Rossi-Blog Comment Discussion

Bob - its better than that. R begged IH to invoice JM for the "heat". TD refused to do so and, intentionally, not a dime was exchanged for anything there.

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It is not so surprising. Rossi's career includes a fair dose of self-delusion

Emphatically disagree. Rossi's misdirection and his pretend fury when a correct measurement or calibration is performed or proposed suggest strongly that his mismeasurements are deliberate, calculated and almost certainly pre-tested extensively in his "factory." Deluded people don't do that. Nothing suggests that Rossi is sincere in the slightest. He keeps going because like most con men, he thinks people will be so dumb, he can continue to fool them indefinitely. This, by the way, is what gets con men caught, for example Madoff and more recently, Elizabeth Holmes, the conwoman who ran Theranos, a thoroughgoing high tech con vastly larger than Rossi for those for whom size matters.

Quote from Bob

Rossi / JM "PAID" IH $1000 per day for heat during Doral for the non-existent factory making non-existent product. That totaled over $360,000 dollars.

I did not read the legal testimony carefully, but I do not think he paid them. I believe he offered to pay them. He asked them to invoice him. But they refused. By that time they did not believe his claims.

EDIT: Ah. I see Dewey Weaver confirmed my impression.

It was a non-existant factory run by a non-existant shell company, which was owned by Rossi himself. That part I read carefully enough to be sure of.

(Mostly I read the technical documents.)

Quote from Adrian Ashfield

It seems that IH were enthusiastic about the 1 MW plant when woodford visited

They were not enthusiastic! I heard from them around that time. They did not believe the claims and they were upset with Rossi by that time.

Quote from hunter

Dewey Weawer just a question...

can you explain me in simply words why TD accepted to close the lawsuit in that way (leaving to him a lot of money)

I do not speak for I.H. or Dewey, but my impression from various lawyers is: this would be like trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. Pursuing this kind of lawsuit is incredibly expensive. Lawyers unrelated to I.H. tell me it is far more expensive than I imagined. There would be no point to spending millions to recover hundreds of thousands.

It would be good if the government went after Rossi for criminal fraud, but unfortunately, I read that criminal fraud is so widespread this is only a minor case and they probably won't bother. The government goes after people who bilk the government itself for hundreds of millions in things like medicare scams, or people who steal hundreds of millions from banks. A few million is not enough to make it worth their while. That's appalling, but that's what I read. It seems crime does pay.

The babblers think Rossi is guilty until proven innocent and also that that is impossible. It is not a logical position.

Perhaps your confusion here is that you do not understand weight of (inductive) evidence, and the importance of induction in reasoning (and particularly scientific reasoning). There is copious evidence to show Rossi a fraud, and that many of his claimed working devices do not work. Logically, within a deductive framework, it is still possible that some devices do work - though in that case Rossi has been very careless in not showing them to people who could properly validate. In fact you can never prove Rossi's devices don't sometimes work, obviously. I predict that you will always stay in a state of deductive uncertainty and therefore (for reasons that are less clear to me) support Rossi.

Most people go by induction - extrapolating from known evidence. By that measure Rossi has all the cards stacked against him, ticks every box (including past history) for a vapourware merchant. Ignoring such abundant evidence means you get a false "I don't know" conclusion. That is bad reasoning. Taking past evidence into account, because many different strands point the same way, you get a very low but technically finite chance that some of Rossi's devices work. Though it would require real contortions to fit his maze of reversals and moving goal posts into a scemario where basically his stuff works.

The believers think Rossi is innocent until proven guilty, but in general lack the experience to know how long it will take to reach the market. As a result, they become disillusioned.

That is however not good reasoning, and not good inductive logic. Why suppose without evidence that somone has a world-beating invention which is still 7 years after first demo unproven, when they have shown themselves to be a liar, delivered provably non-working machines to IH masquerading as working due to a measurement error, etc, etc? I find it really difficult to follow believers on this one.

Quote from hunter

During that time period TD could have sued the "great inventor" for fraud, immediately starting at least from the beginning of lawsuit (it was April 2016) and I believe that 11 M$ (dozen of appartments, villas... to be seized )

I do not know enough about courts and lawsuits to comment. I am only reporting what some lawyers told me, which is that it would probably cost more than I.H. could recover. I have no idea what the actual dollar numbers are. That is, how much it actually costs or how much they might have clawed back.

Quote from hunter

urging the court to perform its own legal check on a sample of the alleged "reactor" using own independent technicians.

I do not think courts do that. As I said, I know little about the legal system, but a lawyer told me that never happens. Independent experts hired by the two sides do various evaluations and tests. You can see testimony about that in the Rossi lawsuit.

My favorite delusion among Rossi believers is the notion that if Rossi's business is a scam, it would be the biggest scam in history. That is hilariously misguided and spectacularly wrong. I guess what the believers are really saying is that if a scam fooled THEM, it must be the greatest scam in history. Of course, that is even more hilarious.

Quote from interested observer

My favorite delusion among Rossi believers is the notion that if Rossi's business is a scam, it would be the biggest scam in history.

It is not even the biggest recent scam in Miami. Florida is a hotbed of fraud, mainly because of medicare scams. Also because it has many elderly people who are easy to fleece. (That's according to Florida newspapers.)

It is, however, by far the biggest scam in cold fusion. It is practically the only scam, unless you count MIT's results. I wouldn't count them. That's just academic cheating, which is so common it doesn't rise to the level of a scam. It was consequential.