When all else is equal, we favor the earliest submitter of a story, but if one submission is more substantive than another (as yours was in this case), then it should win. A substantive article with more information has a better chance of forming a good thread.
"Judge Edward J. Davila ... sentenced Ms. Holmes to 135 months in prison, which is slightly more than 11 years. Ms. Holmes, 38, who plans to appeal the verdict, must report to prison on April 27, 2023.
Federal sentencing guidelines for wire fraud of the size that Ms. Holmes was convicted of recommend 20 years in prison. Ms. Holmes’s lawyers had asked for 18 months of house arrest, while prosecutors sought 15 years and $804 million in restitution for 29 investors."
holy cats. the only thing that might send you away longer is tax fraud and thats only because the us tax code was never demilitarized after we crushed the mafia. 18 months was never going to happen.
Is it normal for there to be a sentencing and then be free for 5 months before going to prison? I always assumed after a sentencing you went straight to prison. What's the rationale for waiting? To listen to appeals?
Or the judge trolling so that she'll pop out the kid and have some days to bond, and as soon as life feels somewhat normal and together the kid will be ripped away and she'll be tossed in a place full of gnashing of teeth and suffering.
Suffer how exactly? The kids will have a father outside of prison, two sets of grandparents and several times more money devoted to them than the median American income.
If anything being kept away from the care of their fraudster unapologetic mother would be a boon , not suffering.
The father is a rich and reasonably attractive dude. I do not think biological mom necessarily has to mean de facto mom. I doubt a custody order will be difficult with real mom in for a dime of prison. This could be a golden opportunity for those kids.
> Growing up without their mom for their first decade? Jesus christ man.
Nonsense. The courts, the social welfare system and a significant number of both men and women have already, for decades, formally decided that removing one parent from a child is alright.
for a very long portion of their lives, they will be known as "the kids of the woman who defrauded investors of hundreds of millions and sold dangerously dodgy medical equipment"
Probably two ways. First, for people to get their affairs in order. For example you don’t need a lease or can sell or rent out your house or something.
Second, for the prison facility to make sure there’s a free space for the incoming person.
Edit: Someone pointed out she’s pregnant, so there’s that…
I detest the kind of fraud Holmes perpetrated, but I very much support treating people with dignity. So the problem isn’t that she gets to wait outside prison but that many others don’t get to.
Especially this guy, wasn’t even a violent offence. Just absolutely despicable treatment.
For rich and connected people convicted of white collar crimes it's very common. It's also common for upper class criminals to arrange the terms of their own work release-- where they are employed by a company they own and are free 12+ hours a day, only returning to custody to sleep. (Epstein did this with his first conviction)
For the rest of the population without money, power or connections accused of drug crimes or petty theft it's typical that you will be arrested and placed in jail immediately and will be in custody until you are convicted / sentenced at which point you will go directly to prison.
Most people who aren't allowed voluntarily surrender weren't granted bail to begin with because they were either ruled a danger to the community or they were deemed an excessive flight risk. Plenty of "low level" criminals are allowed to turn themselves in, read enough cases on https://www.courtlistener.com/pacer and you'll see it's not unusual.
People who defend bail just see bail as something that maximizes the likelihood the accused actually show up to court. In a high trust society it wouldn't be necessary, but we don't have that. Most people who are arrested are actually guilty of a crime which is why there is a 95% conviction rate in the federal system and ~75% across the states. Accordingly "society" has an interest in keeping the non criminal population safe and that is the origin of bail. It is unfortunate that many defendants, especially those who are already marginalized, are unable to exercise their speedy trial rights due to a combination of government incompetence, overwhelmed public defenders, and indigence but I wouldn't say anyone is proud of that.
in US - and specially for federal crimes - its very routine for the courts to give some time for the person to report to prison.
This allows the person sentenced to get their affairs in order.
I know somebody who is sentenced for 10 years. The court gave him 2 months which actually is not enough for all the items he need to wrap up. To give an idea, this person needs to:
- sell his house (who will pay the mortgage now that he is in prison)
- sell his car
- donate / get rid of his clothes and most of his belongings (or leave them in care of family / storage)
- cancel all the subscriptions and utilities
- take care of any medical needs
- inform all the people who might reach out to him so they can communicate with him
- more…
On the correction system side, they also need time to figure out where to send this person and create the space there:
- If the person sentenced has any medical needs they will ask for a “medical” facility (connected to a hospital) and usually nicer.
- the person sentenced might request a correction facility that is closer to his loved ones (the guy I know requested and going to a facility in Texas even though he lives in Florida as his closest relative is his sister who lives near that facility)
- other factors include doing tests / analysis to figure out should the person go to level 1 security (minimum) or something higher; is the person considered a risk to other inmates? are other inmates considered a risk to this person (common for cops, sexual offenders etc)
Of course, if the person is considered a flight risk or violence risk - they will just send him/her to the nearest county jail and then figure out the rest.
Overall, a lot of logistics and consideration is given to an inmate - specially in a federal system.
Yes! My experience is state/county, but you can actually ask the court to give you more time before surrendering to commence your sentence. In my case, I was by default given 2 months before I had to surrender. From what I remember/know, courts are generally pretty respectful if you ask for more time (depending on reasoning/circumstances). If you've shown up all the way to sentencing, you're likely not a huge flight risk.
Imagine how completely devoid of empathy you have to be to get pregnant twice, knowing that your children have an extremely high risk of growing up without their mother, just because you think that this will improve your chances of getting a lighter sentence. Absolutely despicable. She deserves every day she spends in prison.
This to me is the saddest part of the saga. It's obviously awful what she did to the patients but, seeing a mother do this to her own child somehow just hits different.
I thought her thinking was "I will be unable to have a child when I get out of prison". Which makes some sense. Preventing my someone from procreating seems like a serious punishment not warranted in this case.
They don't yet cyrofreeze convicts, you can get pregnant while in prison although I suspect you must be on work-detail or some other revenue generating activity for the prison to approve your visitations.
I mean, sure, technically. It seems far better to have a baby right before you go into prison then in prison though. The experience of being pregnant is probably horrible, and certainly giving birth unchained. Then when the baby comes you get to breastfeed if that's something you want to do and hold your baby for more than 10 minutes. And I guess in 11 years it means you missed like 5th grade graduation, but other than that it's not like 10 vs 11 is super relevant.
I can’t picture someone with such an inflated sense of self-worth finding that to be acceptable. How’s she not making this worse for herself by trying to flee or something?
If one of the guys who was selling children into prison (cash for kids) was able to get on to house arrest before 85%, I'm sure she will be able to find a way.
All: we had a flurry of threads about this all at once, which isn't surprising, but the comments they got were almost all bad (for HN)—cheap and reflexive rather than thoughtful and reflective. We want the latter, not the former*, so please take a moment to reflect before commenting, and if you'd make sure you're up on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html we'd appreciate that too.
Do the families of patients who died have any recourse? It’s an affront to justice that she seems to have gotten away with what’s effectively murder or manslaughter.
They failed to demonstrate patient harm in court. The best they prosecution could find was one person who got a false positive for HIV and was retested and found negative.
If we're talking about financial damage done this sentencing still feels exceedingly light. We have a real double standard - there are people in jail for longer for possession.
Edit to clarify: My statement is more intended to emphasize how overly punishing possession charges rather than to advocate for draconian charges for all offenses.
If her stay in “the Feds” is anything like the experiences I’ve heard of from people who are not her gender nor her race, it’s quite possible that she’ll be giving lectures in the Metaverse by 2026.
No, I meant “from people” not “for people” but thanks cause I didn’t know I had a typo. I do not mean that she’ll be out. I never knew for sure until it was mentioned that there’s no parole in the Feds, but I’ve never heard of anyone paroling out of the Feds before anyhow.
But I can imagine a scenario where someone can put a few dollars “on her books” so she can pay a guard to smuggle an iPhone in to her.
From what I’ve been told, compared to the State penitentiaries, the Feds is relatively easy. Using this is a reference, for a person like Elizabeth Holmes, I reckon that 11 years will not be as punishing as the person I am responding to imagines. If anything, at some point, she may be given access (either legally or illegally) to a smartphone device that will enable her to interact with the outside world (as is very common in prison, the phones aren’t cheap but I don’t think she’d have trouble getting a hold of one).
> From what I’ve been told, compared to the State penitentiaries, the Feds is relatively easy.
I mean, "relatively easy" doesn't mean it's a cake walk, especially since in the US many State systems are barbarically abusive. She will be in prison with an extremely regimented schedule, being told exactly what to do.
Correct, she's probably not going to need to join a gang for protection, but it is still nearly 10 years in lockup assuming she gets maximum good behavior credits.
Yes 11 years of your life is 11 years of your life, but in reality a woman like her, with her (deviated) skill set and profile, can easily handle it in a manner that will convince the average person that she got off lightly. People who are less educated and have less influence are capable of pulling off what I’ve been describing (getting a cellphone and going on Facebook/Meta) while in Federal prison.
It will be far less regimented than lets say, joining the army.
Up at 5AM, stand for the count.
Report to prison job for a couple of hours a day.
5pm, in your cell, standing for the count.
Lights out at 10pm.
You can exercise, go to the library, watch TV, play cards, whatever is available during most of the day.
For some weird reason people love giving people they perceive as rich (even if they have no money anymore - even if they famously lost it) lots of money for nothing.
They have "currency" in prison (cigarettes or something), but it's hard to translate your actual money into that currency. Your visitors can't just bring you a whole bunch of cigarettes on visiting day.
Things like cellphones are typically smuggled in via guards, for actual real money (either by inmates in possession of cash or paid from by someone outside of the prison environment). "Prison currency" tends to be valued at a fraction of its real value (so a $200 cellphone may end up costing $1000 once all of the middlemen are involved)
She's very rich by normal person standards - her husband is a millionaire. Her family is also quite wealthy/well connected (she was childhood friends with Tim Draper's daughter, that's how he became the first Theranos investor).
Several Maryland jails have tablets for inmates. Complete with video calling, messaging (monitored email and SMS), IHeartRadio, Pluto, Tubia, Coursera, Khan Academy and a bunch of games.
These are state and county institutions, not federal. So I can only imagine what's up at the Feds.
I reckon you might be spitballing to an unnecessary degree about the phone. Cell phone possession is a federal crime, and if she gets ahold of an illegal one that isn't a factor of federal prison being a cakewalk, they proliferate in high security state prisons, either way it's going up someone's ass. She won't be giving zoom lectures on it though. I doubt it's something she will get involved with much, planning on use of one to make your decade easier is a good way to spend a a lot of the time in solitary confinement with privileges removed and maybe get time added.
That said, you are correct she probably will be going to a fairly cruisy minimum or low security prison. Due to the nature of federal crimes, with a heavy bimodal distribution of severity (i.e., financial/bank/tax fraud... or murdering a judge or during a bank robbery) you can end up in a very gnarly place or a 'Club Fed'. She will get to play volleyball and do watercolouring, maybe even swimming or roller skating, and there may not be a fence, but she's still getting locked in her cell in evenings, will have to do whatever job she's assigned to, will be around at least a few hardened exploitative types and wont be going anywhere for most of a decade at least.
Yes absolutely I am spitballing (according to iOS dictionary it’s an informal suggestion of a scenario). The scenarios that I’m describing are just vehicles to describe essentially what you’re saying in the second paragraph. But as absurd as things are in the world, just don’t take the possibility for granted if she can pull it off.
She may not be hardened, but she’s proven to be exploitative. And with her education and experience, is possibly as great a threat to her peers as anyone else with a more violent rap sheet.
You've got a great point that she has proven to have a skill for social manipulation, I wonder to what degree that was specific to convincing old powerful men to invest and projecting the 'Steve Jobs' mysterious tech guru image in public — It would be interesting to see how her charms work in a women's prison. Like, she did it for years during public appearances and at work, but will she keep using the fake baritone, around the clock, for ten years?
It would make a great movie, like a better reprise of "Shot Caller" feat. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
It is generally true that Federal prisons are less unpleasant than state prisons. Federal prisons have people convicted of things like interstate wire fraud. State prisons have most of the rapists and murderers, as these are rarely Federal crimes.
This is completely wrong. Prisoners in the federal prison system must serve at least 90% of their sentence. Holmes will not be getting out -- or have unfettered internet access -- anytime before late 2032 at the soonest.
There are. Cell phones. In. Prisons. People who have never even seen a fraction of the wealth that Elizabeth Holmes defrauded people out of are able to get them. She can very well wind up on a Web3 social platform anonymously by 2027, trading crypto while funding SciHub.
I am sure there are further carrots and sticks inside the prison, and of course 11 years is not life so she isn’t immune to extra punishment for more crimes.
I think it's possible someone gets her a phone. But she can't get away with streaming or even posting selfies. She'd have to stick with texting or using pseudonyms.
From my friend who was in: they get some daily time, and all their email is monitored. I could send him mail, but it was through the prison's website, not a regular email.
I imagine the web surfing they can do is fairly limited, but I didn't ask.
I also found out that you can buy anything in prison, including a cell phone, or drugs. Ratting out the people who actually sell the stuff is a great way to get yourself killed.
I'd honestly be shocked if Biden pardoned her. She's a household name at this point and everyone knows she's a con artist and a fraud. Biden gains very little by pardoning her and the media would have a field day going after him if he does. It would hurt the entire Democratic party if he pardoned Holmes.
The only way I see him pardoning her is if he loses the 2024 election and has some sort of fall out with the Democratic party that causes him to go scorched earth, and I don't both of those happening.
"President pardons Elizabeth Holmes" and "President pardons Sholam Weiss" are very different headlines.
Only one of those will draw public outrage, despite the fact that Elizabeth Holmes was sentences to 11 years and Weiss was sentenced to 845 years. I'm fairly certain that no one would care about the second headline because Trump pardoned Weiss a few years ago and no one said shit.
Googling it, Sholam Weiss served 20+ years of a 825 year!! sentence for a fraud that sounds comparable to Holmes'. He died two months after release too from a stroke
He's still alive. What Weiss did was arguably a lot worse than what Holmes did. Him and his friends basically stole half a billion dollars from an insurance company in what was at the time one of the largest corporate frauds ever. I think the state government and some other insurance companies had to basically bail them out in order to make the customers whole. Then he went on the run for 3 years until he was caught. He was living a life of luxury etc all stuff Holmes was never accused of. The only thing that's similar between them is that the loss amount was high. Though he did actually pay most of the restitution he was ordered, whereas Holmes will probably end up paying nothing.
Between you and the very similar sibling comment from
micromacrofoot I've edited my original statement. I completely agree with what you both are saying and wanted to clarify that I was highlighting the contrast between these sentences not advocating for draconian prison sentences for everyone.
Honestly, I don't see how an 11-year sentence would have much more of a deterrent effect on others than, say, a 3-year one. She doesn't seem likely to reoffend, and it's not like her time in jail will pay back the people she defrauded.
It seems like this sentence (like many others in our judicial system) is based more on retribution than anything else.
Oh yes she does. You think she's going to be happy at a menial job? No, she'll be right back with a new con the moment she's back on the street. Only now her name recognition will make the con harder.
She doesn't appear to feel that she did anything wrong originally, and by implication will feel like she's a victim of injustice, so, very likely to reoffend.
The length of prison time seems to me to have multiple aspects to them beyond just rehabilitation or retribution. Often it seems like the purpose is to send signals in order to set social norms, to discourage future criminals, to remove threats, and fairness when compared to worse or lesser crimes. People often debate the rehabilitation vs retribution aspect, but I rarely see people discuss the others.
To me at least. Risking a 3-year sentence to get a billion dollars might be worth it (assuming that I'm not morally objected to the "crime" in question), but 10 years feels a bit much.
It's not even the risk. Depending on the day you ask me, If I was given the option of living as a billionaire for several years and then spending several years in prison, I might just take it.
Though I suppose I personally would prefer the prison time first and the billionaire thing after (like in Chekhov's "The Bet"). In any case, I'm sure that there's a big fraction of humanity who would jump at the chance.
Virtually all of them are convicted in state courts and under state sentencing systems. Most states have mandatory minimums for 1st degree murder, and those minimums are much higher than Holmes' sentence; second-degree murder usually admits a huge range of sentences, which captures the variety of circumstances that might attend an unplanned killing.
> "Virtually" - is murder even a federal crime in the United States?
Yes, but the general federal murder law (18 USC § 1111) only applies in the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States”.
A lot of federal felonies have, in place of a general federal felony murder rule, a distinct crime or enhanced punishment when death is involved and deliberately killing certain federal officials is also a federal crime.
The possession charges are part of a concerted effort beginning in the 1980s "war on drugs" to provide reliable income for the budding private prison industry. It was a hugely successful campaign that has done irreperable damage to the US at the individual level as well as the broad public/financial level.
Poor people cannot afford to defend themselves, so they make easy targets for incarceration.
Wealthy or connected people take much more time and effort to imprison, so the risk vs reward for prosecutors is just not worth it in most cases. You have to _really_ piss off or embarrass a lot of powerful people to get taken down like this current case.
>The possession charges are part of a concerted effort beginning in the 1980s "war on drugs" to provide reliable income for the budding private prison industry.
Source? I checked wikipedia and it suggests that it was the other way around. The article on war on drugs also doesn't show much developments around the 80s. Most of the changes were in the 70s.
> The article on war on drugs also doesn't show much developments around the 80s
I can’t speak to the private prison stuff, but having grown up in the 80s in the US, I can tell you that the Wikipedia article is not complete for the 80s.
There was an enormous anti drug push at the time, culminating in 1989. It was everywhere in the culture that I experienced. Maybe a backlash to the popularity of cocaine at the time, I don’t know.
We even had video games displaying “say no to drugs” in attract mode
>I can’t speak to the private prison stuff, but having grown up in the 80s in the US, I can tell you that the Wikipedia article is not complete for the 80s.
>There was an enormous anti drug push at the time, culminating in 1989. It was everywhere in the culture that I experienced. Maybe a backlash to the popularity of cocaine at the time, I don’t know.
Maybe that's just biased by your memories? If you came of age in the 80s, you're obviously not going to remember all the anti-drug/tough on crime stuff that happened in the 70s. Note that just because that there weren't many developments in the 80s, doesn't mean that they weren't doing anti-drug programs in your school. It just means that the relevant policies were already enacted.
The wikipedia article for "tough on crime" also shows a similar timeline. Crime became a political issue well before the 80s.
Aside from the massive prison population growth during the Reagan years (for drug and minor offenses), it was the Just Say No campaign which was _everywhere_ during the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Say_No
As far as I know, none of the first ladies from Nixon, Ford, or Carter were on TV regularly talking about drugs.
Edit - added: The Clinton years saw even greater rate of increase in prison population, and for most of the same reasons.
"Reagan's presidency marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law violations increased from 50,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000 by 1997."
Seems excessive to me. I don't really care about people conning rich people into parting with their money, especially when they don't bother to do basic due diligence before hand.
"Holmes was acquitted on three charges relating to patients who received inaccurate test results but found guilty on four charges, including one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against investors."
A typical median families income was approx. $70k in 2021. That covers multiple people, and in general across the US is enough to pay for housing, schooling, medical care, etc.
A lifetime of that (inflation adjusted) is usually enough for someone to retire somewhere.
If you take the 48 years from 18 to social security retirement age of 66, that would make a median lifetimes earnings $3,360,000 in 2021 dollars.
Holmes got nearly $1bln from investors in the Theranos mess, which is 297 lifetimes worth of median earnings, which considering that directly maps to someone (or multiple someones) working hard for that time, can be consider ‘life’s works’.
She was convicted of fraud on at least $140 million of wire transfers out of that, or ‘only’ 41 life’s works.
While 11 years is a long time, the destruction of value done is nothing to scoff at.
With decent leadership, 300 people working for their entire lives could accomplish a lot of great things.
Of course, it could also be blown on crypto scams and lambos. It’s not a perfect comparison.
However, there's a consideration - if I somehow steal $1m from Elon, it materially doesn't affect him that much at all. But if I steal $5k from a McDonald's employee, it could ruin them.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.” -Anatole France
She didn't incinerate the money, she spent it, it went somewhere else. It went to workers and other companies.
Now maybe that money could have been spent to commission 300 workers to make great things. Maybe it would have gone to pump up the S&P 500 or some shitcoin.
The problem is that she used false pretexts to get and spend the money.
The ‘life’s work’ metric doesn’t say it’s wasted - it ends up folks pockets, of course, eventually. And some of that will of course also go into things which are more than ‘just’ living.
It’s what it was directed to accomplish, and if that activity produced something of equivalent value (or more) on it’s journey to that state, or dissipated into heat and noise.
Near as I can tell, Theranos was at least 99% heat and noise.
Eh, you would have to prove that the capital would have been allocated to something more useful in the absence of Theranos to prove that that hurts anyone. Most of her investors were not in the medical field, which is part of the reason they never realized she was selling snake oil.
> Penalties for misrepresenting your company help ensure that society devotes resources towards actually good ideas.
I agree with this in theory but I think fines and a ban from working in certain industries or founding companies is probably enough, not a decade in prison.
If it’s not possible to catch these scams in advance, what other chilling effect is going to reduce the quantity of others taking billions of dollars while lying through their teeth?
IMO the reason Holmes deserves to be locked up for a long time is not just because of the fraud she committed, but the way she tried to use her power and her powerful friends to destroy people whose only crime was telling the truth.
Seriously, read Bad Blood, see what she tried to do to Tyler Schultz, Erika Cheung, and Rochelle Gibbons (the widow of the Theranos scientist that committed suicide), among many others. The best analogy I can think of is Lance Armstrong's fraud. Yes, his cheating and lying about it was bad, but I guess at least somewhat understandable given the culture of cycling at the time. But the reason I despise the man is due to his mafioso tactics of intimidation he used to silence people. Holmes did the exact same.
People do not serve that long of sentences for mere possession. That's an exaggeration. I want legalization, but for mere possession you do not get that type of sentence. If someone is serving that for possession, it's one of many charges, a repeat offender attached to a bigger crime, or possession of a very large amount (into the pounds). I think most cases you hear about are someone that had a felony before (such as burglary) and then was caught with possession later on. It's not right, it shouldn't happen...but that's not -just- possession.
It's pretty insane to me still spending a year in prison for possession. Since I come from a country where possession has always be decriminalized, just thinking that some of my behavior could land me in jail is mind bending.
Can you share a citation for your claims? They're completely counter to what I've heard, and even seen firsthand. If anything, I would bet there are people who got busted for simple possession and then had fake charges tacked on to increase their punishment.
Not for sentencing timelines, but virtually nobody (less than 0.5% of all drug offenders) doing federal prison for drugs is in there for mere possession. [0]
The feds aren't going to get you for possession. That's more of a state level thing. If the feds are getting you for drugs it's because you had massive amounts, or crossed state lines with them. Ironically and sort of counter to your citation, simply possessing drugs while crossing state borders is considered trafficking.
