This is how the great depression started. Everybody learned you can make a lot of fast money with fraud. Until the whole house of cards collapsed.

Does asking for downpayments on vehicles you will never ship count?

If so then you you have one more example now.

Agreed. Even the non-governmental example in the article - Nikola Corporation - was uncovered as a fraud more than six years ago. And the governmental examples as described aren't even fraud, they're corruption.

Even in this day and age of somewhat exorbitant company valuations, it's infinitely more difficult to replicate the kind of fraud of Nikola or Theranos. If only because of those companies setting a precedent for abject fraudulence and making basic due diligence that much more of a necessity/expectation. A company like Instinct wouldn't manage to get away with its current valuation if their technology wasn't front-and-center for everyone to see and use.

Time will tell - for all we know there's currently a large company more fraudulent than either of those, and we'll only find out in the future - but trying to paint it as the norm isn't based in any recent real-world examples.

It’s a movie review so they didn’t actually go in deep on the fraud.

FTX, Terra-Luna, Nikola (as mentioned), Builder.ai, Frank, Kalder, Joonko

O and have you heard about the AI labs and how they calculate ARR? lol.

Statistically significant though? I do not know.

A good argument could be made that precisely because it happens in government and those people aren’t booted out post-haste, then society is apparently a lot more OK with this style of behavior than before.

I think Nixon’s watergate is a good comparison. It wasn’t nothing, but how many larger scams and scandals has Trump and family been through with apparent electoral acceptance?

And if it is so. How big a reaction would you get from the population if another Theranos happened? I don’t think people would care, really. Shrug and move on.

I wasn't wow-ed by this piece either. There does seem to be something there, though: this thing where someone commits some serious fraud yet gives Trump a slice and then they're pardoned, along with the precipitous drop in prosecuting just these kinds of cases.

This is the point though. Trump's approval ratings prove his base does not give a single flying fuck about his grift and corruption. They admire it.

Now you've got a third of the country who are just totally ok with fraud if its perpetrated by someone on their team.

Nearly all tech billionaires are on their team.

Yeah —- the fake it till you make it, ghost-in-the-machine strategy has these as extreme outcomes. AI companies whose devices are in fact human-level intelligent because they are being remote-managed by teleworkers, etc.

Delve (YC W24) was a great example of this going badly wrong really recently, but honestly I think the cavalcade of startups using a fork of someone else's open source wrapper around someone else's cloud AI are not far off.

After all, if you have no real secret sauce at all because your supplier's cloud LLM is basically capable of everything you're claiming as a feature with just the thinnest amount of tool-calling, should anyone be investing in you at all, even just to acquihire?

This "succeed at all costs" culture isn't a Valley thing, it's an American thing. Look at our President.

> So I think they have an indirect responsibility of promoting this culture.

Interesting comparison to compare the "standard" software fraudulence of fudging your activity numbers to Theranos' fraud.

I think when it comes down to it, it's a false equivalence - one is a temporary measure done to overcome an inherently short-term critical mass limitation, the second is an indefinite fraud trying to paint an impossible company as real.

"Fake it till you make it" is a legitimate and almost necessary strategy for an early-stage startup, I wouldn't conflate it with Theranos' fraud.

> Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.

That's not the biggest problem by far. They started out catering to literal pedos, look into the r/jailbait controversy.

https://archive.ph/BdlXw

It works fine without JS.