Theranos Faces Congressional Inquiry Over Faulty Blood Tests (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to blood analysis startup Theranos asking for them to explain their failure in providing accurate results to patients using its proprietary blood test technology. The company has faced serious backlash after government and regulatory agencies questioned the results of their proprietary 'Edison' machine, that the company claimed could detect hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood. Not only have the feds proposed banning founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes and the company president Sunny Balwani from the blood-testing business for two years, but Holmes' net worth has been cut from $4.5 billion to zero. Most recently, Walgreens decided to cut ties with the company. House Democrats Frank Pallone, Gene Green and Diana DeGette sent the letter on June 30th, asking Holmes to explain what went wrong, what steps the company is taking to help medical professionals and patients who might have been affected by the manipulated results, and how Theranos plans to comply with regulators. "Given Theranos' disregard for patient safety and its failure to immediately address concerns by federal regulators, we write to request more information about how company policies permitted systemic violations of federal law," reads the letter. Theranos says it plans to clear things up with these lawmakers.

Comments

Put that bitch in Jail

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are we even bothering with enquiries?

There is so much documented fraud.

One county. Two classes.

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep just like with Clinton, you should ask yourself this, if you sent now document classified material to your own email server hosted in your basement do you think the the FBI would investigate that before or after you were arrested and put in jail? We know how it worked for Clinton.

Re:Put that bitch in Jail

[Anonymous Coward]

Theranos Feces Congressional Inquiry Over Faulty Blood Tests.

The inner 12-year-old me had to do it.

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[AK Marc]

You mean Rove/Cheney, right?

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Cheney couldn't have put a server in his basement, his coffin takes up too much space there.

In all seriousness, while the Bush administration did some bad things related to email and record-keeping, and ideally they'd be prosecuted for them, what Hillary did was different. Some rules were more fully spelled out by the time she got into office (and yes, I know they updated the requirements to be even clearer after she left), and her treatment of classified material was shameful.

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[AK Marc]

She entered office under exactly the same rules left by Rove/Cheney. She did almost exactly what they did, and followed their example. The "updated" rules were updated, but also grandfathered, so she wasn't in violation of them, but The Next Guy would be. She was under the same rules as Rove/Cheney, and followed them the same. Well, other than there were 22M confirmed emails from Rove/Cheney that were deleted, violating many FOIA and other laws, and they were never prosecuted. Clinton has indicated she didn't delete any work-related emails, and those who disagree haven't been able to prove that, even when given multiple opportunities to do so.

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

She only did "almost exactly what they did" if you consider White House staffers who weren't running for office using private email addresses for White House and RNC business (no classified information as far as anyone's been able to prove) to be almost exactly the same as a person running for POTUS setting up her own server and keeping Top Secret information on it. Also important to note that Rove resigned over it, and that Cheney, while probably somewhat involved, isn't mentioned in most articles about it.

To be clear, I fully believe that Rove should be prosecuted for it, but what he did was wrong in a different way than what Hillary did. Whether or not she deleted work-related emails is not of concern to me, it's the mishandling of classified information.

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[AK Marc]

The FBI cleared her. Whether she did or didn't mishandle classified information isn't clear. She says no, and nobody has proven otherwise. And no, the excuse that the FBI reports to the president doesn't work, because Congress looked into it as well, and they were Republicans who wanted to bury her, and they couldn't find anything, that's why they did yet another Benghazi, which also didn't find anything.

At some point the Republicans will need to stop wasting taxpayer money investigating her. Though that'll only happen if Trump wins (she'll be so disgraced as to not run again).

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

The FBI categorically did not clear her. They did not recommend prosecution, but that's not the same as saying what she did was fine. They actually said

there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning

She absolutely mishandled classified information. She broke several parts of the USC, some of which do not consider intent. The FBI said they would not support prosecution for a number of reasons, but that, regardless of whether what she did was illegal or not, she should have handled it differently.

Also, re: earlier claim about her not deleting emails, from their statement:

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years

Although, to be fair, they do also go on to say:

I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.

So she did delete some, but it may have been a mistake or without thinking.

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[AK Marc]

They did not recommend prosecution,

No, they recommended no prosecution, there's a difference.

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Fair enough. Going to address the rest of the post, or do you not have anything to contribute?

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[AK Marc]

Oh, correcting one point is not contributing, but correcting them all would be? How many points need to be corrected for it to be a valid contribution?

Re: Put that bitch in Jail

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

If you could correct more things, you would have. But you've been mostly wrong so far.

I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing her on TV and thought to myself: this is so freaking cool, she is young talented, works on bleeding edge bio-tech, and made billions of dollars.
Now, I feel terrible for her.

 

Re: I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

You feel terrible for a fraudster. I have a great investment opportunity for you.

Re:I remembe seeing her on TV

[penguinoid]

that the company claimed could detect hundreds of diseases using a single drop of blood.

bleeding edge bio-tech

Too bad it turned out to be bleeding edge marketing, and now people are out for blood.

Re:I remembe seeing her on TV

[gweihir]

If it sounds too good to be true, it it almost always is. Nobody at that age has that kind of skills. It takes high potential, will and decades of experience to get to a point where you can make even significantly smaller breakthroughs than claimed here these days. My guess is that the youth-madness that pervades society has made too many people utterly blind to the realities.

Now, I do not actually think she is a fraudster. If she was one, she would have sold the company at the first good offer (and there must have been quite a few if Forbes valued her at 4.5 Billion). I think she had a good idea, but youth and inexperience prevented her to see its limitations and how much ruther R&D was actually required. Add to that, that as a female "wunderkind", she had probably quite a few (not too bright) fans among people with money early on. In essence, she may have gotten funded into failure, when a decade or two of solid research may actually have had some useful results that would have held up in practice.

The other thing that may have been at work here is an almost hysterical search for new heroes that can "make America great again". That one is not going to happen. Everybody successful today is a global actor, even if that is sometimes hard to see.

Re: I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

You feel terrible for a fraudster.

That's not fraud. It's simply millenial over-self-confidence making its inevitable acquaintance with reality.

Re: I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Why feel sorry for her,she got caught in a fraud,and un-like lots of other frauds,hers could already have killed people.
It always sounded like bull to me,very little time seems to have proved it so..

Re: I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

You feel terrible for a fraudster.

That's not fraud. It's simply millenial over-self-confidence making its inevitable acquaintance with reality.

They almost certainly believed in their idea originally. The point at which it became fraud is the point at which they started using other people's machines with diluted blood against the specification. She wasn't a "fraudster" to begin with but it really looks, from the media reports, like she has become one.

It's a hard lesson for life, but there's a point where what looks grey and just "enhancing your business opportunities" suddenly turns out to be completely black and clearly fraud. You have already stepped over that line when you start carrying out medical procedures such as blood tests in ways which haven't been verified to work.

Re:I remembe seeing her on TV

[The-Ixian]

I am with you.

I have had experiences in my life where I let people down. It is not fun. I can only imagine that this is 10000 times anything I ever had to face.

Hopefully they can either salvage something of the testing technology or refund investors money.

Re:I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody at that age has that kind of skills. It takes high potential, will and decades of experience to get to a point where you can make even significantly smaller breakthroughs than claimed here these days. My guess is that the youth-madness that pervades society has made too many people utterly blind to the realities.

Let's see - her education consists of- completed high school and some college.
No postdoc in biochemistry, no MBA, nada.

Re: I remembe seeing her on TV

[Qzukk]

I think I can invent a whole new way to process blood tests so they can work with just a tiny drop of blood!

-- over-self-confident millennial

I can't make my invention work so I'll just buy other people's equipment, dilute the drop of blood until I can fill the test tube, and tell people I invented a whole new way to process blood tests!

-- fraudster

Re: I remembe seeing her on TV

[AuMatar]

Exactly. If she had raised money, failed, and not tried to sell the product anyway then its just failure. Feeling sorry for her is reasonable.

But she raised money, failed, hid her failure, and then pretended it was working while giving inaccurate test results. That's fraud.

Re: I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

She didn't just "let people down". She fucking lied to them. That's fraud. She oversold her idea and stupid investors jumped in it looking for a quick return without doing their own research.

Re:I remembe seeing her on TV

[HiThere]

She may not have started out as a fraudster, but when she started claiming to diagnose diseases that she couldn't she became one.

What you say is generally, but not always, true. It's also generally true that products with a portion that is extremely secret usually involve fraud, but it's not always true.

The approach she claimed is plausible. I can conceive of doing that with a printed chip using nano-scale bioreators. I couldn't do it, but it's not really unreasonable to claim that someone else could. And many of the foundation technologies for that device are widely known. So that somebody I've never heard of might build one isn't really implausible.

