7 ms·

Theranos Trouble: A First Person Account

133 points by jackgavigan 11y ago

danso 11y ago
edit: site seems to be down, here's a mirror https://archive.is/C6arp https://archive.is/C6arp > I write the CEO with facts and figures (and supporting documents), and request a response...You can guess what happened: Nothing, no response. I shrugged it off and went on to other topics, but the question nagged at me. If a former Apple executive who works down the road from Theranos can't get a reasonable response, makes me wonder if Theranos ever addressed customer/client concerns?
- cowsandmilk 11y ago
  even if Theranos doesn't have to get FDA approval for their devices, there are likely regulatory concerns with responding directly to customers. They could send a contentless form letter, but the safest thing legally is not to respond.
- kqr2 11y ago
  Jean-Louis Gassée is also the founder of Be Inc, the company which created BeOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e Although BeOS no longer exists, there is the open source compatible OS Haiku: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_%28operating_system%29
  - danso 11y ago
    When I first saw Mr. Gassée's name in the byline, I immediately recognized him as being the Apple exec behind this quip about Steve Jobs, according to Andy Hertzfeld: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Handicapped.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... > Whenever you saw a big Mercedes parked in a handicapped space, you could be sure that it was Steve's car (actually, it was hard to be sure otherwise, since he also had a habit of removing his license plates). This sometimes caused him trouble, since unknown parties would occasionally retaliate by scratching the car with their keys. > Anyway, the story is that one day Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, who had recently transferred to Cupertino from Paris, had just parked his car and was walking toward the entrance of the main office at Apple when Steve buzzed by him in his silver Mercedes and pulled into the handicapped space near the front of the building. As Steve walked brusquely past him, Jean-Louis was heard to declare, to no one in particular - "Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped...".
- larrys 11y ago
  "If a former Apple executive who works down the road from Theranos can't get a reasonable response, makes me wonder if Theranos ever addressed customer/client concerns?" A few possibilities (in all fairness to Theranos) 1) Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know who Jean-Louis Gassée is..(noting her age). 2) She gets a ton of email and didn't see who wrote the email. So it could have been from anyone and unless for some reason she had noted the name in the reply address (and it was more than "jlg@") she would have just passed on it. 3) She forwarded it for someone to handle (given 1&2 above) and they haven't acted on it yet. Noting JLG says "You can guess what happened: Nothing, no response." but doesn't specify if he waited 1 day or 4 weeks.
  - kqr2 11y ago
    Actually he mentions that he ran Apple's Engineering directly in his email: I’m also a techie and, among other things in 47 years in the tech industry, I once ran Apple’s Engineering in Cupertino.
  - danso 11y ago
    It's true, but we don't know to whom he addressed the email...was it the general info@theranos.com email address? To Theranos's PR team? Or to a private direct email address that JLG was able to get? I would guess it'd be the latter 2...JLG has been writing about media/tech long enough to know that sending an email to the general contact form is not adequate, and he doesn't seem the type to be out for a hit-piece (i.e. "I am publishing an exposé in 1 hour, please respond"). And Holmes and her media people obviously are reachable -- besides maintaining Twitter accounts, Holmes was doing interviews the day after the WSJ piece (nevermind all of the PR she was doing in the past two weeks).
  - Pyxl101 11y ago
    This is why senior leaders have executive assistants. C-level execs of large companies get a lot of email and don't read all of it themselves, at least not initially, especially if the email is from someone they don't know. Emailing a large company's leader from the outside is and should be tantamount to emailing a part of their customer service team, if you are a customer. At least, that's how they need to arrange it if they want to be responsive and are failing to be. Good customer service will also escalate complaints internally so that they're properly dealt with, not just responded to (though they might be escalated to a subordinate of the person you intended to contact, rather than the person themselves). If someone emails your CEO, it's a fair bet that they're either really happy, or really unhappy and need attention, versus contacting frontline support. Companies that have good customer service typically have an "executive customer service" team made up of their best CS reps, who have good judgment and can handle unusual situations. Executive CS would for sure research and discover who sent the communication, and consider that fact as part of their response, and how to escalate it internally. To summarize, if a company cares about providing customer service, they can certainly do so, and they should look at email sent to their public figureheads as an extension of their customer service responsibility, or a delegated responsibility to the CEO's assistant. There is no excuse for the lack of response. This is also true for internal communication within a company, by the way. It's routine for assistants to respond on behalf of the person they support for matters that are within their area of responsibility. One of the marks of a higher grade executive assistant is that you can trust them with all of your communication, and can trust them to decide on their own what they can properly respond to on your behalf.
