From the perspective of one American, that sounds insane to me. Patients absolutely must share the responsibility for receiving proper care. Holding staff responsible for a patient who directly lies about their medical history is incredibly cruel to the staff and terribly inefficient because then it would logically mean staff must test for any and all potentially relevant conditions, genetic markers, chemicals, antibodies, bacterial cultures, etc. for every patient. That would be very costly to the system. If patients expect that society has an obligation to take care of them, doesn't it seem logical that the patient has a reciprocal obligation to society to be forthright in their medical history so as to free up as many of society's resources as possible for the next, potentially sicker, patient?

I've been through voir dire twice and in both cases (criminal assault) not only did the attorneys get their allotted strikes, but toward the end of the questioning process the judge also had notes and called certain members of the pool to the bench and further questioned them about their opinions, dismissing some of them to go home. The judge is already there as a representative of the State, so naturally his dismissals will also tend to enforce jury orthodoxy. No libertarian who believes in nullification is EVER getting on a jury unless he perjures himself.

What a complete logic fail. Your semantic processing is so myopic and shallow that you end up believing something exactly the opposite of reality. Here's your homework assignment: describe what a "socialized government" consists of; include especially its component parts such as the agents which enact its rules, maintain its structure, and execute its policies. Then tell me that you "assume the worst in people".

Or do you perhaps have citizenship in some heretofore unknown computer-operated Algorithm Nation?
Even if so, please describe the agents which write and implement your nation's algorithms.

Soylent green is people.

WHOOSH!! ...went the boilerplate/obligatory Slashdot humor.

Aw man, it's an obligatory Slashdot joke. Nothing personal.You know, it's just like when you and another PC-thermal-dissipation guru are at the batting cages practicing for your baseball team's upcoming game, and you make snarky deprecating comments about each other's swing. Or when you and a buddy are down at your boxing gym sparring with each other and trash talking each other. Or whatever other sports you and your many friends play. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

Sounds like a very well-thought out setup that you've fine-tuned over many hours of work. I bet it really impresses the girlfriends you bring over.

You're being too literal. The song is the psychological theme of the entire series -- the ship's crew are all in their own way voluntary rebels or involuntary outcasts who for one reason or another are only at home IN "the sky", that is, trawling through space visiting world after world with no solid ground, only the ship as "home" and only each other as "family/friend". They are ramblers and frontiersmen. The song isn't actually claiming that it is physically impossible to prevent them from seeing or entering "the sky". It's their creed; both a statement of defiance and a statement of purpose -- no matter what else each one of them may have lost, they are determined to preserve their freedom.

"The sky" isn't just the physical sky. The lyric is a metaphor.

Irrelevant, once his first couple calls to establish contact are accessed by the very people he is wanting to report on, he is arrested and jailed without legal representation under various "homeland security" protections before he can actually meet with the press to release any information.

You mean, the members of the press who Snowden, of all people, knew very well were being surveilled directly or indirectly by the people he sought to blow the whistle on?

Of the many horrible decisions made by President Obushma in the last 10 years, I think his most enduring political legacy might just be his excellent job of prosecuting/persecuting whistleblowers and stifling public review of how the governmental sausage-grinder works. By the end of the second decade of the 21st century, people will have been molded into an attitude of reflexive submission to their Overseers.

Exactly. The government goes out of its way to grant legal immunity to telecom/info companies for leaking private customer information to the government, because the government decrees that it has an unlimited "Need To Know" clearance on all its citizens actions, but of course when an individual leaks information about what the government is privately and illegally doing, the government decrees that the citizens have zero "Need to Know" on what their government is doing.

The liability/criminality arrows increasingly flow one way these days. Within 5-10 years any remaining vestiges of privacy will have been neatly sewn up. Just like the cliche that "the Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it", well, the government's Big Data agencies view privacy as damage, and legislate around it.

In the future dystopia dominated by a few giant megalopolies, the company making your enhanced prostheses will also own the entertainment companies. Your RetinEyes implants will come hardwired with company-approved DRM which will automatically deactivate recording functions when presented with the subliminal QR command codes that flash every 10 seconds on the movie screen.

Thousands of DOD-contractor engineers over the past 60 years would disagree with you. Highly-credentialed scientists have been responsible for millions of deaths in the modern world.

This seems like dangerous advice if you care about the psychological well-being of those you leave behind. Look no further than the Schiavo case. If you have all your conceivably anticipated situations spelled out in legally sound documentation, then the context of your death becomes about your loved ones learning to cope with the reality that you are going to die -- which is a reality we all will face anyway. If you just leave it up to one person to do it, you create a situation where disagreements among loved ones might possibly destroy relationships or at least cause severe emotional pain as people have to deal with the natural tendency to contextualize your death as "my brother-in-law didn't love my sister enough to keep her alive and hope for a miracle".

I didn't say 40 years ago. I said three months ago. Obviously the systems which propel the world today are not the same systems which propelled human society in its early stages.

You didn't FIFM. You simply spoke again of trees when I addressed the forest. The whole is greater than merely the sum of its parts.

That's exactly backwards from the question I might ask. The real question is, "Would the leaders of 30 years ago make the same decisions as the ones today?" The answer is, "Probably so, because they would be working within the bounds of the same system". It's all social engineering and choice architecture.

Which of course is beside the point. Millions of Millions of cells in your body now are not the same cells as three months ago. Yet "you" as a system persist. The genius of the political philosophers and statesmen of the 1700s and early 1800s was that they recognized government is a system which has certain inherent tendencies that lead to bad ends, and therefore we must build in limits to those tendencies. 200 years later this country is populated and run by their naive Eloi descendents, whose political philosophy no longer recognizes that Government is a system, and your policies should focus on the systemic effects first. Just because the individual workers in the belly of Leviathan change periodically doesn't mean we should ignore the Emergent Properties of governmental systems. Hitler made history, but History also made Hitler. Create a government and give it power, and individuals will arise to exercise that power. But modern people have a far less sophisticated political philosophy in which the government is perceived as little more than the lever in a Skinner box, and so all we do is vote for the outcomes we want to occur when we press that lever. There is no regard for what disastrous systemic tendencies we are enabling by insisting that government provide these outcomes.

Our collective intelligence vector now stands around saying, "But it's got what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!"