AGREED!

Very good comment.

Heh, I had learned of this very recently: https://gmachine1729.com/2018/05/28/something-i-learned-today-about-microsoft/. I’m almost certain Gates did a lot of really dirty stuff behind the scenes, though of course once you’re powerful enough you can easily pull off a facade of charity, as Gates has done. Many if not most ordinary folk believe that he’s done so much good for the world with his philanthropy, which if you examine more closely was much to redeem his reputation damaged by his ruthless monopolistic acts in the 80s and 90s.

In any case, on the actual topic of this article, the Holmes scandal really taints America’s reputation. Her family had strong ties with Washington, with Senators and prominent government people (not people who actually knew anything about biotechnology) on the board of Theranos.

To generalize, I wonder if America mirrors Gates in many ways. A world monopoly, too powerful to fail, even if it’s mediocre or even catastrophic in many ways. People will buy it even if it’s objectively worse in many ways (as was Windows) for access to the network or, to frame it more negatively, fear of the real repercussion of being shut out. Microsoft have a lot of mediocrity and garbage, but it’s also rich and powerful enough that it can easily buy a lot of really smart plus technically top-notch people, who will easily sell out whatever ideals they used to have. LinkedIn and Github for instance.

Since DOS was a bootleg copy of Kildall’s CP/M, with the forward slash changed to a backslash to make it different, it was Kildall who changed the world. Kind of like Con Edison running on AC instead of Edison’s DC.

Depositions in the case to squash Linux by Microsoft, brought by the right holders to Kildall’s intellectual property, revealed Gates throwing furniture around and shouting that he wanted Kildall… Killed.

Propitially and coincidentally, he died not long after, having fallen down the stairs, alone at home.

I learned early on that most expensive books got shorter and shorter chapters as the material covered became more difficult. Since the mystery of implementation was thus left as an exercise to the reader, it thus became a necessity to consult the applications manuals available for free from chip manufacturers to figure out how it all really worked. The academic approach is, well, academic. At least for those who buy those very expensive texts.

Affirmative Action Hero!

Step 1) Born a “protected class”.
Step 2) Government secured loans.
Step 3) Bankruptcy blamed on Whites, especially males.

The litigation and possible charges are simply due to not enough bankers willing to lose money.

“Speaking as a black lesbian, I can assure you there is no violence implied by No Justice, No Peace.”
Terry Gilliam.

Seems legit.

And chimps are vicious a** killers that will rip people and other chimps to death if provoked for some reason.

In general when animals bare their teeth it isn’t for pleasantries, it either means you either pi**ed them off or they intend to eat you.

Still I hate those fake forced smiles from many of my fellow Americans. It’s always given me bad vibes.

Kind of makes you want to rethink rich guy worship. If guys this smart can be scammed this easily we need to figure out how they’re smart and how they aren’t.

Do you mean all politicians are psychopaths?

Seriously, sociopath and psychopath are not synonymous. While a psychopath is necessarily a sociopath, a sociopath is not necessarily a psychopath. Maybe Holmes is indeed a sociopath. I cannot determine that based on only one interview. Her body language is not that of a psychopath.

Sociopaths are known for being slick, smooth talkers. They are extremely good at deceiving people. That’s part of the definition for being a sociopath. Holmes is definitely one of them.

You need a course in Psychology 101.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201305/how-spot-sociopath

I vaguely remember the “run on water” scam. But there were also other scams involving gadgets that could be attached to the carburetor that would increase gas mileage significantly. One I recall produced an awful whistling noise. Yeah, my buddies and I fell for it, during WWII when gas was severely rationed to four gallons a week. Carburetors on cars are now passe, but still used on small engines where economy is not so critical.

Is this the Gen Mike Hayden of USAf and CIA?

Thanks for your comment. It was a momentary lapse of good judgment on my part to get involved in that discussion in the first place.

Sparkon, I too have had some comments “in moderation” for almost a whole day before which kept me out of the whole conversation. It did piss me off, but I’m pretty sure it’s not intentional on Steve’s part. I believe he is the one that moderates them, and this seems to be done differently from my comments under Buchanan / Fred Reed / Ron Paul / John Derbyshire and others. Those guys may just have a flag set to “screen out blatant profanity and spam, but let the rest all slide”.

I believe Mr. Sailer has just missed some comments and caught up with them much later onregarding those 5% or so that take way too long. It’s probably the same with yours, Sparkon. Otherwise, comments appear on a schedule that is in synch with a late-schedule guy on California time.

I don’t think the people who run this site (Mr. Unz in particular) want readers to know how it works completely, as if they wrote that, it would open the door for scammer/spammers and the like. I wonder if having a real email address makes the comments appear instantaneously (as fast as computers are, I mean).

That’s my take on the comment-lag that you and I see. I hope that helps.

As opposed to iSailer’s erratic, haphazard, and seemingly preferential moderation of comments to his articles at UR, which amounts to soft censorship.

Oh, you’ve noticed? LOL. #metoo

3rd time El Jefe Sailer censored my comment, I quit reading Sailer forever and ever. Fucking poseur. A writer is either honest or dishonest — as soon as a dishonest condition is confirmed, you can no longer trust anything that writer produces.

