Seeing A Bigger Picture, What you have been deconstructing at Wikipedia Review... Options

[Patrick Byrne]

Congratulations on the great progress you have made defrocking some high clergy of Wikipedia since I last visited.

Full disclosure: My name is Patrick Byrne. I work at Overstock.com, which for about one year has employed a former journalist named Judd Bagley to oversee the creation of our car tab and a Wiki called "Omuse," handle relations with the press, and design a new tab (in the works). Long before Judd joined our company, and as a hobby since, he was analyzing techniques employed by a small group of people to hijack social media. Using the handle "Wordbomb" he posted the results of his analysis on this site and on a site he created called "antisocialmedia.net" (for the record, he did not tell me about antisocialmedia.net before he did it, nor for some time after its creation would he confirm that it was he who was behind it). In your admirable endeavors to unscramble what is going on behind the scenes at Wikipedia, Judd/Wordbomb has done his share of work. By a strange coincidence (?), one of the people whose pefidy this community has uncloaked, Slim Virgin, turned out to be a woman from my own past, and I posted elsewhere on this site such information as I thought might be helpful to you (which Mr. Brandt seemed to appreciate). I say this all in full disclosure because the financial press labors to find any incompleteness in my posts on the Internet, apparently finding something unholy in my exercise of first amendment rights without availing myself of (or recognizing the need for) their services.

Now to my point: Nothing is more irritating, I know, than to have someone suggest to you that your own cause is really part of a bigger struggle. One always suspects an attempt to divert one's energies into whichever other cause that speaker favors. So I insist that I seek no diversion from your own current, noble, efforts, when I suggest to you that the threads you are pulling here lead deeply into the heart of a financial scandal that has been percolating into the headlines for six months, and may swamp any financial scandal of our lifetime.

On another message board within Overstock.com I have begun synthesizing information about that scandal, starting by creating one concise, cohesive overview post. Rather than gum up this board with information about that other financial scandal, I will give a link to that overview post: HOW THE SYSTEM REALLY WORKS: INTRO

After you have read that you will wonder if there is independent confirmation of what I wrote there. There is a great deal, and organizing it will be the subject of my subsequent posts. In the meantime, however, consider taking 25 minutes to watch a Bloomberg Special Report, "Phantom Shares". Bloomberg has the most "elite" viewership of any news organization in the world (which may count against it in the eyes of some radicals, I know). Consider what it means when a news service at the pinnacle of the Establishment reports that our capitalist model is powered by a reactor that almost no one has heard of, and that this reactor that has a crack in it (and why it is that only such an elite news service could run that story).

Given my earlier involvement on the Slim Virgin issue, I hope that Daniel Brandt and you will forgive what may seem like a commercial interruption. I simply wish you to understand how what your are confronting here really is part of a larger puzzle, so that you may know the stakes riding on your efforts.

Warm regards,
Patrick M. Byrne
CEO, Overstock.com

[Pwok]

Oh, please, Mr. Byrne!

You don't know me and you're not going to meet me, so you can believe this or not: You just happened to have run into someone who is completely disinterested in your company or your stock, but who has been around the block 10 or 20 thousand times. And from what I've been gleaning in my limited research in what's now about a half-hour, Overstock has been playing all kinds of games with its books. It stands out like the sound of a senator's wingtips tapping on the floor in the bathroom stall next to me in the airport.

What's this "pro-forma EDITDA" crapola I read about in your Q2 conference call? Do you actually think that you can get away with that sort of thing these days? That people will believe it? Hubris knows no bounds, does it? What, and you're claiming an improvement of gross margin without disclosing how much of it came from sales of stuff that you'd written down in prior quarters? What a bunch of smarmy, sleazy crap. I just hated it when managements would pull that kind of shit on me. It wasn't just dishonest, it was insulting. They actually thought we wouldn't see it.

Oh, and don't tell me about GAAP. I know all about GAAP. I still tell people about an accounting class I took in business school. So, we walk in on the first day and the professor hands us a sheet of paper with a bunch of facts printed on it. He tells us that the heat's on, and that our personal options might be riding on the quarterly numbers. He says he wants two numbers: What the company made, and what we'd report. The class average was that the company made 48 cents, and that we'd report 52 cents. "This class is all about where to find that 4 cents," the professor said.

