John Stossel- Privacy: Who Needs It, Make America California and 5 Other Stossel Clips
American Conservative University
English - April 15, 2021 10:00 - 38 minutes - 25.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 508 ratingsPolitics News Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
John Stossel- Privacy: Who Needs It, Make America California and 5 Other Stossel Clips
Privacy: Who Needs It
Make America California
Woke Colleges vs Testing
Unions Invade Private Property
The Woke Award Shows
One Dose or Two?
We Are ALL Essential with Mike Rowe
Privacy: Who Needs It
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Edward Snowden tries to convince me to worry more about privacy. "They're trying to shape your behavior!" he warns. I rudely say: "Americans by and large don't care, and I mostly don't care. I figure that teenage boy across the street could be picking up the stuff I send. The cork's out of the bottle. What difference does it make?" Snowden has good answers. ---- Don't miss the weekly video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 ---- Google's former CEO once said, creepily: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Snowden points out that we will feel pressured to "constrain our intellectual curiosity, and even frankly, our weirdnesses ... because we could potentially someday be judged on the basis for it." Another scary thing about today’s internet is that big tech companies have the power to manipulate. Facebook even did a study that confirmed they could make users angrier by controlling which posts they saw. "This is controlling human behavior by a private company!" Snowden points out. "For what end? Just to see if they could... the next variants... are not going to be just to see if they could. It is going to be for their advantage. It is going to be to shape laws, it is going to be to shape elections.” More of Snowden's points, and my pushback on whether tech companies are really "monopolies", in the video above.
Make America California
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California is the Biden Administration’s role model for America. What are they thinking? The state loses 170,000 people every year. ---- Don't miss the weekly video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 ---- "People are just emptying out of California!” says Kristin Tate, who reports on why so many abandon the state: "exorbitant tax rates, the high crime rates, the failing public school systems, the exorbitant cost of living.” Despite these failures, the LA Times writes, Make America California Again? That's Biden's plan. Why would the rest of us want California’s problems? Our video above highlights California laws and regulations Biden pushes for, and the California politicians who failed their way into his administration. “If we make America California, we are all going to be paying for it,” concludes Tate.
Woke Colleges vs Testing
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Colleges are ending SAT/ACT tests in the name of diversity, despite research that shows they are good at predicting college success. ---- Don't miss the weekly video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 ---- Some schools now won't even look at applicants' test scores. The reason: richer kids may get tutoring, and some minority groups, on average, don’t score as well. Bob Schaeffer of the advocacy group FairTest compares test-makers to "the tobacco industry." He's winning his war against testing. More than half of colleges in the country are now test-optional. "The test makers themselves admit that the SAT and ACT are inferior predictors of college performance [to grades]," Schaeffer tells me. But here's the data: high school grades predict 33% of college grades, while tests predict 32%. Not very “inferior!” Using both grades and SATs predicts 42% of college success. A University of California report found that this trend holds across all races and income levels: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/424154/... In other words, tests are useful predictors of college success and failure. Yet university administrators didn't follow the faculty report's recommendations. Why? Diversity and political correctness. "It really is about making these campuses look right,” says Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. "...using them to make your college catalog look more colorful... It's about aesthetics. It's not about learning." I ask: "What's wrong with these schools saying we want a more diverse student body?” “How you achieve it is what I take issue with," Riley says. "There's this assumption. We just get these kids in the door. They'll be fine. They'll do okay. No, they won’t! ... they're being set up to fail." To really increase diversity, Riley says, support school choice and charter schools that succeed in preparing disadvantaged kids for college.
Unions Invade Private Property
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“If I didn’t allow them in, I’m the one going to jail!” rants a farmer after a California law allowed dozens of union activists to storm onto his farm. ---- Don't miss the weekly video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 ---- “You don’t know if they’re mad, if they’re going to get violent,” says one employee who was working when the union arrived with flags and bullhorns, “It was a scary situation.” The union wanted the workers to strike. Few were interested. “It is asinine!” says Mike Fahner, the farm’s owner. He points out that unions don’t have the right to access private property without permission in any other industry. “If they came back every day I would have been paralyzed.” Mike and another business are challenging the law in the Supreme Court. But they lost in two lower courts. California officials argue that unions must be allowed to go onto farms because "workers remain isolated from the flow of information characteristic of modern society.” Mike says that’s not true. “Every person has a cell phone in their pocket. [Workers] know how to communicate through Facebook and … Twitter much better than most. “This is trespassing,” he adds, “You should be going to jail for doing this.”
