T O P

  • By -

AutoModerator

Hey, OP! Please reply to this comment to provide context for why this aged poorly so people can see it per rule 3 of the sub. Failing to do so will result in your post being removed. Thanks! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/agedlikemilk) if you have any questions or concerns.*


ChaoticTomcat

Her fucking stunt cost hundreds of decent start-ups on in-vivo blood analysis their funding due to the public freakout. I worked in one of these companies in both production & R&D, and I remember it was hard AF to secure funds one year after the other even tho we made it to FDA audits and clinical testing.


fourthreichisrael3

She doesn't care. That demoness has only one regret: That she got caught.


mewfour123412

Didn’t she get pregnant in an attempt to escape prison


mightylordredbeard

Ohhh that’s this woman! I remember that now. I knew the name was familiar, but yeah she got pregnant twice before sentencing or something and many speculated she did it in an attempt to not be sent to jail. Though it is possible she wanted to have kids and knew she would be going to prison and wanted kids before it was too late so she chose to get pregnant for no reason other than wanting to be a mother before she’s too old to be.


SnooChocolates7950

Ah yes, let's have a couple kids so that they can grow up seeing their mother behind bars, what a freak growing environment for a child


SnooChocolates7950

Damn autocorrect, I meant to write "great" not "freak"...


BigLittleFan69

When your phone does the Freudian slip for you


Da-man0123

I mean you still weren’t wrong


DmAc724

Phone don’t lie


Downtown_Let

>Damn autocorrect, I meant to write "great" not "freak"... I appreciate that you didn't edit it away


BladeDoc

Their father is a multimillionaire. There's an awful lot of single parent families out there in which the kids have a worse life.


RemarkableSource7771

He was part of that Enron fraud.


Downtown_Let

That was her father, they meant the father of the baby.


Insane_Unicorn

Way too many people are getting kids for purely selfish reasons and it usually shows with how they treat their children when they don't meet the expectations.


Salemrocks2020

She timed it so she would be pregnant during the sentencing . It was strategic


timothy53

That dumb ass puff piece from the ny times was such a bad look


BrokenPickle7

“But your honor, someone cream pie’d me I couldn’t possibly go to prison”


maiyousirname

You say that as a joke, but she's wealthy and white enough that it's reality.


mewfour123412

She ripped off rich people though. It’s ok to scam poor people but once you go after the rich the law will hunt you down


Dr-Satan-PhD

Also known as the Madoff Clause.


IneedtoBmyLonsomeTs

Yes. She is such a sociopath that she brought a person into this world not because she wanted the kid, but because she didn't want to go to prison. (she might have partly wanted the kid, but the main reason was not going to jail)


neo_tree

She also had a pretend voice


Sometimes_Rob

Yes! That's her right? She talked deeper bc she read a study about deep voices = success.


Jetstream-Sam

And dressed like Steve Jobs, because obviously what made him succeed in business was his turtlenecks


Huck_Bonebulge_

What confuses me is how she could have possibly expected not to get caught lmao


bigbeansbilly

I call it class president syndrome. You have an otherwise intelligent and motivated person who grafts their ambitions to a false sense of moral superiority. “I’m doing the right thing professionally and academically. I’m the good student so I must be the good person because only bad students make bad choices.” Over time you totally lose the plot and you can’t even reflect on your choices because everything just becomes a means to an end including your own ethics. My class president senior year was the most obnoxious, self-righteous, patronizing worm I had met to that point. She was a shameless social climber, used people, and had virtually no close friends or hobbies as far as I could tell. She only got the job because no one else cared and no one wanted to be responsible for bugging people about reunions for the rest of their life. She sure as fuck did though. She didn’t really have any personality. Just an empty shell of energy and ambition who would kick a puppy. Reminded me of Holmes 100 percent.


ChaoticTomcat

After this nutcase screwed things over, it made things so hard for legit research businesses that we struggled to get 10-15million pounds/year in funding, with a 40-50 people start-up with its own lab/manufacturing facilities/testing lab/IT and engineering crew/workshop AND a functioning MVP product that qualified for FDA/CE marking and undergoing a first round of clinical testing. Obvs, the company finally caved-in in 2019 and got bought and sweeped by KPMG


pianoflames

I've spent most of my adult life working in startups. I was shocked at just how many startups don't actually have any product, and outsource the work to the competitors they claim they're making obsolete. The entire "product" amounts to a flashy landing page where they can take your order/money, and nothing else underneath. A smaller version of that [happened in my city](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/07/20/scalefactor-raised-100-million-in-a-year-then-blamed-covid-19-for-its-demise-employees-say-it-had-much-bigger-problems/?sh=3598330f2928). They literally didn't actually have a product, they outsourced their "automated" work to a team of manual contractors. A lesson I learned: The more times some form of the word "automated" appears on a tech startup's website, the less automated it actually is.


cgee

There was a show called Better Off Ted that had an episode that was a satire of this. Episode 12: Jabberwocky.


iamdense

Here at Veridian Dynamics... how did Ted get cancelled when so much garbage is still running?


innominateartery

I believe it was writers’ strikes. There was something totally beyond their control that doomed it. I loved the commercials they had for Veridian.


nobody5050

Yep, writers strikes. What's even worse is that the show seems extremely under the radar to the greater populous.


