
New owners of eBaum's World fire ebaum and his staff - vaksel
http://blog.ebaum.tv/2009/01/welcome.html
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evdawg
eBaum has a reputation for plagiarism and copyright infringement-- what goes
around comes around I guess.

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chris11
Yeah, I would have more sympathy if it was someone else. It sounds like they
were just tossed out on the street. I do find it somewhat ironic that Eric
accused the new C.E.O. of basically stealing some of his personal computer
files when he took all the company's computers without letting staff remove
files. Link to description of eviction:[http://blog.ebaum.tv/2009/01/so-this-
is-how-it-all-went-down...](http://blog.ebaum.tv/2009/01/so-this-is-how-it-
all-went-down.html)

~~~
electromagnetic
Personal files shouldn't be on a company computer, simple as. I know ebaum's
situation is slightly different being a startup and all, however in reality
there should never be personal files on a company computer even if you own the
company.

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chris11
Does anyone know how much actual content was stolen? I'm wondering why someone
would pay a minimum of 15 million in cash to acquire a company where most of
the property has been stolen. It looks like the legal penalties have been
basically inconsequential for Eric.It also looks like HandHeld Entertainment
has a good chance of keeping the content/stealing, but if that is what they
plan on doing, I really question their ethics.

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jlouis
You may or may not like eBaum. But I think his new company will prevail in the
long run. The modern worlds companies are extremely different from an old
taylorism-ideology. You need the right people. Now eBaum is just going to
rebuild the new sites in a couple of days, which is easy since they've done it
before. They will probably make it better as well. They know how to gather
content (legality of this content i'll rather not comment on).

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quoderat
The more I read about it, the less I am convinced that capitalism is all
ponies and manna from heaven, like some here believe.

And it's close to its end, anyway, at least as we know it. No, I am not some
raving conspiracy theorist. Automation and innovation almost guarantee that
the world in 100 years will look drastically different than it does now.

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unalone
So Eric Bauman makes a site that profits from stealing other people's content.
A song is written insulting him. An entire website blames their mayhem on him
in revenge. He is caught altering watermarks and removing citations. He gets
enough money to buy an apartment building and sponsor a boxer. His father
writes insulting emails. Then suddenly another shady company buys him out and
ruins his company, and it's proof that capitalism is bad? On the contrary.
This is excellent evidence that the system regulates itself.

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quoderat
"This is excellent evidence that the system regulates itself."

As it regulated itself with the current financial and economic crisis?

Like AIG regulated itself?

Like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, et al.?

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Dobbs
The system was trying to regulate itself. Thats why the economic crisis is
happening. The companies that are in trouble are ones that can not be
maintained that either need to restructure them selves or die. In the infinite
wisdom of our leaders they decided to stray from the theory of capitalism and
interfere.

Everyone likes to think that capitalism means that everything is happy daisy,
but its not. If things go wrong in capitalism, then life can get hard but it
will eventually self correct if you allow it.

~~~
dhimes
It's regulating itself like a poorly built skyscraper that is being regulated
by gravity: collapsing. We have rules about how to build skyscrapers to keep
people from getting hurt. Why not the economy? Take what works, throw out what
hurts.

There has to be an incentive for people to make money, but it should be ok if
it's required to be within a set of guidelines. Unfettered capitalism builds
an unstable system. Unstable is bad (again, think skyscraper).

Certainly, economists must have a set of rules or principles that apply here.
It would be some equation with a bunch of variable coefficients. Under some
values of those coefficients, the equation would have an approximate solution
that is unstable, like an exponential term with an exponent that can swing
from being positive to negative and back. The job of "regulations" would be to
limit these coefficients.

They must have that sort of thing, right? I mean, what the fuck do they do all
day?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yep, you would think so.

But the economy is mind-bogglingly complex and nuanced, full of billions of
actors who act rationally and irrationally. Lately we have computer systems
thrown into the mix that move billions of dollars around without a human
decision involved.