The Woke Award Shows
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Award shows, like the Oscars, are beating themselves up for their history of white supremacy. Future awards will go only to films that meet diversity quotas. "These awards just shouldn't even be seen as legitimate," musician Eric July tells me. "It's supposed to be based on merit. You'd think that's what the awards are for," he adds. ---- Don't miss the weekly video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 ---- "If the work is good, it doesn't matter if it's exclusively black people working on it, exclusively white, Asian, none of that should even matter!" Eric July says. I push back: “Award shows historically haven't given out the same number of awards" to blacks. July replies, "it's a thing, but this battle was already fought and won… we're talking as if there's a Klansman behind every single corner--preventing people from being great!” In fact, Black actors have achieved great success in Hollywood. Samuel L. Jackson is America’s all time highest grossing actor. What's the harm in diversity quotas? Actor Viggo Mortensen points out that they are "exclusionary" and could keep movies like "1917" from winning awards. The new rules are just one example of awards shows going "woke." The video above has more.
One Dose or Two?
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Government's "experts" botched much of the Covid response. Fortunately other experts -- scientists, economists, and web developers, are helping save lives. ---- Don't miss the weekly video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 ---- There have been MANY problems with government's Covid response. Government predictions were way off. State vaccine websites didn't work. Now government holds back vaccine doses, reserving them for 2nd-doses. But they could do more good as first doses. "We have given out more than 20 million second doses," Economics professor Alex Tabarrok points out. "Those could have been first doses.” He helped convince the British government to change to a first-dose-first policy. American experts like Anthony Fauci oppose that, saying they'd need to do long trials to determine if that's okay, and in "the amount of time that it will take ... we will already be in the arena of having enough vaccines to go around anyway." That's the wrong way to think about it, says Tabarrok. "You have to act decisively and you have to act quickly. Bureaucrats are just not used to doing that," he says. "When you have a tiger chasing you in the forest, you don't want to run a randomized controlled trial -- should I run left or should I run right?" England, which took his suggestion, is now beating America in vaccinating the most people. Other non-government experts have stepped in and made things better. One data scientist living with his parents made models that were much better than government's. They became widely used, and government modellers even asked him for advice. One woman became so frustrated by Massachusetts' vaccine website that she built her own, showing people where in the state vaccines were actually available: macovidvaccines.com. Within days, it was getting 400 hits a minute. The video above has more about how a quick change to government experts' vaccine policy could save lives.
We Are ALL Essential with Mike Rowe
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Mike Rowe tells John Stossel that Covid rules had a huge unintended consequence: They crushed work, sapping meaning from many people's lives. ---- Don't miss the weekly video from Stossel TV. Sign up here: https://johnstossel.activehosted.com/f/1 ---- Rowe says that lockdowns and business closures meant to save lives also take lives. Domestic violence is up. So are calls to suicide hotlines. Unemployment kills. A National Bureau for Economic Research study finds that "890,000 additional deaths may result over the next 15 years from actions taken to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus." That's one of many unintended consequence from a "safety first” mindset. Rowe's slogan is "safety THIRD”. If safety were really first, he notes, "knock the speed limit down to 10 miles an hour… make cars out of rubber… make everybody wear a helmet, and let's eliminate left turns!" "The goal of living is not to merely stay alive. Cars are a lot safer in the driveway. Ships are a lot safer when they don't leave Harbor, and people are a lot safer during a pandemic when they sit quietly in their basements, waiting for the all clear, but that that's not why cars, ships and people are on the planet!" The above video has more of Rowe's points, including starting with the arrogance of politicians decreeing which workers are "essential."