Search Results for: ellen pao

Tim Hunt, Ellen Pao, and how to get rid of old tenured faculty

by philg

Seventy-two-year-old Tim Hunt, the English Nobel Prize-winner, was forced to resign a professorship after some public comments. This has gotten a lot of press due to the number of people who enjoy thinking of themselves as smarter than a Nobel laureate. Let’s benchmark Hunt’s career-ending statement against Kleiner Perkins’s experience employing Ellen Pao:

Tim Hunt Ellen Pao at KP
Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab
You fall in love with them Married partner wants to have sex with her
they fall in love with you She wants to have sex with married partner, assuming that he will leave current wife and children.
when you criticise them, they cry When you criticize her, she goes to court for “$16M. Shake that pu$$y!” (reader comment on February 2015 post, though it was later reported that Ellen Pao was seeking an additional $160 million in punitive damages)

Would it be fair to say that Kleiner Perkins incurred roughly $10 million in legal fees and a lot of aggravation to confirm Hunt’s hypothesis, at least with respect to this particular “girl in the lab.”?

[Update on the Ellen Pao case: the unsuccessful plaintiff now seeks $2.7 million to cover some of her legal fees and costs (cnet) in exchange for waiving her appeal rights against Kleiner, which presumably already incurred at least $10 million in legal fees and expenses. Coincidentally this is the amount that Pao’s husband owes in legal fees for one of his lawsuits and also the amount that the IRS is trying to get out of him (link from post about the total litigation generated by the Pao-Fletcher team). Will she get her fees paid? “You get your fees paid if you’re a female family court plaintiff,” said one litigator, “but having a vagina doesn’t get you a free lawsuit in other venues.” (see previous post about how Ellen Pao would have fared in family court)]

More productively, the Hunt case provides some guidance for universities struggling with how to get rid of old tenured faculty. The original concept of tenure was paired with a mandatory retirement age, e.g., of 65. Such age-based mandatory retirement is now prohibited by federal law and schools have discovered that it is not rational for highly paid and unproductive professors to retire. Being on campus is like being at a lively cocktail party. Why trade that to sit home alone?

Tenure doesn’t mean job security, however. A friend who is a physics professor at UC Berkeley points out that he “can be fired for any reason, except incompetence.”

A lot of older professors hold beliefs that aren’t in sync with current political dogma. People who were “liberal” in the 1970s would be called “reactionary” today. At Harvard College, 96 percent of professors support Democrats (Crimson). It should be easy to winnow out a lot of older professors simply by exposing their failure to keep pace with evolving concepts of what it means to be “liberal” or “Democrat.” Get out a video camera and ask a series of carefully crafted questions:

Eventually one of these oldsters will probably say something sufficient to justify termination on the basis of creating a hostile environment, etc.

Related:

 

Litigious Minds Think Alike: Divorce litigators react to the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit

by philg

As part of wrapping up our book on divorce, custody, and child support laws in the 51 jurisdictions nationwide we talk to a lot of divorce litigators. We’ve talked to nine litigators since the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins jury came back and asked all nine “What do you make of the Ellen Pao case that has been in the news?” One litigator had been busy handling a trial and hadn’t heard about the Pao case. Among those attorneys who were aware of the Pao lawsuit, the first reaction was the same for 6 out of 8: “If you want to get paid for having lady parts you go to Family Court, not Superior Court,” was how one of the 6 phrased the general idea. “If she wanted money, what was she doing with a junior partner?” was an alternative response along the same lines. “Pregnancy with the boss is a better financial strategy than having a fling with a co-worker,” said another lawyer.

[What did the divorce attorneys who did not immediately volunteer the child support profiteering alternative lead with? “When I stage a gender war my client is going to win; the only question is how much.” and “Law firms are always desperate to have more women partners and will give a qualified woman a lot more breaks and chances than they would give a man.”]

How do the numbers work out? Pao’s boss was Kleiner Partner John Doerr, listed by Forbes as having a fortune of $3.4 billion. Let’s assume that a California family court would have imputed 7 percent per year in income to those assets and/or that Doerr actually can earn 7 percent per year. That’s $238 million per year in income for calculating child support or roughly $20 million per month. The official California child support calculator shows that Ms. Pao would have collecting a tax-free $1.05 million per month in child support ($227 million over 18 years). If she had used her Harvard Law School education to study the the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act, in which a factor for obtaining jurisdiction over a nonresident such as Mr. Doerr is the nonresident engaged in sexual intercourse in the state and “the child may have been conceived by that act of intercourse,” she could have made a lot more money accompanying Mr. Doerr on business trips to states where children are more profitable. For example, if Pao could have persuaded Mr. Doerr to have sex with her in Wisconsin she would have been entitled to between 10 and 17 percent of Doerr’s income over an 18-year period. That would have been as much as $728 million. Sex in Massachusetts and New Hampshire would also have yielded a better return than sex in California.

