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U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

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Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#371

Post by dorgo »

dvtv75 wrote: post #349
mhneu wrote: post #238

Excellent news for American society. “The Chickenshit Club” by Eisinger recently explained why the lack of criminal charges had emboldened white collar crime. Basically, individuals need to have the risk of criminal charges if they do something very egregious - they need to have skin in the game. The US Justice Dept has in the past two decades largely only been fining corporations. And so companies estimate risk and…

It's not just a problem in the US, either. I recently learned of a New Zealand concrete company who deliberately don't bother with environmental compliance and instead just cop a fine and pay it. They budget for the fine every year, rather than spending the money to get into compliance. Edit: change of wording

don't co2 certificates work this way? You can reduce your co2 output or buy certificates instead. If government wants to reduce co2 output they just increase the price of co2 certificates.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#372

Post by eric-hu »

dghughes wrote: post #303
mhneu wrote: post #238

Excellent news for American society. “The Chickenshit Club” by Eisinger recently explained why the lack of criminal charges had emboldened white collar crime. Basically, individuals need to have the risk of criminal charges if they do something very egregious - they need to have skin in the game. The US Justice Dept has in the past two decades largely only been fining corporations. And so companies estimate risk and…

Even speeding tickets or anything most normal people would find a burden are nothing to super rich. But making few days in jail mandatory is a major deterrent. Then again even people texting and driving are not swayed by fines. In my region of the world a $3,000 fine is not a deterrent to many people. I say jail time would change that attitude.

An interesting, though inhumane twist, would be to seek a shorter but more severe punishment, like 1 year in a maximum security prison.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#373

Post by yourapostasy »

gaius wrote: post #357
yourapostasy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...they have false confidence about areas they have zero expertise in, purely because they feel they can figure it out. The antidote to this effect: pick any object around you, and set out to make it yourself from scratch. Or just set out to make the precursors. An object as prosaic as say, a window. A lot of people who suffer from this effect dismissively wave away such a challenge, saying in more words that it's…

An object as prosaic as say, a window I think about this alot, starting from absolutely nothing I doubt I could even make a nail, let alone a screw, let alone a nut and bolt. I have no idea what iron ore looks like in the wild or where to find it. I could probably make charcoal and a furnace... if I had the tools, which I wouldn’t. It’s quite humbling.

> It’s quite humbling.

I didn't want to get all management-consultant-preachy earlier, but you touched upon why I persistently perform that exercise. I believe there is a very valuable leadership lesson imparted by continuously performing that exercise first-hand. Too often leadership devolves into management, especially when people lose sight of just how fractally difficult many human endeavors are. The humility helps teach me perspective on problems and people.

That Australian aboriginal might live a dramatically different life than "developed world" citizens, but there is no way I can be convinced that on average, they aren't as smart.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#374

Post by eric-hu »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #301
75dvtwin wrote: post #299

Theranos / Holmes, also demonstrated how superficial, almost down to malpractice current so called journalism is. Complete lack of analysis, expertise in the fields they are covering, and clear initial non-biased position. Instead, we get this flood propaganda + sensationalism garbage from these so called 'reputable' news sources. And, as a consequence, con-artists, career politicians, and 'celebrities' -- leverage t…

> Theranos / Holmes, also demonstrated how superficial, almost down to malpractice current so called journalism is Theranos was exposed by a Wall Street Journal reporter investigating and exposing the fraud. He was threatened multiple times and never budged. This is a story of journalistic excellence.

I think that reporter did good work, but isn't this like pointing to a hackathon bug fix that saves a company as engineering excellence?

The parent is seemingly saying that quality journalism would have better scrutiny to not allow the situation to get this far in the first place.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#375

Post by los_angeles »

icelancer wrote: post #172
atombender wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This interview with John Carreyrou [1], the Wall Street Journal journalist who is largely responsible for exposing Theranos, goes into a lot of detail. It's long, so if you want a shorter answer, jump to the question "What technology did Theranos actually develop?": Basically there were three iterations of the technology. The first one used microfluidics, which are basically the repurposing of the micro-fabrication t…

>> The short answer is her Jobs-like "reality distortion field" -- she was exceedingly good at convincing non-scientists that their science worked. This confuses a lot of people (not saying you are one of them), but this is really common in intelligent non-experts. People vastly overestimate how intelligent they are when they place value on their intelligence; in other words, they like thinking they are smart. When t…

>>When they prize their own intelligence, they have false confidence about areas they have zero expertise in, purely because they feel they can figure it out.