Having a gun while being arrested with possession will get you that kind of sentence. Or at least, the authorities claim that to get a plea deal. Here's a firefighter who had a gun, was arrested for possession, and accepted a plea deal for 3 years in prison:
> "The only reason that he plead guilty is because the culture in office and it threatened Mr. Wilson with mandatory sentences that were more than 10 years," said Descano.
Kalief Browder was imprisoned for three years without trial on the accusation that he stole a backpack[2]. After three years, a judge told him he could plead guilty and walk free, or go to trial and risk being imprisoned for 15 years.
I get the feeling authorities lie a lot to get someone to plead guilty. It seems like over 90% of cases in the U.S. end in a plea deal. Everyone agrees that threatening to break someone's leg to force a confession is a gross violation of justice, but somehow it's fine to threaten to take away decades of their life to force them to confess.
Also: IIRC, a fair number of the people with long sentences for (say) drug possession are there as part of a plea deal which allowed them to avoid more serious charges. If we legalized drug possession, they would still have gone to jail, just on a different set of charges.
And am I also understanding correct that this is for fraud of the investors. But that fraud of the patients getting wrong results was ok and not punished?
The problem is there is a quantitative to compare the punishments for each crime. As such we cannot just throw our hands up and say they are incomparable, we have to compare them to the best of our ability.
There has to be some punishment. If I steal $100 from you and the risk is I get caught and all I would have to do is give it back then there would be a lot more white collar crime.
Exactly - taking away freedom is really the only penalty you can apply to white collar crime, or the risk/reward would be grossly in favor of committing the crime - even income garnishments can't push you to absolute zero.
Before modern bankruptcy laws, it was common for people who owe a lot of money to go to debtor's prison (and this still happens in some parts of the world with more archaic legal systems). At a glance it may seem contradictory since locking someone up would probably preclude any chance the debtor might have to make money towards the debt but the optics of getting punished for wrongdoing is clearly more important here.
This stance is absolutely baffling to me. Just goes to show how our attitudes towards white collar crime (which is orders of magnitude more lucrative than most petty crime) are grossly out of proportion to the harm they cause compared to, say, a car thief.
It's about reoffense, so it's specific to the type. Elizabeth Holmes and SBF needed people to give them a lot of money. They won't be able to do that again without some serious redemption arc.
Also their activity would be watched closely and income garnished.
I agree that in contrast to regular crime, there is no need for prison for incapacitation purpose of punishment, some record forbidding any kind of entrepreneurship or managerial posts would be enough. For reparation purpose of punishment, garnishing the income would be enough.
But there is still deterrence purpose of punishment - if you remove prison from considerations, it significantly changes risk calculations for white collar crime making it much more profitable.
I'm curious on this one, obviously a technical breakdown of how sentencing is applied in cases like this has been posted elsewhere in this thread, based on past (offence) history, non/mitigating circumstances, magnitude of the offence and presumably offset by how you plead etc. So this is the disincentive side to future criminals and this would seem to be an area of fraud (high-stakes) where you stand a (very) high-chance of getting caught, unlike a lot of other fraud where this doesn't appear to be the case [citation needed].
But on the other side, what are the incentives (to future criminals) to try pull off fraud of this magnitude. There's obviously various psychological effects playing out here (as well as circumstantial ones, great idea goes pear-shaped but it's seemingly too late to pull-out due to ego/sunkcost/other fallacies/last minute save).
But has anyone attempted a game-theoretic payoff matrix, I'm just wondering in the wider scheme of things (to loop back in the post I'm replying to about 11years feeling light) will this kind of sentence actually deter any future similar cases from happening or are the payoff's (financial or otherwise) just too high for this to apply any real deterrent threat to those who are likely to be in the position to be influenced by it?
So in reality, actually this is just really a punishment?
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what happened to all of the Theranos hardware / technology after the company was shut down? e.g. the edison testing machines
What is the value of IP that doesn't work? Edison machine IP seems about as useful as those time travel or perpetual motion machine patents that come up.
I don't think that the machine IP has much (any) value, more just curious what happened to them from an "oddity" viewpoint e.g. did they get thrown in a dumpster or is there some warehouse out there, packed with all the stuff they cleared out of the old Theranos HQ
They were often running tests on competitors machines. They either passed those results off as coming from their machines, or validated their own results using competing machines.
Their machine could not do what it promised with the amount of blood it claimed to use and was no better than proven machines, and arguably worse as they had lot of maintenance issues even operating at their HQ.
As the other's have said, Theranos technology had nothing of value. Not only did the technology not work, it is physically impossible for it to ever work - capillary blood is not homogeneous enough at that small of a volume to give accurate quantitative results.
This is one of the things that made me a bit angry when reading some of the letters of support to Holmes today, and her own statement. That is, so much of it still carried on with the fantasy that "Holmes was close, but just fell short".
No, she didn't fall short. Her own lust for recognition and power blinded her to the physical realities of what was possible, harming investors, employees and patients in the process.
I'm actually a bit surprised at the outcome - 11 years seems like a fair and justified sentence for what she perpetrated.
I feel really bad for her children, I can't believe she had the gall to have them given this inevitability.
I'm also of the mind that people shouldn't go to prison for non-violent crime (some extreme form of probation seems more effective to me), but that's an entirely different story.
I am not aware of any statement from her or those close to her that confirms your assertion. She is 38 years old. If she wants children, it's now or never. She might be a terrible person, but that doesn't change the realities of female biology.
I’m not sure that analysis is any more flattering. She had children knowing she was at serious risk of significant incarceration. Pretty awful situation she’s created for innocent children.
I find it odd that she found love and married. It seems like a pretty big negative that someone would have to get over to meet and love someone who defrauded billions of dollars.
And are most of the people she‘s well-connected to not annoyed that she lost their money?
And isn‘t attractive just stating the same as good genetics?
And is she really that smart, given the fact that she first dropped out and then her company failed and now she was imprisoned and the company only „worked“ anyway because of fraud?
> And are most of the people she‘s well-connected to not annoyed that she lost their money?
Ya admittedly one would have to assess that and also make some estimate about how much her notoriety will positively or negatively affect her offsprings' outcomes. I tend to lean toward it being a net positive, since fame seems valuable almost regardless of how it's acquired these days.
> And isn‘t attractive just stating the same as good genetics?
It also includes height, medical history, longevity, intelligence, ambition/drive, work ethic. I admittedly don't know much about medical history, but I might be willing to gamble.
> And is she really that smart,
No she's not really that smart, I'd estimate 1-2 stddevs from the mean. In my opinion that's smart enough for a potential spouse with other positive attributes, particularly if you think that you're smarter still.
a life of community service would be a good start, stick him in a studio apartment serving meals to the homeless 40 hours a week and he might wish for prison
This is not the first and won't be the last case of its kind.
The interesting thing politically is if this will be enforced or not, as I am sure there are a lot of Silicon valley founders worrying now. At best they will get some deserved extra scrutiny, at worse will be getting investigated.
I've seen talk about Holmes' political connections, but she surely is too toxic for them to get her a "free pass". She might get relief from somewhere else though?
Honestly, I couldn't care less about the sentences for Holmes and Bankman-Friend.
You know who I want locked up?
- The guy who pushed someone into the tracks on the NYC subway
- The guy who poured sulfuric acid on a woman in NYC
- The guy who attacked elderly Asian women in SF
- The guy who attacked elderly Asian women in Oakland
- The guy who spit on a friend in San Francisco 2 weeks ago
- The guy who raped Chanel Miller
- The guy who raped another unnamed victim at Stanford recently
- The ones running around South Bay smashing small businesses, smashing cars, sometimes while people are in them
Unfortunately the government doesn't give a flying f about locking the people who are ACTUAL threats to the safety of me and my friends, and busy dealing with locking up some startup founders, who admittedly are disgusting, but not nearly as disgusting as the above.
You know, they could easily go after both groups no?
We often feel we are in a XOR situation, but it's often easier for the govt to try to consistently enforce rules independently of the faces attached to the accused.
This. It's almost sad to see that people equate completely different crimes with each other.
To be honest it's actually a bit refreshing to see someone actually receive a significant charge for financial crimes such as investment fraud. So often it seems white collar crime goes largely unpunished.
I think Holmes did actual damage that equals or surpasses some of these violent acts you enumerate. Medical tests that don't work is a serious crime. There are serious consequences to, say, an HIV test that doesn't work right. And she sold that with full knowledge that it didn't work.
Of course, she's being prosecuted for financial crimes and not this... I guess they got Al Capone on taxes.
> Medical tests that don't work is a serious crime.
I'm not disputing that but there's not much evidence that has come forth that someone actually got hurt as a result of Holmes's bad tests. She is in fact being prosecuted mostly for financial crimes, which frankly, don't affect me or my safety, it makes no difference to me.
I'd much rather financial crimes get punished financially and every last resource of physical locking up be spent on additional hours chasing the living shit out of these people who are committing sexual assaults and racially-motivated violent hate crimes.
That is a matter of life and death. False negative? You put your survival at risk and can unknowingly spread a deadly virus to others, causing harm not just to you but others. False positive? You go on medications with very, very serious side effects on the theory that it will kill you to not do so. Either outcome is horrible violence to innocent lives; if you "test" a thousand people this way you probably already did more violence than the guy who shoves one person on the subway as an isolated incident.
Holmes knew the tech didn't work and continued to allow it to be used.
but you see, the rich need those animal-monster-archetypes to put fear and disgust into working people
also, if you want to understand power, you've got to take off your engineering hat and start thinking in psycho-social fairy tale logic.
(p.s. the concept of anarcho-tyranny is the best thing i've heard from the peter thiel types)
Remember the brown bodega owner that fought back against the black attacker trying to murder him, and was still arrested? and how deeply unfair that felt, making protecting yourself a crime?
someone on twitter had an incredible comment that summed up his ideological sin in stabbing the criminal: "he killed the king's deer"
you'll understand the world much better if you stop willing it to be fair (this is a need of our inner child) and just observe how it works first, like an alien anthropologist...
but just like talking about a dream you had, it won't be polite or even possible to explain or discuss what you see with others, sadly
She (possibly) gets pregnant during the first trial to garner sympathy. Even if you have a charitable interpretation of this only the worst of the worst narcissistic sociopaths decide to "start a family" when they're potentially facing 15 years in Federal Prison. She's currently pregnant with her second child.
Now those kids get to grown up without a mother and live the rest of their lives with the knowledge or at least suspicion they're in this world because their con-artist mother was trying to manipulate the justice system.
Even IF you take the approach that she thought big and failed, doing no real wrong the situation with her pregnancies (in my mind) isn't up for debate. On this issue alone I find her completely reprehensible.
It is terrible if that was the reason, but as for the kids, plenty of kids grow up with one parent or raised by grandparents, aunts/uncles, or adoptive parents.
Even if it wasn't the reason I don't think it's a stretch to say the seed of doubt that this situation plants in the minds of these children will likely cause a lot of completely unnecessary psychological damage.
Or she's 38 and her fertility window is closing. I'll hold many things against her, she deserves prison time, but I won't hold having a child against her or judge her for it. She may be doing it for the reasons you mentioned, but so many women go to prison with far fewer resources to care for their children while they're in. I doubt she thought any seasoned judge would take it into consideration.
And she will be out before she's 50 and be able to have some relationship with her kids. I agree with you (and not the grandparent comment) -- I can't hold this against her.
She could have frozen eggs and done surrogate birth at 50. Or adopt (likely private as she is now a convicted felon). Average life expectancy for women in the US is 79 years and much longer for wealthy people. That's long enough to not only be there for your children in their important development years but also (likely) attend their wedding, be a grandparent, etc. This has the added benefit of the kids not having the psychological damage that comes from the whole "did my mom have me just to try to stay out of prison?" aspect.
She's very intelligent and calculating and had to have considered these substantially better options for starting a family given her situation. Instead, I'm convinced these pregnancies were timed to solely benefit her with likely no consideration for what it meant for these poor kids.
Frozen the eggs? It doesn’t work that way. Viability drops off a cliff after 5 years and ivf is not a simple process. It’s hell on a woman. No one is going to want to go through it multiple times if they don’t have to or risk having quintuplets.
Can confirm it’s hell, and I was just the male partner and our benefits paid for it. We were fortunate and it took 4 rounds. Also, I don’t think the multiple birth is done any more, that’s just if you use fertility drugs. With IVF, they only implant one embryo that’s made it to day 6 at a time.
I was conceived via anonymous donor sperm and IVF but I wasn't aware of the viability timeline issue. Sorry for that. Yet still there's adoption.
As I just elaborated further on in another comment I didn't have parents for the first 10 years of my life either and it was damaging to say the least. Also kind of ironic because of the lengths my parents went to have me only to disappear for a decade.
I'm passionate about this and have tremendous sympathy for these kids because in a way I am these kids. I have such a strong dislike for her because I know this. I've lived it.
I know a lot of things go into such decisions as significant as starting a family but if she had children at any point in the 20 years before being indicted I would have a completely different perspective on this and nothing but sympathy for her in terms of the family situation.
In terms of fertility window - too bad. This is one of the many things she should have been thinking of while conducting her fraud over the past decades. Not everyone should be a parent. She also has the resources to do things like freeze eggs, etc. I know that's not a guarantee but plenty of men have children at 50 and it doesn't seem terrible for the kids.
While the children will be better off than parents with fewer resources this is an almost guaranteed "years of therapy" situation for these poor kids.
Judges don't convict people - juries do and I think it's been demonstrated she's very calculating and conniving. If there was even a remote chance she could skate free based on one juror holding out on a conviction based on her family situation she would take it (and did). It just didn't work and the kids will be the ones paying for it.
Yes, the judge determines the sentencing. I'm not a lawyer and it's complicated but from my understanding there are a lot of quirks (for lack of a better term) when it comes to the sentencing phase. For example, prosecutors asking for sentencing are essentially given cart blanche in terms of making arguments and presenting evidence to the judge to impact sentencing that can't be challenged by the defense and usually can't be introduced during the trial itself. Basically when it comes to sentencing both sides get to take the gloves off.
When she was still a hot ticket part of her public image was the assertion that she was too driven about changing the world to have a boyfriend, which sent a lot of impressionable men absolutely ga-ga for her.
She is not going to be a mother to those children. She is not going to care for them. She will not be a part of their development. They will be entering their tween years when she gets out. Her children will not know her and will not particularly want to have a relationship with her.
Her reasons for getting pregnant are solely and exclusively selfish.
There’s no point in getting into the philosophical debate that is your first point - with the most obvious response being if they weren’t here they wouldn’t know the difference. There is no “they”.
It’s really disheartening to see this come up again and again on this thread.
If anyone would really trade the first 10 years of their life with their mother for any amount of money I truly feel sorry for them. Yes they have a dad. But they also have a mom - but not really because she’s in prison.
This tendency here on HN to presume this situation won’t be of significant negative impact to these kids is shocking to me.
If you really think a kid who lives the first ten years of their life never seeing their mom outside of a prison will be just fine because they have a “millionaire father” I’m not sure what to say.
There are worse situations. Is she selfish because she wants kids before she goes to prison? Is it better to not have kids, instead of having kids while you are in prison? Is it better to not be alive, than to have to overcome a difficult situation? If you don't want to get philosophical, then don't dispense your moraline.
It's ok to feel for the kids. To feel for them so much to tell them you shouldn't exist, is a bit much.
Probably not the best idea to commit crimes that carry prison sentences if you want to start a family. I agree with OP. This is truly horrifying narcissism.
In a previous thread, I had this at "more than 10 years, less than 60" (yeah, that's an easy bet to make!). The core driver of the sentence is probably the guidelines 2B1.1 table, which scales sentencing levels by economic losses. She was convicted for something like $140MM in fraudulent losses, which by themselves ask for a 24-level escalation (the table maxes out in the mid-40s).
By the numbers, the court was probably quite lenient here. Not to say that's an unjust outcome; the "lenient" option for sentencing on serious federal felonies is still quite harsh.
Edit
I tracked down the prosecutor's sentencing memorandum; they asked for 15 years. So I guess maybe not that lenient.
Later edit
The PSR (the court's own sentencing memorandum, which the prosecution and defense respond to) had Holmes at level 43. I hereby claim that I called this. :P
But the PSR looks at the guidelines level table, which suggests 960 months for level 43, and instead recommends 108 months. So the court imposed a sentence higher than the PSR, lower than the prosecution asked, and all parties asked for much lower than the guideline maximum for the level.
I'm doing the math wrong; the guidelines range at that level is 240 months per charge (usually served consecutively). Still much higher than the ultimate sentence.
That's true, and it does mean that once you hit $550MM, you might as well keep going, but on the flip side, the full sentence accelerator for 2b1.1 at $550MM gets you above 20 years by itself.
He may go for it but I don't think he will succeed.
Come on, this is a guy who had:
* A company with a constant revenue stream in a business that could be pretty much 100% automated.
* Backing from the largest investors and VC funds worldwide.
* Valuable connections with people higher up in academia and the prevailing political party in the US (all the way up to the president).
* All the money in the world and free reign over what to do with it.
* Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets.
* A massive group of followers that found his antics particularly alluring and who were trusting him with their money more and more everyday.
* A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (ok, this one's sarcasm)
And he still managed to f*ck it up. I don't think he's capable of pulling off a Hillblom, tbh.
They are either industry saboteurs planted by big banking interests or they are complete imbeciles.
Same can be said about people who gave them money. It's just retarded. The whole business went completely against the core purpose of cryptocurrency. Anyone who invested in him or had their money sitting on his exchange (or any bankrupt exchange) deserved to lose it. It's scary to think what damage large amounts of capital could do in the hands of such idiots; society is better off now.
I ended up losing a significant amount of money on the FTX debacle, and I want to demonstrate that even risk-aware people who tried to act relatively prudently can still end up losing money. I also want to argue that while most parties involved (myself included) made wrong decisions one way or the other throughout this -- and as a result are greatly suffering from the consequences -- that we should focus less on blaming the victims, and more on prosecuting the actual villains, while figuring out a clever way of preventing such large-scale fraud from happening again.
Here is my story:
- I put $50k into FTX last year. The reason for putting the money into FTX was because it was the only large-scale platform that allowed me to trade the specific token that I wanted to trade.
- My investment proved to be more successful than I had anticipated, and I turned the initial investment into $600k by the end of last year.
- By the spring of this year, I had sold my entire position and was now sitting with $400k USD on FTX (as I didn't sell everything at the top).
- At that time, I attempted to withdraw the entire amount into my bank account, but immediately ran into issues with my bank.
- For background, I'm a dual citizen, originally from South America but now living in the US. As you may be aware, US citizens were not allowed to use FTX.com; hence I used my South American citizenship to get verified by FTX, with the condition that I could only withdraw to a South American bank in my name.
- I spent about 10-20 hours this spring attempting to make the withdrawal, which included dozens of phone calls and emails with my bank as well as the FTX support team, in order to execute the transaction. But the process turned out to be more complicated than I had expected.
- Full details are not necessary here as I wish to somewhat protect my identity, but it became clear to me that this process would be very difficult to complete unless I was physically present at the bank in South America.
- While I considered that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not risk-free, I deemed the risk relatively low. A part of that judgement was the fact that FTX was an exchange, and not a bank nor a prop-trading house, and thus I viewed the risk of a run on the bank scenario, or FTX speculating away my money in trading, as low.
- What instead worried me was that FTX could get hacked, or that the founders could take my money and run, but given the high-profile nature of the company and its founders, I made the call that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not an overwhelming risk factor.
- I also considered converting my money into BTC and transferring them to cold storage, but ended up not doing that as I worried about a crypto meltdown, and I reasoned that my money was safer sitting in USD at FTX (despite the aforementioned risks). I further reasoned, that given that the amount was already quite large, that it would be even harder to explain to a local bank where the money had come from once it had gone off an exchange and then come back on again.
- For all of these reasons, I decided to wait, and was planning to do the transfer in less than 2 months from today, once back in South America.
We obviously know what happened next, and we know that pretty much any other solution would have been better for me. But with the information available to me at the time, it wasn't obvious that what happened would happen. I believed I had reasoned appropriately about the risks and made the correct decisions at the time when I made them, with the information available at the time.
My point is that we don't know the stories behind why so many people kept their money on FTX. Perhaps some were more reckless than others, and perhaps someone reading this thinks that I was reckless too. But even so, in my view, none of us "deserved" to have this happen to us. So instead of vilifying the victims, the focus should be on holding the perpetrators responsible, while thinking of a better way forward so that this d...
To expand on parent, you may wish to read a little more about USDC, Uniswap and non custodial wallets (also known as self custody).
Uniswap would allow you to trade any token that follows the ERC20 interface (not all of them do, but many). USDC would allow you to mitigate day to day price volatility. Non custodial wallet would mean the burden lies on you to secure the funds, but a CEX getting hacked or investing away your deposits is not possible. Self custody also means you could move some to another CEX in US to attempt withdrawal.
Also should note there are different and additional risks with this approach: you might lose your keys, get phished/hacked, or use the blockchain incorrectly, or USDC/Uniswap contracts could fail, etc.
Every approach has risks, and the right approach depends on the person. I'd never reccomend self custody for my mother (actually I'd never reccomend crypto for my mother) but if you have the technical skills and are personally responsible self custody might be safer than a cex. It also let's you take advantage of defi, which has a whole other set of risks and benefits.
Thank you! I'm not very familiar with USDC, though I am familiar with Dai and the MakerDAO ecosystem, and it looks like USDC serves a similar purpose, even though the design between the two looks different (one is centralized, one is not). Perhaps those two assets offer similar order of magnitude tradeoffs in terms of tail risk. In retrospect, putting the money in USDC (or Dai) or similar would have been a good course of action.
I realize this wasn't evident from my initial post, but I actually go back many years with crypto and have run both airgapped computers at home as well as used Trezors without mistake (including using Uniswap), so I'm less worried about losing my keys or committing other such user errors.
Ironically, while I used to worry more about using CEX's (thinking they could hacked, or the founders could run away with the money), over time I gravitated towards worrying more about actually getting my crypto money back into the banking system, without running afoul of AML / KYC hurdles, and I thought CEX's would be the less risky option in this regard.
And in this case specifically, once the money on FTX became sizable, I became even more paranoid about this, and I guess I got set in my own thinking of not wanting the money to leave the exchange for fear of not being able to transfer it back into the banking system.
In retrospect, it's funny (and obviously sad at the same time) how I overly worried about one thing, while completely missing out on what the real risk was.
You all have been extremely helpful, so I thank you very much (and not least for allowing me to put some of my thoughts in writing and reasoning with you about it). We live and learn -- now onto figuring out how to make up for the money lost!
I'm curious - all of this makes sense, but what was the disadvantage to buying BTC (Or Eth, or whatever) on FTX, transferring it to Coinbase, and cashing out on Coinbase?
Maybe this is a naive question with regards to how AML / KYC work in crypto, but would Coinbase (and in the extension, my bank) accept an incoming transfer of that size if they didn't know for sure that either 1) the money was coming from "me", or 2) that I had at least obtained it legally?