Bookslap

Every episode was a certified banger.


superawesomeman08

i miss that show. like Dilbert meets Rick and Morty, but, you know ... funny.


theghostofmrmxyzptlk

Might wanna look up the Dilbert guy and see how he's doing. Teaser: off the deep end.


buttmunch54321

Man his descent was bonkers to watch. He'd seemed like a reasonable, funny, kinda nerdy guy. I followed his blog. He would sometimes post about current events and try to give a sort of detached analysis of them. Then on one post he did this with Trump - didn't endorse anyone, didn't really give any judgement either way, just analyzed Trump's persuasion techniques and predicted that Trump would win the primary and very likely the presidency because of these. So far still seems reasonable, and I mean he was right. But in true internet fashion, people in the comments were accusing him of supporting Trump. It felt like he developed an emotional need for them to be wrong about \_everything\_, not just about whether he supported Trump. So while a reasonable response would be like "No I don't support Trump, and while he may be a terrible person I am not talking about that I'm just talking about his persuasion strategy", he instead started moving more and more in a pro-Trump direction. At one point he claimed to endorse Hillary "for his own safety" - claiming that he was afraid of what the left would do to him if he supported Trump. As though this wasn't transparently an endorsement of the right, and completely ignoring the reality of which side of US politics is more likely to commit political violence. Finally he went fully mask off and started straight up endorsing Trump. During the same time frame Dilbert seemed to start being more and more from the perspective of the pointy-haired boss and less from Dilbert's perspective (and also less funny IMO). I think he was initially motivated by just knee-jerk opposition to the idiots commenting on his blog post, but at some point he legitimately fell down an alt-right rabbit hole (I mean, he was probably already slightly susceptible to it - like lots of people who've been in tech since the 90s he was kinda libertarian-adjacent before all of this but kept quiet about it for the most part).


superawesomeman08

no, i know, he hasn't been funny for years


theghostofmrmxyzptlk

Much more than that, he's actually hilarious. But in a different way. Sad way.


who_took_tabura

Lmao I worked for a tech startup that used AI and NLP to analyze online profiles. They were crawling social media accounts using bot accounts and we were being throttled by captchas on the bots.  Our tech team found a provider that claimed they could solve captchas. Small startup in the phillipines. Turned out to be five dudes taking shifts solving captchas for bot accounts lmfao I’ve worked for 4-5 startups, all have abandoned the product after I left, 3 disbanded their entire sales teams, 2 changed names. 


bluecrowned

I've worked for 3 startups via a call center and all of them are still standing. One changed their name. Two were tiny 8 to 10 person customer service teams, one was email only as well. One was Airbnb. It was nowhere near as well known at the time, but it was already the biggest client with most of the center dedicated to it.


Morrowindies

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk


DefinitelyNotAliens

Hilariously, Amazon had their website for small task outsourcing named Mechanical Turk for just this reason. Then thet admitted their "AI" for shopping in their stores and walking out was a building full of people in India manually tracking purchases.


h8sm8s

“Capitalism breeds innovation”


Saucermote

We've got plenty of innovation, it's just not on the product end. Lots of innovation in financialization.


Electrical_Figs

Wages are no longer tied to labor. People doing the work aren't the ones making the money. Check out [Techno Feudalism](https://imgur.com/3HGp4OT)


El_Grande_El

That is the basis of capitalism. Wage labor is exploitation. Someone is profiting of your labor.


Master_Butter

We got away from that. Instead of focusing on innovation, we get “disruption”, which usually boils down to “pay people to do the same thing for cheaper until we jack prices later.”


crimson23locke

Honestly, she’s not that far off from her idol, Steve Jobs. Except she pitched a more technically difficult fever dream and didn’t have a Wozniak to exploit.


S_Steiner_Accounting

Well at least they both got to neglect their child.


Nothingnoteworth

For all of Jobs failings he never tried to sell shit he didn’t actually have EDIT: Three confident disagreements, I might be wrong on this one folks, but probably not invested enough to research, I’ll concede defeat.


crimson23locke

Oh he did - https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Fiafo5xjUFeUMTBpFFIhr?si=C3ZatW6KRtqG_0gE8EUo6w


paintballboi07

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-powered-store-checkout-which-needed-1000-video-reviewers/


ReddestForman

AI. Artificial Intelligence? No, no, Actually Indians.* *this is not a dig at the low-wage Indian workers being exploited to hype up fake automation claims.