I wonder how this squares with the Dunning-Kruger effect. Are domain-stupid generally intelligent people more susceptible than domain-stupid generally stupid people if they are equally cocky?

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#376

Post by jobigoud »

dghughes wrote: post #303
mhneu wrote: post #238

Excellent news for American society. “The Chickenshit Club” by Eisinger recently explained why the lack of criminal charges had emboldened white collar crime. Basically, individuals need to have the risk of criminal charges if they do something very egregious - they need to have skin in the game. The US Justice Dept has in the past two decades largely only been fining corporations. And so companies estimate risk and…

Even speeding tickets or anything most normal people would find a burden are nothing to super rich. But making few days in jail mandatory is a major deterrent. Then again even people texting and driving are not swayed by fines. In my region of the world a $3,000 fine is not a deterrent to many people. I say jail time would change that attitude.

Jails are already overcrowded understaffed in most places though.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#377

Post by gameswithgo »

tluyben2 wrote: post #312
dghughes wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even speeding tickets or anything most normal people would find a burden are nothing to super rich. But making few days in jail mandatory is a major deterrent. Then again even people texting and driving are not swayed by fines. In my region of the world a $3,000 fine is not a deterrent to many people. I say jail time would change that attitude.

Losing your license is a major deterrent as well: as someone who finds driving a waste of time I cannot understand why rich people do it, but they do and they get extremely upset if that privilege is taken away. So 3 times and you lose your license for life? That would solve the reckless behavior and cannot be fixed with money. Ofcourse for less well off people this would be very bad (maybe not being able to go to wo…

>Losing your license is a major deterrent as well:

People still drive when they lose their license. They have to.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#378

Post by drodgers »

briandear wrote: post #368
loeg wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a percent of wealth. Although that isn't really effective punishment for people who blow all their income and don't save anyway.

So should jail sentences be done the same way? If I am in jail 10 days, I lose a hell of a lot more money than some bum spending the same 10 days. So the cost of jail is much greater to me on a per day basis. This “based on wealth” concept is fine, assuming that also applies to jail sentences. We can’t expect an egalitarian scheme for fines if we neglect the same consideration for jail. Assuming our goal is inflictin…

No. Scaling jail sentences based on income would mean that the monetary size of the punishment was (roughly) constant between a rich and poor offender; just like if they were charged the same number of dollars as a fine. However, just as with fines, it would mean that the subjective effect of the punishment is much greater for the poorer person.

If the goal is deterrence, then we need care about how subjectively costly the punishment will be to each person. Having a high income doesn't make your time subjectively more valuable, but it does mean that you can trade it for more money. A rich and a poor person would likely value a day of their own time quite similarly, but they would each value $100 quite differently.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#379

Post by tragic »

gaius wrote: post #355
paulddraper wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the US can’t retrospectively prosecute bankers AFAIK there were poor decisions and bad investments but not straight up fraud. Nobody needed to be jailed; there were a few that needed to be allowed to fail.

poor decisions and bad investments but not straight up fraud LIBOR rigging?

And FX rigging ...

Speaking morally, rather than legally, the packaging of loans into CDOs was clearly fraudulent, basically the equivalent of tampering with the mile meter in your car before selling it. The fact that there is apparently no law to prosecute people under is a failure of our various legislatures and judicial systems.

Re: U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Ramesh Balwani

#380

Post by xorcist »

meowface wrote: post #158
atombender wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did start with legitimate attempts at implementing th technology needed to microfluidics (though apparently Holmes knew nothing about the field and didn't even know anything about existing players such as Abaxis, who actually had working machines). However, they could not get the technology to work and abandoned several development paths in favour of a less ambitious approach that, among other things, involved d…

>They knew it didn't work, but kept selling it anyway, which is where it went from just faking it to outright fraud. I'm playing Devil's advocate and not justifying or defending their fraud and the physical harm they caused, but if we were to look at Holmes' intentions, I'm suspecting it was something like "we just need to do this for a few months/years until our technology works", rather than "let's just run this sc…

It's easy to fall prey for psychopaths trying to second guess their intentions. "This can't be staged, that would be an unnecessary risk. Had they wanted to get rich quick they would have lied about this other thing instead". True intentions are illogical to other people, because they are the result of a limited, narcissistic and self centered world view.

(Not making any real life connections here, I am absolutely not qualified to call anyone medical terms, but in the subthead about clinical psychopathy it seemed important to point out.)

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