H.P. Hovercraft posted:

President Beep posted:

a friend of mine once took one of those “which author are you most like” quizzes and posted the results to facebook on a lark. the two authors were stephen kind and david foster wallace. i made a similar joke about lobsters, and it just sucked the virtual air out of the room.

Jonny 290 posted:

Normally, i'd laugh at you and say "gently caress you i'm in Denver forever", but you happen to pull this poo poo while I'm in a transitional period so I don't wanna say no, I wanna come visit. But I can't visit there, because I know i'd move there right away.. Besides, I've already been through too much poo poo this morning over this city to move away from this dumb poo poo.

Jonny 290 posted:

NO

eschaton posted:

and they have so much TOUQUE

Shifty Pony posted:

seattle is very nice and the cascades are loving gorgeous, but i've visited a few times and pretty much concluded that yeah i could live there but i'd rather just visit regularly.

i know it is a cliche but seriously the rain and the lack of sun would just drive me nuts.

seattle:



Denver:



also holy poo poo is it expensive

Jonny 290 posted:

just strap shaggar to the front of your car, when you hear the 108 dB screeching, a bicycle is ahead

quote:

It was November 2014, and I was working on a feature story about a buzzed-about blood-testing company in Silicon Valley that promised to “disrupt” the lab industry with new technology. The company, Theranos, claimed its revolutionary finger-prick test would be a cheap and less painful way to screen for hundreds of diseases with just a few drops of blood.

Old-fashioned venous blood draws, where the patient watches as vial after vial of blood is collected, would quickly become obsolete, Theranos promised.

The interviews took a month to arrange. The public relations officer wanted to know, did I “plan on sourcing other people?” and implied that CEO Elizabeth Holmes might not be available to me if I did talk to other sources. I rejected that condition, but finally the company’s public relations contacts agreed to let me visit its site at the Walgreens in Palo Alto, California — one of the first such setups in the country — followed by a sit-down interview with Holmes at her office.

I arrived at the Walgreens on the morning of November 4 and was met by two Theranos press representatives who would supervise my visit. I took out my recording equipment (the story was for NPR) and began approaching patients who were waiting in line to check in for testing.

Some didn’t want to talk to a reporter, but others were open and gracious, sharing with me the reasons they had decided to give Theranos a try. One couple offered to let me come with them into the small testing room, set up to feel like a relaxing spa.

A pattern quickly emerged — none of the patients I talked to that day could get a finger-prick test, as promised. Instead, they received a regular venous blood draw, the same as I’d received on numerous occasions at my doctor’s office, though the phlebotomist said the needle was slightly smaller.

I asked the phlebotomist: Was this standard? Did most patients get the venous draw? She told me they “did more finger sticks than venous draws,” but couldn’t give me a number. One of the PR people approached me — I was not authorized to talk to the phlebotomist, he said — and asked me to erase the audio I had recorded. I declined.

I asked him: Why were none of the patients getting a finger prick? Just bad luck and timing, he said. This wasn’t how it usually was, he promised. And wouldn’t I just rather get a finger prick myself and report on the experience, as so many other journalists had agreed to do?

I said no. I needed an actual patient to make a compelling radio story. So I continued waiting for other patients.

Soon, the two Theranos representatives approached me again — with a third on the phone, who said she wanted to talk to me. They were getting complaints about my asking patients questions, she told me. The main Theranos office had gotten several calls from people who had been in the Walgreens that morning, she claimed, complaining that a reporter was bothering them.

I hadn’t pressured anyone. The patients I’d interviewed had all been perfectly friendly and willing. I’ve also been a health reporter for 10 years and never have I been told I was pushing patients to do something that made them uncomfortable.

Something seemed very wrong.

Soon, one of the Theranos representatives approached me again, clearly nervous. They appeared worried. Unless I found a patient getting a finger prick, he said, they would likely have to cancel my interview with Holmes.

It was clearly a threat to try to steer me away from where the story was taking me: Theranos seemed to be doing very few, if any, of its revolutionary tests on actual patients. I asked the press representatives to get the other one on the phone again; I didn’t like being threatened, and I wanted to hash it out with her.

Meanwhile, I sat down with another couple, who had driven 45 minutes to experience the vaunted finger prick. Would they too be steered to a traditional blood test?

As I was interviewing them — but before we knew which test they could get — a sudden and jolting BEEP BEEP BEEP reverberated through the drugstore. “Fire alarm!” someone called out, and we evacuated to the street.