joshu 11y ago
Anyone know what the error bars on all these tests are?
frozenport 11y ago
A great reminder that Theranos is not vaporware!
bhaumik 11y ago
Well this piece certainly wasn't "on the broader topic of lab exams and other healthcare mysteries". She might've replied if she knew it would be called "Theranos Trouble".
wamatt 11y ago
As someone that's used Theranos a few times, I too have wondered about the accuracy and contemplated doing something similar. However, if one is going to make comparisons, I think it's better to use the same draw of blood for both lab companies. Or at least within an hour of each other. There are too many variables at play, and numbers can change between morning and afternoon even on the same day depending on the test. Repeated tests and obtaining standard deviations would also be a good idea.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  > Or at least within an hour of each other. "Taken one hour apart, the Stanford and Theranos HCT numbers differ by about 7%: 44.1 Theranos vs. Stanford 41.1." He was comparing the draws of the same day mainly
- neurotech1 11y ago
  Everyone seems to criticize Theranos but I'm 99% sure other labs have similar variances in results without a WSJ story. The FDA should investigate Quest and the other labs. With the Electronic Health Records, relying on a single lab result could be problematic.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    It appears that most tests done by Theranos are using the same techniques as any other lab, so naturally the variances would be similar. The only test their Edison machine is FDA approved for is herpes simplex. They have caught some flak, however, for allegedly diluting blood samples before standard analysis.
    - djhn 11y ago
      What ends would diluting it achieve?
      - jkimmel 11y ago
        They take smaller blood draws from finger tip pricks that aren't large enough in volume to run on a standard machine from Siemens et al. To get around this, they supposedly dilute the samples to a point where the concentrations of analytes are well below the machines minimum operating specifications.
rcurry 11y ago
This is like the fourth or fifth article on Theranos making the front page of HN in the last week or so. It's kind of like living on the San Andreas Fault and noticing your dog is starting to get really nervous...
- saryant 11y ago
  Reminds me of the rise and fall of Enron. Endless puff pieces about how amazing Ken Lay is and how they're revolutionizing the energy industry until a few reporters actually looked at their financials and published their concerns. Enron was dead eight months later. Substitute Lay for Holmes, financial fraud for medical concerns and that WSJ article on Theranos for Fortune's Is Enron Overpriced? and there you go.
- danso 11y ago
  The recent rush of bad press is mostly because of the one WSJ article which was the first mainstream, in-depth media scrutiny of Theranos...it's possible that they can overcome it if they really do have what they claim they do. edit: grammar
srunni 11y ago
This Theranos story just keeps getting more and more bizarre. George Church publicly criticized its board in a remark to the WaPo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/15/the-wildly-hyped-9-billion-blood-test-company-that-no-one-really-understands/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/15/th...). Considering that Holmes is on the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, while Church is one of its most prominent researchers, why is he suddenly speaking out? If someone like him was concerned about Theranos, how did she end up on the Board of Fellows in the first place? Then Michael Moritz of Sequoia specifically pointed to Theranos as an example of the 'subprime unicorn' boom (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/91063628-73f5-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162cc.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/91063628-73f5-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162...), which is a pretty odd choice, considering the vast majority of unicorns are software companies with very different risks from what Theranos faces. DFJ is one of Theranos's investors (https://www.facebook.com/dfj/posts/10101511622019206 https://www.facebook.com/dfj/posts/10101511622019206), and I can't imagine Moritz would want to publicly antagonize them. And why did the Murdoch-owned Journal publish the original article anyway, despite the Theranos board being stacked with Republican heavyweights? What's the point of having Henry Kissinger and George Shultz on your board, if not to prevent these sorts of incidents?
- noname123 11y ago