Steve Sailer’s Takimag article (unfortunately commenting is gone from that site.

As opposed to iSailer’s erratic, haphazard, and seemingly preferential moderation of comments to his articles at UR, which amounts to soft censorship.

Even now, one of my recent comments to his McNamara article has been awaiting moderation for over 12 hours.

Anyway, back on topic: neither is Holmes pretty, nor does she look smart.

War injuries complicated by medical malpractice.

I did not know that [/Johnny Carson].

Thanks, that’s a weight off my mind.

This will keep happening. There was a guy a hundred years ago who got millions from investors for his car that he claimed ran on water (even Henry Ford showed an interest). People think we’re more savvy nowadays, but we’re not, really. You just need to refine your pitch. A young white woman who appeared to be breaking into the male-dominated tech industry was just right. If she were black, it wouldn’t have worked. People would be wary of a black claiming to have made a major breakthrough in technology, even though of course they’d never admit it.

{Actually without Wozniak there never would have been a Jobs.}

Quite true, but without Jobs there would be no (famous) Woz either.
It is the eternal battle between marketing types and engineers: who is the more important.
Engineers by nature want to design, create.
Engineers by nature are introverts: prefer not to deal with people.
Engineers feel uncomfortable exaggerating (lying?) about what they have designed.
Marketing types have no problem blowing smoke to secure sales and customers.
I am sure there are exceptions, but that’s generally the case (..from my own experience, having worked with both for many years).

You no doubt know about Gary Kildall: he was a brilliant ComSci, and his CP/M was considered a superior OS to DOS. But Kildall was an engineer, not a marketer.
Gates is not only a pretty smart guy, but a very good marketer: he marketed a lousy OS right, and the rest is history, as the saying goes.

Sadly Kildall died (was killed) in obscurity, while Gates and Jobs are famous and billionaires, who have had an unquestioned impact on humanity.

Good post! As Mark Steyn has put it, “The process is the punishment.”

Our slow slide towards stupidity is obvious. Magical thinking has replaced critical thinking .Sound bites have eliminated the space for honest opposition and rebuttal .
At corporate level, making a killing before the known fraud becomes known to everybody has inspired more and more pseudo science and business model.

At the level of peasant like us, the jump to grab an opportunity is symptomatic of our powerlessness and vulnerability . We agree to media hype because we have lost the habit of questioning . Questioning allows critical thinking .

We believe in lottery , believe in sports or Hollywood as the only path left to get richer and famous .

We also divide ourselves along ideas but leave no room to realign or reposition. The same faith that makes a victim of fatal illness to seek Voodoo treatment or biting by snake because of the lack of effective treatment or because of inability to accept death make us vulnerable to scheming and vain promises .

People wanted a female Steve Jobs,

Really? This person didn’t, and I was an early owner of an Apple II+, but it’s a nice simplistic notion that the Apple Cult of Mac fanboys and their fellow travelers will latch onto with some force

Even now it seems about half the people who comment here think Steve Jobs invented the black turtleneck.

Apple succeeded despite Steve Jobs only because enormous company profits due to the huge success of the original, mostly Woz-designed Apple II allowed the company to hire some very talented engineers who were able to overcome many but not all of Steve Jobs’ obsessions — like no fans or cooling vents on the Apple III.

But no problem. When the Apple III acted up from overheating, you could just lift the whole fool thing a foot or two in the air, and slam it drop it back onto your desktop — physically — so that the memory chips would reseat themselves after popping out due to the entire motherboard overheating.

I mean, how elegant is that?

But even today, Macs still run hot. Even today, Macs are still overpriced. Even today, suckers are still born every minute second.

Actually without Wozniak there never would have been a Jobs. Wozniak developed a controller for external memory (I think it was for disk drives). Without it there would have been no viable PC at that time. Jobs was the driving force behind later Apple computers but without the resources from the Apple II, they would have never gotten off the ground.

I think most people know, Jobs is famous for stiffing the engineers working for him.

No, I don’t expect my word to be taken as given truth but, given the record of democratic regimes with regards to the rule of majority bringing psychopaths to power, fresh examples that spring to my mind are Hillary Clinton getting the majority of the popular vote in the USA and the election of Emmanuel Macron as president of France, I’ll take the risk to go against the opinion of the majority and base mine on what concrete traits define a psychopath and not what the majority thinks 😉

Are you saying your words must be taken as given truth? Aren’t you very dictatorial? In according to democracy, majority rules and their opinion is the truth. If the majority opinions here said Elizabeth Holmes was psychopath shouldn’t she is a psychopath in according to democracy?

Some people want all sorts of entrepreneurs as long as they aren’t straight, White and male. If they can classify as a diversity statistic then they’ll be promoted.