By spending one night with Mr. Doerr, Pao would have been in a good position to profit from any future period of inflation. State child support formulae are not inflation-adjusted. Thus if inflation rose to 9 percent per year and Doerr’s return on assets correspondingly rose to 14 percent in nominal terms, Pao’s child support profits would double.

In her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Pao had the burden of proof. To get $238 million in child support under California’s formula, however, Pao would have had the presumption on her side. Doerr would have had the burden to prove that he should be ordered to pay a different amount.

A divorce litigator with a tax background pointed out that had Pao prevailed in her discrimination lawsuit she would have had to pay income tax on at least the $160 million in punitive damages; child support revenue, on the other hand, is tax-free. Had Pao prevailed in her discrimination lawsuit she would have had to share her profits with her attorneys; she could have gotten guideline child support from a Kleiner partner, on the other hand, using taxpayer-funded child support enforcement personnel.

“Pao was sitting on something a lot more valuable than her Ivy League degrees,” concluded an attorney from a state with uncapped child support. “I just want to be there to represent her when Buddy Fletcher decides to go back to being gay.”

Related:

Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins wrap-up

by philg

The jury has returned and Kleiner Perkins is not guilty of sex discrimination.

How is it possible to lose a lawsuit like this in one of the most plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions in the world? As noted in my previous postings (first; second), it was hard to explain why the partners of Kleiner Perkins wanted to make themselves poorer by promoting an unqualified man in favor of a qualified woman. Discrimination of any kind might make sense for a manager at a government agency. His or her salary won’t change if less qualified or productive people are hired to fill jobs. His or her customers cannot be wooed away by a more efficient competitor. But almost anyone should be able to understand that for a VC partnership, indulging in discrimination will personally cost the partners. In addition, Pao had the “bad fact” of the affair with the married co-worker, a circumstance that most people can understand might lead to on-the-job problems.

Why did people think that this case was strong? My theory is that American journalists and pundits, nearly all of whom have no technical education or experience with industry that depends on engineering, simply wanted to write about gender discrimination. Here’s an example from Forbes: “Cracking The Boys Club: Jenny Lee On What It Means To Be The Top Woman In Venture Capital” (March 25, 2015). Forbes talks about VC being a “boys club” (headline) and implies that the U.S. VC world is not “open to female venture capitalists”. These statements are directly contradicted by the woman who is supposedly the subject of the piece. The interviewee, who actually some experience with venture capital and engineering, says that VC “is capitalism at its ultimate. To do well you have to understand this point. No one is going to be nice to you because of your age, or where you come from or your gender. The VC industry is about survival of the fittest, and that’s the same mindset we give to our entrepreneurs.” When pressed as to why there are few female VCs she points out that less than 10 percent of her engineering class at Cornell were female.

Plainly Ms. Pao would be close to $200 million richer today if the jury had been 12 journalists from the New York Times and other publications that reported on the case as though the guilt of Kleiner Perkins had been established prior to trial. Denied a place in the jury box, what are these folks writing now? That this lawsuit was somehow useful in “starting a conversation.” None of the articles about how great this is for the nation mention the fact that it had to cost Kleiner Perkins at least $10 million in legal fees and distraction/time. That would have been enough to fully fund 100 women to get engineering bachelor’s degrees and join the STEM workforce that Barack Obama and the New York Times editorial board say is a good place for people other than themselves (previous posting). Which advances the cause of women in engineering more, 100 women with engineering degrees or a conversation that starts “So the flight attendant on the $65 million Gulfstream was pouring Champagne for me but I couldn’t enjoy it because some douchebag on the far end of the cabin was talking about the Playboy Mansion…”?