Re: I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

Money schmoney - what about all the people that were misdiagnosed one way or another because of this ? People who may have received treatment (in some cases with serious side-effects) needlessly, or others who were diagnosed as being fine only to find out otherwise later (in some cases too late).

Re:I remembe seeing her on TV

[Anonymous Coward]

The approach she claimed is plausible. I can conceive of doing that with a printed chip using nano-scale bioreators.

It certainly is, if you assume disease markers are evenly distributed: for both arterial and venous blood, at any sample location, at any sample time.

The smaller the sample, the larger these issues become.

I smell a rotten fish

[fustakrakich]

How in the world did these people get a license to begin with? Well. now we got this, and the MRI fiasco. I'm trying to figure out what's next on the list.

Re: I smell a rotten fish

[Anonymous Coward]

The same way Tesla is allowed to put "beta" autonomous driving abilities into a production car.

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs a license? By chanting "disrupt" when people start asking questions automatically exempts you from following the law.

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[PolygamousRanchKid]

How in the world did these people get a license to begin with?

Bribes.

Re: I smell a rotten fish

[stealth_finger]

The same way Tesla is allowed to put "beta" autonomous driving abilities into a production car.

How else do you expect them to test it?

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[Noble713]

How in the world did these people get a license to begin with?

Have you looked at Theranos' Board of Directors? It's stacked with seriously connected people from the Military-Industrial Complex. Who knows what kind of strings they pulled.

Re: I smell a rotten fish

[tripleevenfall]

With crash test dummies, of course!

Re: I smell a rotten fish

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they could start with some well designed collision test targets.

From all the Tesla accidents I've seen documented, it seems a very common thread is the Tesla is height blind and has no way to avoid being clotheslined because it's always looking low down. Some simple target testing could have revealed this problem before it wrote off dozens of cars and ended one man's life. That's a pretty serious design flaw that should have been picked up before it shipped.

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[fustakrakich]

Oops, sorry, The question was rhetorical. It's just that all our modern tech is turning out to be as trustworthy an an e-meter, and 20-30 years of work could be down the drain.

It all boils down to, "statistics are evil"... They are too sloppy to be used for anything more than entertainment.

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'm trying to figure out what's next on the list.

FDA food guidelines. They based on agriculture lobbying, not science for human health, and are most likely the cause of the obesity epidemic.

We've all have been lied to. Again.

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[fustakrakich]

DA food guidelines.

That is already ongoing. ie: butter, eggs, meat, animal fat, the list goes on.

Their next brochure? "What so bad about cyanide?"

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[HiThere]

Sorry, but statistics are not evil. It's just that evil people can use them to lie with.

OTOH, the MRI thing so far looks like a program bug that nobody bothered to check for a LONG time. It doesn't look like an intentional problem. Was the code open source? It probably wouldn't have mattered, though, because nobody who didn't have a machine would have any reason to look at the code.

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[AK Marc]

My cyanide is all natural.

Re:I smell a rotten fish

[fustakrakich]

Let's switch them with Folgers cyanide crystals and see if you notice...

The real question we should ask

[fred911]

Is why CMS paid and continued to allow Theranos to accept tests that were being subbed out, basically just scalping a profit.

  There will away be snake-oil sellers where there are buyers with more money than sense but isn't that WHY CMS WAS CREATED??

It's yet another amazing wholesale fleecing of taxpayer by members of "the club".

it's ok, she didn't intend to break any laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait, I thought this was a Clinton thread.

Nevermind! Put this non-Clinton peasant in prison!

Small Government?

[dbIII]

With the "small government" approach the scam would continue.
"Libertarians" take note.
Being free to scam others without consequence doesn't do a lot for the liberty of those being scammed.

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only people who got scammed were the investors. Theranos is unusual in that founder had wealthy family and friends who became initial investors. Other investors are wealthy speculators. Regular people didn't lose any money from this. The tech company started on were promising in early stages but it didn't really pan out... yet. It might work out but there's no guarantees.

-Former Libertarian who's now a communist

Re:Small Government?

[PopeRatzo]

"Libertarians" take note.
Being free to scam others without consequence doesn't do a lot for the liberty of those being scammed.

It's not that libertarians think companies should be free to scam others without consequence. It's that they believe that by applying the magical fairy-dust of a "free market" that nobody will be able to scam because competition will create a perfect utopia where all the billionaires are good, the criminals are beautiful and the CEOs are all above average.

Re:Small Government?

[ShanghaiBill]

It's that they believe that by applying the magical fairy-dust of a "free market" that nobody will be able to scam

In a Libertarian Utopia, this sort of scam would have been less likely because nobody would have assumed that the FDA and other taxpayer funded agencies were doing their job and looking out for the public interest, when they actually weren't.

Re:Small Government?

[NotAPK]

"Regular people didn't lose any money from this."

No, they just lost their health and dignity.

Those living in the US really need to watch this. The guy's manner makes me cringe a bit, but his message and subject matter are both absolutely stunning.

Re:Small Government?

[dbIII]

The guy's manner makes me cringe a bit

People should remember that he makes polemics and not balanced documentaries. It doesn't make what he says any less true it just means he is pushing a single point of view very hard. Things that do not support his points of view will not be in his films but there are plenty of other places that support other points of view.

Re:Small Government?

[lucm]

81 tests had to be redone over a 6 months period, and it was at Theranos initiative after they found issues themselves in one of their labs (that does less than 10% of their tests). That's it. Nobody "lost their health or dignity" so you can stop crying wolf even if it feels comfortable to do it while there's a whole pack around you doing the same.

Everything else in this story is speculation, misinformation or small quotes from audit documents taken out of context.

Re:Small Government?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Some libertarians have a naïve belief that in a free market, good honest companies will always prevail over fraudsters. And they are not completely wrong... in the long run. Fraud generally is discovered eventually and bad companies get replaced with better ones, but often not before massive damage has been wrought. And where one fraudster succeeds even for a while, others will try and follow in his footsteps.

Which is why other libertarians do see a role for government to provide some ground rules and provide oversight to actually enforce those rules. Even if only because it's far cheaper than letting fraudsters run wild.

Re:Small Government?

[MikeBabcock]

All of these assumptions revolve around something nobody ever discusses. Would there be competition at all?

In a new field, be it air travel or vehicle design or blood tests, how does the market 'choose' when only the inventor exists?

Lets pretend for a moment that we've abolished patents as well so that everyone can just copy the ideas they see -- why would most modern inventors bother?

I'm not talking about people who invent things because they're just brilliant and want to, I'm talking about people who get paid by companies like Boeing and General Electric to come up with marketable ideas.

The free market determining outcomes is based on a faulty premise that we would be in the situation we're in now at all without the regulations we've had until now.

Re:Small Government?

[PopeRatzo]

In a Libertarian Utopia, this sort of scam would have been less likely because nobody would have assumed that the FDA and other taxpayer funded agencies were doing their job and looking out for the public interest, when they actually weren't.

It sounds like what you're really saying is that in the absence of an FDA nobody would have ever known the blood tests were bogus.

But you bring up an interesting feature of a libertarian world: there can be no trust when it comes to anything that exceeds the expertise of the consumer. And there can be no trust of any new technology. Who's going to be the first to try radiation therapy for a tumor or a self-driving car?

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Coward]

-Former Libertarian who's now a communist

That Recession must have hit like Atlas' mac truck!

Re:Small Government?

[Trailer Trash]

With the "small government" approach the scam would continue.
"Libertarians" take note.
Being free to scam others without consequence doesn't do a lot for the liberty of those being scammed.

It's always funny how people who argue against libertarianism don't have any fucking clue what libertarianism actually is. I'll explain, you try to understand.

One of the essential roles of government is contract enforcement. Along with property rights, contract enforcement is one of the bedrock principles that makes civilization civilized. I as an individual can make a contract with a multi-billion dollar company and if they renege on their end the government will enforce it (in theory, at least).

Theranos promised to provide something and didn't deliver. Their claims were fraudulent. They broke the implied warranty of merchantability. This is absolutely a case where the government needs to step in and force Theranos to make the victims whole. Given that it's a healthcare product, we also believe that the state has a vested interest in making sure that their claims are valid before the product is sold, anyway.

What's hilarious is that cluefucks like yourself believe that this is a failure of libertarianism when, in fact, it's a failure of big government. We have a regulatory framework in place already that's supposed to find out that Theranos is a fraud before they sell the product, and yet they allowed the product to come to market. As usual, your side fails and you try to blame my side.

Rather than railing against a boogeyman that you're not smart enough to understand, you should be asking why the substantial regulatory framework already in place failed.

Re:Small Government?

