Vanity Fair Blames The Failure of Theranos On Silicon Valley (vanityfair.com) 128
"I was only a day or two behind FBI agents who were trying to put together a time line of what Elizabeh Holmes knew and when she knew it," writes Vanity Fair, in what Slashdot reader PvtVoid describes as "a compelling story of hubris, glamour and secrecy about the unicorn Silicon Valley company that turned out to be founded on bullshit." Another anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
Holmes raised $700 million "on the condition that she would not divulge to investors how her technology actually worked," according to an article detailing how Silicon Valley can "replicate one big confidence game in which entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the tech media pretend to vet one another while, in reality, functioning as cogs in a machine that is designed to not question anything -- and buoy one another all along the way... In the end, it isn't in anyone's interest to call bullshit."
Theranos employed "hundreds of marketers, salespeople, communications specialists, and even the Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris," as well as a chief scientist who eventually became suicidal. But then the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "discovered that some of the tests Theranos was performing were so inaccurate that they could leave patients at risk of internal bleeding, or of stroke among those prone to blood clots." A reporter at the Wall Street Journal says "It's O.K. if you've got a smartphone app or a social network, and you go live with it before it's ready; people aren't going to die. But with medicine, it's different."
He became suspicious after reading the answer that the company's CEO, a Stanford dropout, supplied for a question about their technology. "A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel."
Theranos employed "hundreds of marketers, salespeople, communications specialists, and even the Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris," as well as a chief scientist who eventually became suicidal. But then the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services "discovered that some of the tests Theranos was performing were so inaccurate that they could leave patients at risk of internal bleeding, or of stroke among those prone to blood clots." A reporter at the Wall Street Journal says "It's O.K. if you've got a smartphone app or a social network, and you go live with it before it's ready; people aren't going to die. But with medicine, it's different."
He became suspicious after reading the answer that the company's CEO, a Stanford dropout, supplied for a question about their technology. "A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel."
a chemical reaction generates a signal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: a chemical reaction generates a signal (Score:3, Funny)
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the signal is to NOT invest in this company.
The same could be said for anything in Silicon Valley, really. It's all hot hair pushed by the shiestiest of marketing and sales people - it either flops (most of the time) or it succeeds and increases the share of resources the worst of Humanity have with which to control the direction of the species. If the whole place sank into the ocean the quality of life on Earth would go up noticeably for everyone else.
Blood test debacle (Score:1)
Investigative reporter Scott Adams (Score:5, Interesting)
Scott Adams (of Dilbert) sent two samples for testing and they came back with different results. It seems the scam was very very easy to detect.
Venture capitalists are mostly scammers. They buy into a *plausible* startup, regardless of the reality. One of the other sister companies they invested in, then buys a stake in this new one. Usually a tiny stake at a hugely inflated price. This gives the new startup a super ridiculous valuation based on that tiny sliver of stock. They head for an IPO based on this fake valuation and the crap stock is dumped on the stock markets and sold to unsuspecting investors. VC exit at a big profit.
The company isn't the thing they're investing in, it's the scam IPO, and that has more to do with the designer clothes the CEO wears than technology it makes.
Do you remember Groupon? Or Zygna?
Re: Investigative reporter Scott Adams (Score:1)
On some occasions Theranos used diagnostic equipment made by their competitors. It would have been easier for them to just do that all the time and cross-reference results from different manufacturers.
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No, you have that all wrong. At least as far as VCs on Sand Hill Road and their likes go.
1. Lots (hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?) of people start companies and then pitch their ideas to VCs on Sand Hill Road.
2. Of all these pitches, the Sand Hill Road VCs pick 10 companies.
3. The VC takes effective control of the companies. For bonus points, the VC parachutes in either an idiot nephew or an MBA with zero experience as the new CEO.
4. The VC then makes all 10 companies change their strategies from re
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Venture capitalists, in a very real sense, don't know what they're doing. They want to be in on the next Big Thing, and this requires a startup that fills a previously unnoticed or unsatisfiable need, something not already satisfied by current companies, which pretty much by definition means something that looks like a bad idea, probably one the VCs can't recognize as brilliant early on.
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FBI: Keep hand away from button!
