Right now, I talk to my friends while playing BlazBlue, and randomly buy DLCs for Valkyria and Assassin's Creed II. Why ruin a good relationship, Sony?

We're talking about China, right?

They're not going to like changing their tune.

You speak of designed as if our template was static and present from the start. Have I got a set of genes for your waist!

It's tricky to give just enough insurance that risk is properly diffused, but not so much that you create a moral hazard. The inflection point, it seems, is where effort stops and circumstances overtake. Until we can get into each other's heads and put an exact number on one's effort, we are dealing with truly Knightian uncertainty. If we had a marketing campaign disparaging people whose diet consists of soda and burgers, we could bring the American fat distribution more in line with the Japanese or Scandinavian. Imagine how many children we could send to school with the health savings!

The rationale isn't to limit consumer choice, but to reduce the healthcare costs associated with certain consumer choices. For example, a person's choice of hamburger and soda diet has externalities, namely resulting from the quadruple bypasses some of them require. These costs are not internalized; rather, most likely their health insurance (that is, rest of us) will foot the bill. --Apparently some of us do not want to foot quite so much of that bill. Hence, this. I do not think the government should step into food matters, though. I'd much rather see a more decentralized approach, such as making fun of people.

Until someone looks across the Pacific and notices speeds 30x faster than ours, in which case they will be interrogated while they're drinking champagne in a jacuzzi

Credit cards aren't necessities; cellphones are beginning to be, as they link rural merchants with their market and the rest of the world. Developing countries also prefer cell towers over phone lines for cost issues. They're basically skipping over a century of prototyping. With that said, hitchhiking one extra function onto a guaranteed platform would seem logical enough.

While this should be available for those whose jobs demand such on-demand work, I don't see it as the inevitable destiny of work itself. Time and space proximity are as salient as...well, time and space!

The poor man's concierge.