Yeah, then we are all complete. What a miserable outlook. Will happen though.
I understand why it is what it is, but I don’t think killing 1 person with a knife is necessarily worse than bankrupting 1000s (or more ; the fallout of financial scammers is hard to measure). I think life in prison definitely should be on the table, in the same place with the sexual deviants and murderers. I wouldn’t find it that weird to give someone like Madoff 1000 life sentences and some poor sap who got in a fight and killed someone by accident but the agressor was white and rich, getting a few years. I guess here in the EU it is the latter but not the former and in the US the reverse. I prefer the EU stance, but in an ideal world, financial crimes affecting enough people should be treated as like murder, not just a slap on the wrist.
Well you could even justify it by looking at life expectancy of rich vs poor people, and then consider how many years of potential life are lost by the backrupting of 1000s.
The investigative Youtuber 'CoffeeZilla', Stephen Findeisen, often emphasises the human cost of scams, including bankruptcy and suicides. His description of these scams as a type of "financial murder" may sound extreme but I have to agree with him when the effects are so devastating to so many people.
What he did is comparable to a serial killer in the way he ruined lives. And on a very large scale. The max punishment for that is apparently 150 years. And that is not in sing sing, but in some cushy place. But you are right; he got something that matches the crime vaguely; the problem is that this is an exception and that’s why it’s well known. Many grifters get a few years or nothing for destroying 100s of lives.
This reminds me of the crazy schemes from the Freeman on the land-movement. ”The person committing the fraud was startup CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who is in no way connected to Liz Holmes, sweet mother of two”
Trying to claim that your crimes were committed by a made-up fictional person doesn’t really work, unless you’re shooting for an insanity plea
You need a reason in several US states, and have to be approved by a judge. Some give more leeway than others, but you can't just roll up and ask to have your name changed to "Tequila Slammer Johnson III" without some damn good reasons.
But if you want to change your name from Jessica Smith to your middle name, and thusly be Amanda Smith, that might fly. Doubly so if you have a stalker ex with restraining orders.
Plus I'm not really cool with the idea of you being forced to have a name. You didn't choose it, your parents' did, and they may not have been in sound mind (or have ever been in sound mind, for that matter). If I'm an adult and can vote, drink alcohol, operate motor vehicles, etc, why can't I chose my own name? We let people choose their own pronouns, are you forcing people to use a dead name now, too?
She acts as if she has dissociative identity disorder and that the other person was not actually her. Looks more like she was just a good actor and still has the ability to fool people into thinking she is something else, like she did to the author.
The author is in on it - "it" being a cynical PR managed portrayal optimised to garner sympathy and disassociate her from her crimes. The tactics are so blatant - introducing her as a "mom", the homely photo, focusing on her children, her first quote about how is was all a "mistake" and portraying her as a victim of things she didn't understand. It's honestly offensive.
At first I wanted to alert you that homely means ugly, however then I googled the definition and found that it means ugly for AE and cozy and comfortable in BE, according to Oxford.
Still maybe good to know that it has such diverging meanings.
> still has the ability to fool people into thinking she is something else
I recommend you sit back and review how you arrived at this conclusion. I have personally never interacted with Elizabeth Holmes and everything I know about this person has come through the lens of first media, then courts, and then media again.
It is the media, including the New York Times, that is creating this impression, is that not the case?
So, correctly your sentence would read “still has the ability to fool the handful of people who interact with her directly and then share accounts with us”.
So now, having established the actual state of affair in this ‘information graph’, the next question naturally is: “are these people really fooled or are they fooling me?” I.e. Do we have gullible people in positions that require inquisitive and thorough mindsets, or, even more “actors” pretending to being journalists, a sort of “dissociative [professional] identity disorder”.
Your position implies that there is no way to determine the difference between reputable media and disreputable media; that all stories must be considered with equal weight in the equation that is "the media". I can form an opinion of something without personal experience by considering the reputation of the source(s), and when reputable sources tend to agree and only the low-value sources dissent, I can have a confidence in my opinion that is better than just plotting all points on a graph with equal weight.