Holmes: Mwhahahahaha I perform a chemistry on you, make life signal react to chemical stuff! Go away!
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Brought to you by SJWs (Score:2, Insightful)
A groundbreaking woman! It's about time! A woman who is a CEO and doing something super smart that no one else can!
The only reason this scam worked is because there's plenty of social justice warriors who very badly wanted to believe it. It's a religion, and this is just a clever priestess who fleeced her flock.
If the area was full of people who believed the rapture was nigh, she could have fooled them in a different manner.
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Only in your dream world. Back in reality, hundreds of white men have gotten away with similar before.
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Only in your dream world. Back in reality, hundreds of white men have gotten away with similar before.
The reality of history shows that every race on the planet knows what a fucking con job is
Point was that she didn't get away with it simply because- as the OP (yourself?) alleged- she was given preferential treatment as a woman or member of a (allegedly) "SJW"-favoured group, i.e. stereotypically non-white and/or non-male.
Re:Brought to you by SJWs (Score:5, Insightful)
What I wonder after reading this sorry story is: was Holmes aware that she was selling snake oil all along, or did she start out with the genuinely belief that her company could make the technology work? I'm willing to believe the latter: they did try, but the longer their breakthrough failed to materialize, the more they had to shift their efforts towards keeping up appearances, or "controlling the narrative" as it's called.
Re:Brought to you by SJWs (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah. This isn't a gender specific thing. If anything, it's reassuring to see a woman getting the opportunity to commit such a large financial deception.
What I wonder after reading this sorry story is: was Holmes aware that she was selling snake oil all along, or did she start out with the genuinely belief that her company could make the technology work? I'm willing to believe the latter: they did try, but the longer their breakthrough failed to materialize, the more they had to shift their efforts towards keeping up appearances, or "controlling the narrative" as it's called.
Good question. She probably did believe either it worked or that they would make it work. The article suggests an echo chamber, which is mind-bending in how it can reinforce what should be obviously bad beliefs. In all things, it pays to surround yourself with people willing to disagree and present good arguments.
For a good analogue, just look at the financial traders/gamblers who lose big by continuing to bet in the hopes of making up for their losses, where cutting their losses earlier would have made the situation far less severe.
Re:Brought to you by SJWs (Score:5, Informative)
I think she honestly thought they could make it work - they already use trace multipliers in other areas of medical testing, such as DNA tests, so a company that could come up with a way to do that for all sorts of other tests (being able to do a battery of tests on a drop of blood rather than the two or three vials they have to use these days for certain things) would make a mint, and the science is already there for other tests, so...
But once they determined the trace multipliers thye had come up with didn't work, they should have come clean right there and then. Not turned it from a failed venture into a fraudulent one.
Re:Brought to you by SJWs (Score:5, Insightful)
But once they determined the trace multipliers thye had come up with didn't work, they should have come clean right there and then. Not turned it from a failed venture into a fraudulent one.
Still, I feel like I could understand how a person could get into that situation. Imagine you have a company with investors, employees, facilities, everything. Your investors are pressuring you for results. There's a lot of pressure to get results, and you're failing to produce them, but you think your scientists might come up with a solution at any moment. You might be fooling yourself, but you have a lot of people counting on you, and if you can pull through it, you'll be filthy rich.
All you have to do is stall, and keep it all together long enough for your scientists to make your promises a reality. You expect it to be difficult, but everyone seems happy to look the other way. Your investors don't really care as long as their investments are growing in value. Your employees don't care as long as they get to keep their jobs. Keeping things going requires some secrecy, but everyone involved is just looking for an excuse to believe whatever your tell them.
After a while, you're too deep in. You started out just stalling, misleading people a little until you could figure out how to make it all legit. But that was months ago-- years ago now. You've already accidentally crossed the line into fraud a while back, without even realizing it at the time. Now you have no choice but to keep it all afloat and hope for a scientific breakthrough, or some other miracle,
I'm not saying that this is Holmes's story. I'm just saying that it's not hard to imagine how a relatively young and inexperiences person could fall into a situation like this. After all, they do say "fake it 'til you make it," and she might have been hoping that at some point, her company would "make it". Either way, it does seem like Vanity Fair is right to assign a fair amount of the blame on the Silicon Valley system. Somehow people invested massive amounts of money in a 19 year-old who was claiming to do something experts claimed wasn't possible, and they did so without doing due diligence?