The story that did not seem to capture the media’s or the public’s attention was “Just how much litigation can one couple generate here in the U.S.?” According to this this summary article and this WSJ piece, Pao and her husband, Buddy Fletcher, have put lawyers to work on at least the following matters:

  • should Buddy Fletcher’s race discrimination case against Kidder Peabody be heard in court or in arbitration?
  • how much cash should Buddy Fletcher get from Kidder Peabody as a result of having been black?
  • how much investor cash did Buddy Fletcher steal from his hedge fund?
  • did fellow co-op owners at The Dakota refuse to approve his acquisition of an apartment because they thought that he was black or thought that he would soon have no money? (2011 lawsuit)
  • should Buddy Fletcher be fined or imprisoned by the government? (taxpayer-funded Justice Department and SEC investigations)
  • should some of Buddy Fletcher’s, uh, “buddies” (affiliated companies/shells/etc.) have to repay various investors, including some state pension funds?
  • how annoying do your fellow passengers on a private jet have to be before you can say that you would rather have flown JetBlue?
  • if you sue your partners do they still have to greet you enthusiastically every morning when you show up to the office? (the retaliation claim of the lawsuit, which I am surprised that Pao did not prevail on)

The New York Post says that the overdue fees in just one of Fletcher’s cases are $2.7 million. Let’s assume that the Dakota case is the simplest, $1 million in total fees. Let’s assume the Kidder Peabody case ran up fees on both sides slightly larger than the ultimate payout to Fletcher: another $2 million. The hedge fund debacle, including what the taxpayers are incurring, maybe $20 million in fees? Then count both sides of the Pao case against Kleiner at $15 million? That’s a total of roughly $40 million in legal fees…. for the cases we actually have heard about. How much litigation is that if you go to a country with a more streamlined legal system? We just finished interviewing a Germany divorce litigator. She told us that fees in a custody lawsuit come from a table published by the court. Each side’s attorney can charge 773.50 euro. That’s $842 per side or $1684 in total to decide a case. So Pao and Fletcher have personally generated as much work for attorneys as 23,753 German couples who fight over custody. Germany has a divorce rate of about 2/1000 and a population of 80 million. That works out to 160,000 divorces per year. If we assume that half of those involve minor children and that a third of the couples with children actually fight over custody. Thus Pao and Fletcher have generated more work for attorneys than the entire divorcing-with-children population of Germany, a country in which it is impossible to get divorced without lawyers and courts (i.e., they don’t have an administrative process as might be used by Danes or Swedes).

[You might ask why it is reasonable to assume that only a third of divorcing German couples with children would have a custody fight. First, the potential cash profit from obtaining custody of a child in Germany is limited to about $6000/year (compare to $72,000/year for the top of the Utah guidelines, for example, or the unlimited amounts available in California, Wisconsin, etc.). The government doesn’t hold out the same financial incentives to fight as most U.S. states. Second, the outcome is pretty easy to predict. The attorney that we interviewed said that she, after practicing for 12 years, has never been involved in a contested custody case in which the father prevailed. Very likely the percentage is smaller, in which case Pao and Fletcher have driven enough legal fees to pay for all of the custody lawsuits in Germany plus a lot more!]

Note that the couple managed to run up all of these legal bills without ever (1) investing money productively for investors, (2) delivering a service to consumers, or (3) designing or engineering a product.

What do readers think? What will be the long-term effect, if any, of this lawsuit? And what happens to Ellen Pao now? Does she (a) pull a Judy Faulkner by starting her own company and getting crazy rich by doing a better job than competitors? (okay, and also getting the federal government to force customers to buy the product; sometimes it is fun to ask “Imagine how much richer and more successful Faulkner would have been if she had been a white man.”), (b) become a reality TV celebrity like Kim Kardashian?, or (c) something else?

Related:

Ellen Pao case shows how the moral landscape in the U.S. has changed

by philg

Part of Ellen Pao’s direct testimony in her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins included that she was having sex with a co-worker whom she knew to be married (Business Insider). Presumably everything in Pao’s “case in chief” is intended to persuade the jury that they should be sympathetic toward her. Thus we can take this as a barometer of how times have changed in the U.S. If we were to go back 50 years, for example, it seems unlikely that a plaintiff seeking sympathy from a jury would have started out “So I was having a multi-month adulterous affair with a married guy at work…” Perhaps a public statement like that would be made on some sort of television investigative news program and the person confessing his or her part in what was then a crime would been shown with a face obscured in shadow but certainly nobody would have expected to be paid $2.2 million in 1965 (equivalent to the $16 million Pao seeks today, adjusting for inflation) after relating a tale of this sort.