  > Considering that Holmes is on the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, while Church is one of its most prominent researchers, why is he suddenly speaking out? I think Dr.Church's lab is very prominent in the field of synthetic biology; if I have to guess, his lab's work funding comes from lots of federal research grants outside of Harvard Medical school. So financially and politically, I don't think his hands are tied at all. Also on principle, as a tenured faculty in academia, I don't think he is bound by the same rules/expectations as a FTE at a regular company.
  - srunni 11y ago
    I'm not saying that I'm surprised that he spoke out - I mean the timing of it is unusual. Why didn't he say something when Holmes was appointed to the Board of Fellows, or when the company first started its PR blitz in late 2013? Theranos's unusual board has been in the news for a long time: http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-board-directors/ http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-board-directors/
noname123 11y ago
Also somewhat tangential, but completely related, I'm curious peeps in biotech, what are your guys' opinions on Oxford Nanopore MinION? IMHO, MinION is even more exciting than Theranos in that it is a real-time USB-stick sequencer that sequence a whole complete genome or the metagenomics inside a person's blood or guts (currently < 6hrs, in matters of minutes for detecting viral genomes in blood such as ebola since you can feed the sequencing data in a real-time pipeline to a BLAST to the viral genome reference database). Due to the early access program, there are quite a few papers published on its protocol attesting its pro's and con's. Illumnia, the current king of genome sequencing has more its stock price than 10x since it has beaten out its NGS competitors as the "sequencer de-jure". MinION, IMO like PacBio won't beat Illumina ever in read-error rate; however, can open up a new market in sequencing patient samples in clinical settings - which may be an order of magnitude bigger than academic sequencing. However, the argument against it is that there are already RT-PCR blood tests that can detect reliably in clinical settings different viral infections; also sequencing may be real-time, but you still need technicians to do the sample prep (e.g., extract the DNA and prep it for the NGS adapters). Would love to hear people's opinions on the viability of nanopore sequencing here.
bedhead 11y ago
I manage money for a living and I always get fascinated with frauds and "bullshit businesses" for shorting. This whole flap is so funny to me because about a year ago after reading a few things about Theranos and hearing a few anecdotes from people in the lab business, I thought to myself, "Man, I wish this company was public so I could short it." There were just so many of these little red flags. Anyway, in these situations the response from the company often gives the best indication of how genuinely dire things are. In my experience, Theranos' response has been really, really worrisome. The hasty Cramer appearance (Mad Money??? Uhhh, this isn't a public company). The lawyered-up non-denials and general evasiveness. The editing of the website. The world's most expensive attorneys. The threats to the now-deceased co-founder (realize this was not a response to the WSJ, but still). The reluctant bending to FDA requests. If this company was public it would be my largest short.
- saryant 11y ago
  This is why I think shorts provide a valuable service to the economy. They have an incentive to snuff out fraud and deception in publicly traded companies and act as a bulwark against that sort of behavior. Sadly we don't have an equivalent for privately traded firms.
  - Maarten88 11y ago
    Why is it not enough when all private investors just loose their money if it turns out this company is worth much less that they hoped and payed for? What would it add when a short-seller makes a profit on the loss of the investors who took on the risk trying to create a business. Who would pay the shortseller's profit? In general, I think all derivatives should be taxed the equivalent of casino tax, because that's what it is: betting in a zero-sum game for society. Of couse we know that betting provides very good predictive information, but that does not seem like a good reason to treat financial betting different from other form of gambling.
    - saryant 11y ago
      The profit for shorts provides an incentive to correct the market regarding overvalued or fraudulently valued companies. That's a good thing.
murbard2 11y ago
Totally tangential question, but does the "too many blood cells" translate into greater endurance and stamina for you?
- jane_is_here 11y ago
  In polycythaemia vera, it translated to strokes and heart attacks. Just like it does for the Tour De France. Rob Goris was a recent example http://velonews.competitor.com/2012/07/news/goris-30-dies-of-heart-attack-at-the-tour_227637 http://velonews.competitor.com/2012/07/news/goris-30-dies-of...
  - murbard2 11y ago
    Yes, I understand it's primarily a health concern. I just wonder if, just like for the Tour De France, it also affects stamina. I don't intend to imply that it would a silver lining, I'm merely trying to test my understanding of some biological mechanism.