In my early conversations with my bank, they stated that among other things, they would need to see proof of where the funds had come from (proof of original $ deposit into FTX, FTX trading history, etc.), and I just assumed that sending the crypto to a different exchange would add another layer of complexity that would make that process much harder.
But perhaps I took an overly conservative (and now catastrophic) stance when trying to do everything as cleanly as possible.
I have a sneaking feeling your approach might have worked (or at least it's hard to imagine it being a worse outcome than what actually happened). I'm feeling pretty stupid now for not exploring this further. I guess I never expected FTX would just disappear, and so I didn't explore every option as fully as I should have. I appreciate your suggestion in any case.
I don't know if Coinbase would take that much BTC and immediately cash it out to USD and transfer to your bank.
The part that should be no problem is the American bank itself, if you ask first for instructions. Coinbase is a legit American entity. Procedure should be same as making large transfers or consolidations of IRAs or liquidating brokerage holdings to buy a house.
Thank you for the comment. I hadn't spent all that much time thinking about this from an AML / KYC perspective up until now, but I recall in years past when I wanted to make a bank transfer from Colombia to the US, it felt like I was holding my breath for the money to eventually arrive (and this was bank <-> bank, without crypto involved), given all the paperwork and questions asked.
The money did arrive successfully by the way, but I just took away from that exercise that banks are really, really strict about money transfers and the origin of monies. This all has me thinking that getting crypto back into the banking system -- to the extent it's easy today -- might only get harder in the future.
The short answer is no, most exchanges are happy to take large deposits straight from an Eth or BTC wallet with a little bit of KYC, but your US bank might have put up the same guardrails and Coinbase could always fold in the same way that FTX has.
Fair enough, and thank you for the response. Reading some of the other responses, it seems people are generally of the view that it probably would have been doable, but perhaps not without some level of hickup, particularly with regards to the US bank. I guess I will never know 100% since this is now in the past.
And the comment around Coinbase also makes sense, though I suppose my exposure to that risk could have been minimized assuming the money would ideally only have been sitting there for a few days. In retrospect, I should have obviously attempted the Coinbase route.
I've never moved more than a few thousand dollars around at a time... but you absolutely could move that much into coinbase and withdraw into a US account. Might have some forms to fill out, might have a small waiting period. Will have to send coinbase your US ID etc. But i would be surprised if you had too many issues.
Thank you, that is helpful to know for future reference if I'm ever in a similar situation. I have also moved smaller amounts in the past without much problems (though this was years ago), but you are probably right that this too would have been doable.
I was wondering if this was your concern - I just didn't know how it stacked up to trying to move hundreds of thousands of dollars from a bank in Brazil to a US one.
Good point. My experience with moving to and from South America to the US is that it has been doable, but always with the feeling of "will the money get stuck somewhere this time" (and I never tried anything near this amount).
My concern in this specific situation was greater around moving money from crypto -> bank, vs. bank -> bank. My general sense is that once the money is inside of the traditional banking system, it's less likely to face issues.
But coming to the bank with a wad of cash (or crypto), in my view, could trigger all kinds of issues (in theory at least).
I wrote about what I see as the difference between gambling and investing in a prior comment, if of interest.
But I am genuinely much more curious around the human psyche in situations like these, and I'm seeking your thoughts if you would be kind enough to offer them since I think we are on different sides on this on, in this specific instance.
My experience with the human species is that they generally err on the side of compassion, vs. judgement, but less so in this case. If you could share your thoughts on what might drive the latter rather than former in this case, that would be highly appreciated.
On a personal note, and as I was clear to point out in the parent comment, I am not looking for any sympathy here, I'm a grown man and I am adept at handling adversity. But nor am I necessarily looking for vitriol unless there is a good reason for it. Your thoughts on this topic are appreciated.
> My experience with the human species is that they generally err on the side of compassion
I don't think extreme levels of greed deserves compassion. It's been more than 10+years. I can't have compassion for 20 years. People get tired man and don't care anymore and actually hope for the worst (but don't say it).
Interesting. So it may be your view of this constituting an extreme level of greed that drives your sentiment in this case. That makes more sense to me, though we clearly differ in our assessment of "extreme" and "greed".
Out of curiosity, would you then apply the same logic to people investing in SPAC's, growth stocks at extreme valuation levels, triple leveraged ETF's, doubling down on NKLA when their trucks are shown to roll down hills, etc.? Or is it strictly confined to crypto? To me, these are all different manifestations of the same thing -- a decade of easy money, enabled by flawed monetary policy. An investor in my view can still be rational (not greedy) while still taking interest in such opportunities.
Also, what if this were only 5% of my portfolio (I'm not disclosing the actual %'age, but consider the 5% for argument's sake), would you still consider it an extreme level of greed?
I have my own views of what constitutes extreme greed, but that tends to have more to do with how certain individuals (in this case FTX's executives, but can also be applied obvious scams like OneCoin, and many other scenarios) illegally enrich themselves by exploiting regular people. That, to me, is true extreme greed.
Either way, I think your response is interesting and I appreciate the extra color.
> investing in SPAC's, growth stocks at extreme valuation levels, triple leveraged ETF's, doubling down on NKLA when their trucks are shown to roll down hills, etc.?
Yes. I invest in leveraged etfs. You can't compare NKLA/crypto/SPACs with UPRO for example.
> would you still consider it an extreme level of greed?
I consider the whole crypto ecosystem. I mined bitcoin for some time when it was $300 and thought it was full ponzi even then.
> risk-aware people who tried to act relatively prudently can still end up losing money.
Risk-aware people don't gamble more money than they want to lose. The moral assumption behind "blaming the victims" of crypto schemes is that their losses are little more than a reckoning of their optimism, ignorance and greed, not a tragic economical ruin.
> I turned the initial investment into $600k
If you call it an investment you weren't very risk-aware at the time.
To me, a gamble is something where you go in with the intention of let's say, a 55% chance of winning, and a 45% chance losing it all; or a 10% chance of massively winning, and a 90% chance of losing it all. Whereas investing in things like equities is less binary (as it's rare for things to go to $0), and if you have good investment skills, investing seems to me to offer much greater ways to exploit inefficiencies in the market than what gambling does, and can create much better returns, no matter the asset class.
Obviously one has to be careful which asset class one invests in. High yield bonds are riskier than investment grade bonds; equities are riskier than high yield bonds; bluechip crypto is riskier than equities, and speculative tokens are riskier than bluechip crypto. I think all that is understood, and I was well aware of that aspect of the risk. But an aggressive choice of asset class doesn't necessarily turn it into a gamble, so I reject the way you framed this as a "gamble".
The one thing I would consider a gamble was my "gamble" that FTX would not go under before I had a chance to take my money out. I think it's probably fair to call that a gamble, if that's what you are referring to.
In either case, it's interesting how humans tend to be a quite a compassionate species in face of adversity, and yet, this specific topic seems to trigger something in the human psyche that elicits vitriol and compassion in roughly equal amounts, even as many people are clearly facing adversity. I'm not judging that reaction, but I'm curious as to why it's happening.
Fair enough. It sounds like a real roller coaster ride of good luck followed by terrible luck. I understand that it's sometimes unavoidable to move tokens to an exchange when you are about to cash out. The timing was just really unfortunate.
I guess there is a lesson to be learned about investing in tokens which can only be acquired and disposed of on a single exchange; that is a bit of a red flag. Unfortunately, with crypto, it's better to be paranoid. Many governments and big banks don't want crypto to succeed so these kinds of major collapses are to be expected... I wouldn't be surprised if some of them may be orchestrated intentionally.
Agreed. Well, live and learn. I tried to steer clear of the obviously shady things (like yield farming, etc.) which to me seemed unsustainable all along, but as it turns out, there are ample ways to lose anyway. Thanks for the comment.
Ramesh ("sunny") at Theranos got $40 million bucks when he cashed out after a brief period of working at a dot com startup and he blew most of it on his divorce and Theranos. On the upside, he got to date 19 year old Holmes. People are alleging that SBF being romantic partners with Alameda's chief trader Elisson was also a bad idea for similar reasons.
Btw, does anyone know where the heck Elisson went? I haven't seen any articles specifying her current whereabouts.
> * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets.
Since both his hedge fund and exchange lost billions, I doubt it.
Except for going long in a bull market, was he ever successful in anything?
> * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (Ok, this one's sarcasm)
Again, they've lost massive amounts of money trading.
If your strategy makes a lot of money for years, but then loses more than anything you've ever earned, it's a crappy strategy.
> If your strategy makes a lot of money for years, but then loses more than anything you've ever earned, it's a crappy strategy.
Depends who's money you're playing with. If you profit on the way up and only your customers lose on the way down. Then high-risk strategies are (unfortunately) always better.
My trading strategy has never made me billions nor lost billions. Yet I kinda feel like there's a solid possibility many of these fools will end up waaay better off than me. Assuming they can stay out of jail.
Some of these fools stash the wealth on the side for when they get out of jail. During their sentence they take classes, meditate and self actualize or possibly write a book about some life lesson they just learned in prison. White collar crime is quite lenient in punishments, jail may even be a good experience for some
MIT grads need to stay in their lane. This kind of incompetent deceit at the highest levels of power and influence is supposed to only be possible with a degree from or Harvard and Yale.
edit: what I mean, trollishly, is that I expected more conscientiousness from a room of MIT quant types, even if business process and diligence was not in their wheelhouse.
Plenty of people fuck up in similar or even better circumstances.
What amazes here is the sheer magnitude and low intellect. They did no accounting. They bought property in their own names out of company (customer) assets. He was still "trying to raise money" as of yesterday, in full denail.
This is not an excessively sophisticated criminal mind, he doesn't seem to understand why people would take issue with his actions.
I disagree simply because many people go on to commit the same crime again after release. Most notably with a few serial killers who continued after release.
That isn’t to say we should lock everyone who commits a serious crime up for life, just that there can be utility for seemingly excessively long sentences.
It’s really the ~5-10 year convictions that are over used IMO. I think we have lost sight of how large a penalty 3 years actually is.
I think parents point was that if you’re old enough a 40 year sentence might as well be a 1,000 year sentence, because you’re never getting out either way.
IDK, fraud gamble for the chance to become a billionaire sounds way more attractive if the worse case is 3 years in prison. 3 years is less than college whereas 11 is basically k-12.
Fraud on that scale definitely deserves a stronger penalty.
I was more talking about cases like this where prosecutors sought 10 years for a protester getting excessively confrontational with police officers and now she is serving 4 years in prison: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/pregnant-black-activist-...
The jury acquitted Martin of inciting a riot and reached no verdict on whether she threatened officers’ lives. Her legal team was “elated” when jurors found her guilty only of breaching the peace, punishable by no more than a $500 fine and 30 days in jail, investigator Tony Kennedy recalled.
State law defines breachers of the peace as any disturbers, “dangerous and disorderly persons” or people who utter “menaces or threatening speeches.” But prosecutors presented the charge as a “high and aggravated” crime, which carries up to 10 years imprisonment. Rosado said Judge Kirk Griffin did not allow her to explain the distinction, and the possibility of a much stiffer penalty, to the jury.
I am not saying she does or doesn’t deserve to go to prison, I am more commenting on how the options go from 30 days to multiple years between the seemingly similar crimes.
> there can be utility for seemingly excessively long sentences
That’s only if there is no rehabilitation. The US system seems to be focused solely/overtly on punishment, which obviously means that whoever got locked up hasn’t had their mental state improved during the time of their lockup.
There is some rehabilitation, but obviously not what we'd like to see. I work with formerly incarcerated individuals that have ended up going on to do quite well.
There's also a phenomenon where gang bangers and the like "age out" — they just seem to stop. Unfortunately for many, this realization often occurs in the middle of a very lengthy sentence (they typically drop out, debrief, and enter protective custody).
Sadly, for many rehab isn't just a matter of wanting to do better. Very large numbers of the incarcerated can't do something as seemingly trivial as parse a bus schedule. Aside from undereducation, a fair amount are objectively unintelligent. When all you know is crime and you have a massive uphill battle just to be what many would consider a functional adult, recidivism seems inevitable for some. What makes it worse is that cultural reasons prevent many from reaching out for help while they're behind the wire. It's frankly sad to see, but we're getting better —the investments being made in tablets and the like will hopefully bear fruit in the coming years.
Since you say "almost everybody", I assumed you have been behind bars yourself and know how easy it is to survive not being raped, stabbed to death, pushed to wolves by other gang or being killed by that gang for not going against another one, being forced to snitch by guards, or being snitch out to other inmates in retribution for not snitching out to the guards, and much much more.
No I don't think you spent a day behind. If you were to, you wouldn't be merely pricing your life at $24k per day.
At the Federal level there is no parole. She gets 54 days off per year for "good behavior". So even if she gets that every year she still serves 9 years.
The federal government doesn't have a parole system, and the minimum amount of time you have to serve of your sentence is 85% regardless of good behavior credits.
I see this argument a lot. FTX people donated almost the same amount(a bit less) to Republican politicians. Same mode of operation many big tech orgs use.
Just a theory, but I think that unless politicians feels he has future leverage, they're unlikely to be lenient (can't think of a more fairweather friend than a politician who you know because you gave them money) and actually may go harder on him because of this narrative which they feel they need to counter
They might just want him out of the news cycle. Just look how many stories tying FTX to democrats FOXNEWS already placed on their website. A counter-story would require that people listen, and that FN would report that story. They won't. So getting the story buried and forgotten might be the best play.
FTX exec Ryan Salame donated $23 million to Republicans. FTX buttered both sides of their bread and people in the dark keep wanting to make this a political issue, when it is a fraud issue. Sam donated 27 million to the Protect Our Future organization that supports candidates who take a long term view on policy planning and $10 million to Democrats, is the numbers I've seen.
Donating to politicians can help with some things, but it's hard to see why judges, who he did not donate to, would be influenced.
Also, even if the politicians could help, they already have the money, and SBF can do nothing for them in the future, so they would have to help him out of some selfless sense of honor.
I think her being pregnant and having a child definitely made the sentence a little lighter than if she were otherwise. I do wonder if she'll even serve the full sentence.
The same math gets me over 10 years, but: fair point. She'll serve most of her sentence. The key thing is that it's pretty deterministic; she's not getting out after a couple years, as can be the case for some state felonies.
Yep! I only added that because people frequently confuse parole with "earned time" (and you're right about the math, since I forgot to rate-out the time she can't earn).
Rule of thumb is you'll do 85% of your sentence in the actual federal prison, 15% can be served in a community corrections center. These are usually halfway houses, or county jail if no halfway house in the area contracts with the fed.
tl;dr: federal prisoners get almost two months per year for good behavior.
> Under United States federal law, prisoners serving more than one year in prison get 54 days a year of good time on the anniversary of each year they serve plus the pro rata good time applied to a partial year served at the end of their sentence, at the rate of 54 days per year.
The court doesn't need to mention it to discreetly take it into account. Otherwise why wait until April to begin the sentence? Did they mention the pregnancy there? This is a legal, social, and political orchestration process, not a computational system.
There are lots of reasons the BOP would prefer to avoid incarcerating pregnant women. Surrenders are usually 4-6 weeks out; with the holidays, that pushes out into January. She's not getting that much of a break.
Lots of kids suffer worse deprivations than having one parent in jail. Life is tough, but these kids probably have a better than average shot at a good life.
They'll be raised by a wealthy family with every material advantage in life. Some estimates have it that around 1 in 8 children in America go hungry at some point in their childhoods. So even if these kids are just fed regularly, that puts them ahead of millions of children.
The child did not lose a mother, if he/she never had one. Also she'll be out around the time the child will start elementary school. So yes the child will still be in a better spot than 99% of all children in single family households and probably than almost all in low income ones as well.
It's not a question of rights, since she obviously has them, it's a question of 'How fucked up is it to put your desire to have a child over that child's wellbeing.'
At some point in the desire to wellbeing ratio, that equation crosses the line into 'incredibly selfish'. Children aren't just trophies for their parents.
how did she mess those up? from what I hear, those kids will be taken care of better than most kids on this planet. Sure, not having the mother close is terrible, but who are we to judge that they would have been better off never born? And yes, she probably did this intentionally, but it really was her last chance to even have kids.
> I think getting pregnant was part of her plan to get away from prison. Well 11 years is still 11 years. Tough luck!
I think it's more likely she was worried she wouldn't still be able to have children by the time she got of prison. Probably a nebulous mixture of reasons, but I can't believe it's just a desperate ploy for leniency. It's not unusual for people to really want children, regardless of their circumstances.
“Theranos, Holmes and former company president Sunny Balwani were charged with fraud by the SEC in 2018”, “Holmes gave birth to her first child on July 10, 2021”.
Wow - that’s some high level not-giving-a-shit about other humans (the kids). Or even more cynical, sociopathically using kids/pregnancy to try to get a reduced sentence?
I didn't look carefully, but Holmes' defense sentencing memorandum doesn't appear to mention pregnancy at all. Let's be careful about not making things up to suit a narrative!
It's not about people not wanting the kid to be born though because it prevented harshed sentencing though - it's about the mother possibly wanting to have it for the same reason.
Well, of course it wouldn't mention it. But you can take things into consideration when sentencing, even when they're not stated: they can still affect how you set the penalties and what you chose to include or not.
It wouldn't. There's a solid argument to be made the intention was to influence the jury in terms of conviction.
In any case deciding to start a family when you're even potentially looking at 15 years in prison is a terrible move for these children - absent mother, the lifelong psychological damage of knowing or suspecting the reason for your existence may have been an attempt to manipulate the justice system, etc.
There were financial losses in this case but at this point the most seriously impacted victims of Elizabeth Holmes are her own children.
Imagine you're a woman in your mid-thirties facing a decade or more in prison. You've always wanted children, but you thought there'd be time for that later. Now, though, if convicted, you'll probably never get the chance. What would you do?
I don't know what the hell you're talking about. The kid isn't going to be raised in prison like Megamind. Holmes has a big, well-to-do, supportive family. The kid will be fine. She'll be out when her kid is a 4th grader. She made a perfectly rational family planning decision. It is not the prerogative of the criminal justice system to make that decision for her.
A supportive family and affluence do not make up for the conditions these children have been born into. Their mother isn't around for the first 10 years of their lives. They'll live their entire lives wondering if they were born not because their mother wanted to have them and be present and participate in their lives, but because she (very likely) was doing anything she could to stay out of prison. It has a many years of therapy at least written all over it. These kids are just as much pawns and victims as everyone else seems to be in her life - and they'll likely know it.
She has the resources to freeze eggs and do surrogate birth at 50. Or a private adoption (I doubt official channels like convicted felons). There are plenty of better, less selfish options than the one she chose. I haven't seen anyone arguing for the justice system to prevent someone from becoming a parent. If she started a family at any point in the 20 years prior to being indicted or after release from prison I'd wish her and her family all the best.
Instead (and I really try not to be cynical) this was all almost certainly orchestrated in an attempt to garner sympathy. I have to imagine a non-zero portion of the potential jury pool would (all things being equal) have some potential reluctance in sending a new mother/currently pregnant person to prison because some wealthy people got ripped off. Obviously that's not the way it went.
I really respect you but I'm having a hard time seeing this as anything else and I think we need to have more compassion for her children. They may end up just fine but they're getting a rough start to say the least.
To be absolutely clear - this isn't about her. Enough has been about her. This is about the ends she has gone to in this entire situation and the effect it will almost certainly have on these kids who don't deserve any of this.
I don't know how you can make this argument persuasive without either writing fanfic or veering into misogyny. By all indications, the kid we're talking about is going to have a privileged childhood. The mom thing will be weird, but much less weird that a kid whose mom is convicted (even for a much shorter sentence) in the middle of their childhood. When you find yourself writing the words "she has the resources to freeze eggs and do surrogate birth at 50", you know you've gone way off the rails.
I barely remember anything about being a 4th grader, for what it's worth. Their mom will very much be in their life.
I do. I'm passionate about this because I grew up in somewhat similar circumstances (minus the criminality) - down to age. Upper middle class and not wanting for anything material but completely absent parents and Au Pairs caring for me 24/7 and rotating in and out yearly until I was 10 (by chance the same timeline here).
It took years of psychologists telling me countless times that this childhood experience was very damaging for me and to finally acknowledge the effects continue into my life 38 years later. Having children immediately before going to prison for 11 years is emotional neglect at minimum - those were the words used to describe my childhood. I am "fine" but I can't help but think I'd be better off emotionally if I actually knew my parents growing up. You might not remember anything about being a fourth grader but if you can't tell by now I certainly do. When your childhood is spent with other kids having parents and you don't you remember.
I don't appreciate being told I'm "off the rails" or misogynistic. This isn't fan fiction - it was my life. I can't believe I have to say this but if Sunny pulled this stunt I'd be going just as hard at him.
Again, I've always respected you and still do but respectfully - you have no idea what you're talking about on this one.
You clearly don’t care but I’m shocked and disappointed you’re doubling down on this. In all of my years of being on the internet this is the strangest hill to die on I’ve ever encountered. Not acknowledging any of the content and repeating the personal attack is another interesting touch.
Neglect (verb):
Fail to care for properly.
Neglect (noun):
The state or fact of being uncared for.
No one in prison is participating in the care of their children. She is and will be neglecting them.
I've had a vaguely similar upbringing; upper middle-class, hired carers, absent parents. I agree with you completely. I wasn't aware this wasn't healthy or normal until somebody pointed it out in my late 20s. It was traumatizing in its own way.
This. I grew up without a mother, and it casts a dark shadow that follows you your whole life, in ways I didn't even begin to understand until in my 30s. The damaging mental effects take a lot of work just to manage. It's tiring.
You don't need to remember it for the events to be significant. I'm pretty sure kids have psychological/development needs as young as 4.
The kids will have $, but there's way more to being raised than your wealth resources. Is there a mass ignorance of this on HN? Yay for having more potential (affluent) sociopaths released on the world I guess?
The attitude on this here is pretty astounding to me. Do any of these people have children or know any? I'd wager to guess that most of the "these kids will be fine" responses are coming from people that don't - or if they do have kids, um, yikes. Thinking that the conditions of the first 10 years of someone's life doesn't have any impact on them is utterly bizarre. Her second child will likely be born in prison. Of course no one remembers their birth but I'd venture to guess overall that the outcomes of someone being born in prison are likely less positive than someone not. These kids don't have a great start on life.
+1 for your other point here - great, so now we have the next crop of wealthy and potentially powerful people who will likely have some issues because of these conditions. Just what the world needs more of.
To be clear, everything you're saying about her motivations is plausible. So is the alternative I raised. Neither of us actually knows. She herself may not know. People are messy like that.
The rest I disagree with, though. Kids are resilient and don't need to be shielded from life. Dad isn't going anywhere, for one thing, and they have the option of seeing Mom if the family wants to do it that way. They'll be fine.
As I've said elsewhere on HN I'm passionate about this because I didn't have parents the first 10 years of my life (see reply to tptacek below for details if you're curious). At least these kids will have a dad so that's a plus.