Once I feel that I have a good view of an issue, using information weighted by reputation, I can make a statement like "This article appears inconsistent with the likely narrative, but consistent with someone who has been conned by a conman" without needing to justify my position directly, or abstracted away from the story. If you have a real alternative, you need to present it, but simply questioning someone's methodology is somewhere between irrelevant and disingenuous. At the very least, it adds little to the discussion of the issue at hand -- even more so in casual conversation where people are expressing a personal opinion of little or no real importance beyond this tiny little puddle. I mean, who is really going to respond to something like your comment with a couple of paragraphs to justify one sentence? ;)
And your position is fallacious, since you presume that the reputation of a source correlates to a greater likelihood of truth.
That's a classic fallacy: appeal to/argument from authority. It's especially problematic, since who/what one presumes to be 'reputable', other people may not agree with.
Moreover the opinion of a majority of 'reputable' sources, agreeing to something, does not make it true. Reportage and stories are to be considered chiefly on the basis of what is reported and the likelihood of it being true, and should not be so staked on the reputation of the person/entity reporting it.
Independent sources of information with a reputation for accuracy and unbiased reporting generally agreeing on something is literally the best we have for being informed about something we did not personally witness. Refusing to accept consensus positions from good sources should be done VERY carefully and has a high risk of reaching conclusions that are wildly inaccurate. You'd need a very good reason to reject consensus - one that's based around the available facts, not just negative personal impact or discomfort.
Declaring, without an argument that is not circular, that a collection of respected sources are all wrong (or lying) and that the truth must be something different is, by definition, a conspiracy theory.
I only care about her crime to the extent that some people may have suffered as a result of getting inaccurate test results or paying more for a service under false pretenses.
These days I struggle to see the ethical issue with defrauding the government manipulators and monetary system monopolists who had invested in her.
I think the point of the post was that "government manipulators and monetary system monopolists" are also engaged in lying and fraud at a scale much more massive than Holmes ever was.
If you don't like lying, you might want to edit at your post, where you misrepresented the content of the post you're responding to by removing pretty vital context.
The context is as readily available as it gets -- it was the message I was responding to.
It's absurd to reduce all investors to "government manipulators and monetary system monopolists". In what way were all the victims of Theranos's fraud lying at a larger scale?
This isn't a team sport: just because I'm pointing out that you're wrong, doesn't mean I'm agreeing with the other guy.
It's absurd that you ignored half the comment you were responding to. Whatever point you might have had, you burned all your credibility when you decided to make a dishonest argument by taking someone else's words out of context.
Why should anyone talk to you if you've shown you're unrepentantly taking words out of context to win an argument? I'm not talking about Theranos with someone like that, because that discussion would require nuance which you'll just ignore half of.
> It's absurd that you ignored half the comment you were responding to. Whatever point you might have had, you burned all your credibility when you decided to make a dishonest argument by taking someone else's words out of context.
As I said before, the context is readily available. I have also responded to the totality of the original message. And in doing so, I also quoted you. Leading to this:
> This isn't a team sport: just because I'm pointing out that you're wrong, doesn't mean I'm agreeing with the other guy.
Do you want me to address the person (and your!) claims or not?
You just spent three paragraphs repeatedly calling me an unrepentant, untrustworthy liar with no credibility and no capacity for nuance.
I feel bad for the young people who blew the whistle and she spent millions of dollars trying to intimidate them and ruin their lives. It is given passing mention near the end of the article. I won’t forget that she is a sociopath.
The framing of this story is kinda bizarre. The author keeps insinuating that Holmes is charismatic but full of shit, but the first mention of this is 40% through the article (and the first 40% is pretty flattering of Holmes).
My takeaway, though, was that even now, as Holmes is counting down the days before reporting to prison, she is completely unrepentant.
One idea is that becoming a parent is the PR strategy. Supposedly she started her relationship as Theranos was falling apart, and both of their children have been born while she has going through prosecution. She was pregnant with the second at the time of her sentencing.
Sorry, this is 2023. If you are going to make a psychological "science" claim, you are saying the claim is likely false as the field is mostly covered in bullshit
I don't get why some of the commenters are so surprised by the article. There's a long history of newspapers showing the "human side" of famous criminals. Even Charles Manson got articles like these.
You should always apply a bit of Straussian reading to them. For example, note how in the opening sentences the author confirms that Elizabeth was faking her voice the whole time (as many have suspected). That's not something a truly sympathetic article would have pointed out.
It’s all so exhausting, isn’t it? The PR machine, endlessly contorting reality. She can be a nice, caring person and still do lots of crimes and ruin the lives of others. This isn’t newsworthy; it’s a vanity project for both the author and the subject.
