Once upon a time a science journalist would have some background in science, a business journalist would have some background (or at least education) in business, a technology journalist etc. Those days are long gone, in the modern era having done any honest work for a living is seen as a 'resume stain' (the same is true of corporate executives).

They'll either buy the politicians or bribe the judges to ensure that any tort exposure is minimized if they do nothing.

FTFY

My dog knows more than most politicians.

Medical professionals in the rest of the advanced world don't seem to be "enslaved", and in most places don't have to hire a service to jump through all the hoops of their insurance industry. Our insurance cartels (yes, they really are cartels in pretty much every aspect) control every aspect of healthcare and its regulation in the US, our grotesquely inflated costs and pitiful outcomes are the direct, and desired, result of their market manipulations. You'll have a hard time convincing me that "valuing independence and individualism" leads to the US having a higher infant mortality rate than much of the Third World, or that "free and unfettered access" to healthcare entails slavery, not even in Cuba.

That's why you'll see the Untied States having one of the highest fatality rates in the world once again. That and of course our dismal failure of our for-profit healthcare system.

While I certainly agree with your opinion of The Atlantic and its staff, the COViD19 pandemic demonstrated to the world that when a serious bio-terror attack finally happens the chaotic uncoordinated approach followed by the US is pretty much the worse path to follow. If you think that the response here was "draconian" then you really are not going to like what it's going to take when a pandemic with even a 5% hospitalization rate hits.

IIRC when Voyager was launched the tech to communicate that far didn't even exist.

FISA was passed in 1978, and was the worst thing to come out of the Carter Administration (which was actually pretty good about most other aspects of privacy so it's doubtful he envisioned the way it's subsequently metastasized.)

Wouldn't expiration make reform unnecessary?

Considering all the data that gets hoovered up, it could be in part a blackmail thing as well.

Somehow Section 702 has been twisted to expand 'surveillance of foreign persons' to an utterly absurd degree. First it was just suspicious foreigners, then all foreigners, then foreigners and whoever they talked to. Then the person who was talked to could be surveilled after the contact was concluded. Eventually it was expanded to Six Degrees of contact. For example:

You call the hotel in Phuket to ensure there will be a bottle of champagne when you arrive. FISA can now surveil you, your parents, the friend of your parents, their children, the children's friends, and the parents of the friends.

That's my stalker troll, I think most of its post are a fairly poorly programmed bot of some type. I've seen it crap out a dozen or more after a single post of mine, most of them the same tired copy/pasta, but many of them seem to be human-written as well. From its manner of writing I suspect it's the same one that follows rsilvergun and used to follow creimer. Seems a pretty pitiful life.

My uncle says that a Geiger counter is sometimes used to verify that Fiestaware really is antique and not a counterfeit.

Actually the asbestos companies learned that their product caused mesothelioma in the 1930s, about the same time the tobacco companies realized that their product caused lung cancer, emphysema, and mouth cancers. The executives of both companies spent the next 40 years covering up the facts and condemning millions of their customers to long, drawn out, painful deaths.

I was a little surprised when I just looked at his Wikipedia entry, he's actually worked in the same industry for quite some time. That's rather rare in the modern C-suites, I remember other car company execs who came from airlines, financial corporations, I think there was a lawyer in there somewhere, pretty much anywhere since the supposed role of CEO now is to provide "leadership" (you should read their own publications, it's appalling). Still, he is definitely a modern executive, since he never seems to have actually done any real work for a living, just management. The days of executives coming up through the ranks and knowing what the line employees actually do to keep the company afloat are long gone. Today a stint working an assembly line or waiting table is seen as a 'resume stain' among the management class and generally concealed.

In the game of Executive Musical Chairs, where C-suite residents change companies and industries as often as they change underwear, the goal is to just not be sitting in the corner office when the music stops and let the results of your shitty short-term decisions be someone else's problem. He doesn't actually care about the long-term, only that his employer doesn't crater until after he's cashed out and gone off to loot some other company.