Zitat des Tages von Adam Cohen:
When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met.
Lawsuits prod companies to make their products safer.
Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.
Corporations have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from government, many of which clash with the public interest.
It's tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.
If the Supreme Court rules that rent control is an unconstitutional taking of property, it would put all sorts of zoning rules in danger.
Law graduates have always ended up in business, government, journalism and other fields. Law schools could do more to build these subjects into their coursework.
Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal.
A key reason that elections are run so badly is that in most states, political partisans are in charge.
Set in the advertising world of the 1960s, 'Mad Men' is stunning to look at - a Camelot-era parade of smartly dressed professionals lounging around on midcentury modern furniture.
If a company knows it may have to pay a large amount of money if it poses an unreasonable threat to others, it will have a strong incentive to act better.
The Senate should refuse to confirm nominees who do not take Congressional power seriously.
As long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to keep eligible people from voting.
In the James Cameron blockbuster 'Avatar,' 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na'Vi, Pandora's 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.
There is no actual need to tighten voter ID rules: there have been extraordinarily few instances of people committing fraud at the polls.
Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right - and the national government should protect it.
The Supreme Court's most conservative Justices have presented themselves as great respecters of precedent and opponents of 'judicial activism' - of judges using the Constitution to strike down laws passed by the elected branches of government. If they are true to those principles, they should uphold rent control.
The blogosphere makes it possible to have a sprawling national conversation about the hard times - often among people who would never find each other offline.
DMs are a lot like email - and should have the same privacy protections as a mailed letter.
Mississippi's loose campaign finance laws allow lawyers and companies to contribute heavily to the judges they appear before. That is terrible for justice, since the courts are teeming with perfectly legal conflicts of interest.
In zombie horror, the juxtaposition of the calm world of the living and the menace of the undead inspires terror. In zombie comedy, like 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,' it is played for laughs.
The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.
Defending Congressional authority should not be a partisan issue.
A federal Voters' Bill of Rights could press the states to put non-partisan managers in charge of elections.
The United States may be a religious nation. But it is also a nation with a strong commitment to separation of church and state.
With increased awareness should come greater caution about how confessions are used at trial - and a greater willingness to overturn convictions when it becomes clear that a confession was untrue.
The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.
If we are going to have self-driving cars, the technical specifications should be quite precise.
The press should not get special privileges - if they drive recklessly or put people in danger, they should be subject to every reckless driving and endangerment law on the books - but they should also not be singled out for special punishment.
The public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.
For people worried about the Great Recession and the uncertainty of what is coming next, the characters of 'Mad Men' are good company.
Regency romances end in marriage; zombie stories end in the zombies being vanquished. 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' delivers both.
Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to see it.
When tulip mania dies down, all that remains are pretty flowers. When bubbles burst, nothing is left but soapy residue. But the Internet revolution, for all its speculative excesses, really is changing the world.
An election in which people have to wait 10 hours to vote, or in which black voters wait in the rain for hours, while white voters zip through polling places, is unworthy of the world's leading democracy.
Being unemployed - or working at minimum wage - is rough in the best of circumstances.
