In the news

How is murdering someone even close to borderline evil?

It depends on what you think evil is or whether it exists.

To me, its a biblical construct that people often use to explain away complex stuff without understanding underlying causes.

Discussed here. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/

This is a good book about the Theranos scandal crime: Bad Blood

Podcast version is worth a listen, too.

What are you talking about? It's not about whether she'll physically harm someone it's about the harm she's already caused.

Punishment doesn't need to include incarceration.

The timing of the pregnancy was convenient.

The only thing wrong about that book is that it isn't three times longer. I fucking loved every minute of it, down to details like Balwani's bullying tactics or Holmes' dog shitting all over the office because she never got around to training it.

Pregnant people go to prison too.

Well of course, but the system we have at present includes the punishment of having your freedom taken away as a consequence of certain crimes. I would argue that someone who has the capacity to dish out fake (or at least known to be wrong) blood tests with serious medical consequences and who wanted to open this up to millions of patients across the US was more of a threat to society than someone who engaged in a random act of violence.

But yes, I agree with you that incarceration, and especially how they do it in the states, is not a great system. As it is I find her crime to be more heinous than what most people get sent to prison for.

I in general agree.

Something about rich white self righteous lady really wants harder sentencing however.

What's the best Netflix/similar doc on Theranos?

Holmes deserves very severe unpleasant punishment. She could have killed many people with her fraud and she showed complete disregard and lack of remorse.
House arrest is often no punishment at all, or a minor inconvenience.

She could have killed many people with her fraud and she showed complete disregard and lack of remorse.

On the plus side, the vast majority of money that was lost by investors was from Rupert Murdoch and Walmart's pockets.

Although you're probably right..smaller investors probably took the biggest hit in terms of impact.

Was her testing 'invention' a scam from the start, or was there a time when she honestly believed in it?

Not much of a deterrent for future scams if she only gets a mild punishment.

House arrest is often no punishment at all, or a minor inconvenience.

I used to think this before the first lockdown

But pregnancy is quite often a good bartering tool when it comes to sentencing

Musk has his fanbois and she has fangirls.
Plenty of them tweeting she only got busted cause she’s a woman and she’s preggo so shouldn’t be in jail.
What would happen if it was a random black guy who did Theranos, they’d be calling for a lynching.

I'd pay good money to go back to lockdown 1.0

Without all of the death that came with it of course

I’d pay better money not to. Thank you.

I'm not saying there is no racial bias in the US justice system, but I'm pretty sure if a charismatic, super well connected, ivy-leaguer with fuck tonnes of money and billionaires backers who happened to be black was put on trial they would also benefit from rich person justice.

Well there is another millionaire who was convicted on all of the same charges Holmes had when she was only convicted of 4, but that was probably because he only went to Berkeley and Stanford and not an Ivy League college.

That is evidence of basically nothing.

No not really, but it'll be interesting to see how the punishments differ.

They were also going to be on trial together until the last minute when the judge decided to separate them. Their defense was together and then when tried separately only one is guilty of everything.

or was there a time when she honestly believed in it?

My experience of people who have sailed close to the line, and ones who have mismanaged investors funds is that they never viewed what they were doing as wrong.

And even with the fast ones I don't think in their heads they ever set out to just rob people blind - not least because their upside on success would have been a vast amount more. More leverage other people's money for their own ends without really giving a fuck about the investors.

Common themes were a sense of entitlement, beliving their shit, and gamblers falacy.

I get the impression it was "this product would be really useful if it could be invented, let's get some investors in and then make it" but they never bothered to check whether it was actually possible until it was too late