And believe me, Mr. Byrne, I've found a lot more than 4 cents in my time. Christ, I scoped out the (first) AOL accounting fraud three years before the SEC busted them for it. If I were emporer, the AOL people and their auditors would be in jail, and guys like you would be looking over their shoulders very nervously when contemplating any sort of snake dance with their numbers. If there's one thing that white collar people fear, it's jail. Money can always be replaced, but you can't replace what you lose when you go to prison.

In the classroom example, both numbers were GAAP. You can drive a semitruck through GAAP, but apparently that's not even enough for you now. Mr. Byrne, when I look in the mirror every morning the face I see staring back at me is not that of someone who's mother raised a fool. Sheesh, how stupid do you think I am? Your game is sooooooooooo Utah. What are you thinking now, that the best defense is a good offense? Look, I don't trust Wikipedia farther than I can throw it, but my beef with them is completely unrelated to your crusade, that's for sure. You know who I really feel for? The sucker of a fund manager who bought a big slug of your stock and has to sit there at 2 in the morning and worry about it.

This post has been edited by Pwok: Sat 1st September 2007, 11:29pm

[Patrick Byrne]

Somey,

Cool, man. What a welcome change it is to be on a site where the foolishness has not yet reached critical mass, and everyone can see the deal.

Patrick

[Somey]

There's a deal?

I do try to keep an open mind, at least. Having said that, I have to agree with Gomi somewhat - for many of us, including myself, this whole thing is really about Martin Luther, not naked short selling. Nobody has really proven a distinct relationship between SlimVirgin and Gary Weiss, other than that Mantanmoreland/Weiss helped SV edit Nazi references into the Luther article. You wouldn't think that would be enough to lead her to defend him to such an extent, but I guess that's where you come in.

Either way, the naked shorting seems like just one aspect of the picture, not the Big Picture itself... (I'm not saying I can't be persuaded, though!)

And Pwok seemed like just a regular guy, until today, anyway. In fact, he's been practically exemplary.

And what's a guy going by the name "Unrepentant Vandal" doing in the stock-trading game? Somehow I just can't see a guy in an Armani suit sitting down and deliberately posting misinformation to WP, not to mention going on a blanking spree. The world just gets weirder by the minute.

Oh, and by all means, tell the Juddster that Pwok's IP has never changed, it's not a proxy, and it doesn't match any of the Weiss ranges or addresses we've encountered here. He may well have a special enmity for Utah-based CEO's, but Gary Weiss he's not!

[tarantino]

Oh, and by all means, tell the Juddster that Pwok's IP has never changed, it's not a proxy, and it doesn't match any of the Weiss ranges or addresses we've encountered here. He may well have a special enmity for Utah-based CEO's, but Gary Weiss he's not!

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

[Daniel Brandt]

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

Yes, I find it disturbing that he doesn't do it a lot more often. If I was running this board, all admins would be using their real names instead of screen names, and every single post, from admins and lesser mortals alike, would have the IP address from where it was posted displayed in the corner of the post itself.

The signal-to-noise ratio would improve significantly if this were the case.

[tarantino]

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

Yes, I find it disturbing that he doesn't do it a lot more often. If I was running this board, all admins would be using their real names instead of screen names, and every single post, from admins and lesser mortals alike, would have the IP address from where it was posted displayed in the corner of the post itself.

The signal-to-noise ratio would improve significantly if this were the case.

(my bold)

Yes, that's a good idea. Publicly, it should be all the time, or never.

[gomi]

Am I the only one who finds Somey's continued use of admin tools to post checkuser results on dissident voices disturbing?

....
Yes, that's a good idea. Publicly, it should be all the time, or never.

You are suggesting that Somey told us who Pwok is. He did not. He told us, in a very limited way, who he is probably not. Far from the same thing. Other than the fact that he knows Pwok's IP address and you do not, I can't see what is disturbing.

I'm certainly not saying you have to like him or anything like that, but please, try to sound a bit less accusatory

Okay, I'll try. To be fair, CEO Byrne is reaping the whirlwind from me after so many years of my dealing with some of the most elegant white trash this country has to offer, its corporate elite.

Also, do try to remember that this is Wikipedia Review, not Overstock.com Review or Patrick Byrne Review. Members here have diverse political and social views. You are entitled to your opinion, as is Mr. Byrne, but this forum is not infinitely available to express them except as they bear on Wikipedia.