If I'm ever convicted of large-scale fraud / sociopathic crimes, I'd definitely like Amy to write a story about me.
> .. in 2017. They did not anticipate that she would be indicted. They did not anticipate that she would be sentenced to 11 years.
John Carreyrou's story broken in October 2015, and his investigations the next few years resulted in his book Bad Blood being released in 2018.
I expect everyone that read his original story, or any of his and other reporters' subsequent investigations, would have just naturally assumed indictment, conviction, and sentencing were inevitable - assuming some semblance of justice was involved.
And while we were finding out some of the awful truths, Elizabeth was of course already intimately aware of all of them.
So that claim is just ludicrous.
The author touches on the problem of how to trust someone who by all accounts is a pathological liar - but doesn't seem to have a good answer.
Of all the ethics questions her story/life poses, the one that is bothering me the most - if she hadn't cheated wealthy investors, if she had only played with average people's health/wealth, would she have gotten this much attention? this much punishment? If the answer is a no or a maybe, then we have much, much bigger issues than one person being a fraud, sociopath etc
Another thing to think about - all those press fawning over her (similar to SBF), did those journalists do any due diligence at all? I understand doing good journalism is hard, but it is their moral responsibility to at least double check before praising someone as genius, savior of mankind or whatever else, isn't it?
It’s just non-stop mask wearing. The mask of the CEO, and now a different mask. Can’t hold her responsible for the CEO stuff because that was a different person right?
Is there adequate scholarly video with explanation and critique of U.S. justice system?
I do not understand what U.S. justice system even doing all this time, waiting for her to collect pay check from autobiographical Hollywood epic so she can buy off even more free time outside jail ?
“I can't shake an earlier story that Mr. Evans relayed. In the waning days of Theranos, Ms. Holmes got a dog, a Siberian husky named Balto. Last year, when a mountain lion carried Balto away from the front porch, Ms. Holmes spent 16 hours searching in the woods, digging through brambles and poison oak, hoping to find him alive. Everyone knew Balto was dead, but Ms. Holmes kept searching. The relentlessness. The certainty. The fanaticism. It's the same way Ms. Holmes kept hanging on at Theranos.
Ms. Holmes eventually found her beloved husky, Balto, in the woods. But by then the dog was gone, torn apart by the mountain lion.”
I am actually a lot more interested in the question of the board and investors. If Ms. Holmes is indeed a not-so-smart sociopath/psychopath/... why was half the top level of the US government so prepared to hand her a big check?
A partial list people she convinced: George Schulz (former Secretary of State) and "via him" ...
* Richard Kovacevich, former Wells Fargo & Co. CEO
* Jim Mattis, former head of U.S. Central Command who later became Defense Secretary
* Gary Roughead, U.S. Navy officer
* Sam Nunn, former U.S. Senator
* Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State
* William Perry, former Defense Secretary
* Richard Kovacevich (former CEO of Wells Fargo);
* William Perry (former United States Secretary of Defense); and
* William Foege (former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
* Besty DeVos (former education secretary)
These are all people who decide on who gets to occupy really important positions in the US government. This is not a full list (but I'm mostly leaving out Trump cabinet members ... shall we say for obvious reasons. That Betsy DeVos cannot correctly judge biomedical test performance, fine. That William Foege can't see medical fraud for what it is, not OK. That Secretaries of State cannot tell they're being lied to for 5 years ... I mean the positions these people occupy and oversee are going to be magnets for sociopaths/psychopaths ... and they can't tell?
Her father held various positions in the federal government [0].
Also, cynically, coming from a prominent family, likely
helped opened doors for her and her father; doors which would be closed for the non aristocratic class.
74 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadI understand why it is what it is, but I don’t think killing 1 person with a knife is necessarily worse than bankrupting 1000s (or more ; the fallout of financial scammers is hard to measure). I think life in prison definitely should be on the table, in the same place with the sexual deviants and murderers. I wouldn’t find it that weird to give someone like Madoff 1000 life sentences and some poor sap who got in a fight and killed someone by accident but the agressor was white and rich, getting a few years. I guess here in the EU it is the latter but not the former and in the US the reverse. I prefer the EU stance, but in an ideal world, financial crimes affecting enough people should be treated as like murder, not just a slap on the wrist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost
Stabbing someone in an alley for a hit of fentanyl doesn't really draw the clicks. News is a business.