Re:Brought to you by SJWs (Score:5, Informative)
An old story (made popular by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven)...
One day, while Nasreddin was visiting the capital city, the Sultan took offense to a joke that was made at his expense. He had Nasreddin immediately arrested and imprisoned; accusing him of heresy and sedition. Nasreddin apologized to the Sultan for his joke, and begged for his life; but the Sultan remained obstinate, and in his anger, sentenced Nasreddin to be beheaded the following day. When Nasreddin was brought out the next morning, he addressed the Sultan, saying "Oh Sultan, live forever! You know me to be a skilled teacher, the greatest in your kingdom. If you will but delay my sentence for one year, I will teach your favorite horse to sing."
The Sultan did not believe that such a thing was possible; but his anger had cooled, and he was amused by the audacity of Nasreddin's claim. "Very well," replied the Sultan, "you will have a year. But if by the end of that year you have not taught my favorite horse to sing, then you will wish you had been beheaded today."
That evening, Nasreddin's friends were allowed to visit him in prison, and found him in unexpected good spirits. "How can you be so happy?" they asked. "Do you really believe that you can teach the Sultan's horse to sing?" "Of course not," replied Nasreddin, "but I now have a year which I did not have yesterday; and much can happen in that time. The Sultan may come to repent of his anger, and release me. He may die in battle or of illness, and it is traditional for a successor to pardon all prisoners upon taking office. He may be overthrown by another faction, and again, it is traditional for prisoners to be released at such a time. Or the horse may die, in which case the Sultan will be obliged to release me."
"Finally," said Nasreddin, "even if none of those things come to pass, perhaps the horse can sing."
-- https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Sufism/Nasrudin
Let's apply Godwin's Law (Score:2)
Similar to the V2 rockets in the final stages of World War II.
they do say "fake it 'til you make it," (Score:1)
RE: they do say "fake it 'til you make it,"
And that is the whole problem right there in a nutshell.
Society is led and run by the business school marketing mindset of lie first, and keep on lying until your lies have brought you success. Just look at the two major presidential candidates.
And everyone wonders why things suck so much?
Re:Brought to you by SJWs (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, "misleading people" meant putting their health at risk - either from lack of necessary treatment, or causing them to get unnecessary treatment. That right there overrides any right you have to stall. Protecting people's lives is the top priority - the whole reason the company even existed was because it promised to help prolong people's lives.
Come clean, explain that the test results aren't coming back as accurate as in early trials, and ask/beg for more time to figure out why the difference and to try to correct it. A slight delay is acceptable because you need time for the statistics to solidify enough for a 95% or 99% confidence interval (idiots who claim they "knew all along" notwithstanding - there are always a few of these people holding every possible position, so some of them are always "right" just by pure chance, not because they actually knew anything). But once your collected stats reach that confidence interval, you need to act to protect lives, even if it means admitting your product doesn't seem to work and that the investors may have wasted their money.
Research almost always results in failure. Edison tested over 6000 materials as a filament for a light bulb, and every one of them failed before he stumbled upon one that worked for an acceptably long period of time. But for some reason popular culture sees failure as something shameful, rather than an inevitable and necessary part of the learning process. It's resulted in a government populated by professional liars who (almost [philly.com]) never admit their failures - because we tend to vote for the people who claim they've never failed, when all they are is better at hiding their past failures (usually by pushing the blame onto others). Eliminate the negative stigma associated with failure, and something like Theranos becomes a non-story of an un-notable startup which failed early, instead of a multi-billion dollar scandal putting over a million lives at risk.
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I'm not defending her actions. I'm saying I kind of understand. It's a lot of pressure to put on someone so young. At that age, I had a real hard time saying the words, "I don't know," and she was put in charge of running a multi-million-dollar company. And apparently there weren't any adults in the room overseeing things.
