  The Olami--Feder--Christensen earthquake model is often considered the
prototype dissipative self--organized critical model. It is shown that the size
distribution of events in this model results from a complex interplay of
several different phenomena, including limited floating--point precision.
Parallels between the dynamics of synchronized regions and those of a system
with periodic boundary conditions are pointed out, and the asymptotic avalanche
size distribution is conjectured to be dominated by avalanches of size one,
with the weight of larger avalanches converging towards zero as the system size
increases.