Separately, I wonder what the jury will make of Pao’s complaints that “After she filed the lawsuit, Pao said the work environment at Kleiner Perkins became ‘extremely difficult and very uncomfortable. Partners were uncomfortable talking to me… if I went to their office they seemed nervous.'” (arstechnica) Maybe someone could sue General Motors and expect to keep working on the assembly line. The money sought from litigation would be coming out of the shareholders’ pockets, not the personal checking accounts of co-workers. But Kleiner Perkins is a partnership. Pao was essentially suing these people individually and then being surprised that it was hard to work with them after that. (There is some precedent for Pao’s expectation. Unlike some Scandinavian countries that have an administrative process for divorce (98 percent of Swedish divorces happen in this non-adversarial manner), in the U.S. the government encourages one parent to sue the other and then pays workers, such as judges, to express dismay at the resulting lack of cooperation between the litigants. We just finished analyzing some data from all 243 May 2011 divorce lawsuits in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Only about 16 percent of the couples had filed a “joint petition” indicating that they had gone to a mediator rather than one running to the courthouse to sue the other. So 84 percent decided that a good way to embark on the next phase of a multi-decade co-parenting relationship was a lawsuit.)

Finally, after reading the news coverage of this case I am wondering if I myself might have a case against Kleiner Perkins. This New York Times article is typical: “Ms. Pao, who came to Kleiner with the dream of helping direct such a fund, graduated from Princeton with a degree in electrical engineering. She got a law degree from Harvard and worked for Cravath Swaine & Moore for two years doing international deals. She returned to Harvard for a business degree and worked for a variety of tech companies, including BEA Systems and Tellme Networks. Her geek cred is pretty unassailable.” In other words, a person who got an undergrad engineering degree and then never engineered anything has “geek cred” and, implicitly therefore, is entitled to be selected as a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins. What is the basis of the Philip Greenspun v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit then? I have an engineering degree and have actually had jobs doing hands-on software engineering and electrical engineering. So the Greenspun geek cred should be at least as strong as Pao’s. Like Pao I have been inside the Menlo Park offices of Kleiner Perkins (not to have sex with a married employee, but to talk about some of their portfolio companies’ projects and to attempt to hector them into finding a team and building a startup around my “Mobile Phone as Home Computer” idea). As happened to Pao, the Kleiner Perkins partners with whom I spoke failed to recognize my potential to join them as a senior partner. Instead of issuing me $16 million in paychecks they escorted me to the front door and into my rental car.

Related:

What do readers in Silicon Valley make of the Ellen Pao case against Kleiner Perkins?

by philg

Silicon Valley friends: What do you make of the lawsuit by Ellen Pao against Kleiner Perkins? (USA Today) The standard employment discrimination case, to my mind, starts with the principal-agent problem. It is another way for managers to cheat shareholder-owners, the same way that they might by moving the company headquarters to a different suburb in order to shorten their commute. The managers indulge their personal preference for hiring buddies, people that they think will be fun to work with, etc., regardless of the fact that more qualified workers are available at a lower price. But the Kleiner Perkins partners are compensated strictly according to their funds’ performance. (Perhaps still the standard “2 and 20” structure where they get 2 percent of the fund every year just for showing up and then 20 percent of any profits, even if the profits are driven by inflation and the fund underperforms the S&P 500.) So if Pao’s allegations are true, i.e., that she was doing a great job and producing profits, the greedy venture capitalists stand accused of intentionally making themselves poorer simply so that they would not have to look at an additional woman in the office (25 percent of Kleiner Perkins partners are female, according to Wikipedia, but it is unclear what the percentage would be for the entire office). Econ 101 would predict that those partners would have been happy to have a green Martian in the office if he/she were making money for them.

I haven’t set foot inside Kleiner Perkins for about a decade so I don’t feel qualified to comment on the likely merits of the case. What do Silicon Valley readers think?

Sidenote: Pao is married to Buddy Fletcher, a former hedge fund manager who was a successful plaintiff against Kidder Peabody, initially alleging race discrimination. Wikipedia says that prior to his marriage he was “in a same-sex relationship with Hobart V. ‘Bo’ Fowlkes Jr. for over 10 years” so presumably his lawyers had to choose between alleging that Kidder Peabody discriminated against him because of his skin color or his sexual orientation (at the time).

Related:

Elizabeth Holmes as seen by those who knew her best

by philg

Letters sent to the judge (public because they were officially filed in the case) reveal a more positive side of Elizabeth Holmes, now sentenced to serve 11 years in Federal prison (but maybe Joe Biden will pardon her?). But the letters also reveal a lot about their authors and show that Elizabeth Holmes’s capacity for self-delusion might not be unique.