I’d never been in a drugstore when the fire alarm went off. There was no smoke and no fire.

Jonny 290 posted:

just strap shaggar to the front of your car, when you hear the 108 dB screeching, a bicycle is ahead

Farmdizzle posted:

seattle is also further north than all of maine so we get less sunshine in the winter than most of the rest of the country. it sucks when it starts getting dark at like 4:30. summer rules here though. it's mostly loving gorgeous and almost never too hot

but yeah the cost of living and traffic both suck balls

Jonny 290 posted:

i got stoned wrong thred

FMguru posted:

theranos was amazing

tl;dr in 2014 a reporter goes to walgreens to write a story about this amazing new fingerprick blood draw, doesnt actually see anyone getting the fingerprick blood draw, and the when they keep asking why all the blood draws are standard draw, the fire alarm goes off and everyone runs away

Shifty Pony posted:

lol this is the portrait goodkind insists on using in his cover flap author bio:

FMguru posted:

theranos was amazing

tl;dr in 2014 a reporter goes to walgreens to write a story about this amazing new fingerprick blood draw, doesnt actually see anyone getting the fingerprick blood draw, and the when they keep asking why all the blood draws are standard draw, the fire alarm goes off and everyone runs away

ate all the Oreos posted:

that's some goofy sitcom poo poo

ate all the Oreos posted:

that is the look of a man who can't wait to show you his katana skills

FMguru posted:

theranos was amazing

tl;dr in 2014 a reporter goes to walgreens to write a story about this amazing new fingerprick blood draw, doesnt actually see anyone getting the fingerprick blood draw, and the when they keep asking why all the blood draws are standard draw, the fire alarm goes off and everyone runs away

SENSUAL DAD KISS posted:

Ahahaha holy poo poo

FMguru posted:

theranos was amazing

tl;dr in 2014 a reporter goes to walgreens to write a story about this amazing new fingerprick blood draw, doesnt actually see anyone getting the fingerprick blood draw, and the when they keep asking why all the blood draws are standard draw, the fire alarm goes off and everyone runs away

FMguru posted:

theranos was amazing

FMguru posted:

theranos was amazing

tl;dr in 2014 a reporter goes to walgreens to write a story about this amazing new fingerprick blood draw, doesnt actually see anyone getting the fingerprick blood draw, and the when they keep asking why all the blood draws are standard draw, the fire alarm goes off and everyone runs away

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

is that supposed to be the same kind of fingerprick like what they do to test for iron count before donating blood? because last couple of times i've had small blood draws done for testing by trained phlebotomists, the needle they used was less painful than the goddamn prick.

Shifty Pony posted:

lol this is the portrait goodkind insists on using in his cover flap author bio:

FMguru posted:

i never understood what the big (alleged) win was for theranos technology. being able to do a bunch of tests on a single drop of blood instead of three test tubes worth is...nice, i guess? a slight improvement in the quality of life for people who get blood drawn regularly? it doesnt seem like it actually improves medical outcomes at all, the way a new drug or vaccine or surgical procedure or treatment would. it just makes part of a regular diagnostic procedure somewhat less unpleasant.

its something along the lines of a new coating that makes pills easier to swallow. not exactly the sort of genius breakthrough that would make someone a billionaire and put their face on every magazine cover

FMguru posted:

i never understood what the big (alleged) win was for theranos technology. being able to do a bunch of tests on a single drop of blood instead of three test tubes worth is...nice, i guess? a slight improvement in the quality of life for people who get blood drawn regularly? it doesnt seem like it actually improves medical outcomes at all, the way a new drug or vaccine or surgical procedure or treatment would. it just makes part of a regular diagnostic procedure somewhat less unpleasant.

its something along the lines of a new coating that makes pills easier to swallow. not exactly the sort of genius breakthrough that would make someone a billionaire and put their face on every magazine cover

FMguru posted:

i never understood what the big (alleged) win was for theranos technology. being able to do a bunch of tests on a single drop of blood instead of three test tubes worth is...nice, i guess?

ate all the Oreos posted:

my aunt managed the chem lab in a hospital until she retired and thought theranos was an impossibly crazy idea from the beginning lol

the lab is actually pretty automated already though, they put the tubes on this machine that then scans their code and puts em' on a conveyor, and the conveyor routes them to different other machines based on what test needs to be done. i was visiting when they were first setting it up so that was fun to see in its test mode

lancemantis posted:

was it a labview/national instruments rube goldberg or is there actually enough of a market that its real equipment?