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Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
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Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not particularly surprising, if you assume that the jury was essentially looking for a specific, traceable line between representations from Elizabeth Holmes herself (and nobody else) and the subsequent payment as a necessary element of fraud. (Whether or not the jury was doing so could be guessed from reading the jury instructions, which I haven't done). Being found guilty of defrauding investors in that light…
I agree with everything you said, but I think the person you're replying to is less upset at the prosecutors/jury, and more upset about the laws in the first place. They protect the rich and powerful, and don't worry about the average person getting hurt.
In this case it seems to be a matter of distance, not power.
Imagine that, rather than the CEO making shit up, the case was about a lowly lab technician who faked results out of laziness or recklessness. Even though his fraud ultimately impacted the patients, he would probably still get convicted for defrauding his boss or the company he directly worked for, not the patients he never met or knew.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#553Some founders "fake it till you make it", and this news should serve as a cautionary tale.
"Fake it till you make it" originally meant behaving as an established company would, as opposed to presenting yourself as an upstart startup without a lot of customers. Basically: Professional website, formal company structure, normal business sales practices, having people available to answer the phones, and so on. You still had to do the work and deliver the results, but the goal was to overcome hesitancy to use s…
It's fairly common to see an element of outright fakery before the hopeful-but-not-guaranteed "till you make it".
A coworker was using a mobile app from a startup offering to do "receipt OCR using AI/ML" when in fact they were sending most of the scanned pictures to a call-center in India to be manually entered. They hadn't yet figured out the fancy image recognition algorithm, so they were just throwing AWS Mechanical Turk at it while building up a user base. Realistically, they might never get to that level of AI while staying solvent.
That's not so different ethically to what Theranos was doing. The only difference with Theranos is the scale of it all.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try my best to only procure swag that was actually distributed by the company at time of operation. As an example, you can buy "joke" Enron t-shirts, which I wouldn't be interested in, but some authentic team building event-specific shirt distributed to 50ish people? Oh baby, I'm all ears. I think that's part of the fun, hunting for the original stuff.
> As an example, you can buy "joke" Enron t-shirts, which I wouldn't be interested in I would not be interested in authentic Theranos swag, but I would pay a lot for a new knockoff mock turtleneck with the old MPlayer logo on it. Now I can't even find the old MPlayer logo anymore.
You could try the old revisions on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MPlayer&oldid=790...
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#555It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…
> It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results.
Exactly. This is the exact opposite of the justice I'd expect.
Invest money? Expect to lose it most of the time, that's the game.
Pay for a service? There should be an expectation of honest delivery of said service.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully she'll get more, SV could use a good example. Otherwise it signals that wantrepeneurs can keep doing it with minimal repercussions.
Ok I'm not American so perhaps my perspective is different... More than 10 years would be utterly barbaric. The 65 years mentioned in another comment chain would be well beyond the pale. I'm no fan of Holmes, but what good does it serve to lock up non violent criminals for decades?
Agreed. Holmes is 37, so 65 years is a life sentence. From a European perspective, life sentences should be for people who are too dangerous to ever allow back into the community, or whose crimes are so monstrous society requires such retribution - terrorists, child killers, serial killers and so on. US sentencing appears very vindictive, not so much for trust-fund faildaughters but for people of colour arrested for minor drugs offences or under "three strikes" laws. Reminds me a lot of the "Bloody Code" of 18th century England.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#557Someone mentioned that Holmes will likely get a relatively light sentence because she is an attractive white woman. I've read there is good evidence that black people get harsher sentences than white people and men get harsher sentences than women, other factors being equal. I suspect there is also evidence attractive people get lighter sentences than ugly people. The current system seems like a clear-cut violation o…
First Equal Protection clause from the 14th Amendment applies to only states and not federally. [1] Second, It is extremely hard to prove that discrimination happens while all other things are equal . Rarely all other things are also equal as there are many strongly correlated factors with race[2] that can adversely impact conviction, for example being black on average would be poorer and would more have a court appo…
> First Equal Protection clause from the 14th Amendment applies to only states and not federally
The Holmes case was merely the catalyst for my thinking. The point remains: Why isn't there a legal push to have blind sentencing, at least for state crimes?
> Second, It is extremely hard to prove that discrimination happens while all other things are equal.
It's not that hard. You take a sentencing case - say, guilty plea to armed robbery with no prior convictions - and pair it with a similar case where the defendant is a different race (ideally without know the actual races involved). You do that for 1000 cases and then show that the sentencing is generally harsher for one race than the other.
> U.S. follows trial by jury...In a such a system there will be biases, because people are inherently biased
I'm talking about making sentencing less biased. I don't have any suggestions for making the trial less biased.
> The biggest determining factor is Money. Richer you are, less likely to have trouble with law, and get away with a lot.
OK but when it comes to sentencing money should not be a factor - rich and poor should receive a similar sentence for a similar crime.
> Race, age and gender are objectively measurable [3], "attractiveness" is lot more subjective to eyes of the beholder.
Sure, but it's not completely random. If you and I both choose the most attractive person in a group of 10 people, the chance that we both choose the same person is far greater than 10%.
Let's say we ask 100 people to rate defendants by attractiveness and use the average score for each defendant. It's quite possible we would find the gap in sentencing severity between the top-10% and bottom-10% people in terms of attractiveness is greater than the gap between black and white defendants.
But it's really a moot point - if we prevent the sentencing judge from knowing the race and sex of the defendant then the judge will also not know how attractive he or she is.
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#558What always amazed me is they had nothing… nothing that could do the thing they claimed. To the point they used competitors machines to produce results. Pretty amazing.
While it is unusual for the med tech industry, isnt it what startups do all the time ? it is not that surprising to me . It is not pure SaaS companies either, in the EV/self-driving space we have outright frauds like Nikola rolled a truck downhill to make the video and were public at $8 Billion. Others like Rivian/ tuSimple are definitely are not going to meet the projections in sales and plans they have published. T…
At least Tesla actually delivered shit though and had actual real working electric cars. I don't think any investors are regretting investing in Tesla based on Elon's promises...
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#559It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…
Makes me wonder how much of the rapidly established covid testing infrastructure around the world delivers actual results. Fun fact: In some places like Singapore you don't even get the chance to test again to verify the result, you just serve your time in quarantine and then get back your "safe" status.
> Makes me wonder how much of the rapidly established covid testing infrastructure around the world delivers actual results.
There was a scammy company is Sweden that wrote everyone negative covid results, without actually bothering to analyze the samples:
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/swedish...
Re: Elizabeth Holmes found guilty
#560It blows my mind that she was found guilty for defrauding investors, but not guilty for defrauding patients about their test results. Investors know that every dollar they put into a company could disappear, it's why startups get capital from investors and not bank loans. But a patient does not expect for their blood test results to be completely wrong. Her tests weren't giving false-negatives or false-positives, the…
Didn't they use real lab equipment to conduct real tests? In which case the results would be ok, it just wasn't the tech she promised. Quite a while I read something about the details, so.