Though I often find myself in disagreement with his writings, I concede that Mr Reed’s style is entertaining. However, accusing someone of being a psychopath without real evidence is a very serious matter. Next is the accusation of murder without real evidence.
Holmes is no Steve Jobs, maybe she imagined to be but she isn’t. She appears to be a daddy’s girl too spoiled to focus on acquiring any specific competence, but very intelligent and too eager to prove her worth in the world of grown-ups. That doesn’t make her a psycho, let alone a murderer. The crime for which she has been sentenced is nothing extraordinary.
Psychopaths are not crazies, they perceive reality, they know what is moral and what isn’t, except that they choose to ignore principles in the pursuance of their goals. They are remorseless, callous, cynical and they consider that the end justifies the means. Those are the four traits of psychopaths. The body language I saw in the video doesn’t betray those traits.
So why all the fuss? The focus on Holmes’s personality to explain the gigantic mess up makes me think that there is a lot more to this story than what is told. As for commenters who howl with the pack, well, it speaks more about them than about Holmes.

I’d have to drink a lot, lot of beer. No matter how much I drink, it doesn’t alter my perception of reality, it only makes me go to the bathroom.

Mx. Dworkin left the candy aisle in 2005. She carried a crushing weight and although she couldn’t be missed, she will be.

Steve Jobs needed worker bees to make his concepts actually work.

Somehow I found Elizabeth Holmes resembled Margaret Thatcher, the creepiness, the look, the voice, the tone, the way she talks and other very (very smart, very driven, very self-confident, very glib, very cold-blooded, very manipulative, very willing to take risks, very pretty, and very ruthless.) A very unique trait of Anglo.

Disclosure: IANAL, but my partner of 25 years is, and I’ve helped her strategise on dozens of occasions because I’m pretty good at Game Theory.

Maybe Non-Disclosure Agreements should be banned.

That would be massively problematic: NDAs (and their client-oriented corollaries – Non-Compete Agreements) are a critical part of the mechanisms that firms use to prevent their key staff from being poached, taking development knowledge with them to the new firm and being able to exploit it commercially.

If NDAs didn’t exist, firms would have to find other ways to compartmentalise development data so that it was not exploitable by any single individual (or any single team), which would add significantly to costs, and would slow progress so much that it would be noticeable at a macroeconomic level. (It could be done by deferring compensation to development teams through stock options, but that’s already near its feasible limit).

Besides…

It wasn’t the existence of an NDA per se that was the problem.

An NDA is unenforceable if the disclosure concerns a criminal act; any attempt to sue for NDA violation if the disclosure is of fraud, is doomed to fail bigly.

However a ‘known losing’ case is no big deal if your underlying aim is to beggar the whistleblower, and send up a big flag to other potential whistleblowers saying “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here” (or “Here There Be Dragons“).

In instances like this, the NDA is just a useful trigger that can be deployed readily and at relatively low cost: it’s simple to gussy up a plausible statement of claim that asserts that the disclosure violated the NDA, even if the plaintiff[1] (Theranos) knows, full well, that they will lose the action if it ever sees the inside of a courtroom.

Contrast this with alternative causes in action that were available to Theranos: for example, claiming that the facts disclosed are materially, knowingly false, are not ‘pure opinion’, and are therefore defamatory… well, that’s harder to frame, and invites a bunch of hearings (e.g., anti-SLAPP motions; motions for summary dismissal) that are not expensive.

If you’re going to try to litigate someone into the poorhouse, it’s best to do things that don’t cost too much to prepare; that don’t have straightforward mechanisms for early review an dismissal; and don’t have legislated coutnermeasures in the case you’re discovered to be litigating just to hurt your opponent.

Defamation claims (as an example) almost always “bespoke”. Defamation ‘precedents’ – pre-prepared, “fill in the blanks” versions of documents – are extremely sparse because the facts at issue are very different in each case.

On the flipside: NDA-related precedents are really comprehensive – because for a given firm, the facts at issue can be framed in pretty much the same way every time. Also, there’s no anti-SLAPP equivalent for an NDA action (which is pretty much a breach of contract action for a highly-specific breach), so the defendant/respondent has very little chance of early relief or getting the thing shut down.

So if you had decided to sue a former employee into the poorhouse, and you had the option of an NDA violation, you would choose that. If you didn’t have that option, you wouldn’t abanadon the plan to make the guy’s life suck: you would just choose a different litigation strategy.

And the thing is: regardless of the selected strategy, the thing that kills your opponent is the costs. Even if you lose, and have to pay your target’s costs, courts are usually loath to award anything more than ‘schedule’ costs, which do not cover actual costs.

As a worked example: if I sued you in my jurisdiction, and we had a 4-day trial and I lost, and costs were awarded against me, I would have to pay you the ‘schedule’ of $1750 per day, plus a couple of days’ prep at $1500.

$10k… that’s what I pay (in addition to my own costs, of course), but I still get to see you suffer.

Because…

Your actual costs would be $5000 a day, minimum (decent advocates are pricey), and the prep would be of the order of 10 days @ $3500-4500.

So you won, you got ‘costs’… and you went backwards by about 50 grand.

And if I’m a company, there’s a non-trivial chance that my insurance will cover the costs to me, and/or I will already have accrued a reserve to cover it.

So I got to impose costs roughly equal to a year’s post-tax salary on you, as desired.