[Trailer Trash]

Some libertarians have a naïve belief that in a free market, good honest companies will always prevail over fraudsters. And they are not completely wrong... in the long run. Fraud generally is discovered eventually and bad companies get replaced with better ones, but often not before massive damage has been wrought. And where one fraudster succeeds even for a while, others will try and follow in his footsteps.

Which is why other libertarians do see a role for government to provide some ground rules and provide oversight to actually enforce those rules. Even if only because it's far cheaper than letting fraudsters run wild.

ALL libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight. It's one of the only legitimate functions of government - contract enforcement. See above for more information.

Re:Small Government?

[sunking2]

Strange considering it was the NY Times that broke the story.

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the "small government" approach the scam would continue.
"Libertarians" take note.
Being free to scam others without consequence doesn't do a lot for the liberty of those being scammed.

This is a pretty massive strawman. We have an enormous government now and the scam existed, persisted well after known and just like Clinton the people at Theranos are going to be walking around free both before and after any trial (if one ever even happens.) Any citizen not as well connected would have been screwed for life in either case - even in the decade it would likely take to start the trial.

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of these assumptions revolve around something nobody ever discusses. Would there be competition at all?

In a new field, be it air travel or vehicle design or blood tests, how does the market 'choose' when only the inventor exists?

Lets pretend for a moment that we've abolished patents as well so that everyone can just copy the ideas they see -- why would most modern inventors bother?

I'm not talking about people who invent things because they're just brilliant and want to, I'm talking about people who get paid by companies like Boeing and General Electric to come up with marketable ideas.

The free market determining outcomes is based on a faulty premise that we would be in the situation we're in now at all without the regulations we've had until now.

Ask the people and companies that contributed to FreeBSD or OpenBSD? Ask the numerous people making tutorial and educational videos on Youtube? Ask the millions of engineers who every day share designs and ideas privately with their friends and colleagues even when their friends work for other companies or even competitors?

As an engineer that has notebooks full of inventions that have subsequently been patented by someone else, and knows dozens of engineers most of whom have similar notebooks full of similar inventions that the government now protects us from using for 20 years, I can see the damage patents have done, do and will continue to do to our (and by that I mean every) industry. I've made much more money from the things I've done right than the things I've done first, and the same is probably true for almost every engineer, inventor and scientist.

The people who stand to gain the most from patents and other "intellectual" property, are not the people who invent and make things, but the people who take advantage of sap engineers who lack the financial or social where-with-all to strike out on their own or in groups of other engineers. The hangers on, the sociopaths and the downright criminal.

I'm not a libertarian; I sometimes like the regulation of government and I sometimes loathe it, but your premise is a load of garbage. It's based on a wrongly calculated value model that presumes that value is created by doing something first, when it is not; it is created by doing something well. It's also based on another wrong assumption: that someone doing something after/not-well removes value from the market; if someone does something better than someone else, that adds more value to the market, not less; if more people are able to try and do something, the probability that one of them will do it well goes up; and conversely, if someone does something after and worse, that person is not going to be very successful.

I produce manufacturing technology, and very rarely is my work covered by patents, and only because some client's lawyer insists on it. For the most part my trade is based on the high quality of deliverables, something that someone can't take from me, and I can only lose if I fail to produce it myself. As often as not, the products that my products have a hand in producing are just as unprotected by IP as my products themselves. Something like a bed of nails test jig or custom rigid harness die press costs hundreds of dollars an hour to produce, and anyone that can do it well is also going to charge hundreds of dollars an hour to do the same work; anyone else lowballing the same job probably can't deliver a working product or is in some way mentally challenged for not asking the going rate.

Good engineering is measured in dollars saved not dollars spent. While I make REALLY good money doing the things I do, it's a pittance compared to the money saved by people NOT doing all the work they would have had to do had the jigs and machines I build not been produced. The reality is all the people* whose job someone is probably complaining I destroyed, could not have produced the jigs and machines that replaced* them.

I am today a multi-millionaire and it's not because

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Libertarians" take note.

So, which party should I support to maximize liberty. I am not looking for a perfectly "free market". I do not care what "the holy Bible" says we should do. I do not think "social justice" warrants giving power to benevolent people who will later pass it on to less benevolent people. I do not admire Ayn Rand. I just want to keep power distributed. Where do I go? Help me!

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Coward]

we also believe that the state has a vested interest in making sure that their claims are valid before the product is sold, anyway.

You should let all the other libertarians that are railing against the FDA and their "expensive" test process know that.

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the long run, fraudsters would get their comeuppance in the marketplace. They would then immediately start doing business under a new name.

Re:Small Government?

[JesseMcDonald]

NO libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight.

FTFY. Some people who think they are libertarians, but actually aren't, hold the mistaken belief that an organization defined by its deliberate use of non-defensive force has any legitimate role to play. Not only is this belief not shared by "ALL libertarians", it isn't even compatible with the defining characteristic of libertarian ideology, the Non-Aggression Principle, which can be summarized briefly as the position that the use of non-defensive force is never legitimate. Anyone who holds this belief in a "legitimate" role for government cannot, by definition, be a consistent libertarian.

The name for this particular branch of inconsistent almost-libertarianism is "minarchism".

Re:Small Government?

[Locke2005]

In the libertarian view, a class action lawsuit by those who paid for unreliable blood tests with unlimited damages should discourage people from attempting this scam (as well as lawsuits from investors that were defrauded). The problem with that is that in practice most real fraudsters are smart enough to take the money and leave the country before the shit hits the fan, while lawsuits take years to resolve. So to be effective, discouraging fraud requires a global legal and financial framework that leaves them no literally place to hide -- that sounds pretty un-libertarian, but it's the only way to make it work.

Re:Small Government?

[Locke2005]

Wait... they have radiation therapy for self-driving cars now? I obviously haven't been keeping up!

Re:Small Government?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Anyone who holds this belief in a "legitimate" role for government cannot, by definition, be a consistent libertarian by my definition.

FTFY.

Re:Small Government?

[Locke2005]

You should vote for the party that promises to move government in a more libertarian direction, but not swallow the libertarian bullshit hook, line, and sinker. Given the existing geopolitical climate, libertarian non-interventionism is rather naive, even if it may have made sense 200 years ago. The Republican party currently appears to contain more people that claim to have libertarian leanings, but since it also currently comes with this mass of baggage known as "Trump", I think we should hold off on supporting it. The protectionist propaganda Trump is spouting is the antithesis of a free market. Unfortunately, the globalist regime dominated by huge corporate interests that Clinton seems to be supporting also bears no resemblance to a free market. I guess you could always vote for Gary Johnson. He claims to be a libertarian even though he isn't, but he seems to acknowledge there are some reasonable things that government can achieve.

Re:Small Government?

[darnkitten]

Does the implied warranty of merchantability even apply to services? My understanding was that it applied to goods. (A blood test would be a service; a blood test kit would be a good).

Fitness might be arguable, though again, it seems only apply to goods. Maybe workmanlike quality--I am assuming that applies under US common law, but I am not sure how one would apply it to a medical service.

Re:Small Government?

[ultranova]

ALL libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight. It's one of the only legitimate functions of government - contract enforcement.

You know, I've never really understood why libertarians want to move society's functions from democratic control to unelected plutocrats. Do you think it'll end up as an utopia(-ish) or do you simply think you'd end up on top?

Re:Small Government?

[david_thornley]

There's a very wide array of people who call themselves libertarians, and you don't represent all of them.

You claim that the government will, in theory, enforce contracts between individuals and multinationals. One problem is that that's expensive and inefficient, and someone will have to pay for investigation and the court system. It's cheaper to have something like the FDA, imperfect as it is.

Re:Small Government?

[slew]

Does the implied warranty of merchantability even apply to services? My understanding was that it applied to goods. (A blood test would be a service; a blood test kit would be a good).

Fitness might be arguable, though again, it seems only apply to goods. Maybe workmanlike quality--I am assuming that applies under US common law, but I am not sure how one would apply it to a medical service.

IANAL, but my understanding is that the law imposes upon a party who contracts to render a service for another an implied warranty to perform the service with that degree of skill, efficiency and knowledge that is possessed by those of ordinary skill, competency and standing in the particular trade or profession in which the performer is employed. However, there is always a question of liability (as opposed to simply refunding the monies originally paid to perform the service). In this case, it may take gross negligence, or intentional misconduct to trigger actual liability.

You might argue that Theranos intentionally performed misconduct because they knew their machines did not exhibit ordinary competency, or that knowingly operating the diagnostic machines they purchased with untrained operators was an act of gross negligence (where ordinary negligence might be letting operator certifications expire or not checking them in the first place). But perhaps those might be hard to prove in a court of law, so they may get a negotiated settlement to avoid strict liablity...

Re:Small Government?

[dbIII]

It sounds like what you're really saying is that in the absence of an FDA nobody would have ever known the blood tests were bogus.