Oddly enough, the end result of this preference will -probably- be increased public "justice."
Trying to claim that your crimes were committed by a made-up fictional person doesn’t really work, unless you’re shooting for an insanity plea
But if you want to change your name from Jessica Smith to your middle name, and thusly be Amanda Smith, that might fly. Doubly so if you have a stalker ex with restraining orders.
Plus I'm not really cool with the idea of you being forced to have a name. You didn't choose it, your parents' did, and they may not have been in sound mind (or have ever been in sound mind, for that matter). If I'm an adult and can vote, drink alcohol, operate motor vehicles, etc, why can't I chose my own name? We let people choose their own pronouns, are you forcing people to use a dead name now, too?
At first I wanted to alert you that homely means ugly, however then I googled the definition and found that it means ugly for AE and cozy and comfortable in BE, according to Oxford.
Still maybe good to know that it has such diverging meanings.
I recommend you sit back and review how you arrived at this conclusion. I have personally never interacted with Elizabeth Holmes and everything I know about this person has come through the lens of first media, then courts, and then media again.
It is the media, including the New York Times, that is creating this impression, is that not the case?
So, correctly your sentence would read “still has the ability to fool the handful of people who interact with her directly and then share accounts with us”.
So now, having established the actual state of affair in this ‘information graph’, the next question naturally is: “are these people really fooled or are they fooling me?” I.e. Do we have gullible people in positions that require inquisitive and thorough mindsets, or, even more “actors” pretending to being journalists, a sort of “dissociative [professional] identity disorder”.
Once I feel that I have a good view of an issue, using information weighted by reputation, I can make a statement like "This article appears inconsistent with the likely narrative, but consistent with someone who has been conned by a conman" without needing to justify my position directly, or abstracted away from the story. If you have a real alternative, you need to present it, but simply questioning someone's methodology is somewhere between irrelevant and disingenuous. At the very least, it adds little to the discussion of the issue at hand -- even more so in casual conversation where people are expressing a personal opinion of little or no real importance beyond this tiny little puddle. I mean, who is really going to respond to something like your comment with a couple of paragraphs to justify one sentence? ;)
That's a classic fallacy: appeal to/argument from authority. It's especially problematic, since who/what one presumes to be 'reputable', other people may not agree with.
Moreover the opinion of a majority of 'reputable' sources, agreeing to something, does not make it true. Reportage and stories are to be considered chiefly on the basis of what is reported and the likelihood of it being true, and should not be so staked on the reputation of the person/entity reporting it.
Declaring, without an argument that is not circular, that a collection of respected sources are all wrong (or lying) and that the truth must be something different is, by definition, a conspiracy theory.
These days I struggle to see the ethical issue with defrauding the government manipulators and monetary system monopolists who had invested in her.
If you don't like lying, you might want to edit at your post, where you misrepresented the content of the post you're responding to by removing pretty vital context.
It's absurd to reduce all investors to "government manipulators and monetary system monopolists". In what way were all the victims of Theranos's fraud lying at a larger scale?
It's absurd that you ignored half the comment you were responding to. Whatever point you might have had, you burned all your credibility when you decided to make a dishonest argument by taking someone else's words out of context.
Why should anyone talk to you if you've shown you're unrepentantly taking words out of context to win an argument? I'm not talking about Theranos with someone like that, because that discussion would require nuance which you'll just ignore half of.
As I said before, the context is readily available. I have also responded to the totality of the original message. And in doing so, I also quoted you. Leading to this:
> This isn't a team sport: just because I'm pointing out that you're wrong, doesn't mean I'm agreeing with the other guy.
Do you want me to address the person (and your!) claims or not?
You just spent three paragraphs repeatedly calling me an unrepentant, untrustworthy liar with no credibility and no capacity for nuance.
...which is why it's obvious that the following is not true:
> I have also responded to the totality of the original message.
Anyway...
> Do you want me to address the person (and your!) claims or not?
1. Yes, I would like you to address the person's claims.
2. Now you're telling me what my claims are? Cooooool.
> You just spent three paragraphs repeatedly calling me an unrepentant, untrustworthy liar with no credibility and no capacity for nuance.