It bothers me for people who haven't experienced it to just say "oh they'll be fine". As I've said over and over again on this topic I'm "fine" but that needs to be quoted - I didn't want to acknowledge it for the longest time but it turns out those years can have a pretty significant impact on the rest of your life. My sister and I aren't "fine" the way most kids who grew up with their parents being at least somewhat around are fine.
Things happen - parents die, etc. What really boils my blood on this is she deliberately chose, for her own self interest, to put these kids on a similar path to the one I've lived. That's why I have such a visceral disgust for her and what she has done to these poor kids. I almost don't even care about the fraud and what she was convicted of but when those pregnancies happened my antennae went up.
I'm sorry you had a rough childhood, but zillions of happy children have been raised principally by extended family for... generations? centuries? millennia? Two of my best friends growing up had that family situation. Not to mention: these kids have a dad.
Neglect is very bad. But neglect presumes facts not in evidence. I understand where your "visceral disgust" is coming from, but you are projecting, and you need to find a way to stop.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was “rough” but my sister and I have had some issues and needless to say the overwhelming opinion of mental health professionals we’ve both talked to is that our “unusual” childhoods are almost certainly a significant contributing factor to some of the lifelong struggles we’ve both had.
I responded elsewhere but being in prison with no ability to care for your children matches the literal dictionary definition of neglect. When the word neglect was first used to describe my childhood I dismissed it too. I mean, it’s not like I was going to school without shoes on, right?
Well it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Interesting you bring up projection - you are opining on a situation which you’ve made clear you have no knowledge or experience of. From what I’ve gathered you likely had a more stable and closer to “traditional” (whatever that means) childhood. That’s great but for you to say “I don’t even remember anything from fourth grade” because of your experience and graft it on to people that have or will have a dramatically different experience is pretty incredible and shows a real lack of empathy and compassion. To borrow from you, you need to find a way to stop.
Taking my personal experience out - do you truly and honestly believe that a (child) psychologist would look at this situation and say with the wave of a hand “Oh it’s fine, they’ll be fine”?
If you really do then unfortunately there’s just no point in continuing this discussion.
It bothers me that you think other people haven't experienced it because they disagree with you, as if they couldn't possibly disagree otherwise. It doesn't really bother me of course, I'm just mirroring your phrasing; but it's wrong of you to think that.
I've seen too many of these kinds of discussions devolve into "my trauma can beat up your trauma", so won't offer my biography into evidence. Your experience is valid either way, and the details of mine aren't relevant other than to say there were no lasting effects.
No doubt some of how we turn out is the sculptor, and some is the clay.
If I were her I would freeze some eggs and/or adopt. I don't know what the adoption process looks like for convicted felons but she likely has the resources to pursue one or both of these paths.
She's very intelligent and very calculating - she had to have considered these options. Instead (I'm pretty convinced) she saw an opportunity - however remote - that she could walk away from this thing by getting at least one juror to be reluctant to send a new mother/pregnant woman to prison.
This is, after all, the person that in the face of failure after failure (at best) held out for 15 years on the very tiny chance her concept could eventually maybe just maybe be viable some day (at best). Instead of facing it she's now convicted of fraud and going to prison.
The entire Theranos story is long-shots and Hail Mary's. I truly believe these pregnancies were yet another long-shot with herself and only herself in mind. But in this case it's not the lives of strangers making medical decisions with her shoddy product at risk, it's a lifelong disadvantaged start for her own children.
She is the epitome of narcissism and demonstrates it over and over again. If I really were her I would hope to eventually have the realization that I have some serious personality issues to work on and absent substantial progress on them I probably shouldn't be having kids in the first place. Maybe 11 years in prison will do just that but unfortunately for these kids the damage is already done.
Freezing eggs is not some painless or certain process. She'd still have to wait until getting out of prison, at which point she'd be old enough that there's a significant chance that she wouldn't be able to conceive. She might be able to use surrogacy, but there are many issues with that (medical, but also legal and moral), and she'd be elderly by the time her children graduated from college.
Fair enough but there are consequences for your actions that shouldn't invoke kids growing up without a parent. I spent the first 10 years of my life like these kids will - without parents. Needless to say it's not great.
If IVF doesn't work out for whatever reason there's adoption. Let's try to remember this fraud could have very well ended up killing people. Not being able to have biological children and adopting is minor by comparison.
Her life expectancy should take her well into her 80s, and, at the risk of turning this into a "boo-hoo session" my dad died when I was 26 and he was 61. So even after all of this she'd likely see her kids get married, have children, etc which is more than some people who didn't commit fraud and gamble with people's lives get.
Participation on this thread has been interesting - you’re the first person I’ve seen to also share your own experience with how this will impact these children.
She has the resources to (as one path) freeze eggs and have a surrogate when she gets out. Same kids, same existence only now they have a mother present for the first 10 years of their lives and they don't have to live wondering if their original purpose was a desperate attempt to keep their mother out of prison.
Or there's adoption of any number of real non-hypothetical already born children that will be around when she gets out at 50.
I once saw a Facebook group with the cutesy name "life is a stockholm syndrome and I want my money back". That's spot on.
Happiness is preferable to suffering.
Suffering is a natural part of life. So is happiness.
Suffering is inevitable. Happiness is not.
For some people the happiness outweights the suffering.
It's not a given and you can't really know in advance, but I'm pretty damn sure that having a narcissistic psychopath for a mother tips the scale towards suffering.
Sometimes the happiness outweighs the suffering by such a large margin that you can't even imagine that for others it's the other way around. Maybe you become one of those people who put other people in literal cages "for their own good" - you can get involuntarily hospitalized for expressing doubts in the value of your own life, you know. Even if you're right. Especially if you can prove it.
So that biases the answer you'll get, on top of the natural bias towards self-preservation and reproduction. It still doesn't make it anywhere near truthful.
Ever look up the origins of the word "proletariat"? It literally means "breeders". It's the people who own nothing but their own lives, have no capital other than their time and body. We're selling our lives to the highest bidder out here, man. We're cattle.
Would you teach your kid to be aware of that predicament? No, you would teach them to avoid the subject entirely. For their own good, you see.
Many people are forced to be alive, and just rationalize around that to make the process of staying alive comparatively easier. You can probably imagine what reasoning around such traumatic cognitive dissonance for the sake of sheer self-preservation does to your overall cognitive abilities, and by extension to your ability to make the world a better place so people honestly want to stay in it.
Not need to be unnecessarily harsh. He is 38 now and could expect to spend the rest of their fertile life as a woman in a jail. If she wants to have a baby this narrow window opportunity was her last good option, basically.
A pregnancy in jail would be adding a lot of trauma. Her health circumstances can take a turn for worse, there is a possibility of HIV and STD, and her health will not improve probably while in jail. After jail, she can be too older.
Is doable as long as she has a supportive partner and family. The baby would choose to be alive in any case. She is a grifter, but is also an human being and has the right to arrange her maternity in the best terms that she can afford.
Nothing would have stopped her from banking her eggs and carrying a child after she gets out, or having a surrogate mother, etc. Lord knows she can afford all of that.
How is it harsh to point out that this child will grow up almost to their teens without a mother around? Apparently because the child's mother wants to have a child naturally?
Sorry, but having a kid under conditions that will be pretty harmful to the kid's development just because you want to have a kid is selfish at best.
That it's common does not make it right. We just hit the 8 billion mark, and unimaginable numbers of people across all social strata really don't do anything much but make each other miserable. Do they have the right to live and hope for happines? Definitely. Would it have been better if their parents had used that little miracle called "consciousness" to prevent their children's misery? Also yes.
Maybe you've never experienced what it's like to wish to have never been born, but having fucked up parents makes it very likely for a person to end in a situation where they feel like that about their lives. I think that if your child feels like that even once, you've been wrong to be a parent. (I realize that's a pretty high bar and it's unreasonable to expect the majority people to live up to it. But that goes for any moral standard.)
Of course anyone who is born chooses to stay alive, that's hard-wired into our biology, but that's exactly the reason you have no right to make this argument. Of course every human being has the right to parenthood, but this does not automatically make it right from the perspective of the child. I wish more people understood that and did not see their children as property.
Since we obviously can't ask our children whether they want to be born, it's our responsibility to make that decision for them. Primary caretakers determine the initial psychological makeup of a person, and the sad truth is that a lot of people from all walks of life have children because of irresponsibility, desperation, or plain egotistical reasons. This is cruel and abusive.
Best of wishes to the kid. I hope it grows up to be a happy person. Since it'll grow up in an affluent environment removed from the hardships that most of the world faces every day, there's a chance that happens. But evil people having kids is just cruel to the kids. I'd wager that once she's out of the slammer she'll endeavour to either raise it to be a psychopath, or make its life hell until she's eroded its grip on reality.
I hope in the future people get a better grip on the ethics of creating a new human being, and what you just said is understood for the fallacious reasoning that it is.
I think a good counter to "would choose to be alive" is "but would they choose to be born to different parents"?
Sure, you might say it wouldn't be the same child, but life is so chaotic that just from the random decisions you make, any potential child of yours changes wildly day-to-day anyway. That's a million potential children that would choose to be alive, in the time where you could have maybe one. So that's not enough justification. There are lots of good reasons to have children, but you need those reasons, not merely "would choose to be alive".
I've noticed that the same kind of person to make the "would choose to be alive argument" would also make the "but you can't choose your parents" argument. It's completely insane.
Not, he shouldn't do that, specially when there are much better options.
Sometimes one of our parents is not good. It happens all the time. Millions of children have one parent in jail. Is not their faults and we should still support them. They became pretty decent and sane adults still somehow, with a few scars and own problems, as every one of us, but totally functional socially and morally. Charlize Theron would be a good example.
Men had proven many times that we can take care of the children in a single-parent family also. I don't think that the children of Rick Moranis grow in a hapless family, or became bad people, psychotic, or play the bass in Satan Moranis band now.
I'm going to stop editing the post (sorry about that). Last addendum: according to the prosecution's sentencing memorandum, the factors that justified the departure from the guideline maximum for her sentencing level:
* long history of family and social support (presumably predictive of lower risk of recidivism, higher cost to relations)
* "collateral punishments" (I think? this refers to civil cases)
* Holmes' personal experience with trauma.
So that's roughly how it works, I guess: you apply the guidelines to get a level, which gives you a maximum, and then you mitigate the maximum in a variety of ways.
I was watching White Collar Advice[0] an hour ago and there was an interesting fact(25m30s) that she didn't work since December 2018. If she drove for Uber, it would probably influence the judge.
Worth bearing in mind this person also predicted a 5 year sentence. The case he's making for her working (she'd have picked up a letter of support from her employer for her defense sentencing memorandum) seems really weak.
I think it may have been a good idea to get a job as an Uber driver anyway as it gives an idea, though probably intentionally false, of what her life will be like after jail and a reflection of acceptance of new reduced standing in life. The ability to endue and handle in good spirits the regular humiliation from the occasional passengers recognizing her.
For the jury it could factor in as part of the punishment. It would make concrete the fall from grace and signal a complete loss of hope of trying again. Ending up an Uber driver would also be a deterrent to white collar criminals who may not know what jail is like but do have an idea to what being an Uber driver is like. I think for some people they’d rather go to jail than risk that kind of humiliation. So punishment, prevention, and deterrence… might help.
In fact, she spent the last several years volunteering as a rape crisis counselor, as her defense sentencing memo points out. Justin Paperny, by the way? Not a lawyer.
Didn't know that. Still, that's a bit on the nose, suggests that's she still intends to 'help' people. A cynical part of me even thinks it's yet another way for her to make things about herself, given her own claims of rape. If I was judging I would consider it as a thinly veiled ploy and a continuation of a pattern of deception, as opposed to if she was driving an Uber, then I'd be thinking 'she really did hit rock bottom'
Oh give me a fucking break. Every criminal has experience with trauma. This is the first time I've seen that brought up to justify a particular sentence.
What bothers me about the lenient sentencing is because of my assumption of how easy it will be to get out even earlier due to “good behavior”. She’ll probably get out somewhere between 3-8 years in. This is probably also why she has had two pregnancies while awaiting sentencing. One was probably to try and get a reduced sentence, and the other is to have a reason to be let out early. I understand she is nearing 40, but I personally find it irresponsible to have kids literally right before you go to prison.
No: if she doesn't e.g. abuse phones or get into dumb fights with inmates, she'll get 54 days off per year in good time. That's it; that's what you get in the federal system. There is no parole. She didn't get a reduced sentence; she got a sentence that was higher than the PSR.
Ah, I didn’t realize that about federal prison sentences. Thanks for the correction. I still think she deserves every bit of the sentence though.
To my knowledge, she has never even shown remorse or admitted to her crimes. Even her pre-sentencing statement showed no accountability or responsibility for her actions. She continues to paint Theranos as just a failed startup.
The impact of a mea culpa on sentencing would likely be minimal in the grand scheme of things. I think (for one) she's pathological - as I pointed out in another comment you'd have to be to screw over people like Henry Kissinger and four star Marine Corp general James Mattis who's nickname is actually "Mad Dog". Scary.
Secondly, her post-prison career opportunities are much better if she goes to her grave never admitting or acknowledging any fault or wrongdoing. She still has plenty of fans and true believers. I was interviewing an attorney (of all things) once and she said "All Elizabeth Holmes did was the same thing men do and get away with everyday". Needless to say I didn't hire her.
I don't know if there are any "Son of Sam" laws that apply here but I can definitely see her having a very prosperous career at 50 hitting the speaking circuit, book deal, podcast, whatever capitalizing in 2033 would look like.
It is indeed a long time and a fair thing to bring up. Without getting into a philosophical discussion about sentences in general though, I think it's fair to point out that she ran a fraudulent company for well over 11 years, benefiting personally and financially from it all, while knowingly doing so, lying, and whatever else. She fired an employee who tried to warn fairly early about her lies, who later committed suicide. She hired investigators to follow Tyler Shultz around and bullied him with lawsuits.
These and more actions of hers do make me personally feel okay with her sentencing, especially since she shows zero remorse. Her final words before sentencing were basically "I'm sorry I ran a failed startup".
Yes, but at the same time, she defrauded her investors for billions, and, as was pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, appears to be completely and totally unrepentant. Her position is that Theranos was just a failed startup and that, essentially, she's being punished because she ran out of runway. Whereas, in reality, Theranos didn't work, and, according to its own scientists, could never have worked. It was snake oil from beginning to end.
I don't think 11 years is an unjust sentence for that.
> Investors losing their skin? That's all risk/reward. They took big risk for big reward but lost.
No, it's not OK and it's not all risk/reward. The risk is whether the product can succeed and be better than others' products/services - not whether the company you're investing in is a fraud - that's what the legal system tries to prevent.
Here’s what confuses me about this. The entire SV culture is have an idea, build a prototype, demo it (whether it works or is just a UI doesn’t not matter because you want to validate the product). Then get capital and go all in on making it work. Now this being a medtech product with heavy research, I am not surprised many things were not working and more engineering/scientist hours were needed. I don’t think she was intentionally trying to defraud anyone, I do believe she ran out of runway before her breakthrough and because no more VC capital was available there was not a clear path forward and people lost faith in her. I mean what was the endgame? So be in research mode forever?
Obviously I don’t condone her unhinged behavior of stalking and threatening whistleblowers, but that should not all amount to 11 years. It will absolutely make any similar startup too risky and they will not find any capital.
You can't defraud people while you seek the end of your RnD journey. In order to finance this search, she committed fraud and completely misrepresented the state of her efforts. Based on her lies, people gave her money to continue her development efforts. There is no excuse for this.
> I don’t think she was intentionally trying to defraud anyone
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is not nearly as gray an area as you think. Have you ever read an IPO prospectus or a quarterly report from a publicly traded company? They include big lists of risks that can all threaten the performance of the company. Those are there because you have to be truthful with your investors. If you lie to raise money, that's fraud. If it doesn't actually already work and you tell them it does, it's a problem.
What I think in this case is that it's a pity that she wasn't prosecuted for threatening people's health with unreliable test results. They didn't "run out of runway" while in research mode: they were already selling a defective product that is safety-critical. Google Jean-Louis Gasse's piece on his personal experience with Theranos results. It was incredibly callous to gamble with people's lives that way. I do understand that it was easier to prosecute the financial crimes, but it's still unsatisfying that they were not held to account on those actions.
You have never been able to outright lie to your investors and nobody faces the risk of following in Elizabeth's footsteps save for those who faced with a losing technology choose to simply lie to their users and investors. You are as much at risk of meeting that fate as you are "risk" of finding yourself in a bank with a gun and a ski mask. If you find yourself outside the bank loading your gun then simply remove the ski mask, place the gun in your glove compartment, and go home.
In medicine you are indeed expected to stay in research mode forever until you have something that provably works. None of this is controversial or complicated.
The investors angle, especially the very early ones, still puzzle me. My only experience with medical labs comes from family. Back the day, when Theranos was hottest thing under the sun, I asked my mom, medical lab tech, about it. Her answer was, I paraphrase, "no way, you need way bigger blood samples for one of the tests if you want proper results". Followed something along the lines of who is providing oversight of the labs and making test equipement is properly callibarted. In Germany, local authoroties do just that.
So, I always wondered, if a lab technician needs a mere glance on the sales pitch to have doubts, how could investors miss it during even the most superficial due dilligence? Or did they catch it, and just say fuck it, we can still dump it through an IPO?
And those celebrities going on its board, was the money so good and the hype so blinding?
I can't get too upset about the investors; they had the opportunity to do their own due diligence and chose not too.
She lied to patients, subverting systems meant to protect people against fraudulent medical care and faking blood test results. This wasn't a game. The punishment for cavalierly toying with people's health was far too lenient.
She earned 25 years or more not just on the merits, but as an example to the next person who decides to make money with fake medical treatments.
> I think we throw around years like slaps on the wrist.
I generally agree, but when your fraud is in the hundreds of millions and billions range, well, that's more than most people will earn in a hundred lifetimes.
I think to me it depends very much on who is losing the money. If you defraud Musk of 1B of his money, that represents less than 1/100th of his wealth and is completely irrelevant.
If you defraud 500K people of all their $2K in savings, then you deserve everything that’s coming to you.
Oddly enough I think the justice system is set up to function the other way around.
> After President Biden pardoned Americans convicted of federal marijuana possession last week, reform advocates praised his action as a “historic” step away from mass incarceration, while critics lamented it as another blow to public safety. The truth is somewhat less momentous: the pardons affect only about 6,500 people, none of whom is currently in prison
I have friends that have faced longer prison sentences for a couple bags of weed in their backpacks. she, her lawyers, and her “previous trauma” get no sympathy from me.
The sentence for your friends was excessive, cruel and unfair. That doesn't stop the fact that 9 years (counting maximum 500 days reduction for good behavior) is a very long time.
I know someone who went to prison 25 years for selling drugs out of a brick and mortar store. He clearly sold a lot. But I don’t understand how sentencing for that is fair in comparison to Elizabeth. Feels like Elizabeth did waaay more damage for way longer. Guess just better lawyers?
Why the sympathy for these white collar criminals that have ruined lives in numbers comparable to crimes that we lock other people up for decades for committing?
In general, I'm not convinced in long sentences, I don't believe they deter crime nor do I believe they help criminals become productive members of society especially given the current state of prisons in most countries.
I think that locking up people for decades should only be considered when there's a very real risk of major crime (murder, sexual assault, etc.. ) if the criminal is released.
So the sympathy on my part is not only for white collar criminals, it's for the imprisoned.
She sold fraudulent medical tests that were widely deployed and people made medical decisions based on those fraudulent tests. For instance in AZ alone this effected 175,940 consumers.
Statistically some of those consumers suffered worse outcomes and others died although the link between those outcomes and Theranos is hard to prove in the individual cases. If you throw bricks off of a skyscraper at the street below without looking you are trying to kill "people" even if you never saw any of your eventual victims. She is being punished for the financial aspect of the affair according to those standards but we shouldn't forget the other aspect.
If she was given one day for each person she defrauded of their health not their money she would be in prison for life which to my thinking is equitable. I have no sympathy for her whatsoever. 11 years isn't even enough.
> I agree that relative to other sentences she does, but what does 11 years mean to you? It's everything to me. I cannot imagine giving up 11 years.
Then don't commit one of the most notable frauds of the 21st century? It seems to me that avoiding this fate you so rightfully fear is incredibly simple and anybody who therefore fails to restrain themselves from doing so has earned every second of their sentence.
"To my knowledge, she has never even shown remorse or admitted to her crimes."
I wouldn't be surprised if her pregnancies were calculated to try to gain leniency. Otherwise it's pretty selfish to have kids knowing you could be in prison for most of their childhood.
Yep. He served 4.5 of a 7 year stretch. He got out early by claiming First Step Act ETCs (a new program passed under Trump that gives 1:0.50 day credits for participating in anti-recidivism programs for nonviolent offenders, applicable to moving from full custody to a halfway house).
So, yeah, under the First Step rules, Holmes might see a couple years chopped off that sentence.
I think it's unlikely she serves fewer than 6-7 years. It's a tough sentence!
I was about to mention that - federal prison early release is not some liberal revolving door that's painted in some media outlets. You do your time in federal prison!
Federal prison doesn't have parole, it is a fixed 'good conduct' credit of up to 54 days per year. So she's serving a little more than 9 years minimum.
This is a boring point that people keep making in this thread. If that's actually the case, then none of this discussion matters. If this discussion doesn't matter, jumping into it and pointing that isn't making HN any better for curious discussion. Can it.
I honestly find presidential pardons to be fascinating. The whole idea that a single person can completely subvert the justice system without any true checks and balances is really interesting. It reminds me of monarchy, except that if King Charles (say) attempted to use his legal right to step in and stop justice like this, there would be a revolution, yet it's completely fine for a president to do the same thing on a whim.
The presidential pardon is itself a check for the executive branch to use on the judicial branch.
It's an essential part of the system of checks and balances among the three branches of US government - it prevents the judicial branch from getting too much power compared to the executive branch.
In the US it’s woefully abused, though - political cronies are excused their crimes as a quid pro quo in return for silence - it’s appallingly corrupt and unprincipled.
People who are guilty of a crime and prosecuted fairly under the law should generally serve their sentence. Exceptions to that are best managed by an independent and transparent tribunal who can give principled reasons for commuting specific sentences, for example a prisoner serving a very long term has undergone a genuine moral transformation and is now safe to release, or changes in society have rendered prosecutions of a certain time and place anachronistic and unjust be modern standards.
I'd still argue there ought to be a clemency system that is entirely outside the authority of the judicial branch.
Yes, such a system could be (and has been) abused, but given the power the judicial side has (and how that power has be abused) there has to be a system in place that checks the judicial system's power over individuals. This check prevents over-corruption in the judicial system to an extent. The point is to not allow any branch of government to gain too much power - a "separation of powers".
