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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

#511
post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also iirc the shkreli case is strange since no one actually suffered any damages.

According to him (in an interview) he only jacked the prices up for insurance companies.

specifically referring to the securities case. He's not in jail for manipulating the price of pharmaceuticals.

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in the industry. Literally, there were employees of 7-11 who stated their income as $100,000 or more in order to qualify for a home loan. This type of fraud was rampant and known by everyone.

Are you implying that the bankers should go to jail for the misrepresentations made by the applicant because they didn’t exercise an “appropriate” level of diligence?

I think these people mostly weren't bankers, they were fly by night mortgage pushers who had no incentive not to write bad loans. They wrote crappy loans and then sold the loans on to the banks.

Which is part of the problem with bringing anyone to justice. The actual banks could pretend that they believed they were buying quality debt, which they diced up into CDO and whatnot.

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

#513
post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to him (in an interview) he only jacked the prices up for insurance companies.

Which makes every single person with insurance a (diffuse) victim. Let's not pretend that exorbitant pricing doesn't have any relation to the high cost of medical insurance/care, which in turn of course indirectly kills people.

Drop the tone. All I said is his pharmaceutical practices were 1. legal 2. didn't have direct effect on the consumers of the medicines.

Skherli said he gave the medicine free to those who have no insurance. I don't think by good heart but rather to avoid a major bad publicity from the inability of non-insured to pay.

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

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Mark Zuckerberg who has an annual salary of $1.00?

Make it a percentage of taxable income or something like that. Lots of people have non-salary income.

Zuckerberg gets his cash from loans against his unsold stock. He could keep doing that his entire life and never pay a dime of income-based tax.

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

#515
post #509
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My dad lost his license many years ago and never stopped driving. He gets arrested once in a while, doesn't stop him. You live in a very strange country, in the UK your dad would have had his car taken away from him and crushed... and if he repeatedly found other cars to drive without a license he would probably end up in prison.

My dad has been to jail before for driving without a license, but driving without a license is not a life sentence so he's back out on the road driving next month.

There is no repeat offenders law?

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

#516
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.

A $3000 fine doesn't matter if no one ever fines you, and while I have no statistics, I'm pretty sure its very rare for a cop to pull you over for texting while driving. Like the seatbelt laws, it only ever comes into play as additional item to a stop, and afaik, only really when the cop is being a dick, or you are.

I'm sure it'd come up if you get in an accident as well, but probably the bigger fine in that case is the insurance company will use it for fault.

The primary detterant of it is likely that, because its a fineable offense, its less accepted by the general public, and you'll do it less flagrantly.

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

#517
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my outsiders view of management training is that they work so hard at cultivating confidence that they start thinking that confidence, not competence, is what they need to select for in roles outside of leadership. As far as I can tell, "leader types" are far more vulnerable to confident people than the rest of us because of this.

I also think falling for this is implicit in the notion of the MBA. Previously, management was mainly company founders, founder families, and people who had come up through the ranks. That is, all people who spent years learning the specifics of the business. But the theory of the MBA is there's some universal set of "business skills" that makes actually understanding the business domain irrelevant. In practice, I th…

The MBA is the Western version of the Soviet "apparatchik." This term denoted a party functionary educated in party ideology who was promoted and transferred around to different posts where they would lead things they did not actually understand.

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

#518
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that argument go? Is it just that setting up social rules makes it easy to spot when people don’t follow them?

Yeah, exactly. Psychopaths don't empathize, so they don't understand why social conventions exist, so they sometimes get it wrong and something seems "off". When someone seems "off" you don't trust them.

Problem is that also ensnares sincere people on the autistic spectrum, recent immigrants, and anyone else different for any reason.

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

#519
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. Psychopaths don't empathize, so they don't understand why social conventions exist, so they sometimes get it wrong and something seems "off". When someone seems "off" you don't trust them.

Unfortunately, what you described applies to people on the spectrum too. But I think the key is the difference between sociopaths and psychopaths. Sociopaths are usually really good at using their charisma to move up: >Psychopaths are dangerous. They’re violent and cruel, and oftentimes downright sinister. They show no remorse for their actions, usually because of a lesion on a part of their brain responsible for fea…

AFIAK sociopathy is now more or less regarded as just non violent psychopathy. Most psychopaths are not violent.

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

#520
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The short answer is her Jobs-like "reality distortion field" -- she was exceedingly good at convincing ... Considering this and the lack of substance behind her claims, I would personally bet money that she is a clinical psychopath. The most disturbing thing I have ever observed about human beings is our tendency to follow psychopaths. Psychopaths seem to have this gravity around them and people just fall into line…

You make an interesting observation. I wonder if there are any doomsday stories of an AI that conquers humanity via psychopathic persuasion rather than conventional weapons.

This is by far the most likely scenario.
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