On 28/11/09 12:54 PM, OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:
Not surprisingly, few within the Vort Collective (and elsewhere) give much credence to STEORN's claims, particularly after the disastrous Kinetica Museum demonstration flop conducted several years ago. I myself have yet to reconcile within myself how STEORN's engineers could have gotten as far as they claim to have gotten with their alleged ORBO technology, but then not have pre-tested the prototype within the same harsh environment where it would go on public display.
Speaking of engineers within dubious businesses, I don't know if folks here noticed the report that two programmers (high level types, middle aged, from the pictures) have been nailed in the Madoff mess. Old notes and emails indicate they hated the scheme, but went ahead and wrote the software that made it all possible anyway. This may be relevant to forming a clearer picture of how the STEORN engineers could have "messed up" so badly.
Madoff's programmers apparently also didn't grasp the fact that all Ponzi schemes are mathematically guaranteed to collapse, and you *must* have an exit strategy if you're going to run such a thing -- and so they are going to jail also. This scam was certainly not a "one-man show" run by Madoff. The scheme was quite complex, with multiple sets of records and enormous numbers of fictitious trades being generated to fool the regulators and the public, and apparently involved a substantial number of people in the organization -- far, far more than just Madoff alone. It continues to escape me how multiple well-educated intelligent people within Madoff's organization could have completely overlooked the fact that they were doing something which had a 100% chance of being discovered, and so they were setting themselves up for a major fall. We can speculate about reasons why Madoff himself didn't get out before it was too late, but all the alleged explanations but one seem to break down when we try to apply them to a whole cadre of people. The one explanation that seems to hold water when applied to a substantial 'gang' is "galloping innumeracy" -- they really didn't understand the math of what they were doing, and didn't realize that it was flatly impossible for them to keep it up indefinitely.