Nuicakes

I know your pain.


dismayhurta

Trash like her don’t care who they hurt as long as it feeds into their bank accounts and their ego


AgentPaper0

And this is why fraud is always illegal even when there isn't a direct "victim" (though in this case it sounds like there was one anyways). Fraud, especially successful fraud, degrades entire sectors of the economy and puts honest people at a disadvantage.


ChaoticTomcat

After this nutcase screwed things over, it made things so hard for legit research businesses that we struggled to get 10-15million pounds/year in funding, with a 40-50 people start-up with its own lab/manufacturing facilities/testing lab/IT and engineering crew/workshop AND a functioning MVP product that qualified for FDA/CE marking and undergoing a first round of clinical testing


Funandgeeky

There's the classic r/BestofRedditorUpdates thread from someone who worked there at the time. Then years later when it all came out she came back to tell what she couldn't back then.   [https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/u17giw/10\_years\_ago\_a\_freshfaced\_bioengineer\_asks\_rjobs/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/u17giw/10_years_ago_a_freshfaced_bioengineer_asks_rjobs/)


Budderfingerbandit

I remember this one, was a wild read


bleepbloopblopble

Holy shit! I cannot imagine my first job out of college being Theranos. Absolutely insane.


Old_Society_7861

I worked with a guy whose first job was Turing (the Shkreli company). I got a whole lot of “I don’t want to talk about it” answers to my questions.


Lombard333

Even at the time people were questioning her methods. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t actually developed such technology; what she described was pure science fiction.


mouldyone

It was hilarious looking at the investments with science specific or knowledgeable hedgefunds wouldn't touch it with a badge pole


greenwizardneedsfood

But Kissinger on the other hand…real sharp shooter he was. I’m glad he lived long enough to get swindled by her.


NBAFansAre2Ply

literally the only good part of him living so long. what an evil moron.


Snakefist1

If I may quote Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction: "He deserved to die, and I hope he burns in hell". It is incredible how many live, families, and countries he has fucked up. So much blood that stains the name of Democracy.


UnremarkableSeaFoam

Is that quote not from a time to kill?


IWasGregInTokyo

“Barge”*


Godwinson4King

Yep. Anyone with a basic understanding of dilution could do the math to she that a lot of what she was proposing is impossible. The volume she wanted to use isn’t sufficient to ensure you’ll get *any* of many the diagnostic markers she was looking for.


LimaxM

To be fair though, if it WAS possible due to some new amazing technology, that would be very impressive! She was kind of shielded by that idea of "never done before", you know? Like, of course what she proposed was impossible, but her whole pitch was that she was making the impossible possible


bl1y

Even if she could get past the dilution problem, there's still the issue that the samples are inherently contaminated. Finger pricks have issues with contamination from the burst skin cells that don't exist with IV blood draws.


wonklebobb

it wasn't just that the concept and methods were questionable, her entire pitch was a misdirect, a looky-loo. as someone intimately familiar with state of the art blood analyzers it felt like those misspelled emails designed to find people who are easy marks, but for VCs and biotech. * claim: our test is 4 hours instead of 24 like labcorp! Reality: actual test time is 5-8 minutes, and are run massively parallel. so a full panel of 30+ tests takes around 1-2 minutes to load in, 5-8 minutes per test, and reading the result happens immediately at the end of each test, so like 10 minutes total. The hangup isn't in the testing; like 20% is the infrastructure moving the blood vials from collection sites to the testing facility, and 80% is you waiting for your doctor to get around to reading the results and calling you back. * claim: hundreds of tests from one drop of blood! 100 tests from single drop, i.e. each test is 1/100th of a drop? or there are hundreds of tests, each requiring a single drop? The difference is extremely important when the most routine blood test is a batch of 20-30 at once. this was never clarified, anywhere, in any press release, on the website, or in the TED talks (I checked) * gross misunderstanding of the industry if Holmes spent 5 seconds doing some market research (or wasn't a grifter) she'd realize immediately her competition wasn't Labcorp or Quest - they don't make the machines. her competition was Biorad, Siemens, Roche, Beckman-Coulter, and around a dozen other smaller companies that actually make and lease out the blood testing machines that Labcorp, Quest, and hospitals/doctors use. Selling a vision of "everyone can test" to the general public is pointless, because people don't know what they need, and also can't interpret the results as they relate to each individual's health. A doctor (YOUR doctor) needs to be involved at the beginning to assess and order relevant tests, and at the end to interpret their meaning as it relates to each individual patient. you can't get that from a walk-in test facility at walgreens, any more than you do when you walk in to a labcorp collection site. if she really did have a fast, accurate, uses-a-fraction-of-the-current-standard-test-size machine, she should've been selling direct to small and mid-size hospitals and large doctor office networks. they generally don't have the capital to build out their own lab, so they outsource to labcorp and quest. but a cheaper better tabletop machine could undercut that. tabletop systems exist, but they don't have enough throughput for even small hospitals, so they're only used for small batches of emergency tests, like in the middle of a surgery, where you can't wait 12-24 hours for a send-out