.

That‘s the problem: not only is there no mechanism to adequately punish abuse of the legal system as a mechanism for corporate vengeance… but also, the victims wind up significantly worse off, if they do not back down immediately.

So the ‘right’ solution is not to do away with NDAs: it is to give courts the power to force unsuccessful plaintiffs to pay their counterparties’ full costs, and also to make unrequested awards to defendants/respondents in the event that the plaintiff fails to make their case.

[1] I’ve used ‘plaintiff’ and ‘defendant’ for the two sides of the dispute, whereas ‘applicant’ and ‘respondent’ are more appropriate most of the time.

Don’t forget Fred does not see very well. He once posted, when criticised for typos, that he can not see them. War injury. Almost blind.

Sorry, I didn’t read your post slowly enough, Voj. I agree with you that the lady is not a psychopath, because if she is, then we have millions of them – good for the horror movie bidness, but not for the rest of us. The story is not just about this “whiz-girl” losing her investors’ money; it’s about why they all got into this half-baked thing to begin with (yes, it does remind me of internet bubble 1.0).

This IS an interesting story, and I like Mr. Reed’s writing here on it. However, you should read Steve Sailer’s Takimag article (unfortunately commenting is gone from that site – been a few months now) and look up his 3 or 4 posts on Theranos here on unz.com.

The entrepreneur is like a quarterback. The entrepreneur is the quarterback of the enterprise.

The good entrepreneur must have an understanding of most, if not all, of the components of the enterprise. She may not have the technical expertise of all of the people who the enterprise employs, including the engineers and scientists, but she must be able to generate business without which the engineers and scientists would not be paid.

The entrepreneur must be able to hire marketing and sales people, accountants, attorneys, compliance staff, creative staff, computer and IT professionals, and so forth. It is her vision which gives birth to the enterprise, and her vision alone.

My asseveration that entrepreneurs are more apt to be special than non-entrepreneurial engineers and scientists is a normative assertion. The basis upon which I make the assertion is my life experience coupled with my understanding of human nature and my reading of history.

Let me analogize to the gridiron. The quarterback is almost universally regarded as the most important position on a football team. The quarterback position in the National Football League is undoubtedly the most important position on the football team. In fact, a quarterback is probably the most important position in all of team sports.

One may retort that the quarterback does not do the dirty work of other offensive positions. The quarterback does not have to keep on-rushing defensive ends and outside linebackers from knocking the quarterback into next week. That job is left to the left tackle and the right tackle. The quarterback does not have to prevent a nose tackle or inside linebacker from bull rushing the quarterback and driving him into the ground. No, that job is for the interior offensive lineman such as the center and the left and right guards. The offensive lineman operate in the trenches; they engage in hand-to-hand combat; and they sustain far more aches and pains than does the quarterback.

Like the entrepreneur, the quarterback is the leader. Teams almost always look for leadership from the quarterback position. Why? Because the quarterback either calls the plays or must execute that which the head coach or offensive coordinator has called, but even when the coach is calling the plays, the quarterback must make a pre-snap read to determine whether the play called by the coach makes sense. The quarterback must survey the entire field and be able to recognize the defensive alignment and what the defense will probably do at the time the ball is snapped. This requires a great deal of film study, the ability to make quick assessments and judgments along with being able to effectively communicate with the players on offense.

In other words, the quarterback is the field general. Beyond that, he has to be able to throw the football with accuracy and with touch. He has to be able to elude the rush in order to avoid a sack and he needs to be able to take a hit.

The quarterback does not have to be the best athlete. He does not have to be the biggest or the strongest or the fastest player. But, he has to be a leader and he generally should be the smartest player.

If the quarterback is not a good leader or is not a good communicator or does not take the time to perfect his craft, his team will not fare very well – even if the quarterback is a terrific athlete with a cannon for an arm.

Note that I have not contended that ALL entrepreneurs are special or that ALL entrepreneurs are good or better human beings than non-entrepreneurial engineers or scientists.

Note, too, that I am not arguing that there are no evil, reprehensible entrepreneurs. There most certainly are. Ms. Holmes certainly qualifies.

We agree that Madeline Albright is despicable and ugly.

Don’t you have to apply the beer goggles effect instead?

https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/beer-goggles.htm

On a lighter note, regarding Mrs Holmes’s prettiness

https://www.google.com/search?q=the%20cuteness%20factor&ie=utf-8

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_loris

Or how sarcasm is lost on people who take everything literally. I know what prototyping is, and I believe most people who come here do, thank you, that’s why I wrote ‘is called prototyping’ not ‘is prototyping’. And yes, calling prototyping what isn’t prototyping but is indeed fake-it-until-you-make-it is a widespread practice because to build something you need investment, to get investment you need to show something, to show something you need to build it, to build something… you get the point. That’s not how it should work but that’s how it works very, very often.
What Mrs Holmes did is far from exceptional, many others have done it and do it, so why the fuss and why this character assassination campaign? It is even possible that she did it with the best intentions and that she genuinely believed that what she wanted was technically possible. Given the names involved, I very much doubt that she was so presomptious as to think that she could strip the investors she attracted of their money and get away with it. I have no horse in the race but I am always irritated by scapegoating and this article does just that without even trying to scratch the surface to see if there’s possibly more to this story. Oh, and in my opinion, Fred Reed is not best suited to call Elizabeth Holmes a psychopath.

