Stub 10.1: Chopping at the roots and names mean something

Dilip encountered Radihka and Tory during his usual midnight stroll. As was usual, he heard them discussing something heatedly before he saw them.

He bought the customary lattes and brought them over.

“Even if we weed out the worst Cali government officials, what is to keep more from filling the vacant niche?” Radihka asked.

“Maybe the fact that they are gonna get killed.” Tory replied.

“We can’t expect this doxxing virus to work forever. It WILL get countermeasured and then we will be right back where we started.” Radihka said.

“So what are you thinking?” Tory said.

“I think we need to chop away at the enablers, the environment that makes corrupt officials inevitable.” Radihka said.

“Think about Australia,” Radihka said. “Opossum mutated and became Tasmanian Devils, and mice and kangaroos and Duck-billed Plattapii.”

Radihka’s biology might have been a little bit off but she made her point. Organisms evolve to best capture streams of energy that flow through the ecosystem.

“And again I ask, what are you thinking.” Tory said.

“That is where I stop thinking. I was hoping one of you would have some ideas.” Radihka admitted. This was the first time that Dilip had been included without asking.

Tory was shaking her head. She was twenty-one and didn’t have the life experiences to have a sense of what to do next.

Dilip, however, had a few more miles on his odometer.

“There are people, let’s call them contractors, who get preferential treatment and win bids when they are not the lowest cost bidder. Then they make huge profits. They are the ones who bend the official’s behaviors. Nearly anybody can be bought when enough money is waved in front of their face.” Dilip said.

“How would you go looking for those ‘contractors’? Tory asked, interested.

“You would start with who you are not looking for. You could probably drop out all firms where less than 50% of their revenue comes directly from Cali.” Dilip said. “That would thin out most of the small businesses.”

“Then you would remove all of the contractors who have less than one million Callors profit a year using your imputed income model. It is hard to buy much influence with less than a million Callors.” Dilip continued.

“Finally, you would benchmark your imputed profit margin against industry averages. Giving companies the benefit of the doubt, even if they made twice the profit margin there is a chance that they are just very, very efficient. If their profit margin is more than twice the industry average then they undoubtedly getting the business with kickbacks rather than lowest bid.” For Dilip, that was a long speech.


“We have a test database, why don’t we give it a whirl?” Radihka said.

The test run indicated that some of the suspect contractors popped up due to inheritances. Others due to one-time occurrences like sales of subsidies. Another complication was that the imputed income model struggled when "income" disappeared as bribes that were given to others. Nevertheless, there were workarounds.

After that, the three were pretty happy with the population when Tory had a thought. “We might want to fiddle with the population we dox them to. What good will it do if the person we dox is doxxed to their employees. Likely they will be too intimidated to do anything about it.”

Finally, the three came up with only doxxing them in public venues like restaurants and sports stadiums.

As they were breaking up at 2:30 AM, Radikha said in an off-hand way, “I heard from AJ but I don’t understand what he was trying to say.”

Dilip and Tory sat back down.

Radikha pulled up the picture and text message. “I don’t get it.”

Tory shook her head in the negation, wondering why Tim-Tom hadn’t sent her a text. Clearly he was OK. He was in the background goofing off, although she had never seen a guy “show his guns” the way he was doing. He was bent over at the waist. His left hand was slightly in front of his left knee and his left forearm paralleled his thigh. Tim-Tom’s right hand was near his right pocket and was oriented palm up. He was clearly “making muscles” because they were all popped out like he was lifting something heavy

She figured it was an "Illinois" thing.

The first thing Dilip saw was the picture of Tim-Tom but he didn’t give it much thought. He found the actions of most young people incomprehensible so he didn’t even try to understand.

Then he read the text. “Kaytn Forest Cwiok”,

That tickled some neurons. Kaytn Forest meant something to him. “Did the picture come with Geo data?” he asked.

“I didn’t look.” A second later. “Yes it does.”

In fifteen seconds Dilip was looking at overhead imagery of the location. It showed hundreds, maybe thousands of men digging a trench. The trench was hundreds of feet long, nine feet wide and about four feet deep.

Dilip popped open Wikipedia to refresh his memories regarding Katyn Forest.

Then he woke up Kenny Lane, the Prime Minister of Sedelia, with a phone call. Kenny was up in East Orosi for the weekend.

“Boss, we got a situation. How quick can you get with your buddy Chad?” was all Dilip said.

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