It may be possible that Theranos has been experiencing problems because one or more of the entrenched interests in the pharm industry wants to slow the company down so they can catch up and come up with competing products with a known brand name. Such move would cause the talent to jump ship and thus sink the startup.
Or, they are simply trying to sink the company to extend their present business plan(s).
This is more probable than Theranos and Holmes et. al. being frauds. If such were the case, you would have seen a few billion $ and the leadership missing shortly after the IPO.
Anyone who has driven U.S. Highway 2 in Montana will easily take note of the abundance of roadside memorial crosses set by families and friends of persons who have died on that road. Montana highways are built with a "burrow pit" feature beside them. A burrow pit is a channel usually about 4 feet deep and about 5 feet wide to channel rainwater and snow melt from the highways and adjacent land. A driver who drives into one of these at speeds above 25 mph or so is unlikely to survive the experience due to severe injury and the usual remoteness of the accident sites from emergency medical response aid. Most of these accidents happen in the wee hours of the morning, after bars have closed and their inhabitants are driving home. The people in the vicinity of Montana's U.S. Highway 2 have an unusually high rate of alcoholism, and are thus more likely to drive while drunk. Montana, being a mostly rural state, has a huge problem with alcoholism, and so many drivers are found in these "burrow pits."
I was watching RT News yesterday, and the news anchor was having a talking head session with a couple of 'experts,' one of whom stated that when Duncan first tried to enter a Dallas hospital, the staff who initially questioned him told him to leave, sending him out, apparently not wanting to deal with an Ebola case. Such action could be a critical factor in delaying his treatment. If such allegation is true, the hospital is potentially in deep doo-doo. I'm sure the ambulance chasers would be heavily salivating.
A few years back, a local large-chain supermarket did a major refurbish. UPC codes had been universal for at least five years at the time. While shopping, I noticed that a few different types of canned vegetables were showing up on the shelves without the UPC codes printed on the labels. This was before use-by dates were mandatory.
RFID tags could be on product cases or pallets to enable timely inventory rotation, so goods wouldn't be forgotten in the back and bottom of a densely packed row in the store's stockroom. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this. It should become industry standard practice.
You mentioned the Aztecs. I think you should read the memoirs of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortez's foot soldiers, to know truly what the Aztecs, and all the occupants of Mesoamerica were really about. It was not a romantic reality.
Even with our cowardice state ruler mentality, we have it magnitudes better than any of those, except the royalty, that came before us.
Previous reliance on U.S. technology made the cost of liquid-fueled rocket engines, made mainly by Rocketdyne, ruinously expensive. They required a highly-skilled workforce to build them. The Soviets, on the other hand, were known for designing and building things that didn't require a machinist with PhD.-level knowledge to make. Witness the MiG-25 with nickel-steel leading edges in the wings, that though weighty, did the job as well as the lightweight U.S. zirconioum oxide ceramic equivalents in our jet fighters. And there are other things Russian made I could mention, but won't.
Recently (2013) a war surplus store (Oxman's Surplus) in La Mirada, California had in it's possession a surplus Rocketdyne F1 engine, which was manufactured for the Apollo/Saturn 5 project which sent our astronauts to the moon. They had it in a cradle sitting outside the store, out back, for at least a decade. Anyone with a Brownie or Hasselblad could come by at any hour and take a few snaps. In February 2013 their founder passed away and the store and it's appurtenances became the property of his heirs. Well, it was time to think about paying the taxes Uncle Sam demands after a dynast's demise. I'm reasonably certain that with that in mind, the family decided to sell the aforementioned Rocketdyne F1 engine to liquify the value of the legacy. A Japanese millionaire happened by with 1 million dollars U.S., and with the our government's blessing, made off to parts east Asian with his booty. NASA insiders said the important part of the rocket technology didn't leave with rocket engine. They may now have a disassembled example at hand, but they gotta know how to make a duplicate to really have something of value. Well, NASA comes to the rescue, with news announcements such as how to print metal parts with graduated alloy content (you start on a part with, say, a carbon steel alloy in the base end and finish off with a Hastelloy-type nickel alloy where the burning rocket fuel meets the metal) and suchlike info. . . .
But, hey, we were just trying to keep a failed nation on it's feet to participate in the New World Ordure.