Homes became FAP material the moment I thought she would end up in prison.

And how do you know that “entrepreneur is more apt to be special than a non-entrepreneurial engineer or scientist?”
Perhaps you missed the relevant portion of my post: “Holmes is a visionary. And she is a very talented entrepreneur, considering the roster of investors that she has managed to attract. Her problem was/is that she is an empty vessel with regard to an honest training in something. She knows “almost nothing of the sciences, and nothing at all of the electronic or mechanical engineering, or of medical instrumentation.” Her plebeian ignorance (which also explains her amazing self-confidence) should have qualified her for a working bee at best.”
Incompetence, ignorance, and the lack of expertise go hand in hand with the disrespect towards the hard-won expertise of others.
As for the Trailblazer story, the hideous Hayden has been recognized as very special by the state and by the war profiteers of contractor kind. Hayden, the traitorous “manager,” not only has squandered the $1.2 billion of taxpayers money, he destroyed a working (functioning) program created by a high-level expert (specialist in his field) for a fraction of $1.2 billion. Moreover, the entrepreneurial Hayden put a whistle-blower to prison when the story of Hayden’s treasonous incompetence became known to the wider public. Like the despicable (and equally ugly) Madeline Albright, Hayden continuous to showing up for sharing his “wisdom.”
You may want to re-read the biography of Andrew Carnegie to get a sense of what makes a person a real entrepreneur.

She’s not model pretty, but she’s definitely CEO pretty. Especially considering how badly SJWs covet non-white/cismale/hetero blah blah blah CEOs, she was like manna from heaven. Everyone was so blinded by this young, white, female, “smart” CEO that by the time they realized she had taken everyone for a ride, it was too late.

TLDR….would bang, then ghost.

The problem was that she had no science to back up her claims. She hadn’t done any animal testing or anything to show she actually had a product that would work. Medical product start ups won’t get the big bucks until they actually show some promise. One company we bought made a device that was supposed to give heart failure patients advance warning they were getting too far off the scale by measuring pressure in the left ventricle. They didn’t get near the money this did. The product did not get enough people for clinical trials and it was a failure as another company making something similar was also purchased and they had a superior product.

Does anybody still remember the dot com boom. How many Theranos’ were there then?

That one is an engineer or scientist does not thereby mean that one cannot be an entrepreneur. Nothing in my post suggested otherwise.

However, just because one possesses some engineering or scientific expertise does not thereby mean that one possesses insight, leadership, and vision.

One is not special just because one is an engineer or scientist. On the other hand, an entrepreneur is more apt to be special than a non-entrepreneurial engineer or scientist.

Wow. You’re kind of an asshole, aren’t you?

No, prototyping is absolutely NOT “fake-it-till-you-make-it” unless the boss in corrupt. Prototyping in engineering (I’m not talking about computer software here) means making a working device, but without the packaging, improvements toward optimization, and possibly some more features that make work even better.

OT
but always relevant
Very good articles and analysis of the most important issues of our time at fight
white genocide dot com. Of course type the address without the spaces. The writers are very focused and many encouraging things to be found. Cheers!

And now, Achmed E. Kasem presents a Long-Distance Dedication from the Peak Stupidity blog to the forlorn destitute big-money Theranos investors, whose hope and faith in this gold-dust whiz-girl have vanished into thin air and penny-valuations:

“Did she make you cry,
make you break down,
shatter your illusions of love.
And is it over now. Do you know how
to pick up the pieces and go home?”

Missrs Kissinger, Mattis, Boies, I hope you all are listening tonight. Keep your feet on the ground, and keeping reaching for the stars.

What value are insurance companies adding to the equation that company execs deserve multi-million dollar paychecks and bonuses?

Exactly. It is possible there is more to the story than what Fred Simplicius Simplicissimus Reed can figure out about it.

I agree with you. A prototype, if we take the word for what it means, is supposed to actually work and that’s why I wrote ‘is called’ and not just ‘is’.
My point was that doing what everybody else does doesn’t qualify her for the title of ‘public enemy nr. 1’, neither does what I saw in the video. What did I see in the video? I saw a person who went through a whole set of emotions before facing the camera and who only finishes gathering herself when the interview starts. In the beginning, you don’t see her hands, she keeps her head still, and I believe the tone of her voice is somewhat lower than her natural tone.
Later, in the part after the interviewer tells that the device works for only fifteen tests not the two hundred some it’s advertised to do, she is nodding and her hands appear. Now, she may be the über-psychopath if all her body language is faked but I’m permitted to doubt. Also, I may be wrong because I watched the video only once. Nevertheless, what I think is that though she’s undoubtedly very ambitious, she looked more like someone stuck before a frozen screen desperately seeking the ‘reset’ button and that after the ‘only fifteen tests work’ she saw the mouse cursor moving b/c she no longer felt the complete fraud she was alleged to be. That’s hardly how psychopaths react. That’s how overwhelmed people react.
In short, I didn’t see a psycho, I saw a patsie. So I wonder, why this character assassination stuff? I dare not think that the folks here at Unz do it just because she’s a woman.

