From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2000 - 13:24:51 MDT
hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> Alex Heard of Wired magazine writes:
> > I just wanted to let you know that the story will be out in the
> > September issue, and it's a pretty amazing exposé of how a
> > Net-powered pyramid scheme -- apparently run by a mysterious Russian
> > fugitive through offshore servers in Dominica -- attracted nearly
> > 275,000 players worldwide. The person whose message on this list
> > originally caught my eye -- Rick Potvin -- is now convinced that SG
> > is a scam, too.
>
> I was especially disappointed by the posts here by Frederick Mann,
> a well known "freedom entrepreneur". By promoting these Ponzi schemes
> (especially on his bigbooster.com web site) he is essentially enriching
> himself at the cost of those he suckers in to feed his downline. Even as
> one game after another collapses, he continues to try to draw people in.
> Presently he is promoting DigitalStocks, as StockGeneration has fallen
> off his radar, conveniently forgotten. He has very little credibility
> in my book.
This is something that, as some people who know me personally know, bothers me
greatly about society in general: how easy it is in large societies to defraud
people without worry about its impact upon your reputation, since you can always
'move down the street' where nobody has heard of your previous scams. I've found
this to be particularly true in big cities, as well as on the internet. While
some websites have established 'reputation brokers' within their own websites, I
am not aware of any large public reputation brokerage sites that are available
to all, outside of standard 'consumer review' type sites that focus on products
made by large manufacturers.
Its for this reason that I say that liberty is not freedom, it is
responsibility. Doing what thou wilt and skipping off, impervious to the
consequences, into the sunset is not exercizing liberty, it is abusing it.
Freedom only results when everyone is responsible for the actions they
committed as a result of their liberties.
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