The engineering game is a difficult place to set up a successful fraud; having said that, con-men are most often the smartest men in the room. They enter banking, the board room, the stock market, hedge funds, the money management industry, The SEC regulators, or even the Federal Reserve. As Bernie Madoff<http://www.google.com/images?rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS329&q=Bernie+madoff&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&sa=X&ei=2FmGTaKEC-O90QG1-7nRCA&ved=0CEMQsAQ>often purred to his billionaire con-men pals, “and the great whore will suckle us... until we are fat and happy and can suckle no more.”
If you want to steal lots of money, you go were the money is. Unrelentingly, with the full throated collusion of government, Big Money remorselessly extracts the meager savings of the common working man, and these poor oblivious marks never even know it or even suspect it. So why fear fraud; it is everywhere, and of all times; it is like an ever-present all encompassing swarm of mosquitoes on the scent for blood. It is simply the cost of doing business in today’s world. Do you remember the Enron affair? Lest we forget, Enron Corporation is an energy trading, natural gas, and electric utilities company based in Houston, Texas con game that employed around 21,000 people by mid-2001, before it went bankrupt. Fraudulent accounting techniques allowed it to be listed as the seventh largest company in the United States, and it was expected to dominate the trading it had virtually invented in communications, power, and weather securities. Instead, it became the largest corporate scandal in history, and became emblematic of institutionalized and well-planned corporate fraud. Enron cynically and knowingly created the phony California electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001. There was never a shortage of power in California. Using tape recordings of Enron traders on the phone with California power plants, the film chillingly overhears them asking plant managers to "get a little creative" in shutting down plants for "repairs." Between 30 percent and 50 percent of California's energy industry was shut down by Enron a great deal of the time, and up to 76 percent at one point, as the company drove the price of electricity higher by nine times. Energy merchants regularly tape trader conversations to keep a record of transactions. In one transcript a trader asks about "all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers of California." To which the Enron trader responds, "Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she's the one who couldn't figure out how to (expletive) vote on the butterfly ballot." "Yeah, now she wants her (expletive) money back for all the power you've charged right up — jammed right up her (expletive) for (expletive) 250 dollars a megawatt hour," the first trader says. In another, a trader said, "The magical word of the day is 'burn, baby, burn,"' in reference to a fire in California under a power line that caused a transmission outage, letting Enron take advantage of an increased demand for electricity. Do you pay your taxes; do you put money in the bank; do you have a mortgage, do you give to charity; do you pay your electric bills, do you contribute to church; do you have any money in your wallet? I bet you are being defrauded this very minute; don’t know about it; and are not concerned about it in the least. The only protection we have against fraud is the unceasing application of clear thinking against all the information we can get our hands on. So far from my perspective Rossi is holding up amazingly well to all analytic cynicism out there. But we must never let our guard down; where the strong must always protect the weak; for fraud walks eternal among us. On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com>wrote: > As to the question in the subject header, we don't know, without knowing > the secrets he's keeping, whether his real reasons are legitimate or not. > > As I wrote from the beginning on this, there is no limit to human > ingenuity, so "fraud" cannot be ruled out except by the normal process: > truly independent examination and probably replication. If Rossi were > selling E-Cats, that worked, it would be all over. But he's not, not yet. > > It is not unlawful for Rossi to lie about what he's doing, as long as he > doesn't lie to investors. So it is possible for some provided information to > be misleading. At this point, if he's for real, he has strong motives to > distract those who *are* trying like crazy to figure out the secret. And > there is no particular value to full disclosure. > > And, of course, if he's not for real, if this is fraud, he has even more > reason to present confusing information. > > What we can rule out, from all the evidence, is experimental artifact, > accidental error, mere misinterpretation of results. This is either for real > or it is fraud, because all the reasonable error modes are ruled out, it > would take seriously active deception. That's about as far as I can go, and > I find, from what those I trust have been saying, deception has become > pretty unlikely, as to the heat being produced. > > "Unlikely" is not "impossible." > > But as to any details, deception is still on the table. He has very good > reasons to not disclose, even to mislead or distract. > > If nothing else, this has smoked out some POV-pushers on Wikipedia, editors > who have clearly betrayed their fixed POV, as they push for content that > reflects it, on the Energy Catalyzer article. >