So many people are wrongfully convicted, either because the law is unjust (many drug laws from the 1990s, for example) or because the judicial system itself is so imperfect--from overzealous district attorneys who count their convictions as merit points (independently of the case merits) to the unjust plea bargain system to police investigators who extract false confessions.
They're going to be taken care of by a big, well-off extended family, as hundreds of generations of children have been prior to the modern invention of the nuclear family (hey, Rayiner, remember all the threads about this?). Then, sometime between 1st and 4th grade, depending on how First Step applies to Holmes, they'll also have their mother at home full time rather than visiting her a couple times a month.
They'll be fine. Lots and lots of kids have it actually hard, because their mom is sent away when they're 5 or 6. Here? No problem. I think she's a sociopath, but her family planning decision makes perfect sense, and the people writing comments about how callous or irresponsible she is are telling on themselves in a particular weird way.
Embryo freezing is a miraculous, perfectly viable option for women desiring children, but unable to commit to pregnancy for whatever reason until they are too old. It decouples the embryo viability from the mother's physical age.
My wife was forced down this route when diagnosed with cancer at 35 - the chemo and radiation killed all her eggs and forced her into a mandatory regime of chemically induced menopause. The presence of estrogen in her body is now a life threatening condition for the rest of her life.
We were able to freeze three embryos prior to starting treatment, and are considering surrogacy now.
There is nothing creepy about egg freezing. There is something very creepy about telling a woman that she should freeze her eggs rather than having a kid, because you've decided that's more appropriate.
Her husband is wealthy, her family is too. I'm sure the child will be fine compared to almost every other child who's parent went to prison. To be honest I think psychological development wise it's probably preferable if the child is 0-6 when their mother goes to prison than let's say 6-12.
Arguably she could have decided to have children because with her age and the possibility of a 5-20 year sentence that having children may have been impossible had she waited.
I think it's unfair to draw attention to this particular decision that she has made as as callous or scheming when in reality there are already plenty of examples and her having children may have been the most human of them all.
I read, like 10-15 posts daily on social media where people mentions that they have decided to postpone parenthood simply because their circumstances aren't favorable (mostly finance related).
When I read about Holmes in light of those posts, I'd say she is some sort of callous and insensitive person. She never once gave a shit about ethics, people's lives etc. Who knows she decided to have kids simply because it might reduce her sentence rather than because she really wanted to have kids like rest of us do.
There are special female sections at some jails esp for woman that is pregnant or has babies - afaik they can stay with the mom until they need to go to school.
> She’ll probably get out somewhere between 3-8 years in.
I don’t know that it’s that irresponsible given that her family is incredibly wealthy and she’ll be gone for a relatively short time in their childhood.
I mean I know it’s going to be unpopular to say but she’s a blonde-haired, pretty white girl from a wealthy family. I’m astounded it was as long as 11 years (really 3-5). I’m sure she is too, and I imagine it’ll be reduced further on appeal once Balwani has been painted as the criminal mastermind of the operation.
We’ll know better once we see what he gets, and what the justification is for that sentence.
Quite unfortunate that the media, and all the famous people that pushed and benefited from this pyramid scheme get off scot free just by claiming ignorance.
Do you want your government spending millions of dollars chasing down people who have very little chance of being prosecuted?
I’ve read pretty deeply into Theranos over the years and if anyone is to blame it’s some of the top level engineering/science/executive employees who knew it was bullshit but stuck around (even with the constant threats and intimidation by Sunny Balwani who IMO is even more guilty than Holmes).
Wealthy investors buying into something the media and half-interested retired Washington DC power players, sitting on countless boards, who care more about dinner parties than technology isn’t that surprising or malicious.
You can maybe blame our current credibility systems for pushing it (just like FTX) but at the same time this is a classic human flaw to join the crowd and seek validation from celebrity. The fact it was a giant loser is plenty of disincentive for those in the future. Plenty of those wealthy people lost big… it wasn’t regular joe holding the bag.
The sheen of the genius tech entrepreneur (in this case with the added phoney multiplier of female tech CEO) has taken a big hit in recent years.
What do you mean? You don't think VC's, media and other people that amplify scams should be liable for the BS that they amplify? So they get to be fact checkers, and tell everyone what's right or wrong, but they have ZERO liability when they cause huge societal damage? There is no way Theranos would have been able to pull off these scams if the strongmen that supported them didn't bully whistleblowers and the media didn't amplify the scam. They can not simply claim ignorance. They all wanted to cash in.
> There is no way Theranos would have been able to pull off these scams if the strongmen that supported them didn't bully whistleblowers
(Citation please)
What VCs and Washington DC investors/board members were directly complicit in covering up the fact the science was bullshit early on? Which whistleblowers were silenced or bullied by them?
You seem to know some juicy details I haven't heard about.
Maybe you mean Erika Cheung? She did indeed contact George Schultz (former Secretary of State, 95yrs old at the time of WSJ expose) after befriending Tyler Schultz (his nephew) who worked there and who was also critical in bringing down Theranos. There was no evidence George even replied to her email or tried to 'bully' her (from what I've read it was just ignored). Not long after she went to WSJ which is what took down Theranos. She's still friends with Tyler.
> I’ve read pretty deeply into Theranos over the years and if anyone is to blame it’s some of the top level engineering/science/executive employees who knew it was bullshit but stuck around (even with the constant threats and intimidation by Sunny Balwani who IMO is even more guilty than Holmes).
Sunny and Elizabeth heard from these employees that it wouldn't work. Then they kept pitching that it would work. Unfortunately our laws are such that the only prosecutable crimes in the Theranos case were for defrauding investors, and the only people guilty of defrauding investors were the ones who pitched to those investors.
And some of those scientists and engineers probably also suffered from wishful thinking that this might be a solvable problem. Wishful thinking is not a crime, pitching wishful thinking as already solved to investors is a crime.
> long history of family and social support (presumably predictive of lower risk of recidivism,
Given the nature of her crime, wouldn't strong unwavering familial and social support increase the risk of recidivism? Like, if she was guaranteed to be shunned by all, she would be at 0 risk of it.
That's just the crime. The sentencing decision takes into account everything she did around that crime.
That's why a lot of first-time petty criminals get light sentences (except when drugs are involved - mandatory minimums kick in) compared to the guidelines.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of this being a consideration. Someone had trauma in their life so they get a lenient sentence for defrauding people out of money?
Maybe this isn’t consistently applied across states and gender.
I used to be a pretty damned good lawyer (if I do say so myself), but I never practiced federal criminal law, so I have to admit that was pure gut feeling and general lawyerly instincts. :)
> By the numbers, the court was probably quite lenient here.
This former federal prosecutor does not think so:
> Anyone who claims Holmes received more or less than what she was “supposed to get” does not understand federal sentencing. I served for almost seven years as a federal prosecutor, led dozens of sentencings and co-authored a nationwide guide to prosecutors on the topic, and I couldn’t predict with any confidence what sentence Holmes would receive.
> Indeed, 10 different federal judges would have likely imposed 10 different sentences on Holmes. That’s both a function of the general process and of Holmes’ particular case. She didn’t face a mandatory minimum sentence (meaning the judge was not required to impose a prison term), while her maximum sentence under the relevant statutes for her offense was 80 years (20 years for each of the four wire fraud counts of conviction).
[...]
> Common sense and a dose of perspective show that Holmes shouldn’t spend more than a decade in prison, let alone 15 years. [...] In other words, her crime was serious, but prosecutors can point to no dead body or even serious bodily injury, though the risk was real. [...] At this point the overriding question should be about the prospect of rehabilitation. Holmes can be a productive member of society. The judge, while not sentencing her to as much prison time as he could have, should have shown more leniency.
She just happened to piss off important people, like the grandson of George Schultz who was working for her, that called his buddy in WSJ. What she did (fake it till you make it) is very common, but she didn't understand the flip side of having real American establishment on her board- she myopically only saw the upside, like an entrepreneur probably should .
It seems to excuses her fraud in a roundabout way.
She's not just a random entreprenuer. Medical startups need to be held to a higher standard than average tech companies and the punishment for fraud that puts patients at risk should be as harsh as possible.
I pretty strongly disagree with that prosecutor, no matter his experience. The fact that someone like Holmes “can be a productive member of society” just because she’s white, comes from a middle class family, and there’s no body does not compute. Holmes is very clearly a sociopath. And maybe I have missed something, but I have never seen anything close to remorse or admission of guilt from her. She even still claims her deep voice is her real voice, when there’s evidence and testimony to the contrary. There’s something really wrong there.
White collar crime should be punished to the utmost degree. These are usually people that had everything given to them to live a legitimate, educated, and safe life, and they blew it all due to greed and ego. Most non- “white collar” criminals didn’t have that chance to start with. And white collar crime usually affects a multitude of people over periods of years. It’s not like most other crimes that happen on much smaller timescales with a lot more emotion involved. White collar crime usually means someone is waking up every day for years saying “yep, I’m still gonna keep doing this”.
> In other words, her crime was serious, but prosecutors can point to no dead body or even serious bodily injury, though the risk was real.
This seems a bit weird to me.
If one engages in behavior that creates real bodily risk for people, that ought to be the crime. The probability of injury that was created, not the outcome. If it just so happens that the dice landed in a way that didn’t harm anyone, that doesn’t tell us anything about her intention, how dangerous it is to have her out in society.
Especially for white collar crimes, where the execution of the risk is often set up in such a manner that the perpetrator isn’t there for the injury. If somebody breaks into a gas station and tries to rob the place with a weapon, but at the critical moment doesn’t actually hurt anyone, that’s still obviously very serious, but we can infer that they have some little bit of conscience that spoke up when it was most needed. Not so for the person who set up a dangerous abstract process that just happened to not hurt anyone by coincidence.
Criminal sentences for first time offenders very rarely follow the sentencing guidelines, and in some ways you can consider them to be a starting point for negotiation. When I was a prosecutor, fully 90%+ of the ~750 cases I handled in the 18 months I was there were guilty pleas of some sort. Pleading a 2 year case down to probation was a daily occurrence. (Note that I worked at the state level, not federally.) The machine is lubricated for quick settlement.
Mandatory minimums are obviously a different story.
This appears to be a very ruthless hatchet job. It appears the elites set a trap and imploded her company. It appears her chief scientist Ian Gibbons was poisoned. The media said he died of suicide by tylenol poisoning. Very odd because that’s the worst way to go and Ian was a distinguished engineer and scientist who had his choice of where he wanted to work.
No one wants to talk about the board of directors either, given that these people were so well known and influential this seems… odd.
All her patents were gobbled up by the investors and her company imploded right before covid19 hit.
Even if her machines were only half functioning it would have been nice to have them on every walgreens and walmart in the age of a pandemic.
I feel very sorry for her. I’m probably the only one who thinks she’s a victim here. She tried to make the world a better place and give you access to your own health information. And because she made so mis statements that is typical of a “fake it till you make it” she now has to rot in prison and her children have to go without a mother.
I find this absolutely disgraceful. She would not have been so hyped if it weren’t for the media. They will of course never face any consequences. They get off scott free to pump and dump the next victim.
Why would economic losses be the primary rubric? She was selling a fraudulent medical diagnostic that people were literally using to make life or death decisions.
Impressive application of the sentencing guidelines. But I can’t help but view this as barbaric. A society shouldn’t put mothers of young children in prison.
Not entirely true. She’s young enough where she can harvest a good deal of eggs reliably. They can be frozen until she’s out of prison. The uterus age isn’t as big a deal as the age of eggs when harvested.
This is a common misconception which is very much false.
Frozen eggs don't last indefinitely and the viability degrades over time. After 5 or 6 years they become increasingly unlikely to be viable (it's not impossible, but statistically unlikely to be fruitful).
A friend of my mum had a baby at age ~55 using eggs frozen ~30 years earlier. Not sure if that was a crazy fluke or if some methods of freezing eggs are more reliable?
That's a crazy fluke, the max I've seen claimed to be done at all is 10-14 years.
When I re-entered the dating scene a couple years ago I learned much more than I ever wanted to know about egg freezing. It's big business here in the Bay Area where there are a lot of ambitious career women.
I really think in another decade or two there is going to be a lot of lawsuits regarding egg freezing being pushed on women by tech companies to stay on the career fasttrack when they can't get a viable pregnancy.
Most of the women I know that have gotten it done also seems to have almost a willful ignorance about the failure rate; especially later in life.
UN Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 16
1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. [...]
Do natural rights fully apply to those convicted of serious felonies between day found guilty and the end of serving their sentence? I'm not saying they don't, but in the US one of the natural rights is explicitly the right to bear arms.
I know you're getting downvoted, but I must admit that I hadn't even considered that. She knew she'd likely go to jail for a pretty long time so if she wanted kids it _would_ actually be best if she had them beforehand.
I mean, it definitely also garners sympathy with the judge, but it'd be totally reasonable for her to do it just because she wanted kids.
It just shows how bad of a person she is. She is having kids because _she_ wants to have them, even though she knows it will hard for them growing up. Putting herself before her kids even before they are born is pretty shitty parenting.
Interesting to compare this with the ongoing FTX disaster.
I think these two cases are sort of parallels: people assumed that someone was a genius to such an extent that they disregarded any signs of fraud and sought little proof of the assertions being made.
SBF will get a lower sentence or might even dodge jail altogether considering how many political palms he's greased, including throughout the current administration.
But Holmes did not donate hundreds of millions to various groups and definitely did not help launder large amounts of money from war torn country. You have to be connected closer to the swamp to be protected by them.
I keep seeing this sort of reply here but I don't get it. Isn't the judiciary system in the US independent from politics? If you can donate your way out of jail, something is seriously wrong with the justice system.
The courts are independent, but for criminal matters government prosecutors decide whether someone even makes it to court.
Consider the case of Hillary Clinton, who by textbook definition mishandled classified documents, which other people have been jailed for. She was not even referred for prosecution because of her widespread connections and political machinery.
There's numerous other examples of connected people getting light or no sentences. Jussie Smollett is another one.
Sorry this is an aside: but why’re we still doing this? It stopped being funny a long long time ago, doesn’t contain any information in regards to OP’s question, and we all know in real life people mean XOR when they say OR. so I’m just curious: did you recently find out about this and still find it amusing? What is it adding to the discussion? Nothing personal / maybe I’m just getting too old :)
No, it does not encourage this behavior. And that’s why Elizabeth Holmes sucks.
SV thrives on trust, not on deceipt. There’s a big difference between a founder saying “I’m going to change the world!”, which is optimism mixed with naïveté, versus a founder saying “my technology works!” when they know it does not.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but are you old enough to have been around for the "dotcom 1.0" boom money, VC funding, startups and irrational exuberance of investment in anything tech related from 1995-2000? It's always been like this.
Yyup, I’ve been here a long time. I’m not saying there hasn’t been fraud, but the SV Way is not to outright lie about the core technology, as EH did.
Dotcom 1.0 was full of hucksters and it rightly crashed. The hasn’t been the norm in this newer era of YC, A16Z, First Round, etc. Integrity is valued and expected.
I think there's a big gap between the idealized notion of the "SV Way" and how it has been practiced in actuality.
Like, how can we say Holmes is an outlier when we had literally all of crypto? Sure we're all (rightfully!) ragging on the FTX thing, but the sheer amount of fraud in the space generally was mind-boggling and treated as a matter of course!
If anything the last several years has convinced me that the VC emperors truly have no clothes - the level of diligence done throughout the gig economy hype cycle, and then followed by the crypto hype cycle, is frankly embarrassing. We spent the past several years at least dealing with a non-stop train of hucksters!
One read of the “jepsen” articles completely disproves this for database startups, most of whom have fundamentally lied about their core technology. I’m sure there are further examples should anyone care to do that level of digging.
I concur with your assessment. There is a very strong “fake it till you make it” mentality. Run fast and break things (FB), ignore the rules and regulations (AirBNB, Uber), etc. she wasn’t really doing anything that most other startups don’t do all the time, she just did it more “successfully”.
The key part of "fake it til you make it" is significantly less harmful if you're making some novel software product or tech hardware gadget (like all the bankrupt attempts at new handheld gaming consoles) versus a medical diagnostics apparatus.
I agree that lying to people wealthier and more powerful than you is a dangerous endeavor - it has alway been.
If you're suggesting that SV culture encourages lying more than, Wall Street, Hollywood, Shenzhen, Bengaluru or any other place where large amounts of money moves to high risk ideas, then I disagree. It's at most the same, if not significantly less corrupt.
If you're suggesting that SV culture enourages lying to rich people more than other places, then I think you're misinformed about rich people.
I have quite a few people in my life who were convinced she wouldn't be convicted.
I had to remind them she stole from and (more importantly) embarrassed extremely powerful and well connected people. This is the double-edged sword of the composition of the Theranos board and high profile investors.
It really makes the whole thing even more astonishing. Not only are you constantly lying, defrauding, etc but you're doing it to former Secretaries of State, a former Secretary of Defense, four star generals, etc. These facts are why I think this is just pathological for her. I couldn't imagine screwing over people who have literally spent their lives implementing United States foreign policy and managing armed forces who by their intended purpose have killed a lot of people. I would live every day completely terrified. I mean this isn't a Putin opponent but still...
As one example George Schultz considers his involvement in Theranos to have completely destroyed his legacy. Ouch.
The justice system kind of "is what it is" but in this case there were a lot of people with a lot of weight to throw around to tip the scales.
I'm not sure I feel bad for George Shultz. His grandson gave him the knowledge he needed and instead of being a part of the solution in outing the fraud, he decided to take the side of Theranos and pressured his grandson to keep quiet instead of backing him. Kudos to Tyler Shultz going through all that.
I should have been clearer - I don't feel bad for Shultz, Kissinger, Mattis, Perry or any of the others. I'm just trying to point out how brazen this fraud was considering you're messing with people who can hit back - to put it mildly. More than that, they've spent their entire lives in the ring.
The lesson here is that that investors can blame founders for their own stupidity and walk free with their reputations intact and their very questionable behavior unchallenged. And several of those weren't betting with their own money of course. Which IMHO makes them negligent in a way that you might argue is actually fraudulent. You might even argue that some of them were maybe willingly part of this fraud and just looking the other way on the off chance that this thing might have exited before the shit hit the fan. Raise lots of hype, offload the company, via some exit and cash in before the whole pyramid scheme implodes. That too is part of SV founder culture. Business as usual if it doesn't work. Great success if it does.
Nobody seems to be talking much about the elephant in the room here BTW; which is that this is about a pretty young woman dealing with male investors in a culture where sexism, harassment, etc. are routinely covered up by disingenuous political correctness. It seems we just don't talk about this and pretend it wasn't a huge factor both with investors being taken for the fools they were, the media drooling all over this because having cute women on the front page is great for business, the public interest in Ms. Holmes (same), the near complete lack of that for her male co-conspirator, and a (male) judge taking the side of the cringe worthy crowd of crocodile shedding wealthy male "victims" demanding revenge for being taken advantage of by a pretty woman.
If she was male this company would not have raised this much and the related fraud would not be front page news. Nor would the sentence be this high because this is business as usual in SV.
It's a harsh sentence for two kids to have to grow up with mummy in prison.
It was demanded by an angry mob of mostly male victims and accommodated by a male judge. You can't deny a certain amount of bias and sexism here. And a fair judge might rule differently and perhaps not separate kids from their mother. Having kids is not an excuse of course. This judge sentenced more than the prosecutor even asked. Seems harsh and petty to me to do that.
As it is, judges are elected officials in the US that dependent on campaign financing and support. Guess where the money is in Silicon Valley? Hard to prove that connection of course but this looks like the rich and wealthy "victims" buying some vengeance and getting it.
FYI, federal judges are not elected by the public. Instead, POTUS picks up a judge, and the Senate has to approve. Prosecution asked for 15 years, the defense asked for home confinement or 18 months in prison.
> What went wrong? This is sad because Ms. Holmes is brilliant.
This statement right here.
The fact that a supposedly impartial judge is having a crisis of reasoning...
The joke being "all equal before the law", the punchline being that aristocrat/peasant social structure is doing better than ever inside a self-proclaimed "republic"
Isn’t the argument, “This is especially bad because she had the foundation to use her intelligence in ways not useful to society. She took to crime not because she was raised in the wrong milieu or saw no other chance to survive with what she had. She took to crime by choice. Not only did she caused damage by what she did. She also caused society damage by withholding her talents, for which society, too, had paid, from real tasks facing us.”
I am merely pointing out something we can all see, but pretend not to.
Can you imagine the judge in a serial killers murder case going on about how talented the killer was in cutting up body parts and could have contributed to society by being a specialist amputator. Poor thing just made a bad choice. Now we put away such a talented amputator in prison and the world is darker for it.
Could she really though? She was in her 2nd year of Stanford when she dropped out to "revolutionize" the field. Despite the reputation, and I'm sure it's a magical place, but no university in the world is going to make you an expert in a field just in the second year of an undergraduate degree.
The fact that she could not be convinced of the impossibility of her ideas by her professor who could give a clear falsifying experiment did not bode well for her.
Also, the medical field is far removed from me, but she was a programmer in high school and claimed she made money selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities. That's just bullshit. Even if you do a favorable interpretation and assume they mean compilers written in C++, what would they be compiling that a university would pay money for?
It probably breaks down to whether or not she wants to play the game or not. If she's smart enough to get in a school like that she can certainly handle corporate BSing. I guess she could maybe be a PM or possibly make it in banking.
> She was a fraud and misled everyone in a big way: investors, patients, etc…
ONLY guilty of defrauding investors - not guilty of defrauding patients.
"Holmes was acquitted on three charges relating to patients who received inaccurate test results but found guilty on four charges, including one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against investors."
Which makes me wonder - if your product is not defrauding customers, then how is it that you are defrauding investors ...
> Which makes me wonder - if your product is not defrauding customers, then how is it that you are defrauding investors ...
I believe a distinction is being made where Theranos the company is understood to have defrauded customers but it cannot be proven that Holmes directly defrauded all customers. Where it can be proven that she directly defrauded investors given she was aware of the fraud against customers.
She fully embraced the startup grindset, faked it till she made it (she didnt get there) and moved fast and broke things - emulating the heros around her.
In the end she goes to jail for being a bad investment for investors and not for the "crime" of fucking around with peoples health.
That's hard to determine and presumably why she wasn't prosecuted for it. It's certainly believable that people received false assurances about their health from Theranos that ultimately led to a preventable death.
There's 2 signs of intelligence that I've seen. First, coming up with something new and novel, e.g. being the first to decide that we can move fast & break things. The second is knowing when to apply patterns, e.g. applying the lessons learned from other startups.
Holmes showed her lack of intelligence by applying those startup patterns to a highly regulated industry. To get her product into some of those settings required committing fraud. So, the whole move fast and break things works great for startups, it fails miserably in healthcare. She didn't know better, and even worse didn't know when to apply a different pattern.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 556 ms ] threadWhen all else is equal, we favor the earliest submitter of a story, but if one submission is more substantive than another (as yours was in this case), then it should win. A substantive article with more information has a better chance of forming a good thread.
