is of course, that you do not own your existence. So if you "threaten" suicide, you may be forced to continue living.

I predict that there will be very little overall objection to this premise in the discussion that follows, as the present culture is rapidly converging toward the complete realization of the nightmare "the personal is the political" in which every aspect of everyone's life is going to be everyone else's business. With the individual a bit player.

Exist, dammit, or we'll put you in prison!

" FATCA is the best thing to happen to US taxpayers abroad in"

Can you clarify what exactly you are trying to say here?

Think about your assumptions!

Someone who is elderly or ill may find what seems to you like just moderately time consuming infrequent burden, to be instead an insurmountable, overwhelmingly complex ordeal.

It's more than just tax paperwork. There are asset declaration forms to send to Treasury Dept. Failure to file these can result in prison sentences.

The situation is MUCH more complex than just having to do a 1040 like everyone else in the US. Furthermore, there are regulations the US gov. is enacting which affect how international wire transfers are handled by banks, which is forced upon any bank that has a branch in the US. These regs. can cause you to automatically loose "witholding" taxes on transfered amounts, and then have to go through an ordeal to get the money back if it isn't justified by your overall tax picture.

Finally, the US .gov will happily pass new laws that create new reporting obligations that they will do very little to warn people about. Ie., don't expect a highway billboard to warn you of new reporting obligations. So unless you are proactive about determining whether the legal landscape has changed, you may find yourself out of compliance with some new rules that almost no one knows about, where failure to comply entails possible prison sentences.

They are not nice people creating these rules. Conduct yourself under the US global empire accordingly, if you wish to stay out of trouble!

Note that some of these rules get sold to the public by capitalizing on the resentment toward the "1%." But then what actually happens is that it's the normal people who are most at risk of getting penalized since we don't have tax attorneys constantly monitoring the legal landscape, unlike rich people. So once again, if you cheer on the .gov when it claims it's going to "help" you by giving the shaft to "the rich," unless you are an IDIOT you should know damn well that if you go along with it you are being played for a fool, just as it's always been.

Here's Karl Denninger's take on this. I don't agree or disagree. I just want to see what the reaction is: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-...

Incorrect.

Nearly all power transfer in the electrical grid is via completely passive transformers. There is no "one way" capability to AC transformers. If you are delivering power then it is being distributed proportionally to all other users, minus link losses. The only exception may be HVDC systems, in which power transfer may be unidirectional or bidirectional depending on the design.