From the father of her children:

Liz and I met at a friend’s Fleet Week charity event in the fall of 2017. …

When our dog Balto had been carried away by a mountain lion from our front porch Liz had faith that he could still be alive. She searched for 16 hours in brambles, and poison oak to find him. It was only once she saw his lifeless body that she could come to realize that he was gone. It crushed her.

Her selflessness knows no bounds. … So much of what has been written about Liz is untrue.

Her nightmare of being raped at Stanford was replaced by the nightmare of 12 monstrous years with Sunny which was then replaced by the nightmare of losing her life’s work and the vilification to follow. It’s been a long road of hardship for her.

Many people will make arguments that you should have leniency to ensure she can help others, to ensure she can invent great things or lift up a woman facing the unimaginable reality that she has been raped, and incarceration will limit her capacity to do those things.

From her dad:

Church was a very important part of our life together. Even that became an adventure. The priest at Holy Trinity in Washington DC conducted a children’s Mass with a little blue puppet known as Mr. Blue. We learned a lot from Mr. Blue.

We only learned of the true nature of Sunny Balwani’s abuse after she finally left him in 2016. … For us as a family, one painful lesson is how critical it is for rape and abuse victims, as well as the families of the victims, to understand how vulnerable they are to abuse and control, how that plays out over time and how to psychologically respond to that. … Elizabeth’s relationship with Mr. Balwani was not one of conspiracy as the media contended. The relationship was one of fear, control, and submission.

Personal wealth has not been a motivator for Elizabeth in her life.

From a pilot and military drone pioneer:

(For the record, I agree with Mr. Blue! It is the investors in Theranos who should be imprisoned, not the young Stanford dropout whom the investors believed was more capable than the file cabinets full of chemistry PhDs at Philips, Siemens, Roche, et al.)

From Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey:

I knew Ms. Holmes for about six years before charges were brought against her. We first met at a public policy conference hosted by the late Senator John McCain, bonding at a dinner when we discovered we were both vegan – there was nothing to eat, and we shared a small bag of almonds. … she was not only sincere about her interests but a person who would indeed dedicate herself to making positive contributions in the world beyond her company. … I believe that Ms. Holmes has within her a sincere desire to help others, to be of meaningful service, and possesses the capacity to redeem herself.

From Timothy Draper, bigshot venture capitalist (partner more famous due to various encounters with Silicon Valley females, all of whom were having sex with a slate of other guys (when do these folks have time to work?)):

I am a venture capitalist and have been one for over 35 years. I have seen a wide variety of companies in a wide variety of industries. Some succeed and some fail. We backed Tesla, when it was just an idea on paper, agreed to an investment in Skype when it was an entirely different business than the one they ended up with, backed Baidu when no other US investor was even looking at China. When we backed Theranos, we knew it was a long shot. Elizabeth, at 19 came to us and said, “We will change health care as we know it.” She told me how passionate she was about the need for change, and said she would be making the sacrifice of dropping out of Stanford to create the business.

Now we have a horrifying situation. A potentially great entrepreneur with extraordinary vision is being condemned by society for taking that enormous risk, sacrificing everything and failing, by not properly communicating her side of the story to the public.

Elizabeth has a lot of brilliance in her. She will continue to be a positive contributor to society. Her vision for healthcare was only partially portrayed in her efforts at Theranos, and her ideas could save millions of lives over the course of the next few decades. Restraining her would be a travesty. People have asked me if I would back her again. My answer: Not as a CEO, but as an entrepreneur and Chief Science Officer, absolutely!

Who agrees with me that this Draper guy is the one who should be imprisoned? A college dropout as Chief Science Officer? “Vision” as a substitute for achievement?

Jessica Ewing, a former product manager at Google, reminds us that it is women who are the real victims:

And when I saw Elizabeth do that, I questioned my own life. What was I doing with my time, why couldn’t I do something at a larger scale that helped more people? Elizabeth inspired me to start my own company, Literati, which helps kids find books and become stronger readers. We all need heroes that look like us.

(Speaking for myself, it would be a challenge to regard anyone who looked like me as a hero.)

Speaking as a woman who has raised $60M in venture capital, I can confirm it is not easy. It is not easy for anyone, but I feel it’s worth noting that approximately 3% of venture capital goes to women CEOs.

