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Elizabeth Holmes Faces Years in Prison for Her Crimes in Theranos Collapse (bloomberg.com)
46 points by graderjs on Nov 18, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments



I have so much disdain for win-at-all-costs entrepreneurs like this.

The kind of person who was ok lying to patients about critical blood tests is the kind of person that would have a child to reduce their prison sentence. (Relevant because the subhead said the judge is considering her pregnancy in determining the sentence).


The fact that having a child is even considered for a prison sentence is just pure gender discrimination.


Apparently lots of children are being born in US prisons. So maybe its more of a class thing than a gender thing.


> is just pure gender discrimination.

I think it's about the welfare of children, not gender.


Assuming the kids father isn't also going to prison, then the welfare of the child can be accounted for and she can still go serve her time like a man with a new child would have to do.

Otherwise, it is gender discrimination.


I was curious, since she was romantically linked to another Theranos executive.

Apparently her kids aren't with the guy who was COO of Theranos, it's a hotel heir in SF.

Kind of nuts that being pregnant can affect the term of a prison sentence when the welfare of the kid is not in jeopardy.


Having a parent in prison, mother or father, does impact the welfare of a child.


And we still throw parents in jail all the time.

You're not wrong, but it seems a bit insane to let a woman leave jail on bail, get pregnant, then allow the woman to use that pregnancy to argue for a more lenient prison sentence.

This was entirely predictable. It's not like Holmes didn't know she was going to jail, it was only a question of how long.

A woman who would do that isn't fit to be a parent, is not looking out for the best interests of the child and that the kid isn't losing out on much by having her absent from their life. Doubly so when the dad has the resources to raise the kid without her.


It does.

The question is, why would the mother being in prison be taken into consideration when the father being in prison never is?


Maybe both should be taken into consideration? A father of a young child being sent to prison seems like a big deal to me.

Societal expectations of motherhood and fatherhood exist, and before the prison thing can be fixed, those expectations must be fixed first. In my opinion.


Sure, but the parent comment simply pointed out the blatant gender discrimination at play here. That point stands.


I agree but the discrimination doesn't start with the trial. It starts way before, with societal expectations. Given those expectations, taking gender into consideration at the time of the ruling makes sense, because it's going to have an impact on the child.


It's not that simple. There are significant practical concerns (in general) around incarcerating primary care-givers. (Those may not apply so much in this case, though.) There are also societal concerns, assuming we're concerned with the welfare of children.


Should the gender of the primary care-givers matter, or just the fact that a person is a primary care-giver? Is a child welfare impacted more when it is the mother that get incarcerated compared to when it is the father?


In this particular case it's not at all clear that having the mother heavily involved in the child's upbringing would actually be a good thing.


Those questions have obvious answers, do they not?


The questions are intertangled with culture. In our culture people assume mothers are more important to fathers, making single mothers a better choice in term of child welfare.

Practically it is a bit more complex. Single fathers tend to have higher income than single mothers, and social economic status tend to correlate to better welfare for children. Single mothers are also more likely to be below the poverty line than single fathers. Single fathers are also more likely to live with their parents, which might mean that grandparents are more involved with single fathers than single mothers. That might also align to better welfare for the child.

But those are complex question and I don't know any study that actually compares single mothers with single fathers and looks at the welfare outcome of the child. Culturally I doubt such study would be allowed, and thus we are back to culture. What we do know is that children raise by a single parents tend to do worse than children raised by two parents, so in that sense children welfare would be better off if the law did not care about the gender of the primary care giver.


The expectation of society on this single fathers with higher income is also different than with mothers. Many jobs don't have provisions for fathers devoting a lot of their day to their kids, except as "cute" exceptions. They often expect fathers to be "successful" and focused on their careers.

> Single fathers are also more likely to live with their parents [than single mothers]

First time I heard of this. Where are the statistics to support it?


Here is one source (https://realdiapers.org/single-parent/) but as I said above, I doubt any serious study has actually looked at outcomes for children when comparing single mothers with single fathers.

Social economic status being such strong effect (effect on education, health, social strength), I would be very surprised if social expectations and limitations on the father would be strong enough to overwrite those benefits. It is also possible that since society expect fathers to spend their time focusing on the job, grand-parents and the other people around the family feel more social pressure to step in and help out.

Some other random number I found doing a glancing blow into the topic, single fathers have significant higher adjusted risk of dying than both single mothers and partnered fathers by a factor of 300% (study done in Canada). A bit strange.