PS: I know a psycho when I see one, I have plenty of them in my own family.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+triad+dirty+dozen+test

The fake it until you make it is purely to keep investors from asking rhetorical questions that are used for power plays regarding ownership structures. The reason why that aspect is (wrongly) conflated with prototyping is precisely the show-and-tell bs that CEOs pull to keep the (power playing) investors off their necks. Unfortunately, after a while, many CEOs will begin to believe their own lies.

A legitimate prototype comes after bench scale experiments have clarified various variables that are usually implied but not stated in the literature. But real research takes money and time, which goes against the instant gratification mindset of venture capitalists and managers of established businesses. Thus successful (for the time being) businesses will sell off their RandD divisions for a short term profit, the CEO takes the golden parachute, and five years later, when the new products that the RandD divisions would have developed, are missing, the established company is in a crisis. Selling off the RandD is akin to autocastration, with a mindset akin to the non-gathering of seed stipulation for which Monsatan is notorious.

For a startup, such a mentality is even more unworkable.

And since comments are closed on Sailer’s article, I’ll put it here. For those unfamiliar with industrial processes, the “fake-it-’til-u-make-it” phase is also called ‘prototyping’ (a euphemism always sounds better than the raw description) and is a widespread practice. Ask big labs or defence contractors. I don’t condone it, just sayin’ there’s more to this story than “the girl looked to good to be true”.

Out of curiosity, I watched the video of her interview. I didn’t see the person the author described. There are flaws in her discourse but she doesn’t look as a psycho to me. She shows signs of anxiety, as someone who realises that she miscalculated the game she entered and sees no way out. That’s not how psychos behave. Reed is being simplistic. Sailer is in my opinion closer to the truth. The lady simply doesn’t fit the ‘dirty dozen’ model.

Let’s say that her good daddy’s girl look may be fashionable in the circles of the male hags who sat at the board of her company.

…Well now, that person is 79.

I can’t even think of an attractive woman whom she resembles

.

“She.”

LOL

“Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.”

Nonetheless, Theranos has pointed out an obvious need in this country that is not being met.

Theranos hasn’t pointed out jack-squat. Even if the product were to have revolutionized this convoluted lab process, their intention, like any business, was to make money. If they could have gotten into the big healthcare quagmire to make more profits, they’d have done that too, Ron.

Look, I miss the long-lost free-market in healthcare as much as anyone. The solution to it will only come after the crash. All the government involvement over the years have had the effect of making it impossible to go back to free-market without lots of short-term financial pain (for some) that is more even than what we are getting rectumized with presently.

I see you’ve put a lot of though into this. Yes, I’m all for reducing our carbon footprints with the lawyers. I’m looking forward to strolling on the beach sometime and exclaiming “hey, y’all, I’ve found another lawyers’ tooth.”

I’m glad you liked the limerick too, ST.

{ except if your insurance pays for it}

Insurance doesn’t really pay for it: the pool of people who are paying insurance premiums pays for everything. Insurance companies sit between the doctor and the patient, take a cut, and try their best _not_ to pay when the patient needs medical bills paid. Insurance executives then make multi-million dollar salaries from the premiums paid by people who can barely afford to make the payments.

The whole thing is a scam.
What value are insurance companies adding to the equation that company execs deserve multi-million dollar paychecks and bonuses?

There is one important fact that we may have overlooked. Just like the cost of medications, the cost of blood tests in the USA is irrationally high, and causes much deprivation, pain and anxiety in our dysfunctional healthcare system. Here is an example. I recently tried to obtain a prescribed drug but my private insurance would not pay for it ($287) – I eventually found a coupon on the internet to buy it at my local grocery store for $17 without insurance. Similarly with blood testing of all sorts there is profit and confusion in excess. Here, the costs are exorbitant, out of control and irrational, except if your insurance pays for it and in that case your insurer may have negotiated a better price. Theranos offered the hope of doing such testing on demand for any citizen, with minimal inconvenience and very low cost. This must have been a huge existential threat to the industry. At the present time a blood test is prescribed by your physician and you or your insurer become the victim of a group of companies and industries that make the pharmaceutical industry look like generous and humane benefactors. The entire healthcare industry is at play in this arena. Therefore, in my opinion it is possible that Theranos was punished by a huge and predatory industrial cartel for daring to suggest that blood tests should be offered to all (in their corner drug store) on demand and at a reasonable cost. Many startup companies have great ideas or ideals and no technology; they develop the technology in the years after the company starts research operations. It is claimed that Theranos may have never developed the technology and may be guilty of fraud. Nonetheless, Theranos has pointed out an obvious need in this country that is not being met. Even the appreciation of this reality seems to have been suppressed. In my humble opinion, a company like Theranos, even with modest improvements in technology, could provide the average citizen with rapid and convenient blood testing on demand at an affordable cost.