Despite the Chicken Littles' fears, all 'plastics' that I'm aware of are degradable and do in fact degrade in natural settings if given adequate time. Not long times, either. The so-called long-lived fluorocarbon plastics (those in the "Teflon" family) are used for weather-resistant coatings for materials exposed to the outdoors, and most are expected to not last longer than ten years. Solar radiation is a major factor. The energies imparted to plastic molecules via the sun tend to break the chemical bonds of complex compounds down to successively simpler compounds, which make for foodstuffs for microorganisms and gases that find their way to the atmosphere. This has been talked about by materials scientists for decades. The greater public is just generally unaware, as usual. Those that are heavier than water tend to sink, and that's another matter.
The practice of feeding spent mash to farm animals goes back to the origins of brewing. It reminds me of the authorities in Brussels dictating changes in the practices of traditional European cheese makers which would ruin the essential character of their products and destroy their industry. Enacted laws should be implemented only after the bureaucrats ask themselves if it really makes sense to do such things. Otherwise, they should go back to the legislators and say, "We have a problem here."
If this doesn't happen, we'll get a nation of inane laws enacted by overbearing bureaucrats . . . oh . . . sorry, we're already there.
Re:NSA is infinitely weaker?
The meat of the matter is that when persons are raised to be moral, they will bristle when they see immorality. It may be moral if they understood the full picture, but because much of the Intelligence/Spying business is compartmentalized into need-to-know boxes, the analysts such as Snowden won't see it all. Does anybody remember the Boyce/Lee Falcon and the Snowman case? The NSA can't realistically expect to keep secrets such as those which Snowden revealed secret forever, unless they hire truly true believers who in the end will willingly drink the kool-aid. Those types generally don't make good intelligence analysts, however, they make great ass-kissers and in-place information assets. They need to re-evaluate their methods so that in the end they get the information they need without ruffling feathers. If they become more open and honest with foreign allies about their aims, they'll be able to forge a more effective and less invasive structure.
Uhm, the real reason no one in Congress moved to impeach Reagan was that at the time shortly after he gave Khomeini's Iran Hawk missiles for money to finance Nicaragua's Contra rebels, he really couldn't remember what he'd done the day before. Alzheimer's plaques were short-circuiting his brain.
Presently, it seems, Obama is on top of his intellectual game.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be possible that Theranos has been experiencing problems because one or more of the entrenched interests in the pharm industry wants to slow the company down so they can catch up and come up with competing products with a known brand name. Such move would cause the talent to jump ship and thus sink the startup. Or, they are simply trying to sink the company to extend their present business plan(s). This is more probable than Theranos and Holmes et. al. being frauds. If such were the case, you would have seen a few billion $ and the leadership missing shortly after the IPO.
Anyone who has driven U.S. Highway 2 in Montana will easily take note of the abundance of roadside memorial crosses set by families and friends of persons who have died on that road. Montana highways are built with a "burrow pit" feature beside them. A burrow pit is a channel usually about 4 feet deep and about 5 feet wide to channel rainwater and snow melt from the highways and adjacent land. A driver who drives into one of these at speeds above 25 mph or so is unlikely to survive the experience due to severe injury and the usual remoteness of the accident sites from emergency medical response aid. Most of these accidents happen in the wee hours of the morning, after bars have closed and their inhabitants are driving home. The people in the vicinity of Montana's U.S. Highway 2 have an unusually high rate of alcoholism, and are thus more likely to drive while drunk. Montana, being a mostly rural state, has a huge problem with alcoholism, and so many drivers are found in these "burrow pits."
I was watching RT News yesterday, and the news anchor was having a talking head session with a couple of 'experts,' one of whom stated that when Duncan first tried to enter a Dallas hospital, the staff who initially questioned him told him to leave, sending him out, apparently not wanting to deal with an Ebola case. Such action could be a critical factor in delaying his treatment. If such allegation is true, the hospital is potentially in deep doo-doo. I'm sure the ambulance chasers would be heavily salivating.
A few years back, a local large-chain supermarket did a major refurbish. UPC codes had been universal for at least five years at the time. While shopping, I noticed that a few different types of canned vegetables were showing up on the shelves without the UPC codes printed on the labels. This was before use-by dates were mandatory. RFID tags could be on product cases or pallets to enable timely inventory rotation, so goods wouldn't be forgotten in the back and bottom of a densely packed row in the store's stockroom. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this. It should become industry standard practice.