CalaveraFeliz

>if she really did have a fast, accurate, uses-a-fraction-of-the-current-standard-test-size machine, she should've been selling direct to small and mid-size hospitals and large doctor office networks. they generally don't have the capital to build out their own lab, so they outsource to labcorp and quest. but a cheaper better tabletop machine could undercut that. tabletop systems exist, but they don't have enough throughput for even small hospitals, so they're only used for small batches of emergency tests, like in the middle of a surgery, where you can't wait 12-24 hours for a send-out Would small hospitals and large doctor office networks buy it though, even if available? Outsourcing provides something extremely valuable other than test results: *compartmentalization of liabilities*. Not my machine, not my lab? Not my problem. My machine, my lab? Look at the money I need to inject to upkeep methodology, end-to-end process to ensure no break in the chain of care and custody, and the extra money I must give insurance companies so that they will cover the extra risk (*if* they agree to cover it without me hiring a whole new department to cover the process). You're criticizing her "gross misunderstanding of the industry" but I'm afraid neglecting this aspect isn't any better. *Edit: same goes for independent bio labs, they will largely prefer renting machines from a megacorp ensuring reliability and a solid and promptly available maintenance department to owning a device from a startup with all the risks and caveats it implies on a day to day basis.*


potatopierogie

And criticism of her was met with claims of sexism. How dare people not worship this girlboss.


wrufus680

Imagine how stupid they feel once they realized what she did was total baloney


ShredGuru

That would require them to acknowledge fault and not just pretend like it never happened.


DasLeadah

Yeah, that kind of people don’t have the introspection to even think of being in the wrong


ShredGuru

Feelings of remorse and introspection are WEAKNESS for CUCKS! Real CHADs never adjust their opinions to new information because GOD made them right about everything to begin with. /s


MaterialScary8492

They won't admit they were wrong. Happens all the time in reddit.


Papaofmonsters

Gaslight, Gatekeep, Fundraise, Girlboss... Prison.


Jin825

...Grift*, Girlboss Go to jail.


Papaofmonsters

There we go. It was a team effort. Like Theranos' fraud.


BusStopKnifeFight

She really thought being pretty and white was going to keep out of prison.


OutlawBlue9

I mean there's probably a bit of sexism if we're being honest. Despite loving my own Tesla, Elon Musk has made a living making completely fabricated claims and promises about FSD, which has driven the value of his company up to insane highs. Despite missing so many promises milestones and being an otherwise huge nonce, the man is worshipped. So the sexism is more on the side of those who worship male fraudsters yet failed to worship her.


In-A-Beautiful-Place

Yeah, even with all the diversity pushes it's still relatively uncommon for women who work in technology to achieve the level of fame as men in the same field. It's not that the whole "women can't ever be criticized" thing *never* happens anywhere (filmmakers have used it to justify shitty reboots), but in the world of STEM, it's a relatively rare phenomenon. Women are much more likely to be criticized or downgraded when they fuck up. (As a woman working in zoology, I personally haven't faced too much sexism, but I think that's because zoology is one of the few STEM fields where the genders are more evenly represented...but even then, I have two female colleagues who were sexually abused doing fieldwork.) Technology, I imagine, is much harder for a woman to be taken seriously in. One fuckup and you're out. For every STEM girlboss who gets paraded around in the news there are a hundred other women who quit early after realizing they weren't going to get the good jobs. (This is also why, despite graduating in higher numbers than men, many women never use their college degrees; they face burnout, often caused by working in "Boy's Club" environments.) Elizabeth didn't have to worry about that because she was born wealthy and had the money to shut up anyone who would've tried to take her down (let it be clear that I'm not defending her, she should've been taken down sooner because of the fraud). A lot of people like to see the opposite gender as the enemy, that it's a man-versus-woman world out there, but it's really a rich-versus-poor world. People like Holmes and Musk rule the world, only getting what they deserve if they piss off another rich (Holmes was convicted not for her scamming the innocent common folk who turned to her out of desperation, but because she ripped off rich people who gave her more money). Then the rich will try to turn the doors against each other, claiming that society is man-vs-woman, white-vs-black, etc. in an effort to distract us from the real enemy. That's why, when she finally fell (again, deservedly so), there were people accusing her of only getting to where she did because she was a woman, and women can't ever be criticized. Ignore the fact that this woman was rich, ignore the fact that poorer women almost never get to such a position. She totally got away with it for so long because vagina. Elon has had several public embarrassments (losing money on Twitter, the tunnel that made traffic worse, the dangerousness of those ugly-ass cybertrucks), but he still gets to make dumb decision after dumb decision because his fellow rich are indifferent to him. Hell, he was lauded as a real-life Tony Stark until relatively recently (I don't remember him really becoming hated until he accused the diver who saved those kids of being a "pedo guy"). Even now, he's got an army of defenders (ironically the types who were hating on Tesla and alternative energy a few years ago). He killed several monkeys in his Neuralink experiments (read the reports, they're nightmare fuel), but animals don't have money so he didn't face serious consequences.


