Happy Valentine's Day!

Flip This House? Flip the channel.

In the year 2056, a sociological presentation on the greed and short-sightedness that drove the financial crisis of 2008 will probably open with an episode of Flip That House. The show follows modern-day gold prospectors buying, renovating and selling homes with turnarounds of as little as 30 days.

The show generally features houses that were successfully flipped and sold for tens of thousands of dollars in profit. Crack dens, run-down shanties, doghouses - they're all converted into McMansions in the span of 30 minutes and sold for half-a-million dollars by a sharply-dressed real estate agent who thinks it was a great idea to install granite countertops.

Each episode follows the same basic plot progression: house is bought, then house is fixed, then massive bags full of money are trucked to local bank branch. But the people flipping the houses fit one of three profiles: the young go-getter eager to get her feet wet in the "real world"; the father-son duo who rekindle their relationship over the project; and the chipper, sensible newlyweds who are renovating the house as their honeymoon.

The advice these people dispense on the show is to follow their lead to El Dorado, the city of gold. But advice is only as good as the results it achieves, and it's more profitable now to flip burgers than houses. The fact is that house flipping most likely created more divorcees than millionaires, and each episode of Flip That House is probably directly responsible for 10-20 mortgage defaults from people trying to play along at home.

House-flipping is actually slightly more complicated than this