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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

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...

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

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.

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.

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