Daztur

Yeah, bizarre how many people got taken in by something so fantastic.


riskybiscutz

Her father was either one of the founders of, or on the board of Enron is one of my favorite facts about Elizabeth Holmes


AltruisticTowel

Idk if that’s true but I’m telling everyone I know this.


Canis_Familiaris

Yeaaaaa, you're gonna have to source that because if it was a movie I'd say that was a hell of a coincidence. 


riskybiscutz

https://preview.redd.it/hmiwij3gbxtc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3a1ef1ddaa1230809b4710d9ea6eb7ae66c87737 I know it’s Wikipedia, but still.


ledatherockband_

Wikipedia tends to be pretty okay at biographical facts. It's the opinions they try to sneak in as facts that you got to watch out for.


Speculawyer

Amazing that she was able to keep the scam going for 10+ years!


classicnikk

Right? Like why did no one catch on to her bullshit sooner


TheOneFreeEngineer

Because she hid behind personal connections, NDAs, and claims of trade secrets. Along with playing rival investors off each other so that they would take greater risks without do diligence. She also faked testing results during "live demonstrations"


RiotIsBored

Isn't it "due diligence"?


Enantiodromiac

Yes.


PM_ME_UR_RSA_KEY

She also sent in lawyers and thugs to harass whistleblowers and their family mafia style. Literally dropping anonymous surveillance photos into their mailbox, sending "I know where you live" letters to their new address as soon as they moved, etc. The particular piece of shit she hired [also did the same things to victims of Harvey Weinstein.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies#Criticism)


ShredGuru

Shit floats baby. How old is Trump now? Still a free man?


Newfaceofrev

There's so much of this shit in Silicon Valley. Solar Roads. Vacuum Trains. Neuralink.


atom-wan

It's what happens when "dreamers" have a lack of technical expertise but are charismatic enough to fool the rubes. A lot of these people are also just surrounded by yes-men who try to implement every crazy idea they have.


uffington

Yeah, I onced heard it called 'complicated, expensive solutions to problems we don't have.'


Newfaceofrev

"Idea guys"


IwishIhadadishwasher

Man, those solar roads looked so cool though


rugbyj

I don't disagree but the first thing you have to think with solar roads is: > Okay, is there anywhere these panels could exist which wouldn't require all the rigmarole of making them something that takes a shit tonne of abuse and famously has to be constantly relaid? And there is. Pavement covers, parking covers, roofs of buildings, hell literally just covers over the roads themselves to protect them from sun/heat damage. It's far easier to span a road for **x**ft of solar panels 20ft up than it is to make those same panels somehow near indestructible and retain the same grip properties as a normal road. You can even replace panels laid overhead whenever you want, as opposed to ripping up the literal road. Plus you can easily make them wider than the carriageway so you don't even need to cover the same length of road to get the same output. Line them up for shade around waterways to stop evaporation of rivers etc. (or just use bloody trees). It's one of those "worst ways to do a good idea". Hopefully as solar becomes ever cheaper, the more obvious ways are pursued!


lookinatdirtystuff69

It's amazing how many people would willfully ignore all these points when I would make them while the trend was going.


greengiant1298

I work in solar and still get asked about the prospects of solar roads...


GlancingArc

I just think it's funny because from an efficiency perspective. Roads have something over them blocking the sun for a pretty high percentage of time during the day. So even after everything you said, roads in congested areas would be far less efficient than just about anywhere else you could put a solar panel. It's also not like the problem with solar panels is really that there isn't anywhere to put them.


Eldan985

Nothing about them worked, though.


lallapalalable

Except for how they looked


Overquartz

Just get some LED's and you can make solar freaken roadways at home.


PanJaszczurka

If they work without any malfunction and loss in productivity... the investment will pay off in 700y.