$60 million in capital for a kids’ book club service?!? The home page shows that they send out Women Who Dared, a book that is available for free in our kids’ book club service, a.k.a. The Palm Beach County Public Library. How are the investors ever going to get a return from this when the competition is funded by an infinite river of property taxes?

Note the contempt by this elite feminist for “the masses”:

I’m not sure what actual purpose decades in prison would serve Elizabeth. She is not a threat to society and does not require further rehabilitation. She has already lost her net worth, has been mocked, ridiculed, and has seen her genuine effort to achieve her soul’s highest purpose turned into home entertainment for the masses. In short, I believe my friend has suffered enough for her sins, and putting her away would effectively do nothing but discourage more women from starting businesses…

(The lowest risk and highest return business for a young woman to start in California involves meeting with venture capitalists, but no pitch deck is required. See Litigious Minds Think Alike: Divorce litigators react to the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit for a calculation of the child support profits available by formula under California law.)

Jimmy Carter’s Director of the CDC weighs in. Just as today’s CDC figured out that cloth masks and bandanas were effective PPE against an aerosol virus, such that vulnerable people could feel free to leave their COVID-safe homes, yesterday’s CDC figured out that the best place to look for scientific knowledge is not among those who actually studied science, e.g., by going to grad school in science and then working as a post-doc:

I was impressed by her scientific knowledge… Ms. Holmes has scientific gifts …

He ultimately joined what he refers to as Theranos’s “Board”. I’m not sure if this was a medical advisory board or the corporate board. Either way, I think that he is more deserving of prison than Holmes.

More on the subject of why women have to lead differently, stretching the truth as necessary:

A couple of letters down, Andrew Goldberg agrees that “It’s incredibly difficult to be a startup founder, let alone a female startup founder.” How does Andrew know? He/she/ze/they was originally Angelina Goldberg and switched to a male-sounding name in order to escape prejudice?

A woman who knew Holmes as a Stanford undergraduate writes “my own experiences had led me to believe that the justice system favored men” (94 percent of Californians collecting child support, i.e., the victors of the winner-take-all family court system in that state, identify as women in Census data (source)). She reminds us of who the real criminal in U.S. society is: “we have seen our democracy nearly overthrown”.

It is almost impossible for a woman to get ahead, writes Genta H. Holmes, Bill Clinton’s U.S. Ambassador to Australia:

She contradicts my theory that the real villains of the story are the professional investors. In fact, it is “social media” that we should blame:

Scanning through the 281 pages of letters, the overall portrait is of a deluded person and the authors of the letters show that delusion is an all too common human trait. Even after the exposure of Theranos in Bad Blood, the letter authors haven’t processed that the person with no scientific or engineering training was not and is not on track to make a scientific/engineering difference to the 8 billion humans who infest what used to be a great planet.

Retail investors weren’t harmed by the Theranos fraud. I’m not sure that patients were harmed by the Theranos fraud, other than being worried for a few days in between a Theranos test and an accurate blood test. I guess the 11-year sentence has to be understood also in the context of Holmes’s refusal to plead guilty. The whole criminal justice system is set up with long sentences for those who insist on rolling the dice at trial, thus forcing the government to work. The idea is that the accused will plead guilty and receive what used to be the standard sentence for someone who had been convicted at trial. Holmes will thus serve 3 years for what she did at Theranos and 8 years for trying and failing to pin all of the blame on Sunny Balwani, the old guy with $40+ million with whom she was having sex.

Related:

Who followed the Elizabeth Holmes trial?

by philg

Who followed the Elizabeth Holmes trial closely? “The Elizabeth Holmes Verdict: Theranos Founder Is Guilty on Four of 11 Charges in Fraud Trial” (WSJ, which is the newspaper primarily responsible for bringing down the company):

At the 15-week trial, Ms. Holmes testified in her own defense, showing regret for missteps and saying she never intended to mislead anyone. She accused her former boyfriend and deputy at Theranos of abusing her, allegations he has denied.

She was found guilty on three of the nine fraud counts and one of two conspiracy counts. She was acquitted on four counts related to defrauding patients—one charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three charges of wire fraud.

The verdict doesn’t make sense to me on its face. If the patients weren’t defrauded with false test results how could the investors have been defrauded? But I didn’t follow the trial, so probably the jury knows a lot that I don’t.

If it were up to me, I would imprison the investors for stupidity in thinking that a young American college dropout knew more about blood testing than the file cabinets full of Ph.D. chemists at Philips, Siemens, and F. Hoffmann-La Roche. I would have been reluctant to find Holmes guilty of anything or sentence this new mom to any prison time.

