whether you call yourself a nerd or a geek, if it's important to you to feel superior to others for arbitrary reasons, you're more accurately described as an asshole

Give them citizenship for now. Once your kids are independent adults, they can make their own decision about whether the tax and draft issues are worth the hassle; promise to help them pay the renunciation fee if they choose that option.

Multiple citizenship is one of those things that's a daily hassle, but could save your kids' lives. Imagine if you were making this decision in 1925! Of course the odds of Belgium falling under totalitarian rule are pretty damn slim (slimmer than the US, probably), but if it ever happens, you don't want to be the one to deny your kids a way to get out.

No. The fact that she set up a home-brew system to avoid the State Department's record keeping in the first place, and the fact she's been stonewalling requests for official mail for years, and is her own gatekeeper on the message she decides State should be allowed to see - combine that with her long history of obfuscation, ethics problems, and working with her husband's supporters to engage in seriously sleazy tactics - the burden is very much on you to explain why you think her private stash has been delivered in whole and intact to State when everything in her history and everything about this entire scenario screams the exact opposite.

In fact, to plow through her "official" mail (you know, the stuff she couldn't be troubled to mirror in her department's archiving system the way that the 2009 regulation required her to do), she used employees of her family's business - and that operation is funded in large part by big contributions from foreign governments and other entities from which she solicited money while she was wandering the world as Secretary of State.

Both Kerry and Clinton were subject to 2009's regulation. But you already know that.

It is hilarious, though, to play back her nagging lectures about other people using private email at all, and to know that, for example, an ambassador from her department was given the axe for using private email.

The fact that you seem to anxious to write off her behavior as completely reasonable says nothing about her, but a whole lot about your very strange world view.

I'm going to to be terribly pedantic here, but GST, like all VATs, does not work like that. It is not an expense (as in it does not effect profit and loss). Like all VATs, GST collected on sales is subtracted from GST spent on purchases, and if the remainder is positive, then you pay that to the government, and if it is negative the government sends you the difference. The point is to make a fairer sales tax, where goods and services are not taxed at multiple points. All these financial operations happen on the balance sheet as changes to assets and liabilities, and have nothing to do with expenses at all.

Actually you can't just turn your passport in. You have to pay hundreds of dollars to formally renounce. And you can only do so if you're already a foreign citizen.

My first year in Iceland, my US return was so complex that most tax attorneys refused to touch it. One offered to do it for over $1000. I ended up doing it myself. Three years later I'm still dealing with the IRS on it. It was as thick as a book.

My subsequent returns have been simpler but are still really annoying.

Seriously, don't do this to your kids. Just don't.

It's not even just taxes. The US is so weird about all sorts of things that can bite you. When I got engaged in Iceland, Iceland wanted a certificate from the US proving that I'm not already married - it's a standard requirement here, and most countries have such a certificate. But not the US! In the US you can get a certificate proving that you are married from the state you got married in, but not a certificate proving that you're not married. The only way around it is to find the one sherrif's office in the country who considers a signed affadavit to be sufficient to wed (all of the others disagree).

I would never dream of cursing my kids with US citizenship. How mean could you be to them? I can't bloody wait to get my Icelandic citizenship so that I can formally renounce my US citizenship.

I thought Apple had already done this. Their cafeteria workers have been employees since the late 90s, give or take, and the folks who sit at the front desk are also employees. I had always assumed the security guards were as well, but apparently not.

(facepalm)

Personally, I don't see that any of these things as compelling practical advantages, given that the kids already have dual Swedish and Belgian (and therefore EU) citizenship. If they were Moldovan and South Sudanese, that'd be a different story. Or if they were citizens of a country from which getting a visa to enter the US might be difficult in the future.

But most importantly I think this is one of those decisions that you just don't make primarily on a cost-benefit basis. It's not like deciding to join Costco or subscribe to Hulu. Citizenship entails responsibilities. If you want your kids to shoulder those responsibilities and feel allegiance to the US then it makes sense to get them that citizenship come hell or high water. But given that they already have two perfectly good citizenships from two advanced western democracies with generally positive international relations worldwide, I don't see much practical advantage in adding a third.

Still, I wouldn't presume to give advice, other than this. The poster needs to examine, very carefully, that feeling he has that maybe his kids should be Americans. The way he expresses it, "sentimental reasons", makes those feelings seem pretty trivial, in which case it hardly matters if they don't become Americans. After all, most other Belgians seem to get along perfectly well without being Americans too. But if this is at all something he suspects he might seriously regret not doing, or if it nags him in ways he can't quite put his finger on, he needs to get to the bottom of that in a way random people on the Internet can't help him with.

Exactly. My being sanctimonious would make you hypocritically self-righteous.

Cameras and license plate readers, and Bluetooth readers, have already automated the data capture of your travels and no longer require you to voluntarily participate by running a state-provided transponder.

You're in a public place, in a publicly licensed vehicle, on a public road, and technology means that data is now a matter of public record. Welcome home, Winston Smith.

You may have noticed I don't care how it got there, only why they are acting now the way they are.

Many companies have this immune system response that if something happens that shouldn't have, they will at the same time punish someone internally, and defend themselves externally claiming everything is proper.

... with some food for thought.

The ending '-eous' or '-ious' is added to a noun to produce an adjective that means producing whatever that noun is. Something that is 'advantageous' produces advantage for example. Something which is ignominious produce ignominy (shame, embarrassment). Something that is piteous arouses pity in the onlooker.

I think you see where I'm going with this. The word the headline writer should have used is 'nauseated', although making users nauseous in the pedantic sense would certainly be a concern for the developers of any product.