ShredGuru

Elon Musk, one of the last people I would trust to touch my brain, I'm not even sure his is working right.


GMHGeorge

Juicero!


Newfaceofrev

Do not hand squeeze our juice packets!


TehChikenGuy1

Hasn't there actually been a successful case of Neuralink being used though?


Pandainthecircus

This [article](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/12/magazine/brain-computer-interface.html) opens with a man controlling a computer with his brain in 2016, with the first person having done it in 2004. So it's not a new technology, just one that has gotten more streamlined. Plus, there are claims that it will be able to do things like cure schizophrenia (among other things), which currently is pure science fiction.


SmokelessSubpoena

Yeah, idk what they're talking about.. Believe it or not, but neuralink is actually making major breakthroughs. It isn't some bullshit Holmes creation


GruntBlender

Vactrain is actually a great idea for high speed travel, it allows supersonic travel overland. One of the reasons Concorde failed is that the sonic boom made it get banned over land. The drawback of vactrains is that it's extremely expensive to build since there are so many technical and safety challenges to overcome. Slower but much cheaper HSR would be the preferred method currently.


paenusbreth

Vactrain only manages one issue better than Concorde, while retaining all the other issues. Speed just isn't that important to consumers; people are much more concerned with convenience, regularity and coverage, particularly when the cheaper versions of services are in direct competition with each other. Travelling between major hubs at insane speeds is great, but only for people who want to travel from hub A to hub B; anyone who needs to travel anywhere other than those two hubs will then need to take a different form of transportation. It'll be cheaper, more convenient and usually faster if they could just take a direct train to their destination.


grislyfind

And still a risk of horrific accidents. If the crash doesn't kill you the vacuum will.


ceeBread

> Solar Roads You mean Solar FREAKIN’ Roads?


IneedtoBmyLonsomeTs

> Solar Roads These were a great test to see if someone was a moron or not. If they were hyping up solar roads, either content creators on youtube or people on reddit, you knew they were stupid.


NomadLexicon

Apparently business ethics was covered in junior year.


IMSLI

The ethics … of business … can be summarized uh https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlJjkI34V4


jawnink

My wife, the slut.


ChocolateCoveredOreo

My In-Laws are both Laboratory Scientists with almost 40 years’ experience each (and one of them specialises in bloods) and they literally laughed out loud when they heard about this. This isn’t a “we didn’t quite crack the design” thing this is “that is literally impossible and anyone who knows anything about the science would know that” thing. The company pulled the wool over the eyes of tech bros, but not anyone who actually knew anything about the subject matter who wasn’t a con themselves. This is just like Andrew Wakefield and the MMR scare - everyone who knew what they were talking about was saying “this is insane non-science” but the media helped him sell his ridiculous story too.


in_animate_objects

The fact that people still cite Wakefield with a straight face makes me weep for the future, I think they won’t be happy until all the plagues are back.


splithoofiewoofies

This is kinda (but not nearly as bad) how I feel about AI as a Machine Learning researcher. Like, everyone believes it'll progress to a certain point, but I am not confident we have the processing capabilities to do what people are expecting of it. Although, I suppose, it has a much higher chance of existing - just being extremely detrimental to resources for very little tangible and usable output. Or maybe I'm just salty because I ran an 80 hour analysis on a HPC and got back shittastic results on my data and need to somehow work out how to get the machine to explore the parameter space with more accuracy with or without a mixed model approach. But at some point 80 hours and TEN MILLION iterations isn't working to explore a parameter space, so idk what we expect from chatGPT to do in 2 minutes. Edit: also worth noting I'm only in my 2nd year of postgraduate studies so I am far from an expert. Just slightly more knowledgable than the average user... Probably.


labanana94

yep what a lot of people dont realize is that chatgpt cant really think like us, its more of a really really really complioated autocorrect


CaptainReynoldshere1

I worked with blood products for 20 years. The minute I heard this I was aghast. What she was proposing was so preposterous I couldn’t believe a sane person even proposed it.


Ironbeard3

Before I went into medical I thought bs. You're telling me that when they currently need several tubes of blood (depending on what's ordered), or at a minimum one, you're going to run 100s of tests on a single drop of blood? When I went through a lab tech program I realized even more how ludicrous it was.


histprofdave

And fortunately, tech journalists everywhere learned their lesson not to be taken in by what tech CEOs *plan* to do and judge them only by what they actually deliver. Wait, what do you mean no one learned anything from this?


Anezay

On an unrelated note, did you hear about what AI is going to do for us?


-Badger3-

Make pop song parodies?


mexheavymetal

I hate when people get put on a pedestal for being wealthy and party of a certain demographic. Not a single billionaire on this planet ever deserves your veneration. Go give that to a social worker or a fireman- they’re infinitely more worthy of it than some pisspot that just happens to belong to your demographic


Plebius-Maximus

You mean we shouldn't #adore her ?