Or I think we should be able to admit, at least, this isn't a surprising outcome. People gave a 19 year-old college dropout millions of dollars to pursue a crackpot scheme that scien
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they already use trace multipliers in other areas of medical testing, such as DNA tests
If that was indeed the thinking, then it speaks to her history as a college dropout. DNA tests relying on amplification use the polymerase chain reaction, which is explicitly a template-directed polymerization with exponential amplification. For proteins or small molecules, one would require a specific antibody against a target molecule coupled with something like chemiluminscence, that only results in linear amplification. That's already standard (and expensive) detection tech, so what was this company go
Re:Brought to you by SJWs (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that she's a nice young woman probably helped... a little.
Think you mean a lot. Ask yourself how many times you've read about someone trying to get VC funding for something as shitty as this and they never showed up to dump the money on it. If you don't keep up on VC crap, or don't have friends with an interest in it, you probably don't know what I'm talking about. But you can find plenty on websites that cater to VC's, and some of them are also pushing the "it's women, throw money at them" type of clickbait articles. Keep in mind that SV and VC culture currently has a big push on the "but it's womens, so throw money at it" just like other sectors of society(programers, IT, government and pretty much anything except hard labor jobs or trades) in order to get more women in it. Sometimes going as far as placing people who are incompetent into those jobs for the sake of diversity and everyone likely has a story on that one. You also can't forget the big push on the "we need more womens, because if we don't it's sexist" BS that the media and various marxist feminist organizations have been pushing the last ~5 years either.
This stuff along with the current state of the economy though is drying up not only for this type of BS, but general BS scams in general. Which is good, but I've seen at least 4 articles in the last 6mo saying something along the lines of "funding is drying up, help the women with this project!" The project of course is usually so scam ridden even laymen can look and go NOPE.
Re:Brought to you by SJWs (Score:5, Informative)
What I wonder after reading this sorry story is: was Holmes aware that she was selling snake oil all along, or did she start out with the genuinely belief that her company could make the technology work? I'm willing to believe the latter: they did try, but the longer their breakthrough failed to materialize, the more they had to shift their efforts towards keeping up appearances, or "controlling the narrative" as it's called.
Holmes new the technology cannot possibly work. According to the articles I have read on the topic (including the one in Vanity Fair) she was told so directly by her professors at Stanford when she approached them with the startup idea. Her chief scientist was telling her that the thing is not working. What did she do? She stuffed her board with people who new nothing about biology, chemistry or engineering. The job of her second in command at the company was exclusively to suppress information leaking out. So yes, she new what she was doing: scamming people out of their money.
The VF article also tells a disturbing story how friends and political connections of her father basically propped up the company, gave it legitimacy and suppressed inquiry through legal threats (David Boies) and by using their commanding position in the military (Gen. James Mattis) [washingtonpost.com].
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And yet it has been reported that the chief scientist said he *had gotten it working*.
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I did not know that Kissinger, Perry, Shultz or Nunn were SJWs. Man! You are a news breaker!
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Not replying to you, the post isn't worth it and you are posting as an AC - but replying to those idiots that moderated you.
This have nothing to do with social justice, this is an example of hyped stuff that failed. There have been many other examples of this including some in the computer field _but_ in no case have the gender of the CEO been of interest and no hoard of idiots have constructed conspiracy theories involving social justice and/or men's right movements. Because that would be proof of mental p
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I just found this puff piece on Theranos and CEO Elizabeth Holmes in Wired magazine from a couple of years ago: This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood [wired.com]
Wired senior editor Caitlin Roper gushes, "The results are faster, more accurate, and far cheaper than conventional methods. The implications are mind-blowing. With inexpensive and easy access to the information running through their veins, people will have an unprecedented window on their own health." Roper goes on to "inte
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Got any actual evidence for this claim, or are you simply demonstrating the blind ideology often displayed by people using "social justice warriors" in a sentence?
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I would blame what little success that Theranos enjoyed on Silicon Valley. But when it comes to the failure of Theranos, the culprit is simple: their business model was based on technology that doesn't exist.
I wonder if PT Barnum's family consider their infamous ancestor a failure...
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I would blame what little success that Theranos enjoyed on Silicon Valley. But when it comes to the failure of Theranos, the culprit is simple: their business model was based on technology that doesn't exist.
I wonder if PT Barnum's family consider their infamous ancestor a failure...
not analogous at all really. lives weren't dependent on the result of the "thrill" people got from viewing Barnum's exhibits.
