I think you should be more careful when throwing accusations of fatanticism around.

I think you failed to comprehend the points I was making, however, as long as you are happy with the idea that a corporation which controlled a government would be less powerful than the government it controlled, I will accept your argument. I think two people can disagree civily over who's more powerful, the horse or the rider, and both can even be correct according to the value they place on the various types of power.

I'll let your fanatical "NewsCorp topples America" hypothesis stand on its own merits.

It's fantastical, not fanatical. It would be fanatical if I were proposing that NewCorp should or would do it. You didn't ask that though, you asked if they could do it, and with enough money it's certainly possible. And any company were to try it, I wouldn't bet on them being able to control the country after they toppled the government. A much more likely scenario is NewsCorp providing favourable media coverage to try and influence elections so that the government works for them. But, of course, that would never happen.

It helps if you actually show how an argument supports your position rather than just claiming victory empty-handed. You might want to read up on NewsCorp's assets, for starters. I don't think you give corporations enough credit for the soft power that they wield.

You should also look at world-wide comparisons. Medicare and other public healthcare programs in the US account for more dollars per capita spent than all or almost all universal health-care systems in other countries, and deliver lousy results comparatively.

Canada--with our nominally single-tier, public, single-payer health care system--has longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and better outcomes by any number of other measures. Critics (sometimes justly) focus on input measures like wait-times, but at the end of the day what matters is that we are getting health care and getting good outcomes. We aren't even the best in the world--just middling-decent as these things go.

So the real question is not "why can't government launch a website" but "why can't the US Federal government, alone amongst all governments in all developed nations, provide a reasonable level of basic, universal health care at costs comparable to those in every other developed nation on Earth?"

This isn't a "government" problem. It is a uniquely American problem, and the solution does not lie in any general ideological fix, but in the detailed structure of the specifically American, particularly broken, Federal government.

Which government? NewsCorp is a powerful force in at least Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. I sincerely doubt any of those governments can actually shut down all of NewsCorp on their own. Maybe if all three ganged up on them, they could destroy the entirety of NewsCorp.

I'm sure NewsCorp could actually afford to hire a (small) mercenary army to commit a military coup in Washington. Heck, their reporters already have access to all of the top chain of command in the United States, they could, in theory, assassinate the President and Vice-president nearly simulatenously if they really, really wanted to. So, I'm going to give the point to NewsCorp. The American government can severely inconvenience NewsCorp on their own, but NewsCorp could actually topple the American government.

The part that makes him a leftist. Obama's definitely seems like a right of center politician.

Dual citizenship can be an issue of course - that's the main reason I haven't considered naturalization - but to me that's really one of those things where reasonable people can disagree. There's perfectly good, valid argument both for and against dual nationality, and it really comes down to how you perceive citizenship as an institution. Japan is far from the only country that normally disallows it, by the way (there's a few rare exceptions where Japan allows it).

I don't think people can ever become stateless here, as the law expressly forbids that to happen. Children can have dual citizenship; if either of their parents are Japanese they automatically gain Japanese citizenship, even if they also gain another citizenship at the same time. They only have to choose and renounce one or the other when they become adults. But if they're born on Japanese soil and would become stateless (normally because their parents are) they also gain Japanese citizenship.

Have you tried to settle permanently in Japan and get the citizenship? It is almost impossible unless you have Japanese roots.

No, it's quite easy. I have permanent residency, and plenty of people do become Japanese citizens, without any "roots" to Japan other than what you develop by living here.

You might want to check this blog/information site about naturalization in Japan, written by a former US citizen whow is now Japanese: http://www.turning-japanese.info/ Specifically this post about naturalizing without being ethnically or racially japanese: http://www.turning-japanese.info/2013/03/does-one-get-japanese-citizenship-by.html

I'm a permanent resident in Japan. Getting a work visa was quite easy - much easier than what I've heard about others' experience getting one in the US - and permanent residence was pretty much painless as well. At every stage, the immigration officials were friendly and genuinely helpful.

Of course, each and every autonomous car is recording every second of the closest fifty meters at all times. You so much as hint at breaking the speed limit or breaking any other traffic rule, and a dozen cars will have you recorded with your bike license plate, position, time and speed down to a tenth of a kilometer.

Driving manually, whether a car or bike, is going to become very, very dull.

This is not a lifestyle I want to live. I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.

It is a lifestyle I want*, and I suspect quite a lot of other people also want. And as the cost of a manual car go up; as you are stuck driving the same pace as all the strictly law-abiding autonomous cars; and as you stare out in traffic instead of surfing the web or throwing birds at pigs like the people in the cars around you, that lifestyle will appeal to more and more people who may not like it at first.

And soon you'll have a new generation of "drivers" that grew up with autonomous cars and used them when they were still too young to drive. Most of them will never see the point in spending a bunch of money and time learning how to drive manually. Once autonomous cars are out there, it will be only a matter of time until "driving" is an expensive, somewhat eccentric hobby you do mostly on a driving track.

* I already live that lifestyle in a way, as I don't have or need a car at all where I live. I only keep my license for use as an ID.

Not when the insurance companies artificially jack up the rates for human driven cars.

If humans are the cause of more accidents there's nothing artificial about it.

More realistically, I expect most people a generation from now will find the higher vehicle cost to be easily offset by not having to get a manual driving license, freeing up driving time, lower fuel consumption and using the car even when disabled, too young or otherwise not able to drive manually for whatever reason.

My local government granted Verizon an exception to the common carrier rules that allowed them a monopoly on ISP provision on fiber rather than requiring the free choice of ISP as with DSL in the same location.

Yes. Government is often bad when it comes to regulating telcos.

>Why not make physical connectivity a municipal service?

What part of 'corrupt government officials' don't you understand?

Bullshit.

The routers and fiber cost no more nor less if they are being used or not used.

Usage based billing is just another attempt to kill Netflix.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more mention of standards here, although I've had variable success with standards myself, and good success with open non-standard systems.

Good chioces: Qt, VTK, OpenGL has been extremely long-lived.

Mediocre choices: XML, wx (I moved to wx from Qt when TrollTech went insane over licensing, but have been slowly migrating back in recent years as wx support has decayed on platforms I'm interested in.)

Bad choices: XSLT, VRML

I still use XSLT for some stuff, but VRML was a mistake. Apparently you should stay away from four-letter-acronyms.

Summary: although I prefer standards over non-standards, open vs closed is the fundamental divider between good vs bad bets. Not everything open will survive, but nothing closed will.