I didn't say you had no capacity for nuance. ;)
I'm sure you could participate in a nuanced discussion if you chose to, it's just clear you're making other choices.
My takeaway, though, was that even now, as Holmes is counting down the days before reporting to prison, she is completely unrepentant.
Sorry, this is 2023. If you are going to make a psychological "science" claim, you are saying the claim is likely false as the field is mostly covered in bullshit
So that's for Liz. There rest also want you to forget this board of directors:
Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO
Henry Kissinger, former Sec State, NSC
Sam Nunn, former US Senator
Riley Bechtel, former Bechtel Group CEO
David Boies, a founder and the chairman of Boies Schiller Flexner
William Foege, former director of the CDC
Richard Kovacevich, former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo
Jim Mattis, later U.S. Secretary of Defense
Fabrizio Bonanni, former executive vice president of Amgen
...
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/print-edition/2013/...
So this is a very interesting on-going story. I really want to finally read about the actual story about this "most secretive company".
You should always apply a bit of Straussian reading to them. For example, note how in the opening sentences the author confirms that Elizabeth was faking her voice the whole time (as many have suspected). That's not something a truly sympathetic article would have pointed out.
I agree with you, and found this article to be quite heavy handed at times thematically, but what's the ask or end goal?
Hoping readers engage in a letter writing campaign to the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit?
Plus what else are you going to spend money on in the can? Ramen and smokes?
> .. in 2017. They did not anticipate that she would be indicted. They did not anticipate that she would be sentenced to 11 years.
John Carreyrou's story broken in October 2015, and his investigations the next few years resulted in his book Bad Blood being released in 2018.
I expect everyone that read his original story, or any of his and other reporters' subsequent investigations, would have just naturally assumed indictment, conviction, and sentencing were inevitable - assuming some semblance of justice was involved.
And while we were finding out some of the awful truths, Elizabeth was of course already intimately aware of all of them.
So that claim is just ludicrous.
The author touches on the problem of how to trust someone who by all accounts is a pathological liar - but doesn't seem to have a good answer.
I wonder if this has a factual basis or is mere speculation.
Another thing to think about - all those press fawning over her (similar to SBF), did those journalists do any due diligence at all? I understand doing good journalism is hard, but it is their moral responsibility to at least double check before praising someone as genius, savior of mankind or whatever else, isn't it?
I do not understand what U.S. justice system even doing all this time, waiting for her to collect pay check from autobiographical Hollywood epic so she can buy off even more free time outside jail ?
“I can't shake an earlier story that Mr. Evans relayed. In the waning days of Theranos, Ms. Holmes got a dog, a Siberian husky named Balto. Last year, when a mountain lion carried Balto away from the front porch, Ms. Holmes spent 16 hours searching in the woods, digging through brambles and poison oak, hoping to find him alive. Everyone knew Balto was dead, but Ms. Holmes kept searching. The relentlessness. The certainty. The fanaticism. It's the same way Ms. Holmes kept hanging on at Theranos.
Ms. Holmes eventually found her beloved husky, Balto, in the woods. But by then the dog was gone, torn apart by the mountain lion.”
A partial list people she convinced: George Schulz (former Secretary of State) and "via him" ...
* Richard Kovacevich, former Wells Fargo & Co. CEO
* Jim Mattis, former head of U.S. Central Command who later became Defense Secretary
* Gary Roughead, U.S. Navy officer
* Sam Nunn, former U.S. Senator
* Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State
* William Perry, former Defense Secretary
* Richard Kovacevich (former CEO of Wells Fargo);
* William Perry (former United States Secretary of Defense); and
* William Foege (former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
* Besty DeVos (former education secretary)
These are all people who decide on who gets to occupy really important positions in the US government. This is not a full list (but I'm mostly leaving out Trump cabinet members ... shall we say for obvious reasons. That Betsy DeVos cannot correctly judge biomedical test performance, fine. That William Foege can't see medical fraud for what it is, not OK. That Secretaries of State cannot tell they're being lied to for 5 years ... I mean the positions these people occupy and oversee are going to be magnets for sociopaths/psychopaths ... and they can't tell?
WTF.
No, they are mostly people who once got to decide that.
Verb tenses matter.
Also, cynically, coming from a prominent family, likely helped opened doors for her and her father; doors which would be closed for the non aristocratic class.
[0] https://www.bcg.com/about/people/experts/christian-holmes