That's the sort of thing that happened before there was anything like the FDA.

Re:Small Government?

[dbIII]

ALL libertarians believe the government has a role in providing ground rules and oversight

Except for the ones that don't.
I suppose a defining feature of many is wanting no regulations on them but regulations on others - see Koch for an extreme example. He wanted the freedom to dump poison but the people downstream wouldn't get the freedom to have clean water. You could argue that he wasn't running as a "real" libertarian since he was really pushing for an oligarchy where those with the most money had the most freedom (and the ability to remove freedom from others) but he did run with the "libertarian" word on the ticket.

Re:Small Government?

[dbIII]

I suspect most think they will end up on top - even the "useful idiots" that never would because whoever they think would be their patron is not going to put them near the top. So much of it is so fucking close to feudalism that it makes me astounded that anybody but the plutocrats themselves would see it as anything other than a trap.

Re:Small Government?

[dbIII]

Some "Libertarians" (or at least people who use that word) very strongly advocate for governments too small to deal with contract enforcement.
I put it in quotes specifically because of the "but they are not a real libertarian" response of those who do.
Koch ran under that name but is very much an advocate of having a government too small to be able to effectively deal with contract enforcement.

My comment was really about telling people to beware of simplistic and dangerous stuff spouted by people like that instead of a more considered approach that is a bit more than anarchy or oligarchy.

Re:Small Government?

[PopeRatzo]

That's the sort of thing that happened before there was anything like the FDA.

The FDA was created in 1906. I don't know what kind of blood tests they had back then, but my guess is that there were a LOT of bogus medical procedures and products before then.

Re:Small Government?

[dbIII]

The movie "The Road to Wellness" has a bit of that from the Kellogs angle which was a lot less bogus than many other things. Colm Meaney of Star Trek and other fame is in it. It's fiction but has a lot of the real and weird stuff of the time in it.

Re:Small Government?

[AK Marc]

FDA was formed partly because the medical claims, like that smoking was good for you and doctor recommended, were getting so obviously fraudulent that something had to be done. Fake blood tests would have fit in just fine.

Re:Small Government?

[AK Marc]

Most inventing, as people think of it, is done by people, not companies. Companies file the most patents, as they are using them in a war. A patent isn't innovation. It's an implement of war. Companies want as many as possible, without regard to their usefulness.

Abolition of patents would affect how corporations spend money, but wouldn't affect the general level of advancement. You forget how much is done by universities then sold to a single private company to exploit.

Re:Small Government?

[AK Marc]

Someone who breaks the contract has initiated force, and thus the escalation point is legitimately the government. pre-emptive oversight is un-libertarian, but reactive oversight is libertarian-compatible.

Re:Small Government?

[AK Marc]

They broke the implied warranty of merchantability.

When we start implying contracts, there's no limit to the government power. That's not libertarian. That's totalitarian, with nicer clothes.

What's hilarious is that cluefucks like yourself believe that this is a failure of libertarianism when, in fact, it's a failure of big government. We have a regulatory framework in place already that's supposed to find out that Theranos is a fraud before they sell the product, and yet they allowed the product to come to market.

Wouldn't an ineffective government (not an inconsistent one, like we have, but a hypothetical uniformly incompetent one) be the same as libertarian, only with higher costs? Having an oversight that doesn't provide oversight is the same as no oversight, which would be the libertarian solution. So how is this not a failure of libertarianism? Sure, it's also a fail of bureaucracy, but that's a separate matter to discuss, which isn't the topic in this thread.

As usual, your side fails and you try to blame my side.

Always picking sides. It's US vs THEM. That just leaves you alone, and filled with hate. Oh, and you make people hate your side, not understand it.

Re:Small Government?

[AK Marc]

"pure" libertarianism is very expensive. Lots of pollution by people who can't be made to clean it up. Lots of crime by people who can't be made to perform restitution. Lots of loss to the people and the government. But it's more "pure". Cheap, small-government, libertarianism would tax at gun point and fund Head Start and Libraries, and all that because they are shown to reduce costs elsewhere. There are lots of things that cost money, but save even more. But the purists object to taxing at gunpoint to give it away to the kids, but don't mind taxing at gunpoint to put those kids in jail as adults. The spread of libertarianism is too broad for it to be a useful term.

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Libertarians tend to take contracts pretty seriously. Fraud would be a breach of contract, and as such, even in a libertarian's ideal world, would still be dealt with by the government. But hey, nice strawman.

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

No, libertarians would say that if you scam me on a medical test, I can sue you. Enough suits and the company goes out of business. Plus, even most small government types think the government should protect against outright fraud. You're conflating libertarians with anarchists.

Re:Small Government?

[PopeRatzo]

No, libertarians would say that if you scam me on a medical test, I can sue you.

So you believe patients have the expertise to know that a phony blood test is phony? How about a patent medicine? How exactly would a consumer know that snake oil is snake oil in the absence of regulation?

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

So you believe patients have the expertise to know that a phony blood test is phony?

No, I didn't say that. Please do not put words in my mouth. Note also that I'm not arguing for or against a position, just saying you aren't representing the libertarian argument properly.

How about a patent medicine?

Medicines are covered by the FDA; blood tests - medical tests in general, in fact - are covered by different regulations. The FDA can approve machines or tools, but not test procedures. The issues that resulted in this whole story are unrelated to patented medicines.

How exactly would a consumer know that snake oil is snake oil in the absence of regulation?

Presumably though independent testing and private investigation. The same things that got the ball rolling with this story, in fact. Doctors and reporters were noticing that the Theranos test results didn't agree with conventional ones in a significant number of cases. Note also that not all libertarians want *no* regulation on medical testing (or even drugs). Some do want that, of course, but most just disagree with the current process to varying degrees.

Re:Small Government?

[PopeRatzo]

How exactly would a consumer know that snake oil is snake oil in the absence of regulation?

Presumably though independent testing and private investigation.

And you believe a cancer patient has the means for independent testing and verification? And if he happens to die from not getting the real medication, who is going to do the independent testing and verification?

Are you really so young that you actually believe the free-market libertarian stuff? You realize that it has never once worked anywhere, ever. Not once. Free markets do not exist in nature. They are a fiction. There has never been a free market, and there has never been a libertarian utopia. Because when it comes right down to it, nobody but undergrads think it's anything but a stupid idea. And billionaires, of course, because they can insulate themselves from the downside.

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Note also that I'm not arguing for or against a position, just saying you aren't representing the libertarian argument properly.

Since you missed it the first time...

Free market != unregulated market. There are plenty of free markets, but completely unregulated markets don't work, I agree. But nice "I'm old so I know better, you stupid young person (although I don't know your age)". Solid, A+ argument there.

It'd be nice if you actually responded to the rest of that paragraph instead of just cherry-picking what you thought was the most unreasonable section when taken out of context. But you probably won't do that, it's not your style.

Re:Small Government?

[PopeRatzo]

There are plenty of free markets,

Actually, there aren't. Can you name some free markets? Better still, can you describe what a "free market" is?

Or maybe the question I should be asking is, what does a "free market, but with regulations" mean to you? What is it that makes a market free or not free?

If you're trying to say that yes, markets need to be regulated by the government to exist, then we have a discussion. If you want to talk about the appropriate level of regulation for a market, then we have a discussion. If you believe there is anything like a free market that has ever existed - much less succeeded- , then we're going to need to do some remedial work before we can have a discussion.

Markets do not exist in nature. They can only exist due to some level of regulation.

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

A free market is, contrary to what most people on both political sides think, one where prices are set freely (no price fixing by government or monopoly). It does not mean one that is free from all government regulation. Therefore, most consumer markets in America are free markets, but with regulations that are not price fixing. If you think a free market is one where no government intervention exists at all, then sure, that has probably never existed.

Markets need anti-monopoly regulations to exist, and fraud protection (and, of course, protection from threats, etc.). Other regulations may or may not make it more stable or efficient or desirable in some other way.

Re:Small Government?

[PopeRatzo]

Markets need anti-monopoly regulations to exist, and fraud protection (and, of course, protection from threats, etc.).

So we're not really talking about libertarians at all, are we? Because they have made it clear in no uncertain terms that they don't believe in the need for anti-monopoly regulations to exist.

http://www.cato.org/publicatio...

Re:Small Government?

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

One opinion piece does not a philosophy define.

I'd also like to clarify the argument slightly; monopolies in and of themselves aren't bad, it's abuses of monopoly power that are bad. Antitrust laws, as the article states, are often rather subjective. It's reasonable to argue that antitrust laws have been implemented poorly; less reasonable to say "no news ones either", but big-L Libertarians can be unreasonable. Small-l libertarians would primarily argue for reform rather than abolition. Seems like you only really pay attention to the big-L Libertarians.