The man whom Holmes has accused of raping her daily, Ramesh Balwani, goes to trial next. Let’s see if readers, via the comments, can predict the ratio of prison sentence between these two defendants. I am going to guess that the immigrant/accused rapist receives a sentence that is 2X as long as whatever Holmes suffers. This is partly based on “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases” (University of Michigan Law and Economics Research Paper, 2018), which says, all else being equal, a person whom the jury identifies as a “man” will be sentenced to 1.6X the prison time that a person whom the jury identifies as a “woman” receives. I moved the needle from 1.6X to 2X because Mr. Balwani is an immigrant and I think both the jury and the judge will be angry that someone emigrated to the U.S. to become a criminal.

(If Mr. Balwani enters into a plea bargain, the above prediction should be revised to 1X.)

Related:

When is having sex with the boss a good idea? (Melinda and MacKenzie)

by philg

We are informed that sex between a high-income senior worker at a company and a lower-income junior worker is bad. Yet MacKenzie Scott, then a secretary (“administrative assistant”) at D.E. Shaw, turned sex with Jeff Bezos, a vice-president at the firm, into a multi-$billion fortune. And recently we’ve learned that Melinda Gates, who had sex with the founder/CEO at her employer (Microsoft), will soon join the ranks of strong independent female billionaires. Nobody is saying that it was a mistake for these women to have sex with their respective bosses. Nor is anyone criticizing the bosses for having sex with subordinates and then paying them $billions.

(What if the boss is already married and only “high income” rather than rich? Sex with the boss can still be far more lucrative than continuing to work, depending on the state (see Real World Divorce for each state’s child support formula and this calculation of how much better Ellen Pao would have done by having sex with her boss compared to suing Kleiner Perkins).)

How are people supposed to distinguish between bad-sex-at-the-office and good-sex-at-the-office?

An immigrant friend has been writing about Melinda Gates pulling the ripcord. A sampling:

[14-year-old] read Bill Gates’ divorce tweet and reacted: I so hate it how Americans always describe these things in this annoying sugary way: “we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple” or “we’re no longer a perfect match.” A Russian woman would have said directly: “He got boring” or “He is crazy, I don’t want to deal with him anymore” or “he is running out of money” or “screw him, I am out of here.” In fact, I don’t think any European would talk like Americans do. They wouldn’t probably even say anything because who cares?

I am anticipating a firehose of stories: “Melinda Gates is the real founder of Microsoft, while Bill with the rest of the white men took all the credit”, “Melinda breaks the next layer of the glass ceiling in philanthropy”, “The rising tide of female billionaires: here is how divorce can empower you too”.

From a U.S.-born friend:

So I heard Bill Gates is having a massive parasite removed. The surgical process should cost about 65 billion dollars.

The actual complaint for divorce (“petition” in Washington State) filed by Melinda Gates:

Related:

Reddit stuffs the gender critical feminists into the Memory Hole

by philg

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical :

archive.org shows that, as June 26, the discussion group had 64,400 members:

As advertised, they are hostile to an Ask Me About My Pronouns T-Shirt.

Pride Gender Inclusive Adult Pronouns Graphic T-Shirt - White - image 1 of 1

Feminism is the movement to liberate women from patriarchy. We stand up for the rights of women to control our own bodies as individuals and to control women-only spaces as a class.

Women are adult human females. We do not believe that men can become women by ‘feeling’ like women. We do not condone the erasure of females and female-only spaces, the silencing of critical thinking, the denial of biological reality and of sex-based oppression. We oppose the ‘cotton ceiling’ and the pressure on lesbians to have sex with men. We resist efforts to limit women’s reproductive autonomy. We condemn the men who exploit and abuse women in prostitution and pornography.

“Women do not decide at some point in adulthood that they would like other people to understand them to be women, because being a woman is not an ‘identity.’ Women’s experience does not resemble that of men who adopt the ‘gender identity’ of being female or being women in any respect. The idea of ‘gender identity’ disappears biology and all the experiences that those with female biology have of being reared in a caste system based on sex.” – Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts

Reddit has deleted nearly seven years of content by this community. I asked a friend who considers herself a TERF whether this forum was, in fact, hate-filled. Her answer:

No, the mods were exacting about following the rules. Couldn’t call people trannies, etc. Purely political decision. They still left all the porn subreddits up so it clearly wasn’t about anything other than clamping down on terfs.