Federal sentencing guidelines for wire fraud of the size that Ms. Holmes was convicted of recommend 20 years in prison. Ms. Holmes’s lawyers had asked for 18 months of house arrest, while prosecutors sought 15 years and $804 million in restitution for 29 investors."
pdf - https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
If anything being kept away from the care of their fraudster unapologetic mother would be a boon , not suffering.
Growing up without their mom for their first decade? Jesus christ man.
Growing up without a mom is a hardship. Growing up without her as their mother is a blessing.
Do you not believe a bad mother is worse than no mother?
> Growing up without their mom for their first decade? Jesus christ man.
Nonsense. The courts, the social welfare system and a significant number of both men and women have already, for decades, formally decided that removing one parent from a child is alright.
Why should they make an exception for this child?
so maybe that?
Second, for the prison facility to make sure there’s a free space for the incoming person.
Edit: Someone pointed out she’s pregnant, so there’s that…
1) Their crime was more violent in nature
2) They had a prior record and could be considered a danger to the community
3) Their lawyers weren't as good as Holmes' were
I detest the kind of fraud Holmes perpetrated, but I very much support treating people with dignity. So the problem isn’t that she gets to wait outside prison but that many others don’t get to.
Especially this guy, wasn’t even a violent offence. Just absolutely despicable treatment.
That's another problem of it's own.
For the rest of the population without money, power or connections accused of drug crimes or petty theft it's typical that you will be arrested and placed in jail immediately and will be in custody until you are convicted / sentenced at which point you will go directly to prison.
That Americans are at all proud of such a system is disgusting.
This allows the person sentenced to get their affairs in order.
I know somebody who is sentenced for 10 years. The court gave him 2 months which actually is not enough for all the items he need to wrap up. To give an idea, this person needs to:
- sell his house (who will pay the mortgage now that he is in prison) - sell his car - donate / get rid of his clothes and most of his belongings (or leave them in care of family / storage) - cancel all the subscriptions and utilities - take care of any medical needs - inform all the people who might reach out to him so they can communicate with him - more…
On the correction system side, they also need time to figure out where to send this person and create the space there: - If the person sentenced has any medical needs they will ask for a “medical” facility (connected to a hospital) and usually nicer. - the person sentenced might request a correction facility that is closer to his loved ones (the guy I know requested and going to a facility in Texas even though he lives in Florida as his closest relative is his sister who lives near that facility) - other factors include doing tests / analysis to figure out should the person go to level 1 security (minimum) or something higher; is the person considered a risk to other inmates? are other inmates considered a risk to this person (common for cops, sexual offenders etc)
Of course, if the person is considered a flight risk or violence risk - they will just send him/her to the nearest county jail and then figure out the rest.
Overall, a lot of logistics and consideration is given to an inmate - specially in a federal system.
~Five months from now seems long. Is that a common delta between sentencing and prison?
Perhaps you don't owe fraudster mothers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I’m not sure how advocating for another person to enter the US prison system demonstrates any sort of empathy.
I can’t picture someone with such an inflated sense of self-worth finding that to be acceptable. How’s she not making this worse for herself by trying to flee or something?
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
They failed to demonstrate patient harm in court. The best they prosecution could find was one person who got a false positive for HIV and was retested and found negative.
Edit to clarify: My statement is more intended to emphasize how overly punishing possession charges rather than to advocate for draconian charges for all offenses.
But I can imagine a scenario where someone can put a few dollars “on her books” so she can pay a guard to smuggle an iPhone in to her.
I mean, "relatively easy" doesn't mean it's a cake walk, especially since in the US many State systems are barbarically abusive. She will be in prison with an extremely regimented schedule, being told exactly what to do.
Correct, she's probably not going to need to join a gang for protection, but it is still nearly 10 years in lockup assuming she gets maximum good behavior credits.
What cryptopunk sucker for love wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to help get her a phone? It simply isn’t that far fetched.
what does "legal" have to do with it?
They have "currency" in prison (cigarettes or something), but it's hard to translate your actual money into that currency. Your visitors can't just bring you a whole bunch of cigarettes on visiting day.
These are state and county institutions, not federal. So I can only imagine what's up at the Feds.
That said, you are correct she probably will be going to a fairly cruisy minimum or low security prison. Due to the nature of federal crimes, with a heavy bimodal distribution of severity (i.e., financial/bank/tax fraud... or murdering a judge or during a bank robbery) you can end up in a very gnarly place or a 'Club Fed'. She will get to play volleyball and do watercolouring, maybe even swimming or roller skating, and there may not be a fence, but she's still getting locked in her cell in evenings, will have to do whatever job she's assigned to, will be around at least a few hardened exploitative types and wont be going anywhere for most of a decade at least.
She may not be hardened, but she’s proven to be exploitative. And with her education and experience, is possibly as great a threat to her peers as anyone else with a more violent rap sheet.
It would make a great movie, like a better reprise of "Shot Caller" feat. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
Half are in for drugs, one fifth due to Weapons, Explosives, Arson and one in ten because of sex offenses.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrlinks
So if going down the slightly-less-legal route, the below story was pretty neat. A hacked together prison computer, network attached.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/inmates-built-co...
I imagine the web surfing they can do is fairly limited, but I didn't ask.
I also found out that you can buy anything in prison, including a cell phone, or drugs. Ratting out the people who actually sell the stuff is a great way to get yourself killed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFFxLwvGLhU
Conveniently:
Vice President (at the time) Biden, knew Elizabeth and even visited Theranos.
Elizabeth Holmes held fundraisers for Hillary Clinton with Chelsea Clinton.
Just recently, a prominent Democrat Senator was asking for leniency on her sentencing.
I would be supremely surprised if she is not pardoned before the end of Biden's term(s).
The only way I see him pardoning her is if he loses the 2024 election and has some sort of fall out with the Democratic party that causes him to go scorched earth, and I don't both of those happening.
"President pardons Elizabeth Holmes" and "President pardons Sholam Weiss" are very different headlines.
Only one of those will draw public outrage, despite the fact that Elizabeth Holmes was sentences to 11 years and Weiss was sentenced to 845 years. I'm fairly certain that no one would care about the second headline because Trump pardoned Weiss a few years ago and no one said shit.
It seems like this sentence (like many others in our judicial system) is based more on retribution than anything else.
Furthermore, enhancing someone's sentence to scare the next person is not justice. That's sacrificial and gross.
Oh yes she does. You think she's going to be happy at a menial job? No, she'll be right back with a new con the moment she's back on the street. Only now her name recognition will make the con harder.
Offenders who committed a crime of dishonesty had the highest reconviction rate (45.6%)
https://www.lawscot.org.uk/news-and-events/legal-news/reconv...
Though I suppose I personally would prefer the prison time first and the billionaire thing after (like in Chekhov's "The Bet"). In any case, I'm sure that there's a big fraction of humanity who would jump at the chance.
We fail to reflect that 11 years in prison is a really long and miserable time.
I think a bunch of different kinds of federal crimes (like major drug crimes) will also port their accompanying murder charges to federal court.
Yes, but the general federal murder law (18 USC § 1111) only applies in the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States”.
A lot of federal felonies have, in place of a general federal felony murder rule, a distinct crime or enhanced punishment when death is involved and deliberately killing certain federal officials is also a federal crime.
Especially if it's perpetrated with a car.
Poor people cannot afford to defend themselves, so they make easy targets for incarceration.
Wealthy or connected people take much more time and effort to imprison, so the risk vs reward for prosecutors is just not worth it in most cases. You have to _really_ piss off or embarrass a lot of powerful people to get taken down like this current case.
Source? I checked wikipedia and it suggests that it was the other way around. The article on war on drugs also doesn't show much developments around the 80s. Most of the changes were in the 70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Development_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#20th_century
I can’t speak to the private prison stuff, but having grown up in the 80s in the US, I can tell you that the Wikipedia article is not complete for the 80s.
There was an enormous anti drug push at the time, culminating in 1989. It was everywhere in the culture that I experienced. Maybe a backlash to the popularity of cocaine at the time, I don’t know.
We even had video games displaying “say no to drugs” in attract mode
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Don%27t_Use_Drugs
>There was an enormous anti drug push at the time, culminating in 1989. It was everywhere in the culture that I experienced. Maybe a backlash to the popularity of cocaine at the time, I don’t know.
Maybe that's just biased by your memories? If you came of age in the 80s, you're obviously not going to remember all the anti-drug/tough on crime stuff that happened in the 70s. Note that just because that there weren't many developments in the 80s, doesn't mean that they weren't doing anti-drug programs in your school. It just means that the relevant policies were already enacted.
The wikipedia article for "tough on crime" also shows a similar timeline. Crime became a political issue well before the 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_order
As far as I know, none of the first ladies from Nixon, Ford, or Carter were on TV regularly talking about drugs.
Edit - added: The Clinton years saw even greater rate of increase in prison population, and for most of the same reasons.
"Reagan's presidency marked the start of a long period of skyrocketing rates of incarceration, largely thanks to his unprecedented expansion of the drug war. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law violations increased from 50,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000 by 1997."
Indeed the "drug war" began before the private prison industry, but it has directly and indirectly influenced drug policy to protect and expand its business. https://justicepolicy.org/research/gaming-the-system-how-the...
"Holmes was acquitted on three charges relating to patients who received inaccurate test results but found guilty on four charges, including one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against investors."
A typical median families income was approx. $70k in 2021. That covers multiple people, and in general across the US is enough to pay for housing, schooling, medical care, etc.
A lifetime of that (inflation adjusted) is usually enough for someone to retire somewhere.
If you take the 48 years from 18 to social security retirement age of 66, that would make a median lifetimes earnings $3,360,000 in 2021 dollars.
Holmes got nearly $1bln from investors in the Theranos mess, which is 297 lifetimes worth of median earnings, which considering that directly maps to someone (or multiple someones) working hard for that time, can be consider ‘life’s works’.
She was convicted of fraud on at least $140 million of wire transfers out of that, or ‘only’ 41 life’s works.
While 11 years is a long time, the destruction of value done is nothing to scoff at.
With decent leadership, 300 people working for their entire lives could accomplish a lot of great things.
Of course, it could also be blown on crypto scams and lambos. It’s not a perfect comparison.
However, there's a consideration - if I somehow steal $1m from Elon, it materially doesn't affect him that much at all. But if I steal $5k from a McDonald's employee, it could ruin them.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.” -Anatole France
She didn't incinerate the money, she spent it, it went somewhere else. It went to workers and other companies.
Now maybe that money could have been spent to commission 300 workers to make great things. Maybe it would have gone to pump up the S&P 500 or some shitcoin.
The problem is that she used false pretexts to get and spend the money.
It’s what it was directed to accomplish, and if that activity produced something of equivalent value (or more) on it’s journey to that state, or dissipated into heat and noise.
Near as I can tell, Theranos was at least 99% heat and noise.
Or in other words, if a rich person is defrauded and they still have enough money to live a life of lavish luxury, was a crime still committed?
Penalties for misrepresenting your company help ensure that society devotes resources towards actually good ideas.
> Penalties for misrepresenting your company help ensure that society devotes resources towards actually good ideas.
I agree with this in theory but I think fines and a ban from working in certain industries or founding companies is probably enough, not a decade in prison.
I don't think it was common knowledge that theranos was a scam in the medical industry until relatively late.
Near as I can tell, a decade is light
Where did the money go? Has any been recovered?
Seriously, read Bad Blood, see what she tried to do to Tyler Schultz, Erika Cheung, and Rochelle Gibbons (the widow of the Theranos scientist that committed suicide), among many others. The best analogy I can think of is Lance Armstrong's fraud. Yes, his cheating and lying about it was bad, but I guess at least somewhat understandable given the culture of cycling at the time. But the reason I despise the man is due to his mafioso tactics of intimidation he used to silence people. Holmes did the exact same.
They gave her a sentence that's a little below the federal sentencing guidelines but not by a huge amount.
Checks out.
It's pretty insane to me still spending a year in prison for possession. Since I come from a country where possession has always be decriminalized, just thinking that some of my behavior could land me in jail is mind bending.
[0]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12_sum.pdf
> "The only reason that he plead guilty is because the culture in office and it threatened Mr. Wilson with mandatory sentences that were more than 10 years," said Descano.
Kalief Browder was imprisoned for three years without trial on the accusation that he stole a backpack[2]. After three years, a judge told him he could plead guilty and walk free, or go to trial and risk being imprisoned for 15 years.
I get the feeling authorities lie a lot to get someone to plead guilty. It seems like over 90% of cases in the U.S. end in a plea deal. Everyone agrees that threatening to break someone's leg to force a confession is a gross violation of justice, but somehow it's fine to threaten to take away decades of their life to force them to confess.
[1] https://www.fox5dc.com/news/dc-firefighter-to-be-released-fr... [2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
That Kalief Browder case you linked is a travesty of justice. 3 years before trial is absurd.
Neither of these are federal cases.
Aka don't mess with rich people.
That is to say, there is no quantitative to compare harm from billions of fraud to getting kids hooked on crack.
The relevant question is does the punishment fit the crime.
How the punishment stacks up against other crimes and punishments doesn't matter.
Same with SBF.
Just garnish their income for life or until they make their victims whole.
Wasn't she trying to raise money for a start-up while on trial?
> Same with SBF
Isn't he trying to raise money right now?
Also their activity would be watched closely and income garnished.
But there is still deterrence purpose of punishment - if you remove prison from considerations, it significantly changes risk calculations for white collar crime making it much more profitable.
But on the other side, what are the incentives (to future criminals) to try pull off fraud of this magnitude. There's obviously various psychological effects playing out here (as well as circumstantial ones, great idea goes pear-shaped but it's seemingly too late to pull-out due to ego/sunkcost/other fallacies/last minute save).
But has anyone attempted a game-theoretic payoff matrix, I'm just wondering in the wider scheme of things (to loop back in the post I'm replying to about 11years feeling light) will this kind of sentence actually deter any future similar cases from happening or are the payoff's (financial or otherwise) just too high for this to apply any real deterrent threat to those who are likely to be in the position to be influenced by it?
So in reality, actually this is just really a punishment?
It would be good to stop pushing this kind of misinformation (yeah I know war on drug bad)
The average time served for murder in the US is about 13 years - just a bit longer than Holmes’ sentence.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp16.pdf
They were often running tests on competitors machines. They either passed those results off as coming from their machines, or validated their own results using competing machines.
Their machine could not do what it promised with the amount of blood it claimed to use and was no better than proven machines, and arguably worse as they had lot of maintenance issues even operating at their HQ.
This is one of the things that made me a bit angry when reading some of the letters of support to Holmes today, and her own statement. That is, so much of it still carried on with the fantasy that "Holmes was close, but just fell short".
No, she didn't fall short. Her own lust for recognition and power blinded her to the physical realities of what was possible, harming investors, employees and patients in the process.
I'm actually a bit surprised at the outcome - 11 years seems like a fair and justified sentence for what she perpetrated.
I'm also of the mind that people shouldn't go to prison for non-violent crime (some extreme form of probation seems more effective to me), but that's an entirely different story.
And isn‘t attractive just stating the same as good genetics?
And is she really that smart, given the fact that she first dropped out and then her company failed and now she was imprisoned and the company only „worked“ anyway because of fraud?
Ya admittedly one would have to assess that and also make some estimate about how much her notoriety will positively or negatively affect her offsprings' outcomes. I tend to lean toward it being a net positive, since fame seems valuable almost regardless of how it's acquired these days.
> And isn‘t attractive just stating the same as good genetics?
It also includes height, medical history, longevity, intelligence, ambition/drive, work ethic. I admittedly don't know much about medical history, but I might be willing to gamble.
> And is she really that smart,
No she's not really that smart, I'd estimate 1-2 stddevs from the mean. In my opinion that's smart enough for a potential spouse with other positive attributes, particularly if you think that you're smarter still.
How do you deal with people like Madoff and other Ponzi operators? They ruin the lives of multiple people.
The interesting thing politically is if this will be enforced or not, as I am sure there are a lot of Silicon valley founders worrying now. At best they will get some deserved extra scrutiny, at worse will be getting investigated.
I've seen talk about Holmes' political connections, but she surely is too toxic for them to get her a "free pass". She might get relief from somewhere else though?
You know who I want locked up?
- The guy who pushed someone into the tracks on the NYC subway
- The guy who poured sulfuric acid on a woman in NYC
- The guy who attacked elderly Asian women in SF
- The guy who attacked elderly Asian women in Oakland
- The guy who spit on a friend in San Francisco 2 weeks ago
- The guy who raped Chanel Miller
- The guy who raped another unnamed victim at Stanford recently
- The ones running around South Bay smashing small businesses, smashing cars, sometimes while people are in them
Unfortunately the government doesn't give a flying f about locking the people who are ACTUAL threats to the safety of me and my friends, and busy dealing with locking up some startup founders, who admittedly are disgusting, but not nearly as disgusting as the above.
We often feel we are in a XOR situation, but it's often easier for the govt to try to consistently enforce rules independently of the faces attached to the accused.
To be honest it's actually a bit refreshing to see someone actually receive a significant charge for financial crimes such as investment fraud. So often it seems white collar crime goes largely unpunished.
Of course, she's being prosecuted for financial crimes and not this... I guess they got Al Capone on taxes.
I'm not disputing that but there's not much evidence that has come forth that someone actually got hurt as a result of Holmes's bad tests. She is in fact being prosecuted mostly for financial crimes, which frankly, don't affect me or my safety, it makes no difference to me.
I'd much rather financial crimes get punished financially and every last resource of physical locking up be spent on additional hours chasing the living shit out of these people who are committing sexual assaults and racially-motivated violent hate crimes.
https://www.google.com/search?q=theranos+hiv
That is a matter of life and death. False negative? You put your survival at risk and can unknowingly spread a deadly virus to others, causing harm not just to you but others. False positive? You go on medications with very, very serious side effects on the theory that it will kill you to not do so. Either outcome is horrible violence to innocent lives; if you "test" a thousand people this way you probably already did more violence than the guy who shoves one person on the subway as an isolated incident.
Holmes knew the tech didn't work and continued to allow it to be used.
also, if you want to understand power, you've got to take off your engineering hat and start thinking in psycho-social fairy tale logic.
(p.s. the concept of anarcho-tyranny is the best thing i've heard from the peter thiel types)
Remember the brown bodega owner that fought back against the black attacker trying to murder him, and was still arrested? and how deeply unfair that felt, making protecting yourself a crime?
someone on twitter had an incredible comment that summed up his ideological sin in stabbing the criminal: "he killed the king's deer"
you'll understand the world much better if you stop willing it to be fair (this is a need of our inner child) and just observe how it works first, like an alien anthropologist...
but just like talking about a dream you had, it won't be polite or even possible to explain or discuss what you see with others, sadly
She (possibly) gets pregnant during the first trial to garner sympathy. Even if you have a charitable interpretation of this only the worst of the worst narcissistic sociopaths decide to "start a family" when they're potentially facing 15 years in Federal Prison. She's currently pregnant with her second child.
Now those kids get to grown up without a mother and live the rest of their lives with the knowledge or at least suspicion they're in this world because their con-artist mother was trying to manipulate the justice system.
Even IF you take the approach that she thought big and failed, doing no real wrong the situation with her pregnancies (in my mind) isn't up for debate. On this issue alone I find her completely reprehensible.
She's very intelligent and calculating and had to have considered these substantially better options for starting a family given her situation. Instead, I'm convinced these pregnancies were timed to solely benefit her with likely no consideration for what it meant for these poor kids.
As I just elaborated further on in another comment I didn't have parents for the first 10 years of my life either and it was damaging to say the least. Also kind of ironic because of the lengths my parents went to have me only to disappear for a decade.
I'm passionate about this and have tremendous sympathy for these kids because in a way I am these kids. I have such a strong dislike for her because I know this. I've lived it.
In terms of fertility window - too bad. This is one of the many things she should have been thinking of while conducting her fraud over the past decades. Not everyone should be a parent. She also has the resources to do things like freeze eggs, etc. I know that's not a guarantee but plenty of men have children at 50 and it doesn't seem terrible for the kids.
While the children will be better off than parents with fewer resources this is an almost guaranteed "years of therapy" situation for these poor kids.
Judges don't convict people - juries do and I think it's been demonstrated she's very calculating and conniving. If there was even a remote chance she could skate free based on one juror holding out on a conviction based on her family situation she would take it (and did). It just didn't work and the kids will be the ones paying for it.
https://www.inc.com/magazine/201510/kimberly-weisul/the-long...
Her reasons for getting pregnant are solely and exclusively selfish.
It’s really disheartening to see this come up again and again on this thread.
If anyone would really trade the first 10 years of their life with their mother for any amount of money I truly feel sorry for them. Yes they have a dad. But they also have a mom - but not really because she’s in prison.
This tendency here on HN to presume this situation won’t be of significant negative impact to these kids is shocking to me.
If you really think a kid who lives the first ten years of their life never seeing their mom outside of a prison will be just fine because they have a “millionaire father” I’m not sure what to say.
It's ok to feel for the kids. To feel for them so much to tell them you shouldn't exist, is a bit much.
Projecting much?
By the numbers, the court was probably quite lenient here. Not to say that's an unjust outcome; the "lenient" option for sentencing on serious federal felonies is still quite harsh.
Edit
I tracked down the prosecutor's sentencing memorandum; they asked for 15 years. So I guess maybe not that lenient.
Later edit
The PSR (the court's own sentencing memorandum, which the prosecution and defense respond to) had Holmes at level 43. I hereby claim that I called this. :P
But the PSR looks at the guidelines level table, which suggests 960 months for level 43, and instead recommends 108 months. So the court imposed a sentence higher than the PSR, lower than the prosecution asked, and all parties asked for much lower than the guideline maximum for the level.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790880
Later later edit
I'm doing the math wrong; the guidelines range at that level is 240 months per charge (usually served consecutively). Still much higher than the ultimate sentence.
Gerry Cotton had far less money on the table and he supposedly died abroad.
Come on, this is a guy who had:
And he still managed to f*ck it up. I don't think he's capable of pulling off a Hillblom, tbh.Same can be said about people who gave them money. It's just retarded. The whole business went completely against the core purpose of cryptocurrency. Anyone who invested in him or had their money sitting on his exchange (or any bankrupt exchange) deserved to lose it. It's scary to think what damage large amounts of capital could do in the hands of such idiots; society is better off now.
