That's an impressively detailed response. Did you happen to track all these kinds of quotes routinely for your own research, or are you that good at finding this info that quickly.
Yes, I did (off course this message can't prove it in any way).
I am usually a silent reader in NH but I saw there was no submission to this topic so I submitted it.
"Therapeutic mRNA is typically synthesized using in vitro transcription (IVT) with single-subunit polymerases (e.g., T7, T3, and SP6) using a DNA template to produce multiple copies of the coded mRNA. T7 RNA polymerase can incorporate chemically modified nucleotide triphosphates (NTP), particularly uridine modifications, which have been shown to maintain translational efficiency and alter the interactions between exogenous mRNA and TLR7, TLR8, and RIG-I (20)"
If you know everyone in the house is absent during working hours (a reasonable assumption) or that your target has children and they need to pick them up from school at a certain time, just reboot it during that window. Eventually they will forget to check that the microphone is still off when they get home (if they ever check in the first place).
It doesn’t have to do with her wealth (although that does give her better lawyers). The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual.
And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused). (see edit below)
What would be unusual is for the charges to be reduced or even dropped. But, as it stands, she’s facing 20 years in prison. Possibly more after this incident.
EDIT: I wasn’t saying she wouldn’t be allowed to get married post-conviction. I was saying that, even if the right to marriage was removed when convicted, she’s still not convicted.
> And getting married while awaiting trial is allowed because the accused hasn’t been convicted (hence, accused).
That's wrong; getting married while awaiting trial is allowed in the same way that getting married before being charged is allowed, and getting married after being convicted is allowed.
The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.
(see my edit about my wording re: getting married)
> The surprising thing is not that she was "allowed" to get married. Everyone is. The surprising thing is that someone was willing to marry her.
People marry serial killers more often that one would want to believe. Just do a search for “serial killers married in prison” and you’ll see “top-10” clickbait lists on almost every result. Some people are just crazy and idolize convicts. Someone marrying Holmes is nothing novel. Maybe they were attracted to her psychopathic personality? That happens sometimes.
I think that the surprise here was more about the financials than the morals. Depending on state, after you marry you become liable for your partners debts, and the property you came into the marriage with may become common property that can be siezed to pay them.
So if she gets fined or successfully sued, the husband could find himself with a wife he can't see for 20 years and a big line of creditors taking all his assets and future earnings.
At the very least she's extremely manipulative. She faked her voice in public for years. That's next-level dedication.
Although, after reading Bad Blood, David Boies and his law firm came across as one of the scarier characters in the whole thing. Theranos' lawyers were completely willing to terrify and intimidate anyone who got in the way of their fraud.
Maggie Thatcher did a similar thing, lowering her voice to make herself sound more authoritative. She managed to pull it off reasonably well I think. Possibly the fact that she was a bit older at the time helped.
I never understood why Elizabeth Holmes persisted though because, in her case, it mostly made her sound incredibly odd, and actually quite difficult and unpleasant to listen to. This may have been due to some sort of uncanny valley effect: the disconnect between Holmes' youthful and almost dainty appearance, and her weirdly boomy void giving her a sense of the unreal. The result to me was that it undermined her authority and credibility rather than enhancing them.
It's actually very common for women professionals to use a lower register when speaking to colleagues. People take them more seriously; they notice. I have several friends who do this.
I read that book. I came across that Boies fellow at other times, too. SCO vs IBM. But also while reading Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow (about Harvey Weinstein).
Psychopathy is not limited to serial killers. Psychopathy is prevalent in about 1 in 100. If 1/100 people were serial killers, we'd have a big problem on our hands.
In reality, psychopaths blend into society very well. You likely know a few and wouldn't even suspect them unless you know what to look for. They find their way into positions that are highly competitive, where their lack of empathy serves them well. Psychopaths are overrepresented as surgeons, lawyers, bankers, law enforcement (you'll find a lot of psychopaths behind bars, but you'll also find a lot keeping them there), politicians, and yes CEOs.
Indeed, this is a great example of a fallacy like survivors bias, where you only hear about a tiny percentage of cases because of x, which makes for a poor representation of the entire population.
The vast majority of our interaction with CEO behaviour is via true crime stories and exceptional rare cases. I see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as rare cases of an executives playing a huge role in their companies but I could list off countless billion dollar company CEOs people have ever heard of, let alone 99%+ companies are small/medium sized, many companies aren’t even public, countless play a much smaller and far more boring role, etc etc.
I imagine we do hear about more such cases because there simply are more of them compared to other groups we hear about.
There's been some notable studies by now that concluded the amount of psychopaths is way higher among CEO's than the average population and that it isn't that exceptionally rare among this subgroup as you said.
I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion it is one of the greatest talks of all time and it gave me goosebumps. But if you are really busy, a summary is that everyone has varying degrees of psychopathy that make a gray area in between extreme labels.
Not the most unusual story you'll find. Carlos the Jackal got married in prison, his lawyer is his wife.
This is surprising on so many levels. He'll likely spend the rest of his life in prison. He was a ruthless killer. And his treatment of women is well documented and... not flattering.
It would be incredibly dark as a legal defense, but given her sorta sociopathy, I wonder if she has calculated that being married and having a child before sentencing would make the judge or jury give a more lenient sentence.
Tbh, even knowing that it's a 100% calculated move, I would personally as a juror have a much harder time sentencing a woman with a young child to significant prison time.
This is also a plot point in the Broadway musical (and its movie adaptation) “Chicago”. It even gets a great song, full of double entendres, “My Baby and Me”.