Lives were most certainly at risk from Holmes' bullshit
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I would blame what little success that Theranos enjoyed on Silicon Valley. But when it comes to the failure of Theranos, the culprit is simple: their business model was based on technology that doesn't exist.
I wonder if PT Barnum's family consider their infamous ancestor a failure...
not analogous at all really. lives weren't dependent on the result of the "thrill" people got from viewing Barnum's exhibits. Lives were most certainly at risk from Holmes' bullshit
The infamous "greater good" measure used across the entire spectrum of approved medicine in use today most certainly puts lives at risk. We gamble every single time we hope to not have a fatal or life-altering side-effect from a single drug, or a prescribed cocktail of them. Lawsuits are fought and won against bad medicine all the time.
Not saying Theranos wasn't grossly negligent here due to outright lying. They are. Just pointing out the fact that we assume risk all the time in medicine, which current
Re:Vanity Fair (Score:5, Interesting)
Talking of Vanity Fair am I alone in finding it significant that it is a publication that largely concentrates on entertaining copy on celebrities and lifestyle issues which has recently repeatedly published fairly hard core investigative journalism. How come the so called heavyweight "broadsheet" publications sound like echo chambers for various vested business interests these days and could not publish a challenging piece of investigative journalism to save their lives?
Great job Vanity Fair! you are now on my must read list.
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Actually, Vanity Fair has a long history of this kind of article. It is why they have stayed in business so long.
Rolling Stone is similar in that they write a lot of entertainment articles but occasionally have some truly hard hitting articles.
No. The article blames SV for SUCCESS of Theranos. (Score:5, Interesting)
The title of this post has nothing to do with the article or even the summary. From the Slashdot summary She built a corporation based on secrecy in the hope that she could still pull it off. Then, it all fell apart. The company did not fail because of Silicon valley secrecy, it succeeded because of it. I'm used to Slashdot summaries not matching the article but the title not matching the summary? That's an amazing new low.
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Scam and failure (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose it depends on whether you consider Theranos a successful scam that could only happen in Silicon Valley, or a massive failure which could only happen at that magnitude in Silicon Valley.
I think it is entirely possible it is both a failure and a scam. Wouldn't surprise me at all if it started as an honest effort that eventually failed and turned into a scam. Some of the nuances are unique to Silicon Valley but from a big picture perspective it's a story that has happened before and will happen again. Charismatic CEO builds company and raises lots of money based on product that either couldn't or didn't work and eventually resorted to fraud. Nothing new in that story and it could have happened almost anywhere.
The real failure is the investors who failed to do their due diligence before putting their money down. This is EXACTLY why we insist on patents and public disclosure of how medicines and therapies work before making them public. It's why we have government oversight in the form of the FDA. People want to believe in miracle cures and amazing technology and we have some remarkable achievements in medicine. But quackery is a real thing and there are people who are very willing to literally let credulous or innocent people die to make money.
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But it most certainly would not have received a presumed worth of 9 billion dollars. There are lots of small companies attempting to do ground breaking things. I suspect that the vast majority of them spend most of the time scrambling for capital because research is hard, game changing ideas are few and far between and even if the idea is correct the implementation is damned difficult.
A cute blond in a black turtleneck with Big Daddy Warbucks backing goes a long way.
Pathetic sexisim in the article (Score:2, Insightful)
Even though in the article should focus on how an individual managed to swindle so many and how to avoid it in the future, it can't help to mention without any reason and out of any context that tech people and venture capitalists in the Valley are "white man".
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Even though in the article should focus on how an individual managed to swindle so many and how to avoid it in the future, it can't help to mention without any reason and out of any context that tech people and venture capitalists in the Valley are "white man".
Four times even, the author is a piece of shit.
The fraud was strong in this one (Score:2)
It should have been obvious to anyone with less than a high school education if someone is asking for hundreds of millions of dollars to NOT reveal how something is done, that is a red flag.
But nope, the VCs were more than willing to hand over money to an unknown person offering an unknown procedure without having to show how said product works.