The one thing economists _can_ say is that people usually act in their own
best interests. If there is a loophole to be found, people will find it.
However smart the person coming up with the rules might be, those billions of
people, due to the powers of chaos and sheer numbers, will always be smarter.
You can't engineer billions of people like you would a skyscraper.

The logical conclusion here is to that simple systems that are easy to
understand (and likewise easy to understand how to game) are better than
complex systems that still get gamed but nobody can easily figure out why.

However there is a second camp that says that the economy is like a big
science experiment: pull a rope here and see what happens over there. Sure --
things might not work as expected, but somebody has to be in charge and that's
how science experiments work. After all, as you pointed out, just how
difficult can it be? What _do_ those guys do all day?

The problem is that the social engineering camp always seems to have the same
problem as the laissez-faire camp -- there have been panics (recessions) for
as far back as we have records. So policy doesn't seem to matter that much (or
if it does, we haven't hit the magic combination yet). In fact, because of the
points in the first two paragraphs here, there's good evidence that the more
we muck around with the economy, the worse we actually make it. There is a
large and growing faction of economists that believe that the actions of the
Federal Reserve (and to some extent Hoover and FDR) made the panic of 1929
into a full-blown depression -- turned something that would have taken a year
or three to recover from and turned it into the biggest panic the country has
ever seen.

So no, economics are chaotic, not Newtonian. the laws that apply are myriad,
complex, and currently non-understandable -- and they apply at the individual
rather than system level. That's why economics are so much fun (or suck so
much, depending on your viewpoint.)

Hey -- if it were easy, everybody would be doing it.

~~~
dhimes
_The one thing economists can say is that people usually act in their own best
interests._

Actually, it appears that things are too complex for even this to be true.
They may _try_ , but it's entirely conceivable that they don't understand what
is in their best interest and what endangers their future.

I think I prefer to think of what I am pondering as _Economic_ engineering
rather than social engineering. It seems like a very faith-based discipline,
rather than one that formulates hypotheses based on evidence:

 _There is a large and growing faction of economists that believe that the
actions of the Federal Reserve (and to some extent Hoover and FDR) made the
panic of 1929 into a full-blown depression_

But there is also emerging talk that Jimmy Carter _prevented_ a global
disaster like the one we are facing now. Neither claim is falsifiable, so not
worth much mental energy to consider. Faith-based.

I think that is why I was so impressed with Greenspan's testimony before
Congress where he basically said he felt like the underlying principles on
which he based his understanding of the economy were incorrect (he
specifically mentioned the one you did about acting in our best interest).
Here was a guy in the field who was actually looking at _evidence_ , and
trying to learn. I don't know if he's correct or not, I'm no economist. I'm
griping about the methods, not the principles themselves.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
First, nice rant.

Second -- agreed. People act in what they _perceive_ to be their best
interests. We initially made the mistake of assuming this was what was
actually in their best interests, but that seems more doubtful. (Unless acting
strictly based on perception of best interests is the optimal condition. Then
we're back to square one.)

Third -- agreed. It's to some degree faith-based. Climatology is faith-based
as well, and for the same reasons. There are simply too many variables and the
system is simply too huge and dynamic to be Newtonian. You get a bunch of
smart guys, you make a bunch of models, and you take measurements, all the
time having some "group consensus" that has as much to do with science as
glow-in-the-dark watches have to do with nuclear propulsion.

I've slung some code for Greenspan and the FRB BOG (Board of Governors). The
people there are all highly professional and tend to focus much more on facts
than theories. But even then, in my opinion, there's no science going on. It's
a lot of educated guesswork.

I wouldn't give up on the thought experiments such as what the Fed did during
the Great Depression or what Carter might or might not have done. Thought
experiments are powerful tools, and can lead to advances in science. To the
degree that faith encourages creative explanations of what we don't know, it's
a good thing. To the degree that it shuts out alternative answers, it's an
obstacle. That's true in a lot of areas, not just economics.

