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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Submitted title was "How is this zombie enron site still going?"

Good question! but the place for it is the comments, not the title. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: ""Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." The original title is linkbaity, but it's so retro linkbaity that I think it counts as interesting again.

Now can anybody figure out the year? (Edit: I've put 2001 up based on https://enroncorp.com/corp/pressroom/releases/2001/ene/51-en... being listed as the most recent news)

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zombo.com is still going, so why not Enron?

Overall, zombo.com has done better than Enron

for one, zombo.com has never caused rolling blackouts by knocking power stations offline during peak demands to juice prices.

ah the beauties of deregulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...

But you can cause rolling blackouts at zombo.com. The only limit is yourself.

Enron was cooking the books and collapsed because it was a criminal fraud. The power outages and whatnot were the fault of California regulators, every energy company did the same thing because it's what the poorly written laws said they could do. And regulation arbitrage was one of Enron's few legal profitable endeavors.

Deregulation which Enron lobbied heavily into place on the expectation that they could turn a massive profit from exploiting it. Blaming CA gov has some real "stop hitting yourself" energy to it, and while it's important for every government to protect themselves by being more skeptical of deregulation going forward, it's also crystal clear that Enron was highly culpable in the disaster they created for profit.

Of course, it turns out that the same people who were chasing the old capitalist dream of "create the problem, sell the cure" were also cooking their books. Shocking.

Enron profited from the 2000s crisis due to government regulation demanding energy distributors purchase energy at an unsustainable rate. This is documented in the "Effects of partial deregulation" heading and in the lede.

I think a good portion of that is because of the fundamental differences in business philosophy. Enron dictated success at any cost, and that resulted in the necessity of fraud. Meanwhile, Zombo Com provided an open-ended framework for users to build their own success. Not only does this change the entire tone of their business dealings, but it cleverly offloads liability onto the user where the only limit is, in fact, themselves.

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