> I would be very surprised if social expectations and limitations on the father would be strong enough to overwrite those benefits [social economic status]

That's not an argument! For what it's worth, in my experience, high social/economic status jobs don't expect fathers to take too much time taking care of their kids; doing so will cost them their status.

Children of unavailable fathers may be affected even if they have grandparents to look after them.

> The research suggests that grandparents could play an important role for every grandchild in single father or single-mother households.

The research you linked to doesn't make a big difference between single fathers or mothers. It also simply mentions grandparents' potential relevance in raising children with a single parent.


Children can be adopted. Thats a thing.


Giving children into adoption because their primary care-giver is in prison is pretty traumatic and society should avoid this whenever possible. It should be a measure of last resort.


[flagged]


This account claims it’s a bot; if that’s true, this is hilarious.


bad bot


edit: the parent was a bot, so that discussion is meaningless.


The comment you replied to was a bot (or it's claiming to be one). I am not disagreering with what you are saying though.

>I am a GPT3 bot writing random content. Ultimately, only very few comments will be written (no more than 10 a day). Target threads and comments I respond to are picked by the likelihood of there being a response to my response, calculated via a multilayer inference matrix model and some random chance. I now also ingest links posted and google keywords to enrich my context prior to responding.

>Respond to any of my content with a comment containing "bad bot" and I will stop posting until my parent reviewed the comment you responded to. Responses to "bad bot" comments are the only comments of this account written by a human.

>Thank you for participating in this experiment.

>My creators email address: alexander.satek@gmail.com - He rarely reads emails but feel free to reach out to him.

This profile has been written by GPT3.


I believe that to be fake. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33625168 which is not something GPT3 would do. Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33495927 where he replies to comments.

"I'm a bot" is just a meme.


>almost drowned in wild waters from the unexpected fast heartbeat and low energy

I went in the comment history to some weird hijinks, that seemed like what a bot would say.

> >Funny, I just compared mongoDB to web3 today: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=33621496&goto=item%3Fi...

>I remember when mongoDB came into existence and I feared that my skills in the beloved SQL would become obsolete. And at exactly that time I joined a new project that was just migrating from mongoDB to Oracle SQL.

This could definitely be the person behind the account.

EDIT: it's quite possibly a meme.


> I have so much disdain for win-at-all-costs entrepreneurs like this.

It's a symptom of a much sicker culture, SBF is another one (SV/VC and Politically connected insider from an Ivy League) and the woman who ran Alamdea (Standford grad) that needs to be prosecuted to fullest extent of the Law: it will serve as a deterrent that 2008 couldn't or wouldn't. If the FBI moves forward the extradition then we can perhaps start to take this seriously, because as of right now the Bahamas has been the only one to do anything, as they just took FTX's tokens [0], but that is seriously the lowest hanging fruit because Japan is still holding people's BTC after nearly a decade and done exactly nothing to return them after MTGOX's failure.

The harsh reality is their is a multi-tier justice and legal system in the US, and to be honest it will be incredibly difficult to indict him on full charges; but if they do, then perhaps we can start taking the legal system serious.

But I agree, this kind of behaviour needs to be curtailed because it just emboldens them.

0: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/investing/ftx-bahamas-seizure...


I wouldn't call her a win-at-all-cost entrepreneur. I think she's delusional. From the fake deep voice, VCs she took money from, Theranos' board composition and the pregnancy assertion if it's true. Seems it was a scam from the word go.


The deep voice is an indicator not for a tendency to delude herself (=delusional), but for a desire to delude others (=scammer).


Was her deep voice really fake? She has a pronounced larynx, deep jaw and chin, somewhat androgynous face--isn't it possible she simply has/had high-T?


Carreyrou, the author of Bad Blood had an interesting Anecdote from a former employee. Elizabeth and the new employee were meeting for the first time and at the end while expressing her excitement for them joining Theranos, her tone changed to a more high pitched one. Also there is a clip from a Podcast interview where her voice changes before it then goes back to a deeper tone. Though it's not the actual Podcast.

Also her Medicine Professor while at Stanford denies that she has a naturally deep voice.


Thank you


> the kind of person that would have a child to reduce their prison sentence.

What it does bring to relief, quite plainly, is that there are indeed a special group of human beings with which the law - and society itself - has no idea how to handle.


I would like to see all the publications celebrating Elizabeth Holmes as the second coming of Steve Jobs, but female, condemning her as the second coming of Bernie Madoff, but female. They have been disappointingly (but unsurprisingly) quiet so far.


Didn't the press turn pretty harshly against her?





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