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If the tests are cheap and can be performed as frequently as necessary, I could imagine a system where a test isn't considered positive until a statistically significant number of them have come back positive. If there is an abundance of data, there is no longer a need to extrapolate from a single data point.

I had a blood test once where my electrolytes were somewhat out of whack. I wasn't called in for an expensive kidney scan or consultation with a urologist. I was called in for another blood test. The second test came back fine. I was likely dehydrated the day of the first test.

The availability of cheaper, more frequent testing means that the response to a single positive signal does not have to be as extreme. Thankfully my doctors office offers walk-in blood testing or my experience could've been a much more anxiety-inducing hassle.

I never really understand this argument. People make it about increasing the frequency of blood tests too. Or MRIs. Doctors are afraid of finding "incidentalomas", but why can't we instead just change the way we think about the data?

More data does not inherently mean more scares. If anything, it means that a false positive here and there will be less likely to upend someone's life, because doctors will be more focused on identifying trends, and will be more able to simply ignore outliers.

And I'll happily fill out a form to tell you any information I feel is relevant to my purchase. If you want to covertly fingerprint and track me, I'll gladly take my business elsewhere.

It's nice of google to respect the choice to effectively become undiscoverable to anyone searching for your product.

Who do you think convinced the politicians to make it happen? Lobbyists? (Ha.) It came out of labor movements! Strikes and walkouts! In 1867 workers shut down the entire Chicago economy for a week! (Congress then passed an 8-hour law in 1868, but that was just one step along the way.)

See my edit above. Looking at a country's overall death rates is not how you should compare virulence.

It doesn't need to be a global/political conspiracy for people to be more sensitive to a large amount of people dying after almost 20 years of significantly lower death rates.

Edit: Also, looking at overall deaths per million is not anything like comparing actual mortality rates of those infected. The baseline mortality in 1918 was already way higher and the pandemic amplified that, despite actually being less deadly than COVID-19 at an individual level. So I'd argue that the response to this pandemic was more than merited and was appropriate to the nature of the virus itself. It was not just another "asian flu."

What makes you think it has ended?

Except this exact same argument, nearly verbatim, was one of the alt-right anti-Obama talking points! It's a solid criticism too - don't get me wrong.

But it's a single argument, reused over and over, to do more than simply criticize the actions of an administration - rather, to construct a grand conspiracy about how modern Democrats and progressives are secretly authoritarians. Nothing Greenwald writes these days goes beyond this tired trope. (Which, I suppose, would make perfect sense to anyone who has similarly bought into this conspiracy.)

A third possibility: Greenwald has bought heavily into the same cultural zeitgeist that is extremely prevalent on this forum: that "SJWs" and progressives will somehow destroy the fabric of neoliberalism. He's not warning us of something only he can see, so much as he's repurposing the same, tired alt-right arguments for an audience that doesn't necessarily identify as alt-right.

Amazon is not banning Republicans. Amazon is dropping a risky client after having more than reasonable doubts about that client's ability to operate in good faith. Republican views are not being censored. The fact that this site happens to cater to a lot of "Republicans" who feel marginalized by public discourse is merely a very telling correlation between a political view and a tendency towards violent tendencies and conspiratorial beliefs.

Something can be taxpayer-funded without being an arm of the government. Government grants and public funding sources can be divorced enough from what they fund that you can get things like NPR and PBS, which I don't view as authoritarian, certainly not in the way that state-sponsored media outlets tend to push the current party agendas.

There's a reason that phishing is the go-to infosec attack vector. It's because we still blame users for being tricked into doing things they shouldn't, rather than taking the time to build systems that prevent such vectors from working.

I'm happy that extensions no longer have such wide-reaching access to the system. Whatever we lost in power-user tinkerability isn't worth the high personal cost that the malicious extensions would have on the lives of unsuspecting users.