Spousal communication privilege usually only covers conversation from while you are married, not prior to then. Although, testimonial privilege is a whole can of worms.
> The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual.
I think this is one of the things I learned from Ken White on All the President's Lawyers: we read about legal system abuse here and there and it shocks us, but even the most common normal things in the criminal justice system like how long criminal trials take can be just as shocking if only you know about them.
> The justice system just moves slowly. Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial. This is nothing unusual.
You can demand it goes faster. In the US this is specifically the "speedy trial" provision of the Sixth Amendment. The government is obliged to provide "speedy trial" if demanded - if it can't do that it isn't entitled to a trial at all.
However, your lawyers (and she can afford good ones) will almost invariably advise you not to do that unless things have gotten entirely out of hand - because speedy trial applies to both sides, and the prosecution will have the rough outline of their case before they even file charges, so unless you're in a hurry t go to prison...
It might open up ways for her to hide away some of her ill-gotten gains. Ideally the state keeps track of it and nails her with additional punishment if she is caught trying that.
> Many people spend upwards of years before going to trial.
Slight hijack, but this is a key reason behind the movement to abolish cash bail. The thrust of the argument is essentially that people with more financial resources can pay bail. Those without those resources cannot, so the pre-trial period is often a de facto prison sentence whose length is unknown in advance. This setup obviously results in a tiered justice system.
There are ~500k people in jail who are innocent under the law. The elimination of cash bail is intended to eliminate this disparity.
The problem is that if you remove it, what do you replace it with? A judge making the decision if you’re released or jailed awaiting trial. For me, that’s fine, but for some people, that’s not (despite the judge in the current situation setting the bail amount).
<rant>
You end up with things like California’s SB-10 (thankfully overturned by Prop 25[0]) that would’ve replaced it by a risk assessment “AI” black box.[a]
[a]: SB-10 would supposedly have required “tools [that] shall be demonstrated by scientific research to be accurate and reliable”. But what science? Crime statistics says black people commit more crimes, but some claims that those numbers are the result of overpolicing. Who’s right?
I'm an engineer so this is not an area where I am an expert. But recognizing that we have a system that is openly biased against people without financial resources seems like something we should change.
I understand that DC rarely uses cash bail and has a 40+ year track record showing that 90% of accused show for their trial dates and > 90% are not re-arrested before trial. So maybe since that system seems to work for the most part, we could use that as a basis? Or at least require a very strong burden of proof before we presume people guilty because they are not wealthy?
How much better is the cash bail system at producing defendants at trial than DC's system? Is it so much better that it's worth ignoring our Constitution?
If nothing else, we spend ~$17B incarcerating innocent (again, per our law) people. Seems like an incredible waste of money and human potential. Maybe we try something else.
He was arrested in December 2015 and his trial started in June 2017. After appeals, he wasn’t sentenced until March 2018. Not exactly a speedy process.
It depends on how fast they can build a case and how good the defence is.
He just happened to have a lot of damning evidence against him and a pretty shit defence team, coupled with a shit PR problem in all media outlets, which made his case a toss-in.
Corporate trials always take a long time because of the a) the amount of evidence created at a corporation of any reasonable size is huge, b) rich people can afford good lawyers who can gum up any process and c) the laws are written such that the person actually knew/participated in whatever crime they're being charged with. (A) and then (C) is where a lot of time can be wasted and if the executive was being crafty about 'not knowing' and only getting the good news officially it can be tricky to prove they actually knew they were lying.
The wheels of justice move slow. The timelines of their cases aren’t that different and Holmes’s case is both clear-cut and amazingly complex. Aaron was arrested in Jan 2011 and died Jan 2013 before his trial started and after being offered a plea deal of 6 month in low security. His trial never started and I can’t find if it was ever scheduled when I do a google search. Holmes was arrested in June 2018 and her trial was originally scheduled for March 2021 but delayed until July. Her pre-trial hearings start in two weeks.
It is a high-profile case. Careers will be made and destroyed on the back of it. The legal team want to get their ducks in a row, because it involves government agencies and wealthy investors who will be asked a lot of inconvenient questions about their role (like "why didn't you act sooner?", "why did you invest in that company?") I think it's a mix of prudence, an overloaded justice system, and the pandemic that slow this down.
Given her station in society she is granted a measure of elite impunity... but it's not absolute. She likely won't face that harsh of a penalty when she finally goes to trial. If she got too harsh a sentence it would reflect poorly on those who supported her.
I read awhile back that there was the equivalent of sixteen million pages of evidence. There have of course been the attempts to throw it all out and Holmes has tried to play the victim; she may actually believe she is; in hopes it all lands on her business partner
which leads us to her getting married. part to maintain her lifestyle she was used to during Theranos's time at the top and part to make her more appealing to any jury and doubly so if she can get on stand pregnant. her court appearances that have pictures usually show her without makeup and fancy clothing. So the question then is, sociopath or Psychopath? Probably the former from the assumption of the victimhood
Why do you need to pretend things are racist when they aren't? IT and security use medical terms like 'viruses', and bad computers are 'wiped clean', so 'clean' is a common term and there's no reason to pretend that its intended to be racist. A clean network is a joke though and will fail
So you're pretending to read my mind and claiming without evidence that it's some sort of habit? Very convincing. I did say "at worst" didn't I? That's clearly meant to express that it's an extreme on a range of possible motives or interpretations. When there's a broad choice of equally accurate terms and one makes a choice of the one with certain associations, that choice itself can be a signal. Especially when "keeping out the Chinese" is clearly a major focus of the document. It's a possibility, and I stated no more than that.
