Kansas City, Missouri, has made use of city buses gratis.

This not only helps the poor, it can also reduce car traffic and car pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions.

The "second wave" of studies on algorithmic accountability is taking up questions about which jobs algorithms should be used to do.

I think the crucial underlying question about whether to job algorithmically is whether to collect the data needed to do it algorithmically.

Collecting data about people in a database is inherently threatening and dangerous — more so for some data than for others. If the algorithm requires dangerous data collection, that is a reason not to use the algorithm.

It is a mistake to assume that the danger affects mainly "marginalized communities". Many dissidents come from marginalized communities, because they campaign for justice for those communities. Whistleblowers, by contrast, usually have to be insiders in order to come across the secrets they reveal. And we all depend on them, whether our communities are marginalized or not, to give us the opportunity to restrain our countries from crime and oppression.

*I was a drug rep. I know how pharma companies pushed opioids.*

"A good sales rep builds credibility with doctors by using scientific-seeming language to push the product and makes them feel subtly obligated to write more scrips."

The author could pressure a doctor using data about the doctor's prescribing patterns, obtained from data brokers that bought the records from pharmacies. This suggests we should legislate that any given doctor's prescribing patterns are confidential, and punish pharmacies from distributing them to anyone except a specific state agency, which would also treat them as confidential. This would take away one of the sales reps' tools.

Increased competition and lower profit margins — which we need for other reasons — would also reduce the amount of pushing that the companies would do.

A late-model computerized voting machine system screwed up and said that one candidate had received zero votes. A hand recount determined that that candidate had actually won the election.

Has anyone seen more recent news?

John Barnett was a quality manager in the production of Boeing 787s. He found and reported three systematic problems that threatened passengers' safety, and management retaliated against him.

One flaw is that 25% of the oxygen masks don't provide oxygen work when activated. Another flaw can cause fires, years down the line. As for the defective parts that were installed secretly in planes, they could cause various kinds of problems.

He tells his family not to fly on a 787.