So, here's what I sincerely don't get: why is she allowed to spend a bunch of money on her criminal defense while there are civil cases working their way through the courts, and after she's basically admitted she doesn't have enough money to defend herself in both cases?
I understand it would be probably unconstitutional to delay criminal proceedings until after the civil proceedings. But can't the judge in the civil proceedings do something to prevent all the money from being spent on her criminal defense?
It seems morally wrong that someone can commit fraud and then spend the money obtained via that fraud defending themselves against the state before having to settle up with the people who they defrauded.
This technically hasn't been proven yet, that's what the criminal trial is for. If you take away that assumption, then what would be your argument?
People are allowed to allocate their money however they want. You can say that she's committing another fraud, but that would be yet another case. Maybe there's an injunction that can be filed but I doubt there's enough precedent for it.
> If you take away that assumption, then what would be your argument?
The argument is that the civil and criminal proceedings are considering largely similar statements of fact. The burden of proof is lower in the civil case, of course, but the facts under consideration are the same. Or course, slightly different exact statements are being considered but with a substantively similar underlying truth claim: theranos was a fraud. The real point is, it's hard to believe she would ever win the criminal proceedings and lose the civil proceedings.
To me, it would make sense for the courts to insist that the civil proceeding is resolved first when the criminal proceeding is considering largely the same statements of fact but with a higher burden of proof. Why? Because the people the criminal code is supposed to be protecting are largely the same people who are suing, and those folks would probably prefer getting some money back.
The problem is that this would probably violate the sixth amendment (as is mentioned in my initial post). So, again, constitutionally, I understand why. This just seems like a bug rather than a feature.
So, this isn't about "innocent until proven guilty". This is about "speedy trial". I think one possibility, moving forward, is the following workflow:
1. Federal prosecutors communicate intent to prosecute, and provide a list of victims purportedly effected
2. Any effected victims may file civil suits
2a. Judges/congress/state legislative bodies exempt commitments to defense funds for future possible criminal cases from bankruptcy
3. civil cases resolved
4. criminal charges filed and proceedings begin
We test the limits of every amendment that applies to non-corporate-executives, so why not the sixth in fraud proceedings against C suites as well?
They're completely separate cases with different courts, rules, judges, and penalties. Neither has jurisdiction over the other. Having "the courts insist that the civil proceeding is resolved first" is not a choice for either of them to make. This firewall between criminal and civil isn't a "bug", it's a fundamental part of the justice system.
What is a "future possible criminal case"? Why would there be another criminal case? And if there was, what does this court have to do with it?
You're still presuming she's guilty because there's no grounds for interfering with an innocent person's finances that may affect their ability to defend themselves in court or acting on a case based on the assumed outcome of a different one.
The right to a speedy trial is a right of the defendant they can choose to waive, for example if they know they're guilty and want to delay sentencing and punishment for as long as possible.
You have provided a very complex solution that would have to be applied to all cases to address a very rare scenario.
Prior to being convicted, she is innocent. Hard to use that as a justification to kneecap her ability to defend herself because you already believe she will eventually be found guilty.
because then people could potentially sue others to sabotage a criminal defense. I'm not sure to what extent her finances are monitored by law enforcement and the various judges.
Oh, pretty much every single comment I make gets at least one immediate downvote as soon as I post.
I assume I got in a flamewar with the wrong person some years back or something.
Don't really care about internet points on VC-sponsored forums, but it'd be nice to get an answer to this question from someone who knows something about law, though, so thanks :)
It seems like bot(s) that is/are attempting to prevent other users from getting the ability to downvote/500 points. Flaw with hn and disincentive to post here.
Perhaps, alhtough "person who you get an an argument with intermittently downvotes you posts" isn't exactly a "conspiracy theory". It's just a thing that does happen in internet communities, and that anyone who has moderated one has experience mediating.
But, it's best to be certain! To ensure my downvotes are truly deserved: my bet is on the temporarily embarrassed millionaires taking offense to the last sentence of my prior post ;-) (i.e., /s :) )
In the Holmes case, the plaintiff, if they win, will probably argue that at least part of the settlement should be nondischargeable because Holmes committed fraud.
> Why wouldn't everyone file and wipe out their civil case debt then?
Because either:
1) the courts explicitly disallow it in the particular case; or,
2) the combination of non-exempt assets and continued access to credit is more valuable than the settlement amount (in this case, you would end up paying the entire amount during bankruptcy proceedings in any case anyways, and then have a black mark on your credit for no good reason).
> His distortion seems exactly like every pop-sci article today
The distinction is that pop-sci articles are just journalism. Most academics take pop-sci journalism in their field with a grain of salt at most, and usually a hard eye-roll.
Real scientific journal/conference articles are held to real standards. Exaggerating or misreporting results in a scientific article is basically malpractice. It's by far the worst (scientific) thing that a scientist can do.
As society changes, what it means to be maladapted to that society also changes.
It's amazing how many people will agree with that statement (because... duh) and then freak out when someone points out it's impossible to talk about the DSM without talking about dominant beliefs regarding "what society should be like". I.e., without talking about politics and labor economics.
There are many topics covered by the DSM that are maladaptations to this society but a) would not have been maladaptations in previous soecieties, and b) might not be maladaptations in future societies.
Is it even possible to talk about something like whether some particular aspect of human sexuality is a disorder using only "real science", and on a related note, what does "real science" mean here? E.g., there have certainly existed human societies with no strong taboo around human nakedness, and in those societies Exhibitionistic Disorder wouldn't even make any sense to talk about.