133 points by jackgavigan 11y ago

danso 11y ago

edit: site seems to be down, here's a mirror https://archive.is/C6arp https://archive.is/C6arp > I write the CEO with facts and figures (and supporting documents), and request a response...You can guess what happened: Nothing, no response. I shrugged it off and went on to other topics, but the question nagged at me. If a former Apple executive who works down the road from Theranos can't get a reasonable response, makes me wonder if Theranos ever addressed customer/client concerns?

cowsandmilk 11y ago
even if Theranos doesn't have to get FDA approval for their devices, there are likely regulatory concerns with responding directly to customers. They could send a contentless form letter, but the safest thing legally is not to respond.
kqr2 11y ago
Jean-Louis Gassée is also the founder of Be Inc, the company which created BeOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e Although BeOS no longer exists, there is the open source compatible OS Haiku: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_%28operating_system%29
- danso 11y ago
  When I first saw Mr. Gassée's name in the byline, I immediately recognized him as being the Apple exec behind this quip about Steve Jobs, according to Andy Hertzfeld: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Handicapped.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... > Whenever you saw a big Mercedes parked in a handicapped space, you could be sure that it was Steve's car (actually, it was hard to be sure otherwise, since he also had a habit of removing his license plates). This sometimes caused him trouble, since unknown parties would occasionally retaliate by scratching the car with their keys. > Anyway, the story is that one day Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, who had recently transferred to Cupertino from Paris, had just parked his car and was walking toward the entrance of the main office at Apple when Steve buzzed by him in his silver Mercedes and pulled into the handicapped space near the front of the building. As Steve walked brusquely past him, Jean-Louis was heard to declare, to no one in particular - "Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped...".
larrys 11y ago
"If a former Apple executive who works down the road from Theranos can't get a reasonable response, makes me wonder if Theranos ever addressed customer/client concerns?" A few possibilities (in all fairness to Theranos) 1) Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know who Jean-Louis Gassée is..(noting her age). 2) She gets a ton of email and didn't see who wrote the email. So it could have been from anyone and unless for some reason she had noted the name in the reply address (and it was more than "jlg@") she would have just passed on it. 3) She forwarded it for someone to handle (given 1&2 above) and they haven't acted on it yet. Noting JLG says "You can guess what happened: Nothing, no response." but doesn't specify if he waited 1 day or 4 weeks.
- kqr2 11y ago
  Actually he mentions that he ran Apple's Engineering directly in his email: I’m also a techie and, among other things in 47 years in the tech industry, I once ran Apple’s Engineering in Cupertino.
- danso 11y ago
  It's true, but we don't know to whom he addressed the email...was it the general info@theranos.com email address? To Theranos's PR team? Or to a private direct email address that JLG was able to get? I would guess it'd be the latter 2...JLG has been writing about media/tech long enough to know that sending an email to the general contact form is not adequate, and he doesn't seem the type to be out for a hit-piece (i.e. "I am publishing an exposé in 1 hour, please respond"). And Holmes and her media people obviously are reachable -- besides maintaining Twitter accounts, Holmes was doing interviews the day after the WSJ piece (nevermind all of the PR she was doing in the past two weeks).
- Pyxl101 11y ago
  This is why senior leaders have executive assistants. C-level execs of large companies get a lot of email and don't read all of it themselves, at least not initially, especially if the email is from someone they don't know. Emailing a large company's leader from the outside is and should be tantamount to emailing a part of their customer service team, if you are a customer. At least, that's how they need to arrange it if they want to be responsive and are failing to be. Good customer service will also escalate complaints internally so that they're properly dealt with, not just responded to (though they might be escalated to a subordinate of the person you intended to contact, rather than the person themselves). If someone emails your CEO, it's a fair bet that they're either really happy, or really unhappy and need attention, versus contacting frontline support. Companies that have good customer service typically have an "executive customer service" team made up of their best CS reps, who have good judgment and can handle unusual situations. Executive CS would for sure research and discover who sent the communication, and consider that fact as part of their response, and how to escalate it internally. To summarize, if a company cares about providing customer service, they can certainly do so, and they should look at email sent to their public figureheads as an extension of their customer service responsibility, or a delegated responsibility to the CEO's assistant. There is no excuse for the lack of response. This is also true for internal communication within a company, by the way. It's routine for assistants to respond on behalf of the person they support for matters that are within their area of responsibility. One of the marks of a higher grade executive assistant is that you can trust them with all of your communication, and can trust them to decide on their own what they can properly respond to on your behalf.