The archive.org server grabbed the front page of the forum, but not the actual content. So those of us who were not participants in the community can never know whether they were haters or not. Some of the older threads do seem to be available. Samples:

Transgenderism does seem to be winning the war, if indeed there was anyone other than a few terfs to fight against. Walking into a Target recently, for example, the very first display for all shoppers is of LGBTQIA+-themed products:

(the gender critical feminists might not be pleased to learn that a trans woman is more “authentic” than a cisgender woman!)

Near the pharmacy, Johnson & Johnson talks about its “championing” of all matters LGBTQIA (but not “plus”!) and offers rainbow-wrapped Listerine, sunscreen, etc.:

Companies usually like to avoid actual political controversy. Why lose nearly half your customers by saying “We at GreedCo prefer Candidate X”? There are some dramatic differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, for example, but how many Fortune 500 companies have endorsed either one? The only time that a company would be willing to alienate customers is on an issue where there are hardly any people who strongly oppose the position being taken. From this, therefore, it seems reasonable to infer that, at least since 2011 when Johnson & Johnson decided it was safe to come out of the closet, there is no significant opposition to LGBTQIA advocacy.

I wonder if this sanitizing of the Internet by Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, et al. will actually work against those who advocate for the causes that are now held sacred and to which no opposition can be voiced. Once all of the terfs are silenced, for example, and there is no record that they ever existed because old content is in a memory hole, wouldn’t that cause people to ask an advocate for transgenderism “Who exactly are you fighting against?”

Related:

The hospital 25 years from now: a tower of ICU

by philg

At a celebration of a health care informatics lab’s first 25 years, Boston’s most experienced hospital leaders came in to speculate on what an American hospital would look like in 25 years. The experts agreed that more procedures would be doable on an outpatient basis. So our hospitals would essentially empty out? No! They’ll be filled with people who are incredibly sick and whose cases are extremely complex: “A Tower of ICU.”

David Nathan, who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1955 and eventually became Physician-in-Chief of Children’s and then President of Dana Farber, pointed out that it would be difficult to train young people in this kind of environment where there are no simple cases. (He also shed light on the economics: “You cannot make money doing research. And teaching is hopeless.”) John Halamka, a doc-turned-CIO, quipped “Don’t teach the Krebs cycle; teach the revenue cycle.” Sandra Fenwick, the CEO of Children’s (a $2.3 billion/year enterprise), said that hospitals like hers would see “far more complex disease,” with the simpler problems being handled at home, by primary care providers, and community hospitals.

What about information technology? Electronic health records haven’t resulted in the savings, efficiencies, or improvements that were promised by the vendors and the Obama Administration. In the rare cases when a data exchange is accomplished from one hospital to another, the treating physician is “flooded with useless data”. There is no practical way, currently, to pull just the relevant material from another institution.

Yet computers will be critical to treatment, the speakers believed. “The doctor will Google you now,” was the joke circa 2000, but machine learning will soon transform this into “The Google will doctor you now.” Diagnostic procedures are producing more data than a human can inspect. “The average number of CT slices used to be 30,” one physician said. “Now it is 300. A radiologist cannot look at 300 slices in 10 minutes.” (It was noted that Vinod Khosla predicts that 80 percent of doctors will be obsolete; perhaps we should listen to him since he was smart enough to leave Kleiner Perkins before Ellen Pao could have sex with him.)

How about payments? Atul Butte envisioned a realtime link from Epic to the payor and every order will be screened instantaneously as currently happens with credit card transactions. The doctor will order an expensive test and the insurer will immediately come back with “no.”

(You might ask how good a job hospitals and doctors are doing today. A Harvard-trained pediatrician at the conference said “Only once I had kids did I realize that all of the advice I gave to parents during my pediatrics training was bad advice.”)

What about the disastrous patchwork of private insurance, government largesse, uninsured and undocumented migrants, and self-pay surviving another 25 years? The panelists thought that we would enter the Glorious Age of Single-Payer rather than continue as an international rogue outlier. Germany was cited as a success story for single-payer (Wikipedia says that Germany has a “universal multi-payer health care system”).

Systems-oriented doctors have always loved aviation. See The Checklist Manifesto, for example. The docs at this meeting enjoyed the phrase “Care Traffic Controller” for the physician of the future, coordinating all kinds of services to benefit a patient. None of them seemed to have reflected on the fact that the primary function of an Air Traffic Controller is to separate planes, not bring anyone together.