Re:Small Government?

[PopeRatzo]

Seems like you only really pay attention to the big-L Libertarians.

Cato Institute is not big-L Libertarians.

Re:Small Government?

[MikeBabcock]

All inventing is done by people, but those inventions are owned by the companies they work for in most cases.

Also statistically you're way off. The patent office in the US tracks these things:
In 2015:
U.S. CORPORATION 133434
U.S. GOVERNMENT 991
U.S. INDIVIDUAL 13643

That's an order of magnitude more patents submitted by corporations than by individuals FYI.
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offic...

Re:Small Government?

[AK Marc]

Companies file the most patents,

Also statistically you're way off. [...] That's an order of magnitude more patents submitted by corporations than by individuals FYI.

Wow, you agree in a very disagreeable manner. You said exactly what I said, almost verbatim, and presented it like you somehow contradicted me.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[Anonymous Coward]

"Elizabeth Holmes deserves better here."

I'd say a 4'x8' enclosure and a fat lesbian cellmate would be a start.

Go deep - if guilty, nail them and jail them!

[ebusinessmedia1]

Sunny Balwani and Elizabeth Holmes; the Theranos Board; all Theranos investors; and, Theranos strategic partners and suppliers ALL need to be investigated regarding their knowledge of potential fraud and collusion. If evidence is gained showing intentional fraud from*any* one of the foregoing, jail them!

I smell fish too

[Anonymous Coward]

See, if women became CEOs, this would never happen because.... oh wait.

Re:I smell fish too

[lucm]

Just pray we don't get that Clinton cunt back in the Whitehouse.

Bill or Hilary?

What went wrong

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"House Democrats Frank Pallone, Gene Green and Diana DeGette sent the letter on June 30th, asking Holmes to explain what went wrong,"

What went wrong is they got caught. That's what "went wrong".

This was all just a "magic snake oil" scheme designed to suck in wealthy, gullible investors, nothing more, nothing less.

Re:What went wrong

[ShanghaiBill]

What went wrong is they got caught. That's what "went wrong".

It is almost certainly more complicated than that. There is no way that a fraud like this could actually work in the long run, and any sensible investor would know that. What is more likely is that Elizabeth really thought her tech would work, hyped it to get capital, thus inflating expectations. Then she had too much pride to back down when the tech failed, so she started fudging a little, to buy time to fix the problems. But she couldn't fix the problems, so she then had a choice to either admit failure, and admit to the initial fudging, or ... dig deeper. Just like Bernie Madoff, she grabbed a shovel.

Re:What went wrong

[Cylix]

There was never a question about Madoff going straight to scam. It wasn't until the pyramid scheme fell did he get caught.

This was just insanity and there was never an avenue for it succeed. There are no fudge lines in testing and anyone at any point could proven the product did not work. Which is what happened.

It never worked and either the people involved were criminal or criminally stupid.

I'm going to bet on a whole lot of sociopaths got together. It's still unlikely any of them will see jail time so looks like it panned out!

Re:What went wrong

[gweihir]

That is my take as well. Add youth and inexperience to the mix and possibly entirely misguided advice cheering her on and you have the makings of a disaster even with a good idea to start with. The thing is, a successful lab demonstration takes quite a while to turn into a valid product. 10 years is on the low side, 20 years is more realistic and some things take a lot longer. It takes experience to see that. That experience critically includes the experience of failure.

Re:What went wrong

[lucm]

What went wrong is they got caught. That's what "went wrong".

It is almost certainly more complicated than that. There is no way that a fraud like this could actually work in the long run, and any sensible investor would know that. What is more likely is that Elizabeth really thought her tech would work, hyped it to get capital, thus inflating expectations. Then she had too much pride to back down when the tech failed, so she started fudging a little, to buy time to fix the problems. But she couldn't fix the problems, so she then had a choice to either admit failure, and admit to the initial fudging, or ... dig deeper. Just like Bernie Madoff, she grabbed a shovel.

I think you're onto something. A lot of this comes from her having her moment in the spotlight.

As for the shovel thing, though, maybe it's important to keep in mind that a lot of the "it doesn't work" stuff comes from unreliable reporting from the WSJ, which has been since quoted as if it was The Truth. I'm not saying Theranos cutting edge tech works, I'm saying they never claimed it was ready yet. Some of their early work failed, and they proved somewhat careless with lab procedure, but this is a private company with no requirement to open their books to nosy reporters. Claiming that investors were defrauded is at best hypothetical, we don't know what progress they've made in R&D or even what proportion of their income (made on regular blood tests) is being used for research. All we know about is 81 bad tests (they've done millions of tests so far), one careless lab manager in a small branch office in California, and one big pharmacy chain that dropped them as a partner - which for all we know could be caused by the media frenzy and not by actual concerns about the services rendered.

Re:What went wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're saying stands to reason given:

"I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you've admitted that you're not going to succeed," - Elizabeth Holmes

http://www.inc.com/deborah-petersen/elizabeth-holmes-avoid-backup-plans.html

Re:What went wrong

[ShanghaiBill]

I'm going to bet on a whole lot of sociopaths got together. It's still unlikely any of them will see jail time so looks like it panned out!

It did not "pan out". Theranos never IPOed, they were never acquired. There was no exit. There was no operating profit. Nearly everyone involved lost money.

She gave off all the classic signs.

[EmperorOfCanada]

First she was making it all about her, not about brilliant scientists, but about her her her. Second is that the stuff about her was all about how she is better than the rest of us. Admitted to the top university, gets up 2 hours before she goes to bed, works 28 hour days; basically all that in your face, I am better than you Type-A bullshit.

But the icing on the cake is that after she had raised funds from non-pharma types she just kept promoting. I could barely crack a science publication or a science section in any publication with her single drop of blood hype.

Where I am from the government is huge on being able to "pick a winner" so about twice a year I see the same micro-bubble that is hype hype hype with some front man, usually some vaguely good story about rubber that will make tires good for 300,000km. Then a nice line-up of vaguely important local investors. And just before it all blows up they are in some local business publication with the title "Top 40 under 40' or some other bullshit.

Then it all goes to hell, there are recriminations about government money in the toilet, a useless audit, and then it is forgotten as the latest batch of sure thing winners follow down the same path.

While all this is amusing/enraging; the worst part is that she has now made it nearly impossible for any legitimate company to actually do this research. If some real bio-researcher comes up with some blood tests needing only one drop they won't get one investor to take their calls or conferences to let them talk. They might as well work on cold fusion or herbal cancer cures.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[gweihir]

Indeed. Nobody is that brilliant. The really great ones either made their name using low-hanging fruits (nothing wrong with that, but there are none left these days) or took decades. It is also not about working an insane amount of time. Solid research shows that you can do about 6 hours of solid mental work a day and that is it. But you get these hours only if you do not work many more and take the weekends off. And nobody is exempt from that, even is some huge-ego morons claim they are.

The new thing here is that now women try to promote that faulty self-image as well (see. g.e. Marissa Mayer) and fail, just the same as the men that try it.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[EmperorOfCanada]

I have met so many Marissa Mayers in my life and every one of them left a horrible taste in my mouth. When they look at a person it is only to see if they are someone they can use. If not you can actually see the person vanish from their perception. But if the person is someone they can use as another run in their ladder climbing, their eyes light up and the wheels are turning. With women it often manifests with this sudden becoming of what their target is looking for. Sports hero, lover, tease, politically astute, listener, etc

The second they find a higher rung, the earlier rung is discarded like chewed gum.

What pisses me off about these types is that even when the people they have wronged finally are able to expose them, they somehow land in more success. I have personally witnessed one case where the woman was pretty much thrown to the street in disgrace by a collective action of upper management and the entire board of directors, yet a few months later I read that she was appointed to be on the board of directors of a large monopoly and later was a board member on a number of other companies. All high paying board memberships with many juicy privileges. All that with not a single person who would have anything but nasty things to say about her. She even ripped off the person who bought her house. How the hell?

So in the case of this single drop of blood woman as well as Marissa Mayer, I predict a horribly long successful future where they go from organization to company turning them into complete crap and somehow being able to maintain a straight face while declaring success. Failures that will swell their bank accounts.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Marissa Mayer, that horse faced whinny destroyed all shareholder value

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[monkeyxpress]

Well said. Same happens in New Zealand. There is a startup incubator in Auckland that goes on endlessly about picking winners. This allows them to suck up vast amounts of government money earmarked for startups to feed into its staff salaries and fancy offices. Rather annoying for people with actual startups who have to compete with their vast PR machine for any seed money.

Problem is, most genuine startup founders are busy trying to get a real product out to customers that works. In my experience in both startups and large companies, this aspect of a company (actually making a working product) is mostly over looked. People just assume that if you 'go to China' or 'hire some consultants' the actual product will magic itself together. You can see this everyday on Kickstarter where a whole bunch of great ideas people discover making stuff with a reject rate that doesn't sink your company is no simple matter.