White genes definitely eliminate ugly.

She is very smart, very driven, very self-confident, very glib, very cold-blooded, very manipulative, very willing to take risks, very pretty, and very ruthless. Everything about her is very. If the foregoing resembles the clinical description of a psychopath, there is a reason.

I’m sure Fred would find Roseanne Barr peculiarly attractive.

I started a company on a shoestring – with no venture money whatever. I too claimed to have a game-changing machine – but I jumped on a plane with it every time anybody expressed interest and demonstrated my claims were true within 30 mins of arriving at their place.

Suddenly we were told “You are dead in the water! This California company has just announced that they have succeeded in making your machine on a single silicon chip and they just raised $8M to bring it to market – you are dead, man!” Talk is cheap but it alone raises millions.

Well, it was the silicon chip that got them all that money but, guess what: although they furnished some beautiful offices and each executive (there were quite a few) had a COMPUTER on their desk (this was the 1980s) although all this, the damn thing never worked!

My company carried on up to around $20M in sales worldwide and pretty decent success – still with no venture money – before getting snapped up by a big concern; which promptly fumbled the ball as they usually do.

It’s a true story.

LOL, a mighty good one. The last line (“the cash return beat the Sopranos”) delivers a full business education, short and sweet.

Hilarious! Excellent sense of seeing the irony in the situation: ” So, the company that offered so much promise with a mere drop of blood from …..”

Sorry, not a splendid idea at all. Just think: where would you house all those shysters in a jail? Put them all together and they would gouge each others’ eyes out in no time. Put them in with the other prisoners and the lawyers would get ripped apart by the gentlemen deprived of their money by these lawyers. That leaves solitary. Well, who is going to pay for their upkeep?

Think smart, think environmentally clean, think low cost. Think along lines of a large tank of sharks. Low cost. Environmentally clean. In tune with nature. Poetic justice as well: Sharks eating up sharks.

“…the worker bees, including engineers and scientists.” — from “Liberty Mike”
— The US is saturated with entrepreneurs, unlike the native engineers and scientists who are in short supply here.
The Theranos story is a great exposure of the Ignoramuses in Charge.
Holmes is a visionary. And she is a very talented entrepreneur, considering the roster of investors that she has managed to attract. Her problem was/is that she is an empty vessel with regard to an honest training in something. “She also knows almost nothing of the sciences, and nothing at all of the electronic or mechanical engineering, or of medical instrumentation.”
Her plebeian ignorance (which also explains her amazing self-confidence) should have qualified her for a working bee at best.
Here is more about the fate of the experts, as compared to the “entrepreneurs” in the US: https://billmoyers.com/content/slideshow-six-whistleblowers-charged-under-the-espionage-act/2/
“One program, called Trailblazer, was being built by an outside contractor for $1.2 billion; the other, known as ThinThread, was created in-house by a legendary crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney for about $3 million.”
“Did Hayden’s flawed decisions [incompetence] make America more vulnerable? ” — Yes, they did. hhttps://www.justsecurity.org/47632/hayden-nsa-road-911/
“Hayden decided not to use ThinThread… Instead, he funded a rival approach, called Trailblazer, and he turned to private defense contractors to build …” They wanted a big machine that could make Martinis, too.” … Meanwhile, there was nothing to show for Trailblazer, other than mounting bills. As the system stalled at the level of schematic drawings, top executives kept shuttling between jobs at the agency and jobs with the high-paying contractors. For a time, both Hayden’s deputy director and his chief of signals-intelligence programs worked at saic, a company that won several hundred million dollars in Trailblazer contracts. In 2006, Trailblazer was abandoned as a $1.2-billion flop.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer

look, either the product worked or it did not. If it didn’t it would not be purchased. That is how the system is supposed to work. You create a product, people invest, you supply and if people like it they but it.

She had a simple idea. blood testing on the spot for multiple conditions and far less than current expenses – convenient and cheap. if it worked as described bingo. if not continued development or simply a failed venture.

i am not going to defend the process of defending a product that the agency knew was flawed, but among miscreant behavior — nothing surpasses the tactics of the real estate mbs mortgages and they seem to have gotten away with it as tax payer expense.

Nor would I defend the process of waiting out a customers service to steal their money by claiming they waited too long to bring the issues to their attention —- mercantilism.

She’s not bad looking, but she’s got a weird, fake-looking quality… like a blow-up sex doll or something.

I believe Heather King also ran interference for Harvey Weinstein against reporters threatening to expose him before it all blew up.

In my experience, it is the entrepreneur, the visionary that makes things happen, not the worker bees, including engineers and scientists.

Sorry, but they go together like a horse and buggy, like a boat and motor. The visionary cant bring his vision ‘ to life ‘ without the worker bees….and workers bees don’t have as many jobs without some new entrepreneur vision.
Vanderbilt and Gould had to hire workers bees to lay tracks to make their railroad a reality. Ford had to hire worker bees to put the Model T on the roads. Salk’s polio vaccine had to be mass produced by workers bees for the public.

a lot of what is going on in the market place is not capitalism — it’s mercantilism there is a difference.