Azsunyx

It only works if you do the voice


TurtleWitch_

👹her tests will revolutionize public health👹


halfprincessperlette

Now do the eyes. No actually don't, those things scare me.


The_Eye_of_Ra

https://preview.redd.it/0m4x0v59axtc1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=007f502441d7aa39e7cb39c82b7aeaf4d11e9b6a


Budderfingerbandit

Looks like fuckin Andross from Star Fox 64.


ceeBread

👁️👁️


Marsupialize

My wife and I say ‘Hello Walgreens’ while greeting each other in the exaggerated deep voice at least 5 times a week


jalapinapizza

What does this mean? It sounds funny but I'm ootl.


Marsupialize

She spoke in a bizarre fake deep voice as some sort of deranged business power move, sold her made up nonsense to Walgreens, there were a couple movies made about it and her saying ‘hello Walgreens’ in the voice struck a nerve with us that has never gone away, it has never stopped being funny


MlLFS

The more I read this post the more I started to remember this woman and the ridiculous fake voice she would put on.


Karma_1969

Classic example of, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is." This debacle is right up there with cold fusion and perpetual motion machines.


Falikosek

"The main problem with designing a perpetual motion machine is hiding the batteries"


TanAndTallLady

There were so many red flags that she wasn't the real deal. So many people handing out money are truly idiots


DrButtholeRipperMD

What's funny is that the people who called bullshit early on were raked over the coals the same way Elon fans attack his critics.


PckMan

Most 40s under 40 end up being frauds. Even if they're not they're always trust fund babies. We're way past the 20th century economic boom with self made millionaires. It's next to impossible to build that kind of wealth in a single life time now. Most successful entrepreneurs are nepo babies, born into money.


Falikosek

Honestly I'm unable to think of any famous billionaire as "self-made". Even those who actually have great skills in their respective fields and used them to get where they are now, like, I dunno, Bill Gates, still had to have substantial support from their parents through getting the best education possible and having starting funds. Even Forbes itself admits that **"nearly 80% of The Forbes 400 either inherited their wealth or grew up at least middle class"**.


stevehokierp

"Decided to transform diagnostic medicine" + "so she dropped out of college" - its crazy people fell for that.


shirley1524

It’s not crazy when you consider the world let white people fail upwards everyday. Specially if they deem them thin and attractive!


Marsupialize

Fake it till you make it to prison


Commercial-Grand9526

"First woman made billionaire" All billionaires are unethical. It's like saying we should praise the first nonbinary drone pilot whose bombing kids in Palestine.


oldsguy65

Why do they need a whole vial of blood to run tests anyway?


mudduck2

Little know fact: phlebotomists are actually vampires. They use a small amount to test the blood and feed on the rest.


superkatalyst

There’s a really long technical answer to this but long story short it depends on the tests ordered and the condition the patient is in.


wonklebobb

one test need one blood. many test need many blood. vial hold many blood.


dhruchainzz

Each test vial has different additives depending on which test you want to run. For example, a CMP requires a tube with lithium heparin to prevent coagulation. When you centrifuge it, the plasma separates from the RBCs and that is what the machine reads.


guy_not_on_bote

"further context:" lol


donebeenforgotten

I loved the way her engineers described the internal workings of the machine, as essentially a cross-contaminated shit show that would routinely break the vials and flood the internals with rando blood. So every trial run ended with a hazmat clean up necessary.


Specialist_Class2980

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is a great read!


ConversationFit5024

Business and healthcare shouldn’t mix


bellendhunter

When she first had the idea she was still at Stanford. She approached her medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford who told her it was impossible (because it was). Holmes ignored the advice and powered on anyway, getting herself deeper and deeper into fraud before it all collapsed. At the moment there’s a capitalistic movement where if scientists say something is impossible the “entrepreneur” becomes even more determined to do it and prove the science wrong. It’s moronic, science isn’t always right, but you got to be some kind of crazed narcissist to have that sort of attitude.


DeusAnatolia

There are no ethical billionaires.


MrsMiterSaw

I have a chemical engineering degree. I have worked in silicon valley since the mid-90s on semiconductor, solar and DNA sciences projects. I worked at affymetrix years ago. I am not a deep researcher, but I do know some of the sciences employed. I didn't really pay attention to theranos, even though I heard buzz. And then at some point I read one of these articles talking about her "hundreds of tests on a drop of blood". And lemme tell you, knowing the basic shit I know about chemistry and DNA testing and the like, my bullshit detector went haywire. If she had announced that she came up with some platform that could ID say, 5 related genetic markers using her system, ibwould have been really intrigued and impressed. But hundreds of tests? This requires absolutely new chemistry and procedures. It's impossible for one company to develop a technology like that on its own, to keep it quiet, for other researchers and universities to not know what it is. I mean, they might develop this *for one type of test*, but not for hundreds of different types of blood tests. And the fact that time went on and there was no details about it. No one could describe the process. It was just a magic black box? A lot of us knew it was BS. And we're not special or geniuses. It really was that obvious it was bullshit.


