Your world, examined plainly.
Credit card companies tried pushing their product on college students by offering free pizza and t-shirts.
Congress passed protections in 2009 in response.
Now, the card industry is targeting kids before they're even out of high school.
A building boom is underway across America. But it's not for housing or highways.
It's for data centers and most link their rise to the current AI systems most people use.
What's actually being built is for a different AI system entirely.
Science used to be built on observations.
A change in the definition of what light is led to the rise of uncertainty in science.
Albert Einstein said this ignored the real questions and then spent the rest of his life trying to find the answer.
The US classifies thousands of new secrets every day with many not actually secret.
A court case used to justify national security exemptions from judicial review was found decades later to not actually involve national security information.
And if the Department of Defense gets their wish, they'll classify everything else it produces as out of reach of any review by the public or the courts.
The Freedom of Information Act was meant to make government transparent and abuses open to be corrected.
And for a brief period, it did just that.
But now the Federal Government routinely violates the law. And it even made its own interpretations about it secret from the public.
Government secrets and sensitive data is being lost to hackers and criminals every year.
Many in the press view government sloppiness as the problem.
But the real cause is the line that private corporations crossed in government contracts shortly after 9/11. And it's only getting worse.
More and more people are lamenting the loss of the old internet.
Some even claim the new internet that took its place is dead.
If most people despise what the internet has become, then what caused the change? And more importantly, what are we losing?
Many of the laws Congress passes are unpopular.
Some are so reviled that no Congressmember will link their name to them. And therefore, there's no record of how they got into the bill.
And it all has to do with something that looks more like a hostage situation than legislative deliberation.
Potassium bromate has been shown to cause tumors.
It's banned in Europe. Yet, America allows it to be part of the food Americans eat.
But potassium bromate is just one among many harmful things found in American grocery stores. And some states have passed laws to make talking about food safety legally risky.
Scientists push the bounds of human knowledge.
They contribute significantly to economic growth.
America hasn't made enough of them for decades. And is now losing them more than ever before.
The Treasury Department says there's no more demand for the penny.
Most people think the penny is officially gone.
But the law says otherwise.