Over 20 years being in this game though, I've noticed an interesting trend - you don't really need investor money anymore, at least to get to the point of putting a working product in a customer's hand. Capital costs on things like hardware are lower then ever, and if your founders are technical and prepared to put in some sweat equity, you can get a long way before you even need to put money down. This has fashionably been called 'lean startups' but it is basically the way Apple/Google/MS/FB/HP etc all started.

Once you have cashflow/customers, you can get the attention of investors and cut through all the hype-merchants much easier.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[serviscope_minor]

I have met so many Marissa Mayers in my life and every one of them left a horrible taste in my mouth.

Well, next time I suggest merely eating with them rather than simpply eating them.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[Anonymous Coward]

All that with not a single person who would have anything but nasty things to say about her. She even ripped off the person who bought her house. How the hell?

How? I'm guessing that ample sized breast implants had a lot to do with her success.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[Vegan Cyclist]

You say this as though this is something only women do...I'm pretty sure there's just as big a list, or bigger, of men who do this. So let's just say there are 'people' who do this, mmkay? It's fair to say this is more of a personality trait than a gender issue.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[ErichTheRed]

"When they look at a person it is only to see if they are someone they can use. If not you can actually see the person vanish from their perception. But if the person is someone they can use as another run in their ladder climbing, their eyes light up and the wheels are turning."

Everyone does this to some extent, but the key difference between some sociopath executive and a healthy person is how two-way this is, and the level of sliminess involved.

People like it when they can gain something from others, it's what makes us social animals. I think it crosses the line when someone becomes a master manipulator. It's one of the many reasons I can't stand salespeople. Working as a senior IT person in a large company, I'm approached all the time by slimeball salespeople. From the first second I talk to them, I can tell the only reason they're wasting breath on me is to get me to trust them enough to give them an in with the CIO, project head or whomever else they want to manipulate next. Truly good salespeople and execs know how to tone this down just enough to make their target think they're just being nice. Next time you're dealing with someone like this, flip the situation around and ask yourself how willing this person would be to help you if you were the one calling. That's how you know if you have a Melissa-Mayer-in-Training on your hands.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[twotacocombo]

I have met so many Marissa Mayers in my life and every one of them left a horrible taste in my mouth.

Well, next time I suggest merely eating with them rather than simpply eating them.

If someone actually ate the terrible people in this world, wouldn't we all be better off?

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[gweihir]

Well, there is one clear reason why there are less female CEOs: There are less female sociopaths. That is not the only reason, of course.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[TroII]

The new thing here is that now women try to promote that faulty self-image as well (see. g.e. Marissa Mayer) and fail, just the same as the men that try it.

And the problem is that because they're women, everyone wants to drink the Kool-aid, otherwise they're going to be labeled misogynistic. Many of the critics of Theranos' process fell victim to this: question the results, question the technique, and suddenly you're just a sexist who can't stand to see a woman succeed, so your questions don't matter. Everyone stuck their fingers in their ears and screamed "La la la, I can't hear you over the sound of this incredibly successful woman! Did I mention our CEO is female?"

Putting a woman at the top of the Theranos pyramid was genius because they were essentially placing their product beyond reproach. You aren't allowed to criticize women, these days. Reminds me of the Ghostbusters reboot. If you dare pan the movie, women come out of the woodwork to smear your character and spread the idea you only panned the movie because women are the stars. Nevermind the movie is apparently a pile of dung, no, the negative reviews are because everyone hates women.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[gweihir]

If a strategy is successful, somebody is going to use it,. no matter how despicable (and yes, sexism is despicable and that it is here used to promote women over men does not make it one bit better).

At this point we can reliably say that women as CEOs are _not_ better than men, unless you want to run a scam, apparently.

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[EmperorOfCanada]

Women pull this shit off somewhat differently than men. Not worse, not better, just differently.

But among the well groomed Type-A men the primary difference is usually sport. They usually do some sport that is in your face hardcore. It used to be marathons, then triathlons, and now it seems to be exotic variations of the above. "I've been invited to go to the ultra desert, high altitude marathon in Chile."

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[EmperorOfCanada]

There is one particular database company who I think have their salespeople drown their grandmother's puppy as a "do what ever it takes" test.

As for walking over some IT guy,...

Re:She gave off all the classic signs.

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Alternatively, female sociopaths have different goals (on average) than male sociopaths.

What went wrong, Nothing went wrong

[rtb61]

Failure what failure. Everything went according to typical psychopathic capitalism plans, privatise the profits and socialise the losses. Things only went wrong if the insiders lost money running the scam, if they generated millions in personal profits, then that is exactly the way, free market psychopathic capitalism is meant to work. As for health insurance companies who refuse to pay, or charter schools that abuse children or military contractors that foment war or security organisation spying for economic advantage for corrupt insiders, etc. etc. Everything is functioning exactly as designed, maximise short term profits, fuck everything else and dump the losses and problems on the idiots that vote the lessor evil, election after election, gumbys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (they are laughing at you and make no mistake).

Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong

[Ramze]

That's the thing... the CEO didn't cash out her chips before the value of her stock in the company hit zero. I'm sure she got a lovely salary, but she could have made out like a bandit if she'd sold earlier. Her mistake was thinking she could play magician forever w/ the slight of hand and sensationalism.

It's a shame corporations can't be thrown in jail for fraud like people... shame we can't at least put the CEO in jail for massive, obvious fraud -- at least to her shareholders if not to the public, too.

Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong

[monkeyxpress]

The other possibility is that she also was played. You see this regularly in the property developer market - banks need someone charismatic to lend money too (which creates profit for them), but who is stupid/egoist enough to not wonder why this friendly bank guy is giving them all this money. The banks charm them into securing whatever earthly possessions they and their grandma have against these loans, and ensure the bank is first tier lender. While things are booming this money feeding machine makes the banks huge profits. When the bubble pops, the banks quickly liquidate the guy, recover their part of the loans, and leave the second tier lenders and bankrupted developer to wear the losses.

If she didn't setup a private trust and move a few million into it when she was a billionaire, then she really does seem like the sort of gullible charismatic puppet bubble investors look for.

Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong

[alvinrod]

If she did that, she'd definitely end up in club fed for several years. It wouldn't surprise me if there's a silent partner that knew the score and has made bank while she mostly gets to walk away because it doesn't look like she profited from any of this. The whole thing can be made to look completely above board if the payout is in the form of a well-paying position at a company owned by this silent partner. Everything else is just pageantry and theater to keep people from looking to closely at the magician's hands while this trick is being performed.

Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Your British spelling gives you away.

Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

How were the losses socialized? They had only private investors and they aren't getting bailed out.

Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong

[rtb61]

'ER', like, companies declare bankrupt because they can not pay their creditors, after they used their creditors to generate personal profits (usually exorbitantly inflated wages and golden parachutes) and then socialised those losses on their creditors but wait, it doesn't stop there. Their creditors are now facing those debts and have to pay their creditors with money they did not receive from their debtor, which sends them bankrupt and not being able to pay their debtors, which of course means those debtors, well, you get the idea. A major debt does not go out on it's own, it diffuses out through the economic chain associated with it, diffusing ie socialising out. Now that chain of bankruptcies also destroys the economic status of many employees, the bigger the debt, the more employees, across a range of companies are affected and as a result they draw on social welfare spending. See privatised profits and socialised losses and every company goes that way, eventually (a psychopath takes over, strip mines the investors assets to fill their own pockets and the company collapses, every single time).

Re:What went wrong, Nothing went wrong

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

"Socializing the losses" means that the government or public take the losses, not that there are more people involved. It's still just private individuals taking losses, and given how rich the people who invested in this are, there isn't going to be any significant increase in social welfare spending. You can argue about "socializing the losses" in some cases, sure, but it's not a phrase you can make mean anything you like.

Lies

[Anonymous Coward]

[rant] Lies are finally catching up with them. I really don't like cheaters--they feel it's ok to screw over a bunch of people for their own benefit. To me, that is sociopathic. What if we all tried to cheat and steal our way through life--what type of world would we live in? Just work hard, and be honest like most of the rest of us. If luck shines your way, and you have a brilliant idea like Flappy Bird that makes you rich--great! But otherwise, suck it up, and accept reality like most of us, and don't try to lie and cheat your way to the top. [/rant]

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[Hylandr]

I agree that Political Grandstanding is bullshit. Especially your Sexist grandstanding.

Lets keep this within the context of a legal investigation and keep your sexist hogwash in the toilet where it belongs.

Zero net worth?