Here is my story:
- I put $50k into FTX last year. The reason for putting the money into FTX was because it was the only large-scale platform that allowed me to trade the specific token that I wanted to trade. - My investment proved to be more successful than I had anticipated, and I turned the initial investment into $600k by the end of last year. - By the spring of this year, I had sold my entire position and was now sitting with $400k USD on FTX (as I didn't sell everything at the top). - At that time, I attempted to withdraw the entire amount into my bank account, but immediately ran into issues with my bank. - For background, I'm a dual citizen, originally from South America but now living in the US. As you may be aware, US citizens were not allowed to use FTX.com; hence I used my South American citizenship to get verified by FTX, with the condition that I could only withdraw to a South American bank in my name. - I spent about 10-20 hours this spring attempting to make the withdrawal, which included dozens of phone calls and emails with my bank as well as the FTX support team, in order to execute the transaction. But the process turned out to be more complicated than I had expected. - Full details are not necessary here as I wish to somewhat protect my identity, but it became clear to me that this process would be very difficult to complete unless I was physically present at the bank in South America. - While I considered that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not risk-free, I deemed the risk relatively low. A part of that judgement was the fact that FTX was an exchange, and not a bank nor a prop-trading house, and thus I viewed the risk of a run on the bank scenario, or FTX speculating away my money in trading, as low. - What instead worried me was that FTX could get hacked, or that the founders could take my money and run, but given the high-profile nature of the company and its founders, I made the call that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not an overwhelming risk factor. - I also considered converting my money into BTC and transferring them to cold storage, but ended up not doing that as I worried about a crypto meltdown, and I reasoned that my money was safer sitting in USD at FTX (despite the aforementioned risks). I further reasoned, that given that the amount was already quite large, that it would be even harder to explain to a local bank where the money had come from once it had gone off an exchange and then come back on again. - For all of these reasons, I decided to wait, and was planning to do the transfer in less than 2 months from today, once back in South America.
We obviously know what happened next, and we know that pretty much any other solution would have been better for me. But with the information available to me at the time, it wasn't obvious that what happened would happen. I believed I had reasoned appropriately about the risks and made the correct decisions at the time when I made them, with the information available at the time.
My point is that we don't know the stories behind why so many people kept their money on FTX. Perhaps some were more reckless than others, and perhaps someone reading this thinks that I was reckless too. But even so, in my view, none of us "deserved" to have this happen to us. So instead of vilifying the victims, the focus should be on holding the perpetrators responsible, while thinking of a better way forward so that this d...
Uniswap would allow you to trade any token that follows the ERC20 interface (not all of them do, but many). USDC would allow you to mitigate day to day price volatility. Non custodial wallet would mean the burden lies on you to secure the funds, but a CEX getting hacked or investing away your deposits is not possible. Self custody also means you could move some to another CEX in US to attempt withdrawal.
Also should note there are different and additional risks with this approach: you might lose your keys, get phished/hacked, or use the blockchain incorrectly, or USDC/Uniswap contracts could fail, etc.
Very sorry to hear about your situation.
I realize this wasn't evident from my initial post, but I actually go back many years with crypto and have run both airgapped computers at home as well as used Trezors without mistake (including using Uniswap), so I'm less worried about losing my keys or committing other such user errors.
Ironically, while I used to worry more about using CEX's (thinking they could hacked, or the founders could run away with the money), over time I gravitated towards worrying more about actually getting my crypto money back into the banking system, without running afoul of AML / KYC hurdles, and I thought CEX's would be the less risky option in this regard.
And in this case specifically, once the money on FTX became sizable, I became even more paranoid about this, and I guess I got set in my own thinking of not wanting the money to leave the exchange for fear of not being able to transfer it back into the banking system.
In retrospect, it's funny (and obviously sad at the same time) how I overly worried about one thing, while completely missing out on what the real risk was.
You all have been extremely helpful, so I thank you very much (and not least for allowing me to put some of my thoughts in writing and reasoning with you about it). We live and learn -- now onto figuring out how to make up for the money lost!
In my early conversations with my bank, they stated that among other things, they would need to see proof of where the funds had come from (proof of original $ deposit into FTX, FTX trading history, etc.), and I just assumed that sending the crypto to a different exchange would add another layer of complexity that would make that process much harder.
But perhaps I took an overly conservative (and now catastrophic) stance when trying to do everything as cleanly as possible.
I have a sneaking feeling your approach might have worked (or at least it's hard to imagine it being a worse outcome than what actually happened). I'm feeling pretty stupid now for not exploring this further. I guess I never expected FTX would just disappear, and so I didn't explore every option as fully as I should have. I appreciate your suggestion in any case.
The part that should be no problem is the American bank itself, if you ask first for instructions. Coinbase is a legit American entity. Procedure should be same as making large transfers or consolidations of IRAs or liquidating brokerage holdings to buy a house.
The money did arrive successfully by the way, but I just took away from that exercise that banks are really, really strict about money transfers and the origin of monies. This all has me thinking that getting crypto back into the banking system -- to the extent it's easy today -- might only get harder in the future.
And the comment around Coinbase also makes sense, though I suppose my exposure to that risk could have been minimized assuming the money would ideally only have been sitting there for a few days. In retrospect, I should have obviously attempted the Coinbase route.
My concern in this specific situation was greater around moving money from crypto -> bank, vs. bank -> bank. My general sense is that once the money is inside of the traditional banking system, it's less likely to face issues.
But coming to the bank with a wad of cash (or crypto), in my view, could trigger all kinds of issues (in theory at least).
But I am genuinely much more curious around the human psyche in situations like these, and I'm seeking your thoughts if you would be kind enough to offer them since I think we are on different sides on this on, in this specific instance.
My experience with the human species is that they generally err on the side of compassion, vs. judgement, but less so in this case. If you could share your thoughts on what might drive the latter rather than former in this case, that would be highly appreciated.
On a personal note, and as I was clear to point out in the parent comment, I am not looking for any sympathy here, I'm a grown man and I am adept at handling adversity. But nor am I necessarily looking for vitriol unless there is a good reason for it. Your thoughts on this topic are appreciated.
I don't think extreme levels of greed deserves compassion. It's been more than 10+years. I can't have compassion for 20 years. People get tired man and don't care anymore and actually hope for the worst (but don't say it).
Out of curiosity, would you then apply the same logic to people investing in SPAC's, growth stocks at extreme valuation levels, triple leveraged ETF's, doubling down on NKLA when their trucks are shown to roll down hills, etc.? Or is it strictly confined to crypto? To me, these are all different manifestations of the same thing -- a decade of easy money, enabled by flawed monetary policy. An investor in my view can still be rational (not greedy) while still taking interest in such opportunities.
Also, what if this were only 5% of my portfolio (I'm not disclosing the actual %'age, but consider the 5% for argument's sake), would you still consider it an extreme level of greed?
I have my own views of what constitutes extreme greed, but that tends to have more to do with how certain individuals (in this case FTX's executives, but can also be applied obvious scams like OneCoin, and many other scenarios) illegally enrich themselves by exploiting regular people. That, to me, is true extreme greed.
Either way, I think your response is interesting and I appreciate the extra color.
Yes. I invest in leveraged etfs. You can't compare NKLA/crypto/SPACs with UPRO for example.
> would you still consider it an extreme level of greed?
I consider the whole crypto ecosystem. I mined bitcoin for some time when it was $300 and thought it was full ponzi even then.
Risk-aware people don't gamble more money than they want to lose. The moral assumption behind "blaming the victims" of crypto schemes is that their losses are little more than a reckoning of their optimism, ignorance and greed, not a tragic economical ruin.
> I turned the initial investment into $600k
If you call it an investment you weren't very risk-aware at the time.
Obviously one has to be careful which asset class one invests in. High yield bonds are riskier than investment grade bonds; equities are riskier than high yield bonds; bluechip crypto is riskier than equities, and speculative tokens are riskier than bluechip crypto. I think all that is understood, and I was well aware of that aspect of the risk. But an aggressive choice of asset class doesn't necessarily turn it into a gamble, so I reject the way you framed this as a "gamble".
The one thing I would consider a gamble was my "gamble" that FTX would not go under before I had a chance to take my money out. I think it's probably fair to call that a gamble, if that's what you are referring to.
In either case, it's interesting how humans tend to be a quite a compassionate species in face of adversity, and yet, this specific topic seems to trigger something in the human psyche that elicits vitriol and compassion in roughly equal amounts, even as many people are clearly facing adversity. I'm not judging that reaction, but I'm curious as to why it's happening.
I guess there is a lesson to be learned about investing in tokens which can only be acquired and disposed of on a single exchange; that is a bit of a red flag. Unfortunately, with crypto, it's better to be paranoid. Many governments and big banks don't want crypto to succeed so these kinds of major collapses are to be expected... I wouldn't be surprised if some of them may be orchestrated intentionally.
Btw, does anyone know where the heck Elisson went? I haven't seen any articles specifying her current whereabouts.
I don’t have a source. I heard it in an interview with someone following the case.
Since both his hedge fund and exchange lost billions, I doubt it.
Except for going long in a bull market, was he ever successful in anything?
> * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (Ok, this one's sarcasm)
Again, they've lost massive amounts of money trading.
If your strategy makes a lot of money for years, but then loses more than anything you've ever earned, it's a crappy strategy.
Depends who's money you're playing with. If you profit on the way up and only your customers lose on the way down. Then high-risk strategies are (unfortunately) always better.
My trading strategy has never made me billions nor lost billions. Yet I kinda feel like there's a solid possibility many of these fools will end up waaay better off than me. Assuming they can stay out of jail.
edit: what I mean, trollishly, is that I expected more conscientiousness from a room of MIT quant types, even if business process and diligence was not in their wheelhouse.
Plenty of people fuck up in similar or even better circumstances.
What amazes here is the sheer magnitude and low intellect. They did no accounting. They bought property in their own names out of company (customer) assets. He was still "trying to raise money" as of yesterday, in full denail.
This is not an excessively sophisticated criminal mind, he doesn't seem to understand why people would take issue with his actions.
That isn’t to say we should lock everyone who commits a serious crime up for life, just that there can be utility for seemingly excessively long sentences.
It’s really the ~5-10 year convictions that are over used IMO. I think we have lost sight of how large a penalty 3 years actually is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_numb...
I was more talking about cases like this where prosecutors sought 10 years for a protester getting excessively confrontational with police officers and now she is serving 4 years in prison: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/pregnant-black-activist-...
The jury acquitted Martin of inciting a riot and reached no verdict on whether she threatened officers’ lives. Her legal team was “elated” when jurors found her guilty only of breaching the peace, punishable by no more than a $500 fine and 30 days in jail, investigator Tony Kennedy recalled.
State law defines breachers of the peace as any disturbers, “dangerous and disorderly persons” or people who utter “menaces or threatening speeches.” But prosecutors presented the charge as a “high and aggravated” crime, which carries up to 10 years imprisonment. Rosado said Judge Kirk Griffin did not allow her to explain the distinction, and the possibility of a much stiffer penalty, to the jury.
I am not saying she does or doesn’t deserve to go to prison, I am more commenting on how the options go from 30 days to multiple years between the seemingly similar crimes.
That’s only if there is no rehabilitation. The US system seems to be focused solely/overtly on punishment, which obviously means that whoever got locked up hasn’t had their mental state improved during the time of their lockup.
There's also a phenomenon where gang bangers and the like "age out" — they just seem to stop. Unfortunately for many, this realization often occurs in the middle of a very lengthy sentence (they typically drop out, debrief, and enter protective custody).
Sadly, for many rehab isn't just a matter of wanting to do better. Very large numbers of the incarcerated can't do something as seemingly trivial as parse a bus schedule. Aside from undereducation, a fair amount are objectively unintelligent. When all you know is crime and you have a massive uphill battle just to be what many would consider a functional adult, recidivism seems inevitable for some. What makes it worse is that cultural reasons prevent many from reaching out for help while they're behind the wire. It's frankly sad to see, but we're getting better —the investments being made in tablets and the like will hopefully bear fruit in the coming years.
No I don't think you spent a day behind. If you were to, you wouldn't be merely pricing your life at $24k per day.
Most of his donations were to Democratic candidates. He was the 2nd biggest donor to the Democratic Party behind George Soros.
We will see if he’s prosecuted what the result is. I have made my prediction.
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/15/ftz-crypto-bankman-fried-de...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/11/15/23460684/...
Also, even if the politicians could help, they already have the money, and SBF can do nothing for them in the future, so they would have to help him out of some selfless sense of honor.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_conduct_time
(But I’ve never done time or really looked into it)
> Under United States federal law, prisoners serving more than one year in prison get 54 days a year of good time on the anniversary of each year they serve plus the pro rata good time applied to a partial year served at the end of their sentence, at the rate of 54 days per year.
I know it's not at all the same, but that's better than some vacation policies ...
There are no weekends where she's headed, though.
Shit, they sentenced her to 11 years at Twitter?
She could be pardoned.
If I was facing a jail time, I would NOT have kids till there is clarity. But I guess that is the difference between me and …
Her children will live better lives than 99% of the children on the planet despite not having their mother present until their pre-teen years.
At some point in the desire to wellbeing ratio, that equation crosses the line into 'incredibly selfish'. Children aren't just trophies for their parents.
I think it's more likely she was worried she wouldn't still be able to have children by the time she got of prison. Probably a nebulous mixture of reasons, but I can't believe it's just a desperate ploy for leniency. It's not unusual for people to really want children, regardless of their circumstances.
Wow - that’s some high level not-giving-a-shit about other humans (the kids). Or even more cynical, sociopathically using kids/pregnancy to try to get a reduced sentence?
In any case deciding to start a family when you're even potentially looking at 15 years in prison is a terrible move for these children - absent mother, the lifelong psychological damage of knowing or suspecting the reason for your existence may have been an attempt to manipulate the justice system, etc.
There were financial losses in this case but at this point the most seriously impacted victims of Elizabeth Holmes are her own children.
She has the resources to freeze eggs and do surrogate birth at 50. Or a private adoption (I doubt official channels like convicted felons). There are plenty of better, less selfish options than the one she chose. I haven't seen anyone arguing for the justice system to prevent someone from becoming a parent. If she started a family at any point in the 20 years prior to being indicted or after release from prison I'd wish her and her family all the best.
Instead (and I really try not to be cynical) this was all almost certainly orchestrated in an attempt to garner sympathy. I have to imagine a non-zero portion of the potential jury pool would (all things being equal) have some potential reluctance in sending a new mother/currently pregnant person to prison because some wealthy people got ripped off. Obviously that's not the way it went.
I really respect you but I'm having a hard time seeing this as anything else and I think we need to have more compassion for her children. They may end up just fine but they're getting a rough start to say the least.
To be absolutely clear - this isn't about her. Enough has been about her. This is about the ends she has gone to in this entire situation and the effect it will almost certainly have on these kids who don't deserve any of this.
I barely remember anything about being a 4th grader, for what it's worth. Their mom will very much be in their life.
It took years of psychologists telling me countless times that this childhood experience was very damaging for me and to finally acknowledge the effects continue into my life 38 years later. Having children immediately before going to prison for 11 years is emotional neglect at minimum - those were the words used to describe my childhood. I am "fine" but I can't help but think I'd be better off emotionally if I actually knew my parents growing up. You might not remember anything about being a fourth grader but if you can't tell by now I certainly do. When your childhood is spent with other kids having parents and you don't you remember.
I don't appreciate being told I'm "off the rails" or misogynistic. This isn't fan fiction - it was my life. I can't believe I have to say this but if Sunny pulled this stunt I'd be going just as hard at him.
Again, I've always respected you and still do but respectfully - you have no idea what you're talking about on this one.
Neglect (verb):
Fail to care for properly.
Neglect (noun):
The state or fact of being uncared for.
No one in prison is participating in the care of their children. She is and will be neglecting them.
Is the dictionary fanfiction too?
Check your "I have a mother" privilege. /s
The kids will have $, but there's way more to being raised than your wealth resources. Is there a mass ignorance of this on HN? Yay for having more potential (affluent) sociopaths released on the world I guess?
It's gross to me.
+1 for your other point here - great, so now we have the next crop of wealthy and potentially powerful people who will likely have some issues because of these conditions. Just what the world needs more of.
The rest I disagree with, though. Kids are resilient and don't need to be shielded from life. Dad isn't going anywhere, for one thing, and they have the option of seeing Mom if the family wants to do it that way. They'll be fine.
It bothers me for people who haven't experienced it to just say "oh they'll be fine". As I've said over and over again on this topic I'm "fine" but that needs to be quoted - I didn't want to acknowledge it for the longest time but it turns out those years can have a pretty significant impact on the rest of your life. My sister and I aren't "fine" the way most kids who grew up with their parents being at least somewhat around are fine.
Things happen - parents die, etc. What really boils my blood on this is she deliberately chose, for her own self interest, to put these kids on a similar path to the one I've lived. That's why I have such a visceral disgust for her and what she has done to these poor kids. I almost don't even care about the fraud and what she was convicted of but when those pregnancies happened my antennae went up.
Neglect is very bad. But neglect presumes facts not in evidence. I understand where your "visceral disgust" is coming from, but you are projecting, and you need to find a way to stop.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was “rough” but my sister and I have had some issues and needless to say the overwhelming opinion of mental health professionals we’ve both talked to is that our “unusual” childhoods are almost certainly a significant contributing factor to some of the lifelong struggles we’ve both had.
I responded elsewhere but being in prison with no ability to care for your children matches the literal dictionary definition of neglect. When the word neglect was first used to describe my childhood I dismissed it too. I mean, it’s not like I was going to school without shoes on, right?
Well it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Interesting you bring up projection - you are opining on a situation which you’ve made clear you have no knowledge or experience of. From what I’ve gathered you likely had a more stable and closer to “traditional” (whatever that means) childhood. That’s great but for you to say “I don’t even remember anything from fourth grade” because of your experience and graft it on to people that have or will have a dramatically different experience is pretty incredible and shows a real lack of empathy and compassion. To borrow from you, you need to find a way to stop.
Taking my personal experience out - do you truly and honestly believe that a (child) psychologist would look at this situation and say with the wave of a hand “Oh it’s fine, they’ll be fine”?
If you really do then unfortunately there’s just no point in continuing this discussion.
I've seen too many of these kinds of discussions devolve into "my trauma can beat up your trauma", so won't offer my biography into evidence. Your experience is valid either way, and the details of mine aren't relevant other than to say there were no lasting effects.
No doubt some of how we turn out is the sculptor, and some is the clay.
She's very intelligent and very calculating - she had to have considered these options. Instead (I'm pretty convinced) she saw an opportunity - however remote - that she could walk away from this thing by getting at least one juror to be reluctant to send a new mother/pregnant woman to prison.
This is, after all, the person that in the face of failure after failure (at best) held out for 15 years on the very tiny chance her concept could eventually maybe just maybe be viable some day (at best). Instead of facing it she's now convicted of fraud and going to prison.
The entire Theranos story is long-shots and Hail Mary's. I truly believe these pregnancies were yet another long-shot with herself and only herself in mind. But in this case it's not the lives of strangers making medical decisions with her shoddy product at risk, it's a lifelong disadvantaged start for her own children.
She is the epitome of narcissism and demonstrates it over and over again. If I really were her I would hope to eventually have the realization that I have some serious personality issues to work on and absent substantial progress on them I probably shouldn't be having kids in the first place. Maybe 11 years in prison will do just that but unfortunately for these kids the damage is already done.
If IVF doesn't work out for whatever reason there's adoption. Let's try to remember this fraud could have very well ended up killing people. Not being able to have biological children and adopting is minor by comparison.
Her life expectancy should take her well into her 80s, and, at the risk of turning this into a "boo-hoo session" my dad died when I was 26 and he was 61. So even after all of this she'd likely see her kids get married, have children, etc which is more than some people who didn't commit fraud and gamble with people's lives get.
The children here having resources helps, but having a mom + dad is important and there's pretty much no way around that.
It being her "last chance" doesn't excuse the behavior.
Participation on this thread has been interesting - you’re the first person I’ve seen to also share your own experience with how this will impact these children.
We’re disgusted because we know.
If you (in the future) ask these children I'm pretty darn sure that they would disagree that they would have been better off not existing.
But I guess that doesn't count because.. they're biased in favor of their own existence?
I'm only 30% trying to be sarcastic, and mostly trying to see if this kind of argument makes any kind of sense.
Or there's adoption of any number of real non-hypothetical already born children that will be around when she gets out at 50.
Happiness is preferable to suffering.
Suffering is a natural part of life. So is happiness.
Suffering is inevitable. Happiness is not.
For some people the happiness outweights the suffering.
It's not a given and you can't really know in advance, but I'm pretty damn sure that having a narcissistic psychopath for a mother tips the scale towards suffering.
Sometimes the happiness outweighs the suffering by such a large margin that you can't even imagine that for others it's the other way around. Maybe you become one of those people who put other people in literal cages "for their own good" - you can get involuntarily hospitalized for expressing doubts in the value of your own life, you know. Even if you're right. Especially if you can prove it.
So that biases the answer you'll get, on top of the natural bias towards self-preservation and reproduction. It still doesn't make it anywhere near truthful.
Ever look up the origins of the word "proletariat"? It literally means "breeders". It's the people who own nothing but their own lives, have no capital other than their time and body. We're selling our lives to the highest bidder out here, man. We're cattle.
Would you teach your kid to be aware of that predicament? No, you would teach them to avoid the subject entirely. For their own good, you see.
Many people are forced to be alive, and just rationalize around that to make the process of staying alive comparatively easier. You can probably imagine what reasoning around such traumatic cognitive dissonance for the sake of sheer self-preservation does to your overall cognitive abilities, and by extension to your ability to make the world a better place so people honestly want to stay in it.
A pregnancy in jail would be adding a lot of trauma. Her health circumstances can take a turn for worse, there is a possibility of HIV and STD, and her health will not improve probably while in jail. After jail, she can be too older.
Is doable as long as she has a supportive partner and family. The baby would choose to be alive in any case. She is a grifter, but is also an human being and has the right to arrange her maternity in the best terms that she can afford.
How is it harsh to point out that this child will grow up almost to their teens without a mother around? Apparently because the child's mother wants to have a child naturally?
Sorry, but having a kid under conditions that will be pretty harmful to the kid's development just because you want to have a kid is selfish at best.
In this particular case I think the absence of the mother is a net positive for the child. Would you want to have been raised by Elizabeth Holmes?
This struck a nerve.
Maybe you've never experienced what it's like to wish to have never been born, but having fucked up parents makes it very likely for a person to end in a situation where they feel like that about their lives. I think that if your child feels like that even once, you've been wrong to be a parent. (I realize that's a pretty high bar and it's unreasonable to expect the majority people to live up to it. But that goes for any moral standard.)
Of course anyone who is born chooses to stay alive, that's hard-wired into our biology, but that's exactly the reason you have no right to make this argument. Of course every human being has the right to parenthood, but this does not automatically make it right from the perspective of the child. I wish more people understood that and did not see their children as property.
Since we obviously can't ask our children whether they want to be born, it's our responsibility to make that decision for them. Primary caretakers determine the initial psychological makeup of a person, and the sad truth is that a lot of people from all walks of life have children because of irresponsibility, desperation, or plain egotistical reasons. This is cruel and abusive.
Best of wishes to the kid. I hope it grows up to be a happy person. Since it'll grow up in an affluent environment removed from the hardships that most of the world faces every day, there's a chance that happens. But evil people having kids is just cruel to the kids. I'd wager that once she's out of the slammer she'll endeavour to either raise it to be a psychopath, or make its life hell until she's eroded its grip on reality.