joshu 11y ago

Anyone know what the error bars on all these tests are?

frozenport 11y ago

A great reminder that Theranos is not vaporware!

bhaumik 11y ago

Well this piece certainly wasn't "on the broader topic of lab exams and other healthcare mysteries". She might've replied if she knew it would be called "Theranos Trouble".

wamatt 11y ago

As someone that's used Theranos a few times, I too have wondered about the accuracy and contemplated doing something similar. However, if one is going to make comparisons, I think it's better to use the same draw of blood for both lab companies. Or at least within an hour of each other. There are too many variables at play, and numbers can change between morning and afternoon even on the same day depending on the test. Repeated tests and obtaining standard deviations would also be a good idea.

raverbashing 11y ago
> Or at least within an hour of each other. "Taken one hour apart, the Stanford and Theranos HCT numbers differ by about 7%: 44.1 Theranos vs. Stanford 41.1." He was comparing the draws of the same day mainly
neurotech1 11y ago
Everyone seems to criticize Theranos but I'm 99% sure other labs have similar variances in results without a WSJ story. The FDA should investigate Quest and the other labs. With the Electronic Health Records, relying on a single lab result could be problematic.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  It appears that most tests done by Theranos are using the same techniques as any other lab, so naturally the variances would be similar. The only test their Edison machine is FDA approved for is herpes simplex. They have caught some flak, however, for allegedly diluting blood samples before standard analysis.
  - djhn 11y ago
    What ends would diluting it achieve?
    - jkimmel 11y ago
      They take smaller blood draws from finger tip pricks that aren't large enough in volume to run on a standard machine from Siemens et al. To get around this, they supposedly dilute the samples to a point where the concentrations of analytes are well below the machines minimum operating specifications.

rcurry 11y ago

This is like the fourth or fifth article on Theranos making the front page of HN in the last week or so. It's kind of like living on the San Andreas Fault and noticing your dog is starting to get really nervous...

saryant 11y ago
Reminds me of the rise and fall of Enron. Endless puff pieces about how amazing Ken Lay is and how they're revolutionizing the energy industry until a few reporters actually looked at their financials and published their concerns. Enron was dead eight months later. Substitute Lay for Holmes, financial fraud for medical concerns and that WSJ article on Theranos for Fortune's Is Enron Overpriced? and there you go.
danso 11y ago
The recent rush of bad press is mostly because of the one WSJ article which was the first mainstream, in-depth media scrutiny of Theranos...it's possible that they can overcome it if they really do have what they claim they do. edit: grammar

srunni 11y ago

This Theranos story just keeps getting more and more bizarre. George Church publicly criticized its board in a remark to the WaPo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/15/the-wildly-hyped-9-billion-blood-test-company-that-no-one-really-understands/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/15/th...). Considering that Holmes is on the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, while Church is one of its most prominent researchers, why is he suddenly speaking out? If someone like him was concerned about Theranos, how did she end up on the Board of Fellows in the first place? Then Michael Moritz of Sequoia specifically pointed to Theranos as an example of the 'subprime unicorn' boom (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/91063628-73f5-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162cc.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/91063628-73f5-11e5-bdb1-e6e4767162...), which is a pretty odd choice, considering the vast majority of unicorns are software companies with very different risks from what Theranos faces. DFJ is one of Theranos's investors (https://www.facebook.com/dfj/posts/10101511622019206 https://www.facebook.com/dfj/posts/10101511622019206), and I can't imagine Moritz would want to publicly antagonize them. And why did the Murdoch-owned Journal publish the original article anyway, despite the Theranos board being stacked with Republican heavyweights? What's the point of having Henry Kissinger and George Shultz on your board, if not to prevent these sorts of incidents?

