOs allegedly schemed to present homeless patients with mild health problems as sick enough to need a hospital bed for two or three days, in order to collect government payments (from Medicare and Medi-Cal, for examples.) The homeless patients would agree to it, for the deluxe temporary shelter. By the goose-model-analysis this was a rational exploitation. No geese died. Even the governments that were tapped are still alive. The only problem: the goose-model-analysis leaves out the issue of illegality.

Son of a bitch! It's against the law to defraud federal, state, and local governments!

What's a hospital for? Hospitality. Who needs hospitality the most? The hospice-deficient. Homelessness is actually a debilitating condition, as demonstrated by statistics that show that the average age of people who die on the streets is under 50. If I have a disease that can take 20 to 25 years off my life-span, and the only known cure for the disease is housing, why can't doctors prescribe the cure, and Medicare pay for it?

The real tragedy here is that the patients only got to stay up to 3 days in a hospital bed. That's like treating starvation with a single Holy Wafer. "Take this, eat it !-- It's the Body of Christ! -- Now, beat it!" -- was that Al Yankovic or Michael Jackson? I have confused my own self.

So let's get this antiquated law off our books and make it legal to defraud the government in this way. Better yet, let's be even more rational and put most of the homeless people into regular housing, and save the expensive hospital beds for those who need the full 24-hour nurse and needle treatment.

Questions for Further Exploitation

1. If We, the United States of America, made a REX Agreement for our whole country, how much money would we get? Then, assuming we finish selling our country to China and the United Arab Emirates in 2020, what would we owe REX & Co.? I'm guessing nothing (because we won't be worth anything in 2020, because we won't have invested in our own people), so let's do it! Daddy needs a big-screen TV and an iPhone!

2. Last week we talked about the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. Communities that cooperate with HUD by collecting data on homeless people get HUD funds. The homeless people, whose data is worth so much, get ripped off. They're lucky if 10% of the HUD money eventually reaches them in the form of actual housing. But, hey, it doesn't kill them, right?

Demand Answers, Maybe

The other day somebody asked me what my greatest fault was. I had it coming, as I had just mentioned having one. I didn't tell her the answer, because I want to save that for the grand jury, but it got me thinking. Since I won't admit my greatest fault, what minor faults would I admit? A few minor faults might come in handy, to act as a smokescreen covering up the big one.

A lot of cool minor faults sprang to mind, and then I remembered how much I like to speculate.

Liking to speculate probably doesn't seem like any kind of fault to most of you. But then most of you probably haven't been practicing mathematicians. The following conversation actually happened once, between a colleague of sorts and myself.

Me: "You know what would be cool? If the universe was perfectly round. Yeah, I'll bet it is. I'll bet space is a 4-dimensional sphere."

Him: "What?! Why?"

Me: "Because it would be so cool. You'd know where everything was. You could set up your longitudinal and your latitudinal and your turpitudinal lines. You could spin it in three directions. Maybe it would even bounce nicely if you dropped it in 5-dimensions. Instead of bouncing like a 4-dimensional football."

Him: "What's the proof?"

Me: "I don't have a proof. I'm just guessing for the fun of it."

Him: [Backing slowly away.] "You can't do that. You have to have a proof! You can't just say anything you want…"

Woof! Can you say "conflicting values"? And my other colleagues felt the same way. Eventually I learned to keep my love of speculation in the same dark hidden place in my soul where I kept my love of toe jam art and midget-on-stuffed-animal pornography.

Now I'm old enough, poor enough, and far enough away from any math department that I can broadcast my wicked perversion of the mind. I have no career to lose.

I feel sorry for those poor engineers at NASA who can't do the same. You can see it in the faces when they get on TV. They want to say why they think Columbia blew apart. But that would be doing the S-word thing. It would violate the code. You have to be led there by the evidence. Guessing is not allowed in their profession.

The same goes for prosecuting attorneys trying to figure out what to do about Michael Jackson. Think of the bind they're all in. Even if they couldn't charge him with anything, you know they'd love to say what they think is going on. But they can't. It would violate the code.

The experts are amazingly quiet these days on the subject of Dolly's early demise and what it might portend for any human clones that may or may not be out there.

I guess it's a good thing that all these professional experts show that kind of restraint. When an authority speculates, people don't always recognize that's what's going on. Hey, it doesn't even have to be an authority. Shirley MacLaine has admitted that her speculations about past lives are just that, but that doesn't stop her from having true-believer followers. But when it's an authority it works faster. If a pope speculates about a virgin birth, it's a fact within the week.

Still I hope that the vast majority of you share my ugly little fault. I want to believe that people are prepared to jump at conclusions based on shabby evidence. After all, your government never wants you to have any more than shabby evidence. They're counting on you to be afraid to guess at the truth.

Keep it up, and demand answers.