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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

#391

Post by tluyben2 »

RaceWon wrote: post #382
tluyben2 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I cannot understand why rich people do it This one's mine: Because it's more fun than sex.

Yeah, I know quite a lot of people who have that opinion, but they are talking about the edge cases; they speed, handle phone calls (dropped concentration), text, chat, etc and then say they have so much freedom. But they use illegal ways to not make things boring. If it’s not commuting then I can see how it would be ‘interesting’; I drove sportscars and terrain wagons, but most driving is a->b and without doing something illegal I cannot even stay awake generally. At least that is why in my friend group everyone speeds; they would pass out otherwise. And that’s basically one of the things we are discussing here.

But if you are a model driver AND find it more fun than sex, damn you are lucky.

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

#392

Post by megablast »

teraflop wrote: post #176
comex wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s one example. Apparently RIM’s employees collectively thought it was impossible (to achieve the stated battery life); I think they count as experts: > RIM had a complete internal panic when Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, a former employee revealed this weekend. The BlackBerry maker is now known to have held multiple all-hands meetings on January 10 that year, a day after the iPhone was on stage, and to have…

The comments summarized in that article seem to no longer be available, but I have a hard time believing the summary is accurate. When the iPhone was released, there were already PDAs on the market with screens the same size or bigger.

I had an iPaq at the time, had maybe 4 hours battery life, and that was with wifi used sparingly. No 2g or 3g was possible. Slow processor. Crappy screen.

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

#393

Post by DSingularity »

rayiner wrote: post #383
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…

> Too bad the US can’t retrospectively prosecute bankers for 2008 and claw back their size-subsidized, low risk premium profits. The Theranos case clearly illustrates why. Fraud by the top executives of a company, who lied about what their technology can do to raise a bunch of money, and endangered patients in the process--that is a story you can explain to a jury. Even if you think there are "bankers" (curiously, yo…

If “the big short” can explain it then the DOJ can.

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

#394

Post by ksaxena »

lsc wrote: post #387
RaceWon wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot understand why rich people do it This one's mine: Because it's more fun than sex.

I.. must be using my car incorrectly.

This comment made my day. Thanks :)

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

#395

Post by Retric »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #363
Terr_ wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They misspoke, Finland fines a percentage of income , which would include money from selling Facebook stock to pay for rent, food, yachts, etc. IANATaxLawyer, but I imagine gaming the system would require you to take out non-taxable loans using that company stock as collateral, and hope that your lawlessness is caught during the living-on-a-loan years rather than the liquidate-and-repay years.

Or liquidate a portion of your holdings and realize your gains in a non-penalty year. Either works.

That's harder to predict especially if fines are based on last years income.

Really though a ~0.1% speeding ticket fine is not going to be an issue even if the press is impressed by a very large number fine.

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

#396

Post by masklinn »

jakobegger wrote: post #384
briandear wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The idea of jail is that your personal freedom is taken away as punishment for a number of days. How much opportunity cost those days have, or how much money you lose as a result of your jail time, is irrelevant. The punishment is taking away your personal freedom. Jail time is a fair punishment: Nobody likes having their freedom taken from them. There is no need to scale it. But its different for fines. If you drive…

> The idea of jail is that your personal freedom is taken away as punishment for a number of days.

In fact, the finnish fining above is a system of day-fine: the sentence is expressed in day-fine, each "day" of the fine is multiplied by the offender's day-fine factor (baseline is about half the daily disposable income — daily income after taxes & basic living allowance) and that yields the fine's actual amount.

For court-ordered fines of sufficient size they can also be converted to a prison sentence at a ratio of 3 day-fine to 1 day in prison (rounded down).

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

#397

Post by xmodem »

Retric wrote: post #395
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or liquidate a portion of your holdings and realize your gains in a non-penalty year. Either works.

That's harder to predict especially if fines are based on last years income. Really though a ~0.1% speeding ticket fine is not going to be an issue even if the press is impressed by a very large number fine.

I’m not Finnish or a lawyer but I think their courts would see right through that sort of bullsbit

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

#398

Post by Trundle »

DSingularity wrote: post #393
rayiner wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too bad the US can’t retrospectively prosecute bankers for 2008 and claw back their size-subsidized, low risk premium profits. The Theranos case clearly illustrates why. Fraud by the top executives of a company, who lied about what their technology can do to raise a bunch of money, and endangered patients in the process--that is a story you can explain to a jury. Even if you think there are "bankers" (curiously, yo…

If “the big short” can explain it then the DOJ can.

As far as I remember the big short doesn't though.

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

#399

Post by Fnoord »

Kluny wrote: post #347
pmiller2 wrote: post #218

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.

People with autism also sometimes seem "off" though.

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

#400

Post by bklaasen »

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…

Is there a name for this cognitive bias?
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