Bernie Sanders says Apple's $2.5 billion home loan program a distraction from hundreds of billions in tax avoidance that created California housing crisis.

Anyway, loans will not help people find homes unless they have good prospects to pay back the loans. With wages not rising, and business conspiring to make sure they don't, not many Americans could take advantage of these loans.

Those that do would mainly buy existing housing. So Apple's investment in selling mortgages does not address the shortage very much.

Privacy advocates sound alarm on Google's acquisition of FitBit.

They are missing the point main, I am sad to say. The basic injustice of the FitBit is that it collects personal data. We need to put an end to that practice of collecting data.

Concentration of business is also a big problem, and we need to put that into reverse. It is better if FitBit is not acquired by any other company. But stopping the takeover by Google won't fix the FitBit's surveillance problem.

In an bizarre and ironic reversal, Los Angeles demands Uber provide data about the movements of its cars and scooters, and Uber refuses to hand it over, claiming to protect customers' privacy.

The irony is that Uber is entirely right about this narrow issue — but the issue only exists because of Uber's abusive tracking practices. Los Angeles should not be allowed to know who goes where, and neither should Uber.

The FBI has caught a would-be terrorist who, in his fantasies, was going to bomb a synagogue.

To place a real bomb there would have been a hate crime; to thwart a real plan to do so would be laudable. But we have to wonder whether the supposed criminal would ever have made a real plan, or even formulated the desire, without encouragement from people serving the FBI. Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn't, but chances are we will never find out.

The FBI's agents are not required to save recordings of the conversations in which they press someone to agree to a plan to commit a crime. They only need to save a recording of a subsequent conversation where the subject affirms having that intention. By not recording the prior conversations, they can entrap someone while making sure there is no way to prove they did so.

In order for the FBI to protect us from real terrorist plots and not from nasty vague wishes, we must make it stop converting those vague wishes into pretend plans.

The saboteur in chief has started pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement.

Because that treaty does not have binding requirements, this is no more than a gesture. The real substance of refusal to defend the climate will not begin in 2020. On the contrary, the US hardly even started to defend the Earth's climate.