noname123 11y ago
> Considering that Holmes is on the Harvard Medical School Board of Fellows, while Church is one of its most prominent researchers, why is he suddenly speaking out? I think Dr.Church's lab is very prominent in the field of synthetic biology; if I have to guess, his lab's work funding comes from lots of federal research grants outside of Harvard Medical school. So financially and politically, I don't think his hands are tied at all. Also on principle, as a tenured faculty in academia, I don't think he is bound by the same rules/expectations as a FTE at a regular company.
- srunni 11y ago
  I'm not saying that I'm surprised that he spoke out - I mean the timing of it is unusual. Why didn't he say something when Holmes was appointed to the Board of Fellows, or when the company first started its PR blitz in late 2013? Theranos's unusual board has been in the news for a long time: http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-board-directors/ http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-board-directors/

noname123 11y ago

Also somewhat tangential, but completely related, I'm curious peeps in biotech, what are your guys' opinions on Oxford Nanopore MinION? IMHO, MinION is even more exciting than Theranos in that it is a real-time USB-stick sequencer that sequence a whole complete genome or the metagenomics inside a person's blood or guts (currently < 6hrs, in matters of minutes for detecting viral genomes in blood such as ebola since you can feed the sequencing data in a real-time pipeline to a BLAST to the viral genome reference database). Due to the early access program, there are quite a few papers published on its protocol attesting its pro's and con's. Illumnia, the current king of genome sequencing has more its stock price than 10x since it has beaten out its NGS competitors as the "sequencer de-jure". MinION, IMO like PacBio won't beat Illumina ever in read-error rate; however, can open up a new market in sequencing patient samples in clinical settings - which may be an order of magnitude bigger than academic sequencing. However, the argument against it is that there are already RT-PCR blood tests that can detect reliably in clinical settings different viral infections; also sequencing may be real-time, but you still need technicians to do the sample prep (e.g., extract the DNA and prep it for the NGS adapters). Would love to hear people's opinions on the viability of nanopore sequencing here.

bedhead 11y ago

I manage money for a living and I always get fascinated with frauds and "bullshit businesses" for shorting. This whole flap is so funny to me because about a year ago after reading a few things about Theranos and hearing a few anecdotes from people in the lab business, I thought to myself, "Man, I wish this company was public so I could short it." There were just so many of these little red flags. Anyway, in these situations the response from the company often gives the best indication of how genuinely dire things are. In my experience, Theranos' response has been really, really worrisome. The hasty Cramer appearance (Mad Money??? Uhhh, this isn't a public company). The lawyered-up non-denials and general evasiveness. The editing of the website. The world's most expensive attorneys. The threats to the now-deceased co-founder (realize this was not a response to the WSJ, but still). The reluctant bending to FDA requests. If this company was public it would be my largest short.

saryant 11y ago
This is why I think shorts provide a valuable service to the economy. They have an incentive to snuff out fraud and deception in publicly traded companies and act as a bulwark against that sort of behavior. Sadly we don't have an equivalent for privately traded firms.
- Maarten88 11y ago
  Why is it not enough when all private investors just loose their money if it turns out this company is worth much less that they hoped and payed for? What would it add when a short-seller makes a profit on the loss of the investors who took on the risk trying to create a business. Who would pay the shortseller's profit? In general, I think all derivatives should be taxed the equivalent of casino tax, because that's what it is: betting in a zero-sum game for society. Of couse we know that betting provides very good predictive information, but that does not seem like a good reason to treat financial betting different from other form of gambling.
  - saryant 11y ago
    The profit for shorts provides an incentive to correct the market regarding overvalued or fraudulently valued companies. That's a good thing.

murbard2 11y ago

Totally tangential question, but does the "too many blood cells" translate into greater endurance and stamina for you?

jane_is_here 11y ago
In polycythaemia vera, it translated to strokes and heart attacks. Just like it does for the Tour De France. Rob Goris was a recent example http://velonews.competitor.com/2012/07/news/goris-30-dies-of-heart-attack-at-the-tour_227637 http://velonews.competitor.com/2012/07/news/goris-30-dies-of...
- murbard2 11y ago
  Yes, I understand it's primarily a health concern. I just wonder if, just like for the Tour De France, it also affects stamina. I don't intend to imply that it would a silver lining, I'm merely trying to test my understanding of some biological mechanism.