han-tyumi

Yes, yes, the good ol' "liberal, non-violent, and honorable" CIA of the 50s and 60s. So different from the one we have now.

Is this the CIA that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran after he nationalized their oil industry? Or is it the one that installed a dictatorship in Guatemala to stop land reform and tend to the whims of the United Fruit Company?

Maybe it's the organization that murdered the first elected leader of Congo, to keep cheap copper, colbat and uranium flowing? Certainly it can't be the agency that illegally spied on American citizens who fought for Civil Rights or protested against the Vietnam War.

So much for soft power.

I would not make such a harsh judgment just because electric shocks are involved.

During my master’s I took a class at the Media Lab called Human 2.0 on prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons, and human augmentation. Unsurprisingly, all student final projects involved some form of human experimentation.

To run our final project’s experiments, we had to complete a few online modules on bioethics, first aid, and safe practices, as well as submit a proposal to the IRB. From what I saw across projects, the board applied appropriate scrutiny and made helpful contributions.

It classified our experiment as low risk, and a lot of care went into participant selection and adherence to the approved protocol, but they did not require any health professional to be present during the sessions.

Other projects, however, did require such support and even had some MIT Medical involvement.

Incidentally, my project also involved administering electrical shocks to subjects, albeit very mild ones (tACS to induce directed visual artifacts).

Playbook: anti-regulation entities capture government, strip down regulators, and when disaster ensues, point to regulators' inability to prevent or address issues as an argument to further scale down the watchdog's power.

Reddit is a little different as their intention was to populate the platform with content in the early days [1], not to mislead investors with fake metrics.

Mind you that Huffman and Ohanian did this manually, while founders today can use LLMs to fill their platforms with bots that can interact "naturally" with users. I wonder how many are already doing it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME

To give you some context, my home country is Brazil. Last time I used my private health insurance was in July 2021 and the wait time to see a top specialist was one week. However, I have been there again (without health insurance) and was able to get a same week appointment at the end of March this year, which cost $200.

Right now I live in Cambridge, MA. The wait time to see a dermatologist was 3 months when I needed one. My health plan is also Blue Cross, hired through MIT Medical.

Is it really?

I come from a country with universal healthcare, and while public healthcare suffers from the same wait times we see in the US, private healthcare is on an entirely different league. For instance, with a good private health insurance plan, on a whim, without a referral, one could get an appointment at a decent specialist, and possibly the specialist of their choice within the week. My experience in the US is that you wait 3 months to see any specialist at all.