AFAIK IANAL dual citizenships aren't legal(or maybe not legally recognized would be more correct?) in the US to begin with.

The US position on dual citizenships is generally to ignore them. So as far as the US government was concerned these kids would be solely American. They wouldn't get in trouble or anything.

while our son was born in Canada and I signed to forms to allow him to get a US passport. In hindsight I wish I had never done this.

If you were married at the time of your son's birth, then he was a US citizen regardless of what forms you did or did not fill out. There was nothing you could do about it. So don't feel too badly.

The dollar is not an especially strong currency.

While I agree with the gist of your posting, the dollar is in fact the strongest major currency in the world at the moment, with the possible exception of the Swiss franc.

US consular assistance is pretty worthless. They do the bare minimum and charge up the ass for everything else.

As a dual US-EU citizen, I never travel on my US passport or deal with the US overseas when I can help it, because it's a waste of time.

Also, as a EU citizen, I have the benefit of recourse to consular services from any other EU nation if mine isn't available.

The US isn't the only country that evacuates its citizens, but as far as I know it's the only one that will send you a bill afterwards. I'd much rather be evacuated by the French, for example, who have a far stronger record in overseas citizen protection.

In fact, the USA is the only significant country that taxes based on citizenship rather than residence.

Pretty much no other country taxes its citizens when they are living outside that country in the long term. Only the USA does.

For this reason American dual citizens and expats are at a serious disadvantage in the international job and investment market.

You can rant all you like, but the US can easily seize your assets by putting pressure on the foreign bank where you have them stored.

Any bank of any size will have international operations in the US which are much more valuable to them than you are.

US government threatens bank, bank caves. Every time.

So, basically the Fujifilm X100 series then?

sPh

XT-1 if you really need interchangeable lenses.

- - - - - and living like a king in Patagonia. - - - - -

And a good argument that would have been. If the FBI had tracked him down at a resort in Patagonia with no Internet connection that is, instead of a library in California.

- - - - - and the only way to prevent that is for Dave to kill Fred, - - - - -

As with most glibertarian arguments, there is a hidden clause that does a lot of heavy lifting.

sPh

I remember reading a thread on netnews back around 1983 where an 'old-timer' observed, "This discussion has reached the FIJA stage. Time to log off".

Good to see some things never change.

sPh

- - - - - Yes. You're talking about a singular FEATURE. Yes, the feature helped revolutionize the market. But the market existed BEFORE the feature. - - - - -

Funny how the Newton gets left off the canonical list of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand then.

sPh

- - - - - That's not creating a new business out of nothing, nor is it being particularly visionary. It's a natural improvement on an existing market segment. - - - - -

One has to be careful about trusting accounts written later, whether written by the winners or the losers. But multiple sources have reported that the response to the introductory demo of the iPhone at the highest levels of both Nokia and Blackberry was "that's impossible - they must be faking it". Nokia and Ericsson at least did a reality reset within a year and tried to get back in the game, but Blackberry only realized the iPhone was for real 18 months ago - say early 2014, 7 years after the iPhone was introduced.

I'd call that creating, or recreating, a new segment.

sPh

What is that "better" program? Probably the professional version of TaxAct. Hard to think that there is any software developer more into the details of the tax code than the ones that build the software that does 10s of millions of returns, namely TurboTax and TaxAct.

Thanks for that reference - it might come in useful. I had no idea anyone was still making systems in the classic the "sewing machine" form!

sPh

the Chinese do not use QWERTY, either.

Uh, yes they do. Most people type in pinyin on QWERTY keyboards.

As an aside, I just had to correct myself after misspelling QWERTY.