[whoever57]

I doubt this. Perhaps when compared to the billions that she was worth before her net worth is close to zero.

Unless she is a complete dunce, she will have paid herself millions from the money that investors put into the company. She should have a few millions left over. Hardly billionaire status, but not too shabby either. She will probably get a nice position at a VC company, making millions on the basis of here "experience".

Re:Zero net worth?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no way of knowing how much salary she took since the company is privately held. I bet she took in less than million in salary to not drain the cash reserves before the technology is fully developed. Same with researchers and executives who works there were mostly compensated with future stock options to give the company runway it needs to get the tech working before the money runs out. They really should have kept lower profile until the tech was ready.

Re:Zero net worth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero net worth is ridiculous.
    When this is all over, her stake in Theranos may (perhaps probably) eventually be worth 0, but not less than 0 (limited liability company and all that.) So right now, today, would you pay $1.00 to take-over Ms Holmes entire stake in Theranos, with no downside (other than loss of $1) but upside if things aren't 100% bad. OF COURSE almost anyone do that, because ... maybe... . So her current ownership stake, in terms of what people would pay for it,
is unquestionably > 0. How much, no idea... but it's definitely > 0. Personally, I'm a complete skeptic but I'd pay small thousands to take her entire share of that
company. So she' s worth at least that (Ms Holmes contact me if you are than stressed for cash!) Some investors would pay hundreds or even thousands of time more than I, and that's probably a rational bet too if you have the cash. So that puts a lower bound on her net worth.

Re:Zero net worth?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet she took in less than million in salary to not drain the cash reserves

Theranos raised over $750M in venture capital. I guarantee you she and Sonny drew generous salaries from that pile of cash. They sure didn't spend it on legitimate research.

Gotta hand it to Congress

[93 Escort Wagon]

They really know how to beat a dead horse - especially in an election year.

Maybe one of the congress-critters will ask Holmes why she has a man's voice.

Re: Gotta hand it to Congress

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I want to know why she has a man's voice too! I suppose I am therefore well-represented by my Congressman ;)

That's a joke.

Re:Gotta hand it to Congress

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe one of the congress-critters will ask Holmes why she has a man's voice.

Because she is the T in LGBT?

Ah Yes

[Greyfox]

The awkward phase of the project where Congress hauls your CEO in front of it and is all like "Dude, what the fuck?!" If only there was some sort of magical way that Congress could prevent those sorts of things from happening in the first place. Perhaps we should create a group of people who could create a "law" that would "regulate" an "industry" in order to prevent claims being made that jamming random objects in your pee-hole cures cancer. Or whatever. Sadly, no such group of people exists and we must just wring our hands helplessly whenever this sort of thing happens, and live with constantly clogged pee-holes.

Also, does anyone actually know what Congress' job actually is? They don't seem to be particularly good at hauling CEOs in front of them to ask them awkward questions. Perhaps Congress needs to haul Congress in front of itself and ask it "Dude, what the fuck?" I'm pretty sure we could replace the lot of them with an orangutan. At least then, some CEOs might get covered in orangutan shit from time to time, which makes me think an orangutan would do Congress' job better than it's currently getting done.

Re:Ah Yes

[Black Parrot]

If we start holding CEOs accountable, the terrorists have already won.

Re:Ah Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure we could replace the lot of them with an orangutan.

Oh, so you think President Trump should further expand executive powers? :-)

(Sorry, couldn't resist. My apologies to any orangutans for the association.)

Re:Ah Yes

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

Yep, it sure is a shame the FDA didn't catch their fraud earlier.

Elizabeth was just being extremely careless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Elizabeth was just being extremely careless.

[david_thornley]

Meaning, of course, that she stayed this side of criminal prosecution, and not anything more favorable?

Only men can be the vicitims of sexism.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pull the other one m8! The misogynistic Schandefreude here is palpable.

She didn't intend to commit a crime.

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's all ok. It's not like national security was at risk or anything.

Re:She didn't intend to commit a crime.

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not intent carries heavy weight in courts even in white collar crimes. Think first degree murder and manslaughter.

This is how it goes.

[Anonymous Coward]

1: Get yourself a company with a reasonable attractive young blonde as the front-woman.
2: Hype ridiculous "revolutionary paradigm breaking" product
3: Make sure you have lots of references to Female Empowerment, Women in STEM, "breaking down barriers" and preferably a little LGBTI in there too.
4: PROFIT !!!
5: Watch whole thing crash and burn ......
6: GOTO 1

I mean, come on. Miracle blood machines, power transmission through ultrasonics, what shade of blue the google search bar text needs to be..... how many hundreds of millions of dollars need to be paid to these women who only know how to make a nice cup of tea, blow the company founders, and make the right PC noises into the camera ?

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[Anonymous Coward]

"made a blip if the CEO didn't have a vagina."

Hogwash, a cunt is a cunt whether or not it menstruates. This one just
happens to be the later.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[Njorthbiatr]

Quit falling for the smear campaign, it's unsightly.

Whether or not Theranos is guilty of the claims is irrelevant. You're deciding she's guilty before they've even presented any real evidence based solely on hearsay. Not that you should trust the evidence presented in court.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[stealth_finger]

You might have some valid points if their shit worked. But it didn't. They were saying they could do something quite impressive, took money to do it and then couldn't do it. How is it wrong to do something about that? The fact the boss is a woman is completely irrelevant and on it's own means or implies precisely nothing.

I know what's the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I helped building online blood test business in Europe. The thing is, it's a very huge effort to do smallest bit. Think Linux + KDE + Office at once. Plus, she did over-manage it. She didn't need so many advisers to develop novel technology. She should work more with universities, develop plan and work bit by bit. Plus, she's kinda looks she's not well integrated personality herself. So she's typical startup full of bs.

The noose tightens

[smooth wombat]

As I have said for a very long time, this company is nothing but a scam. Holmes set up elaborate, fake, testing processes to make it seem as if she had the 'miracle' process yet didn't think far enough ahead to realize she'd have to prove the process works.

To this day Theranos has not submitted its process for peer review nor has it submitted to government tests to verify its claims.

If you have two white flags, that should be enough to tell you she's a fraud.

Uncovered Ponzi-Scheme gets big investigation.

[Qbertino]

News at 11.

Honestly, where's the big deal?
Can they jail her? Will they? That's what I'm interested in.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[Anonymous Coward]

You're deciding she's guilty before they've even presented any real evidence based solely on hearsay.

Quit making assumptions about other people's cognitive processes, it's unsightly.

Not that you should trust the evidence presented in court.

Oh? and what evidence would be trustworthy in your opinion? Would the publicly available FDA audits qualify? because those are pretty damning and I wouldn't want to bias my snowflake mind with the wrong facts.

hoodwinked by a (perceived pretty face)

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason people thinks this woman is pretty(I don't see it). Apparently women in tech with blond hair with a pretty face is enough to part people with their money, results be damned.

The market was already correcting

[zerofoo]

Bad test results were already causing Theranos's partners to head for the door. This was a fraud that would not have continued even without government intervention.

Eventually Theranos would have had no customers for their defective product.

Markets work just fine. Doctors started to figure out pretty early on that Theranos's test results were not aligning with standard testing and practice.

As far as investors that lost their shirts - that's part of the risk of speculation. No government can take away investment risk. Just ask anyone who invested with Bernie Madoff.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[lucm]

Whose money did they take, and what didn't work?

You talk as if we were in a post-Enron analysis situation, but that's not the case at all. First they're still in business, still making money doing regular tests at a lower price than the competition (which I start to believe is the root cause of this whole charade). They're still doing research and perfecting their process and technologies, with the goal not to detect cancer from a drop of blood, but to lower even more the cost of blood tests.

As for investors: this is a private company and we don't know what they share or didn't dhare with their private investors, and we don't know what kind of return they get on their money, what kind of deal they made. How come everyone is talking as if it was a few retiress who had lost their savings in a Ponzi scheme? Because outsiders claimed it was "worth" billions at one point, and zero later on?

This is all bullshit.

physically impossible anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of blood tests that can potentially be done with a drop of blood. One of the suits is over cholesterol reports they have generated. It is not news that this not physically possible to do with a few drops of blood, no matter what kind of magical machine you have. But you dont see anyone cover this in the news, even now. Cholesterol is carried in globules of lipoproteins, which in turn form bigger globules. In some hyperlipid patients these can be macroscopic (visible to the human eye). That means your one drop of blood from such a person likely either missed a globule (grossly underreporting average cholesterol levels) or is entirely composed of a globule (grossly overreporting cholesterol, which is apparently the case in one of the news articles I read). While you can theoretically make a machine to detect if the drop of blood is just a bunch of LDLs, and cut out the overreporting, you cannot cut out the underreporting without more blood. That is one reason why cholesterol tests require drawing a large amount of blood in traditional labs.