From the day I heard about Theranos I knew it was a fraud for the simple fact they never revealed how their tests worked, never submitted to any government-approved
Complicit? (Score:4, Insightful)
But nope, the VCs were more than willing to hand over money to an unknown person offering an unknown procedure without having to show how said product works.
While it certainly is possible for a VC to make a mistake when evaluating a company this is kind of the most shocking thing to me. I have close friends who are VCs and when making an investment the first thing they do is to do a LOT of due diligence. If they aren't domain experts in the technology themselves they call in someone they trust who is a domain expert to review the technology. They certainly don't make investments in companies who refuse to disclose to them how their product actually works. That doesn't mean everything will work out but I've never seen a VC personally who would hand over a large check no questions asked.
So we're left with two options. Either the VCs in this instance were reckless fools who invested in something when they should have known better OR they were complicit in the fraud and didn't care. I've seen enough VCs investing in idiotic ideas to believe that it could have been greed/recklessness but it's hard to tell the difference without more information.
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I've watched investors and buyers do due diligence of technology, and its not particularly impressive. I could easily see how with a few good presentations they could be tricked, especially since technologically-minded people aren't good at looking for scams. That is, if they are talking to someone who understands the subject, they assume h
Due dilligence and clear thought (Score:2)
I've watched investors and buyers do due diligence of technology, and its not particularly impressive.
So have I. Some are very good at it, others not so much. But it seems clear that essentially zero due diligence was performed in this case. If someone came to me with a piece of technology looking for investment, there isn't a way in hell I would fork over the money without full disclosure of how it worked. Most of the VCs I know personally are pretty thorough. Obviously this company knew how to find either patsies or accomplices.
I could easily see how with a few good presentations they could be tricked, especially since technologically-minded people aren't good at looking for scams.
This is true. Engineers and scientists can be among the easiest people t
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If someone came to me with a piece of technology looking for investment, there isn't a way in hell I would fork over the money without full disclosure of how it worked.
That's true, if the investors didn't feel they had gotten a full disclosure and still invested, then they were fools.
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Or, the 3rd option: the VCs traded their normal due diligence for trust in previous VCs. Peer pressure and an assumption of action by others.
I've seen it happen before - series B/C/D VCs will invest on the "strength" of a known VC investing in series A. And sometimes that first VC invested simply on the strength of a seed angel investing. Reputation of the early investor, assumption that they "did proper diligence" often is used to justify subsequent investment. And I've been involved in seed-through-
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It should have been obvious to anyone with less than a high school education if someone is asking for hundreds of millions of dollars to NOT reveal how something is done, that is a red flag.
No. It's called an NDA, and it's the thing you sign to find out what you're investing in without revealing trade secrets. If they won't tell you what you're investing in even under NDA, then you're a stupid shit if you invest in it. There's no second way, let alone third one: just a stupid shit.
"Existence" not "Failure" (Score:2)
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Are you reeeeeally, now?
How many big company execs have you seen that don't know that "when Microsoft Word underlines something in red, it means you probably spelled it wrong"?
As for silicon valley, it is what it is.
A 'startup' is what they call a company with people who have no experience, no real assets and no real product.
Old money stays far away. "Pump and dump" is not a viable long-term investment plan.
LOL - we can't tell you how it works (Score:2)
"Holmes raised $700 million "on the condition that she would not divulge to investors how her technology actually worked,"
Can you imagine how many perpetual motion machine creators would love to get some VC using this same "condition"?
The whole problem was the unneeded secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole reason that the patent system replaced trade secrecy is that in return for a specified period of exclusive use an inventor has to reveal how his device works. Theranos treated its process as a trade secret, which should have been a red flag to any investor to not chuck his money into an unknown technology. The Silicon Valley VC culture just got pwned.
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I don't see anything wrong with treating a product as a black box that takes inputs and produces outputs, I only care that it does what it says it does by comparing the outputs to the expected results.
So if a product just happens to guess what you want to see, with 99% accuracy, you'd be happy regardless of the fact that it is just a good guess?
is a fraud and would be identified as a fraud based on the black box testing criteria.
You don't know much about molecular biology, do you?
Early investors should be more careful than trusting that a 19 y.o. girl with no 30 years of experience in the field will deliver 'ground breaking results'. I think in most cases this expectation will end up in a failure.