I hope in the future people get a better grip on the ethics of creating a new human being, and what you just said is understood for the fallacious reasoning that it is.
Sure, you might say it wouldn't be the same child, but life is so chaotic that just from the random decisions you make, any potential child of yours changes wildly day-to-day anyway. That's a million potential children that would choose to be alive, in the time where you could have maybe one. So that's not enough justification. There are lots of good reasons to have children, but you need those reasons, not merely "would choose to be alive".
Sometimes one of our parents is not good. It happens all the time. Millions of children have one parent in jail. Is not their faults and we should still support them. They became pretty decent and sane adults still somehow, with a few scars and own problems, as every one of us, but totally functional socially and morally. Charlize Theron would be a good example.
Men had proven many times that we can take care of the children in a single-parent family also. I don't think that the children of Rick Moranis grow in a hapless family, or became bad people, psychotic, or play the bass in Satan Moranis band now.
* long history of family and social support (presumably predictive of lower risk of recidivism, higher cost to relations)
* "collateral punishments" (I think? this refers to civil cases)
* Holmes' personal experience with trauma.
So that's roughly how it works, I guess: you apply the guidelines to get a level, which gives you a maximum, and then you mitigate the maximum in a variety of ways.
By the way, the whole video is interesting.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFFxLwvGLhU
For the jury it could factor in as part of the punishment. It would make concrete the fall from grace and signal a complete loss of hope of trying again. Ending up an Uber driver would also be a deterrent to white collar criminals who may not know what jail is like but do have an idea to what being an Uber driver is like. I think for some people they’d rather go to jail than risk that kind of humiliation. So punishment, prevention, and deterrence… might help.
IIRC she married a hotel heir. She's never going to have to work if she doesn't want to.
Oh give me a fucking break. Every criminal has experience with trauma. This is the first time I've seen that brought up to justify a particular sentence.
Like, ever.
Enjoy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/06/...
Seriously as bad as that other paper saying we should probably let ourselves get robbed a bit more.
Try the original article:
https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-closing-down-womens...
The article is mild proposals to rehabilitate, e.g. drug users.
I see the title as a rhetorical device.
> If we can’t close down women’s prisons, we can at least slow down their expansion.
Actually I guess they don’t even have to be white, just rich is probably enough.
To my knowledge, she has never even shown remorse or admitted to her crimes. Even her pre-sentencing statement showed no accountability or responsibility for her actions. She continues to paint Theranos as just a failed startup.
The impact of a mea culpa on sentencing would likely be minimal in the grand scheme of things. I think (for one) she's pathological - as I pointed out in another comment you'd have to be to screw over people like Henry Kissinger and four star Marine Corp general James Mattis who's nickname is actually "Mad Dog". Scary.
Secondly, her post-prison career opportunities are much better if she goes to her grave never admitting or acknowledging any fault or wrongdoing. She still has plenty of fans and true believers. I was interviewing an attorney (of all things) once and she said "All Elizabeth Holmes did was the same thing men do and get away with everyday". Needless to say I didn't hire her.
I don't know if there are any "Son of Sam" laws that apply here but I can definitely see her having a very prosperous career at 50 hitting the speaking circuit, book deal, podcast, whatever capitalizing in 2033 would look like.
I agree that relative to other sentences she does, but what does 11 years mean to you? It's everything to me. I cannot imagine giving up 11 years.
I think we throw around years like slaps on the wrist.
These and more actions of hers do make me personally feel okay with her sentencing, especially since she shows zero remorse. Her final words before sentencing were basically "I'm sorry I ran a failed startup".
I don't think 11 years is an unjust sentence for that.
Investors losing their skin? That's all risk/reward. They took big risk for big reward but lost.
No, it's not OK and it's not all risk/reward. The risk is whether the product can succeed and be better than others' products/services - not whether the company you're investing in is a fraud - that's what the legal system tries to prevent.
Obviously I don’t condone her unhinged behavior of stalking and threatening whistleblowers, but that should not all amount to 11 years. It will absolutely make any similar startup too risky and they will not find any capital.
> I don’t think she was intentionally trying to defraud anyone
we very much disagree here.
What I think in this case is that it's a pity that she wasn't prosecuted for threatening people's health with unreliable test results. They didn't "run out of runway" while in research mode: they were already selling a defective product that is safety-critical. Google Jean-Louis Gasse's piece on his personal experience with Theranos results. It was incredibly callous to gamble with people's lives that way. I do understand that it was easier to prosecute the financial crimes, but it's still unsatisfying that they were not held to account on those actions.
In medicine you are indeed expected to stay in research mode forever until you have something that provably works. None of this is controversial or complicated.
So, I always wondered, if a lab technician needs a mere glance on the sales pitch to have doubts, how could investors miss it during even the most superficial due dilligence? Or did they catch it, and just say fuck it, we can still dump it through an IPO?
And those celebrities going on its board, was the money so good and the hype so blinding?
I can't get too upset about the investors; they had the opportunity to do their own due diligence and chose not too.
She lied to patients, subverting systems meant to protect people against fraudulent medical care and faking blood test results. This wasn't a game. The punishment for cavalierly toying with people's health was far too lenient.
She earned 25 years or more not just on the merits, but as an example to the next person who decides to make money with fake medical treatments.
I generally agree, but when your fraud is in the hundreds of millions and billions range, well, that's more than most people will earn in a hundred lifetimes.
If you defraud 500K people of all their $2K in savings, then you deserve everything that’s coming to you.
Oddly enough I think the justice system is set up to function the other way around.
> After President Biden pardoned Americans convicted of federal marijuana possession last week, reform advocates praised his action as a “historic” step away from mass incarceration, while critics lamented it as another blow to public safety. The truth is somewhat less momentous: the pardons affect only about 6,500 people, none of whom is currently in prison
Yes. For corporate murder.
https://fortune.com/2022/01/04/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-hum...
Statistically some of those consumers suffered worse outcomes and others died although the link between those outcomes and Theranos is hard to prove in the individual cases. If you throw bricks off of a skyscraper at the street below without looking you are trying to kill "people" even if you never saw any of your eventual victims. She is being punished for the financial aspect of the affair according to those standards but we shouldn't forget the other aspect.
If she was given one day for each person she defrauded of their health not their money she would be in prison for life which to my thinking is equitable. I have no sympathy for her whatsoever. 11 years isn't even enough.
Then don't commit one of the most notable frauds of the 21st century? It seems to me that avoiding this fate you so rightfully fear is incredibly simple and anybody who therefore fails to restrain themselves from doing so has earned every second of their sentence.
I wouldn't be surprised if her pregnancies were calculated to try to gain leniency. Otherwise it's pretty selfish to have kids knowing you could be in prison for most of their childhood.
So, yeah, under the First Step rules, Holmes might see a couple years chopped off that sentence.
I think it's unlikely she serves fewer than 6-7 years. It's a tough sentence!
It's an essential part of the system of checks and balances among the three branches of US government - it prevents the judicial branch from getting too much power compared to the executive branch.
People who are guilty of a crime and prosecuted fairly under the law should generally serve their sentence. Exceptions to that are best managed by an independent and transparent tribunal who can give principled reasons for commuting specific sentences, for example a prisoner serving a very long term has undergone a genuine moral transformation and is now safe to release, or changes in society have rendered prosecutions of a certain time and place anachronistic and unjust be modern standards.
Yes, such a system could be (and has been) abused, but given the power the judicial side has (and how that power has be abused) there has to be a system in place that checks the judicial system's power over individuals. This check prevents over-corruption in the judicial system to an extent. The point is to not allow any branch of government to gain too much power - a "separation of powers".
So many people are wrongfully convicted, either because the law is unjust (many drug laws from the 1990s, for example) or because the judicial system itself is so imperfect--from overzealous district attorneys who count their convictions as merit points (independently of the case merits) to the unjust plea bargain system to police investigators who extract false confessions.
Given some presidents have pardoned HUNDREDS of people this would imply there is a serious problem with the US justice system?
Thankfully a US president can exert his king-like authority and correct this judicial problem.
Question - Given the obvious flaws with the justice system how does one get the presidents attention to get a pardon?
Have you ever looked at the people who were pardoned and the crimes they committed?
Armed bank robbery, drugs, fraud, counterfeiting.
She has a big, supportive family. Her kids will be fine. People write like the kid is going to be raised in a USP, like Bane from Batman.
They'll be fine. Lots and lots of kids have it actually hard, because their mom is sent away when they're 5 or 6. Here? No problem. I think she's a sociopath, but her family planning decision makes perfect sense, and the people writing comments about how callous or irresponsible she is are telling on themselves in a particular weird way.
My wife was forced down this route when diagnosed with cancer at 35 - the chemo and radiation killed all her eggs and forced her into a mandatory regime of chemically induced menopause. The presence of estrogen in her body is now a life threatening condition for the rest of her life.
We were able to freeze three embryos prior to starting treatment, and are considering surrogacy now.
I think it's unfair to draw attention to this particular decision that she has made as as callous or scheming when in reality there are already plenty of examples and her having children may have been the most human of them all.
When I read about Holmes in light of those posts, I'd say she is some sort of callous and insensitive person. She never once gave a shit about ethics, people's lives etc. Who knows she decided to have kids simply because it might reduce her sentence rather than because she really wanted to have kids like rest of us do.
I don’t know that it’s that irresponsible given that her family is incredibly wealthy and she’ll be gone for a relatively short time in their childhood.
I mean I know it’s going to be unpopular to say but she’s a blonde-haired, pretty white girl from a wealthy family. I’m astounded it was as long as 11 years (really 3-5). I’m sure she is too, and I imagine it’ll be reduced further on appeal once Balwani has been painted as the criminal mastermind of the operation.
We’ll know better once we see what he gets, and what the justification is for that sentence.
I’ve read pretty deeply into Theranos over the years and if anyone is to blame it’s some of the top level engineering/science/executive employees who knew it was bullshit but stuck around (even with the constant threats and intimidation by Sunny Balwani who IMO is even more guilty than Holmes).
Wealthy investors buying into something the media and half-interested retired Washington DC power players, sitting on countless boards, who care more about dinner parties than technology isn’t that surprising or malicious.
You can maybe blame our current credibility systems for pushing it (just like FTX) but at the same time this is a classic human flaw to join the crowd and seek validation from celebrity. The fact it was a giant loser is plenty of disincentive for those in the future. Plenty of those wealthy people lost big… it wasn’t regular joe holding the bag.
The sheen of the genius tech entrepreneur (in this case with the added phoney multiplier of female tech CEO) has taken a big hit in recent years.
(Citation please)
What VCs and Washington DC investors/board members were directly complicit in covering up the fact the science was bullshit early on? Which whistleblowers were silenced or bullied by them?
You seem to know some juicy details I haven't heard about.
Maybe you mean Erika Cheung? She did indeed contact George Schultz (former Secretary of State, 95yrs old at the time of WSJ expose) after befriending Tyler Schultz (his nephew) who worked there and who was also critical in bringing down Theranos. There was no evidence George even replied to her email or tried to 'bully' her (from what I've read it was just ignored). Not long after she went to WSJ which is what took down Theranos. She's still friends with Tyler.
Sunny and Elizabeth heard from these employees that it wouldn't work. Then they kept pitching that it would work. Unfortunately our laws are such that the only prosecutable crimes in the Theranos case were for defrauding investors, and the only people guilty of defrauding investors were the ones who pitched to those investors.
And some of those scientists and engineers probably also suffered from wishful thinking that this might be a solvable problem. Wishful thinking is not a crime, pitching wishful thinking as already solved to investors is a crime.
Given the nature of her crime, wouldn't strong unwavering familial and social support increase the risk of recidivism? Like, if she was guaranteed to be shunned by all, she would be at 0 risk of it.
That's why a lot of first-time petty criminals get light sentences (except when drugs are involved - mandatory minimums kick in) compared to the guidelines.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of this being a consideration. Someone had trauma in their life so they get a lenient sentence for defrauding people out of money?
Maybe this isn’t consistently applied across states and gender.
We'll have to check back in 9.35 years to see if that part is accurate
I mean, the 9 served thing is a little easy, since it follows mechanically from the actual sentence (also, it'll be 10 served, not 9).
= 9.6 years (based on 54 days per year off for good behaviour)
I used to be a pretty damned good lawyer (if I do say so myself), but I never practiced federal criminal law, so I have to admit that was pure gut feeling and general lawyerly instincts. :)
If someone told me I was going to jail for a a week, it would be bad.
I’d someone told me I was having a week added to my 10 year sentence, I’m not sure if care that much.
This former federal prosecutor does not think so:
> Anyone who claims Holmes received more or less than what she was “supposed to get” does not understand federal sentencing. I served for almost seven years as a federal prosecutor, led dozens of sentencings and co-authored a nationwide guide to prosecutors on the topic, and I couldn’t predict with any confidence what sentence Holmes would receive.
> Indeed, 10 different federal judges would have likely imposed 10 different sentences on Holmes. That’s both a function of the general process and of Holmes’ particular case. She didn’t face a mandatory minimum sentence (meaning the judge was not required to impose a prison term), while her maximum sentence under the relevant statutes for her offense was 80 years (20 years for each of the four wire fraud counts of conviction).
[...]
> Common sense and a dose of perspective show that Holmes shouldn’t spend more than a decade in prison, let alone 15 years. [...] In other words, her crime was serious, but prosecutors can point to no dead body or even serious bodily injury, though the risk was real. [...] At this point the overriding question should be about the prospect of rehabilitation. Holmes can be a productive member of society. The judge, while not sentencing her to as much prison time as he could have, should have shown more leniency.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/elizabeth-holmes-sente...
She's not just a random entreprenuer. Medical startups need to be held to a higher standard than average tech companies and the punishment for fraud that puts patients at risk should be as harsh as possible.
Ian Gibbons
White collar crime should be punished to the utmost degree. These are usually people that had everything given to them to live a legitimate, educated, and safe life, and they blew it all due to greed and ego. Most non- “white collar” criminals didn’t have that chance to start with. And white collar crime usually affects a multitude of people over periods of years. It’s not like most other crimes that happen on much smaller timescales with a lot more emotion involved. White collar crime usually means someone is waking up every day for years saying “yep, I’m still gonna keep doing this”.
This seems a bit weird to me.
If one engages in behavior that creates real bodily risk for people, that ought to be the crime. The probability of injury that was created, not the outcome. If it just so happens that the dice landed in a way that didn’t harm anyone, that doesn’t tell us anything about her intention, how dangerous it is to have her out in society.
Especially for white collar crimes, where the execution of the risk is often set up in such a manner that the perpetrator isn’t there for the injury. If somebody breaks into a gas station and tries to rob the place with a weapon, but at the critical moment doesn’t actually hurt anyone, that’s still obviously very serious, but we can infer that they have some little bit of conscience that spoke up when it was most needed. Not so for the person who set up a dangerous abstract process that just happened to not hurt anyone by coincidence.
- wire fraud (3 counts): 7
- victims (10+): 2
- damages ($140M): 24 (!!)
- sophisticated means: 2
- leading role: 4
- abuse of public trust: 2
- obstruction of justice: 2
TOTAL: 43
And here's[1] the chart. Even for first time offenders, penalty can be life.
[1] https://supernotes-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/direct-uploads...
Mandatory minimums are obviously a different story.
This appears to be a very ruthless hatchet job. It appears the elites set a trap and imploded her company. It appears her chief scientist Ian Gibbons was poisoned. The media said he died of suicide by tylenol poisoning. Very odd because that’s the worst way to go and Ian was a distinguished engineer and scientist who had his choice of where he wanted to work.
No one wants to talk about the board of directors either, given that these people were so well known and influential this seems… odd.
All her patents were gobbled up by the investors and her company imploded right before covid19 hit.
Even if her machines were only half functioning it would have been nice to have them on every walgreens and walmart in the age of a pandemic.
I feel very sorry for her. I’m probably the only one who thinks she’s a victim here. She tried to make the world a better place and give you access to your own health information. And because she made so mis statements that is typical of a “fake it till you make it” she now has to rot in prison and her children have to go without a mother.
I find this absolutely disgraceful. She would not have been so hyped if it weren’t for the media. They will of course never face any consequences. They get off scott free to pump and dump the next victim.
When do we break this cycle?
Frozen eggs don't last indefinitely and the viability degrades over time. After 5 or 6 years they become increasingly unlikely to be viable (it's not impossible, but statistically unlikely to be fruitful).
When I re-entered the dating scene a couple years ago I learned much more than I ever wanted to know about egg freezing. It's big business here in the Bay Area where there are a lot of ambitious career women.
Most of the women I know that have gotten it done also seems to have almost a willful ignorance about the failure rate; especially later in life.
Hell of a thing to do to a kid.
I am grateful for the love and care my parents gave me, but I don't consider myself something that belongs to them as birth right.
It is my opinion people must be responsible of the children they breed.
I mean, it definitely also garners sympathy with the judge, but it'd be totally reasonable for her to do it just because she wanted kids.
Thanks for bringing up that perspective.
I never asked for this shit and yet, I exist.
Are you implying that certain class of people (poor, ill, criminal, etc – who know their kids could have it hard) are not supposed to have kids?
I think these two cases are sort of parallels: people assumed that someone was a genius to such an extent that they disregarded any signs of fraud and sought little proof of the assertions being made.
Consider the case of Hillary Clinton, who by textbook definition mishandled classified documents, which other people have been jailed for. She was not even referred for prosecution because of her widespread connections and political machinery.
There's numerous other examples of connected people getting light or no sentences. Jussie Smollett is another one.
Someday we will have to reckon with the fact that SV founder culture encourages this kind of behaviour.
SV thrives on trust, not on deceipt. There’s a big difference between a founder saying “I’m going to change the world!”, which is optimism mixed with naïveté, versus a founder saying “my technology works!” when they know it does not.
Dotcom 1.0 was full of hucksters and it rightly crashed. The hasn’t been the norm in this newer era of YC, A16Z, First Round, etc. Integrity is valued and expected.
And yet Sequoia was an investor and huge proponent of FTX.
If he walks without at least a double digit sentence, that's going to Raise Some Questions.
Like, how can we say Holmes is an outlier when we had literally all of crypto? Sure we're all (rightfully!) ragging on the FTX thing, but the sheer amount of fraud in the space generally was mind-boggling and treated as a matter of course!
If anything the last several years has convinced me that the VC emperors truly have no clothes - the level of diligence done throughout the gig economy hype cycle, and then followed by the crypto hype cycle, is frankly embarrassing. We spent the past several years at least dealing with a non-stop train of hucksters!
Depends highly on the who the deception is against.
The problem is, the medical field has stricter laws around it, and it's much easier to prove that someone is lying.
If you're suggesting that SV culture encourages lying more than, Wall Street, Hollywood, Shenzhen, Bengaluru or any other place where large amounts of money moves to high risk ideas, then I disagree. It's at most the same, if not significantly less corrupt.
If you're suggesting that SV culture enourages lying to rich people more than other places, then I think you're misinformed about rich people.
I had to remind them she stole from and (more importantly) embarrassed extremely powerful and well connected people. This is the double-edged sword of the composition of the Theranos board and high profile investors.
It really makes the whole thing even more astonishing. Not only are you constantly lying, defrauding, etc but you're doing it to former Secretaries of State, a former Secretary of Defense, four star generals, etc. These facts are why I think this is just pathological for her. I couldn't imagine screwing over people who have literally spent their lives implementing United States foreign policy and managing armed forces who by their intended purpose have killed a lot of people. I would live every day completely terrified. I mean this isn't a Putin opponent but still...
As one example George Schultz considers his involvement in Theranos to have completely destroyed his legacy. Ouch.
The justice system kind of "is what it is" but in this case there were a lot of people with a lot of weight to throw around to tip the scales.
Yes, and a shoutout to Tyler Shultz!
And yes, I cannot imagine how stressful it must have been for Tyler.
Nobody seems to be talking much about the elephant in the room here BTW; which is that this is about a pretty young woman dealing with male investors in a culture where sexism, harassment, etc. are routinely covered up by disingenuous political correctness. It seems we just don't talk about this and pretend it wasn't a huge factor both with investors being taken for the fools they were, the media drooling all over this because having cute women on the front page is great for business, the public interest in Ms. Holmes (same), the near complete lack of that for her male co-conspirator, and a (male) judge taking the side of the cringe worthy crowd of crocodile shedding wealthy male "victims" demanding revenge for being taken advantage of by a pretty woman.
If she was male this company would not have raised this much and the related fraud would not be front page news. Nor would the sentence be this high because this is business as usual in SV.
It's a harsh sentence for two kids to have to grow up with mummy in prison.
Holmes herself is entirely responsible for that though, right. She gave that "sentence".
As it is, judges are elected officials in the US that dependent on campaign financing and support. Guess where the money is in Silicon Valley? Hard to prove that connection of course but this looks like the rich and wealthy "victims" buying some vengeance and getting it.
"What went wrong? This is sad because Ms. Holmes is brilliant.”
Brilliant of what? Of dressing in black turtleneck and imitating Steve Jobs? Able to lower her voice one octave down?
This statement right here.
The fact that a supposedly impartial judge is having a crisis of reasoning...
The joke being "all equal before the law", the punchline being that aristocrat/peasant social structure is doing better than ever inside a self-proclaimed "republic"
Can you imagine the judge in a serial killers murder case going on about how talented the killer was in cutting up body parts and could have contributed to society by being a specialist amputator. Poor thing just made a bad choice. Now we put away such a talented amputator in prison and the world is darker for it.
Oh woe!
The fact that she could not be convinced of the impossibility of her ideas by her professor who could give a clear falsifying experiment did not bode well for her.
Also, the medical field is far removed from me, but she was a programmer in high school and claimed she made money selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities. That's just bullshit. Even if you do a favorable interpretation and assume they mean compilers written in C++, what would they be compiling that a university would pay money for?
Maybe she gets out after 5 years, which is hopefully enough for her to not start something similar again.
She was a fraud and misled everyone in a big way: investors, patients, etc…
White collar crime needs to be punished. Or “held accountable for”
ONLY guilty of defrauding investors - not guilty of defrauding patients.
"Holmes was acquitted on three charges relating to patients who received inaccurate test results but found guilty on four charges, including one count of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud against investors."
Which makes me wonder - if your product is not defrauding customers, then how is it that you are defrauding investors ...
I believe a distinction is being made where Theranos the company is understood to have defrauded customers but it cannot be proven that Holmes directly defrauded all customers. Where it can be proven that she directly defrauded investors given she was aware of the fraud against customers.
In the end she goes to jail for being a bad investment for investors and not for the "crime" of fucking around with peoples health.
Make rich people lose some money -- off to jail with ye!
Holmes showed her lack of intelligence by applying those startup patterns to a highly regulated industry. To get her product into some of those settings required committing fraud. So, the whole move fast and break things works great for startups, it fails miserably in healthcare. She didn't know better, and even worse didn't know when to apply a different pattern.