When federal regulatory agencies issued a long, detailed investigative report making it absolutely clear that Theranos did not even come close to legality, and was therefore endangering lives–

This is why I go against those who want to get rid of all regulatory agencies. The major ones like the FDA, the USDA , were created for ”good reason”….to protect the health of the public.
That some are corrupted by politics isn’t a “good reason” to ditch them…..it is a good reason to ‘un corrupt ‘them so they can serve the public good as they were suppose to.

See, that’s what I’m talking about – if you’re not tall, dark, and handsome yourself, Mr. Kaldian, why are you being so picky? I supposed that’s why you beta guys go find those 95 lb. Oriental chicks, you race traitors … [/Rosie*]

No, in all seriousness, you really should put this stuff below the FOLD(S). Anyone who is reading this, QUICK, QUICK, HERE —> MASH THIS NOW!

* Sorry, Rosie, if you’re reading, heh!

Man, Fred has been muff-diving the mud people for so long, this deformed gnome, Holmes, is suddenly “very pretty” and “very attractive”. It’s like those crazy hallucinations people get after too much time in a sensory deprivation tank.

Her talents are real.
She is a FANTASTIC liar, world class.

She is about a #7 on the Roissy scale for facial attractiveness and well below for physicality, sex appeal and sunny nature.

That, and a large fraction consume psychiatric drugs.

Damn You, Bardon! Enough stresses for one day–first Germany is out of WC, now this. I need a drink;)) LOL.

Sometimes…..it doesn’t work….

If you expect the Cohen treatment wake up you’re dreaming he’s fixed with the demoncats and fake news.

No power like pussy power.

Thanks, Achmed. I like your limerick, too. You may have the knack.

But, but,…she went to Stannnford.!
I bet if she had granulated from (let alone dropped out of), e.g., Kansas State, Henry the K & Co. would not have come calling.
Just sayin’.

T H I C C

” It’s a good thing the long arm of the libel law doesn’t extend down to Old Mexico, or I’d be worried about that lady headed south to sit on you.”

Even if libel law extended into Mexico, who would volunteer to serve the papers on Fred? How many Mexican politicos, judges, cops, lawyers killed, jailed and on the lamb year to date?

Well done, bravo.

In my experience, it is the entrepreneur, the visionary that makes things happen, not the worker bees, including engineers and scientists.

Worker bees are worker bees.

De gustibus non est disputandum, but I find her deep voice (real or fake) erotic.

As for looks, she’s a good looking woman, although nothing spectacular (Fred, being in Mejico, must have developed a serious case of Nordic deprivation). Good thing about her is that’s she’s not fat yet, and I prefer them skinny, even to the point of archetypal Auschwitz look (gross Andrea Dworkin will suffice as a counterexample).

So, what about Kissinger, Mattis & other powerful geriatrics?

I think Steve Sailer was right: she was daughter they have never had.

She is far closer to pretty than ugly. Just because she is white, blonde and slim may not necessarily mean she is pretty, but it, per se, eliminates ugly.

Maxine Waters, on the other hand, is far closer to ugly than pretty.

I would rather have all my brain removed based on a Theranos-generated false diagnostic than having enough of it left behind to realize the horror of my situation.

Just sayin’

Holmes was a honey, slender, very pretty, well-groomed, appealing, smart, and maybe the daughter or girlfriend or mistress that her prey would have liked.

Actually not. Holmes is very pretty, but has absolutely no sex appeal whatsoever. She reminds me of Paris Hilton, another attractive blonde who has absolutely no sex appeal.

Fred, you should know this because you said it herself some years ago on your blog. Contrary to the beliefs of the feminists, most men appreciate a woman who can keep up with. Most guys like a girlfriend or wife who will go hiking and scuba diving with them and most fathers will fight tooth and nail to ensure their daughters get the same opportunities in university and career as their sons.

If you read the book carefully, Holmes did not use sex appeal on all of these old heavy hitters on her board. She used her persona as the prodigy daughter “that they all wish they had but had not” as the means to con these men. Carreyrou actually says this in the book. Being pretty helps, but was not the key here. Being the prodigy was.

The baritone was a fake – this is now well known. I can’t believe people couldn’t hear this from the get-go – it gives me the creeps.

I also read the book “Bad Blood”. True to Fred Reed expectations, this is a (very) entertaining and hilarious review of this book.

Rampant capitalism’s sine qua non for success are greed and corruption.

ps: but, dang, Lizzie is hot 🙂

This is UR. Where is the heavy Jewish conspiracy connection?

In other news Andrea Dworkin reportedly weighed over 400 lbs at death and they needed a cherry picker and the door frame removed from her first floor flat to remove the corpse.

indeed, very well said.

Forbes covered this story fairly well, from its start to finish, though apparently it’s not finished

But whatever else may be true about her,

she is not just one of the guys. And she wears black well.

I think it’s a tale of offering more than was possible that spiraled beyond her ability to manage. You have a great idea of an idea that becomes great and it takes off, , it would be hard to stop that train muchless pull it back into the station.