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and I'll argue your 'jobs' point right back at you, against you.

there is NO retirement here. none. you will work until you physically die. or even longer ;)

there is no social safety net. not really. get sick or lose your job and you're homeless.

as you get older, jobs are harder to find. its not that way in other countries, at least in non-3rd world countries, but we go nuts about youth, but really hate our old folks. even middle age gets you rejected from many (most?) of the so-called hot jobs and hot companies.

you will have the least amount of time off, the most pressure to work, work, work! when you need to take a rest, they will fire you and hire a new fresh person. ie, they use and wear-out their workers, here.

jobs looked great to me up until I entered mid 30's and then things really changed. this is what happens when a culture favors youth to an extreme, like we do, here.

yes, there are a lot of top name companies here and many of their HQ's are here. but that does not mean that a job working for that same big-name co is not just as good (or better) overseas.

please don't give people the impression that work-life here is so great. its not. we kill our own people by overworking them and paying just enough to keep them there, but rarely do we employ people long-term anymore (at least in the bay area).

a steady job with workers rights overseas would be far preferable to the rat-race jobs in the US.

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.

you talk about china? of course people in china want to leave. and, lets be honest, they have NO IDEA what the hell the US is really about. even when they move here, they stay together and don't mix (its true even though you may not like this fact) and after 5 years here, they will still not really know what the US is truly about. its a romantic view of what the marketing wants you to believe. it used to be true decades ago, but now, I would not suggest coming here.

now, lets talk europe. if you are in europe, you are already in a modern free society. why ruin that and come to the US?

seriously. the US has nothing over europe if you are already in europe and not used to living in the US. europe has jobs, good lifestyle, freedom, etc. I'm not seeing a good reason to give that up and move here.

I'm in my 50's and spent all my life in the US. I have traveled abroad (unlike most americans) and I do know what I'm talking about. I am not planning on leaving, but I can still see that for newcomers, it would not be a great place and where you are is probably already better than what you will FIND here once you get here.

the storybook is a lie. it was great marketing, but its still a lie. don't come here expecting the land of opportunity. unless you are already rich, white, christian and well connected.

no, I agree with jeremiah.

we have failed. we are a failure. some may not see it, but we will implode sooner or later and then, all hell will break loose.

there is NO plan for sustainability, here. we keep spending on wars and hostility and yet we let 'home repairs' go undone. for decades, now, we have done this.

we are the country of 'dumbing down'; we have the worst healthcare system in the world; we let people go homeless if they lose their jobs and can't find a new one quickly enough; we have crime rates that are astronomical; we have half of the country thinking the world is a few thousand years old and that half also denies science whenver possible.

we are no shining example of what a good country is, anymore. our politics are a mess, our spies are ruining WORLD WIDE security for everyone and we are the main cause of this kind of escalation.

don't even get me started on the work environment here. very little maternity leave, no paternity leave, a recent push for no sick time or vacation time (they lump it all together) and we also have the shortest amount of vacation time compared to all the modern countries. our corporations work the workers to death and then dispose of them, IF you can even GET a job in the US (h1b, yes! born here, sorry.)

there are many good things about the US, don't get me wrong. but if you are not already 'stuck' here, I would certainly NOT entertain coming here, moving here, doing business here and certainly not becoming a citizen here!

(of course, I expect to be added to some watchlist given my comments here. and that's yet another reason to avoid the US. you can't trust the US anymore. we don't even follow our own laws uniformly. if you are rich, you have all you want; if you are not rich, then a 2nd set of laws will apply to you).

don't. just don't. we used to be great. maybe we will again in the future, but right now, its a disaster here.

what's to be gained by having US citizenship, when you both are living in europe?

I am born and raised (and living) in the US, but if I was not born here or already a citizen, I'm not sure I see any real benefit to being part of the US. my view has changed a lot over the last 20 years (world events and all), and so I'm not sure that being 'prisoner of uncle sam' (our version of POMMY, lol) yields a positive benefit anymore.

enjoy your life over there. in fact, I would not even travel here if you don't have to.

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

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.

I solved that issue since birth by not getting a driver's license.

I think I might be one of the people who are getting sick from using VR. It's also one reason why I don't drive.
What happens is that I have nausea symptoms if I am in a moving car and look at my cellphone screen, for example. I can't look at my cellphone or tablet for more than 30 seconds before I start to get sick and feel like throwing up.
My doctor says it's because I am stationary (my body doesn't move), I'm also looking at a stationary object (e.g. cellphone screen) but the environment I'm in moves with high speed.
Strangely enough, I don't get sick while travelling by train or plane, only car and bus. I played and watched movies on my tablet for 8 hours straight while in a moving train and haven't had any symptoms.

They are taking a calculated risk knowing that very few GPL lawsuits actually went to court. They know it takes money to fight a legal battle and hope the opposing side doesn't have it, or will run out of it before reaching a final verdict. And finally, from the fact that they've been at this since 2012 - they probably think that it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.

I'm pretty sure that the next time I fly across int'l borders, if I even bring any electronic devices with me (I'll probably mail them, in fact) - the ones I would bring would be dummy devices. ones I could afford to lose and ones with 'happy happy, joy joy' bullshit on it.

you want to see my login? ok. here you go. that's A login. and as far as you know, its 'my' login. can I go now? thanks. have a nice day. ossifer.

(sheesh. freedom to travel securely with your private papers is a long-gone idea. thank god we can still encrypt our devices and mail them physically or just transfer files around online).

I see lots of business travelers taking their laptops with them on flights. does no one seem to be annoyed that you are put into a tough situation if you have corporate info on there, your login is NOT supposed to EVER be given out to anyone and yet the country you are entrying is forcing you to compromise your company's security. I wonder if you worked for a big enough company, if they would go to bat for you, if you got stuck at a border and refused to let them break into your corp laptop?

The only way you can have losses that exceed your net-worth is if someone has given you a huge amount of money that they really shouldn't. Typically, it means the banks gave these guys credit beyond even the most loose definition of sanity.

More and more I'm thinking that the fantasy worlds we live in when we play roleplaying or computer games are much closer to reality than the fantasy world of the financial industry.

Yeah, I wonder if these two could be in any way related...

MS is a design and UI fiasco and always has been. The only reason few people realize how unusable the crap is, is that we are so used to it that we don't notice anymore - until the next major update, or if you don't use it daily and then suddenly sit in front of it and wonder who the fuck came up with this stupidity.

And everyone who knows anything at all about mobile devices and usability knows that nobody on the planet wants a windows desktop experience on their smartphone. People want a smartphone experience on their smartphone, what's so difficult to understand about that?

Oh, speaking of that: People also don't want a mobile experience on their desktop. They want a desktop experience on their desktop, that's not so difficult, either.

There was a period in the early 00's when one of the my company's manager would periodically walk through my office door and the first words out of his mouth was "I just read about this patent..." and I'd stop him right there.

"This is going to be one of those things where the extent of the filer's 'invention' was to take something people were doing with LORAN fifty years ago, cross out 'LORAN' and write in 'GPS', isn't it?"

"Well," he'd begin.

"I don't want to hear about it. It's guaranteed to be invalid on the basis of obviousness, but if they get lucky in court and I've actually read or even heard about that specific patent they'll be able to take us to the cleaners."

You'd be amazed at some of the technology patents the patent office grants. Stuff anyone who'd been a practicing engineer for more than a few months would laugh his ass off at if he were patent examiner.