Puerto Rico is not autonomous. In Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle, the US Supreme Court found that sovereignty of Puerto Rico ultimately resides in the United States Congress. The US Congress can pass a law for Puerto Rico and there is nothing anyone in the Puerto Rican government can do about it. US Congress has ultimate control over Puerto Rico (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROMESA as an example). That isn’t autonomous.

“If Congress chose to alter Puerto Rico’s political status, it could do so through statute regardless of whether a plebiscite were held or what sentiment such a vote revealed.” Political Status of Puerto Rico: Brief Background and Recent Developments for Congress (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44721/7)

Puerto Rico had been owned by the United States since the US took it during the Spanish-American War in 1898. It is part of the US. There have been multiple votes asking if they want to become an official state of the US. Other countries don’t get the choice to become US states. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_States#Incorporated_vs._unincorporated_territories

You don’t need a passport because it is inside US borders.

It can be just like you’ve said. You can also run tailscale directly on the system hosting a service and access it directly over the tailscale network.

I would agree with this except that I don’t have faith that it won’t be leveraged as a way to get out of a whole crapload of taxes. I’m pretty sure that unemployment insurance, and a lot of the federal taxes, are based on wages and not tips. Also what is the limit? Can I pay my friend $50 to mow my lawn and tip him an extra $25,000, just so I can get around the limit for a gift tax? I wouldn’t trust a Republican administration to implement this without making it easier for Rick people to avoid paying taxes.

Just use Snapraid & MergerFS. No special Hardware required and you don’t need to change what is on your disks.

From a quick search: https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/snapraid/

This is how I do it. No striping, normal partitions, different hard drive sizes, pretty easy. This way makes upgrades super easy too. Currently running 76TB mergerfs with 2 14TB Snapraid parity drives.

New Caledonia is part of France, it’s not a different country. If you are a New Caledonian, you are a French citizen.

He didn’t post a $5M Bond. He put up cash. Makes you wonder if the companies that provide bonds may consider him to risky to bond.

To be fair to the Dune universe, the reason they used swords was because shields made projectile weapons useless and Lasguns and shields just killed everyone (like a mini-nuke on both sides).

I don’t think I appreciated God Emperor until after my 4th read through of the series. Frank Herbert definitely has a great insight into the human condition. Soul Catcher and The Godmakers come to mind most readily but his entire body of work explore different facets of humankind.

Do you think Jason Momoa knows what role he got into?

This honestly sounds like the best solution to this particular problem.

Yes they will get paid eventually. They put that into law after 2019. If you are furloughed, you cannot use leave. Even if you are emergency essential and still working during the shutdown, I don’t believe that you can be paid for leave (but you can still take it if it was scheduled before the shutdown).

To your point, geostationary satellites are in orbits around 22,300 miles away while Starlink is in a LEO orbit ~342 miles away. At the speed of light, that’s an additional quarter second round trip time minimum. Absolutely forever in internet speeds. My experience with GEO is a latency >550ms round trip. With the TCP/IP protocol built the way it is (aka, three-way handshake), a webpage wouldn’t even start downloading until almost 2 seconds have passed.