Similarly, it'd hard to imagine ADD being anything other than a perfectly normal non-maladaptive variation in personality prior to industrialization.
As a practicing scientist, I'm honestly not sure how "real science" is supposed to given an answer a question like 'is being transexual maladaptive?" It's just not a scientific question. There are lots of related scientific questions about human biology. But ultimately, it's a question about how those biological facts interact with social constructions.
Can you tell me, concretely, what you mean by "real science" here?
Not the OP, but I think you’ve actually made exactly the point quite well yourself.
The field of study is not supposed to be “do we like this sort of people and get along well with them” or “are they well adapted behaviorally to be productive members of society” but rather an actual set of illnesses which can be diagnosed, treated, and conceivably cured. We do in fact prescribe powerful pharmacological agents based on these criteria, after all.
And yet, as the Director of the NIMH rightly laments, "DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure."
It is in essence a type of culture war hiding behind a so-called diagnostic manual. In that sense it is more aptly described as a dictionary, whose lexicon is revised more based on their perceived common usage more than hard scientific study.
> It is in essence a type of culture war hiding behind a so-called diagnostic manual
Right, OP was complaining that DSM changed because of politics, and my point was... "yeah, no shit, politics is inseparable from what the DSM is trying to do".
OP can't point to "real science" justifying either the original definition or the changed definition, because both are inherently outside the domain of science.
GP is talking about the 90th percentile. If you want to quibble about exactly where that line is, whatever, but it's not the point. It's very clear that the percentage of people who can afford to invest is broader than the top decile.
> These tests include fuzz testing, as well as running a “shadow build” in Stripe’s CI that runs over every pull request to the monorepo, but reports failures only to the Sorbet developers, instead of to the PR author.
You can watch the Macneil-Lehrer News Hour (now rebranded as just PBS News Hour), the program that Jim Lehrer hosted for the better part of his professional career and the reason people care about his opinion on journalism. It still runs every night: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/
We already have some obscure bureaucratic infrastructure in place from the 70s called the "public broadcasting service". It's funded and everything. Could just re-purpose that I suppose.
Perhaps the public broadcasting service could have a nightly program that dedicates an entire hour of primetime to this type of reporting. And we could even name it in Lehrer's name! Of course in that case we should also give MacNeil credit as well. So perhaps the show could be called something like the "MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour"!
You suggested a tax-funded news outlet that could focus on publishing well-sourced stories instead of keeping up with the hourly news cycle.
What you are asking for already exists [1]. In fact, the article we're commenting on is about the guy who co-hosted it [2]. Up until a few years ago, the program was even called the "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" [3].
> ...we read it when we're young and naive and our eyes are opened...
First, you're projecting.
Second, it's not at all surprising that you're young enough to have first read Manufacturing Consent when you were "young".
Third, books like Manufacturing Consent and Discipline and Punishment are primarily sociological. They do have some normative content, of course, but their primary goal is to explain how the world works.
> It's called 'PR', it's used all day, every day by most companies and political organizations, social movements and even the government.
This is an over-simplification. Of course that's true. Manufacturing Consent is not merely pointing out the existence of politics or merely making the observation that political operatives attempt to use media to shift opinion. It's a book about ___how___ that process works in the age of mass media and in a democratic capitalist society.
The way in which cable news is used to warp people's perception of reality seems pretty obvious in 2020, with hindsight.
And so Manufacturing Consent might seem trite and obvious today. But the book wasn't written in 2019. Or 2018. Or 2008. Or even 1998. It was published in 1988.
Just to put that in context: it was written prior to 9/11. It was written almost a decade before Fox News was founded. It was written only shortly after cable television was even invented. In 1988, "Cable News" as we know it today didn't exist. CNN barely existed, and looked more like a combination of NBC Nightly News and CSPAN. And most importantly, manufacturing Consent was published at a time when most Americans really did believe that the nightly news was a mostly unbiased source of information.
You might read it today and think "yeah, that's obviously how mass media is used to influence how people think about the world". But that's very much not the reaction most people -- even, perhaps especially, hard-nosed realists -- had when reading it in 1988.
It wasn't 'new information' in 1988, it was just news to the plebes, and it was measured/articulated in some way.
This goes back far beyond the advent of 'cable news'.
For centuries, newspapers have been created, bought and promulgated mostly for the purposes of making money and promoting the narrative of the owners, often in the form of personal attacks.
Yes, I'm 'projecting' a little but this issue usually takes quite some time and exposure to grasp as most people don't have any direct dealings with it. It comes up way too often with young people referring to Manufacturing Consent as some kind of revelation. The fact is it's a revelation to them, but not objectively a revelation.
Interestingly in authoritarian regimes you don't have to manufacture consent so much since you're propagandizing 24x7 and you have complete control over the people.
Just because there's no proof that organic is healthier doesn't mean there's no victim.
If for some reason a lot of customers want to pay extra for milk that's hand-milked by a milk maid standing on her head, we can of course talk about how funny those "head-standing milk is better" folks are. But that doesn't make it okay to lie and defraud them.
I understand it would be probably unconstitutional to delay criminal proceedings until after the civil proceedings. But can't the judge in the civil proceedings do something to prevent all the money from being spent on her criminal defense?
It seems morally wrong that someone can commit fraud and then spend the money obtained via that fraud defending themselves against the state before having to settle up with the people who they defrauded.