None of this is new. No physician with his degree did not know this from the beginning of this company. Pure fraud is all it can be.

Re:physically impossible anyway

[HiThere]

Does this imply that there are no other changes in the metabolism that accompany the changes in cholesterol levels? I suspect that there are, and that you could use those. Or that you could measure the level of un-globulated cholesterol and that it would be in proportion to the level of cholesterol globules, sort of the way fragments of protein are measured in urine. It would probably need to be a much more accurate test, but that's not surprising, and not necessarily impossible. A nano-scale chromatography setup might well be exceedingly accurate, and able to detect lots of things an ordinary lab test would just skip. (Some of them are reported to detect thousands of separate tests...but I admit I don't know which tests, or how accurately.)

So a test based around a drop of blood is not intrinsically implausible. Just well advanced over the current state of the art.

Re:physically impossible anyway

[AK Marc]

There's the possibility of non-fraud. Take a drop of blood. Put it in a 1l jug of water. Agitate. Separate into 100 containers. run a mass spectrometer against some number of them, compare the results to the reference outputs. Re-test on the remaining samples to eliminate false positives.

That's not what they did. That's not an answer. But that's one possible way to do what they claimed without being a fraud. What was missing before was the machine learning to get good reference outputs. So the entire thing was plausible, which is why they were always so close.

I expect they were expecting to make the breakthrough before anyone knew they didn't have anything.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[Anonymous Coward]

Whose money did they take? Everybody who they did blood work for. What didn't work? Their blood tests. Literally the whole thing is about they claimed they had a novel blood test and they falsified records that the tests worked when they didn't. Are you not familiar at even a basic level what the problem is and why they're in trouble?

She was just extremely careless

[mpercy]

At this point, what difference does it make?

Re:She was just extremely careless

[Locke2005]

They had a business model based on developing cheaper medical testing technology and then LYING about the results. They should face serious time in federal poiund-me-in-the-ass prison, if for no other reason than to discourage other people from trying this business model. They forgot the most important step in any scam business: take the money and run _before_ people catch on that you're committing fraud!

Distraction by the Jobs Distortion Field?

[ErichTheRed]

I already see a ton of misogynistic posts about Elizabeth Holmes, and I'm not going there. What I am going to mention is that she had that Steve Jobs personality that makes people stop thinking rationally. She even wears black turtlenecks. Startups need charismatic founders because how else would they raise money? But there's something about that Type-A Jobsian executive mystique that just appeals to people on some level. It's entirely possible she had very little idea of how things were actually going also - I've seen company executives who clearly have no idea what the company does and are happy as long as the Salesforce.com dashboard gauges are pointing to the green range.

The problem was that Theranos was trying to play the "fake it till you make it" startup game. I totally expect this from startups, and have been pitched numerous software products that were unfinished at best as an example. The idea is, if you're not just trying to get bought by Facebook or Google, to do just enough to cobble together a "product" and fill in the details later. This works for software; you can say you're all Agile and continuous-integration and DevOps and all those "make it up as we go" buzzwords. It's really hard to fake a disruptive blood test process long-term without people trying to poke holes in it.

I think it would have been very interesting to be on the technical side inside Theranos around the time they realized they were never going to get this new process to work right no matter what they did. That must have been very rough on everyone involved, especially with the outside world basically worshiping you.

Well first we'd need a reasonable prosecutor...

[DRMShill]

seems like we're a bit short of those these days.

Re: Grandstanding and bias

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck modded this up? Are you kidding me? If you did just a little research you'd have all the answers to the questions you asked. This isn't a new revelation. This has been in the news for a while now.

I don't get it, am I missing something?

[G00F]

I must be miss something please clarify: My understanding is Theranos product/services are not as good as marketed, not fully vetted, accusations of using the older tech to do much of the testing, and some mistakes found in the lab work. Further, not disclosing secret sauce information and not being very forthcoming with outside requests.

So far, that just sounds like a normal company, so whats the fraud, crimes, etc?

They also lost a lot of business with companies backing out from all the bad press, feeding the spiral downward. It's worth dropped from $9 billion to $800 million but is still more than what's been invested. And now its under criminal investigation.

So this has to be more than it's Edison tech isn't panning out right?

The bigger story: Is LabCorp and Quest guilty of f

[Anonymous Coward]

The real story is the pricing of labs. There should be an inquiry as to whether the major lab companies are price fixing. They mark up their prices more than people realize. Seems fishy that their prices are about the same given that they are soooo much above their cost. Is there a lab cartel that is behind some of the bad press? Why is there no investigative reporting to blow the lid off of this issue? Theranos offers lower prices because any lab using even the old technology could, but they don't. Why can't LabCorp and Quest charge much much less than they do? Here's your pulitzer for journalism. Theranos is low hanging fruit. How about taking on the guys that just might be indirectly paying the WSJ and other attack dogs. I doubt that Quest would be put through the same ringer if CMS found the same problems there.

What if they do have the tech?

[BlueCoder]

Does anyone ever doubt when companies like this go from darlings to nothing overnight that it couldn't have been a trick to dump the stock price?

Not saying it happened but.... business people have done far worse for less.

Relatively easy to drive a company into the ground only to rebuild it from the ashes. Trump himself uses the technique.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[lucm]

Literally the whole thing is about they claimed they had a novel blood test and they falsified records that the tests worked when they didn't. Are you not familiar at even a basic level what the problem is and why they're in trouble?

You obviously don't even understand the biased version reported by the media, so let's just write you off as someone who will never know what this story is until Oliver Stone makes a movie about it

The market is not magical

[dbIII]

Yet the FBI is still using lie detectors.
Iraq is only now removing the placebo bomb detectors that were found to be worthless five years ago.
Anti-vaxxers are rife despite it being based on a fraud by an English doctor who wanted to sell the alternative vaccine that he had patented.
There's a long list of frauds that do not suddenly go away because of the "magic of the market".

Re:The market is not magical

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

You cite purchasing decisions by two government agencies as support for your argument? Good job. /s

It's also worth pointing out that vaccines aren't much like a free market; lots of people are required to get them (for good reason) and there's basically no profit in them.

The claim you were replying to didn't say it would "suddenly" go away, just that it would *eventually*. What you're arguing about is whether a) government force makes fraud go away faster, and b) if it does, whether you can justify using it. Those are points worth discussing.

Re:The market is not magical

[dbIII]

just that it would *eventually*

Hence my mention of lie detectors which have been debunked for decades but are still costing the taxpayer money. When are they going to *eventually* go away?

Re:The market is not magical

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

I dunno, why don't you ask the government about that? Governments deciding they want to buy something is hardly examples of free market failure though.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[AK Marc]

You sound like a Holocaust denier. Hitler recovered the German Economy after WWI, and so the world invaded and invented a story of Jew death to cover it up. Anything that disagrees is a fabrication of the Jew-owned media.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[lucm]

Thank you. Although I actively play the Devil's advocate I have my doubts about the Theranos story (read my earlier comments before this bullshit media storm and you'll see I have no love for Mrs Holmes), but when imbeciles start calling someone a Holocaust denier for disagreeing with them about such a globally unsiginificant matter as the Theranos scandal, that's a sign that the "truth" they defend is shallow and stands only on the weak shoulders of a misinformed lynch mob. There's talk, there's heated discussions, and then there's fanatism which is the line you crossed, as you used the suffering and murder of millions as a podium to promote your point of view in a simple discussion that didn't require such exploitation.

Just so we're clear: you're not a clever or witty vigilante stepping into a public forum to strike down a naysayer, you're a repugnant and vile self-righteous cunt that shows no common sense or moral clarity. If this kind of behavior worked for you in the past, it's because you probably bullied someone weaker or less intelligent than you, but this time it's not what happened.

Reply or not I don't care, you're a worthless debater.

Re:Grandstanding and bias

[AK Marc]

Reply or not I don't care, you're a worthless debater.

If you didn't care, you'd not have bothered to reply with such a long and impassioned ad hominem. You deny all the media reports, because you "know the *real* truth" even if nobody else believes it or you. I guess you are going for a Jesus complex as well.

when imbeciles start calling someone a Holocaust denier for disagreeing with them

You never "disagreed with" me. I hadn't posted in any threads involving you, until I noticed your causal dismissal of all reports that don't support your opinion. I replied to that, and not anything you'd said on the "scandal" as covered in TFA. Yet you assume I disagree with you on that matter, without any evidence to support that opinion, because it's easier to separate someone into sides, regardless of the facts.

you're a repugnant and vile self-righteous cunt that shows no common sense or moral clarity

Yes, pure ad hominem, without regard to the topic at hand, or the point I made. That's all you have. Hate. Enjoy it. You'll be eating it alone for a long time.