You mentioned the Aztecs. I think you should read the memoirs of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortez's foot soldiers, to know truly what the Aztecs, and all the occupants of Mesoamerica were really about. It was not a romantic reality. Even with our cowardice state ruler mentality, we have it magnitudes better than any of those, except the royalty, that came before us.
Previous reliance on U.S. technology made the cost of liquid-fueled rocket engines, made mainly by Rocketdyne, ruinously expensive. They required a highly-skilled workforce to build them. The Soviets, on the other hand, were known for designing and building things that didn't require a machinist with PhD.-level knowledge to make. Witness the MiG-25 with nickel-steel leading edges in the wings, that though weighty, did the job as well as the lightweight U.S. zirconioum oxide ceramic equivalents in our jet fighters. And there are other things Russian made I could mention, but won't. Recently (2013) a war surplus store (Oxman's Surplus) in La Mirada, California had in it's possession a surplus Rocketdyne F1 engine, which was manufactured for the Apollo/Saturn 5 project which sent our astronauts to the moon. They had it in a cradle sitting outside the store, out back, for at least a decade. Anyone with a Brownie or Hasselblad could come by at any hour and take a few snaps. In February 2013 their founder passed away and the store and it's appurtenances became the property of his heirs. Well, it was time to think about paying the taxes Uncle Sam demands after a dynast's demise. I'm reasonably certain that with that in mind, the family decided to sell the aforementioned Rocketdyne F1 engine to liquify the value of the legacy. A Japanese millionaire happened by with 1 million dollars U.S., and with the our government's blessing, made off to parts east Asian with his booty. NASA insiders said the important part of the rocket technology didn't leave with rocket engine. They may now have a disassembled example at hand, but they gotta know how to make a duplicate to really have something of value. Well, NASA comes to the rescue, with news announcements such as how to print metal parts with graduated alloy content (you start on a part with, say, a carbon steel alloy in the base end and finish off with a Hastelloy-type nickel alloy where the burning rocket fuel meets the metal) and suchlike info. . . . But, hey, we were just trying to keep a failed nation on it's feet to participate in the New World Ordure.
Despite the Chicken Littles' fears, all 'plastics' that I'm aware of are degradable and do in fact degrade in natural settings if given adequate time. Not long times, either. The so-called long-lived fluorocarbon plastics (those in the "Teflon" family) are used for weather-resistant coatings for materials exposed to the outdoors, and most are expected to not last longer than ten years. Solar radiation is a major factor. The energies imparted to plastic molecules via the sun tend to break the chemical bonds of complex compounds down to successively simpler compounds, which make for foodstuffs for microorganisms and gases that find their way to the atmosphere. This has been talked about by materials scientists for decades. The greater public is just generally unaware, as usual. Those that are heavier than water tend to sink, and that's another matter.
The practice of feeding spent mash to farm animals goes back to the origins of brewing. It reminds me of the authorities in Brussels dictating changes in the practices of traditional European cheese makers which would ruin the essential character of their products and destroy their industry. Enacted laws should be implemented only after the bureaucrats ask themselves if it really makes sense to do such things. Otherwise, they should go back to the legislators and say, "We have a problem here." If this doesn't happen, we'll get a nation of inane laws enacted by overbearing bureaucrats . . . oh . . . sorry, we're already there.
Re:NSA is infinitely weaker? The meat of the matter is that when persons are raised to be moral, they will bristle when they see immorality. It may be moral if they understood the full picture, but because much of the Intelligence/Spying business is compartmentalized into need-to-know boxes, the analysts such as Snowden won't see it all. Does anybody remember the Boyce/Lee Falcon and the Snowman case? The NSA can't realistically expect to keep secrets such as those which Snowden revealed secret forever, unless they hire truly true believers who in the end will willingly drink the kool-aid. Those types generally don't make good intelligence analysts, however, they make great ass-kissers and in-place information assets. They need to re-evaluate their methods so that in the end they get the information they need without ruffling feathers. If they become more open and honest with foreign allies about their aims, they'll be able to forge a more effective and less invasive structure.
Uhm, the real reason no one in Congress moved to impeach Reagan was that at the time shortly after he gave Khomeini's Iran Hawk missiles for money to finance Nicaragua's Contra rebels, he really couldn't remember what he'd done the day before. Alzheimer's plaques were short-circuiting his brain. Presently, it seems, Obama is on top of his intellectual game.
. . . grabbing at anything to stay afloat.