She was a 19 year old who started college early, and landed a position in a top Stanford lab before leaving college. This sounds like exactly the path you keep advocating others to take to find success.
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From what patents I've seen, there's the claims section, which is what the patent actually covers, and the description section. I believe the law says that a person ordinarily skilled in the art should be able to create the patented thing from the description, but that doesn't seem to be the case in all patents. I'd love to see patents denied or challenged in court for not including an adequate description.
I don't think so (Score:1)
Not just one bad actor (Score:5, Insightful)
Silicon Valley went along for the ride. The person responsible for the whole thing is Ms. Holmes, who is nothing but a scammer.
You will rarely find a scam this size where just one person is responsible. What about the engineers who HAD to know that the whole thing was bullshit (or were incompetent if they didn't)? How about the investors who couldn't be bothered to do any due diligence before writing a large check? How about the customers for the product who didn't demand adequate demonstrations of effectiveness before deploying the technology? What about the company management who had to know about the problem but lacked a moral compass?
No, there is plenty of blame to go around. Ms Holmes might be the lead singer in this particular band but she's hardly the only one playing.
Elizabeth Holmes is HOT (Score:1)
Always will be some investors who buy fantasies (Score:1)
"A great undertaking, nobody to know what it is." [google.com]
All the fun is in behavioral economics.
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Another freshman takes Economics 101, and misunderstands everything. Thanks for sharing your inadequacies with us.
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Not at all. Libertarianism is concerned with whether people are "held back" or "rise to positions of
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That just might work. In the fantasy Star Trek world where anyone can get what they want when they want it.
When you get off the Holodeck, you have to deal with resource limitations. That's when you're 'deciding on how to live your life' might interfere with mine. Or Granda over there. Or that kid in the corner.
With pure Libertarianism you can't have rule of law because the law, by design and nature, limits people in doing things. And rule of law is really what separates us from South Sudan. Course, yo
Re: Blame most of today's world problems on greed. (Score:1)
You've confused Anarchy with libertarianism.
That's like confusing Hillary Clinton with Pol Pot.
Explaining the difference to you is an act of futility, because you're fully aware of the distinction. You're just indulging in strawman arguments to pretend like your position is superior.
What I like about libertarians is that they're the first to admit their position is imperfect, difficult, and nuanced.
You, on the other hand, could never admit to such a position, because yours requires authoritative control ove
Re: Blame most of today's world problems on greed. (Score:1)
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The rule of certain laws is important in libertarianism. Last I read a Libertarian platform, I couldn't even begin to estimate how much money we'd need to extend the court system to make it work.
Libertarians tend to want the government to decisively enforce contract law without paying any attention to any imbalance in negotiating power, meaning that the court system would become a tool of oppression of the poor and unlucky.
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately, actual people (even Libertarians) continue showing why we need laws and governments. Yes, some people are just too stupid and/or dangerous to manage themselves while not harming others, which is why we have these laws. Freedom is not an absolute value, unless you value above all else the freedom to die in a society that has no rules. Everything else is just a matter of where you put the dividing lines between too lax and strict. Libertarians seem to fail to understand this fundamental point i
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Definitely yet another case of GamerGate targeting a successful female CEO. They did exactly the same to Brianna Wu.
Re: (Score:1)
oh fuck off with that gamergate shit
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Sorry, you can't use successful and Wu in the same sentence. FYI even her buddies(Quinn, et.al) knew that Wu was so batshit insane that they cut them off from the SJW circle-jerk and even people like K.Cross(you might note from Sarkeesian fame) who was once Sarkeesians handler, washed their hands of Wu after trying to deal with them. The only thing GG did was highlight that Wu paid for awards for their shitty title. Need background reading? Check the CON leaks. [reddit.com] Showing that various members were out ther
Re: Well (Score:2, Insightful)
It does. She got extra press time, leniency, and forgiveness because she's an attractive female CEO.
Any man would be in prison already.
Re: (Score:2)
Attractive?
Re: Well (Score:1)
No need. When Henry "NWO" Kissenger is on your board, you know it's a CIA op to build a DNA database of all Americans (those who didn't give to 23andme before their records were siezed by the FDA). Nice that it failed though.