In my Ethics and the Internet class, we are discussing the Jonathan Lebed case: the kid who ran a pump and dump scheme by spamming the Yahoo! Finance boards with false claims about big insider deals going on at little companies he's just bought into. We're going off this Michale Lewis NYT article that paints a rosy picture of Lebed and tries to say that "everyone does it" so it's OK.

I tried posting several links to financial sites that have unbelievably clear explanations of what a pump and dump scam is, and no one seems to understand. They still think some TV finance talking head making a quarterly earnings projection is doing exactly the same thing as Lebed. And that that makes it OK, which is the fallacy of common practice. Not that anyone cares.

Oh well. Explaining securities is certainly no job for me. But you'd think they could at least read. I even quoted streetlawyer's comment from back when Lebed's story was on K5. No effect.

Have I ever mentioned, that while Gonzaga is a good school, it doesn't actually have admissions standards? True. They let anybody in, same as a web log...