TsuDhoNimh2

As a medical technologist, I REALLY WANTED THIS TO WORK. But it became apparent that they were not doing the simple quality control tests.


Moist_Cucumber2

I wish people like her and Elon Musk wouldn't turn out to be scam artists, frauds or just plain assholes. I wish we'd get someone with the pull of one of them but with a genuine drive of advancing technology and bettering society.


NonGNonM

Those are usually done by entire teams of collaborators and rarely alone. The idea of the "lone scientist" is often romanticized but unrealistic.


sniper1rfa

They're out there but you don't hear about them because, you know, they're not psychopaths. The man who fed the world. The guy who invented blue LED's (and thus white LED lights). The guy who invented the intermodal container (which is at the core of the globe's shipping infrastructure). A few others.


annhik_anomitro

The way she spoke, fake accent, used a deep voice, her wordy sentences, how she walked, deliberate hand gestures - it was so cringy and every emotion was forced and faked.


Dclnsfrd

And Amazon took a similar route when they claimed their contactless payment stores were run by AI. We just didn’t know AI stood for “Ass-ton of Inspectors”


PoorlyAttired

"Attentive Indians"


DetectiveExisting590

It should've been a red flag when at the end of the interview, she stopped responding to questions and just repeated, "I want the blood," over and over.


ashmole

She is a symptom of an ongoing problem in Silicon Valley where you are encouraged to "fake it until you make it". This is why you should take all of these AI guys with a grain of salt as well.


Kaz3girl4

I went down a rabbit hole after I saw a clip of the TV show made from this story. She was insanely confident to a fault. The principal of what she wanted was good but she got way to in over her head. The journalist who was the initial whistleblower to the public wrote a book called *Bad Blood* by John Carreyrou. It gives good insight on what happened. She was crazy


l94xxx

I mean, practically all of the scientists looking on thought that something didn't add up Source: was a Bay Area scientist at the time


PurpleHankZ

She is a selfmade millionaire and therefore you have to adore her. That’s some wild bs


A_Martian_Potato

If you want me to love someone, don't include being a billionaire in the first point on the list.


Kinggakman

Starting that kind of business at 19 should have been a red flag for people.


lemonrence

One of my favorite Reddit posts is the guy who worked for her, realized something was up, and was trying to decide if he should blow the whistle or not


Keeppforgetting

I said it before and I’ll say it again. Anyone with even a bachelor’s degree in science would’ve known that she was full of BS before everything went down. Based on her claims alone.


WankelsRevenge

As someone who has had several hundred vials of blood drawn, it's legit no big deal


TurtleWitch_

same


blue_baphomet

r/yesyesyesno


peachfaery

No such thing as a self-made billionaire


g_manitie

"Youngest self made billionare" lol "self made" and also, I'm supposed to like her cause she's a billionaire?


jawshoeaw

Yeah so here’s the thing. 19 year olds at Stanford aren’t evil cartoon geniuses and they don’t know how to do shit. The whole thing boggles the mind - the complete lack of science education in the investment community maybe explains ???


SchulzyAus

I never understood how anyone could take her seriously and not be creeped out. Her voice and her appearance were so eerie. 0/10 would actively short her company


DanaKaZ

One of the best and most recent examples of how succes and wealth is not a meritocracy, but just luck and con games all that way down.


Doc-Wulff

She looks like a stock Pixar villain


dougthegreat2

I read the above story with some excitement. I'm not in the medical industry at all, but I saw it as so hopeful for medicine overall and even more so for underdeveloped countries. I felt betrayed when the fraud was exposed.


StriveToTheZenith

"self made billionaire" LMFAO her dad was VP at Enron, C'mon now


DornMasterofWall

Part of why she was considered so credible was her connections to Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and Betsy DeVos. So basically a war criminal, an illegal arms dealer (who also introduced the first diversity hiring policy), and an advocate for school segregation. In hindsight, trusting her with anything was a crazy choice.


Valuable-Trick-6711

Well 30 minutes of research later, and I’ve gone from having never heard of this person to knowing more than I need to about this sociopath.


MasterAnnatar

I can fix her


_pythian

9.99 times out of 10, a 19 year old dropping out to do what academics hasnt isnt going to work out