This is more evidence of Silicon Valley's anti-woman culture. /sarcasm
Is your sarcasm meant to imply that Silicon Valley's purported anti-woman culture is overstated?
Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
121–130 of 226 posts
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#122I think the reason we (maybe secretly) take so much satisfaction / schadenfreude at this story is that someone who was so hyped and the darling of Silicon Valley got so much funding and attention. While others who toil away on good ideas, without nearly so many connections and silver spoons, struggle to even get 1 minute of air time with the kind of funders and backers that she got. That, plus seeing the cluelessness…
Or maybe some folks feel relieved to have their mental models for actual reality validated. Folks who thought it smelled like vaporware at best, or BS at worst, may not be engaging in schadenfreude so much as "Ha! I knew it! I'm not crazy!" It is possible to have not ugly reasons for finding satisfaction in seeing how this is turning out.
Sufficiently advanced satisfaction at vindication of your worldmodel due to misfortune is indistinguishable from schafenfreude.
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe some folks feel relieved to have their mental models for actual reality validated. Folks who thought it smelled like vaporware at best, or BS at worst, may not be engaging in schadenfreude so much as "Ha! I knew it! I'm not crazy!" It is possible to have not ugly reasons for finding satisfaction in seeing how this is turning out.
Sufficiently advanced satisfaction at vindication of your worldmodel due to misfortune is indistinguishable from schafenfreude.
Not at all. One is empirical where you hone the accuracy of your world model while being able to prove it to others if necessary. It can even benefit their own development and actions, but doesn't have to. An emotionless individual can also possess this trait. Even early robots in A.I. that self-adjusted had a form of this.
Whereas, schafenfreude is an emotional response tied to others success or failures. Two different things with one being clearly superior unless one is pursuing emotional highs and lows.
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#124Here's a television parody I wrote about Theranos that ends right where this story begins... http://pricks.com
I just read a 32 page script and now I want you to write major television shows. Is that your actual job? This is really good.
I genuinely laughed out loud when Allison announced the general council, who has a religious objection to email, would be working from home in Iceland.
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
healthcare is a very hard problem. While we in the tech community may find it morbidly entertaining to watch Theranos burn to the ground. Someone out there needs to attack healthcare. The not dying motivation is fairly important.
Medical care and health care aren't actually the same thing. And the problem is that actually improving health for humans tends to be relatively cheap and culturally based. It is pretty much not a big money space. It involves things like inventing soap and getting people to wash their hands. And this is a thing most people do not want to hear. Better drugs and better surgeries are all ooh, shiny! but they really are…
Good summary. Especially the healthy people being hard to measure. Never heard anyone put it that way before. Now that I think of it, it's usually easier to tie data points to specific illnesses than to a lack of them. I have a feeling I'll be wondering about this in the future.
Quick guess is that healthy relies on emergent behavior of locally interacting cells. Lots and lots and lots of complex behavior with few observable inputs and outputs into the body. The inputs might not have a direct correlation to healthiness. We'd have to have a model of all those processes before we'd see evidence of healthiness in the data points.
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#126Theranos isn't even at the leading edge of blood testing. There are now hand-held FDA-approved immediate blood testing devices.[1][2][3] Most of these require smaller amounts of blood than a remote lab, although more than a drop. Theranos is still in the send-it-to-the-lab-and-wait era. Even if Theranos' technology eventually works, it may be obsolete before it ships. [1] https://www.abbottpointofcare.com/products-se…
If you look carefully at the available assays from these three companies, they cover mostly the clinical chemistry arena.
Theranos was claiming to be able to perform complex immunoassays on their devices. Microfluidic immunoassays are very tough to get right, given the extremely small size of the patient sample and the even smaller concentrations of analyte in the patient's bloodstream.
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is a good factual overview of why Single Payer won't make health care cheap in the US: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-30/single-paye...
Summary of the article: A single payer system works well everywhere else, but is politically impossible in the US. That is a sad indictment of US politics.
The problem with the U.S system is everyone has their hand out for money. In America, Money is considered the universal yardstick for success and universally effective solution to all problems. The health care industry grew 20% last year? Fantastic!
It's a perfect example of the civilizational collapse process that Joseph Tainter, a professor of archeology, wrote about in his book "Collapse of Complex Societies"[1]. A society will get some sort of civilizational process that works to create wealth in their society. The civilization will continue to increase complexity to exploit this process and when the process starts returning negative marginal returns the collapse process begins because the whole civilization can't switch into reverse. This happened to the Romans with their conquer and receive tribute process for example. It eventually started yielding negative returns and they couldn't reverse course. The inertia was just too great.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Arc...
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#128Man, the shoe fell really, really quickly. Also - huge congratulations to the reporting team of the WSJ, that did an incredible job of unconvering this story back when Theranos was still considered a golden goose. John Carreyrou in particular did some exceptional reporting.
Uncovering? They pissed off (justly) somebody very important, probably in the military, and they used WSJ to orchestrate this.
Evidence? That is a very serious charge, and I feel sure you would not just shoot your mouth off with an accusation that would destroy the careers of people and cause damage to our military and country unless you had strong, incontrovertible evidence.
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cynical point of view is that some wealthy investors feel like they were mislead and that is the only reason the SEC gives a hoot.
Respectfully, that's a nonsense point of view. The investors want to get as much of their investment back as possible, or, if they've given up on that, they at least don't want to be seen as having invested in criminals.
If they have concluded that their was some kind of fraud involved then having the government investigate and expose the facts is a lot easier and cheaper for them. They will then be free to use those facts to recover money.
Re: Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S
#130One thing I'd love to know, and that might come out in court eventually, is which early investors exited in the huge dumb-money round in 2014. What did they know and when did they know it, and all that.
Out of interest, does any one know what liabilities such investors might have? If the outside investors had knowledge of the problems we are now seeing and sold off without disclosing the issues, are they somewhat accountable?
That almost entirely binds to what responsibility they had in regards to the company. If they weren't legally insiders, then even if they had more knowledge than the broader public does (which in this case may be irrelevant depending on a few things), they won't be carrying liability.
To be clear, selling doesn't make them liable for fraud committed by Theranos, if they had no role in managing the company. Even if a lawsuit were brought, you're going to have one helluva hurdle in getting any liability to stick to said investor/s without proving direct involvement.
Doing anything about insider trading in a private corporation, has historically been a challenging area for the SEC. They have often previously been more hands off, but they've gotten more aggressive about it lately:
"On December 12, 2011, the SEC announced an enforcement proceeding that serves as a useful reminder that the federal laws against insider trading and misrepresentation apply as forcefully to private companies purchasing stock from employees and other shareholders as they do in the public company setting."
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=e24dc4ab-2a77-...